Bitcoin doesn't get harder to generate so much as the pool of coins is shared between more parties...
As for the carbon footprint, new mining hardware is intentionally more efficient than the previous generation, and if the rewards from mining become smaller than the cost of electricity people will stop doing it. Similarly as the dedicated hardware gets more advanced, mining on GPUs and especially CPUs becomes completely useless, so even with thousands of nodes you will never make any worthwhile amount. The returns from using malware to mine bitcoins must be pretty tiny today, even with huge numbers of infected systems.
And illegal goods/services have been provided for money long before bitcoin even existed, bitcoin just provides a new way to pay for them because of its perceived anonymity... In reality its probably still easier to trace than cash, and the existing methods for combatting such sales will still work too.
Or offer higher quality, better tested products... Offering a long warranty isn't going to cost anywhere near as much if the failure rate is extremely low.
Because of all those horrendous sites that force you to use the browser... I pine for the days when download links were direct links to files which you could cut+paste to wget.
Until recently i had to make do with 0.5mbps dsl, and there are people who are still forced to use much slower links than this... This is one of the reasons i immensely dislike streaming services, i would much rather schedule a download to occur at night when i'm sleeping, streaming over 0.5mbit would be very poor quality but i can download a 720p movie or tv episode while i sleep.
Personally i'd rather my media player spent all its time actually decoding the media, rather than wasting resources trying to enforce some arbitrary drm schemes.
It's a service, no different to any other service you buy... By using an ISP you are support SaaS, the ISP runs all manner of routing software in order to support the service you're using.
It is effective at what it was designed to do - restrict paying customers so they are often forced to buy multiple copies of the same thing. It is not intended to stop organised piracy, these people will never be customers as they would rather do without the media than pay for it. Instead they have identified people who are willing to pay, and use drm to force them to pay more.
Same applies to PC and Amiga, much easier to copy games than cartridge based consoles which was a key factor which drove sales of these platforms for gaming.
Supercomputers are generally built of a large number of general purpose CPUs, which aren't all that good at bitcoin mining compared to dedicated ASICs... Even with hundreds or thousands of CPUs, you will consume more in power than you ever make in bitcoin.
Which means you need to enter your key every time you start the browser... If the browser has a way of automatically knowing the decryption key, then so does a hacker.
Also, previous session data should be useless - the sessions should have expired, or been closed when you logged out. Most sites that offer the option to stay logged in warn you against doing so on a system you don't trust.
And i'm pretty sure other browsers don't store persistent cookies very securely either, they used to be in a plain text file and they can certainly be viewed/user from within most browsers without having to ever supply a decryption key.
A reply paid envelope is not enough under UK law, as that unnecessarily inconveniences the recipient if they have to take the item to a post office. The company should be offering to collect the goods from the same location to which they were originally shipped (most couriers will do this), and should also be compensating the recipient for the fact they haven't received the goods they actually ordered and had to deal with the inconvenience of receiving something else instead.
Under UK law you must inform the sender that you received an unsolicited item from them, and you must make it available for collection... You certainly never have to pay for the shipping yourself or suffer the inconvenience of having to take the package somewhere. You simply make it available to be collected from the same location it was shipped to, at a time which is convenient to you and everything else is down to the original sender.
Under UK law if you receive something unexpected you are obligated to inform the sender, and then make the items available for collection if they want them back. Having done this, if they fail or refuse to collect the goods you are free to keep them.
In this case however the delivery was not unexpected, these users were expecting a delivery from zavvi and didn't receive what they ordered... Normally when this happens (ie every time it's happened to me) you get something massively inferior to what you ordered so you'd have no reason to keep it. The seller is in breach of their contract by sending you something different to what you ordered, and should at the very least be compensating you for messing up your order.
Having the OS is no longer profitable, MS are already considering giving windows phone away. The profit is to be made in selling services, and a phone running android but which defaults to their services is likely to be a lot more profitable than one running a niche platform with a tainted branding.
It's not just tablets, organisations everywhere have for years been deploying new technology that brings with it the promise of improved productivity. In reality it often does not... You take old hardware and old software that works just fine, and spend a fortune replacing it with new faster hardware running new slower software. The end result often isn't any faster, and users have to take time getting used to it while not using any of the new features. Often the new version is much worse than what it replaced, and instead of the software supporting the business, the business has to adapt to the way the software works.
Not at every entry point, security should be a serious consideration on every device. Work on the assumption that everything is directly exposed to the internet and start from there. Trying to only monitor the entry points is the problem, if anything makes it past your entry points then it could have free reign over everything inside.
Then work in the office... Google's plan is to do away with a local corporate network, so that the network available in the office is just an internet connection and you connect over the internet to whatever services you require. If you are in the office then your connection will be just as fast since the services you generally access are just as likely to be local as they were before. It's just that now instead of being on a flat network with insecurely configured devices, you will connect to those devices over a public network and they will be hardened just as you'd expect servers connected to the public internet would be, instead of assuming that only trusted employees can get to the servers and slacking off on server hardening.
Endpoint assessment is a stupid idea, a malicious (i.e. owned) client can easily lie to the server while a legitimate user wanting to use a configuration not thought of by the sysadmin gets screwed. Also having to use a proprietary client is terrible, you end up being unable to update your OS because doing so can break the third party vpn client, or finding yourself with extremely restricted choices as to what os you can use.
Most corporate users, and home users for that matter have no idea how to repair computers. They will simply send it back to the manufacturer to be replaced.
What about if you purchased copies of the games, and played them on an emulator instead of buying the official hardware? Not only would this not be piracy, but the console manufacturer would benefit because the hardware itself is usually sold at a loss, and the user would benefit as they could use hardware they already own instead of purchasing extra hardware solely for playing games.
Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin doesn't get harder to generate so much as the pool of coins is shared between more parties...
As for the carbon footprint, new mining hardware is intentionally more efficient than the previous generation, and if the rewards from mining become smaller than the cost of electricity people will stop doing it.
Similarly as the dedicated hardware gets more advanced, mining on GPUs and especially CPUs becomes completely useless, so even with thousands of nodes you will never make any worthwhile amount. The returns from using malware to mine bitcoins must be pretty tiny today, even with huge numbers of infected systems.
And illegal goods/services have been provided for money long before bitcoin even existed, bitcoin just provides a new way to pay for them because of its perceived anonymity... In reality its probably still easier to trace than cash, and the existing methods for combatting such sales will still work too.
Or offer higher quality, better tested products... Offering a long warranty isn't going to cost anywhere near as much if the failure rate is extremely low.
The Australian law is very similar to European laws...
Why? its a service provided using software, it's not really any different.
Because of all those horrendous sites that force you to use the browser...
I pine for the days when download links were direct links to files which you could cut+paste to wget.
Until recently i had to make do with 0.5mbps dsl, and there are people who are still forced to use much slower links than this...
This is one of the reasons i immensely dislike streaming services, i would much rather schedule a download to occur at night when i'm sleeping, streaming over 0.5mbit would be very poor quality but i can download a 720p movie or tv episode while i sleep.
Personally i'd rather my media player spent all its time actually decoding the media, rather than wasting resources trying to enforce some arbitrary drm schemes.
It's a service, no different to any other service you buy...
By using an ISP you are support SaaS, the ISP runs all manner of routing software in order to support the service you're using.
It is effective at what it was designed to do - restrict paying customers so they are often forced to buy multiple copies of the same thing.
It is not intended to stop organised piracy, these people will never be customers as they would rather do without the media than pay for it.
Instead they have identified people who are willing to pay, and use drm to force them to pay more.
Same applies to PC and Amiga, much easier to copy games than cartridge based consoles which was a key factor which drove sales of these platforms for gaming.
Having nothing running by default is just basic, if you want to open a service to the world then you should have to explicitly turn it on.
Still running default services and just hiding them behind a firewall is a stupid, not having them running at all is far more sensible.
Supercomputers are generally built of a large number of general purpose CPUs, which aren't all that good at bitcoin mining compared to dedicated ASICs... Even with hundreds or thousands of CPUs, you will consume more in power than you ever make in bitcoin.
Which means you need to enter your key every time you start the browser...
If the browser has a way of automatically knowing the decryption key, then so does a hacker.
Also, previous session data should be useless - the sessions should have expired, or been closed when you logged out. Most sites that offer the option to stay logged in warn you against doing so on a system you don't trust.
And i'm pretty sure other browsers don't store persistent cookies very securely either, they used to be in a plain text file and they can certainly be viewed/user from within most browsers without having to ever supply a decryption key.
http://www.adviceguide.org.uk/england/consumer_e/consumer_common_problems_with_products_e/consumer_problems_with_delivery_e/consumer_unsolicited_goods_e/youve_received_goods_or_services_you_didnt_ask_for_distance_sales.htm
A reply paid envelope is not enough under UK law, as that unnecessarily inconveniences the recipient if they have to take the item to a post office.
The company should be offering to collect the goods from the same location to which they were originally shipped (most couriers will do this), and should also be compensating the recipient for the fact they haven't received the goods they actually ordered and had to deal with the inconvenience of receiving something else instead.
Under UK law you must inform the sender that you received an unsolicited item from them, and you must make it available for collection... You certainly never have to pay for the shipping yourself or suffer the inconvenience of having to take the package somewhere. You simply make it available to be collected from the same location it was shipped to, at a time which is convenient to you and everything else is down to the original sender.
Under UK law if you receive something unexpected you are obligated to inform the sender, and then make the items available for collection if they want them back. Having done this, if they fail or refuse to collect the goods you are free to keep them.
In this case however the delivery was not unexpected, these users were expecting a delivery from zavvi and didn't receive what they ordered... Normally when this happens (ie every time it's happened to me) you get something massively inferior to what you ordered so you'd have no reason to keep it.
The seller is in breach of their contract by sending you something different to what you ordered, and should at the very least be compensating you for messing up your order.
Having the OS is no longer profitable, MS are already considering giving windows phone away.
The profit is to be made in selling services, and a phone running android but which defaults to their services is likely to be a lot more profitable than one running a niche platform with a tainted branding.
It's not just tablets, organisations everywhere have for years been deploying new technology that brings with it the promise of improved productivity. In reality it often does not... You take old hardware and old software that works just fine, and spend a fortune replacing it with new faster hardware running new slower software. The end result often isn't any faster, and users have to take time getting used to it while not using any of the new features. Often the new version is much worse than what it replaced, and instead of the software supporting the business, the business has to adapt to the way the software works.
Not at every entry point, security should be a serious consideration on every device. Work on the assumption that everything is directly exposed to the internet and start from there.
Trying to only monitor the entry points is the problem, if anything makes it past your entry points then it could have free reign over everything inside.
Then work in the office...
Google's plan is to do away with a local corporate network, so that the network available in the office is just an internet connection and you connect over the internet to whatever services you require. If you are in the office then your connection will be just as fast since the services you generally access are just as likely to be local as they were before. It's just that now instead of being on a flat network with insecurely configured devices, you will connect to those devices over a public network and they will be hardened just as you'd expect servers connected to the public internet would be, instead of assuming that only trusted employees can get to the servers and slacking off on server hardening.
Endpoint assessment is a stupid idea, a malicious (i.e. owned) client can easily lie to the server while a legitimate user wanting to use a configuration not thought of by the sysadmin gets screwed.
Also having to use a proprietary client is terrible, you end up being unable to update your OS because doing so can break the third party vpn client, or finding yourself with extremely restricted choices as to what os you can use.
Most corporate users, and home users for that matter have no idea how to repair computers. They will simply send it back to the manufacturer to be replaced.
What about if you purchased copies of the games, and played them on an emulator instead of buying the official hardware?
Not only would this not be piracy, but the console manufacturer would benefit because the hardware itself is usually sold at a loss, and the user would benefit as they could use hardware they already own instead of purchasing extra hardware solely for playing games.