well of course. There's a reason armies don't just hand over their plans to the enemy. If you are fighting an opponent and you have perfect knowledge of them, you win. every single time. Norton is such a ridiculously well known target that any virus or worm updated in the last two years has SOME active defense against it.
and there's really nothing you can do with users that insist on shooting themselves in the foot because the safety is annoying.
Sure is. Make protection that's not annoying. If you make a software that you know is annoying, it should not surprise you when people refuse to use it.
We get in machines constantly that are thoroughly infested and have 1, 2, or 3 antivirus products on their computers, all of which's updates have expired a year or more ago. Customers don't undertand that without paying for the update service, the value of the software drops very near zero a month after the subscription expires. So, we clean them up, sell them the latest AV and get their updates going, and we just KNOW we'll be seeing them again in about 14 months.
Windows' security model doesn't help here. The antivirus software takes the "if we know it's bad, don't let it DO that - otherwise it must be safe". This only works if you are omniscent, which never totally works, and completely falls apart after you lose your updates.
I think you are misinformed. Viruses and other nasties don't require the logged in user to be an administrator to infect every account on the machine. They use a wide variety of unpatched system vulnerabilities and can dig themselves in deep enough to be essentially impossible to remove.
Our pc tech here is constantly moaning about a machine that's got malware that has planted itself in the registry of every user on the system (admin and standard) and if he misses even ONE of those when cleaning, it'll just reinfect the entire system (all users) as soon as the missed user logs in.
The funny part is he can't scan the other registries without logging into the accounts, because of "windows security". (then how did they get infected to begin with?!)
I find it hilarious how viruses can run rings around windows security while the admins are restricted from doing the same thing the viruses and trojans do freely.
I don't see how this solves the problem brought up by this article. Apple can't just sell the phone locked to another provider, French law says it has to be available with NO provider as well, even if they do a partnership.
I doubt they care. Yes, France is a market and selling there would be good for business, but it's not essential. And it would be easy to argue that the losses incurred from releasing an unlocked iPhone anywhere could overtake any gains made in being able to sell the iPhone in France. Like any other international business, there will be places in the world where local restrictions that would be placed on your product would be more of a pain than they are worth. I believe this is such a case. Apple will simply not sell the phone in France. It's a business decision made to maximize proffit, which for any business is the correct decision to make. End of problem.
For those that simply have to have an iPhone that live in France, they will buy an iPhone in the US, unlock it by any means necessary, and will take it to France to use. This will cut into Apple's margin for that phone since they won't get a service contract kickback from AT&T for that phone, which is why they are not going out of their way to make sure your unlocked iPhone stays unlocked. At that point it's probably slightly better than break-even for Apple for those that buy and unlock their phone. But it's probably worth it economically, as a trade off on proffit to avoid major customer ill-will.
They're being far less ruthless than they could be, and I believe that's because they don't want to get either the consumers OR AT&T too wound up so they are sitting in the middle. They locked the phone, but they're not working very hard to keep it locked. If you want to see locked, look at the iPod. You don't think they're capable of really putting the screws on the iPhone if they wanted to?
It's very possible the iphone does not cost the what, $1200 people are estimating, to manufacture, and that apple is simply making a ridiculous killing on proffit right now with the lock-in. In other words, they want the lock, but don't NEED it to turn a buck.
That's actually a very good idea for them. The big argument right now is that Apple can't release an unlocked phone in another market due to grey market import of unlocked phones. Soooo, release it locked by another carrier in a new market. In this way the two markets do not compete, and yet consumers in both markets can obtain and use the product.
This is probably Apple's original plan. A year from now we are very likely to see the iPhone for sale in 1/2 dozen markets, each locked to a single provider in that market.
Haven't you seen those shirts that look like you're wearing a seat belt? They're for the people that can't stand to wear a seat belt and are tired of getting "no belt" tickets because they drive by a cop that is checking for seat belt use.
"conduct" would be a more appropriate word here than "transmit". Transmit seems to imply something that can be detected from a distance. This is just bolting sensors to the hull like sticking your ear to a water pipe to tell if water's running.
on the surface that appears sensible, but remember that ANY atmosphere can conduct sound energy. Even a very small leak. A little whisp of gas flowing out of a pinprick of a hole/crack technically conveys sound energy, as the motion of the gas flowing away from the hole. Detecting that is no different than detecting any other sound, it's just that you lose 50% of the sound energy. (because there is only expansion, no contraction) Also considering the very low pressure atmosphere outside such a leak, (there is an atmosphere, even if only 0.00001 A, as a result of the leak) the energy does not transfer well and is very weak compared to the potential sound energy propogated through a dense atmosphere like inside. Also the sound waves quickly lose their conductive media considering how fast they travel relative to the speed of the gas escaping.
Although technically that works very well, there are two basic problems with using smoke
1) since this is a sealed environment, there are compact air filtration, circulation, and other "life support" systems moving the air around. I'd bet if you lit a stick in the ISS it would immediately fall into an "air highway" in the chamber and beeline for the nearest air filter/recirculation intake.
2) somewhat related to (1), they have to filter their air because there's no fresh outside the window to air the place out. So they don't pollute the air inside if they can at all avoid it. Unless filtered out, (and I bet right quick too) the place would reek of incense really quickly, and would NOT go away given time like it does in your house. Also those filters are expensive both in cost and transport. (I'd be interested to see what NASA has figured as the end cost for some things like air filters, air canisters, heck, all sorts of things... even small items like screws, tape, pencils, etc - just try to imagine how much it costs them to send up a new ball point pen?)
that's probably the problem. It probably went several hours before anyone noticed it got blackholed and fixed it, and by that time it had flowed downstream and tanked quite a few lower level DNS's. That's why they said the problem won't be fixed until tomorrow, because that's what it will take for the tanked DNS's caches to expire and them to refresh from their authority.
Now the newest dummies will come with a 4ft cord ending in a cigarette lighter plug, in addition to the shirt that makes it look like it's wearing a seat belt.
"Really, it's OK to give us all this power, we NEED it to protect our/your/their rights. Sure, it COULD be abused, but we would NEVER DO THAT."
Now just how many times have we heard that???
It is never a good idea to make a law broader than is necessary so that you can make sure you have all the criminals covered, at the expense of making even a small minority of the innocent sanctioned. If you can't word the law in such a way as to not incriminate the innocent, it's a bad law. And yes, it really is ok to let 2% of the criminals get away if it means 100% of the innocent remain free.
.. which is usually of one of two variety. First type is 10 pages of useless noise and one important line buried in the middle somewhere that says "OR, we will do as we please and you surrender all your rights", or it uses wording so wide as to be capable of getting you suspended for running Hello World one too many times which leaves it at the descretion of the person enforcing the rules to decide on a case by case basis who broke the rules. (meaning, whoever they choose...)
TOS should be illegal. If I buy a product or service from you, you should not be able to tell me how I'm allowed to use it. The law can tell me how NOT to use it, but you have no business telling me how I CAN use it. If you're unhappy with it then why did you so willingly take my money? How about I put a TOS on the money I give you? No, you can't spend it on that, because I don't want that. Now isn't that just stupid?
The neighboring city has a public utility that does power, cable TV, and cable modem internet. They have been placing wireless access points all over the place for the last several years, mostly on street lights in the downtown area. If you have a laptop out at a cafe downtown you are almost guaranteed internet service.
It's not city-wide by any means, but it's where it's needed.
Fuji Xerox's secret lies in networking the unnamed copier to a dedicated translation server and combining this with algorithms that can distinguish between text, drawings and lines for maintaining page layouts.
In other words, it's not a translation box at all. It's a networked scanner/copier that passes the scan to a server parked somewhere else to modify the page and send it back to the printer.
To call it a translator without mentioning the big box sitting across the office that goes with it, is a bit fraudulent. Reminiscent of the chess playing robot frauds of years back, that were run by a chessmaster hiding somewhere nearby running the mannequin.
You can go back even farther, how in the world did Congress ever allow this bill to become law anyway? Oh, did it ride on the coattails of another bill that was a sure-in to be signed? Now THAT is something that I think needs to change. If something is important enough to go before Congress, it should warrant its OWN vote, and not be able to be attached to something else, especially if the bill it's being attached to has nothing to do with the attached bill.
Most people would agree with that, and most politicians would disagree with it. The reason is that in theory, it is common sense. In practice it doesn't work well. To get things voted in you have to get enough of the voters interested in it to pass it. And a lot of them have a "what's in it for ME?" attitude. This is commonly solved by stuffing different things into a single bill, a bit like preparing a fancy dish, add a little of this and a little of that and adjust it carefully to get the %yes votes above passing number. Powerful senators and groups can ram laws through the bars because their "yes" vote is needed, so others tack on things to the bill that get those groups to vote for it.
I'm not politically savvy but I have heard of the "line item veto" concept. Every president in the nation's history has probably wanted one of these. The ability to pass PARTS of a bill, the parts that are what the bill was for, while veto'ing the "pork belly" that was tacked on to push it through. They never have gotten that because it would probably result in it being very hard to get any bills passed until the thick-headed senators realized porkbelly was no longer a tool that could be abused as a daily matter.
What REALLY ticks me off is the end of budget funding bill. OMG that is the worst. "if you want your government to continue to run next year, you HAVE TO pass this bill". Oh, THAT'S SMART. What's the point? It's going to pass. It has to. So the only thing up for debate is what the rats can manage to shoehorn into the bill before it's voted on. Disgusts me.
Speculating... they want to charge for the bits going in one direction or the other. Before p2p, the ones with deep pockets were the providers, the ones serving data. So even though when a bit goes on the internet it must both be sent and received, (so the net amount of upstream is close to the same as downstream) they choose to charge the ISPs pushing the data (that have the money) not the ones pulling it (that want free content)
Although the circumstances may have changed, they really have no reason to change the business model now.
I have a spreadsheet I use for my finances, and I have been having to resort to converting some numbers to strings and back again to get around rounding errors, but excel pulled a new one on me. After months of entering my checkbook data, a cell toggled to indicate a balance error. It was something like $1234.56 != $1234.56. I bumped the precision as high as it would go and both cells still showed exactly the same value but would not evaluate as equal. So I set a third cell thusly A3=A2-A1. And the third cell now showed as something like -1.0032E-18. (that's like 0.0000000000000000010032) Lovely. This is not the first time I have encountered cumulative rounding errors in Excel. So now I have to test not for (in)equality, but to test for the difference to be less than 1/100th of a cent. That's BS for a spreadsheet app.
I was surprised to find that the error actually had came up much earlier, but when the difference between cells is less than a certain amount, excel's equality resolves as true. So removing the last few entries, the book balanced again, even though the difference was now -2.18E-19. Clearly they are aware of this problem and are trying to hide it. If it was not actively fudging numbers there would probably be a lot more people having numerical problems. (numbers cited here are illustrations, I do not recall the exact values or precision)
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well of course. There's a reason armies don't just hand over their plans to the enemy. If you are fighting an opponent and you have perfect knowledge of them, you win. every single time. Norton is such a ridiculously well known target that any virus or worm updated in the last two years has SOME active defense against it.
at this point I think the "virus" threat is more now the spyware you get from clicking popups.
and there's really nothing you can do with users that insist on shooting themselves in the foot because the safety is annoying.
Sure is. Make protection that's not annoying. If you make a software that you know is annoying, it should not surprise you when people refuse to use it.
We get in machines constantly that are thoroughly infested and have 1, 2, or 3 antivirus products on their computers, all of which's updates have expired a year or more ago. Customers don't undertand that without paying for the update service, the value of the software drops very near zero a month after the subscription expires. So, we clean them up, sell them the latest AV and get their updates going, and we just KNOW we'll be seeing them again in about 14 months.
Windows' security model doesn't help here. The antivirus software takes the "if we know it's bad, don't let it DO that - otherwise it must be safe". This only works if you are omniscent, which never totally works, and completely falls apart after you lose your updates.
I think you are misinformed. Viruses and other nasties don't require the logged in user to be an administrator to infect every account on the machine. They use a wide variety of unpatched system vulnerabilities and can dig themselves in deep enough to be essentially impossible to remove.
Our pc tech here is constantly moaning about a machine that's got malware that has planted itself in the registry of every user on the system (admin and standard) and if he misses even ONE of those when cleaning, it'll just reinfect the entire system (all users) as soon as the missed user logs in.
The funny part is he can't scan the other registries without logging into the accounts, because of "windows security". (then how did they get infected to begin with?!)
I find it hilarious how viruses can run rings around windows security while the admins are restricted from doing the same thing the viruses and trojans do freely.
I don't see how this solves the problem brought up by this article. Apple can't just sell the phone locked to another provider, French law says it has to be available with NO provider as well, even if they do a partnership.
I doubt they care. Yes, France is a market and selling there would be good for business, but it's not essential. And it would be easy to argue that the losses incurred from releasing an unlocked iPhone anywhere could overtake any gains made in being able to sell the iPhone in France. Like any other international business, there will be places in the world where local restrictions that would be placed on your product would be more of a pain than they are worth. I believe this is such a case. Apple will simply not sell the phone in France. It's a business decision made to maximize proffit, which for any business is the correct decision to make. End of problem.
For those that simply have to have an iPhone that live in France, they will buy an iPhone in the US, unlock it by any means necessary, and will take it to France to use. This will cut into Apple's margin for that phone since they won't get a service contract kickback from AT&T for that phone, which is why they are not going out of their way to make sure your unlocked iPhone stays unlocked. At that point it's probably slightly better than break-even for Apple for those that buy and unlock their phone. But it's probably worth it economically, as a trade off on proffit to avoid major customer ill-will.
They're being far less ruthless than they could be, and I believe that's because they don't want to get either the consumers OR AT&T too wound up so they are sitting in the middle. They locked the phone, but they're not working very hard to keep it locked. If you want to see locked, look at the iPod. You don't think they're capable of really putting the screws on the iPhone if they wanted to?
It's very possible the iphone does not cost the what, $1200 people are estimating, to manufacture, and that apple is simply making a ridiculous killing on proffit right now with the lock-in. In other words, they want the lock, but don't NEED it to turn a buck.
That's actually a very good idea for them. The big argument right now is that Apple can't release an unlocked phone in another market due to grey market import of unlocked phones. Soooo, release it locked by another carrier in a new market. In this way the two markets do not compete, and yet consumers in both markets can obtain and use the product.
This is probably Apple's original plan. A year from now we are very likely to see the iPhone for sale in 1/2 dozen markets, each locked to a single provider in that market.
Haven't you seen those shirts that look like you're wearing a seat belt? They're for the people that can't stand to wear a seat belt and are tired of getting "no belt" tickets because they drive by a cop that is checking for seat belt use.
"conduct" would be a more appropriate word here than "transmit". Transmit seems to imply something that can be detected from a distance. This is just bolting sensors to the hull like sticking your ear to a water pipe to tell if water's running.
uh, what do you think is LEAKING? (hint: "AIR!")
on the surface that appears sensible, but remember that ANY atmosphere can conduct sound energy. Even a very small leak. A little whisp of gas flowing out of a pinprick of a hole/crack technically conveys sound energy, as the motion of the gas flowing away from the hole. Detecting that is no different than detecting any other sound, it's just that you lose 50% of the sound energy. (because there is only expansion, no contraction) Also considering the very low pressure atmosphere outside such a leak, (there is an atmosphere, even if only 0.00001 A, as a result of the leak) the energy does not transfer well and is very weak compared to the potential sound energy propogated through a dense atmosphere like inside. Also the sound waves quickly lose their conductive media considering how fast they travel relative to the speed of the gas escaping.
Although technically that works very well, there are two basic problems with using smoke
1) since this is a sealed environment, there are compact air filtration, circulation, and other "life support" systems moving the air around. I'd bet if you lit a stick in the ISS it would immediately fall into an "air highway" in the chamber and beeline for the nearest air filter/recirculation intake.
2) somewhat related to (1), they have to filter their air because there's no fresh outside the window to air the place out. So they don't pollute the air inside if they can at all avoid it. Unless filtered out, (and I bet right quick too) the place would reek of incense really quickly, and would NOT go away given time like it does in your house. Also those filters are expensive both in cost and transport. (I'd be interested to see what NASA has figured as the end cost for some things like air filters, air canisters, heck, all sorts of things... even small items like screws, tape, pencils, etc - just try to imagine how much it costs them to send up a new ball point pen?)
that's probably the problem. It probably went several hours before anyone noticed it got blackholed and fixed it, and by that time it had flowed downstream and tanked quite a few lower level DNS's. That's why they said the problem won't be fixed until tomorrow, because that's what it will take for the tanked DNS's caches to expire and them to refresh from their authority.
So much for using dummies in the front seat."
Now the newest dummies will come with a 4ft cord ending in a cigarette lighter plug, in addition to the shirt that makes it look like it's wearing a seat belt.
"Really, it's OK to give us all this power, we NEED it to protect our/your/their rights. Sure, it COULD be abused, but we would NEVER DO THAT."
Now just how many times have we heard that???
It is never a good idea to make a law broader than is necessary so that you can make sure you have all the criminals covered, at the expense of making even a small minority of the innocent sanctioned. If you can't word the law in such a way as to not incriminate the innocent, it's a bad law. And yes, it really is ok to let 2% of the criminals get away if it means 100% of the innocent remain free.
The same should apply to TOS.
.. which is usually of one of two variety. First type is 10 pages of useless noise and one important line buried in the middle somewhere that says "OR, we will do as we please and you surrender all your rights", or it uses wording so wide as to be capable of getting you suspended for running Hello World one too many times which leaves it at the descretion of the person enforcing the rules to decide on a case by case basis who broke the rules. (meaning, whoever they choose...)
TOS should be illegal. If I buy a product or service from you, you should not be able to tell me how I'm allowed to use it. The law can tell me how NOT to use it, but you have no business telling me how I CAN use it. If you're unhappy with it then why did you so willingly take my money? How about I put a TOS on the money I give you? No, you can't spend it on that, because I don't want that. Now isn't that just stupid?
"They are using someone else's resources..." that they paid for. They are getting their money's worth. Now if going to university was free...
The neighboring city has a public utility that does power, cable TV, and cable modem internet. They have been placing wireless access points all over the place for the last several years, mostly on street lights in the downtown area. If you have a laptop out at a cafe downtown you are almost guaranteed internet service.
It's not city-wide by any means, but it's where it's needed.
Fuji Xerox's secret lies in networking the unnamed copier to a dedicated translation server and combining this with algorithms that can distinguish between text, drawings and lines for maintaining page layouts.
In other words, it's not a translation box at all. It's a networked scanner/copier that passes the scan to a server parked somewhere else to modify the page and send it back to the printer.
To call it a translator without mentioning the big box sitting across the office that goes with it, is a bit fraudulent. Reminiscent of the chess playing robot frauds of years back, that were run by a chessmaster hiding somewhere nearby running the mannequin.
You can go back even farther, how in the world did Congress ever allow this bill to become law anyway? Oh, did it ride on the coattails of another bill that was a sure-in to be signed? Now THAT is something that I think needs to change. If something is important enough to go before Congress, it should warrant its OWN vote, and not be able to be attached to something else, especially if the bill it's being attached to has nothing to do with the attached bill.
Most people would agree with that, and most politicians would disagree with it. The reason is that in theory, it is common sense. In practice it doesn't work well. To get things voted in you have to get enough of the voters interested in it to pass it. And a lot of them have a "what's in it for ME?" attitude. This is commonly solved by stuffing different things into a single bill, a bit like preparing a fancy dish, add a little of this and a little of that and adjust it carefully to get the %yes votes above passing number. Powerful senators and groups can ram laws through the bars because their "yes" vote is needed, so others tack on things to the bill that get those groups to vote for it.
I'm not politically savvy but I have heard of the "line item veto" concept. Every president in the nation's history has probably wanted one of these. The ability to pass PARTS of a bill, the parts that are what the bill was for, while veto'ing the "pork belly" that was tacked on to push it through. They never have gotten that because it would probably result in it being very hard to get any bills passed until the thick-headed senators realized porkbelly was no longer a tool that could be abused as a daily matter.
What REALLY ticks me off is the end of budget funding bill. OMG that is the worst. "if you want your government to continue to run next year, you HAVE TO pass this bill". Oh, THAT'S SMART. What's the point? It's going to pass. It has to. So the only thing up for debate is what the rats can manage to shoehorn into the bill before it's voted on. Disgusts me.
"chroot manages security like DRM manages your digital rights".
ok I better run now. Give me a head start, wouldja?
Speculating... they want to charge for the bits going in one direction or the other. Before p2p, the ones with deep pockets were the providers, the ones serving data. So even though when a bit goes on the internet it must both be sent and received, (so the net amount of upstream is close to the same as downstream) they choose to charge the ISPs pushing the data (that have the money) not the ones pulling it (that want free content)
Although the circumstances may have changed, they really have no reason to change the business model now.
> 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
what is that? machine code? (cpu?)
I have a spreadsheet I use for my finances, and I have been having to resort to converting some numbers to strings and back again to get around rounding errors, but excel pulled a new one on me. After months of entering my checkbook data, a cell toggled to indicate a balance error. It was something like $1234.56 != $1234.56. I bumped the precision as high as it would go and both cells still showed exactly the same value but would not evaluate as equal. So I set a third cell thusly A3=A2-A1. And the third cell now showed as something like -1.0032E-18. (that's like 0.0000000000000000010032) Lovely. This is not the first time I have encountered cumulative rounding errors in Excel. So now I have to test not for (in)equality, but to test for the difference to be less than 1/100th of a cent. That's BS for a spreadsheet app.
I was surprised to find that the error actually had came up much earlier, but when the difference between cells is less than a certain amount, excel's equality resolves as true. So removing the last few entries, the book balanced again, even though the difference was now -2.18E-19. Clearly they are aware of this problem and are trying to hide it. If it was not actively fudging numbers there would probably be a lot more people having numerical problems. (numbers cited here are illustrations, I do not recall the exact values or precision)