I don't know why Microsoft is bending over for the media companies.
Because it's a wonderful opportunity for them. They can get all the benefits of DRM and blame all the problems on the media companies which "forced" them it implement it. The benefits for MS include making unauthorised software unrunnable; if they don't pay MS for a certificate it's untrusted. The PC will become a big dongle, to make it hard to copy or transfer MS software, and anyone else who signs up. And media companies will have to sign on (literally) to use media secured by the DRM. Don't be surprised if in a few years attempting to use open formats like MP3 trigger off alarms and send messages to the RIAA. It's certainly possible technically, and we have the recent example of Sony's rootkit to show that some have the will.
Gutmann is a CompSci guy who has been a biggie in the crypto community since about forever. You'd think an 'editor' would know that. Alas, Slashdot has people with the title, who don't do a job that deserves it.
Well, if the editors edited, they would have noticed this is a dupe from last week.
Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection
On December 23rd, 2006 with 283 comments
David Gerard writes "Security researcher Peter Gutmann has released A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection, a detailed explanation of just what...
Goldblum['s character] is able to plant a virus in the computer designed by AN ALIEN SPECIES. This assumes he has a good working knowledge of not only their user interface, but their hardware, software APIs, programming language, and arguably their natural language as well. Oh, and he learned all this in, like, a day. Granted, he had a Mac, but still.
More plausible than most of the movie. They've been studying an Alien fighter in the Area 51 bunker since 1947 (I assume it's the Roswell ship). So they had decades to work out the interfaces. The Alien computers seem rather primitive and limited anyway, as they had to piggyback on our satellite system to get a countdown clock instead of making their own in 3 lines of code. Lucky for us, eh?
but COME ON, it's not like it's the most implausible thing about the movie.
Yeah. The article was about user interfaces, not impluasible movie science in general. There is a serious point towards the end, that because we see these magical UIs so often on TV and in the movies, a lot of people, and decision makers, want them in real life, no matter how impractical or counter productive they'd be. Life imitates art, and that's not always good. I've seen several stories about implementations of the "Minority Report interface". None took off. As TFA says, they're just tiring and inefficient. Similarly for most voice interfaces. And how much expensive hardware is going to be used to support the "mouth watering graphics" of Vista? How much more work will that help the user get done?
why not offer support for [b]internal[/b] mail to be sent in Microsoft Word format?
For one thing, there are plenty of exploits for MS Word. So for going to a hugely bloated obfuscated binary format you'd gain no security. Like most peopel I get lots of messages sent as DOC attachments already. I usually view them, copy the text, paste into the original message as text (my client, Eudora, lets me do that) and delete the attachment, usually converting a 100k file into 1k text.
And Word files don't have a standard way to handle quoting and replying. So you get everyone making up their own "system", like "Original lines in blue, Jack's response in green, boss's remarks in Arial italic..."
The fact that none of the major E-mail clients can be trusted to do this is a testament to the sad state of software engineering.
I think it's more that to get the same look as intended by the sender using an MS client, you have to use the IE renderer built in to Windows. Otherwise people complained it looked wrong. And this was no doubt a lot easier than writing your own renderer and keeping it up to date.
Personally I stick with an ancient version of Eudora, which does have its own renderer. Sometimes it does look like crap when I get HTML mail, but I can usually work it out, and in the worst case, save to HTML and use a browser. One useful feature is the ability to edit incoming mail. I can select it all, convert to plain text, maybe delete any boilerplate disclaimers. Cuts the storage down by 80%. I know that businesses couldn't do this, but this is my personal stuff and I'm not going to be presenting it in court.
. I'm a little surprised there hasn't been a middle ground estbalished at some point. You know... pretty text, no exploits.
There is (was) a "rich text" for email, looked like a subset of HTML. It was used by early versions of Eudora and other mail clients. I think we can blame Netscape for putting HTML into email, and this was cemented when Outlook came along and started doing it by default. All the other mail clients had to follow though they knew it was a Bad Idea.
which raises the question: why don't they just strip html out instead?
They do. "A Navy user said that any HTML messages sent to his account are automatically converted to plain text." But if you've used tables or such the layout will probably be trashed, so better to reformat as plain text to begin with.
Using something like Lynx to filter HTML into plain text would give pretty good results, it does tables fairly well.
However, then came "The Bear and the Dragon", which starts off on the most horrendous and completely inaccurate character assassination
A neo-con wet dream. I particularly liked how the student revolutionaries just walked into the CCP headquarters and the old guard communists folded up and walked away when they realised democracy was just a better idea.
In that, he couldn't even spell the name of the major city "Guangzhou" correctly. Doesn't he have an atlas?
The last straw for me was Rainbow Six where he demonised conservationists as a bunch of genocidal maniacs. Of course they were defeated by the elite team of crack snipers, because the Greenies decided to attack them head on in their home base for no good reason, instead of just getting on with releasing their plague.
Note to self: destroy copies of "Smartest Guys in the Room" and "Corporate Crime" after installing my program to skim the excess fractional pennies due to rounding bank transactions.
Don't forget to get rid of your Superman III and Office Space videos.
He turned to the priest and said, "Father, I'm sure that I missed that lawyer!"
The Australian version has Aboriginals instead of lawyers. Since you're rather more likely to be passing Aboriginals on a country road while driving a truck than lawyers, I think the lawyer version is a fairly lame fork of the original racist joke.
Tom Clancy seems to have given up writing in favor of licensing his name.
Can't be worse than the crap he (presumably) wrote himself before that. His first two or three were good thrillers, I kept reading from momentum, but they got more and more full of turgid prose, jingoism, silly factual errors, and Tom Ryan became just a mouthpiece for Clancy's extreme right-wing politics.
outsource to India or (the irony, Nigeria) for a human spam filter.
Yes. Because nothing confidential ever gets sent by email and you can trust sweatshop workers not to be tempted to take advantage of anything they read.
I think there was an Attenborough documentary from a while back in which he had his reaction time tested, had a couple of glasses of wine, and had it tested again, to his significant impairment (double IIRC).
Try riding a bicycle after a few drinks. You'll soon notice how your sense of balance is shot. So no great need for checking cyclists, it's self-regulating; drivers can fall asleep at the wheel, cyclists just wobble off the road.
lower the BAC to the ridiculously LOW level of 0.08%.
In Victoria, Australia, which is a LONG way from being a puritanical dry state, the legal BAC is 0.05%.
Even if not intoxicated to impairment.
Of course you're impaired. You just feel good and think that you're not. Your reaction time is worse, and more significantly, your judgement. You drive faster, take more risks. Fine if it's you running into a tree, but not if you head-on into someone else while passing on a corner.
and to my recollection EVERYTHING was backwards and especially the threads. This has "obviously" changed.
If you recollect correctly, that's interesting. Would like to see it documented though. It certainly isn't the case now.
The anecdote with Green/Red light
A little digging found this note at the NYT: "... the meaning of a red traffic light in China. It means stop. During the Cultural Revolution 30 years ago, an effort was made to change the meaning to ''go,'' but the idea did not take hold."
However, it seems a bit urban legendish to me, I've yet to find any first hand references. If it happeend at all it was very short lived. More likely it was a metaphor that someone took literally.
The mobile manufacturers aren't just going to redesign and retool for free.
They change their designs several times a year, and obviously this would not be retrospective, so it shold not cost an extra cent. But they'll try to claim it does, of course.
Maybe it's just me, but so often people I talk to have trouble dealing with sites that don't start with "www".
Yes, but it's not really a complex idea. If companies did use subdomains as intended, it wouldn't take long to penetrate. It might also help with the concept that every domain has to be.com. Hardly anyone uses even.org, even if that is more apporprate than.com. Partly because phishers and link spammers would scoop up the.com if htey dind;t regiser it anyway I suppose. (And of course Slashdot.org when it is by no means a non-profit organisation.)
it very well may be that they don't use left threaded screws. but concluding that because they make right threaded screws they must also use right threaded screws is jumping to conclusions.
I live in China. I was trying to think of some evidence you could actually see short of catching a plane. And while a box of loose screws would obviously be made to whatever spec the customer wanted, internal screws for consumer appliances, which is what I meant, not loose screws, would be whatever was available to the factory and cheapest -- having been involved with export, cost is everything. Why would they increase costs by using a different kind of screw that has no inherent benefits? Historically, China's heavy inudstry was based on Russain technology, which in turn was copied mostly from Europe. More recently, Japanese, based on US standards, though fortuantely mostly metricated.
I still fail to understand why anyone would imagine LH screws would be standard in China.
PS. Chinese vaginas aren't sloped sideways either.
That has nothing to do with what they actually use in China.
Since many consumer appliances are effectively non-repairable, they use whatever parts are convenient. Have a look at any cheap appaince and you'll find all the screws are RH.
And by the way, I LIVE IN CHINA. I've never seen LH threaded anything, except perhaps the usual exceptions like gas pipes and some bicycle parts. Why on earth do you (or the original poster, if that's not you) think LH threads are used here?
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's a wonderful opportunity for them. They can get all the benefits of DRM and blame all the problems on the media companies which "forced" them it implement it. The benefits for MS include making unauthorised software unrunnable; if they don't pay MS for a certificate it's untrusted. The PC will become a big dongle, to make it hard to copy or transfer MS software, and anyone else who signs up. And media companies will have to sign on (literally) to use media secured by the DRM. Don't be surprised if in a few years attempting to use open formats like MP3 trigger off alarms and send messages to the RIAA. It's certainly possible technically, and we have the recent example of Sony's rootkit to show that some have the will.
Well, if the editors edited, they would have noticed this is a dupe from last week.
Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection
On December 23rd, 2006 with 283 comments
David Gerard writes "Security researcher Peter Gutmann has released A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection, a detailed explanation of just what...
More plausible than most of the movie. They've been studying an Alien fighter in the Area 51 bunker since 1947 (I assume it's the Roswell ship). So they had decades to work out the interfaces. The Alien computers seem rather primitive and limited anyway, as they had to piggyback on our satellite system to get a countdown clock instead of making their own in 3 lines of code. Lucky for us, eh?
Yeah. The article was about user interfaces, not impluasible movie science in general. There is a serious point towards the end, that because we see these magical UIs so often on TV and in the movies, a lot of people, and decision makers, want them in real life, no matter how impractical or counter productive they'd be. Life imitates art, and that's not always good. I've seen several stories about implementations of the "Minority Report interface". None took off. As TFA says, they're just tiring and inefficient. Similarly for most voice interfaces. And how much expensive hardware is going to be used to support the "mouth watering graphics" of Vista? How much more work will that help the user get done?
Bad typing. There's actually a <?i> instead of </i> at the end of the first line. Preview is pretty slow, I usually just wing it.
For one thing, there are plenty of exploits for MS Word. So for going to a hugely bloated obfuscated binary format you'd gain no security. Like most peopel I get lots of messages sent as DOC attachments already. I usually view them, copy the text, paste into the original message as text (my client, Eudora, lets me do that) and delete the attachment, usually converting a 100k file into 1k text.
And Word files don't have a standard way to handle quoting and replying. So you get everyone making up their own "system", like "Original lines in blue, Jack's response in green, boss's remarks in Arial italic..."
I think it's more that to get the same look as intended by the sender using an MS client, you have to use the IE renderer built in to Windows. Otherwise people complained it looked wrong. And this was no doubt a lot easier than writing your own renderer and keeping it up to date.
Personally I stick with an ancient version of Eudora, which does have its own renderer. Sometimes it does look like crap when I get HTML mail, but I can usually work it out, and in the worst case, save to HTML and use a browser. One useful feature is the ability to edit incoming mail. I can select it all, convert to plain text, maybe delete any boilerplate disclaimers. Cuts the storage down by 80%. I know that businesses couldn't do this, but this is my personal stuff and I'm not going to be presenting it in court.
There is (was) a "rich text" for email, looked like a subset of HTML. It was used by early versions of Eudora and other mail clients. I think we can blame Netscape for putting HTML into email, and this was cemented when Outlook came along and started doing it by default. All the other mail clients had to follow though they knew it was a Bad Idea.
They do. "A Navy user said that any HTML messages sent to his account are automatically converted to plain text." But if you've used tables or such the layout will probably be trashed, so better to reformat as plain text to begin with.
Using something like Lynx to filter HTML into plain text would give pretty good results, it does tables fairly well.
A neo-con wet dream. I particularly liked how the student revolutionaries just walked into the CCP headquarters and the old guard communists folded up and walked away when they realised democracy was just a better idea.
In that, he couldn't even spell the name of the major city "Guangzhou" correctly. Doesn't he have an atlas?
The last straw for me was Rainbow Six where he demonised conservationists as a bunch of genocidal maniacs. Of course they were defeated by the elite team of crack snipers, because the Greenies decided to attack them head on in their home base for no good reason, instead of just getting on with releasing their plague.
Yeah. So much for continuity.
Don't forget to get rid of your Superman III and Office Space videos.
The Australian version has Aboriginals instead of lawyers. Since you're rather more likely to be passing Aboriginals on a country road while driving a truck than lawyers, I think the lawyer version is a fairly lame fork of the original racist joke.
Can't be worse than the crap he (presumably) wrote himself before that. His first two or three were good thrillers, I kept reading from momentum, but they got more and more full of turgid prose, jingoism, silly factual errors, and Tom Ryan became just a mouthpiece for Clancy's extreme right-wing politics.
I'm sure I could fnd a way, but it's not worth the time to worry about it. I'm not in the market for any of that stuff anyway.
Yes. Because nothing confidential ever gets sent by email and you can trust sweatshop workers not to be tempted to take advantage of anything they read.
Doesn't matter which link I try, they all load a fucking Flash ad that won't go away. Wants to set cookies to bypass; no.
Try riding a bicycle after a few drinks. You'll soon notice how your sense of balance is shot. So no great need for checking cyclists, it's self-regulating; drivers can fall asleep at the wheel, cyclists just wobble off the road.
In Victoria, Australia, which is a LONG way from being a puritanical dry state, the legal BAC is 0.05%.
Even if not intoxicated to impairment.
Of course you're impaired. You just feel good and think that you're not. Your reaction time is worse, and more significantly, your judgement. You drive faster, take more risks. Fine if it's you running into a tree, but not if you head-on into someone else while passing on a corner.
If you recollect correctly, that's interesting. Would like to see it documented though. It certainly isn't the case now.
The anecdote with Green/Red light
A little digging found this note at the NYT: "... the meaning of a red traffic light in China. It means stop. During the Cultural Revolution 30 years ago, an effort was made to change the meaning to ''go,'' but the idea did not take hold."
However, it seems a bit urban legendish to me, I've yet to find any first hand references. If it happeend at all it was very short lived. More likely it was a metaphor that someone took literally.
They change their designs several times a year, and obviously this would not be retrospective, so it shold not cost an extra cent. But they'll try to claim it does, of course.
Yes, but it's not really a complex idea. If companies did use subdomains as intended, it wouldn't take long to penetrate. It might also help with the concept that every domain has to be .com. Hardly anyone uses even .org, even if that is more apporprate than .com. Partly because phishers and link spammers would scoop up the .com if htey dind;t regiser it anyway I suppose. (And of course Slashdot.org when it is by no means a non-profit organisation.)
I live in China. I was trying to think of some evidence you could actually see short of catching a plane. And while a box of loose screws would obviously be made to whatever spec the customer wanted, internal screws for consumer appliances, which is what I meant, not loose screws, would be whatever was available to the factory and cheapest -- having been involved with export, cost is everything. Why would they increase costs by using a different kind of screw that has no inherent benefits? Historically, China's heavy inudstry was based on Russain technology, which in turn was copied mostly from Europe. More recently, Japanese, based on US standards, though fortuantely mostly metricated.
I still fail to understand why anyone would imagine LH screws would be standard in China.
PS. Chinese vaginas aren't sloped sideways either.
Since many consumer appliances are effectively non-repairable, they use whatever parts are convenient. Have a look at any cheap appaince and you'll find all the screws are RH. And by the way, I LIVE IN CHINA. I've never seen LH threaded anything, except perhaps the usual exceptions like gas pipes and some bicycle parts. Why on earth do you (or the original poster, if that's not you) think LH threads are used here?
Yes, you are completely wrong.
I do know that all their screws are left threaded though.
No. Have a look at your hardware stoer. Where are 90% of the products made?
Are you a troll, or just an idiot?