D'oh! If you have the choice between making it cheap by removing features XOR making it cheap from mass production with full features, choose to keep the features.
So what features were removed -- colour screen? -- it never had one. In any case, the idea was never about eye-candy but simple practical business and educational use, and low power consumption. You, and "prostoalex" are comparing two quite different devices. The article cited does not mention the cheap Dell handhelds he linked to, apparently Prostalex imagines Indians can buy from Dell online and get them delivered by FedEx for the same price he can. Dell India doesn't even sell handhelds.
ah-ah--an "unconditional" format will be the long, slow kind. A quick format, if the option is available will be the fast kind.
But why do either of those things when you can just write zeroes to the partition table?
Because it's pretty easy to recreate the partition table. Eg, Testdisk saved my data after a Windows crash destroyed the parttion table.
It depends... in nature viruses silently reproduce before killing the host.
Cold viruses don't usually, for instance. Most peoepl have viral infections several times a year and survive, not to mention herpes and such on your skin, etc, etc.
But some do, the new ones. After a while they become less lethal, the longer their host lives and is incubating more virus, the better for it. From what I've read, our cells are full of ancient virus fragments that started as infections and became domesticated enough to merge into our DNA.
Well, that's assuming the virus isn't set to drop a bomb on the system on a certain date. The idea of making 1,000 or more computers become inoperable at the exact same moment would appeal to blackmailers, pranksters or folks with other motives.
True, but if there is a virus installed, it can destroy (or encrypt) data in any number of other ways already. The professional virus writers, who could unleash such a thing, seem focussed on hijacking machines rather than destroying them. Anyway, the consequences seem to be exactly the same as a hardware failure, for which you should have backups anyway.
They'd be idiots trying this if it wasn't encrypted. Otherwise, the text strings in PDFs are often not plain text, expecially of the fonts have been subsetted, as they are by default now.
Or use a firewall with packet inspection to block any outgoing connections.
Blocking will mean you can't open the file. Cloak your IP using a proxy, they get a meaningless IP (assuming however that no more personal inormation is tranmitted -- TFA says it isn't but it's an obvious extension).
By the way, PDF is an open format. There are MANY non-Adobe applications, some of them open source (many not), that both read and write PDF files.
Originally PDF protection was on the "honour system", a flag that said "don't allow X", which open source software could be easily made to ignore. The trick of this tracking software is, (according to TFA) that the PDF can require you to be online (presumably exchanging a key with a server before you can read it, undoubtedly it will be encrypted. So unless one hacks this, which would probably bring DMCA heat, it can't. Recall what happened to Sklyarov when his company made a protection-remover for PDF files.
But people won't be happy if printing is blocked; and once you can do that, you can at worst print and scan back into a file, even OCR to get text back; or use some virtual printer to do it entirely digitally, in the ame way music and video DRM can be circumvented.
What you describe is unethical, but that is not all SEO.
Before you described what you did as "sneaky". Probably that's what anyone else would call "unethical". Unless you're not more specific, I'll just give you the deficit of the doubt; you're not in a well-trusted profession.
Bascially, spammers are fucking up email and usenet, SEOs are fucking up web search. To be perhaps repetitous, there are many search engines that will happily take your money to give you a higher ranking. The problem is that no one uses them exactly because of that.
Maybe I sell candles and have a wide assortment. I think pay someone to get me traffic via SEO. A user then goes to google and searches for 'trapp candles' because they want to buy some candles. I show up because of my 'sneaky' tactics, they come to my site, find want they want, and leave a happy customer. Is this wrong?
How about this: you find out where the Yellow Pages phone books are being printed, sneak in one night and make your listing duplicated 1000 times over, taking up dozens of pages. Customers looking for "candles" finds dozens of pages with only your number. They say what the hell and buy from you. They're reasonably happy. But it's not them that have been harmed (much, yet). Leaving aside the trespass aspect, that's what you're doing. And next year, a hundred of your competitors sneak in and do the same thing. Now the phone book is 10,000 pages long and no one wants to even open it any more because it's full of ads for candles.
You're fucking up the whole "search" idea for everyone. The end is either Google deletes you and your like or it goes out of business. "Search" is like a listing, NOT like advertising. Every time some company tries to make it like advertising, they lose, Altavista did, Yahoo did, Google didn't and is on top BECAUSE they are perceived as having links not based on payment but relevance.
So if my dickweed President drags my country into a war, it's my War on Terror, but when your PM does it, it's nothing to do with you?
I didn't vote for him so no, and it certainly wasn't part of his platform when he ran, and most of the population opposed it. And I didn't mean it was "your" (personal) "War on Terror", the "you" was a generic American, who has recently endorsed GWB's polcies by re-electing him. But my point remains, the Bali bombers said in their trial that they intended to kill Americans, instead they killed: Australian 88, Indonesian 38, British 26, American 7, German 6, Swedish 5, Dutch 4, French 4, Danish 3, New Zealanders 3, Swiss 3, Brazilian 2, Canadian 2, Japanese 2, South African 2, South Korean 2, Ecuadorian 1, Greek 1, Italian 1, Polish 1, Portuguese 1, Taiwanese 1.
With a population of 20 million, that hit as hard on us as 9/11, AND WE WEREN'T EVEN THE FUCKING INTENDED TARGETS. Being killed for cause is terrible, being killed out of mistaken identity is still dead, and entirely meaningless, which makes it feel somehow worse.
Why would a terrorist want your passport information? Why not? Instead of manufacturing papers with a faked identity and false history, make a passport with an RFID which is almost identical to yours, except with a different picture. Now they have an irrefutable (supposedly) ID, with a valid, verifiable history already in place. One which would raise no red flags whatsoever
The whole point of this will be to cross-reference passenger data into a massive database. Which will flag the same passport being used in two countries at the same time; at least it's a risk they wouldn't take when they can use a clean, unique passport. The technology to clone a passport is much harder than finding valid, or plausible, identity data to fill it with. But again easier to pay to have a valid one issued by a friendly or corrupt official.
In any case, you're describing identity theft, which I mentioned as a possible (fraud) risk, something often cited as a "terrorist!!" activity, but in practice, I've never heard of it, certainly not for Americans (terrorists may get papers in the names of unwitting compatriots).
ut I thought the Doctor got twelve regenerations? Let's see, we've had...
Actually, there was one episode where we got brief flashbacks of several other Doctors, including a female, I think; so he's already more than used up his dozen.
One of them has only a PDA and is guiding the driver to where the americans are
Even if these are readable for further than the "inches" the govt claims, I rather doubt they'd be so for much more than a few yards. Also; these RFIDs will be embedded in most (First World) countries' passports soon, the US actually is more interested in making foreigners' passports trackable than Americans, but they can hardly force other countries to implement this and not do it themselves.
Creating a device with a Public/Private key encryption system, creating a new key each year and supplying that key to thousands of passport readers isn't difficult.
They'd have to be supplied ot passport readers in every country in the world. So two days after this comes into effect, bootleg readers are on sale next to cable TV decoders, but unlike cable TV, passports stay valid for at least 5 years, so changing the encryption isn't an option, so why bother at all.
You are Johnny Terrorist. You go to a crowded bar and scan the crowd. Ah! A lot of Yankee warmongering devils in there! Target-rich environment! Mayhem ensues.
That sounds like an excellent idea. The Bali bombers thought they were blowing up a bunch of Yankee infidel in Kuta, actally most were Asustralians. Us non-American white people would really prefer not to be collateral damage in your War on Terror (though sadly our dickweed prime minister has dragged us into it and made us targets).
a terrorist could get your passport information simply by walking close to you
Why would a terrorist want your passport information? They have perfectly reliable ways to get entirely legitimate papers of their own. If they want to kill you, they will, and pick up your passport from your body later as a souvenir, whether it has RFID or not. On the other hand, thieves, swindlers, identity thieves could very well take an interest in your vital statistics. Why do TERRORISTS!!!! have to be part of every security discussion?
By direct inference, any academic establishment that DOES get hacked by amateurish methods, or by people walking off with laptops holding unsecured data, etc, is clearly NOT a University, or at least not one with any credibility.
I think not. Universities have a feudal power structure, professors have great power, and no doubt some of these found it inconvenient to have to have to walk down to the IT centre or whatever when they forgot their passwords and insisted on a simple way to reset them, Those who knew better probably didn't have the power or inclination ot refuse, and just documented it to cover their asses when the inevitable happened.
She might have gotten away with it if she had used an open wireless access point
Not really; TFA says a discrepancey in the grades was noticed and that started the investigation. Since she changed her own and her roomate's grade's she would have been udner suspicion; though she might have gotten away without a criminal conviction.
The USB spokesman said "the integrity and security of our grading system is intact and was not compromised". Well, the method she used was simply knowing the profs' SSNs, which enabled her to reset their passwords. That seems like a gaping stupid hole that was probably instituted because of forgetful professors insisted on it. Why don't they just use Stick-it notes on their monitors like everyone else?
I agree with you on the data cabling, but as far as I'm concerned, the government needs to keep its nose out of my electrical wiring too.
If it's your house, and you're living in it, I understand your logic. But if you're renting an office or home, and discover a problem with the wiring (such as it being 50 years old and had polarity reversed on random power points) at least if there is a legal standard you can pressure the landlord to fix it. I worked in an office that was like that, the fuseboxes were obsolete and no fuses that fit were available, so they were mostly wired straight through with copper. When you think of how a cheap landlord will save costs wherever possible, it's not enough to leave it up to the owner's conscience.
Because the first one was in a nitch slashdot catagory and the other showed up on the slashdot front page. you obviously subscribe to the nitch catagory. (and read the front page)
Both articles were on the front page -- you can at this moment see both, yesterdays's in the "older stuff" box on the right, of older "front page" stories. Obviously.
It's niche, not "nitch" and category, not "catagory" -- if you hadn't tried to "correct" me with bogus facts, I would have let that ride.
Although I read slashdot on a daily basis, this is the first time that I see this
If you miss a day or more, look at the "Older Stuff" panel on the right of the main stories, where as I write you can see the stories posted yesterday, including Followup on MS and Brazil in NY Times. Then you can go back for as many more days as you want. It's not like "important" stories are duped to bring them to your attention, it's random.
I'm pretty tired of reading this type of defence, it holds as much merit as the "just delete it" excuse spammers use -- and I suppose my annoyance is for a similar reason, someone pushing crap I don't need at me; spammers out of malice, slashdot editors out of laziness.
Slashdot Mirror
No, violent idiots like you may earn my fear, but never respect.
So what features were removed -- colour screen? -- it never had one. In any case, the idea was never about eye-candy but simple practical business and educational use, and low power consumption. You, and "prostoalex" are comparing two quite different devices. The article cited does not mention the cheap Dell handhelds he linked to, apparently Prostalex imagines Indians can buy from Dell online and get them delivered by FedEx for the same price he can. Dell India doesn't even sell handhelds.
Not the rural villagers the Simputer was designed for.
Because it's pretty easy to recreate the partition table. Eg, Testdisk saved my data after a Windows crash destroyed the parttion table.
Cold viruses don't usually, for instance. Most peoepl have viral infections several times a year and survive, not to mention herpes and such on your skin, etc, etc.
But some do, the new ones. After a while they become less lethal, the longer their host lives and is incubating more virus, the better for it. From what I've read, our cells are full of ancient virus fragments that started as infections and became domesticated enough to merge into our DNA.
True, but if there is a virus installed, it can destroy (or encrypt) data in any number of other ways already. The professional virus writers, who could unleash such a thing, seem focussed on hijacking machines rather than destroying them. Anyway, the consequences seem to be exactly the same as a hardware failure, for which you should have backups anyway.
They'd be idiots trying this if it wasn't encrypted. Otherwise, the text strings in PDFs are often not plain text, expecially of the fonts have been subsetted, as they are by default now.
Blocking will mean you can't open the file. Cloak your IP using a proxy, they get a meaningless IP (assuming however that no more personal inormation is tranmitted -- TFA says it isn't but it's an obvious extension).
Originally PDF protection was on the "honour system", a flag that said "don't allow X", which open source software could be easily made to ignore. The trick of this tracking software is, (according to TFA) that the PDF can require you to be online (presumably exchanging a key with a server before you can read it, undoubtedly it will be encrypted. So unless one hacks this, which would probably bring DMCA heat, it can't. Recall what happened to Sklyarov when his company made a protection-remover for PDF files.
But people won't be happy if printing is blocked; and once you can do that, you can at worst print and scan back into a file, even OCR to get text back; or use some virtual printer to do it entirely digitally, in the ame way music and video DRM can be circumvented.
Before you described what you did as "sneaky". Probably that's what anyone else would call "unethical". Unless you're not more specific, I'll just give you the deficit of the doubt; you're not in a well-trusted profession.
Bascially, spammers are fucking up email and usenet, SEOs are fucking up web search. To be perhaps repetitous, there are many search engines that will happily take your money to give you a higher ranking. The problem is that no one uses them exactly because of that.
How about this: you find out where the Yellow Pages phone books are being printed, sneak in one night and make your listing duplicated 1000 times over, taking up dozens of pages. Customers looking for "candles" finds dozens of pages with only your number. They say what the hell and buy from you. They're reasonably happy. But it's not them that have been harmed (much, yet). Leaving aside the trespass aspect, that's what you're doing. And next year, a hundred of your competitors sneak in and do the same thing. Now the phone book is 10,000 pages long and no one wants to even open it any more because it's full of ads for candles.
You're fucking up the whole "search" idea for everyone. The end is either Google deletes you and your like or it goes out of business. "Search" is like a listing, NOT like advertising. Every time some company tries to make it like advertising, they lose, Altavista did, Yahoo did, Google didn't and is on top BECAUSE they are perceived as having links not based on payment but relevance.
I didn't vote for him so no, and it certainly wasn't part of his platform when he ran, and most of the population opposed it. And I didn't mean it was "your" (personal) "War on Terror", the "you" was a generic American, who has recently endorsed GWB's polcies by re-electing him. But my point remains, the Bali bombers said in their trial that they intended to kill Americans, instead they killed: Australian 88, Indonesian 38, British 26, American 7, German 6, Swedish 5, Dutch 4, French 4, Danish 3, New Zealanders 3, Swiss 3, Brazilian 2, Canadian 2, Japanese 2, South African 2, South Korean 2, Ecuadorian 1, Greek 1, Italian 1, Polish 1, Portuguese 1, Taiwanese 1.
With a population of 20 million, that hit as hard on us as 9/11, AND WE WEREN'T EVEN THE FUCKING INTENDED TARGETS. Being killed for cause is terrible, being killed out of mistaken identity is still dead, and entirely meaningless, which makes it feel somehow worse.
The whole point of this will be to cross-reference passenger data into a massive database. Which will flag the same passport being used in two countries at the same time; at least it's a risk they wouldn't take when they can use a clean, unique passport. The technology to clone a passport is much harder than finding valid, or plausible, identity data to fill it with. But again easier to pay to have a valid one issued by a friendly or corrupt official.
In any case, you're describing identity theft, which I mentioned as a possible (fraud) risk, something often cited as a "terrorist!!" activity, but in practice, I've never heard of it, certainly not for Americans (terrorists may get papers in the names of unwitting compatriots).
Actually, there was one episode where we got brief flashbacks of several other Doctors, including a female, I think; so he's already more than used up his dozen.
Even if these are readable for further than the "inches" the govt claims, I rather doubt they'd be so for much more than a few yards. Also; these RFIDs will be embedded in most (First World) countries' passports soon, the US actually is more interested in making foreigners' passports trackable than Americans, but they can hardly force other countries to implement this and not do it themselves.
They'd have to be supplied ot passport readers in every country in the world. So two days after this comes into effect, bootleg readers are on sale next to cable TV decoders, but unlike cable TV, passports stay valid for at least 5 years, so changing the encryption isn't an option, so why bother at all.
That sounds like an excellent idea. The Bali bombers thought they were blowing up a bunch of Yankee infidel in Kuta, actally most were Asustralians. Us non-American white people would really prefer not to be collateral damage in your War on Terror (though sadly our dickweed prime minister has dragged us into it and made us targets).
Why would a terrorist want your passport information? They have perfectly reliable ways to get entirely legitimate papers of their own. If they want to kill you, they will, and pick up your passport from your body later as a souvenir, whether it has RFID or not. On the other hand, thieves, swindlers, identity thieves could very well take an interest in your vital statistics. Why do TERRORISTS!!!! have to be part of every security discussion?
I think not. Universities have a feudal power structure, professors have great power, and no doubt some of these found it inconvenient to have to have to walk down to the IT centre or whatever when they forgot their passwords and insisted on a simple way to reset them, Those who knew better probably didn't have the power or inclination ot refuse, and just documented it to cover their asses when the inevitable happened.
Not really; TFA says a discrepancey in the grades was noticed and that started the investigation. Since she changed her own and her roomate's grade's she would have been udner suspicion; though she might have gotten away without a criminal conviction.
The USB spokesman said "the integrity and security of our grading system is intact and was not compromised". Well, the method she used was simply knowing the profs' SSNs, which enabled her to reset their passwords. That seems like a gaping stupid hole that was probably instituted because of forgetful professors insisted on it. Why don't they just use Stick-it notes on their monitors like everyone else?
If it's your house, and you're living in it, I understand your logic. But if you're renting an office or home, and discover a problem with the wiring (such as it being 50 years old and had polarity reversed on random power points) at least if there is a legal standard you can pressure the landlord to fix it. I worked in an office that was like that, the fuseboxes were obsolete and no fuses that fit were available, so they were mostly wired straight through with copper. When you think of how a cheap landlord will save costs wherever possible, it's not enough to leave it up to the owner's conscience.
If you miss a day or more, look at the "Older Stuff" panel on the right of the main stories, where as I write you can see the stories posted yesterday, including Followup on MS and Brazil in NY Times. Then you can go back for as many more days as you want. It's not like "important" stories are duped to bring them to your attention, it's random.
I'm pretty tired of reading this type of defence, it holds as much merit as the "just delete it" excuse spammers use -- and I suppose my annoyance is for a similar reason, someone pushing crap I don't need at me; spammers out of malice, slashdot editors out of laziness.
It's starting from scratch -- cheap PCs with OSS installed for poor familes who mostly have never had one. No legacy, no "migration" problems.
So what if it does? It's free, no one loses any money. If and when it does come to light, take them to court.
Anyway, at least initally, they'll be using standard packages, there isn't much of a software industry, the whole idea is to encourage it.