Today it's "pirate" media tomorrow, it's whatever Big Brother feels like. The people doing it won't ever really tell you what they are doing. If you thought this kind of shit could only happen in China, WAKE UP NOW! Control is ultimately what the MAFIAA are all about. You will never be free if your computer and internet have owners. The destruction of net neutrality is the natural extension of non free computing and will bring us all right back to 1936 as far as freedom of press is concerned.
It's hard to believe the same person could say these two things:
[Thank God there's a new version of Windows. Vista is] much more secure than [XP].
and
the vast majority of computers on botnets are there because of user action instead of exploited vulnerabilities, I fail to see what a new version of Windows has to do with this
I mention it because it's about this time in the non free OS cycle that M$ usually kills the old version.
The BBC has a nice write up on how open and inviting the world of cybercrime is. Tools are passed around and improved and auctioned along with the results, according to William Beer, of Symantec. The scene is booming, with almost double the number of new threats in the first six months of 2007 as in the last of 2006.
So... what are the chances they just browsed Wikipedia for it?
If they are browsing Wikipedia, it's to insert their own BS into it. They pulled "articles" from "news" sites and ignored their own GAO estimates based on random sampling of real markets. In other words, they pulled it out of some industry (International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition) press release and an "estimate" by the Chief Economist for the Canadian Manufacturing and Exporters.
These estimate "pirate" product as %20 of the entire Canadian economy and that's insane. When you consider real estate, cars, domestic food product, gasoline and non branded commodities that dominate any economy, you would be lucky if %20 of goods were branded at all much less "pirated". How many fake Rolexes do these people think can be sold in a given year? Does anyone really believe that one in five dollars spent goes to something "fake"?
If that was the only word from US law with a tortured meaning, we would all be in better shape. The purpose of new speak, as Orwell understood it is to make sure no one would ever understand the language of the Enlightenment and documents like the US bill of rights. Simple words like "cruel and unusual", "limited duration", "shall not be infringed", "speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury" and "make no law abridging the freedom of speech" are widely missunderstood even when they are remembered.
The old line about polishing a turd comes to mind. Caldera was one of the poorest distributions around.
Pioneers often look bad in hind sight, but OpenLinux was a better place to be than Windows 95 or 98. Had they continued on they could have the markets now owned by Crossover Office and would be at least as polished as Xandros.
when are these companies and perhaps goverment going to make some strides in shutting down bots and zombies?
It's up to you. Botnets allow this kind of activity and there really is no way to trace the communications back to the source without reverting to POTS. Even then, those with enough power and skill can go undetected. OS diversification will help. Elimination of the weaker OS will do more. You can demand your freedom, that the government quit subsidizing non free software and change the way you and your business do things. The only one of the above you know will work is what you do for yourself.
There are several things that are funny about this. Microsoft thinks that it's a good idea to have a "secure" area to collaborate, but can't keep the "confidential" report to themselves. They have yet to deliver such a thing despite their tremendous head start and ubiquity. At the same time, their reps are pushing out tripe about how great Office 2007 is and what a bad idea Google services are.
Office has a lot of momentum and it will be hard to dethrone it or even steal away just a bit of marketshare unless Google finds a strong way to leverage their position to encourage people to use it.
Microsoft thinks that one in three SMB is interested in things like this. I found that information with a Google search, following the hunch that more traditional sharing methods confuse users and ends up leaking information that you would rather keep to yourself.
One of the funniest things the search above turned up is this presentation where M$ makes the case for Software as a Service in late 2005. 30% of SMB are likely to consider "Private web areas with advanced tools for collaboration amongst employees and business partners." I've got bad news for them - Google's work anywhere, someone else does all the work system is far more attractive. Thank you, James Murfin, for an entertaining read.
It's impressively like viewing a PowerPoint doc in a browser. The ability to easily publish on the web like this is kinda neat, and the source code of the presentation is surprisingly tidy.
It's not bad, but did not work in a more locked down browser, and that source code is only tidy if you are used to PowerPoint. Open Office exports to normal html with frames that work anywhere and has robot code that's less cluttered. This will be easier for most people, however, and it's nice to see.
The problem for most businesses, however, seems to be keeping those stupid ppt file OFF the internet. This search, for example, turns up 367 results. I can promise you that more than one of those results is a complete screw up. Separating the places that are for sharing and those that are for normal storage is good practice. Google's service will be easier to understand than many others and will result in fewer accidents.
Heck, the accountants probably know that there is no money to pay themselves. So, why work?
No, something else is wrong because at least one was fired. To get fired they had to have done something incompetent or evil or both. The others may have quit to distance themselves. Of course, it's much too late to escape the stigma of one of the most flagrant and intentional destructions of a public company imaginable. There are some things you should not do, no matter how much money is offered.
USB thumb drives are an on going headache, and an attack vector on top of that. I'm forced to wonder how serious any of these issues would be if we didn't live in a windows centric world.
Outside windoze, the attack vector is gone, there's little need for a thumbdrive because network services work securely, and finally it's easier to make sure information is shared on a need to know basis. That these services are lacking in the non free software world is an indictment of the non free software way, which starts with secrets to begin with. Beyond these precautions, you are left with HR type issues like not hiring someone who's going to sell your client information. Before these precautions, blaming employees is a waste of time.
Playing a ringtone might also--in the mind of the RIAA and the letter of the law--require performing rights.
Hmmm, an interesting concept for something that is impossible to copyright to begin with. Of course, this is the country that fined Girl Scouts for performing "God Bless America" without permission.
Another interesting legal concept is Performance Liability. I mean, what if someone is hurt during the performance? Who's fault is it? For instance, if I program my cell phone to ring "Thriller" in a crowded bar and get beat to shit for it, is the RIAA responsible for inciting a riot or am I? Do I have to pay for medical and clean up costs or do they? I tend to shy away from things that don't offer complete indemnification these days.
I'd rather the government not base their decision on whether to come in guns blazing on something as ridiculous as whether my heart rate is increased...
They will base the decision on your political expression and activism, the other things will simply justify your murder. The elevated heart rate will come when they ask you if you and your children would like some pancakes. The report will say that they had reason to believe you were armed and dangerous.
Unless the US returns to rule of law, tools used to track individuals will be used to identify, harass, intimidate, disrupt and eliminate opposition. Domestic spying is against the law. Unreasonable search violates the Constitution. It is completely unreasonable for government or industry to keep tables of "gait DNA" and other metrics for people who have not committed crimes. The purpose for this kind of thing is a crime in itself.
Their main claim to doom is that people can't put their hands on a Mac in a retail setting. That's neither true nor relevant. There are plenty of places to put you hands on a Mac. The value of that five minutes of exposure is also debatable.
I don't know much about the author but a quick review shows he's not an advocate of freedom or even choice. The more I dig, the worse it gets. He seems to like M$ and has book titles like, "The Microsoft Way: The Real Story of How the Company Outsmarts Its Competition". Other major titles show equal lack of insight or forsight. It's amazing that the NYT would listen to someone like that, but hey he's a business professor who lives in San Jose, so he must know something... right?
This is an interesting story, but must it come from "Erris"?
No, you ACs could have put the story up before me or after me instead of trying to game the Firehose. It works like this:
Use your spare time to look for things that interest you with Google News, RMS's Blog, Daily Rotten, The Register, BBC or just steal it from twitter.
Using your built in sense of morality, conflict and intelligence decide if there's really a story.
Visit the Firehose to see if half a million people have already submitted it and done a good job.
If they have not, do some more research and write a concise summary.
Give it a title that would make Steve Ballmer scream and push submit.
Enjoy the fireworks as multibillion dollar companies spam the result with insulting apologies, lies, spam and all manner of awful trash.
Proffit? No, entertainment is priceless.
What will be even more fun is watching you PR types submit bad news about the companies you represent so some nobody like me does not scoop you when things leak out into the press. Get writing, your boss is paying you to manage opinion here not dick around with one or two "trolls". Be sure to get all the juicy details before they leak out. Try pointing out to your boss that full disclosure is better than being blindsided.
A second post from an AC mentions the fabulous twitter and you have managed to create a tag that will point to more good stories in the future. Keep advertising my friend twitter.
Everyone else should check out the Vista Failure Log these AC's hate so much. It and most of what twitter posts is more intersting than a story about some clueless and rude manager at a big box store.
If you want to read some really intersting news, visit Stallman's Blog, which is updated every other day.
Someone, please, tell me that PC World is not that stupid. Tell me that web page belongs to someone other than the AC that submitted the original story and was latter identified only as "Tikka". It violates their own store policy. Their PR people told The Register they would take care of it. Tell me the video was taken days ago. I'd really rather hear anything other than some self important moron is making life difficult for a Linux user, against store policy, common decency and half the internet's outrage. No?
Perhaps this was actually intentional, and the are using this team as a sacrificial lamb, so to speak.
From both the MAFIAA and the lamb's perspective, this is a dissaster. How do you think those lawsuits are going now that people have proved (again) that MAFIAA is giving their content away on P2P? The lamb's view could not be worse. These wizards of the net can't keep their email to themselves, who's going to give them business now?
Big media needs to face up to the reality of ubiquitous networks and file sharing because all technical and legal efforts have failed. Encryption has failed, the lawsuits are not working and this joke company obviously did not work. All they are left with is pissed off customers and a bad reputation as control freaks. Despite terrible threats, the "pirates" sail on.
It's perfect. You can deny that you're Twitter, promote your crazy bullshit, and have plausible deniability, all at the same time!
Then again, it's possible that you are just crazy as well as irritating.
I told you that I would taunt you a third time. Check out my new home page, and be taunted again and again. Everyone without a url should use the Vista Failure Log, bad Vista or similar to send a message to you clowns and the world at large.
Slashdot Mirror
Today it's "pirate" media tomorrow, it's whatever Big Brother feels like. The people doing it won't ever really tell you what they are doing. If you thought this kind of shit could only happen in China, WAKE UP NOW! Control is ultimately what the MAFIAA are all about. You will never be free if your computer and internet have owners. The destruction of net neutrality is the natural extension of non free computing and will bring us all right back to 1936 as far as freedom of press is concerned.
It's hard to believe the same person could say these two things:
[Thank God there's a new version of Windows. Vista is] much more secure than [XP].
and
the vast majority of computers on botnets are there because of user action instead of exploited vulnerabilities, I fail to see what a new version of Windows has to do with this
I mention it because it's about this time in the non free OS cycle that M$ usually kills the old version.
The BBC has a nice write up on how open and inviting the world of cybercrime is. Tools are passed around and improved and auctioned along with the results, according to William Beer, of Symantec. The scene is booming, with almost double the number of new threats in the first six months of 2007 as in the last of 2006.
Arbor Networks is reporting the same boom from the ISP perspective, and thinks the infrastructure of the internet itself is in danger.
Darkreading details some of the sophistication of the attacks, from an IT perspective as reported by MessageLabs.
Hmmm. Symantec, MessageLabs, McAffe, all at once reporting the same thing. Not to downplay the threat, but is a new version of Windows out?
So... what are the chances they just browsed Wikipedia for it?
If they are browsing Wikipedia, it's to insert their own BS into it. They pulled "articles" from "news" sites and ignored their own GAO estimates based on random sampling of real markets. In other words, they pulled it out of some industry (International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition) press release and an "estimate" by the Chief Economist for the Canadian Manufacturing and Exporters.
These estimate "pirate" product as %20 of the entire Canadian economy and that's insane. When you consider real estate, cars, domestic food product, gasoline and non branded commodities that dominate any economy, you would be lucky if %20 of goods were branded at all much less "pirated". How many fake Rolexes do these people think can be sold in a given year? Does anyone really believe that one in five dollars spent goes to something "fake"?
As someone else points out register is right.
If that was the only word from US law with a tortured meaning, we would all be in better shape. The purpose of new speak, as Orwell understood it is to make sure no one would ever understand the language of the Enlightenment and documents like the US bill of rights. Simple words like "cruel and unusual", "limited duration", "shall not be infringed", "speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury" and "make no law abridging the freedom of speech" are widely missunderstood even when they are remembered.
The old line about polishing a turd comes to mind. Caldera was one of the poorest distributions around.
Pioneers often look bad in hind sight, but OpenLinux was a better place to be than Windows 95 or 98. Had they continued on they could have the markets now owned by Crossover Office and would be at least as polished as Xandros.
If you want to see poor, look at SCO Unix itself.
when are these companies and perhaps goverment going to make some strides in shutting down bots and zombies?
It's up to you. Botnets allow this kind of activity and there really is no way to trace the communications back to the source without reverting to POTS. Even then, those with enough power and skill can go undetected. OS diversification will help. Elimination of the weaker OS will do more. You can demand your freedom, that the government quit subsidizing non free software and change the way you and your business do things. The only one of the above you know will work is what you do for yourself.
There are several things that are funny about this. Microsoft thinks that it's a good idea to have a "secure" area to collaborate, but can't keep the "confidential" report to themselves. They have yet to deliver such a thing despite their tremendous head start and ubiquity. At the same time, their reps are pushing out tripe about how great Office 2007 is and what a bad idea Google services are.
Office has a lot of momentum and it will be hard to dethrone it or even steal away just a bit of marketshare unless Google finds a strong way to leverage their position to encourage people to use it.
Microsoft thinks that one in three SMB is interested in things like this. I found that information with a Google search, following the hunch that more traditional sharing methods confuse users and ends up leaking information that you would rather keep to yourself.
One of the funniest things the search above turned up is this presentation where M$ makes the case for Software as a Service in late 2005. 30% of SMB are likely to consider "Private web areas with advanced tools for collaboration amongst employees and business partners." I've got bad news for them - Google's work anywhere, someone else does all the work system is far more attractive. Thank you, James Murfin, for an entertaining read.
It's impressively like viewing a PowerPoint doc in a browser. The ability to easily publish on the web like this is kinda neat, and the source code of the presentation is surprisingly tidy.
It's not bad, but did not work in a more locked down browser, and that source code is only tidy if you are used to PowerPoint. Open Office exports to normal html with frames that work anywhere and has robot code that's less cluttered. This will be easier for most people, however, and it's nice to see.
The problem for most businesses, however, seems to be keeping those stupid ppt file OFF the internet. This search, for example, turns up 367 results. I can promise you that more than one of those results is a complete screw up. Separating the places that are for sharing and those that are for normal storage is good practice. Google's service will be easier to understand than many others and will result in fewer accidents.
Ed Bott is no more an impartial, unpaid person expressing their opinion about things they like than Laura Didiot is.
Heck, the accountants probably know that there is no money to pay themselves. So, why work?
No, something else is wrong because at least one was fired. To get fired they had to have done something incompetent or evil or both. The others may have quit to distance themselves. Of course, it's much too late to escape the stigma of one of the most flagrant and intentional destructions of a public company imaginable. There are some things you should not do, no matter how much money is offered.
From who? Universal? Robbing the majors is the thing to do these days.
USB thumb drives are an on going headache, and an attack vector on top of that. I'm forced to wonder how serious any of these issues would be if we didn't live in a windows centric world.
Outside windoze, the attack vector is gone, there's little need for a thumbdrive because network services work securely, and finally it's easier to make sure information is shared on a need to know basis. That these services are lacking in the non free software world is an indictment of the non free software way, which starts with secrets to begin with. Beyond these precautions, you are left with HR type issues like not hiring someone who's going to sell your client information. Before these precautions, blaming employees is a waste of time.
Vista has M$'s own version integrated already.
Hmmm, an interesting concept for something that is impossible to copyright to begin with. Of course, this is the country that fined Girl Scouts for performing "God Bless America" without permission.
Another interesting legal concept is Performance Liability. I mean, what if someone is hurt during the performance? Who's fault is it? For instance, if I program my cell phone to ring "Thriller" in a crowded bar and get beat to shit for it, is the RIAA responsible for inciting a riot or am I? Do I have to pay for medical and clean up costs or do they? I tend to shy away from things that don't offer complete indemnification these days.
The Lawyers are not just whistling Dixie!
I'd rather the government not base their decision on whether to come in guns blazing on something as ridiculous as whether my heart rate is increased...
They will base the decision on your political expression and activism, the other things will simply justify your murder. The elevated heart rate will come when they ask you if you and your children would like some pancakes. The report will say that they had reason to believe you were armed and dangerous.
Unless the US returns to rule of law, tools used to track individuals will be used to identify, harass, intimidate, disrupt and eliminate opposition. Domestic spying is against the law. Unreasonable search violates the Constitution. It is completely unreasonable for government or industry to keep tables of "gait DNA" and other metrics for people who have not committed crimes. The purpose for this kind of thing is a crime in itself.
"Huge opportunity dooms Apple (Again!)"
Their main claim to doom is that people can't put their hands on a Mac in a retail setting. That's neither true nor relevant. There are plenty of places to put you hands on a Mac. The value of that five minutes of exposure is also debatable.
I don't know much about the author but a quick review shows he's not an advocate of freedom or even choice. The more I dig, the worse it gets. He seems to like M$ and has book titles like, "The Microsoft Way: The Real Story of How the Company Outsmarts Its Competition". Other major titles show equal lack of insight or forsight. It's amazing that the NYT would listen to someone like that, but hey he's a business professor who lives in San Jose, so he must know something ... right?
This is an interesting story, but must it come from "Erris"?
No, you ACs could have put the story up before me or after me instead of trying to game the Firehose. It works like this:
Proffit? No, entertainment is priceless.
What will be even more fun is watching you PR types submit bad news about the companies you represent so some nobody like me does not scoop you when things leak out into the press. Get writing, your boss is paying you to manage opinion here not dick around with one or two "trolls". Be sure to get all the juicy details before they leak out. Try pointing out to your boss that full disclosure is better than being blindsided.
A second post from an AC mentions the fabulous twitter and you have managed to create a tag that will point to more good stories in the future. Keep advertising my friend twitter.
Everyone else should check out the Vista Failure Log these AC's hate so much. It and most of what twitter posts is more intersting than a story about some clueless and rude manager at a big box store.
If you want to read some really intersting news, visit Stallman's Blog, which is updated every other day.
Someone, please, tell me that PC World is not that stupid. Tell me that web page belongs to someone other than the AC that submitted the original story and was latter identified only as "Tikka". It violates their own store policy. Their PR people told The Register they would take care of it. Tell me the video was taken days ago. I'd really rather hear anything other than some self important moron is making life difficult for a Linux user, against store policy, common decency and half the internet's outrage. No?
Poor Mr. Tank.
Perhaps this was actually intentional, and the are using this team as a sacrificial lamb, so to speak.
From both the MAFIAA and the lamb's perspective, this is a dissaster. How do you think those lawsuits are going now that people have proved (again) that MAFIAA is giving their content away on P2P? The lamb's view could not be worse. These wizards of the net can't keep their email to themselves, who's going to give them business now?
Big media needs to face up to the reality of ubiquitous networks and file sharing because all technical and legal efforts have failed. Encryption has failed, the lawsuits are not working and this joke company obviously did not work. All they are left with is pissed off customers and a bad reputation as control freaks. Despite terrible threats, the "pirates" sail on.
It's perfect. You can deny that you're Twitter, promote your crazy bullshit, and have plausible deniability, all at the same time!
Then again, it's possible that you are just crazy as well as irritating.
I told you that I would taunt you a third time. Check out my new home page, and be taunted again and again. Everyone without a url should use the Vista Failure Log, bad Vista or similar to send a message to you clowns and the world at large.
a jet-powered vehicle where the frontmost thing is your head? At 135mph?
At that speed, I don't think heads first or tail first matters.