> don't think so highly of yourself. The companies
couldn't care less about you personally in terms of pricing. You are just one of several million customers.
False. Amazon has done precisely this -- altered the pricing of certain products based on the content of cookies indicating previous visits.
First-time or infrequent buyers got better discounts, when compared to regular customers who had already demonstrated a willingness to pay at a higher price point.
> If you purchased a pregnancy test or jock-itch ointment last week, it's in a database somewhere if you use one of
those cards
And if you purchased both, I hope you're one of those who "respond favorably to ads that contain humor", 'cuz you're gonna get some seriously funny ads in the mail.
> I would think the police can make a better profile of you
by interviewing people close to you than using Microsoft's database.
Sure, if they know they want you specifically.
But if they're just going fishing, let's look at what was left out of the article:
"So if the FBI came to us and said, 'We need to know what Joe Smith
was watching last Tuesday,' we wouldn't be able to tell them," Oddo
said. "First of all, we wouldn't know who Joe Smith was, but if the
FBI went to his house and cracked open his set-top box and somehow
figured out he was ID 254238, we still wouldn't be able to tell them
what he watched last Tuesday. We would be able to tell them that Joe
watches a lot of baseball, likes Situation Comedies, and responds
favorably to commercials that use humor."
"Please give us the set-top-box ID numbers of all people who match the following set of targeted criteria -- people who watch Babylon 5 but who no longer watch any network news. Please give us a copy of the database that
matches set-top ID numbers with credit card billing records. The Night Watch will
take it from there."
Frankly, why the FBI doesn't do this now via subpoena to Doubleclick and the company DC bought with the intention of matching online profiles with real-world identities is beyond me.
("Show me all 15-year old rappers with wack rhymes living with confirmed nutbars in Marin County who recently purchased Autobiography of Malcolm X through Amazon with their mother's credit card...")
Re:Order from chaos...
on
Emergence
·
· Score: 5, Funny
> Kind of like the "infinite monkeys/infinite typewriters" adage.
20 years of USENET archived, and we still ain't seen it.
> The FBI is counting on social engineering to propogate this virus
Given the risks to the FBI of this virus being reverse-engineered, I would presume they would want it distributed to as few people as possible.
It's not a virus because it doesn't self-replicate. Nor is it a worm (because, not being self-replicating, once on a host, it doesn't infect other hosts through the 'net).
So ML, if released through email, will be targetted directly to the suspect.
If you're a drug kingpin, watch out for "Guido! I send you this plans for drug factory to have your advice!"
If you're a warez d00d, "D00DZ! Drink0rDie got fux0r3d last week! Run this c0d3 to DDOS the fux0rz!" might not be a good email to open.
But if you're Joe Slashdotter, you'll never see it, because the FBI won't send it to you. Not just 'cuz you haven't done anything to make yourself worth attacking, but because even if you have, they know you'll just disassemble it and embarass them.
Gotta run. (Someone sent me a mail saying "Hey, you were wrong, check out the original source code for ML right here in this self-extracting.exe!";-)
> I don't want
the FBI knocking down my door because they read an email I wrote saying that I disagree with John
Ashcroft's latest violations of the Constitution.
(Flippant answer: "Look, it's the Fourth Amendment we're getting rid of, not the First! Get yer Amendments straight, duuuh!";-)
But I think that deserves a serious answer, and since it's the Constitution you're so worried about, I'll have at it.
Ashcroft's actions are highly constitutional. He's fulfilling his obligations as part of the Executive Branch as specified in the Constitution, namely to use the powers granted to him by Congress to fulfil his mandate. Once something gets passed by the Legislative branch, it's law, and the Executive is obliged to work within the (ever-shifting confines of the) law until the Judicial branch (after due prodding) says it did otherwise.
So if you have a beef with the changes going on lately, it's with your Congresscritters for passing bad law.
But please, if you're gonna go Constitutional on us, don't trash the Executive for doing what the Constitution says it has to do -- namely doing the things your representatives in the Legislature told it to!
> I checked the box that said "always trust content from Microsoft Corporation." Therefore, only
Microsoft's real certificate will be accepted by my machine. Even if the FBI forces Verisign to issue an impostor
certificate, it will be detected and thwarted.
You, sir, are not merely a troll, but an expert troll, and I applaud you for a job well done! Thanks for the best laugh I've had this thread.
> If people do buy it then MS is a monopoly, or people are real stupid. If people don't buy it then they will
buy something else, which will kill the monopoly that they are protecting.
Observation: MS is a monopoly. The court agrees.
Observation: People are stupid. Proof by example - 90% of TV.
> Conclusion: Informed consumers kill
monopolies.
Not a conclusion, merely a statement of fact. A fact that is of little relevance, however, given the depth of entrenchment of said monopoly and the depth of stupidity among the consuming population.
> So how are they going to prevent my Linux, Solaris, and MacOs utilities from reading raw data off my DRM-DOS hard disk when I don't BOOT DRM-DOS?
Sector-level weak crypto on the data to your DRM-DOS partition, followed by arrests under DMCA for reverse-engineering the crypto.
Reverse-engineering FAT-DRM crypto "for purposes of interoperability" is a defence in court, not a right.
Note that interoperability is a defence under DMCA, not a right.
So even if it was for purposes of interoperability ("Your Honor, I wrote it because I couldn't read my_thesis.doc on my Linux box, and as a student, I can't afford another WinDRM license for that box, so this was the only way I could use both computers to help me with my thesis!"), you'd have the fun of being arrested, tried, and as soon as the DA used the words "l33t d00dz of the j00ry, this man is a h4x0r!", losing the case and going to jail.
> I would imagine something a cross
between gates, rosen, and kobrin
I dunno, if we get Daddy Gates' money, transmute Rosen's lust for power into lust for something else, and Helena's, uh,
legal expertise, it could be kinda fun.
Heck, if Gates' daughter turns out to be good-looking, we might not even need the paper bags for our heads.
Of course, knowing our luck, we'd get Gates' lust, Rosen's skills, and Kobrin's looks. Maybe it's better not to find out.
> Why isn't this investigation being run by the software producers who are being ripped off? As if the Fed.Gov has some kind
of monopoly on investigation?
*blink*
Uh, they do, dude. That's the difference between the cops and the BSA, namely you can tell the BSA goons to go fuck themselves.
Meantime, as you correctly point out, piracy is no longer needed to make your computer useful anyways.
(And for those of you wearing tinfoil hats, they're not coming after Joe Slashdotter for being the end-user of downloaded warez and mp3z, they're going after the d00dz who acquire the 0-day warez in the first place.)
> Locked up over a thousand people without criminal charges, without private access to legal counsel, and
...in doing so, disrupted the network of cells operating with in the United States to the point where they have been unable to mount a second attack, likely saving the lives of thousands of Americans (citizens and aliens alike) in the process.
> Wait until you find out what happened to the World Trade Center while you were gone...
Yeah, I noticed. And y'know what else I noticed? I noticed that compared to the abuses our enemy has already inflicted upon our population,
anything we've done to ourselves in order to defend against further
threats is pretty small potatoes by comparison.
> [asymmetric information is] a relatively simple concept, but one with profound impacts as far as markets go.
And your.sig - referring to Operation Clambake is another excellent example.
The cult can exist only insofar as it retains an informational advantage over non-cultists. As soon as the "suckers" can discover the cult's core beliefs without spending $360,000, the cult's power evaporates.
> Was the US justified in droping the Atomic Bomb? Based on what we now know about the bomb's after affects, no.
Based upon the fact that the world - its leaders included - saw the horror of nuclear war firsthand, and that said horror was the foundation of the M.A.D. doctrine and the notion of deterrence, and that deterrence worked (by virtue of you and I being alive today) to prevent potential flashpoints in Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba from escalating into a full-fledged nuclear exchange...
...I'd respectfully disagree with your assessment.
Indeed, dropping the Bomb on Japan may have saved not just the lives of US servicemen and Japanese soldiers and civilians during an assault on the Japanese mainland, but it may well have saved all our asses from a Cold War gone "hot".
> Real backup is done on semipermanent media (>10 year storage) in a format that can be taken off site easily.
True -- but given the article's "affordable", "home", "10-100GB" parameters, I'd be quite happy regarding hard drives as a real solution.
Don't expect one hard drive to last you 10 years, because 10 years from now, systems with 40-pin IDE won't exist. (And likewise, neither will readers for the tapes you purchase today. When was the last time you saw a DC600 cartridge tape drive available?)
If you're talking longterm storage, leave your "backup" drive somewhere secure, and expect to replace it every 3-5 years. (That'll probably be a 500G serial IDE drive 5 years from now, a terabyte-range solid-state device 10 years from now, and a petabyte-range holocube 20 years from now.)
> OF course, if you're looking to do weekly's or something then it's no fun changing out a whole drive for it every week, but then it's not THAT much work either...
All of the removable IDE (or SCSI) racks are pretty much the same as the gadget in the review, with minor variations on the theme.
As a bonus, they make futzing around with other operating systems and/or distros (benchmarking, porting, fooling around) a piece of cake, and are a great way to "use up" those old
Other uses - sneakernet with 20G removable media. If you live in an apartment and can't h4x0r j00r w4llz with cable runs, it makes loading content onto your "MP3/DiVX jukebox" computer a snap.
I've got two on my "main" machine (one to boot from, one to use as a backup / "gigabyte floppy drive"), and one on each of my "media playback" machines.
> For home systems with up to 100G of storage, what do you use to back up that much data, with a solution that's affordable to the average computer user?
Given that a 100G hard drive is cheaper than any removable media solution, why not just buy another hard drive and install it in a removable (not hot-swappable, just removable) rack?
Racks are $20 at my local Fry's, and inserts for other hard drives are $10.
Slashdot Mirror
False. Amazon has done precisely this -- altered the pricing of certain products based on the content of cookies indicating previous visits.
First-time or infrequent buyers got better discounts, when compared to regular customers who had already demonstrated a willingness to pay at a higher price point.
And if you purchased both, I hope you're one of those who "respond favorably to ads that contain humor", 'cuz you're gonna get some seriously funny ads in the mail.
Sure, if they know they want you specifically.
But if they're just going fishing, let's look at what was left out of the article:
"Please give us the set-top-box ID numbers of all people who match the following set of targeted criteria -- people who watch Babylon 5 but who no longer watch any network news. Please give us a copy of the database that matches set-top ID numbers with credit card billing records. The Night Watch will take it from there."Frankly, why the FBI doesn't do this now via subpoena to Doubleclick and the company DC bought with the intention of matching online profiles with real-world identities is beyond me.
("Show me all 15-year old rappers with wack rhymes living with confirmed nutbars in Marin County who recently purchased Autobiography of Malcolm X through Amazon with their mother's credit card...")
20 years of USENET archived, and we still ain't seen it.
Given the risks to the FBI of this virus being reverse-engineered, I would presume they would want it distributed to as few people as possible.
It's not a virus because it doesn't self-replicate. Nor is it a worm (because, not being self-replicating, once on a host, it doesn't infect other hosts through the 'net).
So ML, if released through email, will be targetted directly to the suspect.
If you're a drug kingpin, watch out for "Guido! I send you this plans for drug factory to have your advice!"
If you're a warez d00d, "D00DZ! Drink0rDie got fux0r3d last week! Run this c0d3 to DDOS the fux0rz!" might not be a good email to open.
But if you're Joe Slashdotter, you'll never see it, because the FBI won't send it to you. Not just 'cuz you haven't done anything to make yourself worth attacking, but because even if you have, they know you'll just disassemble it and embarass them.
Gotta run. (Someone sent me a mail saying "Hey, you were wrong, check out the original source code for ML right here in this self-extracting .exe!" ;-)
(Flippant answer: "Look, it's the Fourth Amendment we're getting rid of, not the First! Get yer Amendments straight, duuuh!" ;-)
But I think that deserves a serious answer, and since it's the Constitution you're so worried about, I'll have at it.
Ashcroft's actions are highly constitutional. He's fulfilling his obligations as part of the Executive Branch as specified in the Constitution, namely to use the powers granted to him by Congress to fulfil his mandate. Once something gets passed by the Legislative branch, it's law, and the Executive is obliged to work within the (ever-shifting confines of the) law until the Judicial branch (after due prodding) says it did otherwise.
So if you have a beef with the changes going on lately, it's with your Congresscritters for passing bad law.
But please, if you're gonna go Constitutional on us, don't trash the Executive for doing what the Constitution says it has to do -- namely doing the things your representatives in the Legislature told it to!
You, sir, are not merely a troll, but an expert troll, and I applaud you for a job well done! Thanks for the best laugh I've had this thread.
References: Slashdot article: Don't Trust Code Signed by 'Microsoft Corporation'
Microsoft bulletin detailing story of VeriSign issuing two Class 3 code-signing digital certificates to an individual fraudulently claiming to be a Microsoft employee: Erroneous VeriSign-Issued Digital Certificates Post Spoofing Hazard
Alice's NNTP Server first posted from its anonymous author, with help from a regular of alt.tasteless and alt.peeves.
Observation: MS is a monopoly. The court agrees.
Observation: People are stupid. Proof by example - 90% of TV.
> Conclusion: Informed consumers kill monopolies.
Not a conclusion, merely a statement of fact. A fact that is of little relevance, however, given the depth of entrenchment of said monopoly and the depth of stupidity among the consuming population.
Sector-level weak crypto on the data to your DRM-DOS partition, followed by arrests under DMCA for reverse-engineering the crypto.
Reverse-engineering FAT-DRM crypto "for purposes of interoperability" is a defence in court, not a right.
Note that interoperability is a defence under DMCA, not a right.
So even if it was for purposes of interoperability ("Your Honor, I wrote it because I couldn't read my_thesis.doc on my Linux box, and as a student, I can't afford another WinDRM license for that box, so this was the only way I could use both computers to help me with my thesis!"), you'd have the fun of being arrested, tried, and as soon as the DA used the words "l33t d00dz of the j00ry, this man is a h4x0r!", losing the case and going to jail.
As much as I hope you're right, that's what we said about DOS 3.3, Win3.1, and Win95.
Naaw, there's no profit in screwing over unknown artists for the first, and possibly only, time.
The big profits come from fucking the same big-selling artists over and over again.
I dunno, if we get Daddy Gates' money, transmute Rosen's lust for power into lust for something else, and Helena's, uh, legal expertise, it could be kinda fun.
Heck, if Gates' daughter turns out to be good-looking, we might not even need the paper bags for our heads.
Of course, knowing our luck, we'd get Gates' lust, Rosen's skills, and Kobrin's looks. Maybe it's better not to find out.
I say let Microsoft have the patent to this.
I mean, what good is an operating system that does this?
It's innovative, but I'm as likely to buy one as I'm likely to buy a square wheel, or a chainsaw with a blade made of marshmallow.
Y'know, I'd pay good money to FOX to see this guy on COPS someday. We're talking sweeps week material
*blink*
Uh, they do, dude. That's the difference between the cops and the BSA, namely you can tell the BSA goons to go fuck themselves.
Meantime, as you correctly point out, piracy is no longer needed to make your computer useful anyways.
(And for those of you wearing tinfoil hats, they're not coming after Joe Slashdotter for being the end-user of downloaded warez and mp3z, they're going after the d00dz who acquire the 0-day warez in the first place.)
> Wait until you find out what happened to the World Trade Center while you were gone...
Yeah, I noticed. And y'know what else I noticed? I noticed that compared to the abuses our enemy has already inflicted upon our population, anything we've done to ourselves in order to defend against further threats is pretty small potatoes by comparison.
And your .sig - referring to Operation Clambake is another excellent example.
The cult can exist only insofar as it retains an informational advantage over non-cultists. As soon as the "suckers" can discover the cult's core beliefs without spending $360,000, the cult's power evaporates.
Based upon the fact that the world - its leaders included - saw the horror of nuclear war firsthand, and that said horror was the foundation of the M.A.D. doctrine and the notion of deterrence, and that deterrence worked (by virtue of you and I being alive today) to prevent potential flashpoints in Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba from escalating into a full-fledged nuclear exchange...
Indeed, dropping the Bomb on Japan may have saved not just the lives of US servicemen and Japanese soldiers and civilians during an assault on the Japanese mainland, but it may well have saved all our asses from a Cold War gone "hot".
True -- but given the article's "affordable", "home", "10-100GB" parameters, I'd be quite happy regarding hard drives as a real solution.
Don't expect one hard drive to last you 10 years, because 10 years from now, systems with 40-pin IDE won't exist. (And likewise, neither will readers for the tapes you purchase today. When was the last time you saw a DC600 cartridge tape drive available?)
If you're talking longterm storage, leave your "backup" drive somewhere secure, and expect to replace it every 3-5 years. (That'll probably be a 500G serial IDE drive 5 years from now, a terabyte-range solid-state device 10 years from now, and a petabyte-range holocube 20 years from now.)
OK, buy two drives and spend another $10 on another "slider" for your rack.
Store one drive in a safety deposit box offsite. Rotate drives monthly.
(And as another poster suggested, if it's just your MP3z, store the backup copy at your friend's place. And he can store his backup at your place.)
No work at all if you go removable.
(Removable drive rack review)
All of the removable IDE (or SCSI) racks are pretty much the same as the gadget in the review, with minor variations on the theme.
As a bonus, they make futzing around with other operating systems and/or distros (benchmarking, porting, fooling around) a piece of cake, and are a great way to "use up" those old Other uses - sneakernet with 20G removable media. If you live in an apartment and can't h4x0r j00r w4llz with cable runs, it makes loading content onto your "MP3/DiVX jukebox" computer a snap.
I've got two on my "main" machine (one to boot from, one to use as a backup / "gigabyte floppy drive"), and one on each of my "media playback" machines.
Given that a 100G hard drive is cheaper than any removable media solution, why not just buy another hard drive and install it in a removable (not hot-swappable, just removable) rack?
Racks are $20 at my local Fry's, and inserts for other hard drives are $10.
Sure, the Bible may have said the lion and the lamb would lay down together.
It didn't say the lamb would get much sleep.