> [Dell] had a special deal where you got
20% refund (I think) if you used Passport to submit your info. Made no sense why,
Makes perfect sense. Passport is a data aggregator - since all your bits are belong to Passport, Passport can resell that data to marketers to provide you with spam, telemarketing calls, and junk snail mail.
Bill just got tired of the fact that nobody fills out warranty registration cards because they hate junk mail, so he paid you to fill it out.
The assumption here, of course, is that Joe Sixpack will continue to use the machine as shipped by Dell, and Passport can continue to accumulate information on Joe Sixpack's profile, thereby increasing the value of that data to multiple customers beyond the $500 check he sent you.
Of course, if you reformat the hard drive and install Linux, you come out ahead of the game by about $500 minus the cost of the Windoze license you bought with the Dell box.
> but I got a $500 check shortly thereafter.
...and a $5000 credit card bill two years from now when Passport gets 0wned. But since you're only responsible for the first $50 of fraudulent charges in the States, you're still ahead of the game by about, well, $500 minus $50 minus the cost of the 'doze license;-)
> But emails can be forged by anyone with access to port 25 on an SMTP server
Cripes, you had to make me wonder why nobody (ILOVEYOU, etc.) has launched one of these Windoze viruses through an anonymizing open relay out of China.
1) 0wn some poor fux0r's insecure Linux box.
2) Install ssh and tunnel your way to a shell on it.
3) From the 0wned box, telnet to port 25 of an open relay that masks the IP of the spammer and send a few thousand ILOVEYOUs or Melissas.
4) Wipe the logs, the rootkit, and then cp/dev/random/dev/hd0
5) Sit back, relax, and watch the networks melt down.
The use of an anonymizing open relay makes the only publicly-available trail go back to China. The admin may not even know his box is being used as an open relay, let alone keep logs of it.
The use of an 0wned box means that if the Chinese admin keeps logs, the logs will point back to the innocent victim.
The innocent victim's hard drive will be largely wiped when FBI comes knocking on his door. Can you say "Guilty unless proven innocent"?
With the drive and logs mostly wiped, good luck finding the evidence that the box was 0wned and the logs showing an incoming ssh connection from the real perp.
Hell, good luck finding that out even if/dev/hd0 hadn't been wiped.
We're vulnerable. We have been for years. And the only thing we can be thankful for is that skr1pt k1dd13z are morons. The real adversaries are just biding their time.
> As for the "professional courtesy" part, I seriously doubt that that has anything to do with
it. In my opinion, among others, these things limit the spread of concept virii on Linux:
In addition to fragmented software and development speed, there's one very important reason the skr1pt k1dd13z don't attack Linux boxen, which is this:
If all the poorly-administered Linux boxen in the world went down tomorrow, where would they launch DDoS attacks from?
No, it didn't cover my 'scope, but it turns out that TelequipmenT was a British company bought out by Tek in the 70s. Other pics on their site seem to put the date of my tube-based 'scope in the mid-1950s, judging from its general appearance.
...PDFs of them were made available by owners in a way similar to that in which 80s arcade game schematics are archived online?
Sigh... I've got one 'scope that I can use just fine, but have no idea what it's supposed to be capable of, 'cuz it's from a manufacturer (TelequipmenT anyone?) I don't recognize.
And I've got one tube-based antique, that's got no circuit boards - it's just tubes, sockets, and resistors/capacitors soldered together by their leads. Not a homebrew/kit, it's professionally-made. Just very, very old. And (sigh again!) the test mode works, but it doesn't respond to input signals. Lord, I'd love to debug this thing, just for the hell of it. Real bakelite knobs and buttons even!
> In the beginning there was bartering. Then people started using precious metals to represent the value of objects. Then they started
using pieces of paper to represent the metals. Then they started using plastic cards to represent pieces of paper. Now they're trading that in for a number in a database.
Call any broker and ask what it means to hold securities "in street name".
I trade bits for numbers in a database that represent ownership, not of chunks of gold, but of bits in other databases that represent ownership of corporations.
Not my research, I just read about it in nanae and followed a few links in google.com.
> I'm off to DDoS adcops.com...
Please don't.
The way to DDoS spammers is to teach all your friends how to read headers so they can report the spammers to their upstream ISPs.
Likewise, teaching your friends to report pump-and-dump spams to the SEC, Nigerian 419 scams to the SS, tax evasion scams to the IRS, quack medicine to the FDA, and Make-Money-Fast to the USPS, is a highly effective ways to deny service to the scammers behind the spammers.
Traditional DDoS over a network is (a) illegal, and (b) network abuse, the very thing anti-spammers are trying to prevent. We're the good guys, remember?
But getting the spammer deleted - whether from his network (abuse @ his upstream ISP) or from society (various.GOV agencies weilding heavy LART) - is a much more satisfying way of denying service to spammers. Best of all, it's (a) legal, and (b) prevents network abuse.
When I first read this article, I thought "Oh no, tomorrow there'll be another 10,000 chickenboners who think they can make $100K/year spamming".
But between the "*67 protects you from being traced", the "I use my friend's house to drop off carded stuff", and all the other things in that article that don't work, I'm kinda glad this article got published.
This article phishes for punk spamming wannabe-thieves in the same way punk spamming wannabe-thieves phish for AOLamer accounts with spams saying "AOL billing needs your password".
I love the smell of roast spammer in the morning... Dawn is but a few hours away.
> But in typical Bell Canada fashion, they've blocked all traffic eminating FROM port 25,
not traffic with a DESTINATION of port 25.
So lemme get this straight - punk spammers doing direct-to-MX out of port 25, who are easily traced, are blocked, but dirtbags who relay-rape anonymizing Sendmail 8.6 relays in China (traffic to port 25) continue to abuse with imputiny?
> 1) If you go to http://xxx.yyy.zzz/aaa.htm, you will find a link to DeCSS code, [... ] > >
2) If you go to 123 Anytown street, you will find an abortion doctor. > >
The second one was just declared "okay." The first one, at various points in time, has been declared
illegal.
Point of information:
The first example was declared as a violation of a section of the DMCA. The second was declared as not an incitement to commit murder. These are entirely different things, and for good reason.
Although I also feel that this is a weird juxtaposition of cases, my feelings don't enter into it. The operators of both sites got hauled into court for totally different things, and the judges were ruling on totally different sets of laws.
It is not - and cannot be - the job of the the legal system to deal with that issue. If Congress passes laws that say rape is punishable by 2-5 years in prison, but horse-rustling is punishable by hanging, then horse thieves hang, and rapists walk.
It's hard enough for a judge to be consistent with the relevant precedent for any one case. It's impossible - even in theory - to make it all consistent with some imaginary standard whereby different things are deemed differently-naughty.
The standard whereby different things are deemed differently-naughty and penalties are assigned is called "law".
Congress writes it. Judges rule on it.
Sometimes, Congress writes it without regard to the big picture. When this happens, Judges still have to rule on it, and they have to rule in accordance with what Congress wrote, not what they may personally believe is "fair".
Or would you rather have both the Legislative and the Judicial branch not doing their jobs?
> > Japanese cinema is loaded with violence, yet there is little overall violence in Japan. >
> And there doesn't seem to be an increase in tentacle sex crimes in Japan, even though
tentacle rape hentai is readily available.
Tentacles don't rape Japanese schoolgirls. Giant squid-like Japanese monsters rape Japanese schoolgirls!
Write your Congressman today and demand that he or she stand up against the continuing encroachment of Great Cthulhu's 666th-Amendment-guaranteed right to bare tentacles in an crawling chaotic militia!
(There, have we covered all the Constitutional hot-buttons today?;-)
>If you value not being tracked, you really should opt out of Doubleclick's tracking [using their cookie].
If you value not being tracked, you probably don't trust Doubleclick. Why, then, would you use an opt-out method that requires that you trust Doubleclick's word that they'll no longer track you?
Blocking Doubleclick and the other tracking firms at the router, on the firewall, in/etc/hosts or HOSTS, or with a proxy, are just as effective as a means of "opting out", and they don't require you to trust your adversary.
> Only if you rip it to a.wav of about 40MB. Standard 128k MP3s don't sound as good as CDs (I didn't believe this either until I tried it out).
Try a different encoder. In general, you'll still be able to tell the difference, but it may "suck less".
The poster in the other followup is right, though - unless you're intending to share or stream them over the 'net, bandwidth isn't a premium. If it's just for your own use, encode at 256. Or 320. Diskspace is cheap.
> The SBLive (and other inexpensive sound cards with a digital input) resample the data from
the digital in. Therefore you don't have a perfect digital copy. But you have a pretty good one.
The beauty (for us) and terror (for Them) of MP3 is, of course, that you don't need a "perfect" digital copy, because after your first-generation copy, there's no degradation.
My hunch would be that for even the "best" encoder and 320k bitrate, the degradation introduced by the MP3 compression is still greater than that introduced by an SP/DIF re-digitization on something like an SBLive.
They(tm) want us to go back to the days when every generation of a copy is degraded - as in "tape". I'm not going back. Neither is anyone else on this thread.
Although it's always nice to start an encode with a bit-for-bit perfect reproduction, I'll settle for one round of degradation in exchange for infinitely reproducible (and thus, backup-and-restorable, never mind share-with-friends-able) copies thereafter.
Someone talked about a 5000-square-foot house and shelf space for CDs. I'm taking that person out of context, but it got me thinking about backups. Personally, I prefer to spend $150 in hardware costs plus $30 a year to a bank. It's called "a 40G hard drive in a safety deposit box".
15 years from now, when "secure PCs" are the only ones on the market, it'll be "and $25 at a surplus store for an old 2 GHz Athlon laptop for when my old machine finally wears out".
Even if we lose the war for fair use, if you buy your gear now and take good care of it, the personal battle's already won - everyone here will soon own enough music and playback gear to last their lifetime.
> [MSNBC.com sites a redirect loop, each time adding some parameters to
the two bouncing CGIs. when you use] Netscape 4.76 on NetbSD with junkbuster returning a dummy cookie and pretending to be Mozilla
3/MacOS. Funny. I think I'll let it run for a while so it swamps their taxpayer^Wuser database with faulty
cookies:-)
Yeah, if you delete the "vanilla wafer" in junkbuster, you can see the article. If your vanilla wafer is set, you get stuck in the loop.
I wonder what they'll do with 20 wafers of "msnbc.com_tracking_tools_are_weenies"?
> this guy's obviously more in touch with these issues than 90% of the rest of Washington, and
we need more reps like him up there, but all his answers read like so much political-speak. Almost every
answer has some reference to a way he's voted on a bill, a committee he's chaired, a piece of legislation he's
working on, etc. In other words, constant reminder's of the work he's doing in Washington.
Well, first off - yeah, this is how reps start talking after a while.
But with respect to Rep. Boucher - "Getting It" isn't his job - his votes on bills and his committees he's chaired, and the legislation he's worked on - that's his job.
And if he continues to vote and make law in a way that's consistent with Getting It (and if his answers to the Slashdot piece are any indication, he does indeed Get It), then he's doing things about the problems we plebes are only able to rant about on/.
> if he'd just answered the questions, instead of trying to show us how hard
he's working at every opportunity.
I'll play Devil's Advocate here for a minute - there are plenty of people in the world who Get It. But there are very few out of the 600-odd folks on the hill whose actions actually form the basis of the laws about which we rant who Get It.
I'd much rather have him Getting It and influencing the direction of those laws through committee work than saying "All Your Base Are Belong To Us!" to impress the Slashdot crew;)
Without getting into MPAA vs. 2600, I have to give Rep. Boucher credit for this.
You saw it on Slashdot first. A politician, when presented with a question to which he didn't know the answer, admitting it instead
of spin-doctoring about how "whatever the guy was complaining
about must be wrong, and I'm here to help" in order to butter
up the constituent.
I'm sure folks here will inform you of the details of the case - I just wanted to say I appreciate your candor in saying "I don't know" when you didn't know something. This is the first time I've ever heard a politician start a sentence with the phrase "I need to learn more about..." and actually sound believable.
I'm impressed. Really. (How do you express in ASCII that you're not being sarcastic when you really are impressed by something?)
> I make a point of switching back-and-forth between the most liberal radio station in my area and the most conservative,
Ditto. I don't do it with radio, I do it with web sites - reading both salon.com and enterstageright.com.
What I like about doing it on the web is that I know I'm getting biased coverage - neither site pretends to be objective. With MSNBCBSABCNN, it's a joke. Plus, I can read more spin in 10 minutes on both sites than all the networks together could give me in an hour. (Did you ever notice that you can make just as much sense out of the evening news by ignoring the screen and just listening to the words? Now - do you really read that slowly? Plain text is the fastest way I know to cram data into my brain;-)
> With "Me Media" I can point a microscope at one story, and delve far beneath the surface. In doing so I've aquired an understanding about a particular topic, not just been exposed to a dozen one-liners that will all be forgotten the next day.
Amen. And it frees up time.
My mental killfile: All reality TV. Anything to do with Hollywood - who's fucking whom, who's making what movie, who's wearing what at the awards. 90% of sports broadcasts. 100% of the weather report, 75% of the time. Commercials. Routine (i.e. current levels of) fighting in the Middle East and the Balkans. School shootings. Mainstream (i.e. network news, not CNBC, which rules!) business news coverage.
Out of a typical 30 minute nightly newscast, that leaves two or three minutes of actual content. Basically, I used TV news last week to see pictures of space station chunks falling into the Pacific.
I get the news I care about (New CPUs, new space probes, daily reports from current space probes, technological advances, biotech, business) from the 'net.
I then use specialized news broadcasts (CNBC, PBS' Nightly Business Report) to "catch" any business news I missed, and other specialized news broadcasts (PBS' McNeil-Lehrer) to get caught up on issues I haven't been following closely (e.g. who's blowin' up whom in some brushfire war that the media have forgotten about).
I watch the same minutes of TV every day, but the S/N ratio is improved by a 10:1 margin.
Slashdot Mirror
Makes perfect sense. Passport is a data aggregator - since all your bits are belong to Passport, Passport can resell that data to marketers to provide you with spam, telemarketing calls, and junk snail mail.
Bill just got tired of the fact that nobody fills out warranty registration cards because they hate junk mail, so he paid you to fill it out.
The assumption here, of course, is that Joe Sixpack will continue to use the machine as shipped by Dell, and Passport can continue to accumulate information on Joe Sixpack's profile, thereby increasing the value of that data to multiple customers beyond the $500 check he sent you.
Of course, if you reformat the hard drive and install Linux, you come out ahead of the game by about $500 minus the cost of the Windoze license you bought with the Dell box.
> but I got a $500 check shortly thereafter.
Cripes, you had to make me wonder why nobody (ILOVEYOU, etc.) has launched one of these Windoze viruses through an anonymizing open relay out of China.
1) 0wn some poor fux0r's insecure Linux box. /dev/random /dev/hd0
2) Install ssh and tunnel your way to a shell on it.
3) From the 0wned box, telnet to port 25 of an open relay that masks the IP of the spammer and send a few thousand ILOVEYOUs or Melissas.
4) Wipe the logs, the rootkit, and then cp
5) Sit back, relax, and watch the networks melt down.
The use of an anonymizing open relay makes the only publicly-available trail go back to China. The admin may not even know his box is being used as an open relay, let alone keep logs of it.
The use of an 0wned box means that if the Chinese admin keeps logs, the logs will point back to the innocent victim.
The innocent victim's hard drive will be largely wiped when FBI comes knocking on his door. Can you say "Guilty unless proven innocent"?
With the drive and logs mostly wiped, good luck finding the evidence that the box was 0wned and the logs showing an incoming ssh connection from the real perp.
Hell, good luck finding that out even if /dev/hd0 hadn't been wiped.
We're vulnerable. We have been for years. And the only thing we can be thankful for is that skr1pt k1dd13z are morons. The real adversaries are just biding their time.
In addition to fragmented software and development speed, there's one very important reason the skr1pt k1dd13z don't attack Linux boxen, which is this:
If all the poorly-administered Linux boxen in the world went down tomorrow, where would they launch DDoS attacks from?
The Vintage Audio, Video, and Television Site
No, it didn't cover my 'scope, but it turns out that TelequipmenT was a British company bought out by Tek in the 70s. Other pics on their site seem to put the date of my tube-based 'scope in the mid-1950s, judging from its general appearance.
Sweeeeeeeeeet!
Sigh... I've got one 'scope that I can use just fine, but have no idea what it's supposed to be capable of, 'cuz it's from a manufacturer (TelequipmenT anyone?) I don't recognize.
And I've got one tube-based antique, that's got no circuit boards - it's just tubes, sockets, and resistors/capacitors soldered together by their leads. Not a homebrew/kit, it's professionally-made. Just very, very old. And (sigh again!) the test mode works, but it doesn't respond to input signals. Lord, I'd love to debug this thing, just for the hell of it. Real bakelite knobs and buttons even!
Call any broker and ask what it means to hold securities "in street name".
I trade bits for numbers in a database that represent ownership, not of chunks of gold, but of bits in other databases that represent ownership of corporations.
Somebody set up us the futures! All your silver are belong to us!
Well, I guess this guy's doomed ;-)
We're talking about skr1pt k1dd13z here.
"it".
End of discussion.
Not my research, I just read about it in nanae and followed a few links in google.com.
> I'm off to DDoS adcops.com...
Please don't.
The way to DDoS spammers is to teach all your friends how to read headers so they can report the spammers to their upstream ISPs.
Likewise, teaching your friends to report pump-and-dump spams to the SEC, Nigerian 419 scams to the SS, tax evasion scams to the IRS, quack medicine to the FDA, and Make-Money-Fast to the USPS, is a highly effective ways to deny service to the scammers behind the spammers.
Traditional DDoS over a network is (a) illegal, and (b) network abuse, the very thing anti-spammers are trying to prevent. We're the good guys, remember?
But getting the spammer deleted - whether from his network (abuse @ his upstream ISP) or from society (various .GOV agencies weilding heavy LART) - is a much more satisfying way of denying service to spammers. Best of all, it's (a) legal, and (b) prevents network abuse.
And who do we know from adcops.com?
Why, it's Maurice O'Bannon!
What does Maurice do for a living? Why, he's the Treasurer of Empire Towers!
And what does Empire Towers do? Why, they're a bunch of spammers!
What an amazing coincidence!
Crack whores accept VISA? ;)
But between the "*67 protects you from being traced", the "I use my friend's house to drop off carded stuff", and all the other things in that article that don't work, I'm kinda glad this article got published.
This article phishes for punk spamming wannabe-thieves in the same way punk spamming wannabe-thieves phish for AOLamer accounts with spams saying "AOL billing needs your password".
I love the smell of roast spammer in the morning... Dawn is but a few hours away.
So lemme get this straight - punk spammers doing direct-to-MX out of port 25, who are easily traced, are blocked, but dirtbags who relay-rape anonymizing Sendmail 8.6 relays in China (traffic to port 25) continue to abuse with imputiny?
Fuck, that is clueless.
>
> 2) If you go to 123 Anytown street, you will find an abortion doctor.
>
> The second one was just declared "okay." The first one, at various points in time, has been declared illegal.
Point of information:
The first example was declared as a violation of a section of the DMCA. The second was declared as not an incitement to commit murder. These are entirely different things, and for good reason.
Although I also feel that this is a weird juxtaposition of cases, my feelings don't enter into it. The operators of both sites got hauled into court for totally different things, and the judges were ruling on totally different sets of laws.
It is not - and cannot be - the job of the the legal system to deal with that issue. If Congress passes laws that say rape is punishable by 2-5 years in prison, but horse-rustling is punishable by hanging, then horse thieves hang, and rapists walk.
It's hard enough for a judge to be consistent with the relevant precedent for any one case. It's impossible - even in theory - to make it all consistent with some imaginary standard whereby different things are deemed differently-naughty.
The standard whereby different things are deemed differently-naughty and penalties are assigned is called "law".
Congress writes it. Judges rule on it.
Sometimes, Congress writes it without regard to the big picture. When this happens, Judges still have to rule on it, and they have to rule in accordance with what Congress wrote, not what they may personally believe is "fair".
Or would you rather have both the Legislative and the Judicial branch not doing their jobs?
>
> And there doesn't seem to be an increase in tentacle sex crimes in Japan, even though tentacle rape hentai is readily available.
Tentacles don't rape Japanese schoolgirls. Giant squid-like Japanese monsters rape Japanese schoolgirls!
Write your Congressman today and demand that he or she stand up against the continuing encroachment of Great Cthulhu's 666th-Amendment-guaranteed right to bare tentacles in an crawling chaotic militia!
(There, have we covered all the Constitutional hot-buttons today? ;-)
If you value not being tracked, you probably don't trust Doubleclick. Why, then, would you use an opt-out method that requires that you trust Doubleclick's word that they'll no longer track you?
Blocking Doubleclick and the other tracking firms at the router, on the firewall, in /etc/hosts or HOSTS, or with a proxy, are just as effective as a means of "opting out", and they don't require you to trust your adversary.
Hmph! I tried to visit the link and got there! Guess I forgot to add www2.doubleclick.net to my blockfile.
Funny, now I can't go to the link anymore. Shucks.
Try a different encoder. In general, you'll still be able to tell the difference, but it may "suck less".
The poster in the other followup is right, though - unless you're intending to share or stream them over the 'net, bandwidth isn't a premium. If it's just for your own use, encode at 256. Or 320. Diskspace is cheap.
The beauty (for us) and terror (for Them) of MP3 is, of course, that you don't need a "perfect" digital copy, because after your first-generation copy, there's no degradation.
My hunch would be that for even the "best" encoder and 320k bitrate, the degradation introduced by the MP3 compression is still greater than that introduced by an SP/DIF re-digitization on something like an SBLive.
They(tm) want us to go back to the days when every generation of a copy is degraded - as in "tape". I'm not going back. Neither is anyone else on this thread.
Although it's always nice to start an encode with a bit-for-bit perfect reproduction, I'll settle for one round of degradation in exchange for infinitely reproducible (and thus, backup-and-restorable, never mind share-with-friends-able) copies thereafter.
Someone talked about a 5000-square-foot house and shelf space for CDs. I'm taking that person out of context, but it got me thinking about backups. Personally, I prefer to spend $150 in hardware costs plus $30 a year to a bank. It's called "a 40G hard drive in a safety deposit box".
15 years from now, when "secure PCs" are the only ones on the market, it'll be "and $25 at a surplus store for an old 2 GHz Athlon laptop for when my old machine finally wears out".
Even if we lose the war for fair use, if you buy your gear now and take good care of it, the personal battle's already won - everyone here will soon own enough music and playback gear to last their lifetime.
Yeah, if you delete the "vanilla wafer" in junkbuster, you can see the article. If your vanilla wafer is set, you get stuck in the loop.
I wonder what they'll do with 20 wafers of "msnbc.com_tracking_tools_are_weenies"?
Well, first off - yeah, this is how reps start talking after a while.
But with respect to Rep. Boucher - "Getting It" isn't his job - his votes on bills and his committees he's chaired, and the legislation he's worked on - that's his job.
And if he continues to vote and make law in a way that's consistent with Getting It (and if his answers to the Slashdot piece are any indication, he does indeed Get It), then he's doing things about the problems we plebes are only able to rant about on /.
> if he'd just answered the questions, instead of trying to show us how hard he's working at every opportunity.
I'll play Devil's Advocate here for a minute - there are plenty of people in the world who Get It. But there are very few out of the 600-odd folks on the hill whose actions actually form the basis of the laws about which we rant who Get It.
I'd much rather have him Getting It and influencing the direction of those laws through committee work than saying "All Your Base Are Belong To Us!" to impress the Slashdot crew ;)
You saw it on Slashdot first. A politician, when presented with a question to which he didn't know the answer, admitting it instead of spin-doctoring about how "whatever the guy was complaining about must be wrong, and I'm here to help" in order to butter up the constituent.
I'm sure folks here will inform you of the details of the case - I just wanted to say I appreciate your candor in saying "I don't know" when you didn't know something. This is the first time I've ever heard a politician start a sentence with the phrase "I need to learn more about..." and actually sound believable.
I'm impressed. Really. (How do you express in ASCII that you're not being sarcastic when you really are impressed by something?)
Ditto. I don't do it with radio, I do it with web sites - reading both salon.com and enterstageright.com.
What I like about doing it on the web is that I know I'm getting biased coverage - neither site pretends to be objective. With MSNBCBSABCNN, it's a joke. Plus, I can read more spin in 10 minutes on both sites than all the networks together could give me in an hour. (Did you ever notice that you can make just as much sense out of the evening news by ignoring the screen and just listening to the words? Now - do you really read that slowly? Plain text is the fastest way I know to cram data into my brain ;-)
Amen. And it frees up time.
My mental killfile: All reality TV. Anything to do with Hollywood - who's fucking whom, who's making what movie, who's wearing what at the awards. 90% of sports broadcasts. 100% of the weather report, 75% of the time. Commercials. Routine (i.e. current levels of) fighting in the Middle East and the Balkans. School shootings. Mainstream (i.e. network news, not CNBC, which rules!) business news coverage.
Out of a typical 30 minute nightly newscast, that leaves two or three minutes of actual content. Basically, I used TV news last week to see pictures of space station chunks falling into the Pacific.
I get the news I care about (New CPUs, new space probes, daily reports from current space probes, technological advances, biotech, business) from the 'net.
I then use specialized news broadcasts (CNBC, PBS' Nightly Business Report) to "catch" any business news I missed, and other specialized news broadcasts (PBS' McNeil-Lehrer) to get caught up on issues I haven't been following closely (e.g. who's blowin' up whom in some brushfire war that the media have forgotten about).
I watch the same minutes of TV every day, but the S/N ratio is improved by a 10:1 margin.