E2? Please, credit me with at least some good taste! A random contribution: "We need to get you a girlfriend: A cruel phrase that women use to indicate their lack of romantic interest in a man."
Hey, at work we are applying this update because it makes Windows over 50% faster and more secure. I thought I should forward it as you may like it.
Something about the wording suggests to me that this worm is intended to target only very stupid people. Does anybody reading this actually have friends who write emails like that?
Truly, with a little effort, I don't see the problem they are having. Pull the stuff off these discs, and archive it on cd or a big RAID array somewhere.
You'd have to digitize it first, of course. Laserdisc was an analog format.
Domesday compiled basically a census of 'who's who' in England. Doomsday means we all go boom or something.
It's just an archaic spelling of the same word, though I guess it's a fair point that some non-British readers may not have heard of the Domesday Book. The name was a deliberate allusion to the census as something akin to the final judgement that was supposed to follow the second coming of the messiah.
A computer and network geek who seems to go by the name of markl and nothing else has some fascinating pages on the Domesday Project. He even seems to have some movie clips but I have not looked at them.
The Observer article from which this is drawn is here.
From that article:
Betamax video players, 8in and 5in computer disks, and eight-track music cartridges have all become redundant, making it impossible to access records stored on them. Data stored on the 3in disks used in the pioneering Amstrad word-processor is now equally inaccessible.
Needless to say, the term redundant simply means that using standard equipment you'd have problems reading this data. But specialist media recovery firms maintain old machines and there are several that will convert your old 3-inch Amstrad disks or that Betamax wedding recording, for a fee.
The Domesday 1986 disks are undoubtedly difficult to access without specialist equipment, and that's the real problem--eventually any nascent technology will become obsolete and data will be lost. Eventually it will no longer be economic for data recovery companies to maintain their obsolete machines.
Paul Wheatley: "That means we have to find a way to emulate this data, in other words to turn into a form that can be used no matter what is the computer format of the future. That is the real goal of this project."
If they have any sense they'll store most of it on fiche and store that in good conditions.
Even though we contacted them in English, they ran their response through Babelfish (translation software) so we couldn't understand what they were saying
You've got to laugh. Rebecca Ore once told of her colleague trying to deal with some francophone Canadian sysadmins. "He just babelfished them until they gave up and started using English."
Click here for the unframed version. After a very brief introduction, the main story is here.
Re:Explanation of Asteroid Belt
on
Lots of Ice On Mars
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I've always heard that if you put all those asteroids together in the asteroid belt, you still wouldn't have enought mass to make much of a planet (think very small Jovian moon sized). Is this no longer a common theory?
The common theory is that the asteroid belt is a remnant of the creation of the planets-a planet that never formed. A few people are very much out on a limb in suggesting that the belt was a planet. Those ideas appear to owe more to Space Opera than to space science. If a planet did explode, of course most of the material could conveniently be postulated to have left the solar system, never to return. The proponents, mainly the eccentric astronomer Tom van Flandern, could just be right, but there isn't any particular reason to suppose so as yet.
I think my original posting has been misunderstood. I don't mind adware, and much prefer to subsidize a product using that method rather than pay a fixed charge that I might regret if I subsequently switch to another product.
In the case of Opera, I happily used the browser for well over six months, but just one ad campaign rendered the browser very difficult to use because it incorporated a quickly animated human head.
Since there are many usable browsers available for free, paying for the ad-free version of Opera would not only have been uneconomical, it would have rewarded unacceptably poor usability.
Opera used to be my favorite browser, but I switched from that to Mozilla at around Christmas, simply because of one ad campaign that involved an animated gif of human head that waggled from left to right. It was so intrusive that I took to covering the ad area with a gnome-terminal, and looked around for another browser. I told the Opera people about my problems.
Using X on a small laptop via a fairly powerful firewall machine, I eventually realised that I could run Mozilla on the firewall and put the display on the laptop. Although Mozilla is a rather bigger browser than Opera, it actually runs better in that mode than when I ran Opera on the laptop.
Look at those screenshots. The restaurant has a text label superimposed over it, so the wearer can just read the label instead of the sign above the restaurant! No more messy reality for me!
Can you imagine wearing glasses or goggles that, when looking at a person, a built-in display would tell you everything you wanted to know about that person?
So every time a person opened up their browser, poof, they were force-fed a ton of high-bandwidth info that they didn't want.
For this to be plausible, you have to be able to pretend that @home customers would sit around whilst this crappy homepage loaded, when everybody and his dog knows how to set a page to be their homepage. It's an interesting thought, though. Could they have saved money by sacking their content producers?
Now who wants to publish and disseminate information on how to modify a televsion to enable capture of the decrypted video stream?
You don't have to do so. A video monitor can display images. A computer can produce images. Take the decrypted video image and program the computer to display it as a visible image on the screen. Unless the monitor has been so hacked about as to be unusable as a monitor, it will, perforce, display an exact copy of the original picture, without the embedded protection that was part of the original stream intended for a television.
Now you can try to construct the television so that it is impossible to decipher the decryption system and duplicate it in software Well, you can try... <g>
Of course, once the decision to go down this path is taken (I'm very much against it and agree with the description of both the equipment and the cartel), the only type of hardware legally available will be that which incorporates this particular ball and chain.
Nonsense. To make such a system work for copy protection, you'd need to encrypt the processor's address bus, in the final analysis. Once the data is in the wild, it can routinely be copied in such a way that even broken equipment will show it.
we are talking about monitors and televisions that require encrypted digital input signal and will not display anything else
Indeed, but that presupposes that the end-user will be so kind as to only use a particular circumscribed path through the hardware and only use the broken hardware produced by this misbegotten cartel. He can break the link at any point and route the signal to normal equipment, either purchased or constructed.
Let's face it, most developers would rather gnaw their own left leg off than read about something as dull as building secure systems--it's so often something left to a security audit or (even more often) a malicious cracker to discover the inevitable vulnerabilities. So it's nice to see a book that capitalizes on the glamor of nuclear defence systems to try and kickstart interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Are these people for real?
If that is so, then somebody stands to make a killing by distributing bogus "subscribe to Slashdot" emails with their paypal account reference. :(
Something about the wording suggests to me that this worm is intended to target only very stupid people. Does anybody reading this actually have friends who write emails like that?
"Bother," said the Borg. "We've assimilated Pooh."
They were, in a sense--the Coptic language had died before modern scholars started to read them.
Pepys deliberately encrypted his diary using a homemade shorthand, and wrote some of the sexual passages in a vulgar dialect of latin.
The current generation of DVD encryption is no challenge to a good mathematician.
You'd have to digitize it first, of course. Laserdisc was an analog format.
It's just an archaic spelling of the same word, though I guess it's a fair point that some non-British readers may not have heard of the Domesday Book. The name was a deliberate allusion to the census as something akin to the final judgement that was supposed to follow the second coming of the messiah.
A computer and network geek who seems to go by the name of markl and nothing else has some fascinating pages on the Domesday Project. He even seems to have some movie clips but I have not looked at them.
From that article:
Betamax video players, 8in and 5in computer disks, and eight-track music cartridges have all become redundant, making it impossible to access records stored on them. Data stored on the 3in disks used in the pioneering Amstrad word-processor is now equally inaccessible.
Needless to say, the term redundant simply means that using standard equipment you'd have problems reading this data. But specialist media recovery firms maintain old machines and there are several that will convert your old 3-inch Amstrad disks or that Betamax wedding recording, for a fee.
The Domesday 1986 disks are undoubtedly difficult to access without specialist equipment, and that's the real problem--eventually any nascent technology will become obsolete and data will be lost. Eventually it will no longer be economic for data recovery companies to maintain their obsolete machines.
Paul Wheatley: "That means we have to find a way to emulate this data, in other words to turn into a form that can be used no matter what is the computer format of the future. That is the real goal of this project."
If they have any sense they'll store most of it on fiche and store that in good conditions.
Just what we all need--worldwide internet mailing systems brought to their knees because some dumb marketing droid types in a cartesian join. <g>
Even though we contacted them in English, they ran their response through Babelfish (translation software) so we couldn't understand what they were saying
You've got to laugh. Rebecca Ore once told of her colleague trying to deal with some francophone Canadian sysadmins. "He just babelfished them until they gave up and started using English."
Click here for the unframed version. After a very brief introduction, the main story is here.
The common theory is that the asteroid belt is a remnant of the creation of the planets-a planet that never formed. A few people are very much out on a limb in suggesting that the belt was a planet. Those ideas appear to owe more to Space Opera than to space science. If a planet did explode, of course most of the material could conveniently be postulated to have left the solar system, never to return. The proponents, mainly the eccentric astronomer Tom van Flandern, could just be right, but there isn't any particular reason to suppose so as yet.
In the case of Opera, I happily used the browser for well over six months, but just one ad campaign rendered the browser very difficult to use because it incorporated a quickly animated human head.
Since there are many usable browsers available for free, paying for the ad-free version of Opera would not only have been uneconomical, it would have rewarded unacceptably poor usability.
I live in London, UK, and four of the six companies I have worked for over the past three years were US-owned.
I'm not cheap, I'm a free software advocate trying to wear the Opera people down.
GD&R
Using X on a small laptop via a fairly powerful firewall machine, I eventually realised that I could run Mozilla on the firewall and put the display on the laptop. Although Mozilla is a rather bigger browser than Opera, it actually runs better in that mode than when I ran Opera on the laptop.
Yeah, real cool, and useful!
Look at those screenshots. The restaurant has a text label superimposed over it, so the wearer can just read the label instead of the sign above the restaurant! No more messy reality for me!
For this to be plausible, you have to be able to pretend that @home customers would sit around whilst this crappy homepage loaded, when everybody and his dog knows how to set a page to be their homepage. It's an interesting thought, though. Could they have saved money by sacking their content producers?
You don't have to do so. A video monitor can display images. A computer can produce images. Take the decrypted video image and program the computer to display it as a visible image on the screen. Unless the monitor has been so hacked about as to be unusable as a monitor, it will, perforce, display an exact copy of the original picture, without the embedded protection that was part of the original stream intended for a television.
Now you can try to construct the television so that it is impossible to decipher the decryption system and duplicate it in software Well, you can try... <g>
Nonsense. To make such a system work for copy protection, you'd need to encrypt the processor's address bus, in the final analysis. Once the data is in the wild, it can routinely be copied in such a way that even broken equipment will show it.
Indeed, but that presupposes that the end-user will be so kind as to only use a particular circumscribed path through the hardware and only use the broken hardware produced by this misbegotten cartel. He can break the link at any point and route the signal to normal equipment, either purchased or constructed.
Let's face it, most developers would rather gnaw their own left leg off than read about something as dull as building secure systems--it's so often something left to a security audit or (even more often) a malicious cracker to discover the inevitable vulnerabilities. So it's nice to see a book that capitalizes on the glamor of nuclear defence systems to try and kickstart interest.
1962? And sex wasn't invented until the following year, according to the poet Philip Larkin.