I was using hyperboly to make a point. I'm sorry if you missed that.
My first point was about letting Joe know there is a potential problem with the action he chose, my second was about the fact I was talking about Joe's HOME computer, not a work computer. If Joe doesn't have the root password to his home computer the issue goes deeper than warning him of potential problems. The dialog you suggested wouldn't be appropriate as worded on a typical home computer.
If you are going to go ballistic and foul mouthed over a comment without trying to understand it then perhaps your right, there is no point in continued conversation as that requires some maturity. Name calling and cursing at someone because you disagree isn't a conversation. Though I suspect it's intentional given your chosen nom de plume.
I was talking about home computers. that'll piss joe sixpack off if his home computer tells him he doesn't know what he's doing, or implies it. And if it's true Joe will absolutely fly into a rage.
Well said, very well said indeed. I was born in 1970 and was at home when the first shuttle exploded on liftoff. I've read so much from the masters and grand masters of Science Fiction.
I've always felt that 'Out there' is where our destiny as a species lay. And this is clearly apart of the next major step for us on that road.
While I applaud and admire the great men and women who've 'boldly gone' and took those first steps off this tiny little hunk of soil we call home, It is indeed time for the 'rest of us'.
Thanks for help summing up just why this is so important to so many of us.
Good luck Mike, there is a lot resting your sholders monday. Come back safe.
I wouldn't go quite that far. how about a system shouldn't by default run anything not part of the base install and require direct user intervention to run anything else as a start.
It should not be possible (idealy, in reality a few mistakes are inevitable, heck bsd has even had root exploit once!) for a system be compromised in anyway without root access.
Joe sixpack doing everyday normal things and not digging into things he doesn't trully understand(even though he may think he understands them) shouldn't be able to easily fubar his system without some kind of warning. Like "are you really shure you want to run that e-mail attachment, most viruses are run that way click on the damage my computer button to continue, or click on No button to cancel", or "are you shure you want to try and set your monitor to 1954 by 1776 at 875khz, the wrong settings can explode your monitor and set fire to your house and void your warrenty".
Just few ideas.
dammit, I knew I was forgetting one. I know what.com,.exe, and.scr is but what is.etc I can't find any reference to that, is it the email trojan controll applet specification?
Seriously though, it's a good idea to auto-flag such emails and make the recieving user jump through a simple hoop or two to recieve those, but you can't just auto-delete such in many environments, there can be legitimate reasons for sending such things.
But for one thing, e-mail clients should at least pop up a warning box, one that contains usefull info for joe sixpack. EG: "warning this e-mail contains an runnable program attachment. If you're NOT expecting to recieve a program from this person, it is most likely a virus. In that case likely the sender has no knowledge his machine sent it to you. Viruses can have severly harmfull effect on your computer up to and including rendering it unuseable without expensive repairs" with click-boxes that take a second to figure out forcing the reciever to think rather than blindly click OK.
In the meantime why not have the mail server send a warning e-mail with message inlined, but not the attachment, and instruction on how to get the attachment the server has quarantined if it turns out to be a legitimate e-mail.
Well my current round of wierdness seems to be assholes who think I'm trying to kill thier children.
A couple of days ago I make a left onto a road with a speed limit of 65 and a LONG (nearly a mile) visibility in the direction of oncomming traffic.
In the lane I'm entering there is no-one except an old tan sedan WAY at the extreem limit of visibility, and he didn't come into view untill I was already pulling into the lane.
Now in the far right lane (I'm turning into the leftmost travel lane as required by law in missouri when making a left turn) is a blue suv with a white 2-door riding it's bumper about a 1/4 -1/2 mile back. Well about time I'm reaching 50mph (the minimum is 45) I hear tires lock up behind me. looking back there is the white car with some dude yelling and gesturing in the driver seat. A moment later the blue suv flies past me by at least 20mph, I look down to see I'm now passing the speed limit (approx 62, analog dial).
This guy follows me to work (where I'm going) and proceedes to yell at me and anyone who'll listen how I 'could have killed him and his kids, even though (as he admited) it was just him and his wife in the car.
Then today on my way out from work (which is next door to a county police station mind you) some guy and his kid step out in front of me, no problem I just stop, I'm not out of first gear yet and he's almost 30 ft away from me. He suddenly turns, runs up the hood of my car jumps down on the driver side yanks my door open and starts yelling obcenities at me and accusing me of trying to kill him and his kid. Then he tries to take my cell phone when I go to call the police. He's lucky his kid was still in front of my car, it's the only thing that kept me from flooring it when he ran up my hood. The look of pure rage on his face gave me distinct impression he meant me harm.
I have no clue what's next, but things refuse to stay boring around me for more than a few months.
I got my definition from an astronmy short program that used air on pbs sunday nights a few years ago. Mart Horkhiemer, star hustler. or some such, probably totaly scrambled the guys name, he was from the Miami planetarium or some such. DagNabit, my memory is better than this normally, but I got serious issues with names for some idiot reason. (I still call one of my friends by anothers name even though I've known them both over 3 years)
I'll say impressive, even 30% is a lot. But mentioning silcates, I was under the impression silicon was the biggest single element in the crust. I probably read silicates and simply didn't remember it right. thx
So all we need to do ship a double giga shitload of crust to mars and we make serious progress on terraforming it. Hmm... on second thought...
Hmm, I'll have to look into that. I do remember hearing about signal cleaners and boosters and the like that would fix Macrovisions corruption of the signal (that's really what it is). Some time ago, but I never had any personal problems with macrovision, on the rare occasion I needed to copy somthing so encoded (couple of broken tapes, made sense to copy the repaired version, the repairing I didn't totaly trust) I just made sure the old, but very expensive, vcr we had was the one recorded on. It never had a problem with macrovision. Then again it was borderline prosumer at the time it came out and had hook ups for pro cameras and all sorts of nice options, and cost about $1k at a time when most vcr's were about $200.
No it's specificaly 'honored' by the video card or drivers according to ATI themselves.
MacroVISION (mea culpa before). works, as you hinted at, by varying the signal such that while a tv's slower autogain will display it fine, a vcr's typicaly more reactive autogain will be fubared, resulting in a copy that darkens and lightens significantly.
This is NOT what I get from macrovisioned tapes, I get what looks alot like scrambled cable, wavy, highly distorted, colored bands that sorta suggest that image may have once existed. I've seen what macrovision does in fairly severe cases and the symptoms are completely different, and by design on ATI's part.
LOL, sorry wrong kind of crap. But at least someone was smart enough to understand despite the brain slip. I have issues with names, I get them swapped on all kinds of things, I've got friends I've known for about 3 years, I still tend to call one by the other's name. That's why I've been useing the same pseudonym online for 14 years.
Well phasers shouldn't exist yet because in they were brand spanking new when the NCC1701 set out under Pike.
Klingons and romulans were newly discoverd in Kirk's time. And by the movies quite some distance away at max warp contrast with the much slower speeds given for Enterprise.
The bait and switch was simple. Most expected a story that took place BEFORE any of this happened, and with much lower tech.
And yes, Trek is famous for anoying inconsistancies that don't jibe when any anlysis is done. However Enterprise takes it to a whole new level in places, not all of which can be explained by a temporal conflict.
All that said I don't really hate the show, in fact I find it an o.k. show, I'm just dissapointed that these unfortunate elements exist. I would honestly like to have seen a trully pre-tos series, not one that meerly takes place before tos, but has all the same things plus borg and one new arch-villian race.
Last few months thier windows drivers have been a single file or optional 3 file download, properly organized with understandable version number rather than the release date for version 8 files on seperate pages issue they had before.
Since they started doing that way I've not had any real issues with thier drivers other than thier intentional support of macrovision on VHS tapes I've tried to watch.
No ATI has hardware support for video encoding and decoding of mpeg. I believe full support with radeon and partial on some previous cards (probably the earlier AIW's)
ATI, for now at least, has fixed the software driver mess a bit. Go get thier current drivers, you can get them as a single download that installs in one go, no chance of miss-ordered install.
I do have a gripe, as I mentioned above it's the scrambled cable look of any vhs tape I try to watch with macrovision. ATI says this is deliberate.
Well I've got an ATI all-in-wonder radeon 9600 and it's tunner doesn't seem to have any major bugs. But I mostly use it with a vcr, which brings me to my major bitch. It 'honors' macromedia. Antime I try and play a vhs tape with that crap it turns into a parody of scrambled cable. This bugs me to no end, I paid for a product that doesn't work by design in it's main function, letting me use my monitor to view content for tv!. I'm hoping someone will get some linux drivers written that fixes this, but in the meantime It's crippled.
My question would be, and this almost certainly bears on the question posted, What tv tuners have what limitation, espcially the drm/copy protection related crap.
"I doubt many people release viruses because they don't like MS; It just doesn't make much sense. Punish the users, many of whom don't know any better? It's at best a very, very indirect means to an end."
My only problem with this is the assumption of good reasoning on the virus writers part.
Just look around here and see how many people have fun bashing microsoft, how many say 'stop using windblow$ and you won't have that problem' and simular 'use windows and you get what you deserve' attitude.
It's like how some think that because they dissagree with a government they should blow up it's citizens to stop said government. And these are adults with this thinking, not 15 year old script kiddies.
Again, saying it has NOTHING to do with market base is an exageration at least. To many obvious reasons why, the biggest being the simple fact that many virus writers are after attention, and alot are young relatively speaking so they go after the biggest group per virus, namely windows users.
And while linux/bsd is on alot of servers, sadly so is windows. Compare all the windows servers + all the home windows systems + all the other windows systems (school and office and bussines). Now add up all the linux + bsd + Mac systems. HUGE disparity here.
Plus consider, how many off the kids doing this are run into people who know someone who got hit by a linux virus vs a windows virus if they wrote both.
And writing a Mac virus would only be good for laughs amoung the young braggart type virus writers. Think of how the typical <20 year old 1337 windows 'hacker' (aka script kiddie) react to Macs and thier users, thier friends tend to react the same way. I've run into a fair number of kids with this mentality on IRC back when I spent alot of time there. The majority had rather disparaging remarks about the assumed sexuality and intelectual capabilities of mac users. Remember alot of these viruses are writen by such immature people.
You could make an argument that this a social phenomenon and not a market share one, but really the phenomenon is in part related to the 'rebel just like everyone else' mindset that many teenagers adopt as they try to both find thier own individuality as well as 'fit in' with society or some subset thereof.
Bragging rights is about how many systems and how big news splash it made. Companies don't like to disclose publicly when thier systems are compromised because it's bad publicity. But when a new windows virus goes around and hits lots of home users, THAT makes the news.
I have no issue with the thesis that windows exploitability is a major factor in the spread of virus on said. Or that it's in part the major target because it's just easy enough for many to do and just obscure enough (coding is an obscure art to most) to make it an easy "I'm Cool" trick.
I think what bothers people about all the messed up timelines in Enterprise is NOT that the timewars stuff screwed with it. It's the bait and switch.
Most of us were expecting a show about the trek before the federation, before romulans or klingons, and no phasers, and so on.
And besides the continuity issues that could plausably explained by intertemporal manipulation, we have a few other glaring issues, like distances. Places that were months away in TOS are barely weeks away in Enterprise, even though they supposedly don't have anywhere near the speeds in TOS.
I am a fan of time travel stories in any SF background, but in Enterprise they mix-up how it effects things way to much. And really while the time-war plots COULD explain the way to early elements, this is still fairly obviously a retro-fit of the situation.
Thanks I was currious. And was in part thinking out loud, I like to speculate about the fringe cases somtimes (thus the tin-foil hat theory about buffer exploits in possibly corrupted crc's/music or cdrom firmware).
Someone else said somthing about a subversion OSX possibly autoloading under some circumstances, some specific kind of driver or somthing, he used Mac terminology so it wasn't to clear. He did say a recent update turns that off though.
Hmm. ping and tracerout reaches www.beastieboys.com just fine, reasonable ping times for my crappy dialup as well (around 200 ms)
I'm guessing they've simply shut down http till the slashdotting is over, or at least manageable.
Slashdot Mirror
I was using hyperboly to make a point. I'm sorry if you missed that.
My first point was about letting Joe know there is a potential problem with the action he chose, my second was about the fact I was talking about Joe's HOME computer, not a work computer. If Joe doesn't have the root password to his home computer the issue goes deeper than warning him of potential problems. The dialog you suggested wouldn't be appropriate as worded on a typical home computer.
If you are going to go ballistic and foul mouthed over a comment without trying to understand it then perhaps your right, there is no point in continued conversation as that requires some maturity. Name calling and cursing at someone because you disagree isn't a conversation. Though I suspect it's intentional given your chosen nom de plume.
Mycroft
I was talking about home computers.
that'll piss joe sixpack off if his home computer tells him he doesn't know what he's doing, or implies it. And if it's true Joe will absolutely fly into a rage.
Mycroft
Well said, very well said indeed.
I was born in 1970 and was at home when the first shuttle exploded on liftoff. I've read so much from the masters and grand masters of Science Fiction.
I've always felt that 'Out there' is where our destiny as a species lay. And this is clearly apart of the next major step for us on that road.
While I applaud and admire the great men and women who've 'boldly gone' and took those first steps off this tiny little hunk of soil we call home, It is indeed time for the 'rest of us'.
Thanks for help summing up just why this is so important to so many of us.
Good luck Mike, there is a lot resting your sholders monday. Come back safe.
Mycroft
I wouldn't go quite that far.
how about a system shouldn't by default run anything not part of the base install and require direct user intervention to run anything else as a start.
It should not be possible (idealy, in reality a few mistakes are inevitable, heck bsd has even had root exploit once!) for a system be compromised in anyway without root access.
Joe sixpack doing everyday normal things and not digging into things he doesn't trully understand(even though he may think he understands them) shouldn't be able to easily fubar his system without some kind of warning. Like "are you really shure you want to run that e-mail attachment, most viruses are run that way click on the damage my computer button to continue, or click on No button to cancel", or "are you shure you want to try and set your monitor to 1954 by 1776 at 875khz, the wrong settings can explode your monitor and set fire to your house and void your warrenty".
Just few ideas.
Mycroft
dammit, I knew I was forgetting one. I know what .com, .exe, and .scr is but what is .etc I can't find any reference to that, is it the email trojan controll applet specification?
Seriously though, it's a good idea to auto-flag such emails and make the recieving user jump through a simple hoop or two to recieve those, but you can't just auto-delete such in many environments, there can be legitimate reasons for sending such things.
But for one thing, e-mail clients should at least pop up a warning box, one that contains usefull info for joe sixpack. EG: "warning this e-mail contains an runnable program attachment. If you're NOT expecting to recieve a program from this person, it is most likely a virus. In that case likely the sender has no knowledge his machine sent it to you. Viruses can have severly harmfull effect on your computer up to and including rendering it unuseable without expensive repairs" with click-boxes that take a second to figure out forcing the reciever to think rather than blindly click OK.
In the meantime why not have the mail server send a warning e-mail with message inlined, but not the attachment, and instruction on how to get the attachment the server has quarantined if it turns out to be a legitimate e-mail.
Mycroft
Well my current round of wierdness seems to be assholes who think I'm trying to kill thier children.
A couple of days ago I make a left onto a road with a speed limit of 65 and a LONG (nearly a mile) visibility in the direction of oncomming traffic.
In the lane I'm entering there is no-one except an old tan sedan WAY at the extreem limit of visibility, and he didn't come into view untill I was already pulling into the lane.
Now in the far right lane (I'm turning into the leftmost travel lane as required by law in missouri when making a left turn) is a blue suv with a white 2-door riding it's bumper about a 1/4 -1/2 mile back. Well about time I'm reaching 50mph (the minimum is 45) I hear tires lock up behind me. looking back there is the white car with some dude yelling and gesturing in the driver seat. A moment later the blue suv flies past me by at least 20mph, I look down to see I'm now passing the speed limit (approx 62, analog dial).
This guy follows me to work (where I'm going) and proceedes to yell at me and anyone who'll listen how I 'could have killed him and his kids, even though (as he admited) it was just him and his wife in the car.
Then today on my way out from work (which is next door to a county police station mind you) some guy and his kid step out in front of me, no problem I just stop, I'm not out of first gear yet and he's almost 30 ft away from me. He suddenly turns, runs up the hood of my car jumps down on the driver side yanks my door open and starts yelling obcenities at me and accusing me of trying to kill him and his kid. Then he tries to take my cell phone when I go to call the police. He's lucky his kid was still in front of my car, it's the only thing that kept me from flooring it when he ran up my hood. The look of pure rage on his face gave me distinct impression he meant me harm.
I have no clue what's next, but things refuse to stay boring around me for more than a few months.
Mycroft
I got my definition from an astronmy short program that used air on pbs sunday nights a few years ago. Mart Horkhiemer, star hustler. or some such, probably totaly scrambled the guys name, he was from the Miami planetarium or some such. DagNabit, my memory is better than this normally, but I got serious issues with names for some idiot reason. (I still call one of my friends by anothers name even though I've known them both over 3 years)
Mycroft
I'll say impressive, even 30% is a lot. But mentioning silcates, I was under the impression silicon was the biggest single element in the crust. I probably read silicates and simply didn't remember it right. ...
thx
So all we need to do ship a double giga shitload of crust to mars and we make serious progress on terraforming it. Hmm... on second thought
Mycroft
Hmm, I'll have to look into that. I do remember hearing about signal cleaners and boosters and the like that would fix Macrovisions corruption of the signal (that's really what it is). Some time ago, but I never had any personal problems with macrovision, on the rare occasion I needed to copy somthing so encoded (couple of broken tapes, made sense to copy the repaired version, the repairing I didn't totaly trust) I just made sure the old, but very expensive, vcr we had was the one recorded on. It never had a problem with macrovision. Then again it was borderline prosumer at the time it came out and had hook ups for pro cameras and all sorts of nice options, and cost about $1k at a time when most vcr's were about $200.
Mycroft
No it's specificaly 'honored' by the video card or drivers according to ATI themselves.
MacroVISION (mea culpa before). works, as you hinted at, by varying the signal such that while a tv's slower autogain will display it fine, a vcr's typicaly more reactive autogain will be fubared, resulting in a copy that darkens and lightens significantly.
This is NOT what I get from macrovisioned tapes, I get what looks alot like scrambled cable, wavy, highly distorted, colored bands that sorta suggest that image may have once existed. I've seen what macrovision does in fairly severe cases and the symptoms are completely different, and by design on ATI's part.
Mycroft
LOL, sorry wrong kind of crap. But at least someone was smart enough to understand despite the brain slip. I have issues with names, I get them swapped on all kinds of things, I've got friends I've known for about 3 years, I still tend to call one by the other's name. That's why I've been useing the same pseudonym online for 14 years.
Mycroft
Well phasers shouldn't exist yet because in they were brand spanking new when the NCC1701 set out under Pike.
Klingons and romulans were newly discoverd in Kirk's time. And by the movies quite some distance away at max warp contrast with the much slower speeds given for Enterprise.
The bait and switch was simple. Most expected a story that took place BEFORE any of this happened, and with much lower tech.
And yes, Trek is famous for anoying inconsistancies that don't jibe when any anlysis is done. However Enterprise takes it to a whole new level in places, not all of which can be explained by a temporal conflict.
All that said I don't really hate the show, in fact I find it an o.k. show, I'm just dissapointed that these unfortunate elements exist. I would honestly like to have seen a trully pre-tos series, not one that meerly takes place before tos, but has all the same things plus borg and one new arch-villian race.
Mycroft
Not to mention Asimov probably wrote MORE science fact than he wrote fiction. He was extreemly prolific. I think somthing in the hundreds of books.
Mycroft
Better yet, how about covered conyons as a way point durring the many decades/centuries a terraforming operation is likely to take.
Mycroft
Earth is 50% Oxygen by mass?? seems a little high, any sources for that?
Mycroft
Last few months thier windows drivers have been a single file or optional 3 file download, properly organized with understandable version number rather than the release date for version 8 files on seperate pages issue they had before.
Since they started doing that way I've not had any real issues with thier drivers other than thier intentional support of macrovision on VHS tapes I've tried to watch.
Mycroft
No ATI has hardware support for video encoding and decoding of mpeg. I believe full support with radeon and partial on some previous cards (probably the earlier AIW's)
Mycroft
ATI, for now at least, has fixed the software driver mess a bit. Go get thier current drivers, you can get them as a single download that installs in one go, no chance of miss-ordered install.
I do have a gripe, as I mentioned above it's the scrambled cable look of any vhs tape I try to watch with macrovision. ATI says this is deliberate.
MYcroft
Well I've got an ATI all-in-wonder radeon 9600 and it's tunner doesn't seem to have any major bugs. But I mostly use it with a vcr, which brings me to my major bitch. It 'honors' macromedia. Antime I try and play a vhs tape with that crap it turns into a parody of scrambled cable. This bugs me to no end, I paid for a product that doesn't work by design in it's main function, letting me use my monitor to view content for tv!. I'm hoping someone will get some linux drivers written that fixes this, but in the meantime It's crippled.
My question would be, and this almost certainly bears on the question posted, What tv tuners have what limitation, espcially the drm/copy protection related crap.
Mycroft
"I doubt many people release viruses because they don't like MS; It just doesn't make much sense. Punish the users, many of whom don't know any better? It's at best a very, very indirect means to an end."
My only problem with this is the assumption of good reasoning on the virus writers part.
Just look around here and see how many people have fun bashing microsoft, how many say 'stop using windblow$ and you won't have that problem' and simular 'use windows and you get what you deserve' attitude.
It's like how some think that because they dissagree with a government they should blow up it's citizens to stop said government. And these are adults with this thinking, not 15 year old script kiddies.
Mycroft
Again, saying it has NOTHING to do with market base is an exageration at least. To many obvious reasons why, the biggest being the simple fact that many virus writers are after attention, and alot are young relatively speaking so they go after the biggest group per virus, namely windows users.
And while linux/bsd is on alot of servers, sadly so is windows. Compare all the windows servers + all the home windows systems + all the other windows systems (school and office and bussines). Now add up all the linux + bsd + Mac systems. HUGE disparity here.
Plus consider, how many off the kids doing this are run into people who know someone who got hit by a linux virus vs a windows virus if they wrote both.
And writing a Mac virus would only be good for laughs amoung the young braggart type virus writers. Think of how the typical <20 year old 1337 windows 'hacker' (aka script kiddie) react to Macs and thier users, thier friends tend to react the same way. I've run into a fair number of kids with this mentality on IRC back when I spent alot of time there. The majority had rather disparaging remarks about the assumed sexuality and intelectual capabilities of mac users. Remember alot of these viruses are writen by such immature people.
You could make an argument that this a social phenomenon and not a market share one, but really the phenomenon is in part related to the 'rebel just like everyone else' mindset that many teenagers adopt as they try to both find thier own individuality as well as 'fit in' with society or some subset thereof.
Bragging rights is about how many systems and how big news splash it made. Companies don't like to disclose publicly when thier systems are compromised because it's bad publicity. But when a new windows virus goes around and hits lots of home users, THAT makes the news.
I have no issue with the thesis that windows exploitability is a major factor in the spread of virus on said. Or that it's in part the major target because it's just easy enough for many to do and just obscure enough (coding is an obscure art to most) to make it an easy "I'm Cool" trick.
Mycroft
I think what bothers people about all the messed up timelines in Enterprise is NOT that the timewars stuff screwed with it. It's the bait and switch.
Most of us were expecting a show about the trek before the federation, before romulans or klingons, and no phasers, and so on.
And besides the continuity issues that could plausably explained by intertemporal manipulation, we have a few other glaring issues, like distances. Places that were months away in TOS are barely weeks away in Enterprise, even though they supposedly don't have anywhere near the speeds in TOS.
I am a fan of time travel stories in any SF background, but in Enterprise they mix-up how it effects things way to much. And really while the time-war plots COULD explain the way to early elements, this is still fairly obviously a retro-fit of the situation.
Mycroft
Yeah no kidding, that would fall under social factors IMHO. LOTS of malware depend on social engineering as much as code skills.
Mycroft
Thanks I was currious. And was in part thinking out loud, I like to speculate about the fringe cases somtimes (thus the tin-foil hat theory about buffer exploits in possibly corrupted crc's/music or cdrom firmware).
Someone else said somthing about a subversion OSX possibly autoloading under some circumstances, some specific kind of driver or somthing, he used Mac terminology so it wasn't to clear. He did say a recent update turns that off though.
Mycroft
Hmm. ping and tracerout reaches www.beastieboys.com just fine, reasonable ping times for my crappy dialup as well (around 200 ms)
I'm guessing they've simply shut down http till the slashdotting is over, or at least manageable.
Mycroft