Am I the only one that see the irony here? Whould Gamespy even exist if everyone else effectively used the DCMA to stop reverse engineering and exploiting of their code? THis looks to me like a case of a company who decrys the DCMA when used against them, but is quick to try to use it against others.
I would like to point out that this was something Belkin did in a "upgrade" to their Router firmware. I own one of there routers with version 1.0.0 firmware, prior to this hack, and I want to say the damn thing never worked for more than a few minutes at a time. I could never get a response from tech support (this was many months before the September firmware upgrade came out, but they would not even acknowledge the problems). I had even stopped looking for upgrades and was never notified of one being available.
So what do I learn now? While they should have been focusing their efforts on fixing their firmware that did not work, they instead wasted time adding a complex adware plot to the router and likely delayed any real firmware fixes (if they ever did fix the firmware) while putting this hack in.
I'm a Belkin Wireless router owner and I've never seen this problem. To be fair, one reason I might not have seen this problem is that I could never get the router to keep working long enough to see it. Even for the wired connections it would lock up frequently and completely lose track of time (important for this router since it supports time of day options, but you gotta figure something is wrong when it suddenly jumps back to the last century). Belkin "support" is worthless and would not even acknowledge several e-mails.
The device was replaced with another brand that works fine. Off line and collecting dust, I've never had a problem with it hijacking my HTML and inserting ads. Now I have another reason to not buy a Belkin product again, but I hardly needed one.
you forgot off-topic. The topic is quantun encryption. The poster in question tried to do all of the things you listed (like karma whoring) by going off-topic and talking about quantum computing. mod grandparent down!
Boy, some peole just want to find things to complain about.
I just read another "you have to protect us from ourselves" article today, perhaps this should have been included in their list. Personally, I think if people want to hurt themsleves this way they should be allowed to do so. If they do it as part of their job then better qualified technical people should take their place.
Apparently we replace them with slashdot stories that are just mentions of commercial products that do nothing new, just the same things others have been doing for years, but pretend that it's new.
You can have the results instantly and the ballots are locked inside the box in case of a recount.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The only thing wrong with paper ballots that are scanned optically is that there is a record of the ballots, making it somewhat harder for the powers in charge to make sure things go the way they decided they will go. This seems to be the only reasonable explination for the rush to systems like Diebold's with no paper trail. It certainly isn't to help computer-phobic old people who can't follow written instructions.
whoever modded this down as Troll should get a permanent loss of moderation privledges. This post was completely on target.
This sort of nonsense has happened a lot, and to my posts too. Meta-moderation is NOT a valid option (although it might help a very little) because in most cases you can tell what context everything is posted in, so you can't say if a moderator was wrong is calling something redundant or even troll. But Shashdot is going down hill fast from this sort of abuse. The moderator who did this would be a good place to start.
And how is this apparently modded down multiple times as "troll"? (which also recently happened to me). The post was clearly not a troll, far from it.
At the end of the day, he killed 'em, but the case wasn't good enough to prosecute criminally.
Or, another way to look at it was simply that, after a number of strange occurances including moving the case from the area where it happened to an area where there was tremendous racial support for OJ, there was a bad jury verdict, and that just about any 12 reasonable people would have indeed found him guilty in criminal court.
Correction. We had a nice anti-establishment clause in our constitution that forbids the government from forcing religious fairy tales on us. OK, I was a victim of a cult when I grew up (the Cathloics), but I did grow up and learn to think for myself. I do have rights, and no boggy man in the sky gave them to me.
I think this is a very difficult position from the point of Symantec. Where do you draw the line of what to block or not to block?
Oh, come on! It's not even reasonable to block sites about guns or weapons. But to block one side of a political view (the side that supports a legal right granted by the second ammendment, by the way) and not to block the other side (the side that believe in taking away rights not by making changes to the Constitution by rather by ignoring it) is not a question of where to draw the line; it's clearly a case of someone using this software to promote their own political view.
That you might buy this software for your own use is disturbing. That as taxpayers we might buy it and install it in libraries is alarming.
The article makes it sound like she wouldn't have got caught if an FBI agent hadn't been a recepient of the email. I hope this isn't the case and that the FBI is taking a more pro-active attack on this kind of thing than what the article
seems to say.
The FBI clearly knows this kind of thing is going on, but they can't be bothered to do their job and protect US citizens (to be fair, they are too busy snooping on us and reading our private communications). Heck, you could have reported stuff like this and there would have been no follow-up at all. They only bother to go after someone like this when they piss them off and send the spam to an FBI agent.
What ever happened to the ancient art of bribing the reviewer?
Like in "here's a free expensive item for review that you get to keep. We'll be watching the review to see if you get anything else to review? Oh, it's still happening, but sending the reviewer a item that isn't the same as the crap they intend to sell you and me is just a little added insurance.
You can pretty much see this in a lot of reviews that are written too. The only reviews that merit much trust are the independent ones where the reviewer actually went out and got an off-the-shelf item to review; but this is an almost dead pratice. No only does the reviewer not get neat fre stuff then, but his review may be months after the reviews by the company shills come out, and he ends up with the same crap you and I get rather than the free good working versions.
For those that don't know, Cygwin/XFree86 is a port of the X Window System to Cygwin (which provides a *nix-like API on Windows).
Thanks. I still have no idea what this is.
I do know what X is (more or less). OK, I get that Gygwin is trying to make Windows users have Linux/Unix tools (I think that's what that says). So what is Xfree86 and what are we loosing?
I'll go a step further: Some organizations (like say SCO) might not want to release their code to an outside party. And an outside party might not want to accept it and then be sued if there is ever any doubt as how some Linux code ended up in SCO Unix. But there is really no need for any concern here: The submitter can always (and in the case of non-open code should perhaps be required to) submit the code in an encrypted form with a well know encryption system. (Perhaps PGP). Then if there was ever any need for proof they could submit the plain text code in question and the key for that module and have it verified that the code had been submitted and when. This relieves the concerns over letting valuable source code out-of-house and still provides the verification that SCO seems completely lacking (there may well be published Linux sources that would prove SCO's claims false, maybe even on my bookshelf with known dates, but that can't be determined until SCO is will to say what code they think they own).
Heck, if it were not for the current concerns that CDR media self-destructs in a couple of years, I might even be willing to take such a task on myself. Anyone have any insight on a reliable and trusted form of storage (that is affordable in large amounts) that might make this work?
Of course, there are concerns on both keeping duplicates and liability. To be anywhere near safe multiple locations would have to be used to store the files (should this be the responsibility of the storage agent, or should the owner maximize his chances by submitting to multiple storage sites and accepting that the sites keep only one copy that might be destroyed by fire or even another 9/11 type terror attack?)
There is another valid use for this too, software escrow. Some businesses fear doing software work with a small contractor unless he hands over all of his sources, because if he goes out of business or dies they might go down the tubes with him. On the other hand, small contractors are just as concerned about turning over their technology and having it stolen (a company in the state of Washington that is said to do this comes to mind). An escrow service would help with this; but it would be difficult for any such service to verify back to the client company that the source placed in escrow was good source rather than just something submitted to make the client think the true source was in escrow. Again, any thoughts on this, short of having the storage/escrow company actually build a working copy of the software from the source?
Life is very similar to "worms" but is actually much simpler.
Yes it's the same Conway. And Life is certainly NOTmuch simpler than worms. if anything it is much more complex. Both start with a simple set of rules that lead to complex patterns, but with worms there is only a point at any one time, and the patterns are only in it's past history and the changes it has made to it's landscape, a landscape that is consumed. But life and it's variants have multiple points of dynamic change each move (generation). It can show motion in multiple locations and multiple directions at once. It shows beauty and patterns both in it's history and in it's current generation. Conway's game of life, in it's many variations, is actually more complex than worms.
Worms does look more novel, particularly in that it is usually played on a triangular or hexagon grid work, while life is usually played on a square cellular structure. By life is not limited to a 2-d squale cellular structure and more than wormes is limited to a hexagon based structure. Life could certainly be played on a hexagon cell board, as well as many other cell arangements. I expect the main reason life is predominately seen on a square cell arangement is simply because Y by Y arrays lend themself very well to playing life in software, and it is still a complex game on a simple square cellular universe.
Everyone seems to have missed this. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have never mentioned it. Linus has never made this observation. And Robert X. Cringely doesn't seem to get it either. But here is the simple reason why Linux and other free software will always far exceed anything from Microsoft.
Microsoft is producing the software to make money; that's a given. And it's often stated that Bill is driven by a Borg mentality to beat the other players in the industry and to own everything. Which makes a lot of sense; a lot of the evil illegal things they do can not be explained just by a motivation to get money, they already have the money.
And it stated in this article again that open source software development is based on a desire to make this software free. And personal reputation of the developer. And other motivations. But here's the one major driving motivation to Open Source Software that no one else seems to be willing to state:
Open Source software is largely driven, and will continue to succeeded, because of a hatred of Bill Gates. It's as simple as that. People hate Bill Gates so much that they are not just willing but glad to donate tens or hundreds of hours of their time to anything that would make projects that Microsoft competes with better. And the more illegal things he does to try to destroy other software and to take over the software world, the more this will continue to be true.
OK, it's cute. But most slashdot geeks could get much better use of a similarly priced laser cad system that cuts 3d objects, makes PC boards, and can still "print" and engrave 2d surfaces rather than this 2d system that is designed to only print. This may have a very easy to use interface, but many things that have limited functionality do.
Heck, the next logical step beyond claiming that they can white list every legitimate e-mail server on the planet that might ever send a valid e-mail to an AT&T customer would be to simply demand that everyone register all the actual e-mail that they will ever send to an AT&T customer. Then they could check incoming e-mail against everything they had on hand (or even just the md5 checksums of same) and reject any e-mail that wasn't already on file, since it must be spam. Might even be more useful; I could register a half dozen simple mesages now for an AT&T user I know; but I have no way of being sure what IP addresses my service providers might be on six months from now and be sure they were white listed with AT&T.
I hate spam, but I expect the AT&T move will do a lot more harm than good.
As far as I can tell, it's only sleezy Diebold who is telling people not to post the memos. Unless these kids are standing up against a court order to take down the information, they are hardly participating in civil disobedience just because they are pointing out serious flaws in Diebold's buggy system and not listening to Diebold when they say to stop, flaws that Diebold would apparently like to hide.
[i} thus, wireless, no choice.[/i][P]
Actually, you still have choices. There are, for example, devices that let you send your ethernet across the AC power connection. It would let you share an ethernet connection in other rooms of the house, but not past the transformer that feeds the building. There may be security issues here too, but it would generally be much more secure than WiFi. That's not to say I advocate it (although I've seen it used well in one business where I would have had a fit if they had used 802.11b instead), but there certainly are choices, even if you perceive that you can't run wires.
There are several real problems with this. One obviously is that a voter who walks away with a hard copy receipt has no way to know that what is on the receipt is really what the machine turned in as his vote. In any deliberate voting fraud the machine would of course print out what you voted, but that in no way proved that the same information was reported to the general vote totals.
Another serious problem is that it opens the door to making vote buying a lot easier. In theory, (although it has been greatly corrupted in some areas), the vote is private, making it hard for anyone to buy your vote and really have proof that you really gave them what they paid for. I believe this privacy is a factor that at least lessens the chance of vote buying. However, if a vote buyer can pay for a receipt with his name on it, it seems likely that vote buying will happen more often, directly aided by a printed voting receipt.
That's not to say I have answers. I would certainly like to have a system that makes voting easier and more accurate, but I don't see easy answers to solving issues of both voting privacy and avoiding facilitating vote buying while at the same time making voting system more accountable. Particularly not in a society that is not willing to impose the death penality when voting fraud is caught.
You likely don't get any spam. You also likely don't get a lot of valid mail that you would have received, including a lot you wanted. Maybe you even miss some important things. Many businesses use automated e-mail for valid reasons - order confirmation and shipping information status, verification of account creation (including mailing you a password), rebate status confirmation and more. Even slashdot can do this to tell you if there is a response to your post or to inform you of moderation. These automated systems are not going to deal with a challange/response system. Heck, I know humans who wouldn't bother either, particularly if they are trying to do you a favor with their initial e-mail effort. Sure, in some cases you can put a trusted address in a challange system to let it pass, but sometimes you just don't know the address that the sender will be using. So a challange / response system will do most people more harm than good.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one that see the irony here? Whould Gamespy even exist if everyone else effectively used the DCMA to stop reverse engineering and exploiting of their code? THis looks to me like a case of a company who decrys the DCMA when used against them, but is quick to try to use it against others.
So what do I learn now? While they should have been focusing their efforts on fixing their firmware that did not work, they instead wasted time adding a complex adware plot to the router and likely delayed any real firmware fixes (if they ever did fix the firmware) while putting this hack in.
The device was replaced with another brand that works fine. Off line and collecting dust, I've never had a problem with it hijacking my HTML and inserting ads. Now I have another reason to not buy a Belkin product again, but I hardly needed one.
you forgot off-topic. The topic is quantun encryption. The poster in question tried to do all of the things you listed (like karma whoring) by going off-topic and talking about quantum computing. mod grandparent down!
Boy, some peole just want to find things to complain about. I just read another "you have to protect us from ourselves" article today, perhaps this should have been included in their list. Personally, I think if people want to hurt themsleves this way they should be allowed to do so. If they do it as part of their job then better qualified technical people should take their place.
Apparently we replace them with slashdot stories that are just mentions of commercial products that do nothing new, just the same things others have been doing for years, but pretend that it's new.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The only thing wrong with paper ballots that are scanned optically is that there is a record of the ballots, making it somewhat harder for the powers in charge to make sure things go the way they decided they will go. This seems to be the only reasonable explination for the rush to systems like Diebold's with no paper trail. It certainly isn't to help computer-phobic old people who can't follow written instructions.
This sort of nonsense has happened a lot, and to my posts too. Meta-moderation is NOT a valid option (although it might help a very little) because in most cases you can tell what context everything is posted in, so you can't say if a moderator was wrong is calling something redundant or even troll. But Shashdot is going down hill fast from this sort of abuse. The moderator who did this would be a good place to start.
And how is this apparently modded down multiple times as "troll"? (which also recently happened to me). The post was clearly not a troll, far from it.
Or, another way to look at it was simply that, after a number of strange occurances including moving the case from the area where it happened to an area where there was tremendous racial support for OJ, there was a bad jury verdict, and that just about any 12 reasonable people would have indeed found him guilty in criminal court.
Correction. We had a nice anti-establishment clause in our constitution that forbids the government from forcing religious fairy tales on us. OK, I was a victim of a cult when I grew up (the Cathloics), but I did grow up and learn to think for myself. I do have rights, and no boggy man in the sky gave them to me.
Oh, come on! It's not even reasonable to block sites about guns or weapons. But to block one side of a political view (the side that supports a legal right granted by the second ammendment, by the way) and not to block the other side (the side that believe in taking away rights not by making changes to the Constitution by rather by ignoring it) is not a question of where to draw the line; it's clearly a case of someone using this software to promote their own political view.
That you might buy this software for your own use is disturbing. That as taxpayers we might buy it and install it in libraries is alarming.
The FBI clearly knows this kind of thing is going on, but they can't be bothered to do their job and protect US citizens (to be fair, they are too busy snooping on us and reading our private communications). Heck, you could have reported stuff like this and there would have been no follow-up at all. They only bother to go after someone like this when they piss them off and send the spam to an FBI agent.
This is news? Something that happened 65 years ago is not news.
Like in "here's a free expensive item for review that you get to keep. We'll be watching the review to see if you get anything else to review? Oh, it's still happening, but sending the reviewer a item that isn't the same as the crap they intend to sell you and me is just a little added insurance.
You can pretty much see this in a lot of reviews that are written too. The only reviews that merit much trust are the independent ones where the reviewer actually went out and got an off-the-shelf item to review; but this is an almost dead pratice. No only does the reviewer not get neat fre stuff then, but his review may be months after the reviews by the company shills come out, and he ends up with the same crap you and I get rather than the free good working versions.
Thanks. I still have no idea what this is.
I do know what X is (more or less). OK, I get that Gygwin is trying to make Windows users have Linux/Unix tools (I think that's what that says). So what is Xfree86 and what are we loosing?
Heck, if it were not for the current concerns that CDR media self-destructs in a couple of years, I might even be willing to take such a task on myself. Anyone have any insight on a reliable and trusted form of storage (that is affordable in large amounts) that might make this work?
Of course, there are concerns on both keeping duplicates and liability. To be anywhere near safe multiple locations would have to be used to store the files (should this be the responsibility of the storage agent, or should the owner maximize his chances by submitting to multiple storage sites and accepting that the sites keep only one copy that might be destroyed by fire or even another 9/11 type terror attack?)
There is another valid use for this too, software escrow. Some businesses fear doing software work with a small contractor unless he hands over all of his sources, because if he goes out of business or dies they might go down the tubes with him. On the other hand, small contractors are just as concerned about turning over their technology and having it stolen (a company in the state of Washington that is said to do this comes to mind). An escrow service would help with this; but it would be difficult for any such service to verify back to the client company that the source placed in escrow was good source rather than just something submitted to make the client think the true source was in escrow. Again, any thoughts on this, short of having the storage/escrow company actually build a working copy of the software from the source?
Yes it's the same Conway. And Life is certainly NOT much simpler than worms. if anything it is much more complex. Both start with a simple set of rules that lead to complex patterns, but with worms there is only a point at any one time, and the patterns are only in it's past history and the changes it has made to it's landscape, a landscape that is consumed. But life and it's variants have multiple points of dynamic change each move (generation). It can show motion in multiple locations and multiple directions at once. It shows beauty and patterns both in it's history and in it's current generation. Conway's game of life, in it's many variations, is actually more complex than worms.
Worms does look more novel, particularly in that it is usually played on a triangular or hexagon grid work, while life is usually played on a square cellular structure. By life is not limited to a 2-d squale cellular structure and more than wormes is limited to a hexagon based structure. Life could certainly be played on a hexagon cell board, as well as many other cell arangements. I expect the main reason life is predominately seen on a square cell arangement is simply because Y by Y arrays lend themself very well to playing life in software, and it is still a complex game on a simple square cellular universe.
Microsoft is producing the software to make money; that's a given. And it's often stated that Bill is driven by a Borg mentality to beat the other players in the industry and to own everything. Which makes a lot of sense; a lot of the evil illegal things they do can not be explained just by a motivation to get money, they already have the money.
And it stated in this article again that open source software development is based on a desire to make this software free. And personal reputation of the developer. And other motivations. But here's the one major driving motivation to Open Source Software that no one else seems to be willing to state:
Open Source software is largely driven, and will continue to succeeded, because of a hatred of Bill Gates. It's as simple as that. People hate Bill Gates so much that they are not just willing but glad to donate tens or hundreds of hours of their time to anything that would make projects that Microsoft competes with better. And the more illegal things he does to try to destroy other software and to take over the software world, the more this will continue to be true.
OK, it's cute. But most slashdot geeks could get much better use of a similarly priced laser cad system that cuts 3d objects, makes PC boards, and can still "print" and engrave 2d surfaces rather than this 2d system that is designed to only print. This may have a very easy to use interface, but many things that have limited functionality do.
What damn bullshit. A law like this legitimizes spam, and will waste even more bandwidth.
Heck, the next logical step beyond claiming that they can white list every legitimate e-mail server on the planet that might ever send a valid e-mail to an AT&T customer would be to simply demand that everyone register all the actual e-mail that they will ever send to an AT&T customer. Then they could check incoming e-mail against everything they had on hand (or even just the md5 checksums of same) and reject any e-mail that wasn't already on file, since it must be spam. Might even be more useful; I could register a half dozen simple mesages now for an AT&T user I know; but I have no way of being sure what IP addresses my service providers might be on six months from now and be sure they were white listed with AT&T.
I hate spam, but I expect the AT&T move will do a lot more harm than good.
As far as I can tell, it's only sleezy Diebold who is telling people not to post the memos. Unless these kids are standing up against a court order to take down the information, they are hardly participating in civil disobedience just because they are pointing out serious flaws in Diebold's buggy system and not listening to Diebold when they say to stop, flaws that Diebold would apparently like to hide.
[i} thus, wireless, no choice.[/i][P] Actually, you still have choices. There are, for example, devices that let you send your ethernet across the AC power connection. It would let you share an ethernet connection in other rooms of the house, but not past the transformer that feeds the building. There may be security issues here too, but it would generally be much more secure than WiFi. That's not to say I advocate it (although I've seen it used well in one business where I would have had a fit if they had used 802.11b instead), but there certainly are choices, even if you perceive that you can't run wires.
Another serious problem is that it opens the door to making vote buying a lot easier. In theory, (although it has been greatly corrupted in some areas), the vote is private, making it hard for anyone to buy your vote and really have proof that you really gave them what they paid for. I believe this privacy is a factor that at least lessens the chance of vote buying. However, if a vote buyer can pay for a receipt with his name on it, it seems likely that vote buying will happen more often, directly aided by a printed voting receipt.
That's not to say I have answers. I would certainly like to have a system that makes voting easier and more accurate, but I don't see easy answers to solving issues of both voting privacy and avoiding facilitating vote buying while at the same time making voting system more accountable. Particularly not in a society that is not willing to impose the death penality when voting fraud is caught.
You likely don't get any spam. You also likely don't get a lot of valid mail that you would have received, including a lot you wanted. Maybe you even miss some important things. Many businesses use automated e-mail for valid reasons - order confirmation and shipping information status, verification of account creation (including mailing you a password), rebate status confirmation and more. Even slashdot can do this to tell you if there is a response to your post or to inform you of moderation. These automated systems are not going to deal with a challange/response system. Heck, I know humans who wouldn't bother either, particularly if they are trying to do you a favor with their initial e-mail effort. Sure, in some cases you can put a trusted address in a challange system to let it pass, but sometimes you just don't know the address that the sender will be using. So a challange / response system will do most people more harm than good.