All you'll get is a local private address in the "C" space - 192.168.1.*, or 192.168.100.* by default. As for traceroute - instead of saking, why not try it?
I've used many traceroute programs, when they serve a use. In this case it does not. How can you not understand that a DYNDNS updater will not be recording a private IP address, but rather a public one? Why not follow your own advice and try one? I use such an updater all of the time (it is far better than the update code built into my router) and know exactly what the result of such an update is.
No, it would be a "new Earth", which happens from the moon's viewpoint when Earth sees a full moon. A full Earth, from the moon's viewpoint, would happen two weeks later when the moon is "new" and not in the tail at all. Since a "new Earth" and a "full moon" happen at the same time, the full moon reference is perfectly correct and makes more sense.
The IP address won't work for most laptops, since they're probably connecting through a wireless router
Maybe I'm missing something, but that makes no sense at all to me.
Wireless seems to have nothing to do with it, any time that you connect through a wired or wireless router connection you get a local NAT IP address. But the DYNDNS updating that was discussed in the post that I responded to is still valid; it registers the public IP address of the connection, not some private address. Traceroute will not give any additional information; once one has the IP address of where the computer connected from one should be able (with law enforcement and ISP cooperation) to find the point of connection.
Of course, if the thief only connect from public wifi hot spots, then one needs to catch them in that act. Same if they connect through a neighbor's router that doesn't have encryption enabled, although that likely pins down the thief to a very small geographic area. If they connect through their own router, wired or wireless, then DYNDNS gets their public IP address. So any home address connection would be a good target for a warrant. If people insist on running home systems without encryption they should expect such little surprise visits.
Why you think a traceroute to the IP address matters at all is completely unclear.
I certainly question the validity of them being able to somehow get more support from either the ISP or law enforcement than the actual owner of the stolen computer. I see no reason to accept that they can get better responses than the original owner. and I even wonder if they really do. Do they, or do they hit the same brick walls? If they do, why do they get better support?
Yup, there are many ways to learn the IP address/addresses of your computer once it has been stolen. Thing is, what can you do about it then? I've read far too many reports about people who know what addresses have been used by their stolen computers, but have been unable to get ISPs and even law enforcement to get involved and track down the stolen hardware. The ISPs simply are not going to co-operate with you, and law enforcement responses can range wildly. While there may be a few exceptional individuals who will help track a stolen laptop, from what I have read one should not be at all surprised to get a less helpful response from law enforcement.
It could be a good idea to hide a little DYNDNS update routine on each of one's computers (and thankfully DYNDNS will even give you multiple IDs that you can update, so you can have a different one for each computer). But I'll want to see a lot more positive feedback by people who did this or similar things before I will think it's very likely to be helpful. Now if you had a GPS in that laptop and sent out it's coordinates when updating, you might be able to do yourself a lot more good (unfortunately, GPS doesn't work well indoors).
Nevertheless, directions like 'nofollow' and 'noindex' are still respected, so sites can still be excluded from this type of search.
Maybe they shouldn't be, at least not in all cases. Several years back I had done many Google searches for some information that was very important to me, but never could find anything. Then a few months later (too late to be of use), pretty much by a fortunate combination of factors but with no help from Google, I came across the exact information, on a.GOV website in a publicly filed IPO document. As far as I can tell, our US government aggressively marks websites not to be indexed, even when they contain information that is posted there to be public record. When these nofollow directives are over used by mindless and unaccountable bureaucrats, perhaps someone needs to make the decision that these records should be public and that isn't best served by hiding them deep down a long list of links where they are hard to locate. In cases like this I would applaud any search engine that ignores the "suggestion" not to index public pages just because of an inappropriate tag in the HTML. In fact, if I knew of any search engine that was indexing in spite of this tag, I would switch to them as my first choice search engine in an instant. For starters, I would suggest that any.GOV and any State TLD website should have this tag ignored unless there were darn good reason to do otherwise.
"How should people start blowing the whistle on companies like this?"
Unh, perhaps by having the guts to name the company and maybe even the data at risk, rather than just saying n a Fortune 300 company. Oh, I guess you don't want to risk your bonus either, or maybe your job is more important than the safety and security of the citizens of your country. So why the hypocrisy to act like it's only your bosses who are vile evil bloodsuckers hiding the truth for their own enrichment?
The article missed a lot, but certainly a serious candidate would be the Wireworld Computer, a cellular automaton computer that actually (slowly) computes prime numbers and displays them, done by implementing a digital computer as a cellular automaton. This is an amazing computer, only one op code, and you can watch the data as it flows through the computer, including the stack of 64 registers (a few unused in this program).
Sorry, due to a typo the link was lost in the previous post.
The article missed a lot, but certainly a serious candidate would be the Wireworld Computer, a cellular automaton computer that actually (slowly) computes prime numbers and displays them, done by implementing a digital computer as a cellular automaton. This is an amazing computer, only one op code, and you can watch the data as it flows through the computer, including the stack of 64 registers (a few unused in this program).
and a mobile phone company is hiding them in some cellphone boxes to catch thieves
Am I missing something here? Don't mobile phones already have GPS (at least here in the USA)? And unique ID numbers burnt into them? Sure, another always-on GPS device could be handy for as long as the battery lasts (which begs the question of why can the battery last longer in the tiny GPS bug than it lasts in a consumer targeted GPS unit), but it would seem that most mobile phone thefts that could be caught with this GPS bug would be caught and tracked down as soon as the thief or buyer of the stolen property tried to use the phone anyway, and the phone could either be made useless (greatly reducing the incentive for theft) or let working (to help track down whoever has it, just as the GPS bug would do).
This sounds like something that was invented by the Department of Redundancy Department.
There's no mention of the games being fun, but that goes without saying
I take exception with this statement. Having seen many supposedly educational games, my impression is that most if not all of then are not fun, and many are not very educational. Many are an absolute waste and should be treated with the disdain that this article indicates that many parents have.
I put together a nice new system a year ago with an 8500 Nvidia card (amazing how it has dropped from "affordable" to "too cheap to consider" in the last year). The system has never been what I would consider stable, and the hangs and crashes all seem to be video related. I've updates to the latest Nvidia XP drivers many times, but while this may have reduced the problems over the year it is far from eliminating it. While I can play 3D games just fine, I can always duplicate the problem with something as simple as running VNC, and many other seemingly simple video related operations will trigger problems as well.
I'm rather surprised that I didn't see a lot more mention of this in this discussion.
Next time, do your research to make sure you have the latest info
Up until this was posted on Slashdot, Sony way charging the fee to remove bloatware. Only after it was posted and the attention was brought to it did they decide that packing crap into a purchased copy of Windows and then charging extra to fix it wasn't a good move PR wise. Sure, they have backed off now, but the poster deserves a lot of the credit, not criticism.
I'm not sure why people are rating your post as funny. I have not had moderator points in a long time, but if I did I would mark it insightful.
As to the problem of how to use 1 TB of RAM, spending any time at all thinking of this is foolish and wasteful. Of course, I remember the days when we rated our computers in how many kilo bytes of memory we had, and plenty of readers here will remember having 20 to 40 meg hard disks in PC's with far less than 1 meg of physical RAM memory. In those days (and I'll avoid the famous Bill Gates quote on the subject), how would you have spent your time deciding what to do with the memory if you had a computer with 1 gig, 2 gig or even 4 gig of memory? You may have come up with all sorts of amazing ideas. But none of them would have done you any good, because the developers (Mostly Microsoft, but Linux is far from lean and mean any more either) already decided what to do with it, waste it and leave you wanting more. And one of your ideas for a 4 gig system might not have even been to just pretend that most of the last gig of memory wasn't there and ignore it!
So why even have a post about what to do with a terabyte of memory? The solution is simple, install Windows 9 and try to quickly order more memory on-line before the memory hungry service pack comes out, forces it's install on you, and your TB isn't enough.
Oh, there are plenty of other things that can be done if you want to add stuff to the chip. My point was that more can be done with what is already on the chip, but the chip makers just are not doing it. As to the fake chip makers finding one good serial number, sure, they could find out a chips serial number if I can check my own, but having hundreds or thousands of new Dell or Lenovo notebooks all showing up on the database with the same serial number and a comment in the database "an end-user has already registered this CPU, contact us if you have it also" would quickly spot counterfeits, and give the manufacturers a way to start to trace the bad chips back. If a shipment of CPU chips is stolen they could be flagged in the on-line database, making them much harder to fence (and thus reducing the incentive for further such thefts). And I even expect that the manufacturers (and end purchasers) would like to know if CPUs starting showing up in computers that were supposedly destroyed because they failed in the testing phase of manufacturing.
There are a lot of benefits that would come from a simple on-line database of serial numbers that would not come from some more complex on-chip "solutions".
Absolutely. If there were any real threat of a problem here, it could easily be dealt with by very simple technology, but the major manufacturers seems to not want to do that and rather go off on a smoke and mirrors terror binge. Many CPUs have long had a unique serial number built into them. Intel even gained a lot of consumer wrath when they wanted to use this ID to make it easier for every Internet advertiser to track you and amass more personal data about you. But they never made it easy for the user to benefit from this serial number.
Rather than wail and moan about supposedly fake chips, what the manufacturers should do is put on-line the database of valid serial numbers and their specs and history and let end users have access to this information and even add to the database (if they so choose) their ownership of a serial number. This would have several benefits: Fake chips would have a problem of not having a large pool of valid serial numbers (it would be easy enough to not have the database expose the entire list, and limit the number of chips that could be looked up by any IP in a short time) and if fake chips all used the same ID this could be quickly detected. Users could also confirm that the specs for the chip they bought were the specs the manufacturer intended, preventing the practice or remarking chips for higher clock frequencies. A user who desired it could have a lot of confidence that is chip was not counterfeit just by checking into the database and learning what the manufacturer knew about his chip. Chips with serious bugs that were recalled would be detected easily without alarming users of unaffected chips. And this could even provide a service of letting one register their CPU serial number, if they wanted the computer to be able to be look up by law enforcement or others later in the case of theft. That this isn't already being done, yet the industry is acting like counterfeit chips are a big problem, seems to be telling me something is bogus about their claims of doom.
As noted, it was a spamgourmet account and will only let a very limited amount of mail through before going dead forever. Spammers can keep sending mail to the black hole forever, but it does not get out.
If you have XP drivers for an ifeel I would very much like to obtain a copy. My mouse was quite serviceable under 98, did what was expected and didn't have extra vibration, and I even saw one game (B&W) that had extra support for it. But no luck with XP, apparently Logitech withdrew the drivers and I have to been unable to find a copy of them anywhere. If you know where I can find them please post back. If you would mail them to me you could try the address slashdot_temp.mouse.frothingslosh@spamgourmet.com (however, that will only last until about 5 minutes after the spammers harvest it and start spamming it, which from past experience isn't long). Thanks in advance.
This would be far more interesting if I didn't have sitting in a box right in front of me an expensive Logitech "ifeel" optical mouse that is rather useless because Logitech no longer has available XP drivers for it!
Leave it to slashdot to get the headline dead wrong. Actually, this was an appeals court decision, there was no jury involved in this ruling. A jury finding of guilty was several years ago, and the spammer has been out free on appeal enjoying his ill gotten gains ever since. The ruling on interstate commerce issues and first amendment issues was not made by a jury. Curiously, there seems to be no word on him actually reporting to serve his sentence, so he may still be free.
Given that Microsoft didn't really make these but just bought other HD drive production, and that these will no longer be produced, there was no other option but to stop selling them.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used many traceroute programs, when they serve a use. In this case it does not. How can you not understand that a DYNDNS updater will not be recording a private IP address, but rather a public one? Why not follow your own advice and try one? I use such an updater all of the time (it is far better than the update code built into my router) and know exactly what the result of such an update is.
No, it would be a "new Earth", which happens from the moon's viewpoint when Earth sees a full moon. A full Earth, from the moon's viewpoint, would happen two weeks later when the moon is "new" and not in the tail at all. Since a "new Earth" and a "full moon" happen at the same time, the full moon reference is perfectly correct and makes more sense.
Maybe I'm missing something, but that makes no sense at all to me.
Wireless seems to have nothing to do with it, any time that you connect through a wired or wireless router connection you get a local NAT IP address. But the DYNDNS updating that was discussed in the post that I responded to is still valid; it registers the public IP address of the connection, not some private address. Traceroute will not give any additional information; once one has the IP address of where the computer connected from one should be able (with law enforcement and ISP cooperation) to find the point of connection.
Of course, if the thief only connect from public wifi hot spots, then one needs to catch them in that act. Same if they connect through a neighbor's router that doesn't have encryption enabled, although that likely pins down the thief to a very small geographic area. If they connect through their own router, wired or wireless, then DYNDNS gets their public IP address. So any home address connection would be a good target for a warrant. If people insist on running home systems without encryption they should expect such little surprise visits.
Why you think a traceroute to the IP address matters at all is completely unclear.
I certainly question the validity of them being able to somehow get more support from either the ISP or law enforcement than the actual owner of the stolen computer. I see no reason to accept that they can get better responses than the original owner. and I even wonder if they really do. Do they, or do they hit the same brick walls? If they do, why do they get better support?
It could be a good idea to hide a little DYNDNS update routine on each of one's computers (and thankfully DYNDNS will even give you multiple IDs that you can update, so you can have a different one for each computer). But I'll want to see a lot more positive feedback by people who did this or similar things before I will think it's very likely to be helpful. Now if you had a GPS in that laptop and sent out it's coordinates when updating, you might be able to do yourself a lot more good (unfortunately, GPS doesn't work well indoors).
Maybe they shouldn't be, at least not in all cases. Several years back I had done many Google searches for some information that was very important to me, but never could find anything. Then a few months later (too late to be of use), pretty much by a fortunate combination of factors but with no help from Google, I came across the exact information, on a .GOV website in a publicly filed IPO document. As far as I can tell, our US government aggressively marks websites not to be indexed, even when they contain information that is posted there to be public record. When these nofollow directives are over used by mindless and unaccountable bureaucrats, perhaps someone needs to make the decision that these records should be public and that isn't best served by hiding them deep down a long list of links where they are hard to locate. In cases like this I would applaud any search engine that ignores the "suggestion" not to index public pages just because of an inappropriate tag in the HTML. In fact, if I knew of any search engine that was indexing in spite of this tag, I would switch to them as my first choice search engine in an instant. For starters, I would suggest that any .GOV and any State TLD website should have this tag ignored unless there were darn good reason to do otherwise.
Unh, perhaps by having the guts to name the company and maybe even the data at risk, rather than just saying n a Fortune 300 company. Oh, I guess you don't want to risk your bonus either, or maybe your job is more important than the safety and security of the citizens of your country. So why the hypocrisy to act like it's only your bosses who are vile evil bloodsuckers hiding the truth for their own enrichment?
Sorry, due to a typo the link was lost in the previous post.
The article missed a lot, but certainly a serious candidate would be the Wireworld Computer, a cellular automaton computer that actually (slowly) computes prime numbers and displays them, done by implementing a digital computer as a cellular automaton. This is an amazing computer, only one op code, and you can watch the data as it flows through the computer, including the stack of 64 registers (a few unused in this program).
Am I missing something here? Don't mobile phones already have GPS (at least here in the USA)? And unique ID numbers burnt into them? Sure, another always-on GPS device could be handy for as long as the battery lasts (which begs the question of why can the battery last longer in the tiny GPS bug than it lasts in a consumer targeted GPS unit), but it would seem that most mobile phone thefts that could be caught with this GPS bug would be caught and tracked down as soon as the thief or buyer of the stolen property tried to use the phone anyway, and the phone could either be made useless (greatly reducing the incentive for theft) or let working (to help track down whoever has it, just as the GPS bug would do).
This sounds like something that was invented by the Department of Redundancy Department.
I take exception with this statement. Having seen many supposedly educational games, my impression is that most if not all of then are not fun, and many are not very educational. Many are an absolute waste and should be treated with the disdain that this article indicates that many parents have.
I'm rather surprised that I didn't see a lot more mention of this in this discussion.
Bacteria cannot fix nitrogen efficiently when they are deprived of molybdenum So when God created the earth, all of his nitrogen was broken?
Science ? Yea, right. By that logic astrology would be science too.
Up until this was posted on Slashdot, Sony way charging the fee to remove bloatware. Only after it was posted and the attention was brought to it did they decide that packing crap into a purchased copy of Windows and then charging extra to fix it wasn't a good move PR wise. Sure, they have backed off now, but the poster deserves a lot of the credit, not criticism.
As to the problem of how to use 1 TB of RAM, spending any time at all thinking of this is foolish and wasteful. Of course, I remember the days when we rated our computers in how many kilo bytes of memory we had, and plenty of readers here will remember having 20 to 40 meg hard disks in PC's with far less than 1 meg of physical RAM memory. In those days (and I'll avoid the famous Bill Gates quote on the subject), how would you have spent your time deciding what to do with the memory if you had a computer with 1 gig, 2 gig or even 4 gig of memory? You may have come up with all sorts of amazing ideas. But none of them would have done you any good, because the developers (Mostly Microsoft, but Linux is far from lean and mean any more either) already decided what to do with it, waste it and leave you wanting more. And one of your ideas for a 4 gig system might not have even been to just pretend that most of the last gig of memory wasn't there and ignore it!
So why even have a post about what to do with a terabyte of memory? The solution is simple, install Windows 9 and try to quickly order more memory on-line before the memory hungry service pack comes out, forces it's install on you, and your TB isn't enough.
There are a lot of benefits that would come from a simple on-line database of serial numbers that would not come from some more complex on-chip "solutions".
Rather than wail and moan about supposedly fake chips, what the manufacturers should do is put on-line the database of valid serial numbers and their specs and history and let end users have access to this information and even add to the database (if they so choose) their ownership of a serial number. This would have several benefits: Fake chips would have a problem of not having a large pool of valid serial numbers (it would be easy enough to not have the database expose the entire list, and limit the number of chips that could be looked up by any IP in a short time) and if fake chips all used the same ID this could be quickly detected. Users could also confirm that the specs for the chip they bought were the specs the manufacturer intended, preventing the practice or remarking chips for higher clock frequencies. A user who desired it could have a lot of confidence that is chip was not counterfeit just by checking into the database and learning what the manufacturer knew about his chip. Chips with serious bugs that were recalled would be detected easily without alarming users of unaffected chips. And this could even provide a service of letting one register their CPU serial number, if they wanted the computer to be able to be look up by law enforcement or others later in the case of theft. That this isn't already being done, yet the industry is acting like counterfeit chips are a big problem, seems to be telling me something is bogus about their claims of doom.
As noted, it was a spamgourmet account and will only let a very limited amount of mail through before going dead forever. Spammers can keep sending mail to the black hole forever, but it does not get out.
If you have XP drivers for an ifeel I would very much like to obtain a copy. My mouse was quite serviceable under 98, did what was expected and didn't have extra vibration, and I even saw one game (B&W) that had extra support for it. But no luck with XP, apparently Logitech withdrew the drivers and I have to been unable to find a copy of them anywhere. If you know where I can find them please post back. If you would mail them to me you could try the address slashdot_temp.mouse.frothingslosh@spamgourmet.com (however, that will only last until about 5 minutes after the spammers harvest it and start spamming it, which from past experience isn't long). Thanks in advance.
One is sitting right in front of me. I can't get XP drivers for it. Rather useless.
This would be far more interesting if I didn't have sitting in a box right in front of me an expensive Logitech "ifeel" optical mouse that is rather useless because Logitech no longer has available XP drivers for it!
Leave it to slashdot to get the headline dead wrong. Actually, this was an appeals court decision, there was no jury involved in this ruling. A jury finding of guilty was several years ago, and the spammer has been out free on appeal enjoying his ill gotten gains ever since. The ruling on interstate commerce issues and first amendment issues was not made by a jury. Curiously, there seems to be no word on him actually reporting to serve his sentence, so he may still be free.
Given that Microsoft didn't really make these but just bought other HD drive production, and that these will no longer be produced, there was no other option but to stop selling them.
As opposed to the other kind?