From the article, Bob points out how stupid this is, saying:"Second, the equation Bank Julius Baer = Money Laundering is now firmly cemented in the minds of everyone who has encountered this story, regardless of whether it's true."
He implies that this is a bad thing that the bank would want to avoid. But he has already made it clear that the very reason for existence of these banks is money laundering and tax evasion. Is it that hard to imagine that someone at Julius Baer decided "we don't want the Cayman Islands to be the first thing someone thinks of when they want to do money laundering, we want it to be Julius Baer"? Cringley seems to be playing right into their hands.
Isn't "could eventually" one of those warning phrases that tells you something is dubious, like "up to twice as long" or "she has a great personality" or "you're violating our patents but we don't want to tell you which ones"?
...... Even if you can get logged in, multiplayer matchmaking doesn't find enough players for games......... My assumption is that this is the result of lots of new XBLA users logging in with Christmas 360s.
So your theory is that because of a lot of new players, Microsoft can't find enough players for games? Would you care to rethink that theory?
While it's a completely stupid idea and will leave liable every non-technical dolt who sets up an open router, perhaps those of us with technical capability could do our part by reporting these images. Since the definition of obscenity varies by community standards, and I would hate to miss something that just has to be reported, the safest thing might just to be to report all images as they pass through your system to a wifi connected computer. Dedicate an old system to capturing all images as they pass to the wifi point, and e-mail every one of them individually to the people we are supposed to report them to. And I would CC a copy of each e-mail to those 409 congressmen who are so concerned about them also. We have to do this, or the terrorists have won.
I agree completely, it's a shame that you posted this as an Anonymous Coward so it got less notice than it deserves. While the OLPC started at a claimed price of $100, it has now soared to $199, a price that I consider a failure. Why? Not because Intel and Microsoft could make a system at about the same price, but because other legitimate for-profit commercial companies already are! I say that because I've seen several different laptops, eariler this year and as recently as this weekend, selling at $299. And these were systems that included the Microsoft tax. If you could take off the Microsoft tax, these systems would come in at about the $199 price, but be for computers with hard drives, optical drives, more memory, and a lot more CPU power (on the downside they eat more electrical power). I'll assume that these were prices designed to get buyers into the stores, but I doubt that anyone was really losing money on them, just accepting less profit. So it's a shame that a supposed non-profit company couldn't come through on the promise that they choose to make of a lower priced system. But with mainstream compatable computers getting cheaper and cheaper while the OLPC computer has doubled in price, I don't see the OLPC project as a viable sucessful offering. Lot of people here want to seem to blame Intel and M$ for attacking the OLPC price range, but it sure looks to me that the OLPC pricer range has wondered off course and right into the path of where low end commercial for-profit systems have been headed for a long time.
Actually, the leap second makes the most sense to me. But a leap hour in 600 years, when we do an entire day about every four years is absurd. If we had to abandon the leap second, it should only be replaced by the leap minute,. Likely few people would notice the time being off by as much as a minute (just don't use that sextant any more, or if you do wear two watches or set your to heavenly time). But time being off as much as an hour would pretty much muck things up (think of the effect of daylight savings time and double it).
It might happen, but to do so Microsoft would either have to admit that they lied when they claimed that DX10 could not be made to work on XP, or come up with some creative new lie about why it suddenly can. They have no real incentive to do this; it's not as if they care about their XP customers.
I would find it more interesting to know what policies are being broken, and what percentage of those are either extremely lame or actually downright dangerous to the company (I have a friend who is required to use IE and Outlook for example).
You miss the key point: If you send BCC mail to multiple parties, every one of those goes out in an envelope that list all of the BCC recipients. If anyone of those runs their own mail server, they have the ability to capture and then examine the envelope and get the list of all of the other BCC recipients.
Unfortunately for its sources, it emailed them this information with their addresses in the "To:" field (and not the Bcc: field)
More bogis information in a Slashdot post. While using the CC field for a multi-recipient mail is even less private, using the BCC field is not a reliable way to keep the recipient list private either. While this may work for many recipients who use a mail server operated by an ISP, anyone who runs their own mail server is able to capture the entire BCC field and save it. Since it only takes one person to do this, and the person doing it is exactly the person you want to protect this information from, BCC must be considered an insecure way to protect recipient identity. The only safe way to do such a mailing is to send individual mailings to each recipient in the TO: address (and not CC the Vice president in each one of them) even if the text of the message remains the same for each mailing.
Are you sure the question was asked stupidly? Or was it perhaps answered rudely (and maybe incorrectly)? For example the Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD Laptop Hybrid drive is one of the drives that contains 256MB of flash memory and is said to be only usable under Vista, and yet it's specs claim it has a SATA 1.5GB/s interface (note that this is a notebook drive and not a 3GB/s desktop drive). So if I was so stupid in asking this question, how do you explain the specs of the Seagate Momentus? And let me ask another stupid question: If hybrid drive techniques really do save power, why would a drive maker who was trying to position it's drives as power saving not use them (aside from the nasty Vista only issue)?
I remember reading here about the new BTX for factor that was going to change everything and make our ATX cases outdated. Several years later, when I built my newest system, I saw no mention of BTX in the boards or cases that I considered, and eventually built a typical ATX based system. I never even caught mention of CTX. I guess that someone defined it at some point, but that hardly matters. Same here. So AMD has pronounced that they have defined DTX. So what? There are plenty of strange small formats for special systems, and this DTX format is unlikely to affect me or most other users unless it becomes widely used. I wait for that, but will not hold my breath. And I will not get excited later in the week when someone else announces ETX either.
I've read the article (such as it is), and it keeps claiming that this is a technique to recover "lost passwords". But I don't really believe that is the purpose of this software, and I have to ask "What is the difference between a 'lost password" and a password that belongs to someone else and not you?". Does anyone else really believe that the actual use of this software will be to assist the majority of users recover their own passwords? I do not. I suspect it might be harder to patent a tool for identity theft than for recovering "lost passwords" though.
Maybe you are new here. The question is a classic one, and the meaning should be well understood by most readers. It is less clear but far more relevant to this group than the more wordy "but will Linux or XP be able to use this drive". And I explained the issue in the text body. Can you ever forgive me for the confusion that I have caused you?
OK, I've read the article, but he important question was not addresses: Will it run Linux, or XP for that matter, or does it get some of it's power savings by the same technique some new notebook drive do, embedded flash memory that is only supported in that awful Vista and not XP?
Well, if there is one name that I both hold trustworthy enough to guard my private medical data and also associate with a proven history of excelence in computer security, it's Microsoft. But isn't there a danger that the data will be rather skewed towards insanity based on those who choose to opt in?
They don't seem to mention the potential users who would have paid Skype for outbound calls, but are unwilling to do so because they consider the parent company even more evil than the phone company.
....showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes
Or in other words, this science fiction nonsense about parallel worlds, unscientific because it can never be tested or proven, and which was inspired by observations of quantum mechanics, is now supposedly able to explain, guess what,... quantum mechanics, the very concept that the nonsense was built on in the first place.
The absurd number of parallel universes that would have to be created is mind boggling, since, at the very least, an entire universe would have to be created every single time any atom decayed (one for the universe where that atom happened to decay at that instant, another for the case where that atom didn't happen to decay). Strange that none of the wackos who advocate this, and I use the term very loosely, "theory", bother to expain where all of the mass and energy is coming from for all of these extra universes. Note that we are talking about far more universes than atoms in our own universe. Absolute hogwash.
but that decision would apply only to a specific piece of media, and it would have to be disclosed on the package, giving the buyer the opportunity to choose not to purchase it.
Boy, it's great to know that Vista DRM enforces what is put on the package, and that no sleazy group will ever be able to sell us DRM encumbered content if the DRN is not clearly disclosed on the package.
It's also worth noting that if not just one but many owners of their intellectual property, or their authorized agents, send take down notices to the same hosting service, that would get much more attention than the average one-off DCMA spam. Letters like "I'm the legal owner of some of the the intellectual property being hosted at offending.url.here..." or "We are the authorized representative of John Smith, the owner of some of the intellectual property hosted at...." all sent to the same hosting service or, in the case of self hosting, service provider, would get a lot more attention than just one notice or notices from only one source. I can't see any legitimate hosting provider keeping the site up if contacted by even a moderate percentage of the intellectual property owners. A remedy against past abuse or sale of the intellectual property will be far more difficult.
I would have thought this answer was so obvious to anyone who knows Slashdot that the question wouldn't even have been asked. It's been used against decent people for far too long, about time it was used against weasels.
Obviously MS can get past any software firewall that is running on them. If you're talking about a hardware firewall, then yes, it could stop this, if it expected it and knew what IP address to block. And I'll certainly block that address if I can find it, but I'm not going to accept updates to packet sniff and find out what it is (not that we could even be certain that MS doesn't have other addresses that they also use just to screw with those of us who want to protect our systems this way). So please tell us, what address or addresses should we block in our firewalls and how did you determine the information?
Personally, I have the updates turned of on my legal copies of XP because I'm trying to stop stuff like the only time that I did accept the "security ipdate" and suddenly my hardware would no longer run Linux, although it worked fine before the update, and the Linux was on a CD (Knoppix). Before you say that software can't do that, understand that NICs have a small eeprom on them, so that the manufacturers can store unique MAC addresses in them. And in my case the eeprom could also hold some default settings for the NIC. Very strange that after a security update that Linux, which trusted the NIC default settings, no longer worked, and that XP apparently ignored the settings. And I can't think of any reason for a "security update" to modify my NIC eeprom. No more updates from those bastards again, not if I can block them.
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He implies that this is a bad thing that the bank would want to avoid. But he has already made it clear that the very reason for existence of these banks is money laundering and tax evasion. Is it that hard to imagine that someone at Julius Baer decided "we don't want the Cayman Islands to be the first thing someone thinks of when they want to do money laundering, we want it to be Julius Baer"? Cringley seems to be playing right into their hands.
Isn't "could eventually" one of those warning phrases that tells you something is dubious, like "up to twice as long" or "she has a great personality" or "you're violating our patents but we don't want to tell you which ones"?
Particularly if you are talking on your cell phone at the time.
Tax breaks for the ISPs, particularly the telcos.
A hands off business approach, let them do with the money (and the consumers, a.k.a. taxpayers) whatever they want.
So your theory is that because of a lot of new players, Microsoft can't find enough players for games? Would you care to rethink that theory?
While it's a completely stupid idea and will leave liable every non-technical dolt who sets up an open router, perhaps those of us with technical capability could do our part by reporting these images. Since the definition of obscenity varies by community standards, and I would hate to miss something that just has to be reported, the safest thing might just to be to report all images as they pass through your system to a wifi connected computer. Dedicate an old system to capturing all images as they pass to the wifi point, and e-mail every one of them individually to the people we are supposed to report them to. And I would CC a copy of each e-mail to those 409 congressmen who are so concerned about them also. We have to do this, or the terrorists have won.
I agree completely, it's a shame that you posted this as an Anonymous Coward so it got less notice than it deserves. While the OLPC started at a claimed price of $100, it has now soared to $199, a price that I consider a failure. Why? Not because Intel and Microsoft could make a system at about the same price, but because other legitimate for-profit commercial companies already are! I say that because I've seen several different laptops, eariler this year and as recently as this weekend, selling at $299. And these were systems that included the Microsoft tax. If you could take off the Microsoft tax, these systems would come in at about the $199 price, but be for computers with hard drives, optical drives, more memory, and a lot more CPU power (on the downside they eat more electrical power). I'll assume that these were prices designed to get buyers into the stores, but I doubt that anyone was really losing money on them, just accepting less profit. So it's a shame that a supposed non-profit company couldn't come through on the promise that they choose to make of a lower priced system. But with mainstream compatable computers getting cheaper and cheaper while the OLPC computer has doubled in price, I don't see the OLPC project as a viable sucessful offering. Lot of people here want to seem to blame Intel and M$ for attacking the OLPC price range, but it sure looks to me that the OLPC pricer range has wondered off course and right into the path of where low end commercial for-profit systems have been headed for a long time.
Actually, the leap second makes the most sense to me. But a leap hour in 600 years, when we do an entire day about every four years is absurd. If we had to abandon the leap second, it should only be replaced by the leap minute,. Likely few people would notice the time being off by as much as a minute (just don't use that sextant any more, or if you do wear two watches or set your to heavenly time). But time being off as much as an hour would pretty much muck things up (think of the effect of daylight savings time and double it).
It might happen, but to do so Microsoft would either have to admit that they lied when they claimed that DX10 could not be made to work on XP, or come up with some creative new lie about why it suddenly can. They have no real incentive to do this; it's not as if they care about their XP customers.
I would find it more interesting to know what policies are being broken, and what percentage of those are either extremely lame or actually downright dangerous to the company (I have a friend who is required to use IE and Outlook for example).
You miss the key point: If you send BCC mail to multiple parties, every one of those goes out in an envelope that list all of the BCC recipients. If anyone of those runs their own mail server, they have the ability to capture and then examine the envelope and get the list of all of the other BCC recipients.
More bogis information in a Slashdot post. While using the CC field for a multi-recipient mail is even less private, using the BCC field is not a reliable way to keep the recipient list private either. While this may work for many recipients who use a mail server operated by an ISP, anyone who runs their own mail server is able to capture the entire BCC field and save it. Since it only takes one person to do this, and the person doing it is exactly the person you want to protect this information from, BCC must be considered an insecure way to protect recipient identity. The only safe way to do such a mailing is to send individual mailings to each recipient in the TO: address (and not CC the Vice president in each one of them) even if the text of the message remains the same for each mailing.
Are you sure the question was asked stupidly? Or was it perhaps answered rudely (and maybe incorrectly)? For example the Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD Laptop Hybrid drive is one of the drives that contains 256MB of flash memory and is said to be only usable under Vista, and yet it's specs claim it has a SATA 1.5GB/s interface (note that this is a notebook drive and not a 3GB/s desktop drive). So if I was so stupid in asking this question, how do you explain the specs of the Seagate Momentus? And let me ask another stupid question: If hybrid drive techniques really do save power, why would a drive maker who was trying to position it's drives as power saving not use them (aside from the nasty Vista only issue)?
I remember reading here about the new BTX for factor that was going to change everything and make our ATX cases outdated. Several years later, when I built my newest system, I saw no mention of BTX in the boards or cases that I considered, and eventually built a typical ATX based system. I never even caught mention of CTX. I guess that someone defined it at some point, but that hardly matters. Same here. So AMD has pronounced that they have defined DTX. So what? There are plenty of strange small formats for special systems, and this DTX format is unlikely to affect me or most other users unless it becomes widely used. I wait for that, but will not hold my breath. And I will not get excited later in the week when someone else announces ETX either.
I've read the article (such as it is), and it keeps claiming that this is a technique to recover "lost passwords". But I don't really believe that is the purpose of this software, and I have to ask "What is the difference between a 'lost password" and a password that belongs to someone else and not you?". Does anyone else really believe that the actual use of this software will be to assist the majority of users recover their own passwords? I do not. I suspect it might be harder to patent a tool for identity theft than for recovering "lost passwords" though.
Maybe you are new here. The question is a classic one, and the meaning should be well understood by most readers. It is less clear but far more relevant to this group than the more wordy "but will Linux or XP be able to use this drive". And I explained the issue in the text body. Can you ever forgive me for the confusion that I have caused you?
OK, I've read the article, but he important question was not addresses: Will it run Linux, or XP for that matter, or does it get some of it's power savings by the same technique some new notebook drive do, embedded flash memory that is only supported in that awful Vista and not XP?
Well, if there is one name that I both hold trustworthy enough to guard my private medical data and also associate with a proven history of excelence in computer security, it's Microsoft. But isn't there a danger that the data will be rather skewed towards insanity based on those who choose to opt in?
And they don't mention whatever benefit they manage to gain by stealing users passwords and other data, as referenced here: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/26/1312256
Or in other words, this science fiction nonsense about parallel worlds, unscientific because it can never be tested or proven, and which was inspired by observations of quantum mechanics, is now supposedly able to explain, guess what, ... quantum mechanics, the very concept that the nonsense was built on in the first place.
The absurd number of parallel universes that would have to be created is mind boggling, since, at the very least, an entire universe would have to be created every single time any atom decayed (one for the universe where that atom happened to decay at that instant, another for the case where that atom didn't happen to decay). Strange that none of the wackos who advocate this, and I use the term very loosely, "theory", bother to expain where all of the mass and energy is coming from for all of these extra universes. Note that we are talking about far more universes than atoms in our own universe. Absolute hogwash.
Boy, it's great to know that Vista DRM enforces what is put on the package, and that no sleazy group will ever be able to sell us DRM encumbered content if the DRN is not clearly disclosed on the package.
It's also worth noting that if not just one but many owners of their intellectual property, or their authorized agents, send take down notices to the same hosting service, that would get much more attention than the average one-off DCMA spam. Letters like "I'm the legal owner of some of the the intellectual property being hosted at offending.url.here ..." or "We are the authorized representative of John Smith, the owner of some of the intellectual property hosted at ...." all sent to the same hosting service or, in the case of self hosting, service provider, would get a lot more attention than just one notice or notices from only one source. I can't see any legitimate hosting provider keeping the site up if contacted by even a moderate percentage of the intellectual property owners. A remedy against past abuse or sale of the intellectual property will be far more difficult.
I would have thought this answer was so obvious to anyone who knows Slashdot that the question wouldn't even have been asked. It's been used against decent people for far too long, about time it was used against weasels.
Obviously MS can get past any software firewall that is running on them. If you're talking about a hardware firewall, then yes, it could stop this, if it expected it and knew what IP address to block. And I'll certainly block that address if I can find it, but I'm not going to accept updates to packet sniff and find out what it is (not that we could even be certain that MS doesn't have other addresses that they also use just to screw with those of us who want to protect our systems this way). So please tell us, what address or addresses should we block in our firewalls and how did you determine the information?
Personally, I have the updates turned of on my legal copies of XP because I'm trying to stop stuff like the only time that I did accept the "security ipdate" and suddenly my hardware would no longer run Linux, although it worked fine before the update, and the Linux was on a CD (Knoppix). Before you say that software can't do that, understand that NICs have a small eeprom on them, so that the manufacturers can store unique MAC addresses in them. And in my case the eeprom could also hold some default settings for the NIC. Very strange that after a security update that Linux, which trusted the NIC default settings, no longer worked, and that XP apparently ignored the settings. And I can't think of any reason for a "security update" to modify my NIC eeprom. No more updates from those bastards again, not if I can block them.