While the Best Buy is able to offer cheaper prices and more variety, they lack the human interaction I found at my local recordstore.
What!? You miss the human interaction?
Are you sure you're a geek? Are you sure that Slashdot is the right web site for you?
I knew many of the sales associates there and valued their opinion as to what music to buy.
You didn't have an opinion on everything, and a zealous certainty that, regardless of the flame war required, only your opinion could be allowed to prevail?
You didn't swear that you would repeat your opinion ad nauseam, for as long as vi apostles continue to fight emacs proselytes, for as long as camelBackChampions argue with underscore_upholders, for as long as tab fanatics spar with space monomaniacs?
No, definitely, you posted to the wrong web site. You want to take a left and go north three IP ranges to ShinyHappyPeople.com
Why should I care who's watching me if I have nothing to hide?
You have nothing to hide! And you have no reason to fear your benevolent government! Because America is the land of the free and so IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE!
Unless you are a Peace Democrat in american in 1862, when President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and had some 13,000 northern, non-rebel Americans arrested by the military for criticizing his war policies.
But it can't happen here!
Unless you are a union member in 1919, and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer decides to arrest you for being a "Red".
But it can't happen here!
Unless you were Joseph Yenowsky, sentenced in 1920 to six months in jail merely for saying that Lenin was "the most brainiest man" in the world.
But it can't happen here!
Unless you are a Japanese-American living in California in 1942, forced to leave your home for an internment camp.
But it can't happen here!
Unless you are the actor Charlie Chaplin, whom J. Edgar Hoover made sure would not be re-admitted to the United States after trip abroad in 1952, because of allegations of Communist sympathies.
But it can't happen here!
Unless you are Martin Luther King, described in 1963 as "the most dangerous Negro in the future of this nation," who from 1963 to his death in 1968, was spied on under the auspices of the FBI's COINTELPRO program.
But it can't happen here!
Unless you're gay bartender Michael Hardwick, targeted by a police officer with a grudge and arrested for having consensual oral sex with another man in 1982
But it can't happen here!
Unless you're Canadian citizen Maher Arar in 2002, who, passing through a US airport, was deported by U.S. authorities to Syria, where he was tortured for 10 and a half months.
But it can't happen here!
Oh, I guess it can happen here.
Maybe whatever you do, whoever you are by ideology, political association, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation isn't illegal now.
But that could all change tomorrow -- and it can happen here.
US Attorney General John Ashcroft has aggressively pushed to ignore the legislative intent behind the Patriot Act, and use its provisions for to investigate non-terrorist related activity.
Care to give an example?
From the June 15, 2003 edition of The Washington Tiimes, a newspaper widely seen as very conservative:
Long-sought details have begun to emerge from the Justice Department on how anti-terrorist provisions of the USA Patriot Act were applied in nonterror investigations, just as battle lines are being drawn on proposed new powers in a Patriot Act II.
Overall, the policy now allows evidence to be used for prosecuting common criminals even when obtained under extraordinary anti-terrorism powers and information-sharing between intelligence agencies and the FBI.
[...B]etween February and Oct. 20, the [Patriot Act] was used more by federal law enforcement agencies to uncover money laundering than terrorists.
Of the 167 Patriot Act requests [the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)] received, the officials said, 107 were related to money laundering and only 60 involved terrorism.
The argument that [Anton Pillar searches, where the target of the search is not informed of prior to the search] even remotely has anything to do with the patriot act is stupid. It certainly has no provisions for raiding people's homes on behalf of the record industry.
According to Freedom Fight Canada, an "Anton Pillar order is an order allowing for an applicant (without notice to a respondent) to enter the respondent's premises and inspect or seize documents or other items."
Under the Patriot Act, the government is allowed (with a secret warrant) to conduct secret "sneak and peek" searches, without ever informing the target of the search.
The difference is that with Anton Pillar, a private entity can request the search -- so far under U.S. law, only the government can. Of course, if you can find a friendly prosecutor and convince him that there's a possibility a crime has been committed, he'll do your search for you. Indeed, some will argue that that makes U.S. law more favorable to corporations, large corporations generally having more sway with law enforcement than private citizens.
The other difference between Anton Pillar and the Patriot Act is that the legislative intent of the Patriot Act was that its provisions should apply only to suspected acts of terrorism. However, US Attorney General John Ashcroft has aggressively pushed to ignore the legislative intent behind the Patriot Act, and use its provisions for to investigate non-terrorist related activity.
Summary:
both the US and Australia allow "sneak and peek" searches in which the target of the search is not informed of he search;
In Australia, a private citizen can apply for such an order; in the US, only police and prosecutors can, making it effectively unavailable to private citizens, but available to corporations;
Legislation in the US limits such searches to investigations of terrorism, but John Ashcroft is working mightily to extend its use to non-terrorism related activities.
Conclusion: via the mechanism of the Patriot Act, "sneak and peek" searches could be conducted on behalf of the recording industry if it alleges that copyright "piracy" is linked to terrorist fundraising, or if John Ashcroft succeeds in using Patriot Act mechanisms for commonplace investigations.
So I think comparisons to the Patriot Act are warranted (no pun intended).
So, I guess I'm not surprised that there's a "lazy programmer" style security flaw in their products today.
Lazy programmer? Abashed, ashamed, depressed programmer is more like it.
Real is so widely reviled -- by techies, hell, by anyone who has ever downloaded it -- that I'm sure a large number of Real's programers are dispirited, depressed, and resentful that management turned what had been a reputation for technical innovation into a reputation for deceptive marketing practices.
Once a programmer has dragged his ass into Real in the morning only to be told for the tenth week in a row to forget codec improvements, it's time to hide another five opt-out click boxes on a drop-down list at the bottom of narrow scroll pane behind a button on the third page on a fifteen page tab dialog, it's no surprise that even if he does get to patch the codecs, he won't be doing anything near his best work.
"The Government must play a greater role in punishing those who conceal their identities online - Lamar Smith"
Excuse me?
People who are anonymous must be punished?
Are all Texans as offensive as their elected representative?
Hey, terrorist boy, Congressman Smith is right.
Why did you know that once there where these three guys, three anonymous agitators, and they hid behind a fake name, "Publius", and wrote a bunch of stuff that completely changed the government of their country?
Anyway, these three guys started out as rebels and terrorists and traitors, and once things got settled down again, first thing they done was to get together all anonymous like, and they decided to change things yet again.
But they figured that people might not be as convinced of their ideas ifin people know'd it was these rebel traitors behind the ideas, so they made up that fake name "Publius" and published under it.
And what they wrote completely changed the government of their country. It got rid of the Articles of Confederation and made it impossible that the country would ever again be ruled by King George, who they'd rebelled against, and it set up a Constitution and a central government -- actually it was a Federation and them anonymous papers was called The Federalist Papers -- and as a by-product of the debate over them papers, they added ten Amendments to their new Constitution, the first one of which guaranteed, among other things, Freedom of Speech.
And years later one of them anonymous rebels became the Secretary of Treasury of the new country they'd created with their anonymous papers, and one of the then rebels became the First Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the country they created with their anonymous papers, and the other one, well, he became the fourth President of their new country which they had created with their anonymous papers, a country they called "The United States of America."
And I, honest to god this isn't mere rhetoric on my part, I have tears in my eyes right now when I think of all that those three disreputable anonymous rebels created, and the tears are streaming down my cheeks when I think of the Constitution of the United States of America that Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and James Madison agitated for in their anonymous Federalist Papers, and I get a lump in my throat when I think of the glorious First Amendment to that Constitution, which, among other things according to the US Supreme Court, guarantees a right to anonymity to protect our freedom to engage in political discourse and debate.
And Lamar Alexander -- Lamar Alexander, elected to the Congress planned and created by the same Constitution -- when he says that "The Government must play a greater role in punishing those who conceal their identities", well, I have to ask, when is the last time Lamar Alexander read that fine Constitution, that Constitution created by those three anonymous men publishing under a fake name?
And by god! I contend that the those who stand up for that Constitution, and for Free Speech, and for a right to anonymity -- those persons -- and not Big Brother's lackeys with their newspeak "Patriot Act" -- are the real American Patriots.
Orthogonal, thank you. I wish I could e-mail you and get permission to repost this.
Thanks for the praise, Grrr.
I'm not a big fan of some of what goes on in the Democratic Party -- but I'm frightened for America's freedoms, enough that whomever it is, I'll be working for and voting for the Democratic nominee to unseat GW Bush and John Ashcroft.
I hope I'll see you -- and all Americans who value our heritage -- working to preserve our traditional liberties by electing a replacement for the current administration.
If you think that what I wrote can help even a little bit to galvanize our fellow Americans, by all means use it as you best see fit.
While I retain my copyright to my post, I hereby give permission to anyone to repost in whole or part, so long it is credited to "orthogonal" or Slashdot poster "orthogonal" (588627) (orthogonal in quotes and all lower case) and reference is made to the original post's url, either as text: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=95627&c id=8191 090 or as a link <a href='http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=95627&ci d=8191090'>orthogonal's post</a>
Of course you could also have a new combination generated every minute for the super paranoid.
No, if you were "super paranoid" you'd have two identical one-time pads, one residing on the computer to be accessed, one in the hands of a single person trying to connect.
Every minute, the computer would consult its copy of the pad to determine what that minute's secret knock sequence would be.
The person connecting would look up in his copy of the pad that minute's sequence. You'd need to synchronize both participants' clocks, of course.
Less secure would be generating a new combination -- using some continuous function -- every minute.
Less secure than the pad, but more secure than a continuous function, would be a cellular automaton -- life Conway's Game of Life -- where any particular minute's knock sequence could only determined by first determining the previous minute's sequence.
Of course, to prevent the rules from being extrapolated by anyone analyzing your traffic, you'd have to agree on a new function or automaton to use for the next connection before ending the current connection. To guard against interruption of the connection, agreeing on the next connection's function would be the first thing you'd do after making a connection, and to guard against that being interrupted you'd need some fallback combinations -- which brings us back to the one-time pad.
The feature describes how the fortunes of small companies turned when their Google ranking rose or dropped.... [which has] spawned a whole Google-optimization industry where consultants can charge $5,000 per site for tweaking....
Fungible is defined as "[r]eturnable or negotiable in kind or by substitution, as a quantity of grain for an equal amount of the same kind of grain". In other words, it means "interchangeable".
Apparently the information on these web sites is fungible: Google can substitute one business for another, and as far as Google is concerned, the result is the same.
This is not to say that the businesses necessarily offer products that are fungible; but apparently, for certain obvious searches about those products, the sites return essentially the same information. And it's that information -- not the products -- that Google "sells".
So each competing business offers essentially the same information as far as Google is concerned. These businesses then hire consultants to multiply the number of other sites linking to their version of that fungible information, in hopes that Google will see the links and consider their web site the more authoritative and thus higher paged-ranked source for the fungible information.
The problem is that the information is fungible. rather than try to multiply the links to the same old information, differentiate your site by offering different information.
One easy way to offer different information is to offer a different (and presumably but not necessarily lower) price. Or --egads! -- differentiate your site by offering a better product. Or a bundle product.
Or even better, give Google what it wants: diverse information. Write an article about your product or service that addresses a need your customers have. Offer it for free, and attract people to your site. If Ace Hardware offers free e-books on hoe to make home repairs, Google will index it, and I'll, end up there. and maybe I'll stay and buy, rather than go back to Google and find competitor Home depot.
Or give away free instructions for making paper models of your product, like Yamaha does with its motorcycles. That got Yamaha featured on Slashdot -- and for free. Put up a whitepaper -- not the usual crap whitepapers that come down to "the only solution is our product, and by god it's a vague solution" -- but a real whitepaper of real use to professionals in your industry.
Sponsor an open-source project that use or features or facilitates the use of, your product. and then sponsor that project's web space, on your server next to your site.
We could come up with example after example, but the take home point is this: if the information you offer is fungible, expect sooner or later someone else will win the page rank lottery and outrank you. So make sure you offer something unique and uniquely useful.
Not true at all. In fact, I couldn't care less about spyware transmitting information. When I start to care is when I get a call because someone's machine is malfunctioning.
Your points are well taken.
I was using spy-ware literally -- as spying --, and you're right, I was thinking in terms of a personal network, not a corporate network.
Of course (as you imply), the obvious problems are not really a worry to the power user. If my home page is no longer about:blank, or ads start popping up, I'm going to find out why and fix it.
It's the insidious stuff that I might not notice that I worry about: cross-site scripting, third-party cookies, malicious javascript, Real Player-style phoning home.
Thanks for balancing my account with the corporate administrator's perspective.
[Calling Attorney General John Ashcroft "Reichsminister Ashcroft" is t]totally uncalled for... Why is this considered acceptable behavior from grown adults? We don't throw around insults 1/10th as harsh to our co-workers and friends with any degree of sincerity, but make it a politician and an online forum and someone can get a +5 insighful for calling someone a Nazi.
Why the hate? Where is all this anger coming from?
Ashcroft has trashed a 600 years of jurisprudence by effectively abolishing habeas corpus. Right now, American citizens are sitting in prisons, not only denied their 6th Amendment right to a speedy trial, but wholly denied access to any trial, any court or any legal counsel.
Ashcroft doesn't think that is enough, and has further demanded the power without the right to revoke Americans' citizenship by his fiat, without recourse to judicial review.
Ashcroft has abrogated the rights of California, under the 10th Amendment, to make its own laws, and has insisted on prosecuting persons whose "crime "is to give marijuana to the terminally ill to ease their few remaining days of life.
Ashcroft has abrogated the rights of Oregon, by threatened Oregon doctors with the loss of licenses or even prison for following Oregon laws allowing people to die with dignity.
Ashcroft has ignored the intent of the US Congress by applying the wide-ranging powers granted under the "Patriot Act" to crimes that legislators voting for the "Patriot Act" never envisaged it would cover.
Ashcroft has perverted the considered opinions of the majority of US federal judges, by insisting on mandatory minimum sentences that even conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist finds too Draconian, and has abused the consciences of Federal prosecutors by insisting on death-penalty sentences even when local Federal prosecutors thought that ultimate penalty unwarranted.
Ashcroft has championed secret arrests, closed trials, secret military tribunals, and even authorized the deportation of a Canadian resident, Maher Arar, to Syria, where Arar was tortured for 10 and a half months.
But you're right, at lest he's not a Nazi! Thank God Ashcroft tramples the Constitution in a three-piece suit and not a Party uniform.
My Karma's been excellent since my first month here.
In my last 20 comments, I've gooten five 3s, two 4s, and three 5s.
So why is there no Slashdotter, no not one single Slashdotter, to offer to make love to me? Oh, oh, me!
Oh, is there not one maiden here
Whose homely face and bad complexion
Have caused all hope to disappear
Of ever winning man's affection?
Of such a one, if such there be,
I swear by Heaven's arch above you,
If you will cast your eyes on me,
However plain you be, I'll love you!
The more paranoid out there will probably have more more [sic] packages in the loop, but this is definitely one instance where is doesn't do any harm to use multiple packages in parallel.
Oh, it's simpler than that.
Install the Spy-ware Remover. Remove the spy-ware. Remove the remover.
For the more paranoid^H^H^H^H^H less trusting, take a snap-shot of the system, consisting of a list of all files with md5sums for each.
As above, Install the remover, remove the spy-ware, remove the remover. In most cases the spyware will be stand-alone, except for crap like MS-Windows registry entries. Ensure that other than such system-wide repositories like that, after the removal of both spy-ware and spy-ware remover, than no files have been added to your system, and the md5sums of existing files haven't changed.
Finally, spy-ware is only a problem if it can transmit the information it gathers out of your system to its masters. Here MS-Windows users actually have an advantage over linux, because most MS-Windows firewalls can block both incoming and outgoing connections, and can block or allow specific applications using specific protocols on specific ports.
First, as a standard practice, block everything (I even block localhost to localhost connections), then allow only what you actually require (most MS-Windows firewalls allow you to do this interactively and some support single-time-only allowances, so it's not nearly the burden it seems to someone used to IP tables).
Then watch to see if the firewall reports that an application is making outbound connections. If one does, ask yourself why it needs to connect out, and whether you did something to initiate its connecting out.
The one Achilles's heel here is the multitude of applications that use HTTP connections for one thing or another, and the browser in general. To minimize (but not totally control) this, I route all browsers through two HTML transforming proxies, so many cookies and javascripts never even reach the browsers. Other applications get direct connections, but obly if they need them. My mail client, for example, does not need to connect to port 80 for any reason, so I never worry about web bugs in HTML mail. Browsers (well, the proxy at the end of the chain) can connect only to ports 80 and 8080, minimizing risks a little; connections to non-standard ports must be authorized interactively.
I highly recommend Kerio firewall, by the way; it's free as in beer and quite full-featured. Proxomitron is excellent for transforming HTML. Get an md5sum implementation, or better yet, get Cygwin and have a linux-like environment too.
I wonder if I can get a patent on "Invention that does completely the opposite of what it claims to do"
But these programs don't do the complete opposite of what they promise.
I'm sure they do remove spyware.
I mean, I'm sure they are very careful to remove competitors' spyware.
That makes your system more private and more stable, while ensuring that they get a tighter lock on the market for the data they've purloined from spying on you.
Think of it like government: government offers to protect you those who would rob you and beat you, so long as you agree to give the government 40% of your money in the form of taxes and take th eoccasional beating from a cop. Sure, if you fail to come up with the taxes, the government will take the money and beat you, but at least you're only getting robbed and beaten by one entity.
Which entity, by virtue of having a monopoly, can specialize in giving you only the best robbings and beatings.
As, God knows, with Reichsminister Ashcroft and Admiral Poindexter, the current government is I'm sure is getting very good at doing only the best spying on you, Citizen.
Then you'd be wrong. Take a look at the code sometime, it is definately [sic] original.
CmdrTaco! Check your logs for the parent poster's IP address, turn itover to Microsoft, and use the proceeds to hire a coder to incorporate a mandatory spell checker in the Slashdot posting process!
You can use the left-over reward money to buy yourself a T1 line to your house, or get rid of Microsoft ads on Slashdot for a month.
Think about writing applications that communicate using shared memory pages. If one app writes a page and then instructs the kernel to map that page into another process, the kernel can do that rediculously fast.
On modern hardware, in fact, it's so fast that it's often faster than the speed of spelling.
You mention that post-war walls are constructed of plasterboard or Sheetrock but failed to mention how pre-war walls were constructed.[...]In older construction you also get a lot of stone and brick walls. Not to mention the solid wood floors an ceilings.
Yeah, I know my walls are plaster (and it's a bitch when that stuff starts to crumble out too), but I didn't know about the slats, which is why I didn't go into the details of pre-war construction.
Speaking of those solid wood floors, I recently put a nice looooong scratch in mine -- the scratch is probably up to 5 mm wide by 2 deep. Burning some karma here, but we're all trying to help each other, right, one big geek team, what's the easiest way to patch up or at least camouflage this ugly scratch?
It depends on the building materials, but I've found that you're lucky to get 802.11 anything through 2 walls with any strength left.
In the US, at least, it's generally recognized their are two types of apartment building: "pre-war" and "post-war" (from the submitter's spelling of "storey" I'm guessing he's a Brit or other Anglophone).
The war referred to is the Second World War; the difference in the buildings is in the materials (and to a lesser extent, the quality) of construction. Basically, post-war building don't have "real" walls: they have plasterboard or Sheetrock (it's a capitalized because it's a trademark, like Kleenex, I think), thin pieces of crap that stop nothing but physical access and light. Radio, and more annoyingly, sound, goes right through.
That's why if you're shopping for an apartment, and you even intend to immerse yourself in your opera music, rock out to your heavy metal, or kill kittens to your porno collection, you want pre-war construction. Even if you don't have any loud habits, odds are your neighbors will, so you still want pre-war construction.
The down-side of pre-war construction is that real walls absorb radio waves too. With my admittedly underprepared USB WiFi transmitter, I can see a noticeable weakening of the signal even one room and 10 feet away. I can get a very poor signal (3%-10) up to about 40 feet away, at the elevator, and nothing once I'm in the elevator.
But I can get a half-way decent signal (30-40% signal) from twice that distance if I'm in line of sight of one of my apartment's windows.
I'm no cell biologist, but it seems this process could be used to bring back extinct species as well, or at least a part of them[....] Of course, one would then need a female.... maybe an elephant?
That's the rub (no pun intended).
While we have a basic understanding of genetics, our understanding of embryogenesis -- how a baby organism is built from the genetic code -- is still rather limited.
We also, in most cases we don't know what a particular gene does, and given that other genes can control a gene's expression, and those genes can be controlled by yet other genes, and all the genes in the process can be influenced by the organisms internal -- hormones, etc. -- and external environment, just what a gene does is a complicated question.
But it's clear that the environment of the embryo -- which is, by and large, the embryo's mother -- has a strong influence on what's actually produced from the genetic "recipe".
Experiments cloning cats, for instance, have shown that pelt patterns and hair color are only a little influence by the gene (which makes sense if you consider that getting locked into one pattern, over many generations, makes for poor camouflage -- so not having pelt patterns under genetic control may in fact be a very successful genetic adaptation).
So while elephants are related to mammoths, it's still an open question whether injecting mammoth DNA into an elephant egg would produce anything viable, let alone anything that would survive to term and be healthy. But you're correct, it might be possible, and if it is, we could then breed successively less "elephant-contaminated" generations of mammoths.
But it's still far from trivial, and shouldn't be seen as an excuse, as some would use it, to be blase about species extinctions and dwindling species diversity occurring in the present.
Does this qualify as an invention? Is it patentable?
If so, I hope a big corporation doesn't manage to scoop it behind his back. Any time you radically reduce the cost of something there's a big risk of that.
We look through the telescope and we wonder... why Darl McBride is staring back.
Isn't it great the way modern patent and copyright law frees us all to concentrate on creativity and innovation, rather than legal minutia and protecting our work from overbroad and stealth patents?
Slashdot Mirror
While the Best Buy is able to offer cheaper prices and more variety, they lack the human interaction I found at my local recordstore.
What!? You miss the human interaction?
Are you sure you're a geek? Are you sure that Slashdot is the right web site for you?
I knew many of the sales associates there and valued their opinion as to what music to buy.
You didn't have an opinion on everything, and a zealous certainty that, regardless of the flame war required, only your opinion could be allowed to prevail?
You didn't swear that you would repeat your opinion ad nauseam, for as long as vi apostles continue to fight emacs proselytes, for as long as camelBackChampions argue with underscore_upholders, for as long as tab fanatics spar with space monomaniacs?
No, definitely, you posted to the wrong web site. You want to take a left and go north three IP ranges to ShinyHappyPeople.com
Thank you, Air Marshal Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris and the men of the Eighth Air Force.
You have nothing to hide! And you have no reason to fear your benevolent government! Because America is the land of the free and so IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE!
But it can't happen here!
But it can't happen here!
But it can't happen here!
But it can't happen here!
But it can't happen here!
But it can't happen here!
But it can't happen here!
But it can't happen here!
Oh, I guess it can happen here.
Maybe whatever you do, whoever you are by ideology, political association, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation isn't illegal now.
But that could all change tomorrow -- and it can happen here.
From the June 15, 2003 edition of The Washington Tiimes, a newspaper widely seen as very conservative:
Columnist Jeff German in the November 19, 2003 Las Vegas SUN:
According to Freedom Fight Canada, an "Anton Pillar order is an order allowing for an applicant (without notice to a respondent) to enter the respondent's premises and inspect or seize documents or other items."
Under the Patriot Act, the government is allowed (with a secret warrant) to conduct secret "sneak and peek" searches, without ever informing the target of the search.
The difference is that with Anton Pillar, a private entity can request the search -- so far under U.S. law, only the government can. Of course, if you can find a friendly prosecutor and convince him that there's a possibility a crime has been committed, he'll do your search for you. Indeed, some will argue that that makes U.S. law more favorable to corporations, large corporations generally having more sway with law enforcement than private citizens.
The other difference between Anton Pillar and the Patriot Act is that the legislative intent of the Patriot Act was that its provisions should apply only to suspected acts of terrorism. However, US Attorney General John Ashcroft has aggressively pushed to ignore the legislative intent behind the Patriot Act, and use its provisions for to investigate non-terrorist related activity.
Summary:
Conclusion: via the mechanism of the Patriot Act, "sneak and peek" searches could be conducted on behalf of the recording industry if it alleges that copyright "piracy" is linked to terrorist fundraising, or if John Ashcroft succeeds in using Patriot Act mechanisms for commonplace investigations.
So I think comparisons to the Patriot Act are warranted (no pun intended).
So, I guess I'm not surprised that there's a "lazy programmer" style security flaw in their products today.
Lazy programmer? Abashed, ashamed, depressed programmer is more like it.
Real is so widely reviled -- by techies, hell, by anyone who has ever downloaded it -- that I'm sure a large number of Real's programers are dispirited, depressed, and resentful that management turned what had been a reputation for technical innovation into a reputation for deceptive marketing practices.
Once a programmer has dragged his ass into Real in the morning only to be told for the tenth week in a row to forget codec improvements, it's time to hide another five opt-out click boxes on a drop-down list at the bottom of narrow scroll pane behind a button on the third page on a fifteen page tab dialog, it's no surprise that even if he does get to patch the codecs, he won't be doing anything near his best work.
Wrong Lamar. Its Lamar Smith, Texas, not Lamar Alexander, Tennessee.
Christ. Well, I did mention that I got choked up, but that is embarrassing.
Thanks for pointing it out.
Why Lamar Alexander stuck in my head, I don't know. The plaid shirt, was that it? Oh, right, I was writing about Alexander Hamilton.
Oh, crap.
"The Government must play a greater role in punishing those who conceal their identities online - Lamar Smith"
Excuse me?
People who are anonymous must be punished?
Are all Texans as offensive as their elected representative?
Hey, terrorist boy, Congressman Smith is right.
Why did you know that once there where these three guys, three anonymous agitators, and they hid behind a fake name, "Publius", and wrote a bunch of stuff that completely changed the government of their country?
Anyway, these three guys started out as rebels and terrorists and traitors, and once things got settled down again, first thing they done was to get together all anonymous like, and they decided to change things yet again.
But they figured that people might not be as convinced of their ideas ifin people know'd it was these rebel traitors behind the ideas, so they made up that fake name "Publius" and published under it.
And what they wrote completely changed the government of their country. It got rid of the Articles of Confederation and made it impossible that the country would ever again be ruled by King George, who they'd rebelled against, and it set up a Constitution and a central government -- actually it was a Federation and them anonymous papers was called The Federalist Papers -- and as a by-product of the debate over them papers, they added ten Amendments to their new Constitution, the first one of which guaranteed, among other things, Freedom of Speech.
And years later one of them anonymous rebels became the Secretary of Treasury of the new country they'd created with their anonymous papers, and one of the then rebels became the First Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the country they created with their anonymous papers, and the other one, well, he became the fourth President of their new country which they had created with their anonymous papers, a country they called "The United States of America."
And I, honest to god this isn't mere rhetoric on my part, I have tears in my eyes right now when I think of all that those three disreputable anonymous rebels created, and the tears are streaming down my cheeks when I think of the Constitution of the United States of America that Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and James Madison agitated for in their anonymous Federalist Papers, and I get a lump in my throat when I think of the glorious First Amendment to that Constitution, which, among other things according to the US Supreme Court, guarantees a right to anonymity to protect our freedom to engage in political discourse and debate.
And Lamar Alexander -- Lamar Alexander, elected to the Congress planned and created by the same Constitution -- when he says that "The Government must play a greater role in punishing those who conceal their identities", well, I have to ask, when is the last time Lamar Alexander read that fine Constitution, that Constitution created by those three anonymous men publishing under a fake name?
And by god! I contend that the those who stand up for that Constitution, and for Free Speech, and for a right to anonymity -- those persons -- and not Big Brother's lackeys with their newspeak "Patriot Act" -- are the real American Patriots.
Orthogonal, thank you. I wish I could e-mail you and get permission to repost this.
c id=8191 090i d=8191090'>orthogonal's post</a>
Thanks for the praise, Grrr.
I'm not a big fan of some of what goes on in the Democratic Party -- but I'm frightened for America's freedoms, enough that whomever it is, I'll be working for and voting for the Democratic nominee to unseat GW Bush and John Ashcroft.
I hope I'll see you -- and all Americans who value our heritage -- working to preserve our traditional liberties by electing a replacement for the current administration.
If you think that what I wrote can help even a little bit to galvanize our fellow Americans, by all means use it as you best see fit.
While I retain my copyright to my post, I hereby give permission to anyone to repost in whole or part, so long it is credited to
"orthogonal"
or
Slashdot poster "orthogonal" (588627)
(orthogonal in quotes and all lower case) and reference is made to the original post's url, either as text:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=95627&
or as a link
<a href='http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=95627&c
Of course you could also have a new combination generated every minute for the super paranoid.
No, if you were "super paranoid" you'd have two identical one-time pads, one residing on the computer to be accessed, one in the hands of a single person trying to connect.
Every minute, the computer would consult its copy of the pad to determine what that minute's secret knock sequence would be.
The person connecting would look up in his copy of the pad that minute's sequence. You'd need to synchronize both participants' clocks, of course.
Less secure would be generating a new combination -- using some continuous function -- every minute.
Less secure than the pad, but more secure than a continuous function, would be a cellular automaton -- life Conway's Game of Life -- where any particular minute's knock sequence could only determined by first determining the previous minute's sequence.
Of course, to prevent the rules from being extrapolated by anyone analyzing your traffic, you'd have to agree on a new function or automaton to use for the next connection before ending the current connection. To guard against interruption of the connection, agreeing on the next connection's function would be the first thing you'd do after making a connection, and to guard against that being interrupted you'd need some fallback combinations -- which brings us back to the one-time pad.
The feature describes how the fortunes of small companies turned when their Google ranking rose or dropped.... [which has] spawned a whole Google-optimization industry where consultants can charge $5,000 per site for tweaking....
Fungible is defined as "[r]eturnable or negotiable in kind or by substitution, as a quantity of grain for an equal amount of the same kind of grain". In other words, it means "interchangeable".
Apparently the information on these web sites is fungible: Google can substitute one business for another, and as far as Google is concerned, the result is the same.
This is not to say that the businesses necessarily offer products that are fungible; but apparently, for certain obvious searches about those products, the sites return essentially the same information. And it's that information -- not the products -- that Google "sells".
So each competing business offers essentially the same information as far as Google is concerned. These businesses then hire consultants to multiply the number of other sites linking to their version of that fungible information, in hopes that Google will see the links and consider their web site the more authoritative and thus higher paged-ranked source for the fungible information.
The problem is that the information is fungible. rather than try to multiply the links to the same old information, differentiate your site by offering different information.
One easy way to offer different information is to offer a different (and presumably but not necessarily lower) price. Or --egads! -- differentiate your site by offering a better product. Or a bundle product.
Or even better, give Google what it wants: diverse information. Write an article about your product or service that addresses a need your customers have. Offer it for free, and attract people to your site. If Ace Hardware offers free e-books on hoe to make home repairs, Google will index it, and I'll, end up there. and maybe I'll stay and buy, rather than go back to Google and find competitor Home depot.
Or give away free instructions for making paper models of your product, like Yamaha does with its motorcycles. That got Yamaha featured on Slashdot -- and for free. Put up a whitepaper -- not the usual crap whitepapers that come down to "the only solution is our product, and by god it's a vague solution" -- but a real whitepaper of real use to professionals in your industry.
Sponsor an open-source project that use or features or facilitates the use of, your product. and then sponsor that project's web space, on your server next to your site.
We could come up with example after example, but the take home point is this: if the information you offer is fungible, expect sooner or later someone else will win the page rank lottery and outrank you. So make sure you offer something unique and uniquely useful.
That'll be $5000.00, please.
Not true at all. In fact, I couldn't care less about spyware transmitting information. When I start to care is when I get a call because someone's machine is malfunctioning.
Your points are well taken.
I was using spy-ware literally -- as spying --, and you're right, I was thinking in terms of a personal network, not a corporate network.
Of course (as you imply), the obvious problems are not really a worry to the power user. If my home page is no longer about:blank, or ads start popping up, I'm going to find out why and fix it.
It's the insidious stuff that I might not notice that I worry about: cross-site scripting, third-party cookies, malicious javascript, Real Player-style phoning home.
Thanks for balancing my account with the corporate administrator's perspective.
[Calling Attorney General John Ashcroft "Reichsminister Ashcroft" is t]totally uncalled for... Why is this considered acceptable behavior from grown adults? We don't throw around insults 1/10th as harsh to our co-workers and friends with any degree of sincerity, but make it a politician and an online forum and someone can get a +5 insighful for calling someone a Nazi.
Why the hate? Where is all this anger coming from?
Ashcroft has trashed a 600 years of jurisprudence by effectively abolishing habeas corpus. Right now, American citizens are sitting in prisons, not only denied their 6th Amendment right to a speedy trial, but wholly denied access to any trial, any court or any legal counsel.
Ashcroft doesn't think that is enough, and has further demanded the power without the right to revoke Americans' citizenship by his fiat, without recourse to judicial review.
Ashcroft has abrogated the rights of California, under the 10th Amendment, to make its own laws, and has insisted on prosecuting persons whose "crime "is to give marijuana to the terminally ill to ease their few remaining days of life.
Ashcroft has abrogated the rights of Oregon, by threatened Oregon doctors with the loss of licenses or even prison for following Oregon laws allowing people to die with dignity.
Ashcroft has ignored the intent of the US Congress by applying the wide-ranging powers granted under the "Patriot Act" to crimes that legislators voting for the "Patriot Act" never envisaged it would cover.
Ashcroft has perverted the considered opinions of the majority of US federal judges, by insisting on mandatory minimum sentences that even conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist finds too Draconian, and has abused the consciences of Federal prosecutors by insisting on death-penalty sentences even when local Federal prosecutors thought that ultimate penalty unwarranted.
Ashcroft has championed secret arrests, closed trials, secret military tribunals, and even authorized the deportation of a Canadian resident, Maher Arar, to Syria, where Arar was tortured for 10 and a half months.
But you're right, at lest he's not a Nazi! Thank God Ashcroft tramples the Constitution in a three-piece suit and not a Party uniform.
Out of 901 comments, I've only posted AC once.
My Karma's been excellent since my first month here.
In my last 20 comments, I've gooten five 3s, two 4s, and three 5s.
So why is there no Slashdotter, no not one single Slashdotter, to offer to make love to me? Oh, oh, me!
Oh, right, it's the penis thing again.
Damn Slahdot geek sausage-fest.
The more paranoid out there will probably have more more [sic] packages in the loop, but this is definitely one instance where is doesn't do any harm to use multiple packages in parallel.
Oh, it's simpler than that.
Install the Spy-ware Remover. Remove the spy-ware. Remove the remover.
For the more paranoid^H^H^H^H^H less trusting, take a snap-shot of the system, consisting of a list of all files with md5sums for each.
As above, Install the remover, remove the spy-ware, remove the remover. In most cases the spyware will be stand-alone, except for crap like MS-Windows registry entries. Ensure that other than such system-wide repositories like that, after the removal of both spy-ware and spy-ware remover, than no files have been added to your system, and the md5sums of existing files haven't changed.
Finally, spy-ware is only a problem if it can transmit the information it gathers out of your system to its masters. Here MS-Windows users actually have an advantage over linux, because most MS-Windows firewalls can block both incoming and outgoing connections, and can block or allow specific applications using specific protocols on specific ports.
First, as a standard practice, block everything (I even block localhost to localhost connections), then allow only what you actually require (most MS-Windows firewalls allow you to do this interactively and some support single-time-only allowances, so it's not nearly the burden it seems to someone used to IP tables).
Then watch to see if the firewall reports that an application is making outbound connections. If one does, ask yourself why it needs to connect out, and whether you did something to initiate its connecting out.
The one Achilles's heel here is the multitude of applications that use HTTP connections for one thing or another, and the browser in general. To minimize (but not totally control) this, I route all browsers through two HTML transforming proxies, so many cookies and javascripts never even reach the browsers. Other applications get direct connections, but obly if they need them. My mail client, for example, does not need to connect to port 80 for any reason, so I never worry about web bugs in HTML mail. Browsers (well, the proxy at the end of the chain) can connect only to ports 80 and 8080, minimizing risks a little; connections to non-standard ports must be authorized interactively.
I highly recommend Kerio firewall, by the way; it's free as in beer and quite full-featured. Proxomitron is excellent for transforming HTML. Get an md5sum implementation, or better yet, get Cygwin and have a linux-like environment too.
I wonder if I can get a patent on "Invention that does completely the opposite of what it claims to do"
But these programs don't do the complete opposite of what they promise.
I'm sure they do remove spyware.
I mean, I'm sure they are very careful to remove competitors' spyware.
That makes your system more private and more stable, while ensuring that they get a tighter lock on the market for the data they've purloined from spying on you.
Think of it like government: government offers to protect you those who would rob you and beat you, so long as you agree to give the government 40% of your money in the form of taxes and take th eoccasional beating from a cop. Sure, if you fail to come up with the taxes, the government will take the money and beat you, but at least you're only getting robbed and beaten by one entity.
Which entity, by virtue of having a monopoly, can specialize in giving you only the best robbings and beatings.
As, God knows, with Reichsminister Ashcroft and Admiral Poindexter, the current government is I'm sure is getting very good at doing only the best spying on you, Citizen.
Here's some '80s Zeitgeist for all my all homies back in the day, who like me wasted too much time in fronmt of the TV:
Sit Ubu, Sit!
Then you'd be wrong. Take a look at the code sometime, it is definately [sic] original.
CmdrTaco! Check your logs for the parent poster's IP address, turn itover to Microsoft, and use the proceeds to hire a coder to incorporate a mandatory spell checker in the Slashdot posting process!
You can use the left-over reward money to buy yourself a T1 line to your house, or get rid of Microsoft ads on Slashdot for a month.
Anyone who hooks up through Slashdot Personals -- you **MUST** post about it! Karma be damned!
Well, ok, but only because I'm in love!
Her name is www.sexypng.com, but she goes by pronUrl for short. She's a lot nicer than her sister Gif, because she's all about free love!...
Think about writing applications that communicate using shared memory pages. If one app writes a page and then instructs the kernel to map that page into another process, the kernel can do that rediculously fast.
On modern hardware, in fact, it's so fast that it's often faster than the speed of spelling.
B modern! Brake the Speling Barior!
You mention that post-war walls are constructed of plasterboard or Sheetrock but failed to mention how pre-war walls were constructed.[...]In older construction you also get a lot of stone and brick walls. Not to mention the solid wood floors an ceilings.
Yeah, I know my walls are plaster (and it's a bitch when that stuff starts to crumble out too), but I didn't know about the slats, which is why I didn't go into the details of pre-war construction.
Speaking of those solid wood floors, I recently put a nice looooong scratch in mine -- the scratch is probably up to 5 mm wide by 2 deep. Burning some karma here, but we're all trying to help each other, right, one big geek team, what's the easiest way to patch up or at least camouflage this ugly scratch?
It depends on the building materials, but I've found that you're lucky to get 802.11 anything through 2 walls with any strength left.
In the US, at least, it's generally recognized their are two types of apartment building: "pre-war" and "post-war" (from the submitter's spelling of "storey" I'm guessing he's a Brit or other Anglophone).
The war referred to is the Second World War; the difference in the buildings is in the materials (and to a lesser extent, the quality) of construction. Basically, post-war building don't have "real" walls: they have plasterboard or Sheetrock (it's a capitalized because it's a trademark, like Kleenex, I think), thin pieces of crap that stop nothing but physical access and light. Radio, and more annoyingly, sound, goes right through.
That's why if you're shopping for an apartment, and you even intend to immerse yourself in your opera music, rock out to your heavy metal, or kill kittens to your porno collection, you want pre-war construction. Even if you don't have any loud habits, odds are your neighbors will, so you still want pre-war construction.
The down-side of pre-war construction is that real walls absorb radio waves too. With my admittedly underprepared USB WiFi transmitter, I can see a noticeable weakening of the signal even one room and 10 feet away. I can get a very poor signal (3%-10) up to about 40 feet away, at the elevator, and nothing once I'm in the elevator.
But I can get a half-way decent signal (30-40% signal) from twice that distance if I'm in line of sight of one of my apartment's windows.
I'm no cell biologist, but it seems this process could be used to bring back extinct species as well, or at least a part of them[....] Of course, one would then need a female.... maybe an elephant?
That's the rub (no pun intended).
While we have a basic understanding of genetics, our understanding of embryogenesis -- how a baby organism is built from the genetic code -- is still rather limited.
We also, in most cases we don't know what a particular gene does, and given that other genes can control a gene's expression, and those genes can be controlled by yet other genes, and all the genes in the process can be influenced by the organisms internal -- hormones, etc. -- and external environment, just what a gene does is a complicated question.
But it's clear that the environment of the embryo -- which is, by and large, the embryo's mother -- has a strong influence on what's actually produced from the genetic "recipe".
Experiments cloning cats, for instance, have shown that pelt patterns and hair color are only a little influence by the gene (which makes sense if you consider that getting locked into one pattern, over many generations, makes for poor camouflage -- so not having pelt patterns under genetic control may in fact be a very successful genetic adaptation).
So while elephants are related to mammoths, it's still an open question whether injecting mammoth DNA into an elephant egg would produce anything viable, let alone anything that would survive to term and be healthy. But you're correct, it might be possible, and if it is, we could then breed successively less "elephant-contaminated" generations of mammoths.
But it's still far from trivial, and shouldn't be seen as an excuse, as some would use it, to be blase about species extinctions and dwindling species diversity occurring in the present.
Does this qualify as an invention? Is it patentable?
If so, I hope a big corporation doesn't manage to scoop it behind his back. Any time you radically reduce the cost of something there's a big risk of that.
We look through the telescope and we wonder...
why Darl McBride is staring back.
Isn't it great the way modern patent and copyright law frees us all to concentrate on creativity and innovation, rather than legal minutia and protecting our work from overbroad and stealth patents?
XWin -multiwindow &
Ok, when I do this, the X Server starts up, and the comtrol for it shows up in my MS Windows tray.
But when I try to start any x apps from the bash promy, like xeyes, I get thisHow do i run X apps with the rootless X server?
Thanks!