I would bat an eye at the theft of a painting deserving a 10 year sentence. Unless that theft involved people being physically hurt or threatened.
See, if someone steals a $10M painting from you, how much did that really hurt you? We'll even assume that the thing wasn't insured. If you own a $10M painting, it's probably safe to say you are worth at least 10x that amount. Sure, that would be annoying to lose that painting, but it's only an object and it's not going to affect your life much at all.
On the other hand, a low-income family whose house gets burglarized, trashed, and everything they own stolen from them or destroyed is in a MUCH worse situation than the guy with the fancy painting.
Of course, issues like this never get raised in court, because people are shallow and only look at the bottom line. Oh, poor family had $10G worth of damage and stolen property? Meh, 2 years prison for the repeat offender who did it. $10 MILLION dollar painting!?! OMFG!!1!!11 LIFE! LIFE! LIFE!!
So yeah, I also think 9 FUCKING YEARS in prison is completely out of whack for spamming. A reasonable sentence would be to strip the guy of all his spam-earned money and force him to work for the public for 10 years. This way, he's not a burden on society, but is actually beneficial and is paying back to those he ripped off.
"You do have to admire the fact that they, unlike Microsoft or Sony, managed to beat the piracy problem on the cube."
And it answers the age-old argument that gets posed back and forth. You know, the "I wouldn't pirate games if they were cheaper...Games would be cheaper if you didn't pirate them"
Apparently the industry lied and games aren't made any cheaper even when they aren't pirated.
"Insightful!?" I can't believe this got modded insightful. It's the most idiotic non-response you could post in a security discussion. Not to mention the fact that it's just plain incorrect.
Most machines get compromised because of a hole in one of the applications they are running. If there's a hole in some app that a hacker finds out about and exploits before anybody is made aware of it, then it's the admin's fault? How?
I sometimes begin to think that people are being programmed by large corporations. And I'm not talking about the obvious attempts at brainwashing through constant advertising. I'm talking about the sci-fi kind of stuff like in the movie "They Live". Put on that special pair of sunglasses and you'll see the true text behind all of the adverts you encounter:
"Patents are good... Money is good... Money is the be-all, end-all of existence... If money does not change hands, then what you are doing is wrong... If you are not being paid, it is not worth doing... Your worth as a person is measured by your income..."
I'm not surprised that most of the money-oriented behaviour comes from the United States either, because that's where the majority of these large corporations are based.
Take a good look in the cosmic mirror before you call someone's opinion 'ignorant' or 'short-sighted', ok? Because it may in fact be YOU who is not seeing the big picture.
By nature, this is not a complex problem. It only becomes complex because of the greedy attitudes mentioned above.
I agree completely. "Nerf the World" seems to be the theme for the past two decades or so.
Instead of survival of the fittest, with the idiots weeding themselves out of existence, we're protecting them and harbouring a new breed of moron. The future of mankind doesn't look too prosporous with these kinds of people dictacting our actions.
"You wouldn't use gets to input a string, would you? I hope..."
This is what I don't understand: Everyone knows that gets() is a disaster waiting to happen, but nobody fixes it! Why even leave it in the state it's in? Change the compiler so that if the function gets() is called, it passes the arguments to the appropriate alternative and includes some sane defaults for the missing extra arguments you'll need. If some ancient code breaks, so be it and it's fairly trivial to fix.
It's not just the programmer's fault for using the problem function, the person/group who wrote the compiler has some responsibility as well.
I sort of doubt that a CRT is brighter than any recent LCD. Have you seen the brightness on these things? You have to worry about burn in on your brain, not on the display itself!
You're right about resolution though. If you don't run the LCD in its native res, it looks muddy due to the interpolation it has to do.
For a 17" LCD, I find 1280x1024 to be more than adequate, since I used to run my 17" CRT at 1024x768 and was happy. But to each his own.
I dunno.. Why do people keep writing software and giving it away for free? Where's the incentive?
The truth is, there are enough people that create for the love of the craft to make it all worthwhile. People who are in it purely for the money tend to be inferior at their craft anyways.
I guess that came out wrong. I didn't mean to say that algorithms *should* be copywritable, just that your overall code is copywrite.
But when it comes to expiry dates, does it really matter if it's 20 years or forever? In the computer world, probably not. How many software patents have you seen expire where there was not already a free alternative? I can only think of RSA, but it's also been superceded.
I disagree. Copyright is the protection you should get for your code, not patent.
Patent is far too broad to cover something like software algorithms. Software is another science where ideas are built upon other's ideas. Nothing's built in a vacuum here, but yet people still come off thinking that their code is somehow special and that nobody else would have thought of it.
Patent is obviously a bad idea because we're winding up with situations like this stupid Eolas thing. It's like someone (Fraunhoffer?) thinking they are the only ones who can do audio compression because the MP3 patent covers any similar algorithm. While they haven't sued anyone yet as far as I know, they have stated that Vorbis likely infringes on their patents. That's just ridiculous.
I don't think it's so bad. I'm forced to put up with advertising that is shoved in my face everywhere I go, and I get no say about it. The only difference here is that this guy did it for free and it's messages from the people, not from some corporation that has profit in mind.
Hmm, that seems to be the sad state of today's world. Everything's a-ok as long as you've paid somebody. Nothing's legit unless money transfers hands.
The protections that are in use on most of today's games are SecuROM and SafeDisc. They're wrappers around the original executable. They're made this way so that the publisher can easily protect an executable without having the source code. It encrypts the original and decrypts it when you have the original CD in the drive that contains the auth code. Part of the wrapper has the code which checks for verbotten software like debuggers and cd-rom emulation.
Once you've decrypted the executable, you can remove the wrapper and you have the virgin exe again, sans all the bullshit checks and instability associated with the kooky code they've added (you really gotta see this shit to believe it, they break every rule in the programming books).
Thank you for posting that. People complain about the way things currently are, and others pipe in with the "well don't just bitch about it, go vote and fix the system!" And yet it's these same people who then tell you that you are wasting your vote when you don't vote for one of the major parties.
That attitude just really bugs me. I refuse to vote for someone I don't want in power just to tip the scales for someone else. If everyone keeps doing this, then a 3rd party will NEVER win. I'll vote for the party I want, and if they don't win, then they don't win. But at least I'll sleep well at night knowing I did the right thing.
While I agree that what he did was wrong, and he should face the consequences, I don't agree with "making an example" out of anyone when it comes to the law. Everyone should be treated fairly and equally, with no exceptions.
I SERIOUSLY hope so. That market is one of the biggest scams going and it bothers me to no end that millions of people have been so unknowingly manipulated by those bastards.
Basically training women to want diamonds and to convince men that they are worthless unless they can produce the biggest rock to show the woman how much they love them. Uh huh.. Let's breed a few generations of shallow, materialistic, gold diggers. What good is a diamond anyways? Unless you're using it for drilling, cutting, or building a satellite death-laser, it's the equivilent of a piece of glass.
Ugh.. Offtopic, but I had to rant on that issue. DeBeers and Monsanto are at the top of my corporate shit-list.
"nVidia's back, I guess. This will sell a lot of 6800GT's. "
Well, I guess that depends on what you thing "a lot" means. At $661CDN for a 6800GT, I don't see too many being sold in the near future. The Radeon X800XT is even worse, at $800CDN. WTF!? This is narrowed down to the very hardcore of gamers, and they represent a very small percentage of the gaming population.
Many people likely will upgrade, but I just don't see this game selling $600+ cards to a large number of folks.
Yes, because that works OH SO WELL for drugs and other things that have been made illegal and forced underground.
Take a look at the drug scene and the REAL crime that surrounds it thanks to the wonderous insight of the lawmakers.
This is just great! I can't wait for drive by shootings and 10 year olds being sent out with guns to sell people the latest in forbidden computer hardware.
There are literally dozens of ways to check for the presence of debuggers. Some people have already mentioned some here. Here's a few more:
Int68:
MOV AH, 43h INT 68h CMP AX, 0F386h JZ FoundDebugger
Check for SoftIce(most common/powerful debugger) by using the CreateFileA API to check for the SICE VXDs.
And an interesting one found in the SafeDisc protection where(if I recall) they use a checksum of the GDT to decrypt a section of code. The debugger modifies this table and will cause the code to crash.
You won't even notice the 0.001% CPU usage. Today's CPUs are far more powerful than any hardware based parity generator that you're likely to see on a hardware-based RAID card.
Slashdot Mirror
I would bat an eye at the theft of a painting deserving a 10 year sentence. Unless that theft involved people being physically hurt or threatened.
See, if someone steals a $10M painting from you, how much did that really hurt you? We'll even assume that the thing wasn't insured. If you own a $10M painting, it's probably safe to say you are worth at least 10x that amount. Sure, that would be annoying to lose that painting, but it's only an object and it's not going to affect your life much at all.
On the other hand, a low-income family whose house gets burglarized, trashed, and everything they own stolen from them or destroyed is in a MUCH worse situation than the guy with the fancy painting.
Of course, issues like this never get raised in court, because people are shallow and only look at the bottom line. Oh, poor family had $10G worth of damage and stolen property? Meh, 2 years prison for the repeat offender who did it. $10 MILLION dollar painting!?! OMFG!!1!!11 LIFE! LIFE! LIFE!!
So yeah, I also think 9 FUCKING YEARS in prison is completely out of whack for spamming. A reasonable sentence would be to strip the guy of all his spam-earned money and force him to work for the public for 10 years. This way, he's not a burden on society, but is actually beneficial and is paying back to those he ripped off.
"You do have to admire the fact that they, unlike Microsoft or Sony, managed to beat the piracy problem on the cube."
And it answers the age-old argument that gets posed back and forth. You know, the "I wouldn't pirate games if they were cheaper...Games would be cheaper if you didn't pirate them"
Apparently the industry lied and games aren't made any cheaper even when they aren't pirated.
"Insightful!?" I can't believe this got modded insightful. It's the most idiotic non-response you could post in a security discussion. Not to mention the fact that it's just plain incorrect.
Most machines get compromised because of a hole in one of the applications they are running. If there's a hole in some app that a hacker finds out about and exploits before anybody is made aware of it, then it's the admin's fault? How?
October, 2003? That's an eternity for the graphics market.
I sometimes begin to think that people are being programmed by large corporations. And I'm not talking about the obvious attempts at brainwashing through constant advertising. I'm talking about the sci-fi kind of stuff like in the movie "They Live". Put on that special pair of sunglasses and you'll see the true text behind all of the adverts you encounter:
"Patents are good... Money is good... Money is the be-all, end-all of existence... If money does not change hands, then what you are doing is wrong... If you are not being paid, it is not worth doing... Your worth as a person is measured by your income..."
I'm not surprised that most of the money-oriented behaviour comes from the United States either, because that's where the majority of these large corporations are based.
Take a good look in the cosmic mirror before you call someone's opinion 'ignorant' or 'short-sighted', ok? Because it may in fact be YOU who is not seeing the big picture.
By nature, this is not a complex problem. It only becomes complex because of the greedy attitudes mentioned above.
I agree completely. "Nerf the World" seems to be the theme for the past two decades or so.
Instead of survival of the fittest, with the idiots weeding themselves out of existence, we're protecting them and harbouring a new breed of moron. The future of mankind doesn't look too prosporous with these kinds of people dictacting our actions.
"You wouldn't use gets to input a string, would you? I hope..."
This is what I don't understand: Everyone knows that gets() is a disaster waiting to happen, but nobody fixes it! Why even leave it in the state it's in? Change the compiler so that if the function gets() is called, it passes the arguments to the appropriate alternative and includes some sane defaults for the missing extra arguments you'll need. If some ancient code breaks, so be it and it's fairly trivial to fix.
It's not just the programmer's fault for using the problem function, the person/group who wrote the compiler has some responsibility as well.
I sort of doubt that a CRT is brighter than any recent LCD. Have you seen the brightness on these things? You have to worry about burn in on your brain, not on the display itself!
You're right about resolution though. If you don't run the LCD in its native res, it looks muddy due to the interpolation it has to do.
For a 17" LCD, I find 1280x1024 to be more than adequate, since I used to run my 17" CRT at 1024x768 and was happy. But to each his own.
I dunno.. Why do people keep writing software and giving it away for free? Where's the incentive?
The truth is, there are enough people that create for the love of the craft to make it all worthwhile. People who are in it purely for the money tend to be inferior at their craft anyways.
I guess that came out wrong. I didn't mean to say that algorithms *should* be copywritable, just that your overall code is copywrite.
But when it comes to expiry dates, does it really matter if it's 20 years or forever? In the computer world, probably not. How many software patents have you seen expire where there was not already a free alternative? I can only think of RSA, but it's also been superceded.
I disagree. Copyright is the protection you should get for your code, not patent.
Patent is far too broad to cover something like software algorithms. Software is another science where ideas are built upon other's ideas. Nothing's built in a vacuum here, but yet people still come off thinking that their code is somehow special and that nobody else would have thought of it.
Patent is obviously a bad idea because we're winding up with situations like this stupid Eolas thing. It's like someone (Fraunhoffer?) thinking they are the only ones who can do audio compression because the MP3 patent covers any similar algorithm. While they haven't sued anyone yet as far as I know, they have stated that Vorbis likely infringes on their patents. That's just ridiculous.
Well, the site's slashdotted now, but UT's source code was released, although the license isn't GPL..
I don't think it's so bad. I'm forced to put up with advertising that is shoved in my face everywhere I go, and I get no say about it. The only difference here is that this guy did it for free and it's messages from the people, not from some corporation that has profit in mind.
Hmm, that seems to be the sad state of today's world. Everything's a-ok as long as you've paid somebody. Nothing's legit unless money transfers hands.
Actually, it does!
The protections that are in use on most of today's games are SecuROM and SafeDisc. They're wrappers around the original executable. They're made this way so that the publisher can easily protect an executable without having the source code. It encrypts the original and decrypts it when you have the original CD in the drive that contains the auth code. Part of the wrapper has the code which checks for verbotten software like debuggers and cd-rom emulation.
Once you've decrypted the executable, you can remove the wrapper and you have the virgin exe again, sans all the bullshit checks and instability associated with the kooky code they've added (you really gotta see this shit to believe it, they break every rule in the programming books).
Thank you for posting that. People complain about the way things currently are, and others pipe in with the "well don't just bitch about it, go vote and fix the system!" And yet it's these same people who then tell you that you are wasting your vote when you don't vote for one of the major parties.
That attitude just really bugs me. I refuse to vote for someone I don't want in power just to tip the scales for someone else. If everyone keeps doing this, then a 3rd party will NEVER win. I'll vote for the party I want, and if they don't win, then they don't win. But at least I'll sleep well at night knowing I did the right thing.
While I agree that what he did was wrong, and he should face the consequences, I don't agree with "making an example" out of anyone when it comes to the law. Everyone should be treated fairly and equally, with no exceptions.
"the bottom will fall out of the diamond market"
I SERIOUSLY hope so. That market is one of the biggest scams going and it bothers me to no end that millions of people have been so unknowingly manipulated by those bastards.
Basically training women to want diamonds and to convince men that they are worthless unless they can produce the biggest rock to show the woman how much they love them. Uh huh.. Let's breed a few generations of shallow, materialistic, gold diggers. What good is a diamond anyways? Unless you're using it for drilling, cutting, or building a satellite death-laser, it's the equivilent of a piece of glass.
Ugh.. Offtopic, but I had to rant on that issue. DeBeers and Monsanto are at the top of my corporate shit-list.
"nVidia's back, I guess. This will sell a lot of 6800GT's. "
Well, I guess that depends on what you thing "a lot" means. At $661CDN for a 6800GT, I don't see too many being sold in the near future. The Radeon X800XT is even worse, at $800CDN. WTF!? This is narrowed down to the very hardcore of gamers, and they represent a very small percentage of the gaming population.
Many people likely will upgrade, but I just don't see this game selling $600+ cards to a large number of folks.
Yes, because that works OH SO WELL for drugs and other things that have been made illegal and forced underground.
Take a look at the drug scene and the REAL crime that surrounds it thanks to the wonderous insight of the lawmakers.
This is just great! I can't wait for drive by shootings and 10 year olds being sent out with guns to sell people the latest in forbidden computer hardware.
Read the article and look at the screenshots. To me, it was indistinguishable from the GF and ATI cards in the screenshots shown.
There are literally dozens of ways to check for the presence of debuggers. Some people have already mentioned some here. Here's a few more:
Int68:
MOV AH, 43h
INT 68h
CMP AX, 0F386h
JZ FoundDebugger
Check for SoftIce(most common/powerful debugger) by using the CreateFileA API to check for the SICE VXDs.
And an interesting one found in the SafeDisc protection where(if I recall) they use a checksum of the GDT to decrypt a section of code. The debugger modifies this table and will cause the code to crash.
Interstate '76
Great game.
You won't even notice the 0.001% CPU usage. Today's CPUs are far more powerful than any hardware based parity generator that you're likely to see on a hardware-based RAID card.
Jesus Christ! Who are you, Larry fucking Flynt? What are you going to do with all of those?
Hmm, yes, just like the price of CDs dropped after it became ultra-cheap to manufacture them.. Oh wait, it didn't!
Never underestimate the recoding industry's greed.