Every place I have shopped at will not let me return a game once I rip the plastic off the box.
Check with your local citizens advice groups. That sounds illegal, it certainally is here IIRC. Under UK law (AFAIK), you can't spring new contract terms on something after the purchase. The purchase itself is a contract and itself carries many rights and restrictions on what both parties can do. The infamous phrase "your statatory rights are not affected". Knowing those rights is half the battle.
We've got some other neat laws over on this stuff. For example, if I ask the salesperson I need widget A for task B, then I later find that A doesn't do B, I'm entitled to a refund as the goods did not meet my needs. So, if you specifically said something about copy protections not hosing your machine, you would be practically guaranteed a refund should that then happen. Not that you won't have to put up a fight; however you just need to mention the name of the relevant law and the attitude changes instantly!
(continuing on from other reply)...and pay for someone to securely erase the drives, then install the OS? Which then has to be custom tweaked as each of the second hand boxes is different? Drivers? Replacing dodgy hardware with intermitent faults? That's gonna cost $$$.
Using old hardware might work for you. You recycle it into something useful, you get something useful, and you also learn some new tricks in the process. However, it just doesn't scale and when faced with a challenge such as deliver working (robust) PCs to some harsh conditions with limited resources, you really have to go back to the drawing board.
In fact, often donating things hurts charities. Many drug companies "donate" outdated medicine to the third world to get tax breaks. The medicine is often useless and it costs the charity more money to legally dispose of it all.
I was born and grew up during the Cold War, and even after I never felt that we weren't under some "threat". You can certainly argue that the threat has increased in the last few years
Go watch the BBC documentary "The Power Of Nightmares", you can get it on archive.org. You've always been under some threat, and it's no accident. The cold war was extended by folks like Donald Rumsfeld, who claimed Russian intelegence indicated a greater threat than all the other inteligence indicated at the time. Sound familiar?
Echelon, does it still exist in the same sense it once may or may not have, based upon your assumption of said codeword?
Hell yes! This was in the news just the other day:
"While I was at CSE, a classic example: A lady had been to a school play the night before, and her son was in the school play and she thought he did a -- a lousy job. Next morning, she was talking on the telephone to her friend, and she said to her friend something like this, 'Oh, Danny really bombed last night,' just like that," Frost said. "The computer spit that conversation out. The analyst that was looking at it was not too sure about what the conversation was referring to, so erring on the side of caution, he listed that lady and her phone number in the database as a possible terrorist." - Mike Frost (CSE)
Ever hear of ECHELON? I don't recall a warrant being sought for each intercepted conversation. The ACLU was upset about that, but did nothing against a Democrat in Clinton.
No president will EVER fight against Echelon. The moment they do, they'll be taken to a darked smokey room showing an old 8mm film taken from a grassy piece of land, showing a well known event from a new angle. "Any questions Mr President?", "Sure, what's my agenda?"
(props to the late Bill Hicks for the paraphrased quote)
There are many nations that would gladly loan or give military grade weapons to US rebels whose goal was to overthrow the US government.
That sounds exactly like US foreign policy from 1960-2000 to me!! Especially WRT South American countries who's democratic elections gave power to socialists.
He he, that's a funny opinion. Sure, from a military view point it's futile, they can't win. However, I believe that they have managed to turn the US opinion on the war via bodybags, and that is far more likely to lead to US withdrawal than a few tatical defeats. With no US troops duct-taping the country together, civil war will break out and the country splits into it's ethnic groups who spend the next few hundred years fighting each other, with the occasional "thank you" note/bomb sent our way for helping them reach that point.
The democracy is voting and moving ahead, US casualties are down comparred to last year (deaths same, casualties down 20-25%
Got any figures for the Iraq Police Force, or civilians? If not, your numbers are irrelevant on the success of the war. Unless you simply don't give a fuck about them, which I suspect is the case for many people.
Besides, "democracy" is no a win point. Nothing about being a democracy means that you are a nice responsible member of the world community. Don't talk about democracy, talk about life expectancy, education, child mortality, services/sanitation, that's how you measure a country. There are dictatorships I'd rather be in over some places that call themselves "democratic". Not many tho!;-)
This administration is destroying this country. Don't help them do it.
For that matter, the previous one didn't do it any help, either.
Students, may I refer you to the above for the REAL reason the US is falling apart? Look up. Red vs Blue, the illusion of choice. Need to avoid debate? Assign blame!! Divert attention! Avoid discussing the issue at all costs!
here are no known viruses for OS X, so how can they update the virus definitions if they have nothing to base it on?
Interesting, I've heard of this before. There is a Pocket PC virus scanner available, yet there are no viruses on that platform. A fool and his money are easily parted, or so the story goes.
I've never been convinced by the "many eyes" argument. It's hard enough to get coders to review each others code in the office where they are getting paid. How many people actually code-review OSS stuff in reality?
To me, the advantage here has always been the availability of a quick patch. Not code that's inherently more secure due to it's license model.
OS X/Linux/*BSD are designed from the ground up to be immune to the kinds of attacks that Windows gets constantly pounded by.
Bullshit with a capital AND bold "B". The Windows viruses that have done the most harm recently are trojans and NO OS can deal with that problem. Sure, they might ask "Please enter root password", but that is just a speed bump. Most users will see it as the computer asking for the root password (and not the installer) and for years we've been telling them to read what it says and do it. What do you think they'll do?
As software gets more secure, trojan attacks will become more and more common. And where will your OS-X god be then? The whole point of this article is that most computer users believe that there is nothing to worry about, be it through ignorance (most Windows users) and/or arrogance. It seems it's bang-on-the-money going by the discussions going on here.
You read the EULA when you installed the update and launched iTunes for the first time afterward didn't you? If you clicked agree, you gave your permission.
Oh, come on. So what if it's in the EULA. Lot's of shit is said in EULA's, and a large part of using that system is to hide the legalese from the end-consumer. That's the point. Just because it's quasi-legal, it doesn't mean it's morally sound. So, if your iTunes EULA says (near the bottom in an obtuse way) Apple claim the right to your first-born, then that's fine then? Well, it's in the EULA, so you'd better shut the hell up when they come to take him away.
It was behaving like an AJAX web application
Ohh, buzzwords. AJAX is simply a DHTML implemented client/server model using async xml/html gets. Anyone who actually works in the field would say "it's behaving like a typical client/server app". The particular GUI implementation isn't relevant.
Are you saying that you are not taking responsibility for the buttons you click? Collecting info on what you click on would not be anywhere as useful as what you buy from them.
You are pretty far off the mark. You don't seem to understand the power of marketing. Knowing what music people were listening to (and how often) is pure marketing gold. They can tell which songs are liked; which artists are similar based on playlists. I could go on and on describing the info you can mine out of this data. They can tell that someone who is listening to artist X surfs for info about artist Y. This tells the marketing people that if they advertise Y in media that already mentions X, they'll get a good return.
They have no way of knowing how you got that music onto your computer.
And, your point is? It's not worth collecting the data because you don't the source?
You have no evidence that they are sending the User ID on the store but people who do not have an account would not have one so what is your point exactly? Your IP address? I have news for you, every website you visit knows a lot more about the computer you are using than just the IP address.
Don't you think I know that? I'm talking about globally unique IDs, I've already said in another post that I've worked on similar systems in the past.
They aren't tracking the IP address with the intention of hunting you down with silent black helecopters. It's used to differentiate users and track history over a longer period. Don't get me wrong, knowing that IP 192.168.0.1 listened to three albums in this session in itself is hugely valuable, but if you can correlate that data over a period of weeks, you can learn a lot about your target markets listening habits. That allows you to monitor trends and "create" new artists that meet the publics needs. There are two parts of these systems I am weary on: disclosure of it to the end user, and the crappy manufactured music it ultimately will result in!;-)
Some people actually like the feature and consider it useful in helping them discover music. What are you embarrassed about? Do you have N'Sync songs in your library?
It is helpful, and I've written similar features. However, it's important that you are upfront with the user about privacy concerns. You are breaking the law in several countries if you don't. To the best of my knowledge, a EULA has never successfully stood up as a legal document in any country I am familiar with.
No, one of the many issues were that it updated the advert pane each time you put the CD in. Coincidentally this also told Sony whenever the CD was being played, and by which IP address.
Do you really think they would want to store that much information?
Do you realise how much effort the music industry puts into compiling charts? Market research? They are having orgasms on the thought of knowing what we are listening to. It's very valuable information and I have no problem with them accessing it with my permission.
Other tools do the same thing, however they all ask you if you want to enable the feature and they all describe the privacy implications. Even Microsoft's Media Player does it, this is schoolboy stuff.
Even if they did, if the request does not have any information specific to you, you have nothing to worry about.
Client ID? User Id on the music store? IP address? Hello? The Sony rootkit hit one, non-changing and non-unique URL yet that created a massive backlash. Apple != Sony it seems, lot's of love for Apple, none for Sony.
If you were running a music service I'm quite sure you wouldn't be releasing the server's code..
Ask me that in six months. Seriously. I'm sure as hell going to be gathering these stats, but the output will be Creative Commons licensed and fully anonymous. It will also be an opt-in system.
When you log on to your favorite IM or Webmail do you take their word that they're not keeping copies of everything your write?
At first, yes. Then if they are caught lying about it, I never trust them again. Anyone who trusts a liar is a fool.
The only time it doesn't uninstall is when someone has gone in and tried to delete files related to it
Just as well you didn't say that last week, when I was fixing my box after removing Norton. Lot's of blue screens and other such crap started the moment I uninstalled it. Had to remove so much junk by hand, unfortunately I didn't know about the cleaner. There is clearly a problem here; if there wasn't why would they spend resource producing and maintaining a repair product?
99% off "problems" people have with Norton are directly related to part of their OS being broken, like MSI, IE, scripting, DCOM, etc etc.
Yup, because Nortons uninstall caused these problems. I was very close to reimaging, but I had too much setup I didn't want to repeat.
Norton products aren't for power users, they're for home users.
Then why did I need "power user" knowledge in order to perform the simple task of removal? IMHO Norton is for corporate environments where the end user cannot be trusted.
Just last week I had a hell of a time removing Norton AV after it expired. The MSI installer registry was not cleaned out and the PC thought it had extra applications the the Symantec installer had removed. NOTHING else would install that used the MSI mechanism; the installer would hang every time.
After spending days cleaning out obscure HEX GUIDs from the registry, it still didn't work. In the end my googling for the GUIDs they'd used unearthed a registry file that appeared to remove every Symantec entry from the registry that's I'd found. More importantly, it had some additional obscure ones I would never have found. Things who's key values made me think WTF? This is my AV software?
Backed up the registry, ran the strange clean.reg I found on the net (what harm could it do...;-) and all seems well now. Symantec stuff seems to install itself using techniques similar to a nail bomb.
It's not merely bypassed by the antivirus and antispyware utilities, it is hidden from anything that uses the Windows FindFirst/FindNext APIs to view and scan files and folders.
In order to the first, you must do the second. There is no other way to do this. If the Windows APIs can see the data, then applications built on the APIs can see the data.
Apple discards the personal information that the iTunes Ministore transmits to Apple while you use iTunes. [...] Apple tells us that the information is not actually being collected.
Release the source of the server app and then we might believe you. We've all heard the "not actually collected" bit many times. Sony first tried to deny this particular privacy invasion in their rootkit, yet later they were caught out. Unique URLs combined with IPs, what more do you need?
Frankly, if I were writing such a service, logging some of the most financially valuable market research you get your hands on is a given. There wouldn't be any debate on the issue, you log it and sell it! And if you are morally sound, you offer it as an opt-on program and be honest about it.
I've actually been using Jetty as a development platform to test my code, but it's a bit of a memory hog. However, I note now that Jetty 6 is out and one of the goals was to reduce the footprint and dependancies apparently. I'll be checking the update out, thanks for the suggestion.
I came across Tapestry in my hunt for a Java HTML generation framework, however as I'm working on an embedded project I dismissed it as running an application server is not an option for me. The mention of
"However, Tapestry applications are 100% container agnostic... Tapestry doesn't care what servlet container it is used with and does not even require an EJB container."
in the FAQ (section 1.6) offers a little hope, but I could find no other info on alternate (lightweight) deployment methods. After reading the article, it's got my interest again.
Sorry for what must sound like a technical support question, but is it possible to run Tapestry in a lightweight HTTP server such as Simple? It uses the usual HttpRequest/HttpResponse API for dealing with requests and has a minimal footprint. Can I call something in the Tapestry API and pass it the request to render the page?
Or can anyone recommend any other lightweight Java HTML generation frameworks that don't require full-blown servlet containers such as Tomcat?
When my wife set up her mini, all she asked me for was the Wi-Fi network password
Did she install the OS, or was it pre-configured? If it was pre-configured, then a comparison to Windows is weak. It's just as easy to enter a WEP key in Windows, they even have a pretty little popup dialog to ask you if it is determined that one is required. And SP2 is secure out-of-the-box, with firewall & auto-upgrades turned on.
TCO means NOTHING for one machine. When you admin a few dozen, then it matters.
Not so sure I'd be going for a first generation Apple product if I were looking for reliability....
I was going to say the exact same thing. As someone who has been an engineer in a laptop manufacturing plant avoid the new ones. Nothing to do with Apple or any other manufacturer, or even laptops in general. Avoid first gen unless you can afford to be without it now and then while it's away for the inevitable repair. Unless of course you want a future class-action suit and see the legal process as an upgrade path...;-)
Personally, I've always liked the Thinkpad, and no, it's not IBM I worked for. If you want a secure machine, check out the password recovery options. "Buy a new motherboard and harddrive, and throw away the old ones" works for me. Smart thieves should know that a secure Thinkpad is a dead laptop to them.
we can't take part in the settlement because you must have at least 3 documented failures. So far, they both have had no issues whatsoever, and they're pretty much at their end of life
Then why do you feel the desire to have a part in the settlement? It's supposed to componsate people who have lost out due to reliability problems, not provide free money to greedy bastards.
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Check with your local citizens advice groups. That sounds illegal, it certainally is here IIRC. Under UK law (AFAIK), you can't spring new contract terms on something after the purchase. The purchase itself is a contract and itself carries many rights and restrictions on what both parties can do. The infamous phrase "your statatory rights are not affected". Knowing those rights is half the battle.
We've got some other neat laws over on this stuff. For example, if I ask the salesperson I need widget A for task B, then I later find that A doesn't do B, I'm entitled to a refund as the goods did not meet my needs. So, if you specifically said something about copy protections not hosing your machine, you would be practically guaranteed a refund should that then happen. Not that you won't have to put up a fight; however you just need to mention the name of the relevant law and the attitude changes instantly!
You did. Read the EULA.
These games should be carrying a warning similar to cigarettes in that case.
They do. Read the EULA. No one reads the EULA.
Using old hardware might work for you. You recycle it into something useful, you get something useful, and you also learn some new tricks in the process. However, it just doesn't scale and when faced with a challenge such as deliver working (robust) PCs to some harsh conditions with limited resources, you really have to go back to the drawing board.
In fact, often donating things hurts charities. Many drug companies "donate" outdated medicine to the third world to get tax breaks. The medicine is often useless and it costs the charity more money to legally dispose of it all.
Go watch the BBC documentary "The Power Of Nightmares", you can get it on archive.org. You've always been under some threat, and it's no accident. The cold war was extended by folks like Donald Rumsfeld, who claimed Russian intelegence indicated a greater threat than all the other inteligence indicated at the time. Sound familiar?
Hell yes! This was in the news just the other day:
No president will EVER fight against Echelon. The moment they do, they'll be taken to a darked smokey room showing an old 8mm film taken from a grassy piece of land, showing a well known event from a new angle. "Any questions Mr President?", "Sure, what's my agenda?"
(props to the late Bill Hicks for the paraphrased quote)
That sounds exactly like US foreign policy from 1960-2000 to me!! Especially WRT South American countries who's democratic elections gave power to socialists.
He he, that's a funny opinion. Sure, from a military view point it's futile, they can't win. However, I believe that they have managed to turn the US opinion on the war via bodybags, and that is far more likely to lead to US withdrawal than a few tatical defeats. With no US troops duct-taping the country together, civil war will break out and the country splits into it's ethnic groups who spend the next few hundred years fighting each other, with the occasional "thank you" note/bomb sent our way for helping them reach that point.
The democracy is voting and moving ahead, US casualties are down comparred to last year (deaths same, casualties down 20-25%
Got any figures for the Iraq Police Force, or civilians? If not, your numbers are irrelevant on the success of the war. Unless you simply don't give a fuck about them, which I suspect is the case for many people.
Besides, "democracy" is no a win point. Nothing about being a democracy means that you are a nice responsible member of the world community. Don't talk about democracy, talk about life expectancy, education, child mortality, services/sanitation, that's how you measure a country. There are dictatorships I'd rather be in over some places that call themselves "democratic". Not many tho! ;-)
Students, may I refer you to the above for the REAL reason the US is falling apart? Look up. Red vs Blue, the illusion of choice. Need to avoid debate? Assign blame!! Divert attention! Avoid discussing the issue at all costs!
Interesting, I've heard of this before. There is a Pocket PC virus scanner available, yet there are no viruses on that platform. A fool and his money are easily parted, or so the story goes.
To me, the advantage here has always been the availability of a quick patch. Not code that's inherently more secure due to it's license model.
Bullshit with a capital AND bold "B". The Windows viruses that have done the most harm recently are trojans and NO OS can deal with that problem. Sure, they might ask "Please enter root password", but that is just a speed bump. Most users will see it as the computer asking for the root password (and not the installer) and for years we've been telling them to read what it says and do it. What do you think they'll do?
As software gets more secure, trojan attacks will become more and more common. And where will your OS-X god be then? The whole point of this article is that most computer users believe that there is nothing to worry about, be it through ignorance (most Windows users) and/or arrogance. It seems it's bang-on-the-money going by the discussions going on here.
Oh, come on. So what if it's in the EULA. Lot's of shit is said in EULA's, and a large part of using that system is to hide the legalese from the end-consumer. That's the point. Just because it's quasi-legal, it doesn't mean it's morally sound. So, if your iTunes EULA says (near the bottom in an obtuse way) Apple claim the right to your first-born, then that's fine then? Well, it's in the EULA, so you'd better shut the hell up when they come to take him away.
It was behaving like an AJAX web application
Ohh, buzzwords. AJAX is simply a DHTML implemented client/server model using async xml/html gets. Anyone who actually works in the field would say "it's behaving like a typical client/server app". The particular GUI implementation isn't relevant.
Are you saying that you are not taking responsibility for the buttons you click? Collecting info on what you click on would not be anywhere as useful as what you buy from them.
You are pretty far off the mark. You don't seem to understand the power of marketing. Knowing what music people were listening to (and how often) is pure marketing gold. They can tell which songs are liked; which artists are similar based on playlists. I could go on and on describing the info you can mine out of this data. They can tell that someone who is listening to artist X surfs for info about artist Y. This tells the marketing people that if they advertise Y in media that already mentions X, they'll get a good return.
They have no way of knowing how you got that music onto your computer.
And, your point is? It's not worth collecting the data because you don't the source?
You have no evidence that they are sending the User ID on the store but people who do not have an account would not have one so what is your point exactly? Your IP address? I have news for you, every website you visit knows a lot more about the computer you are using than just the IP address.
Don't you think I know that? I'm talking about globally unique IDs, I've already said in another post that I've worked on similar systems in the past.
They aren't tracking the IP address with the intention of hunting you down with silent black helecopters. It's used to differentiate users and track history over a longer period. Don't get me wrong, knowing that IP 192.168.0.1 listened to three albums in this session in itself is hugely valuable, but if you can correlate that data over a period of weeks, you can learn a lot about your target markets listening habits. That allows you to monitor trends and "create" new artists that meet the publics needs. There are two parts of these systems I am weary on: disclosure of it to the end user, and the crappy manufactured music it ultimately will result in! ;-)
Some people actually like the feature and consider it useful in helping them discover music. What are you embarrassed about? Do you have N'Sync songs in your library?
It is helpful, and I've written similar features. However, it's important that you are upfront with the user about privacy concerns. You are breaking the law in several countries if you don't. To the best of my knowledge, a EULA has never successfully stood up as a legal document in any country I am familiar with.
No, one of the many issues were that it updated the advert pane each time you put the CD in. Coincidentally this also told Sony whenever the CD was being played, and by which IP address.
Do you realise how much effort the music industry puts into compiling charts? Market research? They are having orgasms on the thought of knowing what we are listening to. It's very valuable information and I have no problem with them accessing it with my permission.
Other tools do the same thing, however they all ask you if you want to enable the feature and they all describe the privacy implications. Even Microsoft's Media Player does it, this is schoolboy stuff.
Even if they did, if the request does not have any information specific to you, you have nothing to worry about.
Client ID? User Id on the music store? IP address? Hello? The Sony rootkit hit one, non-changing and non-unique URL yet that created a massive backlash. Apple != Sony it seems, lot's of love for Apple, none for Sony.
Ask me that in six months. Seriously. I'm sure as hell going to be gathering these stats, but the output will be Creative Commons licensed and fully anonymous. It will also be an opt-in system.
When you log on to your favorite IM or Webmail do you take their word that they're not keeping copies of everything your write?
At first, yes. Then if they are caught lying about it, I never trust them again. Anyone who trusts a liar is a fool.
Just as well you didn't say that last week, when I was fixing my box after removing Norton. Lot's of blue screens and other such crap started the moment I uninstalled it. Had to remove so much junk by hand, unfortunately I didn't know about the cleaner. There is clearly a problem here; if there wasn't why would they spend resource producing and maintaining a repair product?
99% off "problems" people have with Norton are directly related to part of their OS being broken, like MSI, IE, scripting, DCOM, etc etc.
Yup, because Nortons uninstall caused these problems. I was very close to reimaging, but I had too much setup I didn't want to repeat.
Norton products aren't for power users, they're for home users.
Then why did I need "power user" knowledge in order to perform the simple task of removal? IMHO Norton is for corporate environments where the end user cannot be trusted.
After spending days cleaning out obscure HEX GUIDs from the registry, it still didn't work. In the end my googling for the GUIDs they'd used unearthed a registry file that appeared to remove every Symantec entry from the registry that's I'd found. More importantly, it had some additional obscure ones I would never have found. Things who's key values made me think WTF? This is my AV software?
Backed up the registry, ran the strange clean.reg I found on the net (what harm could it do... ;-) and all seems well now. Symantec stuff seems to install itself using techniques similar to a nail bomb.
In order to the first, you must do the second. There is no other way to do this. If the Windows APIs can see the data, then applications built on the APIs can see the data.
Release the source of the server app and then we might believe you. We've all heard the "not actually collected" bit many times. Sony first tried to deny this particular privacy invasion in their rootkit, yet later they were caught out. Unique URLs combined with IPs, what more do you need?
Frankly, if I were writing such a service, logging some of the most financially valuable market research you get your hands on is a given. There wouldn't be any debate on the issue, you log it and sell it! And if you are morally sound, you offer it as an opt-on program and be honest about it.
I've actually been using Jetty as a development platform to test my code, but it's a bit of a memory hog. However, I note now that Jetty 6 is out and one of the goals was to reduce the footprint and dependancies apparently. I'll be checking the update out, thanks for the suggestion.
Sorry for what must sound like a technical support question, but is it possible to run Tapestry in a lightweight HTTP server such as Simple? It uses the usual HttpRequest/HttpResponse API for dealing with requests and has a minimal footprint. Can I call something in the Tapestry API and pass it the request to render the page?
Or can anyone recommend any other lightweight Java HTML generation frameworks that don't require full-blown servlet containers such as Tomcat?
Did she install the OS, or was it pre-configured? If it was pre-configured, then a comparison to Windows is weak. It's just as easy to enter a WEP key in Windows, they even have a pretty little popup dialog to ask you if it is determined that one is required. And SP2 is secure out-of-the-box, with firewall & auto-upgrades turned on.
TCO means NOTHING for one machine. When you admin a few dozen, then it matters.
I was going to say the exact same thing. As someone who has been an engineer in a laptop manufacturing plant avoid the new ones. Nothing to do with Apple or any other manufacturer, or even laptops in general. Avoid first gen unless you can afford to be without it now and then while it's away for the inevitable repair. Unless of course you want a future class-action suit and see the legal process as an upgrade path... ;-)
Personally, I've always liked the Thinkpad, and no, it's not IBM I worked for. If you want a secure machine, check out the password recovery options. "Buy a new motherboard and harddrive, and throw away the old ones" works for me. Smart thieves should know that a secure Thinkpad is a dead laptop to them.
Then why do you feel the desire to have a part in the settlement? It's supposed to componsate people who have lost out due to reliability problems, not provide free money to greedy bastards.