Chinese IP space is also responsible for the lion's share of system probes and DoS activity.
Care to back that broad, sweeping statement up with facts? Didn't think so, as you are talking nonsence. Most probes and DoS attacks come from zombie hosts, and out of the superpowers, China has the LEAST number of potential zombies, due to it having the least number of connected hosts. If the "lions share" of attacks come from there, then it would buck the trends that all the legitimate online security trackers are noticing.
Buy something at Wal-Mart lately? Well it could have been made with slave^H^H^H^H^Hprison labor.
Does your car not have license plates? Prisons in my country often do laundry service for-profit. How is this any different?
their bellicosity toward Taiwan
Any superpower would regard a self-proclaimed "independent" sub-state in the same way. Did you miss they day in school they talked about why July 4th is popular in America?
aborting babies because they're girls and more
We have "designer babies", where the parents are choosing the genes, not just the sex!! And if any of the eggs turn out to be the wrong sex, they will not be selected for insamination. No different.
The aborting girls thing is mostly an racist urban myth. Apparently they eat babies over there.
they pretty much let their hackers take pot shots at the US' infrastructure with maybe a slap on the wrist
Gimmie ONE case of a US citizen being punished for hacking into an enemy superpower's infrastructure. Fuck, they'd get offered a job in NSA instantly!
The US, EU and Japan aren't perfect, but they are a lot better than China.
Agreed. However, China isn't as bad as it's made out to be by all the propaganda, and many of the people we call allies, e.g. Saudi Arabia are FAR worse than they are. How "good" country is in another countries eyes has nothing to do with idealism and everything to do with interoperability. If you are a dictator that's open to business, then great! If you are democratically elected and opposed to business, a coup will be along any time now...
As laudable as it might sound, China doesn't want its citizens knowing about western technology.
More laughable than laudable! What a stupid thing to believe! What, do you think they censor out every gadget in the hollywood DVDs available everywhere in China? Why? It's POLITICAL thought they censor, not technology.
We aren't much better ourselves, unpopular speach isn't exactly welcome and is likely to get you a one way ticket to camp xray.
But what about the so called "bullet proof" hosting that you can get in China? A lot of the Viagra spammers have their ordering site in China and no number of complaints filed make any difference.
Can you please back that statement up with a few examples? I'm having a hard time figuring out how capitalist scams are taking place in a communist country that isn't all that favourable to foreign business. IIRC you need government approval to do business in China as a foreigner. Which Chinese banks are transfering the profits back to the US? Which hosting companies are doing this?
I suspect that this "china is to blame for all our woes" is simply just plain racism. It is slashdot after all...
Unless you're on the newest version of Windows you're pretty screwed unless you can configure packet filtering on the NIC.
There is a built in firewall from Windows 2000 onwards, accessible via the network card properties. It's not all that functional as firewalls go, but it'll stop inbound nicely until you get yourself going.
But IMHO this is a valid story, but not for Slashdot consumption, preaching to the choir here. Joe Sixpack would NEVER even consider pluging in the wire as dangerous, so if these stories simply prompt him to ask a more knowledgable friend, then they are worthwhile. Seems to be a week for "raising awareness"...
Get a cheap DVD burner and some DVD software, rip the main movie vob from the disk and reburn it on it's own. Result is a disk that plays instantly, your sort of Thomas on Crack fix for the kids. No re-encoding, no loss in quality. Plus you needn't worry that the disk gets damaged as you can make another. You'd probably find that they could have fitted the whole six disc set on two disks, if not for the love of making more money. Then using that sale to further advertise to people so young and impressionable that you have to wonder how they sleep at night!
This may or may not be legal where you are, but you are doing nothing morally wrong and the lawyers can stuff DVDs where the sun don't shine as far as I'm concerned. Sideways.
There may be some specialized discs that do something like this but I don't not think it will be mandatory.
I reckon it will be an add-on, for watching video on demand. If you had broadband, would you mind if the trailers changed each time you watched your local copy of the file (provided you can skip them)? The media companies would love to offer up-to-date trailers, and most users would see it as a plus-point.
They could also add interactive content that having the disk locally unlocks access to. This could even have new "bonus features" added to it over time. Interesting. Digital cable is already doing some neat things here in the UK, but the boxes are about four years old and the UI is incredibly slow with complex content. This could really raise the bar.
Having a net connected set-top box is already do-able. The current version of Xbox Media Centre has scripts to trawl several websites for video stream content. Some of these are iFilm, Stupid Videos & Apple, between which you have an massive library of free media to choose from. Short-films/animations, video game previews/features, music videos and so on. Very impressive, even more so in that it's almost "underground" with the legal grey-area of XBox modding and illegal MS-Compiler created software. I find it surprising though, and possibly indicative of the future, that the best featured devices out there are hacked in some way. I can see a large number of hacks & tweaks for these new players. Jeez, if they have enough CPU/memory you could deploy war archives on it to do just about anything!
GP poster cited small businesses as an example of who cheats their "profit" calculations, though not a particularly relevant one. We're talking about Hollywood production companies, none of which are, by any stretch of the imagination, small businesses.
So? His point was that lot's of companies cook the books in the same way, which was a valid point and something I hadn't personally considered.
we really do need some kind of law against "rebates" and, what does Microsoft call it, "matching marketing funds"? These companies can not play fairly, and these accounting tricks need to be outlawed
Like that's going to happen! The people required to push for this law, politicians, use accounting tricks and double-think to change the word "bribe" into "campaign contribution" for exactly the same reason, i.e. obscuring the fact that what they are doing is illegal and morally wrong.
while the 45s.com guys are probably just ripping off the 45s
I don't think that's the case. Many of the 45s that would make up that list would be valuable on their own, if they were original pressings. From the sounds of it, this "45s" collection is entirely re-pressed (going on the descriptions of the actual disks, e.g. no artwork sleve) and the fact that they are selling more than one collection backs this up.:-)
If the above is correct, they will most likely be working from digital masters from the copyright owners, which they will likely have then used for the producing digital collection (otherwise you mulitply the sourcing effort by two). Despite all this, they could be 128kbps mp3s, or some horrific format like Real Audio!
All total conjecture though! Pretty neat product for a well-off person who has always wanted a jukebox and doesn't want to do the work of buying the music, and the digital mirror is a great add-on, albeit a really expensive add-on. I can see this sort of thing being popular with the BMW types.;-)
Except that doing bodily harm is in some circumstances, legal. AFAIK, firearm manufacturers aren't marketing their guns to gangs.
Have the makers of the Tek9 or Uzi ever given guns free for use in a movie, in the same way car makers etc do? That could considered marketing their product for illegal use in many movies that feature gang culture.
Nokia or another cellphone maker, I believe, implements the audio profile for their phones instead of telephony. Most BT headsets use the telephony profile. Their BT headset does both audio and telephony. So you end up with a situation where their headset and only their headset can work with their phones.
Sounds like something Nokia would do. They are the Microsoft of the phone world, completely non-interoperable with anything else, and full of vendor lock-in. Try migrating your contacts to another manufacturer if you fancy a laugh.
That being said... why would anyone spend time and considerable money developing... stereo BlueTooth headphones?
Emm, because they have mp3 capable PDA/phones and don't want to untangle the headphones whenever they want to make a call/listen to music? Yeah, it is tech overkill, but so is a lot of stuff. Being able to pull out the 'phones and just have them work would be rather handy.
The tangle pisses me off, so I've resorted to velcro tie-wraps for them. I did consider the stereo headphones (yes, they are available), but they were a tad bulky/expensive. Give it time...
It's very irritating to lose my middle-click open new tab function. If I had realised you couldn't use the touch pad as a button, I wouldn't have bought it.
Pester the maker for a driver update, there is no hardware reason why it won't work, provided they have just thrown a laptop touchpad in there (which accept clicks nicely).
Since there is no way to press down on that panel, that means there is no middle click for us X users out there.
You've never used a touchpad on a laptop, right? You can click on these pads, just tap it, you can also double click of course. If you want to drag something, double-tap it but hold on the second tap, and move your finger around the pad.
What exactly is the "Bollocks" directed at? Are you really suggesting that millions of people do *not* use public transport daily in the UK?
No, they use it through a lack of choice. Not many folk choose public transport here. But yeah, millions do suffer it daily as you say.
Do you seriously consider taking the bus all the time, only to be confounded by your own ignorance of the timetable? Why not pick up a copy of it?
I do have a copy of a timetable. Firstly, it only covers one operator, which is about half of the routes in the Glasgow area (missing some I would actually use). Then, it doesn't even have the times on it, as they don't publish them, instead you get told what hours it runs and how often. The hours it runs is about as vague as it gets, basically the 24-hour ones are a different colour, that's it! It also cost me money to buy, which is absurd, what kind of company makes you pay for commercials/price lists? Since buying it though, I've used the bus a hell of a lot more. When you get the bus through a city, you want to know exactly where it goes otherwise you won't use it. I'm not walking 10 blocks because the bus took a wierd route!!
I agree that the information on the web could be a lot better and more standardised.
Ironically, they do have it on their website (well, one of the operators do). I'd settle for "please take one" leaflets on the buses, and print outs in the bus stops instead of the (!) LCD flat panels they are installing, showing commercials. Christ, what would it cost to do a one-time mail drop to every household in the country in an area that has public transport? A hell of a lot less than the cost of annually inspecting everyones GPS tracker which is apparently being installed for the same reasons!!;-)
Millions upon millions of people use public transport in the UK every day. It is not perfect and definitely needs more investment. But to say it is "unusable" just boggles the mind....
Bollocks. I'm sitting in my flat and I need to get to point B. If I want to get a bus I couldn't anyway. I have no information on the routes or the different operators that the journey will require. I don't even know if there is a bus going where I want to go. I would have to pay multiple fares for different legs of the journey for different operators. Most of them require exact change, or you lose the extra (explains the 95p fares minimum fares).
If there was information on the public transport available, then it might be worthwhile. Want to reduce pollution? Don't insist on everyone having GPS trackers in their car. Instead, post them a bus timetable, listing every route for every operator. Have an SMS service that you could query for info. Insist on a standardised timetable dataformat and have sites collating it for actual use.
A monkey could do better. The above is 5 mins of someone randoms time. The people paid to "look after" public transport are a complete waste of space.
It's funny how the UK government changed the main incentive for the cards when the original reason, "to stop terrorism" (when the only people who wouldn't have cards would be terrorists) did not gain support.
It's all about the Al Qaida, WMD, the "bad man", "the children", democracy building...
There are a lot of good uses for near-unbreakable ID. The question is not the cards, the question is the database: who will keep it, and who will be allowed to read it.
There is no such thing as "near-unbreakable ID". Find a friendly person at the place where they admin the system, which will be huge and full of minimum wagers by the way. Then, bribe said person to give me a copy of your card. Or wait a few months until the forgers catch up.
Now this "near-breakable" card is doing the opposite of what it is supposed to. If it's seen as so trustworthy, I could pass myself off as you without ever being questioned. That is entirely counter-productive and makes the problem far worse.
Please note you can also keep a database without issuing the cards...
Yup, they already do this, for taxes, passpords, elections, anti-fraud, anti-terror, criminal record, jury duty. Have multiple databases is far better as a problem in one doesn't instantly make you an "unperson".
It was front page news on the BBC website, shortly after the general election
^ Important emphasis added by me. It was like a week or two after they won the election this came out of nowhere. In a just society, that reason alone should have stopped the idea dead.
Did you skip that all those classes in elemtenary school where they teach tolerance, what prejudice is, that its bad, and about diversity
You can't stop human nature. It's natural to judge people by their looks, at a primal level we do this all the time to determine if something/someone is a threat. And if you wear a lot black, well, everone knows bad guys always wear black!!
This has been demonstrated before. Two girls, friends of each other, decided to get a job. They both went to the mall, however one went looking like a cheerleader, the other like a goth. They wrote about their experiences. Predictably, the blond was given an interview then and there, while the goth was grudginly directed towards an application form (after being ignored and being told there were no openings).
Anyone that says they don't judge on looks is a liar. Whether or not the discriminate is another thing, but we all judge.
The glory of America is that A. we all dont have to think like you, and B. that we dont all think like you. People fought and died for these rights.
Oh, do shut up with that nationalist propaganda crap. Firstly, most places are like that, you are nothing special despite your flag waving indoctination since starting in school. Secondly, perhaps you should open your eyes and see how "people of colour" are treated in your country (and it's prisons). That's just the African-decended people. Forget being an Arab right now, christ that must suck!!
Those who died for those rights would be rolling in their graves if they knew how it turned out. Mind you, didn't the founding fathers keep slaves while they were writing "all men are created equal"? Depends how you define "men" I suppose.
Slashdot Mirror
Em, when was the last time you checked their download page? It's been out for phones for quite some time! And yes, it works over BT/WiFi.
Care to back that broad, sweeping statement up with facts? Didn't think so, as you are talking nonsence. Most probes and DoS attacks come from zombie hosts, and out of the superpowers, China has the LEAST number of potential zombies, due to it having the least number of connected hosts. If the "lions share" of attacks come from there, then it would buck the trends that all the legitimate online security trackers are noticing.
Does your car not have license plates? Prisons in my country often do laundry service for-profit. How is this any different?
their bellicosity toward Taiwan
Any superpower would regard a self-proclaimed "independent" sub-state in the same way. Did you miss they day in school they talked about why July 4th is popular in America?
aborting babies because they're girls and more
We have "designer babies", where the parents are choosing the genes, not just the sex!! And if any of the eggs turn out to be the wrong sex, they will not be selected for insamination. No different.
The aborting girls thing is mostly an racist urban myth. Apparently they eat babies over there.
they pretty much let their hackers take pot shots at the US' infrastructure with maybe a slap on the wrist
Gimmie ONE case of a US citizen being punished for hacking into an enemy superpower's infrastructure. Fuck, they'd get offered a job in NSA instantly!
The US, EU and Japan aren't perfect, but they are a lot better than China.
Agreed. However, China isn't as bad as it's made out to be by all the propaganda, and many of the people we call allies, e.g. Saudi Arabia are FAR worse than they are. How "good" country is in another countries eyes has nothing to do with idealism and everything to do with interoperability. If you are a dictator that's open to business, then great! If you are democratically elected and opposed to business, a coup will be along any time now...
More laughable than laudable! What a stupid thing to believe! What, do you think they censor out every gadget in the hollywood DVDs available everywhere in China? Why? It's POLITICAL thought they censor, not technology.
We aren't much better ourselves, unpopular speach isn't exactly welcome and is likely to get you a one way ticket to camp xray.
Can you please back that statement up with a few examples? I'm having a hard time figuring out how capitalist scams are taking place in a communist country that isn't all that favourable to foreign business. IIRC you need government approval to do business in China as a foreigner. Which Chinese banks are transfering the profits back to the US? Which hosting companies are doing this?
I suspect that this "china is to blame for all our woes" is simply just plain racism. It is slashdot after all...
Unless you're on the newest version of Windows you're pretty screwed unless you can configure packet filtering on the NIC.
There is a built in firewall from Windows 2000 onwards, accessible via the network card properties. It's not all that functional as firewalls go, but it'll stop inbound nicely until you get yourself going.
But IMHO this is a valid story, but not for Slashdot consumption, preaching to the choir here. Joe Sixpack would NEVER even consider pluging in the wire as dangerous, so if these stories simply prompt him to ask a more knowledgable friend, then they are worthwhile. Seems to be a week for "raising awareness"...
This may or may not be legal where you are, but you are doing nothing morally wrong and the lawyers can stuff DVDs where the sun don't shine as far as I'm concerned. Sideways.
I reckon it will be an add-on, for watching video on demand. If you had broadband, would you mind if the trailers changed each time you watched your local copy of the file (provided you can skip them)? The media companies would love to offer up-to-date trailers, and most users would see it as a plus-point.
They could also add interactive content that having the disk locally unlocks access to. This could even have new "bonus features" added to it over time. Interesting. Digital cable is already doing some neat things here in the UK, but the boxes are about four years old and the UI is incredibly slow with complex content. This could really raise the bar.
Having a net connected set-top box is already do-able. The current version of Xbox Media Centre has scripts to trawl several websites for video stream content. Some of these are iFilm, Stupid Videos & Apple, between which you have an massive library of free media to choose from. Short-films/animations, video game previews/features, music videos and so on. Very impressive, even more so in that it's almost "underground" with the legal grey-area of XBox modding and illegal MS-Compiler created software. I find it surprising though, and possibly indicative of the future, that the best featured devices out there are hacked in some way. I can see a large number of hacks & tweaks for these new players. Jeez, if they have enough CPU/memory you could deploy war archives on it to do just about anything!
So? His point was that lot's of companies cook the books in the same way, which was a valid point and something I hadn't personally considered.
Grandparent poster said small businesses, where I reckon the majority won't be traded on the stock exchange.
Like that's going to happen! The people required to push for this law, politicians, use accounting tricks and double-think to change the word "bribe" into "campaign contribution" for exactly the same reason, i.e. obscuring the fact that what they are doing is illegal and morally wrong.
I don't think that's the case. Many of the 45s that would make up that list would be valuable on their own, if they were original pressings. From the sounds of it, this "45s" collection is entirely re-pressed (going on the descriptions of the actual disks, e.g. no artwork sleve) and the fact that they are selling more than one collection backs this up. :-)
If the above is correct, they will most likely be working from digital masters from the copyright owners, which they will likely have then used for the producing digital collection (otherwise you mulitply the sourcing effort by two). Despite all this, they could be 128kbps mp3s, or some horrific format like Real Audio!
All total conjecture though! Pretty neat product for a well-off person who has always wanted a jukebox and doesn't want to do the work of buying the music, and the digital mirror is a great add-on, albeit a really expensive add-on. I can see this sort of thing being popular with the BMW types. ;-)
Have the makers of the Tek9 or Uzi ever given guns free for use in a movie, in the same way car makers etc do? That could considered marketing their product for illegal use in many movies that feature gang culture.
Sounds like something Nokia would do. They are the Microsoft of the phone world, completely non-interoperable with anything else, and full of vendor lock-in. Try migrating your contacts to another manufacturer if you fancy a laugh.
Emm, because they have mp3 capable PDA/phones and don't want to untangle the headphones whenever they want to make a call/listen to music? Yeah, it is tech overkill, but so is a lot of stuff. Being able to pull out the 'phones and just have them work would be rather handy.
The tangle pisses me off, so I've resorted to velcro tie-wraps for them. I did consider the stereo headphones (yes, they are available), but they were a tad bulky/expensive. Give it time...
Pester the maker for a driver update, there is no hardware reason why it won't work, provided they have just thrown a laptop touchpad in there (which accept clicks nicely).
You've never used a touchpad on a laptop, right? You can click on these pads, just tap it, you can also double click of course. If you want to drag something, double-tap it but hold on the second tap, and move your finger around the pad.
What backwater do you live in? ;-) Here it's DVDs, but they charge quite a lot for the service. What parent would say no....? Nice little earner!
No, they use it through a lack of choice. Not many folk choose public transport here. But yeah, millions do suffer it daily as you say.
Do you seriously consider taking the bus all the time, only to be confounded by your own ignorance of the timetable? Why not pick up a copy of it?
I do have a copy of a timetable. Firstly, it only covers one operator, which is about half of the routes in the Glasgow area (missing some I would actually use). Then, it doesn't even have the times on it, as they don't publish them, instead you get told what hours it runs and how often. The hours it runs is about as vague as it gets, basically the 24-hour ones are a different colour, that's it! It also cost me money to buy, which is absurd, what kind of company makes you pay for commercials/price lists? Since buying it though, I've used the bus a hell of a lot more. When you get the bus through a city, you want to know exactly where it goes otherwise you won't use it. I'm not walking 10 blocks because the bus took a wierd route!!
I agree that the information on the web could be a lot better and more standardised.
Ironically, they do have it on their website (well, one of the operators do). I'd settle for "please take one" leaflets on the buses, and print outs in the bus stops instead of the (!) LCD flat panels they are installing, showing commercials. Christ, what would it cost to do a one-time mail drop to every household in the country in an area that has public transport? A hell of a lot less than the cost of annually inspecting everyones GPS tracker which is apparently being installed for the same reasons!! ;-)
Bollocks. I'm sitting in my flat and I need to get to point B. If I want to get a bus I couldn't anyway. I have no information on the routes or the different operators that the journey will require. I don't even know if there is a bus going where I want to go. I would have to pay multiple fares for different legs of the journey for different operators. Most of them require exact change, or you lose the extra (explains the 95p fares minimum fares).
If there was information on the public transport available, then it might be worthwhile. Want to reduce pollution? Don't insist on everyone having GPS trackers in their car. Instead, post them a bus timetable, listing every route for every operator. Have an SMS service that you could query for info. Insist on a standardised timetable dataformat and have sites collating it for actual use.
A monkey could do better. The above is 5 mins of someone randoms time. The people paid to "look after" public transport are a complete waste of space.
It's all about the Al Qaida, WMD, the "bad man", "the children", democracy building...
Ah fuck it: PROFIT.
There is no such thing as "near-unbreakable ID". Find a friendly person at the place where they admin the system, which will be huge and full of minimum wagers by the way. Then, bribe said person to give me a copy of your card. Or wait a few months until the forgers catch up.
Now this "near-breakable" card is doing the opposite of what it is supposed to. If it's seen as so trustworthy, I could pass myself off as you without ever being questioned. That is entirely counter-productive and makes the problem far worse.
Please note you can also keep a database without issuing the cards...
Yup, they already do this, for taxes, passpords, elections, anti-fraud, anti-terror, criminal record, jury duty. Have multiple databases is far better as a problem in one doesn't instantly make you an "unperson".
^ Important emphasis added by me. It was like a week or two after they won the election this came out of nowhere. In a just society, that reason alone should have stopped the idea dead.
You can't stop human nature. It's natural to judge people by their looks, at a primal level we do this all the time to determine if something/someone is a threat. And if you wear a lot black, well, everone knows bad guys always wear black!!
This has been demonstrated before. Two girls, friends of each other, decided to get a job. They both went to the mall, however one went looking like a cheerleader, the other like a goth. They wrote about their experiences. Predictably, the blond was given an interview then and there, while the goth was grudginly directed towards an application form (after being ignored and being told there were no openings).
Anyone that says they don't judge on looks is a liar. Whether or not the discriminate is another thing, but we all judge.
The glory of America is that A. we all dont have to think like you, and B. that we dont all think like you. People fought and died for these rights.
Oh, do shut up with that nationalist propaganda crap. Firstly, most places are like that, you are nothing special despite your flag waving indoctination since starting in school. Secondly, perhaps you should open your eyes and see how "people of colour" are treated in your country (and it's prisons). That's just the African-decended people. Forget being an Arab right now, christ that must suck!!
Those who died for those rights would be rolling in their graves if they knew how it turned out. Mind you, didn't the founding fathers keep slaves while they were writing "all men are created equal"? Depends how you define "men" I suppose.
Just something I find curious. I mean, it's not as though GW isn't ripe for parody.
It's not like the Simpsons is on Fox or anything...wait a moment...!?!