I thought it was interesting that she got busted for sharing on i2hub -- I was surprised when I heard of pending MPAA lawsuits against movie swappers on i2. I'm still not quite sure how the *IAA infiltrated I2, I presume they must have just paid off some undergrads to act as a proxy onto the network. It was a sad day when i2hub got shut down, it was the only cool I2 application if nothing else.
Also, Kudos to MIT for apparently at least trying to delay giving up the student's name. I know that, at my Uni at least, the IT admins have no love for the RIAA lawyers, though there's not a whole lot you can do against an army of lawyers.
All that, and they still don't know how to set up DNS properly.
-----------
$ host harvard.edu
harvard.edu A record currently not present
-----------
I notified them about this months ago, but they didn't seem to care. Most web browsers automatically try the "www" prefix when you type, say, "harvard.edu" into your address bar, so you don't notice this problem generally. However, if you try wget, you can see it fail.
I think, if this bill actually passes, that there will be little effective change. For example, if you see current advertisements for Absolutepoker.net (IIRC) on TV: in the small print it says "This is not a real gambling site" -- mainly because advertising offshore gambling on US TV is apparently a legal grey area. Similarly, look at Kazaa.com -- they just have a disclaimer telling Australian users they "must not download or use Kazaa".
If they outlaw Americans' gambling online with offshore companies, these places will simply put up a disclaimer saying not to use the site if you're in the U.S., and proceed merrily along raking in the illicit money.
This is believable. Windows has gotten a lot more stable with 2K/XP.
I've had things like the desktop lock up on me but killing and restarting explorer.exe with the task manager seems to cure that.
I've found that a lot of times in 2k/XP , if explorer starts chewing through memory due to a leak somewhere, using the task manager to kill and restart explorer.exe usually only provides a temporary fix, with the system becoming unstable again soon.
Meanwhile I now work at a Linux based company and have rebooted on a regular basis.
I find this a bit surprising, and kind of hard to believe given the lack of specifics. The great thing about linux is that, even when you have a run-away process chewing through memory, you can always kill -9 it and it will go away, even if that process is X-Windows/KDE/something big. As compared to Windows, where you can end task a process many times before it decides it will finally exit.
There's not as much groupthink here as you might believe. I happen to think that Linux is, overall, a lot more stable than its counterpart based on my own experience -- I couldn't care less what position the zealots here supports.
This sounds like sort of a nifty idea, since a USB drive can be handy to have.. but if it were released as a regular CD or online download, couldn't I just put it on a USB drive myself? Also, $30 is pretty steep for a CD's worth of music, even if they do throw in the USB stick. Not to mention that in a few years, the handiness of having this USB stick will be outweighed by capacity increases.. no one will be using 128 MB sticks in a couple years' time. I'm just not seeing this pan out.
I can't believe no one's bothered to state the obvious: Use imaging.
If you're very lucky, the worst that will happen over a period of months with Windows is a bit of clutter in the registry and startup menu caused by programs that are generally considered benign [iTunes sneaking in with quickTime, iPod Manager etc. comes to mind]. That's the best-case scenario.
If you're not lucky, you'll get hit by some spyware that creeps in through IE, or worse, a serious exploit like the one mentioned earlier. Most Windows boxes of students I know tend towards having at least a couple spyware apps snuck in, or general slow-down-ware that's hard to classify (the crap from Real, WeatherBug, programs like Norton(?) that sneak copy-protection crap into the MBR, registry and god knows where else..) . I know, I spend a fair amount of time having to clean the bad cruft up. You can't really fault the user if they've gotten crap loaded by those #$(ing Sony CDs or from IE exploits.
Back to my original point -- you should prepare for the unexpected. You never know when the next major Windows worm is going to infect your PC, even if you're careful. After you install Windows with all service packs , just use a Knoppix boot disk and dd [ dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda1/hard_driveA.img, with sda1 being a USB drive... also works for network backups, see here] , or pay for Norton Ghost or similar commercial software. If you anticipate having to use it often, or on multiple PCs, install any programs you think you might need (antivirus/antispyware/other apps) before making the backup, and you'll turn an afternoon job into a half-hour job.
Trust me, this will save you a lot of time in the long run. I can believe that it is possible to tightly lock down a Windows box so that you'll never see performance decreases or malware sneaking in... but in reality, I'd bet it's almost impossible. Myself, I use linux just because I find it has fewer "surprises" that are essentially unfixable. I'm not trying to denigrate Windows, I know it's handy for a lot of stuff, just saying to be careful and be prepared if you do use it.
What I think is telling about this story is how long it's taken for this all to unfold. Think about the enormous publicity this has caused -- even the mainstream media have daily reports on Sony's debacle. There's a lot of people looking through the code to figure out what the hell's in there.
Sony's worse than that Maui X-Stream "Company" that does business solely by ripping off random OS projects. I do think it's a little disheartening that it took the publicizing of a rootkit in the CD before people even began asking what else could be in there -- and it turns out, there's quite a few uncredited GPL'ed/BSD projects in there, like DVD Jon's Code and the mp3 code and associate libraries they just stole.
If it's taken this much publicity for people to unearth stolen code hidden in Sony's proprietary format (the XCP file on the CD), think about how much other GPL'ed code has likely been misappropriated and snuck into other projects out there. I can easily see overbearing PHBs turning a blind eye to this sort of behavior in the face of unrealistic deadlines and such. A sad state of affairs. Sony's being exposed, but I'll bet there's many more such companies out there below our radars.
Because you need domain knowledge. I have no idea of what a MechE does in his day to day worklife.
I've found this to be mostly true, especially in the past. I've been looking for decent Electrical Engineering tools for Linux. Being a student, I can't really afford any of the commercial solutions (and they're actually not all that great either.. I find PSpice to be complete crap). I'd like to have some basic tools just for drawing circuits, never mind accurately modeling them, but the ones that exist are pretty bad. Oregano is the most decent of the bunch, but it has really terrible UI bugs (can't edit out unnecessary pins or labels), and sometimes its internal grid gets misaligned and the wires you're drawing won't connect properly.
This isn't even stuff that's that hard to code -- the CompSci students at my school all have to take the intro circuits class.
On a positive note, it's pretty encouraging how far projects like Audacity (audio editing), Gimp (image editing), inkscape (vector graphics) and a whole slew more I'm forgetting have come -- these are all difficult projects, and especially difficult to code with a decent UI, and I've found them much more useable as of late. So perhaps there's hope for smaller projects that aren't as widely used, as, say, Firefox.
How does this compare to RC5-64?
on
RSA-640 Factored
·
· Score: 1
Wow.. 193 bits. I'm quite astounded that it's come this far. I'm actually a little puzzled.. wasn't it only three years ago that it took something like four years and thousands of distributed PCs to crack RC5-64 (64 bits, as I understand it) ?
If I'm not mistaken, shouldn't it be 2^129 times more difficult to factor a 193 bit number than a 64 bit one? Perhaps I'm not understanding something.. someone want to clue me in?
Why not just show a picture of an object and you a multiple choice answer of what it is?
Well, an obvious problem is you'd have to spend time manually compiling a database of objects and their corresponding pictures. And then it'd only take one spammer to continually load your form, and create a hash of all (or even just many) of the picture->word pairs and your system would be defeated.
However.. this game called Guess the google made me think of a new possibility.. You could have a list of a a few thousand simple words, and automatically pull up the first 20 google images for that work (like in the game) and just have people guess the word. Would be much harder for a spammer to create a table of all the image->word correlations, because you'd be able to use most simple words in the dictionary. Possibly even give users a few guesses in the case of a hard-to-guess word. And a lot more fun than having to squint at mangled random letters in colorful font to boot.
That actually gives me a good idea. Instead of taking this case to the Supreme Court, which would be likely to rule on it as a simple contract dispute (as has apparently already been done) it would be incredible if someone could take the time to setup a new case that would make the courts see non-competes for what they really are:
Have a destitute person sign a contract to work 80 hours a week as a cleaning person for minimum wage+overtime. Put in the contract a "non-compete" clause vindictively saying the servant can't work anywhere else for, oh, say ten years. Then have the employer sue after the servant leaves and tries to work somewhere else for breach of contract. (Note you could probably get away with not even having the "servant" actually work for a year, but just have both parties agree to the contract for the sake of filing suit against each other)
I think such a case would make the courts realize that non-competes are just a fancy way to deprive employees of potential income after leaving the company -- especially in such a clear-cut case where trade secrets aren't even a factor. In the above scenario, the employer should also be seen to be in violation of the minimum wage laws, since the employee effectively can't work anywhere to earn income after leaving the past job. This isn't all that dissimilar from programmers not being able to get any sort of decent job after they leave under a non-compete (where else are they going to get a job outside of their field.. McDonald's?). In any event, I think such a case would force a court to re-evaluate their love for such contracts, especially in such a case where the non-compete borders upon slavery.
Incidentally, I see recent braindead decisions of the Supreme Court to be partly caused by them not being presented with more clear-cut cases. If, for example, the emininent domain case had been about one ruthless business trying to takeover the property of a rival business' CEO as punishment (assuming they really would use his/her property for a tax-generating business) the courts might have seen what unbridled power such an interpration of eminent domain gives companies, and ruled differently.
Google had responded by stating that any copyrighted works would be limited to bibliographical information and a few short lines of selected texts.
I can't see how this is true. If you use Google Print services right now, and use their search feature to search for words inside the text, you can actually read the entire book online for free, with some patience, merely by searching for common words and reading three pages deep at a time.
For example, in this book ("Die Broke"), Google lets you read the first half-chapter or so before cutting you off, but you can read any other part of the book merely by searching for words. See
here. I'm actually quite surprised the bookwarez people haven't picked up on this and written scripts to harvest entire books from Google automatically.
My guess is the publishers are afraid of losing sales for books that are in the public domain
Public domain books actually probably have nothing to do with their argument. PD books are already available for free online from Project Gutenberg -- and PD books that are sold are usually pretty cheap, since any publisher can print it and sell it for the cost of publication plus a few cents. I've got a ton of small paperbacks sitting around that I think I only paid like $.75 for new (old PD books like Thoreau, Emerson). I get the feeling the book publishers are getting scared about the possibilities of their works being spread on the Internet for free, and no longer being able to force students (especially us college students.. grrr) to pay $100 for the new "Revised Seventh Edition" of textbooks.
I realize this is all a big joke, but it irks me whenever I hear about illness, movie sequels, or other things "costing businesses X dollars per year".
Your employer doesn't have a monopoly on your time. We're not costing them $600B by going to see some stupid movie, they're costing us a hundred times that much every day in the taking of our precious time, for a paltry check at the end of the week.
It's time for businesses to wake up and realize that they have the blessing of an overdedicated, overeducated workforce willing to come in on weekends, on Holidays, at night, whenever, for a few more scraps from the table. The tone of this headline is far too whiney for the humble tone that businesses in this country should have. You shouldn't have to feel guilty about calling in sick when you have a cold, or even just planning to go see some dumb sequel. It's your time out of your life. No one lies on their deathbed wishing they'd spent more time at the office.
Advice of the day: Figure out something you enjoy doing in your spare time, preferably something more satisfying than taking in ads on Slashdot (maybe riding a bike, playing tennis, spending time with your S.O., hanging out with your friends, playing golf.. you get the idea) -- and just do it more often. And don't feel guilty about it. Life isn't supposed to be as stressful as we make it sometimes. Enjoying yourself is more important than driving up your employer's stock price another quarter point, or brown-nosing your Professor out of a marginally higher grade.
Releasing multiple versions is a wonderful idea, and I'm a little disappointed this idea hasn't caught on.
I'm not a good coder, but here's a simple yet powerful feature that I would absolutely love to see in a future OpenOffice.
During the install, ask the user whether they would like to operate in "MS Word Compatability Mode". Make this option default to "yes" in Windows. From then on, without any whining to the user about the evils of.doc , or the possibility that "Saving in an external format may have caused information loss", when the user selects 'Save', create a folder with the filename.
Make the only file in that folder be "Filename.doc" but, in a subfolder, have "Filename.sxw", "Filename.pdf", and "Filename.rtf". Give a dialog box on the first run of the program explaining what happened and how to change this default option (e.g. "Go to 'Tools' and hit the green button). Tell the user this dialog box won't be shown again.
I've really been wishing that some big name site like the old Sharereactor (for the edonkey network) or now, Suprnova, would move offshore, specifically to the neat little country of Sealand.
To make a long story short, Sealand is really only inhabited by one dude, occassionally with a few family members, but they've got a great deal with an ISP, so they have mega-bandwidth.
Also it's in their Constitution that they basically have no copyright laws. No reason for them to give a fuck if foreign nations won't play ball. You can basically pay Sealand a nice chunk of money per month, and have them host whatever you want other than kiddie porn.
If someone were to figure out a way to cover the bandwidth costs (those fat microwave links they've got to the mainland aren't cheap) you could have an interesting site and not worry about silly lawsuits. Not that I'm advocating anything of the sort, of course.
In a very tangible way, I found the article to have a very snotty bias. Of course the guy wants to defend traditional (read: non-free) encyclopedias, since that's where the money's at.
I thought it was a little ridiculous how all the hard evidence for the article was based on one entry (Hamilton's) in Wikipedia that the writer just happened to know some nitpicky details about and the Wikipedia article just happened to be one that your average geek isn't all that interested in, hence a few nitpicky factual errors in the article.
Go ahead. Take a look at it now. Want to know the reason the McHenry didn't include a link to the current version of the article? Because he knew the minute he pointed the small birthdate errors out, the article would be fixed immediately. And so it has. If he were actually interested in making Wikipedia a better place he'd have done the edits himself instead of whining online.
Yes, Wikipedia is not perfect right now. It never will be. But come on, give W a break. In a few years time W has become quite an authoritative source on articles with real relevance. It just so happens that many of my interests coinicide with the interests of other contributors to Wikipedia, so when I'm online looking for factual information, Wikipedia is the first place I turn to, without hesitation.
Want an example? How good of an article does EB have on, say, the presidency of GWB or the background of Kerry?
Or a prime example.. how much information has EB collected on 9/11 . These popular types of articles are the ones that Wikipedia excels at. Seriously, check out the 9/11 shrine that Wikipedia set up. It's very moving, and you can tell a lot of effort went into making it.
I know your post was merely made in jest, but it is currently entirely possible to do what you suggest with networks like Freenet.
Your encrypted data is basically spread around all other user's shares. You could just GPG encrypt your files (slightly redundant, since freenet strongly encrypts the files anyway) into a big tarball, and share them on freenet. Eventually they'd be effectively mirrored by other users. You'd just have to remember the right key to retrieve that specific file.
Also, All this nonsense about digital photos being so hard to keep for a long time is utter rubbish. Hard drive capacities have been increasing with Moore's law for a long time. Those X MB of pictures you have on a CD/on your hard drive/on the web right now are trivial compared to what storage capacities will be in ten years when it really is time to move away from those legacy CD-R's/IDE hard drives/webhosts. Moore's law makes this "problem" a non-issue.
You can't say the same about those precious prints you had ordered. If someone smudges them, they're *poof* if you don't have a digital copy.
Whatever happened to that feature "Slashback", where updates to older stories would all be posted together in a condensed form.
I know this is probably a little offtopic and I'll get modded as such, but I'd very much like for this feature to be brought back. I don't think an update to a few-hours old story like this demands its own front page story -- especially when the main story even says "Update" and links to Chris D's comment. Same goes for the "X prize paid" story.. why should it be news that the X prize group actually paid up the money, they've publicly acknowledged on their site that SS1 won the prize for some time now.
Keep the clutter off the main page and save it for real stories.
That stanford URL:
www.stanford.edu/~joeio/fileutils-1.0.6.patch.tar. gz
apparently belongs to a Stanford Faculty member, Irene Joe. The URL is no longer valid, or I'd email her (joeioATstanfordDOTedu), she even has a phone number online. I'm assuming she just had her box compromised and the phishers used her webspace to propagate the trojan, at least initially.
First of all, this site should be shut down immediately. I'm not sure exactly what laws apply, but they're definitely guilty of spamming and spreading trojans, that should be enough in and of itself to notify their hosting provider.
I downloaded that tar file off the site to take a look at it. It contains a makefile, an inst.c , and a binary file "fileutils-patch.bin".
Looking at inst.c, I'm too lazy to figure out all the code on my own, but it's well commented and the functions are properly named, proper indentation, etc. (I suspect they probably just ripped off some open source programs, modified the code a bit, and turned it into a trojan.)
I think there's at least stuff in there to crack your password file since I see: key(pswd, sizeof(pswd_t));
in there. I'm guessing the binary patch file does some nasty stuff as well.
P.S. I just looked at the binary file through strings. It is indeed a rip-off of some GPL program, since the following text is included at the beginning of the file:
fileutils-4.1.9-11
=u9F!
5928f30d339e2c8002986120e6abd2e7d4e61921
=u9F!
fileutils
4.1.9
The GNU versions of common file management utilities.
The fileutils package includes a number of GNU versions of common and
popular file management utilities. Fileutils includes the following
tools: chgrp (changes a file's group ownership), chown (changes a
file's ownership), chmod (changes a file's permissions), cp (copies
files), dd (copies and converts files), df (shows a filesystem's disk
usage), dir (gives a brief directory listing), dircolors (the setup
program for the color version of the ls command), du (shows disk
usage), install (copies files and sets permissions), ln (creates file
links), ls (lists directory contents), mkdir (creates directories),
mkfifo (creates FIFOs or named pipes), mknod (creates special files),
mv (renames files), rm (removes/deletes files), rmdir (removes empty
directories), sync (synchronizes memory and disk), touch (changes file
timestamps), and vdir (provides long directory listings).
daffy.perf.redhat.com
Red Hat Linux
Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, Inc.
Applications/File
linux
i386
I've been using OpenOffice ever since I've moved exclusively to Linux on the desktop. For me at least, Linux is "good enough" already so that its benefits (flexibility, easy software installations/updates, security) outweigh the few downsides (less polished, not being able to run Windows programs).
But one thing that's always struck me about both OO and the Linux operating system is that it's always getting better. Right now I'm using Debian, and with its excellent package management it's quite easy to always have fairly current (or trade whiz-bang for stability if that's your thing) software packages. Every time I move up an incremental upgrade of OO, i notice a few improvements here and there. Same with all the shiny GUI tools, KDE gets better every time I upgrade.
I've used nothing but OO for all the lab reports and essays I've had to make over the past year and a half, and frankly I don't miss Word at all. It's annoying as hell when professors just post.doc files online of handouts instead of something a little more universal like PDF's/RTF's, but I'm managing fine as it is. In a few areas, such as being able to export to PDF, OO even outshines its rival.
Here's to another few years of the Linux desktop experience only getting better. Keep scratching those itches, developers.
I poked around a bit online.. I think the article you were referring to is
this one.
Another good read along the same lines from The Economist is here .
I really hope the grandparent post gets submitted to the candidates, I don't recall ever hearing them directly confirm/deny their support for the drug war.
What? Middle click opens a new tab on either platform unless you have a mouse manager like Logitech's running which remaps all your buttons except left & right.
This is NOT true. I'm on FF 0.8 (apparently the latest package for Debian Unstable, I don't care enough to get all the necessary doodads to compile 1.0PR) and looking at the about:config right now. In order to get it to behave like it does in Windows you have to set:
general.autoScroll to true general.smoothScroll to true
And in order to not get that annoying pop-up dialogue telling you that there's no page to be opened in the clipbar when you try to middle-click a tab bar to close it, you have to set:
middlemouse.ContentLoadURL to false
With those set, I now have a properly functioning Firefox. Should have come that way by default, IMO.
About FF supposedly being aimed towards Windows, I'm not going to believe that unless you have a credible source to cite.
However, one thing that irks me about the Moz team is how Firefox's default behavior is quite different in Linux and in Windows. In Windows, if you middle-click on the tab bar at the top, the tab closes. In Linux, the middle click by default wants to open a new page with a link from the clipboard which, more often than not, is not a valid URL and generates an annoying error message. To fix this, you just have to go into the about:config, and change the middleclick.openURL (I think..) to 'false'.
Another thing.. In Windows, if you middle click in a page, you can scroll up and down. In Linux, again, you have to enable this in the about:config.
Since FF is supposed to be a multi-platform browser, I really wish they would make the default behavior consistent between platforms. I don't want to have to twiddle in the config to get it working like it's supposed to.
Slashdot Mirror
I found some more info about this particular student and her case with the RIAA, if you're curious as to how these things pan out.
Run Over by the RIAA (a previous article)
Xanga site
I thought it was interesting that she got busted for sharing on i2hub -- I was surprised when I heard of pending MPAA lawsuits against movie swappers on i2. I'm still not quite sure how the *IAA infiltrated I2, I presume they must have just paid off some undergrads to act as a proxy onto the network. It was a sad day when i2hub got shut down, it was the only cool I2 application if nothing else.
Also, Kudos to MIT for apparently at least trying to delay giving up the student's name. I know that, at my Uni at least, the IT admins have no love for the RIAA lawyers, though there's not a whole lot you can do against an army of lawyers.
All that, and they still don't know how to set up DNS properly.
-----------
$ host harvard.edu
harvard.edu A record currently not present
-----------
I notified them about this months ago, but they didn't seem to care. Most web browsers automatically try the "www" prefix when you type, say, "harvard.edu" into your address bar, so you don't notice this problem generally. However, if you try wget, you can see it fail.
-----------
$ wget harvard.edu
--14:38:45-- http://harvard.edu/
=> `index.html'
Resolving harvard.edu... failed: Host not found.
-----------
Pretty sloppy if you ask me.
I think, if this bill actually passes, that there will be little effective change. For example, if you see current advertisements for Absolutepoker.net (IIRC) on TV: in the small print it says "This is not a real gambling site" -- mainly because advertising offshore gambling on US TV is apparently a legal grey area. Similarly, look at Kazaa.com -- they just have a disclaimer telling Australian users they "must not download or use Kazaa".
If they outlaw Americans' gambling online with offshore companies, these places will simply put up a disclaimer saying not to use the site if you're in the U.S., and proceed merrily along raking in the illicit money.
I haven't seen a serious crash from a Windows box
This is believable. Windows has gotten a lot more stable with 2K/XP.
I've had things like the desktop lock up on me but killing and restarting explorer.exe with the task manager seems to cure that.
I've found that a lot of times in 2k/XP , if explorer starts chewing through memory due to a leak somewhere, using the task manager to kill and restart explorer.exe usually only provides a temporary fix, with the system becoming unstable again soon.
Meanwhile I now work at a Linux based company and have rebooted on a regular basis.
I find this a bit surprising, and kind of hard to believe given the lack of specifics. The great thing about linux is that, even when you have a run-away process chewing through memory, you can always kill -9 it and it will go away, even if that process is X-Windows/KDE/something big. As compared to Windows, where you can end task a process many times before it decides it will finally exit.
There's not as much groupthink here as you might believe. I happen to think that Linux is, overall, a lot more stable than its counterpart based on my own experience -- I couldn't care less what position the zealots here supports.
This sounds like sort of a nifty idea, since a USB drive can be handy to have.. but if it were released as a regular CD or online download, couldn't I just put it on a USB drive myself? Also, $30 is pretty steep for a CD's worth of music, even if they do throw in the USB stick. Not to mention that in a few years, the handiness of having this USB stick will be outweighed by capacity increases.. no one will be using 128 MB sticks in a couple years' time. I'm just not seeing this pan out.
If you're very lucky, the worst that will happen over a period of months with Windows is a bit of clutter in the registry and startup menu caused by programs that are generally considered benign [iTunes sneaking in with quickTime, iPod Manager etc. comes to mind]. That's the best-case scenario.
If you're not lucky, you'll get hit by some spyware that creeps in through IE, or worse, a serious exploit like the one mentioned earlier. Most Windows boxes of students I know tend towards having at least a couple spyware apps snuck in, or general slow-down-ware that's hard to classify (the crap from Real, WeatherBug, programs like Norton(?) that sneak copy-protection crap into the MBR, registry and god knows where else..) . I know, I spend a fair amount of time having to clean the bad cruft up. You can't really fault the user if they've gotten crap loaded by those #$(ing Sony CDs or from IE exploits.
Back to my original point -- you should prepare for the unexpected. You never know when the next major Windows worm is going to infect your PC, even if you're careful. After you install Windows with all service packs , just use a Knoppix boot disk and dd [ dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda1/hard_driveA.img, with sda1 being a USB drive... also works for network backups, see here] , or pay for Norton Ghost or similar commercial software. If you anticipate having to use it often, or on multiple PCs, install any programs you think you might need (antivirus/antispyware/other apps) before making the backup, and you'll turn an afternoon job into a half-hour job.
Trust me, this will save you a lot of time in the long run. I can believe that it is possible to tightly lock down a Windows box so that you'll never see performance decreases or malware sneaking in... but in reality, I'd bet it's almost impossible. Myself, I use linux just because I find it has fewer "surprises" that are essentially unfixable. I'm not trying to denigrate Windows, I know it's handy for a lot of stuff, just saying to be careful and be prepared if you do use it.
In addition to the story linked about outsourcing to a ship in international waters, /. has already covered outsourcing to rural America: see here.
Sony's worse than that Maui X-Stream "Company" that does business solely by ripping off random OS projects. I do think it's a little disheartening that it took the publicizing of a rootkit in the CD before people even began asking what else could be in there -- and it turns out, there's quite a few uncredited GPL'ed/BSD projects in there, like DVD Jon's Code and the mp3 code and associate libraries they just stole.
If it's taken this much publicity for people to unearth stolen code hidden in Sony's proprietary format (the XCP file on the CD), think about how much other GPL'ed code has likely been misappropriated and snuck into other projects out there. I can easily see overbearing PHBs turning a blind eye to this sort of behavior in the face of unrealistic deadlines and such. A sad state of affairs. Sony's being exposed, but I'll bet there's many more such companies out there below our radars.
I've found this to be mostly true, especially in the past. I've been looking for decent Electrical Engineering tools for Linux. Being a student, I can't really afford any of the commercial solutions (and they're actually not all that great either.. I find PSpice to be complete crap). I'd like to have some basic tools just for drawing circuits, never mind accurately modeling them, but the ones that exist are pretty bad. Oregano is the most decent of the bunch, but it has really terrible UI bugs (can't edit out unnecessary pins or labels), and sometimes its internal grid gets misaligned and the wires you're drawing won't connect properly.
This isn't even stuff that's that hard to code -- the CompSci students at my school all have to take the intro circuits class.
On a positive note, it's pretty encouraging how far projects like Audacity (audio editing), Gimp (image editing), inkscape (vector graphics) and a whole slew more I'm forgetting have come -- these are all difficult projects, and especially difficult to code with a decent UI, and I've found them much more useable as of late. So perhaps there's hope for smaller projects that aren't as widely used, as, say, Firefox.
Wow.. 193 bits. I'm quite astounded that it's come this far. I'm actually a little puzzled.. wasn't it only three years ago that it took something like four years and thousands of distributed PCs to crack RC5-64 (64 bits, as I understand it) ?
If I'm not mistaken, shouldn't it be 2^129 times more difficult to factor a 193 bit number than a 64 bit one? Perhaps I'm not understanding something.. someone want to clue me in?
Why not just show a picture of an object and you a multiple choice answer of what it is?
Well, an obvious problem is you'd have to spend time manually compiling a database of objects and their corresponding pictures. And then it'd only take one spammer to continually load your form, and create a hash of all (or even just many) of the picture->word pairs and your system would be defeated.
However.. this game called Guess the google made me think of a new possibility.. You could have a list of a a few thousand simple words, and automatically pull up the first 20 google images for that work (like in the game) and just have people guess the word. Would be much harder for a spammer to create a table of all the image->word correlations, because you'd be able to use most simple words in the dictionary. Possibly even give users a few guesses in the case of a hard-to-guess word. And a lot more fun than having to squint at mangled random letters in colorful font to boot.
That actually gives me a good idea. Instead of taking this case to the Supreme Court, which would be likely to rule on it as a simple contract dispute (as has apparently already been done) it would be incredible if someone could take the time to setup a new case that would make the courts see non-competes for what they really are:
Have a destitute person sign a contract to work 80 hours a week as a cleaning person for minimum wage+overtime. Put in the contract a "non-compete" clause vindictively saying the servant can't work anywhere else for, oh, say ten years. Then have the employer sue after the servant leaves and tries to work somewhere else for breach of contract. (Note you could probably get away with not even having the "servant" actually work for a year, but just have both parties agree to the contract for the sake of filing suit against each other)
I think such a case would make the courts realize that non-competes are just a fancy way to deprive employees of potential income after leaving the company -- especially in such a clear-cut case where trade secrets aren't even a factor. In the above scenario, the employer should also be seen to be in violation of the minimum wage laws, since the employee effectively can't work anywhere to earn income after leaving the past job. This isn't all that dissimilar from programmers not being able to get any sort of decent job after they leave under a non-compete (where else are they going to get a job outside of their field.. McDonald's?). In any event, I think such a case would force a court to re-evaluate their love for such contracts, especially in such a case where the non-compete borders upon slavery.
Incidentally, I see recent braindead decisions of the Supreme Court to be partly caused by them not being presented with more clear-cut cases. If, for example, the emininent domain case had been about one ruthless business trying to takeover the property of a rival business' CEO as punishment (assuming they really would use his/her property for a tax-generating business) the courts might have seen what unbridled power such an interpration of eminent domain gives companies, and ruled differently.
Google had responded by stating that any copyrighted works would be limited to bibliographical information and a few short lines of selected texts.
I can't see how this is true. If you use Google Print services right now, and use their search feature to search for words inside the text, you can actually read the entire book online for free, with some patience, merely by searching for common words and reading three pages deep at a time.
For example, in this book ("Die Broke"), Google lets you read the first half-chapter or so before cutting you off, but you can read any other part of the book merely by searching for words. See here. I'm actually quite surprised the bookwarez people haven't picked up on this and written scripts to harvest entire books from Google automatically.
My guess is the publishers are afraid of losing sales for books that are in the public domain
Public domain books actually probably have nothing to do with their argument. PD books are already available for free online from Project Gutenberg -- and PD books that are sold are usually pretty cheap, since any publisher can print it and sell it for the cost of publication plus a few cents. I've got a ton of small paperbacks sitting around that I think I only paid like $.75 for new (old PD books like Thoreau, Emerson). I get the feeling the book publishers are getting scared about the possibilities of their works being spread on the Internet for free, and no longer being able to force students (especially us college students.. grrr) to pay $100 for the new "Revised Seventh Edition" of textbooks.
I realize this is all a big joke, but it irks me whenever I hear about illness, movie sequels, or other things "costing businesses X dollars per year".
Your employer doesn't have a monopoly on your time. We're not costing them $600B by going to see some stupid movie, they're costing us a hundred times that much every day in the taking of our precious time, for a paltry check at the end of the week.
It's time for businesses to wake up and realize that they have the blessing of an overdedicated, overeducated workforce willing to come in on weekends, on Holidays, at night, whenever, for a few more scraps from the table. The tone of this headline is far too whiney for the humble tone that businesses in this country should have. You shouldn't have to feel guilty about calling in sick when you have a cold, or even just planning to go see some dumb sequel. It's your time out of your life. No one lies on their deathbed wishing they'd spent more time at the office.
Advice of the day: Figure out something you enjoy doing in your spare time, preferably something more satisfying than taking in ads on Slashdot (maybe riding a bike, playing tennis, spending time with your S.O., hanging out with your friends, playing golf.. you get the idea) -- and just do it more often. And don't feel guilty about it. Life isn't supposed to be as stressful as we make it sometimes. Enjoying yourself is more important than driving up your employer's stock price another quarter point, or brown-nosing your Professor out of a marginally higher grade.
Releasing multiple versions is a wonderful idea, and I'm a little disappointed this idea hasn't caught on.
.doc , or the possibility that "Saving in an external format may have caused information loss", when the user selects 'Save', create a folder with the filename.
I'm not a good coder, but here's a simple yet powerful feature that I would absolutely love to see in a future OpenOffice.
During the install, ask the user whether they would like to operate in "MS Word Compatability Mode". Make this option default to "yes" in Windows. From then on, without any whining to the user about the evils of
Make the only file in that folder be "Filename.doc" but, in a subfolder, have "Filename.sxw", "Filename.pdf", and "Filename.rtf". Give a dialog box on the first run of the program explaining what happened and how to change this default option (e.g. "Go to 'Tools' and hit the green button). Tell the user this dialog box won't be shown again.
There. I doubt that would be so hard.
I've really been wishing that some big name site like the old Sharereactor (for the edonkey network) or now, Suprnova, would move offshore, specifically to the neat little country of Sealand. To make a long story short, Sealand is really only inhabited by one dude, occassionally with a few family members, but they've got a great deal with an ISP, so they have mega-bandwidth.
Also it's in their Constitution that they basically have no copyright laws. No reason for them to give a fuck if foreign nations won't play ball. You can basically pay Sealand a nice chunk of money per month, and have them host whatever you want other than kiddie porn.
If someone were to figure out a way to cover the bandwidth costs (those fat microwave links they've got to the mainland aren't cheap) you could have an interesting site and not worry about silly lawsuits. Not that I'm advocating anything of the sort, of course.
In a very tangible way, I found the article to have a very snotty bias. Of course the guy wants to defend traditional (read: non-free) encyclopedias, since that's where the money's at.
I thought it was a little ridiculous how all the hard evidence for the article was based on one entry (Hamilton's) in Wikipedia that the writer just happened to know some nitpicky details about and the Wikipedia article just happened to be one that your average geek isn't all that interested in, hence a few nitpicky factual errors in the article.
Go ahead. Take a look at it now. Want to know the reason the McHenry didn't include a link to the current version of the article? Because he knew the minute he pointed the small birthdate errors out, the article would be fixed immediately. And so it has. If he were actually interested in making Wikipedia a better place he'd have done the edits himself instead of whining online.
Yes, Wikipedia is not perfect right now. It never will be. But come on, give W a break. In a few years time W has become quite an authoritative source on articles with real relevance. It just so happens that many of my interests coinicide with the interests of other contributors to Wikipedia, so when I'm online looking for factual information, Wikipedia is the first place I turn to, without hesitation. Want an example? How good of an article does EB have on, say, the presidency of GWB or the background of Kerry?
Or a prime example.. how much information has EB collected on 9/11 . These popular types of articles are the ones that Wikipedia excels at. Seriously, check out the 9/11 shrine that Wikipedia set up. It's very moving, and you can tell a lot of effort went into making it.
I know your post was merely made in jest, but it is currently entirely possible to do what you suggest with networks like Freenet.
Your encrypted data is basically spread around all other user's shares. You could just GPG encrypt your files (slightly redundant, since freenet strongly encrypts the files anyway) into a big tarball, and share them on freenet. Eventually they'd be effectively mirrored by other users. You'd just have to remember the right key to retrieve that specific file.
Also, All this nonsense about digital photos being so hard to keep for a long time is utter rubbish. Hard drive capacities have been increasing with Moore's law for a long time. Those X MB of pictures you have on a CD/on your hard drive/on the web right now are trivial compared to what storage capacities will be in ten years when it really is time to move away from those legacy CD-R's/IDE hard drives/webhosts. Moore's law makes this "problem" a non-issue.
You can't say the same about those precious prints you had ordered. If someone smudges them, they're *poof* if you don't have a digital copy.
Whatever happened to that feature "Slashback", where updates to older stories would all be posted together in a condensed form.
I know this is probably a little offtopic and I'll get modded as such, but I'd very much like for this feature to be brought back. I don't think an update to a few-hours old story like this demands its own front page story -- especially when the main story even says "Update" and links to Chris D's comment. Same goes for the "X prize paid" story.. why should it be news that the X prize group actually paid up the money, they've publicly acknowledged on their site that SS1 won the prize for some time now.
Keep the clutter off the main page and save it for real stories.
That stanford URL:. gz
www.stanford.edu/~joeio/fileutils-1.0.6.patch.tar
apparently belongs to a Stanford Faculty member, Irene Joe.
The URL is no longer valid, or I'd email her (joeioATstanfordDOTedu), she even has a phone number online. I'm assuming she just had her box compromised and the phishers used her webspace to propagate the trojan, at least initially.
First of all, this site should be shut down immediately. I'm not sure exactly what laws apply, but they're definitely guilty of spamming and spreading trojans, that should be enough in and of itself to notify their hosting provider.
I downloaded that tar file off the site to take a look at it. It contains a makefile, an inst.c , and a binary file "fileutils-patch.bin".
Looking at inst.c, I'm too lazy to figure out all the code on my own, but it's well commented and the functions are properly named, proper indentation, etc. (I suspect they probably just ripped off some open source programs, modified the code a bit, and turned it into a trojan.)
I think there's at least stuff in there to crack your password file since I see:
key(pswd, sizeof(pswd_t));
in there. I'm guessing the binary patch file does some nasty stuff as well.
P.S. I just looked at the binary file through strings. It is indeed a rip-off of some GPL program, since the following text is included at the beginning of the file:
fileutils-4.1.9-11
=u9F!
5928f30d339e2c8002986120e6abd2e7d4e61921
=u9F!
fileutils
4.1.9
The GNU versions of common file management utilities.
The fileutils package includes a number of GNU versions of common and popular file management utilities. Fileutils includes the following tools: chgrp (changes a file's group ownership), chown (changes a file's ownership), chmod (changes a file's permissions), cp (copies files), dd (copies and converts files), df (shows a filesystem's disk usage), dir (gives a brief directory listing), dircolors (the setup program for the color version of the ls command), du (shows disk usage), install (copies files and sets permissions), ln (creates file links), ls (lists directory contents), mkdir (creates directories), mkfifo (creates FIFOs or named pipes), mknod (creates special files), mv (renames files), rm (removes/deletes files), rmdir (removes empty directories), sync (synchronizes memory and disk), touch (changes file timestamps), and vdir (provides long directory listings). daffy.perf.redhat.com
Red Hat Linux
Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, Inc.
Applications/File
linux
i386
I've been using OpenOffice ever since I've moved exclusively to Linux on the desktop. For me at least, Linux is "good enough" already so that its benefits (flexibility, easy software installations/updates, security) outweigh the few downsides (less polished, not being able to run Windows programs).
.doc files online of handouts instead of something a little more universal like PDF's/RTF's, but I'm managing fine as it is. In a few areas, such as being able to export to PDF, OO even outshines its rival.
But one thing that's always struck me about both OO and the Linux operating system is that it's always getting better. Right now I'm using Debian, and with its excellent package management it's quite easy to always have fairly current (or trade whiz-bang for stability if that's your thing) software packages. Every time I move up an incremental upgrade of OO, i notice a few improvements here and there. Same with all the shiny GUI tools, KDE gets better every time I upgrade.
I've used nothing but OO for all the lab reports and essays I've had to make over the past year and a half, and frankly I don't miss Word at all. It's annoying as hell when professors just post
Here's to another few years of the Linux desktop experience only getting better. Keep scratching those itches, developers.
I poked around a bit online.. I think the article you were referring to is this one.
Another good read along the same lines from The Economist is here .
I really hope the grandparent post gets submitted to the candidates, I don't recall ever hearing them directly confirm/deny their support for the drug war.
What? Middle click opens a new tab on either platform unless you have a mouse manager like Logitech's running which remaps all your buttons except left & right.
This is NOT true. I'm on FF 0.8 (apparently the latest package for Debian Unstable, I don't care enough to get all the necessary doodads to compile 1.0PR) and looking at the about:config right now. In order to get it to behave like it does in Windows you have to set:
general.autoScroll to true
general.smoothScroll to true
And in order to not get that annoying pop-up dialogue telling you that there's no page to be opened in the clipbar when you try to middle-click a tab bar to close it, you have to set:
middlemouse.ContentLoadURL to false
With those set, I now have a properly functioning Firefox. Should have come that way by default, IMO.
About FF supposedly being aimed towards Windows, I'm not going to believe that unless you have a credible source to cite.
However, one thing that irks me about the Moz team is how Firefox's default behavior is quite different in Linux and in Windows. In Windows, if you middle-click on the tab bar at the top, the tab closes. In Linux, the middle click by default wants to open a new page with a link from the clipboard which, more often than not, is not a valid URL and generates an annoying error message. To fix this, you just have to go into the about:config, and change the middleclick.openURL (I think..) to 'false'.
Another thing.. In Windows, if you middle click in a page, you can scroll up and down. In Linux, again, you have to enable this in the about:config.
Since FF is supposed to be a multi-platform browser, I really wish they would make the default behavior consistent between platforms. I don't want to have to twiddle in the config to get it working like it's supposed to.