I don't know what the mean time to infection of an unprotected system is nowadays, but presumably it's on the order of minutes. ISPs like to bitch about the bandwidth consumed by spambots, but they don't seem to want to help their customers avoid being pwned. I do know that some of the DSL modems shipped by SBC (the ones with built-in wireless) have firewalls, but the regular models don't, my Comcast cable modem doesn't, and I've seen very few outfits that provide even basic firewall capability. Like most people on Slashdot, that's fine by me since I'd rather protect myself, but for the millions of users who trustingly jack their unprotected, unpatched machines onto the Net... well. It's much more popular to complain about Microsoft's insecure operating systems, when a lot of the fault can be put at the ISPs feet, since they should at least offer a more secure option to their customers. I have the feeling that if an ISP's sales rep said, "Well, Mr. Jones, we have a more-secure modem available, with a built-in firewall, for an extra twenty dollars" I'll just bet that Mr. Jones would spend the money for a little peace of mind. Sure, that won't protect against mail-borne malware or drive-bys, but at least it would keep most of the worms out.
the countries with the most bandwidth available to the general population, and which also have the greatest number of Windows installations and open mail relays, also produce the most spam. Hardly a surprising conclusion.
Excepth that this Seven-of-Nine will be a Microsoft product... which means that it'll start life as a Borg and will always be Borg.
Unless RMS comes along and removes the Borg implants and GPLs the organic parts. I mean, what Slashdot geek wouldn't want an open-source, free-with-plenty-of-beer 7-of-9?
True... I mean, when my cable connection is down I do feel as if someone removed an important organ from my body... but I can still load OpenOffice and get some work done.
You're sort of comparing apples to oranges here. It's one thing when ego-ridden scientists (yes, scientists are people too) resent one of their own for seeing the obvious and making them look stupid. That's what happened in Barry Marshall's case, and I agree, in many others.
It's something else entirely when corporate executives make the deliberate decision to trade in fear and human suffering. Both situations cause unnecessary suffering and death, but the latter is worse.
Interesting. Now I have a wireless router running alternate firmware, and one of the options is to adjust output power from 1 to 251 mw, which would be way above the legal limit, I understand. As it happens, I used that option to reduce the power from the stock value, since the computers upstairs work fine with the router set to 24 mw. In my case, having that capability reduced my chances of causing unwanted interference. Not everyone wants to blow away their neighbors. Also, since the router is located in the basement and is running at minimum power, it's very hard to pick up a signal outside my house, and that's the way I want it. Encryption is all well and good but if they don't know it's there, so much the better.
I can't argue with you on that point... but, on the other hand, if more people didn't have their religion blinding them to the true nature of reality (which is a lot less predictable than they would like, yet for all that much more interesting), they might have a chance to really learn to think. And you can't deny that, down through the centuries, religions of one sort or another have provided a ready excuse for mayhem.
I've taken tours of Fermilab and a couple of other big labs. I'm only a software engineer so what they're working on is usually over my head, but it is interesting nevertheless. My father was a physicist, and it was fascinating to see a lot of what he talked about when I was growing up in actual working hardware.
What I've read on the subject tells me that these guys use Internet cafes to do most of their dirty work, since private connectivity is very hard to come by in Nigeria. My girlfriend is Nigerian and that's what she's been told too. Who knows though. That may just be the stupid ones that get caught.
I'd say the real question is: "will anything disrupt television more than Bit Torrent already has?" Millions of people now get their television with a high-speed connection and a Torrent client. Heck, you can go to any major Torrent site and grab high-quality rips of all the current TV shows. As long as you don't mind giving up on-demand video, and having to queue your downloads for later viewing, you don't need a cable bill. Maybe that would be different if the major cable outfits offered a quality service without commercials... but they don't.
Sure... it's a video game. But the discussion still centers around whether any extra capabilities allowed by a software flaw can be legitimately exploited by the players.
One argument I've always had over the years in various networked video games I've played (from the original Doom on down the line) is what happens when a bug in the game allows a player to do something he shouldn't, particularly if said bug gives the player an advantage over his opponents. Some will say, "hey! That's cheating!" and others will say, "well, if the game program allowed it then it's legitimate." Both points of view are valid, which is where the conflict comes in.
I remember one FPS where there was a spot in one level where a player could walk through a wall and hide inside it and shoot anyone on the outside. This wasn't a game that had holographic walls or anything like that: it was an error in the level design. I racked up quite a few kills with that one until my friends caught on. At that point what had been a free-for-all turned into five-against-one.
If anything, people are far less in touch with civil rights nowadays, mainly because we've convinced ourselves that they're permanent and we can never lose them (this is America, home of the brave, etc. etc.) We think that because we're technologically advanced, have hot-and-cold running water, electricity and an SUV that we're truly "Free" Unfortunately, most people don't notice that a "right" or liberty is missing until they need it. They wonder what the hell happened, maybe they dimly remember something about their parents or grandparents having had that particular liberty, but by then it's far too late.
By way of example, back in the early Fifties, my father, his three brothers and his sister decided to drive out West and look for the Lost Dutchman gold mine. They never found it, alas, which is why I'm here posting on Slashdot rather than enjoying a cold one on the yacht that I'm sure my father would have left me. In any event, one of the things they needed was some dynamite, so on the way they stopped at a local hardware store in a small town somewhere and picked up a case, along with some blasting caps and a detonator. No problem. They went to a number of the usual places that people had searched for the mine, widened a few underground passages with some carefully placed charges, and then came home. On the way back they remembered they still had most of a case of dynamite left, so they went out into the desert and spent an afternoon blowing holes in it.
I'll wager that a lot of you don't believe me, but it's true. At that point in time nobody had thought to restrict our ability to buy high explosives, because nobody had been making political statements by blowing things up. Every time some moron decides to do something dangerously antisocial the government uses it as an excuse to ban that particular behavior and take away whatever existing freedoms it can get away with. The moron goes to jail (unless we're very lucky and he blew himself up too) and the rest of us live in a society that is just that much less free.
Flash forward about fifty years... can you imagine what would happen if the proprietor of a hardware store offered high explosives for sale? Well, I think at a minimum we're talking a stiff prison sentence. Now certainly, such explosives are something few of us need, and in this day and age it would be a bad idea to permit casual sales of dynamite. But it is a freedom that we all had once, and lost. Believe it or not there are many others, all of them taken away for one reason or another, sometimes for good reason, sometimes not. But we let it happen, because it's easier to just believe our leaders when they say "we're assuming even more power, and restricting you at the same time, but really it's for your own good" than to fight and make them prove it to us. And lately, they've discovered that they can just scare us to death and get any power they want, although I think (I hope) that as a society we're wising up to that one. I don't know, though.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what the mean time to infection of an unprotected system is nowadays, but presumably it's on the order of minutes. ISPs like to bitch about the bandwidth consumed by spambots, but they don't seem to want to help their customers avoid being pwned. I do know that some of the DSL modems shipped by SBC (the ones with built-in wireless) have firewalls, but the regular models don't, my Comcast cable modem doesn't, and I've seen very few outfits that provide even basic firewall capability. Like most people on Slashdot, that's fine by me since I'd rather protect myself, but for the millions of users who trustingly jack their unprotected, unpatched machines onto the Net ... well. It's much more popular to complain about Microsoft's insecure operating systems, when a lot of the fault can be put at the ISPs feet, since they should at least offer a more secure option to their customers. I have the feeling that if an ISP's sales rep said, "Well, Mr. Jones, we have a more-secure modem available, with a built-in firewall, for an extra twenty dollars" I'll just bet that Mr. Jones would spend the money for a little peace of mind. Sure, that won't protect against mail-borne malware or drive-bys, but at least it would keep most of the worms out.
No, it's just the organic version of "security through obscurity."
the countries with the most bandwidth available to the general population, and which also have the greatest number of Windows installations and open mail relays, also produce the most spam. Hardly a surprising conclusion.
Excepth that this Seven-of-Nine will be a Microsoft product ... which means that it'll start life as a Borg and will always be Borg.
Unless RMS comes along and removes the Borg implants and GPLs the organic parts. I mean, what Slashdot geek wouldn't want an open-source, free-with-plenty-of-beer 7-of-9?
I know I would.
True ... I mean, when my cable connection is down I do feel as if someone removed an important organ from my body ... but I can still load OpenOffice and get some work done.
It is for devices like pacemakers and implanted defibrillators ... they have to be replaced every so often.
You're sort of comparing apples to oranges here. It's one thing when ego-ridden scientists (yes, scientists are people too) resent one of their own for seeing the obvious and making them look stupid. That's what happened in Barry Marshall's case, and I agree, in many others.
It's something else entirely when corporate executives make the deliberate decision to trade in fear and human suffering. Both situations cause unnecessary suffering and death, but the latter is worse.
Interesting. Now I have a wireless router running alternate firmware, and one of the options is to adjust output power from 1 to 251 mw, which would be way above the legal limit, I understand. As it happens, I used that option to reduce the power from the stock value, since the computers upstairs work fine with the router set to 24 mw. In my case, having that capability reduced my chances of causing unwanted interference. Not everyone wants to blow away their neighbors. Also, since the router is located in the basement and is running at minimum power, it's very hard to pick up a signal outside my house, and that's the way I want it. Encryption is all well and good but if they don't know it's there, so much the better.
I can't argue with you on that point ... but, on the other hand, if more people didn't have their religion blinding them to the true nature of reality (which is a lot less predictable than they would like, yet for all that much more interesting), they might have a chance to really learn to think. And you can't deny that, down through the centuries, religions of one sort or another have provided a ready excuse for mayhem.
I've taken tours of Fermilab and a couple of other big labs. I'm only a software engineer so what they're working on is usually over my head, but it is interesting nevertheless. My father was a physicist, and it was fascinating to see a lot of what he talked about when I was growing up in actual working hardware.
In other words, to be able to reliably issue ICBM launch commands when the shit has really hit the fan.
What I've read on the subject tells me that these guys use Internet cafes to do most of their dirty work, since private connectivity is very hard to come by in Nigeria. My girlfriend is Nigerian and that's what she's been told too. Who knows though. That may just be the stupid ones that get caught.
I'd say the real question is: "will anything disrupt television more than Bit Torrent already has?" Millions of people now get their television with a high-speed connection and a Torrent client. Heck, you can go to any major Torrent site and grab high-quality rips of all the current TV shows. As long as you don't mind giving up on-demand video, and having to queue your downloads for later viewing, you don't need a cable bill. Maybe that would be different if the major cable outfits offered a quality service without commercials ... but they don't.
Known colloquially as a "Skinner Box".
1. Windows 3.1
... which means that it will have very large breasts and be covered in blue Spandex.
2. Windows 95
3. Windows 98
4. Windows 98ME
5. Windows NT4
6. Windows 2K
7. Windows XP
8. Vista
9. Seven
Seven-of-Nine
This one may have potential.
Sure ... it's a video game. But the discussion still centers around whether any extra capabilities allowed by a software flaw can be legitimately exploited by the players.
needs to have his liver removed with hot pincers.
and I bet Google isn't friends with any of them
Yet. Google will eventually be subverted and have to play by the old-boy rules.
and before you even have time to realise you're not really hurt, you've cursed in public.
Fuckin'-A right!
Sorry, my mouth got away from me for a second there.
Yes, but at least I can read my GMail. The number of works that are copyrighted, kept private, and never enter the public domain is the problem.
One argument I've always had over the years in various networked video games I've played (from the original Doom on down the line) is what happens when a bug in the game allows a player to do something he shouldn't, particularly if said bug gives the player an advantage over his opponents. Some will say, "hey! That's cheating!" and others will say, "well, if the game program allowed it then it's legitimate." Both points of view are valid, which is where the conflict comes in.
I remember one FPS where there was a spot in one level where a player could walk through a wall and hide inside it and shoot anyone on the outside. This wasn't a game that had holographic walls or anything like that: it was an error in the level design. I racked up quite a few kills with that one until my friends caught on. At that point what had been a free-for-all turned into five-against-one.
It's all a matter of perspective, I guess.
Well, he could probably offset the power it takes to run his dashboard lights.
If anything, people are far less in touch with civil rights nowadays, mainly because we've convinced ourselves that they're permanent and we can never lose them (this is America, home of the brave, etc. etc.) We think that because we're technologically advanced, have hot-and-cold running water, electricity and an SUV that we're truly "Free" Unfortunately, most people don't notice that a "right" or liberty is missing until they need it. They wonder what the hell happened, maybe they dimly remember something about their parents or grandparents having had that particular liberty, but by then it's far too late.
... can you imagine what would happen if the proprietor of a hardware store offered high explosives for sale? Well, I think at a minimum we're talking a stiff prison sentence. Now certainly, such explosives are something few of us need, and in this day and age it would be a bad idea to permit casual sales of dynamite. But it is a freedom that we all had once, and lost. Believe it or not there are many others, all of them taken away for one reason or another, sometimes for good reason, sometimes not. But we let it happen, because it's easier to just believe our leaders when they say "we're assuming even more power, and restricting you at the same time, but really it's for your own good" than to fight and make them prove it to us. And lately, they've discovered that they can just scare us to death and get any power they want, although I think (I hope) that as a society we're wising up to that one. I don't know, though.
By way of example, back in the early Fifties, my father, his three brothers and his sister decided to drive out West and look for the Lost Dutchman gold mine. They never found it, alas, which is why I'm here posting on Slashdot rather than enjoying a cold one on the yacht that I'm sure my father would have left me. In any event, one of the things they needed was some dynamite, so on the way they stopped at a local hardware store in a small town somewhere and picked up a case, along with some blasting caps and a detonator. No problem. They went to a number of the usual places that people had searched for the mine, widened a few underground passages with some carefully placed charges, and then came home. On the way back they remembered they still had most of a case of dynamite left, so they went out into the desert and spent an afternoon blowing holes in it.
I'll wager that a lot of you don't believe me, but it's true. At that point in time nobody had thought to restrict our ability to buy high explosives, because nobody had been making political statements by blowing things up. Every time some moron decides to do something dangerously antisocial the government uses it as an excuse to ban that particular behavior and take away whatever existing freedoms it can get away with. The moron goes to jail (unless we're very lucky and he blew himself up too) and the rest of us live in a society that is just that much less free.
Flash forward about fifty years
That we've come this far is a testament to the power of the marketplace.
It's more a testament to the power of the word "free".
I'm holding out for force-field suits. Just flick a switch on a cigarette-pack-sized device clipped to your belt, and Voila! instant spacesuit.