We only have the site owner's word for the claim that the hacker claimed it was actively exploited.
Does this web site operator really strike you as the most trustworthy of characters? (Not that we have any reason to trust Mr. Russo either -- that's the point, it doesn't have to be black and white.)
Take a step back and look at the few things we DO know: - The site employed poor security practices - The site was hacked - The hacker contacted the site owner
Anything beyond this is at this point hearsay.
Conducting unrequested and unauthorised penetration testing is a criminal offence, and that should always be the case. Otherwise you could have too many people who get caught hacking and then just hide behind the excuse that they were just doing some penetration testing and were going to notify the site owners if they found anything.
The reality is that a large number of sites out there have vulnerabilities as not every site can afford to have their site penetration tested on a regular basis. Coders can do their best but they are only human, and hence they occasionally make mistakes. It only takes a single mistake made on a Friday afternoon while the office was winding down and you can be vulnerable.
Not every business model can support the profit margins needed to support expert code reviews and penetration testing of every new release, especially while the entire economy shrinks and both companies and the public have less money to spend. Since creating an absolutely secure site is both very expensive and often not entirely understood by management it is a very easy corner to cut.
Hacking a site you have nothing to do with and then contacting the owner to offer your security services in return for payment is a little too close to extortion for my liking.
<quote>turn off your wireless network when you know you won't use it</quote>
That's like suggesting you not to take your cell-phone with you if you don't think you'll need it. Hell, it's like suggesting unplugging your land-line (haha, land-line) if you aren't expecting a call since a telemarketer might ring.
Actually its nothing like that. The difference is that many people can use the router they bought without ever turning the wifi on. Many people only have a desktop computer and a crappy old phone that does not have wifi built in. I know this might come as an anathema to many slashdot geeks but we are probably also the type who make sure our wifi is secure anyway. There are some people however, who get given one of these things when they sign up for broadband and then just plug there desktop computer into it.
Until I bought and android phone recently I never bothered to turn the wifi on my router on as I only had a laptop that could use it, and I preferred to keep that docked when I was at home as the speed of the wifi annoyed me when copying files between that and my main PC. I also never use wifi for connecting to my bank website. This might sound ridiculous but most laptops don't last very long on batteries anyway so it makes sense to plug them in whenever you can, in which case wifi is not really necessary.
The fact is that encouraging people to turn the wifi on their routers off is a damn good idea since it causes people to question why they are using it anyway, especially now that even WPA can be cracked so easily: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/11/amazon_cloud_wifi_cracking/
Wifi might be more convenient, but that convenience comes at a cost.
It doesn't need to. You can very easily simulate gravity in deep space by a number of methods:
1) You accelerate half the way there at 9.81 m/s, then when you get halfway you spin the capsule 180 degrees and decelerate at the same rate for second half. The end result is you only have a brief preiod of weightlessness in the middle and at both ends. For the vast majority of the journey you have normal gravity. This does take alot of fuel to provide that constant acceleration and decelleration but it will take alot of fuel to go to Mars anyway. If you can use nuclear power and some sort of Ion thruster this may be feasible in future though.
2) You spin the craft and put the living quarters around the outside.
Have you TRIED any other search engine? These guys have been working hard to claw a 0.1% from Google. And along the way they have actually managed to produce some pretty nifty search algorithms. I have stopped using Google for 2 years now and have seldom been let down by my new search engine.
Naming your new one would have been useful, especially if its so great. By not naming it I just assume you are a an anti-google troll. Sorry if that is wrong but we all know there is an anti google campaign paid for by AT&T and MS.
The problem is that if you run an Nvidia binary, it usually constrains you to running certain kernel versions.
I did spend several years running Gentoo and doing regular kernel updates. I always built each kernel from source whenever a new, even minor version was released. I do not remember ever having a problem.
Maybe the Gentoo devs were doing the hardwork by only releasing kernels into portage as stable that the proprietary driver worked with though, but if they can do it with their bleeding edge philosophy then it should not be hard for other distributions.
Nowadays I have move to Ubuntu and that does not give me any issues with kernel compatibility either but maybe Canonical are also doing this upstream.
All in all though, I would like you to post a source for your response or give an example of a kernel that is not supported. Have you ever tried running the proprietary driver yourself or do you have a purely philosophical objection based on it being closed source?
As far as I know, it needs the card manufacturers to commit. I don't believe they "open source" all of their low level specs.
That would be true, if the drivers they release were the ones causing the problem. The last time I checked ATI had open sourced all their specs and it is their driver that sucks. The other major graphics card manufacturer is Nvidia and the get a mention for producing a working OpenGL driver.
I know that their are lots of security issues with the Nvidia proprietary driver supposedly, but I have a sneaky feeling this is because more of the open source community look for a stick to beat nvidia with to try and encourage them to open source their driver. I also think that purely theoretical security issues that only give root to a normal user are not such an issue on single user desktops that are the most likely machines to need graphics acceleration (Personally I disable X on servers).
I used to love ATI cards until I started using Linux. Then I found the Nvidia driver was far more stable than the ATI drivers by bitter experience. This was back in the days when both were closed source but until I start reading things about Nvidia having more issues on Linux than ATI I will stick with what works best. I have never had a single issue with the NVidia closed source driver in the past 7 years.
Open source or closed does not matter to me if only one works correctly. I think many end users of computers are of a similar mindset.
The thing is thought that the other search engines before Google were terrible in this regard.
Before Google the SEO business was rife with dodgy practices. It was only when google showed that these dodgy practices were not going to help get to the top of their results that the SEO market grew up and started being more constructive for the web as a whole.
Before this they would just do whatever they could to game their clients page higher up the ranks using whatever means they could just to get their clients page hits. This was a nice easy metric that clients could easily track and understand with minimum of technical knowledge. Their customer to visitor ratios might have been going down as the page hits went up but this was very hard to track before the whole web metric industry grew up. One might even say that the web metric industry owes much to Google in this regard as now any money spent on SEO and advertising usually needs to be justified by also spending money on tracking too.
How should he have released the key to the rest of us? We all have a sacrosanct right to own our property, and I don't give two *$#% if somebody uses it for piracy. I applaud what he has done here, and in fact, it has finally made me consider actually purchasing a PS3.
If Sony does brick all the consoles, don't blame GeoHot. Blame Sony, because they are the ones that have acted in a morally repugnant fashion for years.
Just remember though that the way Sony make money on the PS3 is by charging people a percentage for the privilege of selling a game for the PS3. Sony also charge development houses a fortune for kit they need to write the games in the first place. They need some sort of special console that will run unsigned code then Sony keep final control of what comes out for the console by charging the games house to sign the code for release.
When the PS3 first hit the market it was sold by Sony at a loss and carried on like that for years. If Sony could not engage in all these practices they would have to do one of two things:
1) Abandon the market. Sony is a business, if they cannot make money by doing something they will not do it.
2) Charge more for the console so they do not need to make up such a huge loss on every console sold.
If Sony did not know they were making a fortune from every game sold they would never be able to risk selling the console at the stupendous loss they were to start with in 2006 when it first came out. This would push the price of buying a PS3 to something comparable to the price of a new PC unless Sony could find another way of ensuring that they were paid a percentage for every PS3 game sold.
"The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for Saturday's blast in Pakistan's tribal region that killed at least 43 people at a food distribution point.
Which is reprehensible.
However it does not help you understand that this has nothing to do with us being decadent, a word you clearly do not understand the meaning of yet.
Persecution of non-muslims is not something you could call decadent, just bigoted and self righteous. Likewise for many of your other examples.
I quite happily recognise my own lifestyle as decadent. I drink too much. I waste more money in a week than some people on this planet earn in a whole year. It being Christmas Day I am now on my 2nd bottle of Champagne (Moet of course).
If you ask some poor guy in Somalia or a peasant farmer in Afghanistan I think he would certainly consider most people in the west to be fairly decadent.
The fact is that even the poorest in our societies have far more spending power than the vast majority of people on this planet. Why do you think our immigration departments and border control have to work so hard to keep people out?
I also recognise that one of the reasons we lead this lifestyle is that our armed forces and security services are out there 24/7 defending us.
You do not have to renew your contract but you do pay the same price (except Tmo) and if you switch carriers you appear to have to pay the same fees. Of course now, it makes less sense to switch carriers as the US GSM carriers are no loner really compatible.
Do you guys in the US not have a massive prepay market? Over here in Britain there are more companies giving away prepay sims than you can shake a stick at. I have a spare prepay sim in case i ever lose my phone again. I can just throw a prepay sim in an old phone and use a different number for the 3 days it takes them to send me a new contract sim.
If you use a prepay sim all the time you get a fair amount of free data and sms messages for every £10 you spend. The only reason people go with contract over here is so you get a decent phone thrown at you every year, other than that it is far cheaper to go with prepay even if you are a high volume caller unless you make all your calls during the day at peak rate. If you only use a phone at evenings at weekends them contract is very expensive compared to prepay.
We also now have companies offering a cheap rolling contract where you only get a sim but use your old phone. These are usually half the monthly cost for same call volume and service, of a contract that gives you a phone and a sim and then locks you in to a minimum term.
I keep hearing the phrase "reduce our dependence on foreign oil" associated with things like wind turbines and nuclear power. Maybe somebody should do a little research and discover that 1% of the electricity in the U.S. is generated using oil as fuel. Unless you're planning on cars, trucks, buses and trains powered by wind turbines or nuclear reactors, how exactly does this "reduce our dependence on foreign oil"?
I think the idea is that people would buy electric cars and hence start putting far more load on the electricity grid instead of going to filling stations. It is a long way off but the idea of running your personal transportation device on stuff that explodes to provide momentum is doomed in the long run. Electric is the way to go as we already have a way of distributing it around the country so you can save on infrastructure:
Israel is far more serious about moving away from oil as the population has a better understanding of where the money they spend on oil goes: Some of it is donated to the likes of Hamas and it comes flying back to the Israel in the form of a rocket. Every one knows that some Saudi money is diverted to terrorism:
This is the best reason for getting away from our dependence on middle east oil, most of the countries that have large amounts of oil are distinctly Muslim and while their leaders might be friendly with our leaders the people in those countries often have more sympathy with the terrorists than the do with us decadent westerners.
Actually, a working DRM solution that only prevented unauthorised installs from functioning but was otherwise completely invisible would be no problem at all. It is only when they screw up that they become insufferable.
As an example the old hardware dongle solution was not too bad. If windows died and needed a complete re-install, no problem. If the PC itself died then you just move it to another PC.
With USB keys now becoming so cheap maybe this is a pretty good solution, just include a Kensington security slot so we can lock the device to the PC in question. Vendor gets piece of mind, we get to not pay extra for freeloaders using the software while we pay full price.
Some people might say what happens if the PC gets thrown away inadvertently, but if this happens without it going via the system admin then you have a problem with the harddisks not being destroyed correctly anyway. All PC's should be deployed by the system admins and then retired by them as well going through a well defined process at both ends depending on data and software stored on the PC.
I seem to remember your UserID though so we have probably had this debate on slashdot before regarding DRM:)
I rather like the self service lines. Maybe it's just me but the baggers always put my squish ables in with my canned goods it seems like.
As an ex employee of a supermarket I can confirm this, I did it for fun. Bagging other people shopping is a very dull job so to pass the time quicker you try and annoy the customer as much as possible while being as polite as you possibly can be about it. This kept me sane for 4 years.
I think as a nation, Britain has a real etiquette about queuing and I know I feel a real injustice when someone gets to skip it.
Go live in Germany for a bit. That will cure you of any queue jumping guilt in a jiffy. They don't seem to queue as much as have a big group of people who all know they are next.
Wonderfully? Wonderfully??? To wander back and forth through a rats maze where the bends are NOT wide enough to granny in front of me to maneuver her cart around without knocking merchandise off the flimsy pegboards. To _finally_ get the to the head of the line and seem to be able to outguess the annoying automated voice guide. (you can see people swipe or hand over cash, the clerk has hit the total button, but the guide doesn't send you to the clerk until after they have hit the change button, even then there is an almost 2 second lag between "Please go to" and the cashier number. And yet it seems _everybody_ , even after staring dumbly at the same signs and flashing lights for 2 minutes STILL starts, looks up in surprise and peers around trying to figure out which aisle the voice is telling them to go to. (With some I suspect the problem is the voices in their head are contradicting the voice on the pole) At the end of this Skinner inspired rat's maze there isn't any frickin' cheese for the customer
This is kind of the point. Although it is more efficient to do this it pisses us off as customers because we just see one long line. We do not notice that it is moving 10 times quicker than 10 separate queues would be. It also robs us of our ability to actively get to the front faster choosing the shortest line and forces us to be more passive which is a state of mind our society does not usually encourage.
Also, did the guy hack it, or just get access to it since it was left without proper security, as I would not consider it "hacking" to access the neighbor's wireless.
Apparrently in this case he had at least passed Script Kiddie 101. He used a password cracking tool to brute force it.
Thinking about it this would work on me since my WPA2 password is set to a dictionary word. In my case though I only allow trusted devices so have to manually allow each device by logging in to the router with a secure admin password (only available via LAN, not from outside). Makes it a bit harder when I get a new phone or laptop but not a massive problem.
The problem with just trusting WPA2 is that a neighbour like this can have an awful lot of time to run a cracking tool against it. Does your router log all bad WPA2 keys that are tried against it? Even if it does how many people are actually that diligent at checking their logs? I have enough of that at work so I have not checked mine in ages at home.
This is the problem when your wifi extends outside your property, whoever has unrestricted private access to that area can spend all the time they need until they bypass whatever security you have in place. Even thinking about my case above you could maybe sniff the MAC address of one of my trusted devices using your own access point and spoof that in order to start cracking the WPA2 password.
The article is rather sparse on details, but what interests me is that Ardolf didn't succeed in his "this'll get the dude in trouble" plan; what led the police to believe that the access point had been 'hacked'? What security was used, for that matter? Were there logs?
The guilty plea certainly makes it seem like this is a case where computer fraud was handled correctly by the system, and since the courts often seem to make the mistake that 'IP address == person' it'd be good to see how they went about distinguishing the actual criminal from the victim here.
This is the scary thing about this case. I bet in most cases it would have succeeded but in this case the next door neighbour in question worked for a law firm so his company had easy access to private detectives. The private detective put on the case was the one who figured it out, not the police. Here is a better link regarding the story that has a few more details:
It is also interesting that the neighbours had a previous beef with the guy: He had picked up and kissed their small child so he probably didn't have to look to far to get the child porn he planted. Although this couple have obviously been through hell at least they now don't have to worry about the weirdo next door going anywhere near their kid.
As much as I dislike Apple, iPhones are a solid platform. They have a few different versions of the OS (there needs to be progress, right?), but that's it.
Is it? Or are you completely ignoring the 4 different physical devices with vastly differing hardware and capabilities. Whilst this doesn't hold a candle to Android it is still a case of having differing devices to choose to support or not. This is an inescapable fact of any platform that is upgraded regularly.
Most developers are probably choosing to not support the iphone2 by now but ignoring the iphone3 is still a very big market to ignore since many of the people who adopted it under contract are still stuck with it unless they pony up the full price for a new phone. Even allowing for just supporting iphone3 basically determines how much you can really utilise the 3D on the iPhone4 and encourages you to produce 2 different versions if you want to use it to it's fullest but still have a large enough market for your app. Granted for many things the 3D capabilities are not needed but for games that is a different matter.
And now you also have the iTab thrown into the mix. Like it or not, "fragmentation" is factor all developers have to deal with. You just pick which devices you want to support. With iOS you actually pick devices, with Win7 and Android you pick specifications but it is still a choice you have to make and always will be until we decide we do not want the to take advantage of any more hardware upgrades to our devices or until they hardware upgrades start being given away free like the software upgrades (I am not saying this is ever likely to happen on any platform).
I don't actually care what happened to the pirate bay servers since they were basically taking the piss and a server is certainly not a human being.
As for the link you did not provide but asked me to google for I see your point since they do allege they were tortured. However, they were not killed which is what I was talking about in my post. Also, there is not actually any way of independently verifying their allegations and they would obviously have preferred a life in affluent Sweden to that of a life in Egypt. We in Europe cannot take in every single person from the rest of the world who happens to have been born into a terrible oppressive country.
I'm assuming that they're trying to keep the rape allegations and wikileaks issues separate.
Expect it if he gets shipped off to America specifically over wikileaks stuff.
Apparently this is not likely to happen since most countries will treat breaking your espionage act as a political crime and the US - UK and US - Sweden extradition treaties do not cover political crimes.
Also, since some of your politicians have suggested killing Assange we could not extradite him if there was any danger of this happening. Almost all countries in Europe (UK and Sweden definitely anyway) consider the death penalty to be so barbaric that we refuse to extradite people to face it regardless of the crime they are accused of. The espionage act does have some parts which are punishable by the death penalty.
That is a lot easier to do with capitol letters and punctuation in the proper place. Writing like that just makes you look either uneducated or stoned.
If you are going to be a grammar nazi, make sure you read your own post thoroughly and follow your own rules. They are called capital letters, not capitol letters.
Slashdot Mirror
We only have the site owner's word for the claim that the hacker claimed it was actively exploited.
Does this web site operator really strike you as the most trustworthy of characters?
(Not that we have any reason to trust Mr. Russo either -- that's the point, it doesn't have to be black and white.)
Take a step back and look at the few things we DO know:
- The site employed poor security practices
- The site was hacked
- The hacker contacted the site owner
Anything beyond this is at this point hearsay.
Conducting unrequested and unauthorised penetration testing is a criminal offence, and that should always be the case. Otherwise you could have too many people who get caught hacking and then just hide behind the excuse that they were just doing some penetration testing and were going to notify the site owners if they found anything.
The reality is that a large number of sites out there have vulnerabilities as not every site can afford to have their site penetration tested on a regular basis. Coders can do their best but they are only human, and hence they occasionally make mistakes. It only takes a single mistake made on a Friday afternoon while the office was winding down and you can be vulnerable.
Not every business model can support the profit margins needed to support expert code reviews and penetration testing of every new release, especially while the entire economy shrinks and both companies and the public have less money to spend. Since creating an absolutely secure site is both very expensive and often not entirely understood by management it is a very easy corner to cut.
Hacking a site you have nothing to do with and then contacting the owner to offer your security services in return for payment is a little too close to extortion for my liking.
<quote>turn off your wireless network when you know you won't use it</quote>
That's like suggesting you not to take your cell-phone with you if you don't think you'll need it. Hell, it's like suggesting unplugging your land-line (haha, land-line) if you aren't expecting a call since a telemarketer might ring.
Actually its nothing like that. The difference is that many people can use the router they bought without ever turning the wifi on. Many people only have a desktop computer and a crappy old phone that does not have wifi built in. I know this might come as an anathema to many slashdot geeks but we are probably also the type who make sure our wifi is secure anyway. There are some people however, who get given one of these things when they sign up for broadband and then just plug there desktop computer into it.
Until I bought and android phone recently I never bothered to turn the wifi on my router on as I only had a laptop that could use it, and I preferred to keep that docked when I was at home as the speed of the wifi annoyed me when copying files between that and my main PC. I also never use wifi for connecting to my bank website. This might sound ridiculous but most laptops don't last very long on batteries anyway so it makes sense to plug them in whenever you can, in which case wifi is not really necessary.
The fact is that encouraging people to turn the wifi on their routers off is a damn good idea since it causes people to question why they are using it anyway, especially now that even WPA can be cracked so easily: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/11/amazon_cloud_wifi_cracking/
Wifi might be more convenient, but that convenience comes at a cost.
Does the test capsule simulate weightless travel?
It doesn't need to. You can very easily simulate gravity in deep space by a number of methods:
1) You accelerate half the way there at 9.81 m/s, then when you get halfway you spin the capsule 180 degrees and decelerate at the same rate for second half. The end result is you only have a brief preiod of weightlessness in the middle and at both ends. For the vast majority of the journey you have normal gravity. This does take alot of fuel to provide that constant acceleration and decelleration but it will take alot of fuel to go to Mars anyway. If you can use nuclear power and some sort of Ion thruster this may be feasible in future though.
2) You spin the craft and put the living quarters around the outside.
Have you TRIED any other search engine? These guys have been working hard to claw a 0.1% from Google. And along the way they have actually managed to produce some pretty nifty search algorithms. I have stopped using Google for 2 years now and have seldom been let down by my new search engine.
Naming your new one would have been useful, especially if its so great. By not naming it I just assume you are a an anti-google troll. Sorry if that is wrong but we all know there is an anti google campaign paid for by AT&T and MS.
http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/2741
http://techrights.org/2009/06/15/microsofts-whisper-campaign-goog/
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-an-anti-google-whisper-campaign-looks-like-2009-6
No I haven't run a proprietary driver, and never will.
So your post was just pure FUD with no source or evidence. Cheers for owning up.
The problem is that if you run an Nvidia binary, it usually constrains you to running certain kernel versions.
I did spend several years running Gentoo and doing regular kernel updates. I always built each kernel from source whenever a new, even minor version was released. I do not remember ever having a problem.
Maybe the Gentoo devs were doing the hardwork by only releasing kernels into portage as stable that the proprietary driver worked with though, but if they can do it with their bleeding edge philosophy then it should not be hard for other distributions.
Nowadays I have move to Ubuntu and that does not give me any issues with kernel compatibility either but maybe Canonical are also doing this upstream.
All in all though, I would like you to post a source for your response or give an example of a kernel that is not supported. Have you ever tried running the proprietary driver yourself or do you have a purely philosophical objection based on it being closed source?
As far as I know, it needs the card manufacturers to commit. I don't believe they "open source" all of their low level specs.
That would be true, if the drivers they release were the ones causing the problem. The last time I checked ATI had open sourced all their specs and it is their driver that sucks. The other major graphics card manufacturer is Nvidia and the get a mention for producing a working OpenGL driver.
I know that their are lots of security issues with the Nvidia proprietary driver supposedly, but I have a sneaky feeling this is because more of the open source community look for a stick to beat nvidia with to try and encourage them to open source their driver. I also think that purely theoretical security issues that only give root to a normal user are not such an issue on single user desktops that are the most likely machines to need graphics acceleration (Personally I disable X on servers).
I used to love ATI cards until I started using Linux. Then I found the Nvidia driver was far more stable than the ATI drivers by bitter experience. This was back in the days when both were closed source but until I start reading things about Nvidia having more issues on Linux than ATI I will stick with what works best. I have never had a single issue with the NVidia closed source driver in the past 7 years.
Open source or closed does not matter to me if only one works correctly. I think many end users of computers are of a similar mindset.
The thing is thought that the other search engines before Google were terrible in this regard.
Before Google the SEO business was rife with dodgy practices. It was only when google showed that these dodgy practices were not going to help get to the top of their results that the SEO market grew up and started being more constructive for the web as a whole.
Before this they would just do whatever they could to game their clients page higher up the ranks using whatever means they could just to get their clients page hits. This was a nice easy metric that clients could easily track and understand with minimum of technical knowledge. Their customer to visitor ratios might have been going down as the page hits went up but this was very hard to track before the whole web metric industry grew up. One might even say that the web metric industry owes much to Google in this regard as now any money spent on SEO and advertising usually needs to be justified by also spending money on tracking too.
How should he have released the key to the rest of us? We all have a sacrosanct right to own our property, and I don't give two *$#% if somebody uses it for piracy. I applaud what he has done here, and in fact, it has finally made me consider actually purchasing a PS3.
If Sony does brick all the consoles, don't blame GeoHot. Blame Sony, because they are the ones that have acted in a morally repugnant fashion for years.
Just remember though that the way Sony make money on the PS3 is by charging people a percentage for the privilege of selling a game for the PS3. Sony also charge development houses a fortune for kit they need to write the games in the first place. They need some sort of special console that will run unsigned code then Sony keep final control of what comes out for the console by charging the games house to sign the code for release.
When the PS3 first hit the market it was sold by Sony at a loss and carried on like that for years. If Sony could not engage in all these practices they would have to do one of two things:
1) Abandon the market. Sony is a business, if they cannot make money by doing something they will not do it.
2) Charge more for the console so they do not need to make up such a huge loss on every console sold.
Some links:
http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/02/05/sony-still-posts-a-loss-for-every-ps3-sold-ps3-costs-sony-18-more-than-it-costs-you/
http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2010/06/29/ps3-no-longer-sold-at-loss/
If Sony did not know they were making a fortune from every game sold they would never be able to risk selling the console at the stupendous loss they were to start with in 2006 when it first came out. This would push the price of buying a PS3 to something comparable to the price of a new PC unless Sony could find another way of ensuring that they were paid a percentage for every PS3 game sold.
"The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for Saturday's blast in Pakistan's tribal region that killed at least 43 people at a food distribution point.
Which is reprehensible.
However it does not help you understand that this has nothing to do with us being decadent, a word you clearly do not understand the meaning of yet.
Might I suggest a dictionary?
decadence means "luxurious self indulgence".
Persecution of non-muslims is not something you could call decadent, just bigoted and self righteous. Likewise for many of your other examples.
I quite happily recognise my own lifestyle as decadent. I drink too much. I waste more money in a week than some people on this planet earn in a whole year. It being Christmas Day I am now on my 2nd bottle of Champagne (Moet of course).
If you ask some poor guy in Somalia or a peasant farmer in Afghanistan I think he would certainly consider most people in the west to be fairly decadent.
The fact is that even the poorest in our societies have far more spending power than the vast majority of people on this planet. Why do you think our immigration departments and border control have to work so hard to keep people out?
I also recognise that one of the reasons we lead this lifestyle is that our armed forces and security services are out there 24/7 defending us.
You do not have to renew your contract but you do pay the same price (except Tmo) and if you switch carriers you appear to have to pay the same fees. Of course now, it makes less sense to switch carriers as the US GSM carriers are no loner really compatible.
Do you guys in the US not have a massive prepay market? Over here in Britain there are more companies giving away prepay sims than you can shake a stick at. I have a spare prepay sim in case i ever lose my phone again. I can just throw a prepay sim in an old phone and use a different number for the 3 days it takes them to send me a new contract sim.
If you use a prepay sim all the time you get a fair amount of free data and sms messages for every £10 you spend. The only reason people go with contract over here is so you get a decent phone thrown at you every year, other than that it is far cheaper to go with prepay even if you are a high volume caller unless you make all your calls during the day at peak rate. If you only use a phone at evenings at weekends them contract is very expensive compared to prepay.
We also now have companies offering a cheap rolling contract where you only get a sim but use your old phone. These are usually half the monthly cost for same call volume and service, of a contract that gives you a phone and a sim and then locks you in to a minimum term.
I keep hearing the phrase "reduce our dependence on foreign oil" associated with things like wind turbines and nuclear power. Maybe somebody should do a little research and discover that 1% of the electricity in the U.S. is generated using oil as fuel. Unless you're planning on cars, trucks, buses and trains powered by wind turbines or nuclear reactors, how exactly does this "reduce our dependence on foreign oil"?
I think the idea is that people would buy electric cars and hence start putting far more load on the electricity grid instead of going to filling stations. It is a long way off but the idea of running your personal transportation device on stuff that explodes to provide momentum is doomed in the long run. Electric is the way to go as we already have a way of distributing it around the country so you can save on infrastructure:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1705518,00.html
Israel is far more serious about moving away from oil as the population has a better understanding of where the money they spend on oil goes: Some of it is donated to the likes of Hamas and it comes flying back to the Israel in the form of a rocket. Every one knows that some Saudi money is diverted to terrorism:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/031215/15terror.htm
Most of the 9-11 bombers were from Saudi or had saudi ties: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijackers_in_the_September_11_attacks
This is the best reason for getting away from our dependence on middle east oil, most of the countries that have large amounts of oil are distinctly Muslim and while their leaders might be friendly with our leaders the people in those countries often have more sympathy with the terrorists than the do with us decadent westerners.
#11: NO DRM, dammit!
Actually, a working DRM solution that only prevented unauthorised installs from functioning but was otherwise completely invisible would be no problem at all. It is only when they screw up that they become insufferable.
As an example the old hardware dongle solution was not too bad. If windows died and needed a complete re-install, no problem. If the PC itself died then you just move it to another PC.
With USB keys now becoming so cheap maybe this is a pretty good solution, just include a Kensington security slot so we can lock the device to the PC in question. Vendor gets piece of mind, we get to not pay extra for freeloaders using the software while we pay full price.
Some people might say what happens if the PC gets thrown away inadvertently, but if this happens without it going via the system admin then you have a problem with the harddisks not being destroyed correctly anyway. All PC's should be deployed by the system admins and then retired by them as well going through a well defined process at both ends depending on data and software stored on the PC.
I seem to remember your UserID though so we have probably had this debate on slashdot before regarding DRM :)
I rather like the self service lines. Maybe it's just me but the baggers always put my squish ables in with my canned goods it seems like.
As an ex employee of a supermarket I can confirm this, I did it for fun. Bagging other people shopping is a very dull job so to pass the time quicker you try and annoy the customer as much as possible while being as polite as you possibly can be about it. This kept me sane for 4 years.
I think as a nation, Britain has a real etiquette about queuing and I know I feel a real injustice when someone gets to skip it.
Go live in Germany for a bit. That will cure you of any queue jumping guilt in a jiffy. They don't seem to queue as much as have a big group of people who all know they are next.
Wonderfully? Wonderfully??? To wander back and forth through a rats maze where the bends are NOT wide enough to granny in front of me to maneuver her cart around without knocking merchandise off the flimsy pegboards. To _finally_ get the to the head of the line and seem to be able to outguess the annoying automated voice guide. (you can see people swipe or hand over cash, the clerk has hit the total button, but the guide doesn't send you to the clerk until after they have hit the change button, even then there is an almost 2 second lag between "Please go to" and the cashier number. And yet it seems _everybody_ , even after staring dumbly at the same signs and flashing lights for 2 minutes STILL starts, looks up in surprise and peers around trying to figure out which aisle the voice is telling them to go to. (With some I suspect the problem is the voices in their head are contradicting the voice on the pole) At the end of this Skinner inspired rat's maze there isn't any frickin' cheese for the customer
This is kind of the point. Although it is more efficient to do this it pisses us off as customers because we just see one long line. We do not notice that it is moving 10 times quicker than 10 separate queues would be. It also robs us of our ability to actively get to the front faster choosing the shortest line and forces us to be more passive which is a state of mind our society does not usually encourage.
Also, did the guy hack it, or just get access to it since it was left without proper security, as I would not consider it "hacking" to access the neighbor's wireless.
Apparrently in this case he had at least passed Script Kiddie 101. He used a password cracking tool to brute force it.
Thinking about it this would work on me since my WPA2 password is set to a dictionary word. In my case though I only allow trusted devices so have to manually allow each device by logging in to the router with a secure admin password (only available via LAN, not from outside). Makes it a bit harder when I get a new phone or laptop but not a massive problem.
The problem with just trusting WPA2 is that a neighbour like this can have an awful lot of time to run a cracking tool against it. Does your router log all bad WPA2 keys that are tried against it? Even if it does how many people are actually that diligent at checking their logs? I have enough of that at work so I have not checked mine in ages at home.
This is the problem when your wifi extends outside your property, whoever has unrestricted private access to that area can spend all the time they need until they bypass whatever security you have in place. Even thinking about my case above you could maybe sniff the MAC address of one of my trusted devices using your own access point and spoof that in order to start cracking the WPA2 password.
Addendum: How much legal headache did his neighbor go through before Ardolf was suspected? The article doesn't say
There is a better article here that has a few more details:
http://www.startribune.com/local/north/112080854.html?elr=KArks:DCiUHc3E7_V_nDaycUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUoD3aPc:_2yc:a_ncyD_MDCiU
He did apparently get a visit from the secret service regarding the death threats.
The article is rather sparse on details, but what interests me is that Ardolf didn't succeed in his "this'll get the dude in trouble" plan; what led the police to believe that the access point had been 'hacked'? What security was used, for that matter? Were there logs?
The guilty plea certainly makes it seem like this is a case where computer fraud was handled correctly by the system, and since the courts often seem to make the mistake that 'IP address == person' it'd be good to see how they went about distinguishing the actual criminal from the victim here.
This is the scary thing about this case. I bet in most cases it would have succeeded but in this case the next door neighbour in question worked for a law firm so his company had easy access to private detectives. The private detective put on the case was the one who figured it out, not the police. Here is a better link regarding the story that has a few more details:
http://www.startribune.com/local/north/112080854.html?elr=KArks:DCiUHc3E7_V_nDaycUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUoD3aPc:_2yc:a_ncyD_MDCiU
It is also interesting that the neighbours had a previous beef with the guy: He had picked up and kissed their small child so he probably didn't have to look to far to get the child porn he planted. Although this couple have obviously been through hell at least they now don't have to worry about the weirdo next door going anywhere near their kid.
As much as I dislike Apple, iPhones are a solid platform. They have a few different versions of the OS (there needs to be progress, right?), but that's it.
Is it? Or are you completely ignoring the 4 different physical devices with vastly differing hardware and capabilities. Whilst this doesn't hold a candle to Android it is still a case of having differing devices to choose to support or not. This is an inescapable fact of any platform that is upgraded regularly.
Most developers are probably choosing to not support the iphone2 by now but ignoring the iphone3 is still a very big market to ignore since many of the people who adopted it under contract are still stuck with it unless they pony up the full price for a new phone. Even allowing for just supporting iphone3 basically determines how much you can really utilise the 3D on the iPhone4 and encourages you to produce 2 different versions if you want to use it to it's fullest but still have a large enough market for your app. Granted for many things the 3D capabilities are not needed but for games that is a different matter.
And now you also have the iTab thrown into the mix. Like it or not, "fragmentation" is factor all developers have to deal with. You just pick which devices you want to support. With iOS you actually pick devices, with Win7 and Android you pick specifications but it is still a choice you have to make and always will be until we decide we do not want the to take advantage of any more hardware upgrades to our devices or until they hardware upgrades start being given away free like the software upgrades (I am not saying this is ever likely to happen on any platform).
I don't actually care what happened to the pirate bay servers since they were basically taking the piss and a server is certainly not a human being.
As for the link you did not provide but asked me to google for I see your point since they do allege they were tortured. However, they were not killed which is what I was talking about in my post. Also, there is not actually any way of independently verifying their allegations and they would obviously have preferred a life in affluent Sweden to that of a life in Egypt. We in Europe cannot take in every single person from the rest of the world who happens to have been born into a terrible oppressive country.
I'm assuming that they're trying to keep the rape allegations and wikileaks issues separate.
Expect it if he gets shipped off to America specifically over wikileaks stuff.
Apparently this is not likely to happen since most countries will treat breaking your espionage act as a political crime and the US - UK and US - Sweden extradition treaties do not cover political crimes.
Also, since some of your politicians have suggested killing Assange we could not extradite him if there was any danger of this happening. Almost all countries in Europe (UK and Sweden definitely anyway) consider the death penalty to be so barbaric that we refuse to extradite people to face it regardless of the crime they are accused of. The espionage act does have some parts which are punishable by the death penalty.
That is a lot easier to do with capitol letters and punctuation in the proper place. Writing like that just makes you look either uneducated or stoned.
If you are going to be a grammar nazi, make sure you read your own post thoroughly and follow your own rules. They are called capital letters, not capitol letters.
The main problem with the invisible hand of the free market is that no-one can see it's giving us the finger.
This is probably the best comment I have ever seen on slashdot.