So, they want to flood the market with developers who make crappy games and insecure applications for the mobile phone, hence creating a market that the phone makers will make millions off of. Quarter-a-game Arcade on your phone, with cheaply produced games on demand, with phonebook on demand for a price, in otherwords.
It boggles the mind at what kind of scams will be born out of this one, and what kind of privacy issues will come into the scene; Buisnessmen need their cellphones, but, they spend hours gaming on them instead of working, so how do we keep them from gaming? Exactly...
Thank you God, it's a great time to be alive and to be a hacker. >:)
Will it be an os designed to screw people over? (as in, drm, tcpa, etc)
Will they simply steal OSS and release it with few changes without honoring the gpl?
Will it be in other languages and availabe to foreigners?
These people are notorious for stealing ideas, and in most cases, modifying them into something better then claiming them as their own. I don't trust foreign companies and goverments any more, and in some cases, less, than I trust my own(US). What is the community to do if they steal it and start selling it stateside?
Becuase it's still a virus. Sure, it has a different payload but nonetheless, it's still illegal under U.S law. Sure, it only infects company machines but you've always got the problem of someone from outside loging on and having their system hosed.
Although I can see this being used for wireless security; everyone is infected with a virus that reportes to the server and automatically tries to infect other machines every, say, 5 minutes. Some script kittie logs on with a unpatched machine, gets infected, then the company has a nice list of IP addys they can trace back because every time they, for example, change IP, it alerts the server.
I remember when I used to be in Smile we would occasionally play different games other than tribes. One night, we were playing the raven shield demo and toying around with the different weapons.
Now, truth be told, all of us had our sound maxed out; you have to have it, the slightest sound can be the determining factor of weither you kill or get killed, no music allowed. Unfortunatly, one of the guys had a 5.1 surround sound system in his room cranked to the max (who I will refer to as "billy".). There was also another guy I was playing with whom I will call "Kiddy".
So, there I was, the match on the prison level just started, and I decided to throw a frag grenaide, max power, up at 45 degree angle to see how far it'd go. So I throw it, watch as the projectile moves off into the distance, then I hear this little pop.
About a half a second later over Teamspeak2 I hear another boom, considerably louder, fallowed by a "Ahh! HOOOLY SHIT!!!".
Of course, "kiddy" asked "what was it" and "billy" said "fuck, a grenaide blew up right next to my fucking head, arrgh". Subsequently, "Billy" was going up a flight of stairs, and the nade hit the upper platform right next to his head.
After that I heard something that made both of us laugh our asses off; "Brb guys, got to change my pants".
It's understandable; you've had a bit too much beer, don't want to goto the bathroom becuase of the addiction of the game, and at the beginning of the map you don't expect a nade to explode right next to your head, a minute 4 or 5 seconds after it started.
Of course, up until the point I left smile, "billy" never heard the end of it, hehee. >:)
Around 90% of the news media in the usa is owned by 6 or so tightly intertwined media congolmerates. Books, including schoolbooks, newspapers, television, radio, etc are all owned by companies trying to make a profit who are also heavily heavily bribing politicans to pass ever more horrifying bills. So, to put it shortly, we've got a problem with the dissemination if information. You don't hear non-corperate friendly news, you only get right wing vs ultra-right wing or how GM's nuke plants in france are so enviromently friendly. No left wing, no independants. no news about how GM is dumping nuclear waste near villages in china. All we get today is sports, some young bastard getting killed in a horriffic way so as to frighten us, then zoloft with it's happy fields telling you about how you may have a depression problem and how to cure it (wonder why:P), then sports, weather, mabye something about bush getting an anal exam, and thats all. No politically minded discussion, no thinking, bullshit.
When it comes to politics, we're promised better better better by both parties and when we try to remember good reasons to vote about them, we draw up blanks so we don't vote. Our views on the world are determined by ricki lake and oprah, or cnn and are just as simple. Sure bush went to war with iraq, and liberated the people while keeping losses at a minimum (which there is proof he's lieing). He hasn't rebuilt anything and the news networks are getting on him for that. You don't see news about important things anymore, just slander slander slander, and mabye some praise mixed inbetween.
After this, we've got a complacent society. People don't seem to care, or they think they're somehow invincible from the wraith of ever more constrictive laws. Or, they're missled to believing that by giving up all their rights unkle sam will take care of them and they are made fearful from all the apparent crime in the world, so much so they buy an ever increasing number of guns, alarms, etc every year then fear eachother because thet may be a terrorist, making it even more difficult to organize and educate. The fear I blame on tv, where a kid can want things they'll never get and watch all the violence they'd ever want to the point they are so desentisized they become antisocial. The complacency I blame on our sham of an education system.
People are, at a very early age, imprisoned in a building and force-fed information which is mostly false and taught to be complacent. If they aren't complacent, they are punished. If you don't shut up when the teacher tells you to, you'll be given a detention. If you don't do what they say, as for example, intake and excrete information on demand, they hold you back a grade or won't graduate you out of highschool, thus labelling you as subversive or lazy for the rest of your life and closing many many oppertunities to you. I was lucky to goto a highschool that let the students keep their subversiveness and encouraged thinking while keeping punishments as mild as the state would allow, but I know in other places you'll get probation for being late to class to many times. Unfortunatly, people fight against this system in the entirely wrong way by avoiding books and education, as their idea of education is similar to the militarys way of training soldiers.
Then you've got the poisoning of the food supply. Exitotoxins which break down your brain to the point you get bad diseases like altimers at an early age, floride in the water which is actually a powerful toxin that causes cancer and weakens bones(which is concentrated into soda in addition to exitotoxins btw), MSG, Nutrasweet, all lovely packaged under the consumer-friendly terms such as "artifical flavoring" or "natural flavoring" thanks to corperations bribing the FDA. This in addition to foods rich in everything but what the body needs. I take vitamins, good $50 a bottle ones everyday to ensure my body gets what it needs and I
"There's a problem. How much money will it cost us to correct the problem if it gets out, PR wise? If that's greater than the cost of fixing the problem if it's exploited, then we'll fix the problem."
Linux does it a different way
"There's a problem in MY software? MY SOFTWARE??? WHAT!!! BLASPHMEY!!! KILL KILL KILL!!!"
Just by this principle alone linux should, over the years and years of work, be more secure than windows. The only time that bugs are not fixed is if the designer is too lazy to fix them.
But even if it wasn't. Lets say tomarrow a major virus, say uberblaster, that exploited a bug in both the linux kernel, mac, and the windows kernel (effecting all windows platforms) came out, all requiring a decent amount of work to fix.
The linux community would be agast, and pissed off and take it personally. I'd even bet linux himself would be up, 24 hours a day with caffine in hand to get it fixed. The patch would be released within a few hours to mabye a day. If linux couldn't get a patch out, other people could as, remember, it's all open source.
MS on the other hand would say "Fsck, we've got to work on this, kick the PR department into full kick on this issue and get the programmers working on a fix posthaste". And in a week a patch would come out.
Linux is, by principle, more secure than windows. We'll only know for sure that it is more secure once it hits the average joe market. With desktops like kde sporting kewler features than the rehashed windows desktop (which, face it, hasn't changed since win95) running on a solid linux backround, you'd hope that people would be happy with it. Until then, distribute antivirus and firewall packages to everyone who has a windows machine and advice them to run windows update until microsoft pulls another "root your machine" ploy's.
Linux isn't probably any more secure than most windows systems. But it's a step in the right direction. It's not something linux lubbers like to admit, but a lot of sysadmins have just as many problems with windows machines getting broken into as with linux boxes getting attacked. Developers working with application makers, and all the while their working on fixing every bug they can lay their hands on; this is the direction we need to go in. Fix all the bugs, even the minor ones because all it takes is 1 bug to screw over thousands of machines. It's also the machine owners job to secure their own part of the internet as well. A patch that isn't downloaded is useless.
We're already at a doller a gig now, in 20 months we'll be at half a buck a gig, and in another 20, a quarter a buck a gig. And harddisks have supposedly been increasing in dependability. Plus, I know most of you have noticed motherboard manufacturers putting raid functions on their boards more and more often. You can go out, blow some money on a pair of big hardisks and raid them.
250 gig/$243= $.97 a gig
50 CDR pack *.7 gig/$20 = $.57 a gig
We have yet to see a removable storage medium that is as flexable, cheap, and portable as the CD. There's DVD-r but that only does what, 2 times that of a cd-r? I'm thinking something that holds around a half a terrabit a disk...
I was hoping there'd be a few more good viruses laying about prepairing to nail other windows systems. Give CEO's a month or two of grief and they'll begin to see it the linux way.
We'll never know what the hackers true intent was, however. It's suspicious that blaster and the sobig virus were thrown out almost one right after the other. It all may be a distraction. For all we know there could be another virus lurking around infecting machines slowly, 1 by 1 until a doomsday date at which they deliver their payload.
I don't think we even live under a democracy. Last election ralph nader got 5% of the national vote and the goverment denied him federal money, immediatly inreasing the amount to 15%. Think if he wins in their system they'll let him in? When I'v got the cash I'm buying a gun; I know there's gonna be a revolution at some point as this country delves farther into a depression, I pray that it won't be violent.
What they have now isn't voting, it's poorly run statistics. Illinois has xxx people in it, if the majority vote is republican, they all must be republican or vice versa. No majority vote like what the constitution says, and no democracy.
I started out, like most people my age, infront of a NES at home playing games like mario, megaman, ninja gaiden, etc. All simple games by todays compairison even though I will say when I replay these games right now, they have a certain nostalgic value and I look at them in a far more strategic light.
Then, I got a SNES and Genesis, and I proceeded to play games like sonic (aka, mario on speed), just about every game from squaresoft I could get my greedy little hands on (FF, SOM, SOE, etc)and eventually got a computer around the same time, at which I started playing doom, blake stone, tetris games, etc.
I was around for the "big move" into 3d. I played mario 64 (mario on speed doing lsd), and some other games. I eventually got a PSX as well and played the FF series on that (couldn't resist when it got cheap). Around the same time my tastes with computers evolved as well; I got Total Annihilation, one of the best RTS games around, as well as starcraft, and all sorts of other games.
After I got the computer going, I finally built myself a gaming rig and stopped playing console games. Now I'm at the point of playing really complicated games like Tribes2, Morrowind (if you can get past the horrid engine, it's pretty good), gothic 2, UT2k3 (gameplay sucks, but the graphics are awesome). Give a game like tribes2 to, say, my father, who hasn't had all those years of conditioning, and he'll get frusterated after a few minuts of playing. He says "I make it look easy" or "I make him dizzy"
So Nintendo is very very right, games have evolved a lot. So much so that, even though our society is used to, and even dependant on digital tech we are creating more and more complicated games for everyone to play that frusterates the hell out of normal, non-gaming people. Now this isn't to say that games like Metal of Honor, Serious sam, Dungeon Siege, etc are difficult games, on the contrary I can give those to my father and he'll have a blast and I'll even admit I had fun playing them too. But I enjoy games like Tribes2 and Total annihilation so much more than DS or MOH simply becuase of the difficulty. Combat in Tribes2 resembles something out of Dragonball Z, accept it's more UT style, you've got skiing and actual strategy. TA is great as well. A proper compairison I think would be as starcraft or warcraft is to chess, is as TA is to Othello. TA is way more complicated but that is what makes it fun.
You'll also notice gamers who play complicated games are usually smarter than those who don't. Sure, they may not have the same vocabulary, education, etc as others but generally their intellegence level is at least double that of a normal sheeple. You'll also notice that studies of the effects of gaming are notoriously absent; nobody has been doing studies on it to see the effects of it, partially because of satanic groups of people masquerading as christian groups threatening anyone who does research they don't like.
So I think nintendo is absolutely correct. I also think they screwed themselves by making it a "family oriented company" and with the N64 by going with carts. Mark your games with age stickers and leave it at that, caving in hand over fist to christian religous groups who are obviously lead by satan is a bad idea.
And for those of you who think I can't paint all of the activist christian groups with a satanic evil glow; watch me, I use a roller! (in the words of SK)
It's a trust issue. We don't trust them to not use the data we give them and they gather against us and in ways we don't like.
RFID, like any other tech, is generally designed to be useful. I actually like the idea of no checker, it saves me time and so long as I can still pay in cash and have a checker if I want, I'm happy. The checkers are replaced by fewer support personell, some of them are kept and the rest are put on either shelf duty or are fired, who can then in theory go and get a better edumication and help to build better systems such as space exploration vehicles or something of the like.
The problem is that corperations are notoriously cheap and they'll do anything to cut costs, including genoside, slavery, extortion, election rigging, forcing workers in different countries to compete for who works for the lowest wages, etc.
Do I want a bunch of criminals in wallmart knowing what I buy, where I live, etc? No. Any information they have is power over me and I don't trust them any more than I trust a mass murderer living next door.
So, if they can earn my trust by not being cheap and BSing us about this, then mabye I wouldn't be up in arms. Although we all know where all this grand automation is going to land us if corperations have their way; the poor house. The IT technician that gets replaced by a foreign worker now works as a bagger at cub foods, who is replaced by a machine. They then goto starbucks, where the people there are replaced by machines that make coffie, they then goto work at burger king, where a fully automated system is setup to make everything. When robots become viable, they'll be stocking shelves for us. Where will all those jobs go and where will the money go? All the jobs go away, the systems are designed to support thousands of people but nobody has any money because there's no work to be had, and the work there is to be had pays so lousy that you can barely make a living.
These people won't just die, they'll protest, violently and otherwise. They'll break into stores, people's houses, buy and steal weaponry and kill and plunder to get what they need. If the goverment does things like increase the vote percentage to get federal funding to %15 when Ralph nader gets %5 of the vote, you'd better believe they'll raise it to %30 when he gets %15, and 50% when he gets %30. What happens when he gets a vast majority? Lets just hope by then the corperations don't have a milita of their own that they can use to kill us all. I don't like how the next 10-20 years are looking at all.
Actually, I have cracked most of the games I own so they don't use the cd because I prefer for the cd to last a few years instead of letting the drive and switching it around slowly chop the cd up. There's your legitamate use if you needed one. It isn't illegal, it just violates and invalidates the eula, so sure I am stealing. They started it by taking away my ability to learn from their work and by charging exuberant prices.
Am I a thief as you are accusing me of? Sure, are you a complete dumass? Yes.
Not to mention people hate monopolies over anything that makes it so expensive to buy that most people can't afford it. If wallmart moves into your town, kills the competition, issues slapsuites and the like against startup companies looking to compete with them, and then quadruples their prices for everything, and you, a hardworking american now has to buy most of their food, clothing, etc from wallmart, is it really wrong to steal from them? At the end of the day do you let your kids starve and go clothless? No, you do what it takes to survive.
Stealing [i]is[/i] a crime; [i]stealing away our ability feed and cloth ourselves or have the conviences we are slaves to is a crime within itself[/i] and when you realize that you'll probably be disguisted with what you just said. Whatever happens after that is vigalanteism under the guise of civil disobedience.
If you don't like something and the state is too corrupt to take care of it, and I can't emphasise this enough
[i] you_have_to_take_care_of_it_yourself[/i].
If the coal mining company is illegally ripping up or polluting your farmland and the goverment does nothing about it, buy a boat repair kit and coat the engine of the construction equipment with fiberglass in the middle of the night so they'll never run again. Plant spikes in the ground and road to pop the tires of the workers and the machines doing the working. Make it so expensive that they can't do it. There are towns in the country where they throw up gigantic inter-city powerlines and where the people, who don't like their farmland being ripped up or polluted by them, will tear them right back down. They'll get up, but they won't stay up!
If an OS company establishes a monopoly by stealing, killing, cheating, and just downright dirty play so much so that most of the software produced is for it, the best way to fight back is to pirate that software or to use something else. Microsoft already has enough money and political influence as is, they don't need anymore, and most of the people in the world can't afford it to begin with. $199 for winxp? $399 for office? I'm not paying that, and I'm consider it highway robbery that when I go out and buy a new dell machine it doesn't come witha CD and then something like blaster comes along and kills the install, so I'v got to go out and shell out some more money. I'm pissed that there's no competition to speak of accept for linux, which isn't ready for the vast majority of users. As soon as there's a viable alternative, you'd better believe MS's software prices are going to plummet to compeditive prices and their stock is going to go down.
Can't ship anhything higher than 56bit encryption over the border, guess what window's has in it? And they can't sell unbundled hardware... It's little laws like that which make it impossible for some retailers top ship worldwide; they'd be pissing off the cia or fbi or some federal or state agency that thinks they're giving some teenager in india the equipment to hack the pentagon right out of the box.
It's bullshit and it's going to kill our economy in the long run. Other countries will begin to produce their own hardware and software independant of us and they'll be able to ship to us but not vice versa.
Actually, you aren't necissarilly breaking the law. A long time ago my grandma gave me a midi editing program, and after using it for a few years my box crashes and the disk the program comes on are damaged, yet lo and behold, I could get the same program off of p2p. Illiegal use? I think not.
I'm also appauled that anyone would even consider this theft, or lisencing, which is absolute bullshit. It's fairly standard; you get the media, you can do anything you want with it within fair use and unregulated use. There is no eula, no blanket contract, nothing. Software is usually lisenced, which is BS, and they do that to keep us dumb to how the program works. There's an auful lot of trust in bringing a robot into your home to be a slave, and turning it on and seeing what happens. Same with software; you have no way of telling what's inside of it and if that protection via lisence was taken away software would be a helluva lot more secure and if you had to include source code...
Another thing is that nobody has to proove they purchased anything. You can be accused, sure, but there is a time limit on reporting a theft. Now, with a car or something very valuable you're supposed to keep records, and if someone comes to you, accuses you of stealing a car 3 years ago, there's no police report and you've got the title they're fucked. If they accuse you of stealing a dining set and you don't have records, and they don't have proof, they are fucked.
Same situation for the RIAA: the proof they have is that you had the file up for sharing. If they download it, since they hold the copyright it's legal. They have to somehow proove it was being uploaded to someone else which they can't proove, they can only proove intent, not an actual act. If I have a CD or MP3 it's assumed I baught it or own it and I don't have to show you jack shit no matter who you are. You don't have to proove you purchased it, it's they have to proove you didn't purchase it.
What captialism is and what it's turned into are 2 completly different things. What capitalism is, is a system of trade that awards people based on their level of ambition and how useful that ambition is; it's a system that prey's on the action/reward system our minds work off.
What capitalism has turned into is the unrealistic expectation you can create a rock with googlie eyes and make billions. So what happens is when people don't make their billions they try to lock up their ideas and inventions, and with that our culture as a humanity. Or when their rock makes billions they get greedy and try to get laws passed that outlaw the competing product.
Another problem are corperations, which you can only expect when the ability to communicate and coordinate millions of people come into being. The reason we didn't see a gigantic corperation like microsoft before is becuase of the communiation involved. The reason we see them now is is because of the communication systems. Anyway, as companies grow and inevitably destroy eachother, you're going to get a few eliete companies coming into being and when that happens, you're eventually going to reach the pinnacle omnicorp, which controls the goverment and commerce for the good of money and power. Orwellian much?
The reason people are doing this isn't because they don't value the product; if they didn't value it they wouldn't try to get it for free. On the contrary, they are trying to get something they value for nothing. They don't want to pay for it, which tells me they are fed up with the system in one way or another. This is why it attacks the heart of capitalism; once everyone stops being greedy and comes to the realization that they don't need or even want to be billionairs, that's the end of capitalism and the point where it becomes useless. I'd rather live in a system where the things that make us human, things like creativity, emotion and morals guide what we do instead of money. Unfortunatly, I'm forced into working a job and doing something that I don't neccissarily enjoy when I could be doing something better for myself and better for all of humanity, such as learning a new programming language or learning to solder circutry. Most people don't realize what they can learn in a lifetime and instead do what they are taught; to be dependant on a system and after their "work" is over, to rest by buying junk and hanging out with friends. It's actually really really sad imo, and since the most greedy and ambitious, and smart get into powerful positions you can only expect our society to go down from where it is right now. Once the corperations reach critical mass they get power of the goverment and, well, everything's downhill from there. That's why we need to stop capitalism now, before we're all enslaved through the system; working 16 hours a day like the kids in africa who make gap clothing to earn a measly living, or replaced with robot slave labor.
Spend some time thinking about that, and listen to rantradio if you want more ideas, the link's in my sig.
You don't get it, it isn't copyright infringement. Taking a picture of something isn't copying it. It can't even be argued becuase we take pictures of advertisements, logo's, books, etc all the time. If I take a picture of someone in a magazine store and I happen to get a rack of magazines, am I infringing on their copyright? The answer is no, taking pictures of anything in public is perfectly legal in america, weither it be for the purpose of copying something or not. It's part of our freedom you need to understand.
Re:No Knee-jerk Privacy responses please...
on
Twist on DNA Privacy
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Oh, right, I'm somehow supposed to want to give up my rights more because the crime was worse? I'm more worried about the goverment getting everyone's dna as a primary way of identifing them and then using that to track/identify/regulate them, or the goverment selling this information to companies who then copywrite sequences of DNA and then charge people to live. If there's substantial amount evidence, then this is really covered under the searches and siezurs part of our bill of rights. Get a court order, or shut the fuck up.
Any information they have on you is power they have over you. It depends on the information they have and what they want to do to you, but it's power nonetheless. Just like a theif gets blueprints of buildings or hackers get copies of software and gather information on vulnerabilities, a goverment will always always gather information before regulation and banning. And they'll do it slowly and try to distract you as well.
Listen to the shows in the link in my sig, they're free and oncemore, they report on these kinds of things and give you information that the media otehrwise wouldn't give out.
and I'd say microsoft's exeuitives think it's come time to start selling the stock in their company and filling their personal pocketbooks a bit further. They are certainly looking they're afraid of something, weither it be linux, US courts, another economic downfall, who knows. But it isn't a good sign when you're company heads start selling off theri stocks; it shows they've lost a good deal of faith in their company's ability to do damage.
People won't pay for what they don't value, and ultamatly, as technology progresses and if control of that technology stays in the hands of people, we'll begin to see new kinds of media such as people throwing up e-newspapers and instead of asking for payment, ask for donations.
The store owners are simply angry becuase an old system they've been using for years is finally beginning to fade away into obsolecence. What people are doing isn't even a crime; as far as the law is conserned you can take all the pictures you want in public in america you want. If you go into a store, it's considered rude to try to make a copy of something that way like it's rude to stand there and read the magazine in the store without buying it.
no, you're a moron for not realizing that you can fight back against this kind of bullshit; your post read like a broken man who realized he can't control a system and instead of working to fix it, gave up and dealt with it. I for one don't like the bullshit; if you make an agreement you keep it and don't fuck around with your customers. IT's how buisness is supposed to be conducted, buisness is not make an agreeement then cheat like hell and if it is then this isn't a world I want to live in.
Alright, lemme just open this lil' e-mail box here, oh...fuck...look at the 40 billion e-mails...now that the obvious is out of the way...
If you have information on someone you have power over them, plain and simple. What kind of power is upto the information and what you want to do to them. If all of our records are tied into one big database, they can figure out "oh, here's a guy who's married and has 2 kids, and he looks at beastiality porn, and he has some money", and if that's available to everyone on the planet. Or, say, they know you like porn then they can spam your e-mail box and send you snailmail, send representatives to harass you, etc. And with our legal system do you think they're going to stop unless every joe sixpack sue's them? Nope
The reason total information awareness is getting so much opposition is becuase it fundementally takes power away from the people; our ability to hide stuff allows us to resist unenforcable laws that are fundementally corrup and horrible. There's a good reason laws are unenforcable; nobody has enough information to enforce them. The first step to banning is regulation; if the goverment doesn't like guns, they can ask you to get a card and a backround check to get them then file that away in some database, then they can ban different types slowly with dumb excuses like "you don't need a machine gun to fight a deer", to which I'd reply "yea, but I'd need one to fight a jeep full of military personell should the goverment become corrupt". If they don't know you have the gun they can't effectivly ban it, plain and simple, but if they do they can make it manditory to bring your gun and all ammo to the local police dept or the dept will come to your house, take the gun and give you a $50 ticket.
Essays like yours make me want to puke all over. It's so poorly thought out I just can't believe it. The "they can't do anything to me with the info I give them" is bullshit, absolute outright bullshit. What if they decided that you're a terrorist for buying draino and aluminum or some combination of household cleaning items that can be used for bombs? As I said before, if they have information on you they have power over you and if you spend some time actually using your brain you'd realize that.
Slashdot Mirror
So, they want to flood the market with developers who make crappy games and insecure applications for the mobile phone, hence creating a market that the phone makers will make millions off of. Quarter-a-game Arcade on your phone, with cheaply produced games on demand, with phonebook on demand for a price, in otherwords.
It boggles the mind at what kind of scams will be born out of this one, and what kind of privacy issues will come into the scene; Buisnessmen need their cellphones, but, they spend hours gaming on them instead of working, so how do we keep them from gaming? Exactly...
Thank you God, it's a great time to be alive and to be a hacker. >:)
Will it be open source?
Will it be an os designed to screw people over? (as in, drm, tcpa, etc)
Will they simply steal OSS and release it with few changes without honoring the gpl?
Will it be in other languages and availabe to foreigners?
These people are notorious for stealing ideas, and in most cases, modifying them into something better then claiming them as their own. I don't trust foreign companies and goverments any more, and in some cases, less, than I trust my own(US). What is the community to do if they steal it and start selling it stateside?
Becuase it's still a virus. Sure, it has a different payload but nonetheless, it's still illegal under U.S law. Sure, it only infects company machines but you've always got the problem of someone from outside loging on and having their system hosed.
Although I can see this being used for wireless security; everyone is infected with a virus that reportes to the server and automatically tries to infect other machines every, say, 5 minutes. Some script kittie logs on with a unpatched machine, gets infected, then the company has a nice list of IP addys they can trace back because every time they, for example, change IP, it alerts the server.
I remember when I used to be in Smile we would occasionally play different games other than tribes. One night, we were playing the raven shield demo and toying around with the different weapons.
Now, truth be told, all of us had our sound maxed out; you have to have it, the slightest sound can be the determining factor of weither you kill or get killed, no music allowed. Unfortunatly, one of the guys had a 5.1 surround sound system in his room cranked to the max (who I will refer to as "billy".). There was also another guy I was playing with whom I will call "Kiddy".
So, there I was, the match on the prison level just started, and I decided to throw a frag grenaide, max power, up at 45 degree angle to see how far it'd go. So I throw it, watch as the projectile moves off into the distance, then I hear this little pop.
About a half a second later over Teamspeak2 I hear another boom, considerably louder, fallowed by a "Ahh! HOOOLY SHIT!!!".
Of course, "kiddy" asked "what was it" and "billy" said "fuck, a grenaide blew up right next to my fucking head, arrgh". Subsequently, "Billy" was going up a flight of stairs, and the nade hit the upper platform right next to his head.
After that I heard something that made both of us laugh our asses off; "Brb guys, got to change my pants".
It's understandable; you've had a bit too much beer, don't want to goto the bathroom becuase of the addiction of the game, and at the beginning of the map you don't expect a nade to explode right next to your head, a minute 4 or 5 seconds after it started.
Of course, up until the point I left smile, "billy" never heard the end of it, hehee. >:)
You see, we've got a couple problems.
:P), then sports, weather, mabye something about bush getting an anal exam, and thats all. No politically minded discussion, no thinking, bullshit.
Around 90% of the news media in the usa is owned by 6 or so tightly intertwined media congolmerates. Books, including schoolbooks, newspapers, television, radio, etc are all owned by companies trying to make a profit who are also heavily heavily bribing politicans to pass ever more horrifying bills. So, to put it shortly, we've got a problem with the dissemination if information. You don't hear non-corperate friendly news, you only get right wing vs ultra-right wing or how GM's nuke plants in france are so enviromently friendly. No left wing, no independants. no news about how GM is dumping nuclear waste near villages in china. All we get today is sports, some young bastard getting killed in a horriffic way so as to frighten us, then zoloft with it's happy fields telling you about how you may have a depression problem and how to cure it (wonder why
When it comes to politics, we're promised better better better by both parties and when we try to remember good reasons to vote about them, we draw up blanks so we don't vote. Our views on the world are determined by ricki lake and oprah, or cnn and are just as simple. Sure bush went to war with iraq, and liberated the people while keeping losses at a minimum (which there is proof he's lieing). He hasn't rebuilt anything and the news networks are getting on him for that. You don't see news about important things anymore, just slander slander slander, and mabye some praise mixed inbetween.
After this, we've got a complacent society. People don't seem to care, or they think they're somehow invincible from the wraith of ever more constrictive laws. Or, they're missled to believing that by giving up all their rights unkle sam will take care of them and they are made fearful from all the apparent crime in the world, so much so they buy an ever increasing number of guns, alarms, etc every year then fear eachother because thet may be a terrorist, making it even more difficult to organize and educate. The fear I blame on tv, where a kid can want things they'll never get and watch all the violence they'd ever want to the point they are so desentisized they become antisocial. The complacency I blame on our sham of an education system.
People are, at a very early age, imprisoned in a building and force-fed information which is mostly false and taught to be complacent. If they aren't complacent, they are punished. If you don't shut up when the teacher tells you to, you'll be given a detention. If you don't do what they say, as for example, intake and excrete information on demand, they hold you back a grade or won't graduate you out of highschool, thus labelling you as subversive or lazy for the rest of your life and closing many many oppertunities to you. I was lucky to goto a highschool that let the students keep their subversiveness and encouraged thinking while keeping punishments as mild as the state would allow, but I know in other places you'll get probation for being late to class to many times. Unfortunatly, people fight against this system in the entirely wrong way by avoiding books and education, as their idea of education is similar to the militarys way of training soldiers.
Then you've got the poisoning of the food supply. Exitotoxins which break down your brain to the point you get bad diseases like altimers at an early age, floride in the water which is actually a powerful toxin that causes cancer and weakens bones(which is concentrated into soda in addition to exitotoxins btw), MSG, Nutrasweet, all lovely packaged under the consumer-friendly terms such as "artifical flavoring" or "natural flavoring" thanks to corperations bribing the FDA. This in addition to foods rich in everything but what the body needs. I take vitamins, good $50 a bottle ones everyday to ensure my body gets what it needs and I
Microsoft tackles the problem like this:
"There's a problem. How much money will it cost us to correct the problem if it gets out, PR wise? If that's greater than the cost of fixing the problem if it's exploited, then we'll fix the problem."
Linux does it a different way
"There's a problem in MY software? MY SOFTWARE??? WHAT!!! BLASPHMEY!!! KILL KILL KILL!!!"
Just by this principle alone linux should, over the years and years of work, be more secure than windows. The only time that bugs are not fixed is if the designer is too lazy to fix them.
But even if it wasn't. Lets say tomarrow a major virus, say uberblaster, that exploited a bug in both the linux kernel, mac, and the windows kernel (effecting all windows platforms) came out, all requiring a decent amount of work to fix.
The linux community would be agast, and pissed off and take it personally. I'd even bet linux himself would be up, 24 hours a day with caffine in hand to get it fixed. The patch would be released within a few hours to mabye a day. If linux couldn't get a patch out, other people could as, remember, it's all open source.
MS on the other hand would say "Fsck, we've got to work on this, kick the PR department into full kick on this issue and get the programmers working on a fix posthaste". And in a week a patch would come out.
Linux is, by principle, more secure than windows. We'll only know for sure that it is more secure once it hits the average joe market. With desktops like kde sporting kewler features than the rehashed windows desktop (which, face it, hasn't changed since win95) running on a solid linux backround, you'd hope that people would be happy with it. Until then, distribute antivirus and firewall packages to everyone who has a windows machine and advice them to run windows update until microsoft pulls another "root your machine" ploy's.
Linux isn't probably any more secure than most windows systems. But it's a step in the right direction. It's not something linux lubbers like to admit, but a lot of sysadmins have just as many problems with windows machines getting broken into as with linux boxes getting attacked. Developers working with application makers, and all the while their working on fixing every bug they can lay their hands on; this is the direction we need to go in. Fix all the bugs, even the minor ones because all it takes is 1 bug to screw over thousands of machines. It's also the machine owners job to secure their own part of the internet as well. A patch that isn't downloaded is useless.
We're already at a doller a gig now, in 20 months we'll be at half a buck a gig, and in another 20, a quarter a buck a gig. And harddisks have supposedly been increasing in dependability. Plus, I know most of you have noticed motherboard manufacturers putting raid functions on their boards more and more often. You can go out, blow some money on a pair of big hardisks and raid them. 250 gig/$243= $.97 a gig 50 CDR pack * .7 gig/$20 = $.57 a gig
We have yet to see a removable storage medium that is as flexable, cheap, and portable as the CD. There's DVD-r but that only does what, 2 times that of a cd-r? I'm thinking something that holds around a half a terrabit a disk...
I'v got teamspeak 2. As far as Illinois is conserned, they can kill my ass.
I was hoping there'd be a few more good viruses laying about prepairing to nail other windows systems. Give CEO's a month or two of grief and they'll begin to see it the linux way.
We'll never know what the hackers true intent was, however. It's suspicious that blaster and the sobig virus were thrown out almost one right after the other. It all may be a distraction. For all we know there could be another virus lurking around infecting machines slowly, 1 by 1 until a doomsday date at which they deliver their payload.
I don't think we even live under a democracy. Last election ralph nader got 5% of the national vote and the goverment denied him federal money, immediatly inreasing the amount to 15%. Think if he wins in their system they'll let him in? When I'v got the cash I'm buying a gun; I know there's gonna be a revolution at some point as this country delves farther into a depression, I pray that it won't be violent.
What they have now isn't voting, it's poorly run statistics. Illinois has xxx people in it, if the majority vote is republican, they all must be republican or vice versa. No majority vote like what the constitution says, and no democracy.
I started out, like most people my age, infront of a NES at home playing games like mario, megaman, ninja gaiden, etc. All simple games by todays compairison even though I will say when I replay these games right now, they have a certain nostalgic value and I look at them in a far more strategic light.
Then, I got a SNES and Genesis, and I proceeded to play games like sonic (aka, mario on speed), just about every game from squaresoft I could get my greedy little hands on (FF, SOM, SOE, etc)and eventually got a computer around the same time, at which I started playing doom, blake stone, tetris games, etc.
I was around for the "big move" into 3d. I played mario 64 (mario on speed doing lsd), and some other games. I eventually got a PSX as well and played the FF series on that (couldn't resist when it got cheap). Around the same time my tastes with computers evolved as well; I got Total Annihilation, one of the best RTS games around, as well as starcraft, and all sorts of other games.
After I got the computer going, I finally built myself a gaming rig and stopped playing console games. Now I'm at the point of playing really complicated games like Tribes2, Morrowind (if you can get past the horrid engine, it's pretty good), gothic 2, UT2k3 (gameplay sucks, but the graphics are awesome). Give a game like tribes2 to, say, my father, who hasn't had all those years of conditioning, and he'll get frusterated after a few minuts of playing. He says "I make it look easy" or "I make him dizzy"
So Nintendo is very very right, games have evolved a lot. So much so that, even though our society is used to, and even dependant on digital tech we are creating more and more complicated games for everyone to play that frusterates the hell out of normal, non-gaming people. Now this isn't to say that games like Metal of Honor, Serious sam, Dungeon Siege, etc are difficult games, on the contrary I can give those to my father and he'll have a blast and I'll even admit I had fun playing them too. But I enjoy games like Tribes2 and Total annihilation so much more than DS or MOH simply becuase of the difficulty. Combat in Tribes2 resembles something out of Dragonball Z, accept it's more UT style, you've got skiing and actual strategy. TA is great as well. A proper compairison I think would be as starcraft or warcraft is to chess, is as TA is to Othello. TA is way more complicated but that is what makes it fun.
You'll also notice gamers who play complicated games are usually smarter than those who don't. Sure, they may not have the same vocabulary, education, etc as others but generally their intellegence level is at least double that of a normal sheeple. You'll also notice that studies of the effects of gaming are notoriously absent; nobody has been doing studies on it to see the effects of it, partially because of satanic groups of people masquerading as christian groups threatening anyone who does research they don't like.
So I think nintendo is absolutely correct. I also think they screwed themselves by making it a "family oriented company" and with the N64 by going with carts. Mark your games with age stickers and leave it at that, caving in hand over fist to christian religous groups who are obviously lead by satan is a bad idea.
And for those of you who think I can't paint all of the activist christian groups with a satanic evil glow; watch me, I use a roller! (in the words of SK)
Hey, lets sue IBM for pantent infringment for linux!
See judge?, lookie, there's all this code but we can't and won't show it to you, but we do ask you make Ibm give us 1 billion.
Oh no! We're getting all this bad publicity. It's IBM's fault, those big bullies!
It's a trust issue. We don't trust them to not use the data we give them and they gather against us and in ways we don't like.
RFID, like any other tech, is generally designed to be useful. I actually like the idea of no checker, it saves me time and so long as I can still pay in cash and have a checker if I want, I'm happy. The checkers are replaced by fewer support personell, some of them are kept and the rest are put on either shelf duty or are fired, who can then in theory go and get a better edumication and help to build better systems such as space exploration vehicles or something of the like.
The problem is that corperations are notoriously cheap and they'll do anything to cut costs, including genoside, slavery, extortion, election rigging, forcing workers in different countries to compete for who works for the lowest wages, etc.
Do I want a bunch of criminals in wallmart knowing what I buy, where I live, etc? No. Any information they have is power over me and I don't trust them any more than I trust a mass murderer living next door.
So, if they can earn my trust by not being cheap and BSing us about this, then mabye I wouldn't be up in arms. Although we all know where all this grand automation is going to land us if corperations have their way; the poor house. The IT technician that gets replaced by a foreign worker now works as a bagger at cub foods, who is replaced by a machine. They then goto starbucks, where the people there are replaced by machines that make coffie, they then goto work at burger king, where a fully automated system is setup to make everything. When robots become viable, they'll be stocking shelves for us. Where will all those jobs go and where will the money go? All the jobs go away, the systems are designed to support thousands of people but nobody has any money because there's no work to be had, and the work there is to be had pays so lousy that you can barely make a living.
These people won't just die, they'll protest, violently and otherwise. They'll break into stores, people's houses, buy and steal weaponry and kill and plunder to get what they need. If the goverment does things like increase the vote percentage to get federal funding to %15 when Ralph nader gets %5 of the vote, you'd better believe they'll raise it to %30 when he gets %15, and 50% when he gets %30. What happens when he gets a vast majority? Lets just hope by then the corperations don't have a milita of their own that they can use to kill us all. I don't like how the next 10-20 years are looking at all.
Actually, I have cracked most of the games I own so they don't use the cd because I prefer for the cd to last a few years instead of letting the drive and switching it around slowly chop the cd up. There's your legitamate use if you needed one. It isn't illegal, it just violates and invalidates the eula, so sure I am stealing. They started it by taking away my ability to learn from their work and by charging exuberant prices.
Am I a thief as you are accusing me of? Sure, are you a complete dumass? Yes.
Not to mention people hate monopolies over anything that makes it so expensive to buy that most people can't afford it. If wallmart moves into your town, kills the competition, issues slapsuites and the like against startup companies looking to compete with them, and then quadruples their prices for everything, and you, a hardworking american now has to buy most of their food, clothing, etc from wallmart, is it really wrong to steal from them? At the end of the day do you let your kids starve and go clothless? No, you do what it takes to survive.
Stealing [i]is[/i] a crime; [i]stealing away our ability feed and cloth ourselves or have the conviences we are slaves to is a crime within itself[/i] and when you realize that you'll probably be disguisted with what you just said. Whatever happens after that is vigalanteism under the guise of civil disobedience.
If you don't like something and the state is too corrupt to take care of it, and I can't emphasise this enough
[i] you_have_to_take_care_of_it_yourself[/i].
If the coal mining company is illegally ripping up or polluting your farmland and the goverment does nothing about it, buy a boat repair kit and coat the engine of the construction equipment with fiberglass in the middle of the night so they'll never run again. Plant spikes in the ground and road to pop the tires of the workers and the machines doing the working. Make it so expensive that they can't do it. There are towns in the country where they throw up gigantic inter-city powerlines and where the people, who don't like their farmland being ripped up or polluted by them, will tear them right back down. They'll get up, but they won't stay up!
If an OS company establishes a monopoly by stealing, killing, cheating, and just downright dirty play so much so that most of the software produced is for it, the best way to fight back is to pirate that software or to use something else. Microsoft already has enough money and political influence as is, they don't need anymore, and most of the people in the world can't afford it to begin with. $199 for winxp? $399 for office? I'm not paying that, and I'm consider it highway robbery that when I go out and buy a new dell machine it doesn't come witha CD and then something like blaster comes along and kills the install, so I'v got to go out and shell out some more money. I'm pissed that there's no competition to speak of accept for linux, which isn't ready for the vast majority of users. As soon as there's a viable alternative, you'd better believe MS's software prices are going to plummet to compeditive prices and their stock is going to go down.
Can't ship anhything higher than 56bit encryption over the border, guess what window's has in it? And they can't sell unbundled hardware... It's little laws like that which make it impossible for some retailers top ship worldwide; they'd be pissing off the cia or fbi or some federal or state agency that thinks they're giving some teenager in india the equipment to hack the pentagon right out of the box.
It's bullshit and it's going to kill our economy in the long run. Other countries will begin to produce their own hardware and software independant of us and they'll be able to ship to us but not vice versa.
Actually, you aren't necissarilly breaking the law. A long time ago my grandma gave me a midi editing program, and after using it for a few years my box crashes and the disk the program comes on are damaged, yet lo and behold, I could get the same program off of p2p. Illiegal use? I think not.
I'm also appauled that anyone would even consider this theft, or lisencing, which is absolute bullshit. It's fairly standard; you get the media, you can do anything you want with it within fair use and unregulated use. There is no eula, no blanket contract, nothing. Software is usually lisenced, which is BS, and they do that to keep us dumb to how the program works. There's an auful lot of trust in bringing a robot into your home to be a slave, and turning it on and seeing what happens. Same with software; you have no way of telling what's inside of it and if that protection via lisence was taken away software would be a helluva lot more secure and if you had to include source code...
Another thing is that nobody has to proove they purchased anything. You can be accused, sure, but there is a time limit on reporting a theft. Now, with a car or something very valuable you're supposed to keep records, and if someone comes to you, accuses you of stealing a car 3 years ago, there's no police report and you've got the title they're fucked. If they accuse you of stealing a dining set and you don't have records, and they don't have proof, they are fucked.
Same situation for the RIAA: the proof they have is that you had the file up for sharing. If they download it, since they hold the copyright it's legal. They have to somehow proove it was being uploaded to someone else which they can't proove, they can only proove intent, not an actual act. If I have a CD or MP3 it's assumed I baught it or own it and I don't have to show you jack shit no matter who you are. You don't have to proove you purchased it, it's they have to proove you didn't purchase it.
What captialism is and what it's turned into are 2 completly different things. What capitalism is, is a system of trade that awards people based on their level of ambition and how useful that ambition is; it's a system that prey's on the action/reward system our minds work off.
What capitalism has turned into is the unrealistic expectation you can create a rock with googlie eyes and make billions. So what happens is when people don't make their billions they try to lock up their ideas and inventions, and with that our culture as a humanity. Or when their rock makes billions they get greedy and try to get laws passed that outlaw the competing product.
Another problem are corperations, which you can only expect when the ability to communicate and coordinate millions of people come into being. The reason we didn't see a gigantic corperation like microsoft before is becuase of the communiation involved. The reason we see them now is is because of the communication systems. Anyway, as companies grow and inevitably destroy eachother, you're going to get a few eliete companies coming into being and when that happens, you're eventually going to reach the pinnacle omnicorp, which controls the goverment and commerce for the good of money and power. Orwellian much?
The reason people are doing this isn't because they don't value the product; if they didn't value it they wouldn't try to get it for free. On the contrary, they are trying to get something they value for nothing. They don't want to pay for it, which tells me they are fed up with the system in one way or another. This is why it attacks the heart of capitalism; once everyone stops being greedy and comes to the realization that they don't need or even want to be billionairs, that's the end of capitalism and the point where it becomes useless. I'd rather live in a system where the things that make us human, things like creativity, emotion and morals guide what we do instead of money. Unfortunatly, I'm forced into working a job and doing something that I don't neccissarily enjoy when I could be doing something better for myself and better for all of humanity, such as learning a new programming language or learning to solder circutry. Most people don't realize what they can learn in a lifetime and instead do what they are taught; to be dependant on a system and after their "work" is over, to rest by buying junk and hanging out with friends. It's actually really really sad imo, and since the most greedy and ambitious, and smart get into powerful positions you can only expect our society to go down from where it is right now. Once the corperations reach critical mass they get power of the goverment and, well, everything's downhill from there. That's why we need to stop capitalism now, before we're all enslaved through the system; working 16 hours a day like the kids in africa who make gap clothing to earn a measly living, or replaced with robot slave labor. Spend some time thinking about that, and listen to rantradio if you want more ideas, the link's in my sig.
You don't get it, it isn't copyright infringement. Taking a picture of something isn't copying it. It can't even be argued becuase we take pictures of advertisements, logo's, books, etc all the time. If I take a picture of someone in a magazine store and I happen to get a rack of magazines, am I infringing on their copyright? The answer is no, taking pictures of anything in public is perfectly legal in america, weither it be for the purpose of copying something or not. It's part of our freedom you need to understand.
Oh, right, I'm somehow supposed to want to give up my rights more because the crime was worse? I'm more worried about the goverment getting everyone's dna as a primary way of identifing them and then using that to track/identify/regulate them, or the goverment selling this information to companies who then copywrite sequences of DNA and then charge people to live. If there's substantial amount evidence, then this is really covered under the searches and siezurs part of our bill of rights. Get a court order, or shut the fuck up.
Any information they have on you is power they have over you. It depends on the information they have and what they want to do to you, but it's power nonetheless. Just like a theif gets blueprints of buildings or hackers get copies of software and gather information on vulnerabilities, a goverment will always always gather information before regulation and banning. And they'll do it slowly and try to distract you as well. Listen to the shows in the link in my sig, they're free and oncemore, they report on these kinds of things and give you information that the media otehrwise wouldn't give out.
and I'd say microsoft's exeuitives think it's come time to start selling the stock in their company and filling their personal pocketbooks a bit further. They are certainly looking they're afraid of something, weither it be linux, US courts, another economic downfall, who knows. But it isn't a good sign when you're company heads start selling off theri stocks; it shows they've lost a good deal of faith in their company's ability to do damage.
People won't pay for what they don't value, and ultamatly, as technology progresses and if control of that technology stays in the hands of people, we'll begin to see new kinds of media such as people throwing up e-newspapers and instead of asking for payment, ask for donations.
The store owners are simply angry becuase an old system they've been using for years is finally beginning to fade away into obsolecence. What people are doing isn't even a crime; as far as the law is conserned you can take all the pictures you want in public in america you want. If you go into a store, it's considered rude to try to make a copy of something that way like it's rude to stand there and read the magazine in the store without buying it.
no, you're a moron for not realizing that you can fight back against this kind of bullshit; your post read like a broken man who realized he can't control a system and instead of working to fix it, gave up and dealt with it. I for one don't like the bullshit; if you make an agreement you keep it and don't fuck around with your customers. IT's how buisness is supposed to be conducted, buisness is not make an agreeement then cheat like hell and if it is then this isn't a world I want to live in.
First, lemme state, you are a moron.
Alright, lemme just open this lil' e-mail box here, oh...fuck...look at the 40 billion e-mails...now that the obvious is out of the way...
If you have information on someone you have power over them, plain and simple. What kind of power is upto the information and what you want to do to them. If all of our records are tied into one big database, they can figure out "oh, here's a guy who's married and has 2 kids, and he looks at beastiality porn, and he has some money", and if that's available to everyone on the planet. Or, say, they know you like porn then they can spam your e-mail box and send you snailmail, send representatives to harass you, etc. And with our legal system do you think they're going to stop unless every joe sixpack sue's them? Nope
The reason total information awareness is getting so much opposition is becuase it fundementally takes power away from the people; our ability to hide stuff allows us to resist unenforcable laws that are fundementally corrup and horrible. There's a good reason laws are unenforcable; nobody has enough information to enforce them. The first step to banning is regulation; if the goverment doesn't like guns, they can ask you to get a card and a backround check to get them then file that away in some database, then they can ban different types slowly with dumb excuses like "you don't need a machine gun to fight a deer", to which I'd reply "yea, but I'd need one to fight a jeep full of military personell should the goverment become corrupt". If they don't know you have the gun they can't effectivly ban it, plain and simple, but if they do they can make it manditory to bring your gun and all ammo to the local police dept or the dept will come to your house, take the gun and give you a $50 ticket.
Essays like yours make me want to puke all over. It's so poorly thought out I just can't believe it. The "they can't do anything to me with the info I give them" is bullshit, absolute outright bullshit. What if they decided that you're a terrorist for buying draino and aluminum or some combination of household cleaning items that can be used for bombs? As I said before, if they have information on you they have power over you and if you spend some time actually using your brain you'd realize that.