In the story in the article the sensor when it went crazy reported 32F/0C instead of reporting that it was broken.
It'd be better if there was an impossibly out of range value like -274C reported when the sensor failed so that the problem would be more clear and could be sorted as a marker value rather than one that requires a response.
I don't see how that solves this problem. If the mailware can read the configurations of the host's e-mail program, it can immitate any authorization you throw at it...
Actually, the DirecTV DVR with TiVo isn't the horse TiVo should be placing its bets on because DirecTV's building their own...
What TiVo's planning on is forgetting about partnering with the cable systems. The cable systems are affraid of letting content be streammed to PCs and won't include that feature in their DVRs, but TiVo will be able to build a CableCard-enabled box and then be able to do what they want with the digital video stream without having to please the system owners.
What the "NX bit" actually does is a pretty nice thing for preventing buffer overflows... if a segment of memory is marked for data use and then the code execution point somehow arrives there, you get a crash-out instead of the execution of arbitrary code.
Of course, AMD's problem is finding a way to try to communicate that concept to the average user. Joe Sixpack doesn't even know what buffer overflow problem is, so they don't understand why they need a solution to that problem. AMD is trying to use the concept of "virus prevention" instead, but apparently they've gone too far in implying that the NX bit eliminates the need for conventional anti-virus methods, which it most certainly does not.
This is an extra set of suspenders, not a new belt.
mod article down (Score:-1, Troll) wikipedia is a bunch of hyporcritical censoring liars. they love to censor certian types of poltical articles that don't match their agenda but they let opinion and bias sneek through if it fits their agenda
What he seems most upset about is the problem of "revert wars" happening whenever an author wants to be the absolute authority on a topic and regularly patrols their article to undo any edits that are made to what they consider their "perfect" work?
What could they do to defuse these situations with a moderations scheme that encurages contributors but discurage this kind of abuse?
"I think the massive amount of potential loss that these defendants could have imposed was astounding, so that's what caused us to seek a substantial sentence against Mr. Salcedo," federal prosecutor Matthew Martens said.
Thousands of compromised accounts would have lead to quite the theft rings... this is a little bit more serious than simply breaking in.
Would somebody please explain how AOL thinks users who can't install the full AOL client on their workstations thanks to sysadmin-imposed policies will be able to get the AOL Browser installed? Whatever policy stands against the AOL client will most likely shoot down this AOL Browser too. PHBs don't want people playing on the Internet during company time, and people are going to be hard pressed to show a business-reason to be accessing the AOL-exclusive entertainment content on company time and resources.
This seems like at face value a project that won't reach its target audience and therefore is doomed to failure.
Re:The future's so bright, I gotta wear used shade
on
iTunes Accepts PayPal
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Topps is actually doing this kind of scheme with baseball cards through a program they call eTopps.
When you buy an eTopps card, you get an actual baseball card. However, unless you ask for it they never send the card to you, it's locked up in a secret vault where Topps maintains it in pristine condition. As long as you let your card stay in the vault, you can sell it on a special section of eBay.
New cards come out in "Intial Player Offerings" or "IPO"s where the cards are offered for direct purchase, but if too many people request the cards some get it and some don't, causing there to be an instant pent up demand for the card on the eBay trading floor.
It's almost exactly the scheme the parent poster is describing...
This case is very different from the Universal v. Sony "Betamax" decision, and we're not doing ourselves a favor by constantly comparing the two.
In the Betamax case, the central issue was over whether using the technology of a VCR to timeshift broadcast programs violated the copyright law, and the court said it wasn't a violation. If it was a violation, using a VCR to record TV would be illegal, and Sony and other VCR makers would be making devices that would have a primarily use that was illegal.
In this case, however, there's no question about whether the use of the technology is legal. Using P2P to upload and download copyrighted works without the copyright owner's permission is illegal. The question is over liabilty... is Grokster liable because people are using their software for an illegal use, when the software can both be used for legal and illegal files.
What's at stake here isn't the legality of P2P, but a dangerous question for software writers. Are the makers of software liable for what their users do with the software? So far they're not and hopefully it's going to stay that way.
Consumer Reports is a such a respected publication because they have strict standards for the products they test. They don't accept items from the product makers, they go out into the marketplace and buy their test subjects using cash whenever possible. (Up until a while ago they even bought cars with cash, until they realized that car dealers began recognizing them as the only people who paid cash for cars, and the IRS requirement of reporting large cash transactions got in their way too.) As a result, their tests are immune to any tweaking...
It'd be nice if the tech publications could afford to do this, because at times they start to resemble the video game websites set up by kids who do it only to get prerelease copies of games for free under the guise of reviewing them. Such kids always have to write glowing reviews of everything they get because as soon as they post a negative review their stream of free stuff grinds to a halt.
Bottom line is that there's a foolproof way of preventing tampering in any review, but it costs money. Any review that involves accepting free stuff compromises the integrity from the start.
The V-Chip is a well-intentioned effort, but it still has several major failings.
- There are no V-Chip ratings for news and sports programs. Therefore, the Super Bowl incident happened in an unrated program. - The V-Chip ratings are done by the broadcasters, not an outside board like the way movies are rated. As a result, there's no hard-and-fast line between what qualifies for any given rating. - There are many TVs still in circulation that predate the invention of the V-Chip.
The reason for censorship over the broadcast media is because they broadcast their content unscrambled in an easy-to-access format. Therefore, there's not much parents can do to protect their kids from watching broadcast TV.
The V-Chip is a nice stopgap measure, but there are plenty of holes in that system. For example, the Super Bowl was classified as a sporting event and therefore didn't carry a V-Chip rating.
This is exactly where the problem of non-enforcement has brought us. Because Oprah gets away with it, Stern thinks he can do it too. However, in reality Oprah was just not caught because none of the complainers were looking at her show, and had somebody complained the stations airing her show would have gotten fined.
The problem is that the FCC doesn't have the resources to watch every channel all the time, and the PTC doesn't either so they just target programs where they expect to find something...
What the PTC has figured out is that indecent TV and radio was being allowed simply because the FCC only takes action when it gets a complaint from somebody in the public. No complaint, nobody was harmed so no foul.
The FCC is still in control over what is indecent, so the PTC's power is merely that of spotter. If they complain about something that isn't over the line nothing will happen. Of course, a big problem with the current system is that the FCC doesn't have a written down definition of what they consider to be indecent so broadcasters are flying blind when it comes to deciding what to air before they actually do it. What they've gotten away with in the past is no help because they've been allow to get away with far too much.
The megacompanies need to realize that they should use their cable outlets for the borderline content they have, because the over-the-air channels are regulated.
It's the reason why we have region-encoding on DVDs, DirecTV can only give the NYC and LA "locals" to people in the boonies, and ICraveTV didn't fly. The NFL and DirecTV make millions off of their Sunday Ticket package which is based on selling for hundreds of dollars a season the right to recieve games freely broadcasted in other parts of the USA.
Copyright owners are declaring boundries across which their content cannot move freely, and they're going to crush any technology that threatens to make it easy to break those lines.
Re:10.2 Billion is a stunning number.
on
Gone Phishing?
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· Score: 1
Part of the problem is that the losses are far more often bourne by the banks rather than the consumer involved. Therefore, it's a drop in the bucket out of a whole industry's profits. If that much money was lost by consumers themselves, then there'd definitely be motivation to close up the holes...
Re:Here's how I got my mom to verify
on
Gone Phishing?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
That list is a good start, but the latest variant involves a worm that hoses the hosts file and that means a properly spelled URL can still possibly lead to a phisher's site...
ING Direct's changing logon
on
Gone Phishing?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
ING Direct's logon page has an interesting feature where it asks for an extra piece of info beyond the username and PIN such as your account's ZIP code or a piece of your SSN on each logon, with the extra question changing every time.
However, this security method has a fatal flaw... if an attacker knows the answer to any one of the questions, the attacker can just keep reloading until they get the question they want to come up and then answer it. Still, it's better than doing nothing at all.
A good rule of thumb is that you should allocate the same length of time to debugging as writing the original code, because a program that works under pristine conditions might look finished to the untrained eye, but it isn't. Every possible "exception case" such as when the user gives an out-of-bounds valus needs to have a specific error trap written to handle the error before it crashes the program.
Programming is an activity based upon trial and error. As a result, it's very hard to predict how long writing any given piece of code is going to take. It's good to have a schedule of targets for the progress of a program, but you can't turn those target dates into deadlines without the risk that your programmers will rush through the task and deliver buggy code.
Slashdot Mirror
In the story in the article the sensor when it went crazy reported 32F/0C instead of reporting that it was broken.
It'd be better if there was an impossibly out of range value like -274C reported when the sensor failed so that the problem would be more clear and could be sorted as a marker value rather than one that requires a response.
I don't see how that solves this problem. If the mailware can read the configurations of the host's e-mail program, it can immitate any authorization you throw at it...
The terms and conditions specificially state that books sold to businesses for resale are not included in the program.
Um, since when did you need their permission? You're a party of the conversation you can record it all you want.
There are twelve states that require permission from both sides of a phone call for it to be recorded. This site has the list.
Actually, the DirecTV DVR with TiVo isn't the horse TiVo should be placing its bets on because DirecTV's building their own...
What TiVo's planning on is forgetting about partnering with the cable systems. The cable systems are affraid of letting content be streammed to PCs and won't include that feature in their DVRs, but TiVo will be able to build a CableCard-enabled box and then be able to do what they want with the digital video stream without having to please the system owners.
TechTV was aquired by Comcast's G4 Media and that's how the two networks got fused together to make G4TechTV.
Matt Drudge's site could be considered to be a blog... that means bloggers have been influencing news events since at least 1998.
What the "NX bit" actually does is a pretty nice thing for preventing buffer overflows... if a segment of memory is marked for data use and then the code execution point somehow arrives there, you get a crash-out instead of the execution of arbitrary code.
Of course, AMD's problem is finding a way to try to communicate that concept to the average user. Joe Sixpack doesn't even know what buffer overflow problem is, so they don't understand why they need a solution to that problem. AMD is trying to use the concept of "virus prevention" instead, but apparently they've gone too far in implying that the NX bit eliminates the need for conventional anti-virus methods, which it most certainly does not.
This is an extra set of suspenders, not a new belt.
mod article down (Score:-1, Troll)
wikipedia is a bunch of hyporcritical censoring liars. they love to censor certian types of poltical articles that don't match their agenda but they let opinion and bias sneek through if it fits their agenda
Apparently the same applies to Slashdot mods...
What he seems most upset about is the problem of "revert wars" happening whenever an author wants to be the absolute authority on a topic and regularly patrols their article to undo any edits that are made to what they consider their "perfect" work?
What could they do to defuse these situations with a moderations scheme that encurages contributors but discurage this kind of abuse?
To qoute the article...
"I think the massive amount of potential loss that these defendants could have imposed was astounding, so that's what caused us to seek a substantial sentence against Mr. Salcedo," federal prosecutor Matthew Martens said.
Thousands of compromised accounts would have lead to quite the theft rings... this is a little bit more serious than simply breaking in.
Would somebody please explain how AOL thinks users who can't install the full AOL client on their workstations thanks to sysadmin-imposed policies will be able to get the AOL Browser installed? Whatever policy stands against the AOL client will most likely shoot down this AOL Browser too. PHBs don't want people playing on the Internet during company time, and people are going to be hard pressed to show a business-reason to be accessing the AOL-exclusive entertainment content on company time and resources.
This seems like at face value a project that won't reach its target audience and therefore is doomed to failure.
Topps is actually doing this kind of scheme with baseball cards through a program they call eTopps.
When you buy an eTopps card, you get an actual baseball card. However, unless you ask for it they never send the card to you, it's locked up in a secret vault where Topps maintains it in pristine condition. As long as you let your card stay in the vault, you can sell it on a special section of eBay.
New cards come out in "Intial Player Offerings" or "IPO"s where the cards are offered for direct purchase, but if too many people request the cards some get it and some don't, causing there to be an instant pent up demand for the card on the eBay trading floor.
It's almost exactly the scheme the parent poster is describing...
This case is very different from the Universal v. Sony "Betamax" decision, and we're not doing ourselves a favor by constantly comparing the two.
In the Betamax case, the central issue was over whether using the technology of a VCR to timeshift broadcast programs violated the copyright law, and the court said it wasn't a violation. If it was a violation, using a VCR to record TV would be illegal, and Sony and other VCR makers would be making devices that would have a primarily use that was illegal.
In this case, however, there's no question about whether the use of the technology is legal. Using P2P to upload and download copyrighted works without the copyright owner's permission is illegal. The question is over liabilty... is Grokster liable because people are using their software for an illegal use, when the software can both be used for legal and illegal files.
What's at stake here isn't the legality of P2P, but a dangerous question for software writers. Are the makers of software liable for what their users do with the software? So far they're not and hopefully it's going to stay that way.
Consumer Reports is a such a respected publication because they have strict standards for the products they test. They don't accept items from the product makers, they go out into the marketplace and buy their test subjects using cash whenever possible. (Up until a while ago they even bought cars with cash, until they realized that car dealers began recognizing them as the only people who paid cash for cars, and the IRS requirement of reporting large cash transactions got in their way too.) As a result, their tests are immune to any tweaking...
It'd be nice if the tech publications could afford to do this, because at times they start to resemble the video game websites set up by kids who do it only to get prerelease copies of games for free under the guise of reviewing them. Such kids always have to write glowing reviews of everything they get because as soon as they post a negative review their stream of free stuff grinds to a halt.
Bottom line is that there's a foolproof way of preventing tampering in any review, but it costs money. Any review that involves accepting free stuff compromises the integrity from the start.
The V-Chip is a well-intentioned effort, but it still has several major failings.
- There are no V-Chip ratings for news and sports programs. Therefore, the Super Bowl incident happened in an unrated program.
- The V-Chip ratings are done by the broadcasters, not an outside board like the way movies are rated. As a result, there's no hard-and-fast line between what qualifies for any given rating.
- There are many TVs still in circulation that predate the invention of the V-Chip.
The reason for censorship over the broadcast media is because they broadcast their content unscrambled in an easy-to-access format. Therefore, there's not much parents can do to protect their kids from watching broadcast TV.
The V-Chip is a nice stopgap measure, but there are plenty of holes in that system. For example, the Super Bowl was classified as a sporting event and therefore didn't carry a V-Chip rating.
This is exactly where the problem of non-enforcement has brought us. Because Oprah gets away with it, Stern thinks he can do it too. However, in reality Oprah was just not caught because none of the complainers were looking at her show, and had somebody complained the stations airing her show would have gotten fined.
The problem is that the FCC doesn't have the resources to watch every channel all the time, and the PTC doesn't either so they just target programs where they expect to find something...
I, for one, welcome our new PTC overlords.
What the PTC has figured out is that indecent TV and radio was being allowed simply because the FCC only takes action when it gets a complaint from somebody in the public. No complaint, nobody was harmed so no foul.
The FCC is still in control over what is indecent, so the PTC's power is merely that of spotter. If they complain about something that isn't over the line nothing will happen. Of course, a big problem with the current system is that the FCC doesn't have a written down definition of what they consider to be indecent so broadcasters are flying blind when it comes to deciding what to air before they actually do it. What they've gotten away with in the past is no help because they've been allow to get away with far too much.
The megacompanies need to realize that they should use their cable outlets for the borderline content they have, because the over-the-air channels are regulated.
Hollywood isn't going to stand for this.
It's the reason why we have region-encoding on DVDs, DirecTV can only give the NYC and LA "locals" to people in the boonies, and ICraveTV didn't fly. The NFL and DirecTV make millions off of their Sunday Ticket package which is based on selling for hundreds of dollars a season the right to recieve games freely broadcasted in other parts of the USA.
Copyright owners are declaring boundries across which their content cannot move freely, and they're going to crush any technology that threatens to make it easy to break those lines.
Part of the problem is that the losses are far more often bourne by the banks rather than the consumer involved. Therefore, it's a drop in the bucket out of a whole industry's profits. If that much money was lost by consumers themselves, then there'd definitely be motivation to close up the holes...
That list is a good start, but the latest variant involves a worm that hoses the hosts file and that means a properly spelled URL can still possibly lead to a phisher's site...
ING Direct's logon page has an interesting feature where it asks for an extra piece of info beyond the username and PIN such as your account's ZIP code or a piece of your SSN on each logon, with the extra question changing every time.
However, this security method has a fatal flaw... if an attacker knows the answer to any one of the questions, the attacker can just keep reloading until they get the question they want to come up and then answer it. Still, it's better than doing nothing at all.
A good rule of thumb is that you should allocate the same length of time to debugging as writing the original code, because a program that works under pristine conditions might look finished to the untrained eye, but it isn't. Every possible "exception case" such as when the user gives an out-of-bounds valus needs to have a specific error trap written to handle the error before it crashes the program.
Programming is an activity based upon trial and error. As a result, it's very hard to predict how long writing any given piece of code is going to take. It's good to have a schedule of targets for the progress of a program, but you can't turn those target dates into deadlines without the risk that your programmers will rush through the task and deliver buggy code.