Well, I did kind of miss that sentance, but at the same time, he started the paragraph with There won't be a huge internet-busting data-destroying worm or virus.
I would submit that while, say, blaster or code red wasn't a data-destroying worm, it was certainly a very damaging virus to the internet and to networks. The way he starts the sentence makes it sound like data-destroying viruses are more dangerous to the internet, while I would argue that they are less dangerous because they affect fewer people and don't damage networks as much or as long.
When it comes to viruses, he gets it but doesn't..
on
Tech Predictions for 2004
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· Score: 2, Informative
I agree with what he said about viruses - that there will be more viruses out there that send spam, steal credit card info, steal passwords, ect. I'm not sure about his claim that those virus writers will be members of organized crime, though.
However, he also says that viruses won't be that destructive because people who have made recent viruses didn't have them destroy hard drives when they could have. What he ignores is that a virus that destroys it's host is pretty much useless, because it no longer has that host. Viruses like Blaster and Sinkin are dangerous and destructive because they continue to spread for months while the user does not know they are infected. If the virus killed it's host quickly it would not spread nearly as much.
While I certainly feel people should be able to look at whatever they want in the privacy of their own home, I don't think I'd go as far as to argue that public nudity should be legal - if only because there is a large percentage of the population that I have no desire to see naked.
I would also imagine that much of their calling is conducted during the day. This would seem to exclude people who work during the day, so they might well be missing the employed demographic
Also, I would imagine that there are a number of people who screen their calls via answering machine and also would thus not answer the phone
The scooters weren't Mitsubishi's - they were Vespa's, an Italian scooter company. Italian food, Italian resturant, that was the connection they were tryng to make.
They did work the Mitsubishi sponsorship in though - the first episode has scenes of the chef driving around in his Mitsubishi SUV, a later one has him screaming at the tow truck driver who is towing it away for being illegally parked.
networks say that the 30-second-skip is an infringing device under the DMCA because there is no substantial non-infringing use for a thirty-second skip ahead
It wasn't the 30 second skip that got RePlay in trouble, which is why the new RePlays (55xx) still have it, as do many VCR's. The older RePlays (50xx) had a feature called commercial skip, that by hitting a checkbox before playing the show would automatically skip commercials. It uses periods of fade to black to determine what it skips
I have a 5060, and I don't use comercial skip all that often, because it tends to confuse fade-to-black as part of a show, like those location screens in law and order, with commercials. It works well for shows that don't do that, however.
The NYT article says that what they are doing is taking voter "consumer information" (ie credit bureau) companies like Equifax that have email info. SInce chances are both Equifax and your voter registartion info contain your address, they can taget it pretty effectively. This isn't spam in the sense that it's not targeted, just in the sense that it's not wanted.
I'm not a big fan of all-in-one devices...
on
PSX Review At Lik-Sang
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I can see the appeal of this device in Japan, where space is at a premium. In the event that it does come to the US, I have to wonder how successful it will be - how many people want one device that does everything? Sure it's cool and convinient when it works, but do you really want to have one part break and thus lose your DVD player, your console, your PVR, and your DVD burner? Plus, I would tend to think most people geeky enough to want these already have all those devices and would be less than willing to buy them all again.
IMHO, most all in one devices tend to be compromises - they do lots of stuff, but none of them well. After having a TV/VCR that broke on a regular basis and seeing some very difficult to configure all-in-one printer/copier/scanners, I tend to stick with standalone devices.
Take a look at Baltimore, which is attempting to wire up the entire Inner Harbor area into a gigantic, free hotspot.
Baltimore hasn't had the best of luck with their efforts so far, at least according to this article in the baltimore sun which calls it spotty at best. I live in Baltimore, but haven't really had a reason to try it out so far.
Ironically, well before Starbucks started offering paid access, a local coffee shop near my college was offering free wireless access. The place recently changed hands, and I'm not positive that it still does, but it would seem that free access might prove a better business model for small/independent places trying to have something different than the big boys.
From the pc mag article:Marty maintains that the scanners at the security gate will not harm film, hard drives, or digital cameras. The stronger scanners for checked baggage, on the other hand, run the risk of causing damage to any of these items
That would seem like a very good reason not to put anything that has data you don't want to be erased in your checked baggage - which would include digital camera with memory card, laptop with hard drive, and hard drive based MP3 player like iPod.
Yup, if someone has a different view then you, they must be an evil corporate troll.
If you look through my recent posts, you'll also find ones where I stick up for Apple and Packet8. I must be rich, what with all these companies I work for.
Maybe there were a few people who honestly thought they were getting 3 years of service, but for most people, they were just hoping to get through a loophole. RePlay changed their priceing plan from paying around $500 for the device and 3 years service, to $150 for the device with service additional. There were still some old stock units sold with the old packaging saying it including the pricing, but anyone who knows anything about DVR's could figure out what happened. The people who bought them were hoping RePlay wouldn't realize they had paid the lower price, and they got caught.
I don't think RePlay did anything wrong, except poor communication with their retailers in terms of getting them to explain that it didn't come with service. But if you don't want to pay for service, you can return it and you are back where you started from, nothing lost. As far as dishonesty, there were people on FW advocating calling up RePlay and lying about how much they paid for it or when they bought it in the hopes of getting free service. That isn't dishonest?
I bought a RePlay months ago, before this happened (a 5060) and love it. Great device, network ready out of the box, works great. My roomate has one too, and it's cool to be able to watch shows off each other's units.
Am I going to fire up the PC to call grandma, and suffer through the lousy audio quality? I think not.
The article discusses how Vonage works, and Packet8 works pretty much the same way. You don't have to fire up your PC to use it. You get a "terminal adapter" - you plug an ethernet cable from your router to the terminal adapter, and a POTS phone into the rj11 plug on the terminal adapter. You then use the phone as any normal phone.
As far as sound quality, Packet8 is way better than the quality I got on my cell, especially considering my apartment building is like a giant faraday cage (steel beams, brick walls, iron bars over all the windows). And it's 20 a month, while I would pay $35 just for a local POTS line, and $50 or so for something like MCI Neighborhorhood "all you can eat" is $50.
He used one service, and asked 2 other people to use two other services. That hardly constitutes a review. From the complaints about the other people, I would guess the writer is more tech savy and more willing to deal with minor inconviniences than the family members he had look at it.
I use Packet8, and I'm happy with it so far. Sounds way better than a cell phone, easier to use, and $20 a month for unlimited calling. It's perfect because I get lousy cell reception in my apartment and regularly call my parents several states away. I did contact their customer support once via email and was happy with the response times and level of service.
If you are planning on trying packet8, search for "packet8 coupon code" on Google - there are a number of $20 off or 1 month free coupons out there.
My guess is two kinds of parents will use this. The first would be parents who are already restrictive, and the second would be parents whose kids have gotten into trouble in the past.
Heck, maybe this will be good for some kids - maybe instead of their parents not letting them go somewhere, they will let them go as long as they have their phone.
Telling an ipod owner that he should plunk $400 on a new ipod because the battery is dead is like telling a car owner that he should plunk $40000 on a new car because the battery is dead.
While it does sound like a nice analogy to compare a car battery to an ipod battery, it's not really fair. Let's face it, an iPod has only a couple parts - battery, lcd, hard drive, casing, plus the accessories (charging cradle, case, earbuds). A car has thousands of parts, many of them quite expensive (engine, transmission, rims, computer, ect). So it's not shocking that the iPod battery cost represents a significant chunk of the iPod's cost, while the battery in a car represents only a small chunk.
You personally might not have a lot of papers with this information on them, but the companies you deal with probably do. If you read the article, it talks about how the group in question would harvest papers from dumpsters outside of accountants, law firms, hospitals, colleges, ect. All of these businesses generate lots of paper, some of it with information like Social Security numbers, and they don't always dispose of it properly. THAT is what's scary - that it's the actions of another organization that can screw up YOUR credit rating for life.
cable companies don't even need to pay people to get them to rat on each other. You can do it for free on this website, and I'm sure there are others. I know Comcast is involved in the above one, there was an article in the Baltimore Sun a while ago about the program - they have been running ads on TV and have had quite a bit of luck getting people to turn on their neighbors.
For an amusing, RIAA-esque read, check out the cabletheft.com "get the facts" section, which blames cable theft not only for higher rates, but also for "ENDANGERING THE LIVES OF OTHERS".
My prediction is that the the trial will go like this:
Opening arguments: RealPlayer lawyer gives eloquent speech on how Microsoft is an evil monopoly that gave realplayer the shaft.
Microsoft lawyer gets up and asks, "ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have any of you actually used realplayer? If one of them has, chances are the jury will be a hung jury. If all of them have, you can count on a quick dismissal.
There are a ton of very-narrowly-focused channels out there, but they are only available to small groups of people, it seems. I like cars and computers, so I would love to have Speedvision and TechTV, but of course my local cable company doesn't carry it in my area. I do, however, get such great channels as the golf channel, multiple religious channels, and the public access channel that shows powerpoint slides when it's not showing a blue screen of death.
Do we really want corporations going around charging people of committing illegal acts?
They aren't charging anyone with anything. They are suing them. They don't have to prove that they did anything illegal, just that they did something that caused damages to them.
As far as the RIAA lawsuits vs. these, there is a huge difference. People dislike the RIAA suits because they are claiming huge amounts of damages that are inacurate, and because they are done under a law that eliminates many of the legal protections of most lawsuits. Most people see spam as having huge costs to individuals and businesses, so there is a difference.
As far as not basing a society on litigation, litigation, not laws, was the common way of resolving many issues until recently. I prefer litigation to laws, because when companies do things wrong, they can answer to the government, but it's harder to get the government to answer to anything.
Microsoft isn't suing them as Microsoft, provider of operating systems and applications. They are suing because of the effect of spam on MSN (which is specifically mentioned in the cnet article) and Hotmail. Both recieve huge amounts of spam to user accounts, and cost MS a ton of money to fight, and tick off their users.
Is MS doing this because they are warm fuzzy people who want to save the world from spam? No. They are doing it because spam costs them a ton of money as a company, cutting into their profits, and they want to stop that. Sometimes, what is good for a company is also good for the people who purchase it's products (and in this case even for people who don't)
Sure, many large/corporate law firms do litigating and defending. But there are a lot of personal injury law firms that just sue.
I'm thinking of the ads-on-the-the back-of-the- phone-book, cheaply filmed late night TV kind of firms. The ones whose ads start with "have you ever been in an accident? Tripped and fallen? Gotten fired from your job for excessive drinking and forgeting to wear pants? Did someone once hurt your feelings? Then you may be entitled to a HUGE SETTLEMENT!
I've been listening to this anti-government crap for the past 5+ years in the discussions of spam. If technology has had the ability to solve this problem, then just when the hell was it going to happen?
Part of the issue is that the target keeps moving - as soon as technology stops spam, spammers find a way around it. Spam blocking technology has come a long way in the last 5 years. But so has spam delivery.
I'm pretty impressed with Yahoo's spam filters - it seems to catch about 95% of the spam that I get on my old junk yahoo account. So I think technology does provide a decent solution, at least in some cases.
I'm a small-government guy, so I think twice about any federal law. This one in particular overrides some state laws that were just starting to be effective, and if given time I think would have been more effective than the federal law. So I would rather see technology and state laws above a federal law.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I did kind of miss that sentance, but at the same time, he started the paragraph with There won't be a huge internet-busting data-destroying worm or virus.
I would submit that while, say, blaster or code red wasn't a data-destroying worm, it was certainly a very damaging virus to the internet and to networks. The way he starts the sentence makes it sound like data-destroying viruses are more dangerous to the internet, while I would argue that they are less dangerous because they affect fewer people and don't damage networks as much or as long.
I agree with what he said about viruses - that there will be more viruses out there that send spam, steal credit card info, steal passwords, ect. I'm not sure about his claim that those virus writers will be members of organized crime, though.
However, he also says that viruses won't be that destructive because people who have made recent viruses didn't have them destroy hard drives when they could have. What he ignores is that a virus that destroys it's host is pretty much useless, because it no longer has that host. Viruses like Blaster and Sinkin are dangerous and destructive because they continue to spread for months while the user does not know they are infected. If the virus killed it's host quickly it would not spread nearly as much.
While I certainly feel people should be able to look at whatever they want in the privacy of their own home, I don't think I'd go as far as to argue that public nudity should be legal - if only because there is a large percentage of the population that I have no desire to see naked.
I would also imagine that much of their calling is conducted during the day. This would seem to exclude people who work during the day, so they might well be missing the employed demographic
Also, I would imagine that there are a number of people who screen their calls via answering machine and also would thus not answer the phone
The scooters weren't Mitsubishi's - they were Vespa's, an Italian scooter company. Italian food, Italian resturant, that was the connection they were tryng to make.
They did work the Mitsubishi sponsorship in though - the first episode has scenes of the chef driving around in his Mitsubishi SUV, a later one has him screaming at the tow truck driver who is towing it away for being illegally parked.
networks say that the 30-second-skip is an infringing device under the DMCA because there is no substantial non-infringing use for a thirty-second skip ahead
It wasn't the 30 second skip that got RePlay in trouble, which is why the new RePlays (55xx) still have it, as do many VCR's. The older RePlays (50xx) had a feature called commercial skip, that by hitting a checkbox before playing the show would automatically skip commercials. It uses periods of fade to black to determine what it skips
I have a 5060, and I don't use comercial skip all that often, because it tends to confuse fade-to-black as part of a show, like those location screens in law and order, with commercials. It works well for shows that don't do that, however.
The NYT article says that what they are doing is taking voter "consumer information" (ie credit bureau) companies like Equifax that have email info. SInce chances are both Equifax and your voter registartion info contain your address, they can taget it pretty effectively. This isn't spam in the sense that it's not targeted, just in the sense that it's not wanted.
I can see the appeal of this device in Japan, where space is at a premium. In the event that it does come to the US, I have to wonder how successful it will be - how many people want one device that does everything? Sure it's cool and convinient when it works, but do you really want to have one part break and thus lose your DVD player, your console, your PVR, and your DVD burner? Plus, I would tend to think most people geeky enough to want these already have all those devices and would be less than willing to buy them all again.
IMHO, most all in one devices tend to be compromises - they do lots of stuff, but none of them well. After having a TV/VCR that broke on a regular basis and seeing some very difficult to configure all-in-one printer/copier/scanners, I tend to stick with standalone devices.
Take a look at Baltimore, which is attempting to wire up the entire Inner Harbor area into a gigantic, free hotspot.
Baltimore hasn't had the best of luck with their efforts so far, at least according to this article in the baltimore sun which calls it spotty at best. I live in Baltimore, but haven't really had a reason to try it out so far.
Ironically, well before Starbucks started offering paid access, a local coffee shop near my college was offering free wireless access. The place recently changed hands, and I'm not positive that it still does, but it would seem that free access might prove a better business model for small/independent places trying to have something different than the big boys.
From the pc mag article:Marty maintains that the scanners at the security gate will not harm film, hard drives, or digital cameras. The stronger scanners for checked baggage, on the other hand, run the risk of causing damage to any of these items
That would seem like a very good reason not to put anything that has data you don't want to be erased in your checked baggage - which would include digital camera with memory card, laptop with hard drive, and hard drive based MP3 player like iPod.
Damn, do you work for the company?
Yup, if someone has a different view then you, they must be an evil corporate troll.
If you look through my recent posts, you'll also find ones where I stick up for Apple and Packet8. I must be rich, what with all these companies I work for.
Maybe there were a few people who honestly thought they were getting 3 years of service, but for most people, they were just hoping to get through a loophole. RePlay changed their priceing plan from paying around $500 for the device and 3 years service, to $150 for the device with service additional. There were still some old stock units sold with the old packaging saying it including the pricing, but anyone who knows anything about DVR's could figure out what happened. The people who bought them were hoping RePlay wouldn't realize they had paid the lower price, and they got caught.
I don't think RePlay did anything wrong, except poor communication with their retailers in terms of getting them to explain that it didn't come with service. But if you don't want to pay for service, you can return it and you are back where you started from, nothing lost. As far as dishonesty, there were people on FW advocating calling up RePlay and lying about how much they paid for it or when they bought it in the hopes of getting free service. That isn't dishonest?
I bought a RePlay months ago, before this happened (a 5060) and love it. Great device, network ready out of the box, works great. My roomate has one too, and it's cool to be able to watch shows off each other's units.
Am I going to fire up the PC to call grandma, and suffer through the lousy audio quality? I think not.
The article discusses how Vonage works, and Packet8 works pretty much the same way. You don't have to fire up your PC to use it. You get a "terminal adapter" - you plug an ethernet cable from your router to the terminal adapter, and a POTS phone into the rj11 plug on the terminal adapter. You then use the phone as any normal phone.
As far as sound quality, Packet8 is way better than the quality I got on my cell, especially considering my apartment building is like a giant faraday cage (steel beams, brick walls, iron bars over all the windows). And it's 20 a month, while I would pay $35 just for a local POTS line, and $50 or so for something like MCI Neighborhorhood "all you can eat" is $50.
He used one service, and asked 2 other people to use two other services. That hardly constitutes a review. From the complaints about the other people, I would guess the writer is more tech savy and more willing to deal with minor inconviniences than the family members he had look at it.
I use Packet8, and I'm happy with it so far. Sounds way better than a cell phone, easier to use, and $20 a month for unlimited calling. It's perfect because I get lousy cell reception in my apartment and regularly call my parents several states away. I did contact their customer support once via email and was happy with the response times and level of service.
If you are planning on trying packet8, search for "packet8 coupon code" on Google - there are a number of $20 off or 1 month free coupons out there.
My guess is two kinds of parents will use this. The first would be parents who are already restrictive, and the second would be parents whose kids have gotten into trouble in the past.
Heck, maybe this will be good for some kids - maybe instead of their parents not letting them go somewhere, they will let them go as long as they have their phone.
Telling an ipod owner that he should plunk $400 on a new ipod because the battery is dead is like telling a car owner that he should plunk $40000 on a new car because the battery is dead.
While it does sound like a nice analogy to compare a car battery to an ipod battery, it's not really fair. Let's face it, an iPod has only a couple parts - battery, lcd, hard drive, casing, plus the accessories (charging cradle, case, earbuds). A car has thousands of parts, many of them quite expensive (engine, transmission, rims, computer, ect). So it's not shocking that the iPod battery cost represents a significant chunk of the iPod's cost, while the battery in a car represents only a small chunk.
You personally might not have a lot of papers with this information on them, but the companies you deal with probably do. If you read the article, it talks about how the group in question would harvest papers from dumpsters outside of accountants, law firms, hospitals, colleges, ect. All of these businesses generate lots of paper, some of it with information like Social Security numbers, and they don't always dispose of it properly. THAT is what's scary - that it's the actions of another organization that can screw up YOUR credit rating for life.
There was one a few years ago called "The difference between God and Larry Ellison
The difference, of course, being that God doesn't think he's larry ellison.
Amazon link
cable companies don't even need to pay people to get them to rat on each other. You can do it for free on this website, and I'm sure there are others. I know Comcast is involved in the above one, there was an article in the Baltimore Sun a while ago about the program - they have been running ads on TV and have had quite a bit of luck getting people to turn on their neighbors.
For an amusing, RIAA-esque read, check out the cabletheft.com "get the facts" section, which blames cable theft not only for higher rates, but also for "ENDANGERING THE LIVES OF OTHERS".
My prediction is that the the trial will go like this:
Opening arguments: RealPlayer lawyer gives eloquent speech on how Microsoft is an evil monopoly that gave realplayer the shaft.
Microsoft lawyer gets up and asks, "ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have any of you actually used realplayer? If one of them has, chances are the jury will be a hung jury. If all of them have, you can count on a quick dismissal.
There are a ton of very-narrowly-focused channels out there, but they are only available to small groups of people, it seems. I like cars and computers, so I would love to have Speedvision and TechTV, but of course my local cable company doesn't carry it in my area. I do, however, get such great channels as the golf channel, multiple religious channels, and the public access channel that shows powerpoint slides when it's not showing a blue screen of death.
Do we really want corporations going around charging people of committing illegal acts?
They aren't charging anyone with anything. They are suing them. They don't have to prove that they did anything illegal, just that they did something that caused damages to them.
As far as the RIAA lawsuits vs. these, there is a huge difference. People dislike the RIAA suits because they are claiming huge amounts of damages that are inacurate, and because they are done under a law that eliminates many of the legal protections of most lawsuits. Most people see spam as having huge costs to individuals and businesses, so there is a difference.
As far as not basing a society on litigation, litigation, not laws, was the common way of resolving many issues until recently. I prefer litigation to laws, because when companies do things wrong, they can answer to the government, but it's harder to get the government to answer to anything.
Microsoft isn't suing them as Microsoft, provider of operating systems and applications. They are suing because of the effect of spam on MSN (which is specifically mentioned in the cnet article) and Hotmail. Both recieve huge amounts of spam to user accounts, and cost MS a ton of money to fight, and tick off their users.
Is MS doing this because they are warm fuzzy people who want to save the world from spam? No. They are doing it because spam costs them a ton of money as a company, cutting into their profits, and they want to stop that. Sometimes, what is good for a company is also good for the people who purchase it's products (and in this case even for people who don't)
Sure, many large/corporate law firms do litigating and defending. But there are a lot of personal injury law firms that just sue.
I'm thinking of the ads-on-the-the back-of-the- phone-book, cheaply filmed late night TV kind of firms. The ones whose ads start with "have you ever been in an accident? Tripped and fallen? Gotten fired from your job for excessive drinking and forgeting to wear pants? Did someone once hurt your feelings? Then you may be entitled to a HUGE SETTLEMENT!
.
I've been listening to this anti-government crap for the past 5+ years in the discussions of spam. If technology has had the ability to solve this problem, then just when the hell was it going to happen?
Part of the issue is that the target keeps moving - as soon as technology stops spam, spammers find a way around it. Spam blocking technology has come a long way in the last 5 years. But so has spam delivery.
I'm pretty impressed with Yahoo's spam filters - it seems to catch about 95% of the spam that I get on my old junk yahoo account. So I think technology does provide a decent solution, at least in some cases.
I'm a small-government guy, so I think twice about any federal law. This one in particular overrides some state laws that were just starting to be effective, and if given time I think would have been more effective than the federal law. So I would rather see technology and state laws above a federal law.