Read this years ago, and thought it was interesting at the time...I've saved the link for years. Really detailed story about finding a really complicated bug in MS Word way back in the day.
Obviously, it's okbecause if he did tell you he's an idiot, he can't be an idiot since he told you up front that he was. But if he didn't tell you he's an idiot, then he certainly is an idiot.
What happened was they tried to go online more, and Uru happened.
Wonderful graphics and levels, with online bits and pieces (I don't know if it was really multiplayer, but there was some social component to it). But all this before most internet connections were capable of dealing with it (5 minute load times for zoning between sections was a really serious deal breaker).
It died, hard, and I think that took the wind out of their sails for a bit. Not sure they ever recovered much after that.
(I was in the early beta and stuck with it pretty much through that, and it was never ready for prime time at all. Last I checked I was still listed in the credits, I'll have to check that again some time).
Totalitarian yet schizophrenic shit like this is what bugs me so much about the US. First you want total personal privacy (a good thing), yet you readily scream for the surveillance of others.
Seems to me like he wants people he likes (himself, liberals, etc.) to have total privacy to do whatever they want, but he wants people he doesn't like (republicans/conservatives) to be constantly recorded and harassed.
And BTW, that isn't remotely an American ideology.
My first thought was...after sitting down and discussing it with his 14 year old nephew, it must all have gone over Rodgers' head, and he didn't learn anything. Hey, next time let the kid write the legislation, leave it to the experts.
Please comply with French law. If any of the bits you send out on the internet could be in any way construed as hateful to any kind of person who might be a French citizen, please make sure those bits don't arrive in France. But all the other bits are fine, keep 'em coming.
Worked there for 23 years, never really very close to being able to qualify for a mortgage, even at the end with the crash, on a home within reasonable distance of work (reasonable being 90 minute commute). Maybe a condo that wasn't too big near the end of my stay, but not much of one.
Moved to FL this year, already have a largish house in a very nice neighborhood. The money I wanted to try to put down in California on a place (but couldn't qualify for the mortgage) covered closing costs and about 30% down. Not some cheap ranch shack either.
Granted, that down payment probably could have bought a nice house outright in a lot of places, but the wife is an orthopedic surgeon, so nowhere better than south Florida for someone who does knees and hips.
If someone hacks something the government cares about then they manage to find that person.
Random, usually broke, teenager, can't fight back, so easy to get a win. Also, national security, national response.
Call around a couple of times and threaten schools and/or officials and they can find you pretty quickly.
Criminal, with little hope of skirting that particular law, easy to get an arrest and conviction. Little work, also people's lives are being directly threatened and/or 'think of the children':P
A Random company robo dials 1/2 of the continental fucking U.S. and all of a sudden these fuckers can't seem to figure out where they are coming from or what the hell can be done about it.
Potentially vague civil law, with a defendant that probably has lawyers and enough money to get more. Not much payback in political or financial capital, so no one who cares about those things will make the effort.
Seriously, great examples of 'the path of least resistance' that most government-types (particularly the elected kind) follow.
I suspect that any network admins worth their pay would be able to tell 1) if the exploit / entry method the guy was talking about was true, and 2) what he did when he got in there. If not, they have bigger problems.
I sympathize with the views here, on both sides. Yes, this guy did something wrong, and at least in some cases seems to have been genuinely grey (if not white) hat about it. But if a system as a flaw big enough, how do you want the company to find out about it, this guy or Anonymous/Lulzsec?
Honestly, he's in a no-win situation, and he put himself there, so it's hard to feel too sorry. But I'd hope that there would be a way for people like this to constructively use their skills, since there seems to be no end of backdoors and holes that need to be fixed. Aside from companies understanding the situation, you're taking your freedom into your own hand when you poke around like this.
Google doesn't need a court, government, or anyone else to determine who it can do business with. If it wants to refuse to do (ad) business with download sites, legal or otherwise (or any other kind of site for that matter), it can and should be able to make that call for itself.
While I detest the idea that 'big brother' can tell me what kinds of sites I can run or view, I just as much detest the idea that 'big brother' can come into my business and tell me I don't have any choice on how I run it.
I'm not saying there wouldn't be consequences for those decisions. Let Google do business with or without whoever they feel like...and if they make stupid choices and piss too many people off, the 'next Google' will learn from that and maybe do things differently.
Too busy right now to research, but compared to the speed this meteor was supposedly moving (33K mph?), and what I remember as the speed of a typical intercept missile (up to 10K or so mph maybe?), doesn't it seem pretty unlikely that it could have actually have been a hit?
Going from very hazy pre-coffee memory here, so my numbers may be *just* a tad off...
Just to catch you up a bit, we allow idiots to become judges here. And to hold political office. It's a kind of 'equal opportunity' thing, you might want to keep that in mind.
Mock all you want (and sorry to derail this rant), but if these people are internet-savvy enough to google a script to do a simple DDoS, they should be able to understand that none of the people they're attacking, or their bosses or politically-connected friends, can do anything about this. Even more so if they're more sophisticated than I'm giving them credit for...
Best thing to do about the 'movie' would have been to ignore it. It would have died the horrible, lonely death it deserved if people had simply not made a fuss about it. Maybe that is beyond their reasoning, but the idea that you can't make something disappear from the internet shouldn't be.
No, I think they're using the movie as an excuse to deflect from the real reason they're doing this. Honestly, what that would be is beyond me, but maybe the tin foil hat crowd here can come up with a more plausible end game. There has to be a small group of people that are trying to profit or get something more concrete out of this than making a horrible, horrible movie disappear.
If you dig a big hole in your end of the field, because the other team dug a big hole on their end of the field...I'm not sure that 'level' would be a good description of the playing field.
IMO, if the cops doctor evidence, they should be held accountable, by law. And if the 'news' or anyone else doctors evidence, they should be held accountable as well. I think that by publishing this sort of footage, you're effectively presenting evidence, albeit not in a court of law in the case of the news, but there should still be punishment (assuming there isn't some libel law already in place for this...IANAL by any stretch of the imagination).
Evaluating the source is most useful when you don't have a good basis to determine the validity of the information yourself. This isn't as crucial as it was pre-internet, since it's not hard for most (?) people to do a little googling to find out more, but there are time where I don't care enough or don't have the bandwidth to find the background. In those cases, if I know the background of the source, I can sometimes easily decide if it's worth remembering or discounting out of hand.
I totally agree with AC posting, but as has been stated, most inflammatory AC comments will usually just get dismissed on the spot, which is perfectly OK since most are deserving of being ignored. The ones that are worthy of being read will stand on their own, and it's not hard for most (sane) people to know the difference.
More importantly, if people tend to look at completely baseless AC posts (or other drivel) and jump on them like they were fact...well, now I can generally dismiss THOSE people as well. Helps me figure out which people have no sense of logic and can't be trusted to come to rational decisions or opinions.
I'm anxiously waiting for Apple, Amazon, and Google to start getting into the business of distributing artists songs just like they do for app developers.
From your lips to God's ears...not so much that I care one way or the other who gets rich from the artists (and it will likely not be the artists...), but at least if those groups started mucking around in the RIAA's affairs more, the lawyers on BOTH sides would be well funded, instead of just one side.
OK I think I just figured out who would get rich from the artists in that scenario...but still, IMO if it's not the RIAA, I'm fine with it.
The way I see it, they just want to have another place to file a lawsuit (the ISPs). Why file against just the 'infringers' when you can file against everyone who has anything to do with the internet.
Next up, log visitors and file against anyone who saw that there was infringing content but didn't report it.
I've seen illegal copies of music on web pages, and look at all the stuff on Youtube that shouldn't be there. I've seen people selling many questionable things out of their cars. Planes are frequently used to smuggle illegal drugs. Hell, you can find stores selling stuff that they're not supposed to be selling in the 'right' parts of the world. Shut all those down too by removing the tools?
If we can just get *most* of the things on bittorrent to be legal, maybe...naw, the music industry has to have a scapegoat.
I like it! If I find a picture of me up in (let's say), Wal Mart, I 1) ask them to take it down; 2) demand $150,000 for infringement, and 3) I now own Wal Mart! No need for a ??? step at all!
I'll shore up a few other points as well since you've made such a good start.
Boeing 'ditched it's Seattle roots' ? The executives moved there, nothing else. Most of the commercial work is still in the NW (they shuttered the assembly plant in Long Beach CA after closing down the old McDonnell Douglas commercial planes), so not a whole lot changed up there.
Outsourcing does happen, though it's not much different now than it was a decade ago. And, it's quite customary in aerospace (not just Boeing) to make agreements with countries to throw them some work in exchange for purchases.
Before the big turn in the economy, very few people at Boeing were being laid off. More than 20 years ago, it was customary to have large fluctuations in the workforce (layoffs in December, new hiring just after the first of the year). Starting in the late 80's that changed, and there haven't been any grand downturns since the very early 90's.
What we're seeing here is predictable. Any new project of this scope has issues (see the A380 links above, and go look back at the history of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program). It's not unusual for delays, given that you're predicting what will happen in the future.
It's more of a on-issue then people think...and most already think it's a non-issue.
If you go into the arena, as soon as the battle starts (which is the first time you can see who your opponents are), drop into this website and look up one of the player's gear...by the time you see anything, you're already dead. The website isn't that fast, and you don't have that kind of time to research anything.
Sure, you can look up every arena player on every server in your battle group, and try to memorize it all (thousands of players on each of 8 or so servers), and assuming that no one changes equipment in the mean time, and assuming that no one has equipment that they use only in arenas, and assuming that knowing all that will give you any edge at all (which usually it won't), then you may have an issue.
Me...I'm less than concerned about it, and it's a cool toy whether or not it poses any kind of problems.
Slashdot Mirror
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rick_s...
Read this years ago, and thought it was interesting at the time...I've saved the link for years. Really detailed story about finding a really complicated bug in MS Word way back in the day.
Obviously, it's okbecause if he did tell you he's an idiot, he can't be an idiot since he told you up front that he was. But if he didn't tell you he's an idiot, then he certainly is an idiot.
What happened was they tried to go online more, and Uru happened.
Wonderful graphics and levels, with online bits and pieces (I don't know if it was really multiplayer, but there was some social component to it). But all this before most internet connections were capable of dealing with it (5 minute load times for zoning between sections was a really serious deal breaker).
It died, hard, and I think that took the wind out of their sails for a bit. Not sure they ever recovered much after that.
(I was in the early beta and stuck with it pretty much through that, and it was never ready for prime time at all. Last I checked I was still listed in the credits, I'll have to check that again some time).
Totalitarian yet schizophrenic shit like this is what bugs me so much about the US. First you want total personal privacy (a good thing), yet you readily scream for the surveillance of others.
Seems to me like he wants people he likes (himself, liberals, etc.) to have total privacy to do whatever they want, but he wants people he doesn't like (republicans/conservatives) to be constantly recorded and harassed.
And BTW, that isn't remotely an American ideology.
Actually I think it's spelled Lake Forest. But my memory may be a little off, I mostly lived North OC / South LA.
My first thought was...after sitting down and discussing it with his 14 year old nephew, it must all have gone over Rodgers' head, and he didn't learn anything. Hey, next time let the kid write the legislation, leave it to the experts.
Dear Twitter:
Please comply with French law. If any of the bits you send out on the internet could be in any way construed as hateful to any kind of person who might be a French citizen, please make sure those bits don't arrive in France. But all the other bits are fine, keep 'em coming.
I'm going to submit this submission for the best example of 'comparing apples to oranges'.
I'll assume the submitter knew nothing about the Google situation in this case, or should I think it's just a bad troll?
Beats California.
Worked there for 23 years, never really very close to being able to qualify for a mortgage, even at the end with the crash, on a home within reasonable distance of work (reasonable being 90 minute commute). Maybe a condo that wasn't too big near the end of my stay, but not much of one.
Moved to FL this year, already have a largish house in a very nice neighborhood. The money I wanted to try to put down in California on a place (but couldn't qualify for the mortgage) covered closing costs and about 30% down. Not some cheap ranch shack either.
Granted, that down payment probably could have bought a nice house outright in a lot of places, but the wife is an orthopedic surgeon, so nowhere better than south Florida for someone who does knees and hips.
If someone hacks something the government cares about then they manage to find that person.
Random, usually broke, teenager, can't fight back, so easy to get a win. Also, national security, national response.
Call around a couple of times and threaten schools and/or officials and they can find you pretty quickly.
Criminal, with little hope of skirting that particular law, easy to get an arrest and conviction. Little work, also people's lives are being directly threatened and/or 'think of the children' :P
A Random company robo dials 1/2 of the continental fucking U.S. and all of a sudden these fuckers can't seem to figure out where they are coming from or what the hell can be done about it.
Potentially vague civil law, with a defendant that probably has lawyers and enough money to get more. Not much payback in political or financial capital, so no one who cares about those things will make the effort.
Seriously, great examples of 'the path of least resistance' that most government-types (particularly the elected kind) follow.
I suspect that any network admins worth their pay would be able to tell 1) if the exploit / entry method the guy was talking about was true, and 2) what he did when he got in there. If not, they have bigger problems.
I sympathize with the views here, on both sides. Yes, this guy did something wrong, and at least in some cases seems to have been genuinely grey (if not white) hat about it. But if a system as a flaw big enough, how do you want the company to find out about it, this guy or Anonymous/Lulzsec?
Honestly, he's in a no-win situation, and he put himself there, so it's hard to feel too sorry. But I'd hope that there would be a way for people like this to constructively use their skills, since there seems to be no end of backdoors and holes that need to be fixed. Aside from companies understanding the situation, you're taking your freedom into your own hand when you poke around like this.
To clarify a little for you...
Google doesn't need a court, government, or anyone else to determine who it can do business with. If it wants to refuse to do (ad) business with download sites, legal or otherwise (or any other kind of site for that matter), it can and should be able to make that call for itself.
While I detest the idea that 'big brother' can tell me what kinds of sites I can run or view, I just as much detest the idea that 'big brother' can come into my business and tell me I don't have any choice on how I run it.
I'm not saying there wouldn't be consequences for those decisions. Let Google do business with or without whoever they feel like...and if they make stupid choices and piss too many people off, the 'next Google' will learn from that and maybe do things differently.
Too busy right now to research, but compared to the speed this meteor was supposedly moving (33K mph?), and what I remember as the speed of a typical intercept missile (up to 10K or so mph maybe?), doesn't it seem pretty unlikely that it could have actually have been a hit?
Going from very hazy pre-coffee memory here, so my numbers may be *just* a tad off...
...no judge on the planet is going to...
Hi, you must be new here, welcome to Earth.
Just to catch you up a bit, we allow idiots to become judges here. And to hold political office. It's a kind of 'equal opportunity' thing, you might want to keep that in mind.
Enjoy your visit!
Mock all you want (and sorry to derail this rant), but if these people are internet-savvy enough to google a script to do a simple DDoS, they should be able to understand that none of the people they're attacking, or their bosses or politically-connected friends, can do anything about this. Even more so if they're more sophisticated than I'm giving them credit for...
Best thing to do about the 'movie' would have been to ignore it. It would have died the horrible, lonely death it deserved if people had simply not made a fuss about it. Maybe that is beyond their reasoning, but the idea that you can't make something disappear from the internet shouldn't be.
No, I think they're using the movie as an excuse to deflect from the real reason they're doing this. Honestly, what that would be is beyond me, but maybe the tin foil hat crowd here can come up with a more plausible end game. There has to be a small group of people that are trying to profit or get something more concrete out of this than making a horrible, horrible movie disappear.
If you dig a big hole in your end of the field, because the other team dug a big hole on their end of the field...I'm not sure that 'level' would be a good description of the playing field.
IMO, if the cops doctor evidence, they should be held accountable, by law. And if the 'news' or anyone else doctors evidence, they should be held accountable as well. I think that by publishing this sort of footage, you're effectively presenting evidence, albeit not in a court of law in the case of the news, but there should still be punishment (assuming there isn't some libel law already in place for this...IANAL by any stretch of the imagination).
Evaluating the source is most useful when you don't have a good basis to determine the validity of the information yourself. This isn't as crucial as it was pre-internet, since it's not hard for most (?) people to do a little googling to find out more, but there are time where I don't care enough or don't have the bandwidth to find the background. In those cases, if I know the background of the source, I can sometimes easily decide if it's worth remembering or discounting out of hand.
I totally agree with AC posting, but as has been stated, most inflammatory AC comments will usually just get dismissed on the spot, which is perfectly OK since most are deserving of being ignored. The ones that are worthy of being read will stand on their own, and it's not hard for most (sane) people to know the difference.
More importantly, if people tend to look at completely baseless AC posts (or other drivel) and jump on them like they were fact...well, now I can generally dismiss THOSE people as well. Helps me figure out which people have no sense of logic and can't be trusted to come to rational decisions or opinions.
I'm anxiously waiting for Apple, Amazon, and Google to start getting into the business of distributing artists songs just like they do for app developers.
From your lips to God's ears...not so much that I care one way or the other who gets rich from the artists (and it will likely not be the artists...), but at least if those groups started mucking around in the RIAA's affairs more, the lawyers on BOTH sides would be well funded, instead of just one side.
OK I think I just figured out who would get rich from the artists in that scenario...but still, IMO if it's not the RIAA, I'm fine with it.
4) every other other possible reason has been shut down.
Citation needed?
The way I see it, they just want to have another place to file a lawsuit (the ISPs). Why file against just the 'infringers' when you can file against everyone who has anything to do with the internet.
Next up, log visitors and file against anyone who saw that there was infringing content but didn't report it.
Reference yesterday's story...
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/04/19/2231240/Michigan-Police-Could-Search-Cell-Phones-During-Traffic-Stops
I wonder if this location data would be part of what could be extracted there...
I've seen illegal copies of music on web pages, and look at all the stuff on Youtube that shouldn't be there. I've seen people selling many questionable things out of their cars. Planes are frequently used to smuggle illegal drugs. Hell, you can find stores selling stuff that they're not supposed to be selling in the 'right' parts of the world. Shut all those down too by removing the tools?
If we can just get *most* of the things on bittorrent to be legal, maybe...naw, the music industry has to have a scapegoat.
I like it! If I find a picture of me up in (let's say), Wal Mart, I 1) ask them to take it down; 2) demand $150,000 for infringement, and 3) I now own Wal Mart! No need for a ??? step at all!
I'll shore up a few other points as well since you've made such a good start.
Boeing 'ditched it's Seattle roots' ? The executives moved there, nothing else. Most of the commercial work is still in the NW (they shuttered the assembly plant in Long Beach CA after closing down the old McDonnell Douglas commercial planes), so not a whole lot changed up there.
Outsourcing does happen, though it's not much different now than it was a decade ago. And, it's quite customary in aerospace (not just Boeing) to make agreements with countries to throw them some work in exchange for purchases.
Before the big turn in the economy, very few people at Boeing were being laid off. More than 20 years ago, it was customary to have large fluctuations in the workforce (layoffs in December, new hiring just after the first of the year). Starting in the late 80's that changed, and there haven't been any grand downturns since the very early 90's.
What we're seeing here is predictable. Any new project of this scope has issues (see the A380 links above, and go look back at the history of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program). It's not unusual for delays, given that you're predicting what will happen in the future.
It's more of a on-issue then people think...and most already think it's a non-issue.
If you go into the arena, as soon as the battle starts (which is the first time you can see who your opponents are), drop into this website and look up one of the player's gear...by the time you see anything, you're already dead. The website isn't that fast, and you don't have that kind of time to research anything.
Sure, you can look up every arena player on every server in your battle group, and try to memorize it all (thousands of players on each of 8 or so servers), and assuming that no one changes equipment in the mean time, and assuming that no one has equipment that they use only in arenas, and assuming that knowing all that will give you any edge at all (which usually it won't), then you may have an issue.
Me...I'm less than concerned about it, and it's a cool toy whether or not it poses any kind of problems.