A while ago I worked at *an undisclosed marketing company* which handled advertising campaigns for many companies through the big four or five advertisers, and every now and then we'd get complains coming in from the companies or people with a keen eye that an advert had turned up in an undesirable place.
The best example of this was a partner of a parner of one of the agencies we advertise with that targeted adult websites, somebody within the company we were advertising for pointed out that their animal suppliment food (think mineral sticks for cows/horses and stuff) was being advertised on a bestiality website.
To this day we've always been wondering _exactly_ how they managed to stumble across that one!
Well, help prevent against catastrophic structural failure as in the Oklahoma City event and the WTC^H^H^H^H^H (*puts on tinfoil hat*) document possible methods of destroying these 'improved' buildings if the government wants to invade any new countries this year.
Perhaps I've had a little too much coffee this morning!
On the other hand this sounds familiar to an article here a few weeks back which described a different method to detect..blah blah lots of good medical reasons.. COCAIN AND ANTHRAX!!!!1!!1!1!!
Maybe more media-folks are getting into the science stuff, or they've finally discovered a new source of money for research grants.
In terms of digital 'licensing' for a specific country or even licensing to a handful of online shops, this is the 'old' way of doing it.
For example, most of the online mp3 shops that cater for DJs will usually ship mp3 versions either at the same time or before it comes out on vinyl/cd. If somebody releases a track in Chicago, I can have it playing at a club night in London - the same day!
And considering that many labels are selling them through 10 or more sites at a time, and all of them are DRM free I honestly cant see why this isn't catching on with the bigger companies, I rarely see any piracy either.
All in all this isn't really new is it? Just HP marketing with a 'its about Linux... come and lap it up children' theme going on.
Like most of the people here, I've been using this servce for a good few years (since around 2000 when they were still Compaq) and nothing seems to have changed.
Yeah aparently Crystal Maze was modeled after Fort Boyard, but they couldn't find a castle to shoot it at in time for the test episode so they changed the format & did it all in large studios & aircraft hangers...
Does nobody remember a TV game series called 'Crystal Maze' that ran from the early-mid '90s.
Basicly it's a team based game, you and about 5 other yuppies in bad early 80s fashion run around (I think) 4 or 5 different scenarios, such as a sunken ship, aztec ruins, a castle dungeon etc. and people volutneer to play in one of the game rooms on that level to win a crystal.
If you stay in the room too long - even if you've already won the crystal, you're locked in for the rest of the gameshow unless the team captain decides to waste a good crystal getting your ass out of there.
From what I've read.. this isn't cracking at all, and it looks like some's gone through the urban dictionary with a vague understanding of what it's doing and picked a word at random..
Consider this, you buy a dedicted server with a web-based 'Control Panel' on it, this makes you no more of an administrator than any other average joe who wants to run a web hosting company.
Now.. just because you can rent a botnet, then control it via a web interface makes you no more of a cracker than anybody else out there who can point & click... This is underground marketing taken to the next level, increasing ROI, reduced management/technical overheads and enabling unskilled people to make a few illegitimate bucks.
At the end of the day, this is what all software companies are aiming for; legal or illegal, their all in the software services business, and some would agree their doing it better than the legal side of the market.
A lot of the posters here seem to think it'll be used as their main or secondary backup source (at 15c/GiB per month it's not bad), and whichever market Amazon try and target it'll always end up being used by the lower end..
Who will use it? Perhaps not your grandma.. but it'd be nice to have a conveniant place to put all these pictures I took with the camera my bought me, or backups of my web/art/academic/porn portfolio or my e-mail inbox because my the company I work for enforce small quotas!
I can't see it being used by SMBs or anything larger - they can afford HDD/Tape backups and the rental of a local self-storage locker.
Basicly the people who want this sort of storage (and more importantly know why they actually need it) will use it because it's cheaper, more reliable etc.
All Amazon have to do now is convince people who don't know why they need this sort of service to signup and store crap on it.
A great example of the type of protection used by games that require the manuals (for those of you who haven't come across this) is from a fighting game (released by Capcom I think) I purchased in the mid-late 90s.
Whenever you started the game up, it'd give you a page number, a column and a row to lookup the code in the code-book.. which was black paper with the codes printed in black shiny writing so you couldn't photocopy it.
I couldn't be bothered to copy the whole code book by hand (so I could hand a copy to my friend) so their copy protection worked.. very well. (These were in the innocent days before I knew about reverse engineering, or even where to find cracks/patches).
I'm no market analyst (well, my clients don't know that.. but times can be hard), but this really does look like Sony has dropped the ball this time by trying to innovate too much.
I've long been a Sony fanboy, but in recent times it seems that Microsoft have finally clicked as to what makes a successful console, and Nintendo are innovating while managing to keep the fun and simple goals in view for their market.
They should just able to break even with the PS3 in the long run, but I don't forsee a PlayStation 4 becoming reality unless they take a good hard look at consoles of the past and present (hmm, Dreamcast?) and honestly sort out their direction.
While some of these companies offer services aimed towards the people of China and ignoring federal regulation (which combined is generally a good thing), the hammer will be brought down and somebody will have to pay for this!
What I don't understand is why an alternative 'internet' has been setup yet, using encrypted/disguised routes to the western world in a P2P fashion. If there's one niche in which open-source software can prosper it's going to be here.
Anyways, the main point I'm getting at here is that the Chinese government will choose somebody or an organization as an example of what will happen to future law-breakers/benders, but it'll still continue..
Is it just me, or does the whole Q/A session seem like a personal attack by either a very informed player, or by somebody who used to work at the company.
Although character assination can (some times) be a just about acceptable thing, the whole interview seems to be going a little bit too far.
I'm sure they'll work out how this guy is, and we'll have another (possibly fake) interview up on slashdot in the next couple of days saying the exact opposite.. So remember kids, if you try and screw people, their going to screw you twice as hard:D
Quick, we have to act fast.. Lets assemble a crack team of scientists to drill into the center of the earth and re-align it using nuclear explosives...
That it was so damn popular.. as a young child (I'm 18 now) I played the original Myst and I never really got anywhere (mostly randomly doing stuff as kids do). A few years later I saw a Myst walkthrough guide in a second-hand bookstore and decided to dig out the Myst cds..
Even at 13 or 14 that damn game baffled the hell out of me and my parents (we were deeply sucked into games like monkey island and loom though).
Why on earth did people play this game where the minimum player requirements were aparently an IQ of 180+ and a brain the size of a small planet!
Bitch, moan, whatever, but I 'just didn't get it'.
Ok, standard adverts are fine because the provider themselfs should be able to advertise their own services considering that a lot of them run free public game servers (for example UK2.net runs about a hundered public counter-strike servers).
A concept similar to google adwords (which I presume is what they've already been running) and allowing other people to advertise on a network of game servers is acceptable because of the low amount of bandwidth involved in downloading the adverts.
The problem comes when you introduce video advertising.. I'm sick and tired of people taking my bandwidth for granted just so they can shovel shit onto my computer that I know I will never take notice of. The second problem is lag... ARE THESE PEOPLE CRAZY!
With two people using my 512k ADSL line (both play a lot of games) and music almost constantly streamed there really isn't much spare bandwidth to go around before a stupid idea like this would make playing the games it supports completely unusable (or just very very laggy).
My third worry is about the advertising of pornography.. how long until the porn industry decides to take advantage of this to try and sell more 'granny midget hardcore lesbian sex'.
Considering the number of under 16s that play games (even those that are rated 18+/R18) I think it is unacceptable (and even illegal when you think about players in other countries).
Advertising in games is inevitable (just as it was on the internet), but as far as I'm concerned I will boycot any games that embrace the advertising technology until it becomes impossible for me not to. Up until that point I will continue to play QuakeWorld.. Best.. Game.. Ever (damn I'm sad).
HPs Desktop business is dealing commodity hardware for 'mom and pop' kinda people who need to check their e-mail, browse the web and share videos with family etc.
I can totally see why Linux is unsupported on their desktop systems, it's a pure business decision due to the relatively tiny number of Linux users buying their systems.
On the other hand their server business is the exact opposite due to the increasing market share Linux is getting in the data centre. Linux has already proved it's self on their entry and mid-range servers for a number of years now and their finally giving it the break into mission-critical data centres that it deserves.
Looking at the parents comment they have never dealt with HP servers running Linux, or indeed HP servers running anything. The platform support package (PSP) is great, it includes industrial strength drivers for their RAID cards, power management interfaces and even utilities to toggle the maintainance LED.
All in all HP could be called double faced, but the amount of development work required to make/certify drivers for all the desktop hardware they make just isn't worth it just to persuade the few Linux users that haven't heard the HP Desktop horror stories to buy their systems.
The last time I checked, I could buy a 250gb seagate barracuda for ~£80 and a seperate USB 2.0 compatible housing case for ~£15...
The difference between buying the same sized hard disk (from a less reliable manufacturer, i've never had any problems with seagate before) works out to about ~£7-10 depending on where you buy from.
This started out as an innovative product, with Linksys using Linux yet again to open new avenues in the consumer computing market.. If only they would release the code for the rest of their products (they already released the build scripts for their wireless range of routers after they were hacked into running custom applications and even custom kernels)..
I've got a standard wired Linksys router just sitting here just begging for me to install Linux on it, although wouldn't NetBSD be a much better choice considering it's being used in much more constrained production environments/products every day!
If only they would publicize more of the open-source projects they've been doing in order to spur more development from people who would actually benifit from them.
Take for example the Betsie perl script (which the BBC use extensively on their websites, it's an open-source cgi script which can be used to translate pages on-the-fly into a text-only mode. This has been very helpful for me and for a suprisingly large number of other web developers trying to tackle the issue of accessablity.
If they keep on going in this direction with opening up more projects and providing more APIs for developers to use, then I can really see in maybe as short as 2 years down the line it could be actually be worthwile to pay for that damn TV license.
Yes I know about the previous SlashDot articles on exactly the same thing, the first time around it was debated and much of the same points were brought up.
The second time around got all the usual 'its a dupe' posts, and this time it just isn't funny.
If anybody has ever read the BBC Technology news section they know their a week or two behind the cutting edge (most news articles seem dumbed down, as you would expect from the major news sites).
Perhaps there should be a new category 'News from BBC Technology' so I can just filter out this crap.
Again, SlashDot is prooving that it's no longer at the forefront of IT industry and geek news (as if we didn't know it already).. This story was out last week at the BBC..
The problem with looking for candidates to take over as the editorial team for the magazine is that they really should be 'inactive hackers'.
By this I mean that they should have the theoretical knowledge behind it to validate articles and write their own, but given the background of Phrack you just know that the FBI/CIA/MI5 will be paying a lot of attention to whoever steps up to take the role.
If the new candidate were ever to practice what they preach, you can be assured that they'll be looking for a new Phrack editor faster than you can say 'mandatory 20-year exemplary sentance'.
The same vulnerability affects both Apache and Microsoft IIS - this is a design problem and not specific to any web server but rather a combination of web server and proxy or caching server and the differences between HTTP parsers.
It's nice to gawk at Microsoft when they are clearly being ass clowns.. but remember, come monday you'll probably be using Microsoft products in some shape or form.
Sure, this effects Apache, but this also effects just about all web servers where the request is first filtered through a cache or proxy...
What we don't need is people running around like headless chickens screaming 'omg dat aprache server got r00ted.. wher3s the sploit!' as 90% of Apache servers on the internet will be completely uneffected by it.
It seems the poster didn't read the (very intresting) Watchfire paper before submitting. And editors... do your job, otherwise you'll soon be replaced by monkeys trained to click the 'Accept Article' button all day.
Slashdot Mirror
A while ago I worked at *an undisclosed marketing company* which handled advertising campaigns for many companies through the big four or five advertisers, and every now and then we'd get complains coming in from the companies or people with a keen eye that an advert had turned up in an undesirable place.
The best example of this was a partner of a parner of one of the agencies we advertise with that targeted adult websites, somebody within the company we were advertising for pointed out that their animal suppliment food (think mineral sticks for cows/horses and stuff) was being advertised on a bestiality website.
To this day we've always been wondering _exactly_ how they managed to stumble across that one!
Just my two cents.
Well, help prevent against catastrophic structural failure as in the Oklahoma City event and the WTC^H^H^H^H^H (*puts on tinfoil hat*) document possible methods of destroying these 'improved' buildings if the government wants to invade any new countries this year.
..blah blah lots of good medical reasons.. COCAIN AND ANTHRAX!!!!1!!1!1!!
Perhaps I've had a little too much coffee this morning!
On the other hand this sounds familiar to an article here a few weeks back which described a different method to detect
Maybe more media-folks are getting into the science stuff, or they've finally discovered a new source of money for research grants.
In terms of digital 'licensing' for a specific country or even licensing to a handful of online shops, this is the 'old' way of doing it.
For example, most of the online mp3 shops that cater for DJs will usually ship mp3 versions either at the same time or before it comes out on vinyl/cd. If somebody releases a track in Chicago, I can have it playing at a club night in London - the same day!
And considering that many labels are selling them through 10 or more sites at a time, and all of them are DRM free I honestly cant see why this isn't catching on with the bigger companies, I rarely see any piracy either.
All in all this isn't really new is it? Just HP marketing with a 'its about Linux... come and lap it up children' theme going on.
Like most of the people here, I've been using this servce for a good few years (since around 2000 when they were still Compaq) and nothing seems to have changed.
Yeah aparently Crystal Maze was modeled after Fort Boyard, but they couldn't find a castle to shoot it at in time for the test episode so they changed the format & did it all in large studios & aircraft hangers...
:)
Just my £0.02p
Does nobody remember a TV game series called 'Crystal Maze' that ran from the early-mid '90s.
:)
Basicly it's a team based game, you and about 5 other yuppies in bad early 80s fashion run around (I think) 4 or 5 different scenarios, such as a sunken ship, aztec ruins, a castle dungeon etc. and people volutneer to play in one of the game rooms on that level to win a crystal.
If you stay in the room too long - even if you've already won the crystal, you're locked in for the rest of the gameshow unless the team captain decides to waste a good crystal getting your ass out of there.
Just my £0.02p
From what I've read.. this isn't cracking at all, and it looks like some's gone through the urban dictionary with a vague understanding of what it's doing and picked a word at random..
Consider this, you buy a dedicted server with a web-based 'Control Panel' on it, this makes you no more of an administrator than any other average joe who wants to run a web hosting company.
Now.. just because you can rent a botnet, then control it via a web interface makes you no more of a cracker than anybody else out there who can point & click... This is underground marketing taken to the next level, increasing ROI, reduced management/technical overheads and enabling unskilled people to make a few illegitimate bucks.
At the end of the day, this is what all software companies are aiming for; legal or illegal, their all in the software services business, and some would agree their doing it better than the legal side of the market.
A lot of the posters here seem to think it'll be used as their main or secondary backup source (at 15c/GiB per month it's not bad), and whichever market Amazon try and target it'll always end up being used by the lower end..
Who will use it? Perhaps not your grandma.. but it'd be nice to have a conveniant place to put all these pictures I took with the camera my bought me, or backups of my web/art/academic/porn portfolio or my e-mail inbox because my the company I work for enforce small quotas!
I can't see it being used by SMBs or anything larger - they can afford HDD/Tape backups and the rental of a local self-storage locker.
Basicly the people who want this sort of storage (and more importantly know why they actually need it) will use it because it's cheaper, more reliable etc.
All Amazon have to do now is convince people who don't know why they need this sort of service to signup and store crap on it.
A great example of the type of protection used by games that require the manuals (for those of you who haven't come across this) is from a fighting game (released by Capcom I think) I purchased in the mid-late 90s.
Whenever you started the game up, it'd give you a page number, a column and a row to lookup the code in the code-book.. which was black paper with the codes printed in black shiny writing so you couldn't photocopy it.
I couldn't be bothered to copy the whole code book by hand (so I could hand a copy to my friend) so their copy protection worked.. very well. (These were in the innocent days before I knew about reverse engineering, or even where to find cracks/patches).
Just my £0.02p
I'm no market analyst (well, my clients don't know that.. but times can be hard), but this really does look like Sony has dropped the ball this time by trying to innovate too much.
I've long been a Sony fanboy, but in recent times it seems that Microsoft have finally clicked as to what makes a successful console, and Nintendo are innovating while managing to keep the fun and simple goals in view for their market.
They should just able to break even with the PS3 in the long run, but I don't forsee a PlayStation 4 becoming reality unless they take a good hard look at consoles of the past and present (hmm, Dreamcast?) and honestly sort out their direction.
While some of these companies offer services aimed towards the people of China and ignoring federal regulation (which combined is generally a good thing), the hammer will be brought down and somebody will have to pay for this!
What I don't understand is why an alternative 'internet' has been setup yet, using encrypted/disguised routes to the western world in a P2P fashion. If there's one niche in which open-source software can prosper it's going to be here.
Anyways, the main point I'm getting at here is that the Chinese government will choose somebody or an organization as an example of what will happen to future law-breakers/benders, but it'll still continue..
All the rest aside.. I've now found a place to find hot over 50 housewives with lots of goodies they want to give me
Hmm, I think all this spam I get may be brainwashing me!
Is it just me, or does the whole Q/A session seem like a personal attack by either a very informed player, or by somebody who used to work at the company.
Although character assination can (some times) be a just about acceptable thing, the whole interview seems to be going a little bit too far.
I'm sure they'll work out how this guy is, and we'll have another (possibly fake) interview up on slashdot in the next couple of days saying the exact opposite.. So remember kids, if you try and screw people, their going to screw you twice as hard :D
Just my £0.02p :)
Hmm, my marketing filter is flashing again..
Panten Pro-V conditioning shampoo with "self-assembling peptide nanofibers loaded with pro-survival factors" for extra shine and longevity..
I'm not calling BS, but cant a crack team of Hardard scientists be a little bit more specific with a short quote!
Quick, we have to act fast.. Lets assemble a crack team of scientists to drill into the center of the earth and re-align it using nuclear explosives...
Coming soon to a cinema near you!
That it was so damn popular.. as a young child (I'm 18 now) I played the original Myst and I never really got anywhere (mostly randomly doing stuff as kids do). A few years later I saw a Myst walkthrough guide in a second-hand bookstore and decided to dig out the Myst cds..
Even at 13 or 14 that damn game baffled the hell out of me and my parents (we were deeply sucked into games like monkey island and loom though).
Why on earth did people play this game where the minimum player requirements were aparently an IQ of 180+ and a brain the size of a small planet!
Bitch, moan, whatever, but I 'just didn't get it'.
Ok, standard adverts are fine because the provider themselfs should be able to advertise their own services considering that a lot of them run free public game servers (for example UK2.net runs about a hundered public counter-strike servers).
A concept similar to google adwords (which I presume is what they've already been running) and allowing other people to advertise on a network of game servers is acceptable because of the low amount of bandwidth involved in downloading the adverts.
The problem comes when you introduce video advertising.. I'm sick and tired of people taking my bandwidth for granted just so they can shovel shit onto my computer that I know I will never take notice of. The second problem is lag... ARE THESE PEOPLE CRAZY!
With two people using my 512k ADSL line (both play a lot of games) and music almost constantly streamed there really isn't much spare bandwidth to go around before a stupid idea like this would make playing the games it supports completely unusable (or just very very laggy).
My third worry is about the advertising of pornography.. how long until the porn industry decides to take advantage of this to try and sell more 'granny midget hardcore lesbian sex'.
Considering the number of under 16s that play games (even those that are rated 18+/R18) I think it is unacceptable (and even illegal when you think about players in other countries).
Advertising in games is inevitable (just as it was on the internet), but as far as I'm concerned I will boycot any games that embrace the advertising technology until it becomes impossible for me not to. Up until that point I will continue to play QuakeWorld.. Best.. Game.. Ever (damn I'm sad).
Eh?
HPs Desktop business is dealing commodity hardware for 'mom and pop' kinda people who need to check their e-mail, browse the web and share videos with family etc.
I can totally see why Linux is unsupported on their desktop systems, it's a pure business decision due to the relatively tiny number of Linux users buying their systems.
On the other hand their server business is the exact opposite due to the increasing market share Linux is getting in the data centre. Linux has already proved it's self on their entry and mid-range servers for a number of years now and their finally giving it the break into mission-critical data centres that it deserves.
Looking at the parents comment they have never dealt with HP servers running Linux, or indeed HP servers running anything. The platform support package (PSP) is great, it includes industrial strength drivers for their RAID cards, power management interfaces and even utilities to toggle the maintainance LED.
All in all HP could be called double faced, but the amount of development work required to make/certify drivers for all the desktop hardware they make just isn't worth it just to persuade the few Linux users that haven't heard the HP Desktop horror stories to buy their systems.
..Nobody already noticed this feature?
It's been a pretty much standard feature for a while now, and I'm really suprised how this could have reached the front page.
Maybe Slashdot should add a new feature.. 'Redirect to a decent news site on-login' and save all our precious work hours.
Cheaper than a USB hard drive.. eh?
The last time I checked, I could buy a 250gb seagate barracuda for ~£80 and a seperate USB 2.0 compatible housing case for ~£15...
The difference between buying the same sized hard disk (from a less reliable manufacturer, i've never had any problems with seagate before) works out to about ~£7-10 depending on where you buy from.
This started out as an innovative product, with Linksys using Linux yet again to open new avenues in the consumer computing market.. If only they would release the code for the rest of their products (they already released the build scripts for their wireless range of routers after they were hacked into running custom applications and even custom kernels)..
I've got a standard wired Linksys router just sitting here just begging for me to install Linux on it, although wouldn't NetBSD be a much better choice considering it's being used in much more constrained production environments/products every day!
If only they would publicize more of the open-source projects they've been doing in order to spur more development from people who would actually benifit from them.
Take for example the Betsie perl script (which the BBC use extensively on their websites, it's an open-source cgi script which can be used to translate pages on-the-fly into a text-only mode. This has been very helpful for me and for a suprisingly large number of other web developers trying to tackle the issue of accessablity.
If they keep on going in this direction with opening up more projects and providing more APIs for developers to use, then I can really see in maybe as short as 2 years down the line it could be actually be worthwile to pay for that damn TV license.
Yes I know about the previous SlashDot articles on exactly the same thing, the first time around it was debated and much of the same points were brought up.
The second time around got all the usual 'its a dupe' posts, and this time it just isn't funny.
If anybody has ever read the BBC Technology news section they know their a week or two behind the cutting edge (most news articles seem dumbed down, as you would expect from the major news sites).
Perhaps there should be a new category 'News from BBC Technology' so I can just filter out this crap.
Again, SlashDot is prooving that it's no longer at the forefront of IT industry and geek news (as if we didn't know it already).. This story was out last week at the BBC..
The problem with looking for candidates to take over as the editorial team for the magazine is that they really should be 'inactive hackers'.
By this I mean that they should have the theoretical knowledge behind it to validate articles and write their own, but given the background of Phrack you just know that the FBI/CIA/MI5 will be paying a lot of attention to whoever steps up to take the role.
If the new candidate were ever to practice what they preach, you can be assured that they'll be looking for a new Phrack editor faster than you can say 'mandatory 20-year exemplary sentance'.
The same vulnerability affects both Apache and Microsoft IIS - this is a design problem and not specific to any web server but rather a combination of web server and proxy or caching server and the differences between HTTP parsers.
It's nice to gawk at Microsoft when they are clearly being ass clowns.. but remember, come monday you'll probably be using Microsoft products in some shape or form.
Sure, this effects Apache, but this also effects just about all web servers where the request is first filtered through a cache or proxy...
What we don't need is people running around like headless chickens screaming 'omg dat aprache server got r00ted.. wher3s the sploit!' as 90% of Apache servers on the internet will be completely uneffected by it.
It seems the poster didn't read the (very intresting) Watchfire paper before submitting. And editors... do your job, otherwise you'll soon be replaced by monkeys trained to click the 'Accept Article' button all day.