But the dvd players under linux all (afaik, unless there's some dodgy proprietary thing out there?) use DeCSS, so you don't need to worry about region codes. I haven't even *set* the region code on my DVD rom drive - I don't need to!!!
The software you're running makes no difference (if it did you wouldn't have to reflash the drive - you'd just use different software nomatter what OS you're on).
Have you not read the (many) other posts attached to this article: newer RPC2 drives disallow raw access to the data if your region code doesn't match, rendering any software such as libdvdcss useless.
Also, libdvdcss isn't 100% reliable - I had to set the region code on my drive in order to play some of my region 2 discs because libdvdcss couldn't crack the key.
And besides, cracking CSS keys can be slow - why bother if I can just reflash the drive to allow RPC1 mode?
The problem is that it's a lot of effort for me to flash the drive because I would have to do one of: 1. Install Windows on my machine - not going to happen. This would be a *lot* of effort and I'm not buying Windows just so I can install some firmware. 2. Boot from a FreeDOS floppy - this would involve finding a floppy drive and installing it in the machine. 3. Put the DVD drive in a Windows machine - this would involve actually *having* a Windows machine. 4. Boot from a FreeDOS CD - this is probably about the only feasable option.
A DDOS however keeps the link alive just saturated so now the machine that is connected has to deal with a huge load.
The machine can't simply decide to cut the line if it goes over a certain limit so it just has to deal with it.
Well, more importantly than that, a DDoS attack is directed at a specific host, not a specific connection. Take down the connection and the DDoS traffic just gets rerouted via a different connection... oh, and you probably just made the effects of the attack worse since you dropped your primary high-bandwidth link so now the same amount of DDoS traffic is going over the smaller links.
Taking down a link that DDoS traffic is flowing over is very similar to preventing traffic jams by closing the motorway - you just end up shifting that traffic onto the smaller side roads, which were probably already at capacity anyway.
A DDoS attack is pretty much impossible to filter since it's coming from *everywhere* - even if you filter it on your link then it's probably still having a serious effect on the links upstream of the filter. The more upstream you move the filters, the more filters you need and the more ISPs you need to cooperate and implement those filters.
Unfortunately though, we rely too much on DNS which is a fairly fragile infrastructure to say the least.
DNS is only fragile if the people running the authoratative servers are lacking in the clue department.
There are a lot of root nameservers and many of them are anycast addresses (so there are actually a lot more than there appear to be at first glance) - so the root nameservers are pretty robust, you'd struggle to take all of them out.
So then we come down to the TLD nameservers (e.g. the ones authoratative for.com,.co.uk,.org, etc.) - if the organisations responsible for running these put plenty of servers at a reasonable number of geographic locations then they are pretty safe.
The bigger problem is the people running the nameservers for the individual domains - too many people only have the mandatory minimum number of nameservers (2), and in many cases both of these servers are connected to the same piece of ethernet cable so it's not a great stretch of the imagination to imagine them both becoming unreachable. This problem is solvable - simply put in more, geographically spaced name servers. DNS was designed to allow this. Of course it costs a bit more money, but resilliance always does.
Am I the only person sick to death of all the lawsuits and patents?
Yes, and I think most of the major companies are also sick of it. Unfortunately it's turning into an arms race and just sitting around being a pacifist just means you get flattened by someone with a bigger pile of patents than you.
It's impossible to write any software without infringing someone's patent and I've heard it used as a reason _not_ to open-source stuff. "We have no business reason to open-source this, but we'd like to for the benefit of the community. However, if we do someone will probably search it for something that looks similar to their patent and sue us." It's hard to argue against that kind of problem because it's true - let someone see your source in the current climate and you _do_ increase the risk of someone suing you, even though you haven't knowingly infringed anything.
What is needed is for the legislators to understand that it's not possible do do *anything* without infringing a patent and then maybe they will see that the whole system is terminally broken and needs to be fixed or completely scrapped.
I'm not going to pick that app's code apart in order to fix the bug that causes it to omit </option> tags in some circumstances
And that is exactly why we need XHTML - such lazyness just plain won't work if you were using XHTML.
If you don't produce complient code then you run a higher risk of your site breaking in a browser you didn't test in. This is getting more and more important with the hundreds of web-enabled devices (cellphones, PDAs, WebTV, etc). And yes, I accept that standards compliance doesn't guarantee it'll render correctly in every browser, but in my experience the rendering problems are significanly more minor on complient code.
There is no logical argument for non-compliance with open standards for CSS and DOM designs; nor for any content being delivered over the web, or application being developed for the web. None, zippo, zero, nada.
It's also worth pointing out that it is illegal in many parts of the world to have a non-complient commercial website since a non-complient website cannot meet the W3C accessibility standards. ISTR the olympic games committee already got sued for lots of cash in Australia for running an inaccessible site (and ignoring the court's previous request for them to fix it).
This is certainly the case in the UK - WAI-AA complient web sites are mandated by the disability discrimination act - there's a fairly good summary available at http://www.bigreddesign.co.uk/accessibility/
Write a trojan to wipe out what people apparently consider to be important so that they are more aware of virus scanners.
I'm not condoning malware here, but I have been saying for a long time that if the malware blew away people's data then they would give a lot more of a crap about securing their machines. Most malware these days attacks third parties (spambots, DDoS, etc) and really doesn't do a lot of damage to the infected machine so why should the owner care that they're infected?
You're complaining that Microsoft is giving discounts to non-profits and calling it an unfair.
Well, I'm not sure where to start here: 1. MS gives discounts to schools and universities. Of these groups, only the state schools are non-profit making, all the other schools and the universities make money. 2. MS gives discounts to students. Why are students given discounts but not home-users? Because giving students incentive to investigate cheaper alternatives ends up pushing those alternatives into businesses when the students graduate. 3. It _is_ unfair when it is financially better to stick with the monopoly company even when the alternative software is free just because they are a monopoly. This is the case with MS - they are a monopoly so almost all people know how to use the software, meaning that you have to retrain people if you want to choose an alternative. This is a self perpetuating cycle and is very difficult to break. 4. Worst of all, even though all of these actions are done by MS for the express purpose of benefitting themselves, it is made to look like they are doing it out of kindness.
And you're actually suggesting that somebody should step in and stop them from doing this?
I don't think I actually suggested that anywhere. What would be a possibility though would be for the government to mandate that all pupils spend equal time learning alternative systems (such as OSX and Linux) and that schools provide such facilities. Once alternative systems are in use in all the schools, the need for retraining people to use non-MS products quickly disappears and so the pressure to stick with MS-only solutions goes. In the long run that's almost certainly good for the schools since running Linux systems is relatively cheap once you've removed retraining from the equation.
And force them to charge our already underfunded schools full price?
Again, I never suggested this anywhere - you are really twisting what I said to fit your own agenda.
So that a product that is FREE can compete?
Hold on, you're complaining that schools shouldn't be charged normal licence fees because they are under-funded and then in the next sentence you complain that they shouldn't use software they don't have to pay to licence. The arguement makes no sense at all and I'm failing to see what your problem is with people using free alternatives to MS products.
Maybe the government should step in and force Linux distros to charge the same as Microsoft and Apple instead?
What would this gain anyone except Microsoft?
From what I can see, using Linux in schools produces several advantages: 1. It improves the breadth of the childrens' education 2. It improves the country's economy by directing the money to local people and businesses (e.g. training companies, sysadmins, etc) rather than paying large amounts of money to large US companies, which simply takes the cash out of the local country's economy. 3. The knowledge (both of the newly educated kids and the trained staff) reduces the amount it costs for anyone to use non-MS solutions (not just the schools, but businesses and home users too).
As long as people continue to carry the implicit assumption that the biggest barrier to Linux being desktop-ready is that not everyone has more than a passing understanding of computers, or that the tastes of the vast majority of computer users aren't as important as the tastes of geeks w/r/t choice and fragmentation, Linux will never be ready for the desktop.
I'm not trying to discount the criticisms here, but rather add one of my own: I do not believe that it's possible for *any* non-Windows OS to be "ready for the desktop" for the average Windows user unless it has a look and feel almost identical to Windows. This is simply because the average user (of any system) will refuse to learn large chunks of new stuff at once.
The same applies to users of other OSes - many Linux users don't find Windows to be anywhere near as "ready for the desktop" as Linux is - I know I certainly don't because I just don't have anywhere near as much experience using Windows as I do using Linux.
To some extent these problems can be reduced when migrating from Windows to Linux since you can use whatever desktop environment you want. So it should be possible to make Linux look and feel like Windows, and this is the way Gnome and Metacity are going (I don't necessarilly agree with the Gnome methodology - IMHO they should've started a completely new project or forked the project in order to create a Windows-alike system rather than dumbing down a perfectly good desktop environment to a point where it's unusable for the original users).
This is not an excuse to remove all the existing WMs that don't conform to the Windows model though - many traditional Unix WM features are very useful to those of us who have grown up with them and removing them would be a mistake - stuff like select+paste, window-shade, sloppy-focus, etc. And once people have migrated to Linux with a Windows-alike WM then maybe more of them will try a different one, since changing WM is a lot less disruptive than changing OS.
If someone steals your car and you don't notice and it's used for a bank robbery, guess where the police will turn up?
Yes, they'll turn up, ask some questions and then leave you alone - you're not gonna get thrown in jail, even if you left your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition (although the insurance company ain't gonna pay out).
In the same way if your machine is used for a phishing scam expect to have your account terminated with prejudice, until you prove that you weren't involved.
You clearly haven't tried reporting abuse to many ISPs - most of them couldn't care less about one of their users running a cracked machine.
Oh yes, it will. It would make people start securing their machines,
No matter how many people you smack with a clue-by-four there are always more who need smacking. Unless over 99% of people start securing their machines we'll still get phishing - your argument is akin to "if we lock up burglars then noone will get burgled"... read the newspaper to see how well that one worked out.:)
and seizing the machine might actually provide clues to the real phisher.
It seems fairly unlikely - the machine will have been compromised from another cracked machine and all the data being returned to the fraudster are probably being bounced across a load of compromised machines and through public communication channels such as IRC. Many of these machines will be spread across the world. Good luck trying to pick up enough of the compromised boxes and get cooperation from the other jurisdictions to get any useful data.
There are so many things wrong with these statement that you surely wrote them as sarcasm.
No, I'm dead serious. If you disagree with the statement then that's fine but you can at least explain *why* you disagree instead of just making a cheap "you're wrong" crack.
Agreed. But wouldn't the ISP of the innocent user have some kind of record of where the fraud messages are being sent?
I think you're making some bad assumptions that: 1. the malware will be communicating with it's owner through email messages 2. these email messages are going through the ISP's smarthost 3. The ISP gives a crap
In reality, the malware is probably talking to the fraudster via IRC or similar - you're going to find it very difficult working out who it's actually talking to. Even if it is using email messages, they almost certainly aren't being sent via the ISP's smarthost (and this is perfectly legitimate too - I certainly don't use my ISP for anything other than an IP connection). So since you've got no clue how it's communicating with the fraudster you're going to have to log and sift through *all* the IP traffic, and that's just not at all feasable.
Earthlink (or whatever the ISP was) was able to tell the DC Police the exact locations that Chandra Levy pulled up on Mapquest.
I don't know the details of that case but the user was probably accessing MapQuest via the ISP's proxy, and the ISP knew the address of both the user and MapQuest so filtering the proxy logs is pretty easy then.
Most likely the home user is plugged into a mainstream ISP... and almost all do some kind of logging.
Well, again you're assuming that the ISP is logging the right traffic and has enough information to filter it down to a managable number of log entries. More importantly, you're assuming that the ISP cares, and in my experience they usually don't.
But the value of TFA is that it shows us an average Joe who thinks it might be cool to make the switch, and it didn't go so well...
I would be interested in seeing how the "average Joe" Linux or OSX user deals with switching to Windows - my guess would be "not very well".
Before I started this job I hadn't used Windows for around 5 years - A year after I started this job (which requires me to use a Windows XP workstation) and I still can't get the hang of it. Things that I take for granted under Linux just can't be done under Windows - even simple stuff like having the window manager do sloppy focus (yes, I've used TweakUI to turn on X Mouse - many applications have problems with it though and it has a habit of randomly raising windows).
My experience tells me that just because people find it difficult to switch doesn't make the OS they are switching to inherently "less user friendly", it's simply hard to switch to a system you're not used to.
IMHO, kids at school should be using several different systems (e.g. Windows, OSX, Linux) as part of their daily work so that they learn the problem solving abilities needed to switch between different systems rather than just learning by rote. You wouldn't believe the number of people I've seen sit infront of a Linux machine running Gnome/MetaShitty and immediately be scared off and never use it again because there's no button that says "Start" on it - they don't use any problem solving abilities to work out that maybe the button on the left side of the task bar does the same job as the Windows Start button.
Of course, getting large numbers of kids to use non-Windows systems at school isn't going to happen while MS is allowed to continue pretending to be the "good citizen" and give cheap/free handouts to schools and students - how can a school justify replacing a chunk of their Windows network with Linux systems (and paying to retrain some of the staff) if MS is providing everything to them at knock-down prices anyway?
(For the record, no I don't personally use a Windows-alike WM - I use E17).
As someone said, think of how stupid the average person is, and remember half the people are even stupid than that.
Wow, you must really be stupid... maybe you need to read up on how "averages" (usually the mean) work. If I told you that people on average had 1.999 legs would you assume that 50% of people had less than that number?
How do these people avoid getting busted? They have IP addresses that point directly to the fake server. Finding out who owns the servers and where it is should be fairly elementary.
Because the person who owns the server is almost always some home user who plugged their Windows box directly into the internet. In the same way as compromised boxes are used to send spam, perform DDoS attacks, etc they are also used to run web servers for phishers.
How do these people NOT get busted, and busted hard?
As much as I like the idea of throwing people in jail who have too little clue to secure their machines, I'm afraid I don't think it'll do a lot to stop the phishers.
Well, maybe; for some definition of "reliable". But in my experience, every phone line I've ever had (over some 4 decades) has been plagued by periods lasting from minutes to hourse when the line wasn't usable due to noise, distortion, lengthy dropouts, whatever.
It's true that the local loop may not be great, but the core network is very reliable (at least it is here in the UK).
And since they do have a culture of reliability, it would probably radically improve internet service.
But would that culture still be applied to the Internet side, which for the most part uses totally different equipment (it's only the cables that are being shared, once you get to the substation the data side will be run off onto a traditional network and I'm not really sure I trust the power companies to be qualified to fix a data network).
The shit hits the fan a lot more forcefully when people can't cook dinner or heat their homes than when people can't get to their porn...
sorry, but you have ZERO idea what you are talking about!! (but this is slashdot i guess...)
rc planes run on 72mhz, the cheap ones run on 27mhz. (right next to CB radio) Ground RC runs on 75mhz, and also shares the 27mhz chunk. Ham band allows RC use on 50 and 53 mhz. guess what, NONE are close to your 35mhz.
reliability is a serious culture within the power community
Five-nines reliability is a big deal in the telco world too, but in my experience most telcos are incapable of running a good and reliable internet service (both BT and NTL are pretty useless).
I'm curious how you would handle multiple users on one line. You're not just running half a dozen or so connections into a hub and multiplexing the signals. The power grid is huge!
Any signal you put on the line is pretty much not gonna make it past the first transformer it hits, so it'll be limited to the phase you're connected to - probably not actually an especially big area.
The BPL schemes that the power companies are pushing (which are doomed to failure because the power lines have a nasty habit of radiating the RF signals) involve injecting the RF signal into each phase separately - i.e. the power lines are used as the equivalent of the telco's local loop. They don't bother backhauling the data over the long distance HT lines - once you get to the substation the data connection will be transferred to fiber and be treated in the conventional way.
The technology is almost cheap too at $200 for a pair of adapters.
Have you included the cost of repairing the system after the local HAM radio operators put an axe through the power lines? (BPL wipes out huge chunks of the RF spectrum)
If the owner of the web server posts material an a web site that is intended for public viewing, they are giving implicit permission.
And you can tell that the publisher intended it for public viewing how...?
If you're looking at a web site and there is material that looks like it's coming from an intranet server, you're probably looking at a web site that some idiot didn't password protect.
Many corporate intranets look no different from public websites. Certainly there's no way I would be able to tell that the intranet here wasn't a public web site if I didn't get asked for authentication.
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But the dvd players under linux all (afaik, unless there's some dodgy proprietary thing out there?) use DeCSS, so you don't need to worry about region codes. I haven't even *set* the region code on my DVD rom drive - I don't need to!!!
The software you're running makes no difference (if it did you wouldn't have to reflash the drive - you'd just use different software nomatter what OS you're on).
Have you not read the (many) other posts attached to this article: newer RPC2 drives disallow raw access to the data if your region code doesn't match, rendering any software such as libdvdcss useless.
Also, libdvdcss isn't 100% reliable - I had to set the region code on my drive in order to play some of my region 2 discs because libdvdcss couldn't crack the key.
And besides, cracking CSS keys can be slow - why bother if I can just reflash the drive to allow RPC1 mode?
The problem is that it's a lot of effort for me to flash the drive because I would have to do one of:
1. Install Windows on my machine - not going to happen. This would be a *lot* of effort and I'm not buying Windows just so I can install some firmware.
2. Boot from a FreeDOS floppy - this would involve finding a floppy drive and installing it in the machine.
3. Put the DVD drive in a Windows machine - this would involve actually *having* a Windows machine.
4. Boot from a FreeDOS CD - this is probably about the only feasable option.
Go there and download the RPC-1 firmware for your drive model. Then, fair use or not, you can watch whatever the hell you want on your compy.
Which is great until you realise you need dos/windows to install the firmware - anyone happen to know how I can flash a drive from Linux?
A DDOS however keeps the link alive just saturated so now the machine that is connected has to deal with a huge load.
The machine can't simply decide to cut the line if it goes over a certain limit so it just has to deal with it.
Well, more importantly than that, a DDoS attack is directed at a specific host, not a specific connection. Take down the connection and the DDoS traffic just gets rerouted via a different connection... oh, and you probably just made the effects of the attack worse since you dropped your primary high-bandwidth link so now the same amount of DDoS traffic is going over the smaller links.
Taking down a link that DDoS traffic is flowing over is very similar to preventing traffic jams by closing the motorway - you just end up shifting that traffic onto the smaller side roads, which were probably already at capacity anyway.
A DDoS attack is pretty much impossible to filter since it's coming from *everywhere* - even if you filter it on your link then it's probably still having a serious effect on the links upstream of the filter. The more upstream you move the filters, the more filters you need and the more ISPs you need to cooperate and implement those filters.
Unfortunately though, we rely too much on DNS which is a fairly fragile infrastructure to say the least.
.com, .co.uk, .org, etc.) - if the organisations responsible for running these put plenty of servers at a reasonable number of geographic locations then they are pretty safe.
DNS is only fragile if the people running the authoratative servers are lacking in the clue department.
There are a lot of root nameservers and many of them are anycast addresses (so there are actually a lot more than there appear to be at first glance) - so the root nameservers are pretty robust, you'd struggle to take all of them out.
So then we come down to the TLD nameservers (e.g. the ones authoratative for
The bigger problem is the people running the nameservers for the individual domains - too many people only have the mandatory minimum number of nameservers (2), and in many cases both of these servers are connected to the same piece of ethernet cable so it's not a great stretch of the imagination to imagine them both becoming unreachable. This problem is solvable - simply put in more, geographically spaced name servers. DNS was designed to allow this. Of course it costs a bit more money, but resilliance always does.
Am I the only person sick to death of all the lawsuits and patents?
Yes, and I think most of the major companies are also sick of it. Unfortunately it's turning into an arms race and just sitting around being a pacifist just means you get flattened by someone with a bigger pile of patents than you.
It's impossible to write any software without infringing someone's patent and I've heard it used as a reason _not_ to open-source stuff. "We have no business reason to open-source this, but we'd like to for the benefit of the community. However, if we do someone will probably search it for something that looks similar to their patent and sue us." It's hard to argue against that kind of problem because it's true - let someone see your source in the current climate and you _do_ increase the risk of someone suing you, even though you haven't knowingly infringed anything.
What is needed is for the legislators to understand that it's not possible do do *anything* without infringing a patent and then maybe they will see that the whole system is terminally broken and needs to be fixed or completely scrapped.
I'm not going to pick that app's code apart in order to fix the bug that causes it to omit </option> tags in some circumstances
And that is exactly why we need XHTML - such lazyness just plain won't work if you were using XHTML.
If you don't produce complient code then you run a higher risk of your site breaking in a browser you didn't test in. This is getting more and more important with the hundreds of web-enabled devices (cellphones, PDAs, WebTV, etc). And yes, I accept that standards compliance doesn't guarantee it'll render correctly in every browser, but in my experience the rendering problems are significanly more minor on complient code.
There is no logical argument for non-compliance with open standards for CSS and DOM designs; nor for any content being delivered over the web, or application being developed for the web. None, zippo, zero, nada.
It's also worth pointing out that it is illegal in many parts of the world to have a non-complient commercial website since a non-complient website cannot meet the W3C accessibility standards. ISTR the olympic games committee already got sued for lots of cash in Australia for running an inaccessible site (and ignoring the court's previous request for them to fix it).
This is certainly the case in the UK - WAI-AA complient web sites are mandated by the disability discrimination act - there's a fairly good summary available at http://www.bigreddesign.co.uk/accessibility/
Write a trojan to wipe out what people apparently consider to be important so that they are more aware of virus scanners.
I'm not condoning malware here, but I have been saying for a long time that if the malware blew away people's data then they would give a lot more of a crap about securing their machines. Most malware these days attacks third parties (spambots, DDoS, etc) and really doesn't do a lot of damage to the infected machine so why should the owner care that they're infected?
You're complaining that Microsoft is giving discounts to non-profits and calling it an unfair.
Well, I'm not sure where to start here:
1. MS gives discounts to schools and universities. Of these groups, only the state schools are non-profit making, all the other schools and the universities make money.
2. MS gives discounts to students. Why are students given discounts but not home-users? Because giving students incentive to investigate cheaper alternatives ends up pushing those alternatives into businesses when the students graduate.
3. It _is_ unfair when it is financially better to stick with the monopoly company even when the alternative software is free just because they are a monopoly. This is the case with MS - they are a monopoly so almost all people know how to use the software, meaning that you have to retrain people if you want to choose an alternative. This is a self perpetuating cycle and is very difficult to break.
4. Worst of all, even though all of these actions are done by MS for the express purpose of benefitting themselves, it is made to look like they are doing it out of kindness.
And you're actually suggesting that somebody should step in and stop them from doing this?
I don't think I actually suggested that anywhere. What would be a possibility though would be for the government to mandate that all pupils spend equal time learning alternative systems (such as OSX and Linux) and that schools provide such facilities. Once alternative systems are in use in all the schools, the need for retraining people to use non-MS products quickly disappears and so the pressure to stick with MS-only solutions goes. In the long run that's almost certainly good for the schools since running Linux systems is relatively cheap once you've removed retraining from the equation.
And force them to charge our already underfunded schools full price?
Again, I never suggested this anywhere - you are really twisting what I said to fit your own agenda.
So that a product that is FREE can compete?
Hold on, you're complaining that schools shouldn't be charged normal licence fees because they are under-funded and then in the next sentence you complain that they shouldn't use software they don't have to pay to licence. The arguement makes no sense at all and I'm failing to see what your problem is with people using free alternatives to MS products.
Maybe the government should step in and force Linux distros to charge the same as Microsoft and Apple instead?
What would this gain anyone except Microsoft?
From what I can see, using Linux in schools produces several advantages:
1. It improves the breadth of the childrens' education
2. It improves the country's economy by directing the money to local people and businesses (e.g. training companies, sysadmins, etc) rather than paying large amounts of money to large US companies, which simply takes the cash out of the local country's economy.
3. The knowledge (both of the newly educated kids and the trained staff) reduces the amount it costs for anyone to use non-MS solutions (not just the schools, but businesses and home users too).
As long as people continue to carry the implicit assumption that the biggest barrier to Linux being desktop-ready is that not everyone has more than a passing understanding of computers, or that the tastes of the vast majority of computer users aren't as important as the tastes of geeks w/r/t choice and fragmentation, Linux will never be ready for the desktop.
I'm not trying to discount the criticisms here, but rather add one of my own: I do not believe that it's possible for *any* non-Windows OS to be "ready for the desktop" for the average Windows user unless it has a look and feel almost identical to Windows. This is simply because the average user (of any system) will refuse to learn large chunks of new stuff at once.
The same applies to users of other OSes - many Linux users don't find Windows to be anywhere near as "ready for the desktop" as Linux is - I know I certainly don't because I just don't have anywhere near as much experience using Windows as I do using Linux.
To some extent these problems can be reduced when migrating from Windows to Linux since you can use whatever desktop environment you want. So it should be possible to make Linux look and feel like Windows, and this is the way Gnome and Metacity are going (I don't necessarilly agree with the Gnome methodology - IMHO they should've started a completely new project or forked the project in order to create a Windows-alike system rather than dumbing down a perfectly good desktop environment to a point where it's unusable for the original users).
This is not an excuse to remove all the existing WMs that don't conform to the Windows model though - many traditional Unix WM features are very useful to those of us who have grown up with them and removing them would be a mistake - stuff like select+paste, window-shade, sloppy-focus, etc. And once people have migrated to Linux with a Windows-alike WM then maybe more of them will try a different one, since changing WM is a lot less disruptive than changing OS.
If someone steals your car and you don't notice and it's used for a bank robbery, guess where the police will turn up?
Yes, they'll turn up, ask some questions and then leave you alone - you're not gonna get thrown in jail, even if you left your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition (although the insurance company ain't gonna pay out).
In the same way if your machine is used for a phishing scam expect to have your account terminated with prejudice, until you prove that you weren't involved.
You clearly haven't tried reporting abuse to many ISPs - most of them couldn't care less about one of their users running a cracked machine.
Oh yes, it will. It would make people start securing their machines,
:)
No matter how many people you smack with a clue-by-four there are always more who need smacking. Unless over 99% of people start securing their machines we'll still get phishing - your argument is akin to "if we lock up burglars then noone will get burgled"... read the newspaper to see how well that one worked out.
and seizing the machine might actually provide clues to the real phisher.
It seems fairly unlikely - the machine will have been compromised from another cracked machine and all the data being returned to the fraudster are probably being bounced across a load of compromised machines and through public communication channels such as IRC. Many of these machines will be spread across the world. Good luck trying to pick up enough of the compromised boxes and get cooperation from the other jurisdictions to get any useful data.
There are so many things wrong with these statement that you surely wrote them as sarcasm.
No, I'm dead serious. If you disagree with the statement then that's fine but you can at least explain *why* you disagree instead of just making a cheap "you're wrong" crack.
Agreed. But wouldn't the ISP of the innocent user have some kind of record of where the fraud messages are being sent?
... and almost all do some kind of logging.
I think you're making some bad assumptions that:
1. the malware will be communicating with it's owner through email messages
2. these email messages are going through the ISP's smarthost
3. The ISP gives a crap
In reality, the malware is probably talking to the fraudster via IRC or similar - you're going to find it very difficult working out who it's actually talking to. Even if it is using email messages, they almost certainly aren't being sent via the ISP's smarthost (and this is perfectly legitimate too - I certainly don't use my ISP for anything other than an IP connection). So since you've got no clue how it's communicating with the fraudster you're going to have to log and sift through *all* the IP traffic, and that's just not at all feasable.
Earthlink (or whatever the ISP was) was able to tell the DC Police the exact locations that Chandra Levy pulled up on Mapquest.
I don't know the details of that case but the user was probably accessing MapQuest via the ISP's proxy, and the ISP knew the address of both the user and MapQuest so filtering the proxy logs is pretty easy then.
Most likely the home user is plugged into a mainstream ISP
Well, again you're assuming that the ISP is logging the right traffic and has enough information to filter it down to a managable number of log entries. More importantly, you're assuming that the ISP cares, and in my experience they usually don't.
But the value of TFA is that it shows us an average Joe who thinks it might be cool to make the switch, and it didn't go so well...
I would be interested in seeing how the "average Joe" Linux or OSX user deals with switching to Windows - my guess would be "not very well".
Before I started this job I hadn't used Windows for around 5 years - A year after I started this job (which requires me to use a Windows XP workstation) and I still can't get the hang of it. Things that I take for granted under Linux just can't be done under Windows - even simple stuff like having the window manager do sloppy focus (yes, I've used TweakUI to turn on X Mouse - many applications have problems with it though and it has a habit of randomly raising windows).
My experience tells me that just because people find it difficult to switch doesn't make the OS they are switching to inherently "less user friendly", it's simply hard to switch to a system you're not used to.
IMHO, kids at school should be using several different systems (e.g. Windows, OSX, Linux) as part of their daily work so that they learn the problem solving abilities needed to switch between different systems rather than just learning by rote. You wouldn't believe the number of people I've seen sit infront of a Linux machine running Gnome/MetaShitty and immediately be scared off and never use it again because there's no button that says "Start" on it - they don't use any problem solving abilities to work out that maybe the button on the left side of the task bar does the same job as the Windows Start button.
Of course, getting large numbers of kids to use non-Windows systems at school isn't going to happen while MS is allowed to continue pretending to be the "good citizen" and give cheap/free handouts to schools and students - how can a school justify replacing a chunk of their Windows network with Linux systems (and paying to retrain some of the staff) if MS is providing everything to them at knock-down prices anyway?
(For the record, no I don't personally use a Windows-alike WM - I use E17).
As someone said, think of how stupid the average person is, and remember half the people are even stupid than that.
Wow, you must really be stupid... maybe you need to read up on how "averages" (usually the mean) work. If I told you that people on average had 1.999 legs would you assume that 50% of people had less than that number?
How do these people avoid getting busted? They have IP addresses that point directly to the fake server. Finding out who owns the servers and where it is should be fairly elementary.
Because the person who owns the server is almost always some home user who plugged their Windows box directly into the internet. In the same way as compromised boxes are used to send spam, perform DDoS attacks, etc they are also used to run web servers for phishers.
How do these people NOT get busted, and busted hard?
As much as I like the idea of throwing people in jail who have too little clue to secure their machines, I'm afraid I don't think it'll do a lot to stop the phishers.
So fat people are less likely to get cancer? Cool! Pass the donuts!
Fat people have more volume so absorb more EM energy.
Well, maybe; for some definition of "reliable". But in my experience, every phone line I've ever had (over some 4 decades) has been plagued by periods lasting from minutes to hourse when the line wasn't usable due to noise, distortion, lengthy dropouts, whatever.
It's true that the local loop may not be great, but the core network is very reliable (at least it is here in the UK).
And since they do have a culture of reliability, it would probably radically improve internet service.
But would that culture still be applied to the Internet side, which for the most part uses totally different equipment (it's only the cables that are being shared, once you get to the substation the data side will be run off onto a traditional network and I'm not really sure I trust the power companies to be qualified to fix a data network).
The shit hits the fan a lot more forcefully when people can't cook dinner or heat their homes than when people can't get to their porn...
sorry, but you have ZERO idea what you are talking about!! (but this is slashdot i guess...)
rc planes run on 72mhz, the cheap ones run on 27mhz. (right next to CB radio) Ground RC runs on 75mhz, and also shares the 27mhz chunk. Ham band allows RC use on 50 and 53 mhz. guess what, NONE are close to your 35mhz.
From the Wikipedia article _you_ linked:
* 35 MHz: aircraft only.
* 40 MHz: surface vehicles.
Who was it who had zero idea what they were talking about again?
reliability is a serious culture within the power community
Five-nines reliability is a big deal in the telco world too, but in my experience most telcos are incapable of running a good and reliable internet service (both BT and NTL are pretty useless).
I'm curious how you would handle multiple users on one line. You're not just running half a dozen or so connections into a hub and multiplexing the signals. The power grid is huge!
Any signal you put on the line is pretty much not gonna make it past the first transformer it hits, so it'll be limited to the phase you're connected to - probably not actually an especially big area.
The BPL schemes that the power companies are pushing (which are doomed to failure because the power lines have a nasty habit of radiating the RF signals) involve injecting the RF signal into each phase separately - i.e. the power lines are used as the equivalent of the telco's local loop. They don't bother backhauling the data over the long distance HT lines - once you get to the substation the data connection will be transferred to fiber and be treated in the conventional way.
Motorola uses its Canopy wireless system, and Current uses low-band VHF (30-50MHz) coupled with HomePlug modems.
Are they paying for all the crashed radio controlled planes that run on 35MHz then?
The technology is almost cheap too at $200 for a pair of adapters.
Have you included the cost of repairing the system after the local HAM radio operators put an axe through the power lines? (BPL wipes out huge chunks of the RF spectrum)
If the owner of the web server posts material an a web site that is intended for public viewing, they are giving implicit permission.
And you can tell that the publisher intended it for public viewing how...?
If you're looking at a web site and there is material that looks like it's coming from an intranet server, you're probably looking at a web site that some idiot didn't password protect.
Many corporate intranets look no different from public websites. Certainly there's no way I would be able to tell that the intranet here wasn't a public web site if I didn't get asked for authentication.