I have my webcam pointed at my computers to see if government spooks or my roommate ever tries to bork my systems from the console. It serves pics via http on a custom port which is forwarded from the cable modem to the router through the firewall and to the computer which actually has the webcam.
I thought about a shell script to grab an image from the camera at a specified rate and then drop those images into a directory which can be parsed by a standard httpd. Whatever...
I'm not that worried about government spooks and the consoles are password locked with vt switching disabled.
----- I can monitor what data a program on my computer accesses. It's not real easy to sift through all that information, but it's available if I want to use it. My firewall blocks outgoing transmissions unless I authorize them ----- Just how difficult is it for a questionable application to get IE to conduct it's transactions in the background? We all know that processes can be running without having a friendly little icon in the taskbar. Would you ever notice an extra instance of explorer.exe that was called by some underhanded program?
No. You wouldn't. And your firewall wouldn't notice it either.
----- Then you should be able to sue ----- And you can!
For a $5000 retainer fee I will be happy to file the initial paperwork. I am part of an organization which is certified in all 50 states.
E-mail me with your contact info and we'll work out the billing arrangements. Once I have the $5000 retainer fee I'll file the paperwork with the appropriate courthouse and I'll keep you posted on responses from the judge and the defendant's attorneys.
----- Wal-Mart could be able to see that you bought clothes at the Gap ----- It's more likely a social thing. Wal-Mart employees will find out that you bought clothes at the Gap and your car tires will be more likely to be slashed in the parking lot. By this point in time parking lots will have EULAs and Wal-Mart's auto service dept. will see a 4000% increase in business and profit.
----- Bzzzt! ----- You know where you can shove that buzzer?
I've worked in many retail outlets and none of them pass their cash through a serial number scanner. There's also the mix and match of making change at the cash register.
Cash is trackable. As money becomes larger in denomination is becomes easier to associate it with individuals since the bill will make it from wallet to register to bank deposit in a much shorter period of time. In terms of 1s, 5s, 10s, and even 20s, there's too much chance of exchange for their to be any reliable tracking.
----- This leads to their ultimate goal, that is, to eliminate staff to increase profit margins ----- Indeed! If every industry could be fully automated then all staff could be eliminated and profit would be maximized.
And there would be no customers because no one would have jobs.
Reading across the responses to this article has seen the usual number of pros and cons to uses of RFID tags just like the pros and cons to uses of p2p filesharing. There are legitimate uses. There are illegitimate uses. While it's illogical to me the general public seems to place more trust in vaporous corporations than they do in their fellow citizen.
Okay. Whatever helps them sleep at night.
Let's view it from this side: How far can a corporation push their ability to monitor RFID tags before they incur a real lawsuit? Let's say Wal-Mart _does_ start profiling people while they're in the store. Let's say that McDonald's does start installing sensors which are compatible with Wal-Mart's tags. Let's say that stores in the local mall _do_ start panning and scanning for competitors' items. Let's say that databases are compiled and cross-referenced, at the corporate level where these deals can be made, with databases of credit card numbers, internet usage. Let's say the local police department or FBI outpost does decide to invest a few million of taxpayer money to pan and scan these cross-referenced databases, profile and watch people who fit into empirically established profiles.
Does the end consumer have any rights at all in this system?
----- A company is nothing more than an organization of...people ----- If that's legally true then why is it so hard for Americans to get their money back on all the companies that went bankrupt from '99 through '00?
Or are you just trolling?
----- Sheesh, you talk like a company is some sort of non-coporeal life form making decisions and then ordering its human slaves to comply ----- They sure act that way when it comes time to pay up.
----- First off, because 99% of P2P usage is for piracy ----- Aside from numbers which come from groups which have a vested interest in one side or the other, do you have any real statistics to show this?
99% of government is used to benefit the wealthy.
----- If you run down pedestrians, there is clear enforcement, and you will be arrested, prosecuted, and sent to jail ----- Only if you're caught and only if you can't afford the legal team that OJ had.
----- It's much, much more difficult to enforce piracy ----- No it's not. There are laws. It's illegal. Enforcement is just as easy as enforcing the laws which protect us from malicious apps running without our consent on our computers.
I will root for increased legislation against underground pirates when I see similar repeal of legislation which protects corporate pirates.
One day, in the future, American citizens will each have a counter-receipt, or counter-EULA, which says,"By selling me this product you are giving me all rights to do whatever I please with it."
----- The entire drive of the piracy apologist mindset is to justify an illegal and immoral act ----- That makes the EULA a "Song of the Software Apologist", right?
Or the employee agreement is a "Song of the Corporate Apologist"?
Or the driver's license is the "Token of the IRS Apologist"?
Or roads, running water, and electricity are the "Statues of the corrupt government apologist"?
That's a grey question for me. I don't know the systems that Mozilla receives funding from so I can't speculate on motives.
For similar holes in Windows, IE, and WMP I'd have to argue that, if the vulns weren't intentional, the decision to deprioritize fixing them is. In the case of MS it simply is financially profitable to have obscure holes available so that every major MS shareholder with a controlling interest in an online marketing firm can continue to reap enormous profits from both sides.
----- I find it very difficult to imagine someone sitting down and trying to figure out how they can convey the message that "big corporations are evil" or whatever else ----- It's not just in games. You've seen the Gates of Hell, haven't you?
The site says that it doesn't work on Excel97 but I'm pretty sure that it does.
The Carmen SanDiego and Hacker games were also politically oriented in that they introduced the user to the concept of identifying good and bad informants irrespective of the group the informant associated with.
Half-Life had the government spook guy that you could never shoot. At the end of the game he gives you a choice,"Join us or face the consequences." If you refuse to sign your soul away to the government then you're dropped on a level filled with an infinite number of the most unkillable demon of the game. That was the deepest and most concise explanation of life in the US: submit or be destroyed. There is no such thing as freedom.
----- Then get a decent firewall and set up the permissions on the network properly ----- Easy enough to say but it's also easy enough for some rogue application to tell IE to legitimately conduct whatever transaction is desired. Heck, on that note, it's easy enough for a rogue application to tell the firewall that it _is_ IE.
What good is the firewall now? IE has all the permission it needs to open a hole the size of a 747 in even a stringent firewall.
Linux doesn't get spyware because it doesn't have a gestapo registry which can be used to hijack applications and system calls. It also doesn't have spyware because, until recently, the web browsers on Linux didn't try to incorporate access to every available system resource. It also doesn't have spyware because Linux doesn't have an Office suite which encourages you to enter all of your personal information and then serve that information to the integrated operating system at will.
The evolution of Gnome, KDE, Oo, and Mozilla will change all of this. Just wait.
----- Mozilla's feedback agent (and, perhaps, some other modules), while certainly NOT spyware ----- I disagree.
The feedback agent can be hijacked by malicious java and Flash working together. It can be used to execute arbitrary code but, more easily, can be used to establish seemingly normal http connections and use your browser as a proxy for people who know that your browser has been compromised. The exploit is small enough to be easily hidden in banner ads.
We have not formally released this security vulnerability because we have been asked by the international governments to wait at least three months to allow Mozilla to fix the hole.
The question that I'm more puzzled by is: What the %#&% is MS doing letting these malicious banner ads onto their Hotmail cycle?
While the majority of the American public lacks the critical thinking ability to be able to consider the far reaching implications of their actions there are a few people, hopefully in positions with real capability of impact, who can see the problem for what it is. The average American doesn't realize the full power vested in a web browser that integrates tightly with the operating system. Most Americans don't realize what kind of trouble they're getting themselves into when they demand that their web browser be able to directly access their sound card, or their video card, or integrate seamlessly with apps on their system so that everything seems to be running inside the browser window as if the browser _were_ the operating system. These citizens clamor for functionality and then clamor for security. It is possible to have both but the price is in learning or in cost and both of these are unacceptable to the popular citizenry.
People in general, and Americans in particular, are obsessed with the mantra of "do something". Perhpas it has been beaten into our culture from the WW-I and WW-II era old hardtimers who felt the indignance of being marched off to war and then watch their subsequent generations enjoy profit without the pain of shell-shock or watching best friends get riddled with bullets. Whatever the reason the American society seems to be unable to enter into a state of natural flux--ebb and flow. Instead American society is stuck in a full steam ahead approach to everything. Refinement means nothing and progress means everything. The definition of progress is addition and more addition. The component of progress that involves improvement has been swamped by the "do something" drive to add more.
Adware and spyware have come about because the operating system and web browser which appeals to the popular citizenry has given them what they want. It has given them more and more and more as they asked. When the problems arose that, in a normal system, would have encouraged refinement and improvement, the users demanded more and more and more. This resulted in EULAs. EULAs made it possible for the software industry to concentrate on giving the users what they want: more. EULAs made it possible for software manufaturers to be free and clear of the necessary refinements and improvements which could have made adware and spyware obsolete before it ever started.
The approach to this problem is not to pass more laws. That approach does nothing but feed the "do something" attitude which has brought us to the quagmire of today. The approach to this problem is to refine and improve what we have. We need not to add more laws but rather to remove the artificial laws which give umbrella protection to less than optimal designs.
Re:Practical or somebody's thesis?
on
Robocones
·
· Score: 1
What the CDC doesn't mention is that, if you're working on a road crew, trying to pay the rent, manage four kids, and work outdoors every day, there's a significantly higher probability that these people wanted to step in front of a truck.
No one jumps in front of a car because it's too unreliable (15%). Wait for a nice juicy Peterbilt (45%).
Slashdot Mirror
I have my webcam pointed at my computers to see if government spooks or my roommate ever tries to bork my systems from the console. It serves pics via http on a custom port which is forwarded from the cable modem to the router through the firewall and to the computer which actually has the webcam.
I thought about a shell script to grab an image from the camera at a specified rate and then drop those images into a directory which can be parsed by a standard httpd. Whatever...
I'm not that worried about government spooks and the consoles are password locked with vt switching disabled.
-----
I can monitor what data a program on my computer accesses. It's not real easy to sift through all that information, but it's available if I want to use it. My firewall blocks outgoing transmissions unless I authorize them
-----
Just how difficult is it for a questionable application to get IE to conduct it's transactions in the background? We all know that processes can be running without having a friendly little icon in the taskbar. Would you ever notice an extra instance of explorer.exe that was called by some underhanded program?
No. You wouldn't. And your firewall wouldn't notice it either.
-----
Then you should be able to sue
-----
And you can!
For a $5000 retainer fee I will be happy to file the initial paperwork. I am part of an organization which is certified in all 50 states.
E-mail me with your contact info and we'll work out the billing arrangements. Once I have the $5000 retainer fee I'll file the paperwork with the appropriate courthouse and I'll keep you posted on responses from the judge and the defendant's attorneys.
-----
Wal-Mart could be able to see that you bought clothes at the Gap
-----
It's more likely a social thing. Wal-Mart employees will find out that you bought clothes at the Gap and your car tires will be more likely to be slashed in the parking lot. By this point in time parking lots will have EULAs and Wal-Mart's auto service dept. will see a 4000% increase in business and profit.
-----
Bzzzt!
-----
You know where you can shove that buzzer?
I've worked in many retail outlets and none of them pass their cash through a serial number scanner. There's also the mix and match of making change at the cash register.
Cash is trackable. As money becomes larger in denomination is becomes easier to associate it with individuals since the bill will make it from wallet to register to bank deposit in a much shorter period of time. In terms of 1s, 5s, 10s, and even 20s, there's too much chance of exchange for their to be any reliable tracking.
-----
This leads to their ultimate goal, that is, to eliminate staff to increase profit margins
-----
Indeed! If every industry could be fully automated then all staff could be eliminated and profit would be maximized.
And there would be no customers because no one would have jobs.
Reading across the responses to this article has seen the usual number of pros and cons to uses of RFID tags just like the pros and cons to uses of p2p filesharing. There are legitimate uses. There are illegitimate uses. While it's illogical to me the general public seems to place more trust in vaporous corporations than they do in their fellow citizen.
Okay. Whatever helps them sleep at night.
Let's view it from this side: How far can a corporation push their ability to monitor RFID tags before they incur a real lawsuit? Let's say Wal-Mart _does_ start profiling people while they're in the store. Let's say that McDonald's does start installing sensors which are compatible with Wal-Mart's tags. Let's say that stores in the local mall _do_ start panning and scanning for competitors' items. Let's say that databases are compiled and cross-referenced, at the corporate level where these deals can be made, with databases of credit card numbers, internet usage. Let's say the local police department or FBI outpost does decide to invest a few million of taxpayer money to pan and scan these cross-referenced databases, profile and watch people who fit into empirically established profiles.
Does the end consumer have any rights at all in this system?
Not a single one.
-----
A company is nothing more than an organization of...people
-----
If that's legally true then why is it so hard for Americans to get their money back on all the companies that went bankrupt from '99 through '00?
Or are you just trolling?
-----
Sheesh, you talk like a company is some sort of non-coporeal life form making decisions and then ordering its human slaves to comply
-----
They sure act that way when it comes time to pay up.
-----
First off, because 99% of P2P usage is for piracy
-----
Aside from numbers which come from groups which have a vested interest in one side or the other, do you have any real statistics to show this?
99% of government is used to benefit the wealthy.
-----
If you run down pedestrians, there is clear enforcement, and you will be arrested, prosecuted, and sent to jail
-----
Only if you're caught and only if you can't afford the legal team that OJ had.
-----
It's much, much more difficult to enforce piracy
-----
No it's not. There are laws. It's illegal. Enforcement is just as easy as enforcing the laws which protect us from malicious apps running without our consent on our computers.
I will root for increased legislation against underground pirates when I see similar repeal of legislation which protects corporate pirates.
One day, in the future, American citizens will each have a counter-receipt, or counter-EULA, which says,"By selling me this product you are giving me all rights to do whatever I please with it."
-----
The entire drive of the piracy apologist mindset is to justify an illegal and immoral act
-----
That makes the EULA a "Song of the Software Apologist", right?
Or the employee agreement is a "Song of the Corporate Apologist"?
Or the driver's license is the "Token of the IRS Apologist"?
Or roads, running water, and electricity are the "Statues of the corrupt government apologist"?
That's a grey question for me. I don't know the systems that Mozilla receives funding from so I can't speculate on motives.
For similar holes in Windows, IE, and WMP I'd have to argue that, if the vulns weren't intentional, the decision to deprioritize fixing them is. In the case of MS it simply is financially profitable to have obscure holes available so that every major MS shareholder with a controlling interest in an online marketing firm can continue to reap enormous profits from both sides.
I hear that it's possible to generate a unique identifier key from any web browser. Cookie not required. MAC address of the network card not required.
That'd be handy code to have, eh?
-----
I find it very difficult to imagine someone sitting down and trying to figure out how they can convey the message that "big corporations are evil" or whatever else
-----
It's not just in games. You've seen the Gates of Hell, haven't you?
The site says that it doesn't work on Excel97 but I'm pretty sure that it does.
Agreed. Civ was neat that way.
The Carmen SanDiego and Hacker games were also politically oriented in that they introduced the user to the concept of identifying good and bad informants irrespective of the group the informant associated with.
Half-Life had the government spook guy that you could never shoot. At the end of the game he gives you a choice,"Join us or face the consequences." If you refuse to sign your soul away to the government then you're dropped on a level filled with an infinite number of the most unkillable demon of the game. That was the deepest and most concise explanation of life in the US: submit or be destroyed. There is no such thing as freedom.
So was it you, your 10-yr old brother, or the 16-yr old sister that was browsing pr0n?
/. uses to create the md5'd unique browser identifier key? It's more useful than a cookie. :)
Does anyone have the code which
Only if it knows how to recognize them.
I'm still convinced that even 0-day AV/AA defs are at _least_ 90 days behind the 0-day virus/malware writers.
-----
Then get a decent firewall and set up the permissions on the network properly
-----
Easy enough to say but it's also easy enough for some rogue application to tell IE to legitimately conduct whatever transaction is desired. Heck, on that note, it's easy enough for a rogue application to tell the firewall that it _is_ IE.
What good is the firewall now? IE has all the permission it needs to open a hole the size of a 747 in even a stringent firewall.
Linux doesn't get spyware because it doesn't have a gestapo registry which can be used to hijack applications and system calls. It also doesn't have spyware because, until recently, the web browsers on Linux didn't try to incorporate access to every available system resource. It also doesn't have spyware because Linux doesn't have an Office suite which encourages you to enter all of your personal information and then serve that information to the integrated operating system at will.
The evolution of Gnome, KDE, Oo, and Mozilla will change all of this. Just wait.
-----
Mozilla's feedback agent (and, perhaps, some other modules), while certainly NOT spyware
-----
I disagree.
The feedback agent can be hijacked by malicious java and Flash working together. It can be used to execute arbitrary code but, more easily, can be used to establish seemingly normal http connections and use your browser as a proxy for people who know that your browser has been compromised. The exploit is small enough to be easily hidden in banner ads.
We have not formally released this security vulnerability because we have been asked by the international governments to wait at least three months to allow Mozilla to fix the hole.
The question that I'm more puzzled by is: What the %#&% is MS doing letting these malicious banner ads onto their Hotmail cycle?
While the majority of the American public lacks the critical thinking ability to be able to consider the far reaching implications of their actions there are a few people, hopefully in positions with real capability of impact, who can see the problem for what it is. The average American doesn't realize the full power vested in a web browser that integrates tightly with the operating system. Most Americans don't realize what kind of trouble they're getting themselves into when they demand that their web browser be able to directly access their sound card, or their video card, or integrate seamlessly with apps on their system so that everything seems to be running inside the browser window as if the browser _were_ the operating system. These citizens clamor for functionality and then clamor for security. It is possible to have both but the price is in learning or in cost and both of these are unacceptable to the popular citizenry.
People in general, and Americans in particular, are obsessed with the mantra of "do something". Perhpas it has been beaten into our culture from the WW-I and WW-II era old hardtimers who felt the indignance of being marched off to war and then watch their subsequent generations enjoy profit without the pain of shell-shock or watching best friends get riddled with bullets. Whatever the reason the American society seems to be unable to enter into a state of natural flux--ebb and flow. Instead American society is stuck in a full steam ahead approach to everything. Refinement means nothing and progress means everything. The definition of progress is addition and more addition. The component of progress that involves improvement has been swamped by the "do something" drive to add more.
Adware and spyware have come about because the operating system and web browser which appeals to the popular citizenry has given them what they want. It has given them more and more and more as they asked. When the problems arose that, in a normal system, would have encouraged refinement and improvement, the users demanded more and more and more. This resulted in EULAs. EULAs made it possible for the software industry to concentrate on giving the users what they want: more. EULAs made it possible for software manufaturers to be free and clear of the necessary refinements and improvements which could have made adware and spyware obsolete before it ever started.
The approach to this problem is not to pass more laws. That approach does nothing but feed the "do something" attitude which has brought us to the quagmire of today. The approach to this problem is to refine and improve what we have. We need not to add more laws but rather to remove the artificial laws which give umbrella protection to less than optimal designs.
Not that I disagree but did he ever explain why he felt this way about BASIC?
I've found the quote many times.
Are there any arguments to justify the statement?
What the CDC doesn't mention is that, if you're working on a road crew, trying to pay the rent, manage four kids, and work outdoors every day, there's a significantly higher probability that these people wanted to step in front of a truck.
No one jumps in front of a car because it's too unreliable (15%). Wait for a nice juicy Peterbilt (45%).
Usage agreements are just plain wrong. I'm not talking legally wrong because they're legally right. I'm talking just plain wrong.
If someone sells something to you it's yours. If they die tomorrow it's still yours. You can still use it, copy it, share it, give it away at will.
The only reason why usage agreements became popular is because the membership fee at the golf course kept going up.