Yahoo blocks random stuff. I believe AIM blocks some things, though I don't remember what, and besides, it's AOL. MSN blocks download.php.
All we have left is gtalk. It would be awesome if gtalk was a viable replacement, but it's not -- it doesn't have video chat, doesn't have voice on Linux or OSX (that I know of), and there aren't enough people using it to completely boycott the others. All the same things apply to Jabber (since Gtalk is just centrallized, Google-ized Jabber).
Regardless, no matter how much it is Yahoo's right to do this, it is still asinine of them to do it.
It is well within Google's rights to censor search results, even in the US. It is well within MS's rights to have Internet Explorer block the Firefox download site. It is well within my rights to block the Microsoft IP ranges from my domain.
"Within their rights" does not mean "reasonable". If my brother shows up at my door starving and shaking with cold, it is well within my rights to not do a thing for him, or maybe leave him outside and call an ambulence to prevent him from freezing. It would also be a truly sick thing to do anything other than bring him inside, warm him up by the fire, and give him a hot meal.
In this case, the danger is that it happens silently. Imagine taking a car for a test drive, being thrilled with it, taking it home, and finding that it had an onboard GPS that's programmed to cut the engine whenever you get near a rival dealership. It's well within their rights to do that, and embed it somewhere in the contract that they're allowed to do that. It's still a disgusting thing to do, and completely unheard of in the automotive world. Yes, you would switch to the rival dealership, but the problem is, you've already bought the car.
So, same problem here. All your friends are on Yahoo, you've been using it for years, and suddenly they do something asinine like this. Only it's becoming more commonplace -- I believe MSN has similar rules that filter out an entire message. But even if you can always guarantee an alternative (like gtalk) -- not always acceptible, as gtalk does't have video chat -- there's still the problem of convincing all your friends to switch. Chances are, most of them will be too lazy to care, especially if you were the one who introduced you to Yahoo in the first place, and because they'd have to tell their friends, and their friends, and so on.
It's like the problem of trying to switch away from an OS, only harder. The only thing that makes it easier is the ability to run more than one at a time, without any real disadvantage.
Not even Google can censor me. (Except they can, of course, because most people on Jabber think they're using a service called "gtalk", but at least the potential is there.)
First, your SF page (and link) seems to be broken.
But more importantly, if you're going to make people download software anyway, why not just have them use Jabber? Could Jabber be extended to do what you want?
I have a Jabber ID that comes out to be the same place as my email address, and I flaunt both on every web forum I'm ever on. The email address gets 30-60 spams per day (nicely filtered by BogoFilter), the Jabber ID doesn't get a single one.
I have two AIM accounts, two MSN accounts, a Jabber ID, a Google Talk account (as in, a Jabber ID @ gmail.com), and a Yahoo account.
I do occasionally pop into AIM chatrooms for a laugh, and those are completely dominated by spambots. But even there, the bots simply spam the channel in predictable ways, waiting for someone to IM them so they can reply with a URL, or tell you to look in their profile for a URL.
I also used to have some people as friends who were not too careful with their security, and were thus loaded with spyware. Their spyware sent me spam occasionally, I told them about it, they didn't care, so I blocked them.
Those are the only two places I've seen spam over IM. I mostly use Gaim on Linux and Adium on OS X, and I've also used Fire, iChat, and Yahoo natively on OS X. I only get unsolicited messages when I'm in chatrooms, or when I bother to try to make Qunu work. Neither of those are spam.
Frankly, I think either spammers haven't discovered IM networks, or a lot of effort has been made to make it hard to spam through them. The centralized approach probably helps a lot, too -- you can't exactly implement a CAPTCHA for Jabber, since anyone can set up their own server and register as many users as they want, but it's easy to implement a CAPTCHA for any of the other systems I'm on. Still, I'm never comfortable with any organization silently acting on my behalf, with no way to control that -- it smacks of ISPs putting VOIP traffic on high priority and ignoring SKYPE traffic. If you want to block messages to me, at least give me the option to unblock them, and default to off (prompt me when I sign up). Same with traffic shaping -- let me control how my own traffic is shaped, or at least let me turn off the shaping.
You might try Ubuntu instead of Suse, but regardless, if you're at all worried about things like this, you should either already have your own computer, or use one that's only shared with trusted friends. And while I trust my friends to be honest, I don't trust them to be competent -- they might delete something or install malware, etc, by accident.
I'd much rather have my own computer running Windows then have to share the root account on a Linux computer.
Given sufficient time alone, I could use bootloader tricks and such to gain access -- the timeout isn't absolute. But I dont do this anymore, and I've never broken a finger.
Either way, it beats the need to have the CDs themselves copyprotected with crap. Given the option of having a million CDs to keep around in the drive, or installing rootkits for copyprotection, or having the program check if you're legit (with the option to run offline), I'd choose the latter.
This is more what I was interested in. The last three comments missed the point -- I know GT is subscription, whereas Steam is distribution. I want to know whether I can do things like -- Steam lets me backup games, and restore the backup (from a DVD) to another Steam account, provide both accounts have the rights to the games.
First off, most places allow some sort of outbound port 80, even if it is heavily restricted. The last place I worked at allowed outbound connections to the Debian update servers, and only through a proxy, but the principle is the same. And if you allow web browsing of any normal sort, it can be very difficult to differentiate between legit web browsing and something like this.
Now, it could be more complex, but to suggest that firewalls don't present a problem is to display an absurd amount of arrogance. The only way I can imagine this working is if they forced the ISPs to cooperate, and did some sort of stenography across multiple protocols (not just HTTP), in the hopes that at least some kind of outbound traffic is allowed. After all, VOIP has to be itself allowed. But at this point, you wonder why they would bother to infect the user -- maybe this simply passes crypto keys on to the ISP, thus defeating zFone?
Still, the sheer audacity of saying that "firewalls aren't a problem". Here's some simple firewall rules that are guaranteed to block it:
iptables -F iptables -X iptables -P INPUT DROP iptables -P FORWARD DROP iptables -P OUTPUT DROP
Saying "Firewalls aren't a problem" is like a travel agency saying "Customs isn't a problem." You can't say that unilaterally, for all customs -- different countries have different laws and procedures surrounding what you can bring into the country, or what you can take out, and in any case, a naval blockade pretty much ends the conversation.
I wonder why they don't just do it all on the ISP's end if they are going to be responcable for infecting users anyway.
Because people can easily encrypt voice communications. This software, being on the client side, can get around encryption. Of course, all this assumes that they know what they're looking for -- I doubt they would know what to do with Asterix, even if it existed for Windows.
As for switching to a new OS, you're right, I do feel a lot safer on Linux.
How does Gametap compare to, say, Steam, in terms of UI, technical details, DRM madness? It looks like a nice service, but I'm loathe to try any subscription service that's not exclusively an MMO, due to the massive DRM often needed to enforce a subscription for a single-player game.
I would also imagine Joe User will be trained faster to "put your finger there, dude", then to feel and remember the tactile pattern.
Won't work. The whole point, I think, is that the grid changes, but the code stays the same. Therefore, you can only tell where the "key" is by touching it. This is also why it's immune to shoulder surfing.
There's an additional two things I do other than touch-typing to throw people off: I use Dvorak, and I (used to) have a five-second timeout on a password that takes me 2 and a half seconds to type. If someone got my password, they almost certainly couldn't type it fast enough.
Linux for the PS2 wasn't functionally crippled although it did require you boot from the office Sony Linux CD.
I think you mean "official" Sony Linux CD. That's the first complaint, especially because they aren't selling the kit anymore, and they would never sell the CD separately from the whole kit. Thus, if you'd already bought a hard disk or a network adapter, you had to buy them again when you bought Linux.
This is also extremely annoying for me, because I didn't want to use a whole hard disk. I wanted to run a tiny kernel+ramdisk, booted from a memory card (which I already had), and run diskless over the network. I already had the means to boot -- an exploit of a buffer overflow in the firmware -- and I had the means to transfer files to the memory card, but I ended up having to use extremely crippled binaries which ran on the bare hardware, instead of a nice, full-fledged Linux.
That aside, it was a fully fledged Linux dist (a variant of RH6).
It also did not contain any drivers for the PS2's native hard drive format. This means you either had to use a separate disk for Linux from the one you used for games, or use an odd hack to be able to partition them.
I do not know if it recognized the memory card format.
In any case, it was certainly Tivo-ized, in that it required binary blobs which only Sony had the rights to, leading to my troubles above: It's possible to distribute a modified PS2 Linux, and indeed, Black Rhino Linux is Debian for the PS2, but that still requires the standard PS2 Linux to install and run.
I do not know if it was possible to modify and upgrade the kernel, but there is no way to download those modules online to make it work. I certainly hope it was possible, because they were using a 2.2.1 kernel, which is definitely crippled by today's standards.
And all that said, I suppose it was technically possible to develop a game for PS2 Linux that had all the power of a native PS2 game, but I don't think they helped out much with APIs.
there is still an active PS2 Linux community out there which suggests it is not entirely useless.
That there is a community out there does not imply it's useful. There is certainly a community built around obfuscated Perl, for instance. Is it cool? Yes. Is it fun? Probably. But neither obfuscated Perl nor PS2 Linux is actually useful.
If the PS3 shipped out of the box with Linux
This is pretty much confirmed. I believe they'll be using Linux for their "dashboard".
Not only would it be a kick ass games console (& music / video player etc.) but a home computer too.
This is Sony's line, but I'm skeptical. My home computer is not armed to the teeth with DRM. I can change just about any line of code on my system, and it'll still at least try to work. I can crack open the case and upgrade, or add completely new functionality. Taking your MythTV example, I can actually create that, the PS3 probably can't, if it doesn't already have a capture card.
Also, I can run a fairly large RAID array, especially compared to the PS3's 60 gig drive.
Homebrewers should be delighted if it happens since in the past Sony have stamped on the homebrewers since they were synonymous with the pirates.
And since Sony (and apparently you) are convinced that homebrewers are synonymous with pirates, I don't expect this to change. My brother uses his PSP to play SNES games, not necessarily because he doesn't want to pay for them, but also because he no longer has a working Gameboy.
A pre-installed Linux would give the homebrewers a nice sandbox to play in while letting Sony implement whatever copy protection controls they felt like.
See? No longer a computer, I don't want protection controls in hardware. So how, exactly, do you propose to create
I don't know if Smart Shuffle is the default, and that guy makes no mention of it. And shuffle had already prevented the same songs from playing three times in a list -- the problem is there might be some trigger (plugging your iPod into a computer, for instance) that reshuffles the list.
Personally, I'm fine with the original randomness, which I still use on my desktop (though not with iTunes). If I really want to, I can generate random playlists and stick to those, but I don't care enough.
In a very, very Tivo-ized way, yes. You can buy Linux for your PS2, and it will come standard on the PS3, but based on how crippled PS2 Linux was, I don't have much hope for the PS3.
I think being able to SSH in to the Wii, and be able to actually write homebrew games for it using a platform I know and love, is definitely a victory for opensource. Too bad it's just a rumor.
I don't see what the average Windows user will contribute to Linux, other than making it a target for spyware.
iTunes/iPod already does this, and it is, indeed, what "shuffle" means -- so long as you pause (instead of stopping or turning it off), you're still playing through a randomized playlist. The problem is spookiness of seeing five songs by the same artist in a row, or very close together, in that random playlist, but that's statistically likely anyway.
You might consider calling it something else. Apple is calling their new shuffle feature "SmartShuffle", but in this case, it's about creating a bias against playing songs by the same artist or album too close together.
This is just about exactly what "Smart Shuffle" does. It allows you to bias the randomness towards not playing two songs from the same artist or album in a row. Makes it less random to make it feel more random.
Drop My Rights is likely not an equivalent (in terms of user-friendliness during use -- can you still download files?) and I doubt the parent was talking about Vista, otherwise the argument of "it's already on my computer" becomes even more worthless. IE6 is insecure, so download a whole new, beta OS (yes, beta! Not RC-quality) instead of downloading a 5 meg firefox?
I suspect grandparent was talking about something like disabling JavaScript.
Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo blocks random stuff. I believe AIM blocks some things, though I don't remember what, and besides, it's AOL. MSN blocks download.php.
All we have left is gtalk. It would be awesome if gtalk was a viable replacement, but it's not -- it doesn't have video chat, doesn't have voice on Linux or OSX (that I know of), and there aren't enough people using it to completely boycott the others. All the same things apply to Jabber (since Gtalk is just centrallized, Google-ized Jabber).
Regardless, no matter how much it is Yahoo's right to do this, it is still asinine of them to do it.
It is well within Google's rights to censor search results, even in the US. It is well within MS's rights to have Internet Explorer block the Firefox download site. It is well within my rights to block the Microsoft IP ranges from my domain.
"Within their rights" does not mean "reasonable". If my brother shows up at my door starving and shaking with cold, it is well within my rights to not do a thing for him, or maybe leave him outside and call an ambulence to prevent him from freezing. It would also be a truly sick thing to do anything other than bring him inside, warm him up by the fire, and give him a hot meal.
In this case, the danger is that it happens silently. Imagine taking a car for a test drive, being thrilled with it, taking it home, and finding that it had an onboard GPS that's programmed to cut the engine whenever you get near a rival dealership. It's well within their rights to do that, and embed it somewhere in the contract that they're allowed to do that. It's still a disgusting thing to do, and completely unheard of in the automotive world. Yes, you would switch to the rival dealership, but the problem is, you've already bought the car.
So, same problem here. All your friends are on Yahoo, you've been using it for years, and suddenly they do something asinine like this. Only it's becoming more commonplace -- I believe MSN has similar rules that filter out an entire message. But even if you can always guarantee an alternative (like gtalk) -- not always acceptible, as gtalk does't have video chat -- there's still the problem of convincing all your friends to switch. Chances are, most of them will be too lazy to care, especially if you were the one who introduced you to Yahoo in the first place, and because they'd have to tell their friends, and their friends, and so on.
It's like the problem of trying to switch away from an OS, only harder. The only thing that makes it easier is the ability to run more than one at a time, without any real disadvantage.
Not even Google can censor me. (Except they can, of course, because most people on Jabber think they're using a service called "gtalk", but at least the potential is there.)
First, your SF page (and link) seems to be broken.
But more importantly, if you're going to make people download software anyway, why not just have them use Jabber? Could Jabber be extended to do what you want?
I have a Jabber ID that comes out to be the same place as my email address, and I flaunt both on every web forum I'm ever on. The email address gets 30-60 spams per day (nicely filtered by BogoFilter), the Jabber ID doesn't get a single one.
I have two AIM accounts, two MSN accounts, a Jabber ID, a Google Talk account (as in, a Jabber ID @ gmail.com), and a Yahoo account.
I do occasionally pop into AIM chatrooms for a laugh, and those are completely dominated by spambots. But even there, the bots simply spam the channel in predictable ways, waiting for someone to IM them so they can reply with a URL, or tell you to look in their profile for a URL.
I also used to have some people as friends who were not too careful with their security, and were thus loaded with spyware. Their spyware sent me spam occasionally, I told them about it, they didn't care, so I blocked them.
Those are the only two places I've seen spam over IM. I mostly use Gaim on Linux and Adium on OS X, and I've also used Fire, iChat, and Yahoo natively on OS X. I only get unsolicited messages when I'm in chatrooms, or when I bother to try to make Qunu work. Neither of those are spam.
Frankly, I think either spammers haven't discovered IM networks, or a lot of effort has been made to make it hard to spam through them. The centralized approach probably helps a lot, too -- you can't exactly implement a CAPTCHA for Jabber, since anyone can set up their own server and register as many users as they want, but it's easy to implement a CAPTCHA for any of the other systems I'm on. Still, I'm never comfortable with any organization silently acting on my behalf, with no way to control that -- it smacks of ISPs putting VOIP traffic on high priority and ignoring SKYPE traffic. If you want to block messages to me, at least give me the option to unblock them, and default to off (prompt me when I sign up). Same with traffic shaping -- let me control how my own traffic is shaped, or at least let me turn off the shaping.
You might try Ubuntu instead of Suse, but regardless, if you're at all worried about things like this, you should either already have your own computer, or use one that's only shared with trusted friends. And while I trust my friends to be honest, I don't trust them to be competent -- they might delete something or install malware, etc, by accident.
I'd much rather have my own computer running Windows then have to share the root account on a Linux computer.
Given sufficient time alone, I could use bootloader tricks and such to gain access -- the timeout isn't absolute. But I dont do this anymore, and I've never broken a finger.
While that would be possible, where did you get that quote? It certainly wasn't in my own post.
This is more what I was interested in. The last three comments missed the point -- I know GT is subscription, whereas Steam is distribution. I want to know whether I can do things like -- Steam lets me backup games, and restore the backup (from a DVD) to another Steam account, provide both accounts have the rights to the games.
First off, most places allow some sort of outbound port 80, even if it is heavily restricted. The last place I worked at allowed outbound connections to the Debian update servers, and only through a proxy, but the principle is the same. And if you allow web browsing of any normal sort, it can be very difficult to differentiate between legit web browsing and something like this.
Now, it could be more complex, but to suggest that firewalls don't present a problem is to display an absurd amount of arrogance. The only way I can imagine this working is if they forced the ISPs to cooperate, and did some sort of stenography across multiple protocols (not just HTTP), in the hopes that at least some kind of outbound traffic is allowed. After all, VOIP has to be itself allowed. But at this point, you wonder why they would bother to infect the user -- maybe this simply passes crypto keys on to the ISP, thus defeating zFone?
Still, the sheer audacity of saying that "firewalls aren't a problem". Here's some simple firewall rules that are guaranteed to block it:
Saying "Firewalls aren't a problem" is like a travel agency saying "Customs isn't a problem." You can't say that unilaterally, for all customs -- different countries have different laws and procedures surrounding what you can bring into the country, or what you can take out, and in any case, a naval blockade pretty much ends the conversation.
Because people can easily encrypt voice communications. This software, being on the client side, can get around encryption. Of course, all this assumes that they know what they're looking for -- I doubt they would know what to do with Asterix, even if it existed for Windows.
As for switching to a new OS, you're right, I do feel a lot safer on Linux.
How does Gametap compare to, say, Steam, in terms of UI, technical details, DRM madness? It looks like a nice service, but I'm loathe to try any subscription service that's not exclusively an MMO, due to the massive DRM often needed to enforce a subscription for a single-player game.
What you describe has been done, but why not just rely on touch-typing and make it impossible for ANYONE to see the keyboard?
Won't work. The whole point, I think, is that the grid changes, but the code stays the same. Therefore, you can only tell where the "key" is by touching it. This is also why it's immune to shoulder surfing.
There's an additional two things I do other than touch-typing to throw people off: I use Dvorak, and I (used to) have a five-second timeout on a password that takes me 2 and a half seconds to type. If someone got my password, they almost certainly couldn't type it fast enough.
The NN in ICANN stands for "Names and Numbers". ICANN could not only revoke their DNS, they could also revoke their IP addresses.
I think you mean "official" Sony Linux CD. That's the first complaint, especially because they aren't selling the kit anymore, and they would never sell the CD separately from the whole kit. Thus, if you'd already bought a hard disk or a network adapter, you had to buy them again when you bought Linux.
This is also extremely annoying for me, because I didn't want to use a whole hard disk. I wanted to run a tiny kernel+ramdisk, booted from a memory card (which I already had), and run diskless over the network. I already had the means to boot -- an exploit of a buffer overflow in the firmware -- and I had the means to transfer files to the memory card, but I ended up having to use extremely crippled binaries which ran on the bare hardware, instead of a nice, full-fledged Linux.
It also did not contain any drivers for the PS2's native hard drive format. This means you either had to use a separate disk for Linux from the one you used for games, or use an odd hack to be able to partition them.
I do not know if it recognized the memory card format.
In any case, it was certainly Tivo-ized, in that it required binary blobs which only Sony had the rights to, leading to my troubles above: It's possible to distribute a modified PS2 Linux, and indeed, Black Rhino Linux is Debian for the PS2, but that still requires the standard PS2 Linux to install and run.
I do not know if it was possible to modify and upgrade the kernel, but there is no way to download those modules online to make it work. I certainly hope it was possible, because they were using a 2.2.1 kernel, which is definitely crippled by today's standards.
And all that said, I suppose it was technically possible to develop a game for PS2 Linux that had all the power of a native PS2 game, but I don't think they helped out much with APIs.
That there is a community out there does not imply it's useful. There is certainly a community built around obfuscated Perl, for instance. Is it cool? Yes. Is it fun? Probably. But neither obfuscated Perl nor PS2 Linux is actually useful.
This is pretty much confirmed. I believe they'll be using Linux for their "dashboard".
This is Sony's line, but I'm skeptical. My home computer is not armed to the teeth with DRM. I can change just about any line of code on my system, and it'll still at least try to work. I can crack open the case and upgrade, or add completely new functionality. Taking your MythTV example, I can actually create that, the PS3 probably can't, if it doesn't already have a capture card.
Also, I can run a fairly large RAID array, especially compared to the PS3's 60 gig drive.
And since Sony (and apparently you) are convinced that homebrewers are synonymous with pirates, I don't expect this to change. My brother uses his PSP to play SNES games, not necessarily because he doesn't want to pay for them, but also because he no longer has a working Gameboy.
See? No longer a computer, I don't want protection controls in hardware. So how, exactly, do you propose to create
I don't know if Smart Shuffle is the default, and that guy makes no mention of it. And shuffle had already prevented the same songs from playing three times in a list -- the problem is there might be some trigger (plugging your iPod into a computer, for instance) that reshuffles the list.
Personally, I'm fine with the original randomness, which I still use on my desktop (though not with iTunes). If I really want to, I can generate random playlists and stick to those, but I don't care enough.
In a very, very Tivo-ized way, yes. You can buy Linux for your PS2, and it will come standard on the PS3, but based on how crippled PS2 Linux was, I don't have much hope for the PS3.
I think being able to SSH in to the Wii, and be able to actually write homebrew games for it using a platform I know and love, is definitely a victory for opensource. Too bad it's just a rumor.
I don't see what the average Windows user will contribute to Linux, other than making it a target for spyware.
No, it's not! You have "al" four times in that, at least! Do you have something against Al! OMG CONSPIRACY!!!
The point is that true randomness doesn't look random, because randomness necessarily includes the possibility of patterns.
iTunes/iPod already does this, and it is, indeed, what "shuffle" means -- so long as you pause (instead of stopping or turning it off), you're still playing through a randomized playlist. The problem is spookiness of seeing five songs by the same artist in a row, or very close together, in that random playlist, but that's statistically likely anyway.
You might consider calling it something else. Apple is calling their new shuffle feature "SmartShuffle", but in this case, it's about creating a bias against playing songs by the same artist or album too close together.
This is just about exactly what "Smart Shuffle" does. It allows you to bias the randomness towards not playing two songs from the same artist or album in a row. Makes it less random to make it feel more random.
Drop My Rights is likely not an equivalent (in terms of user-friendliness during use -- can you still download files?) and I doubt the parent was talking about Vista, otherwise the argument of "it's already on my computer" becomes even more worthless. IE6 is insecure, so download a whole new, beta OS (yes, beta! Not RC-quality) instead of downloading a 5 meg firefox?
I suspect grandparent was talking about something like disabling JavaScript.
Well, if you're going to be pedantic, that's best simplified as 59/79.