They've altered it a bit since the story on Digg. Now it opens to an Overture search engine form instead of a page full of PPC links. Same search engine though. It does save a cached copy of the last page visited in the cache folder, after you shut it down. No cookies or anything else was saved that I could see.
I agree. There should be that one Windows computer in the back of the classroom that takes 5 minutes to boot and then crashes an hour later because all the spyware pop-ups have run out all the memory. That would be the example for why all the computers in the classroom run something else.;-)
Re:Current computer
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The guy that owns my web hosting company told me a funny story along those lines once. He'd gone to the data center to upgrade the kernel on all his servers. They'd take one down, he updated the kernel, rebooted to make sure it worked, then handed it off to another guy to plug back in and the other guy would grab another one.
When they were on the third or fourth server, they realized the servers weren't booting up when they put them back in the rack. So they brought them back to the desk, booted them up and they worked fine. They'd put them back in the rack and nothing.
It took a couple of hours to figure out what the problem was. Somehow he'd managed to compile the kernel in a way that it wouldn't finish booting, if no keyboard was hooked up. He had no way to recompile the kernel there at the data center. He lives in Birmingham and the data center is in Atlanta, so going home to his own computer wasn't an option.
So he ended up buying a few dozen $5 keyboards at some computer shop and just laying them on top of the servers when they put them back in their racks. Worked like a charm.
What I'd like to know is, what's it like right at the exact center of gravity? I mean, when it's 1 foot off the surface of the Earth, will someone be able to jump and accidentally drift off toward the planet Luna? * * * * * * * - yes, I'm kidding.
You, sir, have swallowed someone's propaganda hook, line and sinker. Some sites do use porn to trick people into installing spyware, but they are just one of many types of sites that do this. I've gotten to know a number of porn site webmasters over the years and nearly all of them absolutely hate spyware.
I do spyware and antispyware testing all the time as part of my job. I go to sites with ActiveX installers or that exploit browser flaws and let a virtual machine become badly infected and then run various tests.
Not once have I ever had to go to a porn site to do this. Wrestling fan sites, yes. Serial number and warez sites, yes. Screensaver sites, yes. Certain "ad-supported free hosted" sites, yes. Porn, no, not once.
All true but none of that is relevant. It boils down to two facts:
1) The officers had no warrant when they showed up at the door the first time and there was no probable cause to believe a crime was being committed right there on the property.
2) They were asked to leave - repeatedly. They did not.
Since they had no warrant or probable cause, they had no more rights to be on that man's private property than I would have. Since they did not leave when asked, they were guilty of trespassing. One cop even stuck his foot in the door. I don't know if that counts as breaking and entering in that particular city, but if so, the cop did it.
The only laws broken in that incident were broken by the police. Their supervisor evidently agrees.
I could be wrong about this and I'm sure someone will correct me if I am. As I understand it, not even the copyright owner can give that sort of permission. Even if the copyright owner gives their blessing and says it is ok, it is still a violation of federal law to circumvent copy protection.
If just one of these happened to be a prominent journalist, IT decision maker or similar, the fallout for MS would be far worse than anything they'd gain by the action.
Whoaaaaaaaaaa there buddy. Slow down. You're looking at it as a rational person and projecting a rational conclusion on it. You can't do that.... this is a major corporation we're talking about here. You can't go throwing around logic or common sense like that!
Remember Sony's rootkit? If Sony were able to make themselves believe that what they did was justified and that it was worth doing, why give Microsoft extra points for brains? These are, after all, the people who inflicted Windows ME and Clippy upon the world.
"But it has NOTHING, whatsoever, to do with the MPAA and movies in general."
MPAA? I didn't say anything of the sort. I'm giving my explanation for why Hollywood and the movie theaters make no money from me anymore. The theater experience is an UNPLEASANT AND FRUSTRATING experience. The film breaking was just an accident, but certainly the theater owners can do a better job making sure one customer isn't ruining the experience for everyone else. Unless they do something about that, they can quit whining about losing customers.
How could I have handled that situation better? By reaching forward and smacking the parents? Because I sure as hell wanted to do that, just not badly enough to be arrested. I did the proper thing - contacted management. When management refused to correct the problem, I demanded my money back and went elsewhere.
As for the amateur pychoanalysis, thanks for the reading but I'll use a professional who knows what he's doing if I ever need that. I'm 30 years old, never HAD a basement, have my own house and interact with people just fine. When someone acts rude, I go interact with someone else. Which means I stay out of movie theaters.
I guess this depends on how much time you have to spend on this and how irritated you are, BUT........
If that happened to me, I'd be at the court clerk's office the next day, filing papers. You were sold a defective product and no one is compensating you. Then I'd ask the EFF, ACLU and CDT (and whoever else) if they had any interest sending a lawyer or two.
Until companies are made to understand that harmful DRM like that costs them PR, costs them customers and might cost them in court, they won't stop using it. If they have to eat a few court judgments and deal with the bad PR, they may change their minds about using that crap. More than one game publisher has already dumped DRM because it caused bad PR.
"SO you didn't even try installing, Your just basing your anit-SF opinion on the fact you read it on the intarweeb"
Exactly. I also based my antiSonyBMG rootkit opinion based on what I read on the internet. I didn't need to be r00ted by Sony to form that opinion. If you want to pop a Sony CD into your computer or install a game with StarForce on it while you watch the gators at your bearchfront property, be my guest. For me, my physical property is more valuable to me than someone else's intellectual property and I won't be installing dangerous DRM on it.
It may already be on your Linux machine. My SuSe machine had it preinstalled and there is a KDE GUI front end that works almost exactly like PGP from pgp.com. Enigmail works fine with it along with T-bird, although it broke HTML by changing a config setting. I had to run that problem down and fix it.
No.sys files but there are some.dll files and some googling shows them as being SecureRom-related. I'll look around a little more and see if there are any consistent problems reported with it, but I've had these games for a couple of years and they haven't caused any problems. My burner hasn't spontaneously combusted. In fact I didn't even notice those temp files. It does explain why I can't get VC or SA to install under WINE.
No, I wasn't taking a jab at Hollywood. I'm just explaining why they don't make any money off of me anymore.
Anytime this subject comes up, people always go on about how horrible it is going to a theater these days. I lay a large part of the blame on that. Plus most of the movies suck lately anyway.
I go to the Carmike in Statesboro (35 mile drive) to watch I,Robot. Some assholes bring their 2? 3? year old kid with them and sit directly in front of me. By the time I realized this kid was going to make noise the whole time, there were no empty seats left. The kid starts making a racket as soon as the movie starts and never shuts up. She even started singing! People all over were staring at the kid instead of the screen, waiting for the parents to start acting like parents.
You ignorant fucktards who bring small, noisy, untamed children to adult movies and don't keep them quiet are fucking assholes. What the hell is wrong with you people?
"Oh Jesus Christ!", I yell, as I get up to find the manager. I let the manager know what's going on and he goes in and stands against a wall for about five minutes, watching them. Miraculously, they keep the kid's yap shut the whole time, so the manager sees no reason to ask them to leave. "Fine. You want to run a daycare center instead of a movie theater, that's fine. Give me my money back."
Next day, I go to a smaller theater in Vidalia (25 mile drive) to watch it. So many people are lined up outside that it takes 20 minutes to get everyone in the door (they don't let you in without a ticket + they don't start selling tickets until 5 minutes before show time + only one ticket seller). Graciously, they hold off starting the movie until everyone is in (they did that for Star Wars III too).
Fifteen minutes into the movie, THE PROJECTOR EATS THE FUCKING FILM! They handed out refunds and sent everyone home. GRRRRRRR.........
The next day, I drove all the damn way to Savannah (80+ miles), crammed into an overstuffed theater and FINALLY watched the movie.
This is why I don't watch movies on the big screen anymore. Unless it is something that I HAVE TO SEE RIGHT FRIGGIN NOW, I wait for the DVD. And I RENT that DVD, I don't buy it. Or I buy it used from the video store. So Hollywood loses every opportunity at having my money.
I flat refuse to install anything with StarForce on it. Google starforce and you'll see plenty of articles and rants about it.
I have games that include SecureROM (GTA SA and VC) and SafeDisc (Sim City 3000) and I've never noticed them causing any problems or installing anything other than registry entries. StarForce, on the other hand, installs hidden device drivers, which totally fuck up a cd/dvd drive in some PCs. On some XP machines, it can cause actual physical damage to the burner. It also elevates access priviledges for user-level applications, although I can't imagine why the hell it does that.
Fuck all that. Not on my machine.
After seeing the commercials for Brothers in Arms, I decided to buy it. Then I noticed this disclaimer on the publisher's web site: "NOTICE: This game contains technology intended to prevent copying that may conflict with some DVD-RW, and virtual drives."
I looked around and discovered it was StarForce, so I just put my credit card back in my wallet. Then I sent an email to the publisher to tell them they'd just lost a sale.
Funny thing is, there are four different cracked copies of the game's.exe file at gamecopyworld. I'm sure I could find a copy of the whole game somewhere if I bothered to look. Not only did they lose a sale because of their anticopy software, it turns out the damned thing doesn't work anyway. Real good business decision there.
Some special interest group published a press release recently, blasting Grand Theft Auto for promoting violence against prostitutes, because raping and/or murdering prostitutes ingame racked up points (according to their press release).
Which is complete bullshit, on every single count.
There are no points in GTA. Period. There is no raping in GTA. Period. You get nothing special for attacking a prostitute. In fact, the hookers usually start shooting at you and the police start chasing you if do attack a hooker (or anyone else). Hardly an enticement.
Not only are they flat-out lying, it is obvious that they have never even run any GTA game. This group is lucky that I am not Take Two's general counsel, because I would make it a personal crusade to sue them out of every single asset for creating such a blatantly false press release.
"WindowsME was supposed to be an upgrade to 98SE. Trust me, it wasn't."
(Tin Hat Zone) I believe WinME was a marketing tactic cooked up in Redmond to sell a future version of Windows (which turned out to be XP).
People (at the time) actually liked Win98SE. It worked well enough, despite the fact that it crashed often and needed to reboot every couple of days. MS probably predicted (accurately, most likely) that 98 worked so well that many PC owners would not upgrade beyond it. So someone decided to break 98.
They looked at what worked in 98, broke it, hid DOS-mode (the only thing I actually miss from 98), made it even buggier so that it - amazingly - crashed even more frequently, slapped a new name on it and got OEMs to bundle it.
Suddenly ME was everywhere, it sucked, people knew it sucked and they couldn't get away from it, because the OEMs weren't bundling 98 anymore. My first modern PC had ME and I HATED that thing. So when XP came out, marketed as being much more stable, people upgraded to it out of desperation.
It certainly worked in my case. An ME PC that had never stayed up longer than 3 days suddenly stayed on for weeks and months without a problem, after upgrading it to XP. It was the difference between a '77 Datsun and a modern stretch limo. (/Tin Hat Zone)
Crazy theory, yes. But this IS Microsoft we're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
They've altered it a bit since the story on Digg. Now it opens to an Overture search engine form instead of a page full of PPC links. Same search engine though. It does save a cached copy of the last page visited in the cache folder, after you shut it down. No cookies or anything else was saved that I could see.
Before and after usage log
I agree. There should be that one Windows computer in the back of the classroom that takes 5 minutes to boot and then crashes an hour later because all the spyware pop-ups have run out all the memory. That would be the example for why all the computers in the classroom run something else. ;-)
The guy that owns my web hosting company told me a funny story along those lines once. He'd gone to the data center to upgrade the kernel on all his servers. They'd take one down, he updated the kernel, rebooted to make sure it worked, then handed it off to another guy to plug back in and the other guy would grab another one.
When they were on the third or fourth server, they realized the servers weren't booting up when they put them back in the rack. So they brought them back to the desk, booted them up and they worked fine. They'd put them back in the rack and nothing.
It took a couple of hours to figure out what the problem was. Somehow he'd managed to compile the kernel in a way that it wouldn't finish booting, if no keyboard was hooked up. He had no way to recompile the kernel there at the data center. He lives in Birmingham and the data center is in Atlanta, so going home to his own computer wasn't an option.
So he ended up buying a few dozen $5 keyboards at some computer shop and just laying them on top of the servers when they put them back in their racks. Worked like a charm.
What I'd like to know is, what's it like right at the exact center of gravity? I mean, when it's 1 foot off the surface of the Earth, will someone be able to jump and accidentally drift off toward the planet Luna?
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
- yes, I'm kidding.
You, sir, have swallowed someone's propaganda hook, line and sinker. Some sites do use porn to trick people into installing spyware, but they are just one of many types of sites that do this. I've gotten to know a number of porn site webmasters over the years and nearly all of them absolutely hate spyware.
I do spyware and antispyware testing all the time as part of my job. I go to sites with ActiveX installers or that exploit browser flaws and let a virtual machine become badly infected and then run various tests.
Not once have I ever had to go to a porn site to do this. Wrestling fan sites, yes. Serial number and warez sites, yes. Screensaver sites, yes. Certain "ad-supported free hosted" sites, yes. Porn, no, not once.
All true but none of that is relevant. It boils down to two facts:
1) The officers had no warrant when they showed up at the door the first time and there was no probable cause to believe a crime was being committed right there on the property.
2) They were asked to leave - repeatedly. They did not.
Since they had no warrant or probable cause, they had no more rights to be on that man's private property than I would have. Since they did not leave when asked, they were guilty of trespassing. One cop even stuck his foot in the door. I don't know if that counts as breaking and entering in that particular city, but if so, the cop did it.
The only laws broken in that incident were broken by the police. Their supervisor evidently agrees.
I could be wrong about this and I'm sure someone will correct me if I am. As I understand it, not even the copyright owner can give that sort of permission. Even if the copyright owner gives their blessing and says it is ok, it is still a violation of federal law to circumvent copy protection.
"If I don't have anything to hide, why do they need to watch me?"
Just FYI, that is, without a doubt, the most perfect answer I've ever heard to "I have nothing to hide".
I am so proud today to be an American, where the rule of law.... errr..... I mean.... What I mean is ......
:/
errrmmm.........
Nevermind
Whoaaaaaaaaaa there buddy. Slow down. You're looking at it as a rational person and projecting a rational conclusion on it. You can't do that .... this is a major corporation we're talking about here. You can't go throwing around logic or common sense like that!
Remember Sony's rootkit? If Sony were able to make themselves believe that what they did was justified and that it was worth doing, why give Microsoft extra points for brains? These are, after all, the people who inflicted Windows ME and Clippy upon the world.
Sooo........ Since that's taken care of, it means I can stop putting my plastic bottles on the curb every Monday?
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
Well, so was I, as well as tipping off their web host about a DMCA violation. But I wanted the address of the page with the link to the warez site. And I found it. And they removed the link. This is the article that shows up in the screenshot at the Galactic Civ site
"But it has NOTHING, whatsoever, to do with the MPAA and movies in general."
MPAA? I didn't say anything of the sort. I'm giving my explanation for why Hollywood and the movie theaters make no money from me anymore. The theater experience is an UNPLEASANT AND FRUSTRATING experience. The film breaking was just an accident, but certainly the theater owners can do a better job making sure one customer isn't ruining the experience for everyone else. Unless they do something about that, they can quit whining about losing customers.
How could I have handled that situation better? By reaching forward and smacking the parents? Because I sure as hell wanted to do that, just not badly enough to be arrested. I did the proper thing - contacted management. When management refused to correct the problem, I demanded my money back and went elsewhere.
As for the amateur pychoanalysis, thanks for the reading but I'll use a professional who knows what he's doing if I ever need that. I'm 30 years old, never HAD a basement, have my own house and interact with people just fine. When someone acts rude, I go interact with someone else. Which means I stay out of movie theaters.
I guess this depends on how much time you have to spend on this and how irritated you are, BUT........
If that happened to me, I'd be at the court clerk's office the next day, filing papers. You were sold a defective product and no one is compensating you. Then I'd ask the EFF, ACLU and CDT (and whoever else) if they had any interest sending a lawyer or two.
Until companies are made to understand that harmful DRM like that costs them PR, costs them customers and might cost them in court, they won't stop using it. If they have to eat a few court judgments and deal with the bad PR, they may change their minds about using that crap. More than one game publisher has already dumped DRM because it caused bad PR.
"SO you didn't even try installing, Your just basing your anit-SF opinion on the fact you read it on the intarweeb"
Exactly. I also based my antiSonyBMG rootkit opinion based on what I read on the internet. I didn't need to be r00ted by Sony to form that opinion. If you want to pop a Sony CD into your computer or install a game with StarForce on it while you watch the gators at your bearchfront property, be my guest. For me, my physical property is more valuable to me than someone else's intellectual property and I won't be installing dangerous DRM on it.
"Mind you, most e-mail programs (including, IIRC, thunderbird) don't support GPG"
The Enigmail extension for T-Bird works as a front-end to GPG. I don't know if it can work with GPG in any other way.
It may already be on your Linux machine. My SuSe machine had it preinstalled and there is a KDE GUI front end that works almost exactly like PGP from pgp.com. Enigmail works fine with it along with T-bird, although it broke HTML by changing a config setting. I had to run that problem down and fix it.
No .sys files but there are some .dll files and some googling shows them as being SecureRom-related. I'll look around a little more and see if there are any consistent problems reported with it, but I've had these games for a couple of years and they haven't caused any problems. My burner hasn't spontaneously combusted. In fact I didn't even notice those temp files. It does explain why I can't get VC or SA to install under WINE.
Vidalia. Although it was Reidsville when all that happened.
On second thought, "adult movies" really oughta be "R-rated movies" :)
*ahem*
No, I wasn't taking a jab at Hollywood. I'm just explaining why they don't make any money off of me anymore.
Anytime this subject comes up, people always go on about how horrible it is going to a theater these days. I lay a large part of the blame on that. Plus most of the movies suck lately anyway.
True Story:
I go to the Carmike in Statesboro (35 mile drive) to watch I,Robot. Some assholes bring their 2? 3? year old kid with them and sit directly in front of me. By the time I realized this kid was going to make noise the whole time, there were no empty seats left. The kid starts making a racket as soon as the movie starts and never shuts up. She even started singing! People all over were staring at the kid instead of the screen, waiting for the parents to start acting like parents.
You ignorant fucktards who bring small, noisy, untamed children to adult movies and don't keep them quiet are fucking assholes. What the hell is wrong with you people?
"Oh Jesus Christ!", I yell, as I get up to find the manager. I let the manager know what's going on and he goes in and stands against a wall for about five minutes, watching them. Miraculously, they keep the kid's yap shut the whole time, so the manager sees no reason to ask them to leave. "Fine. You want to run a daycare center instead of a movie theater, that's fine. Give me my money back."
Next day, I go to a smaller theater in Vidalia (25 mile drive) to watch it. So many people are lined up outside that it takes 20 minutes to get everyone in the door (they don't let you in without a ticket + they don't start selling tickets until 5 minutes before show time + only one ticket seller). Graciously, they hold off starting the movie until everyone is in (they did that for Star Wars III too).
Fifteen minutes into the movie, THE PROJECTOR EATS THE FUCKING FILM! They handed out refunds and sent everyone home. GRRRRRRR.........
The next day, I drove all the damn way to Savannah (80+ miles), crammed into an overstuffed theater and FINALLY watched the movie.
This is why I don't watch movies on the big screen anymore. Unless it is something that I HAVE TO SEE RIGHT FRIGGIN NOW, I wait for the DVD. And I RENT that DVD, I don't buy it. Or I buy it used from the video store. So Hollywood loses every opportunity at having my money.
I flat refuse to install anything with StarForce on it. Google starforce and you'll see plenty of articles and rants about it.
.exe file at gamecopyworld. I'm sure I could find a copy of the whole game somewhere if I bothered to look. Not only did they lose a sale because of their anticopy software, it turns out the damned thing doesn't work anyway. Real good business decision there.
I have games that include SecureROM (GTA SA and VC) and SafeDisc (Sim City 3000) and I've never noticed them causing any problems or installing anything other than registry entries. StarForce, on the other hand, installs hidden device drivers, which totally fuck up a cd/dvd drive in some PCs. On some XP machines, it can cause actual physical damage to the burner. It also elevates access priviledges for user-level applications, although I can't imagine why the hell it does that.
Fuck all that. Not on my machine.
After seeing the commercials for Brothers in Arms, I decided to buy it. Then I noticed this disclaimer on the publisher's web site:
"NOTICE: This game contains technology intended to prevent copying that may conflict with some DVD-RW, and virtual drives."
I looked around and discovered it was StarForce, so I just put my credit card back in my wallet. Then I sent an email to the publisher to tell them they'd just lost a sale.
Funny thing is, there are four different cracked copies of the game's
Some special interest group published a press release recently, blasting Grand Theft Auto for promoting violence against prostitutes, because raping and/or murdering prostitutes ingame racked up points (according to their press release).
Which is complete bullshit, on every single count.
There are no points in GTA. Period.
There is no raping in GTA. Period.
You get nothing special for attacking a prostitute. In fact, the hookers usually start shooting at you and the police start chasing you if do attack a hooker (or anyone else). Hardly an enticement.
Not only are they flat-out lying, it is obvious that they have never even run any GTA game. This group is lucky that I am not Take Two's general counsel, because I would make it a personal crusade to sue them out of every single asset for creating such a blatantly false press release.
"WindowsME was supposed to be an upgrade to 98SE. Trust me, it wasn't."
(Tin Hat Zone)
I believe WinME was a marketing tactic cooked up in Redmond to sell a future version of Windows (which turned out to be XP).
People (at the time) actually liked Win98SE. It worked well enough, despite the fact that it crashed often and needed to reboot every couple of days. MS probably predicted (accurately, most likely) that 98 worked so well that many PC owners would not upgrade beyond it. So someone decided to break 98.
They looked at what worked in 98, broke it, hid DOS-mode (the only thing I actually miss from 98), made it even buggier so that it - amazingly - crashed even more frequently, slapped a new name on it and got OEMs to bundle it.
Suddenly ME was everywhere, it sucked, people knew it sucked and they couldn't get away from it, because the OEMs weren't bundling 98 anymore. My first modern PC had ME and I HATED that thing. So when XP came out, marketed as being much more stable, people upgraded to it out of desperation.
It certainly worked in my case. An ME PC that had never stayed up longer than 3 days suddenly stayed on for weeks and months without a problem, after upgrading it to XP. It was the difference between a '77 Datsun and a modern stretch limo.
(/Tin Hat Zone)
Crazy theory, yes. But this IS Microsoft we're talking about.