Just to clarify, the posting for this story is misleading and incorrect. Dell is NOT bundling spyware. Whoever posted it didn't RTFA. I should know, I wrote that article. I've asked Timothy to update the headline.
FYI, you don't know how beautiful a feeling it is to have your site on the front page of Slashdot, AND have mod points at the same time. I was soooooo tempted......
If you really wanted something fixed by MS, and the last 15 times you'd contacted them they'd ignored you, but you've seen someone else release information into the wild and get MS's attention re: a fix within hours... WWYD?
I would have some common goddamn sense and remember that there are countless millions of people who might be put at risk. I would then email security@microsoft.com (or whatever the address is) and let them in on the details. Then if they hadn't answered me a week later, I would post to Bugtraq about the flaws.
What I would not do is post it directly to Bugtraq without bothering to contact the vendor of the software to advertise that I'm looking for a job and donations the way this person did.
[people]
LiuDieyuinchina [N0-@-Sp2m] yahoo.com.cn
UMBRELLA.MX.TC ==> How to contact "Liu Die Yu"
[Employment]
I would like to work professionally as a security researcher/bug finder.
See my resume at my site. I am very eager to work, flexible, and
extremely productive. I have a top notch resume, with credentials
from leading bug finders. I am willing to work per contract, relocate,
or telecommute.
[Give a Hand]
I haven't got a job as a security researcher yet and my family don't support my security
work - so, I don't have a computer of my own. Please consider about donating
at:
http://clik.to/donatepc
> Paranoid real world scenario number X: > > 1. Report bug to Chinese military. > 2. Get promoted.
Non-paranoid disclosure of the actual posts to Bugtraq. You figure out his motivation on your own. It shouldn't take long.
[people] LiuDieyuinchina [N0-@-Sp2m] yahoo.com.cn UMBRELLA.MX.TC ==> How to contact "Liu Die Yu"
[Employment] I would like to work professionally as a security researcher/bug finder.
See my resume at my site. I am very eager to work, flexible, and extremely productive. I have a top notch resume, with credentials from leading bug finders. I am willing to work per contract, relocate, or telecommute.
[Give a Hand] I haven't got a job as a security researcher yet and my family don't support my security work - so, I don't have a computer of my own. Please consider about donating at: http://clik.to/donatepc
"We don't like IE, so we're going to expose you to attacks without alerting M$ to the flaw in order to force you to switch to the browser we tell you to use." Is that really the message you meant to get across?
> sites which are foolish enough to believe I want to leech their images
Clearly you don't run a site yourself. That happens. There is nothing foolish about checking for it.
It costs me hundreds of MB per month if I don't keep an eye on my logs. If my bandwidth use suddenly goes up and I start seeing the same forum showing in my log hundreds of times, going to one of the URLs inevitably shows some asshat using an image from my site in his avatar or sig.
> But don't set it to some bogus info, or you're no better than these crimina^H^H^H^H^H^H^H spammers.
Agreed. Some firewalls actually advertise there. I'm tempted to start displaying a message to the effect of "Did you know your firewall is telling me exactly what software you're using?" Since it's a "privacy" option, that oughta shake a few people up.
They are for less government regulation remember? (oh wait)
They are for less spending. (oh wait)
They are for the little guy. (oh wait)
You know, for those reasons and others, I voted Republican in '96 and would have again in '00 if my car hadn't broken down on election day. I voted for the guy in my district (Jack Kingston) that voted yes.
At this moment, I am ashamed of saying that. It's as if the entire purpose of the Republican and Democratic parties have shifted completely to the opposite since Bush was elected.
The Republicans are now the liberals, wanting to change every damned law in a way that contradicts their original purpose so they can micromanage people's lives. The democrats are now the conservatives fighting to keep the laws as they were intended. God, even Bob Barr (R-GA) joined the ACLU after losing his district in the redistricting of Georgia.
Anyone wondering why this is a big deal, you need to ask yourself one question. What does the Justice Dept have to hide that makes them so determined to avoid citizen oversight? What are they doing that the people won't like?
1.) Create a RAM drive 2.) Point the browser cache to that RAM drive 3.) Download 4.) Dismount RAM drive when done 5.) Wash hands:/
Or, if someone insists on storing this crap, use PGP Disk to create a virtual drive and store it there. Short of coercing the private key out of the pervert or stealing it with spyware, I don't think even the FBI could dig it out of there.
Dammit. I thought you were posting to a different parent. The other was modded troll and I didn't see it. Now I see what you were replying to and I agree.
I do ~90-100 gigs per MONTH and freak out at that.
I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again. I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again. I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again. I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again. I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again. I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again.
Nah.... It's the Europans pissed that we didn't go there first. They'll shoot down one probe per year until we meet their demands (an off ramp to Europa on the interplanetary spaceway next to a MickeyD's).
There will always be people with their heads in the sand. People who dismiss things out of hand are generally too ignorant to bother arguing with about it. The ones you want spend time on are the ones willing debate it.
Some idiot tried to trademark the word "Spybot", bought up spybot.com, then tried to strong arm the guy that makes Spybot S&D antispyware. We announced a boycott of the company involved, had a bunch of web sites pull ads, thousands of angry emails/letters were sent to the people involved, etc.
They tried to feed me a line of crap and tried to fool me into backing off. So I turned the heat up a little hotter with a new announcement and the guy gave it up the next day.
Those guys were not the sharpest sporks in the box, believe me.
True enough, and I should have clarified what I meant.
There is really no need to send whole asteroids back to Earth. We can either mine the asteroids on the spot and send the results back, or we can send it to refineries orbiting at a safe distance around Earth, the moon, Mars, or wherever.
The energy needed to move something from one part of the solar system to the other, excluding escaping from the surface of the planets, is very small.
It costs a fortune to send something out of orbit. Once you away from Earth's (or any other) gravity well, moving things around is incredibly cheap.
You could set off a firecracker on the side of a largish asteroid and it would move into a proper orbit to be collected later. Sure, it would take years to get there, but look how many damned rocks there are out there.... enough to build a small moon altogether. Once you get a steady stream of those going, it will *never* end.
> Sure, there are lots of asteroids with valuable metals and stuff out in the asteroid belt, but getting them back here would be infeasible
Nope. The energy needed to smack a rock out of its orbit and toss it back this way is very small. The hardest part is getting off this rock in the first place.
> -and once they were retrieved, the market value of their contents would plummet.
I disagree with that. It still has to be mined from the asteroids, it still has to be smelted and refined, it still has to be distributed. The great, great grandchildren of those out-of-work steel workers near Pittsburgh will have jobs and there should be enough to go around for all of them. One job will create several other jobs.
> At this point in history, space is a pipe dream--a ridiculous and silly pipe dream.
I disagree here too. It is vital that we spread out from this one planet as soon as possible. There will eventually be another large meteor/comet strike and we can't all be here when it happens. If we have a strong presence in space we might even be able to prevent it.
There is also the matter of six billion Humans on one planet. At some point, we will have consumed every natural resource that can be consumed. Unlike non-sentient beings, we change the environment to suit us, not the other way around. And in the process, we are killing this planet. We need more room, and two empty worlds (Mars and Luna) and the entire asteroid belt are right there with a great big "Vacancy" sign.
The hell with NASA. NASA is a bloated bureaucracy that spends millions debating the impact of fixing a broken toilet seat.
We need pioneers dammit. We need the governments to stand out of the way and let people do it themselves. We'll never get there if it's left up to NASA with their huge, dangerous, inefficient chemical rockets and their damned bureaucrats.
I read a book once where a guy wants to build a tunnel up the side of a mountain near the equator. You evacuate all of the air and use electromagnets to levitate a spacecraft with a block of ice attached to its arse. The magnets push it as fast as it'll go and throws it straight up in the air, then a nearby laser array fires at the ice. The vaporization creates enough thrust to push it all the way to escape velocity.
It'd cost several large fortunes to build it, but once it's built it'd be the cheapest and safest way to launch spacecraft. I bet it'd be a helluva ride too. =)
You know what irritates me? Pres Kennedy said we're going to the moon, and 8 years later we did it. We landed Humans on the moon, we walked around, planted a flag, parked a hoopty, took some snapshots........ and then.... We. Never. Went. Back.
WTF? Thirty friggin years later and no one has ever gone back? Instead we're pouring money into a useless space station for political feel good points.
There are enough metals, water, and WEALTH orbiting just past Mars to make every living Human a trillionaire, and we're still fighting wars over oil, diamonds and pieces of land measuring a few hundred square miles in size.
All the eggs are still in the same basket. It's only a matter of time before a great big rock flies into it and breaks every damned one of them.
Jerry Fenn, the president of the Utah division of Qwest, the regional telephone company here that provides its own high-speed Internet access, said there were few uses yet for the network Utopia plans to deliver.
The speeds to be provided "are way more than what most consumers need in their home," Mr. Fenn said, adding, "Why provide a Rolls-Royce when a Chevrolet will do?"
It would have been more accurate if he had said "Why provide a motorized vehicle when a horse-drawn buggy will do?"
Ignorant shit, the only troll here is you and no doubt your post will be modded accordingly soon enough.
I'm glad you agree there are legitimate uses of ball bearings. Too bad you too fucking stupid to see what I meant. Read what I said again, this time slower. Mouth the words out loud if it still confuses you.
There is a monopoly on remote controls compatible with Chamberlain garage door openers, or there was until this trial was finished. A company does not have the right to stop 3rd party remote controllers from working with their openers. Just as Chrysler does not have the right to stop me from putting an aftermarket muffler on my car and just as Lexmark does not have the right to stop me from choosing my own ink cartridges (not that I'd buy a Lexmark in the first place).
Slashdot Mirror
Just to clarify, the posting for this story is misleading and incorrect. Dell is NOT bundling spyware. Whoever posted it didn't RTFA. I should know, I wrote that article. I've asked Timothy to update the headline.
FYI, you don't know how beautiful a feeling it is to have your site on the front page of Slashdot, AND have mod points at the same time. I was soooooo tempted......
Mike Healan
Editor
www.spywareinfo.com
If you really wanted something fixed by MS, and the last 15 times you'd contacted them they'd ignored you, but you've seen someone else release information into the wild and get MS's attention re: a fix within hours... WWYD?
I would have some common goddamn sense and remember that there are countless millions of people who might be put at risk. I would then email security@microsoft.com (or whatever the address is) and let them in on the details. Then if they hadn't answered me a week later, I would post to Bugtraq about the flaws.
What I would not do is post it directly to Bugtraq without bothering to contact the vendor of the software to advertise that I'm looking for a job and donations the way this person did.
> Paranoid real world scenario number X:
>
> 1. Report bug to Chinese military.
> 2. Get promoted.
Non-paranoid disclosure of the actual posts to Bugtraq. You figure out his motivation on your own. It shouldn't take long.
[people]
LiuDieyuinchina [N0-@-Sp2m] yahoo.com.cn
UMBRELLA.MX.TC ==> How to contact "Liu Die Yu"
[Employment]
I would like to work professionally as a security researcher/bug finder.
See my resume at my site. I am very eager to work, flexible, and
extremely productive. I have a top notch resume, with credentials
from leading bug finders. I am willing to work per contract, relocate,
or telecommute.
[Give a Hand]
I haven't got a job as a security researcher yet and my family don't support my security
work - so, I don't have a computer of my own. Please consider about donating
at:
http://clik.to/donatepc
I don't believe this.
"We don't like IE, so we're going to expose you to attacks without alerting M$ to the flaw in order to force you to switch to the browser we tell you to use." Is that really the message you meant to get across?
No, these people are loading these images directly from my site on the offsite forums and that runs up my bandwidth.
Glad you like it. I broke my stats program, so I have no idea how well my own method is working until I switch servers and reinstall awstats.
> sites which are foolish enough to believe I want to leech their images
Clearly you don't run a site yourself. That happens. There is nothing foolish about checking for it.
It costs me hundreds of MB per month if I don't keep an eye on my logs. If my bandwidth use suddenly goes up and I start seeing the same forum showing in my log hundreds of times, going to one of the URLs inevitably shows some asshat using an image from my site in his avatar or sig.
> But don't set it to some bogus info, or you're no better than these crimina^H^H^H^H^H^H^H spammers.
Agreed. Some firewalls actually advertise there. I'm tempted to start displaying a message to the effect of "Did you know your firewall is telling me exactly what software you're using?" Since it's a "privacy" option, that oughta shake a few people up.
They are for less government regulation remember? (oh wait)
They are for less spending. (oh wait)
They are for the little guy. (oh wait)
You know, for those reasons and others, I voted Republican in '96 and would have again in '00 if my car hadn't broken down on election day. I voted for the guy in my district (Jack Kingston) that voted yes.
At this moment, I am ashamed of saying that. It's as if the entire purpose of the Republican and Democratic parties have shifted completely to the opposite since Bush was elected.
The Republicans are now the liberals, wanting to change every damned law in a way that contradicts their original purpose so they can micromanage people's lives. The democrats are now the conservatives fighting to keep the laws as they were intended. God, even Bob Barr (R-GA) joined the ACLU after losing his district in the redistricting of Georgia.
Anyone wondering why this is a big deal, you need to ask yourself one question. What does the Justice Dept have to hide that makes them so determined to avoid citizen oversight? What are they doing that the people won't like?
Here's a list of who voted yea and nay.
hehe.... Believe it or not, it's my job to know this sort of thing (how to hide computer usage).
Well, they could disable it for the times they're ....... "accessing their materials" .....
.. Is that even possible?
Then turn it back on afterward and reboot.
That, or set the swap TO the RAM drive. Although they'd need a hell of a lot of RAM
1.) Create a RAM drive :/
2.) Point the browser cache to that RAM drive
3.) Download
4.) Dismount RAM drive when done
5.) Wash hands
Or, if someone insists on storing this crap, use PGP Disk to create a virtual drive and store it there. Short of coercing the private key out of the pervert or stealing it with spyware, I don't think even the FBI could dig it out of there.
Dammit. I thought you were posting to a different parent. The other was modded troll and I didn't see it. Now I see what you were replying to and I agree.
> Rape is not something you wish on anybody
Agreed, but what's your point? That we shouldn't jail criminals?
Rail at the state for allowing prison rape to go on. Don't post flamebait because we celebrate a sick freak being put away.
14 gigs PER DAY savings ????
I do ~90-100 gigs per MONTH and freak out at that.
I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again.
I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again.
I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again.
I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again.
I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again.
I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again.
Nah.... It's the Europans pissed that we didn't go there first. They'll shoot down one probe per year until we meet their demands (an off ramp to Europa on the interplanetary spaceway next to a MickeyD's).
There will always be people with their heads in the sand. People who dismiss things out of hand are generally too ignorant to bother arguing with about it. The ones you want spend time on are the ones willing debate it.
Some idiot tried to trademark the word "Spybot", bought up spybot.com, then tried to strong arm the guy that makes Spybot S&D antispyware. We announced a boycott of the company involved, had a bunch of web sites pull ads, thousands of angry emails/letters were sent to the people involved, etc.
They tried to feed me a line of crap and tried to fool me into backing off. So I turned the heat up a little hotter with a new announcement and the guy gave it up the next day.
Those guys were not the sharpest sporks in the box, believe me.
I read somewhere the other day about orbiting solar energy collectors.
I like the idea. Collect the energy, convert it to laser/microwave/whatever, beam it down to collection stations.
True enough, and I should have clarified what I meant.
There is really no need to send whole asteroids back to Earth. We can either mine the asteroids on the spot and send the results back, or we can send it to refineries orbiting at a safe distance around Earth, the moon, Mars, or wherever.
The energy needed to move something from one part of the solar system to the other, excluding escaping from the surface of the planets, is very small.
It costs a fortune to send something out of orbit. Once you away from Earth's (or any other) gravity well, moving things around is incredibly cheap.
.... enough to build a small moon altogether. Once you get a steady stream of those going, it will *never* end.
You could set off a firecracker on the side of a largish asteroid and it would move into a proper orbit to be collected later. Sure, it would take years to get there, but look how many damned rocks there are out there
> Sure, there are lots of asteroids with valuable metals and stuff out in the asteroid belt, but getting them back here would be infeasible
Nope. The energy needed to smack a rock out of its orbit and toss it back this way is very small. The hardest part is getting off this rock in the first place.
> -and once they were retrieved, the market value of their contents would plummet.
I disagree with that. It still has to be mined from the asteroids, it still has to be smelted and refined, it still has to be distributed. The great, great grandchildren of those out-of-work steel workers near Pittsburgh will have jobs and there should be enough to go around for all of them. One job will create several other jobs.
> At this point in history, space is a pipe dream--a ridiculous and silly pipe dream.
I disagree here too. It is vital that we spread out from this one planet as soon as possible. There will eventually be another large meteor/comet strike and we can't all be here when it happens. If we have a strong presence in space we might even be able to prevent it.
There is also the matter of six billion Humans on one planet. At some point, we will have consumed every natural resource that can be consumed. Unlike non-sentient beings, we change the environment to suit us, not the other way around. And in the process, we are killing this planet. We need more room, and two empty worlds (Mars and Luna) and the entire asteroid belt are right there with a great big "Vacancy" sign.
The hell with NASA. NASA is a bloated bureaucracy that spends millions debating the impact of fixing a broken toilet seat.
We need pioneers dammit. We need the governments to stand out of the way and let people do it themselves. We'll never get there if it's left up to NASA with their huge, dangerous, inefficient chemical rockets and their damned bureaucrats.
I read a book once where a guy wants to build a tunnel up the side of a mountain near the equator. You evacuate all of the air and use electromagnets to levitate a spacecraft with a block of ice attached to its arse. The magnets push it as fast as it'll go and throws it straight up in the air, then a nearby laser array fires at the ice. The vaporization creates enough thrust to push it all the way to escape velocity.
It'd cost several large fortunes to build it, but once it's built it'd be the cheapest and safest way to launch spacecraft. I bet it'd be a helluva ride too. =)
You know what irritates me? Pres Kennedy said we're going to the moon, and 8 years later we did it. We landed Humans on the moon, we walked around, planted a flag, parked a hoopty, took some snapshots ........ and then .... We. Never. Went. Back.
WTF? Thirty friggin years later and no one has ever gone back? Instead we're pouring money into a useless space station for political feel good points.
There are enough metals, water, and WEALTH orbiting just past Mars to make every living Human a trillionaire, and we're still fighting wars over oil, diamonds and pieces of land measuring a few hundred square miles in size.
All the eggs are still in the same basket. It's only a matter of time before a great big rock flies into it and breaks every damned one of them.
You gotta love corporate asshats.
It would have been more accurate if he had said "Why provide a motorized vehicle when a horse-drawn buggy will do?"
Ignorant shit, the only troll here is you and no doubt your post will be modded accordingly soon enough.
I'm glad you agree there are legitimate uses of ball bearings. Too bad you too fucking stupid to see what I meant. Read what I said again, this time slower. Mouth the words out loud if it still confuses you.
There is a monopoly on remote controls compatible with Chamberlain garage door openers, or there was until this trial was finished. A company does not have the right to stop 3rd party remote controllers from working with their openers. Just as Chrysler does not have the right to stop me from putting an aftermarket muffler on my car and just as Lexmark does not have the right to stop me from choosing my own ink cartridges (not that I'd buy a Lexmark in the first place).