I've been thinking about this for a little while. It currently would only cost on the order of tens of millions of dollars to record EVERY phone call made in the United States. It is totally possible that the NSA is ALREADY recording every single call we make, which would allow them to do retroactive surveillance just like this.
A single 300 GB hard drive (like the one I bought new for $60) can record around 10 years of continuous phone conversations.
I'd love to hear a podcast interview with the guy to see what he was thinking, to see if he got fired, to see if he feels sorry, etc. It would be interesting to see how such a public screwup affects a sysadmin.
Why couldnt someone put together a distributed computing cluster for image processing/facial recognition/text recogntion processing? Then, you can make an app that sends the images from your cellphone/mobile device to the distributed cluster, and receive the processed data back?
Pretty soon, the bandwidth available to mobile devices and cellphones will be plenty for sending photos and other data across.
Ted Kaczynski already predicted this... and he did exactly what you are describing... He moved to a remote boondock. (well, all except the part about suffering in relative silence).
If you've ever read the Unabomber's manifesto, you will see that he was talking about exactly this when condeming the downward spiral humanity is moving toward using technology.
If you calculate the current cost for hard drive space, (around $80-100 per 300 GB retail cost), you can calculate that it would cost only around $300 million to record EVERY phone conversation that occurs over the United States phone system during the year. (assuming 2300 billion minutes of phone calls recorded at 56kbps) Even though this is still a high amount, it would still not be prohibative for the government to accomplish, and this includes EVERY SINGLE PHONECALL, and doesnt include any cost reduction for buying in bulk, and doesnt consider offloading to tape.
Then, consider that in 2 years time, that cost will likely drop by half, and then by half again in another 2 years... If you figure that the government only records 1/4 of all the phone calls (they can exclude grandma Tillie), and then extrapolate the costs of hard drive space, in 10 years, it will only cost around $1 million (today's money!) to record all those calls. That is chump change.
Then, you might argue, it would take far too many man hours to monitor all these recordings to catch anything. The trick is that you dont HAVE to monitor them. You can just wait for someone or a friend of theirs to become a person of interest, and then you can review backward all of the phone conversations that they had. You can then spider out to all of their friend's conversations and so on.
The scary thing about this is that you can be monitored even before you realize that you are going to do something 'illegal'... Worse yet, things can become 'illegal' or make you a person of interest (suspect) at a later time (like making phone calls to a Muslim charity that later is considered a terrorist group)
Just know, that your (and everyone's) phone could easily be tapped already.
I guess he wasn't making a ton of money off of spamming, because I live only a few miles from that location.... That isn't a very nice neighborhood. Definitely not something my wife would want to move to.
I thought spammers were supposed to be living the lush life on our nickel.
Its amazing how bad almost all of them are. I expected at least a handful to be getting 70-80% of spyware... But to be that horrible was totally unexpected. More amazingly, Giant Anti-Spyware was ONLY 3 WEEKS OLD when they reviewed it. I've been using it for a week, and it really does work well. It has significantly more features and a better UI than the two others I tried (ad-aware... weak with no features, and spybot... better but still ineffective)
Their SpyNet must really be effective to be able to beat ad-aware and Spysweeper by 50%!
Its a good thing sites like this are out there, otherwise who would have known that the software out there is that useless? Its shameful that bad software can still be profitable. I hope Giant gets recognized (monitarily) for it.
Well, if it is tasted and deleted within a few days, then I think we are on the same page. If it wasn't worth keeping around, then no, the software wasnt worth paying for. It is as if the software was shareware and had a trial period. I can understand that.
When the stolen software actually IS shareware and already had a trial period... THAT is wrong. More so than typical software if you ask me, since much shareware is written by small shops and one-guy concerns where they could really use the money.
Even if it wasn't shareware, lets say the software was worth keeping after the hacker has tasted it... What incentive does he have to pay for it? Yes, some people will pay for it, but usually only if it is REALLY REALLY awesme software that they love. The just "good" stuff usually doesnt get paid for. I just gets stolen.
If he is charging too much for his software, then those people have every right to NOT USE THE SOFTWARE. If it is good enough to be stolen, then it is good enough to be paid for, even if it doesnt work as advertised.
As far as responding in kind, the customers were the ones who started the harsh treatement. Older computer programs did not have much copy protection until it became easier to copy the programs.
Im amazed at how many readers here jumped on this decrying censorship and claiming all sorts of DMCA violations. This "censorship" is almost definitely going to be an OPTION for parents to edit what their kids see.
This is a feature of DVDs that should have been available from the beginning! Why is it that I can't select the "clean" or "edited for tv" version of a movie from the main dvd menu? Sometimes I want to allow my kids to watch a movie, but only the edited version so they don't have to see any gore or gratuitous sex. This should be an option on every DVD player. It looks like it only edits around 500 movies... If they were smart, they would make something like a CDDB for movie edits. That way, a central database can store all the edits, and you can download them as you get new movies. Something like this could probably be done with MythTv.
You should be lauding this as an long overdue advancement of the technology.
Bush and his cronies have been trying to dismantle the hubble, the space station, and the aging space shuttle fleet for some time now. Their plan to go to the moon is nothing more than a means to stop work on the existing projects.
They have no intention of going to the moon, and besides, what are we going to learn on the moon or on Mars? They are pretty much dead rocks, which is what we learned the last time we went there. Hubble on the other hand is giving us new discoveries all the time! It will be a shame to see it go.
The net effect may seem to be zero, but you are ENCOURAGING fraud. The Republicans are going to do it because they feel that they need to counteract the Democrats. This is the same mentality that is sending so many of former US jobs overseas.
Wouldn't it be awesome if the leak of the source code led to hundreds of unofficial "patches" that improve things within Windows? It would be hard to downplay open source if a large number of people started using the improved "open-source" versions of windows.
IE could be released with all of the features that Mozilla has that it is missing.
Of course, with some open source projects, if there is a bug or security flaw, not only does the problem not get fixed, there isn't anyone there to fix it!
There are a number of open source projects that are no longer being maintained, but are in fairly wide use. At least with Microsoft, there is someone there saying "yea, yea... I'll get to it!"
True, anyone has the ability to fix the problem, but most of the time the user is not necessarily a developer or admin. And if someone out there DOES fix the problem, there isn't neccessarily a central place to post the fix.
Maybe it is a flaw that the open source community can collectively fix.
Why was that message moderated down? (Oh yea, this is slashdot) Don't moderate it down just because you don't agree with it. It is a legitmate problem with open-source! Slashdot is best when it is a level headed forum for reasoned arguement, not a once sided diatribe against all things capitalist.
Of course, with some open source projects, if there is a bug or security flaw, not only does the problem not get fixed, there isn't anyone there to fix it!
There are a number of open source projects that are no longer being maintained, but are in fairly wide use. At least with Microsoft, there is someone there saying "yea, yea... I'll get to it!"
True, anyone has the ability to fix the problem, but most of the time the user is not necessarily a developer or admin. And if someone out there DOES fix the problem, there isn't neccessarily a central place to post the fix.
Maybe it is a flaw that the open source community can collectively fix.
The basic problem is straightforward. The public believes that the prices that they charge for e-books are too high.
When you do not recieve a hardcopy of a book, you don't feel that it is of the same value. Just today, I was reviewing a book on Amazon that I was interested and found that it is available in electronic format for 2/3 the price. However, that is TOO MUCH MONEY for what you are getting. Without a physical book:
- you cannot read it elsewhere - you can lose it with an accidental keystroke - it is more difficult on your eyes (in most cases) - At times, you are not in control of the media. In cases of some digital music, DRM allows another company to possibly "disable" your music at a later date, if they decided to change the purchase terms.
Those are major downfalls. If a book cost $20, I would be much more willing to purchase an e-book if it were $5 instead of the more likely $15. That, however, is probably below the cost of "manufacture" for the book, which is unacceptable to most publishers. However, the product they are selling is not equal in value to what they are trying to charge.
What I suggest is making the e-book an incentive 'add-on' to a physical book. Sell the physical book for $20, but then throw in the e-book as a bonus, or for around $2-$3 extra. That way you not only have the physical volume, but also a searchable e-book.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been thinking about this for a little while. It currently would only cost on the order of tens of millions of dollars to record EVERY phone call made in the United States. It is totally possible that the NSA is ALREADY recording every single call we make, which would allow them to do retroactive surveillance just like this.
A single 300 GB hard drive (like the one I bought new for $60) can record around 10 years of continuous phone conversations.
I'd love to hear a podcast interview with the guy to see what he was thinking, to see if he got fired, to see if he feels sorry, etc. It would be interesting to see how such a public screwup affects a sysadmin.
Why couldnt someone put together a distributed computing cluster for image processing/facial recognition/text recogntion processing? Then, you can make an app that sends the images from your cellphone/mobile device to the distributed cluster, and receive the processed data back?
Pretty soon, the bandwidth available to mobile devices and cellphones will be plenty for sending photos and other data across.
Ted Kaczynski already predicted this... and he did exactly what you are describing... He moved to a remote boondock. (well, all except the part about suffering in relative silence).
If you've ever read the Unabomber's manifesto, you will see that he was talking about exactly this when condeming the downward spiral humanity is moving toward using technology.
If you calculate the current cost for hard drive space, (around $80-100 per 300 GB retail cost), you can calculate that it would cost only around $300 million to record EVERY phone conversation that occurs over the United States phone system during the year. (assuming 2300 billion minutes of phone calls recorded at 56kbps) Even though this is still a high amount, it would still not be prohibative for the government to accomplish, and this includes EVERY SINGLE PHONECALL, and doesnt include any cost reduction for buying in bulk, and doesnt consider offloading to tape.
Then, consider that in 2 years time, that cost will likely drop by half, and then by half again in another 2 years... If you figure that the government only records 1/4 of all the phone calls (they can exclude grandma Tillie), and then extrapolate the costs of hard drive space, in 10 years, it will only cost around $1 million (today's money!) to record all those calls. That is chump change.
Then, you might argue, it would take far too many man hours to monitor all these recordings to catch anything. The trick is that you dont HAVE to monitor them. You can just wait for someone or a friend of theirs to become a person of interest, and then you can review backward all of the phone conversations that they had. You can then spider out to all of their friend's conversations and so on.
The scary thing about this is that you can be monitored even before you realize that you are going to do something 'illegal'... Worse yet, things can become 'illegal' or make you a person of interest (suspect) at a later time (like making phone calls to a Muslim charity that later is considered a terrorist group)
Just know, that your (and everyone's) phone could easily be tapped already.
I guess he wasn't making a ton of money off of spamming, because I live only a few miles from that location.... That isn't a very nice neighborhood. Definitely not something my wife would want to move to.
I thought spammers were supposed to be living the lush life on our nickel.
Its amazing how bad almost all of them are. I expected at least a handful to be getting 70-80% of spyware... But to be that horrible was totally unexpected. More amazingly, Giant Anti-Spyware was ONLY 3 WEEKS OLD when they reviewed it. I've been using it for a week, and it really does work well. It has significantly more features and a better UI than the two others I tried (ad-aware... weak with no features, and spybot... better but still ineffective)
Their SpyNet must really be effective to be able to beat ad-aware and Spysweeper by 50%!
Its a good thing sites like this are out there, otherwise who would have known that the software out there is that useless? Its shameful that bad software can still be profitable. I hope Giant gets recognized (monitarily) for it.
Well, if it is tasted and deleted within a few days, then I think we are on the same page. If it wasn't worth keeping around, then no, the software wasnt worth paying for. It is as if the software was shareware and had a trial period. I can understand that.
When the stolen software actually IS shareware and already had a trial period... THAT is wrong. More so than typical software if you ask me, since much shareware is written by small shops and one-guy concerns where they could really use the money.
Even if it wasn't shareware, lets say the software was worth keeping after the hacker has tasted it... What incentive does he have to pay for it? Yes, some people will pay for it, but usually only if it is REALLY REALLY awesme software that they love. The just "good" stuff usually doesnt get paid for. I just gets stolen.
If he is charging too much for his software, then those people have every right to NOT USE THE SOFTWARE. If it is good enough to be stolen, then it is good enough to be paid for, even if it doesnt work as advertised.
As far as responding in kind, the customers were the ones who started the harsh treatement. Older computer programs did not have much copy protection until it became easier to copy the programs.
That same background helped get me a modeling gig.
Hmm.... something is wrong here... Someone talking about getting a modeling gig... on SLASHDOT?!?!?!
Maybe you build models... That would make more sense.
Im amazed at how many readers here jumped on this decrying censorship and claiming all sorts of DMCA violations. This "censorship" is almost definitely going to be an OPTION for parents to edit what their kids see.
This is a feature of DVDs that should have been available from the beginning! Why is it that I can't select the "clean" or "edited for tv" version of a movie from the main dvd menu? Sometimes I want to allow my kids to watch a movie, but only the edited version so they don't have to see any gore or gratuitous sex. This should be an option on every DVD player. It looks like it only edits around 500 movies... If they were smart, they would make something like a CDDB for movie edits. That way, a central database can store all the edits, and you can download them as you get new movies. Something like this could probably be done with MythTv.
You should be lauding this as an long overdue advancement of the technology.
Bush and his cronies have been trying to dismantle the hubble, the space station, and the aging space shuttle fleet for some time now. Their plan to go to the moon is nothing more than a means to stop work on the existing projects.
They have no intention of going to the moon, and besides, what are we going to learn on the moon or on Mars? They are pretty much dead rocks, which is what we learned the last time we went there. Hubble on the other hand is giving us new discoveries all the time! It will be a shame to see it go.
A tiny bit? They will make the difference in your salary... if you take a 80% decrease in pay, they make that money!
The net effect may seem to be zero, but you are ENCOURAGING fraud. The Republicans are going to do it because they feel that they need to counteract the Democrats. This is the same mentality that is sending so many of former US jobs overseas.
I have it on Tivo and have only finished half of it... Now you've ruined it for me! :-)
Damn me for checking slashdot!
Why are they worried about meeting the appropriate girls? If they were smart, their parents would have already selected their future wives! :-)
Wouldn't it be awesome if the leak of the source code led to hundreds of unofficial "patches" that improve things within Windows? It would be hard to downplay open source if a large number of people started using the improved "open-source" versions of windows.
IE could be released with all of the features that Mozilla has that it is missing.
Just browse through Freshmeat. I'd say 1/8 of the projects there have not been updated since 2001.
Or search Google for no longer under development. See how many hits are open source projects.
Here is my list of apps that I want to see under development:
Big Sister for Windows (this one is the one I want updated most of all)
Slackware (well, its alive, but barely)
NCSA Server
In all cases I found that they were unsupported and had to switch to a different solution.
And remember, just because YOU don't use it, doesnt mean there aren't a lot of other people that use it and depend on it.
Of course, with some open source projects, if there is a bug or security flaw, not only does the problem not get fixed, there isn't anyone there to fix it!
There are a number of open source projects that are no longer being maintained, but are in fairly wide use. At least with Microsoft, there is someone there saying "yea, yea... I'll get to it!"
True, anyone has the ability to fix the problem, but most of the time the user is not necessarily a developer or admin. And if someone out there DOES fix the problem, there isn't neccessarily a central place to post the fix.
Maybe it is a flaw that the open source community can collectively fix.
Why was that message moderated down? (Oh yea, this is slashdot) Don't moderate it down just because you don't agree with it. It is a legitmate problem with open-source! Slashdot is best when it is a level headed forum for reasoned arguement, not a once sided diatribe against all things capitalist.
Of course, with some open source projects, if there is a bug or security flaw, not only does the problem not get fixed, there isn't anyone there to fix it!
There are a number of open source projects that are no longer being maintained, but are in fairly wide use. At least with Microsoft, there is someone there saying "yea, yea... I'll get to it!"
True, anyone has the ability to fix the problem, but most of the time the user is not necessarily a developer or admin. And if someone out there DOES fix the problem, there isn't neccessarily a central place to post the fix.
Maybe it is a flaw that the open source community can collectively fix.
Well, once... after that, she knows... :-)
Why wouldn't a pager require hand contact? I bet what he really meant to say was _head_ contact.
That would make a lot more sense.
On the subject of Hybrid vehicles (and secondary slightly off-topic of SUVs), Lexus is planning on releasing a hybrid RX330 next year.
That seems like a perfect solution for all of the yuppy quasi-SUV drivers that want it all:
- good looking vehicles
- good milage
- lots of room
- environmentally friendly
What was the number? Maybe some of us can research it and find out.
The basic problem is straightforward. The public believes that the prices that they charge for e-books are too high.
When you do not recieve a hardcopy of a book, you don't feel that it is of the same value. Just today, I was reviewing a book on Amazon that I was interested and found that it is available in electronic format for 2/3 the price. However, that is TOO MUCH MONEY for what you are getting. Without a physical book:
- you cannot read it elsewhere
- you can lose it with an accidental keystroke
- it is more difficult on your eyes (in most cases)
- At times, you are not in control of the media. In cases of some digital music, DRM allows another company to possibly "disable" your music at a later date, if they decided to change the purchase terms.
Those are major downfalls. If a book cost $20, I would be much more willing to purchase an e-book if it were $5 instead of the more likely $15. That, however, is probably below the cost of "manufacture" for the book, which is unacceptable to most publishers. However, the product they are selling is not equal in value to what they are trying to charge.
What I suggest is making the e-book an incentive 'add-on' to a physical book. Sell the physical book for $20, but then throw in the e-book as a bonus, or for around $2-$3 extra. That way you not only have the physical volume, but also a searchable e-book.