The "article" calls this a rootkit. The summary calls it a backdoor. Neither is strictly true.
Rootkits allow unauthorized users root level access and backdoors allow unauthorized remote users access. In this case, you're installing Sony software and this software allows Sony to autoupdate their software and remove cracks. This isn't much different from Chrome autoupdating or Firefox blacklisting certain extensions. The only real difference is that Sony might not have been all that forthcoming about the fact that this new firmware has this capability. My guess is that if you look at the EULA carefully, it does specify that they are allowed to do this.
I would suggest that if you think they have trampled on your rights, then take them to court. Sony will just keep making their firmware more and more "evil" until a sizable number of users stands up and says "no more".
Amen. This whole Street View debacle has been just absolutely ridiculous. Especially in a world of push-button WPS protection, it is just plain silly not to have encryption on your network.
Most people get their wifi from the router that comes with their high-speed Internet and most of those come with encryption enabled. How many people still are using unencrypted wifi anyway?
One other thing that is bothering me is why do they have a suicide bomber on a remote detonator? If you're a suicide bomber, then can't you be trusted with your own detonator?
And you're capable of building a bomb with a remote detonator, then why would you be a suicide bomber (and not just a "drop it and run" bomber)?
The "story" is a little light on details. The suicide bomber has no name and no location is given, other than she was in a "safe house". Why wasn't this news four weeks ago, when it was New Year's? Why do they think it was an errant text message that set the bomb off and not just a defective trigger (after all, the phone should have been destroyed in the blast)?
I don't know what side of the argument you're on, but there have been a few documented cases of cell phones and other electronic devices causing meaningful in-flight interference.
"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." -Ben Franklin
I have heard that story since back in the 90's. I'm pretty sure it's an old wives' tale, or at least no longer applicable. I can't imagine that the cell phone carriers are that sloppy.
Furthermore, at 35,000-60,000 ft (cruising altitude), you're 7-12 miles from the nearest cell tower and you're traveling along in a Faraday cage. I seriously doubt that you would get a usable signal.
The danger is that the device could cause interference with an on-board computer. It doesn't need to crash the airplane to be disruptive. Let's say that your iPhone caused the N2 reading for engine #3 to read 0 on takeoff - the pilot would think that the engine had failed and return to the airport for an emergency landing. Everyone would be deplaned and a ground crew would have to examine the engine for a couple of hours just to verify that everything was okay.
Now, let's say the chances of that happening are 1-in-100 million. Well, the level of disruption and the odds of it happening are so poor that a terrorist wouldn't bother. But there are around 100,000 commercial flights, planet-wide, per day. That would mean that every three years you would have an incident like this.
The price we pay to prevent this is that we don't use our electronics for the first 10 and last 20 minutes of flight and we don't use anything that transmits for the entire flight. Personally, I don't think it's that big of a deal.
Before the spill, BP was trading at $60+/share. Today, they're at $45/share. I can't help but think that since they have already paid out most of the money that will have to and since they have settled most of the claims, and since the well is good and dead, that the stock price has to recover to it's previous levels. If you buy today at $45 and it recovers only to $60 in a year, then that's still a 33% return on investment, which is absolutely terrific, especially in a down economy. Any thoughts?
And there is an DRM encryption implementation in the PDF standard. Those PDFs are unopenable in KPDF and Okular (and I would also assume Acrobat). You have to use Adobe DigitalEditions to open them.
I know this because my library loans some digital books as encrypted PDFs.
As a former Boulder resident, I challenge anyone who thinks this is a privacy issue to find any address in Boulder where they aren't growing pot. It's as "legal" there as it is anywhere.
Just buy a copy of "Flim-Flam" by James Randi and call it good. Although it's an older book (early 80's), he carefully dissects and debunks several popular myths of the day (UFOs, Bermuda Triangle, etc). There is no evidence for such things as ghosts and haunted houses. Either you want some gadgets so you can play tricks on your friends, or you haven't thought about the ramifications very carefully.
Why would this tick you off? Did the manufacturer promise you that Honeycomb would run on it? If so, then you have a right to complain. But realistically, you should buy a phone or tablet because of the features it has today, not because of the features it may have tomorrow or next week.
This whole "more features later" promise BS is how we got stuck with Patch Tuesdays. Microsoft sold us a buggy OS and we knew it was buggy, but we bought anyway, because of the promise that they would fix it later.
The expectation should be that your $600 tablet does, out-of-the-box, at least $600 worth of stuff. If it happens to run Honeycomb or some other OS later on, then that's a great bonus for you.
I don't even see how this is possible. From a processor standpoint, a 1800MHz single core is *roughly* equivalent to a 900MHz dual core. TFA is claiming that Google cares about the chip and not the relative performance? That doesn't make sense.
Not matter how fast a single core goes, there is still a cost associated with having to perform a bunch of context switches and you have to share all of the cache. There are benefits to having a real dual core implementation.
Yeah, but this is an app and it's on the iPhone. That makes it at least two orders of magnitude cooler than any Web v1.0 website. Looking at Webtender, they're using cgi-bin scripts. OMG! That's not Ajax, or Ruby on Rails, or anything cool. That's like a Netscape-type of website.
the Facebook economy has been acquiring an increasingly Darwinian shape
Um, Darwinian evolution does not reward the most populous species, but the one that is best adapted to its environment. In Facebook terms, this would mean that the funnest game would be the best promoted. What's happening here is decidedly un-Darwin-like.
I didn't find CLU/young Flynn to be that unlifelike. The only thing that I saw that was wrong was that his skin was very slightly rubber-looking. Had I not known that he was CG, I probably would have chalked it up to excess makeup.
The reviews I've seen have tried (and failed) to cast C.L.U. as a clueless (pun intended) bad guy. But he wasn't a bad guy, he was Flynn's idealism wrapped up in a program. The movie is more about idealism and the folly of trying to attain perfection than it is about any sort of struggle between good and evil.
Slashdot Mirror
The "article" calls this a rootkit. The summary calls it a backdoor. Neither is strictly true.
Rootkits allow unauthorized users root level access and backdoors allow unauthorized remote users access. In this case, you're installing Sony software and this software allows Sony to autoupdate their software and remove cracks. This isn't much different from Chrome autoupdating or Firefox blacklisting certain extensions. The only real difference is that Sony might not have been all that forthcoming about the fact that this new firmware has this capability. My guess is that if you look at the EULA carefully, it does specify that they are allowed to do this.
I would suggest that if you think they have trampled on your rights, then take them to court. Sony will just keep making their firmware more and more "evil" until a sizable number of users stands up and says "no more".
Amen. Yummy food, environmentally friendly, and guilt free? Sign me up!
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/0050223/New-Critical-Bug-In-All-Current-Windows-Versions
Amen. This whole Street View debacle has been just absolutely ridiculous. Especially in a world of push-button WPS protection, it is just plain silly not to have encryption on your network.
Most people get their wifi from the router that comes with their high-speed Internet and most of those come with encryption enabled. How many people still are using unencrypted wifi anyway?
One other thing that is bothering me is why do they have a suicide bomber on a remote detonator? If you're a suicide bomber, then can't you be trusted with your own detonator?
And you're capable of building a bomb with a remote detonator, then why would you be a suicide bomber (and not just a "drop it and run" bomber)?
The "story" is a little light on details. The suicide bomber has no name and no location is given, other than she was in a "safe house". Why wasn't this news four weeks ago, when it was New Year's? Why do they think it was an errant text message that set the bomb off and not just a defective trigger (after all, the phone should have been destroyed in the blast)?
I expect to see this on Snopes shortly.
Wow... that's a long time to lurk.
I don't know what side of the argument you're on, but there have been a few documented cases of cell phones and other electronic devices causing meaningful in-flight interference.
"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." -Ben Franklin
I have heard that story since back in the 90's. I'm pretty sure it's an old wives' tale, or at least no longer applicable. I can't imagine that the cell phone carriers are that sloppy.
Furthermore, at 35,000-60,000 ft (cruising altitude), you're 7-12 miles from the nearest cell tower and you're traveling along in a Faraday cage. I seriously doubt that you would get a usable signal.
The danger is that the device could cause interference with an on-board computer. It doesn't need to crash the airplane to be disruptive. Let's say that your iPhone caused the N2 reading for engine #3 to read 0 on takeoff - the pilot would think that the engine had failed and return to the airport for an emergency landing. Everyone would be deplaned and a ground crew would have to examine the engine for a couple of hours just to verify that everything was okay.
Now, let's say the chances of that happening are 1-in-100 million. Well, the level of disruption and the odds of it happening are so poor that a terrorist wouldn't bother. But there are around 100,000 commercial flights, planet-wide, per day. That would mean that every three years you would have an incident like this.
The price we pay to prevent this is that we don't use our electronics for the first 10 and last 20 minutes of flight and we don't use anything that transmits for the entire flight. Personally, I don't think it's that big of a deal.
This isn't a troll, but a serious question.
They are an unfriendly, communist, totalitarian regime. We exactly do we care if they are on the Internet?
Again, this is not a troll. I'm really interested in the ramifications of this action, which at the moment escape me.
Perhaps you didn't notice all of the bloat that was added between the time the Firefox source code was:
int main(void) return 0;
and version 0.5.
Before the spill, BP was trading at $60+/share. Today, they're at $45/share. I can't help but think that since they have already paid out most of the money that will have to and since they have settled most of the claims, and since the well is good and dead, that the stock price has to recover to it's previous levels. If you buy today at $45 and it recovers only to $60 in a year, then that's still a 33% return on investment, which is absolutely terrific, especially in a down economy. Any thoughts?
it is trivial to strip the DRM from Nook-compatible books with a few Python scripts
Great, I can see the DCMA takedown notice now. "Python infringes on publishers' rights. It must be destroyed."
And there is an DRM encryption implementation in the PDF standard. Those PDFs are unopenable in KPDF and Okular (and I would also assume Acrobat). You have to use Adobe DigitalEditions to open them.
I know this because my library loans some digital books as encrypted PDFs.
As a former Boulder resident, I challenge anyone who thinks this is a privacy issue to find any address in Boulder where they aren't growing pot. It's as "legal" there as it is anywhere.
Just buy a copy of "Flim-Flam" by James Randi and call it good. Although it's an older book (early 80's), he carefully dissects and debunks several popular myths of the day (UFOs, Bermuda Triangle, etc). There is no evidence for such things as ghosts and haunted houses. Either you want some gadgets so you can play tricks on your friends, or you haven't thought about the ramifications very carefully.
Why would this tick you off? Did the manufacturer promise you that Honeycomb would run on it? If so, then you have a right to complain. But realistically, you should buy a phone or tablet because of the features it has today, not because of the features it may have tomorrow or next week.
This whole "more features later" promise BS is how we got stuck with Patch Tuesdays. Microsoft sold us a buggy OS and we knew it was buggy, but we bought anyway, because of the promise that they would fix it later.
The expectation should be that your $600 tablet does, out-of-the-box, at least $600 worth of stuff. If it happens to run Honeycomb or some other OS later on, then that's a great bonus for you.
I don't even see how this is possible. From a processor standpoint, a 1800MHz single core is *roughly* equivalent to a 900MHz dual core. TFA is claiming that Google cares about the chip and not the relative performance? That doesn't make sense.
Not matter how fast a single core goes, there is still a cost associated with having to perform a bunch of context switches and you have to share all of the cache. There are benefits to having a real dual core implementation.
Yeah, but this is an app and it's on the iPhone. That makes it at least two orders of magnitude cooler than any Web v1.0 website. Looking at Webtender, they're using cgi-bin scripts. OMG! That's not Ajax, or Ruby on Rails, or anything cool. That's like a Netscape-type of website.
That's nice. I AM the Holiday Special.
the Facebook economy has been acquiring an increasingly Darwinian shape
Um, Darwinian evolution does not reward the most populous species, but the one that is best adapted to its environment. In Facebook terms, this would mean that the funnest game would be the best promoted. What's happening here is decidedly un-Darwin-like.
I didn't find CLU/young Flynn to be that unlifelike. The only thing that I saw that was wrong was that his skin was very slightly rubber-looking. Had I not known that he was CG, I probably would have chalked it up to excess makeup.
The reviews I've seen have tried (and failed) to cast C.L.U. as a clueless (pun intended) bad guy. But he wasn't a bad guy, he was Flynn's idealism wrapped up in a program. The movie is more about idealism and the folly of trying to attain perfection than it is about any sort of struggle between good and evil.