Yes, but Virgin (NTL) are one of the companies that are sleeping with Phorm, so obviously they don't care about losing users.
I use Virgin Media (NTL), I have done since before Virgin got involved. They give you fast reliable connections, shite customer service and no limits on downloads outside peak hours.
I WILL be leaving if they drop Phorm on me. And I will write a letter explaining exactly why.
The problem is this:
We have fibre (Virgin/NTL/Telewest or whoever) or we have copper. Not everywhere has both available. A lot of places only have one option. My parents' house was built in a fairly nice area during the 1930s and they have never had cable laid in that part of town. A mate lives in a 5 year old property and doesn't even have a BT line because it will cost £150 for BT to come and put the copper in for him. With a 3G phone, his choice is fairly simple.
Take out this crap, Phorm, Asian call centres and immeasurably bad customer service and Virgin would be heads above all other ISPs I have experienced.
Brian: Please, please, please listen! I've got one or two things to say.
The Crowd: Tell us! Tell us both of them!
Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't NEED to follow ME, You don't NEED to follow ANYBODY! You've got to think for your selves! You're ALL individuals!
The Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different!
The Crowd: Yes, we ARE all different!
Man in crowd: I'm not...
The Crowd: Sch!
If you plug in the safety belt and get it to catch at the right level you can make a hammock type device from it that stops your ass from falling into the bottom of the seat while you sleep and waking you up with a painful ache in your back.
Yes I have slept in many cars.
No way does taking out one of the front seats give you enough room to stretch out.
I told my GF that I couldn't locate an XP Home OEM CD to use with the sticker on the side of her beige box.
She had used my openSUSE 10.3 laptop and seen that OpenOffice.org was very similar to MS Office.
She said that it was OK to put Linux on her computer that she uses for work as long as other people in her large government organisation would be able to read the documents she produced.
The upshot was, after a week someone couldn't read the OOo format and I showed her how to save as.DOC, since then her experience has been 100% positive. We're even trying to get her sister to use Linux because of the number of times she asks for techsupport after the kids mess up Windows.
One major convenience for my GF is that it took less than 10 minutes to set NX up on her machine, and now she can sit in the comfy chair downstairs with my laptop and do her work from there instead of spending untold hours in her study in front of a big ol' CRT that does nothing for her eyes over long periods.
The transition to Linux for her has been very easy. She doesn't have to use a command line, all her apps are in plain view (if you haven't used gOS v1, it is Gutsy with E17) and everything Just Works. She hasn't mentioned going back to Windows since that first document that someone couldn't read.
In answer to that, I don't know. If it's in your BIOS, you can make it work if you try hard enough. My machine has a KT400 chipset (yes, it is quite old now).
If your motherboard has a cd audio looking port near your PCI slots labelled WOL you can connect the wire from your NIC to it. If your NIC is onboard then the wire is built in.
There is lots of info about it, but everyone's system is slightly different. Sometimes you have to send the packet backwards, send it to a specific port or use the correct case for the MAC (00:aa:11:bb != 00:AA:11:BB). Then you have the problem of getting your OS to leave the NIC on at shutdown/suspend. You might end up editing your halt script to take out the -i parameter. One benefit is that once you have STR working, you will most likely get hibernate running too. I spent a while finding out that I have to use s2ram -f -a2 to STR my machine under Linux, but XP's NIC properties had a tick box for "Enable wake-on-lan".
I have found it worth the time I spent setting it up because of the reasons in the previous post. Think of it this way: your laptop connected to Starbuck's free WiFi can be as slow as you want, all the web traffic and page rendering is done on your desktop machine then sent encrypted. Nobody can sniff your session, and decompressing and decrypting SSH packets is something even a Pentium 1 can do fast enough.
I keep three or four SSH keys on my USB key (which is my watch, so I never lose it) so I can access my setup:
Port knock (just a few pings, nothing complex) to open SSH port, all other packets dropped.
SSH into router (RSA2 2048bit passphrase), Wake-On-Lan (with magic packet and secret word) my desktop machine from off, suspend or hibernate.
Port knock the router again to open up port forward to desktop machine, firewalled for anything but port 22.
Either SSH in with desktop key (again 2048 RSA2 passphrase), or NX with non-default server key to a desktop/browser session that has passwords/cookies stored.
Other ideas:
Use your PDA over WiFi/3g
SSH your router and have a script that changes passwords (if the site doesn't use CAPTCHAs)
Phone your GF and ask her to turn your computer on and do whatever it is you're trying to do from an unsafe location (VoIP would be cheaper)
Security is a journey, not a destination.
Needless to say, I change all keys and sequences regularly. I wrote a script that changes WPA, SSH and port knock with one command, which will do my whole house at once if all my equipment is on at the time.
I figure that if someone wants to crack my boxes, they will, but if they want to do it every week from scratch then I'm in more trouble than just being the victim of hacking.
Be a harder target than your neighbours and if you fall victim, you're a chosen target not a random one.
I know I'm a leech by not viewing the ads, but I use Platypus on my web comics.
I had to turn off AdBlock Plus, Greasemonkey and NoScript to find out that the page was shagged on Friday.
Hope they don't do that to Garfield, Ctrl-Alt-Del, UserFriendly and Penny Arcade too. Five comics a day, and now dilbert dot com is replaced with the FeedBurner page. When I get to my desktop machine I'll Platypus that too.
I have been trying to get an article about Phorm onto the front page for ages.
Maybe I should have tried this angle.
How about a compromised adserver on the Phorm network?
Every BT, Virgin and Carphone Warehouse customer would have malware foisted upon them by their ISP.
News for American nerds, maybe. UK nerds might like to know about things like this without having to check the Phorm files at El Reg.
I got my IBM Thinkpad T22 (P3 900 Coppermine, 256MB) to work with gOS (Gutsy derivative) and used my Linksys WPC54GS (bcm43xx) online with WPA-TKIP.
I blacklisted the kernel module and used ndiswrapper. Available with the distro, I chose to compile my own, as is my want.
Right now I'm using the same hardware with openSuSE 10.3, still with ndiswrapper. I just couldn't get on with Gutsy, I was "brought up" on SuSE.
It isn't that easy to do WiFi on Linux, but it isn't impossible. A couple of Googles and you're there. Fiddling about is well documented for Ubuntu, the forums are a mine of information on Linux, and most common problems have solutions there.
I just got kernel 2.6.24.4 running, but out of habit I didn't compile the bcm43xx driver, maybe I should.
DRM is supposed safe, BBC iPlayer downloads are supposed safe. All you have to do is convince a judge that you were using the video for your LifeBits and you can then use your other machine to give it away or whatever else you want to do with it.
I'm a proponent of Linux, whenever I can I slam a copy of gOS onto machines that I feel I'll have to come back to several times.
A lot less hassle if MSN and IE Just Won't Work =)
At the moment one of my my SO's family members lets their friend's kids come round and use the computer. They live in France. I have sent a Kubuntu LiveCD and instructions for setting up SSH. Should be a breeze doing admin over the 'net with screen and NX.
As for my own machine, I ghosted clean XP back to partition, shrunk it, installed Comodo and AVG, then used the other 25GB for openSUSE 10.3. With the latest kernel I can even use my ATA/133 drives at full speed again after the VIA 80/40 cable detection broke in the recent SuSE kernels. If only my ATI graffix card would work with Compiz *sigh*
Actually, Virgin aren't that bad - In this respect, and this respect only. They suck otherwise (Phorm... )
They tell you that you will be capped if you use the service at max rates during the time that everyone and their kids are using it. This is not a PCM cap, it ends at midnight.
If you want to torrent your arse off, set a QoS throttle on your router between 17:00 and 00:00, and let it rip during sleeping and working periods. The benefit to all is obvious.
And to pick you up on the pricing, I pay (PCM) £10 for the 2Mb service, £10 for phone and £10 for the bandwidth-challenged TV service that is so flakey I might go to Sky. With respect, I believe this was a special offer, but Uma told me about it, so I dragged my tongue back into my mouth and gave them a call. Mind, if it had been Ruby Wax doing the commercial I would have just hit the mute button...
Can you tell me the secret to getting Norton off a Windows computer?
Live Updater, AV, FW and all the other bits seem to have their own dependency hell that won't let you uninstall in any order, and when you do finally get out the Knoppix CD and registry editor you're left with a system that looks like it has just had the worst virus of them all run rampant through it.
I long ago started recommending a reinstall if someone had Norton slowing their computer down.
I'm holding on to life in the hope that I live to see the Foundation Series turned into a set of movies.
Anyone who takes that on will be under as much scrutiny as Peter Jackson was for Lord Of The Rings, and will have real trouble with deciding how many movies to make.
On the financial side of producing Foundation, there are countless opportunities for shitty TV series spin-off shows featuring characters from the films. But let RealityTV morons pay with their eyeballs, I just want the movies.
I thought everyone on Slashdot went for the "custom" or "advanced" installation routine as a matter of course?
We learned a long time ago that 9 times out of 10 you can avoid the sub-radar injection of spyware that way and this was a contributory factor in our machines working whilst others fell over all the time.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox
- Installed Firefox 3b
sudo apt-get remove firefox
sudo apt-cache search firefox
- Found the package name
sudo apt-get install firefox-2
That got me running Firefox 2.0.0.12 on Kubuntu. Took less than two minutes. <shrug>
Just for the hell of it, I didn't use sudo at all, I did sudo su before I started, I knew I was going to be using a lot of root commands.
I know I'm going to hell for becoming root on Kubuntu, you don't have to tell me =)
My Beeb (Master) had an 8086 daughterboard inside.
512MB RAM was enough to run DR-DOS.
Remember the days... *configure tube
That was all it took to get DOS to load up from the big-ass 5.25" floppies that didn't really have a lot on them. Better than the C/PM that I was using on my Amstrad PCW8256, but not quite as snazzy as playing Firetrack on the Beeb itself.
For historical purposes, I think the youngsters amongst us should be aware that even in those days we had porn. One of the kids at college gave me (through his little brother) some disks that had PC format porn on them, grainy black and white animated GIFs that looked worse than the newspapers, but WTF, they moved!
Notably, I had this DOS machine way before my school got a DOS box (Schneider 8086, orange screen) for us to look at and admire, and I have this awful feeling that I took the wind right out of my teacher's sails when I showed him how to use the thing. I imagine that either he, or his son are going to reply to this and tell me how I wasted my life by not making the most of my abilities with computers...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but Virgin (NTL) are one of the companies that are sleeping with Phorm, so obviously they don't care about losing users.
I use Virgin Media (NTL), I have done since before Virgin got involved. They give you fast reliable connections, shite customer service and no limits on downloads outside peak hours.
I WILL be leaving if they drop Phorm on me. And I will write a letter explaining exactly why.
The problem is this:
We have fibre (Virgin/NTL/Telewest or whoever) or we have copper. Not everywhere has both available. A lot of places only have one option. My parents' house was built in a fairly nice area during the 1930s and they have never had cable laid in that part of town. A mate lives in a 5 year old property and doesn't even have a BT line because it will cost £150 for BT to come and put the copper in for him. With a 3G phone, his choice is fairly simple.
Take out this crap, Phorm, Asian call centres and immeasurably bad customer service and Virgin would be heads above all other ISPs I have experienced.
I'm thinking of the "Life of Brian"
Brian: Please, please, please listen! I've got one or two things to say.
The Crowd: Tell us! Tell us both of them!
Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't NEED to follow ME, You don't NEED to follow ANYBODY! You've got to think for your selves! You're ALL individuals!
The Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different!
The Crowd: Yes, we ARE all different!
Man in crowd: I'm not...
The Crowd: Sch!
What you need is an answering machine. Just screen. The message plays to the OGM and the tape doesn't get filled up with this nonsense.
I looked into this a while ago, I have a few CF2 3" disks, and would love to read what I wrote when I was 14.
I found this company that offers conversions @ £5 a disk.
This isn't the only company, but a google will find the others.
Play the fools at their own game.
Print one of these out and keep it by the phone:
Anti-Telemarketing Script
Anti-Telemarketing Script
Anti-Telemarketing Script
If you plug in the safety belt and get it to catch at the right level you can make a hammock type device from it that stops your ass from falling into the bottom of the seat while you sleep and waking you up with a painful ache in your back.
Yes I have slept in many cars.
No way does taking out one of the front seats give you enough room to stretch out.
And one awesome Guns 'N' Roses song.
... <searches YouTube> here it is =)
For those who would like to listen to it now, rather than look it up like I'm about to
I did implement this test. With gOS v1.
.DOC, since then her experience has been 100% positive. We're even trying to get her sister to use Linux because of the number of times she asks for techsupport after the kids mess up Windows.
I told my GF that I couldn't locate an XP Home OEM CD to use with the sticker on the side of her beige box.
She had used my openSUSE 10.3 laptop and seen that OpenOffice.org was very similar to MS Office.
She said that it was OK to put Linux on her computer that she uses for work as long as other people in her large government organisation would be able to read the documents she produced.
The upshot was, after a week someone couldn't read the OOo format and I showed her how to save as
One major convenience for my GF is that it took less than 10 minutes to set NX up on her machine, and now she can sit in the comfy chair downstairs with my laptop and do her work from there instead of spending untold hours in her study in front of a big ol' CRT that does nothing for her eyes over long periods.
The transition to Linux for her has been very easy. She doesn't have to use a command line, all her apps are in plain view (if you haven't used gOS v1, it is Gutsy with E17) and everything Just Works. She hasn't mentioned going back to Windows since that first document that someone couldn't read.
In answer to that, I don't know. If it's in your BIOS, you can make it work if you try hard enough. My machine has a KT400 chipset (yes, it is quite old now).
If your motherboard has a cd audio looking port near your PCI slots labelled WOL you can connect the wire from your NIC to it. If your NIC is onboard then the wire is built in.
There is lots of info about it, but everyone's system is slightly different. Sometimes you have to send the packet backwards, send it to a specific port or use the correct case for the MAC (00:aa:11:bb != 00:AA:11:BB). Then you have the problem of getting your OS to leave the NIC on at shutdown/suspend. You might end up editing your halt script to take out the -i parameter. One benefit is that once you have STR working, you will most likely get hibernate running too. I spent a while finding out that I have to use s2ram -f -a2 to STR my machine under Linux, but XP's NIC properties had a tick box for "Enable wake-on-lan".
I have found it worth the time I spent setting it up because of the reasons in the previous post. Think of it this way: your laptop connected to Starbuck's free WiFi can be as slow as you want, all the web traffic and page rendering is done on your desktop machine then sent encrypted. Nobody can sniff your session, and decompressing and decrypting SSH packets is something even a Pentium 1 can do fast enough.
I keep three or four SSH keys on my USB key (which is my watch, so I never lose it) so I can access my setup:
Port knock (just a few pings, nothing complex) to open SSH port, all other packets dropped.
SSH into router (RSA2 2048bit passphrase), Wake-On-Lan (with magic packet and secret word) my desktop machine from off, suspend or hibernate.
Port knock the router again to open up port forward to desktop machine, firewalled for anything but port 22.
Either SSH in with desktop key (again 2048 RSA2 passphrase), or NX with non-default server key to a desktop/browser session that has passwords/cookies stored.
Other ideas:
Use your PDA over WiFi/3g
SSH your router and have a script that changes passwords (if the site doesn't use CAPTCHAs)
Phone your GF and ask her to turn your computer on and do whatever it is you're trying to do from an unsafe location (VoIP would be cheaper)
Security is a journey, not a destination.
Needless to say, I change all keys and sequences regularly. I wrote a script that changes WPA, SSH and port knock with one command, which will do my whole house at once if all my equipment is on at the time.
I figure that if someone wants to crack my boxes, they will, but if they want to do it every week from scratch then I'm in more trouble than just being the victim of hacking.
Be a harder target than your neighbours and if you fall victim, you're a chosen target not a random one.
I know I'm a leech by not viewing the ads, but I use Platypus on my web comics.
I had to turn off AdBlock Plus, Greasemonkey and NoScript to find out that the page was shagged on Friday.
Hope they don't do that to Garfield, Ctrl-Alt-Del, UserFriendly and Penny Arcade too. Five comics a day, and now dilbert dot com is replaced with the FeedBurner page. When I get to my desktop machine I'll Platypus that too.
Duped? I feel duped, but not in that way.
I have been trying to get an article about Phorm onto the front page for ages.
Maybe I should have tried this angle.
How about a compromised adserver on the Phorm network?
Every BT, Virgin and Carphone Warehouse customer would have malware foisted upon them by their ISP.
News for American nerds, maybe. UK nerds might like to know about things like this without having to check the Phorm files at El Reg.
I got my IBM Thinkpad T22 (P3 900 Coppermine, 256MB) to work with gOS (Gutsy derivative) and used my Linksys WPC54GS (bcm43xx) online with WPA-TKIP.
I blacklisted the kernel module and used ndiswrapper. Available with the distro, I chose to compile my own, as is my want.
Right now I'm using the same hardware with openSuSE 10.3, still with ndiswrapper. I just couldn't get on with Gutsy, I was "brought up" on SuSE.
It isn't that easy to do WiFi on Linux, but it isn't impossible. A couple of Googles and you're there. Fiddling about is well documented for Ubuntu, the forums are a mine of information on Linux, and most common problems have solutions there.
I just got kernel 2.6.24.4 running, but out of habit I didn't compile the bcm43xx driver, maybe I should.
That isn't an en_GB/en_US problem, FYI.
Just a bad spelling.
</Nazi>
iTunes got away with it.
DRM is supposed safe, BBC iPlayer downloads are supposed safe. All you have to do is convince a judge that you were using the video for your LifeBits and you can then use your other machine to give it away or whatever else you want to do with it.
I'm a proponent of Linux, whenever I can I slam a copy of gOS onto machines that I feel I'll have to come back to several times.
A lot less hassle if MSN and IE Just Won't Work =)
At the moment one of my my SO's family members lets their friend's kids come round and use the computer. They live in France. I have sent a Kubuntu LiveCD and instructions for setting up SSH. Should be a breeze doing admin over the 'net with screen and NX.
As for my own machine, I ghosted clean XP back to partition, shrunk it, installed Comodo and AVG, then used the other 25GB for openSUSE 10.3. With the latest kernel I can even use my ATA/133 drives at full speed again after the VIA 80/40 cable detection broke in the recent SuSE kernels. If only my ATI graffix card would work with Compiz *sigh*
So bring out a range of LifeBits cameras with built-in LifeBits DRM.
Plausible deniability right there.
Oh, and later on, when you get it home, use your Linux box to rip out the DRM and post it to Pirate Bay.
Actually, Virgin aren't that bad - In this respect, and this respect only. They suck otherwise (Phorm ... )
...
They tell you that you will be capped if you use the service at max rates during the time that everyone and their kids are using it. This is not a PCM cap, it ends at midnight.
If you want to torrent your arse off, set a QoS throttle on your router between 17:00 and 00:00, and let it rip during sleeping and working periods. The benefit to all is obvious.
And to pick you up on the pricing, I pay (PCM) £10 for the 2Mb service, £10 for phone and £10 for the bandwidth-challenged TV service that is so flakey I might go to Sky. With respect, I believe this was a special offer, but Uma told me about it, so I dragged my tongue back into my mouth and gave them a call. Mind, if it had been Ruby Wax doing the commercial I would have just hit the mute button
Can you tell me the secret to getting Norton off a Windows computer?
Live Updater, AV, FW and all the other bits seem to have their own dependency hell that won't let you uninstall in any order, and when you do finally get out the Knoppix CD and registry editor you're left with a system that looks like it has just had the worst virus of them all run rampant through it.
I long ago started recommending a reinstall if someone had Norton slowing their computer down.
I'm holding on to life in the hope that I live to see the Foundation Series turned into a set of movies.
Anyone who takes that on will be under as much scrutiny as Peter Jackson was for Lord Of The Rings, and will have real trouble with deciding how many movies to make.
On the financial side of producing Foundation, there are countless opportunities for shitty TV series spin-off shows featuring characters from the films. But let RealityTV morons pay with their eyeballs, I just want the movies.
Yes, sorry, 512KB.
Taken away by honeyed memories.
I thought everyone on Slashdot went for the "custom" or "advanced" installation routine as a matter of course?
We learned a long time ago that 9 times out of 10 you can avoid the sub-radar injection of spyware that way and this was a contributory factor in our machines working whilst others fell over all the time.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox
- Installed Firefox 3b
sudo apt-get remove firefox
sudo apt-cache search firefox
- Found the package name
sudo apt-get install firefox-2
That got me running Firefox 2.0.0.12 on Kubuntu. Took less than two minutes. <shrug>
Just for the hell of it, I didn't use sudo at all, I did sudo su before I started, I knew I was going to be using a lot of root commands.
I know I'm going to hell for becoming root on Kubuntu, you don't have to tell me =)
Having a Spectrum+ was the biggie. No rubber keys, but the same (to all intents and purposes) machine.
Every time I turned it on I used to 'POKE 23609, 190' to make the keypresses beep.
Long live Chuckie Egg 2!
My Beeb (Master) had an 8086 daughterboard inside.
... *configure tube
...
512MB RAM was enough to run DR-DOS.
Remember the days
That was all it took to get DOS to load up from the big-ass 5.25" floppies that didn't really have a lot on them. Better than the C/PM that I was using on my Amstrad PCW8256, but not quite as snazzy as playing Firetrack on the Beeb itself.
For historical purposes, I think the youngsters amongst us should be aware that even in those days we had porn. One of the kids at college gave me (through his little brother) some disks that had PC format porn on them, grainy black and white animated GIFs that looked worse than the newspapers, but WTF, they moved!
Notably, I had this DOS machine way before my school got a DOS box (Schneider 8086, orange screen) for us to look at and admire, and I have this awful feeling that I took the wind right out of my teacher's sails when I showed him how to use the thing. I imagine that either he, or his son are going to reply to this and tell me how I wasted my life by not making the most of my abilities with computers