What are the chances the downloadable music industry can learn from this? This freely downloadable mp3 is encoded at 192kbps, 50% higher than most if not all tracks available from the legal music download companies, which we pay for. Now go and give the Red Cross some money for their continuing relief efforts.
Have I got this straight, Jonesy? A $40 million computer tells you you're chasing an earthquake, but you don't believe, and you come up with this on your own?
sounds like it's about time for the tin foil hat and body suit/armor, or would that just arc and cause a slight buring sensation. I wonder what it would do to a single flat sheet of foil taped to cardboard box. Metal in a microwave will heat up and if it's close enough together, arc; ball of foil, fork, AOL cd. But that's in a closed space. What's next? The microwave tank from C&C Zero Hour that does fry people and disable buildings with its microwave laser. Finally something that will heat up the bad guy's weapon and make them drops it? I hope it's not strong enough to cause arcing in cartrige casings or the detonation of explosives.
Portable video player: what's battery life, which are the supported formats and does it have tv-out and how much memory will it have? My use of portable device playing video is limited to my Sharp Zaurus 5500(ARM 206MHz 32MB RAM, 32MB storage expandable by CF and SD cards 240x320 idsplay) I have a 1GB SD card to I can store about 2hrs of video. The limiting item is the memory, usually have about 16mb free, not enough to watch a 22min tv eps at 200+MB. Here are the specs of every ipod made so far: http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/consumer_ele ctronics/index.html the higest performance is the 3G/5R 90MHz x 2 32MB for skip free buffer. That would have to be at least doubled to ensure uninterrupted playing of anything larger than a 20MB file. It will probably be used like that cell phone in that commercial with the guy in the elevator, for movie trailers, sports clips and commercials, not tv eps and movies as I'm sure most of us would like. But that won't prevent those who will be able to afford it from spliting shows into a series of smaller files, similar to the ipod photo video clip "trick" of exporting a clip as frames and hitting the next botton as fast as their thumb will go.
of course the first question will be how long will the battery last, hopefully won't be the PSP-like estimates of 14hrs on a charge and it turns out to be 2hrs, a movie if you're lucky. And the 2nd will probably be what file types will it support. I think all portable audio players support mp3 and whatever DRM-ed format, acc, wma, rma. The newer iPod models have at least dual ARM 80MHz and 32MB buffer, that should be enough to play all formats at 500+k variable bitrate but the obsession on "piracy" and DRM is preventing that. When are the entertainment industry folks going to realize that anyone who wants something for free will find a way to get it for free. STOP punishing the people who PAY for their entertainment. When people BUY something they are less likely to give it away on P2P networks, they're going to KEEP it for their OWN USE. The worst that's going to happen is they share it with other people in their home, which I think itunes allows. I don't consider it to be "piracy" if you can't buy it, that tv show from last night that may not be released on DVD and if it is will not be in the next 5yrs. The questionable area are movies no longer in theaters and no announced DVD release date set.
I have the PVR I built myself, women can claim to be experts on the simpler DVR, I think they were designed to be female proof. If by expert they mean turn on/off and adjust the volume level and fast forward through the commercials. Guys can care less about the commercials, we don't need tv advertisements to tell us which products we need/want. When's the last time you saw a commercial for AMD or Maxtor or Acer notebooks? Never? It's Intel and their blue people and gateway with their running delivery staff and Dell with their $400 plain black towers and cheap 60Hz flat pannels(monitor not included).
I'd go with 4) more use of flash memory just about any USB flash drive can be made to be bootable: http://fuzzymunchkin.dyndns.org:8080/tdot/usbkeyfo b/index.php It worked with getting DamnSmallLimux on a year old 128mb PNY attache. The only problem is not every m-board wants to support boot from USB yet. I'm refering to the older/cheaper machines you're trying recover data from, not your own personal machine. And unlike a CD/DVD you can write to the free space.
What we need are the part flash and magnetic drives I think Hitachi or Toshiba or whoever is working on. The small partition we'd normally put Windows(yes, windows, I like new games) on is flash and the data area is a standard hdd, hopefully 10000+rpm with 16+mb buffer. It'd be nice if the flash part was removable/swapable that way it can be backed up once in a while and replaced when it nears 1mill writes or whatever the current estimated fail point is for flash memory. It seems to work with PDAs or at least the Zaurus(only one I've worked with) instant hibernation and resume. Startup time is about the same as a PC, but only needs to be done out of the box and when installing some apps.
I've got a better one, put it on ebay and have the auction end *after* the store release and see how many people don't pay attention to the auction-end time/date and bid a couple hundred, thousand if your lucky. That way unless the bidder wants a non playing bidder mark on their record you just made an easy few hundred dollars. the following is NOT LEGAL ADVICE: I think ending the auction after the store release would make it very easy to defend yourself from any possible legal action or attempts to close the auction by the publisher since the transfer of funds is after the 'offical' release and you're just selling a used book, nice a legal.
In these days of unnecessary obsessively excessive DRM and fears of ships flying the Jolly Rodger "leak" is such a strong word, too strong to describe this un-news worthy occurrence. This is something that can be explained away by "It's my first day" from a temp worker hired to stand outside the store wielding a torch and pitchfork to hold back the Potter nuts.(if you havn't noticed yet I don't care for the potter) Selling items is NOT a 'leak' it is an accidental sale before the release date, but that's what the publisher/distributer gets for supplying stores a week for the release date, I think Halo2 was about 3 days. From my 5min of looking into the 'Real Canadian Superstore' it's not a book store, looks like your average American supermarket, with maybe half an isle of books, and most of the staff probably doesn't know or care about a book's release date. If you've ever worked at one, other than a cashier, you know that they want to go through inventory as quickly as possible. If the boxes were not clearly labed in big letters "DO NOT OPEN/SELL BEFORE " I dont' see anyone getting fired over it.
From the screen shots and what I've read it looks like the recommended action was lowered from quarantine to ignore. But at least it displays it as a "possible" threat and anyone who gives it the slightest bit of attention will chage the action to remove. But as we all know more than enough people will just continue to click "Next" or "Yes" and the Gatorware will remain. Wait! Now isn't that how they initally got the spyware?(probably) If I remember correctly Spybot S&D's default option is to let the user check off which items to remove, it's been a while since it detected anything so I don't remember if the items were all selected by default. With all the spy/adware removal apps there have to be some that are even less good with their default options.
"And how long has it taken the movie industry to realise that you can mix around the Cinema -> DVD -> TV approach to satisfy customers? I've always believed that piracy flourishes due to lack of a commercial alternative and here we have someone looking at providing the movies in the period where consumers are demanding to watch the movie and are forced to go the cinema before the run is over."
exactly, I have one of those ulmimited rentals by mail subscriptions so I can get most of the movies/tv I want, except those not available on DVD yet and not rerun on cable tv every day. The ones I do "find" on the internets are the tv eps with no dvd release in the next year and movies months out of theaters, at least the ones near my home, yet still months away from DVD. SW3 may be one of them, May theater release, saw it twice, and probably no DVD release until the Christmas gift rush making it difficult to find, as if the 6month wait isn't bad enough. The key to stopping what they call "casual piracy" is high availability and low cost, high sales with low profit is just as good as fewer sales with higher, at least it makes sense to me, but the MPAA folks want to try for high sales at high profit.
Can we get a fancy signed note with a shiny gold sticker to give to our ISP when they cap/cut off our service us for breaking their unpublished usage limits? I almost feel sorry for the poor college students living in their dorms with very restricted network usage, maybe 2GB a week or 20KB/s. Going by MovieWeb's avgs of 700MB for "normal" or 1.4GB for "high quality" that's one or two a week, not enough for a slow weekend. These movie services may force some ISPs to upgrade their service and increase their usage caps if enough customers want to use a legal paid service(not pay for kazaa/bit torrent/other), especially if there's ever an unlimited use monthly subscription. It would have be very high quality, far enough before the dvd release and cheap enough for me to cancel my Blockbuster Online membership, $15/mo 3 at at time and 2 coupons for free in-store rentals.
Now that wirless networks are more popular, especially the unsecured ones, this could work well with internal wireless cards. You can't easily block a connection to your neighbor's open network unless you put it next to your own open AP not connected to the Internet or keep it in your own faraday cage lined room. Even that may give the trackers a general location and your neighbor can truthfully say they know nothing about it, could have been someone parked outside in their SUV.
If you really want the laptop and the data go and get a USB 2.5" drive case and pull out the hdd, copy then wipe it and install the software of your choice. If you're that concerned about your "borrowed" hardware then forget to install the drivers for any internal network card(s) and only use pc cards. If you do get caught with a hot laptop, you did remember to report it to a lost&found somewhere? "So you see officer/Mr FBI agent, I found this laptop on the train/bus and I DID report finding it and turned it on to look for an Owner.txt/ RewardIfFound.txt to try and contact the owner."
Objection, leading the witness... For some reason I have the feeling the reporter lectured the victim and encouraged him to give the nice quotes implying the worst case. As for "I'm mainly worried about what the guy may have uploaded or downloaded, like kiddie porn," Dinon said. "But I'll probably never know." Most routers have at least minimal logging, mac addr (as if that's not easy enough to fake) connection time and maybe websites or IPs
reminds me of this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/technology/4650225.stm plenty of talk about how mod chips "could" be used to bypass copy protection, but little coverage of the 80 games also included.
With an open AP I'd be more concerned with the neighbors with laptops running WinXP SP1 or no SP who can use the it auto connected to his network excuse. A friend of some other family member was visiting last week and I agreed to let them borrow my wireless card. gave it to her and went on with whatever I was doing waiting for her to ask me to enter the WEP key, she never did. It seems that even in a neighborhood of "older people" att least one of them knows of wireless networks, but not how to try and secure it.
Part 2: blame the wireless card makers Yes, it is nice to buy the AP and NIC of the same brand at the same time so you can have your 108Mbits UltraG with 256bit WAP and broadcast turned off, just try that when you have to make it work with 5 WNICs of all different brands, that's the most common reason I get when I ask "Why do you leave your wireless connection open?" there's always the hardware that doesn't want to play nice. With all the WNICs my family is using I'm stuck with 128bit WEP with ssid broadcast on at 11mbits, but at least it will show I was tring to protect it if someone breaks in and does something illegal and someone notices, the Feds for kiddy porn or the RIAA for some sucky Britney Spears collection of sound waves or the MPAA for a pre-release copy of SW3 or for some pointless "anonymous" post to their friend's W(ebl)OG.
But there are some WAREZ people who like having an open network or at least an unsecured AP, even if it's not connected to anything or maybe as a honey pot so they can tell their ISP "someone hacked my wireless network and this the MAC addr my router logged" to not get sued for some copyright infringement.
good idea, someone needs to patent the "business practice" of producing songs that no one wants to hear and then suing people who you think could possibly be downloading them to make up for lost revenues due to the unpopularity of your crap and failed business methods. Then sue the RIAA every time it throws out random lawsuits.
Primary: usb hdd, weekly secondary: DVD+RW, bi-weekly using 2 sets of disks, going back a month third-dary: free space on 2nd hdd The main reason I prefer external drives is the independent power supply. No chance of a power supply blowing up and taking your fancy RAID array with it. Even a good UPS(500VA APC) can produce a good size power surge if it's properly overloaded and then you hear your roommate yell OH S**T from the next room. Unless you get more drives the physical space it uses will always remain the same, unless you're using RWs CD/DVDs and cases will start taking up loks of space with weekly backups. Decent USB2 external case: no more than $30 then you can plug in the hdd of you choice.
...or the MAC equivalent, as long as you don't modify data on the hdd it should be very close to completely undetectable, just hold C during boot and you're set.
"Most of the students accused were freshmen, but a few were sophomores and juniors. None of the accused were seniors."
They can always use the freshman defence: "The seniors(none of which are being charged with anything) locked me in a locker for a few hours, they must have used the computer assigned to me to test their 'hacks' to avoid getting caught. Might be embarrassing to admit being stuffed in a locker, but if it saves you from a felony conviction it might be worth a try.
"Shrawder said the secret password "50Trexler," was widely-known among the student body and distributed early in the school year. It allowed between 80 and 100 students to reconfigure their laptops, he said."
"was widely-known among the student body and distributed early in the school year"
I'm seeing this as being very close to the school had a bunch of things locked up with combination locks, my HS did this, and all have the same combination and somehow the combination got out maybe in mid-Oct. What would/should the school do? Change the locks/combinations or wait until after the school year is over then try and prosecute anyone they think accessed the locked areas? I wonder if that school has any signed honor code, then they could give them the admin pword and punish everyone who used it. If the school administration knew about the breach or had enough reason to believe a breach had taken place they could have changed the admin password and recalled and re-imaged all the machines and called it updating or performing maintenance or a Coast Guard health&safety inspection for all I care. Yes, the kids did something wrong and should be punished but the school should be more concerned in plugging the leak, unless someone brute-forced the pword.
What would you do if you didn't like your school spying on you and you had the admin pword and could disable the "security monitoring software"(spyware)? With the years of experience most of us have we can say: "I'd refuse to use it" and have our parents write a letter showing their support of our decision. I don't think a school can fail a student for not wanting to use their computer.
Autoplay is one of those useless things that for some reason(s) have not yet been removed from Windows. I'm guessing it's for all the people who can't find their CD drive in "My Computer" and setup.exe on the disk. I never liked having to wait for the autoplay to run and exit after inserting a disk and have been disabling it since '96/7 and telling people to disable it shortly after when someone I know linked the autorun to a virus and gave it to a friend. I was well compensated for my time removing it but still don't think it was worth the effort, he was asking for it.
For anyone who still doesn't know how to disable that very annoying Windows "feature", better than remembering to hold 'Shift' every time you insert a CD-
win95/98/ME - properties of the CD drive from My Computer browse the other tabs and find auto insert notification and check or uncheck the box depending on if it's to disable or not, it's been a while since I've used it.
2000/XP - run gpedit.msc(Group Policy edit), Administrative templates - System - Disable Autoplay, enable it.
For some reason this can be used to "bypass" someone's "copy protection" which secretly auto-installs itself on autoplay of the disk without user notification, sounds a lot like a virus/spyware to me.
Nope, they just want people to watch the commercials and buy all the advertised products like a bunch of impulsive cash cows then spend even more when they buy it on DVD one season at a time over the next couple years before they re-release it on HD-DVD and then whatever media is created next.
This is no longer and issue of fair use. (ok, so it never really was) It's an issue of making more money from future DVD sales which may or may not ever exist.
Here's the TV/MPAA's business plan in a way we can all understand:
1) Produce semi-decent tv series
(shown ONCE a week and never re-run)
2) Wait a couple years and release on DVD
3) PROFIT!!!
It's a nice plan, but does NOT comply with the demands of the comsumers who wanted to watch the show last night but were not home and don't want to spend their hard earned cash on a piece of dated technology(VCR) and want to wait until everyone decides on the DRM(or lack of) before buying a (HD-)DVR/HD=TV card, or want to wait until a reasonably priced HD-TV service is available in their area.
Have you ever taken the NY/NJ subway/PATH? It's probably the same in other cities with subways or underground trains or whatever they're called by the locals. (feel free to correct me on that)
Use a $2 $5 $10 or $20 bill to buy a Metro card or ticket or just to get change and all you get are the $1 coins. They still have a dedicated use there, but limited elsewhere. It's the easiest way for an automated machine to give change for large denomination bills. They're also useful for fighting off muggers, put a couple in a sock and swing away(try at your own risk)
I keep one in my wallet just so I'll have some petty cash for a snack/drink if I spend all my paper currency, but it's primary purpose is as a novelty item.
Exactly, move it to another time slot where it doesn't have to compete with the very successful SG-1. It was doing fine in the Wed 8pm slot until UPN needed another reality show to compete with Survivor^n or Who wants to be Trump's Idol or whatever they're based on these days.(I haven't bothered to check).
"Enterprise is the kind of TV that should be aired more often."
It is the type of tv that should be shown more often. Shows with real writers and a real script and real actors.(if you don't like it compare it to TNG season 1) But it had to be moved and replaced by "America's Next Top Model" to be killed off by SG-1. To make a bad RPG comarison: a season 4 show can't(easily) beat a season 8 show.
To UPN & Paramount: You know the ratings, move Enterprise to a time slot where it can compete, killing off one of the so called "reality" shows will be a benefit to everyone.
so when did they get around to fixing it?
I bought my copy of Spaceballs about three months ago, is it really WS or do I have to go convince BestBuy(starting the BestBuy comments...now) to let me exchange an open DVD purchased several months ago bought at another store for a new one?
I have the same problem at Rutgers and here's my way around it. Instead of reinstalling every time get the zipped distro of firefox and put it on a usb drive. It can be personalized a little: replace Firefox\defaults\profile\bookmarks.html with your saved bookmarks and copy the contents of Firefox\plugins to Firefox 1.0\plugins on the usb drive. I havn't tried it with any themes or extensions yet.
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What are the chances the downloadable music industry can learn from this?
This freely downloadable mp3 is encoded at 192kbps, 50% higher than most if not all tracks available from the legal music download companies, which we pay for.
Now go and give the Red Cross some money for their continuing relief efforts.
Have I got this straight, Jonesy? A $40 million computer tells you you're chasing an earthquake, but you don't believe, and you come up with this on your own?
sounds like it's about time for the tin foil hat and body suit/armor, or would that just arc and cause a slight buring sensation.
I wonder what it would do to a single flat sheet of foil taped to cardboard box. Metal in a microwave will heat up and if it's close enough together, arc; ball of foil, fork, AOL cd. But that's in a closed space.
What's next? The microwave tank from C&C Zero Hour that does fry people and disable buildings with its microwave laser. Finally something that will heat up the bad guy's weapon and make them drops it? I hope it's not strong enough to cause arcing in cartrige casings or the detonation of explosives.
Portable video player: what's battery life, which are the supported formats and does it have tv-out and how much memory will it have?e ctronics/index.html
My use of portable device playing video is limited to my Sharp Zaurus 5500(ARM 206MHz 32MB RAM, 32MB storage expandable by CF and SD cards 240x320 idsplay) I have a 1GB SD card to I can store about 2hrs of video. The limiting item is the memory, usually have about 16mb free, not enough to watch a 22min tv eps at 200+MB.
Here are the specs of every ipod made so far:
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/consumer_el
the higest performance is the 3G/5R 90MHz x 2 32MB for skip free buffer. That would have to be at least doubled to ensure uninterrupted playing of anything larger than a 20MB file.
It will probably be used like that cell phone in that commercial with the guy in the elevator, for movie trailers, sports clips and commercials, not tv eps and movies as I'm sure most of us would like. But that won't prevent those who will be able to afford it from spliting shows into a series of smaller files, similar to the ipod photo video clip "trick" of exporting a clip as frames and hitting the next botton as fast as their thumb will go.
of course the first question will be how long will the battery last, hopefully won't be the PSP-like estimates of 14hrs on a charge and it turns out to be 2hrs, a movie if you're lucky.
And the 2nd will probably be what file types will it support. I think all portable audio players support mp3 and whatever DRM-ed format, acc, wma, rma. The newer iPod models have at least dual ARM 80MHz and 32MB buffer, that should be enough to play all formats at 500+k variable bitrate but the obsession on "piracy" and DRM is preventing that.
When are the entertainment industry folks going to realize that anyone who wants something for free will find a way to get it for free. STOP punishing the people who PAY for their entertainment. When people BUY something they are less likely to give it away on P2P networks, they're going to KEEP it for their OWN USE. The worst that's going to happen is they share it with other people in their home, which I think itunes allows.
I don't consider it to be "piracy" if you can't buy it, that tv show from last night that may not be released on DVD and if it is will not be in the next 5yrs. The questionable area are movies no longer in theaters and no announced DVD release date set.
I have the PVR I built myself, women can claim to be experts on the simpler DVR, I think they were designed to be female proof. If by expert they mean turn on/off and adjust the volume level and fast forward through the commercials.
Guys can care less about the commercials, we don't need tv advertisements to tell us which products we need/want. When's the last time you saw a commercial for AMD or Maxtor or Acer notebooks? Never? It's Intel and their blue people and gateway with their running delivery staff and Dell with their $400 plain black towers and cheap 60Hz flat pannels(monitor not included).
I'd go with 4) more use of flash memoryo b/index.php
just about any USB flash drive can be made to be bootable: http://fuzzymunchkin.dyndns.org:8080/tdot/usbkeyf
It worked with getting DamnSmallLimux on a year old 128mb PNY attache. The only problem is not every m-board wants to support boot from USB yet. I'm refering to the older/cheaper machines you're trying recover data from, not your own personal machine. And unlike a CD/DVD you can write to the free space.
What we need are the part flash and magnetic drives I think Hitachi or Toshiba or whoever is working on. The small partition we'd normally put Windows(yes, windows, I like new games) on is flash and the data area is a standard hdd, hopefully 10000+rpm with 16+mb buffer. It'd be nice if the flash part was removable/swapable that way it can be backed up once in a while and replaced when it nears 1mill writes or whatever the current estimated fail point is for flash memory. It seems to work with PDAs or at least the Zaurus(only one I've worked with) instant hibernation and resume. Startup time is about the same as a PC, but only needs to be done out of the box and when installing some apps.
I've got a better one, put it on ebay and have the auction end *after* the store release and see how many people don't pay attention to the auction-end time/date and bid a couple hundred, thousand if your lucky. That way unless the bidder wants a non playing bidder mark on their record you just made an easy few hundred dollars.
the following is NOT LEGAL ADVICE:
I think ending the auction after the store release would make it very easy to defend yourself from any possible legal action or attempts to close the auction by the publisher since the transfer of funds is after the 'offical' release and you're just selling a used book, nice a legal.
In these days of unnecessary obsessively excessive DRM and fears of ships flying the Jolly Rodger "leak" is such a strong word, too strong to describe this un-news worthy occurrence. This is something that can be explained away by "It's my first day" from a temp worker hired to stand outside the store wielding a torch and pitchfork to hold back the Potter nuts.(if you havn't noticed yet I don't care for the potter)
Selling items is NOT a 'leak' it is an accidental sale before the release date, but that's what the publisher/distributer gets for supplying stores a week for the release date, I think Halo2 was about 3 days.
From my 5min of looking into the 'Real Canadian Superstore' it's not a book store, looks like your average American supermarket, with maybe half an isle of books, and most of the staff probably doesn't know or care about a book's release date. If you've ever worked at one, other than a cashier, you know that they want to go through inventory as quickly as possible.
If the boxes were not clearly labed in big letters "DO NOT OPEN/SELL BEFORE " I dont' see anyone getting fired over it.
From the screen shots and what I've read it looks like the recommended action was lowered from quarantine to ignore. But at least it displays it as a "possible" threat and anyone who gives it the slightest bit of attention will chage the action to remove. But as we all know more than enough people will just continue to click "Next" or "Yes" and the Gatorware will remain. Wait! Now isn't that how they initally got the spyware?(probably) If I remember correctly Spybot S&D's default option is to let the user check off which items to remove, it's been a while since it detected anything so I don't remember if the items were all selected by default. With all the spy/adware removal apps there have to be some that are even less good with their default options.
this is the first I've heard of that feature, which brand?
Turning off unused devices is a nice battery saver.
"And how long has it taken the movie industry to realise that you can mix around the Cinema -> DVD -> TV approach to satisfy customers? I've always believed that piracy flourishes due to lack of a commercial alternative and here we have someone looking at providing the movies in the period where consumers are demanding to watch the movie and are forced to go the cinema before the run is over."
exactly, I have one of those ulmimited rentals by mail subscriptions so I can get most of the movies/tv I want, except those not available on DVD yet and not rerun on cable tv every day. The ones I do "find" on the internets are the tv eps with no dvd release in the next year and movies months out of theaters, at least the ones near my home, yet still months away from DVD. SW3 may be one of them, May theater release, saw it twice, and probably no DVD release until the Christmas gift rush making it difficult to find, as if the 6month wait isn't bad enough.
The key to stopping what they call "casual piracy" is high availability and low cost, high sales with low profit is just as good as fewer sales with higher, at least it makes sense to me, but the MPAA folks want to try for high sales at high profit.
Can we get a fancy signed note with a shiny gold sticker to give to our ISP when they cap/cut off our service us for breaking their unpublished usage limits? I almost feel sorry for the poor college students living in their dorms with very restricted network usage, maybe 2GB a week or 20KB/s. Going by MovieWeb's avgs of 700MB for "normal" or 1.4GB for "high quality" that's one or two a week, not enough for a slow weekend.
These movie services may force some ISPs to upgrade their service and increase their usage caps if enough customers want to use a legal paid service(not pay for kazaa/bit torrent/other), especially if there's ever an unlimited use monthly subscription.
It would have be very high quality, far enough before the dvd release and cheap enough for me to cancel my Blockbuster Online membership, $15/mo 3 at at time and 2 coupons for free in-store rentals.
Now that wirless networks are more popular, especially the unsecured ones, this could work well with internal wireless cards. You can't easily block a connection to your neighbor's open network unless you put it next to your own open AP not connected to the Internet or keep it in your own faraday cage lined room. Even that may give the trackers a general location and your neighbor can truthfully say they know nothing about it, could have been someone parked outside in their SUV.
If you really want the laptop and the data go and get a USB 2.5" drive case and pull out the hdd, copy then wipe it and install the software of your choice. If you're that concerned about your "borrowed" hardware then forget to install the drivers for any internal network card(s) and only use pc cards.
If you do get caught with a hot laptop, you did remember to report it to a lost&found somewhere? "So you see officer/Mr FBI agent, I found this laptop on the train/bus and I DID report finding it and turned it on to look for an Owner.txt/ RewardIfFound.txt to try and contact the owner."
Objection, leading the witness...
For some reason I have the feeling the reporter lectured the victim and encouraged him to give the nice quotes implying the worst case.
As for "I'm mainly worried about what the guy may have uploaded or downloaded, like kiddie porn," Dinon said. "But I'll probably never know." Most routers have at least minimal logging, mac addr (as if that's not easy enough to fake) connection time and maybe websites or IPs
reminds me of this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/technology/4650225.stm
plenty of talk about how mod chips "could" be used to bypass copy protection, but little coverage of the 80 games also included.
With an open AP I'd be more concerned with the neighbors with laptops running WinXP SP1 or no SP who can use the it auto connected to his network excuse. A friend of some other family member was visiting last week and I agreed to let them borrow my wireless card. gave it to her and went on with whatever I was doing waiting for her to ask me to enter the WEP key, she never did. It seems that even in a neighborhood of "older people" att least one of them knows of wireless networks, but not how to try and secure it.
Part 2: blame the wireless card makers
Yes, it is nice to buy the AP and NIC of the same brand at the same time so you can have your 108Mbits UltraG with 256bit WAP and broadcast turned off, just try that when you have to make it work with 5 WNICs of all different brands, that's the most common reason I get when I ask "Why do you leave your wireless connection open?" there's always the hardware that doesn't want to play nice. With all the WNICs my family is using I'm stuck with 128bit WEP with ssid broadcast on at 11mbits, but at least it will show I was tring to protect it if someone breaks in and does something illegal and someone notices, the Feds for kiddy porn or the RIAA for some sucky Britney Spears collection of sound waves or the MPAA for a pre-release copy of SW3 or for some pointless "anonymous" post to their friend's W(ebl)OG.
But there are some WAREZ people who like having an open network or at least an unsecured AP, even if it's not connected to anything or maybe as a honey pot so they can tell their ISP "someone hacked my wireless network and this the MAC addr my router logged" to not get sued for some copyright infringement.
good idea, someone needs to patent the "business practice" of producing songs that no one wants to hear and then suing people who you think could possibly be downloading them to make up for lost revenues due to the unpopularity of your crap and failed business methods. Then sue the RIAA every time it throws out random lawsuits.
Primary: usb hdd, weekly
secondary: DVD+RW, bi-weekly using 2 sets of disks, going back a month
third-dary: free space on 2nd hdd
The main reason I prefer external drives is the independent power supply. No chance of a power supply blowing up and taking your fancy RAID array with it. Even a good UPS(500VA APC) can produce a good size power surge if it's properly overloaded and then you hear your roommate yell OH S**T from the next room. Unless you get more drives the physical space it uses will always remain the same, unless you're using RWs CD/DVDs and cases will start taking up loks of space with weekly backups. Decent USB2 external case: no more than $30 then you can plug in the hdd of you choice.
...or the MAC equivalent, as long as you don't modify data on the hdd it should be very close to completely undetectable, just hold C during boot and you're set.
"Most of the students accused were freshmen, but a few were sophomores and juniors. None of the accused were seniors."
They can always use the freshman defence: "The seniors(none of which are being charged with anything) locked me in a locker for a few hours, they must have used the computer assigned to me to test their 'hacks' to avoid getting caught. Might be embarrassing to admit being stuffed in a locker, but if it saves you from a felony conviction it might be worth a try.
"Shrawder said the secret password "50Trexler," was widely-known among the student body and distributed early in the school year. It allowed between 80 and 100 students to reconfigure their laptops, he said."
"was widely-known among the student body and distributed early in the school year"
I'm seeing this as being very close to the school had a bunch of things locked up with combination locks, my HS did this, and all have the same combination and somehow the combination got out maybe in mid-Oct. What would/should the school do? Change the locks/combinations or wait until after the school year is over then try and prosecute anyone they think accessed the locked areas? I wonder if that school has any signed honor code, then they could give them the admin pword and punish everyone who used it. If the school administration knew about the breach or had enough reason to believe a breach had taken place they could have changed the admin password and recalled and re-imaged all the machines and called it updating or performing maintenance or a Coast Guard health&safety inspection for all I care. Yes, the kids did something wrong and should be punished but the school should be more concerned in plugging the leak, unless someone brute-forced the pword.
What would you do if you didn't like your school spying on you and you had the admin pword and could disable the "security monitoring software"(spyware)? With the years of experience most of us have we can say: "I'd refuse to use it" and have our parents write a letter showing their support of our decision. I don't think a school can fail a student for not wanting to use their computer.
Autoplay is one of those useless things that for some reason(s) have not yet been removed from Windows. I'm guessing it's for all the people who can't find their CD drive in "My Computer" and setup.exe on the disk. I never liked having to wait for the autoplay to run and exit after inserting a disk and have been disabling it since '96/7 and telling people to disable it shortly after when someone I know linked the autorun to a virus and gave it to a friend. I was well compensated for my time removing it but still don't think it was worth the effort, he was asking for it.
For anyone who still doesn't know how to disable that very annoying Windows "feature", better than remembering to hold 'Shift' every time you insert a CD-
win95/98/ME - properties of the CD drive from My Computer browse the other tabs and find auto insert notification and check or uncheck the box depending on if it's to disable or not, it's been a while since I've used it.
2000/XP - run gpedit.msc(Group Policy edit), Administrative templates - System - Disable Autoplay, enable it.
For some reason this can be used to "bypass" someone's "copy protection" which secretly auto-installs itself on autoplay of the disk without user notification, sounds a lot like a virus/spyware to me.
This is no longer and issue of fair use. (ok, so it never really was) It's an issue of making more money from future DVD sales which may or may not ever exist.
Here's the TV/MPAA's business plan in a way we can all understand:
1) Produce semi-decent tv series
(shown ONCE a week and never re-run)
2) Wait a couple years and release on DVD
3) PROFIT!!!
It's a nice plan, but does NOT comply with the demands of the comsumers who wanted to watch the show last night but were not home and don't want to spend their hard earned cash on a piece of dated technology(VCR) and want to wait until everyone decides on the DRM(or lack of) before buying a (HD-)DVR/HD=TV card, or want to wait until a reasonably priced HD-TV service is available in their area.
Use a $2 $5 $10 or $20 bill to buy a Metro card or ticket or just to get change and all you get are the $1 coins. They still have a dedicated use there, but limited elsewhere. It's the easiest way for an automated machine to give change for large denomination bills. They're also useful for fighting off muggers, put a couple in a sock and swing away(try at your own risk)
I keep one in my wallet just so I'll have some petty cash for a snack/drink if I spend all my paper currency, but it's primary purpose is as a novelty item.
"Enterprise is the kind of TV that should be aired more often."
It is the type of tv that should be shown more often. Shows with real writers and a real script and real actors.(if you don't like it compare it to TNG season 1) But it had to be moved and replaced by "America's Next Top Model" to be killed off by SG-1. To make a bad RPG comarison: a season 4 show can't(easily) beat a season 8 show.
To UPN & Paramount: You know the ratings, move Enterprise to a time slot where it can compete, killing off one of the so called "reality" shows will be a benefit to everyone.
so when did they get around to fixing it? I bought my copy of Spaceballs about three months ago, is it really WS or do I have to go convince BestBuy(starting the BestBuy comments...now) to let me exchange an open DVD purchased several months ago bought at another store for a new one?
I have the same problem at Rutgers and here's my way around it.
Instead of reinstalling every time get the zipped distro of firefox and put it on a usb drive. It can be personalized a little:
replace Firefox\defaults\profile\bookmarks.html with your saved bookmarks
and copy the contents of Firefox\plugins to Firefox 1.0\plugins on the usb drive.
I havn't tried it with any themes or extensions yet.