If the company providing the goods or service to the end user gets broken into, wouldn't it be possible for the malicious party to charge huge fees to the victims' authenticated credit cards using valid private keys?
Different login name, and I've been checking my CC online invoice often since hearing of this incident. Plus my bank put my card on hold when I bought a CD and then made a charitable donation online in rapid succession, until they called me 30 minutes later to verify I had made those purchases. I have faith in my bank.
Steam is handling this situation extremely poorly in my books. I emailed Steam Support about 18 hours ago, again 6 hours ago, and have received no reply. I've spent about $200 over Steam and until now have received excellent service. Now I'm royally pissed off.
As you can see this issue, rumour or otherwise, is public knowledge and widespread. Valve's lack of a statement on this is very conspicuous. Please confirm or deny this story so that I can rest at ease.
I'm not panicking and I'm not about to cancel my credit card, but I'm furious that Valve will not at least advise me whether or not I should do so. If they don't contact me by midnight I'll never buy through their service again. Furthermore, I'll probably join in on any class action lawsuit.
I sincerely hope Google will simply replace all DoubleClick-crippled sites with AdSense. DoubleClick's tracking cookies are the reason I block web ads.
Every story with "Canada" in the title gets that stupid tag. I'm really tired of it. It was cute the first 3 times. The subsequent 500 times went from cheesy to frustrating to insulting pretty quickly. If I could omit that one tag somehow I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Alex St. John is a regular columnist for Computer Power User magazine and he is constantly bashing Microsoft. This interview was fascinating in that it revealed where he's coming from, but it doesn't really excuse his demeanour. Take his words with a grain of salt - all he writes about is Microsoft and he never has anything positive to say.
"Okay, you just bought yourself a 317: Pointing out police stupidity." - Chief Wiggum
America will throw the book at McKinnon because they are embarassed of their lax security practises on such high profile systems. They will make an example of McKinnon because he used little more than a brute force 2-line PERL script to bombard many desktops with obvious passwords (e.g., "password" or "" [blank]).
America is even more ashamed of this security breach because the many same systems were infiltrated by Mathew Bevan using the exact same tactics over 10 years prior. That's right - these government and military and NASA computers have had no password policy after 10 years and 2 break-ins. Adding the number 1 to the end of these passwords would have stopped McKinnon dead in his tracks.
McKinnon is not a sophisticated programmer or cracker. He simply challenged seemingly high security systems with very low-tech kludgey scripts to see what would happen. He got lucky, then he got audacious, and then he got careless.
Get ready for another Mitnick-scale high profile court case on this one. McKinnon won't fry, but he won't see the sun for quite some time.
I just flipped over to my Ubuntu partition and actually thought that the font was even bigger and clearer than in Windows. I'm using Gnome on the latest stable Ubuntu distro (Edgy Eft). I even tried browsing in links which didn't really have a point, I suppose, though I learned that my template is not at all SEO optimized.
I just don't know what the problem could be. The template uses Arial primarily with 3 other secondary typefaces. Maybe I should omit the secondary fonts so that it reverts to the system default. Failing this, could it possibly be your monitor contrast or brightness?
As for white type on a black background being trendy, that may be the case but that's not why I picked it. I learned in a design class that this is -supposed to- make text more legible and easier on the eyes on computer screens. Paper reflects light and black in absorbs it so text actually relieves your eyes when you focus on it, but computer monitors omit light which can be harsh on eyes so light text on a dark background draws your gaze to the highlights of the words. This is only theory but it sure sounded convincing to me.
I'll see what I can do about making a "Template Off" or "Format for print" button with no frills. Much appreciated!
P.s., you ought to consider upgrading to Firefox 2.x. I don't know if that's what's required to make my site look right, but the in-line spell checker alone is what sold me on the upgrade.
I really appreciate your feedback on this. I've viewed my blog in Firefox 1.5 and 2.0, IE 6 and 7, and Opera 9 on Windows, and in Firefox on Ubuntu, and it's looked the same to me on all those platforms. I even increased the font size from the template original. Is it possible your browser is overriding the stylesheet? Is my blog the only site that looks crappy on your browser?
If Sega discontinues Dreamcast service, how will they populate their canned technical support response?
I bought Outrun 2006 for PC via Steam a couple of months ago. The game consistently froze my computer every time I played the game for more than about 30 seconds. It's the only game I have trouble with so I asked Sega for support, noting specifically that I needed assistance with my PC. It took them 2 weeks to reply and they sent me a generic response featuring links on how to repair and clean a Dreamcast. Luckily Steam was understanding enough to issue me a refund - one of two refunds I've ever gotten for a software product in 20 years.
I was going to paste the generic reply letter here but it's longer than I remembered it, so here's a link to my blog where I give a full description of my account. Needless to say I won't be buying Sega software for a PC ever again.
What I perhaps failed to say clearly in my first message was that it's hard to take a person or country seriously when they say "Do as we say, not as we do." America is quite famous for attempting to impose restrictions on others that they do not intend to respect themselves. I know their heart is often in the right place when they enforce things like non-proliferation of weapons, but I can understand how a country like Iran would be wary of laying down all its arms with a 300 pound gorilla breathing right down its neck.
You don't think it's out of the ordinary that the country with the most nuclear weapons invaded another country for having weapons of mass destruction? Whether or not that turned out to be false (and we all know the answer to that one) that is a deplorable hypocrisy. The country with the largest nuclear arsenal most certainly is special.
Not necessarily on topic, but an important counterpoint to your generic statements, I feel.
I don't think Pearl Jam had any trouble selling out concerts in the mid 90's. Maybe whoever told me the story had rose-coloured glasses but he seemed pretty confident that Pearl Jam had (for what it's worth) publicly battled with, and then abandoned, TicketMaster due to the high percentage of their take. Maybe that was just a PR move to differentiate them from other bands, but so long as it's in favour of the fans I'll support it.
However, I agree with you 110% that if a musician really cares about his or her fans then they ought to release their music for free. In my opinion music is one of the most powerful human creations of all time but it's nothing to be proud of if it's your primary career. I wrote nearly 20 songs in the 90's and I distribute them all for free. I don't even put ads on the website. That's the only ethical way to distribute music in my opinion.
I don't know about the others, but 10 years ago Pearl Jam boycotted TicketMaster on the grounds that their service fees were exorbitant. I've never been a huge fan of their music but I support that band 100% for their support of their fans.
You bring up a great point though. If your favourite band works for the RIAA then you are not their top priority, money is.
My dad's doing the same thing. He just ordered a couple of desktops and a laptop for work and Dell provided no alternative to Vista - no XP, no Linux, no clean hard drive. His IT department will be wiping all the disks and installing XP the moment they come through the door.
He'll also be very pleased when I forward a Digg article (can I say the D word on/.?) to him recanting the easy time a German fellow had in acquiring a refund when he told their support department that he'd declined the EULA and promptly formatted his drive. Dell was very forthcoming and earnest and tendered him a refund of (the equivalent of) nearly $120 USD a mere 2 days after his initial call.
I'm sceptical about any service that requires me to surrender my credit card to try it out, and then cancel my trial lest I be charged monthly. However, the price is right and I'm not averse to giving it a try. I think I'll try 30 songs to see how it goes. It's the best pricing scheme I've seen since AllOfMP3, but from what I've read, eMusic doesn't offer as many varieties of bitrate and formats as AllOfMP3.
eMusic sounds great from your description, but the website is pretty frustrating. It reveals nothing about the artists onboard or the browsing interface. I tried signing up for a free trial but it requires a credit card. It really does sound intriguing, though the advertised 2 million songs really isn't that many - especially when you like obscure music genres as I do.
It's a sad thing to admit, but I'm officially afraid of music now. Afraid and angry. I'm afraid of rootkits, embedded media player software that auto-installs, and CDs that will not play on computers. And I'm right pissed off about this because, while I am indeed a music pirate, I have an enormous collection of legitimately purchased music.
Now I refuse to buy music. It is no longer an option. I hate the music industry and I refuse to support even my favourite artists for subjecting their fans to such hazards. I listen to music to accentuate whatever it is I'm doing, and I refuse to change my lifestyle to suit music.
I'm done with buying music. Maybe forever. It all depends on the music industry. I want hassle-free music. I don't care what medium it comes on as long as I can transfer it to whatever media suit what I'm doing that day. I refuse to repurchase albums on other formats. I'm done buying widgets. Music is not something that fits in your hand. Sell me music or begone.
P.s., when I hear audacious BS like the recording industry suing a restaurant for playing music in the dining room my sympathy for their pleas disappears. To empathise with an industry that cannot be satisfied is futile.
A royalty obligation to SoundExchange still exists so long as any listeners are based in the United States.
How do you enforce that? How can you prevent Americans from tuning into an internet resource? If this is true I think it could be shot down fairly easily.
Performance licensing of sound-recordings is dependent on where the performance itself takes place -- not the location of the streaming server.
I really think a loophole could be found in this formula. For instance, what if you uploaded all the music to the offshore stream host? Then the performance would originate from that country.
This is very similar to the eDonkey legal battles of several years ago. The law reinforced that it is illegal to host pirated materials, so eDonkey came around which introduced websites with nothing but links to the pirated material. Some countries then made it illegal to link to this material, so the sites provided links to the links. A few countries got even more audacious and tried to make hash checksums for pirated material illegal, but it was easily argued that identical checksums could be generated for legal archives or at random.
Not to say that streaming radio is equivalent to pirating. I think the music industry is stupid to enforce this. If people lose access to these freely accessible, low-quality streams, they will simply start downloading high quality alternatives whether legal or not.
What about offshore servers? Are you still liable to pay royalties if you're "broadcasting" from Israel or Sweden? Technically you'd be unicasting to your server, not broadcasting to an audience.
Slashdot Mirror
If the company providing the goods or service to the end user gets broken into, wouldn't it be possible for the malicious party to charge huge fees to the victims' authenticated credit cards using valid private keys?
Different login name, and I've been checking my CC online invoice often since hearing of this incident. Plus my bank put my card on hold when I bought a CD and then made a charitable donation online in rapid succession, until they called me 30 minutes later to verify I had made those purchases. I have faith in my bank.
Steam is handling this situation extremely poorly in my books. I emailed Steam Support about 18 hours ago, again 6 hours ago, and have received no reply. I've spent about $200 over Steam and until now have received excellent service. Now I'm royally pissed off.
o _may_be_at_risk
Here is my first email to Steam:
I read a distressing article today claiming that Steam's databases were broken into and credit card information was stolen:
http://emp.damage-web.net/viewtopic.php?p=62590
Is this true? Do I need to cancel my credit card? Please advise ASAP!
And here is my second one, posted this morning:
Do I really need to tell you that this urgent question is time-sensitive?
http://digg.com/gaming_news/Valve_Hacked_Your_Inf
As you can see this issue, rumour or otherwise, is public knowledge and widespread. Valve's lack of a statement on this is very conspicuous. Please confirm or deny this story so that I can rest at ease.
I'm not panicking and I'm not about to cancel my credit card, but I'm furious that Valve will not at least advise me whether or not I should do so. If they don't contact me by midnight I'll never buy through their service again. Furthermore, I'll probably join in on any class action lawsuit.
I sincerely hope Google will simply replace all DoubleClick-crippled sites with AdSense. DoubleClick's tracking cookies are the reason I block web ads.
Every story with "Canada" in the title gets that stupid tag. I'm really tired of it. It was cute the first 3 times. The subsequent 500 times went from cheesy to frustrating to insulting pretty quickly. If I could omit that one tag somehow I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Alex St. John is a regular columnist for Computer Power User magazine and he is constantly bashing Microsoft. This interview was fascinating in that it revealed where he's coming from, but it doesn't really excuse his demeanour. Take his words with a grain of salt - all he writes about is Microsoft and he never has anything positive to say.
I'm pretty sure you're thinking of Sewer Shark and Kriss Kross: Make Your Own Video which were both for SegaCD, not Saturn.
What are you, a UFO sympathizer?
"Okay, you just bought yourself a 317: Pointing out police stupidity." - Chief Wiggum
America will throw the book at McKinnon because they are embarassed of their lax security practises on such high profile systems. They will make an example of McKinnon because he used little more than a brute force 2-line PERL script to bombard many desktops with obvious passwords (e.g., "password" or "" [blank]).
America is even more ashamed of this security breach because the many same systems were infiltrated by Mathew Bevan using the exact same tactics over 10 years prior. That's right - these government and military and NASA computers have had no password policy after 10 years and 2 break-ins. Adding the number 1 to the end of these passwords would have stopped McKinnon dead in his tracks.
McKinnon is not a sophisticated programmer or cracker. He simply challenged seemingly high security systems with very low-tech kludgey scripts to see what would happen. He got lucky, then he got audacious, and then he got careless.
Get ready for another Mitnick-scale high profile court case on this one. McKinnon won't fry, but he won't see the sun for quite some time.
Thanks! Glad to hear my design issues aren't too widespread.
I just flipped over to my Ubuntu partition and actually thought that the font was even bigger and clearer than in Windows. I'm using Gnome on the latest stable Ubuntu distro (Edgy Eft). I even tried browsing in links which didn't really have a point, I suppose, though I learned that my template is not at all SEO optimized.
I just don't know what the problem could be. The template uses Arial primarily with 3 other secondary typefaces. Maybe I should omit the secondary fonts so that it reverts to the system default. Failing this, could it possibly be your monitor contrast or brightness?
As for white type on a black background being trendy, that may be the case but that's not why I picked it. I learned in a design class that this is -supposed to- make text more legible and easier on the eyes on computer screens. Paper reflects light and black in absorbs it so text actually relieves your eyes when you focus on it, but computer monitors omit light which can be harsh on eyes so light text on a dark background draws your gaze to the highlights of the words. This is only theory but it sure sounded convincing to me.
I'll see what I can do about making a "Template Off" or "Format for print" button with no frills. Much appreciated!
P.s., you ought to consider upgrading to Firefox 2.x. I don't know if that's what's required to make my site look right, but the in-line spell checker alone is what sold me on the upgrade.
I really appreciate your feedback on this. I've viewed my blog in Firefox 1.5 and 2.0, IE 6 and 7, and Opera 9 on Windows, and in Firefox on Ubuntu, and it's looked the same to me on all those platforms. I even increased the font size from the template original. Is it possible your browser is overriding the stylesheet? Is my blog the only site that looks crappy on your browser?
Maybe I need to reconsider or tweak my design.
If Sega discontinues Dreamcast service, how will they populate their canned technical support response?
I bought Outrun 2006 for PC via Steam a couple of months ago. The game consistently froze my computer every time I played the game for more than about 30 seconds. It's the only game I have trouble with so I asked Sega for support, noting specifically that I needed assistance with my PC. It took them 2 weeks to reply and they sent me a generic response featuring links on how to repair and clean a Dreamcast. Luckily Steam was understanding enough to issue me a refund - one of two refunds I've ever gotten for a software product in 20 years.
I was going to paste the generic reply letter here but it's longer than I remembered it, so here's a link to my blog where I give a full description of my account. Needless to say I won't be buying Sega software for a PC ever again.
I agree with you 100%. Well stated argument.
What I perhaps failed to say clearly in my first message was that it's hard to take a person or country seriously when they say "Do as we say, not as we do." America is quite famous for attempting to impose restrictions on others that they do not intend to respect themselves. I know their heart is often in the right place when they enforce things like non-proliferation of weapons, but I can understand how a country like Iran would be wary of laying down all its arms with a 300 pound gorilla breathing right down its neck.
You don't think it's out of the ordinary that the country with the most nuclear weapons invaded another country for having weapons of mass destruction? Whether or not that turned out to be false (and we all know the answer to that one) that is a deplorable hypocrisy. The country with the largest nuclear arsenal most certainly is special.
Not necessarily on topic, but an important counterpoint to your generic statements, I feel.
I don't think Pearl Jam had any trouble selling out concerts in the mid 90's. Maybe whoever told me the story had rose-coloured glasses but he seemed pretty confident that Pearl Jam had (for what it's worth) publicly battled with, and then abandoned, TicketMaster due to the high percentage of their take. Maybe that was just a PR move to differentiate them from other bands, but so long as it's in favour of the fans I'll support it.
However, I agree with you 110% that if a musician really cares about his or her fans then they ought to release their music for free. In my opinion music is one of the most powerful human creations of all time but it's nothing to be proud of if it's your primary career. I wrote nearly 20 songs in the 90's and I distribute them all for free. I don't even put ads on the website. That's the only ethical way to distribute music in my opinion.
I don't know about the others, but 10 years ago Pearl Jam boycotted TicketMaster on the grounds that their service fees were exorbitant. I've never been a huge fan of their music but I support that band 100% for their support of their fans.
You bring up a great point though. If your favourite band works for the RIAA then you are not their top priority, money is.
My dad's doing the same thing. He just ordered a couple of desktops and a laptop for work and Dell provided no alternative to Vista - no XP, no Linux, no clean hard drive. His IT department will be wiping all the disks and installing XP the moment they come through the door.
/.?) to him recanting the easy time a German fellow had in acquiring a refund when he told their support department that he'd declined the EULA and promptly formatted his drive. Dell was very forthcoming and earnest and tendered him a refund of (the equivalent of) nearly $120 USD a mere 2 days after his initial call.
He'll also be very pleased when I forward a Digg article (can I say the D word on
I'm sceptical about any service that requires me to surrender my credit card to try it out, and then cancel my trial lest I be charged monthly. However, the price is right and I'm not averse to giving it a try. I think I'll try 30 songs to see how it goes. It's the best pricing scheme I've seen since AllOfMP3, but from what I've read, eMusic doesn't offer as many varieties of bitrate and formats as AllOfMP3.
eMusic sounds great from your description, but the website is pretty frustrating. It reveals nothing about the artists onboard or the browsing interface. I tried signing up for a free trial but it requires a credit card. It really does sound intriguing, though the advertised 2 million songs really isn't that many - especially when you like obscure music genres as I do.
Brilliantly stated!
It's a sad thing to admit, but I'm officially afraid of music now. Afraid and angry. I'm afraid of rootkits, embedded media player software that auto-installs, and CDs that will not play on computers. And I'm right pissed off about this because, while I am indeed a music pirate, I have an enormous collection of legitimately purchased music.
Now I refuse to buy music. It is no longer an option. I hate the music industry and I refuse to support even my favourite artists for subjecting their fans to such hazards. I listen to music to accentuate whatever it is I'm doing, and I refuse to change my lifestyle to suit music.
I'm done with buying music. Maybe forever. It all depends on the music industry. I want hassle-free music. I don't care what medium it comes on as long as I can transfer it to whatever media suit what I'm doing that day. I refuse to repurchase albums on other formats. I'm done buying widgets. Music is not something that fits in your hand. Sell me music or begone.
P.s., when I hear audacious BS like the recording industry suing a restaurant for playing music in the dining room my sympathy for their pleas disappears. To empathise with an industry that cannot be satisfied is futile.
A royalty obligation to SoundExchange still exists so long as any listeners are based in the United States.
How do you enforce that? How can you prevent Americans from tuning into an internet resource? If this is true I think it could be shot down fairly easily.
Performance licensing of sound-recordings is dependent on where the performance itself takes place -- not the location of the streaming server.
I really think a loophole could be found in this formula. For instance, what if you uploaded all the music to the offshore stream host? Then the performance would originate from that country.
This is very similar to the eDonkey legal battles of several years ago. The law reinforced that it is illegal to host pirated materials, so eDonkey came around which introduced websites with nothing but links to the pirated material. Some countries then made it illegal to link to this material, so the sites provided links to the links. A few countries got even more audacious and tried to make hash checksums for pirated material illegal, but it was easily argued that identical checksums could be generated for legal archives or at random.
Not to say that streaming radio is equivalent to pirating. I think the music industry is stupid to enforce this. If people lose access to these freely accessible, low-quality streams, they will simply start downloading high quality alternatives whether legal or not.
What about offshore servers? Are you still liable to pay royalties if you're "broadcasting" from Israel or Sweden? Technically you'd be unicasting to your server, not broadcasting to an audience.
We ought to simply change the title from "Honourable" to "Bastard". That'd make Harper a "Right Bastard".
Formalities notwithstanding, please don't refer to Bev Oda as honourable.
i tage_mi.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/23/canadian_her