It blows my mind that AV software does not stop or warn about auto-installs. I can write my own little trojan, burn a bunch of CDs with "Paris Hilton FULL" written on them, and leave them around campus (or anywhere) and fully expect to have root/admin on many, many machines.
The very idea of launching an executable by putting a disc into a drive should have had us up in arms long before the record companies abused this security hole.
Hopefully, more crap like this means a stronger offensive against crapware, spyware, stealth installs, etc from all fronts, including legislation and being able to sue content providers for damages.
This is just another shot across the bow. Ideally Joe and Jane consumer should be thinking thusly, "They sued all those people! Our CDs now have protection! Uninstall that damn eMule right now!"
All the record companies have to do is get x amount of sympathy going and the P2P gravy train will go further underground. As Joe and Jane opt-out (perhaps they don't want to get sued or perhaps they're sick of 'subsidizing' those who don't pay by dealing with DRM) out of P2P there goes another node and a strict lesson to their kids, "I better not find any P2P software on there." And then this meme travels to the water cooler, "You believe this? I gotta use this stupid Sunncomm player because of all the thieves out there!"
Then the average P2P enthusiast isn't seen as a harmless overzealous yet poor music fan, but as a criminal who is making your life hard. They then hate them and blame them for the reactions of the RIAA. Heck, they may even buy DRM on purpose so they don't get "stolen goods" on their computer or as a 'moral' action.
In other words they want you to understand that they're serious about copy protection infringement and want you to feel bad about it. Once you sympathize with them, they win.
I'll let the reader decide whether its best to let them win or not.
My profile did not copy. Even manually copying the profile didnt work even when i ran firefox.exe -p
I had to make a new profile and manually copy everything in there.
After that, it worked fine.
I really am not liking how they shrunk the 'scroll arrow' in the bookamarks. Now I need careful aim to scroll through my bookmarks. Not a good move guys.
Icons>small icons goes a long way to making it look "right" on windows. An icon with a shadow on windows? Err, doesn't quite fit.
> Just because its FOSS doesn't mean you shouldn't pay
Why not? If they are licensing it free then that EXACTLY means I shouldn't pay.
If I feel like I *want* to donate, that's fine. But that goes without saying. I may want to donate new helmets to my local fire department or blood to the local blood bank. But if I walk into Costingtons and they are giving away some widget I shouldn't feel obligated to tip anyone because of some BS guilt trip you think we all should be sharing.
What Lindows is doing is ethical and within the licensing agreements of the software it offers. The wrong mindset is "Well, I'll release this FOSS and then bitch about how stingy everyone is. Or I'll release this FOSS and expect it to be treated like proprietary software without any investment in marketing, support, etc."
>This will make some difference, but most terrorists will strike at the troops outside of their vehicles anyway.
Terrorists? Try insurgents. The terrorists we all so fear so much come from places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, not Iraq. Its not just a semantic correction, by saying stuff like that you're buying into the BS Bush sold us like 'WMD in IRAQ!!!' and "ALQAEDA IN IRAQ!!!'
They cant change if they are sending. If they are recieving they can do whatever they like.
When sending to SMTP you only have 25, 587, and sometimes 2525. (and some others)
So if I want to spam your company. I would have to connect to your company's smtp service. Most likely its running on port 25. Thus if 25 is filtered for me, I'm screwed.
Mostly, everything but 25 requires authentication and even if this cuts a few percentage points of spam thats (in real life) millions of stopped spam.
Fighting spam requires many fronts, I'm glad to see comcast join the fight. If they don't screw it up, that is.
No way. How many people are using another SMTP other than comcasts? Half? 1/3rd? That would be tens (hundreds?) of thousands of support calls.
This is the best move an ISP can make. As a rule they shouldnt block anything, but if a machine is suspected of being a spam shooter, they should step in and take care of it for the sake of their network and the internet community.
Also, the second smartest move is to ask people if they ever bought anything from a spammer and if they say yes just punch them in the face. Now there's a deterrent we can all get behind!
I'll take monopolists over theocratic moralists any day of the week.
At least I can appeal to people's better judgement by saying that ClearChannel is anti-free market, but try talking reason to the crazy religious people who think a nipple is evil.
Religion is simply not rational, its emotional. No offense, but thats a fact. If it was rational it could be proven and there would be no need for faith.
We really need to get remove censorship powers from the FCC and let the network censors take care of the job. I mean, we have TV ratings now and everything. The FCC's role of "moral policeman" is antiquated and not needed, and now its just being abused for what looks like purely political purposes.
> VOIP over WLAN is not DOA. If you tweak the QOS etc
IANAE, but perhaps change the TCP/IP settings so you dont waste so many SYN/ACKs then upgrade the WIFI to 802.11g perhaps with a VPN/IPSEC or maybe SSH over RF ASAP. FWIW the WAP shoud be IEEE standards compliant, the company who sells it should be ISO9000 compliant too. HTH.
Heck, where is the story? I've only seen this at slashdot and the few media articles it links to.
I mean, I can turn on my nightly news and hear about "getting ripped off at the dry cleaners? Let our investigative unit show you how!" but when your personal home network with all your work, personal stuff, family photos, etc are now open to the world because of some backdoor its like its no big deal.
It seems like until someone writes a worm to really screw these people over, no one is going to care. And I'm sure lots of people are testing worms as we speak.
The larger issue here is the complete disregard for security. A backdoor should never be installed. The firmware reset is more than enough to get back to the default settings. So what if you lose your "settings." That's the price of losing your password info or buying a shoddy product.
I can't believe my ears when i hear about backdoors, especially from companies like Cisco. What are we telling the industry, that we'll roll over for whatever they do? Are we telling the government that their next USA PATRIOT act might as well have mandatory Ashcroftian backdoors because corporate america is apathetic to security?
Its mind-boggling. I hope a Netgear gets equated with untrustworthiness and falls from their market position.
There are simply too many Americans who would rather be told what to think from their religious leaders. They have no love of democracy and see it as a threat. Its these people Powell and the GOP have to bow down to or lose the "Jesus vote."
Its politics first, policy second with these people.
I can't wait for Bush to lose so we can have some sane government.
Wasnt orbit (or a clone) the default theme on a prior version? I'm very certain it was, and it was gorgeous, usable, and well done. In fact, I remember thinking Qute was pretty crappy in comparison. Qute is very 'Microsoft' and corporate. The different button sizes in Orbit and other elements were very usable and damn cool looking.
The current proposal looks like a mock-up done on MS Paint by an 8-year old.
Yep, 60 bucks. We really need more competition. DSL is in the 40-50 range, but that requires a landline. Something I dont need as I'm paying for a cell phone.
WISPs or broadband over powerline at a key price could really shake up the industry.
>Actually, these systems have spheres of influence based on where they plug in. I could care less about this since it will not affect our corporate network.
The ways this will hurt you:
1. XP machines transformed into spam relays flooding your corporate email servers.
2. Floods, zombies, etc attacking your ISP thus increasing latency for all involved or even DDOS. Remember how that MS SQL exploit slowed down the net for millions of people?
3. XP machines transformed into virus/trojan machines shooting emails at your corporate network. What's that? You got hit before you could update the definitions? Too bad.
4. Home users bringing in USB keychains or floppies with today's newest virus because their home machines are on an untrusted network.
5. Remote access users flooding your network with trojan packets by using a machine from Kinkos or some other untrusted location. Or remote access users letting their kids use the "company laptop" and then penetrating your firewall with all sorts of crap.
Criminal investigation and punishment should be done by the authorities, at least we have a check on them. When corporate america decides to "police the net", we all have problems. MS should give up and give everyone whatever patch they need regardless of legality.
Slashdot Mirror
I might as well toss this in:
v ic es\CdRom
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Ser
Double click on "Autorun"
Change the value from "1" to "0"
It blows my mind that AV software does not stop or warn about auto-installs. I can write my own little trojan, burn a bunch of CDs with "Paris Hilton FULL" written on them, and leave them around campus (or anywhere) and fully expect to have root/admin on many, many machines.
The very idea of launching an executable by putting a disc into a drive should have had us up in arms long before the record companies abused this security hole.
Hopefully, more crap like this means a stronger offensive against crapware, spyware, stealth installs, etc from all fronts, including legislation and being able to sue content providers for damages.
>what exactly are they're trying to accomplish?
This is just another shot across the bow. Ideally Joe and Jane consumer should be thinking thusly, "They sued all those people! Our CDs now have protection! Uninstall that damn eMule right now!"
All the record companies have to do is get x amount of sympathy going and the P2P gravy train will go further underground. As Joe and Jane opt-out (perhaps they don't want to get sued or perhaps they're sick of 'subsidizing' those who don't pay by dealing with DRM) out of P2P there goes another node and a strict lesson to their kids, "I better not find any P2P software on there." And then this meme travels to the water cooler, "You believe this? I gotta use this stupid Sunncomm player because of all the thieves out there!"
Then the average P2P enthusiast isn't seen as a harmless overzealous yet poor music fan, but as a criminal who is making your life hard. They then hate them and blame them for the reactions of the RIAA. Heck, they may even buy DRM on purpose so they don't get "stolen goods" on their computer or as a 'moral' action.
In other words they want you to understand that they're serious about copy protection infringement and want you to feel bad about it. Once you sympathize with them, they win.
I'll let the reader decide whether its best to let them win or not.
> I use a Mac and purchased the album
When they came for the Amiga owners, I didn't speak up as I didn't own an Amiga.
When they came for the Linux users, I didn't speak us as I didn't use Linux.
Finally when they came for the Mac users, there was no one left to speak for me as the Windows users stole all their music anyway!
I did an .8 to .9 on win2k and:
My profile did not copy. Even manually copying the profile didnt work even when i ran firefox.exe -p
I had to make a new profile and manually copy everything in there.
After that, it worked fine.
I really am not liking how they shrunk the 'scroll arrow' in the bookamarks. Now I need careful aim to scroll through my bookmarks. Not a good move guys.
Icons>small icons goes a long way to making it look "right" on windows. An icon with a shadow on windows? Err, doesn't quite fit.
using a Hosts file.
Pilot: "Ah, look how nice and blue the sky is up here!"
Co-Pilot: "Actually we're still in clouds. That's a blue screen."
Pilot: "Hold me."
> Just because its FOSS doesn't mean you shouldn't pay
Why not? If they are licensing it free then that EXACTLY means I shouldn't pay.
If I feel like I *want* to donate, that's fine. But that goes without saying. I may want to donate new helmets to my local fire department or blood to the local blood bank. But if I walk into Costingtons and they are giving away some widget I shouldn't feel obligated to tip anyone because of some BS guilt trip you think we all should be sharing.
What Lindows is doing is ethical and within the licensing agreements of the software it offers. The wrong mindset is "Well, I'll release this FOSS and then bitch about how stingy everyone is. Or I'll release this FOSS and expect it to be treated like proprietary software without any investment in marketing, support, etc."
>You're not special.
Actually I would say he is. Then again I'd say you're a pessimist.
To the poster:
You sound a lot like a flighty polymath. These personality types do pretty well in short or unstructered environments.
Take an adult education course that interests you at a local or community college.
Take up an instrument and LEARN IT. Don't self-teach at first, take a class or two. Network with fellow musicians.
Pick projects that are short but worthwhile. The long and drawn-out just aren't for you.
Challenge yourself by always reading a book. Sometimes I randomly play with the lists on Amazon when trying to find something new.
Travel. Get the heck out of dodge every now and again.
Feel free to get out the technology game. You might do better by playing with low tech like photography, filmmaking, painting, etc.
Lastly, find a like minded girl. Geek girls are pretty easy to spot and share lot of your interests and may share your contempt for the mainstream.
>This will make some difference, but most terrorists will strike at the troops outside of their vehicles anyway.
Terrorists? Try insurgents. The terrorists we all so fear so much come from places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, not Iraq. Its not just a semantic correction, by saying stuff like that you're buying into the BS Bush sold us like 'WMD in IRAQ!!!' and "ALQAEDA IN IRAQ!!!'
They cant change if they are sending. If they are recieving they can do whatever they like.
When sending to SMTP you only have 25, 587, and sometimes 2525. (and some others)
So if I want to spam your company. I would have to connect to your company's smtp service. Most likely its running on port 25. Thus if 25 is filtered for me, I'm screwed.
Mostly, everything but 25 requires authentication and even if this cuts a few percentage points of spam thats (in real life) millions of stopped spam.
Fighting spam requires many fronts, I'm glad to see comcast join the fight. If they don't screw it up, that is.
No way. How many people are using another SMTP other than comcasts? Half? 1/3rd? That would be tens (hundreds?) of thousands of support calls.
This is the best move an ISP can make. As a rule they shouldnt block anything, but if a machine is suspected of being a spam shooter, they should step in and take care of it for the sake of their network and the internet community.
Also, the second smartest move is to ask people if they ever bought anything from a spammer and if they say yes just punch them in the face. Now there's a deterrent we can all get behind!
Listener demand? Oh please. They created the dixie chicks issue.
Clear Channel also supported and ran their own pro-war/pro-bush political rallies. I bet that was listener demand too.
"Umm, yeah, I got a request, can we do some political rallies? I mean I know you guys do music, but Im just an average joe.."
Its called corporate media for a reason, by kissing GOP ass they get favors. And it paid off this time.
I'll take monopolists over theocratic moralists any day of the week.
At least I can appeal to people's better judgement by saying that ClearChannel is anti-free market, but try talking reason to the crazy religious people who think a nipple is evil.
Religion is simply not rational, its emotional. No offense, but thats a fact. If it was rational it could be proven and there would be no need for faith.
We really need to get remove censorship powers from the FCC and let the network censors take care of the job. I mean, we have TV ratings now and everything. The FCC's role of "moral policeman" is antiquated and not needed, and now its just being abused for what looks like purely political purposes.
> VOIP over WLAN is not DOA. If you tweak the QOS etc
IANAE, but perhaps change the TCP/IP settings so you dont waste so many SYN/ACKs then upgrade the WIFI to 802.11g perhaps with a VPN/IPSEC or maybe SSH over RF ASAP. FWIW the WAP shoud be IEEE standards compliant, the company who sells it should be ISO9000 compliant too. HTH.
Ah, yes the classic "My eight year old could do that" attack on art.
You could write treatises on what is art, and some have, in the end art is what you make of it.
I've seen "consultants" "erase" a disk by just destroying the partition table. And at the time they were making a whole lot more money than me.
When you factor in diapers, care, and feeding its just not worth it.
Heck, where is the story? I've only seen this at slashdot and the few media articles it links to.
I mean, I can turn on my nightly news and hear about "getting ripped off at the dry cleaners? Let our investigative unit show you how!" but when your personal home network with all your work, personal stuff, family photos, etc are now open to the world because of some backdoor its like its no big deal.
It seems like until someone writes a worm to really screw these people over, no one is going to care. And I'm sure lots of people are testing worms as we speak.
The larger issue here is the complete disregard for security. A backdoor should never be installed. The firmware reset is more than enough to get back to the default settings. So what if you lose your "settings." That's the price of losing your password info or buying a shoddy product.
I can't believe my ears when i hear about backdoors, especially from companies like Cisco. What are we telling the industry, that we'll roll over for whatever they do? Are we telling the government that their next USA PATRIOT act might as well have mandatory Ashcroftian backdoors because corporate america is apathetic to security?
Its mind-boggling. I hope a Netgear gets equated with untrustworthiness and falls from their market position.
> He is popular, people tune in to listen.
There are simply too many Americans who would rather be told what to think from their religious leaders. They have no love of democracy and see it as a threat. Its these people Powell and the GOP have to bow down to or lose the "Jesus vote."
Its politics first, policy second with these people.
I can't wait for Bush to lose so we can have some sane government.
Wasnt orbit (or a clone) the default theme on a prior version? I'm very certain it was, and it was gorgeous, usable, and well done. In fact, I remember thinking Qute was pretty crappy in comparison. Qute is very 'Microsoft' and corporate. The different button sizes in Orbit and other elements were very usable and damn cool looking.
The current proposal looks like a mock-up done on MS Paint by an 8-year old.
Go with Orbit (or its clone). Please.
Yep, 60 bucks. We really need more competition. DSL is in the 40-50 range, but that requires a landline. Something I dont need as I'm paying for a cell phone.
WISPs or broadband over powerline at a key price could really shake up the industry.
Theres on here.
I disabled mine long ago and haven't looked back.
>Actually, these systems have spheres of influence based on where they plug in. I could care less about this since it will not affect our corporate network.
The ways this will hurt you:
1. XP machines transformed into spam relays flooding your corporate email servers.
2. Floods, zombies, etc attacking your ISP thus increasing latency for all involved or even DDOS. Remember how that MS SQL exploit slowed down the net for millions of people?
3. XP machines transformed into virus/trojan machines shooting emails at your corporate network. What's that? You got hit before you could update the definitions? Too bad.
4. Home users bringing in USB keychains or floppies with today's newest virus because their home machines are on an untrusted network.
5. Remote access users flooding your network with trojan packets by using a machine from Kinkos or some other untrusted location. Or remote access users letting their kids use the "company laptop" and then penetrating your firewall with all sorts of crap.
Criminal investigation and punishment should be done by the authorities, at least we have a check on them. When corporate america decides to "police the net", we all have problems. MS should give up and give everyone whatever patch they need regardless of legality.
I've seen firefox fail to block pop-ups at the NYTimes and at Popular Science on more than one occasion. Maybe it DHTML. Dunno.
I don't use adblock, I maintain a hosts file with known ad servers so the stuff never loads in the first place.