Whilst it's impossible to give any firm commitments, would you like to give us some idea how much more secure Vista will be (compared to, say, XP)?
(Hint: I'd like to see "I'd expect 50% less critical vulnerabilities per unit time" or "most system owners will see 50% less spyware" or something along those lines)
The next generation of search engines will not return 10 results per page. Instead, they'll return an essay about the subject you asked for. They'd be foolish not to credit their sources, but users may not click those links if they get the information they need without doing so.
Take an example: I type "outlook ost to pst conversion" into Sir-Find-a-Lot. It returns an essay about how Outlook creates OST files but can't open them, so they have to be converted. So far, this is all information, and whilst it might be credited, it's not actually what I'm after (so I'm not going to click any of the links). However, the essay would go on to say "site x offers an online converter for £10, whilst site y offers software for download for £5". I'm going to click one of those two things, because at the end of the day I want to get something done.
So (in the future) this guy has a point - the people that have whittered on about crappy Outlook won't get clicks, even though their content was used to infer the essay. Those people who actually do something in the field will get the clicks, because, erm, they do something in the field.
In short, one day, information won't have the same value as the services behind it. Actually, that's already true, it's just that some people haven't realised it yet. More importantly, search engines currently only point you at information sources, so the whole point is completely moot.
There are two spare satellites, not used in the basic consellation. Each sat. has an 'id', and I presume any sat. can be any other (surely that must be the case? I think it's a bit classified as to exactly what the sats can do, but surely they must be able to do this?). So in other words, if a sat. fails, they can swing in a spare to replace it. Each sat passes over a ground station daily, so it'll take less than 24 hours to do this (I presume there are numerous ground stations too, so in fact could be done much quicker than this).
In general, you need four sats. to get a position. Of course, it's possible to use three, but four gives greater accuracy. Since you can frequently 'see' more than four, it's possible that the system could still work with less sats. than it currently uses - it'd take longer to acquite a signal, and often result in less than 4 sats in view, so in short it would take longer to get accurate positioning.
Each sat. has four atomic clocks, not just the two that make it work. I can't remember what else is redundant in the sats, but I'd imagine the new version sats are all about super-reliability, so they've probably got everything doubled up except the paint.
So there's actually quite a bit of redunancy, in the sense that you can get positioning with a lot less working than is generally maintained.
To keep this vaguely on-topic, the European system would compliment the existing system. Whilst receivers would need an upgrade (maybe firmware, or hardware on older kit), they'll suddenly have (say) 8 sats in view, rather than just four. For civilians this is great news - we all get faster, better positioning. Militarily, it means that both the US and Europe need to switch off/downgrade GPS before you can't get positioning. Politically that'll probably mean that unless it's a UN based operation, GPS will be on for it. Of course, if the EU/US/UN fall out with each other, then it's anyone's guess.
Honestly, I don't really disagree with you. However, we both share an arrogant viewpoint (which our collective parent poster doesn't).
A few hundred years ago, coal burning plant builders said "the smoke doth vanish into the air". It seemed back then that the atmosphere was so big there was no way we could "fill it up" with coal smoke. Pretty soon, we realised that wasn't the case.
Of course, we humans did the same thing time and time again. "Oh, these little aerosols can't possibly do anything nasty" (and so on).
Pinching the odd asteroid, or digging up n percent of the "it's just dust" moon might seem like a good idea now, but maybe we'll realise that these things are required for something. I can't imagine what, but then I don't assume I know everything yet.
Sadly, we'll have to break things before we figure out how they work. By then, it'll be too late of course. Welcome to human nature. That said, I'm not sure there's really an alternative.
Network Appliance used to sell their fileservers with "co-operative maintenance" (they still might, I dunno). Basically, for a 40K server you'd pay about 7K of that for a box of bits. Basically, they'd send you one drive, one fan, one PSU and if memory serves, a mobo too. The only things you didn't get were a couple of PCI cards, which you'd swap between incarnations anyway (a bit like Sun's SSD cards). In other words, they more or less gave you a spare machine minus the paint. If anything fails, you swap it out and they send you a replacement next day.
Of course, their kit was so reliable I didn't swap anything in four years, but it's the thought that counts;-)
I'm not 100% sure about the "official facts" around this, but it was my understanding that the US abandoned SA in 2000 because the entire world's best mathematical brains were succeeding in defeating it, by "smoothing" out signals (never mind surveyors who were getting millimetre accuracy back in 2000 with SA switched on!). If SA had persisted, that smoothing technology would (by now) be as good as GPS is without SA (indeed, in the UK (in 2000) a national radio station was going to broadcast differential signals by RDS, meaning everyone would have got 1m accuracy quite easily). Thus, SA would have had as-good-as no value. Switching it off demotivated all those activities, once again making SA useful if ever used.
Further, the US gave Haite a big warning about it's impending invasion when all of a sudden, SA was switched off (because the US army didn't have enough military channel receivers to drive their invasion, so nipped into Walmart to stock up with civilian receivers). Possibly not relevant to their decision to turn off SA, but it happened just a few months before the decision was made.
Further still, aviation in general can continue with SA in place. All "friendly" aircraft (ie. those in the US and possibly a few ally countries) can be quickly outfitted with military receivers, if indeed they don't already have them (just as 747s get fitted with missile ECM systems etc). As for "foreign" aircraft crashing into US runways - it's my understanding that all GPS based airport systems also use differential signals from a fixed point on the ground (because even 1m accurate positioning is way too far out). I can't see that changing, even with the European system in place.
However, as has been mentioned already, and is plainly obvious, numerous very important things require GPS to function correctly. Rescue services rely on GPS quite a bit, so having that work regardless of the US/European relationship seems like common sense. Even if both the US and Europe switch on SA, it's possible that European interests can continue (like the aviation example above). This sort of thing still freezes out other countries, so it's only a matter of time before China starts wanting the same thing...
Right - increase in efficiency == increase in power == less need for conventional engine power.
For all those who still don't get it, a 15% increase in power means 15% less need for conventional engine. In European terms, that might be something like a 2.5 litre engine now becomes a 2.0 litre engine. (For all you Americans, that's more like a 5 litre engine becomes a 4.5 litre engine.)
Smaller engine == less weight == net equal(ish) minus the emmisions.
I can't imagine how this can be a bad thing, except that as someone mentioned above, the energy cost of making a car easily outweighs something like 10 years of it's use. Thus, a reduction in the need for cars would be far more beneficial than any likely efficiency boosts will ever bring.
I too worry about this sort of thing, so I wrote a very simple program to continuously make web requests. It does this 'gently', but running 24x7 accounts for hundreds of web requests. Since ISPs have to log all this, that log file ought to be getting pretty big by now.
I know it's not nice to make your favioure ISP drown in the deluge of log files, but so long as this sort of surveillance is impractical, it'll become as uneforcable and unusable as it frankly ought to be. More here: http://www.coofercat.com/wiki/EuropeanElectronicSu rveillance </blatent self-promotion>
Actually, SA is an interesting example. For the most part, it had a far better telco infrastructure than the UK (going back a few years now) because it mostly got built using modern ideas, not based on the notion of having Mrs. Miggins plugging in cables down at the operator's office.
The reason the UK has invested so heavily in it's telco infrastructure is because it was a crock of shite that couldn't support anything beyond 9600baud modems, let alone broadband. That's not really a regulatory based issue, it's to do with our monopolistic legacy.
One could argue that the investment wouldn't have happened if BT was publically owned. Quite possibly true, but in a way, a government controlled monopoly is the most regulated of all. Since BT got privatised, the regulator deliberately made them uncompetitive to open up the market to other companies. Those companies are mostly not doing free local calls, even decades after BT got privatised.
So here we can see that the legacy of the monopoly is more of a problem than the regulation. If the regulators let BT do what they want, they could still wipe out just about all competition by offering free calls (which they could still afford to do). However, by the regulator's actions, the impetus to offer free calls by BT's competitors is far reduced.
Of course, all that pails into insignficance when we think about the renumbering debarcles of the last couple of decades. That wasn't in consumer's interests, but they bore the brunt of it. An inept regulator is quite possibly worse than no regulator. Sorry, meandering off-topic somewhat there;-)
My users won't be happy when they phone me with a problem and I can't give them an instant answer. They've got used to me being able to say "hmm, yeah I've seen that before. A reboot should fix it". Now I'm going to have to blag it with "hmm, let me look it up and get back to you".
Now tell me, if you're the average user who's just trying to get their work done, which would you prefer? A quick answer from someone who sounds knowledgeable, or an hours wait for an answer from someone who's just had to research the problem?
Once again, we see how Microsoft have no idea about service. They've just stiffed every tech support department in the world!
I'm finding myself having to do some "marketing", which broadly consists of sending people something in the snailmail, and then phoning them to ask about it.
It's incredibly difficult to properly research all the companies I'm writing to, although of course some cursory filtering is quite possible (which I'm doing). As a result, I'm actually 'spamming' lots of people who aren't interested (although trying to do it as nicely and understandingly as I can).
If there's another way to get likely punters to know about my brilliant product (which incidentally is engineered to be useful, reliable, etc) then I'd love to know what it is. In my experience simply having a product (and even telling people about it) doesn't sell anything. You have to get 'in people's faces' a bit before they'll pay any attention.
I'm sort of agreeing and disagreeing with you here. Simply telling people achieves little, you have to make them think about it (ultimately by confronting them with a choice). Most advertising is a half-arsed attempt at doing this. By forcing you to close a popup, the advertiser "thinks" you're engaged and making a choice. Clearly this isn't true.
If this is the year of the internet-ad, then they need to grow up a bit. 'Tricking' your customer base into something isn't the best way to Make Friends and Influence People. Actually doing something they want might be a better approach (both exemplified by X10 cameras and Google, respectively).
Absolutely seriously, if 10% of the people reading this put that exploit on their respective blogs, that'd end up creating something of an epidemic.
Whilst intentionally causing people problems is reprehensible, there's a side of me that thinks this is a bit of 'tough love'. If someone's still stupid enough to use IE, then maybe they need to be 'shocked' into understanding?
Then again, that's just wishful thinking, and all we'd have is an epidemic of pr0n surfing ejits who can't work out where the power button is. Okay, I'll shut up now...
Logitech have recently become the number 1 vendor in the mouse market (when measured by volume).
In celebrations, the company announced it is developing a new generation of "smart mouse". This new type of mouse would be something similar to a laptop on castor wheels. The user would have around 100 buttons, and an integrated, full colour, high resolution display which would be used by the mouse to alert the user to various events. Company officials declined to elaborate on a likely price for the new mouse.
That's only half of it. Here in the UK our energy policy is so fscked that you buy electricity from the grid at the domestic rate (eg. 5pence/unit), but you sell at the commercial rate (e.g. 2pence/unit). Thus, even if it's sunny all day, every day (yeah, right, this is Britain), you won't see your money back any time soon.
...standard Microsoft ideas, saying the speaker (!!) seems Anti-American, anti-corporate,
...IS open for everyone, citing some EU decision on that.
Anyone spot the irony there? I know Americans aren't blessed with irony-spotting skills, but the EU being used to bolster an argument about anti-Americanism really takes the biscuit.
Don't teach people too much, basically keep them a bit stupid, let them grow up. They then know too little to understand that you can't go around altering fact to suit your own ends.
"They" may have (had to) read 1984, but they may not have understood what it was actually about.
Either way, we Brits seem to follow the US after about 10 years, so we're as fscked as you are.
Correct - there's no law or mandate to use encryption (actually, almost the opposite).
The thing protecting you is "reasonableness" and "deliberate act". If you fire up your PC and it chooses your neighbours WAP instead of your own, you're responsible for what you do, not your neighbour. Go ahead, threaten the PM, you'll (eventually) get busted (all things being equal), not your neighbour.
On your side of "scared", you also have to make reasonable steps to avoid doing anything stupid. So, if you want to use an unencrypted WAP, then make sure your PC connects to your SSID, not your neighbours. That way, if someone threatens the PM and your neighbour blames you, you've got an "alibi" by demonstrating that for all intents and purposes, it wasn't from your PC. Now, unless someone else makes more deliberate attempts to make it look like you, you're in the clear (and at the end of the day, if you didn't do it, you should/could still be safe).
So it all boils down to raising the stakes to whatever level makes you (reasonably) safe. Right now, tieing your PC to your WAP's SSID is probably sufficient. Give it a couple of years, and 64 bit encryption will be the min-spec. A few more years, 128bit, and so it goes on.
Well, here in the UK we have this idea of "reasonableness".
In this case, since there's no way for the WAP owner to stop signals reaching the road, there's no way they could be reasonably asked not to do it. Thus, your argument doesn't stand, because it is unreasonable of you to expect people to restrict their signals to their private property.
Further, the guy in question was deliberately placing himself in a location with the specific aim to stealing wireless. If it had been the next door neighbour, the argument would be different. It would be different again if the neighbour also had a WAP, and his computer had selected the wrong one.
Again, just because something occurrs, does not make it legal or illegal. It is only if there was a deliberate act, or if all reasonable steps had been taken (to stop it).
So for all of us Brits, legally you don't have to secure your WAP, as it is (and always will be) illegal to steal your signals. However, if someone abuses your IP address and you get busted for something (perphaps because you have an apparent motive and no alibi), you should try to prove you took all reasonable steps to prevent the problem. Once you've done that, you're basically off the hook.
In short: Securing your WAP is a prudent, sensible thing to do, but there's no legal reason to do it.
PS. Watching a movie over someone's shoulder isn't illegal. However, doing something like a Tempest attack on their TV so that you can watch it is. Again, it's all about reasonableness and deliberate acts.
Or as an alternative, create some software that you install as the mailbox "spam@yourdomain.com". Every time you receive some spam, your filter forwards the message to that address. Your mail server then checks the message, possibly consulting a central server for what to do. It then "visits" the spammer's website, downloads a few pages, images etc, and posts a complaint.
Clearly, for the magic software to know what to do, it would need "spam signatures" and then a procedure of what to do. Still, not rocket science to create (and easy to integrate into mail clients and such like).
If you make one (sensible) visit/request to the spammers website in response to each spam you receive, that surely isn't illegal, because the spammer has asked you to do just that. I guess you could add in some randomness, so it maybe makes 75 requests for every 100 spams, or whatever.
Whilst still "dubious", it's not a concerted DOS, because you're only making one request per spam. Of course, multipled by a million mail servers all doing the same thing, it has a more convincing effect.
VeganBob writes (VBW) "There may be (TMB) future non-NASA uses (NNU) of the Shuttle Landing Facilities (SLF). At 15,000 feet long (FFL) and 300 feet wide (TFW), the landing strip (TLS) is larger than those (LTT) at most commercial airports (MCA). From the article (FTA): 'NASA today issued (NTI) a formal request for expressions (FRE) of interest by non-NASA organizations (NNO), including commercial space companies (CSC), for use of (FUO) the Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Florida (FLA). The announcement is the first step (TFS) in considering how and when (HAW) NASA can expand access to (EAT) available capacity at the SLF by government, commercial, and academic (GCA) organizations.' SPACE.com also covers this announcement (CTA)."
Would it be possible to setup a company that "resold" ISP services? I mean, rent a block of IPs, and a E/T1 line run some servers on it, running an SSL secured proxy or VPN concentrators, or some such. Rent said services to your friends.
If the ISP gets turned over, you may lose access, but your friends activities are still safe. It'll take a court order to get you to turn over those details, so everyone does okay out of it, don't they?
You could go on to have a network of these services with other similarly minded geeks, and create an ad-hoc not-quite-anonymous network immune from above-the-law tactics of your corrupt Western government;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps add something along the lines of:
Whilst it's impossible to give any firm commitments, would you like to give us some idea how much more secure Vista will be (compared to, say, XP)?
(Hint: I'd like to see "I'd expect 50% less critical vulnerabilities per unit time" or "most system owners will see 50% less spyware" or something along those lines)
This guy might be right, just not yet.
The next generation of search engines will not return 10 results per page. Instead, they'll return an essay about the subject you asked for. They'd be foolish not to credit their sources, but users may not click those links if they get the information they need without doing so.
Take an example: I type "outlook ost to pst conversion" into Sir-Find-a-Lot. It returns an essay about how Outlook creates OST files but can't open them, so they have to be converted. So far, this is all information, and whilst it might be credited, it's not actually what I'm after (so I'm not going to click any of the links). However, the essay would go on to say "site x offers an online converter for £10, whilst site y offers software for download for £5". I'm going to click one of those two things, because at the end of the day I want to get something done.
So (in the future) this guy has a point - the people that have whittered on about crappy Outlook won't get clicks, even though their content was used to infer the essay. Those people who actually do something in the field will get the clicks, because, erm, they do something in the field.
In short, one day, information won't have the same value as the services behind it. Actually, that's already true, it's just that some people haven't realised it yet. More importantly, search engines currently only point you at information sources, so the whole point is completely moot.
No links from me either, but...
There are two spare satellites, not used in the basic consellation. Each sat. has an 'id', and I presume any sat. can be any other (surely that must be the case? I think it's a bit classified as to exactly what the sats can do, but surely they must be able to do this?). So in other words, if a sat. fails, they can swing in a spare to replace it. Each sat passes over a ground station daily, so it'll take less than 24 hours to do this (I presume there are numerous ground stations too, so in fact could be done much quicker than this).
In general, you need four sats. to get a position. Of course, it's possible to use three, but four gives greater accuracy. Since you can frequently 'see' more than four, it's possible that the system could still work with less sats. than it currently uses - it'd take longer to acquite a signal, and often result in less than 4 sats in view, so in short it would take longer to get accurate positioning.
Each sat. has four atomic clocks, not just the two that make it work. I can't remember what else is redundant in the sats, but I'd imagine the new version sats are all about super-reliability, so they've probably got everything doubled up except the paint.
So there's actually quite a bit of redunancy, in the sense that you can get positioning with a lot less working than is generally maintained.
To keep this vaguely on-topic, the European system would compliment the existing system. Whilst receivers would need an upgrade (maybe firmware, or hardware on older kit), they'll suddenly have (say) 8 sats in view, rather than just four. For civilians this is great news - we all get faster, better positioning. Militarily, it means that both the US and Europe need to switch off/downgrade GPS before you can't get positioning. Politically that'll probably mean that unless it's a UN based operation, GPS will be on for it. Of course, if the EU/US/UN fall out with each other, then it's anyone's guess.
Honestly, I don't really disagree with you. However, we both share an arrogant viewpoint (which our collective parent poster doesn't).
A few hundred years ago, coal burning plant builders said "the smoke doth vanish into the air". It seemed back then that the atmosphere was so big there was no way we could "fill it up" with coal smoke. Pretty soon, we realised that wasn't the case.
Of course, we humans did the same thing time and time again. "Oh, these little aerosols can't possibly do anything nasty" (and so on).
Pinching the odd asteroid, or digging up n percent of the "it's just dust" moon might seem like a good idea now, but maybe we'll realise that these things are required for something. I can't imagine what, but then I don't assume I know everything yet.
Sadly, we'll have to break things before we figure out how they work. By then, it'll be too late of course. Welcome to human nature. That said, I'm not sure there's really an alternative.
"Flash! Flash! I love you, but we only have 14 hours to save the earth!"
Network Appliance used to sell their fileservers with "co-operative maintenance" (they still might, I dunno). Basically, for a 40K server you'd pay about 7K of that for a box of bits. Basically, they'd send you one drive, one fan, one PSU and if memory serves, a mobo too. The only things you didn't get were a couple of PCI cards, which you'd swap between incarnations anyway (a bit like Sun's SSD cards). In other words, they more or less gave you a spare machine minus the paint. If anything fails, you swap it out and they send you a replacement next day.
;-)
Of course, their kit was so reliable I didn't swap anything in four years, but it's the thought that counts
I'm not 100% sure about the "official facts" around this, but it was my understanding that the US abandoned SA in 2000 because the entire world's best mathematical brains were succeeding in defeating it, by "smoothing" out signals (never mind surveyors who were getting millimetre accuracy back in 2000 with SA switched on!). If SA had persisted, that smoothing technology would (by now) be as good as GPS is without SA (indeed, in the UK (in 2000) a national radio station was going to broadcast differential signals by RDS, meaning everyone would have got 1m accuracy quite easily). Thus, SA would have had as-good-as no value. Switching it off demotivated all those activities, once again making SA useful if ever used.
Further, the US gave Haite a big warning about it's impending invasion when all of a sudden, SA was switched off (because the US army didn't have enough military channel receivers to drive their invasion, so nipped into Walmart to stock up with civilian receivers). Possibly not relevant to their decision to turn off SA, but it happened just a few months before the decision was made.
Further still, aviation in general can continue with SA in place. All "friendly" aircraft (ie. those in the US and possibly a few ally countries) can be quickly outfitted with military receivers, if indeed they don't already have them (just as 747s get fitted with missile ECM systems etc). As for "foreign" aircraft crashing into US runways - it's my understanding that all GPS based airport systems also use differential signals from a fixed point on the ground (because even 1m accurate positioning is way too far out). I can't see that changing, even with the European system in place.
However, as has been mentioned already, and is plainly obvious, numerous very important things require GPS to function correctly. Rescue services rely on GPS quite a bit, so having that work regardless of the US/European relationship seems like common sense. Even if both the US and Europe switch on SA, it's possible that European interests can continue (like the aviation example above). This sort of thing still freezes out other countries, so it's only a matter of time before China starts wanting the same thing...
Does it run Linux?
(sorry, it's Christmas so the posting volume is low, and I had to get it in because I've got 'owt else better to do!)
1) Find Tony Blair's personal number plate
2) Stick it to every car in the UK on one particular day
3) ???
4) Profit!
Right - increase in efficiency == increase in power == less need for conventional engine power.
For all those who still don't get it, a 15% increase in power means 15% less need for conventional engine. In European terms, that might be something like a 2.5 litre engine now becomes a 2.0 litre engine. (For all you Americans, that's more like a 5 litre engine becomes a 4.5 litre engine.)
Smaller engine == less weight == net equal(ish) minus the emmisions.
I can't imagine how this can be a bad thing, except that as someone mentioned above, the energy cost of making a car easily outweighs something like 10 years of it's use. Thus, a reduction in the need for cars would be far more beneficial than any likely efficiency boosts will ever bring.
I too worry about this sort of thing, so I wrote a very simple program to continuously make web requests. It does this 'gently', but running 24x7 accounts for hundreds of web requests. Since ISPs have to log all this, that log file ought to be getting pretty big by now.
I know it's not nice to make your favioure ISP drown in the deluge of log files, but so long as this sort of surveillance is impractical, it'll become as uneforcable and unusable as it frankly ought to be.
More here: http://www.coofercat.com/wiki/EuropeanElectronicS
</blatent self-promotion>
Actually, SA is an interesting example. For the most part, it had a far better telco infrastructure than the UK (going back a few years now) because it mostly got built using modern ideas, not based on the notion of having Mrs. Miggins plugging in cables down at the operator's office.
;-)
The reason the UK has invested so heavily in it's telco infrastructure is because it was a crock of shite that couldn't support anything beyond 9600baud modems, let alone broadband. That's not really a regulatory based issue, it's to do with our monopolistic legacy.
One could argue that the investment wouldn't have happened if BT was publically owned. Quite possibly true, but in a way, a government controlled monopoly is the most regulated of all. Since BT got privatised, the regulator deliberately made them uncompetitive to open up the market to other companies. Those companies are mostly not doing free local calls, even decades after BT got privatised.
So here we can see that the legacy of the monopoly is more of a problem than the regulation. If the regulators let BT do what they want, they could still wipe out just about all competition by offering free calls (which they could still afford to do). However, by the regulator's actions, the impetus to offer free calls by BT's competitors is far reduced.
Of course, all that pails into insignficance when we think about the renumbering debarcles of the last couple of decades. That wasn't in consumer's interests, but they bore the brunt of it. An inept regulator is quite possibly worse than no regulator. Sorry, meandering off-topic somewhat there
My users won't be happy when they phone me with a problem and I can't give them an instant answer. They've got used to me being able to say "hmm, yeah I've seen that before. A reboot should fix it". Now I'm going to have to blag it with "hmm, let me look it up and get back to you".
Now tell me, if you're the average user who's just trying to get their work done, which would you prefer? A quick answer from someone who sounds knowledgeable, or an hours wait for an answer from someone who's just had to research the problem?
Once again, we see how Microsoft have no idea about service. They've just stiffed every tech support department in the world!
I'm finding myself having to do some "marketing", which broadly consists of sending people something in the snailmail, and then phoning them to ask about it.
It's incredibly difficult to properly research all the companies I'm writing to, although of course some cursory filtering is quite possible (which I'm doing). As a result, I'm actually 'spamming' lots of people who aren't interested (although trying to do it as nicely and understandingly as I can).
If there's another way to get likely punters to know about my brilliant product (which incidentally is engineered to be useful, reliable, etc) then I'd love to know what it is. In my experience simply having a product (and even telling people about it) doesn't sell anything. You have to get 'in people's faces' a bit before they'll pay any attention.
I'm sort of agreeing and disagreeing with you here. Simply telling people achieves little, you have to make them think about it (ultimately by confronting them with a choice). Most advertising is a half-arsed attempt at doing this. By forcing you to close a popup, the advertiser "thinks" you're engaged and making a choice. Clearly this isn't true.
If this is the year of the internet-ad, then they need to grow up a bit. 'Tricking' your customer base into something isn't the best way to Make Friends and Influence People. Actually doing something they want might be a better approach (both exemplified by X10 cameras and Google, respectively).
Absolutely seriously, if 10% of the people reading this put that exploit on their respective blogs, that'd end up creating something of an epidemic.
Whilst intentionally causing people problems is reprehensible, there's a side of me that thinks this is a bit of 'tough love'. If someone's still stupid enough to use IE, then maybe they need to be 'shocked' into understanding?
Then again, that's just wishful thinking, and all we'd have is an epidemic of pr0n surfing ejits who can't work out where the power button is. Okay, I'll shut up now...
Logitech have recently become the number 1 vendor in the mouse market (when measured by volume).
In celebrations, the company announced it is developing a new generation of "smart mouse". This new type of mouse would be something similar to a laptop on castor wheels. The user would have around 100 buttons, and an integrated, full colour, high resolution display which would be used by the mouse to alert the user to various events. Company officials declined to elaborate on a likely price for the new mouse.
That's only half of it. Here in the UK our energy policy is so fscked that you buy electricity from the grid at the domestic rate (eg. 5pence/unit), but you sell at the commercial rate (e.g. 2pence/unit). Thus, even if it's sunny all day, every day (yeah, right, this is Britain), you won't see your money back any time soon.
Where do you live? Blackpool?
Anyone spot the irony there? I know Americans aren't blessed with irony-spotting skills, but the EU being used to bolster an argument about anti-Americanism really takes the biscuit.
I say, "Roll on Gallileo!" ;-)
Enjoy the evolution happening right here...
Don't teach people too much, basically keep them a bit stupid, let them grow up. They then know too little to understand that you can't go around altering fact to suit your own ends.
"They" may have (had to) read 1984, but they may not have understood what it was actually about.
Either way, we Brits seem to follow the US after about 10 years, so we're as fscked as you are.
Correct - there's no law or mandate to use encryption (actually, almost the opposite).
The thing protecting you is "reasonableness" and "deliberate act". If you fire up your PC and it chooses your neighbours WAP instead of your own, you're responsible for what you do, not your neighbour. Go ahead, threaten the PM, you'll (eventually) get busted (all things being equal), not your neighbour.
On your side of "scared", you also have to make reasonable steps to avoid doing anything stupid. So, if you want to use an unencrypted WAP, then make sure your PC connects to your SSID, not your neighbours. That way, if someone threatens the PM and your neighbour blames you, you've got an "alibi" by demonstrating that for all intents and purposes, it wasn't from your PC. Now, unless someone else makes more deliberate attempts to make it look like you, you're in the clear (and at the end of the day, if you didn't do it, you should/could still be safe).
So it all boils down to raising the stakes to whatever level makes you (reasonably) safe. Right now, tieing your PC to your WAP's SSID is probably sufficient. Give it a couple of years, and 64 bit encryption will be the min-spec. A few more years, 128bit, and so it goes on.
Well, here in the UK we have this idea of "reasonableness".
In this case, since there's no way for the WAP owner to stop signals reaching the road, there's no way they could be reasonably asked not to do it. Thus, your argument doesn't stand, because it is unreasonable of you to expect people to restrict their signals to their private property.
Further, the guy in question was deliberately placing himself in a location with the specific aim to stealing wireless. If it had been the next door neighbour, the argument would be different. It would be different again if the neighbour also had a WAP, and his computer had selected the wrong one.
Again, just because something occurrs, does not make it legal or illegal. It is only if there was a deliberate act, or if all reasonable steps had been taken (to stop it).
So for all of us Brits, legally you don't have to secure your WAP, as it is (and always will be) illegal to steal your signals. However, if someone abuses your IP address and you get busted for something (perphaps because you have an apparent motive and no alibi), you should try to prove you took all reasonable steps to prevent the problem. Once you've done that, you're basically off the hook.
In short: Securing your WAP is a prudent, sensible thing to do, but there's no legal reason to do it.
PS. Watching a movie over someone's shoulder isn't illegal. However, doing something like a Tempest attack on their TV so that you can watch it is. Again, it's all about reasonableness and deliberate acts.
Or as an alternative, create some software that you install as the mailbox "spam@yourdomain.com". Every time you receive some spam, your filter forwards the message to that address. Your mail server then checks the message, possibly consulting a central server for what to do. It then "visits" the spammer's website, downloads a few pages, images etc, and posts a complaint.
Clearly, for the magic software to know what to do, it would need "spam signatures" and then a procedure of what to do. Still, not rocket science to create (and easy to integrate into mail clients and such like).
If you make one (sensible) visit/request to the spammers website in response to each spam you receive, that surely isn't illegal, because the spammer has asked you to do just that. I guess you could add in some randomness, so it maybe makes 75 requests for every 100 spams, or whatever.
Whilst still "dubious", it's not a concerted DOS, because you're only making one request per spam. Of course, multipled by a million mail servers all doing the same thing, it has a more convincing effect.
I thank you (ITY).
Would it be possible to setup a company that "resold" ISP services? I mean, rent a block of IPs, and a E/T1 line run some servers on it, running an SSL secured proxy or VPN concentrators, or some such. Rent said services to your friends.
;-)
If the ISP gets turned over, you may lose access, but your friends activities are still safe. It'll take a court order to get you to turn over those details, so everyone does okay out of it, don't they?
You could go on to have a network of these services with other similarly minded geeks, and create an ad-hoc not-quite-anonymous network immune from above-the-law tactics of your corrupt Western government