I use ReplayTV and have never had any problems with content protection. There is even a great open source tool called DVArchive (at sourceforge) that lets one copy shows to/from the ReplayTV units and even stream content directly from the ReplayTV to any machine that supports HTTP streaming.
I highly recommend both of these products for the geek who wants a great DVR and the freedom to DivX content at will.
I agree with you that they have every right to go after users who are illegally pirating their material. The problem is that they aren't doing that. Rather, they are suing users who some poorly written software has deemed guilty, are who are identified by questionable means at best. This results in a series of form letters and legal threats. The problem is that the typical user can't afford to defend against these allegations, even if they are completely false, creating injustice by forcing innocent individuals to pay and sign away their lives rather than go bankrupt asserting their innocence.
On another note, I am sick of the MPAA and the RIAA claiming the moral high ground when DVDs were originally (poorly) designed to prevent Fair Use and (weakly) copy protected CDs are becoming more and more common in violation of fair use as well. And the trend only continues with HD-DVD...
If any shipping corporations have problems with our site please feel free to forward requests to/dev/null. By emailing us any questions or comments you give fedexfurniture.com the right to post any such message, and or replies on our site.
If you were half as smart as you thought you were, you'd shut up and take the time to learn and appreciate the difference between a concept and a plan. I suggested the concept of tunneling then gave some examples of good tunneling systems to examine. You, lacking the intelligence to take that concept and apply it to a real-world situation, assumed the role of an anonymous coward to display to the world your own stupidity. Nice going.
Now, as the other poster who replied to you stated, virtually any protocol can be tunneled through something as simple as HTTP with a little effort and ingenuity; however, I suppose it takes a little imagination to understand that.
Let me explain it to ya. I'll try to use small words so you don't get too confused.
The NTP client is configured to NTP Sync with a custom daemon running inside the firewall. That custom daemon listens for UDP traffic on a given port. When received, it creates a false HTTP connection to some outside host and passes the information from the UDP connection. That outside host (also running a custom daemon), re-creates an appropriate UDP connection to a trusted time server and the process continues in that fashion until the sync is complete.
You could even use a simple TCP/UDP bridge daemon then tunnel outbound traffic through SSH. (Though this would add another daemon to maintain, secure, etc. and is not necessary as NTP traffic doesn't need to be encrypted.)
This model should allow accurate NTP syncing through just about any firewall with some standard protocol spoofing. Is it complex? Yes. Is it trivial? No. I would submit, however, that any developer worth his/her salt could do it if properly motivated.
I have written dozens of systems taking advantage of UDP and TCP based on the need of the system. I absolutely do know the difference. I haven't, however, had any reason to learn the underpinnings of the NTP protocol as yet, so you're right in that I didn't bother to look up whether its UDP or TCP based. UDP can be tunneled as well, and the idea is still valid. Maybe they allow UDP for some other application (video conferencing etc.) and you could always just use that port with a known outside source. Think before you post - especially as a coward. Oh, that's right - you're an idiot who can't take a smart concept and apply it as necessary to a given situation.
The most common solution to a firewall blocking a particular port or service: tunnel it. SSH is probably the easiest form of tunneling and putty has a great command line utility for just that. But you can also tunnel over HTTP using some basic programming skills. Worst case: set up a port forwarder on the outside of the network that forwards requests on port 80 to time.gov (or some other trusted NTP server) then set your internal NTP server to sync with it on port 80. (This assumes, of course, port based filtering.)
I visit DealMeIn.net religiously. I'm out of town on vacation at the moment and I hate missing the daily postings. Its truly an excellent site, and Dr. Eldarion (or his wife) are great at responding to the "Request a Deal" forum.
I'm getting married next year and as an advocate of open source, I'm trying to sell this idea to my fiance. Can you provide more information on costs, the terms of the contract, etc. to help me get started in my own search? (No worries, I'll spend plenty of time on google as well..but personal experiences mean a lot)
The monitoring is not useful for that purpose in many cities. My father and I discussed this a few months ago. (He is a Captain on the Sheriff's office where I grew up.)
Many departments don't respond to alarm calls as emergency calls anymore as the vast majority of them are false alarms. That means that they'll fit you in along side the noise complaints etc. and not actually come running lights/siren just because the alarm went off.
His advice? Buy the alarm.. get nice loud speakers inside *and* outside of the house and ditch the monitoring service. If someone is determined enough to continue into your home after a loud speaker alerts everyone in the neighborhood to their presence, they are determined enough to kill you before the cops get even close.
And not to start a flame war - but thats also why I believe in having a gun available for home defense.
Microsoft E85-02665 Windows XP Professional Upgrade with SP2 - Retail - $200.95
Thats the upgrade. For a new PC, you need the full version at $299, making it more expensive than any of the other components you list. (Not that there aren't nice components that cost more than $300, but the typical user doesn't buy them.)
Josh.
I've never seen an image protection trick that worked without changing the actual image itself. (Pre-processing it and applying a watermark, for example.) Even Kodak's website (www.proshots.com) for professional photographers has a huge flaw that lets any competent geek download the full quality high-res images without any sort of watermark or copyright indicator.
There is a great tool (non-free) called Passaware that will make that a problem of the past. It creates a floppy disk that claims to be a Windows SCSI Driver. You just boot into a windows boot disk, tap F6, select the disk's driver, and reboot the computer. Bam - the administrative password is now 12345.
Claims to work on 98-2K3 though I've only used it on 2K and XP Pro. (It worked great on both of these.) In fact, the other day I booted off of an XP startup disk and reset the password of a 2K machine.
Josh.
As a developer who has been forced to use IE in applications in the past, I can say that the Microsoft "Web Browser Control" is basically the IE rendering engine encapsulated in an OCX. Its extremely simple to include this rendering engine in any windows application. I'd imagine it would be trivial to write a firefox extension* that parses the URL and loads an IE control in a new "empty" frame if the URL is on the white list, then passes the URL to the control to be handled.
We might be able to use one of the tabs modification extensions that already exists as a starting point for usurping default firefox tab behavior, and I'd be interested in helping with a project of this nature.
*I have no experience writing firefox plugins, but the variety that are available show that the architecture is fairly extensible.
A much simpler, but much less integrated approach would be to use a "URL Launcher." Basically, a program that determines if the domain from the URL entered is "IE-only" or not and fires the appropriate browser accordingly. This would be a 5-10 minute project for a good developer, but would be effective.
My Dell laptop LCD runs natively in 1280x1024, and that res is actually great for software development. I can have the full-screen GUI for the product I am building in the "normal" screenspace and still have space off to the right for code windows or whatever else I want on screen at the moment. Its also great for watching DVDs while on the road.
Josh.
DealMeIn.Net (ran by a fellow slashdotter) and othersites like it frequently have low-end consumer grade wireless equipment for free or almost free after rebates.
If I recall correctly, the memos were improperly left on a shared drive. How many times have we all opened the document named "Strategy Memo" searching for something we legitimately need? This "hacked" thing is just a smoke screen for the fact that the contents of those memos were extremely embarrassing for the democratic party.
I'll one up ya here. I once ran across a program which needed one common password to register it. That password was a bible verse (in the form of "Genesis 1:1") about theft and its harm. Ouch.
I bet they made extensive research in Asia and it turned out that most people will be satisfied with an operating system as crippled as this
The question is: does the typical user know what they will be satisfied with? If I asked my average user how many concurrent processed they'd need to run, they'd be clueless. Though MS's marketing drones could make the question softer - that doesn't make the end user any more likely to give a valid or correct response. Polling data is only useful when the respondents understand the questions they are being asked.
Very few machines are worth 10.5 hours for me. Factoring in labor, I can save a lot of money by saving the data elsewhere then FDisking and reinstalling the OS. Even considering windows install time, program install time, and configuration, I don't have 10.5 hours in it and the user probably has a less glitchy machine for it.
It has very few restrictions. No bandwidth caps, no prohibition on servers or the like, just the usual anti-spam policies (if I spam, they reserve the right to block port 25) etc.
All in all, I think its worth the cost, but I might feel differently if it were coming out of my paycheck.
I wish I could find an alternative, but its the only provider in the small town where I live. Honestly, its not much of a concern as the bill is actually covered by the company I work full-time for. They simply don't mind that I also use it for consulting work after hours.
Is the price really that bad, though? It includes a static IP (admittedly a cheap addition), but we have offices that pay twice as much for T1 based solutions that don't perform at the same level.
A 2mbps to 5mbps Fios connection will cost $35 a month if purchased along with Verizon's local and long-distance telephone service. The service will cost $40 if purchased alone. A connection of up to 15mbps is available for $45 a month if purchased as part of the same telephone service bundle, or $50 alone. The company did not reveal pricing for the 30mbps plans.
That is subsantially less than the $210 I currently pay for my 3Mbps/1Mbps small business connection. I wonder how many of these will roll out as people like me jump to them before the major internet infrastructure starts to suffer? I mean, think of it: end point capacity could literally be upgraded by a factor of 10 in some areas. Will the backbones and their major tributaries be able to handle it?
Yes, my company does pay for my home broadband access..and they are remarkably liberal about it. They don't care what servers I run or how I use the bandwidth (3 Mb/1Mb), just so long as I can still effectively do my job. Of course, I work from home full time, so the situation is a bit different than that of many in our profession.
Josh.
The Product ID and Product Key collected are not retained after you are finished using Windows Update, unless the Product ID is not valid.
Though my workplace has all validly licensed copies, there have been occassions where I've just grabbed the closest Product Key during a reinstall rather than pull up the database of which keys go with which machines. They WILL keep a product ID if they deem it to be invalid? How long before we are all getting audited for not memorizing 30 different Product Keys for the 30 different windows licenses we have?
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I use ReplayTV and have never had any problems with content protection. There is even a great open source tool called DVArchive (at sourceforge) that lets one copy shows to/from the ReplayTV units and even stream content directly from the ReplayTV to any machine that supports HTTP streaming.
I highly recommend both of these products for the geek who wants a great DVR and the freedom to DivX content at will.
I agree with you that they have every right to go after users who are illegally pirating their material. The problem is that they aren't doing that. Rather, they are suing users who some poorly written software has deemed guilty, are who are identified by questionable means at best. This results in a series of form letters and legal threats. The problem is that the typical user can't afford to defend against these allegations, even if they are completely false, creating injustice by forcing innocent individuals to pay and sign away their lives rather than go bankrupt asserting their innocence.
On another note, I am sick of the MPAA and the RIAA claiming the moral high ground when DVDs were originally (poorly) designed to prevent Fair Use and (weakly) copy protected CDs are becoming more and more common in violation of fair use as well. And the trend only continues with HD-DVD...
My favorite part of the site, the footer:
/dev/null. By emailing us any questions or comments you give fedexfurniture.com the right to post any such message, and or replies on our site.
If any shipping corporations have problems with our site please feel free to forward requests to
If you were half as smart as you thought you were, you'd shut up and take the time to learn and appreciate the difference between a concept and a plan. I suggested the concept of tunneling then gave some examples of good tunneling systems to examine. You, lacking the intelligence to take that concept and apply it to a real-world situation, assumed the role of an anonymous coward to display to the world your own stupidity. Nice going.
Now, as the other poster who replied to you stated, virtually any protocol can be tunneled through something as simple as HTTP with a little effort and ingenuity; however, I suppose it takes a little imagination to understand that.
Let me explain it to ya. I'll try to use small words so you don't get too confused.
The NTP client is configured to NTP Sync with a custom daemon running inside the firewall. That custom daemon listens for UDP traffic on a given port. When received, it creates a false HTTP connection to some outside host and passes the information from the UDP connection. That outside host (also running a custom daemon), re-creates an appropriate UDP connection to a trusted time server and the process continues in that fashion until the sync is complete.
You could even use a simple TCP/UDP bridge daemon then tunnel outbound traffic through SSH. (Though this would add another daemon to maintain, secure, etc. and is not necessary as NTP traffic doesn't need to be encrypted.)
This model should allow accurate NTP syncing through just about any firewall with some standard protocol spoofing. Is it complex? Yes. Is it trivial? No. I would submit, however, that any developer worth his/her salt could do it if properly motivated.
I have written dozens of systems taking advantage of UDP and TCP based on the need of the system. I absolutely do know the difference. I haven't, however, had any reason to learn the underpinnings of the NTP protocol as yet, so you're right in that I didn't bother to look up whether its UDP or TCP based. UDP can be tunneled as well, and the idea is still valid. Maybe they allow UDP for some other application (video conferencing etc.) and you could always just use that port with a known outside source. Think before you post - especially as a coward. Oh, that's right - you're an idiot who can't take a smart concept and apply it as necessary to a given situation.
The most common solution to a firewall blocking a particular port or service: tunnel it. SSH is probably the easiest form of tunneling and putty has a great command line utility for just that. But you can also tunnel over HTTP using some basic programming skills. Worst case: set up a port forwarder on the outside of the network that forwards requests on port 80 to time.gov (or some other trusted NTP server) then set your internal NTP server to sync with it on port 80. (This assumes, of course, port based filtering.)
I visit DealMeIn.net religiously. I'm out of town on vacation at the moment and I hate missing the daily postings. Its truly an excellent site, and Dr. Eldarion (or his wife) are great at responding to the "Request a Deal" forum.
I'm getting married next year and as an advocate of open source, I'm trying to sell this idea to my fiance. Can you provide more information on costs, the terms of the contract, etc. to help me get started in my own search? (No worries, I'll spend plenty of time on google as well..but personal experiences mean a lot)
Josh.
The monitoring is not useful for that purpose in many cities. My father and I discussed this a few months ago. (He is a Captain on the Sheriff's office where I grew up.)
Many departments don't respond to alarm calls as emergency calls anymore as the vast majority of them are false alarms. That means that they'll fit you in along side the noise complaints etc. and not actually come running lights/siren just because the alarm went off.
His advice? Buy the alarm.. get nice loud speakers inside *and* outside of the house and ditch the monitoring service. If someone is determined enough to continue into your home after a loud speaker alerts everyone in the neighborhood to their presence, they are determined enough to kill you before the cops get even close.
And not to start a flame war - but thats also why I believe in having a gun available for home defense.
Josh.
Microsoft E85-02665 Windows XP Professional Upgrade with SP2 - Retail - $200.95
Thats the upgrade. For a new PC, you need the full version at $299, making it more expensive than any of the other components you list. (Not that there aren't nice components that cost more than $300, but the typical user doesn't buy them.) Josh.
This is great - until you are in a car accident and are bleeding from the face.
"I need to call [insert japanese equivelent of 911]."
"Sorry sir, facial recognition failed."
[Insert slow painful death]
I've never seen an image protection trick that worked without changing the actual image itself. (Pre-processing it and applying a watermark, for example.) Even Kodak's website (www.proshots.com) for professional photographers has a huge flaw that lets any competent geek download the full quality high-res images without any sort of watermark or copyright indicator.
There is a great tool (non-free) called Passaware that will make that a problem of the past. It creates a floppy disk that claims to be a Windows SCSI Driver. You just boot into a windows boot disk, tap F6, select the disk's driver, and reboot the computer. Bam - the administrative password is now 12345. Claims to work on 98-2K3 though I've only used it on 2K and XP Pro. (It worked great on both of these.) In fact, the other day I booted off of an XP startup disk and reset the password of a 2K machine. Josh.
As a developer who has been forced to use IE in applications in the past, I can say that the Microsoft "Web Browser Control" is basically the IE rendering engine encapsulated in an OCX. Its extremely simple to include this rendering engine in any windows application. I'd imagine it would be trivial to write a firefox extension* that parses the URL and loads an IE control in a new "empty" frame if the URL is on the white list, then passes the URL to the control to be handled.
We might be able to use one of the tabs modification extensions that already exists as a starting point for usurping default firefox tab behavior, and I'd be interested in helping with a project of this nature.
*I have no experience writing firefox plugins, but the variety that are available show that the architecture is fairly extensible.
A much simpler, but much less integrated approach would be to use a "URL Launcher." Basically, a program that determines if the domain from the URL entered is "IE-only" or not and fires the appropriate browser accordingly. This would be a 5-10 minute project for a good developer, but would be effective.
Josh.
My Dell laptop LCD runs natively in 1280x1024, and that res is actually great for software development. I can have the full-screen GUI for the product I am building in the "normal" screenspace and still have space off to the right for code windows or whatever else I want on screen at the moment. Its also great for watching DVDs while on the road. Josh.
DealMeIn.Net (ran by a fellow slashdotter) and other sites like it frequently have low-end consumer grade wireless equipment for free or almost free after rebates.
Josh.
If I recall correctly, the memos were improperly left on a shared drive. How many times have we all opened the document named "Strategy Memo" searching for something we legitimately need? This "hacked" thing is just a smoke screen for the fact that the contents of those memos were extremely embarrassing for the democratic party.
I'll one up ya here. I once ran across a program which needed one common password to register it. That password was a bible verse (in the form of "Genesis 1:1") about theft and its harm. Ouch.
I bet they made extensive research in Asia and it turned out that most people will be satisfied with an operating system as crippled as this
The question is: does the typical user know what they will be satisfied with? If I asked my average user how many concurrent processed they'd need to run, they'd be clueless. Though MS's marketing drones could make the question softer - that doesn't make the end user any more likely to give a valid or correct response. Polling data is only useful when the respondents understand the questions they are being asked.
Very few machines are worth 10.5 hours for me. Factoring in labor, I can save a lot of money by saving the data elsewhere then FDisking and reinstalling the OS. Even considering windows install time, program install time, and configuration, I don't have 10.5 hours in it and the user probably has a less glitchy machine for it.
It has very few restrictions. No bandwidth caps, no prohibition on servers or the like, just the usual anti-spam policies (if I spam, they reserve the right to block port 25) etc.
All in all, I think its worth the cost, but I might feel differently if it were coming out of my paycheck.
Josh.
I wish I could find an alternative, but its the only provider in the small town where I live. Honestly, its not much of a concern as the bill is actually covered by the company I work full-time for. They simply don't mind that I also use it for consulting work after hours.
Is the price really that bad, though? It includes a static IP (admittedly a cheap addition), but we have offices that pay twice as much for T1 based solutions that don't perform at the same level.
Josh.
From the article:
A 2mbps to 5mbps Fios connection will cost $35 a month if purchased along with Verizon's local and long-distance telephone service. The service will cost $40 if purchased alone. A connection of up to 15mbps is available for $45 a month if purchased as part of the same telephone service bundle, or $50 alone. The company did not reveal pricing for the 30mbps plans.
That is subsantially less than the $210 I currently pay for my 3Mbps/1Mbps small business connection. I wonder how many of these will roll out as people like me jump to them before the major internet infrastructure starts to suffer? I mean, think of it: end point capacity could literally be upgraded by a factor of 10 in some areas. Will the backbones and their major tributaries be able to handle it?
Either way, I am looking forward to it.
Josh.
Yes, my company does pay for my home broadband access..and they are remarkably liberal about it. They don't care what servers I run or how I use the bandwidth (3 Mb/1Mb), just so long as I can still effectively do my job. Of course, I work from home full time, so the situation is a bit different than that of many in our profession. Josh.
From the article:
The Product ID and Product Key collected are not retained after you are finished using Windows Update, unless the Product ID is not valid.
Though my workplace has all validly licensed copies, there have been occassions where I've just grabbed the closest Product Key during a reinstall rather than pull up the database of which keys go with which machines. They WILL keep a product ID if they deem it to be invalid? How long before we are all getting audited for not memorizing 30 different Product Keys for the 30 different windows licenses we have?