These pirate trackers also have working versions of both XP and Vista that have working Microsoft validation. Supposedly this isn't possible, Microsoft is tracking re-used keys, etc etc - except that the pirates have found a way around it, and all those pirate distributions of XP that come bundled with tools like Adobe and Nero all can be patched using Microsoft Windows Update.
I wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot pole, even if they were reviewed file for file for viruses and you ran a firewall that blocked outbound connections like Comodo or Zonealarm, because if they want to create a zombie machine, they'll do it using SSL for the control channel.
Windows 7 can't be patched online yet, but after release if these sites have copies that can be, then I doubt Microsoft would be so happy.
As to whether or not this is some MS developers idea of a viral marketing campaign: we give those guys in redmond too much credit. I don't think they like seeing it in the wild, esp. with the comments flowing in about how it's no better than Vista.
David Maynor, CTO with Errata Security, says '09 could be the year when the first large-scale and widespread attack occurs on the Internet's infrastructure. "I think with the [hacking] work being done on Cisco and routing gear in general we'll see the first wide-scale 'e-bomb' that will break peering between ISPs and make large portions of the Internet unreachable," Maynor says.
Other than the attack earlier this year where Pakistan accidently blackholed Youtube worldwide when they injected bogus routes and PCCI stupidly forwarded them on, what exactly do they think can be done? In case they don't know, BGP peers are usually in access lists. And ACLs are fast or ASIC switched, so they are extremely resistant to DDOS attacks (i.e. sending a bunch of packets against a router interface violating an ACL isn't going to do much to a big router), and the rest of BGP is pretty strong based on the trust relationships. I have more confidence in the operators on Nanog fixing any storm than I do sysadmins worldwide.
If they think BGPv5 with PKI is the answer, they have another thing coming. Did you see the root CA spoof this week? Trust via ACLs is monitored and refined with peers and operators, trust via a certificate? A mess waiting to happen.
It sounds to me like David Maynor is just looking to short some Cisco and Juniper stock, and doesn't know anything about how the internet actually works.
With the proliferation of snapshot technology (for instance Parallels on the Mac contains the ability to snapshot the VM and restore any snapshot) plus the ability to back the VM up to a USB2 disk that you can just plugin and then pull and put in a safe place - having point in time backups of servers has become so trivial and easy that it is unbelieveable that anybody would run a buisiness without it.
A leading SAN/NAS vendor (no commercials here) has a solution for SMB that includes a disk shelf and controller integrated together with 4TB of storage for about $14k. Maybe closer to $20k if you license the Linux and Windows backup agents to the SAN. Really - ANYBODY can do this.
If you're really THAT hard up for operating cash, get a 2U server with an integrated tape drive at the very very very least.
I agree with Vinyl here. It's been proven time and again that one-of-a-kind exclusive games move consoles, going back to SNES and even 2600 vs. Intellivision days (the stone age).
It still precludes them from selling at $299, which is where marketing data is suggesting they need to go to compete against Xbox.
PS3 is being outsold by a good margin month to month, which means market share is dwindling (although objectively there are more PS3s in the world, which makes the equation for game developers shift) - and they seem to be losing developer mind share, as evidenced by the fact that there are few games that are PS3 exclusive. Most importantly and shockingly, Microsoft is getting Japanese game developers to come over to Xbox, where that model simply didn't exist in the PS2 days.
Sony needs about 4-5 more Metal Gear Solid like titles, and they really need to work out the bugs with online play. I don't use my PS3 online, but from what I am to understand, it's not even close to Xbox live.
The problem with the article is the decision made by the author not to break the categories into ergonomic vs. standard. That makes it basically a list of keyboards that I could go to Amazon and see.
An excellent point. Bezos has a vested interest in the kindle as a means to further wrest control away from brick and mortar outlets like Barnes & Noble and Borders. He's not going to instruct his bean counters to let on with the truth, which is people really prefer tactile books, with pages that you turn and bookmark with real bookmarks.
This is the last Xmas I use Amazon. They botched every order, and when subcontractors ran out of stock on toys, they all waited until Xmas Eve to let me know they wouldn't be filling my order. One went ahead and charged my credit card anyhow. What a great model Bezos has - he doesn't actually have to do the work, he's just the front end to other stores that don't have his name recognition.
Amazon is increasingly a house of cards.
Google only shares personal information with other companies or individuals outside of Google in the following limited circumstances:
* We have your consent. We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information.
* We provide such information to our subsidiaries, affiliated companies or other trusted businesses or persons for the purpose of processing personal information on our behalf. We require that these parties agree to process such information based on our instructions and in compliance with this Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
* We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request, (b) enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations thereof, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, or (d) protect against imminent harm to the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public as required or permitted by law.
That's a pretty broad policy. *ANY* applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforeable governmental request. That leaves the door pretty wide open for the Chinese government to start asking for the query strings of their citizens to me.
I think the answer is clear, if you need to see webpages and want NO trace of you - you have to compromise a machine, surf via a proxy you set up in it, and then timebomb the drive to wipe itself after you are done. And even then you may get caught, if there are firewall logs.
DISCLOSURE
All use of our site is confidential. We disclose user information only as provided for herein and when we believe that the law requires it, or when disclosure is necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against someone who may be causing injury to others or interfering with Proxify's rights or property.
In the event of an assignment, sale, joint venture, or other transfer or disposition of some or all of the assets of Proxify, you agree that we can accordingly assign, sell, license or transfer any information that our users have provided to us. Please note, however, that the purchasing party cannot use the personal information you have submitted to us under this Privacy Policy in a manner that is materially inconsistent with this Privacy Policy without your prior consent.
That pretty much says: hey, we have your web surfing logs and we'll give em up if we have to. We don't want to, and we'll destroy logs after 30 days (it says that elsewhere in the policy) but dammit, if they bend us over and lube us up - we're gonna damn well hand it over rather than taking one for the team, so to speak.
So Norman the android was right, and Kirk was wrong? Scotty really could die from too much happiness? Oh Logic, you really are a bird chirping in an empty meadow!
Tin soldiers and Bush is coming,
We're finally on our own website.
This summer I hear the clicking,
Four spreads in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it
Firewalls are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her spread nude on the page
How can you link when you know?
Gotta get down to it
Firewalls are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her spread nude on the page
How can you link when you know?
Tin soldiers and Bush is coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the clicking,
Four spreads in Ohio.
It seems like it's basically a news aggregator, and the discussion is mostly mindless drivel (even compared to Slashdot) and people voting.
Mindless drivel compared to Slashdot is like saying it's bad music, even compared to Brittney Spears. It's like saying it's black, even compared to a Black Hole. It's like saying it's bad comedy, even compared to Gallagher. It's like saying it's hot, even when compared to a nuke blast. It's like saying it's a bad posting, even when compared to this one.
Seriously. The dot-com cheerleader mag that has absolutely nothing to say anymore. Go profile John chambers and his three hair comb over again.
BTW, could they have chosen a worse picture of Linus? Don't answer that.
Oh, and they are fools to throw the Netflix guy out there. He owns a distribution model, and with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, I don't think the DVD as a distro method is nearly as dead as they think.
I'm curious why you've been modded as funny, since what you said isn't funny - it's true. Media pirates are being profiled in police documentation as people who are likely to be involved in hacking, stolen credit card rings and other scams. In fact, there is a whitepaper floating around that talks about tracking the upper echelon of hacking rings through their achilles heel - their propensity for aggregating large collections of stolen media. If you think the guys in Sweden who run the Pirate Bay are only involved in running a BT tracker for file sharing, you're incredibly naive. Raid those guys and you'd likely to find lots of other ancillary illegal activity, and running a pirate ring is just the probable cause you need to get a waarant.
Google committed to share price. As somebody who rode a measly $5k up to $30k with Google shares, I happily have now stepped off the bandwagon of shareholders. The stock is overvalued. Google spreadhseet has showed that while AJAX Web apps have many neat features, they are not ready to take the place of OpenOffice.
What they think will gain from being in China will get offset by the corruption that will infiltrate the company. Pretty soon, the Chinese will want Google's research to start occuring over there, or they pull the plug. Anything they don't like, they'll pull the plug. Volunteering to work with them ultimately is far less profitable than working in a true free economy.
How about a film where the soldier abandons his robot in the desert, because the robot keeps calling him "daddy" and it's creepy. And then the robot sets off on a quest to understand itself, and meets up with a sex doll and goes looking for the "Green Hummer"? The film ends with Harrison Ford telling the robot it has no end date, and they drive into the mountains together. Captain Adama lands in a spaceship, leaves a little oragami unicorn on a ledge, and then the hot Cylon chick shows up and takes off her shirt.
Just came to me. I better write the outline before I forget.
Slashdot Mirror
These pirate trackers also have working versions of both XP and Vista that have working Microsoft validation. Supposedly this isn't possible, Microsoft is tracking re-used keys, etc etc - except that the pirates have found a way around it, and all those pirate distributions of XP that come bundled with tools like Adobe and Nero all can be patched using Microsoft Windows Update.
I wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot pole, even if they were reviewed file for file for viruses and you ran a firewall that blocked outbound connections like Comodo or Zonealarm, because if they want to create a zombie machine, they'll do it using SSL for the control channel.
Windows 7 can't be patched online yet, but after release if these sites have copies that can be, then I doubt Microsoft would be so happy.
As to whether or not this is some MS developers idea of a viral marketing campaign: we give those guys in redmond too much credit. I don't think they like seeing it in the wild, esp. with the comments flowing in about how it's no better than Vista.
Here is a quote from the article:
David Maynor, CTO with Errata Security, says '09 could be the year when the first large-scale and widespread attack occurs on the Internet's infrastructure. "I think with the [hacking] work being done on Cisco and routing gear in general we'll see the first wide-scale 'e-bomb' that will break peering between ISPs and make large portions of the Internet unreachable," Maynor says.
Obama's IT security plan (seen here: http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/081208_securingcyberspace_44.pdf) also spends several pages talking about a worldwide attack against BGP, or perhaps against something inherent in Cisco or Juniper gear that is attackable.
Other than the attack earlier this year where Pakistan accidently blackholed Youtube worldwide when they injected bogus routes and PCCI stupidly forwarded them on, what exactly do they think can be done? In case they don't know, BGP peers are usually in access lists. And ACLs are fast or ASIC switched, so they are extremely resistant to DDOS attacks (i.e. sending a bunch of packets against a router interface violating an ACL isn't going to do much to a big router), and the rest of BGP is pretty strong based on the trust relationships. I have more confidence in the operators on Nanog fixing any storm than I do sysadmins worldwide.
If they think BGPv5 with PKI is the answer, they have another thing coming. Did you see the root CA spoof this week? Trust via ACLs is monitored and refined with peers and operators, trust via a certificate? A mess waiting to happen.
It sounds to me like David Maynor is just looking to short some Cisco and Juniper stock, and doesn't know anything about how the internet actually works.
With the proliferation of snapshot technology (for instance Parallels on the Mac contains the ability to snapshot the VM and restore any snapshot) plus the ability to back the VM up to a USB2 disk that you can just plugin and then pull and put in a safe place - having point in time backups of servers has become so trivial and easy that it is unbelieveable that anybody would run a buisiness without it.
A leading SAN/NAS vendor (no commercials here) has a solution for SMB that includes a disk shelf and controller integrated together with 4TB of storage for about $14k. Maybe closer to $20k if you license the Linux and Windows backup agents to the SAN. Really - ANYBODY can do this.
If you're really THAT hard up for operating cash, get a 2U server with an integrated tape drive at the very very very least.
I agree with Vinyl here. It's been proven time and again that one-of-a-kind exclusive games move consoles, going back to SNES and even 2600 vs. Intellivision days (the stone age).
If Sony can't make it go as a game machine, it turns out it works good as a cluster computer, esp. wrt to cracking keys and finding MD5 collisions:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/12/berlin.html
It still precludes them from selling at $299, which is where marketing data is suggesting they need to go to compete against Xbox.
PS3 is being outsold by a good margin month to month, which means market share is dwindling (although objectively there are more PS3s in the world, which makes the equation for game developers shift) - and they seem to be losing developer mind share, as evidenced by the fact that there are few games that are PS3 exclusive. Most importantly and shockingly, Microsoft is getting Japanese game developers to come over to Xbox, where that model simply didn't exist in the PS2 days.
Sony needs about 4-5 more Metal Gear Solid like titles, and they really need to work out the bugs with online play. I don't use my PS3 online, but from what I am to understand, it's not even close to Xbox live.
The problem with the article is the decision made by the author not to break the categories into ergonomic vs. standard. That makes it basically a list of keyboards that I could go to Amazon and see.
Being that this is Wal-Mart, it's called the "Deliverance Gee Your Mouth is Purty" Packer.
It was compiled from a program called "poorwhitetrash.c"
An excellent point. Bezos has a vested interest in the kindle as a means to further wrest control away from brick and mortar outlets like Barnes & Noble and Borders. He's not going to instruct his bean counters to let on with the truth, which is people really prefer tactile books, with pages that you turn and bookmark with real bookmarks.
This is the last Xmas I use Amazon. They botched every order, and when subcontractors ran out of stock on toys, they all waited until Xmas Eve to let me know they wouldn't be filling my order. One went ahead and charged my credit card anyhow. What a great model Bezos has - he doesn't actually have to do the work, he's just the front end to other stores that don't have his name recognition.
Amazon is increasingly a house of cards.
2. It is illegal in Britain to refuse to surrender encryption keys to the police if they ask for them.
Do you have a source online for this? How can refusal to cooperate with an investigation itself be illegal? That makes no sense.
Let's look at Google's privacy policy, shall we?
Information sharing
Google only shares personal information with other companies or individuals outside of Google in the following limited circumstances:
* We have your consent. We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information.
* We provide such information to our subsidiaries, affiliated companies or other trusted businesses or persons for the purpose of processing personal information on our behalf. We require that these parties agree to process such information based on our instructions and in compliance with this Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
* We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request, (b) enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations thereof, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, or (d) protect against imminent harm to the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public as required or permitted by law.
That's a pretty broad policy. *ANY* applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforeable governmental request. That leaves the door pretty wide open for the Chinese government to start asking for the query strings of their citizens to me.
I think the answer is clear, if you need to see webpages and want NO trace of you - you have to compromise a machine, surf via a proxy you set up in it, and then timebomb the drive to wipe itself after you are done. And even then you may get caught, if there are firewall logs.
Let's look at a leading company that does web proxy policy:
DISCLOSURE
All use of our site is confidential. We disclose user information only as provided for herein and when we believe that the law requires it, or when disclosure is necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against someone who may be causing injury to others or interfering with Proxify's rights or property.
In the event of an assignment, sale, joint venture, or other transfer or disposition of some or all of the assets of Proxify, you agree that we can accordingly assign, sell, license or transfer any information that our users have provided to us. Please note, however, that the purchasing party cannot use the personal information you have submitted to us under this Privacy Policy in a manner that is materially inconsistent with this Privacy Policy without your prior consent.
That pretty much says: hey, we have your web surfing logs and we'll give em up if we have to. We don't want to, and we'll destroy logs after 30 days (it says that elsewhere in the policy) but dammit, if they bend us over and lube us up - we're gonna damn well hand it over rather than taking one for the team, so to speak.
So Norman the android was right, and Kirk was wrong? Scotty really could die from too much happiness? Oh Logic, you really are a bird chirping in an empty meadow!
Judith Regan has already signed a book deal with him.
Tin soldiers and Bush is coming,
We're finally on our own website.
This summer I hear the clicking, Four spreads in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it
Firewalls are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her spread nude on the page
How can you link when you know?
Gotta get down to it
Firewalls are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her spread nude on the page
How can you link when you know?
Tin soldiers and Bush is coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the clicking, Four spreads in Ohio.
It seems like it's basically a news aggregator, and the discussion is mostly mindless drivel (even compared to Slashdot) and people voting.
Mindless drivel compared to Slashdot is like saying it's bad music, even compared to Brittney Spears. It's like saying it's black, even compared to a Black Hole. It's like saying it's bad comedy, even compared to Gallagher. It's like saying it's hot, even when compared to a nuke blast. It's like saying it's a bad posting, even when compared to this one.
I love Sinatra's cover of that tune.
Beaker, however, can't bounds check his code worth a damn so he only writes in Java.
Seriously. The dot-com cheerleader mag that has absolutely nothing to say anymore. Go profile John chambers and his three hair comb over again.
BTW, could they have chosen a worse picture of Linus? Don't answer that.
Oh, and they are fools to throw the Netflix guy out there. He owns a distribution model, and with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, I don't think the DVD as a distro method is nearly as dead as they think.
I'm curious why you've been modded as funny, since what you said isn't funny - it's true. Media pirates are being profiled in police documentation as people who are likely to be involved in hacking, stolen credit card rings and other scams. In fact, there is a whitepaper floating around that talks about tracking the upper echelon of hacking rings through their achilles heel - their propensity for aggregating large collections of stolen media. If you think the guys in Sweden who run the Pirate Bay are only involved in running a BT tracker for file sharing, you're incredibly naive. Raid those guys and you'd likely to find lots of other ancillary illegal activity, and running a pirate ring is just the probable cause you need to get a waarant.
Google committed to share price. As somebody who rode a measly $5k up to $30k with Google shares, I happily have now stepped off the bandwagon of shareholders. The stock is overvalued. Google spreadhseet has showed that while AJAX Web apps have many neat features, they are not ready to take the place of OpenOffice.
What they think will gain from being in China will get offset by the corruption that will infiltrate the company. Pretty soon, the Chinese will want Google's research to start occuring over there, or they pull the plug. Anything they don't like, they'll pull the plug. Volunteering to work with them ultimately is far less profitable than working in a true free economy.
Bitch slap his ass, Danno! Besides, as we all know, Bruce doesn't drink.
I loved her in the The Bad and the Beautiful. Her passionate kiss with Kirk Douglas was so racy for the time.
They'll release a study that shows that ODF causes cancer in lab mice.
How about a film where the soldier abandons his robot in the desert, because the robot keeps calling him "daddy" and it's creepy. And then the robot sets off on a quest to understand itself, and meets up with a sex doll and goes looking for the "Green Hummer"? The film ends with Harrison Ford telling the robot it has no end date, and they drive into the mountains together. Captain Adama lands in a spaceship, leaves a little oragami unicorn on a ledge, and then the hot Cylon chick shows up and takes off her shirt.
Just came to me. I better write the outline before I forget.