If there is spyware sending out packets, one could presumably see what IP address they are going to and maybe even reverse engineer their data format. Then someone could write a program which sends their servers spy packets containing meaningless or misleading information, thereby screwing up whatever market research they are trying to do. Maybe we can create some fake correlations between unrelated items, after all, unlikely correlations come up often enough in real life, like diapers and beer, that they may not catch on until long after their databases are completely cluttered with meaningless crap.
Now, if only they could do something about the pop-ups, crashes, dropped connections, high prices, incessant self-promotion, etc, they might have a good product.
One time, when my usual ISP was down, I needed internet. Desparate, (back when I ran Winders) I threw on an AOL CD to use some of the 1045 hours of free access, planning to cancel when my regular ISP was back online. Cancelling AOL is interesting, first off, the person who answers the calls has been brainwashed to think AOL is the greatest THING ever, and will first ask you why you want to cancel, then argue with your reasoning. Once you go through all that, they will offer you two free months of service while you reconsider. DON'T FALL FOR THIS. I did, and forgot, and the bastards charged my credit card three months later. I was mad as hell and had to go through the Movementarian "You're free to leave anytime you want, but tell us why you're leaving" grilling on the phone all over again. Of course, they offered me two free months again, so apparently you can stay on AOL for free indefinitely this way (But why would you want to?).
Kaolin may be the only English word with "aol" as a substring.
Well, obviously its sending all your personal information back to Redmond. This enables Microsoft to better understand their user base. It also presumably allows the government to determine who's a terrorist. If WMP plays a lot of Toby Keith, you're a good American, but if you are listening to REM, you are potentially a suvbersive terrorist type and they are going to be keeping an eye on you. That is why I wear this tinfoil hat and run only GNU Hurd on my computer.
"The next fifty years will be like the last fifty years, only replace commun- with terror-"
"Hey, look at me. I'm a wild man. Woo hoo! I'm a rock star, but I like guns. Isn't that weird? Hello? Hello? Anybody paying attention? Hello? Aw, to hell with it."
-- Ted Nugent
You could just have someone tie you to a bed until you stop screaming.
When my Dad had to work third shift, he would drink big glasses of Mountain Dew with a couple of spoonfuls of coffee grounds stirred in. He called it an eye opener.
Did you ever notice that when the Hindenburg burned, it gave off a thick black smoke. However, hydrogen burns clean. I think most of what was burning was the varnished cotton skin. If aerofoam itself is non-flammable, this may be the way to go.
Also, we would have to work out how to hang a Gondola from something that's mostly air.
What if a probe were sent to a comet to crash into it in such a way that was redirected towards (but not quite directly at) the Earth? The comet might then enter orbit around the Earth and be retrieved with or studied from the space shuttle?
As the sun gives up mass to solar wind and matter->energy conversion. It will get lighter and thus have less gravitational pull. Probably not much though. Likewise, several tons of meteorites and space dust fall to earth every year and gradually make it heavier, increasing its gravitational pull, again probably not a significant effect. But over enough time these effects could change the length of a year.
It least from my perspective, it shows that there is an inverse relationship between quality of an album and the quantity that sells (or is downloaded). F'rinstance, the only album on the list I remotely liked was Damien Rice's O, which was near to the bottom. The rest was largely crap.
waming: wandering off topic
Back in the old days when a disk drive could tip over and kill somebody, music was actually good. This was because record companies took a fundamentally different strategy to marketing. It used to be that they would hire a talented artist, and give them total creative control. This was particularly true w/ the Warner-Reprise label. Often, an artist would just develop a cult following, or they wouldn't become huge until their second or third album, after they've matured and produced something of real quality. This way, good artists managed to have long distiguished careers and produced truly good music. This is why many popular bands from the 60s, 70s had such long careers and produced hits over spans of 10+ years (e.g. Rolling Stones, Springsteen, etc.).
Today, however, the business model for the record industry is to find some no-talent but good looking putzes and hype them to death on their first album so that they make money before they get older and unattractive and people stop buying their album. There is no long term revenue in this plan, but it doesn't matter, because they can always hire younger artists and repeat as necessary to keep up their cash flow. When that doesn't work, they can start suing people for downloading songs.
That's just my 4/25 of a bit.
"You put 'em on stage and you have 'em undress
Some angel whore who can learn a guitar lick
Hey hey, that's what I call music."
The headers don't get modified at compile time, they get modified when a tainted program is run, which could occur when logged in as admin. So, even though I was wrong about the file permissions (I thank you for pointing that out BTW), this is still a theoretically possible (albeit highly ineffective) way to propagate a worm. I didn't say that this would work particularly well, just that it could work.
Also, on a less-related matter, if you don't want to write a quine-like program in the header, you could have the macro-inserted function download and run an executable that modifies the headers for it. With sufficient obfuscation and preprocessor abuse, this worm could be weaved amongst the reams of macros and definitions in the windows.h include tree, effectively making it invisible without close scrutiny.
In the Yahoo! article, all of the companies mentioned except Microsoft use, sell, or support Linux/OSS systems. As such, they are not likely to lobby in favor of Microsoft-style security-through-obscurity. As for licenses, the question really depends on the penalty for practicing without having one. Will it work like the MSCE program, where you can still write MS code without it? Or will it be like a driver's license, where you can be penalized for practicing without it? If its the former, then I don't really care one way or the other. If its the latter, I think it will cause a lot of hassle without any real results.
Also, one should realize that many security holes are caused by bad design choices outside the control of the lowly programmers who might be penalized. Consider this example:
In MS Visual C++, the *.h files are writeable. Therefore, it is possible to create a (very slow) worm using #define macros. They could "hook" various functions to add worm code to the *.h files when ran on another machine with Visual C++. Thus, executables compiled on that machine have this "feature" as well and can spread the worm further.
static int infect_headers() {/* Should contain code to somehow insert a copy of this function and the below #define into this header if its not already there. A quine implemented in a header file?
*/
return 0;// always }
#define strlen(x) (infect_headers() + strlen(x))
Note that the C Preprocessor and compiler works as designed here. The problem lies in the idiotic decision to make the header files modifiable by anyone.
Its true, the average Joe's understanding of computers is pretty poor. Consider the following actual exchanges I've had with people:
1. Best Buy Me: Does this [digital] camera come with drivers for Linux? Clerk: The drivers are for the camera and should work with any operating system. Me: Goodbye
2. AOL vs. Internet Name Withheld #1: If I switch from AOL, can I still buy stuff on Amazon.com?
3. A virus Me: Hello? Name Withheld #2: Mike, I think my computer has a virus. Me: Why do you say that? NW2: It says something about a disk error whenever I turn it on. Me: Take the floppy out of the A: drive. NW2: Wow! It works now! Thanks!
4. Giving away my old computer Me: You can have this old Pentium. Name Withheld #3: I don't need that part. I just need a screen and a keyboard to type letters and stuff. Me: Yeah, but this is what makes it all work. NW3: Oh, right.
Worst:
Microsoft Rights Management Services (RMS)
- Forces everyone who does business with you to use RMS if you use RMS.
- Forces you to use RMS to do business with anyone who uses RMS.
- Slanders the good name of Richard Stallman. Can he sue them for this?
One of the Best:
YahooPOPs. (Provides free SMTP/POP3 access to Yahoo Mail by downloading html, parsing out message, converting to SMTP/POP3) I know it is rather trivial in the big scheme of things, but it is a clever program that demonstrates the creativity and originality of the OSS community.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/yahoopops/
I dated that girl. She knew C, enjoyed D&D, swore by Emacs, and she was one of the most beautiful people I have ever known. I met her at a LUG meeting. After the meeting, I went up and started talking to her. We went out for drinks. A relationship developed. We were a couple in perfect harmony. We finished each other's #defines. But there were irreconcileable differences. She used KDE, I used Gnome. We fought over it. One day, it got so intense that we agreed it would be better if we parted. I haven't seen her in over a year, but I still think about her almost daily. So Crystal, if you are out there and you miss me, send me an email.
Mike
"Software is like sex, its better when its free." -- Attributed to Linus Torvalds
Slashdot Mirror
If there is spyware sending out packets, one could presumably see what IP address they are going to and maybe even reverse engineer their data format. Then someone could write a program which sends their servers spy packets containing meaningless or misleading information, thereby screwing up whatever market research they are trying to do. Maybe we can create some fake correlations between unrelated items, after all, unlikely correlations come up often enough in real life, like diapers and beer, that they may not catch on until long after their databases are completely cluttered with meaningless crap.
Now, if only they could do something about the pop-ups, crashes, dropped connections, high prices, incessant self-promotion, etc, they might have a good product.
One time, when my usual ISP was down, I needed internet. Desparate, (back when I ran Winders) I threw on an AOL CD to use some of the 1045 hours of free access, planning to cancel when my regular ISP was back online. Cancelling AOL is interesting, first off, the person who answers the calls has been brainwashed to think AOL is the greatest THING ever, and will first ask you why you want to cancel, then argue with your reasoning. Once you go through all that, they will offer you two free months of service while you reconsider. DON'T FALL FOR THIS. I did, and forgot, and the bastards charged my credit card three months later. I was mad as hell and had to go through the Movementarian "You're free to leave anytime you want, but tell us why you're leaving" grilling on the phone all over again. Of course, they offered me two free months again, so apparently you can stay on AOL for free indefinitely this way (But why would you want to?).
Kaolin may be the only English word with "aol" as a substring.
I know its out there, its just not popular. Popular music is all hype no substance.
I've heard of data mining, but this must be new. Is it like offshore oil drilling?
Well, obviously its sending all your personal information back to Redmond. This enables Microsoft to better understand their user base. It also presumably allows the government to determine who's a terrorist. If WMP plays a lot of Toby Keith, you're a good American, but if you are listening to REM, you are potentially a suvbersive terrorist type and they are going to be keeping an eye on you. That is why I wear this tinfoil hat and run only GNU Hurd on my computer. "The next fifty years will be like the last fifty years, only replace commun- with terror-"
This is true, they plan for every possible scenario. If Easter Island gives us some shit tomorrow, we're ready. Bring it on!
Judas Priest, Ronnie James Dio, Ozzy Osbourne
Crap, crap and crap. So there.
Ted Nugent Even Crappier.
"Hey, look at me. I'm a wild man. Woo hoo! I'm a rock star, but I like guns. Isn't that weird? Hello? Hello? Anybody paying attention? Hello? Aw, to hell with it."
-- Ted Nugent
You could just have someone tie you to a bed until you stop screaming.
When my Dad had to work third shift, he would drink big glasses of Mountain Dew with a couple of spoonfuls of coffee grounds stirred in. He called it an eye opener.
Did you ever notice that when the Hindenburg burned, it gave off a thick black smoke. However, hydrogen burns clean. I think most of what was burning was the varnished cotton skin. If aerofoam itself is non-flammable, this may be the way to go.
Also, we would have to work out how to hang a Gondola from something that's mostly air.
What if a probe were sent to a comet to crash into it in such a way that was redirected towards (but not quite directly at) the Earth? The comet might then enter orbit around the Earth and be retrieved with or studied from the space shuttle?
"Announcing new Nabisco Trits (TM)"
Also try the Cheese Trits and Cool Ranch Trits
Americans still ride trains?
As the sun gives up mass to solar wind and matter->energy conversion. It will get lighter and thus have less gravitational pull. Probably not much though. Likewise, several tons of meteorites and space dust fall to earth every year and gradually make it heavier, increasing its gravitational pull, again probably not a significant effect. But over enough time these effects could change the length of a year.
"Its only a matter of Time and Newsweek"
It least from my perspective, it shows that there is an inverse relationship between quality of an album and the quantity that sells (or is downloaded). F'rinstance, the only album on the list I remotely liked was Damien Rice's O, which was near to the bottom. The rest was largely crap.
waming: wandering off topic
Back in the old days when a disk drive could tip over and kill somebody, music was actually good. This was because record companies took a fundamentally different strategy to marketing. It used to be that they would hire a talented artist, and give them total creative control. This was particularly true w/ the Warner-Reprise label. Often, an artist would just develop a cult following, or they wouldn't become huge until their second or third album, after they've matured and produced something of real quality. This way, good artists managed to have long distiguished careers and produced truly good music. This is why many popular bands from the 60s, 70s had such long careers and produced hits over spans of 10+ years (e.g. Rolling Stones, Springsteen, etc.).
Today, however, the business model for the record industry is to find some no-talent but good looking putzes and hype them to death on their first album so that they make money before they get older and unattractive and people stop buying their album. There is no long term revenue in this plan, but it doesn't matter, because they can always hire younger artists and repeat as necessary to keep up their cash flow. When that doesn't work, they can start suing people for downloading songs.
That's just my 4/25 of a bit.
"You put 'em on stage and you have 'em undress
Some angel whore who can learn a guitar lick
Hey hey, that's what I call music."
-- Thomas Petty
He makes a good point, the Martian market is virtually untapped...
The headers don't get modified at compile time, they get modified when a tainted program is run, which could occur when logged in as admin. So, even though I was wrong about the file permissions (I thank you for pointing that out BTW), this is still a theoretically possible (albeit highly ineffective) way to propagate a worm. I didn't say that this would work particularly well, just that it could work.
Also, on a less-related matter, if you don't want to write a quine-like program in the header, you could have the macro-inserted function download and run an executable that modifies the headers for it. With sufficient obfuscation and preprocessor abuse, this worm could be weaved amongst the reams of macros and definitions in the windows.h include tree, effectively making it invisible without close scrutiny.
In the Yahoo! article, all of the companies mentioned except Microsoft use, sell, or support Linux/OSS systems. As such, they are not likely to lobby in favor of Microsoft-style security-through-obscurity. As for licenses, the question really depends on the penalty for practicing without having one. Will it work like the MSCE program, where you can still write MS code without it? Or will it be like a driver's license, where you can be penalized for practicing without it? If its the former, then I don't really care one way or the other. If its the latter, I think it will cause a lot of hassle without any real results.
/*
// always
Also, one should realize that many security holes are caused by bad design choices outside the control of the lowly programmers who might be penalized. Consider this example:
In MS Visual C++, the *.h files are writeable. Therefore, it is possible to create a (very slow) worm using #define macros. They could "hook" various functions to add worm code to the *.h files when ran on another machine with Visual C++. Thus, executables compiled on that machine have this "feature" as well and can spread the worm further.
static int infect_headers()
{
Should contain code to somehow insert a copy of this function and the below #define into this header if its not already there. A quine implemented in a header file?
*/
return 0;
}
#define strlen(x) (infect_headers() + strlen(x))
Note that the C Preprocessor and compiler works as designed here. The problem lies in the idiotic decision to make the header files modifiable by anyone.
Its true, the average Joe's understanding of computers is pretty poor. Consider the following actual exchanges I've had with people:
1. Best Buy
Me: Does this [digital] camera come with drivers for Linux?
Clerk: The drivers are for the camera and should work with any operating system.
Me: Goodbye
2. AOL vs. Internet
Name Withheld #1: If I switch from AOL, can I still buy stuff on Amazon.com?
3. A virus
Me: Hello?
Name Withheld #2: Mike, I think my computer has a virus.
Me: Why do you say that?
NW2: It says something about a disk error whenever I turn it on.
Me: Take the floppy out of the A: drive.
NW2: Wow! It works now! Thanks!
4. Giving away my old computer
Me: You can have this old Pentium.
Name Withheld #3: I don't need that part. I just need a screen and a keyboard to type letters and stuff.
Me: Yeah, but this is what makes it all work.
NW3: Oh, right.
Worst: Microsoft Rights Management Services (RMS) - Forces everyone who does business with you to use RMS if you use RMS. - Forces you to use RMS to do business with anyone who uses RMS. - Slanders the good name of Richard Stallman. Can he sue them for this? One of the Best: YahooPOPs. (Provides free SMTP/POP3 access to Yahoo Mail by downloading html, parsing out message, converting to SMTP/POP3) I know it is rather trivial in the big scheme of things, but it is a clever program that demonstrates the creativity and originality of the OSS community. http://sourceforge.net/projects/yahoopops/
I dated that girl. She knew C, enjoyed D&D, swore by Emacs, and she was one of the most beautiful people I have ever known. I met her at a LUG meeting. After the meeting, I went up and started talking to her. We went out for drinks. A relationship developed. We were a couple in perfect harmony. We finished each other's #defines. But there were irreconcileable differences. She used KDE, I used Gnome. We fought over it. One day, it got so intense that we agreed it would be better if we parted. I haven't seen her in over a year, but I still think about her almost daily. So Crystal, if you are out there and you miss me, send me an email.
Mike
"Software is like sex, its better when its free."
-- Attributed to Linus Torvalds