Notwithstanding recent changes to "think of the terrur wrists!", UK law doesn't prevent someone from taking a photograph of anything that's visible from a public place.
What's different here is the technology has changed. In the past, it'd take a long time to put all the photos together into a coherent streetview-type application. But today, Google are automatically stitching together photographs being taken as they're driving along, are able to capture an entire street in one big panoramic photo and make it available to anyone who wants to see it very quickly.
There is also the rather significant issue that 90% of crime is committed by junkies who are just looking for their next hit.
Look on Google Streetview for potential properties to hit? Come off it, most of them can barely operate a TV, they certainly aren't going to go to the trouble of looking on something like that.
The remainder - those carried out by professional burglars, the kind who break in and steal all the antiques rather than the telly - the existence or otherwise of Google will make more or less no difference whatsoever.
I did not RTFA but from the summary it sounds like the conclusion is that the Macbook Pro is worth the money or at least comparable to other high end notebooks. That's nice, but it doesn't really offer an explanation as to why Apple hasn't entered the $500-1000 market. I cannot imagine the staggering marketshare they would gain with a laptop that a majority of parents could afford their college bound kid. Anyone got any insights into Apple's complete disinterest in the mid-range notebook market?
Because the profit margins in that end of the market are razor thin and require you to cut a lot of corners to get down to that.
Apple don't do cheap and nasty any more than, say, Lexus do.
at least ten times as many with instructions on how to physically remove the wireless moden.
That would be the wireless modem that allows you to get online and use a wireless internet service that you're obliged to pay a monthly fee for about 18 months to use?
If there is legal backing for at least some of the money they take, it suddenly becomes a lot harder to convince anyone in authority that it is an orchestrated fraud rather than a mistake.
Or, to put it another way, you have to make a lot of mistakes before anyone will suspect foul play.
My solution would be (since the other reply is right -- your personal CDs are the same as a radio for lic. purposes) to find a radio station that played ONLY royalty-free music, and make sure everyone knew WHY I chose that.
Tho the only one I can think of offhand plays decidedly unrestful music:)
This is the UK, the lady in question is in her 60's and running a horse stable.
I don't think she'll be rigging up a laptop to play an internet radio station any time soon.
If they produce every title with graphics, sound effects and music taking full advantage of the console you're probably right.
Looking at it, the problem seems to be that games studios have set themselves an impossible task - make every game look and sound better than the last. But games have reached a point where achieving this is becoming ever more expensive and the economics are such that producing a console title for mainstream sale which doesn't look like complete arse next to all the others in the shop is virtually impossible unless you've got the resources of someone like EA.
I wonder if anyone would be so bold as to do the right thing, and suggest a law protecting artistic expression in the UK, equivalent in scope to American Freedom of Speech?
Nice idea, but we don't have a formal written constitution as such. (There's lots of nuances to that statement before any closet UK lawyers pick up on it) but the upshot is that we can't point to a piece of paper and say "That particular set of rules is special and can't be overridden unless a two-thirds majority passes a law which explicitly overrides it".
Go to any server manufacturer's website (or a retailer if they sell through the retail channel). Dell, HP, IBM, I don't care. Any of them.
Price up equipment sold specifically for servers. Note particularly the price they charge for a larger/faster hard disk.
Go on, I'll wait.
Right, now go onto your favourite cheap & cheerful parts supplier and look at how much they charge for a hard disk.
Is it really the exact same disk with that much price discrepancy? Well, I (along with a lot of sysadmins) would dearly love to believe that it isn't. Whether or not that's true I honestly couldn't say.
What I can say is that if you do go out and buy the cheapest disks you can to populate the server, warranty support from the OEM is going to suddenly become "Oh, you plugged some random disk in? Go away and come back when all the disks are from us". Which starts to look rather expensive rather quickly when the RAID's knackered and you need to resurrect the system as quickly as possible. If your job is on the line, it's soon looking even more expensive, and nobody wants to say "I was sacked from my last job because I cut one too many corners on a system that was critical to the business" in an interview.
It's not so much of a problem for the Googles of this world who write their own applications to live on huge clusters which have component systems being added and removed all the time. Most of us, however, don't have that luxury.
It pretty much requires physical access and root. If a malicious person gets that sort of access, I'm screwed anyway.
You are but you can be un-screwed by reloading the operating system and restoring data from backup (being careful not to restore whatever it was caused the compromise in the first place, of course).
This effectively neutralises your ability to do that.
It isn't but it certainly simulates a BIOS to the guest OS. My guess is they infected the simulated BIOS.
This seems curious to me - why on Earth would VMWare want to make a virtual BIOS "flashable"? (in inverted commas because it's not a real BIOS so it isn't flashable in the true sense of the word)
Microsoft has repeatedly chosen to patch Windows instead of rebuilding it from the ground up as a modern operating system, the way Apple did with OS X. They should have known 8 years ago that this was the wrong strategy.
Erm... they did.
When XP was released, it was the first version of Windows from the NT product line that was targeted at the home user. From a strictly technical point of view, there really is nothing particularly wrong with the underlying OS. The problem is Microsoft have never enforced the idea of a true multi-user system where the person sitting at the console may not have ultimate power over it - which has led to application developers assuming that the person at the console will always have administrative rights.
Here in the UK we've replaced most of our House of Lords (which were previously hereditary, mostly from wealthy families sending their kids to expensive schools) with a group essentially appointed by the government.
Now, while the entire concept of membership of a government house being inherited may not be terribly fair, it did at least have a couple of benefits:
1. They didn't really have to care about the House of Commons (the elected house).
2. They were mostly sufficiently well educated to see beyond the "it's for your own good" attitude prevalent in most elected governments.
I'm not American, but I can explain the idea to you.
Every decision that introduces a system or process of some sort (doesn't have to be a computerised one, just a system or process) inevitably means that you make a compromise between risk and benefit.
If nobody ever exchanged goods, the risk of losing goods in dishonest transactions or from being mugged would be much lower. However, we'd all be living in caves gathering berries and hunting animals.
Along comes bartering and suddenly those who have an unusual talent for making weapons but are lousy at doing the actual hunting can exchange food for weapons with someone who's a great hunter but a lousy weapon maker. Of course, the hunter could just take the weapon and kill the man who made it (so the risk is slightly higher) but what would he do when the when the weapon eventually wears out?
Fast forward to today and while we're no longer talking about spears and woolly mammoth, the same basic concepts apply.
Not everyone wants to carry lots of cash - mainly because if it gets stolen you're stuck. By making it easier for people to do this (using credit/debit cards), society can move faster because money is spent faster. Banks make money on per-transaction charges so they want to encourage as many as possible; companies make a sale where otherwise they may not have.
The risk is obvious - if card details are stolen, they can be abused. But the risk is reduced with things like online approval for purchases - which ensures that stolen cards aren't useful for very long.
The banks and merchants make money on the difference between (number of transactions) and (number of dishonest transactions). Provided the first is substantially higher than the second and the net figure is greater than what you'd get by just accepting cash, you're doing better.
You'll never invent a system which is 100% risk free, all you can do is reduce the risk. Everyone wants to reduce the risk, but making changes to reduce the risk requires man-hours and equipment, both of which cost money. If you can effectively eliminate US$100,000 of fraudulent charges per year with a change that will cost US$10,000,000, then that change is not going to happen.
If the numbers are the other way around, however, you should patent them and speak to your bank.
We need a new mod category: "understatement." I'm thinking more and more that Orwell was an optimist...
Not really.
If you read 1984 (which so few people who talk about it actually have), you'll know that literally everything people did was monitored - right the way down to the way they spoke, the way they carried themselves, facial expressions, everything. If there was even a hint, a nervous twitch to suggest that the person didn't love Big Brother, they were taken away for "re-education".
Orwell couldn't have predicted the Internet. But if he had known about it, I have no doubt that he'd have mentioned something about it offering no privacy.
Assuming one's enemy is incompetent is a good way to end up dead or enslaved.
Point well taken, but in this case the enemy has repeatedly shown that if the magic word "technology" is uttered, there is truly no start to their competence.
This isn't "people who have the opportunity to go out and enjoy life with their family one last time before dying are more likely to take it if they're religious".
This is "people who are laid up in a hospital bed in agony up to the eyeballs on morphine agony and are more-or-less guaranteed to die within a few days are more likely to cling on if they're religious".
The correct position to ride a bike is on the road.
(Clarification: in the UK, it's illegal to ride on the pavement. But we don't have roads that are three lanes wide with 45mph traffic in each direction intersecting our towns.)
The signal-noise ratio in a lot of mailing lists for specific software commonly used in Linux is definitely getting worse. IMHO This is at least partly attributable to an increase in the number of people asking questions which could easily be answered if they only RTFM - or indeed asking questions then refusing to followup if further detail is asked for.
Distribution-specific web forums (coughUBUNTUcough) are often substantially worse - for an experienced Linux professional glancing over these forums, it's like watching the blind lead the blind.
We can encrypt bit-torrent files so they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between P2P to normal traffic. Sheesh.
There's more than one way to skin a cat.
Even if you were to encrypt it and run it over port 443, it'd be relatively easy to see if it looks like genuine HTTPS traffic:
- Are you connecting to a number of IP addresses which are known to be in blocks allocated to domestic DSL/Cable connections? This is made particularly easy when most ISPs around the world set up PTR records like 123.123.123.123.domestic.dsl.customer.london.isp.com. - Are you sending a small amount of traffic upstream to a small number of servers and receiving much more back? - Is the connection kept open for a significant length of time (more than a few minutes)?
Slashdot Mirror
They've had the power to do that with telephone records for literally decades - and they've been quite open about using it.
All this does is extend it to email.
I'm assuming Wolverine is a movie not a music album, so that would be our overlords at the MPAA, not the RIAA.
While this is true, I would ask exactly how many major record labels exist which do not have sister companies that make movies?
There was a gmail email address right at the bottom of TFA.
Meanwhile, if this is to become SOP for law enforcement, then a lot of businesses may want to think about clustering across national boundaries.
Notwithstanding recent changes to "think of the terrur wrists!", UK law doesn't prevent someone from taking a photograph of anything that's visible from a public place.
What's different here is the technology has changed. In the past, it'd take a long time to put all the photos together into a coherent streetview-type application. But today, Google are automatically stitching together photographs being taken as they're driving along, are able to capture an entire street in one big panoramic photo and make it available to anyone who wants to see it very quickly.
There is also the rather significant issue that 90% of crime is committed by junkies who are just looking for their next hit.
Look on Google Streetview for potential properties to hit? Come off it, most of them can barely operate a TV, they certainly aren't going to go to the trouble of looking on something like that.
The remainder - those carried out by professional burglars, the kind who break in and steal all the antiques rather than the telly - the existence or otherwise of Google will make more or less no difference whatsoever.
I did not RTFA but from the summary it sounds like the conclusion is that the Macbook Pro is worth the money or at least comparable to other high end notebooks. That's nice, but it doesn't really offer an explanation as to why Apple hasn't entered the $500-1000 market. I cannot imagine the staggering marketshare they would gain with a laptop that a majority of parents could afford their college bound kid. Anyone got any insights into Apple's complete disinterest in the mid-range notebook market?
Because the profit margins in that end of the market are razor thin and require you to cut a lot of corners to get down to that.
Apple don't do cheap and nasty any more than, say, Lexus do.
at least ten times as many with instructions on how to physically remove the wireless moden.
That would be the wireless modem that allows you to get online and use a wireless internet service that you're obliged to pay a monthly fee for about 18 months to use?
If there is legal backing for at least some of the money they take, it suddenly becomes a lot harder to convince anyone in authority that it is an orchestrated fraud rather than a mistake.
Or, to put it another way, you have to make a lot of mistakes before anyone will suspect foul play.
My solution would be (since the other reply is right -- your personal CDs are the same as a radio for lic. purposes) to find a radio station that played ONLY royalty-free music, and make sure everyone knew WHY I chose that.
Tho the only one I can think of offhand plays decidedly unrestful music :)
This is the UK, the lady in question is in her 60's and running a horse stable.
I don't think she'll be rigging up a laptop to play an internet radio station any time soon.
If they produce every title with graphics, sound effects and music taking full advantage of the console you're probably right.
Looking at it, the problem seems to be that games studios have set themselves an impossible task - make every game look and sound better than the last. But games have reached a point where achieving this is becoming ever more expensive and the economics are such that producing a console title for mainstream sale which doesn't look like complete arse next to all the others in the shop is virtually impossible unless you've got the resources of someone like EA.
I wonder if anyone would be so bold as to do the right thing, and suggest a law protecting artistic expression in the UK, equivalent in scope to American Freedom of Speech?
Nice idea, but we don't have a formal written constitution as such. (There's lots of nuances to that statement before any closet UK lawyers pick up on it) but the upshot is that we can't point to a piece of paper and say "That particular set of rules is special and can't be overridden unless a two-thirds majority passes a law which explicitly overrides it".
Go to any server manufacturer's website (or a retailer if they sell through the retail channel). Dell, HP, IBM, I don't care. Any of them.
Price up equipment sold specifically for servers. Note particularly the price they charge for a larger/faster hard disk.
Go on, I'll wait.
Right, now go onto your favourite cheap & cheerful parts supplier and look at how much they charge for a hard disk.
Is it really the exact same disk with that much price discrepancy? Well, I (along with a lot of sysadmins) would dearly love to believe that it isn't. Whether or not that's true I honestly couldn't say.
What I can say is that if you do go out and buy the cheapest disks you can to populate the server, warranty support from the OEM is going to suddenly become "Oh, you plugged some random disk in? Go away and come back when all the disks are from us". Which starts to look rather expensive rather quickly when the RAID's knackered and you need to resurrect the system as quickly as possible. If your job is on the line, it's soon looking even more expensive, and nobody wants to say "I was sacked from my last job because I cut one too many corners on a system that was critical to the business" in an interview.
It's not so much of a problem for the Googles of this world who write their own applications to live on huge clusters which have component systems being added and removed all the time. Most of us, however, don't have that luxury.
If u spk entrly in txt, u r almst crtnly fr 2 yng 2 be qualified 2 answr OP qstn.
HTH, HAND.
Let me get this straight:
It pretty much requires physical access and root. If a malicious person gets that sort of access, I'm screwed anyway.
You are but you can be un-screwed by reloading the operating system and restoring data from backup (being careful not to restore whatever it was caused the compromise in the first place, of course).
This effectively neutralises your ability to do that.
It isn't but it certainly simulates a BIOS to the guest OS. My guess is they infected the simulated BIOS.
This seems curious to me - why on Earth would VMWare want to make a virtual BIOS "flashable"? (in inverted commas because it's not a real BIOS so it isn't flashable in the true sense of the word)
I don't know what this means: my house is about 20 years old - is that new enough?
I suspect what they mean is that they'll be rolling it out in housing areas that are being built now rather than to existing housing.
So unless you want to move to a brand new house, no.
Microsoft has repeatedly chosen to patch Windows instead of rebuilding it from the ground up as a modern operating system, the way Apple did with OS X. They should have known 8 years ago that this was the wrong strategy.
Erm... they did.
When XP was released, it was the first version of Windows from the NT product line that was targeted at the home user. From a strictly technical point of view, there really is nothing particularly wrong with the underlying OS. The problem is Microsoft have never enforced the idea of a true multi-user system where the person sitting at the console may not have ultimate power over it - which has led to application developers assuming that the person at the console will always have administrative rights.
Here in the UK we've replaced most of our House of Lords (which were previously hereditary, mostly from wealthy families sending their kids to expensive schools) with a group essentially appointed by the government.
Now, while the entire concept of membership of a government house being inherited may not be terribly fair, it did at least have a couple of benefits:
1. They didn't really have to care about the House of Commons (the elected house).
2. They were mostly sufficiently well educated to see beyond the "it's for your own good" attitude prevalent in most elected governments.
I'm not American, but I can explain the idea to you.
Every decision that introduces a system or process of some sort (doesn't have to be a computerised one, just a system or process) inevitably means that you make a compromise between risk and benefit.
If nobody ever exchanged goods, the risk of losing goods in dishonest transactions or from being mugged would be much lower. However, we'd all be living in caves gathering berries and hunting animals.
Along comes bartering and suddenly those who have an unusual talent for making weapons but are lousy at doing the actual hunting can exchange food for weapons with someone who's a great hunter but a lousy weapon maker. Of course, the hunter could just take the weapon and kill the man who made it (so the risk is slightly higher) but what would he do when the when the weapon eventually wears out?
Fast forward to today and while we're no longer talking about spears and woolly mammoth, the same basic concepts apply.
Not everyone wants to carry lots of cash - mainly because if it gets stolen you're stuck. By making it easier for people to do this (using credit/debit cards), society can move faster because money is spent faster. Banks make money on per-transaction charges so they want to encourage as many as possible; companies make a sale where otherwise they may not have.
The risk is obvious - if card details are stolen, they can be abused. But the risk is reduced with things like online approval for purchases - which ensures that stolen cards aren't useful for very long.
The banks and merchants make money on the difference between (number of transactions) and (number of dishonest transactions). Provided the first is substantially higher than the second and the net figure is greater than what you'd get by just accepting cash, you're doing better.
You'll never invent a system which is 100% risk free, all you can do is reduce the risk. Everyone wants to reduce the risk, but making changes to reduce the risk requires man-hours and equipment, both of which cost money. If you can effectively eliminate US$100,000 of fraudulent charges per year with a change that will cost US$10,000,000, then that change is not going to happen.
If the numbers are the other way around, however, you should patent them and speak to your bank.
We need a new mod category: "understatement." I'm thinking more and more that Orwell was an optimist...
Not really.
If you read 1984 (which so few people who talk about it actually have), you'll know that literally everything people did was monitored - right the way down to the way they spoke, the way they carried themselves, facial expressions, everything. If there was even a hint, a nervous twitch to suggest that the person didn't love Big Brother, they were taken away for "re-education".
Orwell couldn't have predicted the Internet. But if he had known about it, I have no doubt that he'd have mentioned something about it offering no privacy.
Assuming one's enemy is incompetent is a good way to end up dead or enslaved.
Point well taken, but in this case the enemy has repeatedly shown that if the magic word "technology" is uttered, there is truly no start to their competence.
This isn't "people who have the opportunity to go out and enjoy life with their family one last time before dying are more likely to take it if they're religious".
This is "people who are laid up in a hospital bed in agony up to the eyeballs on morphine agony and are more-or-less guaranteed to die within a few days are more likely to cling on if they're religious".
The correct position to ride a bike is on the road.
(Clarification: in the UK, it's illegal to ride on the pavement. But we don't have roads that are three lanes wide with 45mph traffic in each direction intersecting our towns.)
This has been going on for a few years now.
The signal-noise ratio in a lot of mailing lists for specific software commonly used in Linux is definitely getting worse. IMHO This is at least partly attributable to an increase in the number of people asking questions which could easily be answered if they only RTFM - or indeed asking questions then refusing to followup if further detail is asked for.
Distribution-specific web forums (coughUBUNTUcough) are often substantially worse - for an experienced Linux professional glancing over these forums, it's like watching the blind lead the blind.
We can encrypt bit-torrent files so they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between P2P to normal traffic. Sheesh.
There's more than one way to skin a cat.
Even if you were to encrypt it and run it over port 443, it'd be relatively easy to see if it looks like genuine HTTPS traffic:
- Are you connecting to a number of IP addresses which are known to be in blocks allocated to domestic DSL/Cable connections? This is made particularly easy when most ISPs around the world set up PTR records like 123.123.123.123.domestic.dsl.customer.london.isp.com.
- Are you sending a small amount of traffic upstream to a small number of servers and receiving much more back?
- Is the connection kept open for a significant length of time (more than a few minutes)?