No. You need an iPhone's owner's phone number to login as well as have your browser's user agent set to:
Mobile Safari iphone 1.1.3
There are various firefox extensions to do this.
I'm going to try this out at my local starbucks.
The other day I was thinking of this sort of thing in the context of having a huge storage unit connected to your eyes, ears, brain, etc. So that everything you see, hear and think(?) would be recorded for later review if you so choose.
Then I was thinking what the MPAA would do to you if you went into a movie theater.
This is probably good advice. I could go rant about how installing programs is not very intuitive on the Mac. But as you said, that's because I am used to windows with registry entries, 1000 DLL files, etc.
My Mac using friend downloaded the firefox binary (I believe it was a.DMG) and clicked it.
This essentially created a virtual CD on his desktop that included the Firefox executable.
He had no idea why, but if he deleted the original DMG file he could not run firefox anymore.
So I ended up dragging the firefox executable to the Applications folder and then dragged a "shortcut" to the Dock.
It was fairly intuitive to a geek but not so much for a non-geek. Not sure if this is standard practice for installing files.
You might even say that they are making additional money by charging almost $20.00 for the Firewire cable which costs what to manufacture?. $.30? As has been previously mentioned, it is a simple matter to buy one from here for example.
I always wonder about things like this. Example: Printers no longer come with USB cables. USB cables displayed right next to the printers cost at least $20.00 and sometimes more than $30.00. This seems like a tacit agreement between an "HP" and a "Best Buy" to let "Best Buy" (put in quotes to merely make examples of printer manufacturers and retailers) make their profit on the printer CABLE rather than the traditionally extremely low margin printer (Notice I did not say printer CARTRIDGES which they make a HUUUUGE margin on).
One of the things that has kept me from buying an iPod is the ridiculous price of its accessories. An Apple iPod mini Armband costs *29.00*. Yesterday my dad bought a little armband mounted FM radio from Best Buy for $21.00. Do the math.
1. If few general consumers have a dual processor system (or a dual core CPU in this case) then there is no motivation for programmers to create programs that take advantage of them. So if everyone DOES have one of these then perhaps these programs WILL be written.
2. Chip manufacturers really can't add a hell of a lot more MHz at this point. Intel's strained silicon technology has not made the Prescott much faster in clock speed then chips that were out last year. They are now incorporating features to make them use power more wisely and increasing cache sizes. I think that was the point in changing the chips to "model #s" rather than clock speed. IMHO, this was a tacit agreement between AMD and Intel because they have to give SOME reason to consumers to buy the best and the newest.
I personally have had several dual Pentium III cpu machines and was very pleased with them. Even if one processor was cranking at 100%, the machine was still very responsive.
That being said, I think most general consumers could have bought a computer 2 years ago and be fine unless they are heavy gamers or into video editing.
So true... And I'm guilty too. But I agree that we are all seeing things happen in our country that literally drive us nuts and the majority of our fellow citizens don't even blink. It's easy to lose hope. I was shocked that Bush won. I think I'm still in denial.
I need to get off my ass and write some letters or something. Perhaps just to give myself the right to bitch when things stay the same. Damn. There's that cynicism again.
I posted a few minutes that this only makes sense because if they are "hiring a thief to catch a thief".
I don't think just the technical aspect is the only knowledge that is important though.
I think knowing how to "follow the money" to find out who is PAYING for all this spyware to be installed on people's computers and cut it off at the source is actually more useful.
The technical side is just an arms race between the spyware authors and the anti-spyware folks. Some of the things I have seen recently have their hooks so deep into the OS it's ridiculous.
Just his contact list might be an interesting thing to see.
The question is whether he is a "stool pigeon" on his former industry or more of a double agent working at LETTING these spyware companies continue business as usual.
The first thought I had was "let's get the wolves to guard the sheep".
I feel like I'm living in an Ayn Rand Novel. Her overbearing examples of how things SHOULDN'T work seem to rule these days.
Maybe this is a similar philosophy of "use a thief to catch a thief" or in geek terms "hire a 'blackhat hacker' by a security/anti-virus company"? But I doubt they thought that much.
I know for a fact that a few years ago it was possible to change the price of a ringtone in the querystring to 00 and then the ringtone would be free. A little window popped up without the address bar and you had to click a link to download/ring the file to your phone. If you hit F11 the window would maximize and the address bar appears. Then you could edit the querystring to replace price=.99 with price=.00
SQL Injection is one of the easiest flaws to find and is an easy thing to overlook when you are in a rush and developing under ASP.
At least PHP has "magicquotes" to somewhat protect newbies. Although one could argue that this can give a false sense of security I suppose.
Isn't that called the Digital Millenium Compyright Act (DMCA)? Heh heh.
The thing is always in the hand of the user. With some tools, I can completely re-flash my cell phone. If I'm smart, I can even make the modifications I did stealth from the POV of the cell phone company. This is and will always be true, unless you start making appliances that explode when you open them.
Or when you try to make any "illegal operation" with them.
...Or until you persuade the government to criminilize attempts to defeat your DRM. Then you can make your DRM encryption as weak as you want, and let the police pick up the slack for your laziness/technological shortcomings.
People forget that our country was based on the idea that a thousand guilty should go free rather than one innocent be sacrificed.
Somewhere along the way "think of the kids" and media hysteria took over our better moral instincts.
It seems fine to say that those thousand guilty will hurt 10,000 MORE innocent people and the 1 innocent is a worthy cost of a working system.
That is until YOU'RE the innocent.
It would seem that being sodomized in prison would be a bit more than "cruel and unusual". I wonder why the prison system has never been sued into oblivion...
One more bleeding heart liberal comment and I'm done. The fact that we (by we I mean it's an accepted fact in our culture) all think people get abused in prison and we send a crap load of non-violent offenders there is a damn tragedy.
That can't possibly be right. "hundreds of billions of DVDs pressed every year"? should most likely be "hundreds of MILLIONS of DVDs pressed every year". I mean if sales are 27.5 billion (which I would assume is the wholesale price they sell to their distributors, retailers, etc.) that would put the price per DVD at well under $1.00.
Anyways... We seem to be taking most of this article at face value. How much of that 4% is due to organized piracy and how much is due to typical home users burning a copy of the DVD for a friend? Are they getting the number from the amount of DVD-Rs or DVD+Rs sold?
Finally, does anyone really believe this won't break compatibility? Seems like it will be more of the same technique where they add corrupt sectors that computers can't cope with but DVD players can. And which essentially causes the "product" to cease to qualify as a DVD because it no longer adheres to that standard.
Of course none of this will be mentioned on the package of the DVD when you buy it for your kid for Christmas, etc. and it won't play on your "old" DVD player.
I've always felt it was rather ironic that you need to go to school for 8 years or so to become qualified to know the law; i.e. become a lawyer.
However, ignorance is no defense if you commit a crime.
Where is the EULA I had to click OK to that warned me of all the potential punishments if I punch someone or download a copyrighted MP3 or let my dog "fertilize" the neighbor's lawn?
I was curious and I have an adwords campaign going.... When I added "asbestos" I got an estimate of 330 clicks per day. This is usually somewhat high compared to what I will get when I implement the keyword. But then the website I am advertising for has a very limited group of viewers.
I have a max "cost per click" of $2.50. With this limit, I got an estimate of having my add as 1.4th place. So with a max bid of $2.50 I was getting between the top ad and the 2nd ad.
The avg. estimated cost was about $.50. So I think you cost 'em between $4.00 and $20.00.
Which lawyers make in billable time in ohhhhh.... 30 seconds to 6 minutes.
You don't really give enough detail about the roles you have, and/or what your company does. Here are some ideas...
1. Put a concrete policy on computer usage, etc. and enforce it. One sexual harassment lawsuit due to someone shoulder surfing and seeing boobies will make a huge impact. Not sure if this is a technological solution through firewalls n' filters or a policy which could help indemnify the company...
2. Think of what possible industrial espionage, worms, and various p0wning events could occur. This could be everything from code red to your business manager opening various accounts in the company's name (happened to an ex co. I worked for) to a secretary stealing the socials of several hundred employees (happened to a friend's co.)
3. Air travel. Not sure if you have satellite offices, etc. which require setup, training, etc. Many businesses do not schedule flights and hotels until the last moment and this is a huge waste of money.
I guess these are more of a way for you to justify your lives to management. Say, due to so and so and this and that, we will not be at risk for a 10 million dollar lawsuit. So can we keep Bob working here so we don't get that 10 million dollar lawsuit?
It's already a bad sign that you are understaffed and overworked in a profitable company. That kind of proves to me that a bit o' FUD is in order to scare management.
I agree. Even if you don't agree with what someone is doing becaause it does not fit YOUR goals, point of view, etc. does not automatically make it useless useless.
I think it's pretty cool that the modding folks are this excited about the Mini.
I want one. I really do. And the parent hit on the reason why. IT'S CHEAP! The Mac Mini is barely more expensive than the photo iPod. Hell. A license for OS X costs $130...
I am waiting for someone to find a cheap way to add bluetooth and wireless rather than have Apple do it. And I'd like for the next version of OS X to come out too. And err my tax refund...
It is always easier to knock someone else's ideas than create your own.
It's kind of interesting that the stock market has such a clear understanding that things can only do better from here onwards whereas it took years for the board of directors to figure it out!
I had a friend tell me his store was bidding on a huge job to convert hundred of boxes of documents to PDF by scanning the documents. They were going to make CD-Rs with the PDFs on them.
They were then going to dispose of the paper documents via shredding.
This is an oil company with 20+ years of records.
The people he was bidding against were basically of the opinion of: "oh, these things last forever. don't worry about it."
Whereas I thought, "I think CD-Rs have a 10 year or so shelf life in darkness with low humidity."
I figured you would some optical character recognition to put into a keyword database and RAID servers and all kinds of good stuff. Not to mention making copies of the copies every X years.
Not to mention the fact that you would wonder if Cd-rom drives and Adobe Acrobat will be around in 10 or 20 years.
I kind of wonder how many people will get bitten by this issue.
I think this has been discussed before on slashdot that due to our digital world, ironically if there was some sort of global catastrophe there would be very little record of our civilization in 100 years.
Slashdot Mirror
No. You need an iPhone's owner's phone number to login as well as have your browser's user agent set to: Mobile Safari iphone 1.1.3 There are various firefox extensions to do this. I'm going to try this out at my local starbucks.
I suggest remote controlled tazer suppositories. If you misbehave you get juiced! If you tamper with them you get juiced. Problem solved.
The real question is will there be anything more than a 1 year warranty on drives using this new technology.
If not... how about you guys buy one and let me know in two years how it's going.
The other day I was thinking of this sort of thing in the context of having a huge storage unit connected to your eyes, ears, brain, etc. So that everything you see, hear and think(?) would be recorded for later review if you so choose.
Then I was thinking what the MPAA would do to you if you went into a movie theater.
Shaky Cam indeed!
This is probably good advice. I could go rant about how installing programs is not very intuitive on the Mac. But as you said, that's because I am used to windows with registry entries, 1000 DLL files, etc.
.DMG) and clicked it.
My Mac using friend downloaded the firefox binary (I believe it was a
This essentially created a virtual CD on his desktop that included the Firefox executable.
He had no idea why, but if he deleted the original DMG file he could not run firefox anymore.
So I ended up dragging the firefox executable to the Applications folder and then dragged a "shortcut" to the Dock.
It was fairly intuitive to a geek but not so much for a non-geek. Not sure if this is standard practice for installing files.
I always wonder about things like this. Example: Printers no longer come with USB cables. USB cables displayed right next to the printers cost at least $20.00 and sometimes more than $30.00. This seems like a tacit agreement between an "HP" and a "Best Buy" to let "Best Buy" (put in quotes to merely make examples of printer manufacturers and retailers) make their profit on the printer CABLE rather than the traditionally extremely low margin printer (Notice I did not say printer CARTRIDGES which they make a HUUUUGE margin on).
One of the things that has kept me from buying an iPod is the ridiculous price of its accessories. An Apple iPod mini Armband costs *29.00*. Yesterday my dad bought a little armband mounted FM radio from Best Buy for $21.00. Do the math.
I think it is important for two reasons.
1. If few general consumers have a dual processor system (or a dual core CPU in this case) then there is no motivation for programmers to create programs that take advantage of them. So if everyone DOES have one of these then perhaps these programs WILL be written.
2. Chip manufacturers really can't add a hell of a lot more MHz at this point. Intel's strained silicon technology has not made the Prescott much faster in clock speed then chips that were out last year. They are now incorporating features to make them use power more wisely and increasing cache sizes. I think that was the point in changing the chips to "model #s" rather than clock speed. IMHO, this was a tacit agreement between AMD and Intel because they have to give SOME reason to consumers to buy the best and the newest.
I personally have had several dual Pentium III cpu machines and was very pleased with them. Even if one processor was cranking at 100%, the machine was still very responsive.
That being said, I think most general consumers could have bought a computer 2 years ago and be fine unless they are heavy gamers or into video editing.
So here you go: .039 seconds)
Senators of the 109th Congress (info you could have found with google in
I need to get off my ass and write some letters or something. Perhaps just to give myself the right to bitch when things stay the same. Damn. There's that cynicism again.
Actually this is one of the few threads bashing the Bush administration where I have not read even *ONE* comment by a "bushie".
Sort of tells you that maybe even they can't explain THIS one.
I posted a few minutes that this only makes sense because if they are "hiring a thief to catch a thief".
I don't think just the technical aspect is the only knowledge that is important though.
I think knowing how to "follow the money" to find out who is PAYING for all this spyware to be installed on people's computers and cut it off at the source is actually more useful.
The technical side is just an arms race between the spyware authors and the anti-spyware folks. Some of the things I have seen recently have their hooks so deep into the OS it's ridiculous.
Just his contact list might be an interesting thing to see.
The question is whether he is a "stool pigeon" on his former industry or more of a double agent working at LETTING these spyware companies continue business as usual.
The first thought I had was "let's get the wolves to guard the sheep".
I feel like I'm living in an Ayn Rand Novel. Her overbearing examples of how things SHOULDN'T work seem to rule these days.
Maybe this is a similar philosophy of "use a thief to catch a thief" or in geek terms "hire a 'blackhat hacker' by a security/anti-virus company"? But I doubt they thought that much.
Our country is becoming a parody of iteself.
SQL Injection is one of the easiest flaws to find and is an easy thing to overlook when you are in a rush and developing under ASP.
At least PHP has "magicquotes" to somewhat protect newbies. Although one could argue that this can give a false sense of security I suppose.
How about, UNinstall windows?
People forget that our country was based on the idea that a thousand guilty should go free rather than one innocent be sacrificed.
Somewhere along the way "think of the kids" and media hysteria took over our better moral instincts.
It seems fine to say that those thousand guilty will hurt 10,000 MORE innocent people and the 1 innocent is a worthy cost of a working system.
That is until YOU'RE the innocent.
It would seem that being sodomized in prison would be a bit more than "cruel and unusual". I wonder why the prison system has never been sued into oblivion...
One more bleeding heart liberal comment and I'm done. The fact that we (by we I mean it's an accepted fact in our culture) all think people get abused in prison and we send a crap load of non-violent offenders there is a damn tragedy.
Or can you do something like this?
As a previous poster mentioned, I would never do anything until I had an SSH tunnel or something.
Someone in promiscuous mode could ruin your whole month.
That can't possibly be right. "hundreds of billions of DVDs pressed every year"? should most likely be "hundreds of MILLIONS of DVDs pressed every year". I mean if sales are 27.5 billion (which I would assume is the wholesale price they sell to their distributors, retailers, etc.) that would put the price per DVD at well under $1.00.
Anyways...
We seem to be taking most of this article at face value. How much of that 4% is due to organized piracy and how much is due to typical home users burning a copy of the DVD for a friend? Are they getting the number from the amount of DVD-Rs or DVD+Rs sold?
Finally, does anyone really believe this won't break compatibility? Seems like it will be more of the same technique where they add corrupt sectors that computers can't cope with but DVD players can. And which essentially causes the "product" to cease to qualify as a DVD because it no longer adheres to that standard.
Of course none of this will be mentioned on the package of the DVD when you buy it for your kid for Christmas, etc. and it won't play on your "old" DVD player.
I've always felt it was rather ironic that you need to go to school for 8 years or so to become qualified to know the law; i.e. become a lawyer.
However, ignorance is no defense if you commit a crime.
Where is the EULA I had to click OK to that warned me of all the potential punishments if I punch someone or download a copyrighted MP3 or let my dog "fertilize" the neighbor's lawn?
I bet they'll just inspect packets and flag filesnames that contain *xvid*, *divx*, *screener*, *.avi, *.bin, *.iso, *vcd*, etc.
"digital fingerprints" my butt.
I was curious and I have an adwords campaign going.... When I added "asbestos" I got an estimate of 330 clicks per day. This is usually somewhat high compared to what I will get when I implement the keyword. But then the website I am advertising for has a very limited group of viewers. I have a max "cost per click" of $2.50. With this limit, I got an estimate of having my add as 1.4th place. So with a max bid of $2.50 I was getting between the top ad and the 2nd ad. The avg. estimated cost was about $.50. So I think you cost 'em between $4.00 and $20.00. Which lawyers make in billable time in ohhhhh.... 30 seconds to 6 minutes.
You don't really give enough detail about the roles you have, and/or what your company does. Here are some ideas...
1. Put a concrete policy on computer usage, etc. and enforce it. One sexual harassment lawsuit due to someone shoulder surfing and seeing boobies will make a huge impact. Not sure if this is a technological solution through firewalls n' filters or a policy which could help indemnify the company...
2. Think of what possible industrial espionage, worms, and various p0wning events could occur. This could be everything from code red to your business manager opening various accounts in the company's name (happened to an ex co. I worked for) to a secretary stealing the socials of several hundred employees (happened to a friend's co.)
3. Air travel. Not sure if you have satellite offices, etc. which require setup, training, etc. Many businesses do not schedule flights and hotels until the last moment and this is a huge waste of money.
I guess these are more of a way for you to justify your lives to management. Say, due to so and so and this and that, we will not be at risk for a 10 million dollar lawsuit. So can we keep Bob working here so we don't get that 10 million dollar lawsuit?
It's already a bad sign that you are understaffed and overworked in a profitable company. That kind of proves to me that a bit o' FUD is in order to scare management.
I agree. Even if you don't agree with what someone is doing becaause it does not fit YOUR goals, point of view, etc. does not automatically make it useless useless. I think it's pretty cool that the modding folks are this excited about the Mini. I want one. I really do. And the parent hit on the reason why. IT'S CHEAP! The Mac Mini is barely more expensive than the photo iPod. Hell. A license for OS X costs $130... I am waiting for someone to find a cheap way to add bluetooth and wireless rather than have Apple do it. And I'd like for the next version of OS X to come out too. And err my tax refund... It is always easier to knock someone else's ideas than create your own.
Bar Code Tattoos
It's kind of interesting that the stock market has such a clear understanding that things can only do better from here onwards whereas it took years for the board of directors to figure it out!
I had a friend tell me his store was bidding on a huge job to convert hundred of boxes of documents to PDF by scanning the documents. They were going to make CD-Rs with the PDFs on them.
They were then going to dispose of the paper documents via shredding.
This is an oil company with 20+ years of records.
The people he was bidding against were basically of the opinion of: "oh, these things last forever. don't worry about it."
Whereas I thought, "I think CD-Rs have a 10 year or so shelf life in darkness with low humidity."
I figured you would some optical character recognition to put into a keyword database and RAID servers and all kinds of good stuff. Not to mention making copies of the copies every X years.
Not to mention the fact that you would wonder if Cd-rom drives and Adobe Acrobat will be around in 10 or 20 years.
I kind of wonder how many people will get bitten by this issue.
I think this has been discussed before on slashdot that due to our digital world, ironically if there was some sort of global catastrophe there would be very little record of our civilization in 100 years.