In the logs, he found that "nail.exe" and "aurora.exe" were always listed alongside "btdownloadgui.exe," the user interface that downloads/uploads when using BitTorrent.
It's rather interesting that the author mentions one specific BT-client along with the spyware executables. To me, it seems that he tries to create the impression that the spyware installs itself along with "btdownloadgui.exe". Like it did with Kazaa, actually, and a lot like what happened when you installed things like Netscape 4.x or RealPlayer a few years ago. They, too, used to come bundled with heaps of spyware.
The article that he's referring to makes it a little clearer that it's not BitTorrent itself that is the immediate spyware carrier, but the thing is most interesting in what it does not mention. From the screenshot, the title of the download looks like "family_Guy_403_PDTV - LOL.rar" or something like that. Then, in the next screenshot, he proceeds to actually install stuff on his computer. WTF - install a RAR file? In my eyes, there's some serious explanation lacking here. In the first place, he must have unrarred the download, then found an executable in there. Starting this executable produces a License Agreement, which he has to accept before proceeding. All this just to watch a lame TV show?
If you run a domain called "vitalsecurity.org" you should probably know better.
The next thing, he'll be writing about how worms and trojans are often found along with a program called "outlook.exe". Oh, wait...
Blade Runner is very much a social commentary, like all of Phillip K. Dick's work. Alien is a much simpler story.
Both of them are great and original movies, however I agree with you that Blade Runner is the better one. My reason for posting this reply is that I'd like to mention another PKD-based movie that I feel has been somewhat underrated: Paul Verhoefen's "Total Recall" with Arnie in one of his better impersonations. On the inner level, the movie is very much about the same things as Blade Runner. James Berardinelli says it much better than I'm able to, in this review:
In an era when it has become scientifically feasible to implant false memories directly into a person's mind, wipe out a previous identity, and create a fictitious personae so real that the subject believes it to be genuine, how does one know what is and what isn't authentic? This is the question that Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), and, to a lesser extent, the audience, must ponder. How much of his life is real? How many of his memories actually happened and which ones have been manufactured?
Even if Total Recall doesn't belong in any Top 100 list (maybe with the exception of the "Top 100 Worst Last Five Minutes" which is really awful), chances are good that people who appreciates Alien and Blade Runner enjoys this movie too. At least, I do.
I saw a hack once for MacOS X Cocoa that allowed you to hold down some modifier keys and drag buttons around in an app to really reorganize them. In fact you could drag them to another application and put them there, or to a floating toolbar or a menu. That's the beginning step of user interface customization.
That kind of functionality may be cool for a geek who knows what he's doing, but it's a total nightmare from the helpdesk point of view. I don't think that this enhances usability at all. On the contrary; in the hands of a configuration-happy noobie, it would probably render the desktop unusable faster than you can spell out "reorganize".
Usability isn't about "user interface customization". It's about a well thought out interface that the end user will be able to figure out how to interact with efficiently, thus actually minimizing the need for user customization.
Or please, describe how sneaky Obi Wan was to park his ship right outside the enemy hideout's entrance and then to stand outside it and send his spy message back to the council.
Never attribute to sneakiness that which can be adequately explained by the Force.
Patents are a license to sue. They are designed as licenses to sue. They grant the assignee a temporary monopoly should he/she/it choose to enforce it and they grant a source of revenue should he/she/it choose to license it.
Makes me wonder why the US Government didn't patent the nuclear bomb back in '45. They could have sued Stalin out of his shirt.
Not exactly. We know that 2^n-1 can only be prime if n is also prime (if I remember correctly). So while numbers in the form 2^n-1 generally may not have a significantly higher chance of being prime (I don't know), we can choose values of n that are easily 20x as likely to give us a prime number than if we used randomly chosen odd numbers.
The real reason why discovered Mersenne primes are way bigger than any other known primes, is because of the special algorithm for finding them. This is known as the Lucas-Lehmer test (google for it). It isn't feasible to run a brute-force trial factoring for numbers approaching 10 million digits. For a number on the form (2^P)-1 where P is a prime, the Lucas-Lehmer test requires only P iterations of the basic algorithm. It also works especially well for numbers on the form (2^P)-1, because the computer can get away with a lot of simple bit-shifting instead of costlier math operations in terms of CPU cycles.
I've done Lucas-Lehmer testing for the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search for half a year now, and am currently running it on five different machines. The chances of actually finding a huge prime number are probably much less than of winning big-time in Lotto, but I for one think this is kind of fun.
Here in Oslo, Norway, the sky was clear and I had an excellent view of the conjunction on my way to work this morning around 7 o'clock [UTC+0100]. It was a rare and beautiful sight.
I don't remember seeing any Intel ads aimed at the general public before the Pentium was released, and that was in what, '94 or '95?
Yes, they did. I vividly remember an ad for the i486, it must have been in '91. It showed a guy in front of his screen, almost blasted away by the sheer power of a 25MHz i486. At the time I owned a 12MHz 286, and wanted something that powerful very badly. I slavered over that ad for quite a while.
At least to me, they have not said what the problems are to begin with and further more have not said how they are going to address each one.
The problem, from a financial point of view, is of course that it isn't that easy to make money off the Internet as a lot of investors may have thought. TFA suggests as much when it's said that "the Internet will begin to collapse as millions of new computer users from developing nations begin to sign on." My guess is that most of those new users from developing nations hardly have the potential to generate profit remotely in proportion to their consumed bandwidth. So the Internet as a means to stockpile return on investment may well soon be a thing of the past.
And that probably sums up Forbes' interest in the case.
However, as long as the infrastructure of the 'net mainly consist of rather cheap hardware and essentially free software, I can't foresee the imminent death of what we really love about it: The free exchange of information around the globe. It's not the death of the Internet, then, it's rather a full turn of the circle back to Tim's vision. And good riddance to the money hoarders.
--
defenestrare necesse est
English-speaking people for a large part seem to miss the pun on "Burning ROM". Rom is the German form of Rome, and Nero the CD-ROM burner[TM] is a German product.
Correct. The grandparent's suggestion "just devlop [sic] a better solution" (in Linux) is not always a trivial task. It may actually require thousands of man-hours for any program of some merit. On the other hand, it'd certainly be worth it for the benefit of the Open Source community to match a few of the Windows killer apps. (The Linux equivalents should be called "Windows-killer apps";-)
I made the transition to Linux half a year ago, and haven't looked back. However, I've got this wonderful genealogy program "The Master Genealogist" (TMG), that only runs under Windows. The version I use is the old 16-bit one, a FoxPro 2.6 application. My present solution is to use it on my old laptop, which is running Windows 2000. I haven't managed to make it run under Wine. I was on the brink of purchasing Win4Lin some time ago, but their Web Shop messed up the transaction.
If anyone can tell me the easiest way to make this old FoxPro app run under Linux, I'll be much obliged.
And please, don't tell me that there are real alternatives to this program already under Linux, because there aren't. Both LifeLines and Gramps may be great in their own right, but for me they just don't cut it. I've tried both, and it feels like stuffing yourself into a Nissan Micra when you're used to drive around in a Cadillac.
Yeah. If you want to stay free of adverse ads, then just don't let ads into your site in the first place.
Personally, I believe that the best approach to A Better Internet (TM) is not running ads at all. This is in the original spirit of the Internet as a information highway.
The cost of running an Internet site these days are peanuts anyway, so why the heck take money for ads from somebody whose views you don't want to endorse?
Look at a few other highly successfull, and well liked movies and what they all have in common. Such as The Matrix and all three of the LOTR series.
It's painstaking attention to detail, every detail.
And that's exactly the thing that made Disney great in the first place, with Snow White being the premier example. It's still a remarkable movie. There are stunning details that make me wonder how this was done without the aid of computers. Take a look at the reflections in the water in the well scene, - how did they do that? Or the scene where the dwarves enter the bedroom, and the shadows actually follow the candle around the entire room. It's kind of spooky.
Sadly, this level of hyper-realism has all but disappeared from the later Disney movies. Snow White is head and shoulders above the rest (no pun intended).
A couple of good hangings
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Like someone said, "what we need is a couple of good hangings." Myself, I wouldn't mind seeing Alan Ralsky, George W. Bush, Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein on the same scaffold in downtown Bagdhad one sunny afternoon. Actually, I'd gladly pay a grand to see it happen.
I think it's too often stated that the net "democratizes". The true beauty of the net is that it pluralizes.
You'got a very good point.
I think that Andy Warhol's "15 minutes of fame" may be wrong. Actually, anyone of us can be famous to 15 other persons instead. All it takes is to set up a decent website and fill it with content that in some way feels important to oneself.
I run a Norwegian website called Solumslekt with a fairly big genealogy database (yes, I'm in the "senior" group), and in a couple of years I've gathered quite a group of attenders who are hanging around on the discussion forum.
For more than 99% of the Web audience my site is probably worthless, but among the few who share my interests, I've earned myself some good reputation.
I pay the equivalent of twenty bucks a month for professional web hosting, and I think it's worth it. Writing a book isn't my idea of fun, and most genealogy books don't return the investment anyway. It's so much easier to publish on the web.
I think the game is called "Pegged". My dad made one for me when I was a boy.
Your problem reminds me of the classic article by Niklaus Wirth: "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement" in which he describes different approaches to the Eight Queens Problem. This is highly recommended reading, demonstrating that the algorithm can mean a world of difference.
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They would respond only marginally to any kind of stimulus and would not come when called.
Sounds like a job for the Confuse-A-Cat, Ltd.
Did you read TFA?
It's rather interesting that the author mentions one specific BT-client along with the spyware executables. To me, it seems that he tries to create the impression that the spyware installs itself along with "btdownloadgui.exe". Like it did with Kazaa, actually, and a lot like what happened when you installed things like Netscape 4.x or RealPlayer a few years ago. They, too, used to come bundled with heaps of spyware.
The article that he's referring to makes it a little clearer that it's not BitTorrent itself that is the immediate spyware carrier, but the thing is most interesting in what it does not mention. From the screenshot, the title of the download looks like "family_Guy_403_PDTV - LOL.rar" or something like that. Then, in the next screenshot, he proceeds to actually install stuff on his computer. WTF - install a RAR file? In my eyes, there's some serious explanation lacking here. In the first place, he must have unrarred the download, then found an executable in there. Starting this executable produces a License Agreement, which he has to accept before proceeding. All this just to watch a lame TV show? If you run a domain called "vitalsecurity.org" you should probably know better.
The next thing, he'll be writing about how worms and trojans are often found along with a program called "outlook.exe". Oh, wait...
Thank you very much for that link. It's one of the best essays I've read for many years. I'm going to read everything on this site :-)
Was there any Cassavettes or Bergman in there?
At least one Bergman: Persona. I don't know much about Cassavetes, but I believe he spells his name with only one t.
Blade Runner is very much a social commentary, like all of Phillip K. Dick's work. Alien is a much simpler story.
Both of them are great and original movies, however I agree with you that Blade Runner is the better one. My reason for posting this reply is that I'd like to mention another PKD-based movie that I feel has been somewhat underrated: Paul Verhoefen's "Total Recall" with Arnie in one of his better impersonations. On the inner level, the movie is very much about the same things as Blade Runner. James Berardinelli says it much better than I'm able to, in this review:
In an era when it has become scientifically feasible to implant false memories directly into a person's mind, wipe out a previous identity, and create a fictitious personae so real that the subject believes it to be genuine, how does one know what is and what isn't authentic? This is the question that Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), and, to a lesser extent, the audience, must ponder. How much of his life is real? How many of his memories actually happened and which ones have been manufactured?
Even if Total Recall doesn't belong in any Top 100 list (maybe with the exception of the "Top 100 Worst Last Five Minutes" which is really awful), chances are good that people who appreciates Alien and Blade Runner enjoys this movie too. At least, I do.
I saw a hack once for MacOS X Cocoa that allowed you to hold down some modifier keys and drag buttons around in an app to really reorganize them. In fact you could drag them to another application and put them there, or to a floating toolbar or a menu. That's the beginning step of user interface customization.
That kind of functionality may be cool for a geek who knows what he's doing, but it's a total nightmare from the helpdesk point of view. I don't think that this enhances usability at all. On the contrary; in the hands of a configuration-happy noobie, it would probably render the desktop unusable faster than you can spell out "reorganize".
Usability isn't about "user interface customization". It's about a well thought out interface that the end user will be able to figure out how to interact with efficiently, thus actually minimizing the need for user customization.
Or please, describe how sneaky Obi Wan was to park his ship right outside the enemy hideout's entrance and then to stand outside it and send his spy message back to the council.
Never attribute to sneakiness that which can be adequately explained by the Force.
Makes me wonder why the US Government didn't patent the nuclear bomb back in '45. They could have sued Stalin out of his shirt.
The real reason why discovered Mersenne primes are way bigger than any other known primes, is because of the special algorithm for finding them. This is known as the Lucas-Lehmer test (google for it). It isn't feasible to run a brute-force trial factoring for numbers approaching 10 million digits. For a number on the form (2^P)-1 where P is a prime, the Lucas-Lehmer test requires only P iterations of the basic algorithm. It also works especially well for numbers on the form (2^P)-1, because the computer can get away with a lot of simple bit-shifting instead of costlier math operations in terms of CPU cycles.
I've done Lucas-Lehmer testing for the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search for half a year now, and am currently running it on five different machines. The chances of actually finding a huge prime number are probably much less than of winning big-time in Lotto, but I for one think this is kind of fun.
Here in Oslo, Norway, the sky was clear and I had an excellent view of the conjunction on my way to work this morning around 7 o'clock [UTC+0100]. It was a rare and beautiful sight.
Yes, they did. I vividly remember an ad for the i486, it must have been in '91. It showed a guy in front of his screen, almost blasted away by the sheer power of a 25MHz i486. At the time I owned a 12MHz 286, and wanted something that powerful very badly. I slavered over that ad for quite a while.
The problem, from a financial point of view, is of course that it isn't that easy to make money off the Internet as a lot of investors may have thought. TFA suggests as much when it's said that "the Internet will begin to collapse as millions of new computer users from developing nations begin to sign on." My guess is that most of those new users from developing nations hardly have the potential to generate profit remotely in proportion to their consumed bandwidth. So the Internet as a means to stockpile return on investment may well soon be a thing of the past.
And that probably sums up Forbes' interest in the case.
However, as long as the infrastructure of the 'net mainly consist of rather cheap hardware and essentially free software, I can't foresee the imminent death of what we really love about it: The free exchange of information around the globe. It's not the death of the Internet, then, it's rather a full turn of the circle back to Tim's vision. And good riddance to the money hoarders.
--
defenestrare necesse est
English-speaking people for a large part seem to miss the pun on "Burning ROM". Rom is the German form of Rome, and Nero the CD-ROM burner[TM] is a German product.
Correct. The grandparent's suggestion "just devlop [sic] a better solution" (in Linux) is not always a trivial task. It may actually require thousands of man-hours for any program of some merit. On the other hand, it'd certainly be worth it for the benefit of the Open Source community to match a few of the Windows killer apps. (The Linux equivalents should be called "Windows-killer apps" ;-)
I made the transition to Linux half a year ago, and haven't looked back. However, I've got this wonderful genealogy program "The Master Genealogist" (TMG), that only runs under Windows. The version I use is the old 16-bit one, a FoxPro 2.6 application. My present solution is to use it on my old laptop, which is running Windows 2000. I haven't managed to make it run under Wine. I was on the brink of purchasing Win4Lin some time ago, but their Web Shop messed up the transaction.
If anyone can tell me the easiest way to make this old FoxPro app run under Linux, I'll be much obliged.
And please, don't tell me that there are real alternatives to this program already under Linux, because there aren't. Both LifeLines and Gramps may be great in their own right, but for me they just don't cut it. I've tried both, and it feels like stuffing yourself into a Nissan Micra when you're used to drive around in a Cadillac.
Yeah. If you want to stay free of adverse ads, then just don't let ads into your site in the first place. Personally, I believe that the best approach to A Better Internet (TM) is not running ads at all. This is in the original spirit of the Internet as a information highway. The cost of running an Internet site these days are peanuts anyway, so why the heck take money for ads from somebody whose views you don't want to endorse?
And that's exactly the thing that made Disney great in the first place, with Snow White being the premier example. It's still a remarkable movie. There are stunning details that make me wonder how this was done without the aid of computers. Take a look at the reflections in the water in the well scene, - how did they do that? Or the scene where the dwarves enter the bedroom, and the shadows actually follow the candle around the entire room. It's kind of spooky.
Sadly, this level of hyper-realism has all but disappeared from the later Disney movies. Snow White is head and shoulders above the rest (no pun intended).
Like someone said, "what we need is a couple of good hangings." Myself, I wouldn't mind seeing Alan Ralsky, George W. Bush, Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein on the same scaffold in downtown Bagdhad one sunny afternoon. Actually, I'd gladly pay a grand to see it happen.
It's in Lower Telemark, in the south-eastern part of the country.
You'got a very good point.
I think that Andy Warhol's "15 minutes of fame" may be wrong. Actually, anyone of us can be famous to 15 other persons instead. All it takes is to set up a decent website and fill it with content that in some way feels important to oneself.
I run a Norwegian website called Solumslekt with a fairly big genealogy database (yes, I'm in the "senior" group), and in a couple of years I've gathered quite a group of attenders who are hanging around on the discussion forum.
For more than 99% of the Web audience my site is probably worthless, but among the few who share my interests, I've earned myself some good reputation.
I pay the equivalent of twenty bucks a month for professional web hosting, and I think it's worth it. Writing a book isn't my idea of fun, and most genealogy books don't return the investment anyway. It's so much easier to publish on the web.
I think the game is called "Pegged". My dad made one for me when I was a boy.
Your problem reminds me of the classic article by Niklaus Wirth: "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement" in which he describes different approaches to the Eight Queens Problem. This is highly recommended reading, demonstrating that the algorithm can mean a world of difference.
regards, Leif.