Yeah, because we all know how much "hacking" is required to use wide open WiFi connections.
Yeah. Technically you are allowed to connect to any fully open network. The wireless AP has an option to ignore the request to associate if it likes or request it be encrypted, and it didn't. Therefore, you should be allowed to connect to any network using this prinicpal. If the guy bypassed the MAC filtering or WEP to get in, it'd be a different story.
IIRC, Agile/Citilan APs only use one channel. In the city, there's a bunch of other APs including a competing Telstra Bigpond service, and other buisnesses in Adelaide that either use wireless internally or for their customers (like at internet cafés). Sitting near the west end of Rundle Mall, which is the main shopping and café street in Adelaide, I picked up about five or six different networks. The only problem I can see is if you get a serious amount of traffic happening, in which case the airstream becomes crowded. How that turns out in practice I'm not entirely sure.
I think they were using an open network, with a login page the first time you try to use the connection. With Kismet or something similar, you could probably get the login details from another customer, if the page isn't encrypted at all.
I remember there being access availible to Internode customers in some way. It was rather good on the old systems, during Linux.conf.au in 2004, there was free access for confrence attendees. I remember me and some friends sitting down in a café in Rundle Mall having a nice overpriced lunch. Took us some time to find a place where we could eat that had coverage, though.
Now I have a laptop with a working battery, I might go and use it next time I'm in the city.
I once felt this way too. At the moment I'm still using my two year old Nokia 3315. There are some things I'd love to have on it, like a decent calendar, memo taking feature, a music player and a camera.
I do carry a laptop around with me almost everywhere. Problem is it's a bit inconvient to get it out, and resume it from standby and hope that it actually does wake up... then start up a text editor or Sunbird, then put it back to sleep.
While I could plug headphones into my laptop and run the music player to use it as a portable music player, storing it in my bag, running, isn't terribly good for it. It gets very hot very fast.
I'm actually considering buying a second hand PocketPC at the moment. Probably because it'll be cheaper than a new cell phone, but it's yet another thing to put in my pockets.
The user merely watches a movie, and their player gets reflashed in the process. That could work.
Then you could have a HD-DVD virus. Someone distributes a HD-DVD somewhere about something that people are interested in - something that is common at trade shows. They take it home, put the disk in and then their player is reflashed with a different BIOS that won't play any disks after the current playback. They then try it in a couple of other players as "troubleshooting", and kill those ones as well. If the player was network connected (like, a normal standard HD-DVD player with a network connection for some reason), then it could turn the player into a drone.
Okay, I've got my tinfoil hat on, but the potential for abuse is high if a HD-DVD can automatically reflash a player.
Yeah, and then the kind soul who cracked the code gets a new player or firmware to go and crack the code using a different key. New version of the player then gets blacklisted again, and repeat the process. All this does is annoy the users of the product with infinite amounts of replacements needed, and the process becomes very costly for the manufacturer having to replace the equipment.
In the end, revoking player keys is stupid. It comes back to the whole point that DRM is not only a stupid idea but fundamentally flawed. It also creates an interesting situation for the key licensing organisation. Don't like a competitor or just want them to pay higher licensing fees? Threaten to cancel all their keys.
If the consumer association in your country has any sense whatsoever, they won't play along with this at all.
This isn't the first time that Arben has gone open. mbloom.com, one of his other companies, has a product called PdfConv. It's a blatant ripoff of VeryPDF, and it was evident in the diffs for the program. Probably the only differences in Arben's PdfConv were his UI changes and an old version of VeryPDF, looking at a diff of the code. Unfortunately the site is rather convieniently down, and the Wayback Machine seems to be missing some data...
I get the feeling the month of delay is so they can change as much as they can. Or just use it as advertising, then suddenly go back to cashing in.
I have a similar problem at home (and I'm sure many other people do where you have a house full of leechers) though on a smaller scale. Large files get downloaded, but during that time either party has no way of knowing who is downloading what in an automated fashion. Quite often, the files are left on one person's computer, and they refuse to share.
What I'd like to see is a centralized leeching program with a web interface. It should be able to download via HTTP, FTP and Bittorrent. It should be able to queue downloads and run on a schedule (many ISPs have an "off peak" rate on downloads, and also some people would rather have downloads running while they're asleep or away from the computer), and be able to be throttled. After a file is downloaded, it would be saved to a location accessable by all users (such as a public SMB share on a large hard drive). The software should be able to detect if a file has already been downloaded before and warn them of this.
Just a project idea, that I think would be useful.
"You have to realize, it could very well have been seven days AND billions of years or perhaps less than an instant, time isn't the constant we often think it is."
Another way to think of it is in the time that "god created the Earth", the days were far far longer. For example, a day on some planets is far longer than that of a day on our modern-day Earth.
Personally, I don't really buy the creation theories. I like proof, and lack of proof is not proof either. At the moment evolution wins because I can see it every day (resemblance in family members), and a devine being or beings creating everything just doesn't work in my mind.
I agree that MPEG looks ugly, especially for the filesize. Why on earth DVD had to be MPEG is beyond me.
Though one thing fixes it all: lossless compression. Zero data loss, though the data takes up a lot more room than with a lossy compression. Though most likely the digital cinema will use some horrible MPEG Windows Media DRM.
KDE definitely feels like Windows to me. No flame intended, but using KDE feels like being a square plug being shoved into a round hole. Which basically describes how I feel when using Windows.
Look != feel. It doesn't matter if I can make KDE look like anything I like, it still doesn't change the feel.
A firewall should never be used as a first line of defense. Using your analogy of the seatbelt is wrong; what would be a better analogy is to describe the firewall as the airbags.
If you wear your seatbelt (secure your system and turn off unneeded services), you don't really need the airbag. The airbag is used as a second line of defense in case the seatbelt is ineffective.
By relying only on the airbag in your car, and not using the seatbelt, you're probably more likely to get injured if you have to stop suddenly or the car is involved in an accident.
One would assume you have access to a OSX box in order to be concerned about it. Why don't you compile the code and test it yourself, then report back.
I built a similar box (concept-wise) from spare parts laying around. I ended up with a Pentium 133, with 16 MB RAM, 6GB HDD (I don't have a lot of music), ISA soundcard (there was no onboard soundcard) and PCI network card. It runs Debian Linux, and uses mpd to do the work. It boots up in about two minutes to ncmpc, a client to mpd. It plays music rather nicely, and can live in the living room.
On my real (much faster) server, I run phpmp2, which provides a pretty web interface to the system. Running Apache in 16 MB just died.
While the cost of the whole thing was virtually nothing, there was time involved in setting it up. The box is a bit noisy, not terribly visually apealing, and the computer makes it impossible to watch a particular TV channel. However if you invest a bit more money or just have better spare parts laying around than I do, these shouldn't be a problem.
Unfortunately for those of us not in NH, it's a big grey area. Like I happen to know there is an open wireless network setup somewhere outside my college, in a nearby office (not in the college). While I could have connected to it and use the internet there, there is nothing to say that they couldn't get the law involved if I did.
You raise an interesting point, though if I had parked my car, and left the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition, does that give you the right to go into my car without my permission and steal it?
If I had a website setup using a CMS, and I didn't change the admin password from the default one, does that give you the right to (mis)use my website for yourself?
Most wardrivers who do connect want internet access. If you had a home 512 kbit DSL connection, and you had a 8 GB download allowance, how would you like it if someone came along and started downloading large amounts of data and using up your quota? It's still theft.
Until a law has been passed similar to the one you've referenced down here in Australia, I'll refrain from connecting without authorization. Though me running Kismet on my laptop is probably more illegal, as it is a packet sniffer (and a sneakier, more blatant invasion of privacy). It's quite freaky the amount of stuff you could potentially pick up, and the fact that people aren't educated enough to understand the problem. It's like analog cordless phones all over again, but on a larger scale, because the WiFi equipment is easier to acquire, and you put more information into a computer over a network than you do with a cordless phone.
Though we need to get people past the whole "don't open random email attachments", "don't install spyware" and "keep your anti-virus up-to-date" before starting them on wireless security. Though I do like the idea of saying that the security is the responsibility of the owner, and that if reasonable precautions aren't taken they should get what's coming to them.
Though then every virus writer could use that as a precedent; "Oh, they were running X software not updated to the latest version, which is insecure, it's their own fault!"
That defeats the purpose of BitTorrent, and it's selfish. You can throttle the upload speed in Azureus (and others) quite easily, but expect your download speed to suffer. A limited or outright lack of contribution unfairly penalizes others trying to get the file, who are quite willing to seed. Go and read the introduction to how BitTorrent works, and you understand why everyone needs to seed for BitTorrent to work effectively for everyone.
If you can't handle helping to seed the torrent, then go download it from one of the overloaded HTTP mirrors.
I'm assuming you're refering to a POS situation using EFTPOS (or similar). That only applies to savings accounts, IIRC. Credit cards normally just need a signature where there is a human involved. And most of the time the clerk doesn't actually check the signature and just presses OK.
In a shop once, I saw someone use a credit card just by telling the clerk the number. The clerk was a little weary at first, though the customer was convincing. Since the store used a phone to call the bank's computer, the clerk only needed to dial in a card number and an amount to do the transaction.
I noticed they commented on how some of the Linux distros couldn't resize the Windows partition down to do a dual boot. I've yet to see a version of Windows that allows me to size down my Linux partition and add a boot menu so I can easily choose which OS I want to run on startup.
Microsoft's website seems only to be able to tell me how to remove Linux (1, 2) and not have a Windows bootloader installed to allow me to run both. All the other Linux-related KB articles are to do with Virtual PC and SMB problems. installing.
Re:Apparently they never heard of the Cappuccino P
on
Mac mini to PC Hack
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· Score: 1
USB does the same functions that serial and parallel do for the Cappuccino PC. Serial devices have become very rare on a consumer end. The only serial devices I have are some old mice, modems and an IR dongle, which the current model uses USB. Printers and scanners that used parallel connectors now use USB exclusively.
irda has been superceded by Bluetooth, which is availible for the Mac Mini as an optional extra.
The slot loading drive is smaller than a tray loading drive. Apple went to the slot loading drives in 1999, with the iMac, and that was later echoed in the Powerbook and iBooks. There are some weird CDs out there that will give you problems, I'll give you that, but not many for it to be a major issue.
The same way I installed Netscape onto my old computer without opening IE - from a CD-ROM. That was several years ago, now we have things like USB flash disks and CD-Rs, that are very affordable.
We could also use the command-line FTP client in Windows to goto ftp.mozilla.org...
Obviously you're using the standard version of OpenOffice. GNOME has their own GNOME-ized version, ximian-openoffice. I personally prefer it to standard OpenOffice, probably because I use GNOME and it all fits in well with the desktop.
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Yeah. Technically you are allowed to connect to any fully open network. The wireless AP has an option to ignore the request to associate if it likes or request it be encrypted, and it didn't. Therefore, you should be allowed to connect to any network using this prinicpal. If the guy bypassed the MAC filtering or WEP to get in, it'd be a different story.
IIRC, Agile/Citilan APs only use one channel. In the city, there's a bunch of other APs including a competing Telstra Bigpond service, and other buisnesses in Adelaide that either use wireless internally or for their customers (like at internet cafés). Sitting near the west end of Rundle Mall, which is the main shopping and café street in Adelaide, I picked up about five or six different networks. The only problem I can see is if you get a serious amount of traffic happening, in which case the airstream becomes crowded. How that turns out in practice I'm not entirely sure.
Ah, I understand what you're getting at now, and it's rather selfish of those people.
What's wrong with setting up your own Ad-Hoc network or using a small USB powered AP? Honestly...
I think they were using an open network, with a login page the first time you try to use the connection. With Kismet or something similar, you could probably get the login details from another customer, if the page isn't encrypted at all.
I remember there being access availible to Internode customers in some way. It was rather good on the old systems, during Linux.conf.au in 2004, there was free access for confrence attendees. I remember me and some friends sitting down in a café in Rundle Mall having a nice overpriced lunch. Took us some time to find a place where we could eat that had coverage, though.
Now I have a laptop with a working battery, I might go and use it next time I'm in the city.
I once felt this way too. At the moment I'm still using my two year old Nokia 3315. There are some things I'd love to have on it, like a decent calendar, memo taking feature, a music player and a camera.
I do carry a laptop around with me almost everywhere. Problem is it's a bit inconvient to get it out, and resume it from standby and hope that it actually does wake up... then start up a text editor or Sunbird, then put it back to sleep.
While I could plug headphones into my laptop and run the music player to use it as a portable music player, storing it in my bag, running, isn't terribly good for it. It gets very hot very fast.
I'm actually considering buying a second hand PocketPC at the moment. Probably because it'll be cheaper than a new cell phone, but it's yet another thing to put in my pockets.
Then you could have a HD-DVD virus. Someone distributes a HD-DVD somewhere about something that people are interested in - something that is common at trade shows. They take it home, put the disk in and then their player is reflashed with a different BIOS that won't play any disks after the current playback. They then try it in a couple of other players as "troubleshooting", and kill those ones as well. If the player was network connected (like, a normal standard HD-DVD player with a network connection for some reason), then it could turn the player into a drone.
Okay, I've got my tinfoil hat on, but the potential for abuse is high if a HD-DVD can automatically reflash a player.
Yeah, and then the kind soul who cracked the code gets a new player or firmware to go and crack the code using a different key. New version of the player then gets blacklisted again, and repeat the process. All this does is annoy the users of the product with infinite amounts of replacements needed, and the process becomes very costly for the manufacturer having to replace the equipment.
In the end, revoking player keys is stupid. It comes back to the whole point that DRM is not only a stupid idea but fundamentally flawed. It also creates an interesting situation for the key licensing organisation. Don't like a competitor or just want them to pay higher licensing fees? Threaten to cancel all their keys.
If the consumer association in your country has any sense whatsoever, they won't play along with this at all.
This isn't the first time that Arben has gone open. mbloom.com, one of his other companies, has a product called PdfConv. It's a blatant ripoff of VeryPDF, and it was evident in the diffs for the program. Probably the only differences in Arben's PdfConv were his UI changes and an old version of VeryPDF, looking at a diff of the code. Unfortunately the site is rather convieniently down, and the Wayback Machine seems to be missing some data...
I get the feeling the month of delay is so they can change as much as they can. Or just use it as advertising, then suddenly go back to cashing in.
What irks me is that "64 kbps WMA" is "CD Quality". Most sensible people use a minimum of 128kbps MP3. I personally use 160kbps "nominal" Ogg Vorbis.
I have a similar problem at home (and I'm sure many other people do where you have a house full of leechers) though on a smaller scale. Large files get downloaded, but during that time either party has no way of knowing who is downloading what in an automated fashion. Quite often, the files are left on one person's computer, and they refuse to share.
What I'd like to see is a centralized leeching program with a web interface. It should be able to download via HTTP, FTP and Bittorrent. It should be able to queue downloads and run on a schedule (many ISPs have an "off peak" rate on downloads, and also some people would rather have downloads running while they're asleep or away from the computer), and be able to be throttled. After a file is downloaded, it would be saved to a location accessable by all users (such as a public SMB share on a large hard drive). The software should be able to detect if a file has already been downloaded before and warn them of this.
Just a project idea, that I think would be useful.
"You have to realize, it could very well have been seven days AND billions of years or perhaps less than an instant, time isn't the constant we often think it is."
Another way to think of it is in the time that "god created the Earth", the days were far far longer. For example, a day on some planets is far longer than that of a day on our modern-day Earth.
Personally, I don't really buy the creation theories. I like proof, and lack of proof is not proof either. At the moment evolution wins because I can see it every day (resemblance in family members), and a devine being or beings creating everything just doesn't work in my mind.
I agree that MPEG looks ugly, especially for the filesize. Why on earth DVD had to be MPEG is beyond me.
Though one thing fixes it all: lossless compression. Zero data loss, though the data takes up a lot more room than with a lossy compression. Though most likely the digital cinema will use some horrible MPEG Windows Media DRM.
KDE definitely feels like Windows to me. No flame intended, but using KDE feels like being a square plug being shoved into a round hole. Which basically describes how I feel when using Windows.
Look != feel. It doesn't matter if I can make KDE look like anything I like, it still doesn't change the feel.
A firewall should never be used as a first line of defense. Using your analogy of the seatbelt is wrong; what would be a better analogy is to describe the firewall as the airbags.
If you wear your seatbelt (secure your system and turn off unneeded services), you don't really need the airbag. The airbag is used as a second line of defense in case the seatbelt is ineffective.
By relying only on the airbag in your car, and not using the seatbelt, you're probably more likely to get injured if you have to stop suddenly or the car is involved in an accident.
One would assume you have access to a OSX box in order to be concerned about it. Why don't you compile the code and test it yourself, then report back.
I built a similar box (concept-wise) from spare parts laying around. I ended up with a Pentium 133, with 16 MB RAM, 6GB HDD (I don't have a lot of music), ISA soundcard (there was no onboard soundcard) and PCI network card. It runs Debian Linux, and uses mpd to do the work. It boots up in about two minutes to ncmpc, a client to mpd. It plays music rather nicely, and can live in the living room.
On my real (much faster) server, I run phpmp2, which provides a pretty web interface to the system. Running Apache in 16 MB just died.
While the cost of the whole thing was virtually nothing, there was time involved in setting it up. The box is a bit noisy, not terribly visually apealing, and the computer makes it impossible to watch a particular TV channel. However if you invest a bit more money or just have better spare parts laying around than I do, these shouldn't be a problem.
Unfortunately for those of us not in NH, it's a big grey area. Like I happen to know there is an open wireless network setup somewhere outside my college, in a nearby office (not in the college). While I could have connected to it and use the internet there, there is nothing to say that they couldn't get the law involved if I did.
You raise an interesting point, though if I had parked my car, and left the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition, does that give you the right to go into my car without my permission and steal it?
If I had a website setup using a CMS, and I didn't change the admin password from the default one, does that give you the right to (mis)use my website for yourself?
Most wardrivers who do connect want internet access. If you had a home 512 kbit DSL connection, and you had a 8 GB download allowance, how would you like it if someone came along and started downloading large amounts of data and using up your quota? It's still theft.
Until a law has been passed similar to the one you've referenced down here in Australia, I'll refrain from connecting without authorization. Though me running Kismet on my laptop is probably more illegal, as it is a packet sniffer (and a sneakier, more blatant invasion of privacy). It's quite freaky the amount of stuff you could potentially pick up, and the fact that people aren't educated enough to understand the problem. It's like analog cordless phones all over again, but on a larger scale, because the WiFi equipment is easier to acquire, and you put more information into a computer over a network than you do with a cordless phone.
Though we need to get people past the whole "don't open random email attachments", "don't install spyware" and "keep your anti-virus up-to-date" before starting them on wireless security. Though I do like the idea of saying that the security is the responsibility of the owner, and that if reasonable precautions aren't taken they should get what's coming to them.
Though then every virus writer could use that as a precedent; "Oh, they were running X software not updated to the latest version, which is insecure, it's their own fault!"
That defeats the purpose of BitTorrent, and it's selfish. You can throttle the upload speed in Azureus (and others) quite easily, but expect your download speed to suffer. A limited or outright lack of contribution unfairly penalizes others trying to get the file, who are quite willing to seed. Go and read the introduction to how BitTorrent works, and you understand why everyone needs to seed for BitTorrent to work effectively for everyone.
If you can't handle helping to seed the torrent, then go download it from one of the overloaded HTTP mirrors.
I'm assuming you're refering to a POS situation using EFTPOS (or similar). That only applies to savings accounts, IIRC. Credit cards normally just need a signature where there is a human involved. And most of the time the clerk doesn't actually check the signature and just presses OK.
In a shop once, I saw someone use a credit card just by telling the clerk the number. The clerk was a little weary at first, though the customer was convincing. Since the store used a phone to call the bank's computer, the clerk only needed to dial in a card number and an amount to do the transaction.
And yes, I'm aussie.
I noticed they commented on how some of the Linux distros couldn't resize the Windows partition down to do a dual boot. I've yet to see a version of Windows that allows me to size down my Linux partition and add a boot menu so I can easily choose which OS I want to run on startup.
Microsoft's website seems only to be able to tell me how to remove Linux (1, 2) and not have a Windows bootloader installed to allow me to run both. All the other Linux-related KB articles are to do with Virtual PC and SMB problems.
installing.
USB does the same functions that serial and parallel do for the Cappuccino PC. Serial devices have become very rare on a consumer end. The only serial devices I have are some old mice, modems and an IR dongle, which the current model uses USB. Printers and scanners that used parallel connectors now use USB exclusively.
irda has been superceded by Bluetooth, which is availible for the Mac Mini as an optional extra.
The slot loading drive is smaller than a tray loading drive. Apple went to the slot loading drives in 1999, with the iMac, and that was later echoed in the Powerbook and iBooks. There are some weird CDs out there that will give you problems, I'll give you that, but not many for it to be a major issue.
I'm still waiting for ReiserFS support, natively. Even just read only. The alternative isn't terribly nice.
The same way I installed Netscape onto my old computer without opening IE - from a CD-ROM. That was several years ago, now we have things like USB flash disks and CD-Rs, that are very affordable.
We could also use the command-line FTP client in Windows to goto ftp.mozilla.org...
Obviously you're using the standard version of OpenOffice. GNOME has their own GNOME-ized version, ximian-openoffice. I personally prefer it to standard OpenOffice, probably because I use GNOME and it all fits in well with the desktop.