Nah, eBay stick to canned responses and merely pretend to not understand even the basic nature of your problem. They're Captain Oblivious rude, not Soup Nazi rude.
"eBay, you billed me a fee that I already paid and a final value fee for an iten that didn't get any bids."
"Customer, have you tried clearing your cache and cookies, emptying your recycle bin, deleting all the contents of your 'My Documents' folder, and reinstalling Windows?"
Don't forget, you need to install MS-DOS before installing Windows. You have to find your floppies, and heaven help you if what you bought all those years ago was MS-DOS 5.0 on 5 1/4" 1.2 MB floppy disks.
Ground Control to Major TomTom. Commencing countdown, engines on.
Or...
Standing there alone, the car is waiting. "All systems are go." "Are you sure?" Control is not convinced, but the TomTom Has the evidence. No need to abort. The countdown starts.
I didn't mean to suggest a shoot-first stance. Such a stance is ridiculously destructive to the bottom line. I humbly apologize if that's how you took it or that's how it came out.
In my own ISP's case, we give as standard procedure a 24-hour window for owners of malware-infected computers to clean them up before we consider kicking them offline. The window starts when we notify them, not when we discover it or when it begins.
Individual circumstances dictate whether we give more time and tolerate the added burden (a dial-up customer who is making progress, for example) or whether we give less time or even forgo notices altogether (a broadband customer who doesn't care what evils his computer's used for, as another example). It's worth noting that, in my personal experience, the former are somewhat common and the latter almost unheard of.
I have no idea how many ISPs do this, but mine also offers the service (for a fee, of course) of removing maladies from computers and installing effective scanners and removers (AVG, Spybot, etc., licenses permitting and customers allowing) to help prevent relapses.
In the case of the larger ISPs so willing to cut corners that they often cut their bottom lines, and in the bizarre yet all-too-real situations where more abuse means more income, you're right. However, bandwidth is always finite and, in many places, visibly limited.
ISP customers do notice the loss of speed when zombie traffic soaks up a significant portion of any given 'Net line between them and the backbone, and unless they've been conditioned otherwise by unsupportive tech support, they do complain. Granted, it's harder to notice the effects of such traffic closer to the backbone, but the same effects are devastating closer to the last mile.
Zombie-related customer attritions happen regardless of how supportive ISP tech support may be if that ISP remains indifferent to zombie and bot traffic.
Also, customers of zombie-indifferent ISPs do complain (sometimes quite loudly and profanely, as I've had the misfortune of experiencing) when other ISPs block all their email because theirs are spam havens.
The real question is why do you want to blame the network (provider) for a host security problem?
The network provider is blamed anyway. When a botted host sends spam, other networks blame the provider by black-holing that provider. When a botted host floods another host, the provider is blamed by having at least the one host's IP dropped or, if the provider has many bots, the provider's entire subnet blocked.
Should hosts not be hardened against bot infections?
Yes, they should, especially out-of-box. However, the effectiveness of the out-of-box hardening varies from one vendor to another, widely so when Microsoft's OEM vendors are included. Complicating matters is that Windows, currently the most widely attacked target host by both raw numbers and percentage, has the lowest percentage of users with the knowledge and discipline necessary to perform even basic hardening of their own computers against being botted.
Shifting the blame to the network also shifts the cost of the solution, and that's hardly right either.
The network provider already pays the cost of the problem by allowing bot network traffic to compete with, and potentially squeeze out, their customers' legitimate network traffic. In other words, network providers who aren't willing to pay to be part of the solution are in effect paying real money to be part of the problem.
Actually, all ISPs need to do is get the cajones to actually enforce their terms of service and acceptable use policies, and kick zombies off their networks and not let 'em back online until they're cleaned, especially if the rightful owners won't do what's necessary to keep their own computer theirs. A simple analysis of traffic patterns and logs of routing attempts on commonly exploited ports reveals who's likely zombied, and a simple phone call clears up whether it's legitimate use or botted use.
ISPs also need to make themselves accessable to other ISPs so that evidence of botnet and spam zombie behavior can be shared and acted upon. Unfortunately, the only ISPs who do this well are the little mom-and-pop shops who seriously don't take kindly to hosting zombied computers.
No need. I'm filtering loads of spam sent both to and from addresses at my domain which are completely bogus. How from? I'm filtering bounce receipts from other domains sent to bogus addresses there, too, which happen to be spoofing my domain.
"A master's degree in corporate logos can help lolita get out of debt just by adding three inches to your mortgage. Just open the attached video.exe to learn how to begin."
My bad. I forgot that/. equates expressing a basic understanding of rights and responsibilities under the law with pretending to be a lawyer. Sorry. I'll try not to do that again.
To which link do you refer? If you mean my spare-time link, then no.
So what are people going to do when Vista doesn't let them do the things they want, things they have the right to do under the law but which the software outright forbids them to do, despite the capability being evident? This is much more likely to happen through Microsoft error than through MPAA intent, though the latter shouldn't be discounted either. What then? What are people going to do?
I'm advising my customers to break the law? What law is broken when the law itself breaks its own law? Quick recap: The DMCA explicitly permits fair use, but the same DMCA explicitly prohibits the exercise of fair use. I'd be advising my customers to break the law just as well by advising them to buy a product which denies them their rights under the law and just live with it, as the HDCP system within Windows Vista seems designed to do.
Those victories won't come until the laws allowing lock-in or lock-out (depending on your perspective) are challenged. What else will get the law changed for the better but a slew of teed-off consumers wronged by Microsoft caving in to the immoral and possibly illegal demands of the music and movie industries?
Besides, they're not going to turn to me for help until they buy an HD disk that already broke their Windows boxen, or until their boxen break without the aid of actual protected content.
With the existence of the Zune in its present form, I'd say Microsoft has as big a backbone as a jellyfish does regarding DRM. As far as fighting the RIAA goes, it now depends on how strongbacked Steve Jobs, not Steve Ballmer, is. For the MPAA, I'm not sure.
The answers to Nick White's twenty questions are so far beyond useless that they actually inspire rather than calm fears about the potential and likelihood of Windows Vista's DRM technology being abused and/or abusive.
Tell ya what, Nicky. When my customers start calling me about why their computers are performing exactly as you and Microsoft designed, contrary to what they (the consumers) wanted, I'm going to lay it all out for them, straight and level.
I'm going to tell them who it was who sold them a windowless room and told them it was a wonderful vista. I'm probably going to tell them up whose rear ends they can shove their copies of Windows Vista, a task I'm pretty sure they'll want to do rather violently. Then I'm going to name half a dozen OS products that fit their needs beautifully, products without digital restrictions management (DRM) inhibiting their right to fair use, and not a one of which is a Microsoft product.
Oh, and just to be clear, Nicky, I don't sell computers or operating systems, just computer service and consulting. (I'm often told I should start selling computers, but it'll be a shop free of Microsoft products if I do.)
Doesn't MS have one of the longer lengths of support around?
Much longer than Apple Computer, but not near as long as Sun Microsystems. The only reason Microsoft's support cycle has been lengthening recently is because it took them six years and change to update their home computer OS, and even then they rushed it.
And any law that purports to make "malware" illegal is utterly unenforcable - do you really believe that some teenager in Romainia is going to be dragged into court in California for a single offence of this type?
Granted, the enforcability of this law, just like any U.S. law, tends to stop at the border, so no a Romanian script-kiddie isn't going to be dragged into a California courtroom, and he won't be dragged into any Romanian courtroom either unless writing malware's a crime in Romania as well.
Computer hardware and software voodoo
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 1
I picked up a refurbished Toshiba Win95 book that was so old that it didn't even have a CD-ROM drive. It had an Intel 486-SL/33 CPU, 12 MB RAM, and an 800 MB disk drive. Win95 was installed from floppies: 13 of the buggers, with IE3 optional on three more. Anyway, it didn't have an on-board modem. I had to buy a PCMCIA modem card, and all I could afford was a used 14.4 Kbaud. Yes, I surfed the 'Net quite happily on a 14.4, but that was a good ten years ago. But that thing had the weirdest problem.
After using it for a while, like an hour or two, it turned on the modem speaker, so I could hear the modulated data whether I wanted to or not. After three hours, it just wouldn't hold a connection anymore, and nothing could get it back online. Well, I found that it was just getting too warm (but not too warm to the touch), so cooling it down made it perfectly useable again. The best place to keep it cool is -- where else? -- in the refrigerator. I was known as the only one within a thousand mile radius who kept his modem in the fridge's butter tray. It was the only way the modem would work for long stretches.
For Windows use, given how often it crashed otherwise, I kept the can of Diet Coke I was drinking visibly crushed right next to the keyboard. I never crushed the can enough that it would leak, but I crushed it enough that a third had to be drank already. Keeping that within sight of the book kept it from crashing.
When I switched back to desktops, I kept a SkuldUFO catcher doll suspended over the computers. When it was there, no serious failures to speak of. When it wasn't, the "System Halted" BSOD. Your guess is as good as mine.
Now, for general use on desktops and laptops, I keep a plush voodoo doll or two around. I can't quite afford a collection of Tux plushes just yet, so I use the next best thing: Cozy Heart Penguin, one of the Care Bears (along with the patron Care Bear of cryptography, Secret Bear). Those usually convince PCs to play nice.
You do everything you can to try to find the true problem, then you work with the client to find an acceptable solution. If your client is similar to this computer store customer [Video], then you take the appropriate action. Watch the video to the very end to see how to handle the situation properly.
I've been able to slap some sense into my windows for quite some time now. It comes built-in to X11.
First off, choose a cursor theme in which the cursor for moving a window is a hand, such as any of the comix cursor themes in Debian. Next, on those rare occasions when a program misbehaves, hold down the Alt key to warn the window. Finally, click and drag the mouse anywhere on the offending window briefly, while the Alt key is still held down.
Congratulations, you've just slapped some sense into the misbehaving window.
If you follow the online links from the WGA fail page, you'll be asked to select your region. If you select United States, you'll be told rather bluntly that there's no way to buy a new key online.
WGA accused my office's only Windows box of being pirated. We got a new key, one we had to pay for again, and we tried this tool. It left our machine in an even worse state: unable to boot because of a missing extraneous set-up file, a file that was perfectly readable from both the CD and HDD copies of that file.
We had to do an XP repair install anyway to get the new key accepted.
Slashdot Mirror
See flashy "Upgrade LTS to LTS - Dapper to Hardy".
Visit Synaptic & (attempt) to set repositories to Hardy.
What? After seeing the flashy message in Update Manager, you leave it for Synaptic??
You're doing it wrong!
I did forget that. Thank you.
Nah, eBay stick to canned responses and merely pretend to not understand even the basic nature of your problem. They're Captain Oblivious rude, not Soup Nazi rude.
"eBay, you billed me a fee that I already paid and a final value fee for an iten that didn't get any bids."
"Customer, have you tried clearing your cache and cookies, emptying your recycle bin, deleting all the contents of your 'My Documents' folder, and reinstalling Windows?"
Don't forget, you need to install MS-DOS before installing Windows. You have to find your floppies, and heaven help you if what you bought all those years ago was MS-DOS 5.0 on 5 1/4" 1.2 MB floppy disks.
Does anyone even make 5 1/4" USB floppy drives?
Ground Control to Major TomTom. Commencing countdown, engines on.
Or...
Standing there alone, the car is waiting.
"All systems are go." "Are you sure?"
Control is not convinced, but the TomTom
Has the evidence. No need to abort.
The countdown starts.
I didn't mean to suggest a shoot-first stance. Such a stance is ridiculously destructive to the bottom line. I humbly apologize if that's how you took it or that's how it came out.
In my own ISP's case, we give as standard procedure a 24-hour window for owners of malware-infected computers to clean them up before we consider kicking them offline. The window starts when we notify them, not when we discover it or when it begins.
Individual circumstances dictate whether we give more time and tolerate the added burden (a dial-up customer who is making progress, for example) or whether we give less time or even forgo notices altogether (a broadband customer who doesn't care what evils his computer's used for, as another example). It's worth noting that, in my personal experience, the former are somewhat common and the latter almost unheard of.
I have no idea how many ISPs do this, but mine also offers the service (for a fee, of course) of removing maladies from computers and installing effective scanners and removers (AVG, Spybot, etc., licenses permitting and customers allowing) to help prevent relapses.
In the case of the larger ISPs so willing to cut corners that they often cut their bottom lines, and in the bizarre yet all-too-real situations where more abuse means more income, you're right. However, bandwidth is always finite and, in many places, visibly limited.
ISP customers do notice the loss of speed when zombie traffic soaks up a significant portion of any given 'Net line between them and the backbone, and unless they've been conditioned otherwise by unsupportive tech support, they do complain. Granted, it's harder to notice the effects of such traffic closer to the backbone, but the same effects are devastating closer to the last mile.
Zombie-related customer attritions happen regardless of how supportive ISP tech support may be if that ISP remains indifferent to zombie and bot traffic.
Also, customers of zombie-indifferent ISPs do complain (sometimes quite loudly and profanely, as I've had the misfortune of experiencing) when other ISPs block all their email because theirs are spam havens.
The network provider is blamed anyway. When a botted host sends spam, other networks blame the provider by black-holing that provider. When a botted host floods another host, the provider is blamed by having at least the one host's IP dropped or, if the provider has many bots, the provider's entire subnet blocked.
Yes, they should, especially out-of-box. However, the effectiveness of the out-of-box hardening varies from one vendor to another, widely so when Microsoft's OEM vendors are included. Complicating matters is that Windows, currently the most widely attacked target host by both raw numbers and percentage, has the lowest percentage of users with the knowledge and discipline necessary to perform even basic hardening of their own computers against being botted.
The network provider already pays the cost of the problem by allowing bot network traffic to compete with, and potentially squeeze out, their customers' legitimate network traffic. In other words, network providers who aren't willing to pay to be part of the solution are in effect paying real money to be part of the problem.
Actually, all ISPs need to do is get the cajones to actually enforce their terms of service and acceptable use policies, and kick zombies off their networks and not let 'em back online until they're cleaned, especially if the rightful owners won't do what's necessary to keep their own computer theirs. A simple analysis of traffic patterns and logs of routing attempts on commonly exploited ports reveals who's likely zombied, and a simple phone call clears up whether it's legitimate use or botted use.
ISPs also need to make themselves accessable to other ISPs so that evidence of botnet and spam zombie behavior can be shared and acted upon. Unfortunately, the only ISPs who do this well are the little mom-and-pop shops who seriously don't take kindly to hosting zombied computers.
No need. I'm filtering loads of spam sent both to and from addresses at my domain which are completely bogus. How from? I'm filtering bounce receipts from other domains sent to bogus addresses there, too, which happen to be spoofing my domain.
"A master's degree in corporate logos can help lolita get out of debt just by adding three inches to your mortgage. Just open the attached video.exe to learn how to begin."
My bad. I forgot that /. equates expressing a basic understanding of rights and responsibilities under the law with pretending to be a lawyer. Sorry. I'll try not to do that again.
To which link do you refer? If you mean my spare-time link, then no.
So what are people going to do when Vista doesn't let them do the things they want, things they have the right to do under the law but which the software outright forbids them to do, despite the capability being evident? This is much more likely to happen through Microsoft error than through MPAA intent, though the latter shouldn't be discounted either. What then? What are people going to do?
I'm advising my customers to break the law? What law is broken when the law itself breaks its own law? Quick recap: The DMCA explicitly permits fair use, but the same DMCA explicitly prohibits the exercise of fair use. I'd be advising my customers to break the law just as well by advising them to buy a product which denies them their rights under the law and just live with it, as the HDCP system within Windows Vista seems designed to do.
In spite of MPAA victories such as the banning of 321 Studios' DVD X Copy, victories for the consumer such as the legalization of DeCSS (and the overdue vindication of DVD Jon) and the existence of libdvdcss going unchallenged set a precedent which will create similar victories against HDCP-style DRM.
Those victories won't come until the laws allowing lock-in or lock-out (depending on your perspective) are challenged. What else will get the law changed for the better but a slew of teed-off consumers wronged by Microsoft caving in to the immoral and possibly illegal demands of the music and movie industries?
Besides, they're not going to turn to me for help until they buy an HD disk that already broke their Windows boxen, or until their boxen break without the aid of actual protected content.
With the existence of the Zune in its present form, I'd say Microsoft has as big a backbone as a jellyfish does regarding DRM. As far as fighting the RIAA goes, it now depends on how strongbacked Steve Jobs, not Steve Ballmer, is. For the MPAA, I'm not sure.
The answers to Nick White's twenty questions are so far beyond useless that they actually inspire rather than calm fears about the potential and likelihood of Windows Vista's DRM technology being abused and/or abusive.
Tell ya what, Nicky. When my customers start calling me about why their computers are performing exactly as you and Microsoft designed, contrary to what they (the consumers) wanted, I'm going to lay it all out for them, straight and level.
I'm going to tell them who it was who sold them a windowless room and told them it was a wonderful vista. I'm probably going to tell them up whose rear ends they can shove their copies of Windows Vista, a task I'm pretty sure they'll want to do rather violently. Then I'm going to name half a dozen OS products that fit their needs beautifully, products without digital restrictions management (DRM) inhibiting their right to fair use, and not a one of which is a Microsoft product.
Oh, and just to be clear, Nicky, I don't sell computers or operating systems, just computer service and consulting. (I'm often told I should start selling computers, but it'll be a shop free of Microsoft products if I do.)
Much longer than Apple Computer, but not near as long as Sun Microsystems. The only reason Microsoft's support cycle has been lengthening recently is because it took them six years and change to update their home computer OS, and even then they rushed it.
Perhaps a little-known law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (18 USC 1030), reasonable or not, defines malware as illegal.
Granted, the enforcability of this law, just like any U.S. law, tends to stop at the border, so no a Romanian script-kiddie isn't going to be dragged into a California courtroom, and he won't be dragged into any Romanian courtroom either unless writing malware's a crime in Romania as well.
You've never read a $1 cell phone's contract, have you?
Is this anything like the Puffy Cat Virus?
... A group of metrosexual rights activists paraded through the town center chanting, "We're here! We're not queer! But we're close! Get used to it!"
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced." - Barry Gehm
"Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don't understand it." - Florence Ambrose [Freefall #255]
I picked up a refurbished Toshiba Win95 book that was so old that it didn't even have a CD-ROM drive. It had an Intel 486-SL/33 CPU, 12 MB RAM, and an 800 MB disk drive. Win95 was installed from floppies: 13 of the buggers, with IE3 optional on three more. Anyway, it didn't have an on-board modem. I had to buy a PCMCIA modem card, and all I could afford was a used 14.4 Kbaud. Yes, I surfed the 'Net quite happily on a 14.4, but that was a good ten years ago. But that thing had the weirdest problem.
After using it for a while, like an hour or two, it turned on the modem speaker, so I could hear the modulated data whether I wanted to or not. After three hours, it just wouldn't hold a connection anymore, and nothing could get it back online. Well, I found that it was just getting too warm (but not too warm to the touch), so cooling it down made it perfectly useable again. The best place to keep it cool is -- where else? -- in the refrigerator. I was known as the only one within a thousand mile radius who kept his modem in the fridge's butter tray. It was the only way the modem would work for long stretches.
For Windows use, given how often it crashed otherwise, I kept the can of Diet Coke I was drinking visibly crushed right next to the keyboard. I never crushed the can enough that it would leak, but I crushed it enough that a third had to be drank already. Keeping that within sight of the book kept it from crashing.
When I switched back to desktops, I kept a Skuld UFO catcher doll suspended over the computers. When it was there, no serious failures to speak of. When it wasn't, the "System Halted" BSOD. Your guess is as good as mine.
Now, for general use on desktops and laptops, I keep a plush voodoo doll or two around. I can't quite afford a collection of Tux plushes just yet, so I use the next best thing: Cozy Heart Penguin, one of the Care Bears (along with the patron Care Bear of cryptography, Secret Bear). Those usually convince PCs to play nice.
You do everything you can to try to find the true problem, then you work with the client to find an acceptable solution. If your client is similar to this computer store customer [Video], then you take the appropriate action. Watch the video to the very end to see how to handle the situation properly.
I've been able to slap some sense into my windows for quite some time now. It comes built-in to X11.
First off, choose a cursor theme in which the cursor for moving a window is a hand, such as any of the comix cursor themes in Debian. Next, on those rare occasions when a program misbehaves, hold down the Alt key to warn the window. Finally, click and drag the mouse anywhere on the offending window briefly, while the Alt key is still held down.
Congratulations, you've just slapped some sense into the misbehaving window.
If you follow the online links from the WGA fail page, you'll be asked to select your region. If you select United States, you'll be told rather bluntly that there's no way to buy a new key online.
WGA accused my office's only Windows box of being pirated. We got a new key, one we had to pay for again, and we tried this tool. It left our machine in an even worse state: unable to boot because of a missing extraneous set-up file, a file that was perfectly readable from both the CD and HDD copies of that file.
We had to do an XP repair install anyway to get the new key accepted.