Place encrypted file PlansToBlowUpParliament.zip on AC's computer.
Report AC to authorities.
Authorities ask AC for password, but of course he can't give it.
Authorities can't verify the contents of the file, so they can't charge him with a crime. Without revealing the contents of the file, AC can't prove his innocence. AC rots in jail for three months without charges filed against him.
AC loses his job while imprisoned, you loot his cubicle for snacks.
Profit!
For bonus points, see if you can get the file onto the hard drive of some politician you hate.
I turned the ringer off on my phone. There's a red light on it that blinks when someone calls. I found that if I'm deep in thought (and thus at a very bad time to be interrupted) I don't notice it. If I'm idling, or not too far into something, the blinking light instantly attracts my attention. It also blinks when there's a voicemail, so I pick up on that as soon as I emerge from my deep thinking.
As for people stopping by, you can retrain them if you have your supervisor's support. In my case, I'm not supposed to do anything unless I have the request in writing (usually an email). So every time a project manager swings by with some "little request," I listen attentively, answer any questions, and at the end of it say, "OK, great, can you put that in an email for the records?" Eventually they get tired of having to explain something twice and just send the email.
Of course. If it had been in Los Angeles, the blocking of religious channels would have been viewed as more of a feature than a restriction. They were fearmongering, and trying to rally up Louisiana's religious base by raising the possibility of government persecution. This tactic only works in places with a significant religious base.
It seems like they'd run into problems with uptake. Your case is a perfect example. The people who are least likely to upgrade (those who have invested in high quality display hardware) are also thsoe most likely to care about high-def content and thus are more likely to be fully aware of just how hard they're getting fucked by the DRM.
By the way, who the hell convinced the content providers that degrading the quality of a signal provided any kind of security? Their big fear is internet distribution, and it seems like most of the pirated stuff online is already compressed with lossy codecs out of convenience rather than necessity.
Could this backfire? Will the consumer say, "Hell, I can't display the high res version, why should I pay for it? I might as well grab the crappy compressed version online and use that."
I wholeheartedly concur. I installed Ubuntu on my laptop to dual boot with XP. Strangely, what pushed me over to the Linux camp was Dell not shipping an OS recovery CD or a driver CD with my laptop. Yeah, they'll send them if I ask, but Linux install CDs are readily available, so I'm not at the mercy of charity from Dell or MS.
After the OS install, the only things that weren't configured out of the box were the SDIO slot and 3D acceleration for my graphics chip. Video (automatically set to the proper resolution), NIC (wired and wireless), modem, sound, even my digital camera all just worked. Every one of these things required separate driver installations for XP.
So from my standpoint at least, while both OSs have a lot of hardware support, support for Linux is far superior to that of Windows.
The post doesn't promote piracy. While it's easy to see how this tool could be used for piracy, and it's likely it will be used for piracy, all it does is allow the user to make an electronic copy of media that's already in his physical possession. Remember, if you don't already own a CPPM-protected disk, then this utility is useless.
The purpose of CPPM (and just about every other DRM system) isn't to control piracy. As far as the pirates are concerned, most DRM systems are rendered irrelevant before the first protected media is ever produced. I can go online right now and download a DRM-free version of "Revenge of the Sith," but I couldn't acquire a protected version even if I wanted to. So when the DVD is released and it's "protected" by CSS, who are the studios trying to protect it from?
CPPM is similar. Connect to a P2P network and search for "DVDAudio." This stuff is already out there. If I want to get it without paying for it, I can download it right now, and this WinDVD patch is of no use to me whatsoever. If I'm a pirate, I don't give a shit. But if I'm an honest consumer and pay for my music in DVD-Audio format, then I have audio content that I can't play on my iPod. This is what this tool is useful for.
DRM doesn't control the pirate, it controls the honest consumer.
I feel like I make the same post every time there's a/. story on DRM. But I'll keep repeating it as long as there are people wiling to parrot the industry crap about DRM being used to prevent piracy. Either that, or the mods start flagging me as "Redundant."
I know it's impossible to make it completely secure, so it's not too big a blow to my ego when it gets cracked.
My employer knows it's impossible to make it completely secure, so I'm not going to get fired when it gets cracked.
The media companies know it's impossible to make it completely secure, so when it does get cracked my employer will just get contracted to create another one.
My job is secure so long as the media companies don't get a clue.
I could probably spend half my time doing actual work, and the other half reading Slashdot.
People who have been convicted as a "sexual offender" for publicly urinating would beg to differ. It is unfortunate that your offense can change based on who sees you do it. But such is the nature of reactionary Puritanical sex laws.
Please tell me you meant for this to be modded as Funny.
I would just love it if one of them actually stepped forward and begged to differ. I'd be thrilled if someone posted a link to one of these registries and said, "See! All I did was piss in an alley, and now my picture's posted online as a sex offender!" But I've seen nothing of the sort. Every sex offender registration that I've seen involves a crime where someone was actually assaulted. I'm really beginning to think that this guy who's registered as a sex offender for public urination is just an urban legend. Nobody seems to know his name or what state he's registered in, but his tale of woe and misfortune spreads far and wide.
Sex offenders - this list contains people who have done nothing more than urinate in public. This kind of map only encourages vigilantes and hysteria.
This has been bothering me for some time. I keep reading that these lists are horrible because you can wind up on them for minor offenses, while others say only dangerous offenders are listed. But in my own casual perusal of the sites (checking a few from this latest Slashback link and checking out the online registry entries form my neighborhood), I've never seen a listing for someone whose only offense was public uriniation or indecent exposure. I've never brought up a listing and thought, "Well why the hell is he on there?"
While it would be darned near impossible to prove the negative (that minor offenders are never listed), it shouldn't be too hard to find an example where such a person was listed, if there are any. Did you actually find anyone who was listed for public urination?
If someone can provide even a single example, then I'll have a conclusive answer. But the only place I've ever encountered this complaint is on anonymous internet postings where some guy complains that a friend wound up on one of the "Megan's Law" sites for urinating in public or having sex with his girlfriend when he was 18 and she was 17.
If someone is going to code new games, the PC market doesn't seem to have a prayer.
Unless you're coding something like Doom 3, Half-Life 2, The Sims 2, Worlds of Warcraft, or any game with "Star Wars" in the title.
OK, so you friend doesn't game. You think PC games are dead? ATI and NVidia are still selling $400 video cards, and they aren't being used for CAD. Your kids and everyone else's may prefer consoles, but the market also has plenty of people like me who predominantly play PC games. And I'll wager that I command a lot more disposable income than your kids do.
what will it take for the world to do something decisive about these regimes and their (soon to be) nuclear arsenals? a nuclear signature over los angeles or madrid?
How about one over Hiroshima? The government of the USA has a massive arsenal of nuclear warheads, has used them in the past, and has endorsed a policy of pre-emptive warfare. What will it take for the world to do something decisive about this regime? A mushroom cloud over Paris?
Please take note that the only nation to ever actually use nuclear weapons in war was led by a democratically elected secular government. No dictator has ever used a nuclear bomb. No theocrat has ever used a nuclear bomb. No insane terrorist extremist has ever used a nuclear bomb.
Don't get me wrong, Iran and North Korea are run by terribly oppressive a despicable regimes, but that doesn't translate into nuclear war. We should carefully examine the broader context and implications of our reasoning before we go about taking such decisive action.
There's no law against using the broadcast flag, but hardware vendors aren't required to honor it. Some hardware already has it enabled, but the question is hether future hardware will if it's not required. I doubt we'll see continued support for the flag, since it's a feature that makes the hardware less valuable and makes the vendor vulnerable to attacks from competitors, and more expensive to support: "Hey, I can't record the season finale of Survivor, what's wrong with this thing?"
Indeed. This isn't real anonymity. All it does is add more people to the chain of liability. IANAL, so I can't really say whether you can be held legally accountable for the traffic that runs through your node, but I imagine the *AA can just send a letter to your ISP and get you shut down.
I own a PC and a PS2. Both have strengths. Here's what the PS2 has on the PC:
PC: $800. PS2: $150.
Social gaming. A bunch of us can sit around the TV drinking beer and talking shit while we take turns beating the crap out of each other in DOA. Doesn't work so well on a PC.
No service packs.
No driver updates.
No viruses.
Crashes are extremely rare.
I can play almost every game that will ever be released for the platform without upgrading my hardware.
When PS2 games ship, they're rock freaking solid. None of this "ship it to meet the deadline, then release a patch" crap.
Of course the PC has many advantages as well. That's why I own both:)
If the world goes 100% open source, McVoy's revenue drops towards zero, but innovation will rapidly rise closer to 100%.
It means I'll never get paid to code "Hello World" again unless there's something innovative about the implementation because there will be freely available open source alternatives in multiple languages and platforms. No, this doesn't mean I'll be unemployed. What it does mean is that I'll only be working on things that are new. I'll be creating new software, or adapting available software to the specific needs of my employer. He may see it differently, but I think that would make my job a hell of a lot more interesting.
From the article: Normal people do not like being associated with fanatics and lunatics.
So the question here is, which side are the lunatics and fanatics on? The community rises up against mudslinging journalism, Sys-con editors resign when it becomes clear that their CEO is a sociopath, and these are the signs of a community imploding? Standing up for your principles is fanatical? And of all of the incidents that he could have chose to support the idea that the Linux community is full of nutcases, he chooses this one?
Dvorak's really stooped low on this one. The reason is clear: If more communities responded to sleazy journalistic behavior the way the Linux community has in this case, he'd be out of a job.
I think I'll email him now:
To: John Dvorak
CC: The horse you rode in on
Subject: **filtered**, EOM
Camera phones are popular because they're good enough for basic, casual stuff. They're cool for a lot of uses that would normally be covered by low end cameras, but people who really want to take pictures will buy a separate camera.
Integrating music players into cell phones would, if well implemented, put a major dent in the market for low end MP3 players but probably wouldn't touch the iPod. People who buy iPods aren't looking for some freebie toss-it-in music player.
And this assumes that the phone manufactures, wireless service providers, and Microsoft can all get together and form a business model that they can all agree on that doesn't completely turn off the consumers. If they overburden it with DRM, use limitations, limited song libraries, and per-use fees, then the iPod will continue to reign supreme. These are the same companies that want to charge you for each custom ringtone, SMS message, or picture transferred. How much will it cost me to load my CD collection into my own phone?
Can you use (Excel|Word|Windows)?
Answer A: "Which version? (watch as interviewer's eyes glaze over) No matter, I've used several (word processor|spreadsheet|OS) variants in my time, I'm sure I can use or quickly learn to use whatever you have in house."
Answer B: "Yes." It doesn't matter if it's true. If your job requires the ability to use advanced functionality of these programs, the interviewer will ask about these specifically. Besides, I'm sure at some point you'll have interacted with these programs, right?
Can you use Word?
No, Kedit
Can you use Windows?
No, Linux
It "hijacked" your browser? Did you not explicitly install it? Did it sneak onto your computer without your knowledge or consent? Did it not include a means of uninstalling it? The last time you rode in a taxi, did you accuse the driver of kidnapping?
Slashdot Mirror
For bonus points, see if you can get the file onto the hard drive of some politician you hate.
I'll be taking it back to the shop as soon as possible and demanding they exchange it with a copy that is suitable for a child of his age.
You: "I'd like to exchange this copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for a version that's suitable for my 12-year old."
Shop Employee: "Certainly. We can easily do that with a simple modification to the retail version of the game." [breaks disk in half] "Here ya go."
Exactly.
I turned the ringer off on my phone. There's a red light on it that blinks when someone calls. I found that if I'm deep in thought (and thus at a very bad time to be interrupted) I don't notice it. If I'm idling, or not too far into something, the blinking light instantly attracts my attention. It also blinks when there's a voicemail, so I pick up on that as soon as I emerge from my deep thinking.
As for people stopping by, you can retrain them if you have your supervisor's support. In my case, I'm not supposed to do anything unless I have the request in writing (usually an email). So every time a project manager swings by with some "little request," I listen attentively, answer any questions, and at the end of it say, "OK, great, can you put that in an email for the records?" Eventually they get tired of having to explain something twice and just send the email.
Of course. If it had been in Los Angeles, the blocking of religious channels would have been viewed as more of a feature than a restriction. They were fearmongering, and trying to rally up Louisiana's religious base by raising the possibility of government persecution. This tactic only works in places with a significant religious base.
It seems like they'd run into problems with uptake. Your case is a perfect example. The people who are least likely to upgrade (those who have invested in high quality display hardware) are also thsoe most likely to care about high-def content and thus are more likely to be fully aware of just how hard they're getting fucked by the DRM.
By the way, who the hell convinced the content providers that degrading the quality of a signal provided any kind of security? Their big fear is internet distribution, and it seems like most of the pirated stuff online is already compressed with lossy codecs out of convenience rather than necessity.
Could this backfire? Will the consumer say, "Hell, I can't display the high res version, why should I pay for it? I might as well grab the crappy compressed version online and use that."
Yeah, 12% is terrible. I hope he's not powering his home with this thing, cuz the fuel costs will be murder.
I wholeheartedly concur. I installed Ubuntu on my laptop to dual boot with XP. Strangely, what pushed me over to the Linux camp was Dell not shipping an OS recovery CD or a driver CD with my laptop. Yeah, they'll send them if I ask, but Linux install CDs are readily available, so I'm not at the mercy of charity from Dell or MS.
After the OS install, the only things that weren't configured out of the box were the SDIO slot and 3D acceleration for my graphics chip. Video (automatically set to the proper resolution), NIC (wired and wireless), modem, sound, even my digital camera all just worked. Every one of these things required separate driver installations for XP.
So from my standpoint at least, while both OSs have a lot of hardware support, support for Linux is far superior to that of Windows.
The post doesn't promote piracy. While it's easy to see how this tool could be used for piracy, and it's likely it will be used for piracy, all it does is allow the user to make an electronic copy of media that's already in his physical possession. Remember, if you don't already own a CPPM-protected disk, then this utility is useless.
/. story on DRM. But I'll keep repeating it as long as there are people wiling to parrot the industry crap about DRM being used to prevent piracy. Either that, or the mods start flagging me as "Redundant."
The purpose of CPPM (and just about every other DRM system) isn't to control piracy. As far as the pirates are concerned, most DRM systems are rendered irrelevant before the first protected media is ever produced. I can go online right now and download a DRM-free version of "Revenge of the Sith," but I couldn't acquire a protected version even if I wanted to. So when the DVD is released and it's "protected" by CSS, who are the studios trying to protect it from?
CPPM is similar. Connect to a P2P network and search for "DVDAudio." This stuff is already out there. If I want to get it without paying for it, I can download it right now, and this WinDVD patch is of no use to me whatsoever. If I'm a pirate, I don't give a shit. But if I'm an honest consumer and pay for my music in DVD-Audio format, then I have audio content that I can't play on my iPod. This is what this tool is useful for.
DRM doesn't control the pirate, it controls the honest consumer.
I feel like I make the same post every time there's a
They're being very friendly to OSS. Just like they were friendly enough to help that sheep get over the fence...
People who have been convicted as a "sexual offender" for publicly urinating would beg to differ. It is unfortunate that your offense can change based on who sees you do it. But such is the nature of reactionary Puritanical sex laws.
Please tell me you meant for this to be modded as Funny.
I would just love it if one of them actually stepped forward and begged to differ. I'd be thrilled if someone posted a link to one of these registries and said, "See! All I did was piss in an alley, and now my picture's posted online as a sex offender!" But I've seen nothing of the sort. Every sex offender registration that I've seen involves a crime where someone was actually assaulted. I'm really beginning to think that this guy who's registered as a sex offender for public urination is just an urban legend. Nobody seems to know his name or what state he's registered in, but his tale of woe and misfortune spreads far and wide.
Sex offenders - this list contains people who have done nothing more than urinate in public. This kind of map only encourages vigilantes and hysteria.
This has been bothering me for some time. I keep reading that these lists are horrible because you can wind up on them for minor offenses, while others say only dangerous offenders are listed. But in my own casual perusal of the sites (checking a few from this latest Slashback link and checking out the online registry entries form my neighborhood), I've never seen a listing for someone whose only offense was public uriniation or indecent exposure. I've never brought up a listing and thought, "Well why the hell is he on there?"
While it would be darned near impossible to prove the negative (that minor offenders are never listed), it shouldn't be too hard to find an example where such a person was listed, if there are any. Did you actually find anyone who was listed for public urination?
If someone can provide even a single example, then I'll have a conclusive answer. But the only place I've ever encountered this complaint is on anonymous internet postings where some guy complains that a friend wound up on one of the "Megan's Law" sites for urinating in public or having sex with his girlfriend when he was 18 and she was 17.
Not geek related, but: There used to be an Audi in my neighborhood that had the license plate "INNNIE."
If someone is going to code new games, the PC market doesn't seem to have a prayer.
Unless you're coding something like Doom 3, Half-Life 2, The Sims 2, Worlds of Warcraft, or any game with "Star Wars" in the title.
OK, so you friend doesn't game. You think PC games are dead? ATI and NVidia are still selling $400 video cards, and they aren't being used for CAD. Your kids and everyone else's may prefer consoles, but the market also has plenty of people like me who predominantly play PC games. And I'll wager that I command a lot more disposable income than your kids do.
what will it take for the world to do something decisive about these regimes and their (soon to be) nuclear arsenals? a nuclear signature over los angeles or madrid?
How about one over Hiroshima? The government of the USA has a massive arsenal of nuclear warheads, has used them in the past, and has endorsed a policy of pre-emptive warfare. What will it take for the world to do something decisive about this regime? A mushroom cloud over Paris?
Please take note that the only nation to ever actually use nuclear weapons in war was led by a democratically elected secular government. No dictator has ever used a nuclear bomb. No theocrat has ever used a nuclear bomb. No insane terrorist extremist has ever used a nuclear bomb.
Don't get me wrong, Iran and North Korea are run by terribly oppressive a despicable regimes, but that doesn't translate into nuclear war. We should carefully examine the broader context and implications of our reasoning before we go about taking such decisive action.
There's no law against using the broadcast flag, but hardware vendors aren't required to honor it. Some hardware already has it enabled, but the question is hether future hardware will if it's not required. I doubt we'll see continued support for the flag, since it's a feature that makes the hardware less valuable and makes the vendor vulnerable to attacks from competitors, and more expensive to support: "Hey, I can't record the season finale of Survivor, what's wrong with this thing?"
Indeed. This isn't real anonymity. All it does is add more people to the chain of liability. IANAL, so I can't really say whether you can be held legally accountable for the traffic that runs through your node, but I imagine the *AA can just send a letter to your ISP and get you shut down.
Of course the PC has many advantages as well. That's why I own both
If the world goes 100% open source, McVoy's revenue drops towards zero, but innovation will rapidly rise closer to 100%.
It means I'll never get paid to code "Hello World" again unless there's something innovative about the implementation because there will be freely available open source alternatives in multiple languages and platforms. No, this doesn't mean I'll be unemployed. What it does mean is that I'll only be working on things that are new. I'll be creating new software, or adapting available software to the specific needs of my employer. He may see it differently, but I think that would make my job a hell of a lot more interesting.
It's been done, but they still have a few bugs to work out.
So the question here is, which side are the lunatics and fanatics on? The community rises up against mudslinging journalism, Sys-con editors resign when it becomes clear that their CEO is a sociopath, and these are the signs of a community imploding? Standing up for your principles is fanatical? And of all of the incidents that he could have chose to support the idea that the Linux community is full of nutcases, he chooses this one?
Dvorak's really stooped low on this one. The reason is clear: If more communities responded to sleazy journalistic behavior the way the Linux community has in this case, he'd be out of a job.
I think I'll email him now:
Camera phones are popular because they're good enough for basic, casual stuff. They're cool for a lot of uses that would normally be covered by low end cameras, but people who really want to take pictures will buy a separate camera.
Integrating music players into cell phones would, if well implemented, put a major dent in the market for low end MP3 players but probably wouldn't touch the iPod. People who buy iPods aren't looking for some freebie toss-it-in music player.
And this assumes that the phone manufactures, wireless service providers, and Microsoft can all get together and form a business model that they can all agree on that doesn't completely turn off the consumers. If they overburden it with DRM, use limitations, limited song libraries, and per-use fees, then the iPod will continue to reign supreme. These are the same companies that want to charge you for each custom ringtone, SMS message, or picture transferred. How much will it cost me to load my CD collection into my own phone?
There are several options:
Can you use (Excel|Word|Windows)?
Answer A: "Which version? (watch as interviewer's eyes glaze over) No matter, I've used several (word processor|spreadsheet|OS) variants in my time, I'm sure I can use or quickly learn to use whatever you have in house."
Answer B: "Yes." It doesn't matter if it's true. If your job requires the ability to use advanced functionality of these programs, the interviewer will ask about these specifically. Besides, I'm sure at some point you'll have interacted with these programs, right?
Can you use Word? No, Kedit Can you use Windows? No, Linux
It "hijacked" your browser? Did you not explicitly install it? Did it sneak onto your computer without your knowledge or consent? Did it not include a means of uninstalling it? The last time you rode in a taxi, did you accuse the driver of kidnapping?
The internet has built in redundancy. You can find backups here and here.