If this is intelligent discussion, then so is goatse. Bashing Vista isn't intelligent discussion, it's trolling, when it occurs in the context of a story about SP1. Intelligent discussion would be the merits/demerits of SP1, not saying "lolz people need an upgrade to Ubuntu button".
I can't tell which is less intelligent - expressing an honest opinion about Vista without ever representing it as factual or intelligent, or what you are doing which is 1) coming to Slashdot expecting information that is better obtained via Google and 2) getting all pissy because people (who owe you nothing) won't behave the way you want them to.
If you really want to change the nature of the discussion, how about posting your own review of the advantages and disadvantages of SP1 instead of saying "lolz people need to post the way I want them to".
They failed to address the application compatibility issues, the hardware compatibility issues, the lack of a compelling new feature isssue.
It could be argued that worrying so much about backwards compatibility is one reason (other than no incentive to care about quality until it hurts sales) why Windows hasn't vastly improved. Of course, Microsoft is in a bit of a bind on that one -- if this were not the case and users had to obtain/learn all new programs and a completely different OS anyway, then they might as well look into whether an alternative like Linux or OSX would meet their needs.
I've gotten sick and tired of hearing the idiots who feel the need to bash Vista at every opportunity
Think of it as a counterbalance, a reaction to Microsoft's need to promote Vista at every opportunity and the fact that they can make it widespread regardless of its quality. Why blame the reaction instead of the primary cause?
Apple aren't licensing their DRM to anyone, so that leaves non-DRM mp3
...
Hence the about turn on DRM *is* due to a drop in CD sales, but that drop is *not* due to DRM.
Or you could say that the about-face on DRM *is* because of DRM now that the company has a reason to care about interoperability. You know, as opposed to customers being the only ones to suffer because of incompatible proprietary standards. Interoperability is a good idea and proprietary DRM schemes cause incompatibilities by their very nature; it just required some market changes to convince Sony to embrace what has been obvious for some time now.
This kind of hubris is what's really hurting the industry.
If there's anything humanity will always have a surplus of, it's the stupid and gullible. And the people stupid enough to buy stuff from spam are probably also stupid enough to not recognize their own stupidity or ever care about due diligence.
hat has got to be one of the stupidest things i've heard for a while.
They are NOTHING like people speculating on the stockmarket because the spammers out right LIE and commit fraud to get them to buy the stock.
what you are basicly trying to assert is that all the responsibility about stock sales is on the buyer which is just bullshit. the seller MUST disclose risks and other various details about the company and it's future, and they must do so honestly and accurately.
When I said that buying from a scammer is risky behavior, I meant that in the same sense that I would say that smoking cigarettes is also a risk-taking behavior, or that driving drunk is a risky thing to do. This is a very simple concept that has nothing at all to do with the stock market, whether an example of this concept can be found in a pump-and-dump scheme or not. Today it's a stock pump-and-dump scam, tomorrow it's "herbal viagra"; the principle involved is the same and it's generally applicable. That you limit yourself to understanding this very general idea only in terms of stock market speculation is called failing to see the forest for all the trees. So yes, when you completely misunderstand something, it sounds stupid. Imagine that.
they are vicimts of fraud, end of story.
And how the fuck can you suggest it's a good idea to let these bastards keep ripping off people? it will only help fund more spam.
People who sustain a loss after choosing to do something very risky are not victims, they are poor decision-makers. No one forced them to do business with a spammer, no one forced them to invest in a market that they did not truly understand without first obtaining expert advice, and no one forced them to assume that everyone always acts in good faith when any investigation into that matter will reveal ample evidence that some people don't. There is no victim here. The only thing such fraud threatens is the integrity of the stock market, which is the only good reason for prosecuting the scammers. See that? I'm not saying do nothing about it; I'm saying go after them for the right reason instead of going after them so you can be a knight in shining armor to a bunch of imaginary "victims". One of those practices serves a useful function, the other only serves to legitimize a mentality that is making the problem worse. Get rid of that mentality and you'll find that it's vastly more difficult for spammers to make a profit from people who take responsibility for their own actions.
The irony here is that we are talking about people who invest in what they do not understand and your reaction was to respond to what you evidently did not understand.
I was with you right up until you claimed socialism was a scam.
Why do Americans fear that word so much?
Perhaps there is a more ideal form that I've been missing out on, but every form of socialism I have ever heard of requires a rather large and powerful government to administer it. The US Constitution was designed with an explicit purpose of limiting the power and thus also size of government (seems funny today I know) because it's far more difficult for a relatively small, minimal government to become a dictatorship than it is for a large and powerful one.
Not to mention, I have some issues with the morality of income redistribution. If your economic system results in an unequal distribution of wealth, and if you believe that means that it's broken, then try fixing the economic system (whatever that would mean) instead of using confiscatory taxes and government police power to enforce an idea of fairness. We seem to forget that a confiscatory tax is when the government decides that you will pay them a certain amount of money, or else they will send armed men who will insist that you're coming with them. Of course government needs to do this, because if taxes were voluntary no one would pay them. Having said that, the question of whether more of this is REALLY going to do good needs a very solid answer before it's justifiable to do it in the name of fairness (or any other virtuous name).
Also, because such income redistribution can only take place after the unequal distribution of wealth has already happened, it's just a band-aid "solution" and an unwillingness to face a deeper question. There is a saying that for every complex problem there is a very simple, easily understood wrong answer.
What happened to make you equate socialism with communism?
One possibility lies in these two words: Red Scare. There has been more than one, and it's a very easy Google or Wikipedia topic to look up. That there has been plenty of hysteria over this subject could explain how a distinction like that can escape the public's attention.
Fact is, most people in the US just aren't educated enough to recognize a scam.
That's what happens when you decide that your education or that of your children is someone else's (i.e. the government's) responsibility. You may be interested in this book for a much better explanation.
The rest of your post seems based on overlooking this one fact in order to perpetuate a victim mentality. I appreciate that this mentality might be a sincere belief or an unquestioned assumption of yours, but I did want to reply to a couple of things.
Notice how I'm not saying stupid people. Just not educated for whatever reason. Most of the people that read slashdot are VERY tech knowledgeable. We grew up with this. Most of the people who get conned, didn't.
Whether they were too poor to afford a home computer and internet access, or were ahead of the technical wave... it doesn't matter. Remember, the internet hasn't been around that long in comparison to everything else. In the past 30 years, we've advanced more than we have in 300 years. Some people simply cannot keep up or get confused and don't try.
That's why you don't invest real money into something you do not fully understand. If you insist on doing this, you should not be surprised when you lose said money. This is an incredibly simple principle that does not go away just because the internet hasn't been around as long as everything else.
So it's suddenly surprising to you that with all this technology and most of the people not growing up with the technology, we have a lot of VERY uneducated people that are easily scammed?
There's nothing sudden or new about that. They've been easily scammed for some time now. What's new is that now they're more easily reached -- it's much easier for a scammer to send a million e-mails than it is for him to call a million phone numbers or write a million letters. None of this changes such a fundamental thing as whether or not poor decision-making leads to negative consequences.
Like it or not, there are people who consistently make bad decisions, there are lots of them, and they fall for scams because they fail to evaluate the situation they're investing in. The only other new development is that it's becoming more and more fashionable to make excuses for it to comfort them in a misguided attempt to make them feel better. This greatly harms the chances that they will learn from their mistakes, which is something a true victim cannot do.
No, they don't deserve to get screwed. many people don't understand that email is not a form of offical communication and that it's not trust worthy.
But did anyone tell them that it was trustworthy? If so, did they investigate this claim before deciding to blindly believe it? If not, did they make a wise decision and do you normally get good results from making poor choices? The concept of "deserve" has nothing to do with it. Asking whether they deserve to get screwed over is like asking whether someone deserves to feel pain as a result of banging his own head against a wall. It's just a natural consequence based on a simple cause-and-effect principle.
furthur more everytime someone gets ripped off by a spammer it help finance more fucking spam in MY mailbox, so it's in everyones interest to put these bastards in a federal pound me in the ass prison.
It's my opinion that the best way to discourage the kind of poor decision-making that makes people fall for these scams is to avoid interfering with its foreseeable result. Make an effort to stop the spammer because he's spamming (and trying to exploit the stock market) but not because people let their own guillability keep him in business. There's no reason to portray the people who fall for this as "victims" because what happened to them was not random random chance; they were in control of everything that happened after the spammer sent an e-mail. Actually buying something from a spammer is risky (stupid) behavior, so think of them as speculators who couldn't be bothered with due diligence and ended up taking a bad risk.
I have worked in and around newsrooms from college on and I know, firsthand, where much of the problem lies. Journalism, that is, the finding and reporting of facts, has little to do with a journalism major, which is primarily interested in "the proper form."
Yes, this is known as Newspeak. The real understanding of the problem is when you see just how widespread this is and that it's not just limited to the newsrooms. Look at what has happened throughout the years to words like "conservative" or "liberal" and how many times within one lifetime they change meanings.
As the article says, "the emotional center," or, more specifically, an insulated and insular group of people attempting to capture the attention of the audience.
.......
Well, imagine what that's like as a reporter, when you don't have somebody breathing down your neck to report the facts, but instead have them breathing down your neck to "find the emotional center."
Odd that the demands made to reporters are to find an emotional appeal, and coincidentally enough that's also the same thing you would look for if your goal was to manipulate people. Hmm, what are the chances of that? And how we love our entertainers! The doctor who cures cancer is going to be a rather anonymous figure one month later, but if someone can sing and dance and act we need to know every last detail of their personal life.
And that viewpoint-- we're not talking political here, though it does play a role-- agrees with 2% of the wider US population. Two percent.
For all the talk of diversity, it's amazing how the only form of diversity we don't care about is that of worldviews.
Lazy reporting gets you those stories about farmers that always seem to imply that they must be hicks, or slow, or obsessed with "weird things" because they aren't smart/hip/normal enough to move to the city, like "real people." Or the ones that as what [X racial group] thinks about a subject, as if a vast group of people who share a few alleles must have similar opinions.
What these all have in common is that they are about group identity. Lots of lovely "us against them" dynamics can be found here, with a hint of "divide and conquer". To whom would such a thing be useful?
Or, in the most common template of them all, the good little underdog against the evil corporation/city council/religious group.
And this one is called "lip service", in this case to the concept of individuality. None of the $underdog vs $large_group conflicts are ever the sort that could truly change or disrupt $social_order aka $business_as_usual. Instead, they're all nice and sanitized and safe and they fit rather neatly within the boundaries of mainstream thought. Any "debate" presented is about which prescribed point of view (typically along a one-dimensional continuum such as left vs. right) more accurately describes the subject and is therefore phony.
These kinds of patterns are literally everywhere in mass media. They are not at all limited to this one example. You should draw your own conclusions as to what this means. One idea is that modern "democracies" accomplish with propaganda (sometimes called anonymous authority) the same degree of control that despots of old accomplished with the sword (overt authority); with the second method the people knew very well that control was being exerted.
That alone has made me want to check them out. It would be quite refreshing compared to the constant attempt to appear to be "intense" and "hard-hitting" and the childish emotional appeal behind it (what a shitty substitute for a worthy subject).
Is this a reasonable answer to someone who may just use the computer to edit their photos for publishing and checking email? Is this a good way to respond to someone asking for help with their router?
I wish this were a reasonable thing to say, but due to the realities of how often hosts are compromised "is having your data or your identity stolen, participating in a botnet, and having your computer spied on a reasonable price to pay for just using the computer to edit photos and checking e-mail?" is unfortunately a more pertinent question.
You are saying they need to learn more about their router, and yet when they asked about it you say they should not be using their computer because they don't know the answers. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
That isn't what I said at all, but you got upset and that is what you decided to hear. That's understandable, hell I've done that myself, but please allow me to clarify. What I said is perhaps he should not be administering that computer and network, which is not at all the same thing as saying he should never use them. Most people who have their own computers and their own network equipment know somebody, somewhere who is more skilled than they are and could assist with such things while they are learning more about it. It's just a matter of whether you choose to be proactive and prevent threats or whether you choose to be reactive and not give it a second thought or put any effort into it until something bad happens. Personally, I prefer the former.
That's all. Maybe not what you would have preferred me to say, but look around and you'll see that many, many users rely on Microsoft or Norton or McAfee or others to take care of security for them, and what we get for that are things like botnets and identity theft and anonymous spammers because absolutely none of those are a good substitute for a knowledgable user.
Judging from the disproportionately negative reactions from a relatively mild, non-inflammatory post, I begin to suspect that the real problem here is that people want the non-zero (yet hardly staggering) amount of effort needed to be a tougher target to be a zero amount and resent someone who tells them that this is not the nature of the situation. Guess what? If I could wave a magic wand and make everyone's network absolutely secure, I would. Since I can't do that, being honest about the reality of the situation is the best I can do.
So I write a brief post that says, in essence, that in the face of this and other security threats there is no single "magic" solution, but rather, that good security requires informing yourself and understanding the devices that you work with and it gets modded "Redundant". What a waste of a perfectly good mod point. If it bothers you so, I'll explain that the reason why "I am indifferent to any [grief] that is caused" is because I was not being malicious, cushioning someone else's ego is not my concern, and I was honestly saying how I felt about the matter.
If you don't like what I said, or the tone with which I said it, or the fact that I'll apologize for neither, abusing the moderation system to show your resentment is a poor substitute for actually expressing yourself and telling me why you feel that way. Had you done so, you may have caused me to rethink my previous point or to learn something new, or otherwise accomplished something better than subtracting one point from the post on the grounds of imaginary "redundancy". I wish this point were redundant! If it were, perhaps people would stop looking for band-aid solutions and become more informed about security.
Posted with no "karma bonus" since this isn't directly related to Adobe's software and whether it phones home.
would using Squid offer any advantages over using, Little Snitch for such purposes?
Well, Squid is a Web (TCP port 80 and friends) proxy only, whereas Little Snitch is a general monitoring app that can alert you to just about any outgoing traffic much like an outgoing firewall. So, they would work well when used in combination, since Squid can be used to control HTTP traffic in very specific ways beyond "is application X allowed to connect to site Y?" Not to mention that with a Web browser, of course you want it to be able to connect to TCP port 80 and you probably don't want to be prompted at every attempt to connect to a new Web site (it would drive you nuts), so a Little Snitch user would probably just allow the browser to use that port regardless of the site and then Squid would be the better tool to specifically control this.
In OS X, is there an easy way to block all outgoing communication to *.2o7.net? Can I do that on my router (DGL-4300)?
Don't take this the wrong way please, but if this is a serious question then perhaps you should not be administering that machine and that network.
No, I'm not saying that just to give you grief (yes, I am indifferent to any that is caused) but because there are many network-related security threats and blocking a single domain to solve the problem is something of a whack-a-mole game. It would be well worth your time to find out more about what your router and OS can and cannot do and how they can be made more secure. While an extreme stance on this is not necessary (no one expects you to become security expert but you can learn a lot without going nearly that far) I will say that there is simply no substitute for taking responsibility for your own security, online and off.
I never stated a thing about being "fulfilled": I just stated people are wise to use something that IS the most used, so they are ready for it in the workplace, so they can get paid. Job requirements & training for them is what running Windows @ home does for most folks.
The point I was making, which should be clear to you, was that there is no merit in making a choice just because it is popular. I can choose to eat food because "everyone else does" and it means nothing; I can choose to eat food because my survival as an organic being depends on it and this is a rational decision. You could claim that jumping on the Windows bandwagon is a sign of intelligence due to business realities; you could conversely claim that the truly intelligent find ways to deal with compatibility issues without needing to use a single Microsoft product. Both claims mean next to nothing without some reasoning and perhaps evidence to back them up, and for all I know a serious study might determine no correlation with intelligence at all. The only reason why I used the word "fulfilled" is because some of us make decisions using additional criteria other than how much cash is invested in something. You can treat that concept as a stumbling block and willfully miss the point I was making if you like, but this does not negate what I am saying.
"To claim that the popularity of Windows is an inherent virtue of the OS is just plain silly."
oh really? What better gauge is there?? I guess in YOUR world "the majority = dumb"... yea, ok. That would make you the "all knowing one" & the rest of us, just clueless... right???
All I said is that popularity does not determine actual merit. To say that this must mean I think I am the "all knowing one" is an emotional knee-jerk response that attempts to turn this into a personal matter and does nothing to address what I was saying. You don't like what I am saying, that's fine, but to act like this gives you license to automatically declare it false and make assumptions about my character is the very arrogance of which you seem to be accusing me.
The bottom line is, whether the popularity of Windows is due to inherent merit and good design cannot be assessed objectively in the current marketplace (I am putting this mildly). That claim could only be made if 1) all PCs were shipped with blank hard drives and did not come with an operating system of any kind and it was up to the user to separately obtain and install one and 2) all users were technically skilled enough, as well as willing and able, to independently evaluate the stability, performance, and security of all major (PC) operating systems before choosing the one to use. Unless you could arrange for both of these to be true, what popularity is measuring is the marketing skill, business acumen, and incumbency of Microsoft and not the actual merit or design of Windows.
Hmm where to start... first, you have been trolled and possibly unintentionally (by giving a serious response to a joke). Second, while you might have had a valid objection to the GP, you failed to use it; thus the entirety of your post can be summed up as "Follow the crowd and no one will ever think you're dumb!" That's great, if being a sheep and taking the path of least resistance is what makes you feel fulfilled.
To claim that the popularity of Windows is an inherent virtue of the OS is just plain silly. It's an arbitrary decision that was heavily influenced by marketing and made in large part by people (regular end-users, phb's, etc) with no real computing expertise. This is a hell of a business accomplishment and what Microsoft has done in the computing industry is what every other company would like to do in its own industry. That's great for Microsoft and their shareholders, but you have done nothing to defend the intelligence of users who go along with it.
P.S. if the near-ubiquitous quality of Windows means anything, it means that Microsoft's software failures are automatically magnified (think botnets, which are greatly facilitated by a monoculture). They will care about this only to the degree necessary to ensure that it doesn't become a marketing failure.
Now make sure that, whatever you do, you do NOT reply to my post. That way you can follow the crowd and be like every other AC who can't follow the discussion.
Nice try. Do you really think that a sudden, giant wash of cheap, legal narcotics wouldn't bring a lot more young people into a (shorter) lifetime of addiction? People steadily use drugs like heroin because they're addicted to it. They get addicted to it by trying/using it. They try/use it for the first time, typically, in a social setting. Make heroin legal, and you'll manufacture untold more social settings in which that can and will happen for the first time. And then you'll have more people "choosing" that lifetime of addiction, because they'll have no choice. Nice drug, heroin.
So I guess that whole freedom thing is too scary for you, and expecting adults to have some personal responsibility is a concept that exceeds your imagination? Look, the reality is that they cannot even keep drugs out of prisons; what makes you think that keeping them out of general society is going to work, or is going to do anything but imprison people who have committed no "crime" other than possibly harming themselves? You don't seem to realize it, but the belief behind your argument contradicts everything that the USA used to be about, which was personal responsibility, self-determination, individual soverignty, and personal freedom (which includes having no one to bail you out when you make poor choices).
Drugs, being inanimate objects, are not and have never been the cause of any of our problems which is why banning them has done nothing but finance organized crime. What caused the likes of Al Capone to become powerful, and what made people fight in the streets over alcohol? Oh yeah, Prohibition, which was the best thing that ever happened to the mob. What we are doing now is not working, continuing to do it will not work, and trying harder to execute a bad idea won't work either. Change is badly needed in this area.
Yeah, they call that "representative democracy" a republic, only it's deliberately designed to avoid democracy. If you think you disagree with that, I suggest you fight the urge to have a knee-jerk reaction, do a little reading up on what those two terms actually mean and then get back to me.
Ha ha!! So, what has Bush Junior accomplished according to plan? His approval rating is so low that he has nothing left to lose, so I totally get the indifference, but again, what has gone according to plan?
What has gone according to plan? The deliberate expansion of power of government, especially the executive branch, to a level never before seen in the history of this country. In the big picture this hurts the country far more than whether or not Iraq turns out the way we wanted it to. Bush is not nearly the only person who has done this, of course, and to think that one political party has enjoyed this trend any more than the other is to miss the point. It just happens that he has been more successful than most.
I have no idea what the GP's answer to this question would be, but that's mine.
So I don't call myself a conservative, and I pay no attention to the "true" meaning of the word since it's commonly understood as meaning its antonym.
Yes, and this is not an accident; it's an unusually good example of Newspeak. The word didn't just gradually evolve its meaning over time, but instead it took on its completely opposite meaning in less than a decade. This is what happens when masses of people identify with a term without knowing anything about its history. The people who identify with a party or a label simply because their parents did are not doing themselves or their parents any favor. You need neither a conspiracy nor a coincidence to explain this. As politicians and others with a media presence continued to call themselves "conservative" the former meaning simply became less and less true. So long as the change isn't too sudden, those who use the term will continue to receive the backing and political support of those to whom the term appeals. This works so well because party affiliation is best understood as a poor substitute for thinking for yourself.
The practical effect this has had is that there is no longer a choice about whether state power and size should continue to increase. You may elect either a Democrat or a Republican and in either case this will be the result; all of the arguments in the mainstream media are about how and why it should be done. Whether it's for the war effort, for senior citizen prescription drug entitlements, for a public health care system, or to bail out irresponsible home buyers who signed the dotted line on a loan they couldn't afford -- and of all of these, only the military action is a legitimate power of government -- there is always some justification being sold to us as to why government should be expanded with little attention paid to the full consequences of doing so.
Why do people have this double-standard about the Xbox 360? If it's broken on you twice, it is a piece of junk.
It's not limited to the Xbox; you can see similar low expectations with lots of computer or electronic devices. There is a general laziness/stupidity (it can be hard to tell the difference) that average users display due to basic computing that they do not display for things at least as complex, such as their finances, politics, religion, job skills, love lives, etc. This is why there arose the saying "an expert is someone who can read the manual". It's why you hear about users who use their mouse as a foot pedal, or users who answer "Uh, Google!" when asked over the telephone which Web browser they are using, or really forget to turn the machine on (and/or connect the power cord) often enough that it's the first thing a tech asks about. It's why you don't hear about drivers who try to use the accelerator as a hand pedal or car dealers who say "Uh, the road!" when asked what model car they're selling today or televisions declared defective that were never plugged in. There's just something about computers that makes people go into a "dummy mode" where they assume that everything they thought they knew needs to go out the window, except that they take this too far and throw out basic reasoning, the laws of physics, logic, and notions like cause-and-effect as well. With this seems to go their self-confidence and the willingness to try and take a risk of making a mistake, even though the price of failure is much lower in computing than in personal finances, job performance, relationships, etc.
As with most things in life, this situation did not arise from a vacuum and has a deeper cause. The fact that most people do not notice this because $TV_SHOW, $CELEBRITY'S personal drama, or latest $BE_AFRAID_OF_THIS news presentation are more important is part of the problem. That cause might be laziness, in the sense of being too lazy to increase your skill level even though doing so is possible; maybe it's also the whole instant gratification culture that fails to do a cost-benefit evaluation of self-education (on computing or anything else where mediocrity is widely tolerated). It could also be that the rote memorization and the following of procedures that dominates everything else that most people do really has made them so stupid (muscles and wits both entropy if not used) that they clam up when faced with a new and more dynamic environment. In either case, the process by which we have become this way and who really benefits from this situation -- that is, a nice and docile and complacent populace who have a hard time thinking critically -- is something that should be considered carefully.
Apply the same standard of quality to it as you do to anything else.
I wish we would start doing this with all commercial software, on the grounds that since you are paying for it, it's something like fraud if it does not work as advertised or frequently malfunctions. Perhaps ideally it would be understood that with free-as-in-beer software (both GPL and closed-source freeware), if I did not pay for it then I have no reasonable expectation that it will be of any value to me at all, but if I did pay for i.e. a commercial Linux distribution, then this should apply to that vendor as well. This idea of holding the manufacturer liable should not apply to "pirates" who did not pay and should be to the same degree that product liability would apply to a vendor of any tangible retail goods, where there may also be such concepts as contributory negligence.
And why not? The software companies (along with the *IAA's) talk about "intellectual property" when they benefit from what amounts to artificial scarcity, so why not give them both sides of the coin when it comes to treating 0s and 1s like tangible property? Other industries don't get to pick-and-choose the advan
I'm really not trying to make excuses for poor security either, it just isn't as clear to me that a bunch of security minded decisions made ten years ago would have given us the fairly incredible internet we have today, and all the problems that come with it(the problems may well be a feature of the relative level of freedom that exists). There are certainly things that could have been done differently that would have a minimal impact on the usefulness of the internet and a huge impact on its security, but I don't really cotton to the idea that my ability to see that things could be better makes the way things are 'bad'.
You raise an interesting point there, about whether the Internet would be the way it is now if security were a design goal from the beginning. I'm not sure if you are coming from a perspective of features-versus-security but it is an interesting thing to consider. I have to say that I honestly don't know, but there are other forms of "security" that have little to do with hardening hosts. For example, the only reason why anyone ever sends spam e-mail is because there is a small percentage of people who buy these products and make it economically worthwhile for the spammer. I put security in quotes there because spammers are actually using SMTP as designed (their botnets that send the SMTP messages notwithstanding -- spam was around before this was the case); it's more of an abuse of an open system that wouldn't happen if there were no economic incentive. Personally I think the real solution to spam is to treat the buyers as the cause of the problem, whatever that would practically mean (ideally education would be enough). If the incentive for spam were removed, one of the major reasons for having a botnet would go with it.
I don't mean so much that the way things are is "bad" as in morally wrong or anything like that. But I do believe we have already seen plenty of examples of why security matters throughout the years. The message is there for anyone who cares to get it. There is nothing recent or novel about the idea that some people like to exploit poor security practices and break into systems in order to harvest their data or take over their resources. This has been going on for quite some time and has steadily gotten worse for quite some time. It is reasonable to say that if nothing is changed, the Internet will continue to become an increasingly hostile network. When this is the case, I have to conclude that there is something fundamentally wrong with our priorities.
We are only growing more dependent on technology and networks as time passes. One way or another, this problem must be resolved. I would much rather see people start giving a damn about security and inform themselves and address the real root problems, than see the government-imposed alternative that we might get if this doesn't happen. If this continues to get worse, then at some point either your ISP will be required to be your online nanny, or you will be forced to obtain some sort of license to use the Internet by the same protect-the-public logic that requires you to have a license to use a car on public roads. While that second option might sound good, consider how little training and ability is needed (at least in the USA) to get a license to drive a car that could really hurt someone in meatspace -- how high do you think the standard will be for cyberspace? Nothing pleases a politician more than to let something become a crisis, go into "we've got to do SOMETHING" mode, and implement a half-assed feel-good measure that expands the size and power of government. What you get from that is CAN-SPAM, the DMCA, and the Patriot Act. I just don't trust them to get this one right either.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't tell which is less intelligent - expressing an honest opinion about Vista without ever representing it as factual or intelligent, or what you are doing which is 1) coming to Slashdot expecting information that is better obtained via Google and 2) getting all pissy because people (who owe you nothing) won't behave the way you want them to.
If you really want to change the nature of the discussion, how about posting your own review of the advantages and disadvantages of SP1 instead of saying "lolz people need to post the way I want them to".
It could be argued that worrying so much about backwards compatibility is one reason (other than no incentive to care about quality until it hurts sales) why Windows hasn't vastly improved. Of course, Microsoft is in a bit of a bind on that one -- if this were not the case and users had to obtain/learn all new programs and a completely different OS anyway, then they might as well look into whether an alternative like Linux or OSX would meet their needs.
Think of it as a counterbalance, a reaction to Microsoft's need to promote Vista at every opportunity and the fact that they can make it widespread regardless of its quality. Why blame the reaction instead of the primary cause?
Or you could say that the about-face on DRM *is* because of DRM now that the company has a reason to care about interoperability. You know, as opposed to customers being the only ones to suffer because of incompatible proprietary standards. Interoperability is a good idea and proprietary DRM schemes cause incompatibilities by their very nature; it just required some market changes to convince Sony to embrace what has been obvious for some time now.
This kind of hubris is what's really hurting the industry.
Sounds to me like a self-correcting system.
I think you're the first actual victim to be mentioned during this entire discussion.
When I said that buying from a scammer is risky behavior, I meant that in the same sense that I would say that smoking cigarettes is also a risk-taking behavior, or that driving drunk is a risky thing to do. This is a very simple concept that has nothing at all to do with the stock market, whether an example of this concept can be found in a pump-and-dump scheme or not. Today it's a stock pump-and-dump scam, tomorrow it's "herbal viagra"; the principle involved is the same and it's generally applicable. That you limit yourself to understanding this very general idea only in terms of stock market speculation is called failing to see the forest for all the trees. So yes, when you completely misunderstand something, it sounds stupid. Imagine that.
People who sustain a loss after choosing to do something very risky are not victims, they are poor decision-makers. No one forced them to do business with a spammer, no one forced them to invest in a market that they did not truly understand without first obtaining expert advice, and no one forced them to assume that everyone always acts in good faith when any investigation into that matter will reveal ample evidence that some people don't. There is no victim here. The only thing such fraud threatens is the integrity of the stock market, which is the only good reason for prosecuting the scammers. See that? I'm not saying do nothing about it; I'm saying go after them for the right reason instead of going after them so you can be a knight in shining armor to a bunch of imaginary "victims". One of those practices serves a useful function, the other only serves to legitimize a mentality that is making the problem worse. Get rid of that mentality and you'll find that it's vastly more difficult for spammers to make a profit from people who take responsibility for their own actions.
The irony here is that we are talking about people who invest in what they do not understand and your reaction was to respond to what you evidently did not understand.
Perhaps there is a more ideal form that I've been missing out on, but every form of socialism I have ever heard of requires a rather large and powerful government to administer it. The US Constitution was designed with an explicit purpose of limiting the power and thus also size of government (seems funny today I know) because it's far more difficult for a relatively small, minimal government to become a dictatorship than it is for a large and powerful one.
Not to mention, I have some issues with the morality of income redistribution. If your economic system results in an unequal distribution of wealth, and if you believe that means that it's broken, then try fixing the economic system (whatever that would mean) instead of using confiscatory taxes and government police power to enforce an idea of fairness. We seem to forget that a confiscatory tax is when the government decides that you will pay them a certain amount of money, or else they will send armed men who will insist that you're coming with them. Of course government needs to do this, because if taxes were voluntary no one would pay them. Having said that, the question of whether more of this is REALLY going to do good needs a very solid answer before it's justifiable to do it in the name of fairness (or any other virtuous name).
Also, because such income redistribution can only take place after the unequal distribution of wealth has already happened, it's just a band-aid "solution" and an unwillingness to face a deeper question. There is a saying that for every complex problem there is a very simple, easily understood wrong answer.
One possibility lies in these two words: Red Scare. There has been more than one, and it's a very easy Google or Wikipedia topic to look up. That there has been plenty of hysteria over this subject could explain how a distinction like that can escape the public's attention.
That's what happens when you decide that your education or that of your children is someone else's (i.e. the government's) responsibility. You may be interested in this book for a much better explanation.
The rest of your post seems based on overlooking this one fact in order to perpetuate a victim mentality. I appreciate that this mentality might be a sincere belief or an unquestioned assumption of yours, but I did want to reply to a couple of things.
That's why you don't invest real money into something you do not fully understand. If you insist on doing this, you should not be surprised when you lose said money. This is an incredibly simple principle that does not go away just because the internet hasn't been around as long as everything else.
There's nothing sudden or new about that. They've been easily scammed for some time now. What's new is that now they're more easily reached -- it's much easier for a scammer to send a million e-mails than it is for him to call a million phone numbers or write a million letters. None of this changes such a fundamental thing as whether or not poor decision-making leads to negative consequences.
Like it or not, there are people who consistently make bad decisions, there are lots of them, and they fall for scams because they fail to evaluate the situation they're investing in. The only other new development is that it's becoming more and more fashionable to make excuses for it to comfort them in a misguided attempt to make them feel better. This greatly harms the chances that they will learn from their mistakes, which is something a true victim cannot do.
But did anyone tell them that it was trustworthy? If so, did they investigate this claim before deciding to blindly believe it? If not, did they make a wise decision and do you normally get good results from making poor choices? The concept of "deserve" has nothing to do with it. Asking whether they deserve to get screwed over is like asking whether someone deserves to feel pain as a result of banging his own head against a wall. It's just a natural consequence based on a simple cause-and-effect principle.
It's my opinion that the best way to discourage the kind of poor decision-making that makes people fall for these scams is to avoid interfering with its foreseeable result. Make an effort to stop the spammer because he's spamming (and trying to exploit the stock market) but not because people let their own guillability keep him in business. There's no reason to portray the people who fall for this as "victims" because what happened to them was not random random chance; they were in control of everything that happened after the spammer sent an e-mail. Actually buying something from a spammer is risky (stupid) behavior, so think of them as speculators who couldn't be bothered with due diligence and ended up taking a bad risk.
Yes, this is known as Newspeak. The real understanding of the problem is when you see just how widespread this is and that it's not just limited to the newsrooms. Look at what has happened throughout the years to words like "conservative" or "liberal" and how many times within one lifetime they change meanings.
Odd that the demands made to reporters are to find an emotional appeal, and coincidentally enough that's also the same thing you would look for if your goal was to manipulate people. Hmm, what are the chances of that? And how we love our entertainers! The doctor who cures cancer is going to be a rather anonymous figure one month later, but if someone can sing and dance and act we need to know every last detail of their personal life.
For all the talk of diversity, it's amazing how the only form of diversity we don't care about is that of worldviews.
What these all have in common is that they are about group identity. Lots of lovely "us against them" dynamics can be found here, with a hint of "divide and conquer". To whom would such a thing be useful?
And this one is called "lip service", in this case to the concept of individuality. None of the $underdog vs $large_group conflicts are ever the sort that could truly change or disrupt $social_order aka $business_as_usual. Instead, they're all nice and sanitized and safe and they fit rather neatly within the boundaries of mainstream thought. Any "debate" presented is about which prescribed point of view (typically along a one-dimensional continuum such as left vs. right) more accurately describes the subject and is therefore phony.
These kinds of patterns are literally everywhere in mass media. They are not at all limited to this one example. You should draw your own conclusions as to what this means. One idea is that modern "democracies" accomplish with propaganda (sometimes called anonymous authority) the same degree of control that despots of old accomplished with the sword (overt authority); with the second method the people knew very well that control was being exerted.
That alone has made me want to check them out. It would be quite refreshing compared to the constant attempt to appear to be "intense" and "hard-hitting" and the childish emotional appeal behind it (what a shitty substitute for a worthy subject).
I wish this were a reasonable thing to say, but due to the realities of how often hosts are compromised "is having your data or your identity stolen, participating in a botnet, and having your computer spied on a reasonable price to pay for just using the computer to edit photos and checking e-mail?" is unfortunately a more pertinent question.
That isn't what I said at all, but you got upset and that is what you decided to hear. That's understandable, hell I've done that myself, but please allow me to clarify. What I said is perhaps he should not be administering that computer and network, which is not at all the same thing as saying he should never use them. Most people who have their own computers and their own network equipment know somebody, somewhere who is more skilled than they are and could assist with such things while they are learning more about it. It's just a matter of whether you choose to be proactive and prevent threats or whether you choose to be reactive and not give it a second thought or put any effort into it until something bad happens. Personally, I prefer the former.
That's all. Maybe not what you would have preferred me to say, but look around and you'll see that many, many users rely on Microsoft or Norton or McAfee or others to take care of security for them, and what we get for that are things like botnets and identity theft and anonymous spammers because absolutely none of those are a good substitute for a knowledgable user.
Judging from the disproportionately negative reactions from a relatively mild, non-inflammatory post, I begin to suspect that the real problem here is that people want the non-zero (yet hardly staggering) amount of effort needed to be a tougher target to be a zero amount and resent someone who tells them that this is not the nature of the situation. Guess what? If I could wave a magic wand and make everyone's network absolutely secure, I would. Since I can't do that, being honest about the reality of the situation is the best I can do.
So I write a brief post that says, in essence, that in the face of this and other security threats there is no single "magic" solution, but rather, that good security requires informing yourself and understanding the devices that you work with and it gets modded "Redundant". What a waste of a perfectly good mod point. If it bothers you so, I'll explain that the reason why "I am indifferent to any [grief] that is caused" is because I was not being malicious, cushioning someone else's ego is not my concern, and I was honestly saying how I felt about the matter.
If you don't like what I said, or the tone with which I said it, or the fact that I'll apologize for neither, abusing the moderation system to show your resentment is a poor substitute for actually expressing yourself and telling me why you feel that way. Had you done so, you may have caused me to rethink my previous point or to learn something new, or otherwise accomplished something better than subtracting one point from the post on the grounds of imaginary "redundancy". I wish this point were redundant! If it were, perhaps people would stop looking for band-aid solutions and become more informed about security.
Posted with no "karma bonus" since this isn't directly related to Adobe's software and whether it phones home.
Well, Squid is a Web (TCP port 80 and friends) proxy only, whereas Little Snitch is a general monitoring app that can alert you to just about any outgoing traffic much like an outgoing firewall. So, they would work well when used in combination, since Squid can be used to control HTTP traffic in very specific ways beyond "is application X allowed to connect to site Y?" Not to mention that with a Web browser, of course you want it to be able to connect to TCP port 80 and you probably don't want to be prompted at every attempt to connect to a new Web site (it would drive you nuts), so a Little Snitch user would probably just allow the browser to use that port regardless of the site and then Squid would be the better tool to specifically control this.
Don't take this the wrong way please, but if this is a serious question then perhaps you should not be administering that machine and that network.
No, I'm not saying that just to give you grief (yes, I am indifferent to any that is caused) but because there are many network-related security threats and blocking a single domain to solve the problem is something of a whack-a-mole game. It would be well worth your time to find out more about what your router and OS can and cannot do and how they can be made more secure. While an extreme stance on this is not necessary (no one expects you to become security expert but you can learn a lot without going nearly that far) I will say that there is simply no substitute for taking responsibility for your own security, online and off.
The point I was making, which should be clear to you, was that there is no merit in making a choice just because it is popular. I can choose to eat food because "everyone else does" and it means nothing; I can choose to eat food because my survival as an organic being depends on it and this is a rational decision. You could claim that jumping on the Windows bandwagon is a sign of intelligence due to business realities; you could conversely claim that the truly intelligent find ways to deal with compatibility issues without needing to use a single Microsoft product. Both claims mean next to nothing without some reasoning and perhaps evidence to back them up, and for all I know a serious study might determine no correlation with intelligence at all. The only reason why I used the word "fulfilled" is because some of us make decisions using additional criteria other than how much cash is invested in something. You can treat that concept as a stumbling block and willfully miss the point I was making if you like, but this does not negate what I am saying.
All I said is that popularity does not determine actual merit. To say that this must mean I think I am the "all knowing one" is an emotional knee-jerk response that attempts to turn this into a personal matter and does nothing to address what I was saying. You don't like what I am saying, that's fine, but to act like this gives you license to automatically declare it false and make assumptions about my character is the very arrogance of which you seem to be accusing me.
The bottom line is, whether the popularity of Windows is due to inherent merit and good design cannot be assessed objectively in the current marketplace (I am putting this mildly). That claim could only be made if 1) all PCs were shipped with blank hard drives and did not come with an operating system of any kind and it was up to the user to separately obtain and install one and 2) all users were technically skilled enough, as well as willing and able, to independently evaluate the stability, performance, and security of all major (PC) operating systems before choosing the one to use. Unless you could arrange for both of these to be true, what popularity is measuring is the marketing skill, business acumen, and incumbency of Microsoft and not the actual merit or design of Windows.
Hmm where to start... first, you have been trolled and possibly unintentionally (by giving a serious response to a joke). Second, while you might have had a valid objection to the GP, you failed to use it; thus the entirety of your post can be summed up as "Follow the crowd and no one will ever think you're dumb!" That's great, if being a sheep and taking the path of least resistance is what makes you feel fulfilled.
To claim that the popularity of Windows is an inherent virtue of the OS is just plain silly. It's an arbitrary decision that was heavily influenced by marketing and made in large part by people (regular end-users, phb's, etc) with no real computing expertise. This is a hell of a business accomplishment and what Microsoft has done in the computing industry is what every other company would like to do in its own industry. That's great for Microsoft and their shareholders, but you have done nothing to defend the intelligence of users who go along with it.
P.S. if the near-ubiquitous quality of Windows means anything, it means that Microsoft's software failures are automatically magnified (think botnets, which are greatly facilitated by a monoculture). They will care about this only to the degree necessary to ensure that it doesn't become a marketing failure.
Now make sure that, whatever you do, you do NOT reply to my post. That way you can follow the crowd and be like every other AC who can't follow the discussion.
"Why should I change MY name? HE'S the one who sucks!" - Michael Bolton, the office worker.
So I guess that whole freedom thing is too scary for you, and expecting adults to have some personal responsibility is a concept that exceeds your imagination? Look, the reality is that they cannot even keep drugs out of prisons; what makes you think that keeping them out of general society is going to work, or is going to do anything but imprison people who have committed no "crime" other than possibly harming themselves? You don't seem to realize it, but the belief behind your argument contradicts everything that the USA used to be about, which was personal responsibility, self-determination, individual soverignty, and personal freedom (which includes having no one to bail you out when you make poor choices).
Drugs, being inanimate objects, are not and have never been the cause of any of our problems which is why banning them has done nothing but finance organized crime. What caused the likes of Al Capone to become powerful, and what made people fight in the streets over alcohol? Oh yeah, Prohibition, which was the best thing that ever happened to the mob. What we are doing now is not working, continuing to do it will not work, and trying harder to execute a bad idea won't work either. Change is badly needed in this area.
Yeah, they call that "representative democracy" a republic, only it's deliberately designed to avoid democracy. If you think you disagree with that, I suggest you fight the urge to have a knee-jerk reaction, do a little reading up on what those two terms actually mean and then get back to me.
What has gone according to plan? The deliberate expansion of power of government, especially the executive branch, to a level never before seen in the history of this country. In the big picture this hurts the country far more than whether or not Iraq turns out the way we wanted it to. Bush is not nearly the only person who has done this, of course, and to think that one political party has enjoyed this trend any more than the other is to miss the point. It just happens that he has been more successful than most.
I have no idea what the GP's answer to this question would be, but that's mine.
Yes, and this is not an accident; it's an unusually good example of Newspeak. The word didn't just gradually evolve its meaning over time, but instead it took on its completely opposite meaning in less than a decade. This is what happens when masses of people identify with a term without knowing anything about its history. The people who identify with a party or a label simply because their parents did are not doing themselves or their parents any favor. You need neither a conspiracy nor a coincidence to explain this. As politicians and others with a media presence continued to call themselves "conservative" the former meaning simply became less and less true. So long as the change isn't too sudden, those who use the term will continue to receive the backing and political support of those to whom the term appeals. This works so well because party affiliation is best understood as a poor substitute for thinking for yourself.
The practical effect this has had is that there is no longer a choice about whether state power and size should continue to increase. You may elect either a Democrat or a Republican and in either case this will be the result; all of the arguments in the mainstream media are about how and why it should be done. Whether it's for the war effort, for senior citizen prescription drug entitlements, for a public health care system, or to bail out irresponsible home buyers who signed the dotted line on a loan they couldn't afford -- and of all of these, only the military action is a legitimate power of government -- there is always some justification being sold to us as to why government should be expanded with little attention paid to the full consequences of doing so.
It's not limited to the Xbox; you can see similar low expectations with lots of computer or electronic devices. There is a general laziness/stupidity (it can be hard to tell the difference) that average users display due to basic computing that they do not display for things at least as complex, such as their finances, politics, religion, job skills, love lives, etc. This is why there arose the saying "an expert is someone who can read the manual". It's why you hear about users who use their mouse as a foot pedal, or users who answer "Uh, Google!" when asked over the telephone which Web browser they are using, or really forget to turn the machine on (and/or connect the power cord) often enough that it's the first thing a tech asks about. It's why you don't hear about drivers who try to use the accelerator as a hand pedal or car dealers who say "Uh, the road!" when asked what model car they're selling today or televisions declared defective that were never plugged in. There's just something about computers that makes people go into a "dummy mode" where they assume that everything they thought they knew needs to go out the window, except that they take this too far and throw out basic reasoning, the laws of physics, logic, and notions like cause-and-effect as well. With this seems to go their self-confidence and the willingness to try and take a risk of making a mistake, even though the price of failure is much lower in computing than in personal finances, job performance, relationships, etc.
As with most things in life, this situation did not arise from a vacuum and has a deeper cause. The fact that most people do not notice this because $TV_SHOW, $CELEBRITY'S personal drama, or latest $BE_AFRAID_OF_THIS news presentation are more important is part of the problem. That cause might be laziness, in the sense of being too lazy to increase your skill level even though doing so is possible; maybe it's also the whole instant gratification culture that fails to do a cost-benefit evaluation of self-education (on computing or anything else where mediocrity is widely tolerated). It could also be that the rote memorization and the following of procedures that dominates everything else that most people do really has made them so stupid (muscles and wits both entropy if not used) that they clam up when faced with a new and more dynamic environment. In either case, the process by which we have become this way and who really benefits from this situation -- that is, a nice and docile and complacent populace who have a hard time thinking critically -- is something that should be considered carefully.
I wish we would start doing this with all commercial software, on the grounds that since you are paying for it, it's something like fraud if it does not work as advertised or frequently malfunctions. Perhaps ideally it would be understood that with free-as-in-beer software (both GPL and closed-source freeware), if I did not pay for it then I have no reasonable expectation that it will be of any value to me at all, but if I did pay for i.e. a commercial Linux distribution, then this should apply to that vendor as well. This idea of holding the manufacturer liable should not apply to "pirates" who did not pay and should be to the same degree that product liability would apply to a vendor of any tangible retail goods, where there may also be such concepts as contributory negligence.
And why not? The software companies (along with the *IAA's) talk about "intellectual property" when they benefit from what amounts to artificial scarcity, so why not give them both sides of the coin when it comes to treating 0s and 1s like tangible property? Other industries don't get to pick-and-choose the advan
You raise an interesting point there, about whether the Internet would be the way it is now if security were a design goal from the beginning. I'm not sure if you are coming from a perspective of features-versus-security but it is an interesting thing to consider. I have to say that I honestly don't know, but there are other forms of "security" that have little to do with hardening hosts. For example, the only reason why anyone ever sends spam e-mail is because there is a small percentage of people who buy these products and make it economically worthwhile for the spammer. I put security in quotes there because spammers are actually using SMTP as designed (their botnets that send the SMTP messages notwithstanding -- spam was around before this was the case); it's more of an abuse of an open system that wouldn't happen if there were no economic incentive. Personally I think the real solution to spam is to treat the buyers as the cause of the problem, whatever that would practically mean (ideally education would be enough). If the incentive for spam were removed, one of the major reasons for having a botnet would go with it.
I don't mean so much that the way things are is "bad" as in morally wrong or anything like that. But I do believe we have already seen plenty of examples of why security matters throughout the years. The message is there for anyone who cares to get it. There is nothing recent or novel about the idea that some people like to exploit poor security practices and break into systems in order to harvest their data or take over their resources. This has been going on for quite some time and has steadily gotten worse for quite some time. It is reasonable to say that if nothing is changed, the Internet will continue to become an increasingly hostile network. When this is the case, I have to conclude that there is something fundamentally wrong with our priorities.
We are only growing more dependent on technology and networks as time passes. One way or another, this problem must be resolved. I would much rather see people start giving a damn about security and inform themselves and address the real root problems, than see the government-imposed alternative that we might get if this doesn't happen. If this continues to get worse, then at some point either your ISP will be required to be your online nanny, or you will be forced to obtain some sort of license to use the Internet by the same protect-the-public logic that requires you to have a license to use a car on public roads. While that second option might sound good, consider how little training and ability is needed (at least in the USA) to get a license to drive a car that could really hurt someone in meatspace -- how high do you think the standard will be for cyberspace? Nothing pleases a politician more than to let something become a crisis, go into "we've got to do SOMETHING" mode, and implement a half-assed feel-good measure that expands the size and power of government. What you get from that is CAN-SPAM, the DMCA, and the Patriot Act. I just don't trust them to get this one right either.