When you're older and have more to lose you'll understand.
But I am older and do have more to lose, which is why I am not so worried about an error. If a $100 bill turns into a $1000 bill it will still get paid. It if turns into a $10000 bill it will bounce, but at that point the error will be so obvious that I don't expect to have any trouble getting it sorted posthaste. I've been with the same bank for over 20 years, and while I am not a marquee customer their rating system is going to list me as someone they want to keep, so I don't expect a hard time dealing with something that is going to be an obvious screwup.
The analogy to unprotected sex is not valid in my mind, because the likely consequences of a direct debit error don't approach those of an unplanned pregnancy or an STD.
Because in the huge majority of cases nothing goes wrong. I have 6 bills paid every month by direct debit of my checking account. All of these have been in place for at least 5 years.
And I've had direct deposit of my paycheck since sometime in the mid 80s.
In that time I have never had a problem. If a bill is lost in the mail, or I am traveling for a few weeks, no worries. If I accidentally toss a bill in the junk pile, no worries.
The chance of an error on their side is less than the chance of an error on my side. And the consequences of an error are not catastrophic.
Most of my direct debits were setup before my bank offered online bill pay, and if I were starting over I would go that route. But really, it has been a trouble free experience for me.
I used to feel that the same way, but the last time I looked at building a basic box for a family member I found that I basically couldn't beat Dell's prices - maybe $50, but not enough to compensate for the extra effort of buying pieces and assembling them.
At the high end I think you are correct, if only because I can cut back on expensive components I don't care about.
But given the economies of scale that the big operators have, it is hard to beat them significantly on price.
Not quite a comparable case, but there was a mini scandal here in Minnesota recently when it turned out that in many cases what a restaurant sold as walleye (a local favorite) was actually zander.
If I recall correctly, most of the restaurants put the blame on their suppliers, who sold them filets as opposed to whole fish. Without buying whole fish, the claim that the restaurant was duped is quite easy to believe.
If the sushi shops are not buying whole fish, it would be easy to be deceived. But I have to believe that any quality sushi restaurant starts with a whole fish, and in that case the mislabeling would have to be blamed on the restaurant.
I agree that airlines are very good at wringing every last dollar possible from their pricing structure, and even that that pricing structure benefits the consumer in general, no matter how unfair it may seem that the person sitting next to you paid half of what you did.
But the market for airfares is by no means perfect or friction free.
Airlines have enormous fixed costs, and huge interdependencies in their scheduling system.
Suppose that airlines simply decided to raise prices some arbitrary amount to offset the cost of fuel - lets pick 40%.
After a 40% bump, demand will be affected significantly. Planes that were full no longer are, and a route that would be profitable with a full plane loses money when it is half full. Switching to a smaller plane is not an option in most cases, since they only have so many planes.
So you cancel some flights with the worst load factors. But now those people can't get to the connecting flight which is profitable, because the feeder flight is unprofitable.
You go through a vicious cycle of service cutbacks, all of which require that the fare go ever higher, to the point where nobody can afford to fly.
In a perfect market airlines would go out of business, removing excess capacity, and new airplanes would be produced in appropriate sizes. But those things take years to happen and the market is dominated by big carriers whose failure would have huge impacts on the flying public.
So airlines can't raise fares enough to fly profitably, which is why the tacked on fees get ever more absurd.
That is not terribly surprising. Before the Internet, US domestic carriers routinely paid a $25 per ticket commission to travel agents, and you had to go to a travel agent to buy a ticket.
When sites like Expedia and Travelocity first started, they also got that $25 commission, and the business was incredibly profitable for them.
Since then airlines have cut their commission structures repeatedly. If there is any commission left it is tiny. The airlines would prefer that you buy tickets direct from their website after all. So the travel sites have to find a way to remain profitable. Adding their own surcharge is one obvious way.
2. Video rental stores no longer had to buy a special copy to be rented out. (those VHS tapes cost the stores over $100 each in some movies). They would just buy the DVD at $20, and rent it out at $3-$5 each. Way faster payback, way higher profits. (and smaller, you could fit more of them on the shelf..)
I have a hard time believing that video stores were enough of a market to make DVD's take off. While in the late 80s they seemed to be everywhere (much like Starbucks today), I don't think there were enough to make a big market for DVDs.
Pricing DVDs at $20 and getting them sold in mass merchandising stores had a lot to do with pumping volume.
Do yourself a favor - when you watch a Blu-Ray in the store, eject the disk and turn off the unit. Now turn it on. See how long it takes before it wakes up enough to even open the tray (on my cheap Sony - about 45 seconds). Now close the tray and see how long it takes to read the disk and show the menu (at least a minute for me).
I'm sure later generation players will be faster, but the one Sony player I got this winter is glacially slow to startup. Maybe a PS3 would have been a better choice.
While I really don't notice the difference between Blu-Ray and DVD on my 47" 1080p LCD, it has reached the point where I don't like watching TV that is not HD.
Particularly for any kind of sports, there is no comparison between SDTV and HDTV.
It is true that localization is not a trivial cost, but I don't think that is the answer.
Part of it is simply charging what the market will bear - no surprise there, and any rational company will do the same.
But the other factor is that they most likely sell through distributors or foreign subsidiaries, and those organizations get a cut of the revenue as well. So instead of all the money from the sale going to Adobe in the US, the local distributor probably takes somewhere in the range of 25%-40% of the sales price.
Its actually more complicated than that - in the US, Adobe will sell units to one of the big distributors like Ingram, who in turn resells to Best Buy, NewEgg, etc. Ingram gets a substantial cut.
For foreign distributors, Adobe US sells to Adobe Italia, who in turn sells to something like Ingram Italia, who sells to Best Buy Italia. Everyone gets a slice along the way.
I agree with the sentiments many others have expressed.
If we don't assume a post apocalyptic world, anyone coming across these old dumps is going to be technologically savvy enough to realize what they have found and take appropriate precautions.
If we are in a post apocalypse world, the people living in that world probably have so many other means of finding a messy and painful death that long abandoned waste dumps are probably not a significant risk factor in their lives. Kind of like worrying about lead paint in your cave and not the sabretooth tiger between you and fresh water.
If you are fixing the website you are not doing any kind of analysis or investigation of the crime. All you are doing is removing the vandalism of the site, kind of like the painter who is hired to cover up graffiti on the side of a building.
Now if you attempted to go through the logs and find evidence of who the phisher was, so that the website owner could sue the bastard, then maybe you need the PI license.
The speculation on this issue is spiraling out of control.
One thing that I think is overlooked is that this is not Office at $70/year, it is Office + AV for $70/year.
Last I looked (which admittedly was 3 or 4 years ago), Norton wanted annual renewals of $40 for their AV suite, and Windows users have it hammered into them that they MUST keep their AV software up to date.
Looked at that way, the incremental cost of having Office is $30/year on top of what they would spend on Anti-virus.
While I am a happy FF3 user myself, comparing the adoption rates of Firefox and IE is misleading. IE is installed when the computer arrives, and the people still using it either: 1. Don't care what they use 2. Have no choice since it is locked down by work 3. Prefer it over the alternatives.
People in buckets 1 and 2 (which I would argue is the vast majority of IE users) are unlikely to upgrade IE beyond whatever version is on their machine now. People in group 3 are the only voluntary upgraders to IE7.
In contrast, Firefox has the same three buckets, but since it is not preinstalled very few are going to fall into buckets 1 and 2. Almost everyone using it is using it because they want it, and that means that they are far more likely to upgrade to the latest and greatest.
The article discusses the Chinese jammer efforts as being worrisome to US military, specifically the 7th fleet.
I assume that military kit like the JDAM bomb packages all use military receivers, so I think TFA does at least strongly imply that military receivers are being jammed.
I understand your point, but it doesn't directly apply in this case. The two willing parties are the binary of the game and the publisher's authentication server. Once the binary of the game is altered it is no longer a willing party.
But the vulnerability of the binary to being altered is not unique to being run on an open source platform. Having the source of the operating system does not in any meaningful way make the crack simpler.
And suppose you had all the source for the game but could not alter that source (or the resulting binary). In that case it would be perfectly feasible to use some form of encrypted communications as a secure form of DRM.
Once you can alter the binary all bets are off, but Windows and Linux do not differ in that regard.
Don't forget that TIFF has a 4GB limit, due to all the file offsets being encoded as 32 bit values. If a TIFF tag can not store the data directly in the tag body, it stores the location of the data as an offset from the start of the file.
You are saying that he couldn't have pointed out the gaping hole in any other way. Say, by sitting down with someone from the student newspaper and demonstrating the hole with one or two bogus votes?
That would be responsible. Thousands of votes is somewhere between stupid and vandalism. He even admitted it was nothing more than a prank, with no particular goal of exposing an insecure system.
ArsTechnica has an article on this topic, and they point out that the allegations don't make any sense - Internet access in China is already filtered at the ISP level.
Unless these hotels are buying direct connections to a provider outside of China (and why would they?), they are already behind the Chinese Great Firewall and subject to its filtering.
Conversely, for China to honor its agreement about allowing unfettered Internet access during the Olympics, they will need to open up the wall for these hotels.
I believe you have that backwards. IIRC, in Win2k, the administrator always had a backup encryption key, so the owner of the file or the administrator could read it.
In XP and Vista they changed that, and made it possible to not have a backup key at all. In that case the admin could not decrypt other users files.
In either case, I am fairly sure that if you change the admin password from outside of Windows (i.e. by booting from something else) that any encrypted data is unreadable.
What benefit is Windows? Well, seeing that Windows (and before that DOS) has provided a software infrastructure enabling me to make a living as a programmer, I personally see lots of benefits to Windows.
Obviously Microsoft is looking out for their own interests, as every corporation does. But to assert that because Microsoft benefits everyone else must be harmed is just nonsense.
There are going to be two very distinct reactions to this.
In the home world it is unlikely to take off, because people don't think in terms of the monthly cost of operating their computer. They want to buy and be done with it. Same reason that subscription music services have never done really well.
But in the large business market this may well succeed. Businesses are accustomed to budgeting and depreciation and all sorts of accounting practices that people don't have to do at home.
Businesses assume that it costs X dollars a month for a computer, and as long as the subscription costs fits in nicely with whatever cycle they buy upgrades on, they won't mind the rent/buy dichotomy.
Even more, they may really like it because this presumably puts the licensing burden on MS. If the BSA comes in to do an audit, your defense can probably be that all of your people have Albany logons and it is Microsoft's responsibility to track which ones are paid up and which aren't.
Upgrades become something of a no-brainer as well - the cost is figured in ahead of time, and rolling out the upgrade is something that probably happens automatically. I presume that their is some mechanism where organizations can take upgrades on their own schedule, ala Update Server, but the actual process of pushing them down is probably handled by MS.
Slashdot Mirror
When you're older and have more to lose you'll understand.
But I am older and do have more to lose, which is why I am not so worried about an error. If a $100 bill turns into a $1000 bill it will still get paid. It if turns into a $10000 bill it will bounce, but at that point the error will be so obvious that I don't expect to have any trouble getting it sorted posthaste. I've been with the same bank for over 20 years, and while I am not a marquee customer their rating system is going to list me as someone they want to keep, so I don't expect a hard time dealing with something that is going to be an obvious screwup.
The analogy to unprotected sex is not valid in my mind, because the likely consequences of a direct debit error don't approach those of an unplanned pregnancy or an STD.
Because in the huge majority of cases nothing goes wrong. I have 6 bills paid every month by direct debit of my checking account. All of these have been in place for at least 5 years.
And I've had direct deposit of my paycheck since sometime in the mid 80s.
In that time I have never had a problem. If a bill is lost in the mail, or I am traveling for a few weeks, no worries. If I accidentally toss a bill in the junk pile, no worries.
The chance of an error on their side is less than the chance of an error on my side. And the consequences of an error are not catastrophic.
Most of my direct debits were setup before my bank offered online bill pay, and if I were starting over I would go that route. But really, it has been a trouble free experience for me.
I used to feel that the same way, but the last time I looked at building a basic box for a family member I found that I basically couldn't beat Dell's prices - maybe $50, but not enough to compensate for the extra effort of buying pieces and assembling them.
At the high end I think you are correct, if only because I can cut back on expensive components I don't care about.
But given the economies of scale that the big operators have, it is hard to beat them significantly on price.
Not quite a comparable case, but there was a mini scandal here in Minnesota recently when it turned out that in many cases what a restaurant sold as walleye (a local favorite) was actually zander.
If I recall correctly, most of the restaurants put the blame on their suppliers, who sold them filets as opposed to whole fish. Without buying whole fish, the claim that the restaurant was duped is quite easy to believe.
If the sushi shops are not buying whole fish, it would be easy to be deceived. But I have to believe that any quality sushi restaurant starts with a whole fish, and in that case the mislabeling would have to be blamed on the restaurant.
I agree that airlines are very good at wringing every last dollar possible from their pricing structure, and even that that pricing structure benefits the consumer in general, no matter how unfair it may seem that the person sitting next to you paid half of what you did.
But the market for airfares is by no means perfect or friction free.
Airlines have enormous fixed costs, and huge interdependencies in their scheduling system.
Suppose that airlines simply decided to raise prices some arbitrary amount to offset the cost of fuel - lets pick 40%.
After a 40% bump, demand will be affected significantly. Planes that were full no longer are, and a route that would be profitable with a full plane loses money when it is half full. Switching to a smaller plane is not an option in most cases, since they only have so many planes.
So you cancel some flights with the worst load factors. But now those people can't get to the connecting flight which is profitable, because the feeder flight is unprofitable.
You go through a vicious cycle of service cutbacks, all of which require that the fare go ever higher, to the point where nobody can afford to fly.
In a perfect market airlines would go out of business, removing excess capacity, and new airplanes would be produced in appropriate sizes. But those things take years to happen and the market is dominated by big carriers whose failure would have huge impacts on the flying public.
So airlines can't raise fares enough to fly profitably, which is why the tacked on fees get ever more absurd.
That is not terribly surprising. Before the Internet, US domestic carriers routinely paid a $25 per ticket commission to travel agents, and you had to go to a travel agent to buy a ticket.
When sites like Expedia and Travelocity first started, they also got that $25 commission, and the business was incredibly profitable for them.
Since then airlines have cut their commission structures repeatedly. If there is any commission left it is tiny. The airlines would prefer that you buy tickets direct from their website after all. So the travel sites have to find a way to remain profitable. Adding their own surcharge is one obvious way.
2. Video rental stores no longer had to buy a special copy to be rented out. (those VHS tapes cost the stores over $100 each in some movies). They would just buy the DVD at $20, and rent it out at $3-$5 each. Way faster payback, way higher profits. (and smaller, you could fit more of them on the shelf..)
I have a hard time believing that video stores were enough of a market to make DVD's take off. While in the late 80s they seemed to be everywhere (much like Starbucks today), I don't think there were enough to make a big market for DVDs.
Pricing DVDs at $20 and getting them sold in mass merchandising stores had a lot to do with pumping volume.
Do yourself a favor - when you watch a Blu-Ray in the store, eject the disk and turn off the unit. Now turn it on. See how long it takes before it wakes up enough to even open the tray (on my cheap Sony - about 45 seconds). Now close the tray and see how long it takes to read the disk and show the menu (at least a minute for me).
I'm sure later generation players will be faster, but the one Sony player I got this winter is glacially slow to startup. Maybe a PS3 would have been a better choice.
I'd have to dispute the SDTV being "good enough".
While I really don't notice the difference between Blu-Ray and DVD on my 47" 1080p LCD, it has reached the point where I don't like watching TV that is not HD.
Particularly for any kind of sports, there is no comparison between SDTV and HDTV.
It is true that localization is not a trivial cost, but I don't think that is the answer.
Part of it is simply charging what the market will bear - no surprise there, and any rational company will do the same.
But the other factor is that they most likely sell through distributors or foreign subsidiaries, and those organizations get a cut of the revenue as well. So instead of all the money from the sale going to Adobe in the US, the local distributor probably takes somewhere in the range of 25%-40% of the sales price.
Its actually more complicated than that - in the US, Adobe will sell units to one of the big distributors like Ingram, who in turn resells to Best Buy, NewEgg, etc. Ingram gets a substantial cut.
For foreign distributors, Adobe US sells to Adobe Italia, who in turn sells to something like Ingram Italia, who sells to Best Buy Italia. Everyone gets a slice along the way.
I agree with the sentiments many others have expressed.
If we don't assume a post apocalyptic world, anyone coming across these old dumps is going to be technologically savvy enough to realize what they have found and take appropriate precautions.
If we are in a post apocalypse world, the people living in that world probably have so many other means of finding a messy and painful death that long abandoned waste dumps are probably not a significant risk factor in their lives. Kind of like worrying about lead paint in your cave and not the sabretooth tiger between you and fresh water.
If you are fixing the website you are not doing any kind of analysis or investigation of the crime. All you are doing is removing the vandalism of the site, kind of like the painter who is hired to cover up graffiti on the side of a building.
Now if you attempted to go through the logs and find evidence of who the phisher was, so that the website owner could sue the bastard, then maybe you need the PI license.
The speculation on this issue is spiraling out of control.
One thing that I think is overlooked is that this is not Office at $70/year, it is Office + AV for $70/year.
Last I looked (which admittedly was 3 or 4 years ago), Norton wanted annual renewals of $40 for their AV suite, and Windows users have it hammered into them that they MUST keep their AV software up to date.
Looked at that way, the incremental cost of having Office is $30/year on top of what they would spend on Anti-virus.
Why its just pennies a day...
Unfortunately, the version of Office (Home and Student) that is included with Equipt does not include Outlook either.
Which is a damn shame, because Outlook is a nicer client than Thunderbird.
A TSR?
1985 called, and it wants it acronym back.
Now Sidekick, that was a TSR.
On a multitasking system you simply have a stub process that loads a bunch of DLLs and then sits there.
While I am a happy FF3 user myself, comparing the adoption rates of Firefox and IE is misleading. IE is installed when the computer arrives, and the people still using it either:
1. Don't care what they use
2. Have no choice since it is locked down by work
3. Prefer it over the alternatives.
People in buckets 1 and 2 (which I would argue is the vast majority of IE users) are unlikely to upgrade IE beyond whatever version is on their machine now. People in group 3 are the only voluntary upgraders to IE7.
In contrast, Firefox has the same three buckets, but since it is not preinstalled very few are going to fall into buckets 1 and 2. Almost everyone using it is using it because they want it, and that means that they are far more likely to upgrade to the latest and greatest.
The article discusses the Chinese jammer efforts as being worrisome to US military, specifically the 7th fleet.
I assume that military kit like the JDAM bomb packages all use military receivers, so I think TFA does at least strongly imply that military receivers are being jammed.
I understand your point, but it doesn't directly apply in this case. The two willing parties are the binary of the game and the publisher's authentication server. Once the binary of the game is altered it is no longer a willing party.
But the vulnerability of the binary to being altered is not unique to being run on an open source platform. Having the source of the operating system does not in any meaningful way make the crack simpler.
And suppose you had all the source for the game but could not alter that source (or the resulting binary). In that case it would be perfectly feasible to use some form of encrypted communications as a secure form of DRM.
Once you can alter the binary all bets are off, but Windows and Linux do not differ in that regard.
Don't forget that TIFF has a 4GB limit, due to all the file offsets being encoded as 32 bit values. If a TIFF tag can not store the data directly in the tag body, it stores the location of the data as an offset from the start of the file.
Given that it is an online key activation scheme, your post is equivalent to asking, "how will encryption ever work on an open system like Linux".
You are saying that he couldn't have pointed out the gaping hole in any other way. Say, by sitting down with someone from the student newspaper and demonstrating the hole with one or two bogus votes?
That would be responsible. Thousands of votes is somewhere between stupid and vandalism. He even admitted it was nothing more than a prank, with no particular goal of exposing an insecure system.
ArsTechnica has an article on this topic, and they point out that the allegations don't make any sense - Internet access in China is already filtered at the ISP level.
Unless these hotels are buying direct connections to a provider outside of China (and why would they?), they are already behind the Chinese Great Firewall and subject to its filtering.
Conversely, for China to honor its agreement about allowing unfettered Internet access during the Olympics, they will need to open up the wall for these hotels.
I believe you have that backwards. IIRC, in Win2k, the administrator always had a backup encryption key, so the owner of the file or the administrator could read it.
In XP and Vista they changed that, and made it possible to not have a backup key at all. In that case the admin could not decrypt other users files.
In either case, I am fairly sure that if you change the admin password from outside of Windows (i.e. by booting from something else) that any encrypted data is unreadable.
This article has more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypting_File_System
Obviously Microsoft is looking out for their own interests, as every corporation does. But to assert that because Microsoft benefits everyone else must be harmed is just nonsense.
There are going to be two very distinct reactions to this.
In the home world it is unlikely to take off, because people don't think in terms of the monthly cost of operating their computer. They want to buy and be done with it. Same reason that subscription music services have never done really well.
But in the large business market this may well succeed. Businesses are accustomed to budgeting and depreciation and all sorts of accounting practices that people don't have to do at home.
Businesses assume that it costs X dollars a month for a computer, and as long as the subscription costs fits in nicely with whatever cycle they buy upgrades on, they won't mind the rent/buy dichotomy.
Even more, they may really like it because this presumably puts the licensing burden on MS. If the BSA comes in to do an audit, your defense can probably be that all of your people have Albany logons and it is Microsoft's responsibility to track which ones are paid up and which aren't.
Upgrades become something of a no-brainer as well - the cost is figured in ahead of time, and rolling out the upgrade is something that probably happens automatically. I presume that their is some mechanism where organizations can take upgrades on their own schedule, ala Update Server, but the actual process of pushing them down is probably handled by MS.