I'm afraid that I really can't feel much pity for anyone who still hasn't developed an appropriate level of paranoia toward downloading and executing programs. Sure, this new beastie poses as someone on your friends list. Still, I fail to see how I should be any less suspicious of files sent to me via IM (even from friends) as opposed to files emailed to me by friends.
I'm not saying the article isn't newsworthy. I'm saying that these people who are being stupid and executing shit about which they know nothing are getting exactly what they need. They don't deserve this but they do need this. Nothing teaches like pain.
"Except Microsoft hasn't claimed this to be an innovation. That's a statement slashdot users put in Microsoft's mouth so they can then turn around and make statements exactly like yours."
You know it, I know it, but joe-six-pack doesn't know it. He's the one what needs tellin'. Should we really all clam up over how new microsofts "new features" are?
I think it's worth noting that it took MS a full decade to get to the point where we could patch without rebooting -- and it'll only be a decade assuming that vista/longhorn/whatever is released next year.
So...lemme get this straight. I could build a giant faraday cage around a theater that blocks all calls, including emergency ones, but buying one of these little devices is illegal?
Wow. "Welcome to america, the most technologically advanced 3rd world nation on earth," I guess...
The implication here is that this will be used everywhere always. Stop and think about what this is good for. Where will it be used? Really. Think about the best places for adoption of this technology?
The whole 1980's notion of "keep those damn kids outta my store" is passe. This would be great to keep teens out of industrial areas, warehouses, and the alley behind the store after hours. It wouldn't be turned on during the day. After all, you want teens to come to your store. 15 to 18 year olds with an income source often don't have many financial responsibilities and, as a result, have a relatively high percentage of disposable income.
And yes. I agree with you. Shooing teens from my store during the day is a bad thing. I want them to spend as much of their cash as they can, preferably in my store.
If you don't MS to touch your HD, build it from scratch....or have a tech savy friend build it (and tip them for the effort)....or go to your local "mom-and-pop" computer shop, pick out the parts, and have them build it. I can come up with half a dozen different ways to avoid the MS tax.
The point is that people have plenty of options available to them to avoid paying the MS tax. They just have to get out there and find out what those options are.
They way you're talking, you make it sound like tithing to MS is inevitable. It's really not inevitable.
"MS doesn't care, though, that they're not making any money at all on the venture. Their plan is to get enough market share that they can nudge Sony and Nintendo out of the market and then start making the "real" profits that come from having no competetors."
It's much more likely that the xbox is a loss leader and they're raking in cash hand over fist on licensing fees. MS pretty much can't edge the other players out of the console market without resorting to illegal practices; they're too well entrenched.
I don't think this could be done to an adult human. Any program attempting to produce fearless soldiers would necessarily have to start with genetically modified babies. That leaves plenty of time to indoctrinate the subjects. Since the program would be illegal and there would be no official civilian record of any of the subjects, you could simply terminate problem subjects.
I call for an audit of all existing open source OS code.
If the NSA is sneaking tracking info into our printers, what's to stop them from hacking into a few servers here and there and dropping a few extra lines into the latest release?
Call me paranoid. Go ahead. Just remember that if you're laughing at me now, you probably would have laughed at me if I told you that the NSA secrely slipped "tracking dots" into the color documents of every american in the country.
The only thing that's happenening here is a nice sound bite that's engineered to sound good to the clueless masses but, ultimately, isn't meant to go anywhere or do anything. Basically, it's politics in action. "See? I'm tough on problems! I'm a go getter! I want to hold the developers personally responsible for the bugs they write!" Whatever.
"Any person who wants to get information out of your company normally IMHO will be willing to put the phone in their rectum."
Forcing employees to resort to butt-smuggling is sort of like that guy at the walmart that checks receipts as people exit. If you really want to steal something, you're going to find a way. Casual theft by amateurs, however, will be stopped cold. Same principle here.
"Any person who takes information out otherwise is doing so accidentally OR incidentally ("Hey, how about we take this photo of the crew in front of the plutonium purifier?"). My point, again, is that you are not making it difficult for those who want to smuggle info, you are making it difficult to those who don't want to smuggle info, but would do it nevertheless."
If a person doesn't have to stash a camera phone in their anus, they most definitely will pull a stunt like this and then claim ignorance if confronted later. I'm not saying that they won't do it, but I am saying that forcing an object into your poop chute raises the difficulty of theft just a little.
At this point, I'm not sure I care so much about the debate as finding new and innovative ways of describing the insertion of an object past your O-ring.
I must apologize as I seem unable to locate any refrence to that in this thread. In such a state, I cannot address, agree, or disagree with your point.
"If I'm adamant in my intent of copying/smuggling out some information from the place I live, I will put a Nokia 7280 up my ass (less than 3cm wide), take the photos/send them out, put it back there and voila."
Thank you for proving my point. If I ban cell phones in your workplace, I have now eliminated from the number of potential security risks the people who aren't willing to smuggle phones in to work in their colons. It eliminates casual espionage thus security is tightened. Remember, like I said before, the goal of security is to make it as hard as realistically possible to "get the goods".
"Trusting and treating your employees well works better."
I agree that mistreatment of employees can lead to increased desire to screw over your employer. However, let's say that your employer is the DOD and your workplace is a plutonium refinery. Do you really want cameras floating around that place? All I'm saying is that sometimes security measures, like banning camera phones, are necessary. I'm sure you can find instances where the ban is a result of oppressive management. I'm not arguing that point. My entire point is that camera phone bans aren't always the result of PHB's. That's all I'm trying to get you to acknowledge. No more, no less.
"Find an employer that trusts you. Seriously, if an employee is determined to compromise the security of their employer, they will do it, with or without a camera phone."
Right, kind of. Sort of. If you ban camera phones, you've banned a device that can take decent resolution images and transmit them wirelessly and immediately. That measure makes it harder to "compromise security" with ease. The whole point of security is to make it not easy to get the goods.
You know how the customer is always right? Yeah, well, here's a scary thought: American's are the world's great consumers. Our thirst for "things" knows no bounds. Until that changes, we're your customer too.
What I see here is a promotion of a double standard. How exactly is time shifting on TIVO any different whatsoever from time shifting an XM broadcast? If you already have the right to time shift tv shows on digital media, it's clearly a trivial problem to extend that logic to time shifting music on digital media. I'm not saying you have a right to own it just because you can record it. Technically, you don't. Owning a copy of your {tv show, xm broadcast} is an inevitable side effect of time shifting. How exactly am I supposed to record a TV show without making a copy that I could, potentially, distribute?
When will companies begin to realize that they're fighting a losing battle? All these whole-hearted efforts with half-assed results are like taking half a bottle of antibiotics. That which does not kill P2P only makes it stronger. P2P isn't going away -- ever -- and it's pretty well invulnerable to legislation until the day that one government rules the world.
Maybe we need to revise copyright and media ownership rather than grasping for something that's effectively intangible? It's not the popular idea but it's the only viable one.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid that I really can't feel much pity for anyone who still hasn't developed an appropriate level of paranoia toward downloading and executing programs. Sure, this new beastie poses as someone on your friends list. Still, I fail to see how I should be any less suspicious of files sent to me via IM (even from friends) as opposed to files emailed to me by friends.
I'm not saying the article isn't newsworthy. I'm saying that these people who are being stupid and executing shit about which they know nothing are getting exactly what they need. They don't deserve this but they do need this. Nothing teaches like pain.
"Except Microsoft hasn't claimed this to be an innovation. That's a statement slashdot users put in Microsoft's mouth so they can then turn around and make statements exactly like yours."
You know it, I know it, but joe-six-pack doesn't know it. He's the one what needs tellin'. Should we really all clam up over how new microsofts "new features" are?
I think it's worth noting that it took MS a full decade to get to the point where we could patch without rebooting -- and it'll only be a decade assuming that vista/longhorn/whatever is released next year.
I was too lazy to write up a how-to like you did. It's good info to put out there though.
If you challenge the veracity of the reg. info. and it comes back bogus, they could yank his domain.
So...lemme get this straight. I could build a giant faraday cage around a theater that blocks all calls, including emergency ones, but buying one of these little devices is illegal?
Wow. "Welcome to america, the most technologically advanced 3rd world nation on earth," I guess...
The implication here is that this will be used everywhere always. Stop and think about what this is good for. Where will it be used? Really. Think about the best places for adoption of this technology?
The short answer is "everywhere you aren't."
I thought that cell jammers were legal as long as emergency calls remained unhindered within the affected area.
The whole 1980's notion of "keep those damn kids outta my store" is passe. This would be great to keep teens out of industrial areas, warehouses, and the alley behind the store after hours. It wouldn't be turned on during the day. After all, you want teens to come to your store. 15 to 18 year olds with an income source often don't have many financial responsibilities and, as a result, have a relatively high percentage of disposable income.
And yes. I agree with you. Shooing teens from my store during the day is a bad thing. I want them to spend as much of their cash as they can, preferably in my store.
Ever see THX1138?
If you don't MS to touch your HD, build it from scratch. ...or have a tech savy friend build it (and tip them for the effort). ...or go to your local "mom-and-pop" computer shop, pick out the parts, and have them build it. I can come up with half a dozen different ways to avoid the MS tax.
The point is that people have plenty of options available to them to avoid paying the MS tax. They just have to get out there and find out what those options are.
They way you're talking, you make it sound like tithing to MS is inevitable. It's really not inevitable.
"MS doesn't care, though, that they're not making any money at all on the venture. Their plan is to get enough market share that they can nudge Sony and Nintendo out of the market and then start making the "real" profits that come from having no competetors."
It's much more likely that the xbox is a loss leader and they're raking in cash hand over fist on licensing fees. MS pretty much can't edge the other players out of the console market without resorting to illegal practices; they're too well entrenched.
Genetic modification, right?
I don't think this could be done to an adult human. Any program attempting to produce fearless soldiers would necessarily have to start with genetically modified babies. That leaves plenty of time to indoctrinate the subjects. Since the program would be illegal and there would be no official civilian record of any of the subjects, you could simply terminate problem subjects.
I can't be sure that I'm down with that. Sounds like it has too much to do with emasculation. /knows what emacs is //likes vi better
I call for an audit of all existing open source OS code.
If the NSA is sneaking tracking info into our printers, what's to stop them from hacking into a few servers here and there and dropping a few extra lines into the latest release?
Call me paranoid. Go ahead. Just remember that if you're laughing at me now, you probably would have laughed at me if I told you that the NSA secrely slipped "tracking dots" into the color documents of every american in the country.
Looking for a paralell can be an endless game.
The only thing that's happenening here is a nice sound bite that's engineered to sound good to the clueless masses but, ultimately, isn't meant to go anywhere or do anything. Basically, it's politics in action. "See? I'm tough on problems! I'm a go getter! I want to hold the developers personally responsible for the bugs they write!" Whatever.
Let's start a flame war then.
Your mother is dumb, just like the idea of the USA letting go of controll of teh interweb.
"Any person who wants to get information out of your company normally IMHO will be willing to put the phone in their rectum."
Forcing employees to resort to butt-smuggling is sort of like that guy at the walmart that checks receipts as people exit. If you really want to steal something, you're going to find a way. Casual theft by amateurs, however, will be stopped cold. Same principle here.
"Any person who takes information out otherwise is doing so accidentally OR incidentally ("Hey, how about we take this photo of the crew in front of the plutonium purifier?"). My point, again, is that you are not making it difficult for those who want to smuggle info, you are making it difficult to those who don't want to smuggle info, but would do it nevertheless."
If a person doesn't have to stash a camera phone in their anus, they most definitely will pull a stunt like this and then claim ignorance if confronted later. I'm not saying that they won't do it, but I am saying that forcing an object into your poop chute raises the difficulty of theft just a little.
At this point, I'm not sure I care so much about the debate as finding new and innovative ways of describing the insertion of an object past your O-ring.
Accidental/Incidental Spying?
I must apologize as I seem unable to locate any refrence to that in this thread. In such a state, I cannot address, agree, or disagree with your point.
Perhaps you could restate it?
"If I'm adamant in my intent of copying/smuggling out some information from the place I live, I will put a Nokia 7280 up my ass (less than 3cm wide), take the photos/send them out, put it back there and voila."
Thank you for proving my point. If I ban cell phones in your workplace, I have now eliminated from the number of potential security risks the people who aren't willing to smuggle phones in to work in their colons. It eliminates casual espionage thus security is tightened. Remember, like I said before, the goal of security is to make it as hard as realistically possible to "get the goods".
"Trusting and treating your employees well works better."
I agree that mistreatment of employees can lead to increased desire to screw over your employer. However, let's say that your employer is the DOD and your workplace is a plutonium refinery. Do you really want cameras floating around that place? All I'm saying is that sometimes security measures, like banning camera phones, are necessary. I'm sure you can find instances where the ban is a result of oppressive management. I'm not arguing that point. My entire point is that camera phone bans aren't always the result of PHB's. That's all I'm trying to get you to acknowledge. No more, no less.
"Find an employer that trusts you. Seriously, if an employee is determined to compromise the security of their employer, they will do it, with or without a camera phone."
Right, kind of. Sort of. If you ban camera phones, you've banned a device that can take decent resolution images and transmit them wirelessly and immediately. That measure makes it harder to "compromise security" with ease. The whole point of security is to make it not easy to get the goods.
You know how the customer is always right? Yeah, well, here's a scary thought: American's are the world's great consumers. Our thirst for "things" knows no bounds. Until that changes, we're your customer too.
:)
Sucks, don't it?
What I see here is a promotion of a double standard. How exactly is time shifting on TIVO any different whatsoever from time shifting an XM broadcast? If you already have the right to time shift tv shows on digital media, it's clearly a trivial problem to extend that logic to time shifting music on digital media. I'm not saying you have a right to own it just because you can record it. Technically, you don't. Owning a copy of your {tv show, xm broadcast} is an inevitable side effect of time shifting. How exactly am I supposed to record a TV show without making a copy that I could, potentially, distribute?
When will companies begin to realize that they're fighting a losing battle? All these whole-hearted efforts with half-assed results are like taking half a bottle of antibiotics. That which does not kill P2P only makes it stronger. P2P isn't going away -- ever -- and it's pretty well invulnerable to legislation until the day that one government rules the world.
Maybe we need to revise copyright and media ownership rather than grasping for something that's effectively intangible? It's not the popular idea but it's the only viable one.
If you're willing to accept the long hours and be treated like a slave then you're part of the problem. You need to realign your expectations.
Of course I expect you won't. People like you need to lose a spouse before you're willing to accept that you're wrong.