You receive spam and/or your computer is infected with a virus, and you're supposed to join their cause? This seems inherently counterproductive. Could this virus have been written by an anti-neo-nazi (or neo-anti-nazi)?
Maybe they are looking for some kind of 'can't-get-to-my-porn' stockholm syndrome.
Without having more to go on I cannot really accept the numbers that you have, but I do have a bit more respect for them. I still think a lot is going into the issue here, and that a 10-20 or 20-30 number is just too high. How many of the problems you heard about were people who, for lack of a more delicate way to phrase it, were just too stupid for the equipment?
In the end I doubt that lawsuits are the way to handle this. If it burst into flames and burned your house down, that is worthy of a lawsuit. If it causes bodily harm, that is worthy of a lawsuit. If it means your kids decide they hate you until it gets replaced in February, that is worthy of some better parenting.
Kudos for doing your research, but I still think your assesment is wrong. At this point we are down to opinions though, and a lot of colorful truisms apply there.
beats giving it to lazy fuckers who just want to sue themselves rich...
I heard somewhere that you know you have to be right if someone from your rival school will agree with you. If that is true, then I would say you are correct sir.
Oh, gee you sure are right... you linked to ONE GUY who isn't having a problem with his Xbox 360... you really showed me. I best be shutting up now.
I would guess that the one guys is representative of a lot more who are too busy playing games to post about it.
The fact is that it is not a simple process as that poster claims. The MS rep tells the user to restart their Xbox, then they say to plug/unplug it, then they say to try some B.S. and call back. It is a giant runaround and it takes WEEKS to get your replacement unit once they agree to exchange it. Yeah, that sure is simple and painless.
So something is wrong with basic troubleshooting now? Screw the five minutes it would take to say "make sure you have it plugged in correctly" let's just send 'em a new xbox. Also how do you know it takes "WEEKS" to get a replacement? Have you done it? Why is that even a problem? Almost all product returns are expected to take weeks, it is pretty well standard for the business. If they are willing to handle all of the shipping costs both ways then yes it is painless.
Oh, and once the final numbers are out the total of defective units will be closer to 10-20%. Right now many stores are showing failure rates in the 20-30% of the units they received. Once Christmas day hits, the numbers will only go up.
So are you trying to tell me that the people who bought 360s as christmas presents were magically more likely to buy defective ones? Say the number of xboxes in use triples at christmas, and we had (according to your from-the-ass numbers) 20% failure before. How much of a percentage would we have after christmas? 20%. The numbers would go up, not the percentage.
I would love to see something to back up your 10-20% defective units and 20-30% failures on units recieved. I doubt you have them though, as it looks like your microsoft hatred tripped any logic-related breakers you may have in your head.
So what you are asking for is support for the community that wants to reorganize basically their entire browser menu structure, but does not have the technical merit to run dom inspector and edit a css file, or possibly convince someone who knows how to do the same?
That's what, like three people on the whole planet?
If anything, the extension mechanism in FF should prompt you not to use FF (or at least not use its extensions) if you care about secturity.
On its own (and given an idiot behind the keyboard) I will admit that it is a gaping security hole. That is why there is an official, secure extension site. The vast majority of firefox extensions in popular use are hosted there, and the whole thing is controlled by the people who write the browser.
So, what does all this tell you? What it should tell you is that the extension mechanism in FF is flawed. Since the FF extenstions can not be properly confined you will always run the risk of malfunctional or malicious extensions accessing and consuming browser resources that it shouldn't.
No, what it should tell you is that bad extensions are bad. The mechanism is not flawed, some extensions using it are. FF extensions are meant to become part of the browser once installed, which means that by default they should be able to do anything else the browser can. A malicious extension getting on your system and screwing with things is your own damn fault, not a problem with FF. Poor coding and bugs are obviously always an issue, but that is too general to really be relevant here.
The good news is that since (to my knowledge) FF extensions are written in XML and ECMAScript rather than, e.g., C, it should in theory be possible to control to a better extent which and how many resources an extenstion has access to.
This is actually sort of done. There is a special context for XUL applications loaded from the net. They get roughly the same access as a regular web page. XUL applications are not browser extensions, but they are the closest thing to it that fits what you are saying. Extensions are meant to be either trusted or not installed. They have no special security context as they were designed to run as part of the browser. In short they are not activex controls, so do not treat them as such.
And as for Opera not having the same possibilities for extensions as FF, this is IMHO a wise move.
I don't really think so. What it means is that people who want more from Opera are stuck waiting for them to make the changes. Someone with the right knowledge, or just the motivation to do it, could add what they want to firefox.
seriously. Within a year we'll probably see a stories based on slashdot comments (the ultimate self-replicating circle jerk).
Does this mean that slashdot will eventually be able to slashdot itself? Will people stop reading the site altogether as the commentary becomes the articles they usually avoid?
So current vulnerabilities in microsoft image processing libraries are going to be used to promote a currently nonexistant (and possibly never-existant) commercial antivirus/antispyware system? What I want to know is where the tin-foil-hat code let you give someone your address so they could deliver all the crack.
But he doesn't need to have every article he ever writes on his site featured on Slashdot.
Funny, I figured it was the slashdot editors who were responsible for stuff like that. Maybe instead of blaming someone who arguably is not trying to create the problem you should go after the people responsible for what gets on the site.
Cue the "you must be new here/slashdot editors replaced by a script while they go on vacation" jokes.
Maybe someone who knows more about the performance issues of this would be able to add something, but what are the possibilities for some bayesian filtering on the html code of pop-ups?
At first it would probably be enough to just look at the html source sent out by the pop up, but eventually you would need to investigate at least part of the constructed dom tree after the page has loaded to keep people from using javascript to unpack their ad.
Browser detection has come up as a problem a long time ago. Instead try object detection. The idea is that you test for the existence of the javascript features/methods you need and wrap them in a set of standard functions, then use those functions in the rest of your script.
Although I agree that IE7 will slow down the growth of firefox I doubt it will really diminish the current market share. Slightly better support for web features will cut a little bit out of the "it only works in IE" problem, and most of the new stuff in IE7 is in firefox, or a plugin. In the end a lack of new features combined with any possible previous bad IE experiences will keep the new FF users where they are.
In the future I see technologies like xul as "where things are going".(and yes microsoft has one too) HTML+Javascript is only going to get us so far, and although using the javascript to dynamically update pages can do some (comparatively) awesome things, it does not have the feel of a real solution to it. So if I were a web developer[1] I would start playing with these tools now to be ready in ~3-5 years when they become a preferable alternative.
[1] I am not a web developer. If you are one, and I sound like I don't know what I am talking about, that is probably because I don't.
You could always convince them that they need to send a fedex guy out to pick it up from your house. At that point you could ship pretty much any weight item.
I, personally, would ship them $699 worth of gold brick... pre philosopher-stone-transformation, which by my (probably incorrect) calculations means:
20 pounds of bull excrement
2 sets of lead-based plateware, and arsenic-coated flatware
For the exact same reasons that I prefer the GPL to every other open source license. If you release code under a BSD-ish license, Microsoft can co-opt your work into a proprietary product directly without playing the same open source game that you are.
At which point any updates to the code become their maintenance headache. With a BSD style license anyone that uses the code in a closed source project either ends up A) forking it and maintaining their own version or B) submitting their updates as patches. If someone takes BSD-licensed code for a project and forks it to add in their own code, they then have to explain to every PHB that hears about it why their code doesn't have features X, Y, and Z just like the new version of that project. In other words all "co-opting" code under a BSD license gives you is a jump start and a maintenance/marketing headache.
Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with the GPL, but there are things besides legal reasons why a license can effectively keep software free.
So I guess, Microsoft being above the law, it's OK when they do that. The end justifies the means, after all.
It has nothing to do with being 'above the law'. Microsoft set up a honeypot to try and study what happens with infected machines. I think it is pretty important that they are at least trying to do something about zombie-based spam. Plenty of other organizations do it, in fact there are a lot of groups pursuing this line of investigation. Try a few google searches for honeypot or honeynet to see what is going on here.
Hopefully Microsoft will be able to get a better idea of how to handle this and we can all eventually live in a net with a better signal/noise ratio.
Sorry, but not watching television is as valid a choice as spending your life watching fake people do fake things and getting lobotomized by car ads and "reality" programming.
Except that he was not upset at the act of not watching television but, the way that most people who talk about how they do not watch television come off as self-aggrandizing turds who derive their sense of self worth through some superiority gained through not following "the norm".
What the granparent was saying is that people who spout off about how cool it is that they do not watch tv are annoying. In the end I find it just as annoyig as people who recite the drivel that is desperate housewives or the reality tv show du jour. Next time look at someone's entire message instead of assuming they are denouncing your world view.
Ok, I think you win on the web 2.0 buzzword contest. My brain both hurts and has ceased functioning. I'll probably have to go read low level programming manuals until it comes down out of this cloud of crapspeak.
This morning I wholemilkified the cornflakesphere which I then consumified while reading the newspaperfile that was automagically papercasted onto my front lawn-site. Radical!
Was the whole milk still in beta? Did the newpaper leverage you as a development asset? Is that lawn-site developed with a mashup of scalable syndicated fertilizer api's? I'm not sure you are fully web 2.0 compliant yet. I believe there is still a ghost of logical, reasoning thought floating around in there.
Here, read this site six times and publish a podcast of your thoughts that I can find through deli.cio.us in the morning.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they are looking for some kind of 'can't-get-to-my-porn' stockholm syndrome.
In the end I doubt that lawsuits are the way to handle this. If it burst into flames and burned your house down, that is worthy of a lawsuit. If it causes bodily harm, that is worthy of a lawsuit. If it means your kids decide they hate you until it gets replaced in February, that is worthy of some better parenting.
Kudos for doing your research, but I still think your assesment is wrong. At this point we are down to opinions though, and a lot of colorful truisms apply there.
I heard somewhere that you know you have to be right if someone from your rival school will agree with you. If that is true, then I would say you are correct sir.
I would guess that the one guys is representative of a lot more who are too busy playing games to post about it.
The fact is that it is not a simple process as that poster claims. The MS rep tells the user to restart their Xbox, then they say to plug/unplug it, then they say to try some B.S. and call back. It is a giant runaround and it takes WEEKS to get your replacement unit once they agree to exchange it. Yeah, that sure is simple and painless.
So something is wrong with basic troubleshooting now? Screw the five minutes it would take to say "make sure you have it plugged in correctly" let's just send 'em a new xbox. Also how do you know it takes "WEEKS" to get a replacement? Have you done it? Why is that even a problem? Almost all product returns are expected to take weeks, it is pretty well standard for the business. If they are willing to handle all of the shipping costs both ways then yes it is painless.
Oh, and once the final numbers are out the total of defective units will be closer to 10-20%. Right now many stores are showing failure rates in the 20-30% of the units they received. Once Christmas day hits, the numbers will only go up.
So are you trying to tell me that the people who bought 360s as christmas presents were magically more likely to buy defective ones? Say the number of xboxes in use triples at christmas, and we had (according to your from-the-ass numbers) 20% failure before. How much of a percentage would we have after christmas? 20%. The numbers would go up, not the percentage.
I would love to see something to back up your 10-20% defective units and 20-30% failures on units recieved. I doubt you have them though, as it looks like your microsoft hatred tripped any logic-related breakers you may have in your head.
Wow, evidently the 360 is capable of live translation of english into some unholy perl+lisp amalgamation.
I didn't know they spiked the Microsoft Sucks cool-aid with LSD. That explains quite a few things.
Also as the "web as an application delivery platform" concept takes off (and it appears it will) this will only become more important.
That's what, like three people on the whole planet?
On its own (and given an idiot behind the keyboard) I will admit that it is a gaping security hole. That is why there is an official, secure extension site. The vast majority of firefox extensions in popular use are hosted there, and the whole thing is controlled by the people who write the browser.
So, what does all this tell you? What it should tell you is that the extension mechanism in FF is flawed. Since the FF extenstions can not be properly confined you will always run the risk of malfunctional or malicious extensions accessing and consuming browser resources that it shouldn't.
No, what it should tell you is that bad extensions are bad. The mechanism is not flawed, some extensions using it are. FF extensions are meant to become part of the browser once installed, which means that by default they should be able to do anything else the browser can. A malicious extension getting on your system and screwing with things is your own damn fault, not a problem with FF. Poor coding and bugs are obviously always an issue, but that is too general to really be relevant here.
The good news is that since (to my knowledge) FF extensions are written in XML and ECMAScript rather than, e.g., C, it should in theory be possible to control to a better extent which and how many resources an extenstion has access to.
This is actually sort of done. There is a special context for XUL applications loaded from the net. They get roughly the same access as a regular web page. XUL applications are not browser extensions, but they are the closest thing to it that fits what you are saying. Extensions are meant to be either trusted or not installed. They have no special security context as they were designed to run as part of the browser. In short they are not activex controls, so do not treat them as such.
And as for Opera not having the same possibilities for extensions as FF, this is IMHO a wise move.
I don't really think so. What it means is that people who want more from Opera are stuck waiting for them to make the changes. Someone with the right knowledge, or just the motivation to do it, could add what they want to firefox.
Does this mean that slashdot will eventually be able to slashdot itself? Will people stop reading the site altogether as the commentary becomes the articles they usually avoid?
Yes, but in many parts of the US the weather supports us in this endeavor.
So current vulnerabilities in microsoft image processing libraries are going to be used to promote a currently nonexistant (and possibly never-existant) commercial antivirus/antispyware system? What I want to know is where the tin-foil-hat code let you give someone your address so they could deliver all the crack.
Funny, I figured it was the slashdot editors who were responsible for stuff like that. Maybe instead of blaming someone who arguably is not trying to create the problem you should go after the people responsible for what gets on the site.
Cue the "you must be new here/slashdot editors replaced by a script while they go on vacation" jokes.
At first it would probably be enough to just look at the html source sent out by the pop up, but eventually you would need to investigate at least part of the constructed dom tree after the page has loaded to keep people from using javascript to unpack their ad.
No, that's what they call the combination of spacebar-based navigation and their upcoming "Dynamic Interpretation of Combined Keystrokes" technology.
Although I agree that IE7 will slow down the growth of firefox I doubt it will really diminish the current market share. Slightly better support for web features will cut a little bit out of the "it only works in IE" problem, and most of the new stuff in IE7 is in firefox, or a plugin. In the end a lack of new features combined with any possible previous bad IE experiences will keep the new FF users where they are.
In the future I see technologies like xul as "where things are going".(and yes microsoft has one too) HTML+Javascript is only going to get us so far, and although using the javascript to dynamically update pages can do some (comparatively) awesome things, it does not have the feel of a real solution to it. So if I were a web developer[1] I would start playing with these tools now to be ready in ~3-5 years when they become a preferable alternative.
[1] I am not a web developer. If you are one, and I sound like I don't know what I am talking about, that is probably because I don't.
I, personally, would ship them $699 worth of gold brick... pre philosopher-stone-transformation, which by my (probably incorrect) calculations means:
Hopefully someone else reads this and gets that.
At which point any updates to the code become their maintenance headache. With a BSD style license anyone that uses the code in a closed source project either ends up A) forking it and maintaining their own version or B) submitting their updates as patches. If someone takes BSD-licensed code for a project and forks it to add in their own code, they then have to explain to every PHB that hears about it why their code doesn't have features X, Y, and Z just like the new version of that project. In other words all "co-opting" code under a BSD license gives you is a jump start and a maintenance/marketing headache.
Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with the GPL, but there are things besides legal reasons why a license can effectively keep software free.
It has nothing to do with being 'above the law'. Microsoft set up a honeypot to try and study what happens with infected machines. I think it is pretty important that they are at least trying to do something about zombie-based spam. Plenty of other organizations do it, in fact there are a lot of groups pursuing this line of investigation. Try a few google searches for honeypot or honeynet to see what is going on here.
Hopefully Microsoft will be able to get a better idea of how to handle this and we can all eventually live in a net with a better signal/noise ratio.
Despite the comments of anonymous spelling nazis I really wish I had mod points for this.
Ah crap, and now I have to use the stupid preview button.
Except that he was not upset at the act of not watching television but, the way that most people who talk about how they do not watch television come off as self-aggrandizing turds who derive their sense of self worth through some superiority gained through not following "the norm".
What the granparent was saying is that people who spout off about how cool it is that they do not watch tv are annoying. In the end I find it just as annoyig as people who recite the drivel that is desperate housewives or the reality tv show du jour. Next time look at someone's entire message instead of assuming they are denouncing your world view.
There is a "prevew" button next to "submit". Every time I find I should have needed it I try to make myself use it for at least the next five posts.
Ok, I think you win on the web 2.0 buzzword contest. My brain both hurts and has ceased functioning. I'll probably have to go read low level programming manuals until it comes down out of this cloud of crapspeak.
Was the whole milk still in beta? Did the newpaper leverage you as a development asset? Is that lawn-site developed with a mashup of scalable syndicated fertilizer api's? I'm not sure you are fully web 2.0 compliant yet. I believe there is still a ghost of logical, reasoning thought floating around in there.
Here, read this site six times and publish a podcast of your thoughts that I can find through deli.cio.us in the morning.