Yes, but the warning doesn't say what you're opening (opening a laptop usually refers to tipping up the display) and the warning is something you'd see before connecting a phone line to the laptop... this one actually made me laugh the first time I saw it on Vaio packaging (it would make sense in the dis-assembly part of the manual).
I might add, I don't understand people who pay their bills without reading them.
My guess... those people value their free time more highly than however much their utility companies are likely to overcharge them. If the charges are too high, they just don't pay it.
If only we could stop making our kids neurotic about how much carbon daddy's lawn mower is emitting, and get back to making them neurotic about how many starving kids that leftover meatloaf mommy just threw out could have fed...at least the starving kids is a real, tangible (and heartbreaking) issue.
Well, except that the leftover meatloaf couldn't have fed too many starving kids, it being in the wrong location and all. Moving it to the correct location involves burning carbon;)
For that matter, if they want to use a runtime library, why not go with WxPython, or even a DroidPython? You get the runtime protection of Java, the OO environment, the fast engines, small footprint, and avoid licensing issues.
I guess Google figured there was already a large body of commercial Java developers that would jump at the chance to develop for Android.
I don't think anyone said this guy was guilty of infringing copyright... he's charged with intentionally facilitating copyright infringement.
It's similar to someone handing out pamphlets in a parking lot that describe where to find tools that can be used to break into cars, and telling people that breaking into cars is easy.
In both cases, of course, prosecution has to prove that such a stunt actually resulted in an offense -- you can't be accused for facilitating a crime that did not happen. Therefore, this guy's fine as long as nobody can prove that someone used his website to actually download the content its linked links link to.
Someone could be in just as much trouble for maintaining a website of google search queries that are designed to link to content known to be made available against the will of the copyright holder. All the person is doing is deep-linking Google's website, but they can still be held guilty for describing how to commit an illegal act.
Yes, this is where the issue is; if you tell someone that you know there's cash in the 7-11 till at such and such a place, and you know there's instructions on how to defeat security there written down at location X, if someone you tell that to goes ahead and robs the 7-11, you can be held accountable.
There is a fuzzy area here, where intent is extremely important. This is why we have law courts, to decide whether, beyond a reasonable doubt, the intent exists.
Most cases that go to court eventually boil down to intent; most fact-based cases can be resolved by the parties before the thing ever makes it in front of a judge.
I tend to define "dead media" the same way I define "dead language" -- sure, it still exists and is still used, but it is no longer living. It doesn't grow or change to reflect the current social situation. You could argue that RFCs 1149 and 2549 imply that carrier pigeon media isn't dead, but I'd argue that morse code is definitely not just "dead media" but also a dead language... and was such almost from the moment it was invented (and on purpose, too!). It's been a long time since someone's come up with a new way to use it AFAIK.
In theory it's great... in practice, can you name a single environment that supports an HTML5 compliant browser that doesn't already bundle an MP3 codec? And what happens if the available audio is AAC, PCM or FLAC? Also, what does this do to the security model? Could someone write an "MP3" that exploits the javascript decoder?
That's exactly the problem - one man against the several. That way, sure, you get swarmed. But it shouldn't be one. It should be every person living in that neighborhood. Even if you just took all those who took pics - and if they ganged up together - how many is that, and how many does it take to swarm them?
You do realize we're talking about the commercial district, right? While it's true that there are people living in towers in the area, most people would not have been anywhere near the streets in question unless they had gone to the party.
However, there was some enterprising soul perched on the roof of the residential tower that sits above the Bay tossing water balloons down on the rioters below. I presume they figured a dash of cold water would sober up the drunks.
Even in Vancouver, the sports event was non-violent and family friendly. It was the after-game party hosted by the city that got out of hand. From what I saw, the city was prepared to deal with mobs of hockey fans, but not prepared as well for the small group that was intentionally stirring things up -- people who were spread out and hiding in mobs of regular drunk hockey fans. The police were spread too thin to go chasing after these guys, so instead concentrated on damping the results of their antics, preventing further escalation, and did that quite well. There appeared to be very little rioting that didn't have premeditated intentional rioters at the core of it.
Actually, it should be fairly easy to sift out many of the troublemakers from the "me too" crowd from the thousands of people who just happened to be there...
If you look at most of the photos of actual vandalism in progress, you'll see a bunch of young drunk guys in expensive clothes, and one guy off in the corner with a bandanna and a backpack.
It seems like the action took place in waves; first round was a bunch of drunk and impressionable guys mob-marching down the street, with one of the bandanna wearers inserting himself in the group and suggesting they go do something... tip a car, break a window, etc. Once he gets the group moving on a goal, he leaves them to it, and goes off to start more mayhem.
In all the photos I've seen, there were maybe 20 of these guys moving around, always on the sidelines egging others on. A few times, they actually clashed with police or were in the thick of it (such as when torching the police cars with accellerants they brought along specifically for that purpose), but they were always alone in a group of impressionable drunks, and they were obviously NOT drunk.
The second wave was "riot tourists" mixed with drunks who got involved with the first wave... this group stuck around for the photo ops and to take in the spectacle... and the first wave spillover went on to jump on cars that had been trashed already, and were part of the looting of stores attacked by the first wave.
This middle group is the easiest to catch and arrest, as they likely all have facebook accounts, friends who they bragged to, and aren't smart enough to cover their tracks. The tourists should be fine just being ashamed of what they participated in, even if they didn't do anything illegal themselves.
The first group is going to be tough -- no face pics, and for most of the time, they didn't actually do the damage themselves, they just facilitated. Hand out a gas can here, a car escape hammer there, suggest flipping a car here, talk about the looting possibilities there, and never stay in one place long enough to be documented completing the act.
However, what they did is still criminal, and they still have a social sphere that should be able to quite easily identify them... especially since they're likely known for spouting off about sticking it to the establishment in the first place.
I think what these arguments are missing, which is what is often missing, is the area of intent. For example, Slashdot links to all sorts of "illegal" material -- but the site is a news site, not a site that is dedicated to indexing copyright infringed works.
What this guy could have done was make his site a discussion site with TV schedules etc. that just happened to also have an area showing examples of where this content was available online. If these links were not the primary goal of the site, but only a result of other user's activity on the site (and not ad supported), he likely wouldn't be under the extradition cloud.
US courts don't really care that much about what crimes you facilitate; they care about what crimes you premeditatively facilitate. They also care if someone cries foul and appears to have a case, yet you ignore them and don't take reasonable steps to make things better.
Not to mention, using a *cell* phone on a _long haul flight_ is a really bad idea for many reasons. You're going to be emitting at max power continuously, and hopping all over the available cell towers monopolizing bandwidth. Even if the airplane is using fibre, its *detection systems* which actually try to make sense of radio transmissions could have some spillover from the cell bands (not direct, but you can get all sorts of frequency effects at those high transmission levels inside a moving metal object at cruising altitude).
Then you've got the cacophony of everyone and their dog attempting to talk on their phone with cut-outs etc. over top of the regular airplane sounds.
I have to wonder why this isn't being done. It is simply too obvious to patent.
You may have just answered your own question.
Other than that, the only thing I can think of (I had the same assumption you did) is that they were attempting optimal performance and low latency -- Skype actually works amazingly well over some routes that SIP dies on.
I left school because I hated attending classes that I had no interest in.
So you missed out on what college really teaches -- it's not about the head knowledge; you can get that from a book. It's about being willing to stiff it out through activities you don't like in order to accomplish the goals you set for yourself. There are lots of life skills associated with this.
It can also be about how to deal with bureaucracy and change things so you don't have to deal with so many hurdles in the future. I remember being part of a group that got the curriculum changed in my department; I also remember taking completely useless courses, but applying myself to them anyways, as I figured I could use the discipline skills I picked up even if the content itself was totally worthless.
Why, exactly, would it WANT to hide from htop, top, ps or any other process listing facility?
It's sole purpose is to scare the user into providing the crooks with their credit card info. They don't CARE whether you kill the process or not. If you know enough to ps axc -> kill then you're probably not going to fall for this in the first place (note the probably -- everyone has bad days).
As a matter of fact, Apple's KB article for the old version tells people to launch Activity Monitor and use it to quit the process. This worked on the version with admin access.
So either the patch will already recognize and remove this, or they will have to issue another little update to take care of it completely. Given that they are not compromising any privileges, stopping this should be ridiculously easy. Why are these guys even bothering?
Unless perhaps they are trying to get an installed base with the current package, which can then perhaps help with a real exploit - e.g. directing a browser to a website that exploits a real vulnerability.
Apple's AV contains rudimentary signature detection that will block KNOWN copies of problematic malware, when downloaded via Safari or Firefox, or saved via Mail.app.
These guys recently modified their FakeAV so that you download a download app via the SEO poison pages, and IT downloads the actual FakeAV. As a result, any of Apple's detections on the FakeAV itself will never trigger -- and the downloader is much easier to make polymorphic. This means that Apple will always be out of date on the detections unless they overhaul their detection system.
As for why these guys are bothering? Stopping this should be ridiculously easy, but it's turning out that a LOT of Mac users are falling for this and entering credit card details. They don't need OS vulnerabilities when exploiting the user is working so well.
On a side note (not as funny), the guys pushing this FakeAV will provide you with a Mac or Windows variant, depending on your user agent. I haven't noticed them go after Linux yet though....
The funny thing is, they could do this just as easily via a web app on iOS4 or Android.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the warning doesn't say what you're opening (opening a laptop usually refers to tipping up the display) and the warning is something you'd see before connecting a phone line to the laptop... this one actually made me laugh the first time I saw it on Vaio packaging (it would make sense in the dis-assembly part of the manual).
The clue should have been that they were naming their company after evil aliens, bent on subsuming the human race....
I might add, I don't understand people who pay their bills without reading them.
My guess... those people value their free time more highly than however much their utility companies are likely to overcharge them. If the charges are too high, they just don't pay it.
Assuming I will not sign a contract... or purchase minutes that expire, ...what's a good cheap utilitarian service?
USPS?
I can't think of any telco, wireless or otherwise, who doesn't fail at least one of those three conditions. At least not in my country.
If only we could stop making our kids neurotic about how much carbon daddy's lawn mower is emitting, and get back to making them neurotic about how many starving kids that leftover meatloaf mommy just threw out could have fed...at least the starving kids is a real, tangible (and heartbreaking) issue.
Well, except that the leftover meatloaf couldn't have fed too many starving kids, it being in the wrong location and all. Moving it to the correct location involves burning carbon ;)
Company A has another product for >x more than this prodct that has this feature.
More likely, Company A sees that Company B has released something that adds value to their product, and wants to monetize it themselves.
For that matter, if they want to use a runtime library, why not go with WxPython, or even a DroidPython? You get the runtime protection of Java, the OO environment, the fast engines, small footprint, and avoid licensing issues.
I guess Google figured there was already a large body of commercial Java developers that would jump at the chance to develop for Android.
...and yet, bitcoins are already being targeted by malware.
I don't think anyone said this guy was guilty of infringing copyright... he's charged with intentionally facilitating copyright infringement.
It's similar to someone handing out pamphlets in a parking lot that describe where to find tools that can be used to break into cars, and telling people that breaking into cars is easy.
In both cases, of course, prosecution has to prove that such a stunt actually resulted in an offense -- you can't be accused for facilitating a crime that did not happen. Therefore, this guy's fine as long as nobody can prove that someone used his website to actually download the content its linked links link to.
Someone could be in just as much trouble for maintaining a website of google search queries that are designed to link to content known to be made available against the will of the copyright holder. All the person is doing is deep-linking Google's website, but they can still be held guilty for describing how to commit an illegal act.
Yes, this is where the issue is; if you tell someone that you know there's cash in the 7-11 till at such and such a place, and you know there's instructions on how to defeat security there written down at location X, if someone you tell that to goes ahead and robs the 7-11, you can be held accountable.
There is a fuzzy area here, where intent is extremely important. This is why we have law courts, to decide whether, beyond a reasonable doubt, the intent exists.
Most cases that go to court eventually boil down to intent; most fact-based cases can be resolved by the parties before the thing ever makes it in front of a judge.
Don't worry... it also ignores Mac Gamers, Linux gamers, board gamers, sports gamers, and mind gamers.
They're only doing games that run off the media they rent; anything else is going to get really tricky.
I tend to define "dead media" the same way I define "dead language" -- sure, it still exists and is still used, but it is no longer living. It doesn't grow or change to reflect the current social situation. You could argue that RFCs 1149 and 2549 imply that carrier pigeon media isn't dead, but I'd argue that morse code is definitely not just "dead media" but also a dead language... and was such almost from the moment it was invented (and on purpose, too!). It's been a long time since someone's come up with a new way to use it AFAIK.
Ever used Cyberdog? You could run HotJava in Cyberdog in HotJava in Cyberdog....
In theory it's great... in practice, can you name a single environment that supports an HTML5 compliant browser that doesn't already bundle an MP3 codec? And what happens if the available audio is AAC, PCM or FLAC? Also, what does this do to the security model? Could someone write an "MP3" that exploits the javascript decoder?
That's exactly the problem - one man against the several. That way, sure, you get swarmed. But it shouldn't be one. It should be every person living in that neighborhood. Even if you just took all those who took pics - and if they ganged up together - how many is that, and how many does it take to swarm them?
You do realize we're talking about the commercial district, right? While it's true that there are people living in towers in the area, most people would not have been anywhere near the streets in question unless they had gone to the party.
However, there was some enterprising soul perched on the roof of the residential tower that sits above the Bay tossing water balloons down on the rioters below. I presume they figured a dash of cold water would sober up the drunks.
Even in Vancouver, the sports event was non-violent and family friendly. It was the after-game party hosted by the city that got out of hand. From what I saw, the city was prepared to deal with mobs of hockey fans, but not prepared as well for the small group that was intentionally stirring things up -- people who were spread out and hiding in mobs of regular drunk hockey fans. The police were spread too thin to go chasing after these guys, so instead concentrated on damping the results of their antics, preventing further escalation, and did that quite well. There appeared to be very little rioting that didn't have premeditated intentional rioters at the core of it.
Actually, it should be fairly easy to sift out many of the troublemakers from the "me too" crowd from the thousands of people who just happened to be there...
If you look at most of the photos of actual vandalism in progress, you'll see a bunch of young drunk guys in expensive clothes, and one guy off in the corner with a bandanna and a backpack.
It seems like the action took place in waves; first round was a bunch of drunk and impressionable guys mob-marching down the street, with one of the bandanna wearers inserting himself in the group and suggesting they go do something... tip a car, break a window, etc. Once he gets the group moving on a goal, he leaves them to it, and goes off to start more mayhem.
In all the photos I've seen, there were maybe 20 of these guys moving around, always on the sidelines egging others on. A few times, they actually clashed with police or were in the thick of it (such as when torching the police cars with accellerants they brought along specifically for that purpose), but they were always alone in a group of impressionable drunks, and they were obviously NOT drunk.
The second wave was "riot tourists" mixed with drunks who got involved with the first wave... this group stuck around for the photo ops and to take in the spectacle... and the first wave spillover went on to jump on cars that had been trashed already, and were part of the looting of stores attacked by the first wave.
This middle group is the easiest to catch and arrest, as they likely all have facebook accounts, friends who they bragged to, and aren't smart enough to cover their tracks. The tourists should be fine just being ashamed of what they participated in, even if they didn't do anything illegal themselves.
The first group is going to be tough -- no face pics, and for most of the time, they didn't actually do the damage themselves, they just facilitated. Hand out a gas can here, a car escape hammer there, suggest flipping a car here, talk about the looting possibilities there, and never stay in one place long enough to be documented completing the act.
However, what they did is still criminal, and they still have a social sphere that should be able to quite easily identify them... especially since they're likely known for spouting off about sticking it to the establishment in the first place.
I think what these arguments are missing, which is what is often missing, is the area of intent. For example, Slashdot links to all sorts of "illegal" material -- but the site is a news site, not a site that is dedicated to indexing copyright infringed works.
What this guy could have done was make his site a discussion site with TV schedules etc. that just happened to also have an area showing examples of where this content was available online. If these links were not the primary goal of the site, but only a result of other user's activity on the site (and not ad supported), he likely wouldn't be under the extradition cloud.
US courts don't really care that much about what crimes you facilitate; they care about what crimes you premeditatively facilitate. They also care if someone cries foul and appears to have a case, yet you ignore them and don't take reasonable steps to make things better.
...who said anything about replacing? You don't have to toss your old copy when you get the new one.
Not to mention, using a *cell* phone on a _long haul flight_ is a really bad idea for many reasons. You're going to be emitting at max power continuously, and hopping all over the available cell towers monopolizing bandwidth. Even if the airplane is using fibre, its *detection systems* which actually try to make sense of radio transmissions could have some spillover from the cell bands (not direct, but you can get all sorts of frequency effects at those high transmission levels inside a moving metal object at cruising altitude).
Then you've got the cacophony of everyone and their dog attempting to talk on their phone with cut-outs etc. over top of the regular airplane sounds.
You'd almost think you were in the room :D
I have to wonder why this isn't being done. It is simply too obvious to patent.
You may have just answered your own question.
Other than that, the only thing I can think of (I had the same assumption you did) is that they were attempting optimal performance and low latency -- Skype actually works amazingly well over some routes that SIP dies on.
I left school because I hated attending classes that I had no interest in.
So you missed out on what college really teaches -- it's not about the head knowledge; you can get that from a book. It's about being willing to stiff it out through activities you don't like in order to accomplish the goals you set for yourself. There are lots of life skills associated with this.
It can also be about how to deal with bureaucracy and change things so you don't have to deal with so many hurdles in the future. I remember being part of a group that got the curriculum changed in my department; I also remember taking completely useless courses, but applying myself to them anyways, as I figured I could use the discipline skills I picked up even if the content itself was totally worthless.
Why, exactly, would it WANT to hide from htop, top, ps or any other process listing facility?
It's sole purpose is to scare the user into providing the crooks with their credit card info. They don't CARE whether you kill the process or not. If you know enough to ps axc -> kill then you're probably not going to fall for this in the first place (note the probably -- everyone has bad days).
As a matter of fact, Apple's KB article for the old version tells people to launch Activity Monitor and use it to quit the process. This worked on the version with admin access.
So either the patch will already recognize and remove this, or they will have to issue another little update to take care of it completely. Given that they are not compromising any privileges, stopping this should be ridiculously easy. Why are these guys even bothering?
Unless perhaps they are trying to get an installed base with the current package, which can then perhaps help with a real exploit - e.g. directing a browser to a website that exploits a real vulnerability.
Apple's AV contains rudimentary signature detection that will block KNOWN copies of problematic malware, when downloaded via Safari or Firefox, or saved via Mail.app.
These guys recently modified their FakeAV so that you download a download app via the SEO poison pages, and IT downloads the actual FakeAV. As a result, any of Apple's detections on the FakeAV itself will never trigger -- and the downloader is much easier to make polymorphic. This means that Apple will always be out of date on the detections unless they overhaul their detection system.
As for why these guys are bothering? Stopping this should be ridiculously easy, but it's turning out that a LOT of Mac users are falling for this and entering credit card details. They don't need OS vulnerabilities when exploiting the user is working so well.
On a side note (not as funny), the guys pushing this FakeAV will provide you with a Mac or Windows variant, depending on your user agent. I haven't noticed them go after Linux yet though....
The funny thing is, they could do this just as easily via a web app on iOS4 or Android.