In the article, it says they already made $100 million a day. So even though losing half that would be pretty serious, they could still keep themselves up for a while.
It's useless to attack a large corporation such as Microsoft with fines and taking away money, because it doesn't work. Instead, take away things that they need to stay in power, such as forcing them to open their protocols, or greater interoperability. But not money.
The episode was probably taken off a tape, which are high-quality and the easiest thing to get at. An explanation is that it was made by Creative Services at the Broadcast Centre, who edit parts of the tape to create trails. With the tape, they could have got a high-quality rip of the episode quite easily. Whether it was leaked on purpose by Creative Services is another matter.
If an exploit asks you to run it, does it still count as a security exploit?
Yes, it does - it's exploiting their stupidity, not only the program's vulnerabilities. The vast uneducated public, who will jump at the chance of free blue monkeys giving them a firewall to stop their computer broadcasting an IP address that can be seen by hackers to steal your children, will be the ones who will get infected by exploits like this. And it's not as if you have to open a zip, enter a password and run an exe to get infected with this, just a simple "Yes" click - and most users do that just to make the dialog box go away.
The ShellBlock vulnerability in Firefox was considered an 'exploit' - like this case, it was doing the right thing (passing shell:// commands to Windows), but could be exploited.
IE can already be infected by plugins and downloads from other browsers. My sister (whom I have confined to Firefox) likes to play those goddamn Neopets games, which require Shockwave. After installing it, the Yahoo! toolbar had managed to place itself into IE somehow, even when IE hadn't been used for months.
I agree, this does look cool, but there are already colorization tools and Photoshop filters out there - how does this stack up against them? The article says these are "tedious, time-consuming, and expensive tasks", but does not mention the speed of their own scribble method. Using older colorization methods may be preferable if time is an issue.
I'm [not] going to trust any communications I want private with a giant multi-billion company.
I don't trust a giant multi-billion company to keep my messages secure either, but if there's a large breach of security and someone can see all my messages, I wouldn't really care. My IMs are nothing special; in fact they are boring. If someone is really interested in where my friends and I will meet up for lunch on Sunday, I'd feel pretty important.
If I was sharing bomb-making instructions or something else illegal with my friends, I'd make our own private network and send messages across that.
Personally I do not mind the Yahoo home page. They do have a search page which is clean and used only for searching (like Google, really) while the main home page is the portal page, offering links to everywhere else. Also I do not think it is cluttered; full of information and links, maybe, but everything does seem to be in a nice neat order instead of strewn throughout the page.
Shareaza isn't invasive: I used it for months with no ill-effects. It didn't kill my network, just slowed it down quite a lot, so it is not likely to be something sinister; if anything, it is a general problem, as Gtk-Gnutella on Linux causes connection timeout errors for me on any other apps while it's running.
The Firefox interface is all XUL - not minimised at all, just with fewer features. It's what allows themes to change the interface, and extensions. If you want a XUL-less browser, try K-Meleon.
Mozilla has become a well-known name (through its history and through Firefox), while the Gecko engine is relatively unheard of. Similarly, people know Internet Explorer instead of Trident or Tasman, Opera instead of Presto, and so on.
I browse on a mobile phone, and its screen is teeny tiny (think 128x128 pixels). Google is clever enough to sniff the user-agent and provide a small, 5-result version for me, which I think is rather nice of it.
It's a shame this only works for web searching, not Groups or News. News returns a file too big error, even with the text-only version you mentioned. Is there a way to get a mini-version of the news site as well?
Talking of LiveCDs, what distribution does it use? A few distributions (Think Fedora or Ubuntu) modify their Gnomes quite a bit to make it suit their distribution.
Gnome is the default desktop in Fedora Core, but they've themed KDE in exactly the same way.
I like the Bluecurve theme in Gnome. It's useable, looks nice (not like a kid's toy like Windows XP), and is simple enough not to be distracting. It doesn't seem to be totally complete - a few files,.exes for example, still have the standard huge Gnome foot icon, but it is good enough to make me use switch back after trying any of the other themes.
Not really, if you have a laptop and a mobile phone. But they are handy if you don't.
I have a laptop and a cell phone, and like them a lot, but I can see when getting a PDA would be useful. They are a lot easier to carry around (they fit in your pocket, for one thing) than a laptop, and are still more powerful than a simple mobile phone. My mother has one of the über ones that acts as a phone as well as a PDA, so she has no need for a phone now, either.
In your large organization, are you sitting in an office a lot, occasionally going to meetings, or are you constantly on the move? Having a PDA instead of a heavy bulky laptop is much better when you're on the move often.
But of course if he decided to go to Windows you would all have a fit.
Firstly he is only switching hardware to one of these not OS (as is mentioned in the summary now).
Secondly, he is showing how Linux is portable. The PPC versions run just as well as x86. So now people can say "But how do you know it works on Mac platforms?"
Thirdly, there are no tangible reasons to go to Windows, and it's hard to see how he could benefit.
Indeed he does. "My main machine these days is a dual 2GHz G5 (aka PowerPC 970) - it's physically a regular Apple Mac, although it obviously only runs Linux, so I don't think you can call it a Mac any more;)", he said.
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In the article, it says they already made $100 million a day. So even though losing half that would be pretty serious, they could still keep themselves up for a while.
It's useless to attack a large corporation such as Microsoft with fines and taking away money, because it doesn't work. Instead, take away things that they need to stay in power, such as forcing them to open their protocols, or greater interoperability. But not money.
It doesn't look like they're selling anything, actually.
"Nothing
Great deals on Nothing
Shop on eBay and Save!
www.eBay.com"
Ah, but a quarter of the spams 'Debitel' sent were SMS messages! Spam can take other forms too (including meat)
The episode was probably taken off a tape, which are high-quality and the easiest thing to get at.
An explanation is that it was made by Creative Services at the Broadcast Centre, who edit parts of the tape to create trails. With the tape, they could have got a high-quality rip of the episode quite easily.
Whether it was leaked on purpose by Creative Services is another matter.
It has been embodied in the form of Nvu.
If an exploit asks you to run it, does it still count as a security exploit?
Yes, it does - it's exploiting their stupidity, not only the program's vulnerabilities. The vast uneducated public, who will jump at the chance of free blue monkeys giving them a firewall to stop their computer broadcasting an IP address that can be seen by hackers to steal your children, will be the ones who will get infected by exploits like this. And it's not as if you have to open a zip, enter a password and run an exe to get infected with this, just a simple "Yes" click - and most users do that just to make the dialog box go away.
The ShellBlock vulnerability in Firefox was considered an 'exploit' - like this case, it was doing the right thing (passing shell:// commands to Windows), but could be exploited.
IE can already be infected by plugins and downloads from other browsers. My sister (whom I have confined to Firefox) likes to play those goddamn Neopets games, which require Shockwave. After installing it, the Yahoo! toolbar had managed to place itself into IE somehow, even when IE hadn't been used for months.
I agree, this does look cool, but there are already colorization tools and Photoshop filters out there - how does this stack up against them? The article says these are "tedious, time-consuming, and expensive tasks", but does not mention the speed of their own scribble method. Using older colorization methods may be preferable if time is an issue.
I meant 'Technology (Apple)', not Hardware, if it makes it any better.
If you look at the topic list, it's in 'Hardware (Apple)', so it's in Apple.
Ah, you are right. I was only trying to make an example.
s/bomb-making instructions/child pornography/
I'm [not] going to trust any communications I want private with a giant multi-billion company.
I don't trust a giant multi-billion company to keep my messages secure either, but if there's a large breach of security and someone can see all my messages, I wouldn't really care. My IMs are nothing special; in fact they are boring. If someone is really interested in where my friends and I will meet up for lunch on Sunday, I'd feel pretty important.
If I was sharing bomb-making instructions or something else illegal with my friends, I'd make our own private network and send messages across that.
Google can do that. That's where they're lacking! ;)
Personally I do not mind the Yahoo home page. They do have a search page which is clean and used only for searching (like Google, really) while the main home page is the portal page, offering links to everywhere else.
Also I do not think it is cluttered; full of information and links, maybe, but everything does seem to be in a nice neat order instead of strewn throughout the page.
I still prefer Bearshare of Bonery.
You want any client that uses Gnutella. Search for anything, 90% of the results are ~3MB WMV files.
Bliss!
Shareaza isn't invasive: I used it for months with no ill-effects. It didn't kill my network, just slowed it down quite a lot, so it is not likely to be something sinister; if anything, it is a general problem, as Gtk-Gnutella on Linux causes connection timeout errors for me on any other apps while it's running.
The Firefox interface is all XUL - not minimised at all, just with fewer features. It's what allows themes to change the interface, and extensions. If you want a XUL-less browser, try K-Meleon.
Mozilla has become a well-known name (through its history and through Firefox), while the Gecko engine is relatively unheard of. Similarly, people know Internet Explorer instead of Trident or Tasman, Opera instead of Presto, and so on.
I browse on a mobile phone, and its screen is teeny tiny (think 128x128 pixels). Google is clever enough to sniff the user-agent and provide a small, 5-result version for me, which I think is rather nice of it.
It's a shame this only works for web searching, not Groups or News. News returns a file too big error, even with the text-only version you mentioned. Is there a way to get a mini-version of the news site as well?
Talking of LiveCDs, what distribution does it use? A few distributions (Think Fedora or Ubuntu) modify their Gnomes quite a bit to make it suit their distribution.
Gnome is the default desktop in Fedora Core, but they've themed KDE in exactly the same way.
.exes for example, still have the standard huge Gnome foot icon, but it is good enough to make me use switch back after trying any of the other themes.
I like the Bluecurve theme in Gnome. It's useable, looks nice (not like a kid's toy like Windows XP), and is simple enough not to be distracting. It doesn't seem to be totally complete - a few files,
Not really, if you have a laptop and a mobile phone. But they are handy if you don't.
I have a laptop and a cell phone, and like them a lot, but I can see when getting a PDA would be useful. They are a lot easier to carry around (they fit in your pocket, for one thing) than a laptop, and are still more powerful than a simple mobile phone. My mother has one of the über ones that acts as a phone as well as a PDA, so she has no need for a phone now, either.
In your large organization, are you sitting in an office a lot, occasionally going to meetings, or are you constantly on the move? Having a PDA instead of a heavy bulky laptop is much better when you're on the move often.
Why did they drop off the P from PDA? Is it no longer personal?
"PDA"s and handheld computing devices (aside from phones) are the same for most people.
But of course if he decided to go to Windows you would all have a fit.
Firstly he is only switching hardware to one of these not OS (as is mentioned in the summary now).
Secondly, he is showing how Linux is portable. The PPC versions run just as well as x86. So now people can say "But how do you know it works on Mac platforms?"
Thirdly, there are no tangible reasons to go to Windows, and it's hard to see how he could benefit.
If you submit it again, we will ;)
Indeed he does. "My main machine these days is a dual 2GHz G5 (aka PowerPC 970) - it's physically a regular Apple Mac, although it obviously only runs Linux, so I don't think you can call it a Mac any more ;)", he said.