We live in a relativly free society. We don't have somebody tailing each of us and making sure we don't do anything bad. And because of that freedom, there are a nearly unlimited number of things someone could do, if they wanted to, that could wreak havoc on our society.
When you ride a train you are trusting in the fact that nobody has removed the rails and sold them for scrap, that nobody has dug the ties out from under the rails. And you also trust that the train company has people that inspect the tracks and the train regularly. We all trust these things without really thinking about it.
You could seriously injure someone with a well placed punch, anybody, anywhere could decide to suddenly do you bodily harm and you would be defensless against a surprise attack.
When you shake someones hand you have to assume that they didn't just give you a body contact virus like anthrax, when your in a bus you have to assume that nobody has just released a virus or pathogen into the air.
When your driving in your car you have to assume that the other people don't want to crash. Because all it would take for an average American to kill someone is just a flick of the steering wheel.
For a free society to exist, we have to believe in the fact that our fellow man isn't going to turn around and kill us the first chance they get. There is a basic level of trust in human beings that is necessary to function.
When that trust is eroded, things become very complicated and almost impossible to predict the results. There is one result you can count on always, that someone will always find a way to do something if they are motivated.
The weapons that people come up with in prison is no better proof of that. They make lighters out of salt water and copper wire, they make crossbows out of paper, you could stab a person to death using nothing more than a pen.
The only way to prevent these kinds of things in a free society is to try to uncover and stop the plan while it is still being formed. If they have made it all the way to the airport without being caught, then they are well prepared for any searches that might occur in security.
For instance, if a drug mule can carry pounds of cocaine in their stomach, and you send 5 mules and 3 of them are caught, 2 still made it onto the plane and arrived at their destination. And if someone can pack drugs in their stomach they can do the same with explosives....
I'm not saying it's useless to search people at the airport. I'm saying that it gives you a false sense of security, and mostly just harrasses and annoys regular people who now cannot bring a beverage on the plane and have to dump their carry on luggage.
If I was a terrorist and I wanted to cause a midair accident there are several things I could do if I didn't care about my own life. And if the security people are only looking for middle easterners I would use that to my advantage as well.
Even without bringing anything on board, a passenger could open a door in flight and cause the safety ramp to deploy.
They could wear clothes made out of highly flamable materials and start a fire in the lavetory.
You could use some natural toxins that would not show up in a bomb check like animal venom. Imagine what the sharp edge of a paperclip that was rubbed against a poison dart frog would do somebody.
You could re-tread your shoes with a plastic that is benign and would be undetectable under examination as being anything dangerous, but that is made out of a material that releases toxic fumes when burned.
You could get several people to bring relatively benign substances on board and cause a chemical fire, or common household products that when mixed can create chlorine gas.
Sugar is a good one since when mixed with a stabilizer and an oxidiser it becomes an explosive. Something as simple as salt peter and sugar mixed together becomes explosivly flamable.
Even without getting onto a plane you could find a covert way to place somethi
I completly disagree with those assertions. There are always going to be people who want something for nothing, but the problem here is the various copy protection schemes that the game companies are using.
They cause problems on peoples machines and in some cases they break them. Anybody who's ever been stuck with starforce drivers, long after they uninstalled the game that put them there can appreciate that.
Back in the day you could install a game to your hard drive and play it from the hard drive. In fact, a hard drive wasn't used to store the game long term, it was instead a way to speed up retreival. Then they made the games install to the hard drive but still required the CD/DVD to be inserted in the drive. Then they started adding the various product keys and serial numbers so that people who lost the instruction booklet or threw the game box out are hosed when they go to reinstall the game. Then on top of all of that they started doing internet authentication like in Quake 4 where the game checks in with a server. Then you have your starforces and various other mechanisms that fundamentally alter the driver structure in windows and prevent some people from running the game.
The problem is that we didn't drop one thing for another, instead they keep piling it all on top of each other. If I'm going to be required to have the DVD in the drive to play, then whey do I need to waste 6GB of hard drive space? If I have to use a product key then why do I need the disk inserted?
To really put this in perspective consider the pirated alternative.
I can buy a game like Fear, and have to jump through all those hoops or I can download it off a newsgroup after some hacking team removed all the DRM.
The people who pirate these games don't have to put up with all that crap, they just remove the protection. So the only people left stuck with all of these anti piracy measures are the paying customers.
Why should I pay $50 for a game that treats me like a criminal and locks me out of functions of my own computer, when I could get the same game free minus the headache?
Then how can a universe 15billion years old grow in size to 180billion light years? I mean assuming the big bang is correct then that's 90 billion light years to the center of the universe which is still 75 billion light years farther than light could have traveled in 15 billion years.
Going by those numbers the matter at the edges of the universe traveled there faster than the light from the big bang could have, violating Einsteins theory of general relativity.
To put it another way, if the universe existed in the same singularity and then exploded out ward at the speed of light for 15 billion years then it could be 30 billion lightyears wide. Anything that traveled out from the center farther would have to be travelling faster than the speed of light.
I've heard these arguments before and in some cases they have truth to them. I could say this about a game like Altered Beast, which when it came out on the Genesis was sold on it's graphics not it's game play. So when the draw was the graphics, and now those graphics are dated, there is no draw.
Not all games get their fun from graphics though. Why is it that every system and cellphone has an Arkanoid type game? Because Arkanoid is fun to play and requires no time commitment. Play and put it down, no logging out or spending hours leveling your chracter.
Castlevania 1, 2, and 3 on the NES were all excellent games because the gameplay was both challenging and rewarding. You kept playing to see what would happen next, what would the next boss look like? And in their own way, the graphics and sound contributed to it.
Sometimes less is more. One of the charming aspects of the old 8 bit games is that the rasterized rendering engines relied on simple block like textures repeated and varied to form the game world. This was cruder than bitmapped graphics but it forced you to use your imagination more. The box art and the user manuals for the game is where the art was. Those told you what the game was supposed to look like.
Any 10 year old can loose themselves in the world of Legend of Zelda with it's water falls and dangerous ascent to mount doom with it's falling boulders, and explore an entire world. And the map that came with the game showed you what that world was really like. So when you played the game you didn't see raster blocks stacked end on end, you saw woods and rivers. And since your mind was filling in so much, the real world, and hence real world realism, could never possibly be as fantastic as the one in your head.
There is no better example of this than reading a good book. You have nothing to go on but your imagination and the words of the author. Any bookworm here can tell you that the movie never lives up to the book. As fantastic as Peter Jacksons movies were, they can never capture the raw fantasy of reading the books themselves.
So rather than be disappointed by playing older games, they remind me of the shortcomings of newer games. As the graphics become more and more realistic, the imagination and fantasy elements took a back burner to the eye candy.
I can't look at a full moon in a clear sky to this day, without remembering the opening cinematics for Ninja Gaiden. And I absolutely lost myself in the world of Castlevania. In particular, Simons Quest was especially fulfilling to play over and over to get the different endings. I wanted to live in that world, and playing the game was the closest I could come to it.
Some people like nice rendering and graphics, they prefer photo realism to impressionism. Some people like Monet and some people just see little paint daubs.
The old games that are worth saving, are still completly viable games that continue to hold my attention and I only wish there were more games that sucked you in so bad that you dreamed about them.
Why are they defacing a NASA website? Different government agency, different government, different continent. We are over there trying to broker a peace deal. If some hacker has a beef with Lebanon then take it out on Israel.
Both sides are wrong.
The guys firing rockets into Israel are wearing plain clothes and firing from residential neighborhoods. They know Israel is going to immediately retaliate, and they know that when they do, that residential neighborhood is going to become a smoking wreck full of dead bodies. This will in turn make Israel look like they are baby killers and soul less and re-inforce the muslim sentiments that Israel needs to be destroyed. They know that Israel doesn't have the troops to fight a ground war and that the only response they can make is with their airforce. And they exploit this to force Israel to kill innocent people. If anybody should be pissed it should be the people of Lebanon. If I saw a rocket truck parking in front of my apartment I would be telling them where to fuck off to. And the terrorists certainly know that Israel will strike back yet they continue to attack from residential areas. The reason is they are fighting the only way they can. If they wore uniforms and attacked on the open battlefield they wouldn't stand a chance. So they are using the devils logic and fighting the only fight they can, knowing full well that innocent people are going to be killed because of their actions.
And Israel has equiped their armed forces in such a way that they use small groups of special forces backed up by overwhelming air power to defend themselves. They don't have enough people to go in on the ground and in any case they are fighting an enemy who dresses in street clothes and can blend into the wood work. The rules of Geneva don't apply here and it's not a conventional war. The enemy could be anybody because they don't wear uniforms and attack from everywhere. So Israel does the only thing it can and they attack back, even knowing that they are going to kill innocent people because it's the only thing that Israel can do.
You can comment on who's right and who's wrong from the safety of the USA all you want. But the fact of the matter is that if someone were firing rockets at US cities from Mexico or Cuba you can be sure that people would be up in arms demanding retaliation. You can't expect the Israelis to just stand back and take it!
I'm so sick of hearing about cease fires that are broken, and a new peace process that ultimately falls to shit, and suicide bombers, and tanks rolling through Gaza. Even when they weren't at war it was still a daily war. I'm so sick of it that I wish they would just get it over with. Get the fight out of your system, go to war, re-learn how truly horrible and inhumane it is to kill your neighbors. And maybe when enough people have died, and the site of blood is everywhere, maybe then the offers of peace will be real.
War sucks, people die, the innocent always suffer the most. But is living a civil life with daily bombings and rocket attacks any better?
Hey he did more living in his 60 years than most people do in their lives. And while he died with money and probably with a roof over his head, many of the people he screwed over at enron have no pensions and won't have such comforts when their time comes.
The problem with police is that they deal with criminals all day and after awhile they forget most people are not criminals. If you are around a certain group of people all of the time and that's all you see, the brain associates that with reality. And the reality for a cop is that everybody is a criminal.
Step 1. Create the internet, make it free, and get people to incorporate it into every facet of their lives. Step 2. Mine the data and use it to silence your foes, prosecute for thought crimes, and manipulate the masses. Step 3. Profit.
I've used a C610 laptop for 5 years. Any of their laptops with a "dock" connector have these options and it has more to do with dual monitor setups than it does some kind of super dock with a high end graphics card.
The C610 is a POS 1.2ghz P3 with 256MB ram and 20GB hard disk but the dock has PCI slots so you could put a respectable video card in it. Same with any other dock with expansion slots.
Bandwidth is money. And ISP's offer their services with the idea in mind that people are going to utilize their connection 24x7. If people start turning their high speed connections into paid services and re-selling then the bandwidth useage goes up and the ISP's are going to do something to curtail it. Either limiting connections, speeds, or raising prices.
Yeah I am suprised at how laid back a lot of sites are with their billing. I mean it's their sole revenue source and they don't want to back it up to tape unless there is an upgrade. Still though the system usually works well. I can count the number of times I've heard of lost billing on one hand.
The more likely scenario is someone in the billing group needs a file resent or a ticket is opened that requires us to look at the raw records and the original files are long gone. Some of these sites are generating 15GB of billing a week and the disks only hold onto it so long.
What a lot of people don't realize is the equipment that handles call processing and billing, and such, is ancient. Even new equipment is built using old standards. A lot of the billing equipment runs on 9GB disks, the MSC's have the computing power of a 600mhz power pc, 9600baud modems are still the norm for connection, or a x.25 connection. They use old hardware and old standards. And it works fabulously. It's old but it's stuck around this long because it works.
I remember when the soft switches started popping up and everybody was scared that they were going to take over the market, then low and behold they are un-reliable.
At least some of the newer products like the E911 and some of the products based on VxWorks platforms are semi modern.
Every year, thousands of people die from winter weather and storms. Glaciers kill hundreds of people each year in a frozen slow moving death march. Exposure to the bitter cold of the arctic and Antarctic can kill a man faster than even the hottest deserts on the planet. The frozen wastelands that make up the poles of this planet are the most inhospitable places on the earth. Nearly devoid of life and remote.
Every year, billions of dollars are spent dealing with winter and cold weather problems. Ice storms cost power companies millions of dollars in repairs to power lines breaking under the weight of ice. Thousands of people die in automobile accidents, costing millions of dollars. Blizzards and winter storms that rival hurricanes batter and beat against houses, ships, and the fragile eco system of the northern and southern latitudes.
Millions of miles of land are covered in a suffocating layer of ice several miles thick. Land that could be used for farming to feed the hungry. Land that could house the homeless. Land that could provide new industry and natural resources. This land sits un-used, in a frozen wasteland utterly devoid of life.
So remind me again why we want to keep the planets thermostat set at frigid?
Al Gore is telling us that the world is going to end for us in 10 years and we are going to live like cavemen because the snow caps will melt. Al Gore says we should cut back our emissions and live life as a "carbon neutral" society.
Well I say we shouldn't be trying to prevent the planet from warming, we should be encouraging it. Plants LOVE greenhouses and thrive in high CO2 environments. Everybody is always talking about feeding the world and ending world hunger and poverty. And I think global warming can help accomplish those goals
In my experience this doesn't happen all that often. Rarely they will find a problem with the MSC billing 911 calls or calls to voicemail but these are quickly taken care of.
More often than not the problem is that customers get free airtime when there is a billing problem. I see CAMEL (prepaid) phones being able to make free calls thanks to a bug about 10X more than I see free calls being charged.
You work in the billing department so you aren't getting all of the data. The MSC sends GCDR data with all sorts of useful information like LAC and Cell ID, on and off hook signalling, etc. Records are even generated for cell handovers in which no calls are made.
Then the billing system pulls these records off the SDM (or they are pushed with outbound billing) and begins to strip out everything not related to billing the call. And once this is done that data is gone. However a local copy is kept on the SDM or possibly on backup tape and if a problem is found it's a simple matter to resend the file or extract the data.
Sometimes changes to the MSC or HLR can cause some calls to go through for free or other calls that should be free to be charged time. Tmobile, like most providers, will credit airtime back to your phone if a mistake is made. This is business as usual and anybody who answers the phone will have the ability to do so.
Someone had said that acting like a jerk get's results. Well the squeaky gear gets the oil, that is true, but your just as likely to be given the shaft.
I've been on both sides of customer service in telecomm and retail for many years and the best way to motivate someone to help you is to be relaxed and appreciative. Customer reps talk to pissed off customers all day long, they are used to it and acting like a jerk on the phone won't even make them lift an eyebrow. But they almost never get praise or a thanks for their job. After talking to angry people all day, the person who is polite and appreciative will stand out.
If someone is angry at you or your job, getting angry back does nothing but assure a bad call. If someone pushes and you push back, neither moves. If you don't resist and you don't push back, if you withdraw, apologize for the problem that is upseting them , and make an honest effort to help, or be helped, it turns devils into angels, and the worst customer service experiences into the best.
I always make it a point to give praise when I'm talking to somebody if they did a good job, because they almost never get that. If someone does right by you then talk to their supervisor, let them know you appreciate it. And if the person is just being a booger and your getting no where, let them know you aren't looking for a fight, you are calling for help and appreciate anybody who can give it to you.
Secondly the mobile sends an IMSI when it attatches to the network, the IMEI is like your phones serial number which the carrier doesn't really care about. The IMSI is what attatches to your HLR profile.
And phones do work in airplanes and any cellphone anywhere, on the ground, or in the air, can talk to multiple BTS stations at the same time. This is how they track the location of 911 calls, by comparing the signal delay between multiple BTS's that are in contact with your phone and triangulating the location with an MLC. The BSC is the brains behind the radio operation and it constantly monitors the signal strength of your phone and picks the closest radio for you to attatch to. As you start getting closer to another cell, like on an airplane, the system sees a drop in the signal to noise ration and begins to initiate a hand over to the new radio. The BSC handles all of this seemlesly in the background and instructs your phone which radio to talk to.
The reason they don't want you using cell phones in an airplane is becasue of possible interference to the cockpit instrumentation. Planes navigate by radio, using an azimuth to plot a course using radio beacons. Any radio interference can cause an error and potentially put the plane off course.
You are right though that it's nearly impossible to clone a GSM phone because the system will not allow you to be attatched in two places at once. I don't believe it will kick both phones off the network though. It would treat it like a forced handover at the worst, and at the least it wouldn't allow the cloned mobile to attatch if the other phone was already on the network.
And lastly, if you think your phone might be cloned but your not sure....DONT GO TO THE POLICE. Do you think they are going to launch an investigation because you have calls on your phone bill that look suspicious? That in itself isn't evidence of a crime. You need to call the 611 Tmobile UK call center and get someone from customer service to help and escelate up to Tier2 if you have to. If people filed police reports every time they disagreed with a phone bill.......
When you power your mobile on it attatches to the network and is added to the local switches VLR (visitor location register) which is a database of who is on what switch and what radio and base station they are on. The MSC (mobile switching center) then sends a request to the HLR (home location register) which is like a VLR except instead of tracking what radio they are on, it tracks which MSC they are on. So if someone calls your phone, the system does an HLR lookup to see what MSC you are on, and then the call is sent to your current location.
If someone were cloning this persons mobile then they would be attatched to the network 'twice'. This is not allowed and it would cause the 2nd mobile to be unable to attatch to the network.
Think of it like this, your SIM card contains an IMSI (international mobile subscriber identifier) which is a long number that corresponds to your account. When you are attatched to the network it is by SIM/IMSI and the HLR notes which VLR you are in. If a 2nd phone tried to attatch with the same SIM/IMSI information then one of two things would happen because someone can't be in two VLR's at the same time. Either the new SIM would be rejected because the old one did not do a handover to the new VLR. Or the old SIM would be removed from it's current VLR and attempt to re-attach, which would kick off the other SIM/IMSI back and forth.
So if you leave your mobile powered up 24x7 your making it very difficult for someone else to get on the same network and pretend to be you because you can't be in two places at once. And as long as your sim is inserted and your phone is powered on you are attatched to the network, whether you make a call or not.
If you are still concerned have Tmobile set up a call trace on one of these calls or check the IMEI of the calling phone. IF it's in Europe they will have an EIR which keeps track of the IMEI (international mobile equipment identifier) which is like a serial number for the phone. Even if someone cloned your SIM they can't clone your IMEI so it will be different.
With a call trace they can track the LAC and CellID of anycall placed and tell you where it's originating.
It's the 545 hours in one month that looked suspicious to the AOL rep. You have to look out for fraud or identity theft and when the account looks unusual and the person is calling to close it get's angry it can cause a big misunderstanding. When your on the spot like that thinking that you might have a stolen account on your hands and possibly an impersonator on the phone while at the same time trying to treat them like a customer while you work it all out, that could account for his actions.
Like I said though if AOl would just let people cancel on the web without calling an 800 number they wouldn't have these problems.
And abusing a CSR rep, even if they are in the wrong, does nobody any good.
If you read the transcript it sounds like the AOl rep doesn't believe the guy is who he says he is. IE If the account wasn't being used any more why 500 hours in the last month after a year of little to no activity?
It sounds like a misunderstanding. The rep was suspicious of the person calling in and the caller got snarky.
If AOl would just let people cancel from their pc instead of making them call in, and if customers wouldn't act like A$$holes then problems like these could be avoided.
So the system uses sensors to detect the camera and then it shines a white light at the camera. Why not the black box version that detects the systems camera sensors and hits it up with infrared or white light to block it from blocking?
Touche technology!
People need to realize that any technology can be overcome with better technology. It's like Alice in Wonderland, she's running as fast as she can just to stand still.
Like radar.
Police use radar
speeders use radar detectors
police use radar detector detectors
speeders squak random radar energy at the radar detector detectors.
I remember picking up "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" in junior high thinking it was a CYOA book. Both books had similar artwork and were similar in size and it was in the CYOA section of the library.
I got it home and was amazed at how few choices there were, right up to page 20 when I figured out it was a real book, and by then I couldn't stop reading. Then I read the entire series.:)
I don't know much about the IP internet side of TMO, it's outside my area. But I can tell you SMS only handles SMS. It's a dedicated node on the SS7 side of the network. That isn't to say that TMO doesn't have something on the IP side that acts as a relay. It would make sense to do it that way since many of the phones that they offer AIM service with don't have dedicated clients.
Basicly GPRS allows your phone to bypass the MSC and go straight to IP land. Previously you could do a CSD (circuit switched data) call that would route the call the same as a voice call, through the MSC, ot a device called an IWF which uses a bank of DSP's to convert the call to ISDN. From there it would be sent to a device called a CVX1800, which is where your IP is assigned and you are authenticated. And from there it would go to a WAP server which would actually host the Tzones and act as a gateway to the internet. This method is still used as a fall back if GPRS is down.
With GPRS though your call is given dedicated radio timeslots called PDTCH's that route directly from the radio network into whats called an SGSN which is a serving GPRS support node. From there it has links to an HLR which is a Home location register where you SIM and phone information is stored, this is the authentication part. From there the SGSN authenticats and then attatches your mobile to the GPRS network and sends it out to a GGSN which is basicly a glorified gateway. Then the GGSN talks to the WAP server and other Tzones stuff.
So they can use GPRS to handle some of the SMS functionality like MMS picture messaging etc but it still ultimately goes through and SMS box.
I can tell you 100% that the SMS device is not relaying AIM or Yahoo. If your phone has limited functionality then TMO's internet backbone might be relaying the messages, but their internet and Tzones based servers are completely seperate from any callP side devices like the MSC/HLR/SGSN etc.
I have a T809 and have experience as a TMO user as well and I have to sign in to my phone, it contains the AIM pocket and Yahoo pocket software etc and actually logs into the AIM/Yahoo server. I know this because it kicks me out from my desktop because it won't let you log in twice. They keep a continuous GPRS/EDGE connection up as long as I am logged in.
SMS is handled by a completely different box on the callP network that has nothing to do with any GPRS or internet functionality. It's a periphrial of the MSC and deals in the SS7 world of telephony, not the IP world of internet.
SMS is only used for SMS. When you are GPRS attatched and logged into AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, etc you are connected to whatever services server, not to an SMS box. You make it sound like they are doing some kind of relay.
SMS is meant for one way communication and has a limited text length not to mention it isn't always instant.
If you are logged into any IM on your TMO phone your GPRS attatched and it will swap over if you get a phone call and then swap back.
Anybody who wants your car will find a way to take it. Whether it's lock and key, or encrypted tokens. The keys just keep honest people honest.
Even if you locked the doors with a physical key, had a car alarm with tilt sensor, used the club, and had software protection, someone could still bypass all of that and steal your car. But it may not be worth the risk or the effort.
The trick is not to be the weakest link. Yeah someone can get around a car alarm, or cut the club off your steering column. But if you have taken reasonable steps to secure your car, and it's going to be a lot of trouble to get into, a thief is more likely to take a crack at the next car.
If I really wanted to take someones car easy, I wouldn't bother decrypting and breaking in. I'd
A. Wait for them to get into the car and then jack them at gunpoint in which case I get the car and the keys but then they can call the police right away, unless I kidnapp them or kill them, either way it complicates things.
B. Follow them home and break into their garage when they are asleep. You would not believe how many people leave their keys in the car in their garage or how many people leave their cars parked in the driveway, unlocked, with open access to the garage door opener. The weakest link will almost always be the person.
If you don't want to loose your car then be smart. Don't leave your car unlocked. Don't leave the keys in the car. If your car has security, use it and make you a less attractive mark than your neighbor.
The time it takes you to click the buttons isn't factored in. It's whether your ear can tell the difference between two quick down or a quick up down a few miliseconds apart. The time it takes you to click has no affect.
And all the test really judges is your ability to process sounds that are rapidly strung together. Anybody who can understand what the Pikey is saying in "Snatch" should have no problem with this test.
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We live in a relativly free society. We don't have somebody tailing each of us and making sure we don't do anything bad. And because of that freedom, there are a nearly unlimited number of things someone could do, if they wanted to, that could wreak havoc on our society.
When you ride a train you are trusting in the fact that nobody has removed the rails and sold them for scrap, that nobody has dug the ties out from under the rails. And you also trust that the train company has people that inspect the tracks and the train regularly. We all trust these things without really thinking about it.
You could seriously injure someone with a well placed punch, anybody, anywhere could decide to suddenly do you bodily harm and you would be defensless against a surprise attack.
When you shake someones hand you have to assume that they didn't just give you a body contact virus like anthrax, when your in a bus you have to assume that nobody has just released a virus or pathogen into the air.
When your driving in your car you have to assume that the other people don't want to crash. Because all it would take for an average American to kill someone is just a flick of the steering wheel.
For a free society to exist, we have to believe in the fact that our fellow man isn't going to turn around and kill us the first chance they get. There is a basic level of trust in human beings that is necessary to function.
When that trust is eroded, things become very complicated and almost impossible to predict the results. There is one result you can count on always, that someone will always find a way to do something if they are motivated.
The weapons that people come up with in prison is no better proof of that. They make lighters out of salt water and copper wire, they make crossbows out of paper, you could stab a person to death using nothing more than a pen.
The only way to prevent these kinds of things in a free society is to try to uncover and stop the plan while it is still being formed. If they have made it all the way to the airport without being caught, then they are well prepared for any searches that might occur in security.
For instance, if a drug mule can carry pounds of cocaine in their stomach, and you send 5 mules and 3 of them are caught, 2 still made it onto the plane and arrived at their destination. And if someone can pack drugs in their stomach they can do the same with explosives....
I'm not saying it's useless to search people at the airport. I'm saying that it gives you a false sense of security, and mostly just harrasses and annoys regular people who now cannot bring a beverage on the plane and have to dump their carry on luggage.
If I was a terrorist and I wanted to cause a midair accident there are several things I could do if I didn't care about my own life. And if the security people are only looking for middle easterners I would use that to my advantage as well.
Even without bringing anything on board, a passenger could open a door in flight and cause the safety ramp to deploy.
They could wear clothes made out of highly flamable materials and start a fire in the lavetory.
You could use some natural toxins that would not show up in a bomb check like animal venom. Imagine what the sharp edge of a paperclip that was rubbed against a poison dart frog would do somebody.
You could re-tread your shoes with a plastic that is benign and would be undetectable under examination as being anything dangerous, but that is made out of a material that releases toxic fumes when burned.
You could get several people to bring relatively benign substances on board and cause a chemical fire, or common household products that when mixed can create chlorine gas.
Sugar is a good one since when mixed with a stabilizer and an oxidiser it becomes an explosive. Something as simple as salt peter and sugar mixed together becomes explosivly flamable.
Even without getting onto a plane you could find a covert way to place somethi
I completly disagree with those assertions. There are always going to be people who want something for nothing, but the problem here is the various copy protection schemes that the game companies are using.
They cause problems on peoples machines and in some cases they break them. Anybody who's ever been stuck with starforce drivers, long after they uninstalled the game that put them there can appreciate that.
Back in the day you could install a game to your hard drive and play it from the hard drive. In fact, a hard drive wasn't used to store the game long term, it was instead a way to speed up retreival. Then they made the games install to the hard drive but still required the CD/DVD to be inserted in the drive. Then they started adding the various product keys and serial numbers so that people who lost the instruction booklet or threw the game box out are hosed when they go to reinstall the game. Then on top of all of that they started doing internet authentication like in Quake 4 where the game checks in with a server. Then you have your starforces and various other mechanisms that fundamentally alter the driver structure in windows and prevent some people from running the game.
The problem is that we didn't drop one thing for another, instead they keep piling it all on top of each other. If I'm going to be required to have the DVD in the drive to play, then whey do I need to waste 6GB of hard drive space? If I have to use a product key then why do I need the disk inserted?
To really put this in perspective consider the pirated alternative.
I can buy a game like Fear, and have to jump through all those hoops or I can download it off a newsgroup after some hacking team removed all the DRM.
The people who pirate these games don't have to put up with all that crap, they just remove the protection. So the only people left stuck with all of these anti piracy measures are the paying customers.
Why should I pay $50 for a game that treats me like a criminal and locks me out of functions of my own computer, when I could get the same game free minus the headache?
There are independant and art house games available on the PS2. You just have to look around.
Then how can a universe 15billion years old grow in size to 180billion light years? I mean assuming the big bang is correct then that's 90 billion light years to the center of the universe which is still 75 billion light years farther than light could have traveled in 15 billion years.
Going by those numbers the matter at the edges of the universe traveled there faster than the light from the big bang could have, violating Einsteins theory of general relativity.
To put it another way, if the universe existed in the same singularity and then exploded out ward at the speed of light for 15 billion years then it could be 30 billion lightyears wide. Anything that traveled out from the center farther would have to be travelling faster than the speed of light.
I've heard these arguments before and in some cases they have truth to them. I could say this about a game like Altered Beast, which when it came out on the Genesis was sold on it's graphics not it's game play. So when the draw was the graphics, and now those graphics are dated, there is no draw.
Not all games get their fun from graphics though. Why is it that every system and cellphone has an Arkanoid type game? Because Arkanoid is fun to play and requires no time commitment. Play and put it down, no logging out or spending hours leveling your chracter.
Castlevania 1, 2, and 3 on the NES were all excellent games because the gameplay was both challenging and rewarding. You kept playing to see what would happen next, what would the next boss look like? And in their own way, the graphics and sound contributed to it.
Sometimes less is more. One of the charming aspects of the old 8 bit games is that the rasterized rendering engines relied on simple block like textures repeated and varied to form the game world. This was cruder than bitmapped graphics but it forced you to use your imagination more. The box art and the user manuals for the game is where the art was. Those told you what the game was supposed to look like.
Any 10 year old can loose themselves in the world of Legend of Zelda with it's water falls and dangerous ascent to mount doom with it's falling boulders, and explore an entire world. And the map that came with the game showed you what that world was really like. So when you played the game you didn't see raster blocks stacked end on end, you saw woods and rivers. And since your mind was filling in so much, the real world, and hence real world realism, could never possibly be as fantastic as the one in your head.
There is no better example of this than reading a good book. You have nothing to go on but your imagination and the words of the author. Any bookworm here can tell you that the movie never lives up to the book. As fantastic as Peter Jacksons movies were, they can never capture the raw fantasy of reading the books themselves.
So rather than be disappointed by playing older games, they remind me of the shortcomings of newer games. As the graphics become more and more realistic, the imagination and fantasy elements took a back burner to the eye candy.
I can't look at a full moon in a clear sky to this day, without remembering the opening cinematics for Ninja Gaiden. And I absolutely lost myself in the world of Castlevania. In particular, Simons Quest was especially fulfilling to play over and over to get the different endings. I wanted to live in that world, and playing the game was the closest I could come to it.
Some people like nice rendering and graphics, they prefer photo realism to impressionism. Some people like Monet and some people just see little paint daubs.
The old games that are worth saving, are still completly viable games that continue to hold my attention and I only wish there were more games that sucked you in so bad that you dreamed about them.
Why are they defacing a NASA website? Different government agency, different government, different continent. We are over there trying to broker a peace deal. If some hacker has a beef with Lebanon then take it out on Israel.
Both sides are wrong.
The guys firing rockets into Israel are wearing plain clothes and firing from residential neighborhoods. They know Israel is going to immediately retaliate, and they know that when they do, that residential neighborhood is going to become a smoking wreck full of dead bodies. This will in turn make Israel look like they are baby killers and soul less and re-inforce the muslim sentiments that Israel needs to be destroyed. They know that Israel doesn't have the troops to fight a ground war and that the only response they can make is with their airforce. And they exploit this to force Israel to kill innocent people. If anybody should be pissed it should be the people of Lebanon. If I saw a rocket truck parking in front of my apartment I would be telling them where to fuck off to. And the terrorists certainly know that Israel will strike back yet they continue to attack from residential areas. The reason is they are fighting the only way they can. If they wore uniforms and attacked on the open battlefield they wouldn't stand a chance. So they are using the devils logic and fighting the only fight they can, knowing full well that innocent people are going to be killed because of their actions.
And Israel has equiped their armed forces in such a way that they use small groups of special forces backed up by overwhelming air power to defend themselves. They don't have enough people to go in on the ground and in any case they are fighting an enemy who dresses in street clothes and can blend into the wood work. The rules of Geneva don't apply here and it's not a conventional war. The enemy could be anybody because they don't wear uniforms and attack from everywhere. So Israel does the only thing it can and they attack back, even knowing that they are going to kill innocent people because it's the only thing that Israel can do.
You can comment on who's right and who's wrong from the safety of the USA all you want. But the fact of the matter is that if someone were firing rockets at US cities from Mexico or Cuba you can be sure that people would be up in arms demanding retaliation. You can't expect the Israelis to just stand back and take it!
I'm so sick of hearing about cease fires that are broken, and a new peace process that ultimately falls to shit, and suicide bombers, and tanks rolling through Gaza. Even when they weren't at war it was still a daily war. I'm so sick of it that I wish they would just get it over with. Get the fight out of your system, go to war, re-learn how truly horrible and inhumane it is to kill your neighbors. And maybe when enough people have died, and the site of blood is everywhere, maybe then the offers of peace will be real.
War sucks, people die, the innocent always suffer the most. But is living a civil life with daily bombings and rocket attacks any better?
Get it over with.
Hey he did more living in his 60 years than most people do in their lives. And while he died with money and probably with a roof over his head, many of the people he screwed over at enron have no pensions and won't have such comforts when their time comes.
Screw Ken Lay. I hope the worms don't gag.
The problem with police is that they deal with criminals all day and after awhile they forget most people are not criminals. If you are around a certain group of people all of the time and that's all you see, the brain associates that with reality. And the reality for a cop is that everybody is a criminal.
Step 1. Create the internet, make it free, and get people to incorporate it into every facet of their lives.
Step 2. Mine the data and use it to silence your foes, prosecute for thought crimes, and manipulate the masses.
Step 3. Profit.
I've used a C610 laptop for 5 years. Any of their laptops with a "dock" connector have these options and it has more to do with dual monitor setups than it does some kind of super dock with a high end graphics card.
The C610 is a POS 1.2ghz P3 with 256MB ram and 20GB hard disk but the dock has PCI slots so you could put a respectable video card in it. Same with any other dock with expansion slots.
So what's the big deal? Why is this newsworthy?
Bandwidth is money. And ISP's offer their services with the idea in mind that people are going to utilize their connection 24x7. If people start turning their high speed connections into paid services and re-selling then the bandwidth useage goes up and the ISP's are going to do something to curtail it. Either limiting connections, speeds, or raising prices.
Yeah I am suprised at how laid back a lot of sites are with their billing. I mean it's their sole revenue source and they don't want to back it up to tape unless there is an upgrade. Still though the system usually works well. I can count the number of times I've heard of lost billing on one hand.
The more likely scenario is someone in the billing group needs a file resent or a ticket is opened that requires us to look at the raw records and the original files are long gone. Some of these sites are generating 15GB of billing a week and the disks only hold onto it so long.
What a lot of people don't realize is the equipment that handles call processing and billing, and such, is ancient. Even new equipment is built using old standards. A lot of the billing equipment runs on 9GB disks, the MSC's have the computing power of a 600mhz power pc, 9600baud modems are still the norm for connection, or a x.25 connection. They use old hardware and old standards. And it works fabulously. It's old but it's stuck around this long because it works.
I remember when the soft switches started popping up and everybody was scared that they were going to take over the market, then low and behold they are un-reliable.
At least some of the newer products like the E911 and some of the products based on VxWorks platforms are semi modern.
www.savetheglaciers.org
Excerpt
Ice Kills
Every year, thousands of people die from winter weather and storms. Glaciers kill hundreds of people each year in a frozen slow moving death march. Exposure to the bitter cold of the arctic and Antarctic can kill a man faster than even the hottest deserts on the planet. The frozen wastelands that make up the poles of this planet are the most inhospitable places on the earth. Nearly devoid of life and remote.
Every year, billions of dollars are spent dealing with winter and cold weather problems. Ice storms cost power companies millions of dollars in repairs to power lines breaking under the weight of ice. Thousands of people die in automobile accidents, costing millions of dollars. Blizzards and winter storms that rival hurricanes batter and beat against houses, ships, and the fragile eco system of the northern and southern latitudes.
Millions of miles of land are covered in a suffocating layer of ice several miles thick. Land that could be used for farming to feed the hungry. Land that could house the homeless. Land that could provide new industry and natural resources. This land sits un-used, in a frozen wasteland utterly devoid of life.
So remind me again why we want to keep the planets thermostat set at frigid?
Al Gore is telling us that the world is going to end for us in 10 years and we are going to live like cavemen because the snow caps will melt. Al Gore says we should cut back our emissions and live life as a "carbon neutral" society.
Well I say we shouldn't be trying to prevent the planet from warming, we should be encouraging it. Plants LOVE greenhouses and thrive in high CO2 environments. Everybody is always talking about feeding the world and ending world hunger and poverty. And I think global warming can help accomplish those goals
In my experience this doesn't happen all that often. Rarely they will find a problem with the MSC billing 911 calls or calls to voicemail but these are quickly taken care of.
More often than not the problem is that customers get free airtime when there is a billing problem. I see CAMEL (prepaid) phones being able to make free calls thanks to a bug about 10X more than I see free calls being charged.
You work in the billing department so you aren't getting all of the data. The MSC sends GCDR data with all sorts of useful information like LAC and Cell ID, on and off hook signalling, etc. Records are even generated for cell handovers in which no calls are made.
Then the billing system pulls these records off the SDM (or they are pushed with outbound billing) and begins to strip out everything not related to billing the call. And once this is done that data is gone. However a local copy is kept on the SDM or possibly on backup tape and if a problem is found it's a simple matter to resend the file or extract the data.
Sometimes changes to the MSC or HLR can cause some calls to go through for free or other calls that should be free to be charged time. Tmobile, like most providers, will credit airtime back to your phone if a mistake is made. This is business as usual and anybody who answers the phone will have the ability to do so.
Someone had said that acting like a jerk get's results. Well the squeaky gear gets the oil, that is true, but your just as likely to be given the shaft.
I've been on both sides of customer service in telecomm and retail for many years and the best way to motivate someone to help you is to be relaxed and appreciative. Customer reps talk to pissed off customers all day long, they are used to it and acting like a jerk on the phone won't even make them lift an eyebrow. But they almost never get praise or a thanks for their job. After talking to angry people all day, the person who is polite and appreciative will stand out.
If someone is angry at you or your job, getting angry back does nothing but assure a bad call. If someone pushes and you push back, neither moves. If you don't resist and you don't push back, if you withdraw, apologize for the problem that is upseting them , and make an honest effort to help, or be helped, it turns devils into angels, and the worst customer service experiences into the best.
I always make it a point to give praise when I'm talking to somebody if they did a good job, because they almost never get that. If someone does right by you then talk to their supervisor, let them know you appreciate it. And if the person is just being a booger and your getting no where, let them know you aren't looking for a fight, you are calling for help and appreciate anybody who can give it to you.
First off the Logica RIG sucks.
Secondly the mobile sends an IMSI when it attatches to the network, the IMEI is like your phones serial number which the carrier doesn't really care about. The IMSI is what attatches to your HLR profile.
And phones do work in airplanes and any cellphone anywhere, on the ground, or in the air, can talk to multiple BTS stations at the same time. This is how they track the location of 911 calls, by comparing the signal delay between multiple BTS's that are in contact with your phone and triangulating the location with an MLC. The BSC is the brains behind the radio operation and it constantly monitors the signal strength of your phone and picks the closest radio for you to attatch to. As you start getting closer to another cell, like on an airplane, the system sees a drop in the signal to noise ration and begins to initiate a hand over to the new radio. The BSC handles all of this seemlesly in the background and instructs your phone which radio to talk to.
The reason they don't want you using cell phones in an airplane is becasue of possible interference to the cockpit instrumentation. Planes navigate by radio, using an azimuth to plot a course using radio beacons. Any radio interference can cause an error and potentially put the plane off course.
You are right though that it's nearly impossible to clone a GSM phone because the system will not allow you to be attatched in two places at once. I don't believe it will kick both phones off the network though. It would treat it like a forced handover at the worst, and at the least it wouldn't allow the cloned mobile to attatch if the other phone was already on the network.
And lastly, if you think your phone might be cloned but your not sure....DONT GO TO THE POLICE. Do you think they are going to launch an investigation because you have calls on your phone bill that look suspicious? That in itself isn't evidence of a crime. You need to call the 611 Tmobile UK call center and get someone from customer service to help and escelate up to Tier2 if you have to. If people filed police reports every time they disagreed with a phone bill.......
Okay so in answer to the posters question:
When you power your mobile on it attatches to the network and is added to the local switches VLR (visitor location register) which is a database of who is on what switch and what radio and base station they are on. The MSC (mobile switching center) then sends a request to the HLR (home location register) which is like a VLR except instead of tracking what radio they are on, it tracks which MSC they are on. So if someone calls your phone, the system does an HLR lookup to see what MSC you are on, and then the call is sent to your current location.
If someone were cloning this persons mobile then they would be attatched to the network 'twice'. This is not allowed and it would cause the 2nd mobile to be unable to attatch to the network.
Think of it like this, your SIM card contains an IMSI (international mobile subscriber identifier) which is a long number that corresponds to your account. When you are attatched to the network it is by SIM/IMSI and the HLR notes which VLR you are in. If a 2nd phone tried to attatch with the same SIM/IMSI information then one of two things would happen because someone can't be in two VLR's at the same time. Either the new SIM would be rejected because the old one did not do a handover to the new VLR. Or the old SIM would be removed from it's current VLR and attempt to re-attach, which would kick off the other SIM/IMSI back and forth.
So if you leave your mobile powered up 24x7 your making it very difficult for someone else to get on the same network and pretend to be you because you can't be in two places at once. And as long as your sim is inserted and your phone is powered on you are attatched to the network, whether you make a call or not.
If you are still concerned have Tmobile set up a call trace on one of these calls or check the IMEI of the calling phone. IF it's in Europe they will have an EIR which keeps track of the IMEI (international mobile equipment identifier) which is like a serial number for the phone. Even if someone cloned your SIM they can't clone your IMEI so it will be different.
With a call trace they can track the LAC and CellID of anycall placed and tell you where it's originating.
It's the 545 hours in one month that looked suspicious to the AOL rep. You have to look out for fraud or identity theft and when the account looks unusual and the person is calling to close it get's angry it can cause a big misunderstanding. When your on the spot like that thinking that you might have a stolen account on your hands and possibly an impersonator on the phone while at the same time trying to treat them like a customer while you work it all out, that could account for his actions.
Like I said though if AOl would just let people cancel on the web without calling an 800 number they wouldn't have these problems.
And abusing a CSR rep, even if they are in the wrong, does nobody any good.
If you read the transcript it sounds like the AOl rep doesn't believe the guy is who he says he is. IE If the account wasn't being used any more why 500 hours in the last month after a year of little to no activity?
It sounds like a misunderstanding. The rep was suspicious of the person calling in and the caller got snarky.
If AOl would just let people cancel from their pc instead of making them call in, and if customers wouldn't act like A$$holes then problems like these could be avoided.
So the system uses sensors to detect the camera and then it shines a white light at the camera. Why not the black box version that detects the systems camera sensors and hits it up with infrared or white light to block it from blocking? Touche technology! People need to realize that any technology can be overcome with better technology. It's like Alice in Wonderland, she's running as fast as she can just to stand still. Like radar. Police use radar speeders use radar detectors police use radar detector detectors speeders squak random radar energy at the radar detector detectors.
I remember picking up "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" in junior high thinking it was a CYOA book. Both books had similar artwork and were similar in size and it was in the CYOA section of the library.
:)
I got it home and was amazed at how few choices there were, right up to page 20 when I figured out it was a real book, and by then I couldn't stop reading. Then I read the entire series.
A happy mistake.
I don't know much about the IP internet side of TMO, it's outside my area. But I can tell you SMS only handles SMS. It's a dedicated node on the SS7 side of the network. That isn't to say that TMO doesn't have something on the IP side that acts as a relay. It would make sense to do it that way since many of the phones that they offer AIM service with don't have dedicated clients.
Basicly GPRS allows your phone to bypass the MSC and go straight to IP land. Previously you could do a CSD (circuit switched data) call that would route the call the same as a voice call, through the MSC, ot a device called an IWF which uses a bank of DSP's to convert the call to ISDN. From there it would be sent to a device called a CVX1800, which is where your IP is assigned and you are authenticated. And from there it would go to a WAP server which would actually host the Tzones and act as a gateway to the internet. This method is still used as a fall back if GPRS is down.
With GPRS though your call is given dedicated radio timeslots called PDTCH's that route directly from the radio network into whats called an SGSN which is a serving GPRS support node. From there it has links to an HLR which is a Home location register where you SIM and phone information is stored, this is the authentication part. From there the SGSN authenticats and then attatches your mobile to the GPRS network and sends it out to a GGSN which is basicly a glorified gateway. Then the GGSN talks to the WAP server and other Tzones stuff.
So they can use GPRS to handle some of the SMS functionality like MMS picture messaging etc but it still ultimately goes through and SMS box.
I can tell you 100% that the SMS device is not relaying AIM or Yahoo. If your phone has limited functionality then TMO's internet backbone might be relaying the messages, but their internet and Tzones based servers are completely seperate from any callP side devices like the MSC/HLR/SGSN etc.
I have a T809 and have experience as a TMO user as well and I have to sign in to my phone, it contains the AIM pocket and Yahoo pocket software etc and actually logs into the AIM/Yahoo server. I know this because it kicks me out from my desktop because it won't let you log in twice. They keep a continuous GPRS/EDGE connection up as long as I am logged in.
SMS is handled by a completely different box on the callP network that has nothing to do with any GPRS or internet functionality. It's a periphrial of the MSC and deals in the SS7 world of telephony, not the IP world of internet.
SMS is only used for SMS. When you are GPRS attatched and logged into AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, etc you are connected to whatever services server, not to an SMS box. You make it sound like they are doing some kind of relay.
SMS is meant for one way communication and has a limited text length not to mention it isn't always instant.
If you are logged into any IM on your TMO phone your GPRS attatched and it will swap over if you get a phone call and then swap back.
Trust me, I work on the network.
Anybody who wants your car will find a way to take it. Whether it's lock and key, or encrypted tokens. The keys just keep honest people honest.
Even if you locked the doors with a physical key, had a car alarm with tilt sensor, used the club, and had software protection, someone could still bypass all of that and steal your car. But it may not be worth the risk or the effort.
The trick is not to be the weakest link. Yeah someone can get around a car alarm, or cut the club off your steering column. But if you have taken reasonable steps to secure your car, and it's going to be a lot of trouble to get into, a thief is more likely to take a crack at the next car.
If I really wanted to take someones car easy, I wouldn't bother decrypting and breaking in. I'd
A. Wait for them to get into the car and then jack them at gunpoint in which case I get the car and the keys but then they can call the police right away, unless I kidnapp them or kill them, either way it complicates things.
B. Follow them home and break into their garage when they are asleep. You would not believe how many people leave their keys in the car in their garage or how many people leave their cars parked in the driveway, unlocked, with open access to the garage door opener. The weakest link will almost always be the person.
If you don't want to loose your car then be smart. Don't leave your car unlocked. Don't leave the keys in the car. If your car has security, use it and make you a less attractive mark than your neighbor.
The time it takes you to click the buttons isn't factored in. It's whether your ear can tell the difference between two quick down or a quick up down a few miliseconds apart. The time it takes you to click has no affect.
And all the test really judges is your ability to process sounds that are rapidly strung together. Anybody who can understand what the Pikey is saying in "Snatch" should have no problem with this test.