If I was an ISP targeted by this, my answer would be :
"We are confident that the cost of piracy are a mere fraction of the stratospheric sums suggested by the music industry, and negligibly small when set against their vast annual revenues. We therefore feel we can not support such an act."
What firmware was this with? I seem to recall dd-wrt supporting overclocking of the cpu, and remember reports of people running stable on 250 mhz (from 200) with no extra cooling.
Also, it might be a max speed difference between the firmwares (I can think of three in my head : stock, ddwrt and tomato)
I think you're spot on with that guess. For example, Red Hot Chili Pepper's cd release of Stadium Arcadium have been especially critisized for being too compressed (a result of the loudness war. Someone at hometheaterforum.com forum created a comparison between the CD and the LP (which had a much better mastering) release of the album, where you can clearly see the difference.
Now, the norm for most music released now is to mangle it in that way. And the audience is used to hear it that way too. So mp3 compression adding more artifacts to it and removing tones, thus mangling the music further, might sound "better" for a lot of the audience, because that's what they're trained to hear.
That might might explain why my cult didn't seem to work.
You see, I had this wonderful plan. I was going to start a cult with the power to summon giant killer robots. The idea behind it was that the cult would take over the world, or at least grow mighty and powerful (shouldn't be too hard if you can get your hands on giant killer robots), and then funnel the world's resources into research on two fields : 1. Killer robots and 2. Time travel. When these goals were met, the cult leadership would then send these killer robots back in time to when they were needed.
But for some reason unknown to me, this have never happened. I have not gotten any killer robots, and I have so far failed to take over the world. I had reasoned thus that time travel was absolutely impossible, but your theory put things in a different light. Maybe this have happened many times, but time have untangled itself again, and it thus continued to never happen.
TPM would solve at least part of this problem. But I've been holding my breath for years now, and have to admit i've almost forgotten all about it by now..
TPM by itself is not evil, and can help stuff some large holes that the current security model have. However, since the only thing that was focused on when it came out was how it could lock us out of our own computers, absolutely nothing at all happened.. And we're still suffering from those security problems it could easily have fixed.
That won't work if the attacker use a hardware keylogger (which can be inserted under a laptop's keyboard - how often do you check there?).
An easier way to checksum bootloader is via a tamper-proof hash stored in the encrypted area. But that require that the computer is actually telling you the truth, which is doubtful if they already went far enough to change the bootloader. But then again, your idea also require that the computer is honest... They could have replaced the bios itself, or made a small bootloader that worked its magic fast and silent, and then proceeded like a normal boot, starting from usb like bios would do..
I was thinking of this a few months ago, actually, and the only solution I found was to either always have it with you (impractical), or store it in a trustworthy safe (could also be slightly impractical to haul around). And still you have to be certain of your environment (spy cameras, tempest type snooping, in some cases recording the sound of your key clicks...).
Also, if you want it connected to a network, well darnit, you got another can of worms.. First, you need to update it, or else its vulnerable fast. Second, you need to trust the OS providers and the actual update. Could someone have stolen the signing key and faked an update? Is the company / employees really trustworthy? Are you sure the developer's machine isn't hacked and is used to spread dangerous code?
I tried to make a system where I (if I had a lot of resources) couldn't possibly find any way around. I just couldn't find any. All of them had a potential loophole.
My conclusion was : Pick an approperiate level of paranoia and go from there. And never expect it to be 100% secure.
I tried using osx for coding a while back, but stumbled into a rather big problem for me. Keyboard shortcuts. I'm using a lot of shortcuts, like ctrl+arrow to move between words, home/end to jump to beginning and end of line, and so on.
However, the standard shortcuts on osx are completely different, and I never got used to them. I also couldn't find a way to change the shortcuts to what I was used to. I tried for almost half a year, but I couldn't get accustomed to the new shortcuts, and I didn't find a way to change them to my liking.
I play a tank, and I notice that many people seem "overgeared" compared to their skill level. That means that they open with their big hitters at the very start of the combat, ignore threat reduction talents / skills, run away from tank when they get aggro, and so on. That stuff worked fine when they were in worse gear, because they did so little damage. But now, they can make a tank's job impossible..
People gaining the gear the "old way" would have already spent countless hours raiding, and would know that stuff by heart.
So yes, blizzard giving out epics like they were candy IS annoying, and I think it's a large reason for why there are so few people playing tanking roles now.
actually, opera is in some cases the best work browser. Especially when your employer goes el cheapo on your ass (1ghz win2k pc with 256 mb ram and biig AV system running), and you regulary have 3-15 tabs / pages up at any one time. Opera was a lifesaver.
Err right.. I tried Age of Conan this weekend. 3 install DVD's plus 2 GB in patches to download. 25 GB installed on disk. Great stuff.
It still told me to go to microsoft.com, find a specific version of DirectX 9.0c (think it was marked with "October 2007" or similar), download that, and install it... Your point were?
I have been thinking a bit about a skill based leveling system.. Where your level doesn't show how much time you wasted on the game, but rather how well you can play your character.
The basic idea is that you kill mobs and do quests to get gear and get experience playing the class. Then you go to an arena-alike area where you have to defeat a specific mob. First levels will be rather easy, but it will steadily be harder and harder. At the end you not only need the best gear, but will also have to have a deep insight into your class. You can still have talent points and spells for each level, and level dependant armor and similar.
The first rounds would be really easy ones, maybe starting (as in WoW's start areas) non-agressive weak mobs, and then go up from there. The last fights should be akin to soloing Heroic bosses.
One important point to MMO's, gear building. Now that can be an art, and can also make a huge difference. Only when your class, playstyle, talents (or skills), spells and gear are focused on the same goal will you have greatness. Actual playing skill is just a part of the overall picture.
But the best system of all is one where your new characteristics are a tradeoff, and every player's capabilities remain somewhat balanced.
There is a game I played earlier that did this extremely well (in my opinion) : ThreadSpace: Hyperbol. The items you can modify your ship with always cuts down on a different part. +50 to speed? Then it's -50 to some other stat. You level up, but that only allows you to buy greater modifications (100 instead of 50 for example). So as you build up your strength in one area, you will have a weakness in a different area.
It's a great game, but never had enough players for a game based on online gameplay. And nowadays it's hardly anyone online there.. Too bad, the game itself is brilliant. Every action have a countermeasure. Every weapon you use can be turned against you by a good player. Fights between two people can last a few seconds, or go into minutes long epic battles, depending on how good the players are.
According to what I've read they haven't been thinking too hard on that yet, but the protocol says that all messages need to be cryptologically verifiable from a user on a server. That alone will hopefully make spam less of an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
It is in the interest of the bot admins to respect it, since step 2 is usually full-out block of the ip's / user agent.
There is a hack to make Flash stay fullscreen when it lose focus, but that involves some hex editing (or trusting someone providing a patch)
More info : http://lifehacker.com/5419028/keep-flash-videos-in-full-screen-on-dual-monitors
Then it's good that android phones have hardware buttons!
4-way trackball(or in some phones, pad) + button, plus at least search + menu button games can use as they see fit. And that's on all android phones.
Even the crappy htc hero trackball is 10x better than iphone for gaming IMO.
If I was an ISP targeted by this, my answer would be :
"We are confident that the cost of piracy are a mere fraction of the stratospheric sums suggested by the music industry, and negligibly small when set against their vast annual revenues. We therefore feel we can not support such an act."
CCleaner have an option of safe delete, and an option for cleaning free space too (aka overwrite with gibberish).
I did this for a while, but now I prefer privoxy. It's faster, more flexible, and generally easier to set up.
http://www.privoxy.org/user-manual/quickstart.html for a quickstart.
For just blocking domains, edit the user.action file and put in akin to this:
{ +block }
www.ad.example1.com
ad.example2.com
ads.galore.example.com
etc.example.com
What firmware was this with? I seem to recall dd-wrt supporting overclocking of the cpu, and remember reports of people running stable on 250 mhz (from 200) with no extra cooling.
Also, it might be a max speed difference between the firmwares (I can think of three in my head : stock, ddwrt and tomato)
Actually, the movie is not complete fiction. Greatly exaggerated, but not complete fiction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae is pretty interesting reading.
I tried to run it, but it doesn't do anything.
So it seems like they've actually succeeded at simulating a cat. Good job!
I think you're spot on with that guess. For example, Red Hot Chili Pepper's cd release of Stadium Arcadium have been especially critisized for being too compressed (a result of the loudness war. Someone at hometheaterforum.com forum created a comparison between the CD and the LP (which had a much better mastering) release of the album, where you can clearly see the difference.
Now, the norm for most music released now is to mangle it in that way. And the audience is used to hear it that way too. So mp3 compression adding more artifacts to it and removing tones, thus mangling the music further, might sound "better" for a lot of the audience, because that's what they're trained to hear.
Or alternative 3 : http://channelate.com/comics/2008-12-17-dont-believe-everything-you-hear.jpg
That might might explain why my cult didn't seem to work.
You see, I had this wonderful plan. I was going to start a cult with the power to summon giant killer robots. The idea behind it was that the cult would take over the world, or at least grow mighty and powerful (shouldn't be too hard if you can get your hands on giant killer robots), and then funnel the world's resources into research on two fields : 1. Killer robots and 2. Time travel. When these goals were met, the cult leadership would then send these killer robots back in time to when they were needed.
But for some reason unknown to me, this have never happened. I have not gotten any killer robots, and I have so far failed to take over the world. I had reasoned thus that time travel was absolutely impossible, but your theory put things in a different light. Maybe this have happened many times, but time have untangled itself again, and it thus continued to never happen.
Addendum to my own post :
TPM would solve at least part of this problem. But I've been holding my breath for years now, and have to admit i've almost forgotten all about it by now..
TPM by itself is not evil, and can help stuff some large holes that the current security model have.
However, since the only thing that was focused on when it came out was how it could lock us out of our own computers, absolutely nothing at all happened.. And we're still suffering from those security problems it could easily have fixed.
That won't work if the attacker use a hardware keylogger (which can be inserted under a laptop's keyboard - how often do you check there?).
An easier way to checksum bootloader is via a tamper-proof hash stored in the encrypted area. But that require that the computer is actually telling you the truth, which is doubtful if they already went far enough to change the bootloader. But then again, your idea also require that the computer is honest... They could have replaced the bios itself, or made a small bootloader that worked its magic fast and silent, and then proceeded like a normal boot, starting from usb like bios would do..
I was thinking of this a few months ago, actually, and the only solution I found was to either always have it with you (impractical), or store it in a trustworthy safe (could also be slightly impractical to haul around). And still you have to be certain of your environment (spy cameras, tempest type snooping, in some cases recording the sound of your key clicks...).
Also, if you want it connected to a network, well darnit, you got another can of worms.. First, you need to update it, or else its vulnerable fast. Second, you need to trust the OS providers and the actual update. Could someone have stolen the signing key and faked an update? Is the company / employees really trustworthy? Are you sure the developer's machine isn't hacked and is used to spread dangerous code?
I tried to make a system where I (if I had a lot of resources) couldn't possibly find any way around. I just couldn't find any. All of them had a potential loophole.
My conclusion was : Pick an approperiate level of paranoia and go from there. And never expect it to be 100% secure.
I tried to put ads on a wiki I was running. Small stuff, maybe 100 visitors per day. Was hoping it could pay for its own hosting at least.
So far, in around 3 years, I've earned about 10 dollars. Total. Need 100 dollars for google to pay it out.
This was a wiki about a strategy game, so visitors might be more computer savy than regular web users.
So, you'll either need a lot more visitors, more gullible users, or a combination.
Ad views : 250.000 - clicks : 65
I tried using osx for coding a while back, but stumbled into a rather big problem for me. Keyboard shortcuts. I'm using a lot of shortcuts, like ctrl+arrow to move between words, home/end to jump to beginning and end of line, and so on.
However, the standard shortcuts on osx are completely different, and I never got used to them. I also couldn't find a way to change the shortcuts to what I was used to. I tried for almost half a year, but I couldn't get accustomed to the new shortcuts, and I didn't find a way to change them to my liking.
Strange, it's like reading a mirror of my own thoughts. And, it seems like several other people have had the same experience.
This looks like a deep flaw in modern education.
I play a tank, and I notice that many people seem "overgeared" compared to their skill level. That means that they open with their big hitters at the very start of the combat, ignore threat reduction talents / skills, run away from tank when they get aggro, and so on. That stuff worked fine when they were in worse gear, because they did so little damage. But now, they can make a tank's job impossible..
People gaining the gear the "old way" would have already spent countless hours raiding, and would know that stuff by heart.
So yes, blizzard giving out epics like they were candy IS annoying, and I think it's a large reason for why there are so few people playing tanking roles now.
Pain, suffering and a lot of cash?
Just because im downloading it now, I want to mention that android sdk is freely avaliable for windows, mac and linux. Both 32 and 64bit :)
actually, opera is in some cases the best work browser. Especially when your employer goes el cheapo on your ass (1ghz win2k pc with 256 mb ram and biig AV system running), and you regulary have 3-15 tabs / pages up at any one time. Opera was a lifesaver.
Err right.. I tried Age of Conan this weekend. 3 install DVD's plus 2 GB in patches to download. 25 GB installed on disk. Great stuff.
It still told me to go to microsoft.com, find a specific version of DirectX 9.0c (think it was marked with "October 2007" or similar), download that, and install it... Your point were?
I have been thinking a bit about a skill based leveling system.. Where your level doesn't show how much time you wasted on the game, but rather how well you can play your character.
The basic idea is that you kill mobs and do quests to get gear and get experience playing the class. Then you go to an arena-alike area where you have to defeat a specific mob. First levels will be rather easy, but it will steadily be harder and harder. At the end you not only need the best gear, but will also have to have a deep insight into your class. You can still have talent points and spells for each level, and level dependant armor and similar.
The first rounds would be really easy ones, maybe starting (as in WoW's start areas) non-agressive weak mobs, and then go up from there. The last fights should be akin to soloing Heroic bosses.
One important point to MMO's, gear building. Now that can be an art, and can also make a huge difference. Only when your class, playstyle, talents (or skills), spells and gear are focused on the same goal will you have greatness. Actual playing skill is just a part of the overall picture.
But the best system of all is one where your new characteristics are a tradeoff, and every player's capabilities remain somewhat balanced.
There is a game I played earlier that did this extremely well (in my opinion) : ThreadSpace: Hyperbol. The items you can modify your ship with always cuts down on a different part. +50 to speed? Then it's -50 to some other stat. You level up, but that only allows you to buy greater modifications (100 instead of 50 for example). So as you build up your strength in one area, you will have a weakness in a different area.
It's a great game, but never had enough players for a game based on online gameplay. And nowadays it's hardly anyone online there.. Too bad, the game itself is brilliant. Every action have a countermeasure. Every weapon you use can be turned against you by a good player. Fights between two people can last a few seconds, or go into minutes long epic battles, depending on how good the players are.
They are doing something for gmail, docs and similar. They're trying to make them obsolete :)
According to what I've read they haven't been thinking too hard on that yet, but the protocol says that all messages need to be cryptologically verifiable from a user on a server. That alone will hopefully make spam less of an issue.