Nice. It will make those who watch TV happy, and it will make ??AA angry -- I may not really care about the former, but the latter is a GOOD THING(tm).
However, how exactly can this affect the average SlashDot reader? Those of us who would be interested in "pirating" shows already have the capability to do so, and the rest... the rest usually hates TV altogether. Quoting my ex-roommate: "Whoever will bring a TV set here can choose: me or him."
I've found only a single Microsoft product that doesn't suck. Some of their mice were just great. I still have a 7-year old Intellimouse Plus (it did cost as much as if it was made of gold, though), and even after all those years it's still better than most mice I see these days.
Oh, wait... we were talking about software, right?
We can (and do) track *regular* cell phones using cell tower triangulation as well
Yeah. According to a phreaker friend of mine, the average run-of-the-mill cell tower equipment can already track you with the accuracy of around 1m -- and it can be trivially improved to 1cm or better.
The thing is, the cell phone companies put really a lot of effort into claiming such tracking can not be done.
Note that there is a huge difference between "freeware" (gratis pieces of proprietary software, often spyware-laden) and "free software" (no need to explain this here, I hope).
Of course, this distinction won't help the ordinary user, but for you, it's a good rule of thumb: basically everything that comes with source is safe (except some "open source" scams -- if you're paranoid, just check if they use some weird fancy license instead of known-good ones). Of course, it's possible to conceal malicious code, but with the freedom to review and modify, it just doesn't make any sense. On the other hand, gratis pieces of software that don't include the source usually tend to have some strings attached. It may be spyware, may be ads, or perhaps just annoying nag screens -- you shouldn't install anything like this unless you have a reason to think it's ok.
Note that the distros they used were basically just Red Hat variants (RH7.2, 5*RH7.3, RH8.0, 8*RH9, 2*FC1) and Suse (6.3 and 7.2). Suse is very similar to Red Hat, and Red Hat is what my friends call "Microsoft Linux" as it doesn't exactly excel in security.
It would be an interesting thing to see how the other dists would fare. I suspect Debian and Gentoo should survive quite a bit longer than those 3 months. After all, a default minimal Debian Woody installation is 34MB, compared to 0.5GB of Red Hat, and this means you simply don't have that many unnecessary services that can fail.
Well, for the ordinary granny-type user, a web browser and a mail client is all what's important. So, this very move gave them a non-negligible piece of usability.
Not really. The definition of "science" I've been taught includes a requirement of falsifiability. If something lacks any way it could be proved to be false (philosophy, modern religion, etc), it cannot be subjected to scientific methods.
GIMP is pretty modular, this suggestion is plausible. You don't need all the plugins and even most tools to get started. The remainder can be either loaded in the background, or even better, loaded at demand (ie, never in 99% of sessions).
If we could get a window popped up within half a second in the 80s, why would that be impossible in 2004? Of course, GTK is a monstrosity, but it's not that bad. Come on, on a 4Ghz machine you can fit really a lot in that 0.5s...
You can cast as many votes as you want. It's something called approval voting, and it's vastly superior over the old-styled plurality voting as it can address exactly the issue you mentioned.
Of course, there are even better voting systems like Condorcet, although they're many orders of magnitude more complex.
The HTML: 150KB Images: around 700*around 5KB each
So, they're trying to serve 3.5MB big webpage (plus the overhead for every transfer) to the Slashdot horde. As the latter is pretty good at knocking down about any servers,...
It smells like the contest will teach them that splash screens _do_ suck resources after all:p
If it's a planned outage, the watchdogs will be off. Such a setup isn't something that's likely to be something done for just a single machine -- you can't really forget about a system that watches all the laptops in your department.
And for unplanned problems, well, the attention is needed anyway.
Simple. Just have your server ping the laptop every second and launch an alarm if the connection goes down.
Unless you knowingly turn the watchdog off, I can't see a way to work around this that doesn't involve meddling with the server or alarm -- if you use some secure ping like choosing a random number and running some private key cryptographic tool on both ends.
I'm personally using PINE, too. Actually, I've been thinking about migrating to Mutt because of freeness issues, but never managed to get myself to actually do that.
But, for all the non-geek users, Thunderbird is the way to go. It's what I've installed for my boss during the last big spyware disaster he had, and that's what I'm installing for all the other non-savvy users around who ask me for help. And somehow, not a single one of them complained yet, even though they're the kind of people who complain all the time when even an icon they got used to gets changed.
If a judge accepts a bribe, and someone else spreads the news about this around -- this doesn't change the fact that the judge did everything he could to hide that. In other words, he did that quietly, it was just the others who were loud.
This is a RC1 release -- it is supposed to be tested by just the current userbase. RC2 will get a semi-loud announcement to get wider testing, while the final version will be the one which is supposed to get all the publicity.
There is exactly a soft difference between freeware and free software (quoting someone from debian-devel), and it turns out that this difference is about as big as the one between democracy and people's democracy. Which in turn, is about as big as the one between a chair and an electric chair...
First, a LOT of spyware masquerade as spyware-removal tools, and indeed, they do count as anti-spyware tools as they remove some _other_ spyware.
Second, we already heard several times of well-known bona fide tools having whitelists for some of malware. Sometimes, it's because of a lawsuit (Gator/Claria), sometimes because of a business relationship, sometimes...
In other words, they don't even need the undercover kind of work many virus makers were suspected of doing.
Let's see... it's a 16h trip vs 12.6GB/s. With 25GB per disk, you'll need to take 29k disks on the plane. I would say that 30 disks weight around 1kg (it's an estimation by anal extraction, I don't have any scales at hand).
So... in order to match the bandwidth, you would need to haul around 2 tons of disks per plane. The cargo capacity of a 747 is around 30 tons (if I read the brochure I found correctly).
In other words, we already have 1/15th of that -- and the blue ray is _not_ a deployed technology yet. If you use DVDs instead, the 747 still comes ahead, but for ordinary CDs, you would need three jumbo jets doing the route...
They're using a multi-tiered system as well. The binary installed by KaZaa itself does _not_ include outright spyware -- what it does include, are spyware _installers_. This way, they can claim they don't include any spyware and are technically right.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice. It will make those who watch TV happy, and it will make ??AA angry -- I may not really care about the former, but the latter is a GOOD THING(tm).
However, how exactly can this affect the average SlashDot reader? Those of us who would be interested in "pirating" shows already have the capability to do so, and the rest... the rest usually hates TV altogether. Quoting my ex-roommate: "Whoever will bring a TV set here can choose: me or him."
I've found only a single Microsoft product that doesn't suck. Some of their mice were just great. I still have a 7-year old Intellimouse Plus (it did cost as much as if it was made of gold, though), and even after all those years it's still better than most mice I see these days.
Oh, wait... we were talking about software, right?
or 5. they had some assistance from the clerks. You know, if you get paid next to nothing, it doesn't take much to make you look the other way.
We can (and do) track *regular* cell phones using cell tower triangulation as well
Yeah. According to a phreaker friend of mine, the average run-of-the-mill cell tower equipment can already track you with the accuracy of around 1m -- and it can be trivially improved to 1cm or better.
The thing is, the cell phone companies put really a lot of effort into claiming such tracking can not be done.
The tidal forces slow down the Earth by 1.4us/day/century.
:p
This quake sped us by 3us/day.
So uhm, it moved a big disaster away by 214 years!
Even better, in the polish version, "read" is left untranslated.
Note that there is a huge difference between "freeware" (gratis pieces of proprietary software, often spyware-laden) and "free software" (no need to explain this here, I hope).
Of course, this distinction won't help the ordinary user, but for you, it's a good rule of thumb: basically everything that comes with source is safe (except some "open source" scams -- if you're paranoid, just check if they use some weird fancy license instead of known-good ones). Of course, it's possible to conceal malicious code, but with the freedom to review and modify, it just doesn't make any sense.
On the other hand, gratis pieces of software that don't include the source usually tend to have some strings attached. It may be spyware, may be ads, or perhaps just annoying nag screens -- you shouldn't install anything like this unless you have a reason to think it's ok.
Note that the distros they used were basically just Red Hat variants (RH7.2, 5*RH7.3, RH8.0, 8*RH9, 2*FC1) and Suse (6.3 and 7.2). Suse is very similar to Red Hat, and Red Hat is what my friends call "Microsoft Linux" as it doesn't exactly excel in security.
It would be an interesting thing to see how the other dists would fare. I suspect Debian and Gentoo should survive quite a bit longer than those 3 months. After all, a default minimal Debian Woody installation is 34MB, compared to 0.5GB of Red Hat, and this means you simply don't have that many unnecessary services that can fail.
Well, for the ordinary granny-type user, a web browser and a mail client is all what's important. So, this very move gave them a non-negligible piece of usability.
Not really. The definition of "science" I've been taught includes a requirement of falsifiability. If something lacks any way it could be proved to be false (philosophy, modern religion, etc), it cannot be subjected to scientific methods.
So... what about writing a P2P app over SMTP, just to clog down the bastards?
If we could get a window popped up within half a second in the 80s, why would that be impossible in 2004? Of course, GTK is a monstrosity, but it's not that bad. Come on, on a 4Ghz machine you can fit really a lot in that 0.5s...
You can cast as many votes as you want. It's something called approval voting, and it's vastly superior over the old-styled plurality voting as it can address exactly the issue you mentioned.
Of course, there are even better voting systems like Condorcet, although they're many orders of magnitude more complex.
The HTML: 150KB
...
:p
Images: around 700*around 5KB each
So, they're trying to serve 3.5MB big webpage (plus the overhead for every transfer) to the Slashdot horde. As the latter is pretty good at knocking down about any servers,
It smells like the contest will teach them that splash screens _do_ suck resources after all
If it's a planned outage, the watchdogs will be off. Such a setup isn't something that's likely to be something done for just a single machine -- you can't really forget about a system that watches all the laptops in your department.
And for unplanned problems, well, the attention is needed anyway.
Yeah, and if the guard believes the guy, that's the biggest (and most common) issue.
For the wireless signal: just have a centralized server decrypt everything, to keep the secret keys locked up nice and tight.
Simple. Just have your server ping the laptop every second and launch an alarm if the connection goes down.
Unless you knowingly turn the watchdog off, I can't see a way to work around this that doesn't involve meddling with the server or alarm -- if you use some secure ping like choosing a random number and running some private key cryptographic tool on both ends.
I'm personally using PINE, too. Actually, I've been thinking about migrating to Mutt because of freeness issues, but never managed to get myself to actually do that.
But, for all the non-geek users, Thunderbird is the way to go. It's what I've installed for my boss during the last big spyware disaster he had, and that's what I'm installing for all the other non-savvy users around who ask me for help. And somehow, not a single one of them complained yet, even though they're the kind of people who complain all the time when even an icon they got used to gets changed.
This is a RC1 release -- it is supposed to be tested by just the current userbase. RC2 will get a semi-loud announcement to get wider testing, while the final version will be the one which is supposed to get all the publicity.
There is exactly a soft difference between freeware and free software (quoting someone from debian-devel), and it turns out that this difference is about as big as the one between democracy and people's democracy. Which in turn, is about as big as the one between a chair and an electric chair...
First, a LOT of spyware masquerade as spyware-removal tools, and indeed, they do count as anti-spyware tools as they remove some _other_ spyware.
Second, we already heard several times of well-known bona fide tools having whitelists for some of malware. Sometimes, it's because of a lawsuit (Gator/Claria), sometimes because of a business relationship, sometimes...
In other words, they don't even need the undercover kind of work many virus makers were suspected of doing.
Dunno, I've always preferred GDSM or SDSM, it's much easier to just eat the first black dragon...
Ouch... While compiling everything to a ram-disk is technically viable, I somehow fail to see it working in a long run :p
I'm afraid that you're _overestimating_ it.
Let's see... it's a 16h trip vs 12.6GB/s. With 25GB per disk, you'll need to take 29k disks on the plane. I would say that 30 disks weight around 1kg (it's an estimation by anal extraction, I don't have any scales at hand).
So... in order to match the bandwidth, you would need to haul around 2 tons of disks per plane. The cargo capacity of a 747 is around 30 tons (if I read the brochure I found correctly).
In other words, we already have 1/15th of that -- and the blue ray is _not_ a deployed technology yet. If you use DVDs instead, the 747 still comes ahead, but for ordinary CDs, you would need three jumbo jets doing the route...
They're using a multi-tiered system as well. The binary installed by KaZaa itself does _not_ include outright spyware -- what it does include, are spyware _installers_. This way, they can claim they don't include any spyware and are technically right.