Why shut them down when you can seize control of them and use them yourself?
This is turning a blind eye, my friend.
They make an arrest and get a big article in the paper once in awhile just to say they are doing something, and to justify those tax dollars being added to their budgets.
Seriously, after the recent articles about the Air Force creating their own botnets for "cyberwar" with China or Russia, does this surprise anyone?
Actually, I hope they DO reverse the warning label trend, so we can finally weed out all of the idiots that would stick a butter knife into a toaster to retrieve the toast, for example.
If we're lucky, it would weed them out before they had a chance to breed.
Two failed wars, a terrorist attack, the failure to capture, prosecute and imprison most of the culprits involved (far more were in the planning than were on the planes), Abu Ghraib, Guantanomo Bay, USA-PATRIOT Act, yeah, he did such a FINE JOB THERE BUDDY, NO ONE WILL EVER LOOK BACK AND CALL THAT PRESIDENT A BUFFOON, NOSIRREEBOB!/sarcasm
The point you apparently miss, is that any sort of promise made by Microsoft amounts to dog piss flying in the wind.
You could finalize your project made with their technologies one morning, release it to the public by lunch, they can renege on any 'promise' by the time you finish your afternoon siesta. Then you will, of course, have a lawsuit and C&D filed against you and your users by dinner time at the local steakhouse, in a Lubbock, Texas court.
Lrn2read, plz. A poster up the chain already posted the relevant article and subsection specifically stating that reverse-engineering is allowed as long as it isn't used to circumvent copy protection mechanisms.
Examples:
Reverse-engineering Windows Genuine Advantage: Illegal period.
Reverse-engineering the protocol your cell phone uses to transfer data from your computer to the phone and vice-versa: Not illegal, caveat being if it is protected by DRM mechanisms. Encryption doesn't count as DRM (Yet. We'll see what those turds in Congress add later on if enough weasel words and money are exchanged).
Note: Reverse-engineering stuff for the iPhone/iPod is in kind of a gray area, as most things from the Apple store come with DRM of some sort, and if that DRM is in any way applied/extended to the transfer protocols, it may be illegal to reverse-engineer the protocols, even for interoperability with other online music stores. There hasn't been any court rulings on this as of yet.
Hell, it's even used and abused to intentionally deny information to people such as the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, etc. by those who bow down to that which is the Military-Industrial Complex.
How do you think shit gets done and then the rest of them who are to blame, can cry, "No prior knowledge!" (Plausible Deniability), and say it with a straight face?
Uh, if you don't plan on writing to the filesystem, how exactly do you propose anyone load music onto said media player if it only supports exFAT-enabled memory cards and the internal storage also relies on exFAT?
The manufacturers will end up paying licensing fees to Microsoft either way, for convenience if nothing else.
Never discount the scenario of an IT intern who had this task dropped onto him first thing Monday morning after a weekend spent binge-drinking with his frat brothers.
Wrong. That data is still right there in Archive.org's WayBack Machine. Ditto in Google cache, Bing cache, and anywhere else that might have scraped Facebook's pages since then.
Don't you mean the coal and oil companies are noticing that small startups and individual inventors from all over the world are coming up with all kinds of neat 'green' technologies, so they are rapidly stuffing the patent office with filings for things other people invented?
Oh no, they would NEVER try to kill any tech that threatens their strangle grip on our energy supplies.
In this day and age, if your machine gets compromised by a virus, trojan, or rootkit, the only sensible thing to do is wipe and reinstall from a known clean backup. It doesn't matter what OS it is. There's no telling what other little friends they brought along that your chosen methods of detection didn't find. It's not really an option anymore to keep on going with a system that was compromised.
There's also been some evidence of malware that triggers AV software on purpose, and acts as a distraction while the real dirty payload gets delivered silently elsewhere in your system. You are now fooled into thinking your system is clean because your AV caught the distraction virus, completely missing the real one that was also installed.
Actually, funding Al Qaeda and other similar groups is strictly illegal. Anti-Terrorism laws, RICO statutes, etc. put that kind of funding activity squarely into the Not Allowed section of our justice system.
Which competitor? Even your own ISP does it. Run your own email server? Not much luck with that in the States. Most ISPs in this country block Ports 25 and 80 for consumer-grade connections. Verizon blocks Port 25 in quite a few markets on their Business Grade stuff unless you pay extra, Comcast just doesn't give anyone the option, Port 25 is always blocked. Have no idea how AT&T, Covad, Time Warner, etc handle it.
No offense, but your nation is the size of a postage stamp. Define "middle of nowhere".
Try living in Alaska, Southern/Western Texas, anywhere in North/South Dakota or any place in New Mexico or Arizona outside of Albuquerque/Phoenix/Tuscon and see what middle of nowhere really means (along with the internet connections to match).
They won't even stop people even if they get ISP level laws, which is what ACTA does.
That combined with torrent clients steadily moving away from the central-server weakness, they can have fun with their content filtering.
Lots of luck stopping DHT + PEX. They haven't been able to stop eDonkey/eMule and the like (which also uses DHT), and that has been around for years before the Bit Torrent protocol was even written.
It's not just whack-a-mole, it's a complete exercise in futility coming from organizations that are rapidly heading the way of the dinosaur.
You're assuming those holes aren't left there intentionally as honeypots or convenient excuses for actions that might otherwise be construed as acts of war.
Now go try that again using an EDGE or CDMA network communications device.
Also, go try doing that basically with any cellphone-like device, which is what this is aimed for. You won't get the same response times, I assure you.
Remember, this OS is aimed at machines that load everything into RAM and cache to a micro-SD card or something, tops. No hard drives allowed, and no super fat-bandwidth pipe.
You'll be lucky to get the performance equivalent of a Pentium 3 sending data over a 56k modem, on average (cell provider's claimed network speed is rarely if ever actually realized by any of their customers in any location, burst speeds at best, and the really depends on signal interference and network traffic).
The above comment should have been modded down. Poster I replied to having stated software and hardware. PCs were not specifically mentioned. Microsoft does manufacture hardware and writes software.
Irrelevant, input device false dichotomy, is irrelevant.
By textbook definition, even an iPod Touch is a personal computer. Smart Phones also fall under this definition, even though they are primarily supposed to function as portable telephones. They use microchips. They have an operating system. They have defined inputs, and defined outputs. They are programmable. They don't require the intervention of remote command & control to operate. They run software.
The type of input device has no bearing upon the overall defined function of a personal computer.
Using your fallacious argument, then any machine based on a microchip architecture and controlled by voice commands, a touch screen, or a tablet can't possibly be a personal computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Why shut them down when you can seize control of them and use them yourself?
This is turning a blind eye, my friend.
They make an arrest and get a big article in the paper once in awhile just to say they are doing something, and to justify those tax dollars being added to their budgets.
Seriously, after the recent articles about the Air Force creating their own botnets for "cyberwar" with China or Russia, does this surprise anyone?
Actually, I hope they DO reverse the warning label trend, so we can finally weed out all of the idiots that would stick a butter knife into a toaster to retrieve the toast, for example.
If we're lucky, it would weed them out before they had a chance to breed.
He was on the terrorist watch list, and has been for some time, but was never put on the 'no-fly' list that the TSA uses.
I wonder who screwed the pooch there, because that is a sure sign of someone not doing their jobs.
Two failed wars, a terrorist attack, the failure to capture, prosecute and imprison most of the culprits involved (far more were in the planning than were on the planes), Abu Ghraib, Guantanomo Bay, USA-PATRIOT Act, yeah, he did such a FINE JOB THERE BUDDY, NO ONE WILL EVER LOOK BACK AND CALL THAT PRESIDENT A BUFFOON, NOSIRREEBOB! /sarcasm
For your reading pleasure, http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/broken_government/articles/full_list/
Recommended to me by several of the 98% of historians who view Bush's presidency as a complete and utter failure.
Of course he does, but that doesn't mean he's made aware that it even exists until well after the fact.
The point you apparently miss, is that any sort of promise made by Microsoft amounts to dog piss flying in the wind.
You could finalize your project made with their technologies one morning, release it to the public by lunch, they can renege on any 'promise' by the time you finish your afternoon siesta. Then you will, of course, have a lawsuit and C&D filed against you and your users by dinner time at the local steakhouse, in a Lubbock, Texas court.
That's why.
Lrn2read, plz. A poster up the chain already posted the relevant article and subsection specifically stating that reverse-engineering is allowed as long as it isn't used to circumvent copy protection mechanisms.
Examples:
Reverse-engineering Windows Genuine Advantage: Illegal period.
Reverse-engineering the protocol your cell phone uses to transfer data from your computer to the phone and vice-versa: Not illegal, caveat being if it is protected by DRM mechanisms. Encryption doesn't count as DRM (Yet. We'll see what those turds in Congress add later on if enough weasel words and money are exchanged).
Note: Reverse-engineering stuff for the iPhone/iPod is in kind of a gray area, as most things from the Apple store come with DRM of some sort, and if that DRM is in any way applied/extended to the transfer protocols, it may be illegal to reverse-engineer the protocols, even for interoperability with other online music stores. There hasn't been any court rulings on this as of yet.
Hell, it's even used and abused to intentionally deny information to people such as the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, etc. by those who bow down to that which is the Military-Industrial Complex.
How do you think shit gets done and then the rest of them who are to blame, can cry, "No prior knowledge!" (Plausible Deniability), and say it with a straight face?
Uh, if you don't plan on writing to the filesystem, how exactly do you propose anyone load music onto said media player if it only supports exFAT-enabled memory cards and the internal storage also relies on exFAT?
The manufacturers will end up paying licensing fees to Microsoft either way, for convenience if nothing else.
Never discount the scenario of an IT intern who had this task dropped onto him first thing Monday morning after a weekend spent binge-drinking with his frat brothers.
See: Zeus or any of the myriad Zolob variants, for a start.
Until now that is, as you have to specifically opt-out of it now.
Or didn't you read exactly what they exposed?
Wrong. That data is still right there in Archive.org's WayBack Machine. Ditto in Google cache, Bing cache, and anywhere else that might have scraped Facebook's pages since then.
Lots of luck there, tough guy.
Don't you mean the coal and oil companies are noticing that small startups and individual inventors from all over the world are coming up with all kinds of neat 'green' technologies, so they are rapidly stuffing the patent office with filings for things other people invented?
Oh no, they would NEVER try to kill any tech that threatens their strangle grip on our energy supplies.
In this day and age, if your machine gets compromised by a virus, trojan, or rootkit, the only sensible thing to do is wipe and reinstall from a known clean backup. It doesn't matter what OS it is. There's no telling what other little friends they brought along that your chosen methods of detection didn't find. It's not really an option anymore to keep on going with a system that was compromised.
There's also been some evidence of malware that triggers AV software on purpose, and acts as a distraction while the real dirty payload gets delivered silently elsewhere in your system. You are now fooled into thinking your system is clean because your AV caught the distraction virus, completely missing the real one that was also installed.
And who is to say the binary the company released compiled from the code presented as source?
Dimwit.
Actually, funding Al Qaeda and other similar groups is strictly illegal. Anti-Terrorism laws, RICO statutes, etc. put that kind of funding activity squarely into the Not Allowed section of our justice system.
Which competitor? Even your own ISP does it. Run your own email server? Not much luck with that in the States. Most ISPs in this country block Ports 25 and 80 for consumer-grade connections. Verizon blocks Port 25 in quite a few markets on their Business Grade stuff unless you pay extra, Comcast just doesn't give anyone the option, Port 25 is always blocked. Have no idea how AT&T, Covad, Time Warner, etc handle it.
No offense, but your nation is the size of a postage stamp. Define "middle of nowhere".
Try living in Alaska, Southern/Western Texas, anywhere in North/South Dakota or any place in New Mexico or Arizona outside of Albuquerque/Phoenix/Tuscon and see what middle of nowhere really means (along with the internet connections to match).
They won't even stop people even if they get ISP level laws, which is what ACTA does.
That combined with torrent clients steadily moving away from the central-server weakness, they can have fun with their content filtering.
Lots of luck stopping DHT + PEX. They haven't been able to stop eDonkey/eMule and the like (which also uses DHT), and that has been around for years before the Bit Torrent protocol was even written.
It's not just whack-a-mole, it's a complete exercise in futility coming from organizations that are rapidly heading the way of the dinosaur.
The last time I was on there, there was over 16 thousand torrents in the Games section alone.
That should give you a good idea.
You're assuming those holes aren't left there intentionally as honeypots or convenient excuses for actions that might otherwise be construed as acts of war.
Just sayin'.
Now go try that again using an EDGE or CDMA network communications device.
Also, go try doing that basically with any cellphone-like device, which is what this is aimed for. You won't get the same response times, I assure you.
Remember, this OS is aimed at machines that load everything into RAM and cache to a micro-SD card or something, tops. No hard drives allowed, and no super fat-bandwidth pipe.
You'll be lucky to get the performance equivalent of a Pentium 3 sending data over a 56k modem, on average (cell provider's claimed network speed is rarely if ever actually realized by any of their customers in any location, burst speeds at best, and the really depends on signal interference and network traffic).
The above comment should have been modded down. Poster I replied to having stated software and hardware. PCs were not specifically mentioned.
Microsoft does manufacture hardware and writes software.
Reading Comprehension Fail.
Irrelevant, input device false dichotomy, is irrelevant.
By textbook definition, even an iPod Touch is a personal computer. Smart Phones also fall under this definition, even though they are primarily supposed to function as portable telephones. They use microchips. They have an operating system. They have defined inputs, and defined outputs. They are programmable. They don't require the intervention of remote command & control to operate. They run software.
The type of input device has no bearing upon the overall defined function of a personal computer.
Using your fallacious argument, then any machine based on a microchip architecture and controlled by voice commands, a touch screen, or a tablet can't possibly be a personal computer.