All pda's have add on software for security already... People just need to use it.
"People just need to use it" is the crux of the whole problem. Look at the virus issue. There are steps that can be taken to secure Windows PCs in such a way as to protect them against the majority of threats (all those of you who said "Yes, install Linux" settle down - you'll get your turn later). Nevertheless, as we all know to our cost, there are probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of insecure and infected PCs out there that are being used as channels for spam, DDoS and malware.
The difference between the theoretically attainable level of security and the actual level of security is the user. Most computer users are not knowledgeable or motivated enough to secure their systems properly. Saying "People just need to use it" ignores the point that, in the real world, people don't. Which is why home PCs can become a conduit for spam, and why the increasing power and connectivity of portable connected devices (laptops, PDAs, mobile phones with PDA-like features, PDAs with mobile phone-like features etc) does make for a genuine potential threat.
I've been receiving spam for months pushing something called "THE ANTIDOTE" (all caps, please, exclamation mark optional), which is supposedly derived from crocodiles. The spammers claim it will cure SARS, HIV, influenza, bird flu, swine fever, athlete's foot, creeping nose warts, stammering, incontinence, the heartbreak of psoriasis ("Christ, you don't know the meaning of heartbreak, buddy"), Huntington's chorea, St Vitus' Dance, St Matthew Passion, St Elmo's Fire, Tickle-Me-Elmo, the Black Death, the Yellow Peril, jungle fever, morning breath, flat feet, fallen arches, golden arches, cellulite and cirrhosis. Among others.
I'm used to seeing spammers jump on the bandwagon to push whichever medication is currently getting media coverage with at most a couple of days lag time, but the 'crocodile! ANTIDOTE!' spams began months ago. Should scientists stop doing original research and just sample the spam-stream to look for the next miracle cure?
It's time to stop pushing the rock up the hill and start looking for new business models
That may be exactly what they're doing. A crackdown on illegal downloading plus an absurdly-high levy on recordable media might eventually create a situation where they can ram Internet-based subscription services down our throats. Under this model, you don't 'own' music, you just rent it. As soon as you stop the monthly payments, all your music goes away.
One of the problems with CDs or DVDs for the content producers is that no matter how much they inflate the cost, they can only sell each one once. Whereas a subscription-style service could really be the gift that keeps on giving month after month. Implementing this across the board requires the cooperation of hardware and software producers, as well as a servile legislature that is willing to dance blindly to the tune of big business, of course, but experience has shown that neither of these are hard to come by.
This analysis is perhaps a little paranoid. Nevertheless, it's safe to say that the RIAA was not formed in order to offer consumers better value. I think we can safely predict that whatever new distribution models they do propose will be for their convenience, not ours.
I dont think DDOSing some spammer pricks domain is that bad
I wonder how long it will be before someone does a massive joe-job on an innocent domain, and BlueFrog takes the bait and DDOS's them off the Internet. Or before a spammer puts their site on a shared virtual server and every single other site hosted on that server goes down when BlueFrog starts hurling packets at it.
There's a reason why anti-spammers say "Don't fight abuse with abuse."
The idea is that you carry your computer around with you, session and all.
This makes it sound quite appealing to me. I quite often find myself using cybercafes and the Windows boxes they run tend to be lousy with malware (especially in the third world). I don't like typing passwords into these things, and I'm not able to set up skey or something similar on all the systems I need to access.
I like the idea of a pocket-sized gizmo that I can plug into any computer, even the most comprehensively pwned, and get a safe, sterile environment set up the way I want it with all my tools and data. The alternative would presumably be Knoppix on a mini-CD, plus a USB thumb drive, but that would require a reboot, which makes cybercafe owners suspicious.
I might wait until it's smaller, cheaper and MacOS-compatible, but I could see myself buying something like this eventually.
So, how well is Windows running on your Apple Powerbook?
Well, it's a tad slow, but it seems stable enough. But that's what you get for running under emulation.
The fact that I can only run Windows under VirtualPC on my PowerBook isn't really - as far as I can see - a DRM issue. It's probably not even the fault of the hardware vendor (Apple), so much as the software vendor (Microsoft). Although I think the decision not to offer an Apple/PowerPC version of Windows has more to do with the harsh realities of the marketplace than anything more sinister.
Another 'early adopter' can be found at www.mola.org.
I can't remember when I first saw this, but they might well have pre-dated Weird Al. The site hasn't changed in all that time either: I guess they take their "evolutionary stasis" seriously. Pity - the Netmaster rap shows talent.
Another recent study has shown that American workers typically spend upwards of seven or eight hours per day sleeping, at immense cost to the American economy. "Workers spend as much time 'sleeping' as they do at the office." report the study's authors. "If we could just cut out this unproductive time and harness those extra hours, the effect on the economy would be enormous. It's not unrealistic to suggest that Gross National Product could be doubled." Other activities cited by the study include 'eating and drinking', 'commuting', 'family and friends', 'hobbies' and 'relaxation', all of which take time that might otherwise be used to generate revenue. The study called for businesses to take measures to eliminate all these extraneous activities by 2010.
It's almost a validation of Creative Commons that Dvorak Doesn't Get It. I've read an awful lot of stupid articles by that man over the years, many of which poured similar scorn on useful ideas or products. By this point, I'd be profoundly suspicious of anything that Dvorak did hail as a good idea.
As someone who has content to share, I appreciate that Creative Commons offers a simple, intelligible way for me to offer people usage rights that go beyond what's allowed by fair use (this is the first key point that Dvorak manages to miss) but doesn't require ceding all control over my 'works' (as putting it in the public domain would). CC's choice of licenses aren't for everyone, but they've done a good job of making available some useful alternatives that are straightforward to adopt and interpret and don't require any lawyers to get involved.
Entertaining for a moment the fiction that, in some parallel universe, I might actually want TV advertisers to have my contact details, I can still see some major problems with this.
The Yahoo! article speaks about sending your 'contact details' to an advertiser: the Slashdot poster interprets this as meaning 'email address'. The question is, "which email address?". I currently only use tagged disposable addresses (of the kind supported by SneakEmail, for instance) for communication with companies. This allows me to dump them if the company sells them on or won't take 'unsubscribe' for an answer. It also fingers the culprit if the address does get abused. So I'd like my hypothetical TiVo to let me specify the address that I want to send to each advertiser.
But if I can do that, then that opens the door to all kinds of abuse. Think of the fun I could have by entering the address of the person who last flamed me on Usenet and then spending the evening clicking through ads on the crappiest channel I can find. So my guess is that if TiVo supports sending email addresses, it will only send the user's address as registered with TiVo, making it impossible to figure out exactly which piece of sneaking mainsleaze scum sold that address to every mailing list company on the planet (and meaning that when I'm eventually forced to abandon that address, I lose contact with all the advertisers I did want to hear from).
This is part of a larger question: which information will it send to advertisers. My guess is that it would send a complete 'packet', including phone, physical address and email. What if I want an advertiser to email me, but not to phone me? Or if I want them to send their brochures to my house (at some measurable cost to them) but not spam my inbox (at negligible cost) four times a week? I'd hope there'd be some way of releasing information selectively, but I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't.
If I owned a TiVo the first thing I'd do would be to disable this feature, and the second thing I'd do would be to enter garbage data in all the fields I could, just in case.
I think he should be made to give back all the wi-fi packets he stole. And the court should examine them carefully to make sure that they're the same ones, so he can't get away with just giving the rightful owner any old packets he happens to have lying around.
The most disappointing thing about them is that Lucas could have had ANYONE write and direct these movies. But no, he had to do it himself. He had to make something that fit in with his bullshit Joseph Campbell "modern myth" take on the thing.
I could stand it if it were a Joseph Campbell-type "modern myth". That's what the original "Star Wars" (which I understand I am now required to call "A New Hope") was and as far as I'm concerned it worked just fine. However, Lucas now appears to be simply making it up as he goes along. The three "prequels" seem to be little more than extended backstory stitched together with splashy CGI and the requisite number of "this will show up later in the videogame" sequences. At least the motivations in the first "Star Wars" movie were fairly clear. Now I have strictly no idea who the Separatists are or what they want to be separated from, why it's necessary for some group I can't identify to occupy Natalie Portman's poster-pretty planet, or why every possible contingency seems to require the Jedi to fly to either Tatooine or some place with volcanoes.
I realize that if I actually cared to know, all I'd need to do would be to browse the entire starwars.com website and read a round dozen poorly-written paperbacks. Sadly, the last two or three sloppily put-together movies (and the approach of something resembling maturity, not to say middle age) have made it difficult for me to care.
I think there's a lesson here. For all of its faults and failings and derivativeness, the first "Star Wars" movie did actually capture people's imagination in a way that not every film manages. Call it the price of greatness, call it what you will, but maybe the fact that "Star Wars" meant so much to so many people should have put Lucas under some kind of karmic obligation not to short-change his fans. Duty required him to put in the hours, tie his Muse to the rack, and serve up something good. He didn't, and the result has been a series of increasingly lame and lazy productions. One day, maybe he'll look up from counting his millions and feel faintly ashamed.
I just typed the tracking number for a package I'm expecting into Google. Sure enough, I get a link to the tracking site of the courier company.
But the page also contains another link, which reads "Free hardcore porn if you click here!" and takes you to a page filled with 3- and 4-number and -digit groups that has been used to spamdex a porn site into Google (the page in question is currently safe for work, unless your employers disapprove of promiscuous associations between small integers, but it links to the main page of the porn site, which probably isn't. And maybe you don't want (name of pornsite deleted) showing up in the traffic logs on your company firewall).
The spamdexers seem to have done their work well. Having done some experiments, I now suspect that almost any UPS tracking number entered into Google will bring up a page containing a link to that particular porn site. Can't beat that for free advertising.
Oddly, the best service I ever had from NetSol was when I was transferring my last domain away from them. There was some kind of glitch in the process, and one of their support people took up the issue, gave me his direct email address so that I could contact him with any additional questions, and followed up later to make sure that everything had gone smoothly (which it had).
Meanwhile, the registrar I was transferring to didn't answer a single email that I sent them. I was almost tempted to stay with NetSol.
"I used to think democracy meant the people keeping a watchful eye on the government, not the government keeping a watchful eye on the people." [Julian Assange]
... but it looks as if NASA has cut our budget again. It will be necessary to switch off some of the life support units to reduce costs. I have the greatest confidence that the mission can be successfully completed without the assistance of your colleagues.
Let's turn this on its head. Instead of asking "Why are people scared of this?" (and I believe there are good reasons), let's ask "Why is it necessary?" What significant improvement in security or convenience actually comes from having a remotely-readable RFID device? What can they get from it that they couldn't get equally easily from a 'contact-required' solution (such as a chip that only gave up its information when pressed against a reader plate, or a printed representation in something like Aztec code?
I can't think of any; it's not as if you're going to be able to walk swiftly through security checkpoints just by waving your passport in the air. They're still going to want to make you stop, make you stand there while the official looks you up and down and asks you some irrelevant questions. So what need do RFID chips fulfil, except for protecting immigration officers and airline ticket clerks from the threat of disease spread on dirty passports?
When a government seems strongly committed to a course of action that offers no benefits and has obvious disadvantages as well, I think it doesn't hurt to ask why.
It would be a lot easier to bring the web to handheld devices if the makers of such devices supported standards consistently or completely. As the css-discuss page on handheld stylesheets confirms, support is often patchy or non-existent.
and then look at Google's cached version of the page, you'll see that Jared makes it clear that the site is not affiliated with Hasbro; he also encourages people to go and buy the game. The J.W. Spear/Hasbro trademark was also asserted on the homepage, and no attempt was made to give the impression that e-Scrabble was an 'official' site.
I suspect that the legal arguments are largely in Hasbro's favor. However, it's pretty clear that there was never any attempt to deceive people, or to make money with someone else's intellectual property. It's just another case of the basic geek instinct - see something neat that you can do, do it, and worry about the consequences later.
Unfortunately, the "this was a cool project and made people happy; therefore I was obliged to do it" argument, while intuitively appealing to Slashdot readers, doesn't carry a lot of weight in a court of law.
What's amusing is that the 'description' meta tag on MelbourneIT's homepage describes them as "The world's leading domain name registrar". In whose fantasy universe, may I ask?
Slashdot Mirror
Anonymous coward wrote:
"People just need to use it" is the crux of the whole problem. Look at the virus issue. There are steps that can be taken to secure Windows PCs in such a way as to protect them against the majority of threats (all those of you who said "Yes, install Linux" settle down - you'll get your turn later). Nevertheless, as we all know to our cost, there are probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of insecure and infected PCs out there that are being used as channels for spam, DDoS and malware.
The difference between the theoretically attainable level of security and the actual level of security is the user. Most computer users are not knowledgeable or motivated enough to secure their systems properly. Saying "People just need to use it" ignores the point that, in the real world, people don't. Which is why home PCs can become a conduit for spam, and why the increasing power and connectivity of portable connected devices (laptops, PDAs, mobile phones with PDA-like features, PDAs with mobile phone-like features etc) does make for a genuine potential threat.
I've been receiving spam for months pushing something called "THE ANTIDOTE" (all caps, please, exclamation mark optional), which is supposedly derived from crocodiles. The spammers claim it will cure SARS, HIV, influenza, bird flu, swine fever, athlete's foot, creeping nose warts, stammering, incontinence, the heartbreak of psoriasis ("Christ, you don't know the meaning of heartbreak, buddy"), Huntington's chorea, St Vitus' Dance, St Matthew Passion, St Elmo's Fire, Tickle-Me-Elmo, the Black Death, the Yellow Peril, jungle fever, morning breath, flat feet, fallen arches, golden arches, cellulite and cirrhosis. Among others.
I'm used to seeing spammers jump on the bandwagon to push whichever medication is currently getting media coverage with at most a couple of days lag time, but the 'crocodile! ANTIDOTE!' spams began months ago. Should scientists stop doing original research and just sample the spam-stream to look for the next miracle cure?
confusion wrote:
That may be exactly what they're doing. A crackdown on illegal downloading plus an absurdly-high levy on recordable media might eventually create a situation where they can ram Internet-based subscription services down our throats. Under this model, you don't 'own' music, you just rent it. As soon as you stop the monthly payments, all your music goes away.
One of the problems with CDs or DVDs for the content producers is that no matter how much they inflate the cost, they can only sell each one once. Whereas a subscription-style service could really be the gift that keeps on giving month after month. Implementing this across the board requires the cooperation of hardware and software producers, as well as a servile legislature that is willing to dance blindly to the tune of big business, of course, but experience has shown that neither of these are hard to come by.
This analysis is perhaps a little paranoid. Nevertheless, it's safe to say that the RIAA was not formed in order to offer consumers better value. I think we can safely predict that whatever new distribution models they do propose will be for their convenience, not ours.
darkmayo wrote:
I wonder how long it will be before someone does a massive joe-job on an innocent domain, and BlueFrog takes the bait and DDOS's them off the Internet. Or before a spammer puts their site on a shared virtual server and every single other site hosted on that server goes down when BlueFrog starts hurling packets at it.
There's a reason why anti-spammers say "Don't fight abuse with abuse."
Ungrounded Lightning wrote:
This makes it sound quite appealing to me. I quite often find myself using cybercafes and the Windows boxes they run tend to be lousy with malware (especially in the third world). I don't like typing passwords into these things, and I'm not able to set up skey or something similar on all the systems I need to access.
I like the idea of a pocket-sized gizmo that I can plug into any computer, even the most comprehensively pwned, and get a safe, sterile environment set up the way I want it with all my tools and data. The alternative would presumably be Knoppix on a mini-CD, plus a USB thumb drive, but that would require a reboot, which makes cybercafe owners suspicious.
I might wait until it's smaller, cheaper and MacOS-compatible, but I could see myself buying something like this eventually.
Well, it's a tad slow, but it seems stable enough. But that's what you get for running under emulation.
The fact that I can only run Windows under VirtualPC on my PowerBook isn't really - as far as I can see - a DRM issue. It's probably not even the fault of the hardware vendor (Apple), so much as the software vendor (Microsoft). Although I think the decision not to offer an Apple/PowerPC version of Windows has more to do with the harsh realities of the marketplace than anything more sinister.
Another 'early adopter' can be found at www.mola.org.
I can't remember when I first saw this, but they might well have pre-dated Weird Al. The site hasn't changed in all that time either: I guess they take their "evolutionary stasis" seriously. Pity - the Netmaster rap shows talent.
Another recent study has shown that American workers typically spend upwards of seven or eight hours per day sleeping, at immense cost to the American economy. "Workers spend as much time 'sleeping' as they do at the office." report the study's authors. "If we could just cut out this unproductive time and harness those extra hours, the effect on the economy would be enormous. It's not unrealistic to suggest that Gross National Product could be doubled." Other activities cited by the study include 'eating and drinking', 'commuting', 'family and friends', 'hobbies' and 'relaxation', all of which take time that might otherwise be used to generate revenue. The study called for businesses to take measures to eliminate all these extraneous activities by 2010.
MECC wrote:
I guess that would be Darwin.
intheory writes
It's almost a validation of Creative Commons that Dvorak Doesn't Get It. I've read an awful lot of stupid articles by that man over the years, many of which poured similar scorn on useful ideas or products. By this point, I'd be profoundly suspicious of anything that Dvorak did hail as a good idea.
As someone who has content to share, I appreciate that Creative Commons offers a simple, intelligible way for me to offer people usage rights that go beyond what's allowed by fair use (this is the first key point that Dvorak manages to miss) but doesn't require ceding all control over my 'works' (as putting it in the public domain would). CC's choice of licenses aren't for everyone, but they've done a good job of making available some useful alternatives that are straightforward to adopt and interpret and don't require any lawyers to get involved.
Entertaining for a moment the fiction that, in some parallel universe, I might actually want TV advertisers to have my contact details, I can still see some major problems with this.
The Yahoo! article speaks about sending your 'contact details' to an advertiser: the Slashdot poster interprets this as meaning 'email address'. The question is, "which email address?". I currently only use tagged disposable addresses (of the kind supported by SneakEmail, for instance) for communication with companies. This allows me to dump them if the company sells them on or won't take 'unsubscribe' for an answer. It also fingers the culprit if the address does get abused. So I'd like my hypothetical TiVo to let me specify the address that I want to send to each advertiser.
But if I can do that, then that opens the door to all kinds of abuse. Think of the fun I could have by entering the address of the person who last flamed me on Usenet and then spending the evening clicking through ads on the crappiest channel I can find. So my guess is that if TiVo supports sending email addresses, it will only send the user's address as registered with TiVo, making it impossible to figure out exactly which piece of sneaking mainsleaze scum sold that address to every mailing list company on the planet (and meaning that when I'm eventually forced to abandon that address, I lose contact with all the advertisers I did want to hear from).
This is part of a larger question: which information will it send to advertisers. My guess is that it would send a complete 'packet', including phone, physical address and email. What if I want an advertiser to email me, but not to phone me? Or if I want them to send their brochures to my house (at some measurable cost to them) but not spam my inbox (at negligible cost) four times a week? I'd hope there'd be some way of releasing information selectively, but I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't.
If I owned a TiVo the first thing I'd do would be to disable this feature, and the second thing I'd do would be to enter garbage data in all the fields I could, just in case.
I think he should be made to give back all the wi-fi packets he stole. And the court should examine them carefully to make sure that they're the same ones, so he can't get away with just giving the rightful owner any old packets he happens to have lying around.
You wrote
I could stand it if it were a Joseph Campbell-type "modern myth". That's what the original "Star Wars" (which I understand I am now required to call "A New Hope") was and as far as I'm concerned it worked just fine. However, Lucas now appears to be simply making it up as he goes along. The three "prequels" seem to be little more than extended backstory stitched together with splashy CGI and the requisite number of "this will show up later in the videogame" sequences. At least the motivations in the first "Star Wars" movie were fairly clear. Now I have strictly no idea who the Separatists are or what they want to be separated from, why it's necessary for some group I can't identify to occupy Natalie Portman's poster-pretty planet, or why every possible contingency seems to require the Jedi to fly to either Tatooine or some place with volcanoes.
I realize that if I actually cared to know, all I'd need to do would be to browse the entire starwars.com website and read a round dozen poorly-written paperbacks. Sadly, the last two or three sloppily put-together movies (and the approach of something resembling maturity, not to say middle age) have made it difficult for me to care.
I think there's a lesson here. For all of its faults and failings and derivativeness, the first "Star Wars" movie did actually capture people's imagination in a way that not every film manages. Call it the price of greatness, call it what you will, but maybe the fact that "Star Wars" meant so much to so many people should have put Lucas under some kind of karmic obligation not to short-change his fans. Duty required him to put in the hours, tie his Muse to the rack, and serve up something good. He didn't, and the result has been a series of increasingly lame and lazy productions. One day, maybe he'll look up from counting his millions and feel faintly ashamed.
I just typed the tracking number for a package I'm expecting into Google. Sure enough, I get a link to the tracking site of the courier company. But the page also contains another link, which reads "Free hardcore porn if you click here!" and takes you to a page filled with 3- and 4-number and -digit groups that has been used to spamdex a porn site into Google (the page in question is currently safe for work, unless your employers disapprove of promiscuous associations between small integers, but it links to the main page of the porn site, which probably isn't. And maybe you don't want (name of pornsite deleted) showing up in the traffic logs on your company firewall). The spamdexers seem to have done their work well. Having done some experiments, I now suspect that almost any UPS tracking number entered into Google will bring up a page containing a link to that particular porn site. Can't beat that for free advertising.
Oddly, the best service I ever had from NetSol was when I was transferring my last domain away from them. There was some kind of glitch in the process, and one of their support people took up the issue, gave me his direct email address so that I could contact him with any additional questions, and followed up later to make sure that everything had gone smoothly (which it had). Meanwhile, the registrar I was transferring to didn't answer a single email that I sent them. I was almost tempted to stay with NetSol.
"I used to think democracy meant the people keeping a watchful eye on the government, not the government keeping a watchful eye on the people." [Julian Assange]
... but it looks as if NASA has cut our budget again. It will be necessary to switch off some of the life support units to reduce costs. I have the greatest confidence that the mission can be successfully completed without the assistance of your colleagues.
Let's turn this on its head. Instead of asking "Why are people scared of this?" (and I believe there are good reasons), let's ask "Why is it necessary?" What significant improvement in security or convenience actually comes from having a remotely-readable RFID device? What can they get from it that they couldn't get equally easily from a 'contact-required' solution (such as a chip that only gave up its information when pressed against a reader plate, or a printed representation in something like Aztec code? I can't think of any; it's not as if you're going to be able to walk swiftly through security checkpoints just by waving your passport in the air. They're still going to want to make you stop, make you stand there while the official looks you up and down and asks you some irrelevant questions. So what need do RFID chips fulfil, except for protecting immigration officers and airline ticket clerks from the threat of disease spread on dirty passports? When a government seems strongly committed to a course of action that offers no benefits and has obvious disadvantages as well, I think it doesn't hurt to ask why.
It would be a lot easier to bring the web to handheld devices if the makers of such devices supported standards consistently or completely. As the css-discuss page on handheld stylesheets confirms, support is often patchy or non-existent.
If you use Google to search for
and then look at Google's cached version of the page, you'll see that Jared makes it clear that the site is not affiliated with Hasbro; he also encourages people to go and buy the game. The J.W. Spear/Hasbro trademark was also asserted on the homepage, and no attempt was made to give the impression that e-Scrabble was an 'official' site.
I suspect that the legal arguments are largely in Hasbro's favor. However, it's pretty clear that there was never any attempt to deceive people, or to make money with someone else's intellectual property. It's just another case of the basic geek instinct - see something neat that you can do, do it, and worry about the consequences later.
Unfortunately, the "this was a cool project and made people happy; therefore I was obliged to do it" argument, while intuitively appealing to Slashdot readers, doesn't carry a lot of weight in a court of law.
What's amusing is that the 'description' meta tag on MelbourneIT's homepage describes them as "The world's leading domain name registrar". In whose fantasy universe, may I ask?