While I totally agree with your point, I wonder if maybe they aren't operating under some ridiculous rule that says something like "original submissions must not be modified" and they are unable to use the rotate function because it modifies the document (many systems just do the rotate and save automatically without asking; others will ask if you want to save). I'm just trying to figure out some reason why a person or group of people in that office would come up with something so ludicrous as to NOT just hit rotate. There must be some silly rule that needs to be changed before they can use rotate.
Exactly right. Add in to that the fact that neither Chrome nor Firefox are very friendly to corporate software distribution and patching systems and that neither works with established systems like Group Policy and folks at major corporations using Windows don't want to touch it. I use FF at work and Chrome and FF at home, but I have admin rights on my work machine since I build images and write code. Most folks in the company don't have admin and just have IE with the corporate policies applied for security settings. I understand that Chrome doesn't even support pass through authentication (some other poster in another topic said this; I have not verified as we've found that Chrome just beats the shit out of our proxy servers so I won't install at work to verify that it can't do auto-sign in). Until these browsers "grow up" and support corporate customizations and policy they won't be the most used browsers in a corporate setting. I'm a fan of both (using FF to post this), but even I couldn't seriously propose to replace IE with either of them today.
Aha! Interesting - thanks for that. There are always some sneaky people out there. I would have never thought of doing that (not only am I not sneaky enough, I'm not evil enough either).
Actually no - in the plugin space like Flash and PDF IE is superior due to its model of running different zones in different access levels. For example the "Internet Zone" runs with less privilege than a "standard user" account and cannot write to the file system outside of Temporary Internet Files and cannot write to the registry outside of a specific non-trusted area. This is with IE already running as standard user - even if the user is running as administrator. You can read up on it here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250462(VS.85).aspx. For well controlled (corporate) systems, users cannot willy-nilly add sites to the "Trusted Sites" zone which would enable those plugins to now run as standard user (basically move from the low integrity level to the medium level). Home users, of course, can often be tricked into raising the security level of a site - making integrity levels less effective in helping to prevent successful exploit, but even here it prevents most original "drive bys" and requires the user to take an action (indicating trust of the site) before anything bad could happen. Remember that most of these exploits that folks have recently been seeing a lot in the press are IE6 / Windows XP only. With Windows XP of course the whole integrity level and running sites as lower than standard user doesn't exist.
I wonder what the real difference would be then between the city using rock salt or fertilizer? One would put sodium chloride in the water, the other would put potassium nitrate or some such (not a chemistry expert - sorry). Either one would result in water that "wasn't pure" as far as this fab is concerned though. Why would it make a difference which pollutant it was?
Thank you. I was about to post the same - these other browsers are great (I am typing this at home on Chrome - now that is has extension support, and my secondary browser at home is Firefox while at work I primarily use FF) however as you said they put zero effort into being maintainable in an enterprise. Assume that an enterprise pushes out either FF or Chrome to their users. There is no easy way to configure even the proxy settings, let alone configure the security settings to allow certain apps/ sites more or less trust. The default install will pop up requests for admin rights randomly when they decide to update themselves (of course enterprise users aren't admins - or shouldn't be!). As you said - they don't really have patching: for the most part they are just completely new installs, often bringing UI changes and new features in an update. Unfortunately that means even more testing than a normal Internet Explorer patch since IE patches don't deliver features/changes.
Being a corporate desktop design person, I have admin rights and prefer FF to IE. However I have to manage that installation just like a home user. If Google or Mozilla would spend some time/money on re-architecting their patching model and their deployment of settings they would be very viable in the corporate space. The only thing left as a blocker could be those legacy apps (which it should be admitted are becoming a smaller percentage of the installed base and could probably be handled in ways others in this thread have mentioned like Citrix, etc.).
Simply use Group Policy to set the proxy server for IE to localhost. Now IE is internal only. However be careful of side effects. Some other applications for some reason share / use IE's settings. For example Google Chrome uses IE's settings. Firefox doesn't, so it will be OK. Any client side app that requires internet connectivity is also likely to instantiate a winsock connection using the defaults for the API which are basically "query the IE settings and use those for internet connectivity". Java applets may also have trouble depending on how they are written. As always, testing, testing, testing.
Another way to do it would be to use GPO to set an extended user agent on IE6 - for example adding "INTERNALONLY" to the user agent. Have the proxy deny connection requests that contain this string in their user agent. That would have the effect (generally) of not stopping applications that initialize winsock with the defaults as the defaults don't use IE's configured user agent string.
Well it is a real ban and you can be pulled over for it in California. On my 38 mile commute home every day I see probably 25 - 30 people holding phones up to their ears. I am sure I pass a lot more as I don't actually check every driver on purpose. For several years, I personally have used a bluetooth headset - but it seems the majority of people don't do it. They prefer to hold the phone up. Quite honestly, when I see someone cut someone off, make an unsafe lane change, or do some other bad driving maneuver I do try to take a look and I would say about half the time they have a phone up to their ear. I don't know what the answer would be; raise the fine, increase enforcement, or something completely new. Whatever it is, the current rules aren't making much difference.
You know, I am sure they will claim that the play is on the "iPod" name. However, I think that they are really going for the iPADD name (PADD as in Personal Access Data Display from Star Trek http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/PADD). They can't make it too obvious I guess because Paramount would sue them. But when I see a slate form factor machine like this I immediately think PADD.
Yes, if it pans out and is semi-affordable it would be great. I can't really reasonably do an all electric now because my commute one way is 38 miles with no place to plug in at work. With a little bit longer trip on the way home (picking the kids up from school, etc.) it is over 80 miles before being home to charge. Even 200 miles on a charge would make this more attractive, although some folks would still want to have some sort of "battery swap" stations along the interstates so that they could take longer road trips.
That's absolutely correct and was solved back in Windows Vista / IE 7. As of then, "Internet zone" sites are automatically running with LESS privilege than a standard user. Bascially they can't write anything outside of temporary internet files and an untrusted "low" zone in the registry. Of course Windows 7 and IE 8 continues this. You can use Process Explorer to see the integrity level at which applications are running. Medium is standard user, Low is for things like the Internet Zone, and High is anything running with system or administrative privileges. This is one of the reasons that many of these exploits don't work correctly against anything but Windows XP.
Obviously you say that in jest (and I laughed). However, I was once on a shuttle back to the hotel from a Microsoft event with several representatives of some of Microsoft's large customers when some crazy guy was trying to convince a rep from a major airline that they needed to re architect their luggage system to assign an IPv6 address to each bag. This guy was serious about it too. My buddy and I just kept cracking jokes at his expense though.
If you leave your bag unattended its time to live might expire. When the luggage system backs up, it sends a source quench. What do you mean "no route to host"? My luggage was fragmented! Can't your luggage route around the storm? and many more...
It was one of the most enjoyable bus rides I've ever had.
I try that every year and it hasn't worked yet. I assume it is my company that doesn't publish the info (perhaps they have to pay for the privilege or perhaps they see a privacy issue). Anyway, a company with 60,000 employees globally and about 25,000 in the US and they don't publish the data so Turbo Tax can import it. I wish they did!
I agree about the Google redirects. I know they have been there for awhile now, but I first actually "noticed" them (as in they caused me a problem) just the other day when I was trying to get some links to "further reading" to go into some technical document I was writing. I sure didn't want Google redirect links in my document so I actually ended up going to Bing and doing the same search. That worked better as Bing apparently doesn't do the redirect thing and the links are actually links to the site you searched for. Bing doesn't do anything else better, but Google made their links useless for that function.
I've got a Lenovo X200s with two video out ports - a DVI and a DisplayPort. I have two panels both of which have only VGA and DVI. I have a DisplayPort -> DVI adapter plugged into the DisplayPort on the X200s and it works great for having dual screen.
I'd agree with Droid on Verizon (it's what I am using now after several years of AT&T - during which I had no problems; I switched because I was cancelling my work provided plan on AT&T and wanted to go with the Droid), but the submitter mentioned connecting notebooks too. From what I've seen, Verizon wants an extra data plan to tether your phone to your computer. I realize there is an app store app or two that enables tethering, but since Verizon seems to want to use tethering as another income stream I don't know if it will end up being disabled by some technical measure. Anyway, something to consider strongly is the cost of tethering on the plan you go with.
I don't know. I've always used Google for search the last several years. I also have a Droid phone. But just yesterday I was writing some documentation for some code I wrote to help manage the driver store on Windows. I needed to add some links to further information about driver INF files on the MS site. I went to google and did a search. I realized quickly that at some point over the last few years Google has changed the way their links work. They no longer are a link to the site you want - they are a link to something at Google that then redirects to your chosen site. Since I have no idea how long those links will work, they were useless to me (I wanted to right-click and copy shortcut / copy link and paste it into my documentation as further reading - but some link to Google that may work fine for today and maybe not work fine next year isn't all that handy). I copied my search from Google and pasted it into Bing. I got pretty much the same results, but a right-click and copy shortcut actually got me the real URL and I could then paste it into my doc. I don't even know when Google changed this so that their links aren't real links to sites - but stuff like that could drive me permanently to Bing.
I have yet to see a believable CG scene period. Whether the actors were real or not. In fact, I guess it is worse when the actors are real and performing in front of a green screen and the CGI is composited in later. I've noticed that many people can sit through scenes like that just fine (including my wife), but for me they are just jarring. It's usually something with perspective or lighting sources or whatnot that just screams "something is wrong here" and blows the immersion I am trying to get in the movie. I can generally back up the movie and point out to my wife the things I am seeing and then she will "get it", but it really seems like only some people notice this stuff. (perhaps like only some people notice 60 hz flicker on CRT monitors).
Maybe it is something like being "hyper observant" or something. The other thing that always jars me out of a scene is the continuity. Something like a glass in the actor's hand that is 1/2 full and then a cut to another view and it is all of a sudden totally full. A different number and placement of flowers in a vase. A scene in a House episode where he pulls out a syringe, bleeds the air out and clearly has it less than half full then a cut to another camera and it is 3/4 full.
Both types of scenes - the CGI and the "continuity error" just seem to rudely pull or push me back out of that immersion in the film.
I'm glad you have neighbors you can trust vasgzr. I don't even have relatives I can always trust. At one point my wife's cousin's daughter (17) stayed with us for a few days. She brought her notebook. I gave her our WPA2 key and a lecture about "don't use my internet connection to do any copyright violation - no music or movies, etc.". Next morning I come downstairs to find her downloading a bunch of songs on Limewire. WPA2 key changed, no more privileges for her. I can't trust my neighbors (or their guests) either - they may download kiddie porn, warez, music, whatever through MY IP address. Having open WiFi would be very nice to do, but the hassle of possibly getting RIAA notes or even possibly police at my door (for the kiddie porn thing a neighbor's guest could do) is not even worth it. Until such time as ISP's are able to uniquely identify WHO did it and not just "well this guy owns the house where the service is terminated", the other folks in the area can get their own internet access.
I've seen lots of them. One per month at work for SOX compliance (unfortunately the crazy system our company bought uses them). One more just the other day from my kids school district for a form to apply to be in the school's "pathways" program (engineering program in this case). This form didn't even work right. The form field checking worked, but the submit button failed to do its email thing - so we had to print it and carry it in because you can't SAVE it. Another to apply to be a coach for the soccer league (background check info). All of these things use the forms feature with ActionScript/JavaScript. Just because one person isn't required to use them doesn't mean all of us don't have to use them.
BTW, I agree that adobe reader is terrible software - but I can't get the school district, the soccer league, or my work to switch...
I guess some big-wheel producers or their companies could be said to buy movies. The rest of us just license them for non-public presentation in our homes or some such nonsense (I fast forward that part when possible; it isn't always a no button press area even though it is a no skip section for some reason). Of course there are many folks these days who acquire their license through less than legal means. I personally have a wall of DVD's that are all legally licensed. But I'd agree with you that pretty much no normal person "buys movies" since the several million dollars for them are out of our price range.
I guess if you said "who buys round plastic shiny discs that ship with a limited viewing license for a movie" I would hold up my hand and say "me".
I think that is one of the reasons AT&T wants the FCC to mandate the change. Just like the way today they are required to provide POTS phone service most places (there are exceptions) and they get funding to do so, they would like to get funding to run DSL or other broadband other places. That way they don't have to pay for the infrastructure (again) and get to reap the advantages of it (again). Those more rural areas like yours? Just like today my POTS bill has items on their to force me (and others) to pay to bring service to folks in rural areas, if we get a mandated end date for POTS my broadband bill will have line items forcing me (and others) to pay to get DSL or equivalent service to rural folks. I don't know if that is a good or bad idea - but public funding for the infrastructure with the companies getting the profit is what this is about.
True; encryption is one important piece of the pie. But, in the example the GP gave, if the data still exists in a backup somewhere it is still subject to discovery requests and, encrypted or not, you will have to divulge it in an unencrypted form. Also, the encryption won't protect you in the case of a government seizing the server - you are still "down" for whatever function was being provided by that server. In other places you may find that it is illegal to import certain encryption technologies. Are you doing so when you simply have a server acting as a data store? Maybe not, but I don't think case law in some of these countries has decided that. As the GP says, there is a lot to consider when planning to store your data off premises.
NetBIOS doesn't have anything to do with autoconfiguration or DHCP though. Of course people have DHCP. NetBIOS over TCP/IP though is a layer that allows machines to find each other sans DNS. For example say you have three machines on your home network behind a NAT router. You share a printer from one of them (yes, I mean Windows machines). Unless you have setup hosts files or a home DNS server (which most home users with a three machine network WON'T do), then the machines use a NetBIOS broadcast to find each other. Even in many corporate networks this isn't disabled. Name resolution of a "short name" (for example L3B3ABC-7 instead of L3B3ABC-7.test.example.com) will go this route:
DNS (with the local machine's primary DNS suffix appended - so the query is L3B3ABC-7.test.example.com)
DNS (with the primary DNS suffix devolved one level appended - so the query is L3B3ABC-7.example.com)
Any other configured (GPO) DNS search suffixes
A NetBIOS subnet only broadcast for the short name
It is this last query that they are saying can easily be poisoned.
It is probably trivial to code up something to do this. I imagine the sample of a WPAD file for Firefox or IE autoconfiguration could work as a denial of service of sorts (routing you to a non-existent proxy or something) - possibly even attempting a proxy man-in-the-middle attack. The others (Exchange, SMB file shares, etc.) would seem to be only a small denial of service. If those servers were accessible they would have been found via DNS so they aren't available anyway. And the protocols require authentication so the attacking machine couldn't spoof more than the naming service for those. The proxy one though would be the interesting one.
Do you have a suggestion for a non half-assed solution to prevent copyright infringement? If so, you could probably make quite a bundle on your idea. It's all well and good to point out the flaws of said systems - but what we need is someone who can point to how this stuff should be done and help the industry to do it right. At this point in time, it is hard to see how content providers could continue to spend the resources to creative expensive (some would say quality, others would say cruddy, but few would dispute that it currently has high costs for talent) content if they just dropped all of their DRM efforts and tacitly allowed the unfettered copying of their content.
I'm no genius on this - I wish that I had the next big idea here. As a consumer though I would want a system that allows me free access to shift content between any devices and any format without having to hack it. Any OS should be usable. The media companies would reasonably expect that if I transferred it to someone else that it would be transferred like a book and I would no longer have a copy. Loan it? Sure. Sell it (under first sale doctrine) - sure, but then I should no longer have a copy. (Yes, the media companies wouldn't like that, but I said if they were being reasonable they would expect that).
There needs to be some way to build something like this without requiring "servers" that can be taken offline (like what Wal-Mart tried to do) in order to view the content.
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While I totally agree with your point, I wonder if maybe they aren't operating under some ridiculous rule that says something like "original submissions must not be modified" and they are unable to use the rotate function because it modifies the document (many systems just do the rotate and save automatically without asking; others will ask if you want to save). I'm just trying to figure out some reason why a person or group of people in that office would come up with something so ludicrous as to NOT just hit rotate. There must be some silly rule that needs to be changed before they can use rotate.
Exactly right. Add in to that the fact that neither Chrome nor Firefox are very friendly to corporate software distribution and patching systems and that neither works with established systems like Group Policy and folks at major corporations using Windows don't want to touch it. I use FF at work and Chrome and FF at home, but I have admin rights on my work machine since I build images and write code. Most folks in the company don't have admin and just have IE with the corporate policies applied for security settings. I understand that Chrome doesn't even support pass through authentication (some other poster in another topic said this; I have not verified as we've found that Chrome just beats the shit out of our proxy servers so I won't install at work to verify that it can't do auto-sign in). Until these browsers "grow up" and support corporate customizations and policy they won't be the most used browsers in a corporate setting. I'm a fan of both (using FF to post this), but even I couldn't seriously propose to replace IE with either of them today.
Aha! Interesting - thanks for that. There are always some sneaky people out there. I would have never thought of doing that (not only am I not sneaky enough, I'm not evil enough either).
Actually no - in the plugin space like Flash and PDF IE is superior due to its model of running different zones in different access levels. For example the "Internet Zone" runs with less privilege than a "standard user" account and cannot write to the file system outside of Temporary Internet Files and cannot write to the registry outside of a specific non-trusted area. This is with IE already running as standard user - even if the user is running as administrator. You can read up on it here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250462(VS.85).aspx. For well controlled (corporate) systems, users cannot willy-nilly add sites to the "Trusted Sites" zone which would enable those plugins to now run as standard user (basically move from the low integrity level to the medium level). Home users, of course, can often be tricked into raising the security level of a site - making integrity levels less effective in helping to prevent successful exploit, but even here it prevents most original "drive bys" and requires the user to take an action (indicating trust of the site) before anything bad could happen. Remember that most of these exploits that folks have recently been seeing a lot in the press are IE6 / Windows XP only. With Windows XP of course the whole integrity level and running sites as lower than standard user doesn't exist.
I wonder what the real difference would be then between the city using rock salt or fertilizer? One would put sodium chloride in the water, the other would put potassium nitrate or some such (not a chemistry expert - sorry). Either one would result in water that "wasn't pure" as far as this fab is concerned though. Why would it make a difference which pollutant it was?
Thank you. I was about to post the same - these other browsers are great (I am typing this at home on Chrome - now that is has extension support, and my secondary browser at home is Firefox while at work I primarily use FF) however as you said they put zero effort into being maintainable in an enterprise. Assume that an enterprise pushes out either FF or Chrome to their users. There is no easy way to configure even the proxy settings, let alone configure the security settings to allow certain apps/ sites more or less trust. The default install will pop up requests for admin rights randomly when they decide to update themselves (of course enterprise users aren't admins - or shouldn't be!). As you said - they don't really have patching: for the most part they are just completely new installs, often bringing UI changes and new features in an update. Unfortunately that means even more testing than a normal Internet Explorer patch since IE patches don't deliver features/changes.
Being a corporate desktop design person, I have admin rights and prefer FF to IE. However I have to manage that installation just like a home user. If Google or Mozilla would spend some time/money on re-architecting their patching model and their deployment of settings they would be very viable in the corporate space. The only thing left as a blocker could be those legacy apps (which it should be admitted are becoming a smaller percentage of the installed base and could probably be handled in ways others in this thread have mentioned like Citrix, etc.).
Simply use Group Policy to set the proxy server for IE to localhost. Now IE is internal only. However be careful of side effects. Some other applications for some reason share / use IE's settings. For example Google Chrome uses IE's settings. Firefox doesn't, so it will be OK. Any client side app that requires internet connectivity is also likely to instantiate a winsock connection using the defaults for the API which are basically "query the IE settings and use those for internet connectivity". Java applets may also have trouble depending on how they are written. As always, testing, testing, testing.
Another way to do it would be to use GPO to set an extended user agent on IE6 - for example adding "INTERNALONLY" to the user agent. Have the proxy deny connection requests that contain this string in their user agent. That would have the effect (generally) of not stopping applications that initialize winsock with the defaults as the defaults don't use IE's configured user agent string.
Well it is a real ban and you can be pulled over for it in California. On my 38 mile commute home every day I see probably 25 - 30 people holding phones up to their ears. I am sure I pass a lot more as I don't actually check every driver on purpose. For several years, I personally have used a bluetooth headset - but it seems the majority of people don't do it. They prefer to hold the phone up. Quite honestly, when I see someone cut someone off, make an unsafe lane change, or do some other bad driving maneuver I do try to take a look and I would say about half the time they have a phone up to their ear. I don't know what the answer would be; raise the fine, increase enforcement, or something completely new. Whatever it is, the current rules aren't making much difference.
You know, I am sure they will claim that the play is on the "iPod" name. However, I think that they are really going for the iPADD name (PADD as in Personal Access Data Display from Star Trek http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/PADD). They can't make it too obvious I guess because Paramount would sue them. But when I see a slate form factor machine like this I immediately think PADD.
Yes, if it pans out and is semi-affordable it would be great. I can't really reasonably do an all electric now because my commute one way is 38 miles with no place to plug in at work. With a little bit longer trip on the way home (picking the kids up from school, etc.) it is over 80 miles before being home to charge. Even 200 miles on a charge would make this more attractive, although some folks would still want to have some sort of "battery swap" stations along the interstates so that they could take longer road trips.
That's absolutely correct and was solved back in Windows Vista / IE 7. As of then, "Internet zone" sites are automatically running with LESS privilege than a standard user. Bascially they can't write anything outside of temporary internet files and an untrusted "low" zone in the registry. Of course Windows 7 and IE 8 continues this. You can use Process Explorer to see the integrity level at which applications are running. Medium is standard user, Low is for things like the Internet Zone, and High is anything running with system or administrative privileges. This is one of the reasons that many of these exploits don't work correctly against anything but Windows XP.
Obviously you say that in jest (and I laughed). However, I was once on a shuttle back to the hotel from a Microsoft event with several representatives of some of Microsoft's large customers when some crazy guy was trying to convince a rep from a major airline that they needed to re architect their luggage system to assign an IPv6 address to each bag. This guy was serious about it too. My buddy and I just kept cracking jokes at his expense though.
If you leave your bag unattended its time to live might expire.
When the luggage system backs up, it sends a source quench.
What do you mean "no route to host"?
My luggage was fragmented!
Can't your luggage route around the storm?
and many more...
It was one of the most enjoyable bus rides I've ever had.
I try that every year and it hasn't worked yet. I assume it is my company that doesn't publish the info (perhaps they have to pay for the privilege or perhaps they see a privacy issue). Anyway, a company with 60,000 employees globally and about 25,000 in the US and they don't publish the data so Turbo Tax can import it. I wish they did!
I agree about the Google redirects. I know they have been there for awhile now, but I first actually "noticed" them (as in they caused me a problem) just the other day when I was trying to get some links to "further reading" to go into some technical document I was writing. I sure didn't want Google redirect links in my document so I actually ended up going to Bing and doing the same search. That worked better as Bing apparently doesn't do the redirect thing and the links are actually links to the site you searched for. Bing doesn't do anything else better, but Google made their links useless for that function.
I've got a Lenovo X200s with two video out ports - a DVI and a DisplayPort. I have two panels both of which have only VGA and DVI. I have a DisplayPort -> DVI adapter plugged into the DisplayPort on the X200s and it works great for having dual screen.
I'd agree with Droid on Verizon (it's what I am using now after several years of AT&T - during which I had no problems; I switched because I was cancelling my work provided plan on AT&T and wanted to go with the Droid), but the submitter mentioned connecting notebooks too. From what I've seen, Verizon wants an extra data plan to tether your phone to your computer. I realize there is an app store app or two that enables tethering, but since Verizon seems to want to use tethering as another income stream I don't know if it will end up being disabled by some technical measure. Anyway, something to consider strongly is the cost of tethering on the plan you go with.
I don't know. I've always used Google for search the last several years. I also have a Droid phone. But just yesterday I was writing some documentation for some code I wrote to help manage the driver store on Windows. I needed to add some links to further information about driver INF files on the MS site. I went to google and did a search. I realized quickly that at some point over the last few years Google has changed the way their links work. They no longer are a link to the site you want - they are a link to something at Google that then redirects to your chosen site. Since I have no idea how long those links will work, they were useless to me (I wanted to right-click and copy shortcut / copy link and paste it into my documentation as further reading - but some link to Google that may work fine for today and maybe not work fine next year isn't all that handy). I copied my search from Google and pasted it into Bing. I got pretty much the same results, but a right-click and copy shortcut actually got me the real URL and I could then paste it into my doc. I don't even know when Google changed this so that their links aren't real links to sites - but stuff like that could drive me permanently to Bing.
I have yet to see a believable CG scene period. Whether the actors were real or not. In fact, I guess it is worse when the actors are real and performing in front of a green screen and the CGI is composited in later. I've noticed that many people can sit through scenes like that just fine (including my wife), but for me they are just jarring. It's usually something with perspective or lighting sources or whatnot that just screams "something is wrong here" and blows the immersion I am trying to get in the movie. I can generally back up the movie and point out to my wife the things I am seeing and then she will "get it", but it really seems like only some people notice this stuff. (perhaps like only some people notice 60 hz flicker on CRT monitors).
Maybe it is something like being "hyper observant" or something. The other thing that always jars me out of a scene is the continuity. Something like a glass in the actor's hand that is 1/2 full and then a cut to another view and it is all of a sudden totally full. A different number and placement of flowers in a vase. A scene in a House episode where he pulls out a syringe, bleeds the air out and clearly has it less than half full then a cut to another camera and it is 3/4 full.
Both types of scenes - the CGI and the "continuity error" just seem to rudely pull or push me back out of that immersion in the film.
I'm glad you have neighbors you can trust vasgzr. I don't even have relatives I can always trust. At one point my wife's cousin's daughter (17) stayed with us for a few days. She brought her notebook. I gave her our WPA2 key and a lecture about "don't use my internet connection to do any copyright violation - no music or movies, etc.". Next morning I come downstairs to find her downloading a bunch of songs on Limewire. WPA2 key changed, no more privileges for her. I can't trust my neighbors (or their guests) either - they may download kiddie porn, warez, music, whatever through MY IP address. Having open WiFi would be very nice to do, but the hassle of possibly getting RIAA notes or even possibly police at my door (for the kiddie porn thing a neighbor's guest could do) is not even worth it. Until such time as ISP's are able to uniquely identify WHO did it and not just "well this guy owns the house where the service is terminated", the other folks in the area can get their own internet access.
I've seen lots of them. One per month at work for SOX compliance (unfortunately the crazy system our company bought uses them). One more just the other day from my kids school district for a form to apply to be in the school's "pathways" program (engineering program in this case). This form didn't even work right. The form field checking worked, but the submit button failed to do its email thing - so we had to print it and carry it in because you can't SAVE it. Another to apply to be a coach for the soccer league (background check info). All of these things use the forms feature with ActionScript/JavaScript. Just because one person isn't required to use them doesn't mean all of us don't have to use them.
BTW, I agree that adobe reader is terrible software - but I can't get the school district, the soccer league, or my work to switch...
I guess some big-wheel producers or their companies could be said to buy movies. The rest of us just license them for non-public presentation in our homes or some such nonsense (I fast forward that part when possible; it isn't always a no button press area even though it is a no skip section for some reason). Of course there are many folks these days who acquire their license through less than legal means. I personally have a wall of DVD's that are all legally licensed. But I'd agree with you that pretty much no normal person "buys movies" since the several million dollars for them are out of our price range.
I guess if you said "who buys round plastic shiny discs that ship with a limited viewing license for a movie" I would hold up my hand and say "me".
I think that is one of the reasons AT&T wants the FCC to mandate the change. Just like the way today they are required to provide POTS phone service most places (there are exceptions) and they get funding to do so, they would like to get funding to run DSL or other broadband other places. That way they don't have to pay for the infrastructure (again) and get to reap the advantages of it (again). Those more rural areas like yours? Just like today my POTS bill has items on their to force me (and others) to pay to bring service to folks in rural areas, if we get a mandated end date for POTS my broadband bill will have line items forcing me (and others) to pay to get DSL or equivalent service to rural folks. I don't know if that is a good or bad idea - but public funding for the infrastructure with the companies getting the profit is what this is about.
True; encryption is one important piece of the pie. But, in the example the GP gave, if the data still exists in a backup somewhere it is still subject to discovery requests and, encrypted or not, you will have to divulge it in an unencrypted form. Also, the encryption won't protect you in the case of a government seizing the server - you are still "down" for whatever function was being provided by that server. In other places you may find that it is illegal to import certain encryption technologies. Are you doing so when you simply have a server acting as a data store? Maybe not, but I don't think case law in some of these countries has decided that. As the GP says, there is a lot to consider when planning to store your data off premises.
NetBIOS doesn't have anything to do with autoconfiguration or DHCP though. Of course people have DHCP. NetBIOS over TCP/IP though is a layer that allows machines to find each other sans DNS. For example say you have three machines on your home network behind a NAT router. You share a printer from one of them (yes, I mean Windows machines). Unless you have setup hosts files or a home DNS server (which most home users with a three machine network WON'T do), then the machines use a NetBIOS broadcast to find each other. Even in many corporate networks this isn't disabled. Name resolution of a "short name" (for example L3B3ABC-7 instead of L3B3ABC-7.test.example.com) will go this route:
DNS (with the local machine's primary DNS suffix appended - so the query is L3B3ABC-7.test.example.com)
DNS (with the primary DNS suffix devolved one level appended - so the query is L3B3ABC-7.example.com)
Any other configured (GPO) DNS search suffixes
A NetBIOS subnet only broadcast for the short name
It is this last query that they are saying can easily be poisoned.
It is probably trivial to code up something to do this. I imagine the sample of a WPAD file for Firefox or IE autoconfiguration could work as a denial of service of sorts (routing you to a non-existent proxy or something) - possibly even attempting a proxy man-in-the-middle attack. The others (Exchange, SMB file shares, etc.) would seem to be only a small denial of service. If those servers were accessible they would have been found via DNS so they aren't available anyway. And the protocols require authentication so the attacking machine couldn't spoof more than the naming service for those. The proxy one though would be the interesting one.
Do you have a suggestion for a non half-assed solution to prevent copyright infringement? If so, you could probably make quite a bundle on your idea. It's all well and good to point out the flaws of said systems - but what we need is someone who can point to how this stuff should be done and help the industry to do it right. At this point in time, it is hard to see how content providers could continue to spend the resources to creative expensive (some would say quality, others would say cruddy, but few would dispute that it currently has high costs for talent) content if they just dropped all of their DRM efforts and tacitly allowed the unfettered copying of their content.
I'm no genius on this - I wish that I had the next big idea here. As a consumer though I would want a system that allows me free access to shift content between any devices and any format without having to hack it. Any OS should be usable. The media companies would reasonably expect that if I transferred it to someone else that it would be transferred like a book and I would no longer have a copy. Loan it? Sure. Sell it (under first sale doctrine) - sure, but then I should no longer have a copy. (Yes, the media companies wouldn't like that, but I said if they were being reasonable they would expect that).
There needs to be some way to build something like this without requiring "servers" that can be taken offline (like what Wal-Mart tried to do) in order to view the content.