Because people understand the concept behind nails and tires and don't understand the concepts behind viruses. To make it more accurate...
Related news: A tire changing shop decided to show how a carniverous squirrel can chew through a tire, and then started selling squirrel proof tires.
What is your take on the constant threats coming from Diebold? To have the CEO state that he will deliver his state to the Republicans, and then unleash the attack lawyers on everyone pointing out the painfully obvious flaws in the system seems terribly questionable behavior. It seems to me that it would be easier, probably cheaper, and certainly better PR to take advantage of the free testing and fix the issues rather than sending lawyers after anyone who breathes a word about the flaws and refusing to fix them.
Do you believe they are just trying to protect "their good name" or is something a little more nefarious going on?
For a little fun, burn a dozen or so Ubuntu disks and boot them on the store machines and walk away. When I was shopping for my laptop I did exactly that. I got tired of the endless research/restart process of trying to find a laptop that had components that wouldn't be a nightmare and eventually just went store by store booting all their laptops with an Ubuntu disk to see which ones had hardware without headaches. Not a single employee questioned me, and a few customers were interested in that linux thing. And interestingly enough one place had wireless next door and I was able to hop on their wireless and surf the web for a few hardware messages right from that box.
I don't really know what the hell you are talkin bout you hippie. But I'ms gunna get me one of dem unicorn huntin licenses you be talking bout and I'm gunna bag me the biggest horn you have ever seen. I will polish that horn every day in an entirely heterosexual fashion.
The unsolicited fax thing has been illegal for a long long while now. But if you really are still getting them and not just making up another slashdot reply, I have a few fun ideas for you
1. Fax them replies back, the more their fax machine is busy the less they are faxing.
2. Same as above, but take 3-5 pages and tape them together in a loop, keeps their machine terribly busy and they run out of paper
3. Same as above, but use black paper. No ink, no paper, no dialing for them. And we have all seen how ink prices are, and how willing companies are to throw around DMCA charges to prevent cheap refills.
No gaurontees on the legality of any of this fun, but I imagine they would be hard pressed to say in court that they didn't solicit a response from you with their unsolicited faxes.
Neat idea, but I figure implanting a large antenna would be better. Not only do you get the location, they can't effectively leave it behind, AND you have that added benefit of making your daughter slightly more difficult to 'do' anything with. And yes, I have a baby girl and have been working on ways to combat the various problems of the male population years in advance of needing it. I figure my best bet at this point is to be a good shot at a long distance until I come up with a better plan.:)
Well it has already been established through the leaked source code that MS has put in back doors throught the code so that their own products seem to operate better than anything written with the API they released. This is a huuuge source of the bad nasties that allow all flavors of IE/Office related nonsense to affect the core OS.
As far as their motiviation...MS has done NOTHING that wasn't ultimately motivated by profit. And generally they don't care for 'earning' their profit so much as stealing or beating it out of anyone who looks like they are doing something interesting. And as long as they are taking payoffs from scumware makers (Remember Claria?) then they DO have a motivation in wanting an insecure OS. Oh that and as long as their OS is insecure, and they are the only one who can provide security products...then they absolutely have a motivation for an insecure OS. I mean really...what better way to not bother cleaning up your code, and then charging your customers $20+/year to "protect" them from your lack of QA. Its perfect, not only do they not have to pay the costly QA costs, but they MAKE MONEY on the lack of QA!. Just wait until they start trying to charge for your hardware upgra...oh damn...they are already doing that too.
Incidentally I keep hearing that stupid line about "I don't use any protection and I never got anything" Do you realize how dumb that sounds? I mean you think you sound smart for not catching anything, but its like "I never used a condom and I don't get tested and I never got AIDS" Sure cuz you don't know that you have caught anything. Now you are right that generally not doing stupid things keeps you safe, but reputable sites have gotten nailed with defacements that allowed for driveby installs of scumware. The days of scumware/viruses causing problems for the user are LONG since past, most are financially motivated in botnets, spambots, keyloggers, etc etc, the whole point is to NOT get noticed by the user so they can continue to do their scumware jobs.
SHHHHHH!!!! You are going to destroy their thing! They keep using that "don't divorce ever" part as their anti gay flag. Because "Jesus said marriage is between a man and a woman!" See god DOES hate gays! They totally ignore the context of that paragraph was the pharisees telling Jesus that he was wrong because even moses allowed them to divorce their wives. No mention of gay anything.
I don't believe ANYONE in office has a damned clue about what Jesus actually taught...and to be honest I don't think most of the church going populace has a freaking clue either. As a child that always bothered me, going to church and only having tiny little excerpts read to me, nothing in order, nothing related, and then a long sermon about what that little paragraph means totally out of context of what was happening in that part of the bible.
Doesn't have to be left open. You can crack WEP keys relatively easily...just need enough packets. Thank god for bittorrent and other sharing stuff. Not hard to catch enough packets when people d/l so much stuff:) Also, you should never trust an open network is accidental...I mean i could open mine up just to watch what you do on it:)
Why would you assume the people who this is going to hurt have a clue in regards to network engineering in any fashion. I frequently see ICS and such turned on when there was no reason. Or if you want it simplified...cable/dsl modem -usb-> PC -> ethernet -> WAP OR cable/dsl modem -usb-> PC -> built in wireless. You have obv havent fired up wireless stuff in an airport recently...tons of nonsense wireless settings.
Linux and BSD don't seem to have a problem working on security without locking other people out from making security tools. Why is MS any different? Why is their "security" locking other people out? I realize the technical implementations are fairly different, but that doesn't affect the reasons for being critical of the MS lockout attempt in the name of security. That being said, I really have no sympathy for the AV makers since the arguement is absolutely correct about securing an insecure OS, and paying them is quite a protection racket (I remember reading quite some time ago about how one was advertising signatures for a virus that had never been found in the wild, which certainly sounds like we made it in our lab and are protecting you from it). But MS security has been a freaking joke, and will continue to be a freaking joke, and locking out companies (albiet questionable ones) that do make better products is purely anticompetitive and has little to do with any security attempt. When MS doesn't work with the scumware makers to take payoffs to not detect their stuff as scumware...then maybe I will take them a little more seriously.
1. Create OS with holes
2. Lock out other scumware detectors
3. Collect bribes from scumware makers to not detect the scumware
When your country is finally annexed you will be blamed, tortured, and locked away for life for being a dirty foreigner. I'm sorry you didn't want to help us before the runaway train got that far.
I would just like to point out another quote related to "the beam in their own eyes" that makes the Religious Right such a freaking joke.
Your quote "How can you tell your brother he has a mote of dust in his eye when you have a plank in your own?"
Another good one "Those who draw the sword will die by the sword"
Yet, while in GROSS violation of everything Jesus ever said, these asshats on the right chant his name in some sick mantra of hypocrasy. I'm not terribly religious myself, but I opted to go read the New Testament to see what the hell was really going on with all of these stupid out of context bible quotes. Jesus himself was one angry guy, frequently attacking the religious/political leaders of the time for making up all these stupid rules about religion when there were only 10 SIMPLE rules that mattered. Oh well... The right is becomming well known for hypocrasy.
"Think of the children!" -- Mark Foley
"Women are too stupid to vote, and women scientists aren't really scientists" -- Ann Coulter (I agree here only because by her own argument she is too stupid to know what she is talking about)
Hardware encryption/decryption is terribly fast compared to its software counterpart
True on the passwords thing, but I have seen solutions that use smartcard type setups
Hardware encryption/decryption being faster, and its not your files per say that are encrypted its the entire drive, i fail to see why this matters
Its not exactly new technology, its a new vendor and new marketing. Hardware encryption of drives has been going on for quite some time...I know this because after the rash of stolen laptops I thought to my self "Geeze, this is stupid, why doesn't anyone use hardware encryption, its fast, its secure, and it would pretty much kill these problems" and went off researching the problem of making it computer friendly hardware as I frequently deal with hardware encryptors anyways. Sure enough my dreams of making a super cool product to revolutionize the market and make myself millions disolved as I found I was far from the first one to the punch:)
So I see dozens of comments about "Its no big deal, you have to be on the lan". Am I the only one that hasn't forgotten how common wireless networks are and how trivial it is to gain access to most of them?
I haven't run into many people who actually bought an Alienware system. However, the few real life people that I know that HAVE bought them were terribly unhappy with them. The hardware was indeed mediocre, and if it was premium hardware, it was broken premium hardware that took months for them to get right. One guy had bought a laptop, arrived with cracked screen, he sent it back, they "fixed" it and sent it back a dead screen with no crack...he sent it back again (this was the last I talked to him, so I assume they eventually remedied it). All in all it took him something like an extra 3 months of back n forth and fighting with them to take care of it (Again assuming that the last laptop they sent back to him was indeed in working order). This is not the type of service you should expect when you spend that kind of money on "premium" gear.
You are under the mistaken impression that the populace will take the right side. Most will cheer the government on for protecting them from evil hackers that want to kill them and still their credit cards.
As much as I agree with the apathetic part, and people not knowing their rights. I would like to say, after having been shot at going to work for a few months, I have a new appreication for going to work without being shot at. So, going to work without being shot at is no small thing.
Well here is the thing. For the geek type that has multiple machines you will indeed have that router separation or better. I actually have a dual nic linux box plugged in acting as my router/firewall/server. For the vast majority of computers that I have had to go work on for people...they only have that single computer in the house, and it makes no sense to go shell out an extra $50-80 for that router. In fact, the few that I have had to call their provider for help, the provider insists that I plug the computer directly into the modem before they will help me (their stupid little scripts don't account for any variance, and they generally don't seem to hire people with a clue about networking or troubleshooting).
Also, while this doesn't apply directly to the discussion at hand it is still demonstrates the nasty on the net that doesn't require stupid user tricks, my box detects anywhere between 5 and 15 hits from that stupid MS SQL worm every day and how old is that beast? That being said, the VAST majority of problems do indeed come from "stupid user tricks" however, "stupid browser tricks" tend to fall under that category and while some sites are obviously less safe than others, there have been a number of reputable sites that have had malware type issues on them. Would you blame the shooter if the gun mfg had problems keeping the slide on during recoil and it cracked people in the face frequently? Doesn't matter what they were shooting at, the gun still injured the user outside of what it should be doing in normal operation. (I am just bored with all the car comparisons)
Slashdot Mirror
I brought that one up myself in the first related discussion I had. By almost every measure it was worse, but noone remembers.
Because people understand the concept behind nails and tires and don't understand the concepts behind viruses. To make it more accurate...
Related news: A tire changing shop decided to show how a carniverous squirrel can chew through a tire, and then started selling squirrel proof tires.
What is your take on the constant threats coming from Diebold? To have the CEO state that he will deliver his state to the Republicans, and then unleash the attack lawyers on everyone pointing out the painfully obvious flaws in the system seems terribly questionable behavior. It seems to me that it would be easier, probably cheaper, and certainly better PR to take advantage of the free testing and fix the issues rather than sending lawyers after anyone who breathes a word about the flaws and refusing to fix them.
Do you believe they are just trying to protect "their good name" or is something a little more nefarious going on?
For a little fun, burn a dozen or so Ubuntu disks and boot them on the store machines and walk away. When I was shopping for my laptop I did exactly that. I got tired of the endless research/restart process of trying to find a laptop that had components that wouldn't be a nightmare and eventually just went store by store booting all their laptops with an Ubuntu disk to see which ones had hardware without headaches. Not a single employee questioned me, and a few customers were interested in that linux thing. And interestingly enough one place had wireless next door and I was able to hop on their wireless and surf the web for a few hardware messages right from that box.
I don't really know what the hell you are talkin bout you hippie. But I'ms gunna get me one of dem unicorn huntin licenses you be talking bout and I'm gunna bag me the biggest horn you have ever seen. I will polish that horn every day in an entirely heterosexual fashion.
MS already gave them the source code to Windows. Why would they bother using linux?
Hmm, not sure, but I imagine you could still fill up hard drive storage on the systems that accept faxes directly to file.
The unsolicited fax thing has been illegal for a long long while now. But if you really are still getting them and not just making up another slashdot reply, I have a few fun ideas for you
1. Fax them replies back, the more their fax machine is busy the less they are faxing.
2. Same as above, but take 3-5 pages and tape them together in a loop, keeps their machine terribly busy and they run out of paper
3. Same as above, but use black paper. No ink, no paper, no dialing for them. And we have all seen how ink prices are, and how willing companies are to throw around DMCA charges to prevent cheap refills.
No gaurontees on the legality of any of this fun, but I imagine they would be hard pressed to say in court that they didn't solicit a response from you with their unsolicited faxes.
Neat idea, but I figure implanting a large antenna would be better. Not only do you get the location, they can't effectively leave it behind, AND you have that added benefit of making your daughter slightly more difficult to 'do' anything with. And yes, I have a baby girl and have been working on ways to combat the various problems of the male population years in advance of needing it. I figure my best bet at this point is to be a good shot at a long distance until I come up with a better plan. :)
Well it has already been established through the leaked source code that MS has put in back doors throught the code so that their own products seem to operate better than anything written with the API they released. This is a huuuge source of the bad nasties that allow all flavors of IE/Office related nonsense to affect the core OS.
As far as their motiviation...MS has done NOTHING that wasn't ultimately motivated by profit. And generally they don't care for 'earning' their profit so much as stealing or beating it out of anyone who looks like they are doing something interesting. And as long as they are taking payoffs from scumware makers (Remember Claria?) then they DO have a motivation in wanting an insecure OS. Oh that and as long as their OS is insecure, and they are the only one who can provide security products...then they absolutely have a motivation for an insecure OS. I mean really...what better way to not bother cleaning up your code, and then charging your customers $20+/year to "protect" them from your lack of QA. Its perfect, not only do they not have to pay the costly QA costs, but they MAKE MONEY on the lack of QA!. Just wait until they start trying to charge for your hardware upgra...oh damn...they are already doing that too.
Incidentally I keep hearing that stupid line about "I don't use any protection and I never got anything" Do you realize how dumb that sounds? I mean you think you sound smart for not catching anything, but its like "I never used a condom and I don't get tested and I never got AIDS" Sure cuz you don't know that you have caught anything. Now you are right that generally not doing stupid things keeps you safe, but reputable sites have gotten nailed with defacements that allowed for driveby installs of scumware. The days of scumware/viruses causing problems for the user are LONG since past, most are financially motivated in botnets, spambots, keyloggers, etc etc, the whole point is to NOT get noticed by the user so they can continue to do their scumware jobs.
SHHHHHH!!!! You are going to destroy their thing! They keep using that "don't divorce ever" part as their anti gay flag. Because "Jesus said marriage is between a man and a woman!" See god DOES hate gays! They totally ignore the context of that paragraph was the pharisees telling Jesus that he was wrong because even moses allowed them to divorce their wives. No mention of gay anything.
I don't believe ANYONE in office has a damned clue about what Jesus actually taught...and to be honest I don't think most of the church going populace has a freaking clue either. As a child that always bothered me, going to church and only having tiny little excerpts read to me, nothing in order, nothing related, and then a long sermon about what that little paragraph means totally out of context of what was happening in that part of the bible.
Doesn't have to be left open. You can crack WEP keys relatively easily...just need enough packets. Thank god for bittorrent and other sharing stuff. Not hard to catch enough packets when people d/l so much stuff :) Also, you should never trust an open network is accidental...I mean i could open mine up just to watch what you do on it :)
Why would you assume the people who this is going to hurt have a clue in regards to network engineering in any fashion. I frequently see ICS and such turned on when there was no reason. Or if you want it simplified...cable/dsl modem -usb-> PC -> ethernet -> WAP OR cable/dsl modem -usb-> PC -> built in wireless. You have obv havent fired up wireless stuff in an airport recently...tons of nonsense wireless settings.
Linux and BSD don't seem to have a problem working on security without locking other people out from making security tools. Why is MS any different? Why is their "security" locking other people out? I realize the technical implementations are fairly different, but that doesn't affect the reasons for being critical of the MS lockout attempt in the name of security. That being said, I really have no sympathy for the AV makers since the arguement is absolutely correct about securing an insecure OS, and paying them is quite a protection racket (I remember reading quite some time ago about how one was advertising signatures for a virus that had never been found in the wild, which certainly sounds like we made it in our lab and are protecting you from it). But MS security has been a freaking joke, and will continue to be a freaking joke, and locking out companies (albiet questionable ones) that do make better products is purely anticompetitive and has little to do with any security attempt. When MS doesn't work with the scumware makers to take payoffs to not detect their stuff as scumware...then maybe I will take them a little more seriously.
1. Create OS with holes
2. Lock out other scumware detectors
3. Collect bribes from scumware makers to not detect the scumware
4. Profit!
Sorry there is no ??? here, its fairly obvious.
When your country is finally annexed you will be blamed, tortured, and locked away for life for being a dirty foreigner. I'm sorry you didn't want to help us before the runaway train got that far.
I would just like to point out another quote related to "the beam in their own eyes" that makes the Religious Right such a freaking joke.
Your quote "How can you tell your brother he has a mote of dust in his eye when you have a plank in your own?"
Another good one "Those who draw the sword will die by the sword"
Yet, while in GROSS violation of everything Jesus ever said, these asshats on the right chant his name in some sick mantra of hypocrasy. I'm not terribly religious myself, but I opted to go read the New Testament to see what the hell was really going on with all of these stupid out of context bible quotes. Jesus himself was one angry guy, frequently attacking the religious/political leaders of the time for making up all these stupid rules about religion when there were only 10 SIMPLE rules that mattered. Oh well... The right is becomming well known for hypocrasy.
"Think of the children!" -- Mark Foley
"Women are too stupid to vote, and women scientists aren't really scientists" -- Ann Coulter (I agree here only because by her own argument she is too stupid to know what she is talking about)
Hardware encryption/decryption is terribly fast compared to its software counterpart
:)
True on the passwords thing, but I have seen solutions that use smartcard type setups
Hardware encryption/decryption being faster, and its not your files per say that are encrypted its the entire drive, i fail to see why this matters
Its not exactly new technology, its a new vendor and new marketing. Hardware encryption of drives has been going on for quite some time...I know this because after the rash of stolen laptops I thought to my self "Geeze, this is stupid, why doesn't anyone use hardware encryption, its fast, its secure, and it would pretty much kill these problems" and went off researching the problem of making it computer friendly hardware as I frequently deal with hardware encryptors anyways. Sure enough my dreams of making a super cool product to revolutionize the market and make myself millions disolved as I found I was far from the first one to the punch
So I see dozens of comments about "Its no big deal, you have to be on the lan". Am I the only one that hasn't forgotten how common wireless networks are and how trivial it is to gain access to most of them?
I haven't run into many people who actually bought an Alienware system. However, the few real life people that I know that HAVE bought them were terribly unhappy with them. The hardware was indeed mediocre, and if it was premium hardware, it was broken premium hardware that took months for them to get right. One guy had bought a laptop, arrived with cracked screen, he sent it back, they "fixed" it and sent it back a dead screen with no crack...he sent it back again (this was the last I talked to him, so I assume they eventually remedied it). All in all it took him something like an extra 3 months of back n forth and fighting with them to take care of it (Again assuming that the last laptop they sent back to him was indeed in working order). This is not the type of service you should expect when you spend that kind of money on "premium" gear.
You are under the mistaken impression that the populace will take the right side. Most will cheer the government on for protecting them from evil hackers that want to kill them and still their credit cards.
As much as I agree with the apathetic part, and people not knowing their rights. I would like to say, after having been shot at going to work for a few months, I have a new appreication for going to work without being shot at. So, going to work without being shot at is no small thing.
Come on...so its an Invalid Subnet Mask.
Shut up you nazi!
Well here is the thing. For the geek type that has multiple machines you will indeed have that router separation or better. I actually have a dual nic linux box plugged in acting as my router/firewall/server. For the vast majority of computers that I have had to go work on for people...they only have that single computer in the house, and it makes no sense to go shell out an extra $50-80 for that router. In fact, the few that I have had to call their provider for help, the provider insists that I plug the computer directly into the modem before they will help me (their stupid little scripts don't account for any variance, and they generally don't seem to hire people with a clue about networking or troubleshooting).
Also, while this doesn't apply directly to the discussion at hand it is still demonstrates the nasty on the net that doesn't require stupid user tricks, my box detects anywhere between 5 and 15 hits from that stupid MS SQL worm every day and how old is that beast? That being said, the VAST majority of problems do indeed come from "stupid user tricks" however, "stupid browser tricks" tend to fall under that category and while some sites are obviously less safe than others, there have been a number of reputable sites that have had malware type issues on them. Would you blame the shooter if the gun mfg had problems keeping the slide on during recoil and it cracked people in the face frequently? Doesn't matter what they were shooting at, the gun still injured the user outside of what it should be doing in normal operation. (I am just bored with all the car comparisons)
I can't say that I'm upset about free PR for a viable alternative to the current cartel methods of diamond production.