You ignore several facts:
-The criminals at these registrars often used the same bogus contact info to register domains 1000+ times. They won't provide real info. A good registrar would suspend the domains of customers doing that until they provided real info - since the spammers wouldn't, they'd lose the domains. If the domains last hours instead of weeks, it's lost sales for the spammers, cost & time to register the new domain, and need to send out more spam with the new site.
-If registrars WON'T comply, like these registrars- they lose their accreditation! EstDomains lost theirs for these activities (blind eye to bogus contact info & spammers).
-If they use a private registration service that won't comply to the spam notifications, a good registrar would suspend any domains by that private registration company until they acknowledged it. Or, the registrar loses their accreditation.
If the people who buy stuff from spam get "page not found" errors every time they try to visit sites, they will be less able and less inclined to buy from spam.
The whole point of WHOIS is to have a liable, legal contact. If you got a notice of infringement of copyright or something- for whatever reason- they'd send it to your WHOIS info. The whole point of WHOIS info is to have accountability.
And the reason the registrar made you change your WHOIS info is, if they allow customers to repeatedly use fake WHOIS info, they could lose their accreditation. Any legit domains could be moved to a compliant registrar, while the spam domains get revoked.
Oh, and people DO lose their accreditation. See EstDomains, revoked because of all the spam and bogus registrations. It DOES happen. By making registrars have accountability to prevent spammers (by preventing them from registering 1000+ domains on the same credit card & whois info and giving them back shortly after suspending them without actually doing anything), it makes it harder for spammers to keep their domains operating, making it less profitable as they need to register new domains AND send out new spam with the new address.
And it's hardly "useless data". If you receive a legal complaint, and you had bogus WHOIS data, that could come to bite you in the ass in a HUGE way in court. Yeah, it's rare. Now, your hosting company gets any correspondence for you, and sends it to you- so you get privacy too.
I don't expect more from the older device. I find it laughable that Amazon axed the SD card slot, and the removable battery was a big plus- my 3 year old iPod has a 5 minute battery life (and it's a Video, so the battery is soldered in). That's a massive downside.
Page flip speed isn't a huge deal (unless they made it 50% or more faster) and the 25% battery life increase will wane over time, especially when the Kindle 1 owner can change the battery.
The new device has:
-No removable battery
-No SD card slot
-Is slightly thinner
-Gets slightly better battery life
Looks uglier (opinion).
I'd like to see the new one in person, but from what I can tell, the newer version is (pathetically) inferior to the original in a few critical ways.
No SD card slot and when the battery starts to die the early adopters can just buy a new battery... and they paid the same price. Who really got the better deal?
I'm sad Ruckus is gone. The catalog was actually pretty good, and had most of the (Mainstream) music I'd listen to. It was handy to hear decent (192KBPS WMA) quality copies of entire tracks- I used it to assess multiple albums for purchase.
Where did Ruckus fail?
-Ads were probably not sufficient to cover the cost of everything. My ad blocker detected Ruckus and removed all of the ads from the interface.
-The client was beyond buggy. Many times, licenses for songs wouldn't renew at all. I could redownload them, wasting their bandwidth, but I couldn't use a few KB and renew the licenses.
-It was utterly incompatible with the iPod or the Zune as PlaysForSure DRM was used. If you were adept you could use Tunebite (Fairuse4WM used to work), but the quality wasn't as good as iTunes Plus.
-There was a smaller catalog than iTunes. Part of the reason was track restrictions. Say, Stadium Arcadium by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. You could download the whole album EXCEPT Dani California and Stadium Arcadium, the two album singles (I don't remember if it was the RHCP album I was thinking of). I remember finding albums with less than 1/2 their tracks downloadable.
It provided a legal avenue to listen to whole songs, and if you used an older WMA player, essentially "free" music while you were in college. I think it was a worthwhile experiment. Ruckus' death blow was opening up to all US universities; previously, the universities that offered it basically paid Ruckus.
The benefit of the domain approach is that they know what domains to buy and can point them at any IP- if the IP of the server gets blocked, it connects to a different domain- which they can point to a different server. The worm generates (up to) 250 domains per day.
By using IPs, you make it easier to block it on a firewall level- just block the IPs. And if they can have the worm algorithmically generate IP addresses- that they can be sure to have each day- that would be damn impressive. That's pretty much impossible.
Except the fact that the Conflicker worm connects to domains via an algorithm- that the spammers buy specifically to control the machines, and no other people are on that domain. If the phishers have any of the 250 domains the worm tries to connect to each day (again, the worm has this code in the client), the worm gets instructions. So, OpenDNS can use the algorithim and block any domains each day even if the authors have already registered the bad domains., preventing the worm from getting instructions.
Also, as an OpenDNS user, I've seen geocities.com/baduser12 be blocked as phishing, while geocities.com and geocities.com/averageuser123 isn't blocked.
One responsibility of a registrar is to try to stop fraudulent domain sales.
In this case, some of these companies (Xin Net in particular) keep allowing the same spammers with the same obviously fake Whois info keep registering new domains. And Xin Net has suspended domains when KnujOn and others report them, and shortly afterwards, give them back to the same spammers.
Abuse WILL happen, but Xin Net went beyond having a lot of people registering spam domains with it. They would suspend domains when KnujOn and others asked, and would then give them back to the spammers. Additionally, Xin Net keeps letting the SAME abusive customers with the same WHOIS data keep registering new domains.
This new iteration of the tool is somewhat different; however, most of what I said is relevant.
On most issues, it doesn't seem to do anything manually anymore. I tried a Fix-it for a job stuck in a print queue (a network printer on a different network) for XP- it worked fine. I tried a Vista fix-it regarding log files: Open it, it opens a dialog that says "This fix-it does not apply to your system" and closes.
The page even says:
Note If you are not on the computer that has the problem, you can save the automatic fix to a flash drive or to a CD, and then you can run it on the computer that has the problem.
It doesn't ask you if the PC with the issue is the one you're on anymore; however, if the Fix-it is for a different OS, it won't run at all.
I know, using a Microsoft automated support tool is an instant deduction on my geek points. However, I had a registry issue caused by a botched Office update, and the tool automated a bunch of registry edits and menu navigating, and it actually worked.
I've also had a few friends (of course, I do the PC repair for them) use it with positive results.
One of the first things that it asks you is if you're using it on the PC that is having the issue. If you hit "a different PC", it asks you to run it on the other PC, or it gives you step-by-step manual directions.
Having a friend with an inverse situation (Vista issue, XP fix-it - network related, if I recall correctly), he ran the fix-it tool and hit "problem on this PC"- and it refused to run (wrong OS error).
The Fix-it tool can fix a lot of errors that would prevent proper internet access too- and not every Windows PC has internet.
Since the submitter never even tried to run the file (because someone running Ubuntu, or even XP would never need to download a Vista fix-it for his friend), this is really a nonstory.
Correct. The only activation limit on the retail copy is that you can only activate online the first five times. After that, you call the automated phone line. You say your product key, wait 5 seconds, and have the activation code read back to you. Doing it by phone isn't hard at all; it's even toll free.
Bill will call Ballmer tonight and tell him to "execute order 66".
On the morning of January 24th, 2009, hundreds of botnet controllers and spammers will be found dead. All will have died from brute force trauma, with no weapons or clues...other than a broken chair at each crime scene...
But Mac OS and Linux distros aren't de facto monopolies in the operating system market. If Mac OS came on 95% of computers and Safari was on the machines out of the box, I think the EU would pursue the issue too. It's about using one monopoly/near monopoly position to further another one.
If Microsoft held less than half of the market, I don't think MS would have been the target of the EU for this
If GM owned 95% of the auto market and somehow used their monopoly position to, say, put a proprietary, patented gas tank in their car that could only be filled at gas stations owned by GM, that would be a much more valid comparison.
Found it. Apparently when you double clicked a media file in the XP "N edition" it asked you to install Windows Media Player or Winamp: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/09/windows-xp-n-edition-xp-without-media.html
My guess is OEMs will prebundle a browser and MS will include Opera on there (they started the complaint and have a smaller marketshare than Firefox currently). That is, if anybody buys it. (Apparently only 1,500 XP "N edition" disks have been ordered with no known sales...)
IIRC the way Windows XP N was in Europe was that the user was presented with a choice of several non Microsoft media players at first run.
Nobody actually bought N (well, no OEMs, I'm sure a few people did out of principle). My guess is Microsoft tries to offer that as a combined product/SKU with the "no media player" editions and, failing that, it'll get it's own SKU.
I think it DOES relate to playing the media. You have to renew your licenses regularly for music that you get on a "rent for $X a month" to make sure you're actually still subscribed. Those licenses are issued to last from date A to date B - it has to check that any DRMed media is within the time period for a valid license.
Sorry, but I don't work for any security companies, nor do I know anybody that does. Just giving my opinion on two tools that save me an assload of time when I need to remove difficult malware.
Back when it was Antivirus 2008 (and earlier) it was pretty easy to remove (relatively). Kill two processes at once via process explorer (so the tree dies and the other process doesn't revive the killed process), remove some registry and startup entries.
I just had to deal with a new version (friend's PC)- Spyware Guard 2008. What a pain in the ass. This version installed a rootkit, a device driver, locked the HOSTS file, added hidden registry entries, hidden services, parent and child services, downloading stubs to update it to stop detection...antiviruses stopped updating.
I was determined to kill it though. I got SuperAntiSpyware Free edition- free for personal use. Picked up all of the entries (rootkit, files, registry, etc.) and removed them after a reboot, no safe mode necessary. A standalone A/V scan (McAfee boot disc with latest definitions, and a rootkit scan from an OS outside of Windows) turned out clean, which impressed me.
I've also used Malwarebytes on a few PCs- very efficient and effective. I have to PayPal some money to these developers, as these two tools are great and allow even users who were decieved into running this crap to disinfect their own PCs. It also makes a techie's job much easier- a few minutes of running tools versus hours of trying to hack at the thing manually.
I hope whoever is contributing to this P.I.T.A. malware has karma bite them in the ass.
Amazon is charging tax on Amazon orders placed by NY residents despite the fact that Amazon has no facilities in NY due to an unconstitutional law that hasn't been challenged yet. It says if you have an affiliate in the state (like, affiliate links), you are liable to pay tax.
Newegg.com started doing it too, but two months later they sent an email to NT residents that stated (in a nutshell), "We looked at the law with our lawyers and there is no way NY could ever win this. They'd be stupid to take it to court. Therefore, we're going to stop taxing NY customers again."
Somebody has to take this law to court. The problem is, no one has the balls to.
Slashdot Mirror
You ignore several facts:
-The criminals at these registrars often used the same bogus contact info to register domains 1000+ times. They won't provide real info. A good registrar would suspend the domains of customers doing that until they provided real info - since the spammers wouldn't, they'd lose the domains. If the domains last hours instead of weeks, it's lost sales for the spammers, cost & time to register the new domain, and need to send out more spam with the new site.
-If registrars WON'T comply, like these registrars- they lose their accreditation! EstDomains lost theirs for these activities (blind eye to bogus contact info & spammers).
-If they use a private registration service that won't comply to the spam notifications, a good registrar would suspend any domains by that private registration company until they acknowledged it. Or, the registrar loses their accreditation.
If the people who buy stuff from spam get "page not found" errors every time they try to visit sites, they will be less able and less inclined to buy from spam.
The whole point of WHOIS is to have a liable, legal contact. If you got a notice of infringement of copyright or something- for whatever reason- they'd send it to your WHOIS info. The whole point of WHOIS info is to have accountability.
:D
And the reason the registrar made you change your WHOIS info is, if they allow customers to repeatedly use fake WHOIS info, they could lose their accreditation. Any legit domains could be moved to a compliant registrar, while the spam domains get revoked.
Oh, and people DO lose their accreditation. See EstDomains, revoked because of all the spam and bogus registrations. It DOES happen. By making registrars have accountability to prevent spammers (by preventing them from registering 1000+ domains on the same credit card & whois info and giving them back shortly after suspending them without actually doing anything), it makes it harder for spammers to keep their domains operating, making it less profitable as they need to register new domains AND send out new spam with the new address.
And it's hardly "useless data". If you receive a legal complaint, and you had bogus WHOIS data, that could come to bite you in the ass in a HUGE way in court. Yeah, it's rare. Now, your hosting company gets any correspondence for you, and sends it to you- so you get privacy too.
You're welcome
I don't expect more from the older device. I find it laughable that Amazon axed the SD card slot, and the removable battery was a big plus- my 3 year old iPod has a 5 minute battery life (and it's a Video, so the battery is soldered in). That's a massive downside.
Page flip speed isn't a huge deal (unless they made it 50% or more faster) and the 25% battery life increase will wane over time, especially when the Kindle 1 owner can change the battery.
The new device has:
-No removable battery
-No SD card slot
-Is slightly thinner
-Gets slightly better battery life
Looks uglier (opinion).
I'd like to see the new one in person, but from what I can tell, the newer version is (pathetically) inferior to the original in a few critical ways.
No SD card slot and when the battery starts to die the early adopters can just buy a new battery... and they paid the same price. Who really got the better deal?
I'm sad Ruckus is gone. The catalog was actually pretty good, and had most of the (Mainstream) music I'd listen to. It was handy to hear decent (192KBPS WMA) quality copies of entire tracks- I used it to assess multiple albums for purchase.
Where did Ruckus fail?
-Ads were probably not sufficient to cover the cost of everything. My ad blocker detected Ruckus and removed all of the ads from the interface.
-The client was beyond buggy. Many times, licenses for songs wouldn't renew at all. I could redownload them, wasting their bandwidth, but I couldn't use a few KB and renew the licenses.
-It was utterly incompatible with the iPod or the Zune as PlaysForSure DRM was used. If you were adept you could use Tunebite (Fairuse4WM used to work), but the quality wasn't as good as iTunes Plus.
-There was a smaller catalog than iTunes. Part of the reason was track restrictions. Say, Stadium Arcadium by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. You could download the whole album EXCEPT Dani California and Stadium Arcadium, the two album singles (I don't remember if it was the RHCP album I was thinking of). I remember finding albums with less than 1/2 their tracks downloadable.
It provided a legal avenue to listen to whole songs, and if you used an older WMA player, essentially "free" music while you were in college. I think it was a worthwhile experiment. Ruckus' death blow was opening up to all US universities; previously, the universities that offered it basically paid Ruckus.
The benefit of the domain approach is that they know what domains to buy and can point them at any IP- if the IP of the server gets blocked, it connects to a different domain- which they can point to a different server. The worm generates (up to) 250 domains per day.
By using IPs, you make it easier to block it on a firewall level- just block the IPs. And if they can have the worm algorithmically generate IP addresses- that they can be sure to have each day- that would be damn impressive. That's pretty much impossible.
Except the fact that the Conflicker worm connects to domains via an algorithm- that the spammers buy specifically to control the machines, and no other people are on that domain. If the phishers have any of the 250 domains the worm tries to connect to each day (again, the worm has this code in the client), the worm gets instructions. So, OpenDNS can use the algorithim and block any domains each day even if the authors have already registered the bad domains., preventing the worm from getting instructions.
Also, as an OpenDNS user, I've seen geocities.com/baduser12 be blocked as phishing, while geocities.com and geocities.com/averageuser123 isn't blocked.
You're not supposed to do that. Your domain could be suspended until you update the data, and even possibly revoked.
One responsibility of a registrar is to try to stop fraudulent domain sales.
In this case, some of these companies (Xin Net in particular) keep allowing the same spammers with the same obviously fake Whois info keep registering new domains. And Xin Net has suspended domains when KnujOn and others report them, and shortly afterwards, give them back to the same spammers.
Abuse WILL happen, but Xin Net went beyond having a lot of people registering spam domains with it. They would suspend domains when KnujOn and others asked, and would then give them back to the spammers. Additionally, Xin Net keeps letting the SAME abusive customers with the same WHOIS data keep registering new domains.
On most issues, it doesn't seem to do anything manually anymore. I tried a Fix-it for a job stuck in a print queue (a network printer on a different network) for XP- it worked fine. I tried a Vista fix-it regarding log files: Open it, it opens a dialog that says "This fix-it does not apply to your system" and closes.
The page even says:
It doesn't ask you if the PC with the issue is the one you're on anymore; however, if the Fix-it is for a different OS, it won't run at all.
It's Slashdot. The car analogy is mandatory. You have 30 seconds to comply.
I know, using a Microsoft automated support tool is an instant deduction on my geek points. However, I had a registry issue caused by a botched Office update, and the tool automated a bunch of registry edits and menu navigating, and it actually worked.
I've also had a few friends (of course, I do the PC repair for them) use it with positive results.
One of the first things that it asks you is if you're using it on the PC that is having the issue. If you hit "a different PC", it asks you to run it on the other PC, or it gives you step-by-step manual directions.
Having a friend with an inverse situation (Vista issue, XP fix-it - network related, if I recall correctly), he ran the fix-it tool and hit "problem on this PC"- and it refused to run (wrong OS error).
The Fix-it tool can fix a lot of errors that would prevent proper internet access too- and not every Windows PC has internet.
Since the submitter never even tried to run the file (because someone running Ubuntu, or even XP would never need to download a Vista fix-it for his friend), this is really a nonstory.
Correct. The only activation limit on the retail copy is that you can only activate online the first five times. After that, you call the automated phone line. You say your product key, wait 5 seconds, and have the activation code read back to you. Doing it by phone isn't hard at all; it's even toll free.
Microsoft was going to limit the number of activations ("device transfers"), but they made it unlimited again because of all of the pissed off consumers (I was one such person).
Bill will call Ballmer tonight and tell him to "execute order 66".
On the morning of January 24th, 2009, hundreds of botnet controllers and spammers will be found dead. All will have died from brute force trauma, with no weapons or clues...other than a broken chair at each crime scene...
But Mac OS and Linux distros aren't de facto monopolies in the operating system market. If Mac OS came on 95% of computers and Safari was on the machines out of the box, I think the EU would pursue the issue too. It's about using one monopoly/near monopoly position to further another one.
If Microsoft held less than half of the market, I don't think MS would have been the target of the EU for this
Microsoft is pretty much a de facto monopoly.
If GM owned 95% of the auto market and somehow used their monopoly position to, say, put a proprietary, patented gas tank in their car that could only be filled at gas stations owned by GM, that would be a much more valid comparison.
Found it. Apparently when you double clicked a media file in the XP "N edition" it asked you to install Windows Media Player or Winamp:
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/09/windows-xp-n-edition-xp-without-media.html
My guess is OEMs will prebundle a browser and MS will include Opera on there (they started the complaint and have a smaller marketshare than Firefox currently). That is, if anybody buys it. (Apparently only 1,500 XP "N edition" disks have been ordered with no known sales...)
IIRC the way Windows XP N was in Europe was that the user was presented with a choice of several non Microsoft media players at first run.
Nobody actually bought N (well, no OEMs, I'm sure a few people did out of principle). My guess is Microsoft tries to offer that as a combined product/SKU with the "no media player" editions and, failing that, it'll get it's own SKU.
I think it DOES relate to playing the media. You have to renew your licenses regularly for music that you get on a "rent for $X a month" to make sure you're actually still subscribed. Those licenses are issued to last from date A to date B - it has to check that any DRMed media is within the time period for a valid license.
Sorry, but I don't work for any security companies, nor do I know anybody that does. Just giving my opinion on two tools that save me an assload of time when I need to remove difficult malware.
I guess timothy is still living in the year of Linux on the desktop...
:P )
(Ubuntu user here, sorry for the tired old joke
Back when it was Antivirus 2008 (and earlier) it was pretty easy to remove (relatively). Kill two processes at once via process explorer (so the tree dies and the other process doesn't revive the killed process), remove some registry and startup entries.
I just had to deal with a new version (friend's PC)- Spyware Guard 2008. What a pain in the ass. This version installed a rootkit, a device driver, locked the HOSTS file, added hidden registry entries, hidden services, parent and child services, downloading stubs to update it to stop detection...antiviruses stopped updating.
I was determined to kill it though. I got SuperAntiSpyware Free edition- free for personal use. Picked up all of the entries (rootkit, files, registry, etc.) and removed them after a reboot, no safe mode necessary. A standalone A/V scan (McAfee boot disc with latest definitions, and a rootkit scan from an OS outside of Windows) turned out clean, which impressed me.
I've also used Malwarebytes on a few PCs- very efficient and effective. I have to PayPal some money to these developers, as these two tools are great and allow even users who were decieved into running this crap to disinfect their own PCs. It also makes a techie's job much easier- a few minutes of running tools versus hours of trying to hack at the thing manually.
I hope whoever is contributing to this P.I.T.A. malware has karma bite them in the ass.
Modding to tell you that:
A) I found that both hilarious and true.
and
B) I accidentally modded you overrated, sorry. Replying to undo the mistake.
Amazon is charging tax on Amazon orders placed by NY residents despite the fact that Amazon has no facilities in NY due to an unconstitutional law that hasn't been challenged yet. It says if you have an affiliate in the state (like, affiliate links), you are liable to pay tax.
Newegg.com started doing it too, but two months later they sent an email to NT residents that stated (in a nutshell), "We looked at the law with our lawyers and there is no way NY could ever win this. They'd be stupid to take it to court. Therefore, we're going to stop taxing NY customers again."
Somebody has to take this law to court. The problem is, no one has the balls to.