I haven't read it, but I'll take your word on it. To paraphrase Freud himself "Sometimes a tentacle is just a tentacle".
Re:Ban all Microsoft Users from the Internet...
on
DNS Root Servers Attacked
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
In every operating system I've seen yet, security is an inconvenience.
It's nice to read something occasionally not written by a zealot:)
One of Vista's features is the way that even if you log in with admin privileges, you don't actually have them until you jump through an extra hoop, and even then I think you only have them only as long as necessary. I'm sure that if it has been implemented correctly, it will certainly shorten the amount of self-hanging rope available to the average user.
I'm also sure that there are lots of people working on a hack to disable this right now. (I've not used Vista so I may be misinformed - there may be a way to disable it easily anyway?)
And even without that, enough people are gullible enough that if a web site says that to use the available features correctly you need to "follow these simple instructions", it will be done.
Ah... maybe you've pinpointed the motive behind this attack. It's a setup to make everyone think that South Korea is up to no good...
And just when I thought I had someone to blame for the 4 Cisco router crashes i've seen in the last 24 hours (3 yesterday, 1 today. Won't let DNS traffic pass until the affected unit is rebooted.)
I think someone already probably thought of that loophole. Couldn't they hire him in some capacity though? Even if it was just to blog about the experience or something.
Worst case they could hire him for an amount such that it was $25000 after tax, which would then give him enough to pay the tax bill with.
So... what if I cut and paste what you just posted into the copyright site, pay $2, and register it as mine? Suddenly it doesn't seem so simple. You have to consider:
. How do I prove that the material I am trying to copyright is mine to copyright? If I cut and pasted it off of a web site, especially one that wasn't indexed somewhere, how could they tell?
. What happens when I sue you for posting my copyrighted material on slashdot? How do you prove that you originally wrote it in the first place, and that you didn't copy it from me? (I put it on my web site and modified the datestamps to make it look like it predated yours by a few days)
This alone would make a system where $2 is nowhere near enough to cover costs. And in fact if I didn't like something you'd said on slashdot, for $2 I could trivially register it as mine and issue slashdot with a cease-and-desist letter.
I think it's time to raise some funds and buy out all the law firms that specialise in copyright law. That way, everytime there is a dispute, my superfirm gets revenue. Even better, because you won't find a non-superfirm copyright lawyer who's any good at all, both sides will be represented by my superfirm lawyers and we can drag it out for long enough to suck the money out of everyone.
Or, just accumulate a few copies and merge them together to make a complete version instead of the crippled version they would have if they had purchased it legitimately.
Undetectable they say!!! what if the missing bits of information are someone's nipple???
Just as with copy protection on CD's, its the legitimate purchaser who has to deal with the inconvenience of having the actually put the CD in when they want to use the software, the pirates copy it all to harddisk, patch it, and run without the CD. In the end it's the people who actually pay the money who get shafted.
I can just imagine the business model now... sell the robot for $49.95 and the 'ink' cartridges for $49950 (good for a volume of 5m^3). House plans will be loaded via usb stick, but they can only be designed with licensed software ($100000/user), and only then by architects who have attended the $50000 training course, which must be attended every two years.
Within hours of release someone will have reverse engineered the 'ink' cartridge slot to take generic branded concrete bags, and the private keys for signing the plans will follow a few days later. The manufacturers will release a statement saying that using generic branded 'ink' cartridges will void the warranty and may not give you the quality you want. On closer inspection, the quality statement is possibly true, but only marginally and nobody cares. As for warranty, it is cheaper to go and buy a new unit than to put up with the downtime caused by waiting for a repair.
Long and drawn out legal proceedings will begin, firstly against the hackers who released the original hack for the concrete bags, and then against the hackers who released the signing keys, but it will be ruled that you have to identify and locate the defendant first before you can prosecute them. After a succession of grandmothers and 8 year old girls are brought before the judge as being the original culprits, the case is thrown out, eventually.
Then they'll start bringing charges against the users who are using the 3rd party products, but that never works, and they haven't actually made enough money yet to be able to 'influence' any congressmen to get on their side.
Test: hold a paper sheet on a door, and write with your favorite pen, keeping it flat.
Maybe your favorite pen is different to the one I just tested with (BIC), but when I tried writing upside down it worked for about 10 seconds of scribbling and then stopped. Going back to the right way up, it took a few seconds but started again. Repeatable. At 90 degrees (closest I could get to microgravity) it went for a bit longer but still faded out pretty quick. If your favorite pen happens to be a Fisher Space Pen then you are cheating:p
I find snopes to be a fairly reliable source on such matters.
In recent years in Australia there has been a big push on improving farm safety. Lots of tv commercials showing stuff like a kid riding on the wheel arch of a tractor towing a plough, and then the next minute the parent turns around and they aren't there anymore...
I've heard lots of people saying things like "we did that all the time back in our day, and we turned out okay". I just think to myself yeah, _you_ survived without incident, but stacks of people were sucked into machines, fell off ladders, got trapped under rolled tractors, suffocated in storage tanks etc. It's kind of like seatbelts... they are cheap to install, take no effort to use, and make a _huge_ difference for most low to mid speed accidents.
In Australia a lot of the major roads have those noise bumps too, if you suddenly find your car has wandered onto them then it's probably a good idea to pull over to the side and slap yourself a few times or pour a bucket of cold water over your head, or just have a quick sleep.
Why not just not drive tired and pay attention to driving?
That has got to be one of the most ignorant things i've ever heard. I classify it as the sort of thing that the overweight lady stands up and says on a show like Jerry Springer, and gets a big round of applause, even though it doesn't make any sense. Of course you are paying attention to driving, but there is a point where sleep is going to happen, and the noise bumps are a cheap way of helping you figure out that you are about there. Tiredness can be one of those things that sneaks up on you.
Reminds me of "During the space race, the Americans spent millions of dollars developing a pen that could function reliably in micro gravity conditions. The Russians used a pencil.". Stupid Americans you might think, but using a pencil produces leaves tiny dust fragments floating around. They are conductive (bad for anything electrical) and probably not so good to be breathing in all the time.
I think the one they used on mythbusters was a smaller top loading domestic unit, and the myth they were testing was that someone stood in the thing while it was on. The parents anecdote i think was referring to commercial frontloading machines large enough to actually fit a person inside. I'm not convinced of the accuracy of the anecdote in question, but i don't think you can compare it to what they tested on mythbusters.
Curiously, I'm 30-ish and have never been called up for jury duty, despite being eligible for over 12 years. My wife has only been called up once. A guy at work seems to be called up at least once a year though!
The disturbing thing is, the attitude of everyone seems to be that you have to try and get out of it as quickly as possible. Just think, one day you might be up there being convicted for a crime, do you want to put your fate in the hands of 12 people who were too stupid to get out of jury duty???
The question you have to ask though, is would a warning label have actually helped in this case? Anyone stupid enough to do that is probably not going to take the advice of a label, assuming they can actually read it anyway.
I still use vi when i'm at a text only console. And even when i'm not a lot of the time. If you ever had to use a text terminal running at 9600bps or slower, you probably would have learned vi and loved it too. At the time the learning curve was steep, but the payoff was grand (even if the payoff was just laughing at the other students waiting for there screens to redraw:). Nowadays, the learning curve is still steep but the payoff isn't so obvious, and kids these days don't seem to understand the concept of delayed gratification.
As soon as keyboards started to appear with cursor keys on them, I think most implementations of vi would let you use them to move around even when you were in 'type' mode, and that was _years_ ago.
Actually, I even remember having command line history requiring a press of escape to scroll back. I think it was on an old Irix server. It seemed like a pain until you realised that your hands didn't have to move from the home row at all, which is the other great advantage of vi.
I'm sure that a while ago I read about a system that could print encoded data onto paper at a reasonably high density (eg not readable by a human, but easily decoded with a scanner). At a 'plucked out of the air' figure of.25mm x.25mm per 'bit', and an equally 'plucked out of the air' figure of 11 bits of data per byte (to allow for clocking and maybe some error correction), you'd fit about 80kbytes on a single page of A4, and about 40mb per 500 sheet ream. Not that high (and possibly much higher or much lower once you stop plucking figures out of the air:), but if you had some stuff that you wanted stored for a seriously long time it might be feasible. Add in a few pages describing the encoding you have used and store it properly, and it might still be useful in thousands of years...
From Microsoft's point of view, it is far better to get OEM's to agree to supply one of their operating systems installed on every workstation at a rediculously low cost than for everyone to pirate it. I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't get away with it now (or maybe they do?) but a while back the deal with OEM's was they they had to supply a Microsoft operating system on everything they sold to get a good price.
Servers are bit different, but last time I priced a low end HP server to run Linux on, it was cheaper to get a 'Bundle' which included a DAT72 tape drive and Small Business Server than it was to get the same configuration not sold as a bundle!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Not that far removed from the motto of several other large companies:
"Don't get caught doing anything evil."
Yep, one thing worse than waking up dead is waking up never having existed at all.
... and full of frozen people.
I haven't read it, but I'll take your word on it. To paraphrase Freud himself "Sometimes a tentacle is just a tentacle".
One of Vista's features is the way that even if you log in with admin privileges, you don't actually have them until you jump through an extra hoop, and even then I think you only have them only as long as necessary. I'm sure that if it has been implemented correctly, it will certainly shorten the amount of self-hanging rope available to the average user.
I'm also sure that there are lots of people working on a hack to disable this right now. (I've not used Vista so I may be misinformed - there may be a way to disable it easily anyway?)
And even without that, enough people are gullible enough that if a web site says that to use the available features correctly you need to "follow these simple instructions", it will be done.
Ah... maybe you've pinpointed the motive behind this attack. It's a setup to make everyone think that South Korea is up to no good...
And just when I thought I had someone to blame for the 4 Cisco router crashes i've seen in the last 24 hours (3 yesterday, 1 today. Won't let DNS traffic pass until the affected unit is rebooted.)
I think someone already probably thought of that loophole. Couldn't they hire him in some capacity though? Even if it was just to blog about the experience or something.
Worst case they could hire him for an amount such that it was $25000 after tax, which would then give him enough to pay the tax bill with.
So... what if I cut and paste what you just posted into the copyright site, pay $2, and register it as mine? Suddenly it doesn't seem so simple. You have to consider:
. How do I prove that the material I am trying to copyright is mine to copyright? If I cut and pasted it off of a web site, especially one that wasn't indexed somewhere, how could they tell?
. What happens when I sue you for posting my copyrighted material on slashdot? How do you prove that you originally wrote it in the first place, and that you didn't copy it from me? (I put it on my web site and modified the datestamps to make it look like it predated yours by a few days)
This alone would make a system where $2 is nowhere near enough to cover costs. And in fact if I didn't like something you'd said on slashdot, for $2 I could trivially register it as mine and issue slashdot with a cease-and-desist letter.
I think it's time to raise some funds and buy out all the law firms that specialise in copyright law. That way, everytime there is a dispute, my superfirm gets revenue. Even better, because you won't find a non-superfirm copyright lawyer who's any good at all, both sides will be represented by my superfirm lawyers and we can drag it out for long enough to suck the money out of everyone.
I'll be rich!!!
What part of "All the experimental data in the universe" don't we understand here :P
Didn't Sony just recall a whole heap of Li-Ion batteries? They could use those as detonators!
Or, just accumulate a few copies and merge them together to make a complete version instead of the crippled version they would have if they had purchased it legitimately.
Undetectable they say!!! what if the missing bits of information are someone's nipple???
Just as with copy protection on CD's, its the legitimate purchaser who has to deal with the inconvenience of having the actually put the CD in when they want to use the software, the pirates copy it all to harddisk, patch it, and run without the CD. In the end it's the people who actually pay the money who get shafted.
(btw, i'm mostly kidding)
I expect some mighty palaces to be erected in the land of Elbonia then.
I can just imagine the business model now... sell the robot for $49.95 and the 'ink' cartridges for $49950 (good for a volume of 5m^3). House plans will be loaded via usb stick, but they can only be designed with licensed software ($100000/user), and only then by architects who have attended the $50000 training course, which must be attended every two years.
Within hours of release someone will have reverse engineered the 'ink' cartridge slot to take generic branded concrete bags, and the private keys for signing the plans will follow a few days later. The manufacturers will release a statement saying that using generic branded 'ink' cartridges will void the warranty and may not give you the quality you want. On closer inspection, the quality statement is possibly true, but only marginally and nobody cares. As for warranty, it is cheaper to go and buy a new unit than to put up with the downtime caused by waiting for a repair.
Long and drawn out legal proceedings will begin, firstly against the hackers who released the original hack for the concrete bags, and then against the hackers who released the signing keys, but it will be ruled that you have to identify and locate the defendant first before you can prosecute them. After a succession of grandmothers and 8 year old girls are brought before the judge as being the original culprits, the case is thrown out, eventually.
Then they'll start bringing charges against the users who are using the 3rd party products, but that never works, and they haven't actually made enough money yet to be able to 'influence' any congressmen to get on their side.
And so on.
Must... resist.... temptation... to... comment... on... spelling... and... grammar...
Dammit.
Who are in turn owned by Bill Gates after the 'buyout' a few years back.
Maybe your favorite pen is different to the one I just tested with (BIC), but when I tried writing upside down it worked for about 10 seconds of scribbling and then stopped. Going back to the right way up, it took a few seconds but started again. Repeatable. At 90 degrees (closest I could get to microgravity) it went for a bit longer but still faded out pretty quick. If your favorite pen happens to be a Fisher Space Pen then you are cheating
I find snopes to be a fairly reliable source on such matters.
I've heard lots of people saying things like "we did that all the time back in our day, and we turned out okay". I just think to myself yeah, _you_ survived without incident, but stacks of people were sucked into machines, fell off ladders, got trapped under rolled tractors, suffocated in storage tanks etc. It's kind of like seatbelts... they are cheap to install, take no effort to use, and make a _huge_ difference for most low to mid speed accidents.
In Australia a lot of the major roads have those noise bumps too, if you suddenly find your car has wandered onto them then it's probably a good idea to pull over to the side and slap yourself a few times or pour a bucket of cold water over your head, or just have a quick sleep.
That has got to be one of the most ignorant things i've ever heard. I classify it as the sort of thing that the overweight lady stands up and says on a show like Jerry Springer, and gets a big round of applause, even though it doesn't make any sense. Of course you are paying attention to driving, but there is a point where sleep is going to happen, and the noise bumps are a cheap way of helping you figure out that you are about there. Tiredness can be one of those things that sneaks up on you.
Reminds me of "During the space race, the Americans spent millions of dollars developing a pen that could function reliably in micro gravity conditions. The Russians used a pencil.". Stupid Americans you might think, but using a pencil produces leaves tiny dust fragments floating around. They are conductive (bad for anything electrical) and probably not so good to be breathing in all the time.
I think the one they used on mythbusters was a smaller top loading domestic unit, and the myth they were testing was that someone stood in the thing while it was on. The parents anecdote i think was referring to commercial frontloading machines large enough to actually fit a person inside. I'm not convinced of the accuracy of the anecdote in question, but i don't think you can compare it to what they tested on mythbusters.
Curiously, I'm 30-ish and have never been called up for jury duty, despite being eligible for over 12 years. My wife has only been called up once. A guy at work seems to be called up at least once a year though!
The disturbing thing is, the attitude of everyone seems to be that you have to try and get out of it as quickly as possible. Just think, one day you might be up there being convicted for a crime, do you want to put your fate in the hands of 12 people who were too stupid to get out of jury duty???
The question you have to ask though, is would a warning label have actually helped in this case? Anyone stupid enough to do that is probably not going to take the advice of a label, assuming they can actually read it anyway.
I still use vi when i'm at a text only console. And even when i'm not a lot of the time. If you ever had to use a text terminal running at 9600bps or slower, you probably would have learned vi and loved it too. At the time the learning curve was steep, but the payoff was grand (even if the payoff was just laughing at the other students waiting for there screens to redraw :). Nowadays, the learning curve is still steep but the payoff isn't so obvious, and kids these days don't seem to understand the concept of delayed gratification.
As soon as keyboards started to appear with cursor keys on them, I think most implementations of vi would let you use them to move around even when you were in 'type' mode, and that was _years_ ago.
Actually, I even remember having command line history requiring a press of escape to scroll back. I think it was on an old Irix server. It seemed like a pain until you realised that your hands didn't have to move from the home row at all, which is the other great advantage of vi.
Bah. I'm too old.
I'm sure that a while ago I read about a system that could print encoded data onto paper at a reasonably high density (eg not readable by a human, but easily decoded with a scanner). At a 'plucked out of the air' figure of .25mm x .25mm per 'bit', and an equally 'plucked out of the air' figure of 11 bits of data per byte (to allow for clocking and maybe some error correction), you'd fit about 80kbytes on a single page of A4, and about 40mb per 500 sheet ream. Not that high (and possibly much higher or much lower once you stop plucking figures out of the air :), but if you had some stuff that you wanted stored for a seriously long time it might be feasible. Add in a few pages describing the encoding you have used and store it properly, and it might still be useful in thousands of years...
From Microsoft's point of view, it is far better to get OEM's to agree to supply one of their operating systems installed on every workstation at a rediculously low cost than for everyone to pirate it. I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't get away with it now (or maybe they do?) but a while back the deal with OEM's was they they had to supply a Microsoft operating system on everything they sold to get a good price.
Servers are bit different, but last time I priced a low end HP server to run Linux on, it was cheaper to get a 'Bundle' which included a DAT72 tape drive and Small Business Server than it was to get the same configuration not sold as a bundle!!!
Yeah... and here was me thinking the commies had finally invaded!