I would have to agree with everything you said, censorship is stupid. It only makes it even more obvious that something questionable (in the minds of the censors) is being said.
For example, my mom and I were watching tv 2 days ago, and a person said "Grab life by the balls".
Well they bleeped balls, because of the context. My mom and I were like, "what the hell!", they bleeped a word referring to testicles. God forbid people learn about testicles! What is so wrong about the human anatomy?
That reminds me of this one girl in my grade 8 class many years ago. Whenever we had Sex Ed. class, she would leave the class while we learned about the human body, STDs, condoms and other extremely important subjects.
At first I wondered why the hell does she leave class everytime? Well it turns out, she was a mormon, and her parents told the school they didn't want her to learn these taboo subjects! I found it quite funny that her parents were so strict/religious that they wanted to shelter their daughter from society. Are they going to shelter her, her entire life? Even after she moves out? Kids need to learn these things, because they aren't going to be protected by their parent(s) forever.
Why should I pay $15 for a CD if I just want to listen to it once?
Don't buy it then, no one is holding a gun to your head. That doesn't give you the right to download it illegally because you find the price too steep.
Gas is ridiculously expensive, that doesn't give me the right to go and steal it because I feel the price is unjust. A Music CD is a luxury, you do not need it to survive.
Or what if I want to use a software product, but for the task I intend to use it for it's not worth the price?
Again, don't buy it. You don't need software to survive, it is a luxury. Computers are a luxury. Alot of stuff is expensive, too expensive for most people, so they don't buy it. That doesn't mean they should steal it instead.
Alot of people would steal/download stuff off the internet, but they would never dare steal a car for example in real life. The internet allows people to hide behind their computer and they believe they have the god given right to do whatever they want.
I admit I download mp3s and "0day" movies and games (warez). I know it is illegal and immoral. I don't need to make up excuses for my behaviour and claim it is the RIAA's fault. People have been downloading copyrighted material for so many years now, that they now believe it is ok. After all, everyone else is doing it. I am sick of all the people on slashdot blaiming the RIAA for their activities. Grow up and be responsible for your own actions! Now I will suffer being modded to hell for speaking my opinion.
There used to be an awesome screensaver for Windows 3.1 when I was a kid. It was a guy on a stranded island (that was about 20 feet wide with 1 coconut tree in the middle). He would do various comedic things. I totally forget the name of it, but it was an awesome screensaver. I used to spend loads of time just sitting there and watching what he did.
Back on topic though, I think that RSS screensaver is pretty cool. Gives me lots of ideas for future projects. For example, say you're an web page admin and you have multiple monitors. You could have it setup the so the screensaver would show graphs or other statistics related to your server(s) on one idle monitor. I'm sure this has been done before, I just havent heard about it.
Spiffy looking colours and charts would be pretty cool, kinda like seti@home, it looks neat, even if you don't have a clue what's actually going on.
One thing I hate about Windows is the whole idea of the "My" Folders.
My Music, My Pictures, My Videos, My Documents, My Games, My Oh My Please Stop!
Looking at the Longhorn screenshots, I see that they still have the "My Music" folders. Does Microsoft not learn from their previous mistakes?
Theres many replacements for Explorer. The only one i'm really familiar with is LiteStep but there are many more shell replacements for Windows 95 to XP.
All this almost makes me want to switch to a Mac, if only they were not so bloody expensive. I just can't get myself to pay $1500+ for a computer. I've never spent more than $500 on any machine I have ever owned, with the exception of my laptop.
My first PC (a 286) cost $5000 (CDN). My second pc (a Pentium 75mhz) cost more then $3000. My third pc (a pentium2 233mhz) cost more then $2000. My fourth pc (a pentium4 1.4ghz) cost more then $2000. My fifth and current pc (a dell, pentium 4 2.66ghz with 1gb ram, 120gb harddrive, other nice goodies) cost around $2400 (all prices in CDN).
I checked out how much it would cost to buy Dual G5 2.7ghz with 2gb ram. The setup I choose was around $3300 (USD), so it would be almost $4000 Canadian. Pretty pricey and my current computer still can handle any load its given, so I probably won't even think about upgrading for another year or two. If I had $4000 on me today though, I would buy one of these babies and check out Tiger, it looks amazing, 100x better then my WinXP pro box.
PS. i'm never going to upgrade to longhorn, unless they pay me.
When I was 13, I used to be in a hacking group known as ViRii on Undernet.
Around that time (early to mid 90s), there were several hacker group wars going on Undernet. I remember the +++ATH0 exploit among many dozens of other exploits at the time.
In mIRC, you could do://raw NOTICE VictimsNick : $+ $chr(1) $+ PING +++ATH0 $+ $chr(1)
And their modem would hangup/reset.
There was a guy name VallaH i knew in my hacker group. He was the one who original discovered The Ping of Death in Windows 95. He also wrote jolt.c and many others. He was among the first people to find remote exploits in Windows 95. (Microsoft actually hired him that year to work on Windows NT network security, I was quite jealous at the time). The funny thing is, he only designed it to nuke Windows, but it also worked on early Linux 2.0 kernels, solaris and mac (since they all used mainly the same BSD tcpip code i'm guessing)
Vallah later lost his job at Microsoft due to his hacking past/present i'm guessing.
"My friend, I will call him Vallah. Lost his job at Microsoft working on network interoperability(sp?) for Windows 2000 when the FBI showed up with a warrent for the files on his machine at work. He has still not been charged with anything and most likely wont be... again, mainly becuase he hasn't done anything. Guilty by association and an infamous past."
I wasnt a hacker myself, more of a wannabe (script kiddie) hacker. I mainly just nuked other people on IRC and did channel takeovers, etc.. The fun lasted until I was around 15 (i'm now 22). Alot of the more serious hackers I was associated with ended up getting caught by the FBI. I have literally hundreds of old hacking stories from my early days with IRC. (Note that i'm now into computer security, not destructive behaviours like hacking).
I have one other story about a guy I knew around my age by the name of XaiL. He was 13 at the time, and he hacked nasa.gov using an old phf exploit. I used to talk to him on the phone long distance, he was a funny guy, sounded like a girl, he hadn't even started puberty by the sound of his voice. I do admit that the only hacking I ever did was using this same phf technique, long since patched. I'm not proud of my early days as a destructive script kiddie hacker, but at the time, it was so much fun.
I also had a very small part in writing the mIRC script known as 7th Sphere (my code was included in the last release, version 3.0, not the previous 2.666). At the time it was a hugely popular "war" script used by script kiddies to nuke, flood, do channel takeovers and many other evil deeds on IRC servers. It came with programs made by Rhad using VB, most notably was "click.exe", a program that let you instantly "nuke" any victim. If you do a google search for click.exe or "Rhadware", you will get the idea of how evil his programs were.
Alot of canadians put mayonnaise on their french fries too. This always grossed me out in high school. I consider myself more of a tradionalist, I use ketchup and salt only.
Long-distance Swimmer Tammy Van Wisse holds the World Record (fastest person) to swim 1515 mile length of the Murray River in Australia. It took from 5 November 2000 - 18 February 2001: 106 days, and she's a professional, and it was a river, not a cold and turbulent ocean.
I'm guessing she swam with the current?
One thing I forgot to add to my previous post was that I also use the AdBlock extension for Firefox. Check out this site http://www.geocities.com/pierceive/adblock/ for up to date adblock filters.
The only thing I hate about hosts file blocking is, that when a site with an offending address is blocked, I can't access that site at all. I wish there was a way for my browser to continue loading the site while ignoring any blocked connections.
I don't think that Mozilla is exactly a model for security. At my company, we've had to deploy three complete updates since the release of Firefox 1.0.
Compared to Internet Exploiter (IE), i'd say its exponentially more secure.
Just check out http://secunia.org/ for a comparison of Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they mean 15% of companies that have email systems.
I would have to agree with everything you said, censorship is stupid. It only makes it even more obvious that something questionable (in the minds of the censors) is being said.
For example, my mom and I were watching tv 2 days ago, and a person said "Grab life by the balls".
Well they bleeped balls, because of the context. My mom and I were like, "what the hell!", they bleeped a word referring to testicles. God forbid people learn about testicles! What is so wrong about the human anatomy?
That reminds me of this one girl in my grade 8 class many years ago. Whenever we had Sex Ed. class, she would leave the class while we learned about the human body, STDs, condoms and other extremely important subjects.
At first I wondered why the hell does she leave class everytime? Well it turns out, she was a mormon, and her parents told the school they didn't want her to learn these taboo subjects! I found it quite funny that her parents were so strict/religious that they wanted to shelter their daughter from society. Are they going to shelter her, her entire life? Even after she moves out? Kids need to learn these things, because they aren't going to be protected by their parent(s) forever.
Why should I pay $15 for a CD if I just want to listen to it once?
Don't buy it then, no one is holding a gun to your head. That doesn't give you the right to download it illegally because you find the price too steep. Gas is ridiculously expensive, that doesn't give me the right to go and steal it because I feel the price is unjust. A Music CD is a luxury, you do not need it to survive.
Or what if I want to use a software product, but for the task I intend to use it for it's not worth the price?
Again, don't buy it. You don't need software to survive, it is a luxury. Computers are a luxury. Alot of stuff is expensive, too expensive for most people, so they don't buy it. That doesn't mean they should steal it instead.
Alot of people would steal/download stuff off the internet, but they would never dare steal a car for example in real life. The internet allows people to hide behind their computer and they believe they have the god given right to do whatever they want.
I admit I download mp3s and "0day" movies and games (warez). I know it is illegal and immoral. I don't need to make up excuses for my behaviour and claim it is the RIAA's fault. People have been downloading copyrighted material for so many years now, that they now believe it is ok. After all, everyone else is doing it. I am sick of all the people on slashdot blaiming the RIAA for their activities. Grow up and be responsible for your own actions! Now I will suffer being modded to hell for speaking my opinion.
There are several reasons why the RIAA sues people.
1) To protect their copyrighted material
2) To collect large sums of money
3) To scare people away from downloading illegally
4) All of the above
There used to be an awesome screensaver for Windows 3.1 when I was a kid. It was a guy on a stranded island (that was about 20 feet wide with 1 coconut tree in the middle). He would do various comedic things. I totally forget the name of it, but it was an awesome screensaver. I used to spend loads of time just sitting there and watching what he did.
Back on topic though, I think that RSS screensaver is pretty cool. Gives me lots of ideas for future projects. For example, say you're an web page admin and you have multiple monitors. You could have it setup the so the screensaver would show graphs or other statistics related to your server(s) on one idle monitor. I'm sure this has been done before, I just havent heard about it.
Spiffy looking colours and charts would be pretty cool, kinda like seti@home, it looks neat, even if you don't have a clue what's actually going on.
The entire operating system is 63kb? Thats some sleak packaging!
One thing I hate about Windows is the whole idea of the "My" Folders. My Music, My Pictures, My Videos, My Documents, My Games, My Oh My Please Stop! Looking at the Longhorn screenshots, I see that they still have the "My Music" folders. Does Microsoft not learn from their previous mistakes?
Theres many replacements for Explorer. The only one i'm really familiar with is LiteStep but there are many more shell replacements for Windows 95 to XP.
All this almost makes me want to switch to a Mac, if only they were not so bloody expensive. I just can't get myself to pay $1500+ for a computer. I've never spent more than $500 on any machine I have ever owned, with the exception of my laptop.
My first PC (a 286) cost $5000 (CDN). My second pc (a Pentium 75mhz) cost more then $3000. My third pc (a pentium2 233mhz) cost more then $2000. My fourth pc (a pentium4 1.4ghz) cost more then $2000. My fifth and current pc (a dell, pentium 4 2.66ghz with 1gb ram, 120gb harddrive, other nice goodies) cost around $2400 (all prices in CDN).
I checked out how much it would cost to buy Dual G5 2.7ghz with 2gb ram. The setup I choose was around $3300 (USD), so it would be almost $4000 Canadian. Pretty pricey and my current computer still can handle any load its given, so I probably won't even think about upgrading for another year or two. If I had $4000 on me today though, I would buy one of these babies and check out Tiger, it looks amazing, 100x better then my WinXP pro box.
PS. i'm never going to upgrade to longhorn, unless they pay me.
When I was 13, I used to be in a hacking group known as ViRii on Undernet.
//raw NOTICE VictimsNick : $+ $chr(1) $+ PING +++ATH0 $+ $chr(1)
Around that time (early to mid 90s), there were several hacker group wars going on Undernet. I remember the +++ATH0 exploit among many dozens of other exploits at the time.
In mIRC, you could do:
And their modem would hangup/reset.
There was a guy name VallaH i knew in my hacker group. He was the one who original discovered The Ping of Death in Windows 95. He also wrote jolt.c and many others. He was among the first people to find remote exploits in Windows 95. (Microsoft actually hired him that year to work on Windows NT network security, I was quite jealous at the time). The funny thing is, he only designed it to nuke Windows, but it also worked on early Linux 2.0 kernels, solaris and mac (since they all used mainly the same BSD tcpip code i'm guessing)
Vallah later lost his job at Microsoft due to his hacking past/present i'm guessing.
Quoted from this archived email:
"My friend, I will call him Vallah. Lost his job at Microsoft working on network interoperability(sp?) for Windows 2000 when the FBI showed up with a warrent for the files on his machine at work. He has still not been charged with anything and most likely wont be... again, mainly becuase he hasn't done anything. Guilty by association and an infamous past."
I wasnt a hacker myself, more of a wannabe (script kiddie) hacker. I mainly just nuked other people on IRC and did channel takeovers, etc.. The fun lasted until I was around 15 (i'm now 22). Alot of the more serious hackers I was associated with ended up getting caught by the FBI. I have literally hundreds of old hacking stories from my early days with IRC. (Note that i'm now into computer security, not destructive behaviours like hacking).
I have one other story about a guy I knew around my age by the name of XaiL. He was 13 at the time, and he hacked nasa.gov using an old phf exploit. I used to talk to him on the phone long distance, he was a funny guy, sounded like a girl, he hadn't even started puberty by the sound of his voice. I do admit that the only hacking I ever did was using this same phf technique, long since patched. I'm not proud of my early days as a destructive script kiddie hacker, but at the time, it was so much fun.
I also had a very small part in writing the mIRC script known as 7th Sphere (my code was included in the last release, version 3.0, not the previous 2.666). At the time it was a hugely popular "war" script used by script kiddies to nuke, flood, do channel takeovers and many other evil deeds on IRC servers. It came with programs made by Rhad using VB, most notably was "click.exe", a program that let you instantly "nuke" any victim. If you do a google search for click.exe or "Rhadware", you will get the idea of how evil his programs were.
Alot of canadians put mayonnaise on their french fries too. This always grossed me out in high school. I consider myself more of a tradionalist, I use ketchup and salt only.
Long-distance Swimmer Tammy Van Wisse holds the World Record (fastest person) to swim 1515 mile length of the Murray River in Australia. It took from 5 November 2000 - 18 February 2001: 106 days, and she's a professional, and it was a river, not a cold and turbulent ocean. I'm guessing she swam with the current?
One thing I forgot to add to my previous post was that I also use the AdBlock extension for Firefox. Check out this site http://www.geocities.com/pierceive/adblock/ for up to date adblock filters.
I personally use this hosts file. (Currently 239 kb, Last Update: 04-15-05)
Check out here for more INFO on hosts files.
The only thing I hate about hosts file blocking is, that when a site with an offending address is blocked, I can't access that site at all. I wish there was a way for my browser to continue loading the site while ignoring any blocked connections.
It'll be on bittorrent 1 week earlier, that is all.
I don't think that Mozilla is exactly a model for security. At my company, we've had to deploy three complete updates since the release of Firefox 1.0.
Compared to Internet Exploiter (IE), i'd say its exponentially more secure.
Just check out http://secunia.org/ for a comparison of Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Internet Explorer (versions 5.0 to 6.0):
-Found: 138 Secunia Security Advisories
-Found: 2257 Viruses
Mozilla Firefox (versions 0.x to current 1.0.3)
-Found: 39 Secunia Security Advisories
-Found: 7 Viruses
Of course, IE is far from a model citizen, but IE6-SP2 is much better, and *security* is the focus of IE7 according to the developers.
I wonder how many people actually upgrade to SP2? I know I havent, and I probably won't until I'm positive it wont break any of my games/apps.