So I re-read the article, and here is the part he journalist was referring to-
In my opinion, some people at Microsoft do not care and they just do what they want, so phrases like âoeresponsible disclosureâ will ring in my mind when the âoeresponsible patchingâ ring in their minds. To be clear: I will keep sharing my findings for as long as MSRC keeps acting like an unreachable rock star.
Okay maybe the journalist meant that the researcher won't wait 60/120 days disclosure, which is still a far cry from not reporting bugs at all.
there's no fix available for this issue because the researcher has decided to stop reporting bugs to Microsoft after they've ignored many of his previous reports.
I don't see the author saying this anywhere in Caballero's article. Maybe the reporter at the news site (and the submitter) should have read the article first.
For what it is worth, Caballero is a respected browser security researcher. I don't think he would do something like this.
an exploit called BANANAGLEE, used against Fortinet firewalls
If the submitter actually bothered to read the article, he would realize that BANANAGLEE targets Juniper, not Fortinet. Hoes does one make the mistake of mis-attributing to someone who was only mentioned once in the entire article?
Yes. Plug and Pray- I mean Play was the biggest selling point of W95 (in addition to a 32bits kernel).
Since ISA doesn't support PnP, it went away very quickly. But even with PCI, you will have to pray that your 16 IRQs won't conflict, you have enough memory address (and the right part of addresses!), and DMA (usually not a problem.)
The software detects the behavior of an application. The detection is probably like 'if a process accesses each image file (OpenFile/CreateFile) , read it, create a new file with "same_name+.encrypted", then delete the original image file.' x 10 times, then that process is likely guilty.
1. What happens if the malware instead use MapFileView and 10 others potential Win32/kernel32 APIs combination? This quickly become a arms race and is going to be terrible in terms of system overhead, not to mention the time gap between a new method appearing and the detection software catching it.
2. What about Windows' internal processes that, for example, shadow copy the file? Would the detection software catches it? What about false detection of, say, the disk defragmentation software?
3. Since the system is already compromised, what stops the malware from detecting the countermeasure and just delete all the files in the system straight out? If that's too obvious, then how about write a random byte per x bytes offset to all files? Even if you killed the malware process, you can't be sure that there no other malware running on the system that can go into revenge mode.
Do you remember any new movie set piece in The Force Awaken?
When people talk about Star Wars, new movie set pieces immediately come to mind.
For A New Hope, it's the Star Destroyers and the Death Star. For The Empire Strikes back, it's the snowy mountain filled with AT Walkers, then the City in the Cloud. For The Return of the Jedi, it's more AT walkers in forest, the rebellion fleet, and the half completed Death Star.
For The Force Awaken. it's the...? The new not-Death Star? The Bridge? X-Wings? Desert/Forest/Snow/Snowy forest?
My point is, the new movie recycles all the old pieces from the original movies. As Lucas said, this is what makes this movie bland.
The Star Wars movies have always featured villains who are cold, calculating and in control of their emotions. Vader, the Emperor, Dooku, Maulâ"the Sith always acted with a chilling precision. But Kylo Ren is anything but precise. Heâ(TM)s brash, raw, sullen, and just bursting with emotion. This is something we've seen before in the Expanded Universe of books and comics, but never in the movies.
Kylo Ren howls and loses his mind, whenever anything goes wrong.
Kylo Ren harbors a bitter resentment for the expectations thrust upon him in his former life as Ben Solo, Jedi-in-training and a son of legends. Even his lightsaber itself is unstable and angry, flickering with sparks and heat-just like its owner.
Re:The first windows to have a TCP/IP stack.
on
Windows 95 Turns 20
·
· Score: 1
[code]You got a couple of things wrong.
1. It did have a TCP/IP stack...along with a NetBUEI and a IPX/SPX stack. MS made sure all the well known LAN protocols are supported.
2. Windows 95 did not have QuickBASIC built in. I don't know where you got that idea from
3. The 3dfx Banshee came out on 1998, a good 3 years after Windows 95's release.
4. Windows 95 did not have Internet Explorer built in. It wasn't until Windows 95 OSR2, released in 1997, that IE 3 was in. Perhaps you are think about Windows Plus! for 95 and its IE1, which you had to purchase separately?
5. It has some form of memory protection in the form of virtual memory. Compare to Windows 3.1, the MMU and the preemptive scheduling make it the first true consumer OS to have memory protection.
6. KDE and Gnome basically copied Windows 95's gui all the way to year 2000. I am not sure why you would think that if it's not for Win95, the year of Linux on the desktop could come earlier.[/code]
>Eu has been very cruel to Greece and the Greek people.
In much the same way a rehab clinic is cruel to drug addicts.
Before you say that rehab clinics don't withhold living essentials (eg. food) from drug addicts, have you considered asking EU for those items, instead of asking EU to 'give us free money' (by way of forgiving loans).
I think, at this point, they would rather give you living essentials to shut the pensioners up, instead of giving them any more money.
This tool looks very intriguing, so I gave it some malicious code for a spin (all codes are from malicious drive-by sites in the last 24 hours.)
/** @type {function (string): *} */ e = eval; /** @type {string} */ v = "0" + "x"; /** @type {number} */ a = 0; try {
a *= 2; } catch (q) { /** @type {number} */
a = 1; } if (!a) {
try {
document["bod" + "y"]++;
} catch (q$$1) { /** @type {string} */
a2 = "_";
}
z = "2f_6d_*snip*"["split"](a2); /** @type {string} */
za = ""; /** @type {number} */
i = 0;
for (;i < z.length;i++) {
za += String["fromCharCode"](e(v + z[i]) - sa);
}
zaz = za;
e(zaz); } /**
* @param {string} n
* @param {string} k
* @param {number} v
* @param {string} reason
* @return {undefined}
*/ function SetCookie(n, k, v, reason) { /** @type {Date} */
var defaultCenturyStart = new Date; /** @type {Date} */
var expiryDate = new Date;
Sort of useful, I guess. But ultimately not an essential feature for malicious javascript analysis. I think the tool would be more useful to legitmate JS reverse-engineering tasks as their obfuscated JS are much much bigger.
Maybe, but from what I've heard, Africans much prefer western aids.
Westerners just drop their pile of money on the Africans' door and tell the Africans to save themselves with it.
Chinese on the other hand distributes/build the aids themselves with lots of strings attach (nothing evil, mind you, just enough to make sure that both the Chinese and Africians get their money's worth.)
To the Africans, they see Chinese' policy as an intrusion.
>>A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that involves the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors. Ponzi scheme organizers often solicit new investors by promising to invest funds in opportunities claimed to generate high returns with little or no risk. In many Ponzi schemes, the fraudsters focus on attracting new money to make promised payments to earlier-stage investors and to use for personal expenses, instead of engaging in any legitimate investment activity.
The key point here is the "solicit new investors by promising to invest funds in opportunities claimed to generate high returns" section. In a normal Ponzi Scheme, the previous investors would attempt to guarantee newcomers that profit is certain.
In comparison, Bitcoin promises no such thing. While it is true that the profit of previous investors (or speculators) do indeed come from newcomers, the newcomers are not promised anything beyond their belief that the price will continue to rise.
This key difference makes the Bitcoin phenomenal a 'Bubble', not a 'Ponzi Scheme'.
A patent on using a smart phone device as a chisel to open pain cans. After the phone is inserted into the crack, the vibrator would turn on rhythmically and attempt to loosen the lid.
I am sure this idea is novel, and is about as obvious as the patent mentioned in the summary.
I am not sure if this has been reported in the western world, but for the first time ever in China, the price of corn (per weight) has exceeded the price of rice.
Think about this for a second. It's China, where people eat rice daily. Yet corn, a staple food for livestock, is now more expensive than rice itself. Leaving aside it takes 10x more energy to raise cattle than plant, this is a dramatic reversal of fortune.
Also, Americans like to whine how China has them by the balls- Hell no. If America stops selling food to China tomorrow, you can guarantee that there is going to be massive starvation within a week(and revolution, and probably WW3) in China.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2019/why-do-telephone-keypads-count-from-the-top-down-while-calculators-count-from-the-bottom-up The story begins back in pre-calculator days, when there were cash registers. We're not talking cash registers that scan, but mechanical things where you actually had to push the keys hard to punch numbers. The cash registers were designed with 0 at the bottom, and the numbers going up. Why did cash registers choose this organization? I was unable to find any clear answer. These were the days before customer surveys and mass marketing opinion polls. The people who designed cash registers evidently just thought it was the obvious approach--lowest numbers at the bottom, highest numbers at the top.
In fact, the earliest cash registers had multiple keys. You didn't enter 7 and 9 and 5 for $7.95; there was a separate column of keys for each decimal place. Think of a matrix, with the bottom row of 0's, next a row of 1's, then a row of 2's, going up. The right hand column would represent single units (cents), the next column for tens, then hundreds, etc. So, to enter $7.95, you'd actually enter 700, then 90, then 5.
When calculators made their appearance, they copied the cash register format. In fact, some of the earliest mechanical calculators (ah, how my wife loved her Friden!) had multiple columns, like the cash register. The earliest calculators had keypads that were ten rows high and generally 8 or 9 columns across.
When hand-held and electronic calculators made their appearance, they copied the keypad arrangement of the existing calculators--0 at the bottom, 1-2-3 in the next row, 4-5-6 in the next row, and 7-8-9 in the top row, from left to right. So, basically, they evolved from the cash register.
The Touch-Tone phone emerged in the early 1960s. Before that, there were rotary dials, with the numbers starting at 1 at the top right and then running counterclockwise around the dial to 8-9-0 across the bottom. Why would "0" be on the bottom? Probably because the dialing mechanism was pulse, not tone. Since they couldn't do zero pulses for 0, they did ten pulses, and hence put the 0 at the end. (Thanks to Radu Serban for this suggestion.)
There seem to be three reasons that the Touch-Tone phone keypad was designed as it was:
(1) Tradition. People were used to dialing with 1-2-3 on top, and it seemed reasonable to keep it that way.
(2) AT&T (the only phone company at the time) did some research that concluded there were fewer dialing errors with the 1-2-3 on top (possibly related to the traditional rotary dial layout).
(3) Phone numbers years ago used alphabetic prefixes for the exchange (BUtterfield 8, etc.). In the days of rotary dials, no doubt it seemed logical to put the letters in alphabetical order, and to associate them with numbers in numerical order. The number 1 was set aside for "flag" functions, so ABC went with 2, DEF with 3, and so on. When Touch-Tone phones came in, keeping the alphabet in alphabetical order meant putting 1-2-3 at the top.
So there we have it. Basically, calculator keypad design evolved from cash registers, while telephone keypad design evolved from the rotary dial. Tradition has kept them that way ever since.
Usually for this kind of interviews, both parties agree on a set of topics they are about to discuss. In this case it appears to be the CEO demoing the newest tablet.
He probably was not expecting that question at all, so he got offended, and left.
Imagine your future mother-in-law asked you over for a BBQ, and when you start roasting, she suddenly asks you about your past sex lives. Yes she has every reasons to ask (for the sake of her daughter's well being), but that doesn't make it any less rude.
Exactly. A good analogy would be geeks who buy the Blu-ray edition of Star Trek TV series- the shows are exactly the same as they were 50 years ago. The fans aren't buying the 'new edition' so that they can watch it for the 10th time. They are buying it for collection sake.
Anime are aired on TV weekly, and if you missed that, there are always online illegal streaming sites that you can catch. Downloading the episode is just another way to watch.
Good idea. I have an improvement to suggest though.
The receiving side's phone should also have a reverse text-voice system. That way the driver can convert the voice to text, send the msg across the network to the receiving device, convert it back to voice, and play it to the receiver. Bonus point if the voice sounds like HAL. We can call it the telelocational phonetic system!
I think the confusion stems from the fact that we are talking about money (even though it's not real).
A better example would be instead you getting counterfeit money, you are trading for a fake Rolex watch.
So you trade your car for a watch you thought worth $1000. After the trade you found out its real value is $10. Would you call that theft? Wait a second I think there is a term for this kind of situation...I think it's something that rhyme with 'floor'....It's fraud!
Is fraud the same as theft? That's the argument you are having. The effect is the same in which you are deprive of $990, but is it theft?
Personally, like you, I don't think so, even though the end result is the same; but that's just a technicality.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he is from University of Waterloo in Canada. Here is the statistics https://uwaterloo.ca/engineeri...
Women in Engineering 2016
Women in Engineering # Women % Women
Undergraduate Year One Enrollment 504 29.2%
All Undergraduate Students 1833 25.2%
Undergraduate Degrees Awarded 211 18.6%
All Graduate Students 447 26%
Graduate Degrees Granted 139 23.1%
PhD Degrees Granted 30 20.8%
Professors 49 16.8%
Great university btw
So I re-read the article, and here is the part he journalist was referring to-
In my opinion, some people at Microsoft do not care and they just do what they want, so phrases like âoeresponsible disclosureâ will ring in my mind when the âoeresponsible patchingâ ring in their minds. To be clear: I will keep sharing my findings for as long as MSRC keeps acting like an unreachable rock star.
Okay maybe the journalist meant that the researcher won't wait 60/120 days disclosure, which is still a far cry from not reporting bugs at all.
there's no fix available for this issue because the researcher has decided to stop reporting bugs to Microsoft after they've ignored many of his previous reports.
I don't see the author saying this anywhere in Caballero's article. Maybe the reporter at the news site (and the submitter) should have read the article first.
For what it is worth, Caballero is a respected browser security researcher. I don't think he would do something like this.
an exploit called BANANAGLEE, used against Fortinet firewalls
If the submitter actually bothered to read the article, he would realize that BANANAGLEE targets Juniper, not Fortinet. Hoes does one make the mistake of mis-attributing to someone who was only mentioned once in the entire article?
Yes. Plug and Pray- I mean Play was the biggest selling point of W95 (in addition to a 32bits kernel).
Since ISA doesn't support PnP, it went away very quickly. But even with PCI, you will have to pray that your 16 IRQs won't conflict, you have enough memory address (and the right part of addresses!), and DMA (usually not a problem.)
The software detects the behavior of an application. The detection is probably like 'if a process accesses each image file (OpenFile/CreateFile) , read it, create a new file with "same_name+.encrypted", then delete the original image file.' x 10 times, then that process is likely guilty.
1. What happens if the malware instead use MapFileView and 10 others potential Win32/kernel32 APIs combination? This quickly become a arms race and is going to be terrible in terms of system overhead, not to mention the time gap between a new method appearing and the detection software catching it.
2. What about Windows' internal processes that, for example, shadow copy the file? Would the detection software catches it? What about false detection of, say, the disk defragmentation software?
3. Since the system is already compromised, what stops the malware from detecting the countermeasure and just delete all the files in the system straight out? If that's too obvious, then how about write a random byte per x bytes offset to all files? Even if you killed the malware process, you can't be sure that there no other malware running on the system that can go into revenge mode.
As mentioned elsewhere, on Amazing Liquid Fire's Amazon page, it is frequently bought with "Red Hot Devil Lye" (Sodium Hydroxide).
If both substances come in contact during transit on a plane...things would get very exciting very quickly.
I want to add some on top of what you said.
Do you remember any new movie set piece in The Force Awaken?
When people talk about Star Wars, new movie set pieces immediately come to mind.
For A New Hope, it's the Star Destroyers and the Death Star.
For The Empire Strikes back, it's the snowy mountain filled with AT Walkers, then the City in the Cloud.
For The Return of the Jedi, it's more AT walkers in forest, the rebellion fleet, and the half completed Death Star.
For The Force Awaken. it's the...? The new not-Death Star? The Bridge? X-Wings? Desert/Forest/Snow/Snowy forest?
My point is, the new movie recycles all the old pieces from the original movies. As Lucas said, this is what makes this movie bland.
>[Kylo Ren] was less of a badass, and more like a bipolar emo kid with daddy issues.
That's exactly the point.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/kylo-re...
The Star Wars movies have always featured villains who are cold, calculating and in control of their emotions. Vader, the Emperor, Dooku, Maulâ"the Sith always acted with a chilling precision. But Kylo Ren is anything but precise. Heâ(TM)s brash, raw, sullen, and just bursting with emotion. This is something we've seen before in the Expanded Universe of books and comics, but never in the movies.
Kylo Ren howls and loses his mind, whenever anything goes wrong.
Kylo Ren harbors a bitter resentment for the expectations thrust upon him in his former life as Ben Solo, Jedi-in-training and a son of legends. Even his lightsaber itself is unstable and angry, flickering with sparks and heat-just like its owner.
Just look at Norse Attack Map
Lots o NTPf traffic from China
http://map.norsecorp.com/
[code]You got a couple of things wrong.
1. It did have a TCP/IP stack...along with a NetBUEI and a IPX/SPX stack. MS made sure all the well known LAN protocols are supported.
2. Windows 95 did not have QuickBASIC built in. I don't know where you got that idea from
3. The 3dfx Banshee came out on 1998, a good 3 years after Windows 95's release.
4. Windows 95 did not have Internet Explorer built in. It wasn't until Windows 95 OSR2, released in 1997, that IE 3 was in. Perhaps you are think about Windows Plus! for 95 and its IE1, which you had to purchase separately?
5. It has some form of memory protection in the form of virtual memory. Compare to Windows 3.1, the MMU and the preemptive scheduling make it the first true consumer OS to have memory protection.
6. KDE and Gnome basically copied Windows 95's gui all the way to year 2000. I am not sure why you would think that if it's not for Win95, the year of Linux on the desktop could come earlier.[/code]
>Eu has been very cruel to Greece and the Greek people.
In much the same way a rehab clinic is cruel to drug addicts.
Before you say that rehab clinics don't withhold living essentials (eg. food) from drug addicts, have you considered asking EU for those items, instead of asking EU to 'give us free money' (by way of forgiving loans).
I think, at this point, they would rather give you living essentials to shut the pensioners up, instead of giving them any more money.
It is posts like this that reminds me why I never become an author.
This tool looks very intriguing, so I gave it some malicious code for a spin (all codes are from malicious drive-by sites in the last 24 hours.)
Sort of useful, I guess. But ultimately not an essential feature for malicious javascript analysis. I think the tool would be more useful to legitmate JS reverse-engineering tasks as their obfuscated JS are much much bigger.
Maybe, but from what I've heard, Africans much prefer western aids.
Westerners just drop their pile of money on the Africans' door and tell the Africans to save themselves with it.
Chinese on the other hand distributes/build the aids themselves with lots of strings attach (nothing evil, mind you, just enough to make sure that both the Chinese and Africians get their money's worth.)
To the Africans, they see Chinese' policy as an intrusion.
Do you know the definition of Ponzi scheme? Because I don't think that term means what you think it means.
Bitcoin is many things, but it is as much of a Ponzi scheme as gold, real estate, or stock speculations. ie. not a Ponzi scheme at all.
While one can argue that Bitcoin is a scam (and most definitely a bubble), it does not fit the formal definition of a ponzi scheme.
http://www.sec.gov/answers/ponzi.htm
>>A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that involves the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors. Ponzi scheme organizers often solicit new investors by promising to invest funds in opportunities claimed to generate high returns with little or no risk. In many Ponzi schemes, the fraudsters focus on attracting new money to make promised payments to earlier-stage investors and to use for personal expenses, instead of engaging in any legitimate investment activity.
The key point here is the "solicit new investors by promising to invest funds in opportunities claimed to generate high returns" section. In a normal Ponzi Scheme, the previous investors would attempt to guarantee newcomers that profit is certain.
In comparison, Bitcoin promises no such thing. While it is true that the profit of previous investors (or speculators) do indeed come from newcomers, the newcomers are not promised anything beyond their belief that the price will continue to rise.
This key difference makes the Bitcoin phenomenal a 'Bubble', not a 'Ponzi Scheme'.
That gives me a patent idea:
A patent on using a smart phone device as a chisel to open pain cans. After the phone is inserted into the crack, the vibrator would turn on rhythmically and attempt to loosen the lid.
I am sure this idea is novel, and is about as obvious as the patent mentioned in the summary.
Just something to add.
I am not sure if this has been reported in the western world, but for the first time ever in China, the price of corn (per weight) has exceeded the price of rice.
Think about this for a second. It's China, where people eat rice daily. Yet corn, a staple food for livestock, is now more expensive than rice itself. Leaving aside it takes 10x more energy to raise cattle than plant, this is a dramatic reversal of fortune.
Also, Americans like to whine how China has them by the balls- Hell no. If America stops selling food to China tomorrow, you can guarantee that there is going to be massive starvation within a week(and revolution, and probably WW3) in China.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2019/why-do-telephone-keypads-count-from-the-top-down-while-calculators-count-from-the-bottom-up
The story begins back in pre-calculator days, when there were cash registers. We're not talking cash registers that scan, but mechanical things where you actually had to push the keys hard to punch numbers. The cash registers were designed with 0 at the bottom, and the numbers going up. Why did cash registers choose this organization? I was unable to find any clear answer. These were the days before customer surveys and mass marketing opinion polls. The people who designed cash registers evidently just thought it was the obvious approach--lowest numbers at the bottom, highest numbers at the top.
In fact, the earliest cash registers had multiple keys. You didn't enter 7 and 9 and 5 for $7.95; there was a separate column of keys for each decimal place. Think of a matrix, with the bottom row of 0's, next a row of 1's, then a row of 2's, going up. The right hand column would represent single units (cents), the next column for tens, then hundreds, etc. So, to enter $7.95, you'd actually enter 700, then 90, then 5.
When calculators made their appearance, they copied the cash register format. In fact, some of the earliest mechanical calculators (ah, how my wife loved her Friden!) had multiple columns, like the cash register. The earliest calculators had keypads that were ten rows high and generally 8 or 9 columns across.
When hand-held and electronic calculators made their appearance, they copied the keypad arrangement of the existing calculators--0 at the bottom, 1-2-3 in the next row, 4-5-6 in the next row, and 7-8-9 in the top row, from left to right. So, basically, they evolved from the cash register.
The Touch-Tone phone emerged in the early 1960s. Before that, there were rotary dials, with the numbers starting at 1 at the top right and then running counterclockwise around the dial to 8-9-0 across the bottom. Why would "0" be on the bottom? Probably because the dialing mechanism was pulse, not tone. Since they couldn't do zero pulses for 0, they did ten pulses, and hence put the 0 at the end. (Thanks to Radu Serban for this suggestion.)
There seem to be three reasons that the Touch-Tone phone keypad was designed as it was:
(1) Tradition. People were used to dialing with 1-2-3 on top, and it seemed reasonable to keep it that way.
(2) AT&T (the only phone company at the time) did some research that concluded there were fewer dialing errors with the 1-2-3 on top (possibly related to the traditional rotary dial layout).
(3) Phone numbers years ago used alphabetic prefixes for the exchange (BUtterfield 8, etc.). In the days of rotary dials, no doubt it seemed logical to put the letters in alphabetical order, and to associate them with numbers in numerical order. The number 1 was set aside for "flag" functions, so ABC went with 2, DEF with 3, and so on. When Touch-Tone phones came in, keeping the alphabet in alphabetical order meant putting 1-2-3 at the top.
So there we have it. Basically, calculator keypad design evolved from cash registers, while telephone keypad design evolved from the rotary dial. Tradition has kept them that way ever since.
It wouldn't kill you to actually read the article, you know.
The word ambush seems to be about right.
Usually for this kind of interviews, both parties agree on a set of topics they are about to discuss. In this case it appears to be the CEO demoing the newest tablet.
He probably was not expecting that question at all, so he got offended, and left.
Imagine your future mother-in-law asked you over for a BBQ, and when you start roasting, she suddenly asks you about your past sex lives. Yes she has every reasons to ask (for the sake of her daughter's well being), but that doesn't make it any less rude.
Exactly. A good analogy would be geeks who buy the Blu-ray edition of Star Trek TV series- the shows are exactly the same as they were 50 years ago. The fans aren't buying the 'new edition' so that they can watch it for the 10th time. They are buying it for collection sake.
Anime are aired on TV weekly, and if you missed that, there are always online illegal streaming sites that you can catch. Downloading the episode is just another way to watch.
Good idea. I have an improvement to suggest though.
The receiving side's phone should also have a reverse text-voice system. That way the driver can convert the voice to text, send the msg across the network to the receiving device, convert it back to voice, and play it to the receiver. Bonus point if the voice sounds like HAL. We can call it the telelocational phonetic system!
You fool! We are the baggage! The luggage will be in the passenger compartment. Now down you go!
I think the confusion stems from the fact that we are talking about money (even though it's not real).
A better example would be instead you getting counterfeit money, you are trading for a fake Rolex watch.
So you trade your car for a watch you thought worth $1000. After the trade you found out its real value is $10. Would you call that theft?
Wait a second I think there is a term for this kind of situation...I think it's something that rhyme with 'floor'....It's fraud!
Is fraud the same as theft? That's the argument you are having. The effect is the same in which you are deprive of $990, but is it theft?
Personally, like you, I don't think so, even though the end result is the same; but that's just a technicality.