Actually, the easiest way to kill it is to ALT-TAB to the hidden window, then hit ALT-F4. Ka-CHING!
With me, anyway, Morpheus doesn't bring up that rubbish so often. Maybe this is because I have a rule in my personal firewall prohibiting it from using port 80 (and a load of rules meaning that DoubleClick, RealNetworks etc are completely inaccessible). Oh, well.
Just a quick correction: Half-Life never did this over the LAN (you never needed the CD over the LAN), but over the Internet it certainly would. It doesn't even need the CD after version 1.1.0.3 for single-player, so I doubt it checks over the Net any more either.
BZIP2's pretty much standard now. It compresses better than.tar.gz, and the actual program is better. The Linux kernel comes in.bz2s, KDE comes in.bz2s, every major distro has a bzip2 package (including *BSD)... Oh, yeah, and:
bzip2 -dc [file].bz2 | tar -xvf -
Always useful.
Compiling the software using a simple./configure; make; make install is VERY easy: this is the reasoning behind the BSD ports system, and is the reason it is so popular (and good). Everything gets optimised to your system rather than some slow but ultra-compatible 386. The only improvement they could make would be to do everything in a make install, and they're set.
And they have license issues preventing the distribution of binary packages. That's the other problem. As actually getting something like RedHat to install is harder than this, it should be easy enough to compile mplayer on any system. Don't knock it.
If you're running filters on stuff like Reply-To, or X-Mailer, or weird MIME headers readable only by Lookout Express (for filtering out Sircam and company, which take up *lots* of mailbox space; I use Pegasus), you have to do that sort of thing.
Then, of course, there's the content: stuff like "protected under S.1618 passed by the..." ("Murk" disclaimer; law never passed) or "to opt out, send a message marked REMOVE to..." or "**AS SEEN ON TV**!" (esp. with "five reports" or "Dave Rhodes") are all ideal spam filters.
I don't filter, because every spammer I see just uses a different Yahoo! (non-existant) junk mailbox each time. Filtration is useless. Action isn't.
Here are the main current Evil Spammer Tricks (TM):
Open relays are more prominent than ever, especially in.cn and.tw where no-one can read English and no-one can nuke (or even just fix their goddamn SMI-SVR4 boxen: Sendmail relayed up to 8.9.x, not so long ago). These are sometimes combined with:
SOCKS4/SOCKS5 proxies. Anonymity assured. HipCrime's newsagent group-bombing software posts through SOCKS proxies now, so he is effectively untraceable. Bastard. At least with @home out for the count (they had a *lot* of WinGates and AnalogX stuff lying around), we might have some hope.
Having leased lines/colo from UU.net, C&W, Verio and other people who don't nuke (that's pretty much all of tier 1.) These take forever to get rid of, and are the most annoying.
And there's always the problem of mainsleaze - "legitimate" companies spamming. I've been spammed by Terra Lycos recently to a email address I gave NeoPlanet (who never spammed me) about a year ago, RealNetworks spammed me so often I now have them firewalled (IP blocks on request), and eBay are well known for resetting preferences and other little schemes. As such, I try to use alternatives (eg. Google.) But there's not much I can do to get an ISP hosting a $bn company to follow their TOS in this case...
I'm on a dialup (can't get DSL or cable where I live, or even bloody ISDN), and I pay per minute. So each spam I get, it costs me: especially in the case of 800K multimedia extravaganzas, which I have recieved in the past and act as a sort of mini-mailbomb. *This* is why it annoys me: even filtering means the damage is done.
I don't see many Free Software developers rushing out to buy commercial Qt licenses so they can produce Free Software for Windows. So, basically, TrollTech would not be harmed financially, and would probably gain more users (which could mean more Commercial licenses, if some of the Free Software developers wished to make non-Free Software).
This is what the Qt for Windows Non-Commercial Edition is for. License is fairly restrictive, but it'll certainly do in a "single developer in a garage" situation.
They're wrong, all those benchmarks. I get a higher 3Dmark on WinXP than I do on Win98, and a higher Q3A timedemo 1 score as well. I score 8000+ in XPbench, for crying out loud. And I'm only on a GeForce 2.
What I did was: install XP, install nVIDIA driver v22.50 (available from MSI, so it's as official as you can get for a leak) and sit back.
These people must be testing with the supplied drivers with WinXP for NV (and indeed any) cards which don't have OpenGL support: they go straight to the software layer, a lot like mesa on Linux, that Microsoft put in for less fortunate cards. This is, of course, very slow indeed.
However, the VIA 4-in-1s (I have a T-bird) are not required on XP, because the version that's in there is actually good. Otherwise, that's why you use other drivers instead. And it's *very* stable.
Precisely. In the UK, most DOGs (on-screen graphics) are on channels on digital satellite (SkyDigital) or terrestrial (ITV Digital). Both have an "i" button which tells you what name the channel you're on has, what the current programme is and what the next one is, making DOGs redundant.
Plus, they're very annoying: SkyNews has a HUGE graphic now which makes it look like a tabloid newspaper, and BBC CHOICE has a series of red boxes appearing constantly telling you what's next. That *IS* annoying, especially when you can hit "i" and see the same info, inanimate. I don't know why they do it.
Easy. In WinXP, insert a floppy disk, go into My Computer, right-click on the FDD icon, select Format. What's that format type I see called "Make MS-DOS system disk"?
The version of DOS it installs is DOS v8.0, the bootstrap used for Windows Me. You can also obtain better DOS bootdisks from bootdisk.com - I use the DR-DOS one for BIOS flashing. Until 64-bit systems become common, DOS will always be there.
Oh, *please*. Executive Software make the disk defragmenter. That's it - not a major part of Win2K at all. Just because ES is full of Scientologists doesn't mean that the software works for them as well.
Diskeeper was licensed because it is *the* most popular disk defragmenter for NT - Microsoft licensed it in much the same way as they licensed VSGrid for VB5 to replace grid.ocx. If it did anything nasty, it would have beeh everywhere by now. Besides, their version is much modified and stripped-down.
And besides, I use TPF as a firewall - a very high grade package, BTW, even detects its own automatic updater - and I haven't seen Diskeeper trying to call out. Anyway, NTFS means you don't have to defrag for a long time. All scaremongering, it seems.
Note: I hate Hubbard's "religious" multi-billion dollar scam, but am ambivalent on all conspiracy theories.
Apart from the usual options (never run an unscanned attachment, never use a double-extension file, check everything), there's the usual Outlook Express security guide - go to Tools/Options, Security tab, then set to "Restricted Zone". Knocks all JavaScript nasties into a puddle. Also, make sure they send as plain text and not HTML - not virus related, but aesthetically.
Also, tell the Windows users to use Windows Update, especially on critical updates.
Executor, as far as I'm aware, only runs 68K Mac applications. It emulates a 680x0 as part of the process.
MOL runs the real MacOS (for PowerPC) in a window. It does this by directly passing virtual machine function calls to the PPC processor inside - it isn't an emulator. It's a lot like VMWare on i386 in this respect.
If I wanted to point out an advantage of Linux over Windows is this respect, it would definitely be that I haven't yet encountered a Linux program that tries to sneak piggyback software behind my back, or even clutter my desktop with links to itself, even though I do play with a lot of software on my Linux desktop machine.
You may soon have to redefine that precept. I've heard from some sources that RealPlayer for Linux adds an extra line to your/etc/mailcap, of course without your permission, meaning that if any mail comes in of RealPlayer MIME type, it gets played automatically. If that's true, it's very very scary indeed - the average user won't make head or tail of what's going on when they suddenly get a video advertisment for Office Depot coming out of nowhere. They can't even do that in Windows.
Just because it's a minority OS doesn't mean it's not being taken care of, especially when it's RealNetworks that's involved.
The idea with both of these is that you are explicitly telling the OS to open services, as opposed to IIS which you are telling Windows to run implicitly by taking a default install.
Not on NT4 Workstation or Win2K Professional - you have to install it through Add/Remove. And you are allowed to uncheck the box marked "Internet Information Server" using Win2K setup - it's even on the main screen.
At long last, people actually see that Code Red is just an IIS worm exploiting an IIS bug that was fixed two months ago! It quotes Graham Cluley of Sophos, one of the most clued in people in the antivirus companies.
Unpatched systems are not just a problem in the Microsoft world, of course: remember all the Sendmail 8.6 and SMI-SVR4 and 8.8 (nasty buffer overflow/relaying/take your pick) installations or old versions of BIND or Apache that litter the Net, and sigh. Microsoft had a patch out within days of the vulnerability getting posted to bugtraq, and all the open source products would do the same - or release a new version.
Admins that don't keep up with patches or new versions are the real problem here - that's why we have so many open relays, or rooted RedHat 6.x machines. Does linuxconf still make open relays by default? It did for a long time.
The ineffable rubbishness of IIS does need to be taken into account here - I'd rather use Apache. However, admins that don't keep up with the security patches mailing list (or bugtraq) for NT or Linux or xBSD or anything is in serious danger of being rooted whenever anything like Code Red or the Morris worm or just your neighbourhood script kiddie comes along. And that is a seriously bad thing.
Have you ever heard about all the patents that exist around MP3 recording? Playback has licensing problems itself (up to $100,000 for a one time payment), and for encoding MSFT would have to pay $5 per copy of WMP8 for full MP3 encoding capabilities.
For the amount of copies Microsoft will sell of XP and will give away of WMP8, that means they're paying $50m (at least) in patent fees to Thomson Multimedia, and then there's all the fees to include Fraunhofer's own encoding engine. They're not going to do that.
The limited MP3 encoder has been removed from the latest build of XP and a plugin will become available. It will not be limited - any idea that WMP8 will automatically limit MP3 bitrate is complete FUD.
This patent encumberment is why Ogg Vorbis exists, of course...
He's the top guy at Elcomsoft, the small Russian company which developed it. He may well have had a part in writing the program (and any price is a bit much for a ROT13 decoder) - he certainly did a presentation which showed him as the guy who cracked it. I think (insert IANAL here) that Statesian law is similar to UK law in this regard: people in charge of companies are responsible for what they do. He was courting fate, I must say.
He's not going to get jailed anyway; he's going to get a large fine and poss. a suspended sentence. No judge is going to jail someone for a small violation of criminal law. I hope so, anyway.
However, on July 16, Russian computer programmer Dmitry Sklarov was arrested by the FBI for writing a computer program and presenting a paper on it at a security conference in Las Vegas.
This is a common misconception. Skylarov was arrested because he sold (yes, sold) his eBook crack program for an extortionate amount of money within the United States. The Elcomsoft site was on a US dedicated server with Verio, and credit card transactions were handled through a Californian firm. In other words, Skylarov broke the DMCA, knowingly.
Of course, this doesn't mean that DMCA is a good law (it isn't). But Skylarov broke the law, and courted fate by travelling to the United States. It's not surprising that he got what he was looking for.
What we should be aiming for is getting rid of the DMCA: if we have to use Skylarov (author of spamware and script kiddie tools) to do it, so be it. But it's a less clear-cut case than DeCSS (which was programmed in a foreign country, hosted on foreign servers, only linked to within the United States), and should be treated as such - only as a step to the DMCA's eventual abolition.
No, it's because Sun sued Microsoft, and won. So if Microsoft wants to stay in line with the injunction, it can't develop its JVM or bundle it with the operating system. So it has to supply it on Windows Update instead, so it can't be seen as bundling.
Don't attach a sinister motive to everything about Microsoft: it just doesn't work all the time.
Playing sound recordings for the benefit of a not-for-profit club, society or other organisation having charitable purposes as [its] main object, or the advancement of religion, education or social welfare, and where any charges for admission are applied solely for the purposes of the organisation.
...or...
Playing broadcasts or cable programmes that include sound recordings in a public place where the public have not paid for admission. (This also does not infringe copyright in the broadcast, cable programme and any film included in these). Note that paying for admission includes paying for goods or services at premium rates due to the playing of the broadcast etc.
This is truer than you might imagine... I did Higher English this year, and to send in my folio I had to sign away the copyright to my pieces to the Scottish Qualifications Authority, who run the exams system (badly). It's pathetic.
This intellectual property thing is part of the "citizenship" idea. Basically, it's an attempt to instil American-style flag-waving patriotism rubbish into our classrooms; (c) Tony Blair 2001. Intellectual property is just one of the things our beloved government is trying to make us respect, including how "drugs are bad" and how "underage sex is bad" and so on. Ugh.
Besides, this is a Westminster parliament thing which applies to England and Wales only, so I and my brothers won't see the "benefits" (Scotland has nothing *like* the National Curriculum that England has.) And check out the Intellectual Property website, which is run on a very badly configured Solaris machine (check that combo box). Sadly, Netcraft doesn't say SPARC or i386...
However, the author hasn't looked at the Intellectual Property website itself. If you look at it, it gives a list of various items which are legitimately permitted: research, private study, critical analysis, teaching in schools and universities, and not-for-profit music playing. It seems to be slightly scaremongering. But it still has some points to make, and they're worthwhile: about exactly how weak-spined and controlled Blair is, and how it won't be improved by any of the opposition. Such a pity, really: we've got nowhere to go.
No official player on any platform will perform a screenshot.
What, like the RealMagic Hollywood Plus? That's an official DVD player, and the software does screenshots. I've confirmed that myself (I own a Creative Dxr3: the Dxr3 is an OEM H+ and with H+ drivers and software it takes screenshots.)
PowerDVD does too. You appear to be slightly mistaken, I'm afraid.
I'm on technical beta and am currently using XP beta 2. Sorry, no names or numbers.
It *is* painless. I am a consumate upgrader and system fiddler, and XP has worked just fine with BIOS upgrades and minor system configuration changes. Hell, I've even heard it's worked OK with board switches, without needing reactivation.
There are two ways to activate XP: by the Internet, or by phone. You can activate without registration; Microsoft doesn't even need your name (XP's activation numbers are calculated by a one-way hash of hardware configuration and particular copy of XP only.) By phone, you call a special XP activation desk within the bowels of Microsoft (insert your country here) and ask about the activation. If you change your system enough or try to install it on five or six computers, Microsoft will start to ask questions (they say they will try and lean towards the user.)
There are some problems with the activation system that are still to be solved; I don't like the idea myself. But Microsoft can't disable the software remotely: reactivation is triggered by the user, not Microsoft. No ports are opened, no contact made. All these fears about activation are mostly FUD; and besides, you have to "activate" if you want to use RedHat Network or Ximian update mechanisms, and I don't hear any complaints about that.
And as for the security hole: it is a standard HTTP site intended for the people who have paid $20 for the public preview. Pirating XP from the public preview site (for that is what it is, in the same way as "borrowed" cable TV) reflects badly on Slashdotters from the people who have paid for it, and will almost certainly be logged, so I would definitely not recommend it. That kind of thing was why the activation system was produced: so that piracy like that could be prevented, friend to a friend or wider. You just proved Microsoft's point. What a pity.
Toad.com is Gilmore's domain, and he is running an outdated (and probably r00table) version of Sendmail. He's configured it so that it's an open relay, and staunchly refuses to change this practice - even after it's been shown that spammers have abused it. It was in the RSS for a time, and ORBS since 1999 (even after Gilmore tried to threaten it off). Verio threw him off because he was running this open relay against their TOS and since then he has become blind to the anti-relay movement.
He could upgrade to sendmail 8.11.x and use SMTP AUTH, or POP-before-SMTP. But he doesn't seem to realise this.
And as for the story: ORBS occasionally listed people out of spite (this is what led to its downfall). Gilmore's listing *wasn't* out of spite, as the server was an open relay used for spam. The new relay lists probably won't follow the same pattern (in fact ORBL has been retesting lots of old relays from the ORBS list and changing and removing them) and will be restricted to relays only. Thus, problem solved.
Jamie: I'm sorry to hear that you and Rob Malda have been listbombed. I wouldn't condone such actions myself - the anti-spam movement can only succeed if the people in it are less abusive than the spammers themselves.
Anti-spammers get listbombed too - if you read nanae, you can weekly read stories of spamfighters being listbombed or mailbombed, or forge subscribed. That's why the community tries to eliminate anonymous open relays, and unconfirmed mailing lists: to make sure that chances for mailbombing are lessened. The fact that you have been listbombed is because of the existence of unconfirmed lists and FFAs: if they didn't exist, all you would have would be an ignorable confirm message. That's why we oppose them, consent not content.
Gilmore misses the point: all the open relay databases keep lists. We decide what to do with them. All of them are DNS-based lists, so no BGP stuff there; also, it's often used in MTAs to just give a warning that "X is listed in inputs.orbs.org", so the user can decide what to do with it.
The open relay was useful, but it is an anachronism. It is just too unsafe to keep them any more (and the latest RFCs advise you to keep the relays closed). ORB* lists are there for a purpose: but they're not censorship. Not at all.
No... Phoenix is smarter than that. They own Award. If you look at Phoenix's site (ugh: text in graphics is AWFUL web design) it says underneath "PhoenixNet":
New and experienced users alike face some tough hurdles when trying to get running on a new computer. From connecting to the Internet to learning about and managing their PC. How do they get started? What do they need? How can they get these essential tools? Usually, it takes a computer expert to navigate the Internet and locate, access and install the latest Internet technologies for communication, entertainment, education and business. Most users don't even know what they're missing.
To summarise: we'll dump lots of crap on your desktop, force us to be your home page and spy on you. People with packet sniffers have confirmed that the software sends stuff back even when "disabled". And one of their partners is RealNetworks, whose own spyware will be
automatically packaged and installed
alongside Acrobat Reader and other such rubbish. No thanks! There's always AMI, of course...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the easiest way to kill it is to ALT-TAB to the hidden window, then hit ALT-F4. Ka-CHING!
With me, anyway, Morpheus doesn't bring up that rubbish so often. Maybe this is because I have a rule in my personal firewall prohibiting it from using port 80 (and a load of rules meaning that DoubleClick, RealNetworks etc are completely inaccessible). Oh, well.
Just a quick correction: Half-Life never did this over the LAN (you never needed the CD over the LAN), but over the Internet it certainly would. It doesn't even need the CD after version 1.1.0.3 for single-player, so I doubt it checks over the Net any more either.
BZIP2's pretty much standard now. It compresses better than .tar.gz, and the actual program is better. The Linux kernel comes in .bz2s, KDE comes in .bz2s, every major distro has a bzip2 package (including *BSD)... Oh, yeah, and:
./configure; make; make install is VERY easy: this is the reasoning behind the BSD ports system, and is the reason it is so popular (and good). Everything gets optimised to your system rather than some slow but ultra-compatible 386. The only improvement they could make would be to do everything in a make install, and they're set.
bzip2 -dc [file].bz2 | tar -xvf -
Always useful.
Compiling the software using a simple
And they have license issues preventing the distribution of binary packages. That's the other problem. As actually getting something like RedHat to install is harder than this, it should be easy enough to compile mplayer on any system. Don't knock it.
If you're running filters on stuff like Reply-To, or X-Mailer, or weird MIME headers readable only by Lookout Express (for filtering out Sircam and company, which take up *lots* of mailbox space; I use Pegasus), you have to do that sort of thing.
Then, of course, there's the content: stuff like "protected under S.1618 passed by the..." ("Murk" disclaimer; law never passed) or "to opt out, send a message marked REMOVE to..." or "**AS SEEN ON TV**!" (esp. with "five reports" or "Dave Rhodes") are all ideal spam filters.
I don't filter, because every spammer I see just uses a different Yahoo! (non-existant) junk mailbox each time. Filtration is useless. Action isn't.
Here are the main current Evil Spammer Tricks (TM):
- Open relays are more prominent than ever, especially in
.cn and .tw where no-one can read English and no-one can nuke (or even just fix their goddamn SMI-SVR4 boxen: Sendmail relayed up to 8.9.x, not so long ago). These are sometimes combined with:
- SOCKS4/SOCKS5 proxies. Anonymity assured. HipCrime's newsagent group-bombing software posts through SOCKS proxies now, so he is effectively untraceable. Bastard. At least with @home out for the count (they had a *lot* of WinGates and AnalogX stuff lying around), we might have some hope.
- Having leased lines/colo from UU.net, C&W, Verio and other people who don't nuke (that's pretty much all of tier 1.) These take forever to get rid of, and are the most annoying.
- And there's always the problem of mainsleaze - "legitimate" companies spamming. I've been spammed by Terra Lycos recently to a email address I gave NeoPlanet (who never spammed me) about a year ago, RealNetworks spammed me so often I now have them firewalled (IP blocks on request), and eBay are well known for resetting preferences and other little schemes. As such, I try to use alternatives (eg. Google.) But there's not much I can do to get an ISP hosting a $bn company to follow their TOS in this case...
I'm on a dialup (can't get DSL or cable where I live, or even bloody ISDN), and I pay per minute. So each spam I get, it costs me: especially in the case of 800K multimedia extravaganzas, which I have recieved in the past and act as a sort of mini-mailbomb. *This* is why it annoys me: even filtering means the damage is done.They're wrong, all those benchmarks. I get a higher 3Dmark on WinXP than I do on Win98, and a higher Q3A timedemo 1 score as well. I score 8000+ in XPbench, for crying out loud. And I'm only on a GeForce 2.
What I did was: install XP, install nVIDIA driver v22.50 (available from MSI, so it's as official as you can get for a leak) and sit back.
These people must be testing with the supplied drivers with WinXP for NV (and indeed any) cards which don't have OpenGL support: they go straight to the software layer, a lot like mesa on Linux, that Microsoft put in for less fortunate cards. This is, of course, very slow indeed.
However, the VIA 4-in-1s (I have a T-bird) are not required on XP, because the version that's in there is actually good. Otherwise, that's why you use other drivers instead. And it's *very* stable.
Precisely. In the UK, most DOGs (on-screen graphics) are on channels on digital satellite (SkyDigital) or terrestrial (ITV Digital). Both have an "i" button which tells you what name the channel you're on has, what the current programme is and what the next one is, making DOGs redundant.
Plus, they're very annoying: SkyNews has a HUGE graphic now which makes it look like a tabloid newspaper, and BBC CHOICE has a series of red boxes appearing constantly telling you what's next. That *IS* annoying, especially when you can hit "i" and see the same info, inanimate. I don't know why they do it.
Easy. In WinXP, insert a floppy disk, go into My Computer, right-click on the FDD icon, select Format. What's that format type I see called "Make MS-DOS system disk"?
The version of DOS it installs is DOS v8.0, the bootstrap used for Windows Me. You can also obtain better DOS bootdisks from bootdisk.com - I use the DR-DOS one for BIOS flashing. Until 64-bit systems become common, DOS will always be there.
Oh, *please*. Executive Software make the disk defragmenter. That's it - not a major part of Win2K at all. Just because ES is full of Scientologists doesn't mean that the software works for them as well.
Diskeeper was licensed because it is *the* most popular disk defragmenter for NT - Microsoft licensed it in much the same way as they licensed VSGrid for VB5 to replace grid.ocx. If it did anything nasty, it would have beeh everywhere by now. Besides, their version is much modified and stripped-down.
And besides, I use TPF as a firewall - a very high grade package, BTW, even detects its own automatic updater - and I haven't seen Diskeeper trying to call out. Anyway, NTFS means you don't have to defrag for a long time. All scaremongering, it seems.
Note: I hate Hubbard's "religious" multi-billion dollar scam, but am ambivalent on all conspiracy theories.
Apart from the usual options (never run an unscanned attachment, never use a double-extension file, check everything), there's the usual Outlook Express security guide - go to Tools/Options, Security tab, then set to "Restricted Zone". Knocks all JavaScript nasties into a puddle. Also, make sure they send as plain text and not HTML - not virus related, but aesthetically.
Also, tell the Windows users to use Windows Update, especially on critical updates.
Executor, as far as I'm aware, only runs 68K Mac applications. It emulates a 680x0 as part of the process.
MOL runs the real MacOS (for PowerPC) in a window. It does this by directly passing virtual machine function calls to the PPC processor inside - it isn't an emulator. It's a lot like VMWare on i386 in this respect.
That's why it'll only run on a PPC.
Just because it's a minority OS doesn't mean it's not being taken care of, especially when it's RealNetworks that's involved.
To my surprise, I found another good article about Code Red on BBC News Online:
BBC News | SCI-TECH | Code Red 'was never a threat'
At long last, people actually see that Code Red is just an IIS worm exploiting an IIS bug that was fixed two months ago! It quotes Graham Cluley of Sophos, one of the most clued in people in the antivirus companies.
Unpatched systems are not just a problem in the Microsoft world, of course: remember all the Sendmail 8.6 and SMI-SVR4 and 8.8 (nasty buffer overflow/relaying/take your pick) installations or old versions of BIND or Apache that litter the Net, and sigh. Microsoft had a patch out within days of the vulnerability getting posted to bugtraq, and all the open source products would do the same - or release a new version.
Admins that don't keep up with patches or new versions are the real problem here - that's why we have so many open relays, or rooted RedHat 6.x machines. Does linuxconf still make open relays by default? It did for a long time.
The ineffable rubbishness of IIS does need to be taken into account here - I'd rather use Apache. However, admins that don't keep up with the security patches mailing list (or bugtraq) for NT or Linux or xBSD or anything is in serious danger of being rooted whenever anything like Code Red or the Morris worm or just your neighbourhood script kiddie comes along. And that is a seriously bad thing.
Have you ever heard about all the patents that exist around MP3 recording? Playback has licensing problems itself (up to $100,000 for a one time payment), and for encoding MSFT would have to pay $5 per copy of WMP8 for full MP3 encoding capabilities.
For the amount of copies Microsoft will sell of XP and will give away of WMP8, that means they're paying $50m (at least) in patent fees to Thomson Multimedia, and then there's all the fees to include Fraunhofer's own encoding engine. They're not going to do that.
The limited MP3 encoder has been removed from the latest build of XP and a plugin will become available. It will not be limited - any idea that WMP8 will automatically limit MP3 bitrate is complete FUD.
This patent encumberment is why Ogg Vorbis exists, of course...
He's the top guy at Elcomsoft, the small Russian company which developed it. He may well have had a part in writing the program (and any price is a bit much for a ROT13 decoder) - he certainly did a presentation which showed him as the guy who cracked it. I think (insert IANAL here) that Statesian law is similar to UK law in this regard: people in charge of companies are responsible for what they do. He was courting fate, I must say.
He's not going to get jailed anyway; he's going to get a large fine and poss. a suspended sentence. No judge is going to jail someone for a small violation of criminal law. I hope so, anyway.
Of course, this doesn't mean that DMCA is a good law (it isn't). But Skylarov broke the law, and courted fate by travelling to the United States. It's not surprising that he got what he was looking for.
What we should be aiming for is getting rid of the DMCA: if we have to use Skylarov (author of spamware and script kiddie tools) to do it, so be it. But it's a less clear-cut case than DeCSS (which was programmed in a foreign country, hosted on foreign servers, only linked to within the United States), and should be treated as such - only as a step to the DMCA's eventual abolition.
No, it's because Sun sued Microsoft, and won. So if Microsoft wants to stay in line with the injunction, it can't develop its JVM or bundle it with the operating system. So it has to supply it on Windows Update instead, so it can't be seen as bundling.
Don't attach a sinister motive to everything about Microsoft: it just doesn't work all the time.
This is truer than you might imagine... I did Higher English this year, and to send in my folio I had to sign away the copyright to my pieces to the Scottish Qualifications Authority, who run the exams system (badly). It's pathetic.
This intellectual property thing is part of the "citizenship" idea. Basically, it's an attempt to instil American-style flag-waving patriotism rubbish into our classrooms; (c) Tony Blair 2001. Intellectual property is just one of the things our beloved government is trying to make us respect, including how "drugs are bad" and how "underage sex is bad" and so on. Ugh.
Besides, this is a Westminster parliament thing which applies to England and Wales only, so I and my brothers won't see the "benefits" (Scotland has nothing *like* the National Curriculum that England has.) And check out the Intellectual Property website, which is run on a very badly configured Solaris machine (check that combo box). Sadly, Netcraft doesn't say SPARC or i386...
However, the author hasn't looked at the Intellectual Property website itself. If you look at it, it gives a list of various items which are legitimately permitted: research, private study, critical analysis, teaching in schools and universities, and not-for-profit music playing. It seems to be slightly scaremongering. But it still has some points to make, and they're worthwhile: about exactly how weak-spined and controlled Blair is, and how it won't be improved by any of the opposition. Such a pity, really: we've got nowhere to go.
PowerDVD does too. You appear to be slightly mistaken, I'm afraid.
I'm on technical beta and am currently using XP beta 2. Sorry, no names or numbers.
It *is* painless. I am a consumate upgrader and system fiddler, and XP has worked just fine with BIOS upgrades and minor system configuration changes. Hell, I've even heard it's worked OK with board switches, without needing reactivation.
There are two ways to activate XP: by the Internet, or by phone. You can activate without registration; Microsoft doesn't even need your name (XP's activation numbers are calculated by a one-way hash of hardware configuration and particular copy of XP only.) By phone, you call a special XP activation desk within the bowels of Microsoft (insert your country here) and ask about the activation. If you change your system enough or try to install it on five or six computers, Microsoft will start to ask questions (they say they will try and lean towards the user.)
There are some problems with the activation system that are still to be solved; I don't like the idea myself. But Microsoft can't disable the software remotely: reactivation is triggered by the user, not Microsoft. No ports are opened, no contact made. All these fears about activation are mostly FUD; and besides, you have to "activate" if you want to use RedHat Network or Ximian update mechanisms, and I don't hear any complaints about that.
And as for the security hole: it is a standard HTTP site intended for the people who have paid $20 for the public preview. Pirating XP from the public preview site (for that is what it is, in the same way as "borrowed" cable TV) reflects badly on Slashdotters from the people who have paid for it, and will almost certainly be logged, so I would definitely not recommend it. That kind of thing was why the activation system was produced: so that piracy like that could be prevented, friend to a friend or wider. You just proved Microsoft's point. What a pity.
220 [deleted].toad.com ESMTP Sendmail 8.8.7/8.8.7; Mon, 2 Jul 2001 15:46:14 -0700
Toad.com is Gilmore's domain, and he is running an outdated (and probably r00table) version of Sendmail. He's configured it so that it's an open relay, and staunchly refuses to change this practice - even after it's been shown that spammers have abused it. It was in the RSS for a time, and ORBS since 1999 (even after Gilmore tried to threaten it off). Verio threw him off because he was running this open relay against their TOS and since then he has become blind to the anti-relay movement.
He could upgrade to sendmail 8.11.x and use SMTP AUTH, or POP-before-SMTP. But he doesn't seem to realise this.
And as for the story: ORBS occasionally listed people out of spite (this is what led to its downfall). Gilmore's listing *wasn't* out of spite, as the server was an open relay used for spam. The new relay lists probably won't follow the same pattern (in fact ORBL has been retesting lots of old relays from the ORBS list and changing and removing them) and will be restricted to relays only. Thus, problem solved.
Jamie: I'm sorry to hear that you and Rob Malda have been listbombed. I wouldn't condone such actions myself - the anti-spam movement can only succeed if the people in it are less abusive than the spammers themselves.
Anti-spammers get listbombed too - if you read nanae, you can weekly read stories of spamfighters being listbombed or mailbombed, or forge subscribed. That's why the community tries to eliminate anonymous open relays, and unconfirmed mailing lists: to make sure that chances for mailbombing are lessened. The fact that you have been listbombed is because of the existence of unconfirmed lists and FFAs: if they didn't exist, all you would have would be an ignorable confirm message. That's why we oppose them, consent not content.
Gilmore misses the point: all the open relay databases keep lists. We decide what to do with them. All of them are DNS-based lists, so no BGP stuff there; also, it's often used in MTAs to just give a warning that "X is listed in inputs.orbs.org", so the user can decide what to do with it.
The open relay was useful, but it is an anachronism. It is just too unsafe to keep them any more (and the latest RFCs advise you to keep the relays closed). ORB* lists are there for a purpose: but they're not censorship. Not at all.
To summarise: we'll dump lots of crap on your desktop, force us to be your home page and spy on you. People with packet sniffers have confirmed that the software sends stuff back even when "disabled". And one of their partners is RealNetworks, whose own spyware will be alongside Acrobat Reader and other such rubbish. No thanks! There's always AMI, of course...