Yes, I agree that IN THEORY it is possible to recover data from a drive that has been written over "only once." But, in order to do so, you have to disassemble the drive and read the actual "analog" magnetic value.
True. In labs like the NSA has built near D.C., or like countless data recovery operations have built.
I was responding specifically to "there ARE methods to get data off of a hard drive platter that has been overwritten only once" which to me sounded like you were stating that only a second write was required to sufficiently secure your data if your drive fell in to malevolent hands. Sorry if I misinterpreted:-)
That's very cool, and IMO intuitive. I had thought of this idea too, but it seemed like it might be a nuisance if you accidentally clicked it.
Now give Steve a buzz and ask him to make the eject button on the case work:-) I imagine that after all your years of tireless work, appleLaserWriter, you've got to have some pull around there!
I'm curious, as I stated elsewhere, I've not found OSX to be to my personal tastes, so I'm not sure how this works. I've only used OSX on a G4, which does not have an eject button on the keyboard, but does have one on the case that only functions when there's no disk in the drive.
What happens if you have multiple disks inserted (say, a DVD ROM, a CD burner, a floppy, and a ZIP disk), and you push the eject button? Does a menu come up asking which disk you want to pop out? Does the most recently inserted disk pop out? Does the disk inserted longest ago come popping out? Do they all come popping out?
Since I have not tried it, I cannot tell what this behavior will be, and that by definition makes the eject button on the keyboard non-intuitive.
Again, eject buttons on the case are the most intuitive practice. For CD & DVD I have to push the button to open the tray to begin with, so by the time I've gotten a disk in to the computer, I'm familiar with the concept that this button opens the drive. Why, after all this time, can Macs not unmount a disk when its eject button is pushed?
Don't get me wrong, I think the Mac UI is brilliant as a whole, but this point really gets to me, it's one of the earliest functions most users will learn, and it's very non intuitive.
I'll quote: (similar to how OSX's recycle can appears while dragging a disk)
I agree though, in general Mac designers have been years ahead of their time, and I realize that the behavior has been modified slightly to make it more obvious that you're not deleting a disk by putting it in the trash, but the fact does remain, you're putting a disk where the trash can goes in order to eject it. This behavior is IMO only continued because Mac zealots are accustomed to it, and to them it's as intuitive as putting socks on is.
"Wake up, Toto! We're not in 1999 any more, but you're complaining about the limitations of that era's Macintoshes."
The model is still the same; presuming it's intuitive for a user to drag an icon SOMEPLACE to eject a disk, the trashcan is still not the first place people would be looking. The only thing that's changed (unless you consider 10.3) is that the icon down there changes once you start to drag a disk.
As I stated before, it's more intuitive to have a physical button on the case for ejection. Many macs still carry an eject button that doesn't function. That's not intuitive.
This IMO is about the only thing Mac does wrong as far as interface design goes. Personally, the interface in general is not to my tastes, I honestly prefer more options presented to me at once, but I recognize that it's better overall since it makes the learning curve less steep for total newbies. I agree with this interface, but it's not for me.
You can get data off of a disk after several writes also.
An analogy I use, which is not terifically accurate on technical terms, but which does a good job of illustrating the point is this:
Think about hard disk heads writing 1xxxxxxx or 0xxxxxxx when they store data on the disk. The 1 and 0 are the signal strength at an arbitrary magnetic value of 10^8, while the remaining lesser magnetisms are left more or less unaffected. Actually, whatever existed there has its power diminished, so you sort of see a digit shift to the right.
The next write makes sure to set the most significant power of the disk, but physics causes the magnetism that previously resided there to leave some impact on the actual charge. Let's say I had a 0 in a given spot previously. Now I write a 1. The overall magnetic charge is actually just slightly below 1, which I will represent as 10xxxxxx. You see, 0 represents a negative charge and 1 represents a positive charge (north or south if you will). So you can recover data from the previous write by seeing whether each charge is a bit above or below the expected charge here. The next write (let's say a 0) causes the charge to be 010xxxxx. The charge is slightly above a 0 (south), and even more slightly below an expected 01 reading. This continues on out to infinity actually.
Given perfect media, perfect measuring equipment (read heads), perfect write heads, and perfect storage conditions (zero magnetic drift on the disk), data could be read off of a disk that was stored there billions of writes ago. In this perfect circumstance, there is an infinite amount of data that could be stored on a single atom.
Of course in reality, write heads leave a charge plus or minus a few percent of their target charge, magnetic drift caused by media imperfections (such as media decay) and environmental factors (such as errant magnetic fields, eg, from the earth or surrounding equipment), plus a limitation on the precision of reading equipment means we can only recover data from out a few writes, depending on the circumstances. As far as securing your workstation goes, keeping it in close proximity to other electronic devices will strongly boost the chances that environmental magnetism will push individual bits on the disk out of the realm of being able to recover that data. Surprisingly (or not), inexpensive disks work better toward securing your data this way since they have lower quality write heads with a wider fluctuation of write power, and lower quality surfaces causing higher material decay and quicker data loss. These same disks though have a higher failure rate for exactly the same reasons.
All of this is why data destroying tools offer you a option for how many passes you wish to make over the disk. The more times you write, the less likely the data will be recoverable. 8 times is usually more than sufficient for IDE disks, I'd recommend 16 or more times on a high quality disk, such as many SCSI drives.
Dragging the disk to the trash/recycle can always seemed like a strongly counter-intuitive practice to me. The trash can is for deleting things. Why would I put my 4,000 page thesis document, that I just completed after 6 semesters of hard work, which I'm keeping only on a single floppy in to the trash can? When undocking my laptop, I don't stick it in the local waste recepticle.
Much more intuitive IMO would have been an eject icon over which you can drag items (similar to how OSX's recycle can appears while dragging a disk). Better yet, what about a button on the case labeled "Eject?" I understand that purely mechanical ejects aren't feasible for performance reasons (floppies on PC's have to write immediately because of this), but why not have one that sent an eject request to the system, performing the same internal tasks as when you drug a disk to the trash?
Re:not gonna happen, the lobbies are too powerful
on
Do-It-Yourself VOIP Telco
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Exactly. The way they'll compete is legislation. Imposing huge fees for operating a telco. This'll come under the guise of protecting national security. You see, if every mom and pop can offer secure voip (public/private key encryption generated per-call), the feds can't wire tap. If you want to offer phone service, you'll have to support some proprietary infrastructure that Verizon or other big bells will be happy to develop for the government free of charge. They'll then be happy to license it to Mom & Pop for $500,000/year for up to 10,000 users, as the base (cheapest) license, then it gets more expensive after that.
But there's only one version of the softare, so unless you're running VerizonOS, you can't run it. Reversing the encryption (which is actually just an XOR against 0x00) will be illegal under the DMCA, and so there will not be any Linux/FOSS versions of the software, because to get there you have to have violated the DMCA.
This software will spring up out of Russia as FOSS, but its use within the U.S. will result in jail time.
Now the nation is protected, you see.
Following this, you'll see a group of FOSSers who decide that such things really should be free, and you'll find an underground network flying right through the radio waves in the air. Users who rebel against federal legislation and establish VoIP networks across the Internet using 802.11 or whatever the broad range wireless standard is at the time. They'll go on in relative anonymity for a while, but they'll all be struck with how very very cool this technology is, and they'll build steam and momentum, attracting other users to the technology until all of the sudden, someone pays attention, and legislation comes in that starts to restrict the use of such things.
Users will cry foul, people will claim this violates their first ammendment rights, and then Apple will release iPhone, with pretty colors, in hardware that looks edible, and whose color scheme wouldn't offend a conservative grandmother on a bad LSD trip. People will flock to this "new technology" and sell their souls to it before they realize that it's the same thing as what they had before, only it's got more restrictions.
Soon Microsoft and Sony will realize that they've been behind the times on this stuff, and they'll release their own alternatives which offer extra features that no one wants or needs. The physical design of the hardware will look like a high school sophomore sketching doodles in the edges of his notebook paper, compared against Apple's Mona Lisa level design. Micorosoft and Sony will have invested several million dollars in to this before they realize that they're always playing catchup, and have never reached the black, financially speaking, on these products, when they discontinue the line, completely stranding those who *had* bought in to it.
Later, Apple will announce a deal where they buy Verizon and several other major telco's, who are now on the financial rocks, and every time you answer your phone, you'll hear a "Bong" and your phone will smile at you to let you know everything is ok.
Soon after this, you'll see Apple G7's booting up with a picture of Steve Wozniak with borg implants badly photoshopped over his face.
I'm not sure it will ever need getting around. If ever you saw a anti-trust lawsuit waiting to happen, this would be it. Think about it: the big company strong arming the little company out of the market by artificially devaluing their products? That's not competetive, it's monopolistic.
What might happen is an open source movie project that has some talented animators but lacks the computational resources. Given that it's open source, it's unlikely that it'd be a problem if pirate trailers were made, and I can't think of any other way that a group of open source animators would be able to dig up the computational resources to render a Shrek type movie.
You might be cautious, you fell in to the same trap that I did ~3 years ago the first time I tried to web-ify LoRD. In the middle of a fight, you can put in http://klomdark.servebeer.com:8081/ROTFOH/Heal All. asp to get healed, then put in http://klomdark.servebeer.com:8081/ROTFOH/atta ck.a sp?MonsterNum=1 to return to the fight.
Care to elaborate? I tried a wide variety of options, and most worked on 95% or 99% of the platforms out there, but only an essentially non-repeating URL completely defeated the most aggressive caching platforms.
Given that it re-routes all the replies through their service, I'd wager that they are at least smart enough to mark a message as read if they get a reply for it through their network.
There are some web clients (Particularly on hand-helds) that don't pay attention to this header and cache anyhow. I ran in to this problem while developing a http based game Legend of the Green Dragon. The only way I had to defeat it is to put a unique tag on the end of every link generated by the site. If you go there, you'll see a lot of arguments similar to &c=1-071542 added to the end of most non-form-post links. No matter how I set my headers, people's portable devices were still caching entire pages which had been set to expire already, or had been set to not be cached at all.
The thinking of these clients I guess is that the cost of downloading unneeded data is high enough that it's a more worthwhile risk to present old data even when specifically told that this data is old.
You'd have a hard time communicating much over this channel, first, the available characters appear to be [!] and [.]. Second, once you saw either a few positives or a few negatives, chances are you decide the machine is either up or down, and stop pinging it. LONG before you have a chance to do any real communication across this channel.
Unless you're expecting it, and allow your ping to run for 10,000+ count.
Don't you see where this is going? Downloadable albums are more expensive in the stores and restricted with DRM. So people buy their albums in the stores anyhow.
Now the RIAA can say, "You see, all this time people have been saying that it's the convenience of an electronic format they want" (which has not been our argument), "and when we offer it to them, electronic purchases are only 5% of the physical sales. These Internet music buyers are just pirates who are not happy to pay for music even when we give it to them the way they want," (which they're not).
Small merchants might see an appreciable percentage of their transactions go to credit card transactions, but huge companies like Wal-Mart will see a much much smaller percentage go to this. I would be surprised if it was as high as 1%. Their merchant account would be heavily competed for.
The fee off the top for the merchant comes from the processing company, it's how they make money, they're the middle man in between Wal-Mart and MasterCard. MasterCard itself only makes money off the interest on credit cards. What they do is not free, it comes in costs of processing, and this is where the transaction fee comes from for the merchant. My bank is not involved in this decision, so I can't be mad them. The transaction company won't do it for free, so I can't be mad at them.
It's ultimately Wal-Mart's decision to reduce (eliminate) the convenience of debit cards, while at the same time robbing me of the fraud protection that I get on my debit card when used as a MasterCard that I don't get by using it as a MAC card. I was already paying for using my card this way because in the end these fees are passed down to the consumer any how. Because I won't see prices go down as a result of this decision on their part, I'm still paying this when I buy from them, but now I'm also being charged in another way.
If they want to entice me to use my card as a MAC, they can split the difference in fees with me when I pay cash or MAC. Or let me save up Wal-Bucks redeemable for a percentage off merchandise when I pay this way.
If that trend of rejecting debit cards continues to other stores, then the debit card dies, it's totally useless as it's not accepted elsewhere, and we might as well go back to using MAC cards. I got it for a reason, and I'm not keenly interested in giving that up to pad the bonus of a Wal-Mart exec who said, "Look how much we can save if we screw our customers."
Not for me. I stopped shopping at Wal-Mart when they stopped accepting my debit Mastercard as a credit card and forced me to use it as a MAC card. Haven't bought something from them since. That decision is reinforced with the introduction of RFID tags on all their merch.
You see, I get 9 monthly uses of my MAC card before I get billed $1 per transaction. My bank does this because they want me to use it as a Mastercard. My wife and I each get money out on Monday morning on the way to work for lunches for the week and the like. That leaves roughly 1 extra use of my MAC a month before I'm getting charged. No way I'm wasting it on WhiteTrash-Mart.
One time, when in Wal-Mart with my Mother-in-law after having dinner with her (she drove so I got to wander Wal-Mart with her after dinner), I loaded up my shopping cart with items (things I was actually interested in) and tried to check out, electing a line being checked out by a manager. When they refused to take my card as a Mastercard, I let them know what I thought of this principle, and walked out. I wasn't rude or anything, it wasn't the manager's fault that the company has this policy I just wanted to make a statement. If they'd taken my card, then no harm no foul, I still wanted that stuff. Several clothes items, 2 computer software boxes, 1 GameCube game, and various household goods brought my total up to $250 or the neighborhood. Not probably their largest sale for the day, but no doubt enough to make them take note. Hopefully this reinforced the point.
I just wish there were a Target within 30 minutes of my house (closest one is about 40 mins).
The problem is that this necessitates a larger average time between vulnerability discovery and vulnerability fix. The author defines zero-day exploits but doesn't address the fact that his proposed model seriously increases the exposure surface area to these aside from to make the insubstantiated claim to the effect of "these don't really exist".
Although I don't agree with the article's author, I think the inference is that if patches were released more like service packs, where you patch 30 or 40 things at a shot, and only have to do it once a month, that the lower administrative overhead involved in this model (vs the micro patching from today) would encourage a shorter average time from patch release to patch install across the board.
Ethereal is definately the way to go. It's FOSS (Free Open Source Software for those who aren't in the know). Although I don't work in the network security business myself, I do dabble in it, and have a number of friends in major corporations who *are* professional network security folks, ranging in every level of the chain from grunt to global director for a major pharmaceutical.
The industry de facto standard software for this category (when it comes to non-FOSS) is Sniffer Pro, which costs something like (I haven't priced it) USD8,000 a seat. These aforementioned friends of mine, despite owning licenses for Sniffer Pro, use Ethereal over Sniffer Pro.
If you're doing remote sniffing, you might use tcpdump, or tethereal (textmode Ethereal), or if you're sitting on the machine (or have some graphic access, eg, Terminal Services, or tunneled X), use Ethereal.
We should feel sorry no matter the circumstances because a person has been ruined.
Further, it's been a while since I read a 409 scam, but I don't recall any of the ones I'd received in the past saying, "Here is a way you can get rich quick, but it's illegal." Rather they try to establish tragic circumstances that will see a lot of money going to either some cruel government, or being lost by its rightful owners due only to red tape. Thus these scams play on the victim's own compassion as well as their sense of greed.
Just because to you and me, it is obviously fraudulent and illegal, doesn't mean that it is obvious to someone else. In fact, it's these "someone else's" who are the ones that fall victim to it. Almost anyone who's smart enough to identify that it's illegal to do what the scam proposes is also smart enough to recognize that it's a scam. Not everyone is so gifted, and thus compassion is merrited.
I seem to recall an aphorism about laying down with dogs and contracting fleas. I feel for the guy, don't get me wrong. But it's like feeling sorry for the guy who sunk his retirement account into a Y2k bunker. Or better, actually fell for one of those 409 scammers.
Actually I do feel for those people, they work hard their entire life, and a single indiscretion costs them their entire life's accomplishments. The people who take advantage of such vulnerable individuals are predators, and maybe it was a really stupid thing to do, but it still cost the person everything they had.
There's a difference between giving up and persuing ill-fated approaches.
And since in your sarcasm you demonstrate that you're not a fan of giving up, you simultaneously advocate the giving up of certain essential liberties on the net -- specifically the lack of censorship.
ISP's blocking websites based on the content of those websites is a BAD precedent, I don't care if it's advertising spam services or showing gruesome imagery. So long as it is not ILLEGAL, it shouldn't be censored. I *don't* want my ISP (or any ISP) being responsible to make the decision on what is and is not acceptable content for me or any of their the paying customers, to view.
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True. In labs like the NSA has built near D.C., or like countless data recovery operations have built.
I was responding specifically to "there ARE methods to get data off of a hard drive platter that has been overwritten only once" which to me sounded like you were stating that only a second write was required to sufficiently secure your data if your drive fell in to malevolent hands. Sorry if I misinterpreted
That's very cool, and IMO intuitive. I had thought of this idea too, but it seemed like it might be a nuisance if you accidentally clicked it.
:-) I imagine that after all your years of tireless work, appleLaserWriter, you've got to have some pull around there!
Now give Steve a buzz and ask him to make the eject button on the case work
Quote:
(similar to how OSX's recycle can appears while dragging a disk)
I'm curious, as I stated elsewhere, I've not found OSX to be to my personal tastes, so I'm not sure how this works. I've only used OSX on a G4, which does not have an eject button on the keyboard, but does have one on the case that only functions when there's no disk in the drive.
What happens if you have multiple disks inserted (say, a DVD ROM, a CD burner, a floppy, and a ZIP disk), and you push the eject button? Does a menu come up asking which disk you want to pop out? Does the most recently inserted disk pop out? Does the disk inserted longest ago come popping out? Do they all come popping out?
Since I have not tried it, I cannot tell what this behavior will be, and that by definition makes the eject button on the keyboard non-intuitive.
Again, eject buttons on the case are the most intuitive practice. For CD & DVD I have to push the button to open the tray to begin with, so by the time I've gotten a disk in to the computer, I'm familiar with the concept that this button opens the drive. Why, after all this time, can Macs not unmount a disk when its eject button is pushed?
Don't get me wrong, I think the Mac UI is brilliant as a whole, but this point really gets to me, it's one of the earliest functions most users will learn, and it's very non intuitive.
DUDE, have you actually READ my comment?
I'll quote:
(similar to how OSX's recycle can appears while dragging a disk)
I agree though, in general Mac designers have been years ahead of their time, and I realize that the behavior has been modified slightly to make it more obvious that you're not deleting a disk by putting it in the trash, but the fact does remain, you're putting a disk where the trash can goes in order to eject it. This behavior is IMO only continued because Mac zealots are accustomed to it, and to them it's as intuitive as putting socks on is.
"Wake up, Toto! We're not in 1999 any more, but you're complaining about the limitations of that era's Macintoshes."
The model is still the same; presuming it's intuitive for a user to drag an icon SOMEPLACE to eject a disk, the trashcan is still not the first place people would be looking. The only thing that's changed (unless you consider 10.3) is that the icon down there changes once you start to drag a disk.
As I stated before, it's more intuitive to have a physical button on the case for ejection. Many macs still carry an eject button that doesn't function. That's not intuitive.
This IMO is about the only thing Mac does wrong as far as interface design goes. Personally, the interface in general is not to my tastes, I honestly prefer more options presented to me at once, but I recognize that it's better overall since it makes the learning curve less steep for total newbies. I agree with this interface, but it's not for me.
You can get data off of a disk after several writes also.
An analogy I use, which is not terifically accurate on technical terms, but which does a good job of illustrating the point is this:
Think about hard disk heads writing 1xxxxxxx or 0xxxxxxx when they store data on the disk. The 1 and 0 are the signal strength at an arbitrary magnetic value of 10^8, while the remaining lesser magnetisms are left more or less unaffected. Actually, whatever existed there has its power diminished, so you sort of see a digit shift to the right.
The next write makes sure to set the most significant power of the disk, but physics causes the magnetism that previously resided there to leave some impact on the actual charge. Let's say I had a 0 in a given spot previously. Now I write a 1. The overall magnetic charge is actually just slightly below 1, which I will represent as 10xxxxxx. You see, 0 represents a negative charge and 1 represents a positive charge (north or south if you will). So you can recover data from the previous write by seeing whether each charge is a bit above or below the expected charge here. The next write (let's say a 0) causes the charge to be 010xxxxx. The charge is slightly above a 0 (south), and even more slightly below an expected 01 reading. This continues on out to infinity actually.
Given perfect media, perfect measuring equipment (read heads), perfect write heads, and perfect storage conditions (zero magnetic drift on the disk), data could be read off of a disk that was stored there billions of writes ago. In this perfect circumstance, there is an infinite amount of data that could be stored on a single atom.
Of course in reality, write heads leave a charge plus or minus a few percent of their target charge, magnetic drift caused by media imperfections (such as media decay) and environmental factors (such as errant magnetic fields, eg, from the earth or surrounding equipment), plus a limitation on the precision of reading equipment means we can only recover data from out a few writes, depending on the circumstances. As far as securing your workstation goes, keeping it in close proximity to other electronic devices will strongly boost the chances that environmental magnetism will push individual bits on the disk out of the realm of being able to recover that data. Surprisingly (or not), inexpensive disks work better toward securing your data this way since they have lower quality write heads with a wider fluctuation of write power, and lower quality surfaces causing higher material decay and quicker data loss. These same disks though have a higher failure rate for exactly the same reasons.
All of this is why data destroying tools offer you a option for how many passes you wish to make over the disk. The more times you write, the less likely the data will be recoverable. 8 times is usually more than sufficient for IDE disks, I'd recommend 16 or more times on a high quality disk, such as many SCSI drives.
Dragging the disk to the trash/recycle can always seemed like a strongly counter-intuitive practice to me. The trash can is for deleting things. Why would I put my 4,000 page thesis document, that I just completed after 6 semesters of hard work, which I'm keeping only on a single floppy in to the trash can? When undocking my laptop, I don't stick it in the local waste recepticle.
Much more intuitive IMO would have been an eject icon over which you can drag items (similar to how OSX's recycle can appears while dragging a disk). Better yet, what about a button on the case labeled "Eject?" I understand that purely mechanical ejects aren't feasible for performance reasons (floppies on PC's have to write immediately because of this), but why not have one that sent an eject request to the system, performing the same internal tasks as when you drug a disk to the trash?
Exactly. The way they'll compete is legislation. Imposing huge fees for operating a telco. This'll come under the guise of protecting national security. You see, if every mom and pop can offer secure voip (public/private key encryption generated per-call), the feds can't wire tap. If you want to offer phone service, you'll have to support some proprietary infrastructure that Verizon or other big bells will be happy to develop for the government free of charge. They'll then be happy to license it to Mom & Pop for $500,000/year for up to 10,000 users, as the base (cheapest) license, then it gets more expensive after that.
But there's only one version of the softare, so unless you're running VerizonOS, you can't run it. Reversing the encryption (which is actually just an XOR against 0x00) will be illegal under the DMCA, and so there will not be any Linux/FOSS versions of the software, because to get there you have to have violated the DMCA.
This software will spring up out of Russia as FOSS, but its use within the U.S. will result in jail time.
Now the nation is protected, you see.
Following this, you'll see a group of FOSSers who decide that such things really should be free, and you'll find an underground network flying right through the radio waves in the air. Users who rebel against federal legislation and establish VoIP networks across the Internet using 802.11 or whatever the broad range wireless standard is at the time. They'll go on in relative anonymity for a while, but they'll all be struck with how very very cool this technology is, and they'll build steam and momentum, attracting other users to the technology until all of the sudden, someone pays attention, and legislation comes in that starts to restrict the use of such things.
Users will cry foul, people will claim this violates their first ammendment rights, and then Apple will release iPhone, with pretty colors, in hardware that looks edible, and whose color scheme wouldn't offend a conservative grandmother on a bad LSD trip. People will flock to this "new technology" and sell their souls to it before they realize that it's the same thing as what they had before, only it's got more restrictions.
Soon Microsoft and Sony will realize that they've been behind the times on this stuff, and they'll release their own alternatives which offer extra features that no one wants or needs. The physical design of the hardware will look like a high school sophomore sketching doodles in the edges of his notebook paper, compared against Apple's Mona Lisa level design. Micorosoft and Sony will have invested several million dollars in to this before they realize that they're always playing catchup, and have never reached the black, financially speaking, on these products, when they discontinue the line, completely stranding those who *had* bought in to it.
Later, Apple will announce a deal where they buy Verizon and several other major telco's, who are now on the financial rocks, and every time you answer your phone, you'll hear a "Bong" and your phone will smile at you to let you know everything is ok.
Soon after this, you'll see Apple G7's booting up with a picture of Steve Wozniak with borg implants badly photoshopped over his face.
I'm not sure it will ever need getting around. If ever you saw a anti-trust lawsuit waiting to happen, this would be it. Think about it: the big company strong arming the little company out of the market by artificially devaluing their products? That's not competetive, it's monopolistic.
You're right on the nose with this post.
What might happen is an open source movie project that has some talented animators but lacks the computational resources. Given that it's open source, it's unlikely that it'd be a problem if pirate trailers were made, and I can't think of any other way that a group of open source animators would be able to dig up the computational resources to render a Shrek type movie.
You might be cautious, you fell in to the same trap that I did ~3 years ago the first time I tried to web-ify LoRD. In the middle of a fight, you can put inl All. aspa ck.a sp?MonsterNum=1
http://klomdark.servebeer.com:8081/ROTFOH/Hea
to get healed, then put in
http://klomdark.servebeer.com:8081/ROTFOH/att
to return to the fight.
Care to elaborate? I tried a wide variety of options, and most worked on 95% or 99% of the platforms out there, but only an essentially non-repeating URL completely defeated the most aggressive caching platforms.
Given that it re-routes all the replies through their service, I'd wager that they are at least smart enough to mark a message as read if they get a reply for it through their network.
There are some web clients (Particularly on hand-helds) that don't pay attention to this header and cache anyhow. I ran in to this problem while developing a http based game Legend of the Green Dragon. The only way I had to defeat it is to put a unique tag on the end of every link generated by the site. If you go there, you'll see a lot of arguments similar to &c=1-071542 added to the end of most non-form-post links. No matter how I set my headers, people's portable devices were still caching entire pages which had been set to expire already, or had been set to not be cached at all.
The thinking of these clients I guess is that the cost of downloading unneeded data is high enough that it's a more worthwhile risk to present old data even when specifically told that this data is old.
You'd have a hard time communicating much over this channel, first, the available characters appear to be [!] and [.]. Second, once you saw either a few positives or a few negatives, chances are you decide the machine is either up or down, and stop pinging it. LONG before you have a chance to do any real communication across this channel.
Unless you're expecting it, and allow your ping to run for 10,000+ count.
Don't you see where this is going? Downloadable albums are more expensive in the stores and restricted with DRM. So people buy their albums in the stores anyhow.
Now the RIAA can say, "You see, all this time people have been saying that it's the convenience of an electronic format they want" (which has not been our argument), "and when we offer it to them, electronic purchases are only 5% of the physical sales. These Internet music buyers are just pirates who are not happy to pay for music even when we give it to them the way they want," (which they're not).
Good show RIAA. Red herrings for everyone.
Small merchants might see an appreciable percentage of their transactions go to credit card transactions, but huge companies like Wal-Mart will see a much much smaller percentage go to this. I would be surprised if it was as high as 1%. Their merchant account would be heavily competed for.
The fee off the top for the merchant comes from the processing company, it's how they make money, they're the middle man in between Wal-Mart and MasterCard. MasterCard itself only makes money off the interest on credit cards. What they do is not free, it comes in costs of processing, and this is where the transaction fee comes from for the merchant. My bank is not involved in this decision, so I can't be mad them. The transaction company won't do it for free, so I can't be mad at them.
It's ultimately Wal-Mart's decision to reduce (eliminate) the convenience of debit cards, while at the same time robbing me of the fraud protection that I get on my debit card when used as a MasterCard that I don't get by using it as a MAC card. I was already paying for using my card this way because in the end these fees are passed down to the consumer any how. Because I won't see prices go down as a result of this decision on their part, I'm still paying this when I buy from them, but now I'm also being charged in another way.
If they want to entice me to use my card as a MAC, they can split the difference in fees with me when I pay cash or MAC. Or let me save up Wal-Bucks redeemable for a percentage off merchandise when I pay this way.
If that trend of rejecting debit cards continues to other stores, then the debit card dies, it's totally useless as it's not accepted elsewhere, and we might as well go back to using MAC cards. I got it for a reason, and I'm not keenly interested in giving that up to pad the bonus of a Wal-Mart exec who said, "Look how much we can save if we screw our customers."
Not for me. I stopped shopping at Wal-Mart when they stopped accepting my debit Mastercard as a credit card and forced me to use it as a MAC card. Haven't bought something from them since. That decision is reinforced with the introduction of RFID tags on all their merch.
You see, I get 9 monthly uses of my MAC card before I get billed $1 per transaction. My bank does this because they want me to use it as a Mastercard. My wife and I each get money out on Monday morning on the way to work for lunches for the week and the like. That leaves roughly 1 extra use of my MAC a month before I'm getting charged. No way I'm wasting it on WhiteTrash-Mart.
One time, when in Wal-Mart with my Mother-in-law after having dinner with her (she drove so I got to wander Wal-Mart with her after dinner), I loaded up my shopping cart with items (things I was actually interested in) and tried to check out, electing a line being checked out by a manager. When they refused to take my card as a Mastercard, I let them know what I thought of this principle, and walked out. I wasn't rude or anything, it wasn't the manager's fault that the company has this policy I just wanted to make a statement. If they'd taken my card, then no harm no foul, I still wanted that stuff. Several clothes items, 2 computer software boxes, 1 GameCube game, and various household goods brought my total up to $250 or the neighborhood. Not probably their largest sale for the day, but no doubt enough to make them take note. Hopefully this reinforced the point.
I just wish there were a Target within 30 minutes of my house (closest one is about 40 mins).
The problem is that this necessitates a larger average time between vulnerability discovery and vulnerability fix. The author defines zero-day exploits but doesn't address the fact that his proposed model seriously increases the exposure surface area to these aside from to make the insubstantiated claim to the effect of "these don't really exist".
Although I don't agree with the article's author, I think the inference is that if patches were released more like service packs, where you patch 30 or 40 things at a shot, and only have to do it once a month, that the lower administrative overhead involved in this model (vs the micro patching from today) would encourage a shorter average time from patch release to patch install across the board.
Ethereal is definately the way to go. It's FOSS (Free Open Source Software for those who aren't in the know). Although I don't work in the network security business myself, I do dabble in it, and have a number of friends in major corporations who *are* professional network security folks, ranging in every level of the chain from grunt to global director for a major pharmaceutical.
The industry de facto standard software for this category (when it comes to non-FOSS) is Sniffer Pro, which costs something like (I haven't priced it) USD8,000 a seat. These aforementioned friends of mine, despite owning licenses for Sniffer Pro, use Ethereal over Sniffer Pro.
If you're doing remote sniffing, you might use tcpdump, or tethereal (textmode Ethereal), or if you're sitting on the machine (or have some graphic access, eg, Terminal Services, or tunneled X), use Ethereal.
We should feel sorry no matter the circumstances because a person has been ruined.
Further, it's been a while since I read a 409 scam, but I don't recall any of the ones I'd received in the past saying, "Here is a way you can get rich quick, but it's illegal." Rather they try to establish tragic circumstances that will see a lot of money going to either some cruel government, or being lost by its rightful owners due only to red tape. Thus these scams play on the victim's own compassion as well as their sense of greed.
Just because to you and me, it is obviously fraudulent and illegal, doesn't mean that it is obvious to someone else. In fact, it's these "someone else's" who are the ones that fall victim to it. Almost anyone who's smart enough to identify that it's illegal to do what the scam proposes is also smart enough to recognize that it's a scam. Not everyone is so gifted, and thus compassion is merrited.
Whew boy... taken out of context....
I seem to recall an aphorism about laying down with dogs and contracting fleas. I feel for the guy, don't get me wrong. But it's like feeling sorry for the guy who sunk his retirement account into a Y2k bunker. Or better, actually fell for one of those 409 scammers.
Actually I do feel for those people, they work hard their entire life, and a single indiscretion costs them their entire life's accomplishments. The people who take advantage of such vulnerable individuals are predators, and maybe it was a really stupid thing to do, but it still cost the person everything they had.
yeah, you're right. let's just give up.
There's a difference between giving up and persuing ill-fated approaches.
And since in your sarcasm you demonstrate that you're not a fan of giving up, you simultaneously advocate the giving up of certain essential liberties on the net -- specifically the lack of censorship.
ISP's blocking websites based on the content of those websites is a BAD precedent, I don't care if it's advertising spam services or showing gruesome imagery. So long as it is not ILLEGAL, it shouldn't be censored. I *don't* want my ISP (or any ISP) being responsible to make the decision on what is and is not acceptable content for me or any of their the paying customers, to view.