It sounds to me from the paper like a laptop's own speakers are capable of generating enough sound to disrupt the laptop's hard drive, in ultrasound ranges that most humans can't hear. Yes, it's a lot of sound energy, but still possible for it to be unnoticed, especially if you timed it for when the user isn't around, or mixed it into music or other legitimate sound.
The speaker doesn't necessarily have to be within 4 inches; perhaps with further tuning or a different speaker it could work from elsewhere within the room. And there are plenty of plausible scenarios where you don't have physical access to the hard drive, but you do have access to a nearby speaker.
e.g.
- you're running a website and you want to DoS your users' laptop hard drives using the laptop speakers
- you compromised one computer (or phone, or media player, or other device with speakers) and want to use it to attack another device sitting on the desk beside it.
- you rented datacenter space just above your target's server, and your server has an internal speaker which you can attack them with.
The number listed was posted on Network Solutions' official Twitter account, the same account which explicitly said that the email is real. It really is their official Twitter account; their website links to it, and checking archive.org reveals that their website has linked to it for quite some time.
Web.com (Network Solutions' parent company) has also responded in other ways, confirming this story. For example, see http://domainnamewire.com/2014... .
I don't know what system they're using in Singapore (or whether perhaps your inability to tune particular channels is just an issue of signal strength), but digital TV in general is not some conspiracy to control information.
Anyone with the right equipment can transmit a digital TV signal, and anyone with a TV and an antenna can receive it. Just like analog.
You seem to be concluding that we shouldn't lecture about personal responsibility because that won't give him another chance.
Calling it luck or saying "we could all die at some point" isn't going to give him another chance either, so I don't see how your conclusion follows from your premise.
On a laptop or tablet, one watt is a lot of power to waste. But of course it looks small when you compare it to an irrelevant but very energy-intensive task and add some anti-Microsoft flamebait.
I don't see what the point of this claim about the "most outdated cellphone" was. Even among new phones, there are models without touchscreens or wifi, and if you start considering outdated technology at all then your claim becomes even more inaccurate.
RTFS. He's not claiming that there's an almost perfect spam filter being suppressed by a conspiracy.
He's making the very plausible claim that spam filters naturally err on the side of false positives, to the detriment of the users, because false positives are a less visible problem than false negatives.
Because (if you read the post you're replying to) USB makes it easier to add the drives and upgrade, and it means you can connect a large number of drives at once.
Yes, I'm serious. But if my comment is as moronic as you seem to think it is, maybe you can actually help me. I have a couple of computers here which came with OEM crapware Windows and no clean install media (only the option to create crapware recovery discs). How do I get a free, legal, clean Windows installation?
There is hardware and software which is supported on Windows but has less support, or lower performance, or doesn't work at all, on the other operating systems you mentioned.
This means that for some applications, Windows is superior. Even if Windows is crap, it's simply not true to claim that another OS is "far superior to Windows in every way".
Windows does not give media companies a universal remote backdoor to delete your data. It doesn't make sense to blame Windows for the fact that you decided to buy DRM'ed movies/music/books.
If you want to use Windows you're often stuck with a choice between using the OEM crapware installation or paying for a new retail copy of Windows. Whereas on Linux a clean reinstall is generally free.
It's the 21st century. You know, that century where not every Slashdot reader has a smartphone, and the majority of smartphones don't come with a built-in barcode reader, and reading barcodes is mostly pointless enough that the majority of users haven't installed a barcode reader.
I live in one of those parts of the world where data transfer actually costs money. The last time I opened my wireless network, the neighbours pirated more stuff in a day than the amount of data I would transfer in a month.
The reality is that, no matter what nice happy communist policy you put on your open wireless network, people will abuse it to download large torrents, and you'll be the one paying for it.
> radiation tends to play bloody havoc with radio signals
Could you provide more details about how that works? I'm surprised, because gamma radiation has a very different wavelength to radio signals, and alpha and beta particles are different things altogether.
Radio signals are used all the time in the relatively radiation-filled environment of outer space, too.
If a piece of software is critical to your business, you test updates and patches before deploying them, and you make sure you have the ability to roll back to a previous version if something ends up not working.
In school we used computers for everyday stuff: documents, presentations research, etc. But from what I can remember we were never taught anything about them at all.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds to me from the paper like a laptop's own speakers are capable of generating enough sound to disrupt the laptop's hard drive, in ultrasound ranges that most humans can't hear. Yes, it's a lot of sound energy, but still possible for it to be unnoticed, especially if you timed it for when the user isn't around, or mixed it into music or other legitimate sound.
The speaker doesn't necessarily have to be within 4 inches; perhaps with further tuning or a different speaker it could work from elsewhere within the room. And there are plenty of plausible scenarios where you don't have physical access to the hard drive, but you do have access to a nearby speaker.
e.g.
- you're running a website and you want to DoS your users' laptop hard drives using the laptop speakers
- you compromised one computer (or phone, or media player, or other device with speakers) and want to use it to attack another device sitting on the desk beside it.
- you rented datacenter space just above your target's server, and your server has an internal speaker which you can attack them with.
Get the AI to write Slashdot comments; it'll be an improvement.
The number listed was posted on Network Solutions' official Twitter account, the same account which explicitly said that the email is real. It really is their official Twitter account; their website links to it, and checking archive.org reveals that their website has linked to it for quite some time.
Web.com (Network Solutions' parent company) has also responded in other ways, confirming this story. For example, see http://domainnamewire.com/2014... .
I don't know what system they're using in Singapore (or whether perhaps your inability to tune particular channels is just an issue of signal strength), but digital TV in general is not some conspiracy to control information.
Anyone with the right equipment can transmit a digital TV signal, and anyone with a TV and an antenna can receive it. Just like analog.
It'll probably turn out that, with no evidence the government has stolen *your* data specifically, you have no legal standing.
These episodes were recovered in 1991.
You seem to be concluding that we shouldn't lecture about personal responsibility because that won't give him another chance.
Calling it luck or saying "we could all die at some point" isn't going to give him another chance either, so I don't see how your conclusion follows from your premise.
On a laptop or tablet, one watt is a lot of power to waste. But of course it looks small when you compare it to an irrelevant but very energy-intensive task and add some anti-Microsoft flamebait.
There's a big difference between watching TV shows for free, and fraudulently claiming someone else's work as your own.
I don't see what the point of this claim about the "most outdated cellphone" was. Even among new phones, there are models without touchscreens or wifi, and if you start considering outdated technology at all then your claim becomes even more inaccurate.
And people say the free market leads to efficient allocation of resources...
A site is increasing their search engine ranking by... producing meaningful content that people want to link to? I don't see what the problem is here.
RTFS. He's not claiming that there's an almost perfect spam filter being suppressed by a conspiracy.
He's making the very plausible claim that spam filters naturally err on the side of false positives, to the detriment of the users, because false positives are a less visible problem than false negatives.
It's ok to blacklist email received from open proxies. It's not ok to block legitimate email for just *mentioning* them.
Because (if you read the post you're replying to) USB makes it easier to add the drives and upgrade, and it means you can connect a large number of drives at once.
Yes, I'm serious. But if my comment is as moronic as you seem to think it is, maybe you can actually help me. I have a couple of computers here which came with OEM crapware Windows and no clean install media (only the option to create crapware recovery discs). How do I get a free, legal, clean Windows installation?
There is hardware and software which is supported on Windows but has less support, or lower performance, or doesn't work at all, on the other operating systems you mentioned.
This means that for some applications, Windows is superior. Even if Windows is crap, it's simply not true to claim that another OS is "far superior to Windows in every way".
Windows does not give media companies a universal remote backdoor to delete your data. It doesn't make sense to blame Windows for the fact that you decided to buy DRM'ed movies/music/books.
If you want to use Windows you're often stuck with a choice between using the OEM crapware installation or paying for a new retail copy of Windows. Whereas on Linux a clean reinstall is generally free.
> What century is this?
It's the 21st century. You know, that century where not every Slashdot reader has a smartphone, and the majority of smartphones don't come with a built-in barcode reader, and reading barcodes is mostly pointless enough that the majority of users haven't installed a barcode reader.
I live in one of those parts of the world where data transfer actually costs money. The last time I opened my wireless network, the neighbours pirated more stuff in a day than the amount of data I would transfer in a month.
The reality is that, no matter what nice happy communist policy you put on your open wireless network, people will abuse it to download large torrents, and you'll be the one paying for it.
> radiation tends to play bloody havoc with radio signals
Could you provide more details about how that works? I'm surprised, because gamma radiation has a very different wavelength to radio signals, and alpha and beta particles are different things altogether.
Radio signals are used all the time in the relatively radiation-filled environment of outer space, too.
If a piece of software is critical to your business, you test updates and patches before deploying them, and you make sure you have the ability to roll back to a previous version if something ends up not working.
This advice is not specific to Google products.
I'm 22, from Australia.
In school we used computers for everyday stuff: documents, presentations research, etc. But from what I can remember we were never taught anything about them at all.