Aren't a lot of those Android devices forthcoming? If this proves effective with an iPad it'll likely be just as effective on a similar tablet device whether it's running iOS, Android, Windows, MeeGo, or WebOS. You can't conduct research using many of those other operating systems because there aren't yet physical devices running them.
Hell, Apple could have donated them and used it for a tax write-off. Let's see if this is even effective before we worry too much about finding the cheapest alternative.
That's another explanation. Humans are complex beings. It's likely that there are dozens of reasons why they play MMOs. We've merely discovered that one of the reasons can be used to make the same people do something in real life. Some of the people who bought the Nike+ have probably never played MMOs, but if they ever did, it might just be because of the achievements.
Baseless conjecture? Sure, but it's a reasonable starting place for a hypothesis.
My best guess as to 'why it works' is that it makes people feel good about themselves. If people can't feel good about themselves in the real world why wouldn't they escape to some other world where they can feel good? MMOs provide this for some people. Why can't other things give people this sensation regardless of how mundane they are?
Say what you want about (ab)using this for commercial gain, but at least Nike has found a way where this can have a positive benefit on someone's real world existence. If this helps someone who needs more exercise to actually get out and exercise, I can't really say it's a bad thing. We've discovered something that can motivate people. Whether we use it for good or bad is entirely up to us.
Let's at least be a little bit honest. Maybe the ability to install Linux on a PS3 was a big deal around here, but for the vast majority of people buying one it's not even on their radar. There's a least a sizable number of these people who have either never heard of Linux or have no real understanding of what it actually is.
I don't expect that Sony will lose many sales over this. Considering that they may still be selling it at a loss and hoping to make up for it in game sales may actually net them more money as there were at least a few people who were using them to make clusters.
They don't have to offer anything because they got the FCC to kill whatever form of competition this might have given them. When you can get the government to essentially grant you a monopoly without the strict oversight and regulations that are usually associated with such things (e.g. utility companies.), why bother actually trying to be competitive or offer anything?
Or they realized that if they hit 10,000 people with a $1,000 settlement, they could easily $10,000,000 without having to do a whole lot. Especially if it's a film with a very raunchy sounding title. Most people would gladly pay $1,000 to avoid having that information become public. They probably won't even have to go to court for most of the cases. Then they can use that $10,000,000 to make 2000 more pornos and sue another 10,000 people for copyright infringement.
Reminds me of a scene from Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels: (Quote taken from IMDB)
Tom: Listen to this one then; you open a company called the Arse Tickler's Faggot Fan Club. You take an advert in the back page of some gay mag, advertising the latest in arse-intruding dildos, sell it a bit with, er... I dunno, "does what no other dildo can do until now", latest and greatest in sexual technology. Guaranteed results or money back, all that bollocks. These dills cost twenty-five each; a snip for all the pleasure they are going to give the recipients. They send a cheque to the company name, nothing offensive, er, Bobbie's Bits or something, for twenty-five. You put these in the bank for two weeks and let them clear. Now this is the clever bit. Then you send back the cheques for twenty-five pounds from the real company name, Arse Tickler's Faggot Fan Club, saying sorry, we couldn't get the supply from America, they have sold out. Now you see how many of the people cash those cheques; not a single soul, because who wants his bank manager to know he tickles arses when he is not paying in cheques!
I actually found that if you don't expect too much, a VNC client for a phone can be a great thing. A co-worker and I used VNC clients from an android phone and an iPad to drive a powerpoint presentation on a notebook and it worked well enough. The iPad had enough screen real estate that you could get slide notes and a timer, and even though the phone was more limited due to a smaller screen the freedom to move away from the podium where the notebook was connected was great.
It wasn't a great experience, and not something that I would want to use for a lot of other tasks, but it worked well for that particular purpose. Personally, if someone were to make an iOS/Android application that allowed you to drive a powerpoint while giving you a note card to reference would be amazing. Yeah, my example is something fairly limited, but it's still something that was a lot of fun to do.
If you're already paying for cable and can Tivo it, already have Netflix and can stream it, or have already bought the DVD boxset and own it, etc. I can't imagine that this service is for you.
Same reason why people who grow garden vegetables usually don't buy them at the store.
Yes and not all of us are stupid or gullible enough to think that something is worth what a company with a history of ripping people off is charging.
Then don't buy it. No one is forcing you to consume that content.
Cable/Sat TV around here is about $10 per month then add another $10 for STB rental, another $10 for the phone line.
I don't know what the local cable company charges for basic cable or phone around here since I don't purchase either or really have any desire to do so. There're really only a few shows that I'm interested in watching, and most of them aren't on basic cable anyhow. I already own the ones I'd ever care to watch more than once, and Hulu usually allows me to satisfy my curiosity for anything I might be interested in, so I don't know if the rental model applies to me either.
Yes. When I can get it for free and I feel its not even worth $1 to buy I'll never pay $0.99 to have use of a few 1s and 0s for a while.
If everyone felt that way, there wouldn't be as many 1s and 0s for you to use for a while. Someone has to pay and right now advertisers cover the cost to get eyeballs in front of a TV. If there aren't any eyeballs in front of that TV and no one will pay to rent or buy the program, it's not going to get made. You might look at it as paying for some bits, but I look at it as an hour's worth of entertainment. Compared to most things, a dollar isn't unreasonable. Just because it costs next to nothing to duplicate those bits doesn't mean that it took no effort to create what those bits represent.
I imagine that a sizable portion of the/. crowd makes a living from software development. Everything that these people make can be had at no cost, but if everyone were to do that, there'd be a lot of people out of the job. I'm not going to claim to be some kind of saint because I pirated a shit load of music and other stuff back in the day, but now that I have a job and can afford music, books, movies, etc. Even today I'll use some non-legitimate source for content if I can't find a legal avenue to access it, but I honestly don't mind paying for something that I get enjoyment from.
I'm one of those people who think that musicians can survive without record sales because they can fall back on live performances. Hell, the RIAA takes most of the money from record sales for even the most highly successful artists so artists must be making the money elsewhere. I don't see a similar situation for television shows, however. Maybe toys and action figures?
I don't want to call you an asshole or something like that, but I can't really understand your point of view. When I was young and didn't have much for disposable income I probably didn't differ much, but I just spent enough money at a local bar that I could have otherwise spent to rent a season worth of episodes of a TV show I like. If it's not an issue of money or availability, what's stopping you from parting with few dollars to enjoy yourself?
I actually checked out your music a while back when you linked to it in a previous story. It's not something I would normally listen to or for that matter knew existed, but I found it really enjoyable for the mood I was in at the time. There are no radio stations in the area playing that genre of music so it's not something that I'd likely stumble across either. I definitely wouldn't mind throwing some money your way whenever you get finished. Thanks for putting it out there.
The only thing broken around here is the RIAA's business model. I imagine they're pissed that their money tree is dying.
So we have an entity so scary and powerful it can use its international network of secret agents to undertake elaborate underhanded methods to destroy its enemies half a world away on short notice, but so incompetent that it fails miserably at something this simple?
It's the same as the conspiracy theorists who simultaneously think that the same US government that has so horribly botched things in Iraq and Afghanistan was able to mastermind a scheme to destroy the World Trade Center buildings and pin the blame on foreign terrorists in order to start a massive war for some nefarious purpose.
Why not a simple case of a few women looking to gain attention or become famous by accusing another famous person who's currently in the spotlight of a crime like rape?
Or if you really want a conspiracy, who's to say Assange didn't pay a few women to make a flimsy rape claim against him in order to make it appear as though someone is out to get him? He's usually painted as an egotistical prick, so this sort of behavior isn't outside of his alleged character.
There's half a million different ways to look at it and no one here has even a remote knowledge of all of the facts involved in this case. Most of the people here aren't from Sweden and have almost no understanding of their legal system or the normal procedure for handling these kinds of allegations.
For a website that normally promotes rational thought and a scientific approach, the response to this story has been fucking bonkers.
I've seen a lot of amazing things in my life: the Grand Canyon, the Toledo Cathedral, fish swimming amongst coral reefs. Yet I still can't think of any quite as spectacular as the ones I've seen flat on my back and gazing out into space.
You don't even need tracking to do something nefarious. You could easily gather RFID information about people congregating in a certain area, say a political protest. Now you've got a computer creating a dossier on you because you may be some kind of radical seeking to bring down the government. A government like China could easily use a system like this to track dissidents. They don't even need to have anyone physically monitoring the people. Just find out where they meet and start grabbing information on anyone who comes to the site.
You could also determine when a group of people are not around their home and use this information to decide when to rob their house. If all of the residents and their nearest neighbors have all been scanned at movie theaters, clubs, or restaurants in the last half hour you could break-in with the expectation that no one would be around to catch you in the act for a certain period of time.
There are plenty of other creative abuse cases for RFID other than tracking.
Okay, not an entirely easy fix, but what's to stop a society from creating laws preventing the collection or dissemination of this type of information?
The part I really don't understand is why Schmidt runs around and spouts crap that comes off as fear-mongering when this is the type of stuff on which Google is basing the company's future. If anything, he should be reassuring people that this kind of scenario will never come to pass because Google is more responsible than this and values the privacy of its users.
I'm obviously responding to a troll here, but I'm not a person who hates this country. There are some things I don't like about this country, but I can't say that there's any other country where I'd prefer to live. Well, maybe Switzerland.
If some entity has a long history of doing X, it's pretty damn stupid not to expect them to do X. It has nothing to do with whether or not it's right or wrong, the US has a history of involving itself in foreign politics. There's no need to pass moral judgement on it, but it's a fact that the US has attempted to influence foreign politics with great frequency in the past.
Well, we do have an extensivehistory of meddling. Okay, it's actually freaking huge. Whether or not we actually did anything or not, I wouldn't blame Iran for believing that the US played some role in the recent turmoil.
Probably to discourage other people from attempting to leak information which could be a hell of a lot more volatile. Most of the stuff leaked by Manning is harmless or contains no valuable information that could be used by the enemy. However, there are likely plenty of documents that could cause serious problems, from planned attacks on enemy hideouts which the enemy still believes to be secret to weapon designs, capabilities, or nuclear secrets.
They're going to throw the book at him on principle, not over any particular document which happened to be leaked. I'm glad that Manning did what he did and I hope it helps to end the conflicts in which we are involved and brings a greater deal of transparency to the actions of our military. At the same time I'm glad that the military is taking this seriously and trying to make sure it doesn't happen again. Like it or not, there are a lot of things of which the military has knowledge, that I would prefer other parties not being able to access.
In some parts of the country, people either don't mind or prefer to be referred to as an inhabitant of their state. For example, most people from Texas would not take offense to be called a Texan; a person from California being called a Californian; a person from New York a cunt.
Some people buy movie tickets, flowers, and dinner. Some just pay a hooker. Either way you're paying for sex.
If you really wanted to pedantic about it, there's also opportunity cost. Think of all of the other exciting things you could be doing, such as coding or watching Gentoo install.
Based on a few other articles that I've read, the owner of the phone would need to install an app that contains this rootkit first. Either users would need to sideload the application or someone would need to sneak an app containing it into the Android Marketplace, which is possible considering that developers have snuck apps with hidden tethering functionalities into the iPhone's App Store in the past.
Assuming that the rootkit works without needing any suspicious permissions, you won't get any additional useful warnings. If it needs some special set of permissions, but is masquerading as a legitimate app that would need those permissions anyway you probably won't notice either. Most of the articles I've been able to find are a little sparse on details. The rootkit has only been tested on two HTC phones, but the creators claim it will work on all phones. The two phones it has been shown to work on both ship with 2.1, so this may have possibly been fixed in Froyo already.
This is a bit worse than the article from the other day about the Android app that was supposedly stealing a lot of data but mostly turned out to be sensationalist drivel; however, it's still not a drive-by attack, which is what people should really be worried about.
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't a lot of those Android devices forthcoming? If this proves effective with an iPad it'll likely be just as effective on a similar tablet device whether it's running iOS, Android, Windows, MeeGo, or WebOS. You can't conduct research using many of those other operating systems because there aren't yet physical devices running them.
Hell, Apple could have donated them and used it for a tax write-off. Let's see if this is even effective before we worry too much about finding the cheapest alternative.
That's another explanation. Humans are complex beings. It's likely that there are dozens of reasons why they play MMOs. We've merely discovered that one of the reasons can be used to make the same people do something in real life. Some of the people who bought the Nike+ have probably never played MMOs, but if they ever did, it might just be because of the achievements.
Baseless conjecture? Sure, but it's a reasonable starting place for a hypothesis.
My best guess as to 'why it works' is that it makes people feel good about themselves. If people can't feel good about themselves in the real world why wouldn't they escape to some other world where they can feel good? MMOs provide this for some people. Why can't other things give people this sensation regardless of how mundane they are?
Say what you want about (ab)using this for commercial gain, but at least Nike has found a way where this can have a positive benefit on someone's real world existence. If this helps someone who needs more exercise to actually get out and exercise, I can't really say it's a bad thing. We've discovered something that can motivate people. Whether we use it for good or bad is entirely up to us.
Let's at least be a little bit honest. Maybe the ability to install Linux on a PS3 was a big deal around here, but for the vast majority of people buying one it's not even on their radar. There's a least a sizable number of these people who have either never heard of Linux or have no real understanding of what it actually is.
I don't expect that Sony will lose many sales over this. Considering that they may still be selling it at a loss and hoping to make up for it in game sales may actually net them more money as there were at least a few people who were using them to make clusters.
Originally it was, but during the long beta the parrot ceased to be.
They don't have to offer anything because they got the FCC to kill whatever form of competition this might have given them. When you can get the government to essentially grant you a monopoly without the strict oversight and regulations that are usually associated with such things (e.g. utility companies.), why bother actually trying to be competitive or offer anything?
Or they realized that if they hit 10,000 people with a $1,000 settlement, they could easily $10,000,000 without having to do a whole lot. Especially if it's a film with a very raunchy sounding title. Most people would gladly pay $1,000 to avoid having that information become public. They probably won't even have to go to court for most of the cases. Then they can use that $10,000,000 to make 2000 more pornos and sue another 10,000 people for copyright infringement.
Reminds me of a scene from Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels: (Quote taken from IMDB)
Tom: Listen to this one then; you open a company called the Arse Tickler's Faggot Fan Club. You take an advert in the back page of some gay mag, advertising the latest in arse-intruding dildos, sell it a bit with, er... I dunno, "does what no other dildo can do until now", latest and greatest in sexual technology. Guaranteed results or money back, all that bollocks. These dills cost twenty-five each; a snip for all the pleasure they are going to give the recipients. They send a cheque to the company name, nothing offensive, er, Bobbie's Bits or something, for twenty-five. You put these in the bank for two weeks and let them clear. Now this is the clever bit. Then you send back the cheques for twenty-five pounds from the real company name, Arse Tickler's Faggot Fan Club, saying sorry, we couldn't get the supply from America, they have sold out. Now you see how many of the people cash those cheques; not a single soul, because who wants his bank manager to know he tickles arses when he is not paying in cheques!
I actually found that if you don't expect too much, a VNC client for a phone can be a great thing. A co-worker and I used VNC clients from an android phone and an iPad to drive a powerpoint presentation on a notebook and it worked well enough. The iPad had enough screen real estate that you could get slide notes and a timer, and even though the phone was more limited due to a smaller screen the freedom to move away from the podium where the notebook was connected was great.
It wasn't a great experience, and not something that I would want to use for a lot of other tasks, but it worked well for that particular purpose. Personally, if someone were to make an iOS/Android application that allowed you to drive a powerpoint while giving you a note card to reference would be amazing. Yeah, my example is something fairly limited, but it's still something that was a lot of fun to do.
Around here we normally just say "whoosh" and move on to other more important things, like not reading the articles.
If you're already paying for cable and can Tivo it, already have Netflix and can stream it, or have already bought the DVD boxset and own it, etc. I can't imagine that this service is for you.
Same reason why people who grow garden vegetables usually don't buy them at the store.
Yes and not all of us are stupid or gullible enough to think that something is worth what a company with a history of ripping people off is charging.
Then don't buy it. No one is forcing you to consume that content.
Cable/Sat TV around here is about $10 per month then add another $10 for STB rental, another $10 for the phone line.
I don't know what the local cable company charges for basic cable or phone around here since I don't purchase either or really have any desire to do so. There're really only a few shows that I'm interested in watching, and most of them aren't on basic cable anyhow. I already own the ones I'd ever care to watch more than once, and Hulu usually allows me to satisfy my curiosity for anything I might be interested in, so I don't know if the rental model applies to me either.
Yes. When I can get it for free and I feel its not even worth $1 to buy I'll never pay $0.99 to have use of a few 1s and 0s for a while.
If everyone felt that way, there wouldn't be as many 1s and 0s for you to use for a while. Someone has to pay and right now advertisers cover the cost to get eyeballs in front of a TV. If there aren't any eyeballs in front of that TV and no one will pay to rent or buy the program, it's not going to get made. You might look at it as paying for some bits, but I look at it as an hour's worth of entertainment. Compared to most things, a dollar isn't unreasonable. Just because it costs next to nothing to duplicate those bits doesn't mean that it took no effort to create what those bits represent.
I imagine that a sizable portion of the /. crowd makes a living from software development. Everything that these people make can be had at no cost, but if everyone were to do that, there'd be a lot of people out of the job. I'm not going to claim to be some kind of saint because I pirated a shit load of music and other stuff back in the day, but now that I have a job and can afford music, books, movies, etc. Even today I'll use some non-legitimate source for content if I can't find a legal avenue to access it, but I honestly don't mind paying for something that I get enjoyment from.
I'm one of those people who think that musicians can survive without record sales because they can fall back on live performances. Hell, the RIAA takes most of the money from record sales for even the most highly successful artists so artists must be making the money elsewhere. I don't see a similar situation for television shows, however. Maybe toys and action figures?
I don't want to call you an asshole or something like that, but I can't really understand your point of view. When I was young and didn't have much for disposable income I probably didn't differ much, but I just spent enough money at a local bar that I could have otherwise spent to rent a season worth of episodes of a TV show I like. If it's not an issue of money or availability, what's stopping you from parting with few dollars to enjoy yourself?
I actually checked out your music a while back when you linked to it in a previous story. It's not something I would normally listen to or for that matter knew existed, but I found it really enjoyable for the mood I was in at the time. There are no radio stations in the area playing that genre of music so it's not something that I'd likely stumble across either. I definitely wouldn't mind throwing some money your way whenever you get finished. Thanks for putting it out there.
The only thing broken around here is the RIAA's business model. I imagine they're pissed that their money tree is dying.
So we have an entity so scary and powerful it can use its international network of secret agents to undertake elaborate underhanded methods to destroy its enemies half a world away on short notice, but so incompetent that it fails miserably at something this simple?
It's the same as the conspiracy theorists who simultaneously think that the same US government that has so horribly botched things in Iraq and Afghanistan was able to mastermind a scheme to destroy the World Trade Center buildings and pin the blame on foreign terrorists in order to start a massive war for some nefarious purpose.
Why not a simple case of a few women looking to gain attention or become famous by accusing another famous person who's currently in the spotlight of a crime like rape?
Or if you really want a conspiracy, who's to say Assange didn't pay a few women to make a flimsy rape claim against him in order to make it appear as though someone is out to get him? He's usually painted as an egotistical prick, so this sort of behavior isn't outside of his alleged character.
There's half a million different ways to look at it and no one here has even a remote knowledge of all of the facts involved in this case. Most of the people here aren't from Sweden and have almost no understanding of their legal system or the normal procedure for handling these kinds of allegations.
For a website that normally promotes rational thought and a scientific approach, the response to this story has been fucking bonkers.
I've seen a lot of amazing things in my life: the Grand Canyon, the Toledo Cathedral, fish swimming amongst coral reefs. Yet I still can't think of any quite as spectacular as the ones I've seen flat on my back and gazing out into space.
You actually read the f'ing article?
I'd ask if you're new here, but judging from your user ID, you actually are.
At least you're grumbling about the editors so I think you'll fit in okay here.
You don't even need tracking to do something nefarious. You could easily gather RFID information about people congregating in a certain area, say a political protest. Now you've got a computer creating a dossier on you because you may be some kind of radical seeking to bring down the government. A government like China could easily use a system like this to track dissidents. They don't even need to have anyone physically monitoring the people. Just find out where they meet and start grabbing information on anyone who comes to the site.
You could also determine when a group of people are not around their home and use this information to decide when to rob their house. If all of the residents and their nearest neighbors have all been scanned at movie theaters, clubs, or restaurants in the last half hour you could break-in with the expectation that no one would be around to catch you in the act for a certain period of time.
There are plenty of other creative abuse cases for RFID other than tracking.
Okay, not an entirely easy fix, but what's to stop a society from creating laws preventing the collection or dissemination of this type of information?
The part I really don't understand is why Schmidt runs around and spouts crap that comes off as fear-mongering when this is the type of stuff on which Google is basing the company's future. If anything, he should be reassuring people that this kind of scenario will never come to pass because Google is more responsible than this and values the privacy of its users.
I'm obviously responding to a troll here, but I'm not a person who hates this country. There are some things I don't like about this country, but I can't say that there's any other country where I'd prefer to live. Well, maybe Switzerland.
If some entity has a long history of doing X, it's pretty damn stupid not to expect them to do X. It has nothing to do with whether or not it's right or wrong, the US has a history of involving itself in foreign politics. There's no need to pass moral judgement on it, but it's a fact that the US has attempted to influence foreign politics with great frequency in the past.
Well, we do have an extensive history of meddling. Okay, it's actually freaking huge. Whether or not we actually did anything or not, I wouldn't blame Iran for believing that the US played some role in the recent turmoil.
Probably to discourage other people from attempting to leak information which could be a hell of a lot more volatile. Most of the stuff leaked by Manning is harmless or contains no valuable information that could be used by the enemy. However, there are likely plenty of documents that could cause serious problems, from planned attacks on enemy hideouts which the enemy still believes to be secret to weapon designs, capabilities, or nuclear secrets.
They're going to throw the book at him on principle, not over any particular document which happened to be leaked. I'm glad that Manning did what he did and I hope it helps to end the conflicts in which we are involved and brings a greater deal of transparency to the actions of our military. At the same time I'm glad that the military is taking this seriously and trying to make sure it doesn't happen again. Like it or not, there are a lot of things of which the military has knowledge, that I would prefer other parties not being able to access.
In some parts of the country, people either don't mind or prefer to be referred to as an inhabitant of their state. For example, most people from Texas would not take offense to be called a Texan; a person from California being called a Californian; a person from New York a cunt.
\ducks
Maybe it's because Android users don't have to worry about holding it wrong.
Nobody knows how to love you like--- well, you.
But usually it's free of charge.
Some people buy movie tickets, flowers, and dinner. Some just pay a hooker. Either way you're paying for sex.
If you really wanted to pedantic about it, there's also opportunity cost. Think of all of the other exciting things you could be doing, such as coding or watching Gentoo install.
Based on a few other articles that I've read, the owner of the phone would need to install an app that contains this rootkit first. Either users would need to sideload the application or someone would need to sneak an app containing it into the Android Marketplace, which is possible considering that developers have snuck apps with hidden tethering functionalities into the iPhone's App Store in the past.
Assuming that the rootkit works without needing any suspicious permissions, you won't get any additional useful warnings. If it needs some special set of permissions, but is masquerading as a legitimate app that would need those permissions anyway you probably won't notice either. Most of the articles I've been able to find are a little sparse on details. The rootkit has only been tested on two HTC phones, but the creators claim it will work on all phones. The two phones it has been shown to work on both ship with 2.1, so this may have possibly been fixed in Froyo already.
This is a bit worse than the article from the other day about the Android app that was supposedly stealing a lot of data but mostly turned out to be sensationalist drivel; however, it's still not a drive-by attack, which is what people should really be worried about.
Pft... Everyone knows you just need to create a GUI-interface using Visual Basic to track his IP address.