I think this is the case in most countries in the world (except maybe the USA?)
Like terrorism, EULAs mainly serve as a mechanism for threat. They can be referred to in letters from attorneys. In an actual court session they don't have much value.
Don't forget that Linux has exactly the same issues. The name "rootkit" originates not from this Windows implementation, but from earlier Unix/Linux versions. From the time Linux supported loadable modules, rootkits have existed that used this mechanism to intercept systemcalls and hide files.
You forget the most important feature (and the reason for failure of IPv6):
- a smooth migration path from the older versions of the protocol
Without such a migration path, nobody will ever switch.
It is like the early versions of Windows, that had to be able to run DOS applications or nobody would have made the switch.
It was dumb, just plain DUMB, to not consider this when designing IPv6.
Re:Zombie Cluster - not feasable =(
on
RSA-640 Factored
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Remember that those calculations assume a specific algorithm. It could always happen that some bright guy finds a more efficient (or more easily distributed) way to attack the problem. This is always a risk with encryption that relies on "computationally hard" problems.
The actual linked item says: "The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space," he recalls, adding that U.S. satellites picked up the explosion.
This could well be because the user has something called tr in his path. It reminds me of the many times I saw that new programmers on our Unix system in those days wrote their first program, called it test.c, compiled it to "test" and then saw very misterious problems occurring that no other user saw. In those days, the current directory was often first in the PATH, and many scripts used the "test" program/bin/test instead of its alias name '[' that was later invented. Those scripts would run the user's test program instead of/bin/test.
The big problem is that Microsoft has (several times) designed software with functionality that anyone who thinks a second about security would never have included, just for the reason of its insecurity. They only thought about how sexy it would look and how much the users would appreciate it, and they never considered how badly they could have been hurt.
They should not have designed it that way in the first place. Nobody would miss the functionality. In (many) other industries, those that design new products first think about possible consequences. Also, there are often laws and governmental validation institutes that validate the product before it is being put on the market. Things like medicine and cars have to be type-approved before they can even be sold, and other goods like food or electrical equipment have to comply to standards and are taken off the market when they fail to do so.
For some reason, software has been exempt from all this. Considering the dependency of the world and individuals on software, this is a bad situation. Even worse is the fact that software manufacturers can easily sign away all their responsibility in a simple EULA. Companies like Microsoft should be accountable for the design decisions they make. That would make them a lot more careful.
An IT department of a big corporation better doesn't allow office PC users to install software on their system. With a well set-up office Windows system this kind of CD simply will not be able to perform its tricks.
Maybe in your country, but not here... Merely buying some technology from another company does not mean you are no longer responsible for your product.
Their MSN Hotmail service sends many more spam and scam messages than that, and they do not bother to fix the problem. There is only some outsourced abuse service that you can send violating messages which results in either of these actions:
- you get a message back that the complaint does not include a hotmail address (which it does) - you get a message that your complaint does not include full headers and body - you get a message that your message was too long - you get a message back that the submitted message was not in english - your message is refused by their mailserver because it was detected as being spam (duh!)
and only in a very minority of cases: the account is deleted about 4 days after the spamrun. useless, of course.
Any attempt to report improvement strategies is not understood by those abuse-desk employees, and they just send back a reply with "please send me the headers and body of the message you are referring to".
If only they would implement some spamscanning in their outbound mail, some ratelimiting (especially for new accounts), or whatever measure...
The detection in the camera would not detect the TV screen, but the displayed movie that includes watermarking features that define the picture as being copy-protected. This is not at all impossible.
Of course the camera manufacturers would have to implement this, but remember that big camera manufacturers like Sony are also big media companies. One branch could easily ask the other to do something about piracy.
To avoid this, the industry has invented (and is moving to) HDMI as the interface between DVD player and TV. It seems it is mandatory for HDTV capable players (and receivers).
You are wrong on this. It is quite easy to include some "watermark" feature that will make the camcorder refuse to record the TV image, or make it tracable to the origin somehow.
Compare with fladbed scanners that refuse to scan money.
It is not a matter of "is it significantly better" but "is it perceivably better".
Typical "large" TV sets now are 32-42 inch diagonal. When you put a 1920x1080 image on that, and go sit at a typical viewing distance, there is no way you eye is going to see the details at that resolution.
I do have a 32" TV, with a 1366x768 LCD panel, and when I display a PC desktop on it it is impossible to read the normal fonts at "couch" distance. This TV scales NTSC and PAL resolutions up to the panel res (with some enhancement algorithm), displays 720p at 1:1 mapping, and scales down 1920x1080.
I have tried watching HDTV movies on the PC input, and indeed there is improved quality. But when comparing with anamorphic widescreen PAL or SD DVB, it is not an improvement that will make the general public want to spend a couple of thousands on. In fact with typical DVB channels the MPEG artifacts are more apparent than the lack of resolution, i.e. the picture could be improved by merely allocating more bandwith for the same system.
You may think that this 20% difference is small, but when comparing NTSC and PAL it is a very significant difference. Apparently it is in the region where every difference counts. This is not really true for 720p and especially 1080i. I would even say that the disadvantage of having interlacing offsets the extra resolution of 1080i vs 720p.
The framerate is not much of an issue with LCD screens. And modern CRT TVs have framerate doublers here. The advantage is that we have no 3:2 pulldown.
The analog network is only used by state TV here. All commercial stations transmit in digital only, because it costs them much less to do so. So anyone with "only terrestrial analog" reception can receive only 3 state TV channels and sometimes a local station.
TV reception here can be done via:
- analog terrestrial (the legacy method)
- analog cable (by far the most widely used method. cable companies transcode about 35 digital channels to analog on cable so a legacy TV set can receive them)
- digital terrestrial
- digital cable
- digital satellite
All digital systems are subscription services, and indeed they are all DVB (-T, -C and -S).
Note that HDTV has a difficult time here, because our SD TV system already has a better resolution than the NTSC system, so the difference is less apparent.
Also, we now have two categories of TV stations here:
- the state TV, who have a sense for quality but no money.
- the commercial channels, who absolutely don't care about quality.
The state channels are currently the only ones transmitting 16:9 anamorphic, the others use letterbox only. Then HDTV would be a lot better. However, the commercial channels have the objective of airing commercials, and filling material between those commercials that prevents the viewers from zapping away, The quality of the programming, and much less the picture, is absolutely unimportant to them.
Analog TV will be phased out in 2006 here in the Netherlands...
Politicians make such decisions here with only a couple of months leadtime. Some statistics showed that only about 70.000 families are still watching the analog TV network, it costs some 15 million euro per year to keep it running, government needs 15 million euro for some other purpose, so the network will be switched off next year.
(it is still unclear if this will happen all at once on Jan 1st, and if there will be subsidies to buy digital receiving equipment)
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I think this is the case in most countries in the world (except maybe the USA?)
Like terrorism, EULAs mainly serve as a mechanism for threat. They can be referred to in letters from attorneys. In an actual court session they don't have much value.
Don't forget that Linux has exactly the same issues.
The name "rootkit" originates not from this Windows implementation, but from earlier Unix/Linux versions.
From the time Linux supported loadable modules, rootkits have existed that used this mechanism to intercept systemcalls and hide files.
You forget the most important feature (and the reason for failure of IPv6):
- a smooth migration path from the older versions of the protocol
Without such a migration path, nobody will ever switch.
It is like the early versions of Windows, that had to be able to run DOS applications or nobody would have made the switch.
It was dumb, just plain DUMB, to not consider this when designing IPv6.
Remember that those calculations assume a specific algorithm.
It could always happen that some bright guy finds a more efficient (or more easily distributed) way to attack the problem. This is always a risk with encryption that relies on "computationally hard" problems.
The error is in the article.
The actual linked item says: "The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space," he recalls, adding that U.S. satellites picked up the explosion.
This is of course something completely different.
Remember: Nothing sucks like a VAX
This could well be because the user has something called tr in his path. /bin/test instead of its alias name '[' that was later invented. /bin/test.
It reminds me of the many times I saw that new programmers on our Unix system in those days wrote their first program, called it test.c, compiled it to "test" and then saw very misterious problems occurring that no other user saw.
In those days, the current directory was often first in the PATH, and many scripts used the "test" program
Those scripts would run the user's test program instead of
The big problem is that Microsoft has (several times) designed software with functionality that anyone who thinks a second about security would never have included, just for the reason of its insecurity.
They only thought about how sexy it would look and how much the users would appreciate it, and they never considered how badly they could have been hurt.
They should not have designed it that way in the first place. Nobody would miss the functionality.
In (many) other industries, those that design new products first think about possible consequences. Also, there are often laws and governmental validation institutes that validate the product before it is being put on the market. Things like medicine and cars have to be type-approved before they can even be sold, and other goods like food or electrical equipment have to comply to standards and are taken off the market when they fail to do so.
For some reason, software has been exempt from all this. Considering the dependency of the world and individuals on software, this is a bad situation.
Even worse is the fact that software manufacturers can easily sign away all their responsibility in a simple EULA. Companies like Microsoft should be accountable for the design decisions they make. That would make them a lot more careful.
No no no... the summary says 3,000,000 and the article says "5 million".
We all know that "5 million" equals "3,000,000".
If they meant "5,000,000" they would have written "5 mebimillion".
... but that is only possible when your product actually does something, and anyone needs it!
An IT department of a big corporation better doesn't allow office PC users to install software on their system.
With a well set-up office Windows system this kind of CD simply will not be able to perform its tricks.
Maybe in your country, but not here...
Merely buying some technology from another company does not mean you are no longer responsible for your product.
How can a user process create files in the root directory?
Must be some mis-configuration?
So they mount a filmscanner in a truck and rip it while driving from A to B?
Interesting...
Their MSN Hotmail service sends many more spam and scam messages than that, and they do not bother to fix the problem.
There is only some outsourced abuse service that you can send violating messages which results in either of these actions:
- you get a message back that the complaint does not include a hotmail address (which it does)
- you get a message that your complaint does not include full headers and body
- you get a message that your message was too long
- you get a message back that the submitted message was not in english
- your message is refused by their mailserver because it was detected as being spam (duh!)
and only in a very minority of cases: the account is deleted about 4 days after the spamrun. useless, of course.
Any attempt to report improvement strategies is not understood by those abuse-desk employees, and they just send back a reply with "please send me the headers and body of the message you are referring to".
If only they would implement some spamscanning in their outbound mail, some ratelimiting (especially for new accounts), or whatever measure...
Also, remember that a fast response time does not mean you will see smooth moving images.
There will still be smearing because the LCD has a sample-and-hold characteristic and shows each image the full time between refreshes.
To solve this, a strobing backlight that flashes shortly during each frame is required.
Typical cheap harddisks in cheap PCs sustain 50 MB/s these days...
(the times, they are changing)
The detection in the camera would not detect the TV screen, but the displayed movie that includes watermarking features that define the picture as being copy-protected.
This is not at all impossible.
Of course the camera manufacturers would have to implement this, but remember that big camera manufacturers like Sony are also big media companies. One branch could easily ask the other to do something about piracy.
See other replies for more detailed explanations.
To avoid this, the industry has invented (and is moving to) HDMI as the interface between DVD player and TV.
It seems it is mandatory for HDTV capable players (and receivers).
You are wrong on this.
It is quite easy to include some "watermark" feature that will make the camcorder refuse to record the TV image, or make it tracable to the origin somehow.
Compare with fladbed scanners that refuse to scan money.
It is not a matter of "is it significantly better" but "is it perceivably better".
Typical "large" TV sets now are 32-42 inch diagonal. When you put a 1920x1080 image on that, and go sit at a typical viewing distance, there is no way you eye is going to see the details at that resolution.
I do have a 32" TV, with a 1366x768 LCD panel, and when I display a PC desktop on it it is impossible to read the normal fonts at "couch" distance.
This TV scales NTSC and PAL resolutions up to the panel res (with some enhancement algorithm), displays 720p at 1:1 mapping, and scales down 1920x1080.
I have tried watching HDTV movies on the PC input, and indeed there is improved quality.
But when comparing with anamorphic widescreen PAL or SD DVB, it is not an improvement that will make the general public want to spend a couple of thousands on. In fact with typical DVB channels the MPEG artifacts are more apparent than the lack of resolution, i.e. the picture could be improved by merely allocating more bandwith for the same system.
You may think that this 20% difference is small, but when comparing NTSC and PAL it is a very significant difference. Apparently it is in the region where every difference counts. This is not really true for 720p and especially 1080i.
I would even say that the disadvantage of having interlacing offsets the extra resolution of 1080i vs 720p.
The framerate is not much of an issue with LCD screens. And modern CRT TVs have framerate doublers here. The advantage is that we have no 3:2 pulldown.
The analog network is only used by state TV here. All commercial stations transmit in digital only, because it costs them much less to do so. So anyone with "only terrestrial analog" reception can receive only 3 state TV channels and sometimes a local station.
TV reception here can be done via:
- analog terrestrial (the legacy method)
- analog cable (by far the most widely used method. cable companies transcode about 35 digital channels to analog on cable so a legacy TV set can receive them)
- digital terrestrial
- digital cable
- digital satellite
All digital systems are subscription services, and indeed they are all DVB (-T, -C and -S).
Note that HDTV has a difficult time here, because our SD TV system already has a better resolution than the NTSC system, so the difference is less apparent.
Also, we now have two categories of TV stations here:
- the state TV, who have a sense for quality but no money.
- the commercial channels, who absolutely don't care about quality.
The state channels are currently the only ones transmitting 16:9 anamorphic, the others use letterbox only. Then HDTV would be a lot better.
However, the commercial channels have the objective of airing commercials, and filling material between those commercials that prevents the viewers from zapping away, The quality of the programming, and much less the picture, is absolutely unimportant to them.
Hence no HDTV for us in the near future.
Analog TV will be phased out in 2006 here in the Netherlands...
Politicians make such decisions here with only a couple of months leadtime.
Some statistics showed that only about 70.000 families are still watching the analog TV network, it costs some 15 million euro per year to keep it running, government needs 15 million euro for some other purpose, so the network will be switched off next year.
(it is still unclear if this will happen all at once on Jan 1st, and if there will be subsidies to buy digital receiving equipment)
Well, have a look at www.vmsk.org or one of his other sites...
Of course it is all a big joke, but he won't believe that himself.
Hal Walker would not agree with you!
His VMSK scheme allows the transmission of arbitrary high bitrates in arbitrary small bandwidths... or so he claims.