For those of us that do still use and prefer Internet Explorer (and know how to use it safely and keep it clean), a free application called No! Flash exists and can be had from http://www.bbshare.com/.
This little tray app, when enabled, seems to block the exploit completely, at least on Windows 2000 with IE6.
The same little application optionally also blocks Javascript as well as a few other things.
I discovered it while looking for something to block the annoying flash-based ads on Slashdot. Who knew it would actually keep me safer as well.
And the normal disclaimer, I'm not affiliated, just found the application and think it's quite useful.
"Call me a stickler but isn't a ROUTER considered a stand-alone piece of equipment that allows outside access?"
Well, depending on which of their markets you live in, and who you end up talking to on the support line, ROUTERS are NOT supported. They won't even talk to you with a router connected. They want 1 PC plugged directly to the cable modem. In my moms market they make it very difficult to use a router at all, even with MAC cloning and other such "tricks".
"... a Roomba is more about entertainment than cleaning a house."
Speaking as someone that owns a first generation Roomba, bought new, that's still in use to day and has never had anything replaced (even with too many pets in the house), in my mind, you're wrong.
It does a good job, especially compared to my wife who may not have had a broom in her hand for 15 yrs and I'm not even sure she knows what a vacuum looks like (yea, yea, hindsight and all). We just put in all new wood floors (replacing shag carpet it ran fine on) and the Roomba has served us so very well with them (and the carpet too) that we are about to purchase a "Scooba" from them. That one mops floors. I don't have rain gutters, but they also have a robot now for cleaning them. How many people do you know enjoy that job? Ditto for a pool cleaning robot which they make. Another company has an autonomous yard mowing robot. Were my yard suitable for one, I'd have that too. My yard is too big and uneven with too many holes where trees once stood, but for small urban type yards, again, that would be a wonderful tool for many people that don't like to mow the yard or those that have health problems that make it miserable for them to do.
Robots, for now in the US, are utilities. They aren't friends or companions, but rather something to make busy lives less so by reducing time spent doing mundane tasks. We as a country are working more and more hours which equates to less family time as well as less rest. I don't see anything wrong with trying to find some where and some way to pick up that slack.
I do to, and all I can say is you've been very lucky. I've had 6 or 8 GMail outages, some for 30 mins, some for a few hours. Not in the distant past either. The most recent outage for me and my accounts (or, probably the server my account was on) was about 3 months ago.
Go search Google Groups. You will see lots of people that get random messages from GMail saying it's down. There's some people in those groups where GMail has been down for days at a time.
For you, GMail won't work. Same PC, another user logs into a different GMail account and it does work. I've never seen it go down for everyone, but don't think for a minute it doesn't go down for people all the time.
I was the foreman on a murder trial a few years ago.
After the trial, speaking with the defense and prosecutors, they both said they nearly excluded me, but both took a chance. They outright told me that they are afraid of people in technical, specifically IT related technical fields, serving on juries. They didn't really elaborate much but it was the general rule, not one just for this case.
I did convey to them that I believed that was wrong thinking on thier parts.
I don't know about anywhere else in the country (or world for that matter) but as someone that has been "casually" looking locally for a Wii since it launched, I have yet to see *ANY* sitting on the shelf of any store I have been to in South East Texas. This includes Walmart, Target and the like, as well as Hastings (a book and music and movie chain, same people that started and own NetFlix I believe), as well as EB Games and Gamestop.
It's not open source, it's not free, it's not even exactly what I'd call cheap. But, it does seem to do a bang up job and it's harder to defeat than the average programs that do the same thing. Not only can it block URLs, chats etc, but it can monitor anything that's done on the PC (including webmail), email screen shots of activity, analyze what's happening on the PC in real time and if it's severe enough, notify you immediately. There's a ton of features in it. Also, though not impossible, it was not as trivial to detect and defeat as most. Heck, it's probably some form of rootkit in its own right.
Maybe goes too far for some, but it is decent software for what it does. If I remember right, licensing was kinda limiting and I didn't like the activation features, but I'd still call it best of breed. There is also several different versions with different capabilities.
Just a disclaimer... I don't work for them, am not affiliated with them and have never purchased their product, but I have worked for and with people whom have purchased. I helped them decide on a solution and we tried many such programs. This was hands down the best. It's also been a few years since then though, but I imagine it has only gotten better.
"Why do we keep acting like everyone should be able to pick out their own mate..."
Oblig Simpsons quote... Comic Book Guy: Inspired by the most logical race in the galaxy, the Vulcans, breeding
will be permitted once every seven years. For many of you this will
mean much less breeding, for me, much much more.
Point taken, but just for the record, EQ has become much more new player friendly in the last few years. There's an actual tutorial now instead of just throwing you to the wild. There are tons of examples of things they've done to help new players. There's maps in game now. Also, the "Attack" command no longer defaults to the "A" key. Boy it sucked being new back in the day and forgetting to hit enter before you started typing a chat message and you end up attacking that NPC.
I never considered death in EQ all that punishing... It could be much, much worse. You don't lose your items, they remain on your body. You aren't sent to some purgatory where you have to fight your way or wait your way out. Other players can resurrect you, other players can drag your corpse to an area for you to retrieve. New players under a certain level even retain all their items when they die.
I can also say that SoE (as much as I hate them and Sony in general) does constantly try to keep the game balanced. The only problem is you can never make everyone happy. People complain because something is out of balance, they fix it, then someone else complains that they aren't as powerful as they once were. Patches generally happen at least once a month, sometimes a lot more frequently than that.
Since EQ is another one of those games you can never win, theres plenty of ways to play it as well. Lately, I haven't wanted to fight anything. Any time I have spent has been trade skilling, or fishing. Nothing in EQ says you have to grind, guild up or even group. Main main character is a warrior class that has done nothing but solo his entire life because I'm not a group or guild kind of person.
Not that anyone else cares why, but one reason I can't get into WoW is because of the silly cartoonish graphics.
This is not an ad for EQ, but I thought your generalizations about it above were a little out dated. I haven't been a hard core EQ player in years now.
It's my understanding that the size you are referring to is the size for the full redistributable for say an administrator of a large network. Download it once and install to all the Vista PCs, no matter there version, language, etc. For instance, it includes every language that Vista has in it.
As an end-user or windows update download, it should be much, much smaller than that.
So how many judges rule on the spirit of the law and not the words of the law? I'm betting not many, and if they do, their ruling likely won't stand anyway. While I would whole heartedly agree that in many cases, the spirit of the law could potentially be a better way to do it and lead to a more sane ruling, that's not the way it was designed to work in this country. Sit on a jury sometime and listen to the judges instructions. You don't go by the spirit of things, you go by what's written in front of you there in black and white.
What's Tivo given back? How about some credibility to Linux in the eyes of the common man? See... it can be used for something other than a headless server in a dark back closet somewhere. Isn't anything that gets the Linux name out in the public view, especially in a main stream product a good thing? How many people had never heard of Linux before they got their Tivo? I certainly know several.
It always seems like the hardcore Linux fans want it both ways. It has to start somewhere you know and Tivo would likely have been a good place to start.
"...it's not using public property like the phone company"
So those cable lines hanging all on the telephone and power poles, and all those buried along side the roads and highways, those running in sewers and running under roads and sidewalks aren't using public property? So you don't consider right of ways and telephone/power poles, etc. public property? Then what public property are those other utilities that you mentioned using?
There is another work around. If you add on another extension after.ZIP GMail tends to leave it alone even though it does recognize it is a ZIP file and even if it contains an.exe. My thought has always been that while it knows it is a zip (it tells you so) it also knows most people won't just be able to click on it and have it open.
So for me a file I've named testme.zip becomes testme.zip.doh and GMail never complains.
Heck, the ZIP program I use even recognizes it as a ZIP with the.doh extension and opens it with a single click anyway.
I have always been annoyed with the fact that they block ALL.exe files and even.ZIP files with exe's in them. As a programmer delivering exe's it makes it little tougher.
It must depend on what area of service of theirs you are in. I just helped my mom (in central FL) set up her very first computer and very first internet and it absolutely registers your NICs MAC with the modem.
She had to run a CD and it did the marrying. There was no getting out on the net until then. And that CD will NOT work unless your PC is directly connected to the modem itself. Add a router in the mix and it fails. In fact, they say routers are explicitly against there TOS and support won't even talk to you unless it's completely out of the loop.
So to get it working at all we had to use the PC directly connected to the modem and they became married. Then we had to insert the router and clone the PCs MAC address into the router.
That lasted for about a week then it quit working all together. After some testing, I realized that not only does it register the MAC address, it also expects you to have their host and DNS info you got assigned when running the CD so that had to be setup on the router as it had been assigned to the PC as well.
I was literally cursing way before it was all done. I've never seen something so customer unfriendly.
Slashdot Mirror
For those of us that do still use and prefer Internet Explorer (and know how to use it safely and keep it clean), a free application called No! Flash exists and can be had from http://www.bbshare.com/.
This little tray app, when enabled, seems to block the exploit completely, at least on Windows 2000 with IE6.
The same little application optionally also blocks Javascript as well as a few other things.
I discovered it while looking for something to block the annoying flash-based ads on Slashdot. Who knew it would actually keep me safer as well.
And the normal disclaimer, I'm not affiliated, just found the application and think it's quite useful.
"Call me a stickler but isn't a ROUTER considered a stand-alone piece of equipment that allows outside access?"
Well, depending on which of their markets you live in, and who you end up talking to on the support line, ROUTERS are NOT supported. They won't even talk to you with a router connected. They want 1 PC plugged directly to the cable modem. In my moms market they make it very difficult to use a router at all, even with MAC cloning and other such "tricks".
They really do suck.
I've found that Denyhosts is a nice tool to take care of securing SSH and blocking hosts of incorrect SSH attempts.
As it happens, I have a working Odyssey 2 tucked away in the closet.
"... a Roomba is more about entertainment than cleaning a house."
Speaking as someone that owns a first generation Roomba, bought new, that's still in use to day and has never had anything replaced (even with too many pets in the house), in my mind, you're wrong.
It does a good job, especially compared to my wife who may not have had a broom in her hand for 15 yrs and I'm not even sure she knows what a vacuum looks like (yea, yea, hindsight and all). We just put in all new wood floors (replacing shag carpet it ran fine on) and the Roomba has served us so very well with them (and the carpet too) that we are about to purchase a "Scooba" from them. That one mops floors. I don't have rain gutters, but they also have a robot now for cleaning them. How many people do you know enjoy that job? Ditto for a pool cleaning robot which they make. Another company has an autonomous yard mowing robot. Were my yard suitable for one, I'd have that too. My yard is too big and uneven with too many holes where trees once stood, but for small urban type yards, again, that would be a wonderful tool for many people that don't like to mow the yard or those that have health problems that make it miserable for them to do.
Robots, for now in the US, are utilities. They aren't friends or companions, but rather something to make busy lives less so by reducing time spent doing mundane tasks. We as a country are working more and more hours which equates to less family time as well as less rest. I don't see anything wrong with trying to find some where and some way to pick up that slack.
"I use gmail for all my email."
I do to, and all I can say is you've been very lucky. I've had 6 or 8 GMail outages, some for 30 mins, some for a few hours. Not in the distant past either. The most recent outage for me and my accounts (or, probably the server my account was on) was about 3 months ago.
Go search Google Groups. You will see lots of people that get random messages from GMail saying it's down. There's some people in those groups where GMail has been down for days at a time.
For you, GMail won't work. Same PC, another user logs into a different GMail account and it does work. I've never seen it go down for everyone, but don't think for a minute it doesn't go down for people all the time.
You obviously don't use GMail.
I was the foreman on a murder trial a few years ago.
After the trial, speaking with the defense and prosecutors, they both said they nearly excluded me, but both took a chance. They outright told me that they are afraid of people in technical, specifically IT related technical fields, serving on juries. They didn't really elaborate much but it was the general rule, not one just for this case.
I did convey to them that I believed that was wrong thinking on thier parts.
Working in a large organization that uses some IBM mainframes, that certainly agrees with what I have seen.
Way to burst everyone's bubble by reading the article.
I don't know about anywhere else in the country (or world for that matter) but as someone that has been "casually" looking locally for a Wii since it launched, I have yet to see *ANY* sitting on the shelf of any store I have been to in South East Texas. This includes Walmart, Target and the like, as well as Hastings (a book and music and movie chain, same people that started and own NetFlix I believe), as well as EB Games and Gamestop.
One day I'll actually find and buy one.
http://www.spectorsoft.com/
It's not open source, it's not free, it's not even exactly what I'd call cheap. But, it does seem to do a bang up job and it's harder to defeat than the average programs that do the same thing. Not only can it block URLs, chats etc, but it can monitor anything that's done on the PC (including webmail), email screen shots of activity, analyze what's happening on the PC in real time and if it's severe enough, notify you immediately. There's a ton of features in it. Also, though not impossible, it was not as trivial to detect and defeat as most. Heck, it's probably some form of rootkit in its own right.
Maybe goes too far for some, but it is decent software for what it does. If I remember right, licensing was kinda limiting and I didn't like the activation features, but I'd still call it best of breed. There is also several different versions with different capabilities.
Just a disclaimer... I don't work for them, am not affiliated with them and have never purchased their product, but I have worked for and with people whom have purchased. I helped them decide on a solution and we tried many such programs. This was hands down the best. It's also been a few years since then though, but I imagine it has only gotten better.
"Why do we keep acting like everyone should be able to pick out their own mate..."
Oblig Simpsons quote...
Comic Book Guy: Inspired by the most logical race in the galaxy, the Vulcans, breeding
will be permitted once every seven years. For many of you this will
mean much less breeding, for me, much much more.
Point taken, but just for the record, EQ has become much more new player friendly in the last few years. There's an actual tutorial now instead of just throwing you to the wild. There are tons of examples of things they've done to help new players. There's maps in game now. Also, the "Attack" command no longer defaults to the "A" key. Boy it sucked being new back in the day and forgetting to hit enter before you started typing a chat message and you end up attacking that NPC.
I never considered death in EQ all that punishing... It could be much, much worse. You don't lose your items, they remain on your body. You aren't sent to some purgatory where you have to fight your way or wait your way out. Other players can resurrect you, other players can drag your corpse to an area for you to retrieve. New players under a certain level even retain all their items when they die.
I can also say that SoE (as much as I hate them and Sony in general) does constantly try to keep the game balanced. The only problem is you can never make everyone happy. People complain because something is out of balance, they fix it, then someone else complains that they aren't as powerful as they once were. Patches generally happen at least once a month, sometimes a lot more frequently than that.
Since EQ is another one of those games you can never win, theres plenty of ways to play it as well. Lately, I haven't wanted to fight anything. Any time I have spent has been trade skilling, or fishing. Nothing in EQ says you have to grind, guild up or even group. Main main character is a warrior class that has done nothing but solo his entire life because I'm not a group or guild kind of person.
Not that anyone else cares why, but one reason I can't get into WoW is because of the silly cartoonish graphics.
This is not an ad for EQ, but I thought your generalizations about it above were a little out dated. I haven't been a hard core EQ player in years now.
Buying them legally from a store might also be another idea, novel as it may be.
It's my understanding that the size you are referring to is the size for the full redistributable for say an administrator of a large network. Download it once and install to all the Vista PCs, no matter there version, language, etc. For instance, it includes every language that Vista has in it.
As an end-user or windows update download, it should be much, much smaller than that.
"...lay on a regular basis. It's one of the benefits of being married."
As someone that is, you sir, cannot truly be married...
So how many judges rule on the spirit of the law and not the words of the law? I'm betting not many, and if they do, their ruling likely won't stand anyway. While I would whole heartedly agree that in many cases, the spirit of the law could potentially be a better way to do it and lead to a more sane ruling, that's not the way it was designed to work in this country. Sit on a jury sometime and listen to the judges instructions. You don't go by the spirit of things, you go by what's written in front of you there in black and white.
What's Tivo given back? How about some credibility to Linux in the eyes of the common man? See... it can be used for something other than a headless server in a dark back closet somewhere. Isn't anything that gets the Linux name out in the public view, especially in a main stream product a good thing? How many people had never heard of Linux before they got their Tivo? I certainly know several.
It always seems like the hardcore Linux fans want it both ways. It has to start somewhere you know and Tivo would likely have been a good place to start.
"...it's not using public property like the phone company"
So those cable lines hanging all on the telephone and power poles, and all those buried along side the roads and highways, those running in sewers and running under roads and sidewalks aren't using public property? So you don't consider right of ways and telephone/power poles, etc. public property? Then what public property are those other utilities that you mentioned using?
Interesting... same thing I happen to say to those sites that block IE just because they don't like it.
There is another work around. If you add on another extension after .ZIP GMail tends to leave it alone even though it does recognize it is a ZIP file and even if it contains an .exe. My thought has always been that while it knows it is a zip (it tells you so) it also knows most people won't just be able to click on it and have it open.
.doh extension and opens it with a single click anyway.
.exe files and even .ZIP files with exe's in them. As a programmer delivering exe's it makes it little tougher.
So for me a file I've named testme.zip becomes testme.zip.doh and GMail never complains.
Heck, the ZIP program I use even recognizes it as a ZIP with the
I have always been annoyed with the fact that they block ALL
"Half the point of smoking weed is to show Uncle Sam the finger. Gets a bit pointless if it is legal!"
Then you aren't doing it right!
Just in case you really don't know, Earthlink is a cheap dial-up ISP so I'm sure it's software to get you online with them, similar to AOL crapware.
It must depend on what area of service of theirs you are in. I just helped my mom (in central FL) set up her very first computer and very first internet and it absolutely registers your NICs MAC with the modem.
She had to run a CD and it did the marrying. There was no getting out on the net until then. And that CD will NOT work unless your PC is directly connected to the modem itself. Add a router in the mix and it fails. In fact, they say routers are explicitly against there TOS and support won't even talk to you unless it's completely out of the loop.
So to get it working at all we had to use the PC directly connected to the modem and they became married. Then we had to insert the router and clone the PCs MAC address into the router.
That lasted for about a week then it quit working all together. After some testing, I realized that not only does it register the MAC address, it also expects you to have their host and DNS info you got assigned when running the CD so that had to be setup on the router as it had been assigned to the PC as well.
I was literally cursing way before it was all done. I've never seen something so customer unfriendly.
Add to that the fact that social engineering is platform independent.