It's right there in the summary. 300 or 500 GB external Maxtor hard drives. One would presume that they are USB2, as are most external hard drives.
Most external hard drives are preformatted to FAT32, so the user simply can plug it in and use it on almost any OS. Even thumbdrives come preformatted, so presumably the nasty files are simply already on the filesystem, rather than buried in the firmware or anything unstoppable like that. If removed, they probably will stay gone for good.
The summary mentions autorun.inf and ghost.pif. Recent versions of Windows will look for autorun.inf in the root directory of any inserted disk (CD, DVD, USB drive, maybe even floppies?) and will run a script out of it. Holding down the shift key while inserting/connecting the disk makes Windows not do that; it can also be disabled somewhere deep in the control panel. Most of the time these scripts are one or two lines long and just execute a program elsewhere, typically an installer.
.pif is an ancient extension from back in the win95 days, and due to strange backwards compatibility weirdness, Windows will execute any file with a.pif extension and the executable magic number. (Try it out - copy calc.exe to calc.pif and see) This makes it a very popular extension for malicious binary executables, because the windows shell will not look past the extension, and in no way indicate that the file is an executable program, it will call it a "Program Information File" which seems quite safe to the layman. So odds are ghost.pif is a standard off-the-shelf win32 trojan similar to the ones in the wild everywhere.
I doubt wine would know what to do with autorun.inf. If you attempted to execute ghost.pif under wine, it might actually run and work, although it would only have wine's permissions. Parallels probably would properly parse autorun.inf, and would attempt to run ghost.pif, but it would all be happening inside the virtual machine, and ghost.pif was almost certainly not written with breaking out of these environments in mind, so only the virtual machine would be compromised.
So the people at risk are the people running any version of windows that includes autorun support (I think that's 98 and up) and have it enabled (the default), and do not hold down the shift key while plugging in the drive. I figured that out from the summary. Now I'm going to RTFA and see if I was right.
This is SOP for virtually all retail stores, and if you're trying to get a job that involves "customer service" even tangentially you will be subjected to one of these personality tests
The correct answer, obviously, was "kiss your car". After a while with no employment prospects, you get good at bullshitting your way through those tests; I know I did, and that's why I'm employed for the princely sum of $7.91/hr.
Anyway, I say the whole broadcast TV thing needs to just die anyway. Seriously, how many people do you know personally who don't have satellite or cable? I know of one person, but that's it.
Screw that. I/actually use/ a rabbit-ear antenna. As do many people in my neighborhood.
I live in an urban area. All of the VHF stations come in crystal clear on my 30 year old television set, and most of the UHF stations do, too. The Fox affiliate comes in a little bit fuzzy, but that's because they broadcast from a suburb 30 very hilly miles south of here; if I had a proper roof antenna there would be no problem.
The local cable monopoly has nothing to offer me other than 50 channels I have no interest in, and 5 or so channels I have no interest in paying $49.99/mo for. Their value is going to get much worse when I finally buy an HDTV - all the local channels are already broadcasting HD signals, which I can already pick up on my $14.99 bunny ears - to get HD on cable I have to get the $61.39/mo package. A la carte programming would make this situation somewhat better, but that will only happen over their cold dead bodies (which sounds like a reasonable solution to me).
Basically, screw that idea. Broadcast TV must stay around. If I don't get my Letterman, I get very very angry.
Aside: What is up with cable/sat providers anyway? I pay, but still have to watch commercials? Is there something I just don't understand here?
WoW has realms specifically tagged as either role play or "normal". The normal realms vastly outnumber the RP realms, but people actually do fully role-play on the RP servers. And the role-play focused guilds on the RP servers really get into it. Blizzard strongly encourages it too.
I guess if you can do spin for the RIAA, you can so spin for ANYONE. The Dems may have made a very good decision. Her first job is to spin her own hiring!
But any update will only be a temporary fix. ANY software player will have to put their key in memory at some point while it's running, the new key will be found quickly. And the keys for almost all software players will be found.
Assuming they keep their word, and revoke the keys as they're found, software players will become nearly unusable, with patches every few weeks to update the key, attempt to obfuscate it more, and make it usable with new disks again. If they go that route, it's only a matter of time until software HD-DVD/BR players are permanently blacklisted and cease to exist. Consumers won't like that much. We'll see special cables running from new drives to new video cards, because consumers will not put up with a lack of being able to play HD discs on their computers. And the ones that bought software players will be ROYALLY pissed.
If they let it slide, or just sue the people who found the key in the memory dumps, but do not revoke software player keys there's STILL no way to put the cat back in the bag - HDDVD/BR content protection is finished.
Should people really have to choose where to live based on the ISPs available in the area?
When people are choosing where to live, generally they look at a number of things. What's the local government like. If they have children, what's the local school system like. What utility companies serve the area. Is natural gas heat available or are they stuck with electric or oil heat. Is the cellular service any good.
Of course people should take what ISPs serve the area into account when they choose where to live. I chose an apartment with DSL available, and because of that, I can choose my DSL provider from many. I made damn sure of that before I signed the lease.
Because I did my homework when I moved, I get my service from an ISP that won't hand over my information without court intervention, one whose TOS explicitly allowed sharing a connection and running any servers I wanted. It's more expensive than what the local phone company offers, but that's the free market for you.
If you had read the packaging, you would have noticed that nearly ever CF lightbulb comes with a warranty, and that rather than throwing them away, you could bring them in for free replacements. I have never seen one in the store without at least a 3 year warranty, sometimes 5.
Here's a thought. Mail servers should, on receiving an SMTP connection from an IP address, probe that IP address to see if it's a Microsoft consumer-grade operating system. If so, reject the connection. That would put a dent in the zombie problem.
It's a good idea - SMTP connections coming from a windows box that's not running NT/2k/2003 can't possibly be legit. But if the machine in question is behind any sort of firewall or NAT device, that probe becomes horribly difficult. Of course, I would be willing to bet that a sizable chunk of the zombie machines are not behind any sort of protection, so you'd still be able to take a pretty big bite out of the problem.
Another idea is to blacklist IP blocks belonging to residental ISPs you see spam coming from, and then whitelist that ISPs particular legit mail servers. Very labor intensive, though, and then if your legitimate users are traveling and using that ISPs connection, they won't be able to send mail through your servers (unless you force them to use a webmail interface or something).
Actually, very few PS2 games use dual layer DVDs; many opt to use two single-layer DVDs instead. For instance, although Xenosaga I was on a dual-layer DVD, but Xenosaga 3 was on two single layer DVDs. Check the wikipedia list of PS2 DVD9 games - it's quite short.
Cheap, yes, but if you had RTFA, you would know that he already had an unlimited data usage plan - this was a per-KB surchage for using it across the border in Canada, something that SHOULD be outrageously cheap.
Actually, there IS land ownership on the moon. For a small admistrative fee, you can claim moon property from the Lunar Embassy, a very small international organization who put in a land claim for the whole of the moon decades ago, and have been managing the official deed records for moon property ever since. Individuals can purchase land from various lunar real-estate resellers in their own countries - usually for less than $20 an acre.
It still remains to be seen if deeds to land on the moon will be honored by individual world governments, though. There's never been any legal challenge to one.
If you honestly believe that an cost of minimum wage labor has any impact on staffing levels, you have obviously never worked in or near any industry that uses minimum wage labor heavily. The cost of a minimum wage paycheck, no matter if it's $6 or $9 an hour, is a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of their business expenses.
The thing which regulates demand for this kind of labor is not how much money a business has to pay for it. Min-wage labor is damned cheap at any currently proposed price, and they will hire as many people as they need to serve all their customers. It is consumers that control the demand for this type of labor, not the companies that hire the laborers.
With unskilled labor as absurdly cheap as it currently is, if a company can't afford to hire enough minimum-wage laborers, the problem isn't with the price of labor, it's with their business model.
"Nobody wanted to work for $6 an hour and those that did were lazy, late and called in sick a lot."
You've almost got it right.
No one wants to work for $6 an hour. Those willing to settle for it only put in $6 an hour worth of effort. Cultural differences aside, if you put most people in that job, they will not break their back for a wage like that. They will do as little work as they can get away with, because you're paying them as little as you can get away with. And because of the wage, the business will be perpetually understaffed, giving the employees who are willing to stay a ton of job security, and the ability to slack all they can.
I'm glad you found yourself a group of people willing to exert themselves for a shitty wage at an even shittier job. I hope that works out for you. For the rest of us living the minimum-wage life, the only thing we'll exert ourselves at is getting a better/higher paying job - offer us something worth working for and we're all over it.
I deliver pizza. I make minimum wage, get no benefits (unless you count a discount on my cell-phone), and they don't even fully reimburse me for my gas, let alone car upkeep. Guess what: I don't strain myself at work. Should they decide to let me go before I find something better, there are hundreds of retail/foodservice establishments in the city desperate for people. I will have a new job within 12 hours. When I'm done slowly chugging my way through college, I will leave these employers and show them the same amount of respect they have shown me: none.
My city does not have a significant non-educated immigrant population, but there IS a common thread between the establishments with better food or service; they are the ones that pay more. When it comes to employees, you get what you pay for, plain and simple.
This is easy. They'll just put all the super-secret stuff in their own proprietary, binary only module, and modify the linux kernel so that it will only load 1 module. Then they won't have to reveal anything useful except that they're loading a kernel module. That's totally in line with GPLv2, so long as they release everything they've done to the kernel to get it to load 1 module on the Wii.
Besides, the games won't be running under linux; as another poster pointed out, the dev kits have been out for a long time now and it uses the same RTOS as the Gamecube. Only the built-in stuff will run under linux. Even if someone did figure it out, they wouldn't be able to pirate games, they'd only be able to run unrestricted linux on the Wii. Because Nintendo is already going to turn a profit on the hardware itself from day one, this hurts no one at all. Hell, it would be in their best interests to ENCOURAGE people to make their own linux programs for the Wii.
This probably means that the Wii is running on Linux the same way the Dreamcast ran on WinCE.
There's most likely a linux-based dashboard sort of thing, so all of the non-game functionality in the machine is done under linux. It was probably easier to adapt the PowerPC port of linux to run that stuff than to right their own general-purpose OS from scratch for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Made in Thailand.
Sold in Taiwan.
You are the one who is confused.
It's right there in the summary. 300 or 500 GB external Maxtor hard drives. One would presume that they are USB2, as are most external hard drives.
Most external hard drives are preformatted to FAT32, so the user simply can plug it in and use it on almost any OS. Even thumbdrives come preformatted, so presumably the nasty files are simply already on the filesystem, rather than buried in the firmware or anything unstoppable like that. If removed, they probably will stay gone for good.
The summary mentions autorun.inf and ghost.pif. Recent versions of Windows will look for autorun.inf in the root directory of any inserted disk (CD, DVD, USB drive, maybe even floppies?) and will run a script out of it. Holding down the shift key while inserting/connecting the disk makes Windows not do that; it can also be disabled somewhere deep in the control panel. Most of the time these scripts are one or two lines long and just execute a program elsewhere, typically an installer.
I doubt wine would know what to do with autorun.inf. If you attempted to execute ghost.pif under wine, it might actually run and work, although it would only have wine's permissions. Parallels probably would properly parse autorun.inf, and would attempt to run ghost.pif, but it would all be happening inside the virtual machine, and ghost.pif was almost certainly not written with breaking out of these environments in mind, so only the virtual machine would be compromised .
So the people at risk are the people running any version of windows that includes autorun support (I think that's 98 and up) and have it enabled (the default), and do not hold down the shift key while plugging in the drive. I figured that out from the summary. Now I'm going to RTFA and see if I was right.
This is SOP for virtually all retail stores, and if you're trying to get a job that involves "customer service" even tangentially you will be subjected to one of these personality tests
The correct answer, obviously, was "kiss your car". After a while with no employment prospects, you get good at bullshitting your way through those tests; I know I did, and that's why I'm employed for the princely sum of $7.91/hr.
Posts like this are the reason we need a "-1, Wrong" moderation option. Troll or Overrated just doesn't cut it.
wouldn't a high prime number be more valuable than a low one?
And does 000 count as prime? Because that would be the best 3 digit uid.
To be able to put a practical high performance RAID enclosure on USB? AWESOME.
Screw that. I /actually use/ a rabbit-ear antenna. As do many people in my neighborhood.
I live in an urban area. All of the VHF stations come in crystal clear on my 30 year old television set, and most of the UHF stations do, too. The Fox affiliate comes in a little bit fuzzy, but that's because they broadcast from a suburb 30 very hilly miles south of here; if I had a proper roof antenna there would be no problem.
The local cable monopoly has nothing to offer me other than 50 channels I have no interest in, and 5 or so channels I have no interest in paying $49.99/mo for. Their value is going to get much worse when I finally buy an HDTV - all the local channels are already broadcasting HD signals, which I can already pick up on my $14.99 bunny ears - to get HD on cable I have to get the $61.39/mo package. A la carte programming would make this situation somewhat better, but that will only happen over their cold dead bodies (which sounds like a reasonable solution to me).
Basically, screw that idea. Broadcast TV must stay around. If I don't get my Letterman, I get very very angry.
Aside: What is up with cable/sat providers anyway? I pay, but still have to watch commercials? Is there something I just don't understand here?
I, for one, welcome our new anonymous overlords!
Apparently, the ability to phish myspace passwords from clueless users earns you the title of "Hackers on Steroids" now. OMGWTFHAX!
WoW has realms specifically tagged as either role play or "normal". The normal realms vastly outnumber the RP realms, but people actually do fully role-play on the RP servers. And the role-play focused guilds on the RP servers really get into it. Blizzard strongly encourages it too.
I guess if you can do spin for the RIAA, you can so spin for ANYONE. The Dems may have made a very good decision. Her first job is to spin her own hiring!
But any update will only be a temporary fix. ANY software player will have to put their key in memory at some point while it's running, the new key will be found quickly. And the keys for almost all software players will be found.
Assuming they keep their word, and revoke the keys as they're found, software players will become nearly unusable, with patches every few weeks to update the key, attempt to obfuscate it more, and make it usable with new disks again. If they go that route, it's only a matter of time until software HD-DVD/BR players are permanently blacklisted and cease to exist. Consumers won't like that much. We'll see special cables running from new drives to new video cards, because consumers will not put up with a lack of being able to play HD discs on their computers. And the ones that bought software players will be ROYALLY pissed.
If they let it slide, or just sue the people who found the key in the memory dumps, but do not revoke software player keys there's STILL no way to put the cat back in the bag - HDDVD/BR content protection is finished.
Which way will it go?
This was only a matter of time.
You can't sell a product with a "secret" key inside it to tech-savvy consumers and expect it to remain secret for any extended period of time.
It just won't work. It's time for this incovenience to end (not that it will).
You still have a land-line telephone?
Like, copper wires that run from the house to the back of a telephone?
I think you're at the wrong website. Land-lines are for internet, not for phones. Unless it's VoIP.
When people are choosing where to live, generally they look at a number of things. What's the local government like. If they have children, what's the local school system like. What utility companies serve the area. Is natural gas heat available or are they stuck with electric or oil heat. Is the cellular service any good.
Of course people should take what ISPs serve the area into account when they choose where to live. I chose an apartment with DSL available, and because of that, I can choose my DSL provider from many. I made damn sure of that before I signed the lease.
Because I did my homework when I moved, I get my service from an ISP that won't hand over my information without court intervention, one whose TOS explicitly allowed sharing a connection and running any servers I wanted. It's more expensive than what the local phone company offers, but that's the free market for you.
If you had read the packaging, you would have noticed that nearly ever CF lightbulb comes with a warranty, and that rather than throwing them away, you could bring them in for free replacements. I have never seen one in the store without at least a 3 year warranty, sometimes 5.
It's a good idea - SMTP connections coming from a windows box that's not running NT/2k/2003 can't possibly be legit. But if the machine in question is behind any sort of firewall or NAT device, that probe becomes horribly difficult. Of course, I would be willing to bet that a sizable chunk of the zombie machines are not behind any sort of protection, so you'd still be able to take a pretty big bite out of the problem.
Another idea is to blacklist IP blocks belonging to residental ISPs you see spam coming from, and then whitelist that ISPs particular legit mail servers. Very labor intensive, though, and then if your legitimate users are traveling and using that ISPs connection, they won't be able to send mail through your servers (unless you force them to use a webmail interface or something).
Actually, very few PS2 games use dual layer DVDs; many opt to use two single-layer DVDs instead. For instance, although Xenosaga I was on a dual-layer DVD, but Xenosaga 3 was on two single layer DVDs. Check the wikipedia list of PS2 DVD9 games - it's quite short.
Cheap, yes, but if you had RTFA, you would know that he already had an unlimited data usage plan - this was a per-KB surchage for using it across the border in Canada, something that SHOULD be outrageously cheap.
Actually, there IS land ownership on the moon. For a small admistrative fee, you can claim moon property from the Lunar Embassy, a very small international organization who put in a land claim for the whole of the moon decades ago, and have been managing the official deed records for moon property ever since. Individuals can purchase land from various lunar real-estate resellers in their own countries - usually for less than $20 an acre.
It still remains to be seen if deeds to land on the moon will be honored by individual world governments, though. There's never been any legal challenge to one.
In Canada, milk comes in bags.
If you honestly believe that an cost of minimum wage labor has any impact on staffing levels, you have obviously never worked in or near any industry that uses minimum wage labor heavily. The cost of a minimum wage paycheck, no matter if it's $6 or $9 an hour, is a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of their business expenses.
The thing which regulates demand for this kind of labor is not how much money a business has to pay for it. Min-wage labor is damned cheap at any currently proposed price, and they will hire as many people as they need to serve all their customers. It is consumers that control the demand for this type of labor, not the companies that hire the laborers.
With unskilled labor as absurdly cheap as it currently is, if a company can't afford to hire enough minimum-wage laborers, the problem isn't with the price of labor, it's with their business model.
"Nobody wanted to work for $6 an hour and those that did were lazy, late and called in sick a lot."
You've almost got it right.
No one wants to work for $6 an hour. Those willing to settle for it only put in $6 an hour worth of effort. Cultural differences aside, if you put most people in that job, they will not break their back for a wage like that. They will do as little work as they can get away with, because you're paying them as little as you can get away with. And because of the wage, the business will be perpetually understaffed, giving the employees who are willing to stay a ton of job security, and the ability to slack all they can.
I'm glad you found yourself a group of people willing to exert themselves for a shitty wage at an even shittier job. I hope that works out for you. For the rest of us living the minimum-wage life, the only thing we'll exert ourselves at is getting a better/higher paying job - offer us something worth working for and we're all over it.
I deliver pizza. I make minimum wage, get no benefits (unless you count a discount on my cell-phone), and they don't even fully reimburse me for my gas, let alone car upkeep. Guess what: I don't strain myself at work. Should they decide to let me go before I find something better, there are hundreds of retail/foodservice establishments in the city desperate for people. I will have a new job within 12 hours. When I'm done slowly chugging my way through college, I will leave these employers and show them the same amount of respect they have shown me: none.
My city does not have a significant non-educated immigrant population, but there IS a common thread between the establishments with better food or service; they are the ones that pay more. When it comes to employees, you get what you pay for, plain and simple.
This is easy. They'll just put all the super-secret stuff in their own proprietary, binary only module, and modify the linux kernel so that it will only load 1 module. Then they won't have to reveal anything useful except that they're loading a kernel module. That's totally in line with GPLv2, so long as they release everything they've done to the kernel to get it to load 1 module on the Wii.
Besides, the games won't be running under linux; as another poster pointed out, the dev kits have been out for a long time now and it uses the same RTOS as the Gamecube. Only the built-in stuff will run under linux. Even if someone did figure it out, they wouldn't be able to pirate games, they'd only be able to run unrestricted linux on the Wii. Because Nintendo is already going to turn a profit on the hardware itself from day one, this hurts no one at all. Hell, it would be in their best interests to ENCOURAGE people to make their own linux programs for the Wii.
This probably means that the Wii is running on Linux the same way the Dreamcast ran on WinCE.
There's most likely a linux-based dashboard sort of thing, so all of the non-game functionality in the machine is done under linux. It was probably easier to adapt the PowerPC port of linux to run that stuff than to right their own general-purpose OS from scratch for it.