So, just to be clear, this story, posted on March 2nd, is reporting on a worm which has started exploiting a zero day vulnerability that was covered by slashdot on February 12th?
Isn't twenty days long enough to disable a remotely exploitable and totally unnecessery, unsafe service that no admin in his right mind should have enabled on a box connected to the net anyway?
> All Microsoft has to do is block the IP address that is requesting thousands of activations on
> separate, invalid keys per second.
RTFA. That's nothing like how this works.
The actual activation part is totally manual, only the key generation is automated. You can generate keys without any kind of network connectivity.
>..is the perfect way to fund public goods, like information.
It's not really a "compulsory" tax. You're obliged to pay the license fee if you own a television tuner set to recieve broadcast television stations.
This is, as you might imagine, ludicrously difficult to enforce. I'm a student, I use a tv tuner card, and I sure as hell don't pay £130 or whatever it is per year. How exactly am I going to be forced to pay the license fee? I get threatening letters often (which is the primary tactic the license fee collection agency use to get people to pay up) but if a license inspector ever comes to my property and asks to come in to verify I don't own an operational tv tuner, I'll politely tell him to fsck off.
From there, the only way he can get access to my property is to get a warrant from a judge, based on zero evidence that I'm doing anything wrong. Good luck there.
The license fee collection agencry is an RIAA type agency that uses scare tactics and ignorance to collect its money. The only people who get fined tend to be relatively poor people who don't pay for a license but also don't realise that they have the legal right to refuse entry to a license inspector. An inspector calls round, demands to be let in, the person lets them in, shows them the tv, and they get a fine to the order of several thousand pounds.
The whole system is ludicrous, outdated and monstrously inefficient. We would be much better served if an independent body determined an appropriate level of funding for the BBC year-on-year, and the money came from general taxation.
> HID has sent a letter to IOActive, a security consulting firm, accusing Chris Paget, IOActive's
> director of research and development, of possible patent infringement over a planned presentation,
> "RFID for beginners," on Wednesday, a move that could lead to legal action should the talk go
> forward, according to Jeff Moss, founder and director of Black Hat.
I, for one, take comfort in the fact that HID Corp can sue anyone that breaks into my workplace after cloning my security card.
OpenDNS makes money by offering clearly labeled advertisements alongside organic search results when the domain entered is not valid and not a typo we can fix. OpenDNS will provide additional services on top of its enhanced DNS service, and some of them may cost money. Speedy, reliable DNS will always be free.
I dropped my Treo in a parking lot after taking some hefty back-pain meds... When returned the next day, the LCD was cracked but the left side worked.
I have to cut-and-paste text messages then add carriage feed returns so I can read the text...
$100 for new screen
$200 for new (replacement) treo
$300 for new treo version
Too cheap and lazy to upgrade or fix it now...
When I broke the screen on my sony ericsson T610 about a year ago, I was given a quote of about $200 for a new branded screen - I went to my local asian-run backstreet electronics store and got a new generic screen installed for $30 including labour (although labour is nothing, I could have installed it myself). Anyways, it was hugely cheaper than a branded part, and brighter than the original to boot! It's been working flawlessly since then.
I agree, I was expecting better - in my opinion there are a host of features that people have been talking about for years that haven't appeared in any search engine I've used.
Things like:
* searching by md5 hash to find where a random file on your hard drive came from
* allowing the specifying of precise image size or dimensions to find a specific image - e.g., google indexes an image, you see the thumbnail, want to find it, but the original site is down - why can't google show me other images that match the original size and dimensions of that cached image, to help me find a mirror?
* A search engine that rec0gn!s3s 4|_|_ 5p3c!4L cH4rAters
* filtering search results by IP range
* incorporating WHOIS details in search results (e.g foo +bar -foobar inurl:baz author:"J. Random Hacker")
and so on, ideas that I hear mentioned occasionally but that never seem to go anywhere. Most of them would be fairly trivial to implement - perhaps file hashing would be too CPU intensive, but it could be limited to smaller files, or less acpu intensive algorithm could be used.
Anyways, most of these I'd only use if they were added to Google - when it comes right down to it, database size is king with search engines - I'm happy to leave the meta/interactive/social/tagging side of things to the social bookmarking sites.
I might be the most anti-DRM/anti-Intellectual Property person around here, but this argument that a company should lower its prices to discourage stealing is ridiculous. You're saying that because Rolex charges $5k for a watch, then it's OK to steal one.
Ignoring the intrinsic differences between software and physical goods, actually, yes, that argument makes a lot of sense. If it's too expensive for you to buy, then it doesn't matter a damn if you "steal" (copy) it.
People just don't seem to realise that as soon as you can replicate something at 0 cost, a totally different set of morals and laws is needed.
When you steal a watch, you're stealing a physical object that, had you not stolen it, its owner could have exchanged for money. You taking the object precludes them from doing so.
When you copy a piece of softwarefor your own use, you are denying one potential sale to the owner of the software. Then only workable model in which you are taking anything from them is one in which you were going to purchase the software, then don't as a result of having copied it. I'm not saying that this doesn't happen, but starting from the position of it being too expensive for you to afford - then no, it doesn't.
So, logically speaking, if I am not willing or unable to pay $x for "proprietary OS", and my other two options are "pirate copy of proprietary OS" and "FOSS OS", then from the point of view of the software manufacturer, it doesn't matter a damn if I pirate it or use a free alternative. They still get $0. In fact, it's probably slightly better for them that I pirate their OS, because I will learn skills tied to that OS, will be more likely to purchase it in the future if I can at some point afford $x, and will generally promote it to people that I encounter and increase adoption levels of their software.
So, in other words, if you start from the position of "under no circumstances will I purchase software x at price $y", then it really doesn't matter what you do, legal or illegal, with software x. The manufacturer doesn't lose.
I suppose, to use your watch analagy, it's like seeing a rolex watch you like, realising you can't possibly afford one, so then building one yourself, using your own materials at your own cost, to look exactly like the watch you wanted. Has rolex lost a sale? Not if you couldn't possibly afford it in the first place.
DRM is a necessity for sustaining artists wages, and the consumer has always had a choice, so don't blame others, if you're are not satisfied with a product or its price DON'T BUY IT, the industrie sets its prices by what people are prepared to pay, so it's your own fault at the end of the day.
Something I don't understand about the pro-drm crowd... OK, even accepting logic that "getting something for free that others pay for" = "stealing", where the hell does DRM come into this equation?
Accepting every argument that demonises file-sharing, p2p, Usenet binaries and other pirate goodness, DRM STILL
* increases the price of the media for regular, law abiding consumers
* restricts the ability of those same law abiding consumers from exercising legally protected fair use rights
* forces law abiding customers into hardware lockins and restricts their ability to choose media platforms
* makes data backup of legally purchased media more difficult/impossible
* decreases massively the chance you can still use your legally purchased media in 5/10/15 years time
and what does it do to thwart all the things that the pro-DRM camp complain about?
Seriously, this isn't too hard guys! It just doesn't work!. There are software companies that make high-end graphics and video editing suites that cost thousands of dollars to license, that protect their software with deeply complex and highly secure code, multiple layers of remote license validation and so forth, and you can still download cracked copies of the software from Usenet and bittorrent sites. If software companies, with [to use a little *IAA logic] thousands of dollars to lose per copy made can't protect their content, how do you think that music and movie companies that makes hundreds of thousands of copies of their products that have to be accessible/decodable on hundreds of different hardware platforms can possibly do it?
It doesn't matter how you feel about pirates, DRM still doesn't make sense.
For christs sake, wont people learn and get a brain cell these days.
If ONE drug dealer sells $10 worth of drugs to an addict, then that dealer pays two addicts $5 each to wash his car, then they later
buy $5 each of drugs, thats equal to $30 GDP from the same $10.
All total sales from 10000000s of companies != total dollars in circulation (go check your M1/M2 money supply)
GDP is theoretically equal to the value of the output (Y) of an economy, i.e., the total value of all goods and services created by firms in that economy. For simplicity's sake, let's ignore things like trade balance and so forth, and assume a small closed economy. GDP is therefor PY, or price times output. The price of every good or service times the quantity of each good or services produced.
GDP measures only final value transactions - that is, firms-to-households and firms-to-government transactions. Firm-to-firm transactions are not counted in an attempt to not measure the value of goods and services twice.
The force of money "being spent more than once" that you discuss is known as Velocity (V) and is a vitally important economic concept. Velocity measures the number of transactions a unit of currency is used for in a given period of time. As velocity changes, the practical amount of money in an economy changes. In fact, in econmic terms PY = MV. Or in other words, price times output (aka GDP) is equal to money times velocity. So, you can see, velocity is hugely important - as velocity increases, more transactions are taking place, in some situations as a result of more goods and services being produced.
In other words, $1 being spend fifteen times really is like $15 being spend once. In terms of money as a unit of account, it's identical, as the value of goods and servies produced that the money represents is identical.
Theres the truth, TAXES are not there for the government to spend (they can borrow it), but its there to control inflation which the
central banks create, as they make all the money and are not owned by the governments.
Its like two mafias, one makes all the counterfeits, the other 'collects fees' for letting it happen.
If you make too many fakes, the taxes go up.
I'm not sure where you pulled this from. Taxes are precisely there for the government to spend. All taxes taken are either spent by government or invested. This is the primary purpose of taxes. Output = Consumption + Investment + Government Spending
Taxes do not explicity affect inflation. Taxes do not reduce or increase the money supply. Governments or central banks typically alter the money supply and therefor inflation by either increasing the money supply (buying long-term bonds) or decreasing the money supply (selling long-term bonds).
Also, in modern Western states, central banks almost never create inflation by printing money, except desired inflation. Inflation is caused by many various factors, notably consumer expectations and confidence, and arguably demand for money. Printing money is too clumsy a tool to be relied on heavily. Central banks are much more likely to use reserves to try to keep to a desired inflation level.
I genuinely thought that the headline read "benchmarking gaming dice". I was really looking forward to geeking out on twenty-two pages of twenty-four-sided goodness.
assuming you never actually *do* anything with your PC.
How would booting from a persistant image work with file tables, data caches, network stacks and general data and metadata that change rapidly and unpredictably?
Oops! You loaded your antivirus definitions from last month into RAM for no reason because you forgot to update your boot image.
Or perhaps you add an additional thirty seconds to the load time because your boot image is for tcp/ip settings that conflict with your LAN since you set up DHCP last week and forgot to tell Windows Persistant Image Boot Manager(tm).
Unless of course you form a new boot image every time you shut down, but that will increase your shut down time, and may very well lead to problems if you have power outages or you get impatient and hard power down your system because your OS now takes twice as long to shut down properly.
unlike windows xp and volume activation 1.0 windows vista doesnt have any corporate keys which will permanently activate it. volume activation 2.0 requires a corporate user to either do a one time activation through microsoft servers (mak) or companies can host a local activation server which does not talk to microsoft (kms). the only difference is kms requires re-activation once every 180 days. however as long as theres a local kms server its simple to keep windows activated. this release is a vmware image of a permanently activated kms server which allows local activation of windows vista business/enterprise edition. volume activation 2.0 is only built into those two editions.
install vista business/enterprise edition with the key [removed, check.nfo].
using the latest vmware workstation, boot the image. disable vmware firewall.
on the non vm vista right click the command prompt icon and run as admin. type...
> The summary didn't cover the part where intentional copyright infringement can land you in jail for up to ten years. Yes, the DMCA > sucks and is overly draconian, but I'd rather violate that within my home than endg up in the slammer for having accidentally > including a snippet of something copyrighted in something I upped to Youtube.
Where did that come from?
From TFA:
"It calls for penalties against people who sell pirate versions of music and films on the internet to be brought in line with those who make hard copies. Currently, the former face two years and the latter 10."
Slashdot Mirror
> require the OS to supply the password at some interval to a write-only memory.
Sounds really useful. From what I hear, write-only memory is about as cryptographically secure as it comes.
> For example, is it legal to shoot heroin in your house? How about meth?
It sure as hell should be.
How about "victimless" or "consensual" crimes should be legal in your own home? In fact, how about we just get rid of consensual crimes altogether?
So, just to be clear, this story, posted on March 2nd, is reporting on a worm which has started exploiting a zero day vulnerability that was covered by slashdot on February 12th?
Isn't twenty days long enough to disable a remotely exploitable and totally unnecessery, unsafe service that no admin in his right mind should have enabled on a box connected to the net anyway?
> All Microsoft has to do is block the IP address that is requesting thousands of activations on > separate, invalid keys per second. RTFA. That's nothing like how this works. The actual activation part is totally manual, only the key generation is automated. You can generate keys without any kind of network connectivity.
>..is the perfect way to fund public goods, like information.
It's not really a "compulsory" tax. You're obliged to pay the license fee if you own a television tuner set to recieve broadcast television stations.
This is, as you might imagine, ludicrously difficult to enforce. I'm a student, I use a tv tuner card, and I sure as hell don't pay £130 or whatever it is per year. How exactly am I going to be forced to pay the license fee? I get threatening letters often (which is the primary tactic the license fee collection agency use to get people to pay up) but if a license inspector ever comes to my property and asks to come in to verify I don't own an operational tv tuner, I'll politely tell him to fsck off.
From there, the only way he can get access to my property is to get a warrant from a judge, based on zero evidence that I'm doing anything wrong. Good luck there.
The license fee collection agencry is an RIAA type agency that uses scare tactics and ignorance to collect its money. The only people who get fined tend to be relatively poor people who don't pay for a license but also don't realise that they have the legal right to refuse entry to a license inspector. An inspector calls round, demands to be let in, the person lets them in, shows them the tv, and they get a fine to the order of several thousand pounds.
The whole system is ludicrous, outdated and monstrously inefficient. We would be much better served if an independent body determined an appropriate level of funding for the BBC year-on-year, and the money came from general taxation.
inevitably, I fucked that up
<user="Odiumjunkie"
<title="Re:we should do this too"</xml>
<quote id="wwwillem">
<pre><user="wwwillem"></pre>
</quote>
<p><span class="pedantic">Forget to close that tag much?</span></p>
</xml>
From TFA:
> HID has sent a letter to IOActive, a security consulting firm, accusing Chris Paget, IOActive's
> director of research and development, of possible patent infringement over a planned presentation,
> "RFID for beginners," on Wednesday, a move that could lead to legal action should the talk go
> forward, according to Jeff Moss, founder and director of Black Hat.
I, for one, take comfort in the fact that HID Corp can sue anyone that breaks into my workplace after cloning my security card.
How does OpenDNS make money?
OpenDNS makes money by offering clearly labeled advertisements alongside organic search results when the domain entered is not valid and not a typo we can fix. OpenDNS will provide additional services on top of its enhanced DNS service, and some of them may cost money. Speedy, reliable DNS will always be free.
here
Where do I sign?
in other news, sales of Polonium-210 reached a record high today. Details at 11.
When I broke the screen on my sony ericsson T610 about a year ago, I was given a quote of about $200 for a new branded screen - I went to my local asian-run backstreet electronics store and got a new generic screen installed for $30 including labour (although labour is nothing, I could have installed it myself). Anyways, it was hugely cheaper than a branded part, and brighter than the original to boot! It's been working flawlessly since then.
I agree, I was expecting better - in my opinion there are a host of features that people have been talking about for years that haven't appeared in any search engine I've used.
Things like:
* searching by md5 hash to find where a random file on your hard drive came from
* allowing the specifying of precise image size or dimensions to find a specific image - e.g., google indexes an image, you see the thumbnail, want to find it, but the original site is down - why can't google show me other images that match the original size and dimensions of that cached image, to help me find a mirror?
* A search engine that rec0gn!s3s 4|_|_ 5p3c!4L cH4rAters
* filtering search results by IP range
* incorporating WHOIS details in search results (e.g foo +bar -foobar inurl:baz author:"J. Random Hacker")
and so on, ideas that I hear mentioned occasionally but that never seem to go anywhere. Most of them would be fairly trivial to implement - perhaps file hashing would be too CPU intensive, but it could be limited to smaller files, or less acpu intensive algorithm could be used.
Anyways, most of these I'd only use if they were added to Google - when it comes right down to it, database size is king with search engines - I'm happy to leave the meta/interactive/social/tagging side of things to the social bookmarking sites.
> it's the first thing that popped into my head
/. comment.
I take that as a caveat for pretty much any
Ignoring the intrinsic differences between software and physical goods, actually, yes, that argument makes a lot of sense. If it's too expensive for you to buy, then it doesn't matter a damn if you "steal" (copy) it.
People just don't seem to realise that as soon as you can replicate something at 0 cost, a totally different set of morals and laws is needed.
When you steal a watch, you're stealing a physical object that, had you not stolen it, its owner could have exchanged for money. You taking the object precludes them from doing so.
When you copy a piece of softwarefor your own use, you are denying one potential sale to the owner of the software. Then only workable model in which you are taking anything from them is one in which you were going to purchase the software, then don't as a result of having copied it. I'm not saying that this doesn't happen, but starting from the position of it being too expensive for you to afford - then no, it doesn't.
So, logically speaking, if I am not willing or unable to pay $x for "proprietary OS", and my other two options are "pirate copy of proprietary OS" and "FOSS OS", then from the point of view of the software manufacturer, it doesn't matter a damn if I pirate it or use a free alternative. They still get $0. In fact, it's probably slightly better for them that I pirate their OS, because I will learn skills tied to that OS, will be more likely to purchase it in the future if I can at some point afford $x, and will generally promote it to people that I encounter and increase adoption levels of their software.
So, in other words, if you start from the position of "under no circumstances will I purchase software x at price $y", then it really doesn't matter what you do, legal or illegal, with software x. The manufacturer doesn't lose.
I suppose, to use your watch analagy, it's like seeing a rolex watch you like, realising you can't possibly afford one, so then building one yourself, using your own materials at your own cost, to look exactly like the watch you wanted. Has rolex lost a sale? Not if you couldn't possibly afford it in the first place.
DRM is a necessity for sustaining artists wages, and the consumer has always had a choice, so don't blame others, if you're are not satisfied with a product or its price DON'T BUY IT, the industrie sets its prices by what people are prepared to pay, so it's your own fault at the end of the day.
Something I don't understand about the pro-drm crowd... OK, even accepting logic that "getting something for free that others pay for" = "stealing", where the hell does DRM come into this equation?
Accepting every argument that demonises file-sharing, p2p, Usenet binaries and other pirate goodness, DRM STILL
* increases the price of the media for regular, law abiding consumers
* restricts the ability of those same law abiding consumers from exercising legally protected fair use rights
* forces law abiding customers into hardware lockins and restricts their ability to choose media platforms
* makes data backup of legally purchased media more difficult/impossible
* decreases massively the chance you can still use your legally purchased media in 5/10/15 years time
and what does it do to thwart all the things that the pro-DRM camp complain about?
* Stops pirates from stealing media?
Seriously, this isn't too hard guys! It just doesn't work!. There are software companies that make high-end graphics and video editing suites that cost thousands of dollars to license, that protect their software with deeply complex and highly secure code, multiple layers of remote license validation and so forth, and you can still download cracked copies of the software from Usenet and bittorrent sites. If software companies, with [to use a little *IAA logic] thousands of dollars to lose per copy made can't protect their content, how do you think that music and movie companies that makes hundreds of thousands of copies of their products that have to be accessible/decodable on hundreds of different hardware platforms can possibly do it?
It doesn't matter how you feel about pirates, DRM still doesn't make sense.
use insider knowledge of their own software to extract trillions of dollars from VeriSign!
Come on, no-one actually thought people could use MS software for anything else did they?
This advert is CLEARLY not NPOV. Can we get a citation on the shampoo making hair "glossy and full of bounce"? 84.28.125.19
WTF I USE IT AND IT MAKES MY HAIR GLOSSY 61.101.19.42
Hey no original research you nub 69.120.51.20
Do we having anything on "glossy and full of bounce" as opposed to just glossy? 84.28.125.19
OK HAVE REWRITTEN ARTICLE TO CLEAN UP, NOW "SHINY AND NATURALLY SOFT", NOT "GLOSSY AND FULL OF BOUNCE" 61.101.19.42
nominated for deletion, 01/02/07, not noteworthy enough 83.102.48.18
GDP is theoretically equal to the value of the output (Y) of an economy, i.e., the total value of all goods and services created by firms in that economy. For simplicity's sake, let's ignore things like trade balance and so forth, and assume a small closed economy. GDP is therefor PY, or price times output. The price of every good or service times the quantity of each good or services produced.
GDP measures only final value transactions - that is, firms-to-households and firms-to-government transactions. Firm-to-firm transactions are not counted in an attempt to not measure the value of goods and services twice.
The force of money "being spent more than once" that you discuss is known as Velocity (V) and is a vitally important economic concept. Velocity measures the number of transactions a unit of currency is used for in a given period of time. As velocity changes, the practical amount of money in an economy changes. In fact, in econmic terms PY = MV. Or in other words, price times output (aka GDP) is equal to money times velocity. So, you can see, velocity is hugely important - as velocity increases, more transactions are taking place, in some situations as a result of more goods and services being produced.
In other words, $1 being spend fifteen times really is like $15 being spend once. In terms of money as a unit of account, it's identical, as the value of goods and servies produced that the money represents is identical.
I'm not sure where you pulled this from. Taxes are precisely there for the government to spend. All taxes taken are either spent by government or invested. This is the primary purpose of taxes. Output = Consumption + Investment + Government Spending
Taxes do not explicity affect inflation. Taxes do not reduce or increase the money supply. Governments or central banks typically alter the money supply and therefor inflation by either increasing the money supply (buying long-term bonds) or decreasing the money supply (selling long-term bonds).
Also, in modern Western states, central banks almost never create inflation by printing money, except desired inflation. Inflation is caused by many various factors, notably consumer expectations and confidence, and arguably demand for money. Printing money is too clumsy a tool to be relied on heavily. Central banks are much more likely to use reserves to try to keep to a desired inflation level.
Try 01.23, Christmas morning.
God, I hate Christmas.
I genuinely thought that the headline read "benchmarking gaming dice". I was really looking forward to geeking out on twenty-two pages of twenty-four-sided goodness.
assuming you never actually *do* anything with your PC.
How would booting from a persistant image work with file tables, data caches, network stacks and general data and metadata that change rapidly and unpredictably?
Oops! You loaded your antivirus definitions from last month into RAM for no reason because you forgot to update your boot image.
Or perhaps you add an additional thirty seconds to the load time because your boot image is for tcp/ip settings that conflict with your LAN since you set up DHCP last week and forgot to tell Windows Persistant Image Boot Manager(tm).
Unless of course you form a new boot image every time you shut down, but that will increase your shut down time, and may very well lead to problems if you have power outages or you get impatient and hard power down your system because your OS now takes twice as long to shut down properly.
Microsoft.Windows.Vista.Local.Activation.Server-Me lindaGates.torrent
.nfo].
...
...
unlike windows xp and volume activation 1.0 windows vista doesnt have any corporate
keys which will permanently activate it. volume activation 2.0 requires a corporate
user to either do a one time activation through microsoft servers (mak) or companies
can host a local activation server which does not talk to microsoft (kms). the only
difference is kms requires re-activation once every 180 days. however as long as
theres a local kms server its simple to keep windows activated. this release is a
vmware image of a permanently activated kms server which allows local activation of
windows vista business/enterprise edition. volume activation 2.0 is only built into
those two editions.
install vista business/enterprise edition with the key [removed, check
using the latest vmware workstation, boot the image. disable vmware firewall.
on the non vm vista right click the command prompt icon and run as admin. type
cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs -skms vm_vista_ip
cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs -ato
windows should now be activated.
to check activation status type
cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs -dlv
tested using echos windows vista enterprise and vmware workstation 5.5.3 but seems to
have issues with the billgates windows vista business.
> The summary didn't cover the part where intentional copyright infringement can land you in jail for up to ten years. Yes, the DMCA
> sucks and is overly draconian, but I'd rather violate that within my home than endg up in the slammer for having accidentally
> including a snippet of something copyrighted in something I upped to Youtube.
Where did that come from?
From TFA:
"It calls for penalties against people who sell pirate versions of music and films on the internet to be brought in line with those who make hard copies. Currently, the former face two years and the latter 10."