While it's a near-certainty that a DRM-free movie or music download service with major studio backing would become very popular, very quickly, it's equally probable that the files would be wildly pirated as well. But then again, it's already easy enough to find any song or film you need fairly quickly, if you just know where to look. Therefore, it seems much less certain that unprotected content would cause much harm to the pocketbooks of RIAA and MPAA members.
And if the major Linux players go ahead and support DRM? Then other Linux distributors will come along with their DRM-less versions and scoop up market sahre, and users will see the movies and listen to the music they want to anyway using pirated versions of stuff. Let's not forget, what a coder creates, another coder can hack. No amount of DRM is going to keep enterprising coders from breaking it and freeing the content. The DRM camp is, as usual, kidding themselves.
And we've had unprotected media around us for years, like FM radio or good old cable TV, and all we need in order to make unauthorized copies of those broadcasts are cassette radios or VCRs. Just because content has gone digital shouldn't mean that we all are going to turn into the dirty, rotten pirates in need of heavy restraints that DRM proponents seem to assume that we are.
There will always be freely available content, if you know where to look. Let's not forget: many radio stations stream their audio already, and how hard is it to record that stream? A user will always be able to pick up the content they want given the effort, the RIAA and all its cronies be damned. It doesn't make us criminals, but consumers forced to extraordinary lenghts to get the things we want without having to be beholden big media over and over again.
But if Google's DNA is so adaptable...
on
Google's DNA
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· Score: 1, Insightful
...doesn't that make it a virus? It can basically spread from one place to another, adapting to each new "host" as it goes.
Now, before the "Troll" stamps come out, I'm not saying this is necessarily bad, though this does tend to make Google a... wait for it... monopoly. Yes there are competitors, but they seem a distant second right now and are probably going to remain so if the article is true. I doubt Yahoo can modify its culture to compete directly with Google.
Google's strength in being so adaptable is in the power it gains with each arena it moves into. If Google truly wants to be the planet's information source, there will come a point that it is so large yet so tenuous and amorphous, that no government will be able to go around it. This means trouble for a United States hell bent on spying on people or a China trying to rewrite history and keep fresh ideas coming in in a controlled fashion.
The question now becomes, has Google learned the Spiderman lesson -- will they treat their great power responsibly?
But those are among the nominees for the first Emmy award to be given by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for outstanding original programming for computers, cellphones and other hand-held devices, including the video iPod.
I hope that really isn't the title of the award. A) It's a mouthful and B) I think it's safe to say Apple doesn't need to get billing while other don't. Of course this is more a technical award, so you're not going to get to see it during the main Emmy telecast -- this will be relegated to that 3-minute clip they show about halfway through where they show all the geeks getting their awards at a banquet where some B-list star is roped into emceeing and handing out the awards. Of course it's usually a fairly good-looking female B-list star, but hey, better than nothing if you're a geek.
Apple don't need to get people to switch to Mac OS X; they need to get them to buy Apple's computers.
Or do they? Given the success of the iPod and all its brethren, there's a steady stream of income to support the computer lines while the whole OS X/XP thing gets sorted out. Frankly, the ability to dual boot XP or OS X is not going to matter to the regular consumer, only to the Mac fanatic or the Windows user with Mac curiosity. While dual boot capacity might help make some converts, it's not going to create a groundswell of change over to Macs.
...one child will receive the coveted "Floppy Disk of Power", unlocking all my secrets... sadly, the floppy will have been stored with my refrigerator magnet collection...
The FedEx box, seams carefully reinforced with duct tape, which includes a bubble wrap lining to protect your laptop from even the most rude of shocks.
...in this contest you must write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function. To be more specific, it should do something subtly evil.
That sounds like most of the C code I've ever seen... or written, come to think of it...
One thing they didn't mention...
on
Hacker Boot Camp
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· Score: 1
...is whether they had to shave their heads or were subject to violent hazing. Doesn't seem like boot camp otherwise.
"Social engineering is a very, very effective technique. We have statistics that show significant infection rates for the social engineering malware. Phishing is a major problem because there really is no patch for human stupidity," he said.
Make your system as foolproof as possible and I'll show you the fool who can break it. It makes no sense to deepen the moat, add more boiling oil, and hire a thousand new guards if the user is simply going to lower the drawbridge.
Personally, I can't wait for the day they can patch human stupidity.
Some companies worry the new services will overwhelm their networks with unwanted traffic. Others are primarily concerned about security or their ability to track workplace communications, especially in industries like financial services, where regular monitoring is required by regulators. Instant messages from the outside, for example, often aren't logged and archived the way email is, creating a potential backdoor for illicit communications or breaches of client privacy.
Sounds like the heyday of Napster, when people were swapping files so liberally and often that servers were grinding to a halt with all the traffic. Still, a large corporation should be able to retard traffic or have enough server capacity to deal with the onslaught. As to whether or not all these services are security holes, sure they are, just as sure as the email attachment some unwitting dupe opens from his corporate email account.
I do see the point about communications logging though, especially in the Sarbanes-Oxley age. If a financial services corporation can't account for all its traffic, they run the risk of someone internally using proprietary information for personal gain and flying right under the radar.
But it's got a gotcha. There's an exemption if they encrypt their data - even if the encryption is lame or broken. If they encrypted their data, they don't have to notify anyone. That's a loophole to drive a world class semi through. And there are fears that it will superceed laws like those in some states, such as California, which have no such exemption.
Even if the encryption isn't lame or broken, it's still data out there on the loose. How long would it take to crack, given all the available information on encryption? There are precious few "uncrackable" encryption schemes and I doubt most major corporations are going to go to those lengths to protect data. From what I've seen behind the scenes, most will use tricks and simple algorithms, figuring it makes the data "mostly" secure.
The report says the US military's first priority is that the "department [of defence] must be prepared to 'fight the net'". The internet is seen in much the same way as an enemy state by the Pentagon because of the way it can be used to propagandise, organise and mount electronic attacks on crucial US targets.
It can also be used to say, spread the truth about illegal covert activities by the US against sovereign nations, allow oppressed people to get word out about their plight, give Americans a say in how their money is spent, and generally promote freedom and democracy. I can see why the Pentagon would be so frightened by the Internet.
Sorry to tell the pointy-heads in the Pointy-gon, but you're going to have a hard time bringing down even small portions of the Net. Perhaps you can take out individual sites, or even clusters of sites that reside on the same server farm, but I doubt they could take out enough to stop Internet traffic. They could certainly disseminate false or misleading information, but hey, people do that everyday already. As to dominating communications around the planet, the only thing I know of that can do that is the sloar wind. I think the Pentagon would have itself a cyber-Vietnam on its hands if it ever tried to 'attack the Internet'.
You misunderstand autism. This has nothing to do with memory. Autistic people do not have the facial expression recognition algorithms that most humans have. So someone has implemented such an algorithm on a computer, and then the computer tells the autistic person what the expression means.
I worked with the autistic population for about 7 years. I think it has not been established that autistic people lack facial expression recognition algorithms. From what I've seen, they cannot interpret what they see, lacking the ability to integrate facial expressions of others with their own feelings, and use that to create a picture of what someone else is feeling. The autistic individual tends to treat everything as an object, and they can recognize form and substance, but not emotionality. However, they can learn it, given enough conditioning and reinforcement, albeit it is very artificial and prone to error if certain situations occur which were not anticipated. This device may work as an excellent training tool for those who can use it properly, but it won't solve the problem in the long run.
Most are not tech savvy, and have no idea the difference between http and https, don't look at the links they click on, and can't tell a spoofed URL from a real one on sight.
Most people are pretty gullible. They believe what they're told, whether by a newscaster, the President, scientists, or the glowing pixels of a web page. Critical reasoning skills are lacking.
Most people are pretty stupid. They get an email purportedly from their bank telling them they need to update their information for security purposes or have lost their bank account number, or something equally unlikely, and don't question it. They don't call their local bank branch to verify it, they simply click.
Most people believe the Internet is infallible. They think every person who has a blog or web page knows what they are talking about. They think if a page looks a little like what they normally see when they bank online, that it's the same thing, even though the URLs to the links are all wrong.
You can't protect people from themselves, although our Congress tries to do this every day by passing inane laws that protect no one but the large corporations and billionaires. People who go online will continue to be duped as long as no concerted effort is made to educate them. Cue the PSAs.
But what the heck is 'Bio-piracy'? Because privacy and piracy sound vaguely familiar isn't reason enough, IMHO. Naming the awards 'the Captain Hook awards' seems even more facetious.
Avast there! Hand over your tissue samples, you scurvy lubbers! Yeargh! This one seems a fine, strapping specimen! Take her ovaries, Maties!
Biopiracy makes no sense. Genes are genes -- you can take the essential building blocks of them and mix and match them to your heart's content. The number of combinations available is staggering. They make it sound like no one has a right to do with their genetic material as they please.
The supposed problem presented by the USCC is that the 16,000 computers are being built by a Chinese-mainland company. The USCC argues that a foreign intelligence like that of the Communist Party of China (CPC) can use its power to get Lenovo to equip its machines with espionage devices. Lenovo has strongly declined that it is involved in any such activities.
On the one hand, they have a point: it would be very easy for the Chinese government to "encourage" Lenovo to plant things in these machines to allow them to spy on the US. On the other hand, given the profusion of malware, keyloggers, Trojans, and such, the Chinese government could already be spying on the US without having to go to such extraordinary lengths. Frankly, it's too obvious to be credible.
Whether Diebold is bona fide or not, they are likely to claim trade secret privilege to hide the actual workings of their machine or their testing mechanisms... and again, if they're telling the truth, then they would claim that, and if they're not, then their claim would be hard to challenge.
So the solution is obvious: every Diebold electronic voting machine is to be guarded by a member of that state's National Guard, with orders to kill anyone who attempts to touch the machine. That should take care of Diebold repair people, poll workers, and voters, leaving the country free to be be taken over by our future squirrel overlords.
Inclining the bed at an angle of 6 degrees with the head at the lower end produces bone and muscle loss, decreases in cardiovascular activity, and reduced capacity to exercise similar to those produced by prolonged spaceflight.
Similar results can be obtained by sitting in front of your computer and playing World of Warcraft every day for 16 hours. Remember, your results may vary.
Mind you, politicians tend to be from the lower end of the IQ pool... of course it makes it easier for them to spot stupidity, being so intimately familiar with it themsevles.
Also realize that counterfeit software more than likely has hacked CD Keys. Microsoft does not want people buying this hacked software only to find out that it doesn't work like it should.
Or worse, contains a payload it shouldn't, like a keylogger. Rule #1 of eBay is "Buyer Beware." My wife has only recently gotten into eBay and been burned a few times buying those "too-good-to-be-true" items only to be sadly disappointed. I tried to tell her. Buying software on eBay s just a bad idea.
Frost blames himself for the theft of his personal information. He said the Web site that launched when he clicked on the link in the fraudulent e-mail belonged to a legitimate online camera store, and that the woman he spoke with at that store even told him that her site had been hacked and that it had probably downloaded "some kind of virus to his computer."
Frost also admits he ignored her warning and put off installing the latest patch, something he said he plans to rectify after re-installing the operating system on his computer. Meanwhile, he's had to arrange new online login credentials for his bank and reset his eBay and Paypal passwords, all of which were found on the hacking Web site.
Ignore the warnings at your own peril. Everyday computer users are fooled by the science fiction ideal of the "ubquitous computer", where you pretty much walk up to it, do your thing, and you're off. PCs are n't anywhere near that level yet; you can't blithely go about your business and figure nothing bad is going to happen.
They need to make virus updates and software patches fully automatic. Take the user out of the loop. The software will know when it needs to be patched or upgraded; let it happen behind the scenes, where the user doesn't have to get involved. That would probably solve 90% of the problem right there.
Making as much money as you can in a profession is something every human being in an open market wishes to do (excluding entreprenuership).
That's fine as far as it goes. But tell me this: why should "professional" athletes get paid these millions when their college counterparts get paid nothing, for playing basically the same sport? Is a baseball player actually worth $20 million dollars simply because he's a good baseball player? If that's so, then why isn't a top-notch programmer worth a few million? Is it simply because there are so many programmers and so few "professional" athletes? Is the ability to play baseball or football worth more than the ability to program? Maybe it's apples and oranges to some, but you have to admit that professional sports figures have an opportunity to make money at the magnitude that we blue- and white-collar individuals can't even hope to match in a lifetime of work.
Major professional sports organizations supported the legislation, including the National Football League and Major League Baseball, saying in a joint statement that sports betting "threatens the integrity of our respective sports."
Buhwahahaha!! Can you say steroids?!? Can you say overblown contracts?!? There can't be a threat to something they don't have.
A group called the Poker Players Alliance opposed the legislation as well.
The Poker Players Alliance - a stalwart group of poker-playing heroes, determined to defend truth, justice, and the right to draw to an inside straight!
They're running Linux on these things aren't they? No market share for Microsoft.
Gates has valid points, but they're overshadowed by his oafishness. And it's really strange given the amount of money he pours into Africa every year. Bizarre.
Slashdot Mirror
And if the major Linux players go ahead and support DRM? Then other Linux distributors will come along with their DRM-less versions and scoop up market sahre, and users will see the movies and listen to the music they want to anyway using pirated versions of stuff. Let's not forget, what a coder creates, another coder can hack. No amount of DRM is going to keep enterprising coders from breaking it and freeing the content. The DRM camp is, as usual, kidding themselves.
And we've had unprotected media around us for years, like FM radio or good old cable TV, and all we need in order to make unauthorized copies of those broadcasts are cassette radios or VCRs. Just because content has gone digital shouldn't mean that we all are going to turn into the dirty, rotten pirates in need of heavy restraints that DRM proponents seem to assume that we are.There will always be freely available content, if you know where to look. Let's not forget: many radio stations stream their audio already, and how hard is it to record that stream? A user will always be able to pick up the content they want given the effort, the RIAA and all its cronies be damned. It doesn't make us criminals, but consumers forced to extraordinary lenghts to get the things we want without having to be beholden big media over and over again.
...doesn't that make it a virus? It can basically spread from one place to another, adapting to each new "host" as it goes.
Now, before the "Troll" stamps come out, I'm not saying this is necessarily bad, though this does tend to make Google a... wait for it... monopoly. Yes there are competitors, but they seem a distant second right now and are probably going to remain so if the article is true. I doubt Yahoo can modify its culture to compete directly with Google.
Google's strength in being so adaptable is in the power it gains with each arena it moves into. If Google truly wants to be the planet's information source, there will come a point that it is so large yet so tenuous and amorphous, that no government will be able to go around it. This means trouble for a United States hell bent on spying on people or a China trying to rewrite history and keep fresh ideas coming in in a controlled fashion.
The question now becomes, has Google learned the Spiderman lesson -- will they treat their great power responsibly?
I hope that really isn't the title of the award. A) It's a mouthful and B) I think it's safe to say Apple doesn't need to get billing while other don't. Of course this is more a technical award, so you're not going to get to see it during the main Emmy telecast -- this will be relegated to that 3-minute clip they show about halfway through where they show all the geeks getting their awards at a banquet where some B-list star is roped into emceeing and handing out the awards. Of course it's usually a fairly good-looking female B-list star, but hey, better than nothing if you're a geek.
Or do they? Given the success of the iPod and all its brethren, there's a steady stream of income to support the computer lines while the whole OS X/XP thing gets sorted out. Frankly, the ability to dual boot XP or OS X is not going to matter to the regular consumer, only to the Mac fanatic or the Windows user with Mac curiosity. While dual boot capacity might help make some converts, it's not going to create a groundswell of change over to Macs.
...one child will receive the coveted "Floppy Disk of Power", unlocking all my secrets... sadly, the floppy will have been stored with my refrigerator magnet collection...
The FedEx box, seams carefully reinforced with duct tape, which includes a bubble wrap lining to protect your laptop from even the most rude of shocks.
That sounds like most of the C code I've ever seen... or written, come to think of it...
...is whether they had to shave their heads or were subject to violent hazing. Doesn't seem like boot camp otherwise.
Smokin'!!!!!
Make your system as foolproof as possible and I'll show you the fool who can break it. It makes no sense to deepen the moat, add more boiling oil, and hire a thousand new guards if the user is simply going to lower the drawbridge.
Personally, I can't wait for the day they can patch human stupidity.
Sounds like the heyday of Napster, when people were swapping files so liberally and often that servers were grinding to a halt with all the traffic. Still, a large corporation should be able to retard traffic or have enough server capacity to deal with the onslaught. As to whether or not all these services are security holes, sure they are, just as sure as the email attachment some unwitting dupe opens from his corporate email account.
I do see the point about communications logging though, especially in the Sarbanes-Oxley age. If a financial services corporation can't account for all its traffic, they run the risk of someone internally using proprietary information for personal gain and flying right under the radar.
Even if the encryption isn't lame or broken, it's still data out there on the loose. How long would it take to crack, given all the available information on encryption? There are precious few "uncrackable" encryption schemes and I doubt most major corporations are going to go to those lengths to protect data. From what I've seen behind the scenes, most will use tricks and simple algorithms, figuring it makes the data "mostly" secure.
It can also be used to say, spread the truth about illegal covert activities by the US against sovereign nations, allow oppressed people to get word out about their plight, give Americans a say in how their money is spent, and generally promote freedom and democracy. I can see why the Pentagon would be so frightened by the Internet.
Sorry to tell the pointy-heads in the Pointy-gon, but you're going to have a hard time bringing down even small portions of the Net. Perhaps you can take out individual sites, or even clusters of sites that reside on the same server farm, but I doubt they could take out enough to stop Internet traffic. They could certainly disseminate false or misleading information, but hey, people do that everyday already. As to dominating communications around the planet, the only thing I know of that can do that is the sloar wind. I think the Pentagon would have itself a cyber-Vietnam on its hands if it ever tried to 'attack the Internet'.
I worked with the autistic population for about 7 years. I think it has not been established that autistic people lack facial expression recognition algorithms. From what I've seen, they cannot interpret what they see, lacking the ability to integrate facial expressions of others with their own feelings, and use that to create a picture of what someone else is feeling. The autistic individual tends to treat everything as an object, and they can recognize form and substance, but not emotionality. However, they can learn it, given enough conditioning and reinforcement, albeit it is very artificial and prone to error if certain situations occur which were not anticipated. This device may work as an excellent training tool for those who can use it properly, but it won't solve the problem in the long run.
People fall for phishing because:
- Most are not tech savvy, and have no idea the difference between http and https, don't look at the links they click on, and can't tell a spoofed URL from a real one on sight.
- Most people are pretty gullible. They believe what they're told, whether by a newscaster, the President, scientists, or the glowing pixels of a web page. Critical reasoning skills are lacking.
- Most people are pretty stupid. They get an email purportedly from their bank telling them they need to update their information for security purposes or have lost their bank account number, or something equally unlikely, and don't question it. They don't call their local bank branch to verify it, they simply click.
- Most people believe the Internet is infallible. They think every person who has a blog or web page knows what they are talking about. They think if a page looks a little like what they normally see when they bank online, that it's the same thing, even though the URLs to the links are all wrong.
You can't protect people from themselves, although our Congress tries to do this every day by passing inane laws that protect no one but the large corporations and billionaires. People who go online will continue to be duped as long as no concerted effort is made to educate them. Cue the PSAs.Avast there! Hand over your tissue samples, you scurvy lubbers! Yeargh! This one seems a fine, strapping specimen! Take her ovaries, Maties!
Biopiracy makes no sense. Genes are genes -- you can take the essential building blocks of them and mix and match them to your heart's content. The number of combinations available is staggering. They make it sound like no one has a right to do with their genetic material as they please.
On the one hand, they have a point: it would be very easy for the Chinese government to "encourage" Lenovo to plant things in these machines to allow them to spy on the US. On the other hand, given the profusion of malware, keyloggers, Trojans, and such, the Chinese government could already be spying on the US without having to go to such extraordinary lengths. Frankly, it's too obvious to be credible.
So the solution is obvious: every Diebold electronic voting machine is to be guarded by a member of that state's National Guard, with orders to kill anyone who attempts to touch the machine. That should take care of Diebold repair people, poll workers, and voters, leaving the country free to be be taken over by our future squirrel overlords.
Similar results can be obtained by sitting in front of your computer and playing World of Warcraft every day for 16 hours. Remember, your results may vary.
Mind you, politicians tend to be from the lower end of the IQ pool... of course it makes it easier for them to spot stupidity, being so intimately familiar with it themsevles.
Or worse, contains a payload it shouldn't, like a keylogger. Rule #1 of eBay is "Buyer Beware." My wife has only recently gotten into eBay and been burned a few times buying those "too-good-to-be-true" items only to be sadly disappointed. I tried to tell her. Buying software on eBay s just a bad idea.
Case in point:
Frost blames himself for the theft of his personal information. He said the Web site that launched when he clicked on the link in the fraudulent e-mail belonged to a legitimate online camera store, and that the woman he spoke with at that store even told him that her site had been hacked and that it had probably downloaded "some kind of virus to his computer."
Frost also admits he ignored her warning and put off installing the latest patch, something he said he plans to rectify after re-installing the operating system on his computer. Meanwhile, he's had to arrange new online login credentials for his bank and reset his eBay and Paypal passwords, all of which were found on the hacking Web site.
Ignore the warnings at your own peril. Everyday computer users are fooled by the science fiction ideal of the "ubquitous computer", where you pretty much walk up to it, do your thing, and you're off. PCs are n't anywhere near that level yet; you can't blithely go about your business and figure nothing bad is going to happen.
They need to make virus updates and software patches fully automatic. Take the user out of the loop. The software will know when it needs to be patched or upgraded; let it happen behind the scenes, where the user doesn't have to get involved. That would probably solve 90% of the problem right there.
That's fine as far as it goes. But tell me this: why should "professional" athletes get paid these millions when their college counterparts get paid nothing, for playing basically the same sport? Is a baseball player actually worth $20 million dollars simply because he's a good baseball player? If that's so, then why isn't a top-notch programmer worth a few million? Is it simply because there are so many programmers and so few "professional" athletes? Is the ability to play baseball or football worth more than the ability to program? Maybe it's apples and oranges to some, but you have to admit that professional sports figures have an opportunity to make money at the magnitude that we blue- and white-collar individuals can't even hope to match in a lifetime of work.
Buhwahahaha!! Can you say steroids?!? Can you say overblown contracts?!? There can't be a threat to something they don't have.
A group called the Poker Players Alliance opposed the legislation as well.The Poker Players Alliance - a stalwart group of poker-playing heroes, determined to defend truth, justice, and the right to draw to an inside straight!
They're running Linux on these things aren't they? No market share for Microsoft.
Gates has valid points, but they're overshadowed by his oafishness. And it's really strange given the amount of money he pours into Africa every year. Bizarre.