If you have privacy concerns, don't use the service.
The same can be said for online banking, email correspondence, chat, IM, or P2P. The fact is you have to be smart about who you let have access to what data. It's hard enough protecting your security in just the above arenas, without letting an outside group have access to your hard-drive. Another service I don't think I'll be touching anytime soon.
OTOH, I'm all for device convergence, the less things I have to carry around, the better. It's not like I was carrying around an IM client device though.
Three words: Star Trek Communicator
Instant contact. No video (do you really need to see the person you're talking to?). Able to carry on a normal conversation (instead of bursts of acronyms, abbreviations, and hacked-up vocabulary). Portable. Interfaceable with a computer. And best of all, only a couple of centuries away!
And there you have it. There will be enough content/software out there that doesn't use or fouls up the watermark system that it will be essentially useless. It's just like DRM; consumers will rise up against anyone using a system which compromises their ability to do what they want to do, when they want to do it. At least, that's the hope anyway.
yea, but how does this hinder a pirater who got his watermarked music from the web? The music is watermarked and works just fine.
I didn't say this idea would actually work, just that this is one of the liklier routes that would be taken. We all know that anything one programmer can create, another can crack. In the end, this is futility and the music industry is too blind to see it.
...Microsoft trying to bury Netscape in the browser war. But Netscape eventually spawned Firefox, which now stands to hit Microsoft where it hurts. AMD may be pushed to the brink by Intel, but once it's clear that they might die, they will suddenly find themselves free to follow new directions. Intel may be sowing the seeds of its own destruction.
Assuming a "de-tag" program doesn't pop up an hour later, what do you do with this wonderful invention? Instead of passing around a "normal" mp3 of Metallica, they're now sharing a "watermarked" version that allegedly can't be discerned by mere humans. How does this help?
You code media players to detect the watermark (which would have to be in a standardized format) and refuse to play anything that does not contain the watermark. Conversely, ripping programs will not rip anything containing the watermark, making it harder to copy the source. You wouldn't have to worry so much about removal programs, as programs that would "fake" the watermark, basically couterfeiting programs. Of course, those would pop up fifteen minutes later.
That being said I see two useful features (which may have been mentioned in the article that I admit I haven't read). One, simply have the phone check your calendar to see if you have a meeting scheduled. Two, provide some type of "snooze" button. Right now, if you decline a call because you're in a meeting, you still get an annoying beep when they leave a message, or the same damn "ringing" 10 min later when they call again. Why not have a single button basically put the phone in silent mode for the next half/hour/n minutes?
Better yet, a "Do Not Disturb" feature, that allows you to keep the phone on, see who's calling, but not have to answer it. If the same number tries to call more than once, send it driectly to voice mail and have the phone note the number and times of the calls and display it actively. That way you could have your phone on silent but watch the display for important information.
Still, most of the time you have this problem, it's rude people, so no amount of technology can cure that.
As was mine. The membrane keyboard, the little thermal printer, saving programs to my tape deck (I didn't have the offical Sinclair tape storage devide; I had to use my own tape recorder). I had used the TRS-80 Model 1 we had at school before and was astounded when about 10 Commodore Pet computers made their way there a short time later. I still remember writing a program in Basic to solve the Kinight's Tour! But the Sinclar was mine, though within a year it was relaced by a Commodore 64. I eventually gave the Sinclair to my high school math teacher. I hope it's still working...
It's even simpler than anyone gives it credit for: it's an outgrowth of competitiveness. Flame wars occur usually because two people, polar opposites on an issue, come to loggerheads over the issue and begin lobbing verbal grenades at each other. This leads to bystanders joining in the fray and pretty soon even people who have no idea what started it or what it's about are firing their ill-thought sarcasm at others like a TOT artillery barrage.
I saw it on USENET for years before the modern incarnation of the Internet as Web came along. It's like rams at rutting time; they will bang their heads together heedless of the damage.
Actually, their latest addition to the prize bonanza is a trip to China for 10 years in a "re-education" camp... Lovely accomodations with 5000 of your closest friends, all the rice you can eat, and to finance the whole thing you make cheap leather wallets and kids toys.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't public companies supposed to archive all their corporate e-mails anyway, under Sarbanes-Oxley? Megacorps aren't going to use this service anyway, of course, but I can see it being useful for a mid-sized company to be able to say, "Yeah, Google has all of it."
And who's to say that when the government decides it needs to read your emails, that Google won't just hand them over? I wouldn't touch this with a ten-foot pole, business or personal.
Amazon.com has appointed a new chief executive, David Tennenhouse, 48, for its A9.com search unit after the former chief, Udi Manber, was coaxed away by Google to become the search giant's vice president of engineering.
Here chief execuuuutive, gooood chief execuuuutive... come to Google... we've got some nice carrots for youuuuuuuu... C'mon, that's it...
Re:The e-mail I sent to the editor was ignored.
on
No Time Travel, Sorry
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This guy is a pseudo-scientific moonbat.
I agree. I ran across this in my searching on this guy: Einstein was dumb. ahahaha... AHAHAHA... ahahaha... To quote: Now a whole new generation of notorious crackpots in high places have
jumped in lunatic Godel's time travel banwagon. Examples are Kip
"wormhole" Thorne, Stephen "black hole" Hawking, Brian "superstring"
Greene, Michio Kaku (Mucho Kuckoo), etc... ahahaha... AHAHAHA...
ahahaha...
I can deduce the following from this article:
This guy does not have an advanced degree in Physics or Astronomy
He watches too much Dexter's Laboratory
Time to call the nice men in the white coats with the truck with the padding in the back...
If that's the case, why haven't they switched already?
It was 3:27 am and Gerry was staring at the little screen, held lovingly, in the palm of his hand. "Oh sweet giver of information!" he breathed, watching the tiny print roll by on his screen. And then, without warning, the characters on the screen began to change, to morph into indecipherable icons. Promptly, the screen went blank, and then new words appeared... "SYSTEM SHUTDOWN. UPGRADE COMMENCING. ESTIMATED DOWNTIME: 17 Hours." Gerry's eyes went wide, his palms began to sweat, his hands trembling. He threw back his head and screamed "Noooooooooooooooooooooo...!!!"
AOL and Yahoo said the program, which is being offered through a company called Goodmail Systems, will target banks, online retailers and other groups that send large amounts of e-mail.
...if all it did was affect those sending millions of spam messages, but instead it picks on the little guy, who even at such a low rate, can't afford to send out too many mailings. This will hurt non-profits and charitites the most. And it won't stop the spammers anyway; they'll forge the ids/addresses of "good" email customers and send their mail pouring through anyway.
Do you expect any direct competition from Google in the near future? Would you be surprised in Google made a bid for Wikipedia, given Google's propensity for snapping up useful companies and their technology? Would you say "no" if they offered you a large compensation package and the promise of continued autonomy over it?
No, he's going for people using his trademark maliciously...attacking spyware in the way that is easiest and best for him. Certainly this stirs more pots than just me running AdAware on my Windows box, no?
But then again, perhaps he Bit off more than he can chew...
At least until somebody shot at your gigantic air-filled target...
Given that it would be helium-filled, not air-filled, even so you'd be hard-pressed to destroy an airship outright. Shooting through the fabric walls accomplishes nothing but putting holes in them, and given that your typical airship encompasses a tremendous volume with low pressure at near sea-level, the result would be a very slow deflation (unlike letting go of a party balloon and watching it zip around the room). Also, if it is semi-rigid, it would have an internal structure capable of maintaining integrity even if it lost lift. If they can pull it off, it might be a boon to the military. There's a tiny bit of extra information about it in Wikipedia.
Just like all types of software, spyware will eventually evolve into new forms... assuming you believe in that evolution stuff... it may be declining now, but it will eventually rise in a new form.
But what is more important to a home user? His or her own personal files, or a bunch of system files? I can answer that question for you: the pictures of little Johnny's first day of school mean a whole lot more to a user than the system files that keep the system running. Of course, they should make backups-- but wasn't Linux supposed to be secure? So why should they backup? Isn't Linux immune to viruses and what not? Isn't that what the Linux world has been telling them?
It begs the question, why would you store things like personal pictures, music, and such in your home directory rather than on some other media? If you're expecting nothing bad to happen, no matter what operating system you choose to use, then you're being foolish.
Besides, I don't think the Linux community has been stating that Linux is "bulletproof" but more that it's better than Windows at security. As the number of Windows-related vulnerabilities increases, this will become more important to the home user, who isn't going to to worry just about the destruction of their personal files, but the taking of their personal data.
The wild card in all of this will be whether big, successful tech companies get behind the upstarts. Linux hit prime time only when IBM, Oracle, and others got behind it, rewriting their software to make it compatible and convincing worried CIOs that it was robust and reliable enough to entrust their business to it.
A company such as SAP (SAP) could be pivotal. The German software giant is locked in an applications war with Oracle, but the bulk of companies running SAP applications run them on Oracle databases. So even when SAP wins an application deal, it's often making money for its archrival. That doesn't sit well with ultracompetitive SAP, which already has a burgeoning partnership with MySQL. Closer ties there could mean more SAP applications on MySQL databases. Elsewhere, Red Hat (RHAT) has endorsed both MySQL and Postgres, as did Sun Microsystems (SUNW) last November.
So Oracle has now become Microsoft, pretty much resting on its laurels and claiming that its users are more than happy with them, while all-the-while, their users are shopping for cheaper and better solutions. If SAP were to out-and-out declare they like MySQL better and shift most of their DB usage there, Oracle would have a very large amount of egg on their face.
Let's face it: when you become the dominant leader of your industry, you tend to forget what got you there and you take it for granted you will always be there. I've used Oracle, MySQL, and Sybase, and I find the latter two to be a lot easier to work with than Oracle. Oracle is trading solid dependability for tricks and gimmicks, and in the end, no one wants to pay that kind of money for things they don't need or won't use.
Of course Google will be competing with PayPal, even if their service isn't remotely the same. Google will trust that its name and its success in the global marketplace will draw people to its pay service, draining PayPal in the process.
Will they be successful? Short-term, yes, long-term, no. It comes down to this: Google is trying to do too much. Rather than expand at a consistant rate and consolidate their power at every step, they seem to be trying to be everywhere at once. Don't let that stock price fool you; it can fall (and did last week!) as easily as it can go up, and with it, the fortunes of the company.
From ZDNet Asia: The flaw was disclosed on Monday, when Winamp maker Nullsoft, a division of America Online, released an update to fix it. The company posted version 5.13 of Winamp, while Secunia and other security companies issued alerts about the problem. Secunia rated the issue "extremely critical," its highest rating.
Flaw detected and removed. New version of Winamp out. Get the new version. Protected. Not much more difficult than that. Shouldn't there a be a "Software Vulnerabilties" section to Slashdot, where these things could be posted?
Google comes up with the PageRank system, basically counting the number of links to a particular page from all the other pages on the Internet, and they are shocked (shocked!) to find that the system is being abused.
From Google's Technology Page: PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value.
Democratic? Call this Troll-bait, but how is the Internet democratic? I get a million friends to put a link to some worthless page on all our sites and suddenly the PageRank for that site jumps. And how democratic is it when Google "decides" that someone has violated the spirit of the system and shuts them out? More like autocratic.
Frankly Google is hoist upon its own petard for this one -- you can't come up with some system and then be scandalized to find that people are going to try and abuse it. Insurance companies, public aid programs, and computer voting companies could tell you that!
Hmmm... heck, just a website were people could complain and enter a license plate would be good enough. If the site sees the same plate several times, they should intervene. Mind you, the complaint needs to be verified to reduce potential abuse.
Here in Joisy, you can report people by dialing #77 on your cell phone... 'course we prefer the old-fashioned method of following the joik home and havin' a little "chat" with 'em...
Slashdot Mirror
The same can be said for online banking, email correspondence, chat, IM, or P2P. The fact is you have to be smart about who you let have access to what data. It's hard enough protecting your security in just the above arenas, without letting an outside group have access to your hard-drive. Another service I don't think I'll be touching anytime soon.
Three words: Star Trek Communicator
Instant contact. No video (do you really need to see the person you're talking to?). Able to carry on a normal conversation (instead of bursts of acronyms, abbreviations, and hacked-up vocabulary). Portable. Interfaceable with a computer. And best of all, only a couple of centuries away!
And there you have it. There will be enough content/software out there that doesn't use or fouls up the watermark system that it will be essentially useless. It's just like DRM; consumers will rise up against anyone using a system which compromises their ability to do what they want to do, when they want to do it. At least, that's the hope anyway.
I didn't say this idea would actually work, just that this is one of the liklier routes that would be taken. We all know that anything one programmer can create, another can crack. In the end, this is futility and the music industry is too blind to see it.
...Microsoft trying to bury Netscape in the browser war. But Netscape eventually spawned Firefox, which now stands to hit Microsoft where it hurts. AMD may be pushed to the brink by Intel, but once it's clear that they might die, they will suddenly find themselves free to follow new directions. Intel may be sowing the seeds of its own destruction.
You code media players to detect the watermark (which would have to be in a standardized format) and refuse to play anything that does not contain the watermark. Conversely, ripping programs will not rip anything containing the watermark, making it harder to copy the source. You wouldn't have to worry so much about removal programs, as programs that would "fake" the watermark, basically couterfeiting programs. Of course, those would pop up fifteen minutes later.
Better yet, a "Do Not Disturb" feature, that allows you to keep the phone on, see who's calling, but not have to answer it. If the same number tries to call more than once, send it driectly to voice mail and have the phone note the number and times of the calls and display it actively. That way you could have your phone on silent but watch the display for important information.
Still, most of the time you have this problem, it's rude people, so no amount of technology can cure that.
As was mine. The membrane keyboard, the little thermal printer, saving programs to my tape deck (I didn't have the offical Sinclair tape storage devide; I had to use my own tape recorder). I had used the TRS-80 Model 1 we had at school before and was astounded when about 10 Commodore Pet computers made their way there a short time later. I still remember writing a program in Basic to solve the Kinight's Tour! But the Sinclar was mine, though within a year it was relaced by a Commodore 64. I eventually gave the Sinclair to my high school math teacher. I hope it's still working...
It's even simpler than anyone gives it credit for: it's an outgrowth of competitiveness. Flame wars occur usually because two people, polar opposites on an issue, come to loggerheads over the issue and begin lobbing verbal grenades at each other. This leads to bystanders joining in the fray and pretty soon even people who have no idea what started it or what it's about are firing their ill-thought sarcasm at others like a TOT artillery barrage.
I saw it on USENET for years before the modern incarnation of the Internet as Web came along. It's like rams at rutting time; they will bang their heads together heedless of the damage.
Actually, their latest addition to the prize bonanza is a trip to China for 10 years in a "re-education" camp... Lovely accomodations with 5000 of your closest friends, all the rice you can eat, and to finance the whole thing you make cheap leather wallets and kids toys.
And who's to say that when the government decides it needs to read your emails, that Google won't just hand them over? I wouldn't touch this with a ten-foot pole, business or personal.
Here chief execuuuutive, gooood chief execuuuutive... come to Google... we've got some nice carrots for youuuuuuuu... C'mon, that's it...
I agree. I ran across this in my searching on this guy: Einstein was dumb. ahahaha... AHAHAHA... ahahaha... To quote: Now a whole new generation of notorious crackpots in high places have jumped in lunatic Godel's time travel banwagon. Examples are Kip "wormhole" Thorne, Stephen "black hole" Hawking, Brian "superstring" Greene, Michio Kaku (Mucho Kuckoo), etc... ahahaha... AHAHAHA... ahahaha...
I can deduce the following from this article:
- This guy does not have an advanced degree in Physics or Astronomy
- He watches too much Dexter's Laboratory
Time to call the nice men in the white coats with the truck with the padding in the back...It was 3:27 am and Gerry was staring at the little screen, held lovingly, in the palm of his hand. "Oh sweet giver of information!" he breathed, watching the tiny print roll by on his screen. And then, without warning, the characters on the screen began to change, to morph into indecipherable icons. Promptly, the screen went blank, and then new words appeared... "SYSTEM SHUTDOWN. UPGRADE COMMENCING. ESTIMATED DOWNTIME: 17 Hours." Gerry's eyes went wide, his palms began to sweat, his hands trembling. He threw back his head and screamed "Noooooooooooooooooooooo...!!!"
That's why.
...if all it did was affect those sending millions of spam messages, but instead it picks on the little guy, who even at such a low rate, can't afford to send out too many mailings. This will hurt non-profits and charitites the most. And it won't stop the spammers anyway; they'll forge the ids/addresses of "good" email customers and send their mail pouring through anyway.
Do you expect any direct competition from Google in the near future? Would you be surprised in Google made a bid for Wikipedia, given Google's propensity for snapping up useful companies and their technology? Would you say "no" if they offered you a large compensation package and the promise of continued autonomy over it?
But then again, perhaps he Bit off more than he can chew...
Given that it would be helium-filled, not air-filled, even so you'd be hard-pressed to destroy an airship outright. Shooting through the fabric walls accomplishes nothing but putting holes in them, and given that your typical airship encompasses a tremendous volume with low pressure at near sea-level, the result would be a very slow deflation (unlike letting go of a party balloon and watching it zip around the room). Also, if it is semi-rigid, it would have an internal structure capable of maintaining integrity even if it lost lift. If they can pull it off, it might be a boon to the military. There's a tiny bit of extra information about it in Wikipedia.
Just like all types of software, spyware will eventually evolve into new forms... assuming you believe in that evolution stuff... it may be declining now, but it will eventually rise in a new form.
It begs the question, why would you store things like personal pictures, music, and such in your home directory rather than on some other media? If you're expecting nothing bad to happen, no matter what operating system you choose to use, then you're being foolish.
Besides, I don't think the Linux community has been stating that Linux is "bulletproof" but more that it's better than Windows at security. As the number of Windows-related vulnerabilities increases, this will become more important to the home user, who isn't going to to worry just about the destruction of their personal files, but the taking of their personal data.
A company such as SAP (SAP) could be pivotal. The German software giant is locked in an applications war with Oracle, but the bulk of companies running SAP applications run them on Oracle databases. So even when SAP wins an application deal, it's often making money for its archrival. That doesn't sit well with ultracompetitive SAP, which already has a burgeoning partnership with MySQL. Closer ties there could mean more SAP applications on MySQL databases. Elsewhere, Red Hat (RHAT) has endorsed both MySQL and Postgres, as did Sun Microsystems (SUNW) last November.
So Oracle has now become Microsoft, pretty much resting on its laurels and claiming that its users are more than happy with them, while all-the-while, their users are shopping for cheaper and better solutions. If SAP were to out-and-out declare they like MySQL better and shift most of their DB usage there, Oracle would have a very large amount of egg on their face.
Let's face it: when you become the dominant leader of your industry, you tend to forget what got you there and you take it for granted you will always be there. I've used Oracle, MySQL, and Sybase, and I find the latter two to be a lot easier to work with than Oracle. Oracle is trading solid dependability for tricks and gimmicks, and in the end, no one wants to pay that kind of money for things they don't need or won't use.
Of course Google will be competing with PayPal, even if their service isn't remotely the same. Google will trust that its name and its success in the global marketplace will draw people to its pay service, draining PayPal in the process.
Will they be successful? Short-term, yes, long-term, no. It comes down to this: Google is trying to do too much. Rather than expand at a consistant rate and consolidate their power at every step, they seem to be trying to be everywhere at once. Don't let that stock price fool you; it can fall (and did last week!) as easily as it can go up, and with it, the fortunes of the company.
As usual, nothing to see here...
From ZDNet Asia: The flaw was disclosed on Monday, when Winamp maker Nullsoft, a division of America Online, released an update to fix it. The company posted version 5.13 of Winamp, while Secunia and other security companies issued alerts about the problem. Secunia rated the issue "extremely critical," its highest rating.
Flaw detected and removed. New version of Winamp out. Get the new version. Protected. Not much more difficult than that. Shouldn't there a be a "Software Vulnerabilties" section to Slashdot, where these things could be posted?
Google comes up with the PageRank system, basically counting the number of links to a particular page from all the other pages on the Internet, and they are shocked (shocked!) to find that the system is being abused.
From Google's Technology Page: PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value.
Democratic? Call this Troll-bait, but how is the Internet democratic? I get a million friends to put a link to some worthless page on all our sites and suddenly the PageRank for that site jumps. And how democratic is it when Google "decides" that someone has violated the spirit of the system and shuts them out? More like autocratic.
Frankly Google is hoist upon its own petard for this one -- you can't come up with some system and then be scandalized to find that people are going to try and abuse it. Insurance companies, public aid programs, and computer voting companies could tell you that!
Here in Joisy, you can report people by dialing #77 on your cell phone... 'course we prefer the old-fashioned method of following the joik home and havin' a little "chat" with 'em...