I've had my TiVo for over 4 years now. I love it to death. I think that TiVo did a hell of a lot of things right. Some quick examples:
1. Unlike, say, Microsoft, they never discouraged their users from hacking their boxes. As a result, a huge community of TiVo hackers emerged (see http://www.tivocommunity.com/). I upgraded my TiVo's 30 gig hard drive to two 120's, and installed a cachecard/network card combo from 9th Tee, which means I can do fun tricks like scheduling shows and season passes from the road, or watching shows in my bedroom on my XBOX.
2. Really great support. I've only had to call TiVo a couple of times, both for channel lineup issues, but they were always extremely friendly and helpful over the phone. For example, after I moved into my new house, I realized that Adelphia had just upgraded the cable in my area, and TiVo didn't have the lineup yet. So I called support, and the next day, TiVo called me back to tell me that my lineup was added. Simply awesome.
3. Choosing Linux. When I telnet into my TiVo, I get a bash shell. I've installed an ftp server, web server (TiVoWeb), and even installed cron. How cool is that? Plus, this excellent decision has led to new software being developed exclusively for the TiVo (such as a caller id display that uses the TiVo's built-in modem, so you can see who's calling without getting up off the couch). Simply brilliant.
4. The interface. They obviously put a ton of work into it, and it really shows. It just kicks so much ass.
Now obviously, they dropped the ball in a couple of areas. The Comcast merger was just a more recent one. I think these are the two biggies:
1. I think that their biggest problem has always been slow adoption; as long as I've had the thing, I've been seeing ads pop up on TiVo Central giving me hot deals on new TiVo units, which I'm supposed to share with my friends and family. Great, I can save Dad $50 on his new unit. But if they really expect me to convince Dad that he can't live without a season pass on those Seinfeld reruns he loves so much, then they should be giving me the 50 smackers. I'd probably have 10 people signed up under me right now if I got some sort of compensation for it. (By the way, click here [freeminimacs.com] to get a free Mini Mac!):-)
2. Too expensive. The hardware and service together really do cost too much, unless you got in early like I did (back when lifetime service was $200). They should do what my damn cell phone company does: Knock the hardware down to like $99, and make me pay a very affordable $9.95 a month. If I try to cancel before 2 years are up, hit me with some obscene early termination fee. Yes, I hate it when cell phone companies do this, but that's how they stay in business. Besides, it's not like I'd be foolish enough to cancel my TiVo service anyway. TiVo is heroin. So far, I've paid $499 for TiVo and lifetime service, so TiVo won't make any more money off of me. If they were using my above plan, I would have paid in $589 so far, with more coming in every month.
I would really hate to see TiVo go. I hope they don't. But I suspect that even if the service dies, thanks to the openness of their hardware platform, someone (maybe me) will figure out how to write a script to pull show data off of Yahoo! TV or something. And with Microsoft and MythTV and several others entering the PVR market, there's no question that TiVo's invention is here to stay.
It is really great that TiVo is going to offer ads our way, thats the way it should work, and ultimately, lead to better advertising.
I've itched about this before as well - Thunderbird very well could blow away Outlook in many organizations, but the CALENDAR *SUCKS* - Sorry, Sunbird sucks more ass than anything that has even sucked ass before. The last time I tried it, it was incapable of recognizing its own calendar files, instead they were opening as plain old text in Mozilla.
Here's my idea: Ditch flippin Chatzilla. Put a lot of effort towards the calendar.
The Calendar is one of the big reasons (that I have found) that people stick with Microsoft Outlook.
It doesn't even have to be the whiz-bang calendar like Outlook has, but it'd be nice if it would actually work worth a crap.
some spyware installs with "legit" apps MOST seems to come in through the browser through one of the following:
1: users clicking yes blindly 2: users clicking yes becuase the system makes it extremely hard for them not to by overlapping windows or by reloading the page when they click cancel (yes i have seen this done) 3: security holes
while the spyware companies themselves may officially frown on the latter two there is no doubt that they are being used by less scrupulous sites on commission per install.
another problem is that the antivirus companies won't treat spyware like trojans (possiblly because they are scared of legal issues). a good on access scanner should be able to prevent any known shitware (viruses trojans spyware etc) from being run in the first place.
IMHO, it's only a "good thing" from a relative standpoint. Sure, it's "good" that MS realizes spyware is enough of a problem that they decide to buy out someone who has already been working hard to solve the problem. (From a few recent comments I read over on ArsTechnica after they posted a spyware-testing article, Giant's product is supposedly quite good. In fact, arguably the best available right now, of the non-freeware spyware removers.)
As the parent poster pointed out though, this stuff isn't even an issue for non-Windows users. I'm using my PowerMac G5 tower right now, and it's rather nice not to have to wait while my anti-virus package loads up (further cluttering up a crowded system tray), and then having to wait while the thing does its automatic updates every day or two. No spyware/malware worries either. Just boot up and go....
I do PC on-site service calls for a living (Mac too, on the odd occasion we get them), and I can honestly say that virus/spyware issues generate the vast majority of my income right now. From that angle, I guess I should be happy there's such a big problem. But somehow I'm not... I often tell my customers about the Macintosh alternative (both the good and the bad), and at least 40% of the time or so, they decide it really sounds like it's "right up their alley" and they consider one for their next system purchase.
Call me crazy or whatever... but after 14 years of working with computers, I just feel like it should be as enjoyable an experience for people as possible. Using as much as 30% of your CPU time running background tasks like firewalls, virus scanners and anti-spyware packages seems so unnecessary....
Web, a Distraction at Work
on
Hooked On The Web
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It is a non-issue to realize that most of the modern day losses in productivity come from distracted workers using the internet for personal pleasure rather than company projects. This distraction effort splits the focus of the individual and causes a decrease in the finite amount of cognitive processing ability given to any one task. Marijuana on the other hand results in modification of the reward pathway system in the brain. So there is an actually psychochemical difference in the brain which leads to addiction. Between the two, marijuana actually modifies the brain negatively while email only distracts. I really wish these people had taken the time to realize this before putting out a sensationalist piece of work.
I build Linux and Apple clusters for biotech, pharma and academic clients. I needed to announce this because clusters designed for lifesci work tend to have different architecture priorities than say clusters used for CFD or weather prediction:) Suffice it to say that bioclusters are rate limited by file I/O issues and are tuned for compute farm style batch computing rather than full on beowulf style parallel processing.
I've used *many* different platforms to address different requirements, scale out plans and physical/environmental constraints.
The best whitebox vendor that I have used is Rackable Systems (http://www.rackable.com/ [rackable.com] . They truly understand cooling and airflow issues, have great 1U half-depth chassis that let you get near blade density with inexpensive mass market server mainboards and they have great DC power distribution kit for larger deployments.
For general purpose 1U "pizza box" style rackmounts I tend to use the Sun V20z's when Opterons are called for but IBM and HP both have great dual-Xeon and dual-AMD 1U platforms. For me the Sun Opterons have tended to have the best price/performance numbers from a "big name" vendor.
Two years ago I was building tons of clusters out of Dell hardware. Now nobody I know is even considering Dell. For me they are no longer on my radar -- their endless pretend games with "considering" AMD based solutions is getting tired and until they start shipping some Opteron based products they not going to be a player of any significant merit.
The best blade systems I have seen are no longer made -- they were the systems from RLX.
What you need to understand about blade servers is that the biggest real savings you get with the added price comes from the reduction in administrative burden and ease of operation. The physical form factor and environmental savings are nice but often not as important as the operational/admin/IT savings.
Because of this, people evaluating blade systems should place a huge priority on the quality of the management, monitoring and provisioning software provided by the blade vendor. This is why RLX blades were better than any other vendor even big players like HP, IBM and Dell.
That said though, the quality of whitebox blade systems is usually pretty bad -- especially concerning how they handle cooling and airflow. I've seen one bad deployment where the blade rack needed 12 inch ducting brought into the base just to force enough cool air into the rack to keep the mainboards from tripping their emergency temp shutdown probes. If forced to choose a blade solution I'd first grade on the quality of the management software and then on the quality of the vendor. I am very comfortable purchasing 1U rackmounts from whitebox vendors but I'd probably not purchase a blade system from one. Interestingly enough I just got a Penguin blade chasssis installed and will be playing with it next week to see how it does.
If you don't have a datacenter, special air conditioning or a dedicated IT staff then I highly recommend checking out OrionMultisystems. They sell 12-node desktop and 96-node deskside clusters that ship from the factory fully integrated and best of all they run off a single 110v electrical. They may not win on pure performance when going head to head against dedicated 1U servers but Orion by far wins the prize for "most amount of compute power you can squeeze out of a single electrical outlet..."
Sure they should have to. The way they let spyware on your computer should be a crime.
The worst spyway is not even a minimally legitimate commercial venture-- it is theft, run by international criminals and organized crime. So-called "legitimate" spyware and adware have conditioned people to think that a windows box encrusted with this shyte is normal.
The newest stuff is delivered by a trojan downloader, that also installs a keylogger--or several. The browser hijackers they install do one--or several things--to send you to their fake websites so they can steal your credit card, or even your identity:
-- They take over your HOSTS file so that legitimate urls are translated into THEIR IP addresses, not the real ones.
-- They add THEIR fake banking, paypal, amazon, etc. sites to your "trusted sites" list.
-- They may even change your proxy settings to accomplish or reinforce the same thing.
If you try to clean this crap off with AdAware or Spybot S&D, the trojan downloader--which also disable your AV software and/or Spybot--will NOT detect the trojan downloader, and it will reinstall the malware faster than you can clean it.
Some of these were spread the old fashioned way-- email attachments. Others used the Windows RPC 445/tpc buffer overflow exploit, or the latest IE IFRAME exploit, or one of the 16 other exploits out there for IE alone that MS has not patched.
This shit crossed a line about six months ago from being a commercially-oriented nusiance to being outright theft, run by the same criminals that run phishing scams.
I clean up PCs as a sideline, and the trend is very ominous-- the utility of the PC as a productive tool is threatened, as is the integrity and trust of the Internet.
Thanks, Microsoft. I'd like to see the Dept. of Homeland security take your ass to court for criminal negligence.
I for one welcome Google's approach to adverts - it's a hell of a lot better than the completely untargetted, very annoying Flash, animated GIFs and popups that other advertisers use. Whats more, Google's targetted text ads are sometimes actually useful.
Everyone complains about adverts but obviously don't think about the economics - web sites have to fund themselves somehow, so either you're going to have to pay directly or put up with the ads. IMHO ads designed to be annoying and untargetted can be blocked without any problem but Google style ads are reasonably non-intrusive and targetted so you should allow them - you want to push the advertisers in the direction of sensible unobtrusive ads rather than forcing the sites to close down.
I prefer to store data on my own computer, for privacy reasons. I will not use these services for sensitive, private data, because I do not know who else has access to said data. And I see no point in using their service only for non-sensitive needs, while returning to my existing solutions for private matters.
I doubt their service offers anything beyond what is already possible with a solid Linux or BSD setup, while costing far more and lacking the security I've come to expect.
The only groups these wiretaps hurt are the law-abiding citizens. The smart (read: dangerous) criminals have it all figured out-- Prepaid cell phones.
Pre-paid cell phones are literally disposable, one-use toys to the bad guys. You don't even need a fake ID, just cash, and not all that much at that. How can they tap your phone when you use a different phone for each call? The best they could do is tap all the pre-paid phones and listen to every conversation out there -- good luck with that! (wanna bet the NSA is big into voice recognition?)
I meant that there is an assumption when one uses encryption that it must be because there is "something to hide." I know they need to get a warrant but it doesn't change the fact that the fact I use encryption might be used to infer my guilt.
Remember that we're all presumed innocent. To take an example of encryption, just because I'm using encryption does not mean that I am plotting nefarious schemes against my fellow citizens. I may be discussing confidential business things, for example. Y'know, dare I say it, I might actually work from home in an effort to not drive my car around and burn gas, hurt the environment, etc., etc.
These sorts of mistakes can be dangerous. Imagine the above example--I'm some bigshot business-guy. I own a publicly traded company. The FBI inadvertently taps my phone and learns that someone at the company I work for has just invented something that will make the company a ton of money. Do you really think those agents aren't going to call up their stock-brokers and say, "BUY! BUY! BUY!" (Or, assume the other direction, if you prefer)
Frankly, yes. I want to make it difficult for the government to wiretap it's citizens. I want somebody to look at the evidence that has been accumulated and act as my representative to say, "Hey, wait. Just because he encrypts his phone calls doesn't mean he's a terrorist." I want somebody to second-guess these guys.
The story of the gutsy cop who goes against procedure to nab the bad guys before they enact their evil deeds is a great movie. But it's not real life--remember, in most cases we get the see the bad guys planning their acts in the movies so we know who the bad guy is. Reality is not that cut-and-dried.
In short, I'm more worried about the government abusing it's power than of the terrorists blowing up a building. That happens alot more often.
From the BBC story, this sounds grossly unfair to Dr. Hwang.
According to the BBC, Dr. Hwang did not attempt to violate the policy, he did not even know about the fact that the women donated, and it is clear that he wasn't trying to circumvent the policy either. It sounds to me like he did nothing wrong.
Yes, he did lie to Nature about it, but I find his justification acceptable. While there are some ethical considerations that go into publishing a journal, Nature has no business conducting ethics investigations, and this particular aspect of the experiment had no bearing on the scientific validity of the results.
To me, this story mostly reflects poorly on Nature--attempting to pry into areas that really are none of their business--and the Korean research establishment.
Hats off to Dr. Hwang for being willing to take the blame for something he didn't do. I suspect that his motivation is to keep human cloning research going, and he knows that the media and politicans would continue a feeding frenzy over this as long as he stays in his job.
Because clearly, Blackberries only exist so that your bosses boss can send you an email with a sig at the bottom that says "sent from Mr. Big's Blackberry (while rolling down the hgwy in his Z4).
But seriously, the company I work at recently yanked all blackberry devices and replaced them with Treo 600 and treo 650's.
the fact that you dont need any "special" software to access email and has the capability of viewing doc and excel attachments was the death spike for the blackberry here at this company.
and honestly, the treo's have much better sounding audio for phone calls than even the latest blackberry's did.
This is a big deal. You don't find raw metal much on Mars; most of it is tied up with oxygen. Raw metal has many implications: if it is common, it can be a great source of base building. If the metals are rare on Earth as well, and they're common on Mars, they could provide a potential export source. If it is a meteor, and they're common, it could affect our models of how often Mars gets struck by meteors. Since the rock isn't buried, it could provide clues as to how long it's been on Mars, how fast Meridiani Planum is eroding, and give us dataon how metals wear over time on Mars.
Any time you find something you've never found before, it's a big deal. Honestly, to people who've been following the mission, it looked like Opportunity was pretty much wrapping things up. It just left a geological treasure trove and there isn't much more "on the map", so to speak. It's neat to see it continue making nice finds.
Of course, this is very similar to the movie industry. If the movie got rated NC-17, it wouldn't be shown in most mainstream theaters, and thus it gets edited until it gets an R rating. When a movie that is directed at the 12-15 year old market gets an R rating, they usually try to get it down to PG-13 so as to attract more of their intended audience. What is so wrong with this? If you rely too much on the rating system to make decisions for your children, you have more problems then how good a job the ESRB is doing.
My question is, what do the parents want? Of course the ratings are toothless. They're just a guide. The "Mature" rating tells parents that a game labeled "M" is considered by the ESRB to be potentially inappropriate for people under 17. The ESRB is basically saying: "If you're in doubt, and your kid is under 17, don't allow this game in your home." If a parent is really in conniptions over video-game sex, violence, whatever, then they only need to exert minimal effort to convert their fears into action.
For parents that care to be more nuanced and/or involved, there are strategy guides in every game store that present the content of games in great detail. And there's also gamefaqs.com, which is free and convenient. Parents don't have to be gamers to avoid being totally oblivious. Now, I certainly don't expect every parent to be this savvy from the get-go. But the parents who claim to give a shit could educate themselves with what I think is a reasonable amount of time and effort.
But no, let's legislate the fuck out of the video-game industry because Hillary Clinton is running for president.
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I've had my TiVo for over 4 years now. I love it to death. I think that TiVo did a hell of a lot of things right. Some quick examples:
1. Unlike, say, Microsoft, they never discouraged their users from hacking their boxes. As a result, a huge community of TiVo hackers emerged (see http://www.tivocommunity.com/). I upgraded my TiVo's 30 gig hard drive to two 120's, and installed a cachecard/network card combo from 9th Tee, which means I can do fun tricks like scheduling shows and season passes from the road, or watching shows in my bedroom on my XBOX.
2. Really great support. I've only had to call TiVo a couple of times, both for channel lineup issues, but they were always extremely friendly and helpful over the phone. For example, after I moved into my new house, I realized that Adelphia had just upgraded the cable in my area, and TiVo didn't have the lineup yet. So I called support, and the next day, TiVo called me back to tell me that my lineup was added. Simply awesome.
3. Choosing Linux. When I telnet into my TiVo, I get a bash shell. I've installed an ftp server, web server (TiVoWeb), and even installed cron. How cool is that? Plus, this excellent decision has led to new software being developed exclusively for the TiVo (such as a caller id display that uses the TiVo's built-in modem, so you can see who's calling without getting up off the couch). Simply brilliant.
4. The interface. They obviously put a ton of work into it, and it really shows. It just kicks so much ass.
Now obviously, they dropped the ball in a couple of areas. The Comcast merger was just a more recent one. I think these are the two biggies:
1. I think that their biggest problem has always been slow adoption; as long as I've had the thing, I've been seeing ads pop up on TiVo Central giving me hot deals on new TiVo units, which I'm supposed to share with my friends and family. Great, I can save Dad $50 on his new unit. But if they really expect me to convince Dad that he can't live without a season pass on those Seinfeld reruns he loves so much, then they should be giving me the 50 smackers. I'd probably have 10 people signed up under me right now if I got some sort of compensation for it. (By the way, click here [freeminimacs.com] to get a free Mini Mac!):-)
2. Too expensive. The hardware and service together really do cost too much, unless you got in early like I did (back when lifetime service was $200). They should do what my damn cell phone company does: Knock the hardware down to like $99, and make me pay a very affordable $9.95 a month. If I try to cancel before 2 years are up, hit me with some obscene early termination fee. Yes, I hate it when cell phone companies do this, but that's how they stay in business. Besides, it's not like I'd be foolish enough to cancel my TiVo service anyway. TiVo is heroin. So far, I've paid $499 for TiVo and lifetime service, so TiVo won't make any more money off of me. If they were using my above plan, I would have paid in $589 so far, with more coming in every month.
I would really hate to see TiVo go. I hope they don't. But I suspect that even if the service dies, thanks to the openness of their hardware platform, someone (maybe me) will figure out how to write a script to pull show data off of Yahoo! TV or something. And with Microsoft and MythTV and several others entering the PVR market, there's no question that TiVo's invention is here to stay.
It is really great that TiVo is going to offer ads our way, thats the way it should work, and ultimately, lead to better advertising.
I've itched about this before as well - Thunderbird very well could blow away Outlook in many organizations, but the CALENDAR *SUCKS* - Sorry, Sunbird sucks more ass than anything that has even sucked ass before. The last time I tried it, it was incapable of recognizing its own calendar files, instead they were opening as plain old text in Mozilla.
Here's my idea: Ditch flippin Chatzilla. Put a lot of effort towards the calendar.
The Calendar is one of the big reasons (that I have found) that people stick with Microsoft Outlook.
It doesn't even have to be the whiz-bang calendar like Outlook has, but it'd be nice if it would actually work worth a crap.
some spyware installs with "legit" apps MOST seems to come in through the browser through one of the following:
1: users clicking yes blindly
2: users clicking yes becuase the system makes it extremely hard for them not to by overlapping windows or by reloading the page when they click cancel (yes i have seen this done)
3: security holes
while the spyware companies themselves may officially frown on the latter two there is no doubt that they are being used by less scrupulous sites on commission per install.
another problem is that the antivirus companies won't treat spyware like trojans (possiblly because they are scared of legal issues). a good on access scanner should be able to prevent any known shitware (viruses trojans spyware etc) from being run in the first place.
IMHO, it's only a "good thing" from a relative standpoint. Sure, it's "good" that MS realizes spyware is enough of a problem that they decide to buy out someone who has already been working hard to solve the problem. (From a few recent comments I read over on ArsTechnica after they posted a spyware-testing article, Giant's product is supposedly quite good. In fact, arguably the best available right now, of the non-freeware spyware removers.)
As the parent poster pointed out though, this stuff isn't even an issue for non-Windows users. I'm using my PowerMac G5 tower right now, and it's rather nice not to have to wait while my anti-virus package loads up (further cluttering up a crowded system tray), and then having to wait while the thing does its automatic updates every day or two. No spyware/malware worries either. Just boot up and go....
I do PC on-site service calls for a living (Mac too, on the odd occasion we get them), and I can honestly say that virus/spyware issues generate the vast majority of my income right now. From that angle, I guess I should be happy there's such a big problem. But somehow I'm not... I often tell my customers about the Macintosh alternative (both the good and the bad), and at least 40% of the time or so, they decide it really sounds like it's "right up their alley" and they consider one for their next system purchase.
Call me crazy or whatever... but after 14 years of working with computers, I just feel like it should be as enjoyable an experience for people as possible. Using as much as 30% of your CPU time running background tasks like firewalls, virus scanners and anti-spyware packages seems so unnecessary....
It is a non-issue to realize that most of the modern day losses in productivity come from distracted workers using the internet for personal pleasure rather than company projects. This distraction effort splits the focus of the individual and causes a decrease in the finite amount of cognitive processing ability given to any one task. Marijuana on the other hand results in modification of the reward pathway system in the brain. So there is an actually psychochemical difference in the brain which leads to addiction. Between the two, marijuana actually modifies the brain negatively while email only distracts. I really wish these people had taken the time to realize this before putting out a sensationalist piece of work.
I build Linux and Apple clusters for biotech, pharma and academic clients. I needed to announce this because clusters designed for lifesci work tend to have different architecture priorities than say clusters used for CFD or weather prediction:) Suffice it to say that bioclusters are rate limited by file I/O issues and are tuned for compute farm style batch computing rather than full on beowulf style parallel processing.
I've used *many* different platforms to address different requirements, scale out plans and physical/environmental constraints.
The best whitebox vendor that I have used is Rackable Systems (http://www.rackable.com/ [rackable.com] . They truly understand cooling and airflow issues, have great 1U half-depth chassis that let you get near blade density with inexpensive mass market server mainboards and they have great DC power distribution kit for larger deployments.
For general purpose 1U "pizza box" style rackmounts I tend to use the Sun V20z's when Opterons are called for but IBM and HP both have great dual-Xeon and dual-AMD 1U platforms. For me the Sun Opterons have tended to have the best price/performance numbers from a "big name" vendor.
Two years ago I was building tons of clusters out of Dell hardware. Now nobody I know is even considering Dell. For me they are no longer on my radar -- their endless pretend games with "considering" AMD based solutions is getting tired and until they start shipping some Opteron based products they not going to be a player of any significant merit.
The best blade systems I have seen are no longer made -- they were the systems from RLX.
What you need to understand about blade servers is that the biggest real savings you get with the added price comes from the reduction in administrative burden and ease of operation. The physical form factor and environmental savings are nice but often not as important as the operational/admin/IT savings.
Because of this, people evaluating blade systems should place a huge priority on the quality of the management, monitoring and provisioning software provided by the blade vendor. This is why RLX blades were better than any other vendor even big players like HP, IBM and Dell.
That said though, the quality of whitebox blade systems is usually pretty bad -- especially concerning how they handle cooling and airflow. I've seen one bad deployment where the blade rack needed 12 inch ducting brought into the base just to force enough cool air into the rack to keep the mainboards from tripping their emergency temp shutdown probes. If forced to choose a blade solution I'd first grade on the quality of the management software and then on the quality of the vendor. I am very comfortable purchasing 1U rackmounts from whitebox vendors but I'd probably not purchase a blade system from one. Interestingly enough I just got a Penguin blade chasssis installed and will be playing with it next week to see how it does.
If you don't have a datacenter, special air conditioning or a dedicated IT staff then I highly recommend checking out OrionMultisystems. They sell 12-node desktop and 96-node deskside clusters that ship from the factory fully integrated and best of all they run off a single 110v electrical. They may not win on pure performance when going head to head against dedicated 1U servers but Orion by far wins the prize for "most amount of compute power you can squeeze out of a single electrical outlet..."
Sure they should have to. The way they let spyware on your computer should be a crime.
The worst spyway is not even a minimally legitimate commercial venture-- it is theft, run by international criminals and organized crime. So-called "legitimate" spyware and adware have conditioned people to think that a windows box encrusted with this shyte is normal.
The newest stuff is delivered by a trojan downloader, that also installs a keylogger--or several. The browser hijackers they install do one--or several things--to send you to their fake websites so they can steal your credit card, or even your identity:
-- They take over your HOSTS file so that legitimate urls are translated into THEIR IP addresses, not the real ones.
-- They add THEIR fake banking, paypal, amazon, etc. sites to your "trusted sites" list.
-- They may even change your proxy settings to accomplish or reinforce the same thing.
If you try to clean this crap off with AdAware or Spybot S&D, the trojan downloader--which also disable your AV software and/or Spybot--will NOT detect the trojan downloader, and it will reinstall the malware faster than you can clean it.
Some of these were spread the old fashioned way-- email attachments. Others used the Windows RPC 445/tpc buffer overflow exploit, or the latest IE IFRAME exploit, or one of the 16 other exploits out there for IE alone that MS has not patched.
This shit crossed a line about six months ago from being a commercially-oriented nusiance to being outright theft, run by the same criminals that run phishing scams.
I clean up PCs as a sideline, and the trend is very ominous-- the utility of the PC as a productive tool is threatened, as is the integrity and trust of the Internet.
Thanks, Microsoft. I'd like to see the Dept. of Homeland security take your ass to court for criminal negligence.
I for one welcome Google's approach to adverts - it's a hell of a lot better than the completely untargetted, very annoying Flash, animated GIFs and popups that other advertisers use. Whats more, Google's targetted text ads are sometimes actually useful.
Everyone complains about adverts but obviously don't think about the economics - web sites have to fund themselves somehow, so either you're going to have to pay directly or put up with the ads. IMHO ads designed to be annoying and untargetted can be blocked without any problem but Google style ads are reasonably non-intrusive and targetted so you should allow them - you want to push the advertisers in the direction of sensible unobtrusive ads rather than forcing the sites to close down.
I prefer to store data on my own computer, for privacy reasons. I will not use these services for sensitive, private data, because I do not know who else has access to said data. And I see no point in using their service only for non-sensitive needs, while returning to my existing solutions for private matters. I doubt their service offers anything beyond what is already possible with a solid Linux or BSD setup, while costing far more and lacking the security I've come to expect.
Or just use a pre paid cell phone.
The only groups these wiretaps hurt are the law-abiding citizens. The smart (read: dangerous) criminals have it all figured out-- Prepaid cell phones.
Pre-paid cell phones are literally disposable, one-use toys to the bad guys. You don't even need a fake ID, just cash, and not all that much at that. How can they tap your phone when you use a different phone for each call? The best they could do is tap all the pre-paid phones and listen to every conversation out there -- good luck with that! (wanna bet the NSA is big into voice recognition?)
I meant that there is an assumption when one uses encryption that it must be because there is "something to hide." I know they need to get a warrant but it doesn't change the fact that the fact I use encryption might be used to infer my guilt.
Remember that we're all presumed innocent. To take an example of encryption, just because I'm using encryption does not mean that I am plotting nefarious schemes against my fellow citizens. I may be discussing confidential business things, for example. Y'know, dare I say it, I might actually work from home in an effort to not drive my car around and burn gas, hurt the environment, etc., etc.
These sorts of mistakes can be dangerous. Imagine the above example--I'm some bigshot business-guy. I own a publicly traded company. The FBI inadvertently taps my phone and learns that someone at the company I work for has just invented something that will make the company a ton of money. Do you really think those agents aren't going to call up their stock-brokers and say, "BUY! BUY! BUY!" (Or, assume the other direction, if you prefer)
Frankly, yes. I want to make it difficult for the government to wiretap it's citizens. I want somebody to look at the evidence that has been accumulated and act as my representative to say, "Hey, wait. Just because he encrypts his phone calls doesn't mean he's a terrorist." I want somebody to second-guess these guys.
The story of the gutsy cop who goes against procedure to nab the bad guys before they enact their evil deeds is a great movie. But it's not real life--remember, in most cases we get the see the bad guys planning their acts in the movies so we know who the bad guy is. Reality is not that cut-and-dried.
In short, I'm more worried about the government abusing it's power than of the terrorists blowing up a building. That happens alot more often.
From the BBC story, this sounds grossly unfair to Dr. Hwang.
According to the BBC, Dr. Hwang did not attempt to violate the policy, he did not even know about the fact that the women donated, and it is clear that he wasn't trying to circumvent the policy either. It sounds to me like he did nothing wrong.
Yes, he did lie to Nature about it, but I find his justification acceptable. While there are some ethical considerations that go into publishing a journal, Nature has no business conducting ethics investigations, and this particular aspect of the experiment had no bearing on the scientific validity of the results.
To me, this story mostly reflects poorly on Nature--attempting to pry into areas that really are none of their business--and the Korean research establishment.
Hats off to Dr. Hwang for being willing to take the blame for something he didn't do. I suspect that his motivation is to keep human cloning research going, and he knows that the media and politicans would continue a feeding frenzy over this as long as he stays in his job.
Because clearly, Blackberries only exist so that your bosses boss can send you an email with a sig at the bottom that says "sent from Mr. Big's Blackberry (while rolling down the hgwy in his Z4).
But seriously, the company I work at recently yanked all blackberry devices and replaced them with Treo 600 and treo 650's.
the fact that you dont need any "special" software to access email and has the capability of viewing doc and excel attachments was the death spike for the blackberry here at this company.
and honestly, the treo's have much better sounding audio for phone calls than even the latest blackberry's did.
Yeah, too bad phones have stupid numbers instead of usernames. That'll never catch on.
This is a big deal. You don't find raw metal much on Mars; most of it is tied up with oxygen. Raw metal has many implications: if it is common, it can be a great source of base building. If the metals are rare on Earth as well, and they're common on Mars, they could provide a potential export source. If it is a meteor, and they're common, it could affect our models of how often Mars gets struck by meteors. Since the rock isn't buried, it could provide clues as to how long it's been on Mars, how fast Meridiani Planum is eroding, and give us dataon how metals wear over time on Mars.
Any time you find something you've never found before, it's a big deal. Honestly, to people who've been following the mission, it looked like Opportunity was pretty much wrapping things up. It just left a geological treasure trove and there isn't much more "on the map", so to speak. It's neat to see it continue making nice finds.
Of course, this is very similar to the movie industry. If the movie got rated NC-17, it wouldn't be shown in most mainstream theaters, and thus it gets edited until it gets an R rating. When a movie that is directed at the 12-15 year old market gets an R rating, they usually try to get it down to PG-13 so as to attract more of their intended audience. What is so wrong with this? If you rely too much on the rating system to make decisions for your children, you have more problems then how good a job the ESRB is doing.
My question is, what do the parents want? Of course the ratings are toothless. They're just a guide. The "Mature" rating tells parents that a game labeled "M" is considered by the ESRB to be potentially inappropriate for people under 17. The ESRB is basically saying: "If you're in doubt, and your kid is under 17, don't allow this game in your home." If a parent is really in conniptions over video-game sex, violence, whatever, then they only need to exert minimal effort to convert their fears into action.
For parents that care to be more nuanced and/or involved, there are strategy guides in every game store that present the content of games in great detail. And there's also gamefaqs.com, which is free and convenient. Parents don't have to be gamers to avoid being totally oblivious. Now, I certainly don't expect every parent to be this savvy from the get-go. But the parents who claim to give a shit could educate themselves with what I think is a reasonable amount of time and effort.
But no, let's legislate the fuck out of the video-game industry because Hillary Clinton is running for president.
I used to grade student's code as a TA at my university, and I'll tell you what is more annoying than NO comments, this:
printf("Encrypt message...");/* print "Encrypt message..." to the console */
and then followed by about 150 lines of uncommented spaghetti code