[Once it's been upheld by the Supreme Court], no one can ever challenge their constitutionality again.
Not quite. Ever heard of Plessy v. Ferguson? It's admittedly much more difficult (on the balance for good reason) to challenge a previously-decided Supreme Court decision, but by no means impossible. That's just one (probably the most famous) example of the Court reversing itself, but there's a lot more.
Not necessarily. It could mean that the game was great, but the problem of overloaded servers basically ruins the game. Just how much it ruins the game wouldn't necessarily be apparent from a pre-release copy, and the fact that it happened once means it could happen again - putting a serious dent in the scores. No dishonesty required - a great game that has a huge major flaw that ruins the game is a perfectly valid reason to downgrade its score, and this probably qualified. You're probably just annoyed they didn't get all up-in-arms about the online requirement while everything was working fine. I have a problem with that too, but most people don't and wouldn't hold it against a game if the game worked fine
Now of course some reviews are paid for, and some reviews are dishonest. But it's not a necessary condition for this to happen.
For the record, I don't have this game, nor will I ever buy it despite being somewhat interested in it. So I can't make any claim about how good the game is when it's working.
The problem is what do you think would have happened if you or I built a machine to do this and drove around the United States? Especially if you ever drove anywhere remotely close to a government building.
Like a radio scanner? People use those to the time to listen to actual live police activity, and it's perfectly legal (unless you're using that to assist with committing a crime IIRC)
Turns out that important government radio communication is encrypted so that these very same eavesdroppers can't make use of it. Not illegal to listen, nor even particularly frowned upon, they just make it impossible to do so if they want you to stop. Almost exactly the situation here.
It gets even better. I had a professor who showed that many "encrypted" government radios in fact weren't encrypted because they had misleading displays, or they were incorrectly configured, even when all the equipment was capable of it. He was listening to live drug raids and so on - tactical information that could have assisted real criminals, such as identifying features of undercover operatives and informants, identities and locations of surveillance targets, plans and locations for forthcoming takedowns, and details of executive protection operations. You know what happened to him? He got a nice paper about it. Of course it helps to be a researcher, not a guy with a "manifesto".
Don't forget to keep in mind that people have gotten pretty heavy charges brought against them for no more than typing a url into a browser which is even more so broadcast for everyone to see.
With the notable exception of child pornography (and I have an issue with criminal charges for possession for precisely this reason, but even so it's not exactly "broadcast for everyone to see"), I'm not aware of any. Citations?
Next, Google did not cooperate. That's part of what the fine is for. They were supposed to delete everything and didn't.
Is this true. It seems odd that they'd do that, given that they're the ones who decided to mention anything in the first place and said they'd delete it from the start. Guess they learned their lesson about talking.
None that have a built-in megaphone. More to the point, if anybody were stupid enough to use such a phone without some sort of cipher in place, they'd be laughed at for expecting privacy. That's the point - if a phone isn't encrypted, it's still point-to-point. Wifi is a broadcast mechanism, and the only way to secure it is encryption. Note I didn't say "effective" encryption, and Google wasn't cracking WEP.
The intent of a phone user is to keep his conversation private. The intent of a WiFi network is to broadcast traffic to all that can hear it, unless it's encrypted, in which case the intent is still to broadcast it to everybody that can hear it, but limit the understanding of it to those that have the key.
Would you even need a place with no extradition treaty? Or would the court view it as "I sent you these bits and now I want them back!"? I mean sure it's a "currency" but I'm not sure the courts recognize it as something with value.
Just a FYI, if you (or anyone else) tries to Rambo a drone like this, you're going to kill anybody standing under the end of the parabolic arc your bullet takes since it'll come back at lethal velocity. Firing guns in the air is a stupendously stupid idea, and yes people have died like this.
IE6 was a disaster from a technological point of view, but Microsoft sure got a lot of vendor lock-in from it!!!
IE6 was very very nice and Netscape was bloated and slow by comparison. I don't know what you mean by "technological point of view" - sounds like weasel words - but it was more stable than Netscape and fixed the box model bug. Then Netscape 7(?) came out and it sucked, and a lot of people I know jumped ship. A lot of Microsoft's "embrace and extend" was actually very nice - anyone remember the Microsoft JVM? Much faster than Sun's. And don't forget that Internet Explorer introduced XMLHttpRequest, which is legitimately a different and more useful way of thinking about web programming. All of the current "new things" in web tech (like WebGL) couldn't hope to be as influential.
IE6 was a great browser while there was competition. The problems with it were not technical - once they had successfully and deliberately killed off competition, they didn't touch it for years.
One full time employee doing nothing but checking for this compliance would have been an awful lot cheaper than paying the fine.
That's of course the idea. A fine this big suddenly turns "complying with the binding agreements we made" into a "business priority"
Frightening thought: If Microsoft actually realised this as well and _did_ hire one person to do nothing but check compliance with this one judgement (should be an easy job), someone has lost their job now.
If they did have a guy, it's possible he was just too far down the totem pole to actually do anything other than go "um didn't we say we'd do this?" and some random middle manager went "sounds like my department would lose money". The net effect should be to get Microsoft (and all other companies) to prick up their ears and get senior people involved in compliance, which is a good thing.
You have no legal recourse to punish the liars and set the record straight.
You absolutely do, it's just hard. Libel is defined as damaging known-false public statements (in the US anyway), and a troll lying about your business and costing you money is absolutely culpable. Taking them to account is difficult, to be sure, but it's certainly possible.
It's completely correct. The user's computer downloaded the applet, which then proceeded to download the trojan from some Internet location and install it through this vulnerability. Uploading implies that the attackers were the "active" party; that would generally be a worm.
That's being foolish. A wildcard DNS entry will easily match more than hundreds of billions of domains. This is large enough that it's more than anybody could conceivably have a use for. The number of subdomains is in fact bounded, but actually even figuring out the limit is a mathematical exercise - not a practical concern.
Consider - you have more than 200 quadrillion plastic ballpit balls. This is large enough that you can't count them in more than a million years, even if you counted very, very quickly. Thus, you can't even do one of the most basic things you'd want to do with a non-finite number - count it.
Thus, nearly infinite in the practical sense that the GP meant, and everybody else took it to mean.
You obviously don't know anything about radio. Switching frequencies within a band requires an entirely new antenna construction for any efficiency at the kind of power commercial broadcasting uses. It's not a software problem at all.
The approximate wavelength of 66MHz is 4.5 meters, while it's 3.6 meters for 82MHz. That requires lopping about 20% off of the top of the antenna, or else adding enough to bring it up to the next efficient multiple of the new wavelength. You must have seen commercial broadcast masts before - 20% is a lot of antenna. Plus, for the kind of power commercial broadcasters use, you'd probably need to replace a lot of components of the transmitter itself since they're pretty carefully tuned to the frequency. It could easily cost about $50k just for that (not including the tower work), even for a not-so-big TV station.
Finally, the differences in propagation even of the two relatively close frequencies you mention make it likely that a lot of people would go from decent TV reception to none at all.
Thankfully nobody at the FCC is taking this kind of advice. Frequency allocations are - on the whole - done pretty carefully. When they seem slow and stuffy, it's usually for a reason
That's not fair! The Beep mode doesn't just beep, it also deletes lines of your file at random. Trying to figure out how to get them back, or at least get out without doing more damage, simply deletes more lines.
One of my very first experiences with Linux was when I was about 13, back in about 2002. I was told by a forum to use vi to edit a config file. This traumatized me so much I spent the next 6 years using nano before learning emacs.
Because the fallout from fabricating data and accusing the NY Times of journalistic malfeasance based on it is a vastly worse idea than saying "well yeah, it was supposed to be barely possible based on the stated ranges, temperature, and real-world conditions"
I suspect the logs will actually be released, if not to us to some third party. The NYT seems to be taking this pretty seriously once accusations were leveled against their integrity.
No, he managed to not run out of juice despite being at empty and driving in circles. The reporter claims he was looking for a poorly-marked charging station, Musk claimed he was trying to run the battery down to dead.
It's not about the.6 miles. It's about trying to say "the car died right in the parking lot" in his review.
Wait, what? I've never heard that the OS X version of Steam was a 3rd party port. In fact, I'm almost certain it wasn't since I was in the Mac Beta and on the email list with the developers (who all have valvesoftware.com email addresses)
Is it simpler? Sure, if you're within 50-100 feet you're probably alright with a HT omni and low power, but there's a good chance you'll find some kind of fence in the way - not to mention, the RX antenna is probably on some kind of mast, and maybe even directional itself. Just a yagi would probably get you where you needed to be, but 25-50w transmitters aren't exactly hard to make (or buy and hack) either and should give you plenty of field strength at the antenna from a couple hundred feet or further . No B&E needed, which is frankly the way you'd be caught.
Maybe that's what happened here. It's by no means difficult (though highly, highly illegal) to point a few-dozen watt transmitter at the receiving antenna with a highly directional antenna and spoof the EAS message from whatever station it listens to for alerts.
A lawyer would call this "consideration", as in a contract. In exchange for me giving up the right (by knowingly buying a game through Steam) to re-sell my game, I get several useful features I wouldn't get from buying it at a store on CD. Whether there's technical reasons behind it or not is irrelevant - the point is that it's a tradeoff, not a "take".
In practice, I usually buy my games so heavily discounted that they're cheaper than a used game would be. So it's an even better tradeoff than it might have been at full price.
People keep forgetting that the reason people like Steam is because they provide a service in exchange for you giving something up. If you buy your games with a Steam account, you get them integrated with social features, achievements, cloud saves and settings, automatic updates, and most importantly, brain-dead simple moving to new computers.
That's without all the "good faith" things people have come to expect from Valve like frequent deep sales, new platform support, etc.
Meanwhile, you can be damn sure your new Xbox game will be strictly less functional than before, not a trade off. The problem is the one-sidedness.
Slashdot Mirror
[Once it's been upheld by the Supreme Court], no one can ever challenge their constitutionality again.
Not quite. Ever heard of Plessy v. Ferguson? It's admittedly much more difficult (on the balance for good reason) to challenge a previously-decided Supreme Court decision, but by no means impossible. That's just one (probably the most famous) example of the Court reversing itself, but there's a lot more.
Not necessarily. It could mean that the game was great, but the problem of overloaded servers basically ruins the game. Just how much it ruins the game wouldn't necessarily be apparent from a pre-release copy, and the fact that it happened once means it could happen again - putting a serious dent in the scores. No dishonesty required - a great game that has a huge major flaw that ruins the game is a perfectly valid reason to downgrade its score, and this probably qualified. You're probably just annoyed they didn't get all up-in-arms about the online requirement while everything was working fine. I have a problem with that too, but most people don't and wouldn't hold it against a game if the game worked fine
Now of course some reviews are paid for, and some reviews are dishonest. But it's not a necessary condition for this to happen.
For the record, I don't have this game, nor will I ever buy it despite being somewhat interested in it. So I can't make any claim about how good the game is when it's working.
The problem is what do you think would have happened if you or I built a machine to do this and drove around the United States? Especially if you ever drove anywhere remotely close to a government building.
Like a radio scanner? People use those to the time to listen to actual live police activity, and it's perfectly legal (unless you're using that to assist with committing a crime IIRC)
Turns out that important government radio communication is encrypted so that these very same eavesdroppers can't make use of it. Not illegal to listen, nor even particularly frowned upon, they just make it impossible to do so if they want you to stop. Almost exactly the situation here.
It gets even better. I had a professor who showed that many "encrypted" government radios in fact weren't encrypted because they had misleading displays, or they were incorrectly configured, even when all the equipment was capable of it. He was listening to live drug raids and so on - tactical information that could have assisted real criminals, such as identifying features of undercover operatives and informants, identities and locations of surveillance targets, plans and locations for forthcoming takedowns, and details of executive protection operations. You know what happened to him? He got a nice paper about it. Of course it helps to be a researcher, not a guy with a "manifesto".
Don't forget to keep in mind that people have gotten pretty heavy charges brought against them for no more than typing a url into a browser which is even more so broadcast for everyone to see.
With the notable exception of child pornography (and I have an issue with criminal charges for possession for precisely this reason, but even so it's not exactly "broadcast for everyone to see"), I'm not aware of any. Citations?
Google grabbed _intentionally_. Someone thought it was a good idea to do this and wrote the code to achieve it.
I had heard they used Kismet. I know for a fact that it logs unencrypted packets by default By default Kismet will log the pcap file, gps log, alerts, and network log in XML and plaintext. (section 10).
Next, Google did not cooperate. That's part of what the fine is for. They were supposed to delete everything and didn't.
Is this true. It seems odd that they'd do that, given that they're the ones who decided to mention anything in the first place and said they'd delete it from the start. Guess they learned their lesson about talking.
Google didn't use a telescopic lens. You (anyone who used an unencrypted WiFi network) projected it onto the side of their house.
None that have a built-in megaphone. More to the point, if anybody were stupid enough to use such a phone without some sort of cipher in place, they'd be laughed at for expecting privacy. That's the point - if a phone isn't encrypted, it's still point-to-point. Wifi is a broadcast mechanism, and the only way to secure it is encryption. Note I didn't say "effective" encryption, and Google wasn't cracking WEP.
The intent of a phone user is to keep his conversation private. The intent of a WiFi network is to broadcast traffic to all that can hear it, unless it's encrypted, in which case the intent is still to broadcast it to everybody that can hear it, but limit the understanding of it to those that have the key.
Would you even need a place with no extradition treaty? Or would the court view it as "I sent you these bits and now I want them back!"? I mean sure it's a "currency" but I'm not sure the courts recognize it as something with value.
Just a FYI, if you (or anyone else) tries to Rambo a drone like this, you're going to kill anybody standing under the end of the parabolic arc your bullet takes since it'll come back at lethal velocity. Firing guns in the air is a stupendously stupid idea, and yes people have died like this.
IE6 was a disaster from a technological point of view, but Microsoft sure got a lot of vendor lock-in from it!!!
IE6 was very very nice and Netscape was bloated and slow by comparison. I don't know what you mean by "technological point of view" - sounds like weasel words - but it was more stable than Netscape and fixed the box model bug. Then Netscape 7(?) came out and it sucked, and a lot of people I know jumped ship. A lot of Microsoft's "embrace and extend" was actually very nice - anyone remember the Microsoft JVM? Much faster than Sun's. And don't forget that Internet Explorer introduced XMLHttpRequest, which is legitimately a different and more useful way of thinking about web programming. All of the current "new things" in web tech (like WebGL) couldn't hope to be as influential.
IE6 was a great browser while there was competition. The problems with it were not technical - once they had successfully and deliberately killed off competition, they didn't touch it for years.
One full time employee doing nothing but checking for this compliance would have been an awful lot cheaper than paying the fine.
That's of course the idea. A fine this big suddenly turns "complying with the binding agreements we made" into a "business priority"
Frightening thought: If Microsoft actually realised this as well and _did_ hire one person to do nothing but check compliance with this one judgement (should be an easy job), someone has lost their job now.
If they did have a guy, it's possible he was just too far down the totem pole to actually do anything other than go "um didn't we say we'd do this?" and some random middle manager went "sounds like my department would lose money". The net effect should be to get Microsoft (and all other companies) to prick up their ears and get senior people involved in compliance, which is a good thing.
You have no legal recourse to punish the liars and set the record straight.
You absolutely do, it's just hard. Libel is defined as damaging known-false public statements (in the US anyway), and a troll lying about your business and costing you money is absolutely culpable. Taking them to account is difficult, to be sure, but it's certainly possible.
It's completely correct. The user's computer downloaded the applet, which then proceeded to download the trojan from some Internet location and install it through this vulnerability. Uploading implies that the attackers were the "active" party; that would generally be a worm.
That's being foolish. A wildcard DNS entry will easily match more than hundreds of billions of domains. This is large enough that it's more than anybody could conceivably have a use for. The number of subdomains is in fact bounded, but actually even figuring out the limit is a mathematical exercise - not a practical concern.
Consider - you have more than 200 quadrillion plastic ballpit balls. This is large enough that you can't count them in more than a million years, even if you counted very, very quickly. Thus, you can't even do one of the most basic things you'd want to do with a non-finite number - count it.
Thus, nearly infinite in the practical sense that the GP meant, and everybody else took it to mean.
You obviously don't know anything about radio. Switching frequencies within a band requires an entirely new antenna construction for any efficiency at the kind of power commercial broadcasting uses. It's not a software problem at all.
The approximate wavelength of 66MHz is 4.5 meters, while it's 3.6 meters for 82MHz. That requires lopping about 20% off of the top of the antenna, or else adding enough to bring it up to the next efficient multiple of the new wavelength. You must have seen commercial broadcast masts before - 20% is a lot of antenna. Plus, for the kind of power commercial broadcasters use, you'd probably need to replace a lot of components of the transmitter itself since they're pretty carefully tuned to the frequency. It could easily cost about $50k just for that (not including the tower work), even for a not-so-big TV station.
Finally, the differences in propagation even of the two relatively close frequencies you mention make it likely that a lot of people would go from decent TV reception to none at all.
Thankfully nobody at the FCC is taking this kind of advice. Frequency allocations are - on the whole - done pretty carefully. When they seem slow and stuffy, it's usually for a reason
That's not fair! The Beep mode doesn't just beep, it also deletes lines of your file at random. Trying to figure out how to get them back, or at least get out without doing more damage, simply deletes more lines.
One of my very first experiences with Linux was when I was about 13, back in about 2002. I was told by a forum to use vi to edit a config file. This traumatized me so much I spent the next 6 years using nano before learning emacs.
If you want to look for the real scum, look for those who would happily put an innocent person to death.
It is, nonetheless, the assertion in Musk's piece. I'm not sure I believe it in light of some of the newer information, but it is the assertion.
Considering that New York's "current direction" of population growth is +0.85% a year, probably not.
Because the fallout from fabricating data and accusing the NY Times of journalistic malfeasance based on it is a vastly worse idea than saying "well yeah, it was supposed to be barely possible based on the stated ranges, temperature, and real-world conditions"
I suspect the logs will actually be released, if not to us to some third party. The NYT seems to be taking this pretty seriously once accusations were leveled against their integrity.
No, he managed to not run out of juice despite being at empty and driving in circles. The reporter claims he was looking for a poorly-marked charging station, Musk claimed he was trying to run the battery down to dead.
It's not about the .6 miles. It's about trying to say "the car died right in the parking lot" in his review.
Wait, what? I've never heard that the OS X version of Steam was a 3rd party port. In fact, I'm almost certain it wasn't since I was in the Mac Beta and on the email list with the developers (who all have valvesoftware.com email addresses)
Citation, please?
Is it simpler? Sure, if you're within 50-100 feet you're probably alright with a HT omni and low power, but there's a good chance you'll find some kind of fence in the way - not to mention, the RX antenna is probably on some kind of mast, and maybe even directional itself. Just a yagi would probably get you where you needed to be, but 25-50w transmitters aren't exactly hard to make (or buy and hack) either and should give you plenty of field strength at the antenna from a couple hundred feet or further . No B&E needed, which is frankly the way you'd be caught.
Maybe that's what happened here. It's by no means difficult (though highly, highly illegal) to point a few-dozen watt transmitter at the receiving antenna with a highly directional antenna and spoof the EAS message from whatever station it listens to for alerts.
No doubt.
A lawyer would call this "consideration", as in a contract. In exchange for me giving up the right (by knowingly buying a game through Steam) to re-sell my game, I get several useful features I wouldn't get from buying it at a store on CD. Whether there's technical reasons behind it or not is irrelevant - the point is that it's a tradeoff, not a "take".
In practice, I usually buy my games so heavily discounted that they're cheaper than a used game would be. So it's an even better tradeoff than it might have been at full price.
People keep forgetting that the reason people like Steam is because they provide a service in exchange for you giving something up. If you buy your games with a Steam account, you get them integrated with social features, achievements, cloud saves and settings, automatic updates, and most importantly, brain-dead simple moving to new computers.
That's without all the "good faith" things people have come to expect from Valve like frequent deep sales, new platform support, etc.
Meanwhile, you can be damn sure your new Xbox game will be strictly less functional than before, not a trade off. The problem is the one-sidedness.