IIRC, you can set up a whitelist, where only the e-mails addresses you place on the list will be let through to the inbox. Then auto-delete everything else.
Blizzard should be the one to police it's virtual world.
Blizzard should take an active role in preventing/eliminating things they don't want in their world.
It's sad, but you do know that the users (who are paying Blizzard) are the primary watchdogs, right? There are not enough employees to keep track of everything, and most botting/exploiting and other less extreme violations go unnoticed by Blizzard... Until a user reports another user. At that point (often taking several unique reports), a Blizzard employee takes a look at what is going on and makes a judgment of the situation.
While this is effective and (mostly) efficient, I agree that Blizzard should be policing the game, not their customers.
if they spent more time developing quests (and adding to the lower level quest lines) people wouldn't want to automate their grinding
Well, once you've played over 40 characters from level 1-30, and 10 others to 70 (level cap), you get to the point where you just don't care about many of the quests anymore. Sure, there are some that are fun to do over and over (and over), but there comes a time, when you just want to shoot yourself.
And then there are some people who just want to play at max level to get their epics and mess around, but leveling takes soooo long (I swear it doesn't take that long, but you know the ADDish types who have played WoW for 3 years and don't have any characters past level 10...)
These are the people who are using automation utilities such as Glider. Changing quests to be more appealing won't help in either case - those who Glide now would still Glide.
I fall into the first category, but I haven't (and won't) resort to automation. I took solace in alternative activities, such as RPing, to fill the boredom.
There are times which violence ensues. Perhaps one prisoner snitched on anothers' contraband locations - he'll get a bar of soap in a sock to the head or something of that nature. For those people who are just there doing their time and minding their own business, it's not so bad.
There are a few bad eggs (more so than the rest) who are just prone to violent acts, but it is rather rare outside of maximum security facilities.
As for "rape", aside from people who did something to justify being punished in such a way (there's an unwritten code of conduct. "honor among thieves" if you will), the only intra-prisoner sex going on is consensual.
Bottom line, be nice, mind your own business, don't act like you're scared of everything and everyone around you, and you'll be just fine.
Picking up on useful (to the prisoner community) trades can be beneficial to your safety as well. Jailhouse sign-language, as many gangs need people to communicate with the other tanks (50-man sectioned off units), but cannot do so themselves. Also, getting an outside trustee status can enable you to smuggle in tobacco products (or even marijuana if you're brave) with which you can both make money and friends on the inside. You'd also be surprised to find how many friends you can make by smuggling Kool-Aid and cookies from the kitchen back to the tanks, if you've been lucky enough to obtain a trustee position there. The list goes on.
I definitely agree to Piers Anthony being wonderful! But I wouldn't give anything outside of the Xanth-based books to anyone under 13. Some of his works, like Bio of a Space Tyrant, I would wait a bit later as well, 15-16 I'd say.
The Xanth series itself is ginormous and is relatively harmless. Enjoyed everything Piers had to offer in my teens.
I really, really, really loved L.E. Modesitt, Jr.'s Magic of Recluse series... Man, good times!
OH, and Larry Niven's Ringworld was very dear to me as well.
I'm confused by many of the replies here which talk about auto sheet-feeders and 'double wide' flatbed scanners, but they all seem to ignore the original problem: the spine would be damaged or require disassembly of the magazine itself.
There are special flatbed scanners such as this one which allow scanning without flattening the spine. And you could also try a palm scanner, which I think they also have wider "stick" versions which can do 8.5" sizes too.
IMO these would be the best options to not ruin your original collection. I think the palm scanner I linked is a really old greyscale one, and the special flatbed might not be the best brand... But I'm just providing an example of the type of scanning technology I would use, not suggesting the specific products themselves.
Not debunking that it is excessive, but your math is flawed due to your lack of play mechanics (no offense meant, you're just underinformed is all).
Yes, there are 6 tiers of equipment, but the first three are remnants from level 60, all but useless, and almost noone even tries for them, except for maybe nostalgia. Tier 4 is even becoming dated enough that most people skip it and jump right into Tier 5. Thus, there are usually only 2 tiers to go through.
Another number change for your formula is that there are not eight items in each set. T4 and T5 only have 5 pieces. T6 has 8.
Also, there is Player vs. Player (PvP) gear available which is as good as each of the tiers. Most players go to the battlegrounds between raids, which is more time, yes, but results in less actual raiding. PvP gear is "guaranteed", whereas the Tier stuff, you just have a chance at getting. If you waste enough time each day in-game (oh, say 12-14 hours a day), you can get the equivalent of Tier 5 in PvP gear in less than a week.
Supposedly, there will be no more Tiers ever again, that they are going to a new system, but still, there will be upgrades at some point, yes.
Your statements have the correct intent, just a bit exaggerated due to the game working differently than your math made it seem. It's actually much shorter of a time, and much easier to get the top level gear than it used to be way back when.
A great number of people are stopping their subscriptions with WoW due to how easy it is to "max out" the game, even when new content rolls out, they just devour it in hardly any time at all. In the past it used to be a challenging game compared to what it is now. Blizzard has slowly "dumbed down" the game so that they can obtain a larger user base who want a casual game.
I seem to remember something about how US citizens are not allowed to legally use encryption higher than that which the US government can decrypt? Maybe not, but it seems a very familiar subject to me.
Anyhow, you shouldn't try to send information that the government would find criminally attractive internationally anyhow, thus nullifying the premise of ECHELON.
For certain, use encryption for anything you deem sensitive, but there is some data which is best transferred using the often more secure sneaker net.
You couldn't sneak that through a metal detector, though. Hopefully they would overlook it dangling from your keychain, especially if you were smart enough to buy a device that looks nothing like a standard USB key in an attempt to slip by (example).
Uh.. perhaps it's about them losing money from people downloading music for free instead of paying for it? I don't believe this for a second. There have been several studies done which will inform you that the people who are downloading music that they have not purchased, would never have bought the music to begin with. People who are willing to pay for their music do so, the rest pirate it. Several of my friends even choose to download pirated copies of their favorite bands before they are released, but purchase an actual copy of it when it comes up for sale, because they support those bands. Thus, the people selling the music are losing very little, if anything, from those who pirate.
"Amazing amount" does not sound like something that is guessable. To me, this reads as 'we thought they would get nothing and are amazed' as opposed to 'they took a large amount of the data we own'. Since we have no idea what they would consider "par", it's impossible to judge that they took considerable data.
As for what was taken and their use of "sensitive"... They did not use "classified", so the data was mostly worthless to anyone. "Sensitive" doesn't even pique my curiosity! Much like most people here, I agree that the data was likely just secretarial-level stuff - inconsequential. The Ars Technica article (the section quoted below) does venture to say that it was login information which was stolen, but the next paragraph in the article starts "The government isn't saying what, exactly, got stolen." so I don't think the login statement is precise. Regardless, it is definitely implied that this was on live systems, not just a mere honeypot, yet might as well have been.
To be fair, even if the data they obtained was completely useless, the point, imho, is that they were able to get anything at all. To allow a known vunerability to be exploited with tons of tax dollars footing the IT bill? Ridiculous (though the government has been mostly full of fail for all eternity). I feel it is "amazing" that the hacker(s) did not get more data.
I chose to reply to this particular comment because I felt that your statement about the secretaries was... misguided.
"(...)stereotypical secretaries (who competitively install every kind of of smiley and intellimail app they can find) as being the ones that email the malicious code to each other."
It wasn't the users who e-mailed things, it was the hacker's code doing the mailing. The code just made the e-mail appear to be an internal document/memo/etc, which tricked the receiver into opening it.
"The bug spread itself by e-mailing malicious payloads from one system on the network to another. The messages themselves were spoofed and appeared to be legitimate missives from other employees. Once the recipient opened an infected e-mail, the worm sent that person's password and other login credentials back to home base." - Ars Technica
I completely agree with the original article in how there is no reason for him to be considered "cheating". How can you cheat at homework? If a group of people chose to get together and help each other with the homework (virtually or in-person, it's the same), who cares? What's wrong with that? I just don't get it.
Now, if there were some rules in this school about not conferring with your classmates on homework, I could understand that, but I did not read anything to that effect.
I assume that "unauthorized" is simply being implied here. While it makes more sense to include the distinction, most people who read this know that this is what they mean. As for inclusion in a legal agreement of some nature, it should be specified, yes.
The game I use in particular uses torrent to distribute their data for patches, and so forth. As such, it gets flagged at the ISP as "torrent traffic" and I get transmissions capped. Though online gaming doesn't require much bandwidth (compared to some other things), it has been extremely affected by the recent ISP changes. I went from a constant 30-90ms latency to only having 30-90ms when I am standing still away from any other players and server-controlled beings. When I get around something that requires more data to be transfered, these ISP changes cause a drastic change. Often peaking at 2000-3000ms, this is ridiculous. If they are going to use a policy such as this to curb online piracy (or whatever their reason), they need to consider a deeper packet analysis, or have certain traffic on a "safe-list", such as online games.
And to think that I was considering hosting a torrent tracker for my family to share home videos not that long back. I'm glad I never got around to it, as these recent problems are major hindrances.
I'm pretty sure if you dug down deep in your 'contract' you signed with your cable internet provider that you will find the truth about how there is only so much bandwidth available to your entire neighborhood, and that they are free to throttle you whenever and for whatever reason they wish in order to keep everyone within the norms. So you're downloading or seeding 500TB/day while the guy down the road can't even load up his G-Mail account to view pictures of his brother on vacation due to your consumption. For this, I understand and applaud their decision to enforce the throttling... However, I think they should have made this more apparent to the customers from day one.
While cable offers greater potential for speed/burst speeds since you can 'leech' the bandwidth from your neighbors, you might want to consider a high-end DSL or even a T-line if you want more stable and pre-defined throughput values.
I currently use a mid-tier SBC/AT&T DSL plan, and it's plenty for my personal uses, but just like all of the cable internet users out there, I am having bandwidth issues as well, so this might not be the way to go. I've been having problems with an online game, the same one quite a few people have been having problems with lately. It's kind of sad that their attempts to squash torrent traders is affecting other things, such as gaming.
Some of the comments got me thinking about how these watermarks have to get decoded from the audio at some point, right? Someone mentioned advertising inside the audio - I suppose this would be some banner or whatever which shows up on your media player when you play the song back, for example. How long until someone creates and 'watermarks' your mp3s with viruses instead of some advertisement? This is the worry I have about such technology. One more way for malicious software to make it onto your system.
However, speaking of decoding, if there is a decoder within your (future) audio player to interpret these watermarks, then that is already step one to hacking the watermarks out of the media. As for the comment regarding that the watermark would persist if the audio stream was filtered through analog, I highly doubt this would happen as the watermark would then have to exist in the audio itself, and not just embedded in the file - resulting in a reduction of audio quality. The data would have to be encoded into tones outside the range of human hearing, but decipherable by the audio player - but these bits of information representing the watermark tones would take up part of your audio stream's bandwidth, resulting in less room for the actual audio (although most likely a minuscule amount).
More likely this would be a digital stamp, which means a knowledgeable person would be able to remove it if they desired (much like you can remove DRM from your audio, if you know how).
The problem is not that it is an untaxed medium. Blizzard pays taxes for their network connections, electricity consumption, employees, and so on. I pay taxes on the monthly fee I pay to Blizzard...
Point: In the World of Warcraft (not sure of the other games), all of the characters, currency, and items (armor, weapons, etc) are owned by Blizzard, and you have no rights to them - Blizzard even owns your character's name, according to their EULA.
Fallout: Timmy and Johnny are 5-year old children who play with a ball at their daycare. Does this mean their parents have to pay tax on each time the ball changes hands simply because it is worth monetary value? The ball is still owned by the daycare.
Clarification: In the game, some players sell their currency and goods for real-world money on sites such as ebay and a slew of underground ones. Timmy should only be taxed if he charges Johnny real money to be able to play the ball, correct?
Future: What is the next step? Import/Export taxes/levies for international players to be able to receive the treasure they get after killing a dragon in the game?
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, you can set up a whitelist, where only the e-mails addresses you place on the list will be let through to the inbox. Then auto-delete everything else.
Blizzard should be the one to police it's virtual world.
Blizzard should take an active role in preventing/eliminating things they don't want in their world.
It's sad, but you do know that the users (who are paying Blizzard) are the primary watchdogs, right? There are not enough employees to keep track of everything, and most botting/exploiting and other less extreme violations go unnoticed by Blizzard... Until a user reports another user. At that point (often taking several unique reports), a Blizzard employee takes a look at what is going on and makes a judgment of the situation.
While this is effective and (mostly) efficient, I agree that Blizzard should be policing the game, not their customers.
if they spent more time developing quests (and adding to the lower level quest lines) people wouldn't want to automate their grinding
Well, once you've played over 40 characters from level 1-30, and 10 others to 70 (level cap), you get to the point where you just don't care about many of the quests anymore. Sure, there are some that are fun to do over and over (and over), but there comes a time, when you just want to shoot yourself.
And then there are some people who just want to play at max level to get their epics and mess around, but leveling takes soooo long (I swear it doesn't take that long, but you know the ADDish types who have played WoW for 3 years and don't have any characters past level 10...)
These are the people who are using automation utilities such as Glider. Changing quests to be more appealing won't help in either case - those who Glide now would still Glide.
I fall into the first category, but I haven't (and won't) resort to automation. I took solace in alternative activities, such as RPing, to fill the boredom.
There are times which violence ensues. Perhaps one prisoner snitched on anothers' contraband locations - he'll get a bar of soap in a sock to the head or something of that nature. For those people who are just there doing their time and minding their own business, it's not so bad.
There are a few bad eggs (more so than the rest) who are just prone to violent acts, but it is rather rare outside of maximum security facilities.
As for "rape", aside from people who did something to justify being punished in such a way (there's an unwritten code of conduct. "honor among thieves" if you will), the only intra-prisoner sex going on is consensual.
Bottom line, be nice, mind your own business, don't act like you're scared of everything and everyone around you, and you'll be just fine.
Picking up on useful (to the prisoner community) trades can be beneficial to your safety as well. Jailhouse sign-language, as many gangs need people to communicate with the other tanks (50-man sectioned off units), but cannot do so themselves. Also, getting an outside trustee status can enable you to smuggle in tobacco products (or even marijuana if you're brave) with which you can both make money and friends on the inside. You'd also be surprised to find how many friends you can make by smuggling Kool-Aid and cookies from the kitchen back to the tanks, if you've been lucky enough to obtain a trustee position there. The list goes on.
Really wish Modesitt's series was more popular. Wonderful stuff!
I definitely agree to Piers Anthony being wonderful! But I wouldn't give anything outside of the Xanth-based books to anyone under 13. Some of his works, like Bio of a Space Tyrant, I would wait a bit later as well, 15-16 I'd say.
The Xanth series itself is ginormous and is relatively harmless. Enjoyed everything Piers had to offer in my teens.
I really, really, really loved L.E. Modesitt, Jr.'s Magic of Recluse series... Man, good times!
OH, and Larry Niven's Ringworld was very dear to me as well.
I'm confused by many of the replies here which talk about auto sheet-feeders and 'double wide' flatbed scanners, but they all seem to ignore the original problem: the spine would be damaged or require disassembly of the magazine itself.
There are special flatbed scanners such as this one which allow scanning without flattening the spine. And you could also try a palm scanner, which I think they also have wider "stick" versions which can do 8.5" sizes too.
IMO these would be the best options to not ruin your original collection. I think the palm scanner I linked is a really old greyscale one, and the special flatbed might not be the best brand... But I'm just providing an example of the type of scanning technology I would use, not suggesting the specific products themselves.
Not debunking that it is excessive, but your math is flawed due to your lack of play mechanics (no offense meant, you're just underinformed is all).
Yes, there are 6 tiers of equipment, but the first three are remnants from level 60, all but useless, and almost noone even tries for them, except for maybe nostalgia. Tier 4 is even becoming dated enough that most people skip it and jump right into Tier 5. Thus, there are usually only 2 tiers to go through.
Another number change for your formula is that there are not eight items in each set. T4 and T5 only have 5 pieces. T6 has 8.
Also, there is Player vs. Player (PvP) gear available which is as good as each of the tiers. Most players go to the battlegrounds between raids, which is more time, yes, but results in less actual raiding. PvP gear is "guaranteed", whereas the Tier stuff, you just have a chance at getting. If you waste enough time each day in-game (oh, say 12-14 hours a day), you can get the equivalent of Tier 5 in PvP gear in less than a week.
Supposedly, there will be no more Tiers ever again, that they are going to a new system, but still, there will be upgrades at some point, yes.
Your statements have the correct intent, just a bit exaggerated due to the game working differently than your math made it seem. It's actually much shorter of a time, and much easier to get the top level gear than it used to be way back when.
A great number of people are stopping their subscriptions with WoW due to how easy it is to "max out" the game, even when new content rolls out, they just devour it in hardly any time at all. In the past it used to be a challenging game compared to what it is now. Blizzard has slowly "dumbed down" the game so that they can obtain a larger user base who want a casual game.
I seem to remember something about how US citizens are not allowed to legally use encryption higher than that which the US government can decrypt? Maybe not, but it seems a very familiar subject to me.
Anyhow, you shouldn't try to send information that the government would find criminally attractive internationally anyhow, thus nullifying the premise of ECHELON.
For certain, use encryption for anything you deem sensitive, but there is some data which is best transferred using the often more secure sneaker net.
You couldn't sneak that through a metal detector, though. Hopefully they would overlook it dangling from your keychain, especially if you were smart enough to buy a device that looks nothing like a standard USB key in an attempt to slip by (example).
Precisely. Sales or "#1 on charts" both have absolutely zero to do with whether a song, album, or band is good at all.
I myself think the black album was the ONLY album that was good at all from Metallica in their entire career - but that's just my opinion :)
No one will be doing the monitoring, it will all be filtered using keywords, byte patterns, and so on - much like Echelon.
Not simply hobbyists, this would cause major issues for the entire open-source world!
As for what was taken and their use of "sensitive"... They did not use "classified", so the data was mostly worthless to anyone. "Sensitive" doesn't even pique my curiosity! Much like most people here, I agree that the data was likely just secretarial-level stuff - inconsequential. The Ars Technica article (the section quoted below) does venture to say that it was login information which was stolen, but the next paragraph in the article starts "The government isn't saying what, exactly, got stolen." so I don't think the login statement is precise. Regardless, it is definitely implied that this was on live systems, not just a mere honeypot, yet might as well have been.
To be fair, even if the data they obtained was completely useless, the point, imho, is that they were able to get anything at all. To allow a known vunerability to be exploited with tons of tax dollars footing the IT bill? Ridiculous (though the government has been mostly full of fail for all eternity). I feel it is "amazing" that the hacker(s) did not get more data.
I chose to reply to this particular comment because I felt that your statement about the secretaries was... misguided. It wasn't the users who e-mailed things, it was the hacker's code doing the mailing. The code just made the e-mail appear to be an internal document/memo/etc, which tricked the receiver into opening it.
I completely agree with the original article in how there is no reason for him to be considered "cheating". How can you cheat at homework? If a group of people chose to get together and help each other with the homework (virtually or in-person, it's the same), who cares? What's wrong with that? I just don't get it.
Now, if there were some rules in this school about not conferring with your classmates on homework, I could understand that, but I did not read anything to that effect.
I assume that "unauthorized" is simply being implied here. While it makes more sense to include the distinction, most people who read this know that this is what they mean. As for inclusion in a legal agreement of some nature, it should be specified, yes.
The game I use in particular uses torrent to distribute their data for patches, and so forth. As such, it gets flagged at the ISP as "torrent traffic" and I get transmissions capped. Though online gaming doesn't require much bandwidth (compared to some other things), it has been extremely affected by the recent ISP changes. I went from a constant 30-90ms latency to only having 30-90ms when I am standing still away from any other players and server-controlled beings. When I get around something that requires more data to be transfered, these ISP changes cause a drastic change. Often peaking at 2000-3000ms, this is ridiculous. If they are going to use a policy such as this to curb online piracy (or whatever their reason), they need to consider a deeper packet analysis, or have certain traffic on a "safe-list", such as online games.
And to think that I was considering hosting a torrent tracker for my family to share home videos not that long back. I'm glad I never got around to it, as these recent problems are major hindrances.
I'm pretty sure if you dug down deep in your 'contract' you signed with your cable internet provider that you will find the truth about how there is only so much bandwidth available to your entire neighborhood, and that they are free to throttle you whenever and for whatever reason they wish in order to keep everyone within the norms. So you're downloading or seeding 500TB/day while the guy down the road can't even load up his G-Mail account to view pictures of his brother on vacation due to your consumption. For this, I understand and applaud their decision to enforce the throttling... However, I think they should have made this more apparent to the customers from day one.
While cable offers greater potential for speed/burst speeds since you can 'leech' the bandwidth from your neighbors, you might want to consider a high-end DSL or even a T-line if you want more stable and pre-defined throughput values.
I currently use a mid-tier SBC/AT&T DSL plan, and it's plenty for my personal uses, but just like all of the cable internet users out there, I am having bandwidth issues as well, so this might not be the way to go. I've been having problems with an online game, the same one quite a few people have been having problems with lately. It's kind of sad that their attempts to squash torrent traders is affecting other things, such as gaming.
Some of the comments got me thinking about how these watermarks have to get decoded from the audio at some point, right? Someone mentioned advertising inside the audio - I suppose this would be some banner or whatever which shows up on your media player when you play the song back, for example. How long until someone creates and 'watermarks' your mp3s with viruses instead of some advertisement? This is the worry I have about such technology. One more way for malicious software to make it onto your system.
However, speaking of decoding, if there is a decoder within your (future) audio player to interpret these watermarks, then that is already step one to hacking the watermarks out of the media. As for the comment regarding that the watermark would persist if the audio stream was filtered through analog, I highly doubt this would happen as the watermark would then have to exist in the audio itself, and not just embedded in the file - resulting in a reduction of audio quality. The data would have to be encoded into tones outside the range of human hearing, but decipherable by the audio player - but these bits of information representing the watermark tones would take up part of your audio stream's bandwidth, resulting in less room for the actual audio (although most likely a minuscule amount).
More likely this would be a digital stamp, which means a knowledgeable person would be able to remove it if they desired (much like you can remove DRM from your audio, if you know how).
Businesses, when purchasing goods for resale, do not pay sales tax on those goods.
The problem is not that it is an untaxed medium. Blizzard pays taxes for their network connections, electricity consumption, employees, and so on. I pay taxes on the monthly fee I pay to Blizzard...
Point: In the World of Warcraft (not sure of the other games), all of the characters, currency, and items (armor, weapons, etc) are owned by Blizzard, and you have no rights to them - Blizzard even owns your character's name, according to their EULA.
Fallout: Timmy and Johnny are 5-year old children who play with a ball at their daycare. Does this mean their parents have to pay tax on each time the ball changes hands simply because it is worth monetary value? The ball is still owned by the daycare.
Clarification: In the game, some players sell their currency and goods for real-world money on sites such as ebay and a slew of underground ones. Timmy should only be taxed if he charges Johnny real money to be able to play the ball, correct?
Future: What is the next step? Import/Export taxes/levies for international players to be able to receive the treasure they get after killing a dragon in the game?
Motion detecting glove-based input? Nintendo Power Glove.