there is no way of telling if an AP is open due to unintended negligence
I would actually argue that the negligence is explicitly implied.
Linksys routers, in particular, have stickers over the connection ports that instruct you to "run CD first."
That CD prompts you to set up a secured network. If you ignore those stickers and don't run the CD, or if for some reason you can't run the CD, you're implying you don't want security on your network, you should return the device for a refund, or pay a professional to set it up for you. In the event a professional sets it up, he or she can be liable for the misconfiguration, should finger pointing be desired.
What they are doing is not even questionable, it is completely legal.
That's true here in the US. Existence of companies like Skyhook and the iPod Touch's location feature make that evident. The question is if it's legal in Germany.
Not that it shouldn't be, particularly when an AP is metaphorically screaming,
Hello there, anyone who can hear me! My name is Linksys! You can tell me apart from other folks with the same name because I'm XX:YY:ZZ:AA:BB:CC! If you like, I can give you an IPv4 address! No, no, I haven't been told to exclude anyone who doesn't know my favorite word or phrase! Please talk to me! I love you!
Here in the States, logging that you heard such a declaration rightly isn't against the law. Further, based on my very crude analogy, I also don't think that "unauthorized" connection/use of an unprotected/unconfigured AP should be a criminal offense either. Perhaps if someone learns that their pipe is being used against their knowledge, they could (and should) take civil action to force that person to pay for what he's been freeloading on, but I digress.
For someone who actually breaks in to an encrypted AP (and yes, WEP counts), consider that WEP might be like a retarded-midget bouncer who'll believe you if you lie to him, whereas WPA could be, "My name is Linksys... Sorry about this, but unless you speak Italian and ol' Tony tells you what my favorite word or phrase is, I can't give you an IPv4 addres!" Any situation where network encryption is either bypassed or broken without the network owner's knowledge and permission is nefarious outright, regardless of intention, and that should most definitely be a criminal offense. Although if ol' Tony finds out before the cops do, you're probably even worse off.
I can see future products do a version check and declare incompatibility regardless if it is truthful.
Indeed!
Wii games often force firmware updates before they can be played, but this of course wreaks havoc on third party firmware. Such firmware has traps in it to break or bypass the update utilities and simply load the game. Very convenient for a hands off mod of the system.
If they can't integrate it into something I can use with a remote
Uhhhh, dude... Hulu Desktop was created explicitly for use on Media Center computers, complete with support for Media Center remotes.
And it's been available for some time now.
AND it runs on Linux!
....Personally speaking, I just wish that Hulu (or... anything that can offer a reasonable flat rate per month for that matter) would give better user experience and picture quality than the scene releases have for the last decade or so. We'll get progress some day.
I don't know about you, but if I were to spend 3-4 months day in and out in a program run by a certified educational institution that taught Linux and acquired a cert, I know for a fact that I'd be a much more attractive candidate for Linux administration than someone who just says he's got Linux experience.
I'm busy because I'm the only IT guy in our organization
I know what you're talking about.
After I got a full time job doing admin/helpdesk work for a larger company with a more proper (though terribly underpaid) IT Dept., I learned that not only is cutting corners hazardous (because it makes you look bad), it often eats up more cash, via your time, than just buying whatever the fully supported and proper solution is for what you need.
If you're flying solo in systems administration, and your boss says, "We need on our network/server/desktop," and you find a couple of products that do what you need, get the cost of closed source product A with a support contract and open source product B's support contract, particularly if said product's failure interrupts line of business, and present them as options to your boss and as the cost thereof.
Having someone to call in the event of a nightmare that knows more about a product than you ever will is quite the life and time saver. Furthermore, assuming that you being on your own for this business is indicative of the amount of equipment you're responsible for, paying even $5k for support contracts annually or even less often is a hell of a lot cheaper than you troubleshooting problems on your own or hiring a second admin or a contractor to fix what you can't or don't have the time for.
Lastly, get yourself a sales rep with an ISV. Personally, I've used PC Connection and Insight, and even though I go to Newegg for my personal purchases, having someone you literally call to ask about products and price quotes is a godsend. It's rather beneficial to have a relationship with a good sales rep, even if you only call them once or twice a year. That ability to pick up the phone, say, "My boss wants me to do X, what do you guys have that'll get X done, and what's the cost/feature difference between the varying products?" and get a comprehensive answer immediately or in a few hours via email while you're doing other work sure beats the hell out of researching it for hours or days, coming up with the same or inferior answer, and having to bill the company for hours where it looks like you've gotten nothing done.
Solo administration isn't always necessarily about what you can do or how much administration knowledge or experience you have---though if you've got no idea how to set up a basic Windows SBS you might want to consider classes or a career change---it's really more about the resources you can exploit to get the job done as quickly, efficiently, and most importantly as correctly as possible.
And remember, if you tell your boss how much something costs, you explain why, and he tells you to GTFO, then just do it. It's not worth your time, and ironically, it's generally not worth the company's time either. The only person who'll give him a lower price quote is someone who's going to struggle with things as much as you will without taking advantage of the things he could and should to get the job done.
13 years, and sometimes the speciousness or pretension of the sig-files takes my breath away and I feel I have to respond.
In case you were unaware, I've seen that sig many times on here since... probably as long as I can remember. At the very least, the last 1.5 years or so.
I find it hard to believe that, as a 13-year/. veteran, you'd only say something now and that you'd not post about it with your regular UID. I'm sure you can spare the karma, since you obviously care about it.
I shouldn't have to create and store H.264, Ogg Theora, MPEG2, and MJPEG versions just because every different browser chose their own format to support.
I suppose you could always try to solve codec support the same way Root CA's get into browsers.
Company A pays browser maker X large sums of money to include support for codec N.
Web sites B, C, D, and F license codec N from company A to produce content encoded with said codec.
Not that such a business model would actually work, but perhaps if it did, Google would just buy off all the browsers and open source their codec with no royalty fees, perhaps.
An admin I used to work with would pick arbitrary words that relate to the password's purpose and then rewrite them in 1337 sp34k with a little padding.
As an example, if an internal system was named "slashdot," a password for it might be something like "s1@shd0t%"
While it was a useful technique to create passwords that met complexity requirements, it was hell for the other admins when "administrative password changing time" rolled around:-P
Say you watched a movie in the theater, and then at home. It doesn't suddenly "look fake" at home. Yes, it's been transferred from 25 to say 60 fps, but the imperceptible flicker is what matters.
Movies are shot at 24 fps and then converted for NTSC video via a 3:2 pulldown. The effect is that, every second, 24 unique frames are shown on the 60 fps display, but it's still only 24 fps video. The problem with the technique is that it introduces jitter into what was previously fluid camera movements. Side to side panning is the most obvious situation where this occurs.
Like I said though, I think movies should be displayed using a very high--but even--pulldown ratio. Say 4:4 or 5:5. 120hz TV's perform a 5:5 pulldown on 24 fps film content, and the result is amazing. The only thing that I dislike about seeing movies in the theater is the obnoxious flicker I see out of the sides of my eyes when watching on a very large canvas. That high, even pulldown ratio would help to mitigate that issue.
And I'm sorry I'm not citing things, but I really don't care enough to do so. I enjoy my opinion, but I'm not really out to prove anything:P
Come on, people, double or quadruple the frame rate.
There's a small problem with that. While yes, you could (and I think they should) use a technique like frame doubling (via an X:X pulldown, for example) to increase the actual frame rate output by a projector, when the actual content is being displayed at a frame rate of 24, 30, 60, etc., fps, your eyes can tell the difference.
If a movie were to be filmed and then subsequently projected at 30 or 60 fps, for example, when you watched it, you'd come back with the feeling that it's "fake" or "poorly done." This isn't actually because that's the case, but rather because, as you've become accustomed to watching certain things at 24 fps such as movies and TV shows, and other things at 30 fps such as sports or the news, your brain makes the association that 24 fps content is "film" and 30 fps content is "live." The mystique behind film itself as an art relies on combining so many different factors together to create what you eventually see at the theater or on your home television, and even something as subtle as raising the frame rate by 25% can literally be enough to ruin your ability to enjoy a film.
I wish I had a comparison video to show you, but I've never seen one and am too lazy to look one up for the purpose of this post, but the effect that frame rate has on perception of content really is amazing and definitely not worth dismissing.
The best example I can think of might be the first Spidey/Goblin fight scene from Spider Man 3. While the movie was horrible, that fight and its camera movement were so fast that the frame rate of the recording couldn't keep a fluid image on the screen when I saw it. To increase the frame rate of the entire movie would have ruined it almost as much as Raimi's writing, and doing so for one scene simply isn't feasible.
I've seen "estimates" for Gbps FTTH setups and do understand that it would cost a lot of dough, but one really does wonder.
I'm quite certain that anything that's overall cheaper than a complete backbone through last-mile overhaul, though orders of magnitude more expensive per bit/second gained in capacity, will be the repeated step taken by every telco and cable provider in existence until the end of time, offering marginal increases in bandwidth every two years to the average consumer that's paid more in telephone/cable bills than the FTTH materials and installation cost in-between upgrade cycles.
Sigh. I should buy a sign that reads:
WTB:
INTERNET THAT MAKES UPGRADING TO 802.11n NECESSARY
SYMMETRICAL CONNECTIONS JUST LIKE THE ONES MY ISP HAS
Oh well the last Cox tech I spoke with said DOCSIS 3.0. Last summer. At least that can max out 100BASE.
These types of name changes have prevented older publications from compiling nicely into modern libraries and vernacular for some time now. I propose we switch to some type of managed form of journalism---let's call it Journalism.NET---where these types of scientific references can be safely ported to new, more up to date word-ware paradigms!
Over the last decade, I keep seeing these manufacturing processes grow ever smaller. I still remember when I bought my Athlon FX-55. 130nm process. Aw hell yeah. It's currently living the remainder of its life in one of my guest boxes. God that chip was such a waste of money, but I digress.
For those in the know, this ever shrinking manufacturing process tech: when will it stop? Where will it stop? 10nm? Sub-1nm?
Your inane comment aside, I don't recall if I was ever taught how to pluralize numbers. I do remember that, when pluralizing letters, it's "A's and B's." Extending the rationale behind that to numbers makes sense to me (and is quite handy when dealing with serial or model numbers; think "Dell GX280's"), but I suppose you have to be very intelligent to write something that way based on a rationalization coming from education rather than basing it on your ignorance of the proper method.
Perhaps, if you took the time to go smoke a cigarette and drink a cup of coffee, you might not sit on Slashdot and submit comments that make you look like an elitist jerk.
My IQ, on the other hand, is in the 120's or 130's. It's been a long time since I've had a WAIS test though. Always sorta wanted to get another one now that I'm out of school.
I consume nicotine and high amounts of caffeine on a regular basis. I'm told that it's partially a self-medicating technique observed in people with ADHD.
Ironically, the medication for said condition makes me want to smoke more frequently...
The things you suggest though are circumstantial. Might definitely be enough for an indictment (I think) were it the US judicial system, but the problem with circumstantial evidence is, again, reasonable doubt.
Slashdot Mirror
there is no way of telling if an AP is open due to unintended negligence
I would actually argue that the negligence is explicitly implied.
Linksys routers, in particular, have stickers over the connection ports that instruct you to "run CD first."
That CD prompts you to set up a secured network. If you ignore those stickers and don't run the CD, or if for some reason you can't run the CD, you're implying you don't want security on your network, you should return the device for a refund, or pay a professional to set it up for you. In the event a professional sets it up, he or she can be liable for the misconfiguration, should finger pointing be desired.
What they are doing is not even questionable, it is completely legal.
That's true here in the US. Existence of companies like Skyhook and the iPod Touch's location feature make that evident. The question is if it's legal in Germany.
Not that it shouldn't be, particularly when an AP is metaphorically screaming,
Hello there, anyone who can hear me!
My name is Linksys!
You can tell me apart from other folks with the same name because I'm XX:YY:ZZ:AA:BB:CC!
If you like, I can give you an IPv4 address!
No, no, I haven't been told to exclude anyone who doesn't know my favorite word or phrase!
Please talk to me! I love you!
Here in the States, logging that you heard such a declaration rightly isn't against the law. Further, based on my very crude analogy, I also don't think that "unauthorized" connection/use of an unprotected/unconfigured AP should be a criminal offense either. Perhaps if someone learns that their pipe is being used against their knowledge, they could (and should) take civil action to force that person to pay for what he's been freeloading on, but I digress.
... Sorry about this, but unless you speak Italian and ol' Tony tells you what my favorite word or phrase is, I can't give you an IPv4 addres!" Any situation where network encryption is either bypassed or broken without the network owner's knowledge and permission is nefarious outright, regardless of intention, and that should most definitely be a criminal offense. Although if ol' Tony finds out before the cops do, you're probably even worse off.
For someone who actually breaks in to an encrypted AP (and yes, WEP counts), consider that WEP might be like a retarded-midget bouncer who'll believe you if you lie to him, whereas WPA could be, "My name is Linksys
I can see future products do a version check and declare incompatibility regardless if it is truthful.
Indeed!
Wii games often force firmware updates before they can be played, but this of course wreaks havoc on third party firmware. Such firmware has traps in it to break or bypass the update utilities and simply load the game. Very convenient for a hands off mod of the system.
Good quality, 17,000 streaming titles, including thousands of seasons of television.
Current seasons and episodes? From all OTA broadcast networks? Without commercials?
If they can't integrate it into something I can use with a remote
Uhhhh, dude... Hulu Desktop was created explicitly for use on Media Center computers, complete with support for Media Center remotes.
And it's been available for some time now.
AND it runs on Linux!
....Personally speaking, I just wish that Hulu (or... anything that can offer a reasonable flat rate per month for that matter) would give better user experience and picture quality than the scene releases have for the last decade or so. We'll get progress some day.
There's got to be a mount (or you could probably unscrew two of them and put them together) with suction cups on both sides.
That'd get the job done.
I don't know about you, but if I were to spend 3-4 months day in and out in a program run by a certified educational institution that taught Linux and acquired a cert, I know for a fact that I'd be a much more attractive candidate for Linux administration than someone who just says he's got Linux experience.
I'm busy because I'm the only IT guy in our organization
I know what you're talking about.
After I got a full time job doing admin/helpdesk work for a larger company with a more proper (though terribly underpaid) IT Dept., I learned that not only is cutting corners hazardous (because it makes you look bad), it often eats up more cash, via your time, than just buying whatever the fully supported and proper solution is for what you need.
If you're flying solo in systems administration, and your boss says, "We need on our network/server/desktop," and you find a couple of products that do what you need, get the cost of closed source product A with a support contract and open source product B's support contract, particularly if said product's failure interrupts line of business, and present them as options to your boss and as the cost thereof.
Having someone to call in the event of a nightmare that knows more about a product than you ever will is quite the life and time saver. Furthermore, assuming that you being on your own for this business is indicative of the amount of equipment you're responsible for, paying even $5k for support contracts annually or even less often is a hell of a lot cheaper than you troubleshooting problems on your own or hiring a second admin or a contractor to fix what you can't or don't have the time for.
Lastly, get yourself a sales rep with an ISV. Personally, I've used PC Connection and Insight, and even though I go to Newegg for my personal purchases, having someone you literally call to ask about products and price quotes is a godsend. It's rather beneficial to have a relationship with a good sales rep, even if you only call them once or twice a year. That ability to pick up the phone, say, "My boss wants me to do X, what do you guys have that'll get X done, and what's the cost/feature difference between the varying products?" and get a comprehensive answer immediately or in a few hours via email while you're doing other work sure beats the hell out of researching it for hours or days, coming up with the same or inferior answer, and having to bill the company for hours where it looks like you've gotten nothing done.
Solo administration isn't always necessarily about what you can do or how much administration knowledge or experience you have---though if you've got no idea how to set up a basic Windows SBS you might want to consider classes or a career change---it's really more about the resources you can exploit to get the job done as quickly, efficiently, and most importantly as correctly as possible.
And remember, if you tell your boss how much something costs, you explain why, and he tells you to GTFO, then just do it. It's not worth your time, and ironically, it's generally not worth the company's time either. The only person who'll give him a lower price quote is someone who's going to struggle with things as much as you will without taking advantage of the things he could and should to get the job done.
THE CAKE IS A LIE!!!
Nonsense. It's so delicious and moist.
13 years, and sometimes the speciousness or pretension of the sig-files takes my breath away and I feel I have to respond.
In case you were unaware, I've seen that sig many times on here since... probably as long as I can remember. At the very least, the last 1.5 years or so.
/. veteran, you'd only say something now and that you'd not post about it with your regular UID. I'm sure you can spare the karma, since you obviously care about it.
I find it hard to believe that, as a 13-year
I shouldn't have to create and store H.264, Ogg Theora, MPEG2, and MJPEG versions just because every different browser chose their own format to support.
I suppose you could always try to solve codec support the same way Root CA's get into browsers.
Company A pays browser maker X large sums of money to include support for codec N.
Web sites B, C, D, and F license codec N from company A to produce content encoded with said codec.
Not that such a business model would actually work, but perhaps if it did, Google would just buy off all the browsers and open source their codec with no royalty fees, perhaps.
s/word/word
Is that a RegEx or something like that? Like
$foo = "driven";
$bar = RegEx("s/driven/tempered/");
Printf($bar);
Is my pseudocode gonna print "tempered"?
:P
Totally offtopic, but I'm curious cause I see it in IRC all the time and I asked once but I don't think anyone was listening
An admin I used to work with would pick arbitrary words that relate to the password's purpose and then rewrite them in 1337 sp34k with a little padding.
:-P
As an example, if an internal system was named "slashdot," a password for it might be something like "s1@shd0t%"
While it was a useful technique to create passwords that met complexity requirements, it was hell for the other admins when "administrative password changing time" rolled around
Say you watched a movie in the theater, and then at home. It doesn't suddenly "look fake" at home. Yes, it's been transferred from 25 to say 60 fps, but the imperceptible flicker is what matters.
Movies are shot at 24 fps and then converted for NTSC video via a 3:2 pulldown. The effect is that, every second, 24 unique frames are shown on the 60 fps display, but it's still only 24 fps video. The problem with the technique is that it introduces jitter into what was previously fluid camera movements. Side to side panning is the most obvious situation where this occurs.
:P
Like I said though, I think movies should be displayed using a very high--but even--pulldown ratio. Say 4:4 or 5:5. 120hz TV's perform a 5:5 pulldown on 24 fps film content, and the result is amazing. The only thing that I dislike about seeing movies in the theater is the obnoxious flicker I see out of the sides of my eyes when watching on a very large canvas. That high, even pulldown ratio would help to mitigate that issue.
And I'm sorry I'm not citing things, but I really don't care enough to do so. I enjoy my opinion, but I'm not really out to prove anything
Come on, people, double or quadruple the frame rate.
There's a small problem with that. While yes, you could (and I think they should) use a technique like frame doubling (via an X:X pulldown, for example) to increase the actual frame rate output by a projector, when the actual content is being displayed at a frame rate of 24, 30, 60, etc., fps, your eyes can tell the difference.
If a movie were to be filmed and then subsequently projected at 30 or 60 fps, for example, when you watched it, you'd come back with the feeling that it's "fake" or "poorly done." This isn't actually because that's the case, but rather because, as you've become accustomed to watching certain things at 24 fps such as movies and TV shows, and other things at 30 fps such as sports or the news, your brain makes the association that 24 fps content is "film" and 30 fps content is "live." The mystique behind film itself as an art relies on combining so many different factors together to create what you eventually see at the theater or on your home television, and even something as subtle as raising the frame rate by 25% can literally be enough to ruin your ability to enjoy a film.
I wish I had a comparison video to show you, but I've never seen one and am too lazy to look one up for the purpose of this post, but the effect that frame rate has on perception of content really is amazing and definitely not worth dismissing.
The best example I can think of might be the first Spidey/Goblin fight scene from Spider Man 3. While the movie was horrible, that fight and its camera movement were so fast that the frame rate of the recording couldn't keep a fluid image on the screen when I saw it. To increase the frame rate of the entire movie would have ruined it almost as much as Raimi's writing, and doing so for one scene simply isn't feasible.
Too bad the Feds decided putting hundreds of billions of dollars into Wall Street was a bigger priority.
That's a funny point. While we're all aware that $200 Billion won't even get 768k to every home in the country, just how many mega(giga?)bits do you think it could have gotten us?
I've seen "estimates" for Gbps FTTH setups and do understand that it would cost a lot of dough, but one really does wonder.
I'm quite certain that anything that's overall cheaper than a complete backbone through last-mile overhaul, though orders of magnitude more expensive per bit/second gained in capacity, will be the repeated step taken by every telco and cable provider in existence until the end of time, offering marginal increases in bandwidth every two years to the average consumer that's paid more in telephone/cable bills than the FTTH materials and installation cost in-between upgrade cycles.
Sigh. I should buy a sign that reads:
WTB:
INTERNET THAT MAKES UPGRADING TO 802.11n NECESSARY
SYMMETRICAL CONNECTIONS JUST LIKE THE ONES MY ISP HAS
Oh well the last Cox tech I spoke with said DOCSIS 3.0. Last summer. At least that can max out 100BASE.
Any day now.
These types of name changes have prevented older publications from compiling nicely into modern libraries and vernacular for some time now. I propose we switch to some type of managed form of journalism---let's call it Journalism.NET---where these types of scientific references can be safely ported to new, more up to date word-ware paradigms!
So, in true Slashdot spirit:
It's a sad day when getting root on my own device requires 'hacking'
FTFY.
Over the last decade, I keep seeing these manufacturing processes grow ever smaller. I still remember when I bought my Athlon FX-55. 130nm process. Aw hell yeah. It's currently living the remainder of its life in one of my guest boxes. God that chip was such a waste of money, but I digress.
For those in the know, this ever shrinking manufacturing process tech: when will it stop? Where will it stop? 10nm? Sub-1nm?
A single lady's got to earn his money somehow.
He should be in ... Youtube.
Oh. My. God.
How does one get in Youtube!?!??! I MUST KNOW!
Indeed!
Your inane comment aside, I don't recall if I was ever taught how to pluralize numbers. I do remember that, when pluralizing letters, it's "A's and B's." Extending the rationale behind that to numbers makes sense to me (and is quite handy when dealing with serial or model numbers; think "Dell GX280's"), but I suppose you have to be very intelligent to write something that way based on a rationalization coming from education rather than basing it on your ignorance of the proper method.
Perhaps, if you took the time to go smoke a cigarette and drink a cup of coffee, you might not sit on Slashdot and submit comments that make you look like an elitist jerk.
My IQ, on the other hand, is in the 120's or 130's. It's been a long time since I've had a WAIS test though. Always sorta wanted to get another one now that I'm out of school.
I consume nicotine and high amounts of caffeine on a regular basis. I'm told that it's partially a self-medicating technique observed in people with ADHD.
Ironically, the medication for said condition makes me want to smoke more frequently...
The things you suggest though are circumstantial. Might definitely be enough for an indictment (I think) were it the US judicial system, but the problem with circumstantial evidence is, again, reasonable doubt.
;)
Just a thought, of course