The best part about them pushing for criminal prosecution is the evidence needed in criminal cases versus the evidence needed in civil court. In a criminal case, the prosecution must prove beyond a shadow of a doubt (99.9% certainty) that the accused is guilty. In civil court, the jury is instructed to make its decision based on "preponderance of evidence," which means the jury only needs to believe 51% one way or the other to make a decision. I'd almost rather be prosecuted as a criminal for a case like this. If they think they have a hard time proving a case now, imagine how hard it will be when they need 99.9% certainty rather than 51%.
/me thanks heaven (and Mark Shuttleworth) for Ubuntu. You know, this attack has been around for a LONG time, but in an even deadlier form called the Evil Twins attack. Basically, an Evil Twins attack involves the attacker creating an access point (NOT an ad-hoc network) out of one network card, and using a second to relay that traffic to the real AP. They set their rogue AP's SSID to the same string as the target network, making client computers completely unaware that they are on a rogue network, and likely to connect to the rogue AP, even if they have their computers set to only connect to "trusted" networks. For the more anal clients that check the MAC address of the AP, that can be spoofed too. More info on the Evil Twins attack: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,120054-page,1/ar ticle.html This is why it's always in your best interests to tunnel ALL your traffic to a remote, known-secure connection whenever you are on any kind of wireless network.
Who is really surprised by this? Let's be honest. Most people that work in any sort of white collar (and even a good chunk of those in blue collar) jobs sit in front of some sort of terminal all day while they are at work. That's 8 hours every day. If you sleep 8 hours and spend 8 in front of the PC, that only leaves 8 more hours. Factor in meal times, taking kids to soccer practice, commute to and from work, and that probably only leaves 5-6 hours (at best) of free time each day to do whatever you want to do, including spending time with your SO. This story is sensationalist hogwash that is trying to stir up reactions like "OMG look at us! Society is degenerating blah blah blah!" We've heard it all before. Nothing to see here - move along.
One question for the recording industry:
on
XM+MP3 Going to Trial
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
When was it decided that digital recording is exempt from the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992? I see that the reasoning behind your argument is that when these digital recorders make a recording, it will not degrade - but when was it decided that personal recordings must degrade in order to be deemed acceptable for the consumer to posssess? Why can your customers not take measures to guarantee that the recordings they make do not fall victim to the ravages of time? If what you've said on many occasions is true and you are indeed selling us the license to the content, not the media, and that license has no expiration date, then why does the longevity of the format have any bearing on its legality? If you want to sell us licenses to the content, give us the ability to recover all of the content in event of loss. If you want us to have to re-purchase the content upon its loss, allow us to take the appropriate measures to protect our investments. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Crystal Ball Predictions? It's one thing to look into the foreseeable future and try to guess what might happen, but your predictions, especially that last paragraph, are about as likely to happen as Sony giving an open, sincere apology for the rootkits. The industry will never realize what mistakes it is making. It will never wake up. It's quite content to take the blue pill and continue ignoring its customers. It will continually blame slumping sales on piracy, not lack of desirable content or unreasonable pricing. It will continually pay its actors and executives exorbitant salaries that have no relationship whatsoever to the services provided. It will continually pass those high production costs down to its consumers. And finally, the STUPID CONSUMER will NEVER wake up and stop buying the industry's trash! Only one thing will make the industry listen: Money. Changes like what you suggested will never be possible as long as the consumer thinks it's OK for DRM-laden movies to cost $25 and keeps buying them.
...work has already begun for IE 8 and it may be released as a final product 'within 18-24 months'. Translation:
...we are now waiting patiently for the Mozilla team to come up with new innovation for us to claim as our own. Once that has happened, IE8 may be released as a final product 'within 54-76 months'.
I agree. A great example of this is the graphics in GTA:III on the different platforms. Play it on PS2, then play it on Xbox. Drive a car, and look at the paint. It shines and reflects in the Xbox version, but all cars in the PS2 version are painted with a matte finish. There are other examples, but this one truly stood out to me.
I am so sick of this whole "closing the analog hole" mantra. I wrote a blog entry about this a while ago, and I will quote it here: Argh. Blogger is down. Paraphrase:
Human beings are inherently and irreparably analog. Until there are digital, encrypted inputs into our brains, the analog hole will always be (as it always has been) the human interface. End of story. Game, set, match. Trying to close the analog hole is like trying to rake water uphill. It's not gonna happen, and it's just costing the consumer more money - every dollar that the industry spends on making piracy harder is just another dollar that the legal, paying consumer will have to help them recuperate (read: price hikes for paying customers). Enough of this, already. Vote with your wallet. NEVER buy HD content in DRM encumbered formats.
You see, most of the applications out there that most people use only run on Windows. Actually, most of the applications out there that most people use are now web based, and thus cross-platform compatible. Most people I know only get on their computer to use Email, MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, etc. I agree that Windows is the dominant OS, that most users are accustomed to using it, and that they will freak out if their new PC doesn't have it, this doesn't make your statement true. The desktop OS may not be dead, but it is dying. (Netcraft confirms it!)
It's not that any of them are dead set on it. It's a cold war. For example, if Seagate decided that it needed to get right with its consumers and started labeling its disks accurately, then Maxtor, WD, etc would have the competitive advantage because their drives of identical capacity would be labeled as having more space. Ultimately, it's the consumer's fault for not reading the fine print on the boxes he buys. If Seagate (or any other manufacturer) could trust its consumers to be informed enough not to buy into the 1000 byte Kilobyte farce, then they would be able to change. But the fact remains that the consumer is stupid and cannot be trusted to make that decision. Long ago, some marketing twerp at one of these companies figured out that kilo/mega/giga... are all metric units measured in thousands increments and decided to use the metric measurement and put the "decryption" key (1 Gigabyte = 1000 Megabytes) in 2 point font on the bottom of the box. Unable to make a hard disk whose actual capacity matched this one's imaginary capacity for a similar price, all the other manufacturers followed suit. So you see, it's not that any of them are trying to deceive. They're simply caught up in a game that some idiot started in attempt to make a fast buck. Now everyone has to suffer. Thanks a lot, marketing twerp.
What? So you refuse to adopt new technologies at the slightest sign of danger? My suggestion: Stay the hell away from all electronics. They could shock you.
Definitely a bad hacker. The only way that Google could keep his search terms and link them directly to him as a person would be if he were logged into his Gmail account when he was searching for the help he sought (or if he did them while sitting at his desk at work or home). Had he been smart, he would have done all the research from a public terminal in a library or university where no logon is needed. But we've already established that he wasn't smart. His imprisonment is not an effective disincentive to other hackers because he was just so stupid about it, and no self respecting real hacker would be so careless and they're probably all laughing at his sorry ass now.
FTFA: "You're new video and tv-capable mobile phone" For once, It's an incorrect use of "you're" when "your" should have been used. Usually it's the other way around.
Firefox has an IE Tab plugin that uses the IE rendering engine to load one tab while the remaining tabs stay in Gecko. It even allows the user to set a list of websites that load with the IE engine by default. (It comes with several sites pre-configured this way, like windowsupdate.com) I wonder if Opera users could get the same kind of feature in the Windows release, or a Gecko-rendered tab in the Linux release. This could really help out in those sticky situations, and it wouldn't require the user to download and install a separate browser just to visit one website. Just a thought.
I've never heard of a grandmother, aunt, uncle, child, or otherwise require training to use the basic software that comes with windows. Apparently you've never heard of any of my grandparents, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc, to all of which I have had to give basic Windows support.
You are right about the same computer being able to run the game in either OS - There are even games that have been released for both platforms on the same disc! (Unreal Tournament, anyone?) Linux is fully capable of playing games, and any MS fanboi who tries to tell you otherwise is lying through his teeth. (Nexuiz, America's Army, Enemy Territory) The only reason that game developers make their games for Windows only most of the time is because they have a limited budget and cannot justify the additional man-hours necessary to get the game to run in Linux. I have a proposal: There needs to be an industry standard "framework" for games on the PC platform. Like the Java Virtual Machine, the code would be completely portable. The interface, the sound, the netcode, and all that would be handled by the framework rather than the game itself. Then developers could release a game that used the framework, and any system that could run the framework could run the game. You could have people playing new games on BeOS, for pete's sake. Think of the additional profit that could be made! More platforms supported = more customers.
I was wondering the same thing. There are commercial products out there that limit network access to unpatched machines, but they allow quarantined machines to access certain sites like windowsupdate.com and the AV def servers. I wonder if there are any patents held by those companies with which they could deliver a smackdown to MS.
I show them my AIGLX + Beryl setup. They ask "Is that Windows Vista?" with a surprised, eager tone in their voices. "No," I reply, "It's better. And it's free." That's when they get really interested. Average Joes LOVE eye candy, and Beryl had Aero beaten before Vista was even out of beta.
Hold on... A decrease in range? I thought 802.11n was supposed to boost range.
According to this product description:
"By overlaying the signals of multiple radios, Wireless-N's "Multiple In, Multiple Out" (MIMO) technology multiplies the effective data rate. Unlike ordinary wireless networking technologies that are confused by signal reflections, MIMO actually uses these reflections to increase the range and reduce "dead spots" in the wireless coverage area. The robust signal travels farther, maintaining wireless connections up to 4 times farther than standard Wireless-G."
I don't plan on offing myself at any age. The fact that you wish for me to commit suicide is disturbing, and lends no credibility to your argument, but I will defend my case nevertheless. I grew up with technology. I have kept myself current on it all, and I don't ever plan to lose sight of it. Most of these people I was referring to are Luddites who actively TRY not to learn new things. They actually go out of their way to continue using outdated methods and systems when everyone else is switching to the new thing(s). I don't know why. I think learning new things is easy and fun, but these people have a fear of change, and that is what causes them to get so far behind that they don't have any chance of catching up. The reason we need teachers is because we need a system for certifying achievement. You can probably teach yourself 95% of what you can learn in school. The teachers are there to administer the tests that prove that you know it. My comment wasn't ageist - it was realistic.
I am afraid that you give far too much credit to the average corporate peon. I work in a highly progressive educational institution, and even the students have trouble picking up new behavior. You can forget about it with anyone over 45.
The whole German "handy" thing stems from a stupid obsession that anything English (or English sounding) is cool - it actually results in very bad English that looks stupid to people who can speak English properly, and is unintelligible to others who don't speak English.Sounds like the motivation behind engrish.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking it would be more like the Oregon Trail.
The best part about them pushing for criminal prosecution is the evidence needed in criminal cases versus the evidence needed in civil court. In a criminal case, the prosecution must prove beyond a shadow of a doubt (99.9% certainty) that the accused is guilty. In civil court, the jury is instructed to make its decision based on "preponderance of evidence," which means the jury only needs to believe 51% one way or the other to make a decision. I'd almost rather be prosecuted as a criminal for a case like this. If they think they have a hard time proving a case now, imagine how hard it will be when they need 99.9% certainty rather than 51%.
/me thanks heaven (and Mark Shuttleworth) for Ubuntu.r ticle.html
You know, this attack has been around for a LONG time, but in an even deadlier form called the Evil Twins attack. Basically, an Evil Twins attack involves the attacker creating an access point (NOT an ad-hoc network) out of one network card, and using a second to relay that traffic to the real AP. They set their rogue AP's SSID to the same string as the target network, making client computers completely unaware that they are on a rogue network, and likely to connect to the rogue AP, even if they have their computers set to only connect to "trusted" networks. For the more anal clients that check the MAC address of the AP, that can be spoofed too.
More info on the Evil Twins attack: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,120054-page,1/a
This is why it's always in your best interests to tunnel ALL your traffic to a remote, known-secure connection whenever you are on any kind of wireless network.
Who is really surprised by this? Let's be honest. Most people that work in any sort of white collar (and even a good chunk of those in blue collar) jobs sit in front of some sort of terminal all day while they are at work. That's 8 hours every day. If you sleep 8 hours and spend 8 in front of the PC, that only leaves 8 more hours. Factor in meal times, taking kids to soccer practice, commute to and from work, and that probably only leaves 5-6 hours (at best) of free time each day to do whatever you want to do, including spending time with your SO. This story is sensationalist hogwash that is trying to stir up reactions like "OMG look at us! Society is degenerating blah blah blah!" We've heard it all before. Nothing to see here - move along.
When was it decided that digital recording is exempt from the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992? I see that the reasoning behind your argument is that when these digital recorders make a recording, it will not degrade - but when was it decided that personal recordings must degrade in order to be deemed acceptable for the consumer to posssess? Why can your customers not take measures to guarantee that the recordings they make do not fall victim to the ravages of time? If what you've said on many occasions is true and you are indeed selling us the license to the content, not the media, and that license has no expiration date, then why does the longevity of the format have any bearing on its legality? If you want to sell us licenses to the content, give us the ability to recover all of the content in event of loss. If you want us to have to re-purchase the content upon its loss, allow us to take the appropriate measures to protect our investments. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Crystal Ball Predictions? It's one thing to look into the foreseeable future and try to guess what might happen, but your predictions, especially that last paragraph, are about as likely to happen as Sony giving an open, sincere apology for the rootkits. The industry will never realize what mistakes it is making. It will never wake up. It's quite content to take the blue pill and continue ignoring its customers. It will continually blame slumping sales on piracy, not lack of desirable content or unreasonable pricing. It will continually pay its actors and executives exorbitant salaries that have no relationship whatsoever to the services provided. It will continually pass those high production costs down to its consumers. And finally, the STUPID CONSUMER will NEVER wake up and stop buying the industry's trash! Only one thing will make the industry listen: Money. Changes like what you suggested will never be possible as long as the consumer thinks it's OK for DRM-laden movies to cost $25 and keeps buying them.
...work has already begun for IE 8 and it may be released as a final product 'within 18-24 months'. Translation:
...we are now waiting patiently for the Mozilla team to come up with new innovation for us to claim as our own. Once that has happened, IE8 may be released as a final product 'within 54-76 months'.I agree. A great example of this is the graphics in GTA:III on the different platforms. Play it on PS2, then play it on Xbox. Drive a car, and look at the paint. It shines and reflects in the Xbox version, but all cars in the PS2 version are painted with a matte finish. There are other examples, but this one truly stood out to me.
Argh. Blogger is down. Paraphrase: Human beings are inherently and irreparably analog. Until there are digital, encrypted inputs into our brains, the analog hole will always be (as it always has been) the human interface. End of story. Game, set, match. Trying to close the analog hole is like trying to rake water uphill. It's not gonna happen, and it's just costing the consumer more money - every dollar that the industry spends on making piracy harder is just another dollar that the legal, paying consumer will have to help them recuperate (read: price hikes for paying customers). Enough of this, already. Vote with your wallet. NEVER buy HD content in DRM encumbered formats.
It's not that any of them are dead set on it. It's a cold war. For example, if Seagate decided that it needed to get right with its consumers and started labeling its disks accurately, then Maxtor, WD, etc would have the competitive advantage because their drives of identical capacity would be labeled as having more space. Ultimately, it's the consumer's fault for not reading the fine print on the boxes he buys. If Seagate (or any other manufacturer) could trust its consumers to be informed enough not to buy into the 1000 byte Kilobyte farce, then they would be able to change. But the fact remains that the consumer is stupid and cannot be trusted to make that decision. Long ago, some marketing twerp at one of these companies figured out that kilo/mega/giga ... are all metric units measured in thousands increments and decided to use the metric measurement and put the "decryption" key (1 Gigabyte = 1000 Megabytes) in 2 point font on the bottom of the box. Unable to make a hard disk whose actual capacity matched this one's imaginary capacity for a similar price, all the other manufacturers followed suit.
So you see, it's not that any of them are trying to deceive. They're simply caught up in a game that some idiot started in attempt to make a fast buck. Now everyone has to suffer. Thanks a lot, marketing twerp.
What? So you refuse to adopt new technologies at the slightest sign of danger? My suggestion: Stay the hell away from all electronics. They could shock you.
Definitely a bad hacker. The only way that Google could keep his search terms and link them directly to him as a person would be if he were logged into his Gmail account when he was searching for the help he sought (or if he did them while sitting at his desk at work or home). Had he been smart, he would have done all the research from a public terminal in a library or university where no logon is needed. But we've already established that he wasn't smart. His imprisonment is not an effective disincentive to other hackers because he was just so stupid about it, and no self respecting real hacker would be so careless and they're probably all laughing at his sorry ass now.
FTFA:
"You're new video and tv-capable mobile phone"
For once, It's an incorrect use of "you're" when "your" should have been used. Usually it's the other way around.
Firefox has an IE Tab plugin that uses the IE rendering engine to load one tab while the remaining tabs stay in Gecko. It even allows the user to set a list of websites that load with the IE engine by default. (It comes with several sites pre-configured this way, like windowsupdate.com) I wonder if Opera users could get the same kind of feature in the Windows release, or a Gecko-rendered tab in the Linux release. This could really help out in those sticky situations, and it wouldn't require the user to download and install a separate browser just to visit one website. Just a thought.
The "Oops Department."
You are right about the same computer being able to run the game in either OS - There are even games that have been released for both platforms on the same disc! (Unreal Tournament, anyone?)
Linux is fully capable of playing games, and any MS fanboi who tries to tell you otherwise is lying through his teeth. (Nexuiz, America's Army, Enemy Territory) The only reason that game developers make their games for Windows only most of the time is because they have a limited budget and cannot justify the additional man-hours necessary to get the game to run in Linux.
I have a proposal: There needs to be an industry standard "framework" for games on the PC platform. Like the Java Virtual Machine, the code would be completely portable. The interface, the sound, the netcode, and all that would be handled by the framework rather than the game itself. Then developers could release a game that used the framework, and any system that could run the framework could run the game. You could have people playing new games on BeOS, for pete's sake. Think of the additional profit that could be made! More platforms supported = more customers.
I was wondering the same thing. There are commercial products out there that limit network access to unpatched machines, but they allow quarantined machines to access certain sites like windowsupdate.com and the AV def servers. I wonder if there are any patents held by those companies with which they could deliver a smackdown to MS.
I show them my AIGLX + Beryl setup. They ask "Is that Windows Vista?" with a surprised, eager tone in their voices.
"No," I reply, "It's better. And it's free."
That's when they get really interested. Average Joes LOVE eye candy, and Beryl had Aero beaten before Vista was even out of beta.
Ummm... OO.o doesn't need salesmen offering discounts - It's free.
Hold on... A decrease in range? I thought 802.11n was supposed to boost range.
According to this product description:
"By overlaying the signals of multiple radios, Wireless-N's "Multiple In, Multiple Out" (MIMO) technology multiplies the effective data rate. Unlike ordinary wireless networking technologies that are confused by signal reflections, MIMO actually uses these reflections to increase the range and reduce "dead spots" in the wireless coverage area. The robust signal travels farther, maintaining wireless connections up to 4 times farther than standard Wireless-G."
I don't plan on offing myself at any age. The fact that you wish for me to commit suicide is disturbing, and lends no credibility to your argument, but I will defend my case nevertheless. I grew up with technology. I have kept myself current on it all, and I don't ever plan to lose sight of it. Most of these people I was referring to are Luddites who actively TRY not to learn new things. They actually go out of their way to continue using outdated methods and systems when everyone else is switching to the new thing(s). I don't know why. I think learning new things is easy and fun, but these people have a fear of change, and that is what causes them to get so far behind that they don't have any chance of catching up.
The reason we need teachers is because we need a system for certifying achievement. You can probably teach yourself 95% of what you can learn in school. The teachers are there to administer the tests that prove that you know it.
My comment wasn't ageist - it was realistic.
I am afraid that you give far too much credit to the average corporate peon. I work in a highly progressive educational institution, and even the students have trouble picking up new behavior. You can forget about it with anyone over 45.
The whole German "handy" thing stems from a stupid obsession that anything English (or English sounding) is cool - it actually results in very bad English that looks stupid to people who can speak English properly, and is unintelligible to others who don't speak English.Sounds like the motivation behind engrish.