How hard is it to detect a riot? Hey look, there's a guy throwing a trashcan through a window surrounded by dozens of other people. Doesn't seem like rocket science.
Anyone in the eastern U.S. who has been to Sheetz or Wawa (don't start that war here, they're both great) knows that kiosks work and customers love them once they're used to them. More efficient, removes a step in the chain, orders get done right more often. Had lots of mistakes at McD's, never gotten the wrong thing at Sheetz or Wawa.
All a $15/hr min wage does is create jobs for robots.
I hate to be the turd in the environmental punchbowl here, but what about increased solar activity, Monder minimum, the little ice age, and all that? How do we know that it's just CO2?
And given the tendancy of the solar wind to strip off the atmosphere and our reversing magnetic field, mightn't some extra gas in the atmosphere be a good thing in the extreme long term, even if some cities get a bit soggy in the short term?
I'm just asking...
Talk about being able to punish bad actors. If this research leads to a little GUI desktop app that tells what packets your ISP is throttling and how much, bad actors will have nowhere to hide.
Geeks everywhere will blog the offenders into submission, and "Cable Modems w/no throttling!" suddenly becomes a very nice selling point. Wish I could have made it to Black Hat...
... and anyone who isn't using something like Skype or third-party cell phone to call a source whom a federal prosecutor might want to talk to is crazy. No, I don't know that anyone is listenting in, or that any of my sources might be the subject of an investigation. But it's just so easy to take precautions, it's dumb not to.
I use Skype when I want to keep something quiet. PGP isn't the world's most difficult tool for e-mail. I keep my home system double-NATed, I clean up my tracks frequently and don't ever use an easy-to-find e-mail account if I need to talk to someone quiety, i.e. firstname.lastname-AT-Mymediacompany.dork
Here's a gem: I don't use the company phone if I need to talk to a really good source. If I'm super-leery of something, I use someone else's cell phone, as in not a colleague.
That's not to say I'm sitting on information that could do serious harm just for a good story. If I find out that there's an immediate threat to someone's life or property, or there's a threat to national security (if I ever get a story that good), I'll sing like a bird. Journalists have to remember they're citizens, too, and I don't want any blood on my hands.
But if it's somebody trying to root out a whistleblower, too bad. I'm not going to make it easy.
If this is true, and that's a big if, it would raise some hard core legal questions. Can Microsoft revoke a license that's been purchased legally? I know a number of people who are having trouble with this stuff who dropped the $100+ for a sealed box copy already, and they're seriously PO'd. Talk about making OS X look good...
I'm no legal scholar, but might this not also have some sort of interplay with the anti-trust settlement? A remote kill switch sounds like it could have some major anti-competitive uses.
From a PR perspective, it's unimaginable that they wouldn't jump on a rumor like this right out of the gate. If they don't quash this in the next 48 hours, this has the potential to snowball. Stuff like this has to be squashed early or it lives forever.
... for files and music, and thanks to some helpful slashdotters, it's up and running nicely.
We took and old PC, smacked an old copy of XP pro SP 2 on it, threw in an extra couple of old hard drives. We put it on the LAN, unplugged the monitor, keyboard and mouse and ran it via remote desktop.
Then we put Hamachi on it, set up shared folders, gave everbody the password and are running the VPN peer-to-peer. Everybody can share files on a LAN, the server is made of spare parts and anyone who can use windows file sharing has access to the files they want.
And if my crowd can pull this off, anybody's family can. Best of luck.
FYI, I took several suggestions under advisement, and as of last night, the VPN was up and running, in most cases behind two NAT routers, firewalls, and various other impediments to easy networking. The file transfer speed ain't great, but it's way better than putting it on a zip disk and putting the zip disk in a car.
Plus, all my lower-tech users can swap files easily with mapped drives, and I can safely tell them now not to open ANY file attatchments for ANY reason. If it's legit, it'll come over the VPN.
Gracias!
All great suggestions. I've got some goof off time this weekend, so I'll take a look at all these, run them through the "can I afford it" and "can they figure out how to do this" filter and get to it.
BTW, I know connecting up all the LANs is a bit over the top, but really, if I can pull this off, how cool would that be? It's good for at least a semi-Ubergeek badge or something...
Slashdot Mirror
When there's no room left in Hong Kong, the dead will go to mainland China...
How hard is it to detect a riot? Hey look, there's a guy throwing a trashcan through a window surrounded by dozens of other people. Doesn't seem like rocket science.
Avoid Volvo driverless cars in Australia, around zoos with bad security.
Anyone in the eastern U.S. who has been to Sheetz or Wawa (don't start that war here, they're both great) knows that kiosks work and customers love them once they're used to them. More efficient, removes a step in the chain, orders get done right more often. Had lots of mistakes at McD's, never gotten the wrong thing at Sheetz or Wawa. All a $15/hr min wage does is create jobs for robots.
I hate to be the turd in the environmental punchbowl here, but what about increased solar activity, Monder minimum, the little ice age, and all that? How do we know that it's just CO2? And given the tendancy of the solar wind to strip off the atmosphere and our reversing magnetic field, mightn't some extra gas in the atmosphere be a good thing in the extreme long term, even if some cities get a bit soggy in the short term? I'm just asking...
...feel as stupid as I do now? Og use calculator to addy big numbers.
Talk about being able to punish bad actors. If this research leads to a little GUI desktop app that tells what packets your ISP is throttling and how much, bad actors will have nowhere to hide. Geeks everywhere will blog the offenders into submission, and "Cable Modems w/no throttling!" suddenly becomes a very nice selling point. Wish I could have made it to Black Hat...
... and anyone who isn't using something like Skype or third-party cell phone to call a source whom a federal prosecutor might want to talk to is crazy. No, I don't know that anyone is listenting in, or that any of my sources might be the subject of an investigation. But it's just so easy to take precautions, it's dumb not to.
I use Skype when I want to keep something quiet. PGP isn't the world's most difficult tool for e-mail. I keep my home system double-NATed, I clean up my tracks frequently and don't ever use an easy-to-find e-mail account if I need to talk to someone quiety, i.e. firstname.lastname-AT-Mymediacompany.dork
Here's a gem: I don't use the company phone if I need to talk to a really good source. If I'm super-leery of something, I use someone else's cell phone, as in not a colleague.
That's not to say I'm sitting on information that could do serious harm just for a good story. If I find out that there's an immediate threat to someone's life or property, or there's a threat to national security (if I ever get a story that good), I'll sing like a bird. Journalists have to remember they're citizens, too, and I don't want any blood on my hands.
But if it's somebody trying to root out a whistleblower, too bad. I'm not going to make it easy.
If this is true, and that's a big if, it would raise some hard core legal questions. Can Microsoft revoke a license that's been purchased legally? I know a number of people who are having trouble with this stuff who dropped the $100+ for a sealed box copy already, and they're seriously PO'd. Talk about making OS X look good...
I'm no legal scholar, but might this not also have some sort of interplay with the anti-trust settlement? A remote kill switch sounds like it could have some major anti-competitive uses.
From a PR perspective, it's unimaginable that they wouldn't jump on a rumor like this right out of the gate. If they don't quash this in the next 48 hours, this has the potential to snowball. Stuff like this has to be squashed early or it lives forever.
...everybody now has all the music they want, and new shares are devoted to new music. And since most new music sucks, there's little growth.
... for files and music, and thanks to some helpful slashdotters, it's up and running nicely. We took and old PC, smacked an old copy of XP pro SP 2 on it, threw in an extra couple of old hard drives. We put it on the LAN, unplugged the monitor, keyboard and mouse and ran it via remote desktop. Then we put Hamachi on it, set up shared folders, gave everbody the password and are running the VPN peer-to-peer. Everybody can share files on a LAN, the server is made of spare parts and anyone who can use windows file sharing has access to the files they want. And if my crowd can pull this off, anybody's family can. Best of luck.
FYI, I took several suggestions under advisement, and as of last night, the VPN was up and running, in most cases behind two NAT routers, firewalls, and various other impediments to easy networking. The file transfer speed ain't great, but it's way better than putting it on a zip disk and putting the zip disk in a car. Plus, all my lower-tech users can swap files easily with mapped drives, and I can safely tell them now not to open ANY file attatchments for ANY reason. If it's legit, it'll come over the VPN. Gracias!
My license plates don't read TARDIS for nothing...
All great suggestions. I've got some goof off time this weekend, so I'll take a look at all these, run them through the "can I afford it" and "can they figure out how to do this" filter and get to it.
BTW, I know connecting up all the LANs is a bit over the top, but really, if I can pull this off, how cool would that be? It's good for at least a semi-Ubergeek badge or something...