I hacked a cheap WinCE-based Satnav and installed ScummVM onto it. Also, I made damn sure I didn't pay for my copy of Monkey Island... but I guess that's the pirate in me.
Yep, I set up a router for someone recently that was configured like this. The owner runs a Guest House so she could give one password for guests and another for her kids.
This obviously has benefits to society but comes at the cost of making your home network less secure - most routers don't separate the internet side of things from the home network side of things, so it's similar to allowing a person to connect their PC to your LAN socket. Any machines on your network are now visible to an attacker.
Science works in the opposite way to religion - skepticism and doubt are at the heart of the scientific method. Science is about coming up with a model or a theory to explain something, and then testing it and trying to prove it wrong. Most religions claim to know some divinely inspired truth which must not be questioned, and doubt and skepticism are seen as the enemies of religion - and quite rightly so.
The level of "faith" required to accept a scientific finding is not comparable to the level of faith required to believe in religion. If a team of scientists conducts an experiment and comes up with a result then the experiment is analysed through peer review, and if possible the experiment is run again and again (often by different teams) to see if they get the same results or not.
DRM was never about the consumer. The only people who benefit from DRM are content providers.
They use DRM as a way of unfairly controlling what you can do with the content you paid good money for.
Err, I don't like SP2 because I've personally witnessed it fuck up 2 PCs to the extent that they wouldn't even boot.
We had to use System Restore to go back. I don't have the time to find out what it is about the computers SP2 doesn't like. The service pack should just work. If there's something it doesnt like then we should have had a warning saying "Cannot install SP2 until you remove foo/bar"
Secondly, on the many machines I admin which do run SP2 okay, performance is definitely slower with SP2 installed.
As for your other moronic comments:
OSX is a far better OS than Windows (stability, security, ease of use, performance and general overall cleverness). And I don't own, nor have I ever owned, an Apple computer.
Windows 98 is faster and more secure than Windows XP. It's also has fewer features and is more unstable. Oh, and it doesn't look as pretty, if that's your bag. Maybe people are still running 98 because their computers are not fast enough to run XP? Or maybe they just use it because they have it, it works, and they can't afford £250 to buy Windows XP Professional for no good reason.
According to PC World Business here in the UK, a copy of XP Pro will set you back £210+VAT, whereas you can buy a brand new NEC PC, 256mb RAM, 40gig h/d, LAN, keyboard but no monitor WITH a copy of XP Home for £199+VAT.
Does that make any sense to you?
While I'm at it, go and look how much a full retail copy of MS Office costs these days. How does £350 sound?
The latest version of Knoppix runs from CD, and if you burn it to a CDRW you can even save your settings onto CD as you use it. It includes an OS, Open Office 2 Beta (excellent IMO), not to mention shitloads of free apps.
I like Windows and I tolerate MS Office but I do not think they justify the insanely high prices MS charges for them.
1) Switch on the built-in firewall before you connect to the internet. It's very basic but it does the job, I've been running an unpatched XP system with nothing more than the built-in firewall for months now with no problems.
2) Buy a router. £25/$40 buys you a piece of hardware which acts like a firewall and blocks all incoming ports, other than ones you solicit, natch.
3) Slipstream SP2 into your XP install. Personally I'm staying away from SP2 but use it if you must.
4) Put a copy of Zone Alarm on your "XP Install Disc 2", along with the the many useful bits of freeware available at www.grc.com
If they cared about security (remember them saying that Windows XP was the most secure operating system ever?) they would have shipped it with the firewall on by default and most services off by default.
Why oh why did they think it was a good idea to have an RPC server on by default when there's probably less than 1% of users who would use the feature?
How many insecurities has Internet Explorer had since it was launched with XP? I lost count. Even now, there are still holes in there wide enough to drive a truck through but they are not patched. Microsoft want to keep things quiet until they get around to fixing the bugs, and they only fix the bugs when they see the problem being exploited in the wild.
And, thanks to Microsoft integrating the Internet Exploder engine so tightly into their OS, if a bug affects IE then it probably also affects Outlook, Outlook Express, MS Help and gawd knows what else.
Actually the purpose of this puzzle is to test your problem solving skills.
They want to know that you are capable of thinking for yourself: maybe you know nothing about the differences between Blofish and AES. That doesn't matter. What does matter is you have a problem and can find a way to solve it.
The IE scripting error had been a problem for several weeks. When I did system restore I restored back to 4 days ago.
If system restore did what it said on the tin then I would have restored the computer back the state it was in 4 days ago INCLUDING the scripting error.
System restore alone did not fix the buggy IE problem. System restore simply made the computer usable again by undoing the effects of the service pack.
A combination of installing the service pack and then using system restore to go back fixed the problem.
All the user was getting was the occasional script error in IE when submitting something via a form. Updating IE to the latest version seems like a perfectly valid thing to do as any corrupted DLL or config files would be replaced.
There were no updates from Windows Update except for SP2. As SP2 is officially endorsed by Microsoft you would assume that if the PC was working before the upgrade then it would continue to work after the upgrade was installed, right?
There is no denying the fact that SP2 was responsible for making the PC reset part-way through the bootup procedure.
Wow talk about relevant... I was at someone's house last night and they had just downloaded Service Pack 2. They were having problems with Internet Explorer so they hoped SP2 would fix it so they let the computer chew away for 5 minutes, then once it was installed they rebooted.
The computer got 5 seconds in to loading Windows before getting a BSOD (which lasted less than a second) before rebooting again.
And again. And again.
After 5/6 crashes it was obvious SP2 had royally fucked the PC up. Luckily we managed to boot up in Safe Mode and use System Restore to undo the effects of SP2 and now the computer is working normally (in fact, the IE problems seem to have gone!).
Now I am very dubious about installing SP2 at work, I think we'll be forced to upgrade before long but MS clearly still have some bugs to squash.
I'm sorry but I don't hate spammers because they want to get rich quick. The desire to get rich quick is a natural, healthy and legal one!
I hate spammers because they are lying, thieving scamming criminal bastards.
They hijack computers to send out millions of junk messages to millions of people. They do this to be anonymous and therefore unaccountable, and they use other people's bandwidth to send out their junk.
Some spammers send out pornographic email knowing damn well thousands of kids will end up with it in their inboxes, and they include spurious text in the messages to try to evade spam filters.
I would wager than 99% of all products they advertise via spam are fake or illegal. Anyone stupid or ignorant enough to buy anything from one of these criminals is simply encouraging them to annoy more and more people.
It's not about getting-rich-quick that I have the problem with, it's the way they go about it.
Except, of course, that we programmed the machines in the first place.
When a computer program crashes it's usually down to the human(s) who programmed it, and in the rare occasions it's a hardware glitch and it was humans who designed the hardware, so we're still to blame either directly or indirectly.
I suppose it's like the argument about whether bullets kill or the human who pulled the gun's trigger.
1) Don't install so much crap on your computer. 5 megapixel photos set as wallpaper along with Real Player, Gator Spyware Crap, Quicktime Task, HP scanner registration reminder sofware, webshots, Norton anything, MS office bar etc running on startup will make your nice shiny new computer run like an arthritic snail on sleeping tablets.
2) Turn off some of the eyecandy. All those fades and whooshes and stuff don't actually do anything useful, they just consume CPU cycles and waste your time.
3) Use Ad Aware and SpyBot regularly to keep scumware out of your computer. I had to clean up a PC this morning which had stopped working because the BASTARDS at NewDotNet wrote some software which fucked the TCP/IP stack backwards.
4) Defrag regularly and run MSCONFIG to check what crap is sneaking back on to your Startup scripts.
BTW, Windows 3.1 sitting on MSDOS 6.2 ran like shit of a stick on my old P133. I wonder if/how it would run on a modern system?
>Actually there's a host of viruses that do that now - something about "+++scanned by McAfee+++" or something like that
That reminds me of another piece of social engineering which, for some reason, women seem to fall for more than men:
Every so often I receive either a joke email, or a sentimental vomit-inducing friendship-type, with a message at the end saying "Send this to 5 people in your address book and a love heart will appear on your screen" or "If you send this to 7 people in the next 7 hours your dream will come true, if not your goldfish will die".
I get so pissed off when I receive these, some people are just so superstitious/retarded its insane.
It's not only email disclaimers which are annoying and stupid (not to mention a waste of bandwidth) - what about those messages which say "This email has been certified virus free by xxxxx"?
I wouldnt trust that message any more than I would trust an executable attachment because for all I know a virus could email itself to me with a message saying "This email is virus free" in the hopes I unplug my brain before running the attachment.
BTW, returning to the topic for a minute, email disclaimers piss me off when they tell me what I can and can't do with an email I received. Er... excuse me but if someone sends an email to me by mistake I will do whatever the fuck I like with it, thank you very much!:P
In my experience, every single attempt to recreate a heirarchical system (be it a file system, database or in this instance a browser history) fails utterly because it doesn't adhere to the K.I.S.S. principle.
Virtual Reality (oh that is sooo 1990s!) systems often make things much more complicated to use no matter what the graphics are like... it's very easy to get lost in VR space, you have no concept of "up" or "down" (no horizon, no gravity) and trying to control your view quickly and effectively using a keyboard and mouse is very tricky, unless you're a seasoned Descent player.
However, arranging the history in a 2d manner (such as the tree view mentioned here) seems a far better way of going about it - everything you need is within your field of view, arrange in a consistent way (eg all rectangles are same size... unlike a 3d view where they appear to be smaller as they are further away) and you can tell at a glance what the relationship is.
2d vs 3d - It's kinda like the view a general gets on a battlefield (2d) versus the rather limited perspective a soldier has of the action (3d)
I'm sure it can create short films of 10 minutes... that's if you don't mind a low resolution low framerate compressed-to-hell pixellated blob resembling vomit!
Best stick with the mobile phone that's also a low-res video camera aspect I think instead of making wild marketing claims about how the phone can make you the next Steven Spielberg...
The legal solution for the problem is already mostly in place
If only it was. The recent CAN-SPAM act lets spammers send you their shit providing they give you a way to opt out. Er... excuse me? The burden should be on them to ensure you opt in, not for us to opt out. Besides, many spammers use the "unsubscribe" links to validate the addresses they are spamming are being read by real people and are not being filtered, and therefore are more valuable.
We need laws which make it perfectly clear that spam should not be tolerated - any commercial email which is sent to someone who has not expressly opted in to receive the email should be treated in the same way that littering or grafiti is - an unsightly nuisance which actually costs money to get rid of.
Why don't Governments form "spam police" which are allowed to go after and fine the spammers for sending out their crap - the spam police would eventually be financially self-suffient.
Slashdot Mirror
I hacked a cheap WinCE-based Satnav and installed ScummVM onto it. Also, I made damn sure I didn't pay for my copy of Monkey Island... but I guess that's the pirate in me.
Yep, I set up a router for someone recently that was configured like this. The owner runs a Guest House so she could give one password for guests and another for her kids.
This obviously has benefits to society but comes at the cost of making your home network less secure - most routers don't separate the internet side of things from the home network side of things, so it's similar to allowing a person to connect their PC to your LAN socket. Any machines on your network are now visible to an attacker.
Science works in the opposite way to religion - skepticism and doubt are at the heart of the scientific method. Science is about coming up with a model or a theory to explain something, and then testing it and trying to prove it wrong. Most religions claim to know some divinely inspired truth which must not be questioned, and doubt and skepticism are seen as the enemies of religion - and quite rightly so. The level of "faith" required to accept a scientific finding is not comparable to the level of faith required to believe in religion. If a team of scientists conducts an experiment and comes up with a result then the experiment is analysed through peer review, and if possible the experiment is run again and again (often by different teams) to see if they get the same results or not.
DRM was never about the consumer. The only people who benefit from DRM are content providers. They use DRM as a way of unfairly controlling what you can do with the content you paid good money for.
Err, I don't like SP2 because I've personally witnessed it fuck up 2 PCs to the extent that they wouldn't even boot.
We had to use System Restore to go back. I don't have the time to find out what it is about the computers SP2 doesn't like. The service pack should just work. If there's something it doesnt like then we should have had a warning saying "Cannot install SP2 until you remove foo/bar"
Secondly, on the many machines I admin which do run SP2 okay, performance is definitely slower with SP2 installed.
As for your other moronic comments:
OSX is a far better OS than Windows (stability, security, ease of use, performance and general overall cleverness). And I don't own, nor have I ever owned, an Apple computer.
Windows 98 is faster and more secure than Windows XP. It's also has fewer features and is more unstable. Oh, and it doesn't look as pretty, if that's your bag. Maybe people are still running 98 because their computers are not fast enough to run XP? Or maybe they just use it because they have it, it works, and they can't afford £250 to buy Windows XP Professional for no good reason.
According to PC World Business here in the UK, a copy of XP Pro will set you back £210+VAT, whereas you can buy a brand new NEC PC, 256mb RAM, 40gig h/d, LAN, keyboard but no monitor WITH a copy of XP Home for £199+VAT.
Does that make any sense to you?
While I'm at it, go and look how much a full retail copy of MS Office costs these days. How does £350 sound?
The latest version of Knoppix runs from CD, and if you burn it to a CDRW you can even save your settings onto CD as you use it. It includes an OS, Open Office 2 Beta (excellent IMO), not to mention shitloads of free apps.
I like Windows and I tolerate MS Office but I do not think they justify the insanely high prices MS charges for them.
Yes.
1) Switch on the built-in firewall before you connect to the internet. It's very basic but it does the job, I've been running an unpatched XP system with nothing more than the built-in firewall for months now with no problems.
2) Buy a router. £25/$40 buys you a piece of hardware which acts like a firewall and blocks all incoming ports, other than ones you solicit, natch.
3) Slipstream SP2 into your XP install. Personally I'm staying away from SP2 but use it if you must.
4) Put a copy of Zone Alarm on your "XP Install Disc 2", along with the the many useful bits of freeware available at www.grc.com
5) Download, burn and learn how to use Knoppix.
6) ????
7) Profit!
We are now on Service Pack 2 and only now is there a half-way decent firewall on by default. How long did that take, three and a half years or so?
>So, you don't actually know, then?
Not the exact number, no. Do you?
I know there are dozens, too many to remember, and a large proportion of them are considered by Microsoft as "serious".
In fact, that's the main reason why so many people are infected with spyware as some sites do drive-by downloads.
Maybe you were just trolling.
"Microsoft Security" is an oxymoron.
If they cared about security (remember them saying that Windows XP was the most secure operating system ever?) they would have shipped it with the firewall on by default and most services off by default.
Why oh why did they think it was a good idea to have an RPC server on by default when there's probably less than 1% of users who would use the feature?
How many insecurities has Internet Explorer had since it was launched with XP? I lost count. Even now, there are still holes in there wide enough to drive a truck through but they are not patched. Microsoft want to keep things quiet until they get around to fixing the bugs, and they only fix the bugs when they see the problem being exploited in the wild.
And, thanks to Microsoft integrating the Internet Exploder engine so tightly into their OS, if a bug affects IE then it probably also affects Outlook, Outlook Express, MS Help and gawd knows what else.
This is security?
Ha!
Actually the purpose of this puzzle is to test your problem solving skills.
They want to know that you are capable of thinking for yourself: maybe you know nothing about the differences between Blofish and AES. That doesn't matter. What does matter is you have a problem and can find a way to solve it.
Don't be so quick to make assumptions...
The IE scripting error had been a problem for several weeks. When I did system restore I restored back to 4 days ago.
If system restore did what it said on the tin then I would have restored the computer back the state it was in 4 days ago INCLUDING the scripting error.
System restore alone did not fix the buggy IE problem. System restore simply made the computer usable again by undoing the effects of the service pack.
A combination of installing the service pack and then using system restore to go back fixed the problem.
No, I don't know why that should be either.
There was no spyware on it. The script errors were possibly due to Norton.
All the user was getting was the occasional script error in IE when submitting something via a form. Updating IE to the latest version seems like a perfectly valid thing to do as any corrupted DLL or config files would be replaced.
There were no updates from Windows Update except for SP2. As SP2 is officially endorsed by Microsoft you would assume that if the PC was working before the upgrade then it would continue to work after the upgrade was installed, right?
There is no denying the fact that SP2 was responsible for making the PC reset part-way through the bootup procedure.
Wow talk about relevant... I was at someone's house last night and they had just downloaded Service Pack 2. They were having problems with Internet Explorer so they hoped SP2 would fix it so they let the computer chew away for 5 minutes, then once it was installed they rebooted.
The computer got 5 seconds in to loading Windows before getting a BSOD (which lasted less than a second) before rebooting again.
And again. And again.
After 5/6 crashes it was obvious SP2 had royally fucked the PC up. Luckily we managed to boot up in Safe Mode and use System Restore to undo the effects of SP2 and now the computer is working normally (in fact, the IE problems seem to have gone!).
Now I am very dubious about installing SP2 at work, I think we'll be forced to upgrade before long but MS clearly still have some bugs to squash.
I'm sorry but I don't hate spammers because they want to get rich quick. The desire to get rich quick is a natural, healthy and legal one!
I hate spammers because they are lying, thieving scamming criminal bastards.
They hijack computers to send out millions of junk messages to millions of people. They do this to be anonymous and therefore unaccountable, and they use other people's bandwidth to send out their junk.
Some spammers send out pornographic email knowing damn well thousands of kids will end up with it in their inboxes, and they include spurious text in the messages to try to evade spam filters.
I would wager than 99% of all products they advertise via spam are fake or illegal. Anyone stupid or ignorant enough to buy anything from one of these criminals is simply encouraging them to annoy more and more people.
It's not about getting-rich-quick that I have the problem with, it's the way they go about it.
Except, of course, that we programmed the machines in the first place.
When a computer program crashes it's usually down to the human(s) who programmed it, and in the rare occasions it's a hardware glitch and it was humans who designed the hardware, so we're still to blame either directly or indirectly.
I suppose it's like the argument about whether bullets kill or the human who pulled the gun's trigger.
> It really doesn't matter if your mobil phone company can find your position, because you're transmitting RF to their towers
If you commit a crime then make sure you give your mobile phone to someone else - that way you can "prove" you weren't in the area.
Yet you post to Slashdot with a registered account?
I say what I like in my text messages, I don't care if it embarrasses the snooping bastards who read them, they are supposed to be PRIVATE.
If I were to say something to incriminate me I would either speak in code, not use text messaging or claim my phone was stolen.
1) Don't install so much crap on your computer. 5 megapixel photos set as wallpaper along with Real Player, Gator Spyware Crap, Quicktime Task, HP scanner registration reminder sofware, webshots, Norton anything, MS office bar etc running on startup will make your nice shiny new computer run like an arthritic snail on sleeping tablets.
2) Turn off some of the eyecandy. All those fades and whooshes and stuff don't actually do anything useful, they just consume CPU cycles and waste your time.
3) Use Ad Aware and SpyBot regularly to keep scumware out of your computer. I had to clean up a PC this morning which had stopped working because the BASTARDS at NewDotNet wrote some software which fucked the TCP/IP stack backwards.
4) Defrag regularly and run MSCONFIG to check what crap is sneaking back on to your Startup scripts.
BTW, Windows 3.1 sitting on MSDOS 6.2 ran like shit of a stick on my old P133. I wonder if/how it would run on a modern system?
That reminds me of another piece of social engineering which, for some reason, women seem to fall for more than men:
Every so often I receive either a joke email, or a sentimental vomit-inducing friendship-type, with a message at the end saying "Send this to 5 people in your address book and a love heart will appear on your screen" or "If you send this to 7 people in the next 7 hours your dream will come true, if not your goldfish will die".
I get so pissed off when I receive these, some people are just so superstitious/retarded its insane.
I wouldnt trust that message any more than I would trust an executable attachment because for all I know a virus could email itself to me with a message saying "This email is virus free" in the hopes I unplug my brain before running the attachment.
BTW, returning to the topic for a minute, email disclaimers piss me off when they tell me what I can and can't do with an email I received. Er... excuse me but if someone sends an email to me by mistake I will do whatever the fuck I like with it, thank you very much! :P
In my experience, every single attempt to recreate a heirarchical system (be it a file system, database or in this instance a browser history) fails utterly because it doesn't adhere to the K.I.S.S. principle.
Virtual Reality (oh that is sooo 1990s!) systems often make things much more complicated to use no matter what the graphics are like... it's very easy to get lost in VR space, you have no concept of "up" or "down" (no horizon, no gravity) and trying to control your view quickly and effectively using a keyboard and mouse is very tricky, unless you're a seasoned Descent player.
However, arranging the history in a 2d manner (such as the tree view mentioned here) seems a far better way of going about it - everything you need is within your field of view, arrange in a consistent way (eg all rectangles are same size... unlike a 3d view where they appear to be smaller as they are further away) and you can tell at a glance what the relationship is.
2d vs 3d - It's kinda like the view a general gets on a battlefield (2d) versus the rather limited perspective a soldier has of the action (3d)
Best stick with the mobile phone that's also a low-res video camera aspect I think instead of making wild marketing claims about how the phone can make you the next Steven Spielberg...
If only it was. The recent CAN-SPAM act lets spammers send you their shit providing they give you a way to opt out. Er... excuse me? The burden should be on them to ensure you opt in, not for us to opt out. Besides, many spammers use the "unsubscribe" links to validate the addresses they are spamming are being read by real people and are not being filtered, and therefore are more valuable.
We need laws which make it perfectly clear that spam should not be tolerated - any commercial email which is sent to someone who has not expressly opted in to receive the email should be treated in the same way that littering or grafiti is - an unsightly nuisance which actually costs money to get rid of.
Why don't Governments form "spam police" which are allowed to go after and fine the spammers for sending out their crap - the spam police would eventually be financially self-suffient.