a good firewalled computer will block 99.999% of the outbound requests and only transmit via backdoors in the system. they then are breaking the law to claim you are breaking the law, and thus you have a right to sue them for using a backdoor on your systems.

citation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal#Legal_and_financial_problems

"In addition to violations of the Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act of 2005, which allowed for civil penalties of $100,000 for each violation of the law, the alleged violations added in the updated lawsuit (on December 21, 2005) carried maximum penalties of $20,000 per violation."

Isn't the very point of this player's system, that the player serves the interests of the disc's publisher over the interests of the users, where the users' needs should always yield whenever there is a conflict? That's not a mere technicality; it's the very essence. From the spec's pov, this is desirable operation. Nothing has been subverted.

I can see some appeal to that, but surely any sane leaker will post using a restaurant's free wifi or similar - meaning their doxing gets associated with any other innocent user who happens to have posted updates from that restaurant, with no apparent link to their own isolated accounts?

Personally, I'd probably use the free wifi at the railway station on my daily commute - indeed, I do use it most days, for innocent purposes - or if I wanted to do something that might be traced, ride an hour or so on one of the lines and use another station on the network, using a randomised MAC address on a laptop. Anyone who was identified as associated with me then is completely uninvolved. Yes, maybe you'd catch a few low-level trolls, but you'd be falsely smearing a whole lot of innocent third parties - making the identification worthless anyway.

To having Communists read your stuff.

Seriously, I was buying Lenovo before now. I did not get burned on Superfish. But I'm done with Lenovo. If this is what they try get away with without effort at hiding, then what they are they spending effort on hiding? I don't need the PRC in my network also, I have the NSA for that.

If it makes you feel better, I vaguely remember working with MFM drives. It's been long enough ago where I don't remember anything about how they work. :)

I think I used this one. Looks like just about the same thing. It's probably identical inside.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/app...

The most ancient laptop I ever touched was a Compaq 386/16 with a 20MB 3.5" 1/2 height IDE drive. It sounds pretty much like the same, or probably the piece of crap I had was a predecessor. I do remember it was clearly a 20MB drive though. I swapped it for a regular desktop 40MB IDE that we had in the shop.

Everything I found about that series says it's IDE. I couldn't find anything specifically saying the physical size, but I suspect it was a 3.5" drive. I seriously doubt it was RLL, MFM, ESDI, or anything more exotic. So he's wasting everyone's time asking rather than just opening it up and seeing "ooh, a IDE drive." Even if it was, he could go find some combination of adapters to use it. Anyone who's worked with stuff long has a box full of adapters and cards for exactly this. Well, I did ditch all my ancient cards on eBay a few years ago.

I'd be surprised if the drive even spins though. Most of the time when I go to try ancient hardware, the drives don't spin, or spin enough, even though the owner remembers that it was working when they shut it off.

The new machines lack LPT ports? WTF kind of machine did you buy without an LPT port? A laptop, sure, a desktop? You have to look hard, even today to find a machine that doesn't have a printer port.

Pretty much anything built in the last five or so years won't have serial or parallel ports. If you're lucky, you might have some headers on the motherboard that can be brought to the slot cage with connectors in brackets like what were common before ATX, but I've run across plenty of motherboards that don't even have those. Notebooks are even less likely to have them. This Dell Inspiron E1505 I'm typing on is a bit long in the tooth...main reason I'm keeping it going is its 15" 1680x1050 screen. No serial or parallel ports on it.

When I saw a sufficiently-old notebook come through my office a while back that had a serial port on it, I hung onto it for talking to our switches and routers. I forget what model of HP it is, but it's old enough that it runs on an Athlon XP. It's probably the better part of 10 years old at this point. The last emerge -uND world took a couple of days to run, but it's fast enough to run Minicom and Firefox, and to do traffic captures from the switch: serial connection to the management port to enable SPAN, Ethernet to the SPAN port for capture, and WiFi to talk to the whole thing from my office instead of the server room.

Lets see... What would they say? This is the one-sided conversation, since it doesn't matter what you say anyways.

"Ok, we can accept that estimate."

"Ya, ya, ya, whatever."

"We'll have that information to you by the start of the project."

"The information isn't ready yet, we'll have that by the time you need it."

"I thought we had that to you already. We'll have to check with the information source."

"The PMs have some changes."

"Here's the information, but there are some small changes."

"No, those are small changes, they won't impact the timeline."

"No, you can't have more time, we already made commitments."

"The PMs have some changes."

"What do you mean you won't have it in on schedule? You agreed with the initial estimate."

"You're going to stay here until it's done, I don't care how long it takes."

"I don't care that you've been in the office 30 hours straight, this is your fault."

"We're hiring an off-shore company to help you with the project. Get them up to speed."

"The PMs have some changes."

"Since we have the off-shore team, we need to cut your department back."

"I read an article saying Java is the future. Redo it in Java."

"What do you mean we're waiting on the off-shore company?"

"We fired the off-shore company. You're good, you can get it done in time."

"Ok, hire more people into your department, but we're only offering half the salary, and no more bodies."

"Why is this project so far behind? Don't you know what you're doing?"

"The PMs have these changes."

"Why aren't you done? We're weeks from the deadline!"

"You didn't meet the deadline. Don't you know deadlines are firm. We have commitments."

"I don't want excuses, I want results."

"You and your idiot team are fired. Get out of my building."

[2 months later]

"We need you to come back and finish the project. We need it by next Monday, that should be plenty of time."

"Here's all the new specs. They should be easy to do."

"What do you mean total rewrite, it's only a few chances. You are an idiot. Get out."

[1 month later]

"We need you to come back and finish the project. We need it by" {click}

"We need you to come back and finish the project. We need it by" {click}

"We need you to come back and finish the project. We need it by" {click}

"Why do you keep hanging up on me?" {click}

He was a wise man...

Most people do not have a problem with the jackboot of authority, so long as it is on their feet rather than their neck.

This is the worst crime of all.