Slashback: Real-ID, PriceRitePhoto, RIM 75
iBill stolen info a framejob? An anonymous reader writes "The database of stolen credit card information recently discussed on Slashdot appears not to have come from iBill after all. From the article: 'Secure Science's Lance James backed away from his conclusion that iBill, which processes most of its transactions on behalf of adult services, was the source of the leak. He says pornography transaction databases may be considered especially desirable to spammers, and that a criminal may have deliberately mislabeled a database taken from another source.'"
First steps towards defying the Real ID act. An anonymous reader writes "With House Bill 1582, The New Hampshire House of Representatives has taken the first steps towards defying the Federal Government on the infamous Real ID act, which last year passed 100-0. This bill does not express disagreement with the Real ID act, it prohibits the state DMV from amending licensing procedures altogether, and it passed 270-84. Several impassioned testimonies were given at the House, and even those against the bill expressed displeasure with the Real ID act. It now moves on to the 24-member state Senate. The afternoon's proceedings can be viewed or listened to via the NH General Court website under the afternoon of March 8th."
Peter Quinn continues his support of Open Source. Stony Stevenson writes "Computerworld Australia reports that former Massachusetts state government CIO, Peter Quinn is fronting the battle for OpenSource. He believes the cost of government is not sustainable in its present form and any technology leader who is not supporting and implementing open standards should resign and get out of the business. From the article: 'Even though the personal toll from state government experience was huge, Quinn said he would not be silenced. "I will remain very vocal and prominent regarding open standards, open source, especially Open Document Format and all aspects of accessibility for the disabled community," he said.'"
Judge flunks lawsuit against spammers. Hawkeye writes "A federal court in California has just created a huge legal loophole for companies who hire sleazy spammers. Kennedy-Western, an unaccredited university (aka diploma mill) has been absolved for outsourcing its email advertising to 'proxy-abusing, header-forging, hash-busting spammers,' according to the story at Spam Kings. The court ruled that Kennedy-Western didn't violate the CAN-SPAM Act because the plaintiff, a small California ISP named Hypertouch, 'failed to provide any evidence that KWU had actual knowledge or consciously avoided knowledge of a current or future violation of the CAN-SPAM Act by anyone who sent the e-mails at issue.' Perhaps not surprisingly, KWU enlisted as an expert witness Jason Rines, an email marketer who once worked with the notorious Sanford Wallace and who has been listed on the Spamhaus Block List."
WinXP on a Mac, round 2. fan777 writes "Slashdot recently posted a story regarding blurry Flickr photos on what may be the first WinXP installation on a Mac. To those who claimed heavy photochopping, narf2006 has finally released a blurry video (Complete with Mirror || Torrent)."
Juniper drops message board suit. It seems that Juniper Networks has finally come to their senses and dropped the suit against several unidentified LightReading message board users. From the article: "What is still unknown is whether or not Juniper ever uncovered the identities of "Does 1-10." The company's complaint cited several messages that got the company riled up, and most those messages allege that Juniper is bribing lawyers and spying on its employees."
Vint Cerf answers TLD questions. netzer writes "CircleID is running responses they have received from Vint Cerf on the questions submitted to him from the community with regards to top level domains."
PriceRitePhoto gets relisted. Thomas Hawk has an interesting blog entry in which he details how PriceRitePhoto, the online retailer who gained so much recent infamy, has been relisted on Yahoo! shopping after only a three month penance. From the article: "What was interesting to me at the time when the PriceRitePhoto story was going on was that PriceRitePhoto had supposedly been delisted a year earlier from comparison shopping site PriceGrabber. What I never could get is how after being delisted on PriceGrabber that PriceRitePhoto ended back on there a year later to try and rip me off. Of course that first delisting didn't get the visibility that mine did, but not to worry, not only is PriceRitePhoto back in business at Yahoo! Shopping, they are back in business on PriceGrabber as well. This after being delisted there at least twice that I know of."
RIM goes on the offensive for patent reform. flanman writes to tell us it seems that RIM has decided to continue the patent reform fight even after giving up their recent court battle. RIM is running full page ads in a number of US newspapers urging lawmakers to change the way patents are issues and managed. RIM also has more details on the Blackberry site.
PriceRitePhoto being relisted? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:PriceRitePhoto being relisted? (Score:1, Informative)
In the meantime, let's all make sure that both Yahoo! and PriceGrabber know how we feel about the re-listing.
Re:PriceRitePhoto being relisted? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:PriceRitePhoto being relisted? (Score:1)
Re:PriceRitePhoto being relisted? (Score:5, Informative)
Here is teh update from his blog
Update #2: Just received an email from Joe Lazarus from Yahoo! Shopping: "Hi Thomas, We appreciate our users alerting us to potential issues. In this particular case, the merchant was investigated by our Customer Care team and was found to be in violation of Yahoo!'s Terms of Service. All listings from this merchant will cease to appear on Yahoo! Shopping within the next 24 hours."
Re:PriceRitePhoto being relisted? (Score:2)
He's on update 24 or so now and it looks like it needs to be updated again. That update was right after the Blog hit Slashdot/Digg the first time.
Probably just turnover in yahoo staff... (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose one could say they ought to have a blacklist to check or some such, but who knows how the actual department functions or what the internal policies are.
Link to YouTube video of Mac Booting Windows XP.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Link to YouTube video of Mac Booting Windows XP (Score:5, Insightful)
People also noticed that the Windows boot screen changed. Instead of being a black background with a Windows logo and a little pulsating bar at the bottom (reminds me of the Knight Rider car), it is just the Windows logo on a greyish background. Maybe a result of the EFI hacking?
The other way it could be faked is if the screen isn't actually connected to the iMac at all. There could be a PC somewhere directly connected to the screen somehow. Personally, I think that would take a lot of hacking by itself, probably more effort than the average hoaxster is willing to commit.
Re:Link to YouTube video of Mac Booting Windows XP (Score:5, Interesting)
For all I can tell this is real unless he managed to hook up the iMac's screen directly to a behind the scenes PC. Even then I would have doubts.
The little windows logo that replaces teh Mac at bootup tells me that this guy did his homework and was able to modify the EFI for it to load some custom bootloader
Re:Link to YouTube video of Mac Booting Windows XP (Score:2)
Re:Link to YouTube video of Mac Booting Windows XP (Score:2)
One thing I might point out is that during the login / welcome to windows thing, the screen doesn't take up the whole screen. Its been some time since I last reinstalled windows, is this normal?
Re:Link to YouTube video of Mac Booting Windows XP (Score:2)
Re:Link to YouTube video of Mac Booting Windows XP (Score:1)
Re:Link to YouTube video of Mac Booting Windows XP (Score:2)
Another idiocy of Windows.
Re:Link to YouTube video of Mac Booting Windows XP (Score:2)
My initial reaction to seeing that is that what's happening is they've hacked BootX (which is responsible for displaying the apple logo) to emulate BIOS. I don't know if that's possible, but it seems like a viable approach.
Speaking of that LED... (Score:3, Interesting)
What happened to the LED on the front? It shut off once Windows was installed; is this normal? Does it do this when you run Linux on a Mac?
Re:Speaking of that LED... (Score:2)
After watching the video, it looks as though the light coming on after the reboot looks normal, but I didn't notice him ever putting the c
Agreed. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Agreed. (Score:2)
Re:Agreed. (Score:2)
Also, I tried figuring out what the system properties dialog said, but the only thing I could make out was "Con***** Intel*** CPU". Way to go with a blurry, badly interlaced, highly compressed video.
RIM's poor decision (Score:5, Interesting)
WinXP on Mac (Score:1, Interesting)
For all we know it could just be a full-screen movie of a Windows XP install/boot that's running. I want some information on how he got XP to talk EFI.
blurry video?? (Score:5, Insightful)
For all we know, it could be a broadcast by UFOs.
Re:WinXP on Mac (Score:2)
So all you need is to implement a PC AT BIOS emulator before XP begins.
Look Mister Hawks (Score:5, Funny)
If you don't stop your whiny attitude, we are gonna send somebody to your house to beat you up.
Sincerely,
PriceRitePhoto
Damage control (Score:1, Insightful)
Q - Why would you want to run Windows XP on mac?
A - Dell was fresh out of quad core computers with three PCI-express slots and the ability to add 8 GIGABYTES of ram. Shucks.
Re:Damage control (Score:1)
Still doesn't explain why you'd want to run Windows XP on the thing, though. I don't know about you, but I'd rather a fully modern operating system with up-to-date hardware support, no major memory-support limitations, and not to mention security such as Mac OS X, or even better Linux, or maybe even OpenBSD if I was trul
Re:Damage control (Score:1)
quad core computers? (Score:2)
Apple's fresh outta those, too, though likely not for that much longer (August for the PowerMac replacement?).
Re:Damage control (Score:2)
You can do 2 dual core xeons, and 16gb of ram on an X64 precision 670.
it's $11,902
can't help with the three pci-express slots tho....
patent reform\ (Score:3, Insightful)
Link to Thomas Hawk's Blog Entry (Score:4, Informative)
Real ID (Score:2)
Re:Real ID (Score:5, Interesting)
New Hampshire is also home to the Free State Project [freestateproject.org]: I haven't joined the project, but I do admire its proponents.
Re:Real ID (Score:3, Informative)
Imagine that: legislators who can still read a constitution... and agree with parts of it that don't just expand their own authority.
Signed: A Free State Projec
Re:Real ID (Score:2)
Re:Real ID (Score:2)
Re:Real ID (Score:2)
Re:Real ID (Score:1)
Re:Real ID (Score:2)
No nullification (Score:2)
States are free not to comply, but they might get some gripes from the people trying to collect their w
the infamous Real ID act, (Score:1)
Damn! So much for Mr. Feingold [watchblog.com]...Thought we had a winner for a second.
Re:the infamous Real ID act, (Score:2)
Re:the infamous Real ID act, (Score:3, Informative)
Re:the infamous Real ID act, (Score:2)
Re:the infamous Real ID act, (Score:1)
Ah ha! The video gives away the secret (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm willing to bet that what's happening here it that he's managed to copy the NT bootloader onto the USB drive and then boot to it. Booting to USB devices is, I believe, something that Apple supports. I know it's supported by every current BIOS so why should the next generation EFI have fewer features? Maybe if you plug in a bootable USB device, the EFI will boot it instead of the MBR on the primary disk drive...or more likely there's a hotkey to boot to USB devices like how holding "C" I think forces a boot to CD-ROM.
Anyway, the sneaky part is that booting to CD-ROM or USB kicks in all sorts of helpful things. Booting to most CD-ROMs (El Torito spec) creates a fake "A:" drive with the contents of the bootsector binary file. Ironically, you can't acccess the CD-ROM itself unless that bootsector loads a CD-ROM driver. Booting to USB drives, I would guess, creates Int 13 or 80h or whatver it's called...basically BIOS-compatible addressing for drives. This is how funky SCSI or RAID controllers can create drives that you can see in DOS, which has no idea how to access a 32-bit PCI device.
So my theory is that the Mac creates a C: drive and loads the NT installer kernal, at which point the installer loads the right driver to see the IDE drivers (or perhaps he loads the appropriate textmode driver for the actual disk controller). Once the kernal can see the drive, it can put the pointer in the BOOT.INI and format and partition it. Then, the USB drive becomes the boot drive (has BOOT.INI, NTLDR, etc) and the internal IDE drive becomes the system drive (\WINDOWS directory, pagefile, etc).
There are people who know how to boot the NT kernal from USB keys and even read-only media like CD-ROMs. I wonder if anyone has tried using a WinXP embedded bootable CD on an Intel Mac (like BartPE or the official Microsoft recovery one. It's a clever idea, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is the magic step. As a bonus, using the BIOS emulation provided by USB burning would probably bypass all of the trusted computing components since they are not DOS compatible.
Still, talk about making a sow's ear out of a silk purse!
-JoeShmoe
.
Re:Ah ha! The video gives away the secret (Score:1, Interesting)
EFI looks for a bootloader on certain types of filesystems. On the Intel Mac, HFS+ and FAT32 are supported, nothing else. So what you do is you write your own EFI bootloader which loads a CSM to get BIOS compatibility, and loads the NT kernel and so on. You can also patch the in-RAM copy of EFI with your bootloader to know how to load El Torito CDs to do the install as well.
Once you have a functional CSM and a bootloader that knows how to load the NT kern
Re:Ah ha! The video gives away the secret (Score:1)
Re:Ah ha! The video gives away the secret (Score:2)
The most plausible trick I've seen thus far is writing a new bootloader that copies one of the open source BIOSes (who would have thought they'd be useful!?) into
Re:Ah ha! The video gives away the secret (Score:2)
Vint Cerf clueless about websites? (Score:1, Insightful)
I know you can't be ultra-knowledgable about everything, but I would have thought that Vint Cert would know better than to talk about topics he's ignorant of.
A more serious problem has been that JAVA programmers for web pages often don't know that there are more than seven gTLDs and that many of them have more than three letters. That leads to rejection of email addresses and other entries into web forms that make reference to domain names. We need some educational outreach to fix that.
How about an e
Ebay userid history (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
I know about this case (Score:2)
The judge ignored the California spam law in this case, which provides almost strict liability. The "expert" for Kennedy Western said that the headers could have been forged by Hypertouch and Joe's family members. Even though the people that that KW hired said that they probably was not.
What you talking about "knowing" requirment creates the Sargent Schultz Defense. And they don't want to know anything since they profit from the spam. Now, if KW, displayed verified "affiliate
What is this OpenSource of which you speak? (Score:2, Insightful)
Although the ComputerWorld article mentions open source too, Peter Quinn's main battle is (was?) over open standards - a very different topic. Microsoft likes to confuse them so they can say that Massachusetts is excluding them. That's not true - they are free to implement the open standard (Open Document) in their closed source.
Please don't confuse the two.
I could install windows on My imac (Score:1)
I forget if you sleep your system if the RDC comes back with it but why didnt he simply use VNC or some other remote system.
BTW did yo
Debate begins at 4:08:40 or thereabouts (Score:3, Informative)
Real ID Act of 2005 and one way to get it to fail (Score:1)
One of the most onerous provisions of the Real ID Act is requiring states to ele
Re:Real ID Act of 2005 and one way to get it to fa (Score:2)
Re:SCMODS? (Score:1)
Jake: Goddamned.
Elwood: Man, I haven't been pulled over in six months. I bet those cops have got SCMODS.
Jake: SCMODS?
Elwood: State County Municipal Offender Data System.
(The cops do have SCMODS, Elwood has a record:
BLUES, ELWOOD
ILLINOIS LICENSE : B263-1655-2187
CURRENTLY UNDER SUSPENSION
WARRANTS OUTSTANDING : PARKG. 116
MOVING VIOLATIONS : 56
ARREST DRIVER
Officer Daniel returns to the car)
Officer Daniel: Elwood, we show your license currently under suspension. Step o
Good Patent Reform Ideas for RIM to support (Score:2)