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Comment I felt sorry for Meta.IS for a moment.. but.. (Score 1) 98

Curious about this, I checked out Meta.is - been around 9 years according to the wayback machine.. my site visit seems to have exposed that they distribute malware! Chrome popped a new tab with the "Your Chrome is Out of Date" and "Click to update" which linked to this - blob:https://meta.is/0c839c04-d9a0-4a4d-a21d-c039e049d5b5

Submission + - How Hollywood Accidentally Built Netflix (vox.com)

An anonymous reader writes: [T]he story really starts in 2008, when Netflix broke into streaming in a big way, through a backdoor: It purchased the digital streaming rights to movies from Disney and Sony — that is, movies you’ve heard of, like Pirates of the Caribbean — from Starz, the pay TV channel. Starz had ambitions for its own streaming service, but those fizzled, which is why you have probably never heard of Vongo. And that’s why Netflix got those movies for a song — around $30 million a year — while becoming a pretty good streaming service almost overnight. For context: In 2012, when Netflix wanted to make a new streaming deal for content from Disney, which by then had realized that streaming was a real thing, Netflix paid an estimated $300 million a year.

A contractual loophole let Netflix get Disney’s and Sony’s stuff without cutting deals with Disney and Sony. But soon enough, media companies were scrambling to sell their stuff directly to Netflix: They saw Netflix as an easy source of nearly free money — if Reed Hastings and company wanted to pay them for old shows and movies they were already selling other places, then they’d be happy to do it. But that free money wasn’t really free: Netflix took the stuff Hollywood considered its leftovers and built a giant business with it — and ended up competing directly with the established media players, using their own content. Which leads us to today, where the biggest media companies in the world find themselves years behind what used to be a Silicon Valley upstart.

Comment Re:The Man From Earth (Score 1) 893

This movie is definitely a unique exploration into humanity - my wife and I watched it on Netflix ages ago and we had to buy if after. It's not an action film - it's a film about an incredible social discourse and it starts noble, but has twists and even a few hits below the bible-belt! Even after seeing it, I remember just listening to the dialog of the film while driving and being enrapt.

Comment Have you tried The Measurement Lab? (Score 1) 203

https://www.measurementlab.net... has some good tests. Sadly, some of old Net Neutrality tests have died there - but some of their stuff remains and is good. Back when this fight started, Google backed some groups working to make speed tests that detect if specific slowing was going on - all those tests are at this site - even though the public servers behind them are offline now. Cheers.

Comment Learning to code in the 70's and 80's (Score 1) 515

So I got into computers early on - having been a technological terror growing up - taking apart everything. My friends dad had gotten a SWTPC 6800 with an SS50 bus and I used that to get my early knowledge on - we were typing in BASIC code on the thing, either adapting games found in issues of Creative Computing magazine, or modifying them to have some fun while figuring out how to do things we wanted. That was early on - later on, when the TRS-80 became more mainstream, the games in the magazine got more platform specific - and Creative Computing printed all the source code for the game in the magazine. Back then there were no "downloads" or "OCR" that could replace simply typing in all the content and trying it. That's what we did. And people weren't perfect - so after typing in 10k lines of code to make a dancing robot, getting random errors at various lines in the code was inevitable - it was that "post entry" debugging where the code education comes in - now you're checking your own work for syntax and other little bits - but to really know what's going on takes time - and then it clicks. The incentive was when the new space shooter was Commodore specific and you had an Apple ][ - this forced you to figure out what they did, convert to Apple, and try your own version. The "programming" nerd switch, for me, took some years before it clicked - around the middle/end of 10th grade before I became dangerously knowledgeable in this stuff - enough to write a game that summer and get hired by a software firm during my Junior year in high school. That was some 6 years of hands on, with 3 of it focused on learning to code in my off-time.

Comment This is why only the qualified should decide. (Score 1) 585

I don't know anyone that supports the US Government on this - at least - I don't know anyone who supports them and knows anything about PKI encryption and what it means - if you really want to support the folks arguing for the US Gov in this case, ask if they'll hand all their passwords and PIN's to the FBI. See what their reaction is then.

Comment Do what Tsutomu did... (Score 1) 265

Back a long time ago, Tsutomu Shimomura (the engineer who ID'd Kevin Mitnick's famous sequence-number attacks), got pissed about Microsoft's FTP server trying to connect on the identd port after he FTP'd into them for any reason. To get back at Microsoft, Tsutomu setup the chargen service on the identd port (port 113) with a rate-limit. When he FTP'd to Microsoft after that, any connections to port 113 would stay open as his computer would stream all ASCII characters out. Seeing as you are likely having ports scanned like 80/443 and so on - why not chargen those? The scans will get stuck, and the data will keep flowing until they die. Even better, if they're collecting all the returns - chargen will ensure they get all the ASCII their disks can hold. Cheers.

Comment This could not be worded any worse (Score 1, Insightful) 91

In the header for this, your last sentence: "This article takes readers from the first Crypto War of the early 1990s to the present-day political battle to keep everyone who uses the Internet safe." The present day battle is not about keeping people safe - it's breaking down people's ability to keep secrets. The cost for this level of protection is way too high.

Comment Why not use Google Apps? (Score 1) 108

Google offers free Google Apps for Business for domains with less than 10 users on them - and it's free. Just gotta setup the MX records - I get DNS control for free from GoDaddy as they are my registrar, but I don't host a site at all on my 3-character domain. With that, I can point my MX records to google, and the domain has multiple email accounts on it, all for free. The trick is that the google hides the "get it for free" link on the setup page.

Comment Our #1 health problem is profit margins (Score 1) 668

Homeopathy may be crap, but there's no doubt that one of our worlds largest problems is the connection between patents, drug development, and commercial interests focused on profiting on new creations, and not actually spending any time or interest on curing diseases and solving problems using what nature gives us.

Examples of this are rife everywhere - from my own experience, any asthmatic can tell you in the 2000's their rescue inhaler only cost them $15 for the generic - however, when the gas inside the inhaler was changed from a CFC-based propellant to nitrogen, they filed new drug status (for the same ancient drug), purely because they changed the propellant - asthmatics now pay $45 for the same inhaler (with insurance, FYI) with the new gas. Who's to say they won't switch to oxygen or CO2 as a propellant when the next round of patents expire and the prices drop to generic levels?

On the opposite side of the spectrum, herbal remedies can for some things be quite helpful - and some of the "herbal cures" in that realm like Slippery Elm for diverticulitis work very well but are not prescribed by any doctor lawfully as these cures are not tested by anyone officially - because doing so won't guarantee the researchers investment in testing will be paid back because they cannot control who sells that herbal cure afterwards. There are cures in nature that are not being directly researched, presented or even considered by the big pharma community because of this. Many cures in nature are being researched so that the potentially patent-able bits are pulled out for testing and potential commercialization. If they found that chewing a certain leaf or making tea of it cured something important, big pharma would never tell us - not until they pulled the active parts out and sold that to us 15 years later at a premium after extensive testing as well.

I suppose the FDA should be doing this on their own, but that's an extra that's not in their charter..

Comment How does your math hold up when it's $3? (Score 1) 480

I don't know about your PowerBall setup - but the payout is when you do the power-play because that engages the multiplier - without it you cannot win the "monster payout" that is advertised. Those are $3 each. When I do play the lotto, I don't even waste my time with PowerBall @ $3 per ticket unless the jackpot is over $250m, and then I know I'm tossing my money away anyway.

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