Slashback: Real-ID, PriceRitePhoto, RIM

Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including a possible iBill framejob, the first steps towards defying the Real ID act, Peter Quinn continues his support for Open Source, Judge flunks lawsuit against spammers, WinXP on a Mac, round 2, Juniper drops message board suit, Vint Cerf answers questions on TLDs, PriceRitePhoto gets relisted, and RIM goes on the offensive for patent reform -- Read on for details.

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?

[endtwist (862499)]

Normally I would say that PriceRitePhoto was relisted for a simple reason: money...except that in this case, I can't see where _anyone_ would profit from them being relisted. Am I wrong here? Does Yahoo! or PriceGrabber somehow make money from them being relisted? (bribes?)

Re:PriceRitePhoto being relisted?

[slashkitty (21637)]

You pay for placement in those places... so yeah, they would. What isn't said is that PriceRitePhoto changed their name to Barclayphoto. You can see their ebay username change here [ebay.com]

Re:PriceRitePhoto being relisted?

[vivek7006 (585218)]

I think they will be booted soom.

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."

Probably just turnover in yahoo staff...

[rebelcool (247749)]

Turnover in these departments tends to be pretty high. It wouldn't be unusual that whoever approved the relisting has no idea about what happened previously (unless they were alerted, which it appears they now have been).

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..

[OlivierB (709839)]

For those who don't want to sell their souls to Quicktime heres the Video [youtube.com]

Re:Link to YouTube video of Mac Booting Windows XP

[radicalskeptic (644346)]

Many people are wondering if the video is real or not. The obvious problem is that it could be a video from a Windows PC running on a Mac in full-screen, but there are a few problems with that theory. For example, I think at one point the resolution of the screen changes, complete with all the visual craziness that causes. What kind of video capture software would catch a screen resolution change like that?

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

[OlivierB (709839)]

I was sceptic as well but if you watch carefully he actually turns on the Mac from sleep mode at one point (see teh white Led on the front). I cannot imagine that any computer could wake up and *instantly* playback full screen video. I just doesn't work like that.
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

[Firehed (942385)]

Let's not forget how much insanely harder it would be to fake a video that's all jittery and everywhere like this than had the camera been on a tripod (which is probably why it wasn't). It's one thing to crop video to the same size/shape/whatever and overwrite the same place every single frame, it's quite another to deal with it for a few thousand frames where none have the video in the same place. Of course it still doesn't dual-boot by the looks of it - the original goal of the project and to my underst

Speaking of that LED...

[TCQuad (537187)]

I was sceptic as well but if you watch carefully he actually turns on the Mac from sleep mode at one point (see teh white Led on the front).

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?

Agreed.

[by Anonymous Coward]

I found a really good summary [hishamrana.com] of what could be the technique behind making this happen.. The chances are he is using the BOCHS hack for implementing a video bios. In the process of booting, windows does NOT take control until its kernal is fully loaded which is where the first screen flicker comes in. The *ONLY* way he could have done this way to connect the LCD of the Mac directly to a PC behind the scenes. However, even then, if you look at the model # of the hard drive, its the same one you find in the first intel imacs shipped. My conclusion is that it would take far too much work to make this a hoax so it must be real. I'm pretty sure this guy is using the Bochs technique.

RIM's poor decision

[Internet Ronin (919897)]

Look, I'll agree the patent system needs a major overhaul, in fact, most people well versed in patent law feel the same way. RIM did not lose this case because of bad patent law. They lost the case because they made really bad decisions. Their two major arguments (that the Intel processor in the BB was the mobile device, not the BB itself; that RIM's Canadian servers weren't subject to US patent law) were BLATANTLY contradicted by US Patent law precedent and by the U.S.C. (US Code of Law). Not only that, their courtroom and executive behavior was asinine. They infuriated the Judge (District court Judge James Spencer), may have been lying in their testimony (about procedure MANDATED by US federal law!), and filed the SAME motion FOUR TIMES (it was beat 4 times, by the same argument; James Spencer began to wonder if there was something wrong with his hearing). RIM had an easy win, but lack of technical expertise in their legal decisions (lawyers usually know the LAW, not technology) and simple good corporate behavior, and NTP would likely have been sent packing. I also theorize that a critical argument could be made regarding obviousness, but it would require examining the fundamental precedent that NTP used, and judging its usefulness. Alas, that is another topic for another day (and hopefully a scholarly publication for myself, but I digress...). Patent Law would have protected RIM, if they hadn't shot themselves in the foot. Patent law was not the problem here.

Look Mister Hawks

[by Anonymous Coward]

If you don't stop your whiny attitude, we are gonna send somebody to your house to beat you up.

Sincerely,

PriceRitePhoto

patent reform\

[bwthomas (796211)]

I know that everyone always says, "oh, every big company is pro-patent", &c. &c., but i have to say that it's nice to see that a company that's been burned by shaky patents (RIM) has decided to pursue / support the effort towards patent reform. I hope that they are able to do something good.

Link to Thomas Hawk's Blog Entry

[dellsworth (776177)]

Since the story didn't link to the blog, here it is: http://thomashawk.com/2006/03/yahoo-shoppers-bewar e-priceritephoto.html [thomashawk.com]

Real ID

[hsmith (818216)]

Looks like state nullifciation isn't dead yet! Good job NH.

Re:Real ID

[syukton (256348)]

New Hampshire's state motto is "Live Free or Die."

New Hampshire is also home to the Free State Project [freestateproject.org]:

The Free State Project is an agreement among 20,000 pro-liberty activists to move to New Hampshire, where they will exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of government is the protection of life, liberty, and property. The success of the Project would likely entail reductions in taxation and regulation, reforms at all levels of government to expand individual rights and free markets, and a restoration of constitutional federalism, demonstrating the benefits of liberty to the rest of the nation and the world.

I haven't joined the project, but I do admire its proponents.

Re:Real ID

[sadomikeyism (677964)]

The original article needs to be corrected. In fact, the NH House did express disagreement with the REAL ID Act, they stated in the bill they voted for that they found the Act "is contrary and repugnant to Articles 1 through 10 of the New Hampshire constitution as well as Amendments 4 though 10 of the Constitution for the United States of America."

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

Ah ha! The video gives away the secret

[JoeShmoe (90109)]

If you look at the textmode setup screen, you can see there's a 256MB USB key present (244MB storage device). Later after the GUI is booted, you can see under Disk Drives there's a Generic USB storage disk.

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
.

Can we slow down a minute?

[aiken_d (127097)]

With regards to the CAN-SPAM issue, sure, spam is bad and spammers are evil. But does anyone really want a court system where there's no requirement to prove that the defendent was aware of the illegal activities of their subcontractors? Just saying they "should have been" is emotionally rewarding, but I for one am glad that the judge here is insisting on proof.

-b

Debate begins at 4:08:40 or thereabouts

[syukton (256348)]

"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."

Could you have mentioned that the empassioned debate takes place during the last thirty fucking minutes FOUR AND A HALF HOUR session? I sat through the first three hours of the session of the house before deciding to try skipping ahead. For anyone else that wants to hear the debate, it begins near 4:08:40 with the statement, "My intention is that this will be the last bill of the day."

blurry video??

[eclectro (227083)]

For all we know it could just be a full-screen movie of a Windows XP install/boot that's running.

For all we know, it could be a broadcast by UFOs.

Re:WinXP on Mac

[TheRealMindChild (743925)]

EFI is only the "BIOS". Since when has Windows needed the BIOS for close to anything? It, like most OS's do very little that they need, and do the rest themselves... and that is only at boot.

So all you need is to implement a PC AT BIOS emulator before XP begins.

quad core computers?

[Tumbleweed (3706)]

A - Dell was fresh out of quad core computers

Apple's fresh outta those, too, though likely not for that much longer (August for the PowerMac replacement?).

Re:Damage control

[way2trivial (601132)]

Umm..
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....

Re:the infamous Real ID act,

[takeya (825259)]

It was hidden in a military spending bill.