LostInSpace

I picked up my first ever home broadband router on thursday, I wanted nothing fancy just something to hook up to the system and get it up and running fast and simple. Here's what I got Netgear RP614 v.3. It's very similar, in features, to the D-link 604 except that this one also has SPI whereas the D-link does not. As you can see I did some homework on this but I missed one thing. I got the router so I didn't have to use a software firewall anymore, turns out that this router (as most) only block incoming traffic not outgoing. I came by this information reading a few tech sites and they mentioned this fact about most routers just blocking incomming traffic but they only suggested the continued use of a software firewall for outgoing traffic. Blimey, there's goes that idea of not having to use a software firewall. My question is, is there a way to cleverly finagle this thing into blocking outgoing traffic. Right now I'm still using Zone alarm with the router but I turned all the things off in zone alarm that the router handles and am just using it to block outgoing traffic. I want nothing coming in and going out that I didn't give permission to. Any suggestions? BTW: One of the other reasons I got the router is when I upgrade my computer soon (it's another thread in this topic area) I'm going to use the current one I'm using to build another computer for friends and family members that come to visit. This way they have access to the DSL as well. Thanks in advance for any help and insight. I also, in my search came across this nifty site Shields Up. It checks how stealthy your system is. [ 07-16-2005, 04:23 PM: Message edited by: LostInSpace ]

ZDNet: SpreadFirefox.com, the community marketing Web site for the open-source Firefox Web browser, was hacked earlier this week, potentially exposing user data. Oy vey!

Link quote: Rescue or rip-off? Did the 'world's most experienced rescuer' defraud the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund? INVESTIGATION By John Hockenberry Correspondent Dateline NBC Updated: 8:13 p.m. ET July 15, 2005 Out of the ashes of Ground Zero emerged the faces of heroes. They were tear-stained faces, soiled faces, and scarred faces of the fearless. For a time, Doug Copp seemed to be one of those heroes. As chief of the American Rescue Team International for the past 16 years, Doug Copp had been circling the globe, offering his services in disaster zones from from El Salvador to Turkey. The people who met him were given hope in the most dire of circumstances. But that hope would soon turn to doubt. Believers would be asking themselves questions about the man who calls himself "the worldÔÇÖs most experienced rescue worker." Meeting Doug Copp Albuquerque Journal Reporter Leslie Linthicum first met the then 51-year-old Copp shortly after 9/11. Linthicum was looking for a way to get to New York to cover the story, but her paper had a plane on standby. Since the nation's airspace had been shut down, she had no way to get it in the air. Then her boss told her about Doug Copp, a rescuer who said he had the kind of high-level connections that could clear the plane for take-off. A few phone calls later, that's exactly what happened. ÔÇ£I thought he must be pretty good at what he does and a pretty big wheel if he's going to get that kind of clearance for us,ÔÇØ said Linthicum. Copp said he had that clout and was working with the White House to secure a fax that would give them unfettered access to Ground Zero. Listening to Copp's confidence about his friends in high places were three other people: A writer working on a screenplay about Doug Copp, and filmmakers Mike Miller and John Grace. Miller and Grace learned about Copp in the summer of 2001 when they came across dramatic video of Doug Copp appearing to pull a little girl out of the rubble after an earthquake in Turkey. When the filmmakers set out to learn more about Copp, they came across an impressive resume that began in 1985. Copp, a demolitions expert, offered his services after the Mexico City earthquake. In the years that followed, he claimed trips through 892 collapsed buildings at 100 disasters around the world. Where Copp went, there were cameras. He appeared in numerous documentaries and news reports, including a 1999 appearance on MSNBC news after the Egypt air crash. After a brief meeting, Miller and Grace decided enthusiastically to produce a documentary about Copp. The themes, the producers thought, would center around rescue, danger and heroism. The 9/11 tragedy Grace and Miller thought they would travel to catastrophes all over the world for their film ÔÇöbut then disaster struck right here at home. Their project was suddenly overtaken by a much bigger story. ÔÇ£The world-famous American rescue team leader is right here,ÔÇØ says Miller. ÔÇ£And we've got to get him to New York, so he can start doing some stuff to do some good.ÔÇØ As they flew toward New York, Copp warned that when it came to staying alive in the smoldering ruins, there was no higher authority than his word. Copp had also led them to believe that they had a faxed approval from the White House to go directly to Ground Zero. "He waved a paper at me one day before that I assumed was the fax," says Miller. "I didnÔÇÖt have any reason to challenge him at that point." But things began to go awry the moment they went to pick up their credentials. They called the White House, but no one they spoke to knew anything about Copp or that paper. Copp's request was denied. At the time, they just chalked these setbacks up to just the general chaos and confusion. Eventually, Copp flagged down a police officer and told him that he had a special invention he called ÔÇ£The Copp Casualty LocatorÔÇØ that could detect gases given off by decomposing flesh and find bodies trapped in the rubble. The police officer led them to Ground Zero. And there, with the filmmakers cameras rolling, Copp put the sniffing machine to work. ÔÇ£It began beeping like there was something going on. And these fire people are scrambling like crazy trying to get to where they believe a body might be,ÔÇØ says Grace. ÔÇ£They wanted to believe too.ÔÇØ But the beeps were just that ÔÇö nothing more. ÔÇ£Doug wrote it off as, ÔÇÿWell, it must have been just a little blood left in the dirt,ÔÇØ says Grace. With that, Linthicum had seen enough. She decided to move on. ÔÇ£I thought, ÔÇÿI'm never going to hear his name again.ÔÇÖÔÇØ But the filmmakers stayed on, hoping the setbacks were temporary. After a few minutes of sifting through the rubble, Doug Copp changed tactics. It was time, he said, to go underground to look for survivors. Mike Stewart / Courtesy of The Albuquerque Journal Doug Copp sat on a ledge outside the ground zero perimeter on Sept. 13, 2001, after he talked his way past the first police barrier. Once he reached the ramp of the parking garage beneath the collapsed towers, Copp heard some banging that he thought was coming from trapped survivors. The noise turned out to be merely the heavy equipment removing the rubble above. But Copp continued to search this ramp area, all the while documenting his exploits on videotape. Then after about 15 minutes, as the tape and battery for the video camera ran out, Copp headed back up to the surface. There was to be no more shooting that day, and their time on the rubble at Ground Zero that night was about to run out. ÔÇ£We were there for probably three hours before we were escorted out,ÔÇØ says Miller. Testing the 'Copp Casualty Locator' The next day, on September 14, the filmmakers went to a fire station on their own. They were hoping to convince firefighters that machine could help them find their fallen brothers. They put the sniffer in a jar of rotted meat Copp used for such demonstrations, and much to their relief, it seemed to work. The firefighters were convinced and brought the filmmakers back to Ground Zero. But once again, the machine failed. They say that when they told Copp that the machine did not work, he accused the filmmakers of ruining the device. And when Copp learned that they had thrown away the jar of rotted meat he kept for testing the machine, Copp ÔÇ£went off like a bottle rocket.ÔÇØ ÔÇ£He was so mad about that sample of meat being discarded that you thought the world had ended for him right there on the spot,ÔÇØ says Miller. ÔÇ£That was one of the things that started me to thinking there's something wrong here.ÔÇØ By September 15, two days after they arrived in New York, the filmmakers had seen enough. They pulled the plug on their documentary and headed home. ÔÇ£At that point, I was done with it. I wanted out. We felt like posers. We felt like total frauds. And it's a terrible time in our nation's history. And to be in the spotlight at Ground Zero, at that time and place and to not deliver on something that gave those guys so much hope. It was emotionally horrific,ÔÇØ recounts Grace. The filmmakers, too, thought that would be the last they would hear of Doug Copp. A few days later Copp also returned to his home in New Mexico. And before long, the rescuer claimed to be in need of rescuing himself, complaining of debilitating health problems. (cont. on page 2 of the link) Watching this report right now on NBC. From seeing all the stuff brought out about this guy I'd say he's a rip-off artist. He goes to these diaster zones to profit from them anything he contracts from these sites he deserves.

quote:Originally posted by street: Actually, I was referring to the word, as in :OPPOSITE of ASLEEP. I know. I just couldn't resist bustin' chops again.

ZDNet: A 2002 e-mail suggests that an investigation commissioned by The SCO Group failed to produce any evidence that Linux contained copyrighted Unix code. quote: "Despite the vast disparity between SCO's public accusations and its actual evidence--or complete lack thereof--and the resulting temptation to grant IBM's motion, the court has determined that it would be premature to grant summary judgment," Kimball wrote. "Viewed against the backdrop of SCO's plethora of public statements concerning IBM's and others' infringement of SCO's purported copyrights to the Unix software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities."

And then there's this Parents 'ignore game age ratings'. Who'd have thunk it. quote: A study commissioned by the UK games industry found that parents let children play games for adults, even though they knew they were 18-rated. There it is, in black and white, it's the parents not the gaming industry who is at fault. quote: And to a certain degree, sticking an 18-rating on a game made that title more desirable. "We called it Magic 18," said Mr Freund. "The 18+ label was seen as promoting the content, promising adult content rather then saying 'my parents will stop me playing this.'" They got that right.

quote:Originally posted by street: Hey Crunch, I for one, am glad to see another "AWAKE" individual come into this community. Indeed, WELCOME. Are you referring to the Jehovah's Witnesses AWAKE publication? JW: AWAKE. Scroll down to the bottom of the page on that link.

quote:Originally posted by Capn Crunch: Jaguar, you are TRULY The Lord of The Flies. You fit the role perfectly. What you need to do is read up a little like on Earth's historical climate past etc.. With all the fear mongering, I'm surprised they are not using Venice as a wake up call to us causing global warming. However, those of us with a modicum of intelligence know the real reason why Venice is being flooded.

That was pretty damn awesome. Thanks SC for that one and thanks a lot now I gotta go pickup my knickers from the other side of my room.

(Reuters) -- Astronomers have detected a planet outside our solar system with not one, but three suns, a finding that challenges astronomers' theories of planetary formation...... Caltech astronomer Maciej Konacki, who wrote the research article, refers to the new type of planets as "Tatooine planets," because of the similarity to Luke Skywalker's view of his home planet by the same name, with its multiple suns, in the original "Star Wars" film.

quote:Originally posted by Jaguar: I loved his reference to Columbine, Like video games somehow had something to do with it. From what I remember, they were trying to blame it on a movie, The Matrix, and had nothing to do with any computer or console game. This guy needs to get his facts straight.

quote:Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr: You go girl!! Be careful SC, she may come after you next for calling her a girl. I can see the headlines now: "Hillary Clinton takes on Derek Smart and 3000ad® for a derogatory comment." You are going to see a lot more politicians come out of the woodwork on this ESRB issue for the free publicity.

At least the issue was easily fixed. I guess you can say that this is now all just water under the bridge.

ZDnet: Firefox 1.0.5, released Tuesday, patches a dozen bugs in the open-source Web browser, some of them "high risk," said Chris Hofmann, director of engineering at Mozilla. High-risk problems typically allow an intruder to commandeer a PC or expose the user's data. I wonder if any of the fixes cover an issue I've been having since I installed the 1.4 fix. I haven't read the update specs yet, but the problem I am having is a memory leak. I know it's firefox because when I use IE (which I still have installed) the problem goes away and I don't have turn on my memory manager to release the memory.

Oh well, flight cancelled again.

You know after reading all this I started getting flashbacks about a few things between AMD and INTEL so I did a search and sure enough I kind of remembered it. AMD and Intel seems to have been wrangling with each other the past decade or more. Mostly Intel dragging AMD into court. Here's a nice article I found that sums it up: Part 1: History Lesson quote: A few words on licensing technologies of Intel. There are some people out there who wonder why Intel doesn't refuse to extend licenses for its products to get rid of its importunate competitor. First, FTC will never let it because of the antimonopoly law (Intel can't help extending its licenses as the state obliges to do it); moreover, there is such a concept as a strategic product. Intel will have to produce Alpha for God knows how long, irregardless of whether it likes it or not, because the American military need it. And Intel will give licenses for x86 to AMD, because the Tomohavks the USA used to fire at Serbia and Afghanistan were based on the embedded 80386 processors from AMD, and the military want that the strategic components be produced by several companies, just to feel confident. The Shuttles which stand idle at the moment (not because of AMD) contain quite a lot of its chips. This is one, but not last reason why AMD isn't afraid of licensing problems. Though it changes with time. The matter is that in 386's time the military orders didn't make a considerable share in the Intel's budget as it was before, that is why Intel could pay less attention to the whims of generals. Starting from the i486 the external contracts weren't put an end to. You probably remember the UMC 486SX-2 or AMD 5x86. So, do you understand why the processors' names changed so unexpectedly, though before all companies simply copied original names of Intel? But I digressed again. Well, at the end of the fiscal year of 1981 the sales volumes grew twice as compared with 1979. It was quite a good development, even for the semiconductor industry of those times. In 1981 AMD and Intel prolongated and extended their cross-license agreement, and a year later the companies concluded an agreement on exchange of technologies that focused on the iAPX86 family. Well, it's high time to finish the first part of the AMD's development because later this manufacturer turned into a x86 CPU maker, but this is quite a different story. Part 2: Down and dirty with AMD and Intel quote: For a start, in 1987 the company established a technological collaboration with Sony, which brought the access to the CMOS production technology. The process was to made a use of. Production of an analog of the i386 looked good, and AMD had a license for the Intel's x86 family (see the previous part). AMD also had all data on production of 8086, 80186, and 80286 processors received from Intel within the frames of the agreement of 1982. But since 1982 a lot of time passed away, and the relationships between the two companies went too bad. Intel refused to uncover the design of 80386 as AMD demanded, that is why the latter tried to make Intel fulfill the conditions of the agreement via the arbitrage. Soon after that Intel simply tore up the agreement of 1982. As expected, AMD won. The higher court approved of the arbitrage's decision, but the next appeal turned out to be more successful for Intel. The process ends only in 1991 when the supreme court of California take's the AMD's part and, thus, it puts an end to the first legal proceeding between two companies. Intel had to pay off over $1 billion! Well, they could close down the company. But it was too dull............................................... What we are mostly interested in is the first sphere where AMD becomes popular - IBM PC compatible processors. As it was mentioned above, in 1991 the right for production of x86 processors was ratified by the court, but AMD had no latest data on new Intel's processors. However, AMD started reverse-engineering regarding the Intel's products since the Intel's refusal to provide AMD with the data on the i386. As a result, in 1990 the company developed a working analog of the i287 coprocessor. It wasn't an exact copy of the IntelÔÇÖs solution, but the microcode (internal low-level intructions of processor) coincided entirely. Intel was really outraged and sued for breaching the patents. But another court had confirmed the AMD's right to use the fruits of the agreement of 1982, and AMD used it saying that the agreement gave the right to copy the microcode of ALL Intel's processors. It worked. And in March 1991 the company developed a clone of the i386 - Am386. It had a different circuit, but it coinsided entirely in the microcode with the Intel'one.

Okay Soback, let's put it this way. You open a small computer store. You need to carry both AMD and Intel to cover a full range of customer demand and revenue for your new foundly store to achieve profitable success to survive the first year. You contact AMD and they are more than happy to sell you their chips. Varoom, now here comes intel. "ang on a minute if you want to deal with us you can't carry any AMD chips." Now you are stuck you need both to survive. If you tell them to get lost, you will only have AMD to sell and your buisness will not survive. Then Intel sweetens the pot "We will give you a nice hefty bonus at the end of each year to cover your potential sales you would have made if you carried AMD". Hmmmm, salvation. Thank you Intel deal done. There goes another loss for AMD.

Uh oh. I didn't think of this myself Broadband over Power Line: Why Amateur Radio Is Concerned about Its Deployment. Wonder what jaguar's thoughts are going to be on this.

quote:Originally posted by Soback: Thank you LIS for making my point. Nooooo . Anyway, I've never owned commercially made PC's either. I find they are usually crap no matter what chip is in them. Besides the fact that finding one with an AMD chip in it was next to impossible (I wonder why). So, I choose what I consider the best components myself and put them together. However, not everyone is that tech savy. You'd be lucky if some get by the mouse and keyboard concept. I do agree with you about government interference. But, I do believe that in this case it is called for. You can't deny there have been abuses by Intel. I've seen plenty of companies that have done the same. To deny that these problems don't occur is not realistic.

Dang it time ran out. If you are interested, you can download the "Tripod Call" Sound!.

quote:Originally posted by Scrivener: But like I've said, in 20-30 years, I swear I'll do it right... even if it's called something else. I want to see Earth loose - just once. Actually, it would be better if both sides lost in this case because each species has their own unique nasty little microbes.

Nice response Darkling. I've only owned an intel chip once and that was back in the 8088xt days. Since then, it's been AMD for me all the way. Price and performance could not be beat.

Oh yeah, forgot about that. I viewed a report on the news yesterday about it. They talked about doing this years ago if I remember correctly.

quote:Originally posted by Prez: Ov vey! You environmental wackos are starting to remind me of McCarthy and his obssession with communists. LOL! Hmm, I just had a thought. What if these wackos along with the politicians really know that it's mostly a natural phenomena and cannot be stopped and to put a smoke screen over everything to make the people feel good and secure that something is being done with the promise of it getting better by their intiatives.

Link quote: ZDNet: update European regulators raided the offices of Intel and a number of PC-related companies early Tuesday as part of an antitrust investigation into the chip giant. As part of the dawn raid, European Commission officials and national competition authorities in Milan, Italy; Munich, Germany; Madrid, Spain; and Swindon, England, descended on several Intel offices, a Commission representative said and an Intel representative confirmed. The officials also visited a number of companies that manufacture or sell computers. "These inspections are being carried out within the framework of an ongoing investigation," a Commission representative said. Intel said it is cooperating fully with investigators. "Our normal business practice is to cooperate, and we are doing (that) so far in this case," Intel representative Chuck Mulloy told CNET News.com. "We firmly believe that our business practices are fair and lawful." The United Kingdom's Office of Fair Trading, or OFT, said that it had assisted the European competition authorities in an "on-site inspection" of Intel's Swindon offices. "It is really a European Commission matter," said an OFT spokeswoman. She said the inspection was likely to have been carried out under article 81 of the EC Treaty, which prohibits price fixing and other distortions of competition within the European Union. The spokeswoman could not say whether anything was removed from Intel's offices. The investigation comes just weeks after rival Advanced Micro Devices filed suit against Intel, alleging the chip giant has used scare tactics and coercion to prompt computer makers and other companies to use Intel's chips instead of rivals'. Intel's chief executive, Paul Otellini, has said that he expects his company to come out on top in the dispute. In the European inquiry, other PC makers and retailers were reportedly questioned. Dell, which exclusively sells products based on Intel chips, said the company's headquarters in Bracknell, England, were visited Tuesday by officials from the Commission's competition division. But the company declined to give details of what the officials were doing or the nature of the visit. As of 5:30 p.m. local time, Commission investigators were still on the premises and Dell was cooperating fully, said Claire Ramage, a Dell representative in Europe. European representatives of Hewlett-Packard said that the company's offices were not visited by Commission officials on Tuesday. IBM representatives were not immediately available to comment. Other PC makers had little to say. German electronics retailer MediaMarkt declined to state its relationship with either Intel or AMD. And DSR Retail, the parent company for U.K.-based online retailer Dixons, declined to say whether it was visited as part of the probe, but reiterated its earlier stance that a reference to Dixons in AMD's complaint against Intel is factually incorrect. A source familiar with antitrust issues predicted that Intel will not have much to say about the probe right away. (cont..)