Dr Zaius

This is getting a bit of topic and treading into a grey legal area, so I'll apologise in advance. But anyway, my provider(Vodafone New Zealand) since introducing GPRS a few years ago has had numerous holes in their billing system. To start with hardly anyone was geting charged with then they fixed most of the problems. A few lucky people still retained free access until sometime last year when they seem to have gotten everything sorted. Some people are able (on prepaid) to just have a low balance and use GRPS with no costs, however this doesn't work for most people. Changing APNs and other tricks that have worked on some overseas providers don't work here or only worked for a limited time. Supposedly there are people who know of a hole but I've yet to see anyone here in NZ who has got free GRPS without it being a billing error. I've heard of people tunneling the traffic from their phone out through ports/services that aren't charged for by the provider such as DNS to say their home compuer. I don't know much about how APNs and the rest of the GRPS system works but it sounds some what plausible. I haven't really looked into the issue in depth, but I'll do some research and go and ask some phone fanatics about it. If I do end up with free GRPS then I'll definately want a Hak.5 wap site. :P

I don't know how "necessary" it is, but I guess we're all here because we like doing things that aren't "necessary". :P Personally I wouldn't use it due to the insane prices my provider charges for data.

Think of the movie man, "with my help we can do it in 5 minutes" etc, if we all pitch in then we can be taking down Gibsons every 10 seconds. Theres no way The Plague err... Government could stop everyone. God that movie was bad... Yeah it's a bit of a mixed bag down here, we have quite a large amount of liberals and lefties that make sure our government doesn't do anything too drastic. But we still have quite alot of people in the government who would like to put a uniform on every man here and send them off to support Commander Bush. Althought most of the time we're too busy squabbling over petty domestic issues to worry about anything else.

Well considering a huge amount of other sites are tracking our usage for their own evil uses without us knowing it, I really have no problem at all with Google tracking me, it's not like they have a name/address to go with all my search terms etc. Sure they could go through my ISP and ask about my IP, but they would need some legal grounds for my ISP to hand over personal information.

Maybe it's just that only a limited ammount of XXXL shirts were made compared to other sizes? We can only hope...

You have to wonder what legitimate uses an open relay SMTP server has? I suppose theres the anonymity issue, but thats nothing that using a proxy and a webmail service can't fix, or even just go down to your local Internet Cafe and send your emails there. It's a simple matter to find an open relay server, theres huge lists of them if you google, you'll likely have to try about 100 or so before you get one that works though.

To say that America regulating the internet would destroy it for the rest of the world is a bit of a stretch. All Non-English speaking areas of the world would likely continue on as if nothing ever happened, as it stands places like Korea have a very independent "area" of the internet with the infrastructure to support itself. Other English speaking countries may take a while to move their assets out of the US though, but there would hardly be a noticable change. The internet wouldn't die, it would morph and adapt itself. We would likely see all the "core" of the internet in the US being replaced by services from Europe and Asia. A good example to compare this to is when there were the big Bit Torrent raids and all the popular trackers were shut down, it didn't destroy the Torrent scene, people just scattered to other trackers and now trackers are more popular than ever. Say every bit of internet infrastructure in the US shuts down right now, all that will happen is people will go to BBC instead of CNN to look at headlines. We might have a higher ping but we'll still have an internet. Yes in America you certainly do have a challenge on your hands to retain your freedoms. Fortunately in most other Western Countries there is a horde of liberals to protest about these sorts of things. If you get enough people on the streets then there isn't enough Police and jail cells to stop you all. Not saying that you have to have a revolution, but if you get a massive wave of support then changes will happen. If you do lose all your freedoms then it's a short trip up to Canada, or why not hop on a plane to Europe or come down under? I personally will offer refuge with broadband access to anyone fleeing the tyranny of restricted internet.

IPTV: StepONE - general computing/modding/hacking/gaming (they don't really focus on one thing) http://www.steponepro.com - They are also making a series called In The Back Of Your Mind that hasn't been released yet. 1337 - A fictionalised drama-ish series about a group of hackers working as a team to help people in need - http://www.mathclubinc.com Welcome To The Scene - A fictionalised drama-ish series about a piracy group in "The Scene" - http://www.welcometothescene.com

Yeah they're not exactly designed to be opened, you sort of have to pry them apart carefully. You could google the model card you have and see if anyone else has modded it before? That might help to see how feasible modding it is.

Yes with most cards it is quite simple to take them apart and solder on a pigtail. Although if you're unsure about doing it then buying another card may be a better option.

So if I sneak into your house and act like a dog it won't detect me? From my experiance with cameras/motion detection on PCs I've found it depends alot more on the quality of the cameras than the software, although I've only used a few packages. I guess the positions I had my cameras in played a part too, the cheap ones like I was using really don't work too well in areas where there is a large ammount of natural lighting change.

Windows 2000 can be a bit wierd with some devices like with a Skymedia card I had for my internet. Firstly are you using drivers that say they support 2000? 2000 really doesn't like drivers not designed specifically for itself when it comes to certain hardware. As has already been suggested XP might be a possibility? If your worried about it being slow then you can always turn off themes and all the other stuff and it runs more or less like 2000.

Step One: Build Linux PC Step Two: Hold Linux PC in front of you, get a friend to hold the PS2 in front of them. Step Three: Run at each other really really fast and the Linux PC will fuse with the PS2 on collision. As far as I know there is no way of doing this without modifying the hardware or shelling out the money to buy the PS2 Linux package.

I'll upgrade as soon as a torrent is up. If I was paying then I wouldn't be upgrading as the price will be way to high to justify the new features. Regardless of paying or not paying it's going to be risky beign an early adopter, like the early days of XP when hardly any hardware had XP compatible drivers.

Well if you really wanted to get data back off it then chances are only the logic board would be dead, so you could try something like: http://www.deadharddrive.com/ But you say its newish and not much important on there so I presume it's still covered under Seagates warranty? It does seem strange that it killed the drive, you say you only spilit a small amount and the drives are quite well sealed so it must have just been one of those unlucky things that happen.

You say you don't really want to change from XP, but this could be a good chance to experiment and have alot of fun with other operating systems, in particular I would look at some of the dedicated media center type operating systems. Although if you want to stay with XP and want it to boot quicker then you have two options: 1) Upgrade the hardware, which I don't think is something you want to do? 2) Optimise your current install, you say you've disabled a few things etc but theres probably alot more you could do, do some googling for "speeding up XP boot time" etc, theres been hundreds of articles on it. Theres alot of things you can cut out of XP.