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Way back when the MS is a Monopoly ruling first came out in late '99 I put together a site called MS-Monopoly.com. It was covered by /. but damned if I can find the story on /. now but here's a Linux Today blurb.

I'd used the well known Monopoly game board as the basis for our site, with a different company that MS had bought for each square. The Community Chest and Chance cards were contributed by users. Satire is meant to be protected by copyright law, at least here in Canada. Anyway, we got slashdotted not once but twice, Yahoo site of the day, we were in Mac Addict, a whole bunch of portals, etc. Basically we were getting tonnes of traffic... then came the letters from Hasbro.

Long story short, I didn't own the domain name and the guy who did got cold feet after we received the fourth letter. I was holding out for a registered letter, but it wasn't my neck. We'd checked with lawyers and while we had a case fighting a case, even one your most likely going to win, gets expensive in a hurry. We reluctantly closed up shop.

Interestingly enough before we got shut down we heard from a fellow who produced his own version of Monopoly. According to him the game itself is in the public domain because it was a popular game long before it became a Hasbro product. He shipped us one of his board games and gave us permission to copy it for our site, but by that time we had moved on to other things.

To the folks making Facebook apps, I wish you luck. Fighting a Hasbro will require deep pockets and in court nothing is 100%. Yes, if you win you can sue for costs... but you can't be sure you'll win.

ms-monopoly.com lives on... as a advert site. Google it though and you'll still find copies of the site (minus a working backend) and references around, I guess people like a good joke.. In the end it had to end, but I guess that's life.

- The Jester, Department of Jest

It is when we unconditionally love not just our parents and children and pets but all life that we can make a claim to being civilized.

No, you confuse being civilized with being the Christian God. If you start loving the virus that give you HIV, the poisonous snake that bit you in the leg, or the tiger that bit you in the throat, you are dead. Being civilized just means that you conform to the (rather arbitrary) norms of a given civilization. Even here on earth, that means rather different things in different civilizations.

There are tribes on this earth that believe young boys need to suck the dicks of their elders in order to get the "life force" themselves, so they can progress from boys to men. Such a ritual is not considered civilized in the western world, but if you try to stop it in this tribe, I can assure you, that they will not view you as very civilized.

There you go.

Reminds me of the furore in 1999, when a South African had the idea of letting whores run round his game farm, and allowing bikers to hunt them down and shoot them with paintball guns (for a fee, of course).

Choice quote, from this blog:

A 19-year-old hooker called Lindy was quoted as saying, "The fee is low, but it's an adventure, and at least I should lose a bit of weight." !!!!!

you could always use Charlie Fourie's Car Flame Thrower

Well, considering that, presently, we can only splice in the genes in before birth, your uplifted critters may suffer as many moral quandaries as the incumbent sentients do;* would they jump at the idea of founding a new race, or want the big bad scientists to leave their poor dumb cousins alone?

It's also worth noting that most creatures have a reproductive urge, but few societies among our species instate a reproductive right. Are we obliged to match Adams and Eves? What if they can't stand each other?

Notably, some humans don't seem to have a problem taking advantage of unfortunate relatives, while others decry any form of meddling.

---

*Under the assumption that 'intelligence' implies 'morality,' an unfounded one to make.

I wonder if Rob has a Hot Wheels PC on his desk?

Running diverse software on the roots is probably a Good Thing, but security through obscurity isn't

Man this is such a false meme, where did it get started? Obscurity by itself is questionable security, but as a component of a multi-layered security strategy it's perfectly reasonable.

• Security by obscurity is your world-readable /etc/passwd file, with the password data either hashed (obscured) or moved to the shadow file (also obscured). (And if your shadow password file isn't world readable, that's just more obscurity.)

• Security by obscurity is the fact that most people don't have the names & addresses of the personnel running the US military's nuclear weapons systems so that these people can't be blackmailed. Maybe these people can be trusted not to betray their country under torture and such, but keeping their identities non-public -- an obscurity measure -- is important too.

• Security by obscurity is Dick Cheney's "undisclosed location" (*cough* Greenbrier Resort, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia)

• Security by obscurity is restricting access to your company's co-location facility, so that untrusted people can't get physical access to your equipment.

In short, in a broad sense, "security by obscurity" is a lot of good ideas, when you think about it. Any of these ideas can be an Achilles heel, but the solution there is not to cut off the heel altogether, but to wear sensible shoes when going out in the wilderness :)

To get back to the original topic, obscurity is a perfectly good tactic for the people running these DNS servers as part of their overall strategy for protecting the system. It's perfectly reasonable for certain aspects of their systems, processes, etc to be kept on a need to know basis. Sure, there is a benefit to keeping software source open as a security measure, though the benefit of doing that is debatable (and no, I'm not going to be the one to debate it -- I agree that it's generally a good idea but can understand some of the objections). But in this case, where the software is a black box to the outside world, and it's explicitly *not* meant for general DNS use (it's meant for authoritative servers only!) I don't see any particular harm in keeping their doors locked down pretty well.

Not that they're doing that in the first place. As another reply noted, you yourself write that both the betas & release will be available under a BSD style license :-)

But moreover, your objections are I think misplaced -- as are most of the people that blindly parrot the "obscurity is bad" meme. Think about what you're saying -- it really doesn't hold up to scrutiny.