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"Ethical" is a matter of opinion, and mine is that downloading off P2P is more ethical* than buying from the Russians. Here's my reasoning: if I download off P2P, the artist doesn't make any money. But if I buy from the Russians, the artist doesn't make any money and a third-party profits off the artist's work. I'd rather just mail the artist some cash instead.

*yes, I said "more ethical," not "less unethical." Please don't flame me about it; I'm not in the mood to argue. Instead, just read this.

It is time to set the record straight regarding the situation with respect to Vladinator/JCB/Reza/Lonesome Cowboy Burt/Whatever other aliases he may be using. The situation has been confused due to the recent world-wide influx of Vlad-haters, helper-cells, interested third parties and the occasional Vlad sympathizer.

Let us start with a basic tenet of the Association of Anti-Vlad Avengers: There is no difference between William Scott Lockwood III and those who aid him, give him comfort, and/or use him as a substandard, "Always Save" hosting solution. Though we may have no direct quarrel with you, Mr. "Trollaxor", you appear to be friendly with Mr. Lockwood and - by your own admission - are using him as a substandard "Always Save" hosting solution. Consider the fact that if you were using a respectable host for your web site, you would not be having the difficulties you are having now. Also, with this attempt at ferreting out information for Mr. Lockwood, you are aiding and abetting our sworn enemy and have aligned yourself in direct oposition to a powerful internet force (that is, the AAA and its splinter groups).

This brings us to a primary characteristic of the AAA which has been detailed elsewhere, but which I will repeat here in interest of completeness: no single cell, as an entity, is aware of the members of any other cell. The structure of our association works as follows. Each cell is composed of no more and no less than three members who all reside in a roughly similar geographic area. One of the three members is designated as a messenger. This messenger is the only member in contact with a messenger from exactly two other cells. In this way, the members of each cell remain anonymous to the members of any other cell. If a messenger has been compromised, the corresponding cell is responsible for "cleansing" that messenger and replacing him or her with a new messenger. Such a cell will remain on probation - meaning they will only be allowed contact with a single other cell - until such time as the new messenger has been operating for no less than six months.

Our activities are clandestine and even if another cell wanted to share the information you request, it would not be able to because it would not be privy to said information.

As you can see the AAA, though very loosely connected, operates in a highly efficient manner and is deadly serious about the stated goals of the organization: namely, the complete, unconditional eradication of Vladinator, in any and all forms, from the internet.

We have been following the current situation with Vladinator's hosting service quite closely and we estimate the damages to be severe at this point. However, we cannot agree to end our champaign any sooner than already decided upon. We may have shown mercy in this, our second major attack, if Mr. Lockwood had shown the proper degree of humility at our hands. Instead, Mr. Lockwood responded with his usual barrage of lies and vitriol. For this reason, and the fact that we are otherwise bored, we have extended the length of this attack. We realize that Mr. Lockwood's hosting company will try various tricks to deflect our attack, things such as firewalls and IP banning. Eventually, they will succeed in eliminating the current attack at which point we will rest for a period of not less than seven days prior to initiating another attack.

We predict that the end of this second wave will result in another round of cockiness from Mr. Lockwood, given the highly reactionary character that he is. The next attack, which will be the "third wave", will be far more subtle than the current attack and will undoubtedly shake Mr. Lockwood's faith in his current alliances and dealings. This cycle of attack/end att

It is time to set the record straight regarding the situation with respect to Vladinator/JCB/Reza/Lonesome Cowboy Burt/Whatever other aliases he may be using. The situation has been confused due to the recent world-wide influx of Vlad-haters, helper-cells, interested third parties and the occasional Vlad sympathizer.

Let us start with a basic tenet of the Association of Anti-Vlad Avengers: There is no difference between William Scott Lockwood III and those who aid him, give him comfort, and/or use him as a substandard, "Always Save" hosting solution. Though we may have no direct quarrel with you, Mr. "Trollaxor", you appear to be friendly with Mr. Lockwood and - by your own admission - are using him as a substandard "Always Save" hosting solution. Consider the fact that if you were using a respectable host for your web site, you would not be having the difficulties you are having now. Also, with this attempt at ferreting out information for Mr. Lockwood, you are aiding and abetting our sworn enemy and have aligned yourself in direct oposition to a powerful internet force (that is, the AAA and its splinter groups).

This brings us to a primary characteristic of the AAA which has been detailed elsewhere, but which I will repeat here in interest of completeness: no single cell, as an entity, is aware of the members of any other cell. The structure of our association works as follows. Each cell is composed of no more and no less than three members who all reside in a roughly similar geographic area. One of the three members is designated as a messenger. This messenger is the only member in contact with a messenger from exactly two other cells. In this way, the members of each cell remain anonymous to the members of any other cell. If a messenger has been compromised, the corresponding cell is responsible for "cleansing" that messenger and replacing him or her with a new messenger. Such a cell will remain on probation - meaning they will only be allowed contact with a single other cell - until such time as the new messenger has been operating for no less than six months.

Our activities are clandestine and even if another cell wanted to share the information you request, it would not be able to because it would not be privy to said information.

As you can see the AAA, though very loosely connected, operates in a highly efficient manner and is deadly serious about the stated goals of the organization: namely, the complete, unconditional eradication of Vladinator, in any and all forms, from the internet.

We have been following the current situation with Vladinator's hosting service quite closely and we estimate the damages to be severe at this point. However, we cannot agree to end our champaign any sooner than already decided upon. We may have shown mercy in this, our second major attack, if Mr. Lockwood had shown the proper degree of humility at our hands. Instead, Mr. Lockwood responded with his usual barrage of lies and vitriol. For this reason, and the fact that we are otherwise bored, we have extended the length of this attack. We realize that Mr. Lockwood's hosting company will try various tricks to deflect our attack, things such as firewalls and IP banning. Eventually, they will succeed in eliminating the current attack at which point we will rest for a period of not less than seven days prior to initiating another attack.

We predict that the end of this second wave will result in another round of cockiness from Mr. Lockwood, given the highly reactionary character that he is. The next attack, which will be the "third wave", will be far more subtle than the current attack and will undoubtedly shake Mr. Lockwood's faith in his current alliances and dealings. This cycle of attack/end att

It is time to set the record straight regarding the situation with respect to Vladinator/JCB/Reza/Lonesome Cowboy Burt/Whatever other aliases he may be using. The situation has been confused due to the recent world-wide influx of Vlad-haters, helper-cells, interested third parties and the occasional Vlad sympathizer.

Let us start with a basic tenet of the Association of Anti-Vlad Avengers: There is no difference between William Scott Lockwood III and those who aid him, give him comfort, and/or use him as a substandard, "Always Save" hosting solution. Though we may have no direct quarrel with you, Mr. "Trollaxor", you appear to be friendly with Mr. Lockwood and - by your own admission - are using him as a substandard "Always Save" hosting solution. Consider the fact that if you were using a respectable host for your web site, you would not be having the difficulties you are having now. Also, with this attempt at ferreting out information for Mr. Lockwood, you are aiding and abetting our sworn enemy and have aligned yourself in direct oposition to a powerful internet force (that is, the AAA and its splinter groups).

This brings us to a primary characteristic of the AAA which has been detailed elsewhere, but which I will repeat here in interest of completeness: no single cell, as an entity, is aware of the members of any other cell. The structure of our association works as follows. Each cell is composed of no more and no less than three members who all reside in a roughly similar geographic area. One of the three members is designated as a messenger. This messenger is the only member in contact with a messenger from exactly two other cells. In this way, the members of each cell remain anonymous to the members of any other cell. If a messenger has been compromised, the corresponding cell is responsible for "cleansing" that messenger and replacing him or her with a new messenger. Such a cell will remain on probation - meaning they will only be allowed contact with a single other cell - until such time as the new messenger has been operating for no less than six months.

Our activities are clandestine and even if another cell wanted to share the information you request, it would not be able to because it would not be privy to said information.

As you can see the AAA, though very loosely connected, operates in a highly efficient manner and is deadly serious about the stated goals of the organization: namely, the complete, unconditional eradication of Vladinator, in any and all forms, from the internet.

We have been following the current situation with Vladinator's hosting service quite closely and we estimate the damages to be severe at this point. However, we cannot agree to end our champaign any sooner than already decided upon. We may have shown mercy in this, our second major attack, if Mr. Lockwood had shown the proper degree of humility at our hands. Instead, Mr. Lockwood responded with his usual barrage of lies and vitriol. For this reason, and the fact that we are otherwise bored, we have extended the length of this attack. We realize that Mr. Lockwood's hosting company will try various tricks to deflect our attack, things such as firewalls and IP banning. Eventually, they will succeed in eliminating the current attack at which point we will rest for a period of not less than seven days prior to initiating another attack.

We predict that the end of this second wave will result in another round of cockiness from Mr. Lockwood, given the highly reactionary character that he is. The next attack, which will be the "third wave", will be far more subtle than the current attack and will undoubtedly shake Mr. Lockwood's faith in his current alliances and dealings. This cycle of attack/end att

Ah, you want http://kuro5hin.org/. It's on the left.

What first drew me online and kept me excited for years was the sense of community that people had in the BBS scene before the rising popularity of the Web. Despite many attempts at creating this same feeling on the web from AIM, to Craigslist, Friendster, gMail to even Slashdot or Kuro5hin, I have not been able to develop the same type of relationships. It seems almost bizarre to suggest that a global online community could have a BBQ or meet for dinner at a local fast food restaurant.
People like Jom Jennings of FidoNet and Scott Converse of OneNet really deserve to be recognized by organizations like the VCF. The communities they fostered, perhaps because local dial-up networks kept everything provincal, are probably what I miss about the modern Internet with its spammers, phishers, con artists, Patriot Act, unsecure email and general lack of polite behavior. More than anything else, this misplaced sense of community is what I miss about the early days online.

Sounds like a book I read.

K5 Story

So no, both sides are not equally complicit. The GOP is far and away more criminal.

My advice to everyone on this particular issue: 1. Send those involved to jail. The GOP should oust the people who decided to fund this fraudulent organization. Yesterday.

No, that would be the ethical thing to do. Instead they just fired them, and then moved them to Ohio to do the same damn thing.

I'm a republican, btw.

I was too, until I realized how deeply criminal the party has become. From Tom Delay to Cheney to Rowland to the treason committed against Valerie Plame to the almost innumerable criminal investigations into Republican activities, it just sickens me. I *was* an Eisenhower Republican, but today that makes me a bleeding-heart liberal.

That's just the way the Slashdot system works, buddy - centralised control for a better experience for all. If you're interested in a more free-as-in-freedom-for-all experience, try the alternatives. [/shameless plug]

Happy Birthday! I would sing the song, but... you guessed it http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/7/5/112441/6280

One implication of the myriads that this nightmare can produce is "royalty" on children of parents who underwent a DNA therapy, since the children (and their progeny) are now carriers of some corporation's "Intellectual Property".

BS. A gene therapy patent filed before a child is born will have expired by the next generation. Or are you assuming a hypothetical Cher Patent Term Harmonization Act?

"With regard to monopolies they are justly classed among the greatest nuisances in government. But is it clear that as encouragements to literary works and ingenious discoveries, they are not too valuable to be wholly renounced? Would it not suffice to reserve in all cases a right to the public to abolish the privilege at a price to be specified in the grant of it? Is there not also infinitely less danger of this abuse in our governments than in most others? Monopolies are sacrifices of the many to the few. Where the power is in the few it is natural for them to sacrifice the many to their own partialities and corruptions. Where the power, as with us, is in the many not in the few, the danger can not be very great that the few will be thus favored [emphasis mine]. It is much more to be dreaded that the few will be unnecessarily sacrificed to the many.

OT, i know, but DAMN, wtf?
who's in charge here, .. for the past year we've seen the quality of /. articles deteriorate and deteriorate, .. but this without a doubt tops 'm off...
a _frontpage_ thread that isjust one big rtfm flame waiting to happen
anyhoo,.. /me is packing my bags and upping. c'yall on http://www.kuro5hin.org/, http://www.arstechnica.com/ and / or http://www.theregister.co.uk/ hopefully the newsvalue of /. rises above the current http://www.fark.com/ in a year or so,...
in other words;
screw you guys, .. I'm going home

Followup question: if he doesn't step down, what will the military do?

An important goal of human interface design is to understand and reduce the probability of these rare-but-inevitable human errors.

Well, you have alternatives [/shameless plug]

some discussion

When are people going to stop allowing the networks to shove this filth down their throats?

When the viewers realize that they are not the customers of the networks, they are the products of the networks to be sold to the advertisers. Take a look back at Rusty's article on kuro5hin from 2002.

With a six-month release schedule, solid funding, and many prominent Debian and Gnome developers employed by Canonical to work on Ubuntu, the future looks bright for this project. For such a new distribution they have already come quite a long way. The mailing lists and IRC channel are full of people checking out the distribution, and has already moved into the top twenty distributions listed on DistroWatch, an impressive feat considering how young the project still is.

As Ubuntu Warty is still in preview period, there are several quirks that are still being ironed out before the final release, but it is already a very stable and solid desktop system. I predict that this distribution will have the staying power that so many other Linux options seem to lack.

I didn't

Rob

Well at least be glad that the term of a U.S. patent isn't this long.

It's not very hard. Something like this would work nicely.

And the goatse.cx site was suspended. It's not there anymore.

So I guess we'll have to raise the money to replace it, eh?

That won't be necessary. Apparently the site was suspended without warning on January 14, 2004, but not without protest. Some thought the ".cx" top-level domain name was recieving a bad reputation. However this hasn't stopped the site reappearing under different domain names- for example, one excluding the "se" and another substituting the ".ca" TLD for ".cx". So it is still there, to the horror of unnwitting first-time viewers everywhere. It has also spawned a whole series of parodies and tributes. There is a Wikipedia article about it, with more information than you ever wanted to know on the topic.

On the heels of the parent post, people could go read about Ted Nelson. Xanadu has been in the making for 35 years. This is a fun read, but also see the rebuttal here.

There's also this article over at Kuro5hin.

Just think of the money to be made by copyrighting a genre or production style of music!

Methods for producing musical works and sound recordings are not copyrightable in the United States. 17 USC 102(b). They may be patentable, but those last only 20 years provided that Cher doesn't get in bed with drug companies.

Daily Kos, one of the top progressive political sites on the web, is now a Scoop site.

It was previously on MT, but the partisan nature of the site attracted large numbers of trolls and flamers hijacking my message boards.

I wrote an article on kuro5hin about these issues yesterday and today it is on the front page. Have a look for yourself.

If you want to read a great story about Burning Man then read this, from Kuro5hin. One of the best stories from that site in a while.

The Fork in the Road: A Political Morality Play in One Act

I give you M$ Crack Monkey Steve Ballmer yelling "Developers Developers DEVELOPERS!!! "

Agreed, but try pasting that graphic on CNN! The best compromise between personal accuracy and 'ease of use' I've come across so far is a cube, with one's position located on three policy axes: government spending, social freedoms, and corporate-friendliness.

Described in more detail here.

Here's how to perform an attack that will break the trivial XOR encryption in a few minutes:

* Determine how long the key is

This is done by XORing the encrypted data with itself shifted various numbers of places, and examining how many bytes are the same. If the bytes that are equal are greater than a certain percentage (6% accoridng to Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography second edition), then you have shifted the data by a multiple of the keylength. By finding the smallest amount of shifting that results in a large amount of equal bytes, you find the keylength.

* Shift the cipher text by the keylength, and XOR against itself.

This removes the key and leaves you with the plaintext XORed with the plaintext shifted the length of the key. There should be enough plaintext to determine the message content.

Your example works, because your key and plain text are the same length. I think the point is that all Jumpdrives either use the same key, or use one short enough to apply the above to, etc. Short of including (and inventing) a one time pad generator that is truly random, and with the availability of other password encryption methods, why use XOR?

The governments Germany, France, and Italy have all made huge promises to their peoples of generous pensions paid out of general taxation.

The next 30 years will see the unwinding of those promises as demographic changes make them undeliverable.

What bland words for such a dire predicament! Who will innovate in the EU, knowing that their profit will be confiscated in a desperate attempt to pay the pensions bill. Will it even be possible to do business in countries riven by such social stresses? The future will be made elsewhere. The blood of the Europeans will be drunk by monsters from the past.

I don't know why the hell I even bother to show up.

Yeah, neither do I. Not only do you show up here, you take the time to write useless crap like this. Kuro5hin called, they want their troll back.

The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act has nothing directly to do with patent law, other than that the act provides a model for the U.S. Congress to follow when providing consideration for drug companies' campaign contributions, as in the dystopic Cher Act proposal.

The myriads of hackers on KDE and GNOME applications. I'm particularly fond of Kate, KDE's text editor, which is also a component in many other KDE applications.

Ward Cunningham, the creator of the original wiki idea, and Clifford Adams, the maintainer of one of the first usable wiki engines, UsemodWiki.

Rusty Foster, Dries Buytaert and Rob Malda, who created Scoop, Drupal and Slash, respectively, three very powerful weblog engines I use every day.

Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis for starting the GIMP. Ton Rosendaal and the rest of the Blender team for proving that proprietary applications can become open source through distributed funding.

Anthony Jones, creator of iRATE, for exploring new ways to discover free music.

Dave Winer of UserLand for developing a simple content syndication format (now RSS 2.0), the MetaWeblog API and the XML-RPC protocol.

Keith Packard of HP for his many improvements to X.

Guido van Rossum for creating Python, Larry Wall for creating Perl and the many people involved in making PHP, and making it useful.

And of course, the many other people involved in all of these programs, and those who built the software infrastructure that made them possible.

questions have been raised as to whether Moore's movie presents truth or propaganda

People are still questioning it?

Moore hopes to air the film prior to the November elections

There's your answer right there.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie, but there was a clear opinion expressed. F911 is material disseminated by an opponent to a poltical agenda, thus "propaganda" by definition.

It is entirely possible for something to be both truthful and propaganda. In fact, I'd venture to guess that most politically-biased material is truthfull. At least, efficient propganda is.

The only thing I took issue with was claims about the family ties between Bush and bin Laden. They are actually very weak ties and arguments. Specifically the one with the Carlyle Group. For more information on this, I would suggest checking out the following K5 Diary entry: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/8/2/121046/0201

Kuro5hin: Here

And the book text is Here

Yeah, you can read it here.

Slashdot went political a long time ago...

Seriously though, congrats guys, this should make for some more really good discussions on slashdot.

SilentChris is a kuro5hin.org troll. trying to troll the trolls and failing it hard.

Despite the fact that Al writes newspaper articles which are reviewed by one or two other people and thinks these are unbiased truth, he thinks that wikipedia articles written and then reviewed by one or two other people are full of lies. Sure, if someone tries to sneak errors into wikipedia they can do it, just as someone could sneak errors into the newspaper or britannica if they wanted to.

The is a common misconception about what an encyclopedia is. It is not a place to cite as a source in a research paper, rather a place to get an overview of a subject. everything you find in an encyclopedia you need a source for before you can quote it in a paper, so in that sense it really doesn't matter if there are a couple of innacuracies because then you just can't find them in a primary source so that's it, end of story. The funny thing is Britannica and every other major encyclopedia has a huge disclaimer about how there is no guarantee of the accuracy of the information contained, yet Al continues to insist on it being gospel truth.

Lastly, for those who don't know, September 15th-20th is going to be one of the biggest moments in the history of Freedom. Wikipedia will hit 1 million articles, firefox 1.0 will be released, Adbusters starts their blackspot sneaker marketing blitz (which I don't necessarily agree with). In our country if you take a rich man, strip him ass naked and throw him in the middle of the woods, then in a week or two he will be relatively well off again. If you take a poor ignorant man and do the same then in a week or two he will be just as poor. Knowledge and social savvy is what separates the classes in the United States, not money itself. Information is a key foundation of knowledge. Wikipedia aims to bridge the information gap between the rich and poor, and if this Al Fasoldt guy can't see the good in that then there really isn't anything more that can be said for Wikipedia.

here

Google is your friend.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/5/16/163447/493

My favorite little gem from this article:

"...In practical terms, that would spell the end of encryption as we know it. The Internet would be vulnerable to hackers and computer viruses... "

heh.

While we're OT, here's a little piece of fiction that I encountered on kuro5hin once, about what would happen if a large corporation were to locate an NP-oracle.

Gee, ya think?

Once Prime Intellect gets a hold of this I want to be invited to all the good parties.

The only kind of fiction banned in Denmark is child porn. I think there's some kind of exception if you can argue that it has "artistic value", so The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect might be legal. (Read chap. 8 to see what I mean, but you now know what to expect. Be warned.)

There is a nazi local radio station that used to receive government culture support funding - like every other local radio. This was not very popular, so recently the rules were made just flexible enough to deny them funding. I suppose Denmark is so lenient in this regard because it's obvious that the danish nazis are a bunch of jerks who can't even tie their own shoes. (They were even during the german occupation)