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Government censorship is certainly dangerous, but I think the self censorship practiced by the media (including the U.S. media) is more insidious.

Consider the story that the BBC ran in early 2001 about the theft of the U.S. presidential election. The BBC is not some indie rag, but the story was not picked up by ANY of the U.S. media until almost a year later (too late to do any good).

Whatever you think about Noam Chomsky, his theory on media self censorship is worth hearing: The media doesn't make money by selling news to audiences. It makes money by selling audiences to advertisers. In other words, advertisers must be kept happy at all times. The media chooses which stories will be reported on, but more subtly, it chooses how issues will be framed. The choice between the "right" and "left" viewpoints on issues that we are given in our media is often a false dichotomy. Whole ranges of opinions outside the liberal/conservative framework are ignored.

So pay attention. Don't rely on the news media to filter things for you. Get your news from multiple sources, including sources outside the U.S. Try out The Agonist and TerrorWatch and some other samizdat news sites. Don't always believe what you hear about Arab news networks. It is your responsibility to educate yourself.

rkz is a known troll that singlehandedly destroyed the kuro5hin diary section. furthermore, he's one of the leaders of the Anti-Vladinator brigade.

Are we talking about ATMs made by Diebold?

I hate to say it, but any company that would use MS Access for their voting machines just maybe might use VB for their ATMs.

Oh, yes... I notice that nobody's stated it here, but I'd just like to remind all you Windows users keep your machines updated with the latest patches. Ummm.... just, if you're in Europe, don't use the patches that get mailed out to you from Microsoft. Also, don't visit the wrong website (there's a unpatched flaw that allows bad websites to hijack your machine).

I only say this, because I've been getting tons of spam and Microsoft Updates (but fortunately use Linux, which is still the minority OS and therefore doesn't seem to get non-apt-type updates like this.)

My primary tasks include stomping out the various fires that crop up, and making sure our systems are up and available (in spite of the Children in Redmond).

I do a lot of one-on-one support, and fix anything that's broken. I get drafted to fill in the gaps whenever something comes up that we don't have enough resources for. (I just spent a day doing forms data entry, for example).

In my spare time (which varies from 40 to -20 hours/week), I've been spending quite a bit of time trying to plan out a migration to Linux. I'm free to pursue whatever projects I think will help the company. I also hope to eventually move our in-house database from Access 97 to MySql/Apache.

I read slashdot, k5, and a few other sites, to keep a watch out for the newest holes from the kiddies in Redmond. Yes, it counts as work, if I didn't do it, we'd have gotten crushed by things at least 3 times in the past 2 years.

--Mike--

This is an excellent opportunity for the RIAA to leverage a private currency. They could control the cost per unit in US$, and actually charge sub 1 cent prices for certain independant artists, to encourage sales.

There was a good bit on Kuro5hin about this a little while back.

This is an excellent opportunity for the RIAA to leverage a private currency. They could control the cost per unit in US$, and actually charge sub 1 cent prices for certain independant artists, to encourage sales.

There was a good bit on Kuro5hin about this a little while back.

I use Visual Studio as my main compiler, because of it's excellent debugger, but I still prefer emacs for the long coding sessions. this article on k5 that I wrote awhile ago (site seems down right now) may help ease the jealousy.

What will everyone do when 3/4 of the world is no longer struggling to obtain the basic needs in life?

You know, people keep asking that, and we still have vast misery, poverty and hunger in this world. I think we'll deal with the problem of arbitrary abundance when we get to it.

On the other hand, for someone in this county, food, shelter and clothing can be taken care of by someone working minimum wage. If you make an order of magnitude more than that, you spend it on gadgetry, larger versions of everything that wage-slave owns, entertainment of various sorts and broadband.

Oh, and big SUVs.

Don't fool yourself; we will always have a way to set the haves apart from the have-nots.

--grendel drago

The only good thing about such patents is that they expire in 20 years

Not if Eolas teams up with major drug companies and lobby Congress for something like the Cher Patent Term Harmonization Act.

it's just hard to find. I suggest reading The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, but you'll have to read it online.

About a week ago, I found that I was getting spammed multiple times from multiple sources, all by different routes, but within the same minute. Because of this, I concluded that this was spamming caused by viruses. Here's a link where I show the spam I got, plus a bunch of the different headers. If you're technically adept, you'll be able to figure this out. If not, well, the other links may be more useful.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/9/6/23747/49282

It turns out that I was right.

I searched for more information, and got this [I suggest reading the rest of this first. After that, you can go and view the links. I believe these links are safe.]

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/9/3/6257/30997

At this point, I sent it on to my Dad, and asked him to forward it to JMU Computing Services. A few days later, he sent back to me the quoted portion that I've appended at the end of this.

Here's the summary of what's going on. It turns out that some virus/trojan horse/worm writer has gotten together with spammers. They exploit a known, but unfixable flaw in Internet Explorer to take control of your computer without you having to even click anything. All you have to do is go to the wrong website.

Once you do this, the computer installs a .DLL file that is opened when Internet Explorer starts up. The .DLL file will then download spam from the internet, and start sending it to all those addresses in your address book. Apparently, if you have P2P installed [Kazaa, for example], it makes use of that, too, to spam everyone you know. As an added bonus, because your computer is now sending out spam, it will work really slowly at everything else. Sorry, but priorities are priorities, and the spammers/virus writers have their own priorities which aren't necessarily yours.

Are you infected? Ultimately, since the real problem is in Internet Explorer, then as long as you have that, there's no way of knowing, except if your firewall reports that it is doing a lot of internet work without you clicking anything. If you don't understand firewalls, then the only way you can tell is that your computer is really, really slow on the internet. Understand that the worms used this month will change next month.

But if you are infected with the instance described in my links, the files to look for are C:\MSDOS.EXE and a file called wthunk32.dll (though I do not know where that will be. You'll have to use 'Find File' to search for it.) Now, if you have it, you can use the process described on the 2nd link above, to see if it's really spamming. Or, you can just rename it to another name (like _wthunk32.dll , with an underscore before the name, and c:\_msdos.exe), and everything should be fine. If you're worried that this might be bad advice, by all means, first make a bootable floppy, and copy these two files to the floppy before you do anything else. Then, if worst comes to worst, you can always boot the floppy, and restore things to their previous state.

Anyhow... if you notice, the advice from JMU Computing Services, below, is "just don't use Internet Explorer to go to any new websites." If you don't think that's acceptable, let me suggest another option:

Go to http://www.mozilla.org.

and download the heir to Netscape. It's free, it's open-source, and it's a ton more secure. It's what I use. It's also a lot more convenient than Internet Explorer, because it has this neat feature called "Tabs". When you right-click a link in Internet Explorer, you have the option "open in a new window". Well, you h

About a week ago, I found that I was getting spammed multiple times from multiple sources, all by different routes, but within the same minute. Because of this, I concluded that this was spamming caused by viruses. Here's a link where I show the spam I got, plus a bunch of the different headers. If you're technically adept, you'll be able to figure this out. If not, well, the other links may be more useful.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/9/6/23747/49282

It turns out that I was right.

I searched for more information, and got this [I suggest reading the rest of this first. After that, you can go and view the links. I believe these links are safe.]

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/9/3/6257/30997

At this point, I sent it on to my Dad, and asked him to forward it to JMU Computing Services. A few days later, he sent back to me the quoted portion that I've appended at the end of this.

Here's the summary of what's going on. It turns out that some virus/trojan horse/worm writer has gotten together with spammers. They exploit a known, but unfixable flaw in Internet Explorer to take control of your computer without you having to even click anything. All you have to do is go to the wrong website.

Once you do this, the computer installs a .DLL file that is opened when Internet Explorer starts up. The .DLL file will then download spam from the internet, and start sending it to all those addresses in your address book. Apparently, if you have P2P installed [Kazaa, for example], it makes use of that, too, to spam everyone you know. As an added bonus, because your computer is now sending out spam, it will work really slowly at everything else. Sorry, but priorities are priorities, and the spammers/virus writers have their own priorities which aren't necessarily yours.

Are you infected? Ultimately, since the real problem is in Internet Explorer, then as long as you have that, there's no way of knowing, except if your firewall reports that it is doing a lot of internet work without you clicking anything. If you don't understand firewalls, then the only way you can tell is that your computer is really, really slow on the internet. Understand that the worms used this month will change next month.

But if you are infected with the instance described in my links, the files to look for are C:\MSDOS.EXE and a file called wthunk32.dll (though I do not know where that will be. You'll have to use 'Find File' to search for it.) Now, if you have it, you can use the process described on the 2nd link above, to see if it's really spamming. Or, you can just rename it to another name (like _wthunk32.dll , with an underscore before the name, and c:\_msdos.exe), and everything should be fine. If you're worried that this might be bad advice, by all means, first make a bootable floppy, and copy these two files to the floppy before you do anything else. Then, if worst comes to worst, you can always boot the floppy, and restore things to their previous state.

Anyhow... if you notice, the advice from JMU Computing Services, below, is "just don't use Internet Explorer to go to any new websites." If you don't think that's acceptable, let me suggest another option:

Go to http://www.mozilla.org.

and download the heir to Netscape. It's free, it's open-source, and it's a ton more secure. It's what I use. It's also a lot more convenient than Internet Explorer, because it has this neat feature called "Tabs". When you right-click a link in Internet Explorer, you have the option "open in a new window". Well, you h

or is kuro5hin.org really gay?

You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends The Divine Maggees, Oliver Brown and Rick Walker's Loop.pooL.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating copyright with the file sharing programs, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs directly from the artists and seeing their shows instead of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the labels have chosen for us to listen to. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads do not infringe copyright because the artists give you permission to download them.

Thank you for your attention.

You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends The Divine Maggees, Oliver Brown and Rick Walker's Loop.pooL.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating copyright with the file sharing programs, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs directly from the artists and seeing their shows instead of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the labels have chosen for us to listen to. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads do not infringe copyright because the artists give you permission to download them.

Thank you for your attention.

You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends The Divine Maggees, Oliver Brown and Rick Walker's Loop.pooL.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating copyright with the file sharing programs, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs directly from the artists and seeing their shows instead of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the labels have chosen for us to listen to. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads do not infringe copyright because the artists give you permission to download them.

Thank you for your attention.

A recent article about legal music downloads. Lot's of independent stuff there.

I see the similarity, but there is also a difference: in the case of the SPEWS blocklist the decision of an admin to use it is voluntary, and not mandated by the government. Therefore it can be argued that blocking a whole ISP that hosts spammers is not a bad thing -- if all the customers of that ISP are affected, they will move away, and it will hit the ISP where it counts -- money. As long as they aren't made to suffer financially, there will always be ISPs willing to host spammers. I'm only saying that this sounds like a reasonable argument, not that it is unequivocally right. Tricky questions, certainly. A recent controversy about this aspect of the SPEWS blocklist produced some interesting arguments for both sides. When the blocking is required by law, of course, we must be far more circumspect, since the possibility of abuse is great.

Some guy called Michael Crawford has written am article for Kuro5hin called Links to Thousand of Legal Music Downloads.

Interesting article - also talks about an interesting player concept called irate. It downloads the free tunes for you....

Do you believe that they are innocent and that the RIAA has unfairly targeted them?

However, everyone deserves a fair day in court. And more to the point, since most of us have read a hundred similar debates on the P2P subject, I thought I'd take an opportunity to steer the discussion in a different course, which I thought might prove interesting or helpful to some folks.

i have the honor of having the very first post on your very first section of your series ;-)

http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2003/4/11/4127/09 278/1#1

the rule of unintended consequences

Kuro5hin has a recent article which explains the issue, including pointers to archives with about 40,000 music titles that are legal to download.

Boycott the RIAA, and start downloading / buying music that isn't theirs. Support artists who make good music and don't have access to the RIAA's media juggernaut.

i liked your articles on schizophrenia awhile back ;-)

i had my own anti-riaa rant myself awhile back:

the rule of unintended consequences

You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends The Divine Maggees, Oliver Brown and Rick Walker's Loop.pooL.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating copyright with the file sharing programs, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs directly from the artists and seeing their shows instead of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the labels have chosen for us to listen to. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads do not infringe copyright because the artists give you permission to download them.

You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends The Divine Maggees, Oliver Brown and Rick Walker's Loop.pooL.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating copyright with the file sharing programs, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs directly from the artists and seeing their shows instead of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the labels have chosen for us to listen to. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads do not infringe copyright because the artists give you permission to download them.

Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads There is hope that we can get out of legal mess. This article says that 90% - 95% of artists are unsigned. There has got to be plenty of quality out there, waiting for the people to find them. With good collaborative filtering, we can find the music we want without those bastard lawyers. Musicians, don't sell out! We want to support you! Let us hear your work, and the money will come. I am downloading iRate right now.

After you posted that, I read it. I also looked for people who criticized David Hardy. Guess what, there's a lot in the argument you game me that is false or misinterpretation. See for yourself here.

Libby Hoeler is an "accidental" internet celeb.

There's a write up about it at kuro5hin.

Everyone hates you, including your kids you fat fuck.

Dot Net doesn't look like a developer panacea just yet. If Sun keeps the enhancements coming and works to bring the development environment up to Visual Studio's standards (Yes, VS has its problems, but it has a lot of unique tools, like compile-and-continue, which save hours!), Java may well survive.

Dot Net is also anything but small. It's possible to create ROMmable Java applications in just a couple megs of flash memory. On the other hand, there's no such thing as embedded dot Net just yet. And if they continue with the execution model they've currently got, any piece of code is going to net a ROM many times larger than what's possible with Java. Either way, I'll want $699 for my fp, beeyotch.

RieserFS 4 is worth a serious look if your interested in file system development. there was a great article over on kuro5hin about it a few weeks ago.

Care to place a wager? Plenty of companies (take Sun for example), are surviving on less (and with less prospects) than Microsoft at the moment.
I think you've got your logic the wrong way around anyway. It probably should be "MS will wither without Windows". However, even if Microsoft were to have its market share eroded more by competition, they're hardly going to "die". I use GNU/linux at home, because it fulfills my functional requirements (with gcc, emacs, xmms and mozilla), but the state of the linux desktop leaves a lot to be desired - in terms of ugliness, klunkiness (yes, even with the interactivity patch and O(1) scheduler), useability (take the gnome control centre for example), and compatibility (although this is improving in some regards). Gaim still blows. Some of this arises from the current stagnant state of XFree86.

I can't really recommend linux to my family and friends, I know it's just going to cause them pain. It might be suitable for your typical "type-it-up and email it to me" secretary, but not when you want to use commercial services that tend to have Windows only clients (a lot of economic software), and recommending TeX to someone who has written 250 pages of their thesis in Word, albeit structured using styles, isn't really helpful.

Mac OS X seems to be doing a lot better than linux in terms of desktop software, especially considering how new the (Aqua) API is. A new Powerbook is certainly enticing, but the price tag is the limiting factor.

-- Why is it that every article on /. so easily descends into M$-bashing/defending? I even managed to include some X bashing and Apple evangelism!

Lack of clickable links

Reading this thread (which of course I found via my aggregator (RSS Bandit) from the Slashdot Feed, there seems to be a lot of confusion about what RSS actually IS. The beauty of RSS, IMHO, is that is is Really Simple. The Creative Commons licensed spec for RSS 2 shows that there's a tiny core of mandatory information and reasonable extensibility through the use of XML namespaces. I use RSS to locate new articles from here, from The Register, BBC News, The Guardian, ITN news (yes, I'm a news junkie), kuro5hin, InfoWorld, Wired, for product update news from various SourceForge projects I use, for tracking a bunch of techie blogs I read without having to visit every one of them regularly, for recently-posted-article lists from thirty or so sites that I couldn't possibly keep track of by visiting them individually. I figure that if you've had a look at the examples I've given, and optionally the spec, you ALREADY have enough to successfully expose and consume RSS.

But the thing is, RSS is Really Simple. Simple to consume, simple to produce. So, since I already have my reader in place, I've also got a bunch of private feeds - an RSS file that shows me login/logout events from my server logs, an RSS feed that shows me the last 25 orders valued over 250 placed by our customers, an RSS feed that lists the 25 most recent software releases we've done, outstanding Service Requests and Change requests.

All of this could be achieved in other ways - what makes it a winner for me is that, for anything that's a series of events, it's pretty much trivial to expose those events as RSS <item>s, and then I can monitor all those items, from their diverse sources, in one place.

But then, I'm already somewhat smitten with RSS, obviously.

TomV

Whatever shall I do???

Yours humbly,
Ta bu shi da yu

The K5 moderation won't work here because it's too prone to abuse. But separate modpoints can make the difference.

Isn't is time for the editors to "ask slashdot" how to improve the site?

Perhaps it's Something Awful that's doing it?

Fark seems to think so.

(Ever feel like you're writing for memepool or Everything2? I sure do!)

I was trying to explain this to some people the other day as well; Windows is indeed insecure by design. And Microsoft could have fixed things at any time in the past 8 years or so with regard to viruses; it isn't like they haven't known about the problem. If you ask me, it's gross negligence on their part, and they should be liable for damages.

It's a completely different thing with criminals. Crime does not "just happen", it usually have social roots. There are countries with extremely low crime level and they don't have to worry that situation will somehow worsen quickly and dramatically (unless they invite a lot of immigrants from less civilized countries).

In the same venue, some countries are safer from terrorism than others and this is not going to change dramatically (unless Iceland manages to piss off Pakistan or Angola somehow).

The situation with viruses is different - viruses do "just happen", because our experience shows that virus writers to not need any extra motivation - they write viruses just for the sake of it. Ergo no country (system) can be considered safe, because a virus may emerge any day. Another problem is that simple bugs are often enough to cause virus-like behaviour. There have been cases when an innocent mistake made a system to send too many e-mails, producing a spam-like behaviour. Imagine that a bug in DNS server will cause it to "spam" other DNS servers with lotsa packets instead of just sending the update a shutting up. Internet brought to a halt by a bug. You can imagine many similar scenarios. To defend against that we need to build secure systems. And viruses do help.

Why hasn't this technology been adopted by general CPU designers?

Probably because Nintendo may have an exclusive license to sell products containing 1T-SRAM, and it may last anywhere between the lifetime of the GameCube and the lifetime of the patent. Be glad there's no Cher Patent Term Harmonization Act.

Buddy, you are asking completely the wrong people if you want educated opinions. Try here if you want 'educated'.

That will be all.

• Don't send our kids to concentration camps
  
• Treat Chechens like humans (although criminals and enemies) and do not send them to death camps
  
• Do not jail political protesters
  
• Do not dream about total control over all citizens anymore
  
• No longer use 1984 tricks like doublespeak and editing history
  
• Do not jail people for hyperlinking
  
• Do not jail people for jokes in their belongings
  
• No longer send KGB officers to make people "disappear"
  
• Do not jail people for writing fiction
  
• And overall are highly unlikely to become a totalitarian prison-state
  
• Do not get busted for downloading an MP3 (and since most artists place MP3s on their sites, we don't even need P2P).
  
• Don't have perpetual copyrights.
  

They are so allowed, once they expatriate themselves.

K5 democrats write articles about coffee and about tea.

They are so allowed, once they expatriate themselves.

K5 democrats write articles about coffee and about tea.

They are so allowed, once they expatriate themselves.

K5 democrats write articles about coffee and about tea.

In the Netherlands, there was a patent case once about the idea of salvaging sunk ships by filling them with air-filled ping-pong balls; the patent was denied because the idea had been used before in a Donald Duck comic.

On the other hand, think of what would have hit the proverbial fan had the patent been upheld. The government would have recognized a Disney writer as the inventor, and the assignee would have been (obviously) The Walt Disney Company. In that case, Disney would have sought out a Cher Patent Term Harmonization Act for sure.

Please mod this up.

Or perhaps you could shut the fuck up, because noone cares when you submitted it.

If you don't like slashdot. LEAVE!

If you want to read a *great* article on the subject written by a professional gambler, click here.