Slashdot Mirror

Heathens (: Have you not discovered the way of the freeware and absolutely fantastic pfe32?

If you're interested in some other 3D software for Linux (some GPL, some not), there's 3dom, 3dpm, Behemot, G3D, Giram, 3delight, AC3D, and of course Blender as mentioned above.

Come on Karma, don't fail me now! The Linux Pimp

Darn you.. make me think.. What am I made of skills?

Real Link

Even though I tested it, here is a plain text version in case it gets screwed up:\
http://iain.lancs.ac.uk/html/gallery-misc1.html

Have a look at some Advanced You're.
--

http://www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/~greenrm /its.html

No, the bicycle is a physical object and stealing it would deprive you of its use.

What if you live on top of a hill overlooking a town. Phone service being too expensive, you use semaphore flags to communicate with your friend who lives in the town. Should it be illegal for other townspeople to look at the top of the hill? Or maybe we should ban telescopes and binoculars?

You may be thinking of "Top Gun Wingman", developed at UCB and presented at Middleware 98 as an example of an adaptive middleware proxy. It is wonderful what happens when students want to look up the Internet Movie DataBase from a wireless PDA while watching a film.

(I'm only posting this anonymously because my email inbox is full and I don't want a flood of emails. It doesn't take a genius to find my email addresses, but please don't bother.)

An AC wrote:

what we need now is an example of a slashdot-mirror effect, where a controversial piece of material supressed by the authorities gets so widely distributed that they can't get to every copy of it.

Absolutely. We need a Mirror Central where people can volunteer to host controversial stuff that has been censored. This is no idle speculation - see above for URL. You could have a mailing list which thousands of people could sign up to (obviously not everyone would have the free space to host RealPlayer files, but there would be smaller stuff too) which would send out news about which sites are either:

• Under actual threat of censorship
• Highly likely to be censored (but what criteria would we use for this? Hmmm...)
• Actually have been shut down, but have been mirrored and could use more mirrors.

(Of course, you could get flooded by thousands of people claiming their sleazy website was shut down by Geocities and "It's Censorship!". Without debating whether it was censorship or whether it was justified [Terms of Service anyone?], there is a very simple solution to this - just sort by topic. Those who want to mirror, say, adult banner farms are free to do so - but I don't think there'll be many takers. Once the sleazeballs realise no-one is going to help them, they'll go away - sure, there'll always be the stupid ones, but this is a small price to pay for such a great tool for freedom of speech and expression. Anyway, more about this on the site and in the discussion groups - it's not completely black-and-white.)

You could also have a separate mailing list which would have regular news digests about sites which had been successfully rescued.

The only question is, who hosts Mirror Central? It almost goes without saying that they'll need to have a sufficiently unrestricted Terms of Service for our needs, and quite a hefty chunk of bandwidth. It needs to be a provider who is not easily scared by threats of litigation - and since, judging by their past record, the Church of Scientology might try to get something else about them removed soon, it'll need to be someone who can stand up to them. (!!!!)

Of course Mirror Central would itself be mirrored, but you'd need one or two high-bandwidth main URLs to list it by in search engines and directories - the latter simply don't go in for listing multiple mirrors for the same site.

We could also include sections and software on how to get round blocking software, and could get a huge number of hits by cross-linking with other anti-censorship sites (just think EFF!).

And perhaps it could do with a better name as well...

Right, anyway, time to stop talking and start acting. A search on "censorship mirror" on Metacrawler doesn't bring up any sites like Mirror Central, so it appears that no-one's successfully done this before (or maybe they have but it hasn't had time to show up on Metacrawler yet). Okay, I've just registered http://mirrorcentral.cjb.net as a temporary measure only - just to get the idea going and as a rallying point and a launching point. This redirect URL was working when I tried it just now, but if it isn't, the real URL is http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/greenrd/mirror/ . The site will initially contain an intro to what this is and two mailing lists (one for discussion of the idea and co-operating on the site, one for alerts of sites that need mirroring) - once we decide on a cool name we can register a domain name and do some serious site design (but who would everyone trust to be the owner? Hmmm... something to think about. I suppose in the long term you'd want a Mirror Central Foundation or whatever with stated objectives, so that the domain name(s) can't be legally misused by the registrant, but again, it would be good to get this up and running on an ad hoc basis ASAP).

The way I envisage it, Mirror Central wouldn't actually host or contain any mirrors itself. That way, as long as no court is stupid enough to rule that mere linking consitutes copyright infringement, libel etc. or whatever the alleged violation is (unfortunately, this is far from out of the question), mirrors can be attacked one by one but the centre is legally speaking untouchable. And, legalities aside, if we can build up Mirror Central into something really popular and interesting, it could become so popular that shutting it down would cause an unconscionable outcry!

Of course decentralisation is important - the less people rely on one centralised site, the better - mirrors should link to each other so that even if Mirror Central goes down people can still navigate. The license of the Mirror Central directory could be almost exactly the same as the Open Directory license - allowing free use and modification, but requiring an attribution link back to Central.

It would actually be extremely simple to write software to find a way in to the "mirror web", even if a large number of sites including Mirror Central were down - you could either use special keywords invented for this specific purpose thru search engines to find a way in, or just simple polling, or both.

[This was added at both top and bottom because /. truncates long comments] Could anyone help out with this? I can't do this on my own - I've got piles of coursework to do already! To help in any way, however big or small, please visit the temporary page at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/greenrd/mirror/ and sign up to the discuss mailing list or forum. Thanks!

--
Robin Green

(I'm only posting this anonymously because my email inbox is full and I don't want a flood of emails. It doesn't take a genius to find my email addresses, but please don't bother.)

An AC wrote:

what we need now is an example of a slashdot-mirror effect, where a controversial piece of material supressed by the authorities gets so widely distributed that they can't get to every copy of it.

Absolutely. We need a Mirror Central where people can volunteer to host controversial stuff that has been censored. This is no idle speculation - see above for URL. You could have a mailing list which thousands of people could sign up to (obviously not everyone would have the free space to host RealPlayer files, but there would be smaller stuff too) which would send out news about which sites are either:

• Under actual threat of censorship
• Highly likely to be censored (but what criteria would we use for this? Hmmm...)
• Actually have been shut down, but have been mirrored and could use more mirrors.

(Of course, you could get flooded by thousands of people claiming their sleazy website was shut down by Geocities and "It's Censorship!". Without debating whether it was censorship or whether it was justified [Terms of Service anyone?], there is a very simple solution to this - just sort by topic. Those who want to mirror, say, adult banner farms are free to do so - but I don't think there'll be many takers. Once the sleazeballs realise no-one is going to help them, they'll go away - sure, there'll always be the stupid ones, but this is a small price to pay for such a great tool for freedom of speech and expression. Anyway, more about this on the site and in the discussion groups - it's not completely black-and-white.)

You could also have a separate mailing list which would have regular news digests about sites which had been successfully rescued.

The only question is, who hosts Mirror Central? It almost goes without saying that they'll need to have a sufficiently unrestricted Terms of Service for our needs, and quite a hefty chunk of bandwidth. It needs to be a provider who is not easily scared by threats of litigation - and since, judging by their past record, the Church of Scientology might try to get something else about them removed soon, it'll need to be someone who can stand up to them. (!!!!)

Of course Mirror Central would itself be mirrored, but you'd need one or two high-bandwidth main URLs to list it by in search engines and directories - the latter simply don't go in for listing multiple mirrors for the same site.

We could also include sections and software on how to get round blocking software, and could get a huge number of hits by cross-linking with other anti-censorship sites (just think EFF!).

And perhaps it could do with a better name as well...

Right, anyway, time to stop talking and start acting. A search on "censorship mirror" on Metacrawler doesn't bring up any sites like Mirror Central, so it appears that no-one's successfully done this before (or maybe they have but it hasn't had time to show up on Metacrawler yet). Okay, I've just registered http://mirrorcentral.cjb.net as a temporary measure only - just to get the idea going and as a rallying point and a launching point. This redirect URL was working when I tried it just now, but if it isn't, the real URL is http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/greenrd/mirror/ . The site will initially contain an intro to what this is and two mailing lists (one for discussion of the idea and co-operating on the site, one for alerts of sites that need mirroring) - once we decide on a cool name we can register a domain name and do some serious site design (but who would everyone trust to be the owner? Hmmm... something to think about. I suppose in the long term you'd want a Mirror Central Foundation or whatever with stated objectives, so that the domain name(s) can't be legally misused by the registrant, but again, it would be good to get this up and running on an ad hoc basis ASAP).

The way I envisage it, Mirror Central wouldn't actually host or contain any mirrors itself. That way, as long as no court is stupid enough to rule that mere linking consitutes copyright infringement, libel etc. or whatever the alleged violation is (unfortunately, this is far from out of the question), mirrors can be attacked one by one but the centre is legally speaking untouchable. And, legalities aside, if we can build up Mirror Central into something really popular and interesting, it could become so popular that shutting it down would cause an unconscionable outcry!

Of course decentralisation is important - the less people rely on one centralised site, the better - mirrors should link to each other so that even if Mirror Central goes down people can still navigate. The license of the Mirror Central directory could be almost exactly the same as the Open Directory license - allowing free use and modification, but requiring an attribution link back to Central.

It would actually be extremely simple to write software to find a way in to the "mirror web", even if a large number of sites including Mirror Central were down - you could either use special keywords invented for this specific purpose thru search engines to find a way in, or just simple polling, or both.

[This was added at both top and bottom because /. truncates long comments] Could anyone help out with this? I can't do this on my own - I've got piles of coursework to do already! To help in any way, however big or small, please visit the temporary page at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/greenrd/mirror/ and sign up to the discuss mailing list or forum. Thanks!

--
Robin Green

(I'm only posting this anonymously because my email inbox is full and I don't want a flood of emails. It doesn't take a genius to find my email addresses, but please don't bother.)

An AC wrote:

what we need now is an example of a slashdot-mirror effect, where a controversial piece of material supressed by the authorities gets so widely distributed that they can't get to every copy of it.

Absolutely. We need a Mirror Central where people can volunteer to host controversial stuff that has been censored. This is no idle speculation - see above for URL. You could have a mailing list which thousands of people could sign up to (obviously not everyone would have the free space to host RealPlayer files, but there would be smaller stuff too) which would send out news about which sites are either:

• Under actual threat of censorship
• Highly likely to be censored (but what criteria would we use for this? Hmmm...)
• Actually have been shut down, but have been mirrored and could use more mirrors.

(Of course, you could get flooded by thousands of people claiming their sleazy website was shut down by Geocities and "It's Censorship!". Without debating whether it was censorship or whether it was justified [Terms of Service anyone?], there is a very simple solution to this - just sort by topic. Those who want to mirror, say, adult banner farms are free to do so - but I don't think there'll be many takers. Once the sleazeballs realise no-one is going to help them, they'll go away - sure, there'll always be the stupid ones, but this is a small price to pay for such a great tool for freedom of speech and expression. Anyway, more about this on the site and in the discussion groups - it's not completely black-and-white.)

You could also have a separate mailing list which would have regular news digests about sites which had been successfully rescued.

The only question is, who hosts Mirror Central? It almost goes without saying that they'll need to have a sufficiently unrestricted Terms of Service for our needs, and quite a hefty chunk of bandwidth. It needs to be a provider who is not easily scared by threats of litigation - and since, judging by their past record, the Church of Scientology might try to get something else about them removed soon, it'll need to be someone who can stand up to them. (!!!!)

Of course Mirror Central would itself be mirrored, but you'd need one or two high-bandwidth main URLs to list it by in search engines and directories - the latter simply don't go in for listing multiple mirrors for the same site.

We could also include sections and software on how to get round blocking software, and could get a huge number of hits by cross-linking with other anti-censorship sites (just think EFF!).

And perhaps it could do with a better name as well...

Right, anyway, time to stop talking and start acting. A search on "censorship mirror" on Metacrawler doesn't bring up any sites like Mirror Central, so it appears that no-one's successfully done this before (or maybe they have but it hasn't had time to show up on Metacrawler yet). Okay, I've just registered http://mirrorcentral.cjb.net as a temporary measure only - just to get the idea going and as a rallying point and a launching point. This redirect URL was working when I tried it just now, but if it isn't, the real URL is http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/greenrd/mirror/ . The site will initially contain an intro to what this is and two mailing lists (one for discussion of the idea and co-operating on the site, one for alerts of sites that need mirroring) - once we decide on a cool name we can register a domain name and do some serious site design (but who would everyone trust to be the owner? Hmmm... something to think about. I suppose in the long term you'd want a Mirror Central Foundation or whatever with stated objectives, so that the domain name(s) can't be legally misused by the registrant, but again, it would be good to get this up and running on an ad hoc basis ASAP).

The way I envisage it, Mirror Central wouldn't actually host or contain any mirrors itself. That way, as long as no court is stupid enough to rule that mere linking consitutes copyright infringement, libel etc. or whatever the alleged violation is (unfortunately, this is far from out of the question), mirrors can be attacked one by one but the centre is legally speaking untouchable. And, legalities aside, if we can build up Mirror Central into something really popular and interesting, it could become so popular that shutting it down would cause an unconscionable outcry!

Of course decentralisation is important - the less people rely on one centralised site, the better - mirrors should link to each other so that even if Mirror Central goes down people can still navigate. The license of the Mirror Central directory could be almost exactly the same as the Open Directory license - allowing free use and modification, but requiring an attribution link back to Central.

It would actually be extremely simple to write software to find a way in to the "mirror web", even if a large number of sites including Mirror Central were down - you could either use special keywords invented for this specific purpose thru search engines to find a way in, or just simple polling, or both.

[This was added at both top and bottom because /. truncates long comments] Could anyone help out with this? I can't do this on my own - I've got piles of coursework to do already! To help in any way, however big or small, please visit the temporary page at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/greenrd/mirror/ and sign up to the discuss mailing list or forum. Thanks!

--
Robin Green

Posted by Sy Borg:

You use Notepad? You really want to get hold of PFE. It's free and damn good for general editing.