Slashdot Mirror

Yes, bittorrent has a lot of great legitimate uses, but we are deluding outselves if we think legal bittorrent usage is the majority of bittorrent traffic, or even a large portion of it. I get that extreme statements like this are necessary to balance out the extreme statements made by the other side (that song you downloaded cost us 500 million, etc..) .. but I still don't like it :(

That shouldn't matter. The Supreme Court has ruled that if there's pretty any legitimate use then it's covered by fair use:

The Court's 5-4 ruling to reverse the Ninth Circuit in favor of Sony hinged on the possibility that the technology in question had significant non-infringing uses, and that the plaintiffs were unable to prove otherwise.

Besides, if your argument is that you shouldn't have torrents because they're mostly used for nefarious purposes then we should ditch email because 73% of if it is spam.

I've been one of the collateral victims of one of the FBI's "grab everything and go" raids. Some of you might recall the FooNet raid back in 2004.

http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/foo021604

My shell host had their boxes colocated with Foonet, so when the FBI went in and just grabbed every single machine in the building my host was screwed. And by extension, I was screwed. My host ended up losing almost all their customers (Including me) when they neglected to get a backup online in a reasonable amount of time. As far as I know nobody else on my host ever got their data back from the feds.

MySpace is dying.

This is being widely discussed in the hosting industry. The full jury ruling is online, and there's additional analysis and discussion at the Web Host Industry Review, TechDirt and Data Center Knowledge.

Buffnet wasn't prosecuted for having USENET servers, they were prosecuted for not blocking the content after having been informed of its existence.

BuffNet was charged with a misdemeanor for facilitating child pornography because its servers allowed access to a bulletin board containing illegal pornographic images. A two-year investigation found that the ISP failed to take action after they were notified of the illegal activity. In February, 2001, the company pleaded guilty and a judge ordered BuffNet to pay a $5,000 fine, according to a published report.

source

A link with some info:
http://www.thewhir.com/marketwatch/0324008_FBI_Probe_Darfur_Protest_Site_Hack.cfm

Registration required:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/23/AR2008032300014.html

Earlier this month, Monster discovered [a] a malicious code that attempted to harvest stolen email addresses from its database and transfer them to a server in Ukraine. The hackers then sent out phishing emails that claimed to be prospective employers offering a work-from-home job that asked for access to the user's bank account. Monster responded by notifying these job seekers that their contact records had been downloaded illegally and is now working with law enforcement officials and the appropriate regulatory agencies [b]. Monster also revealed that this incident was not the first time the company's database had been the target of criminal activity.

The company says that to boost its security measures it is implementing new robust capabilities for worldwide monitoring and surveillance of site traffic, reviewing and tightening all site access policies and controls and launching a series of targeted initiatives to protect job seeker contact information.

Source

[a] Monster discovered: Did you note that Monster themselves noticed the infiltration. Wasn't posted to a full disclosure list which means they caught it on their own for a change. Give them that credit

[b] Monster initiated contacting those affected and working with LEA's. This didn't come to light in the same fashion as say with what happened at LinkedIn. Linkedin spurns bug bounty hunter. So why post such a trollish statement as "monster shrugged it off". There should be a mechanism to moderate those who post articles.

EV1 (home of EV1Servers.net) was one of the foolish companies that actually purchased the Brooklyn Bridge rights that SCO was selling.

(See http://thewhir.com/marketwatch/ev1033004.cfm)

I would imagine they would want a place in line to get their money back, but would it be behind Novell? behind IBM's countersuits? What, if anything, could they realistically get back?

Maybe EV1 would have done better investing in Nigerian money brokering.

Digging back a few months, I found another gem...

365 Main Recognized by PG&E...for taking proactive steps to reduce power usage.

This is what technical folk refer to as an "understatement".

How many people have ponied up cash to SCO because of their outrageous claims about Linux IP?

AFAICT from a spot of searching, about four. And one of them regrets it.

Bob Parsons, owner of GoDaddy, contributed $10,000.00 US to Perverted-Justice.com, an online vigilante group. Perverted-Justice is the group involved with Dateline NBC. Media groups and journalism scholars have taken Dateline NBC to task for journalism ethics violations regarding their involvement with Perverted-Justice.

Take 2: So this makes (RIAA (Mashboxx (grokster.com))) a customer of the largest suc... (scratch that) licensee of SCOSource, and the brand found in the convenient RedHat box.

Funny you should mention that... I was going to post a lengthy article about that very same thing, then decided "what good will factual information do... this is slashdot, after all."

So, in short... After a run-about with Cohen in federal court in the late 1980's (where my wife represented the defendant that Cohen filed against), he appeared again in the late 1990's with a letter from his attorney, asking that we turn over one of our domain names (sexbytes.com) because it violated his trademark on the word "sex". All that is explained here, for the most part with other bits being available here.

Anyway, Cohen went away after I wrote him a nice letter reminding him of our 1980's encounter and let him know I was adding a few "very interesting" questions to the deposition Gary Kremem was going to be taking of him. He went away like a puppy dog with his tail tucked between his legs... and I lived happily ever after, seducing woman after woman, as explained here.

Microsoft ASP.NET and IIS Serve Majority of Fortune 1000 Sites http://www.techweb.com/showPressRelease.jhtml?arti cleID=X333718#_

Microsoft Leads Port80 Web Server Study According to the survey, 53.5 percent of the sites surveyed ran Microsoft IIS. This was more than double the 19.3 percent running Apache.
http://thewhir.com/marketwatch/mic030304.cfm

"Microsoft seems to be winning its war against Linux" (Info-Tech Research Group) http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/21/ 1318229&tid=109&tid=106

Slashdot = "preaching to the congration"

Rolf "get the facts" Tollerud

Ya, just like Firefox is more secure then IE.

As of writing, Internet Explorer 6 has 20 unpatched vulnerabilies, one or more of which are marked as highly critical. Firefox has 3 vulnerabilities, with one or more marked as less critical. So yes, Firefox is more secure than IE.

The Linux market is so incredibly tiny that no hacker looking to make money takes the time to hack Linux.

I would not rate a 30-40% webserver marketshare as 'incredibly tiny', and yet Red Hat, the most popular Linux distribution for servers has 0 unpatched vulnerabilities whilst Windows Server 2003 suffers from 8 unpatched vulnerabilities and Windows XP Professional suffers from a full 26 vulnerabilities one or more of which are marked as as highly critical.

How can claim that Linux is less secure than Windows, when it has less unpatched vulnerabilities?

IIRC, ThePirateBay, probably the biggest Bittorrent "dark grey" tracker network, is hosted in Sweeden, and, well, they openly mock US companies that send them threatening letters.

http://thepiratebay.org/legal.php

Also, IIRC, Sealand, which is a floating fortress that was abandoned in international waters, apparently has a hosting company. They make it a point to host things that might be illegal in other countries (the exception being child pornogrpahy and spam).

http://thewhir.com/marketwatch/sealand.cfm
http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa081100 a.htm

Correct. Spam is far worse than it was a few years ago.

Why... Sealand of course!

Note, that site has a link to a great picture of Sealand here.

Take anything said by Chris Faulkner or CIHost with a really big grain of salt. I worked for CIHost for a short time so I have a good base for my opinions.

Yes they did tatoo the guys head [they also were the first to advertise on a boxer's trunks with Evander Holyfield.] but I'd be amazed if they actually got 800 new clients with it. If CF says 800, it's probably closer to 8.

For examples of Bullshit statements by CF see the following:

MyDoom Virus - Claims that his technicians created Doompster to filter out copies of the virus. What really happened? He just made the Sr. Unix admin create a sendmail filter to drop all attachments, regardless of whether or not they were infected.

Witty worm. I can't find a link to it at this time, but I believe he put out a release saying that his technicians developed software to recover the data from the trashed drives. The reality? They bought a copy of Restorer Pro 2000 [An awesome utility BTW! Saved my ass a few times].

And finally, those Backup drives they claim to have upgraded. They didn't exist in the first place! They have one functioning backup system that gets their website and some [not all] of the shared hosting machines. None of the dedicated machines are backed up [as they claim]. Even the customers who pay for a tape rotation on their machine? Doesn't happen. The backup just overwrites the tape from the night before.

Their Rock Solid Infrastructure?. Yeah right. They constantly lose power because there isn't enough power coming into the building. The servers are plugged into $1.50 powerstrips like you'd get at office-max, and they are dangling from the powercords of the top servers. Sounds rock-solid to me!

Oh the things I've got on this company would make you run screaming! :)

The point is, don't believe anything from this creep! He's either a criminal, or he's criminally negligent in the way his company is run. I'm SOOOO glad to be out of there.

Anonymous, because his mommy [he's only like 27] is a lawyer and they like to sue people.

...no, I'm not kidding and I'm not talking about slashdotting. So special thanks are due to the poster of the "In case of slashdotting" article.

I haven't been able to connect to The Register for three days now, BTW. I'm glad that others have been able to.

Don't laugh. There are firms whose entire strategy appears to be an intellectual property land grab by being the first to submit a patent application for a widely-used business concept. It's a big issue in web hosting, where a patent squatter has been awarded a patent for the subdomain and applied for a bunch more. Even SCO had an actual business, once upon a time. For some companies, patents are the business.

I would think the longer this drags on, the worse it is for SCO. They only have finite money (and some people already want that money back), eventualy they will be unable to finance continued litigation.

Linux, and OSS in general, does not seem to be suffering a significant (or even noticable) negative backlash from all of this, if anything it has been free publicity.

Let's face it, the linux center of mass in the Pacific Northwest is decidedly south of BC. Where is OSDL? Where are the West Coast linux strategists for IBM and Intel? Where is the 2nd fastest linux cluster and 5th fastest supercomputer in the world? Where is there a large Debian based distro aimed at homes and offices? Which Pacific Northwest city has new lugs sprouting up? Which prominent lug in the north did not participate at all in LFNW 2003, the largest LFNW to that date?

The triangle of Seattle, Portland, Richland (PNL puts it on the map) is the center of mass of Linux in the Northwest. Hopefully LFNW will take this into account in the future.

If he doesn't want us to think of him as a big pansy, he needs to ... actually have some balls.

"The true travesty is the way the legal system is. Complainants can file tons and tons of actions and the defendants, if they don't have the monetary resources to bombard the plaintiff, are taken advantage of in the court system. We were taken advantage of in this case because we will never recover all of our costs. We spent an excess of six figure defending this."

No. 1 is EV1Servers.net who announced SCO lied about how much they were paid (Microsoft is a fan of EV1)
(little did the CEO know when he made the deal that SCO planned to 'worth' him out of seven figures)

No. 2 is CompterAssociates who announced SCO lied about "linux licenses" which are really from an unrelated settlement

No. 3 is Leggett and Platt say SCO lies and they don't have a license and "would not have an interest in doing so"

No. 4 is Questar Gas said they just wanted to get things over with and also runs Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) on Windows 2000


Make sure *you* are Legally Unencumbered(tm) by getting a SCOsores license
and don't forget to head over and sign your Clean Slate contract with the RIAA

No. 1 is EV1Servers.net who announced SCO lied about how much they were paid (Microsoft is a fan of EV1)
(little did the CEO know when he made the deal that SCO planned to 'worth' him out of seven figures)

No. 2 is CompterAssociates who announced SCO lied about "linux licenses" which are really from an unrelated settlement

No. 3 is Leggett and Platt who shockingly is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000

No. 4 is Questar Gas who just wanted to get things over with and also runs Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) on Windows 2000


Make sure *you* are Legally Unencumbered(tm) by getting a SCOsores license
and don't forget to head over and sign your Clean Slate contract with the RIAA

The EV1 deal is interesting.

SCO is claiming the deal with EV1 was worth more than a million dollars. EV1 is disputing the 7 figures and the confusion seems to be the weasel word "worth".

In other words, SCO is claiming that $1million+ "worth" of licenses were sold. So that's $1mill/$699 = 1400+ licenses, or $1mill/$1399 = 700+ licenses. SCO's own quarterly says only $20k income from licensing this quarter. It's possible the EV1 payments are in stages, or won't appear on SCO's financials until next quarter, but it's also possible that EV1 only paid $20k for their licenses.

But SCO is spinning this to sound much more impressive. EV1 was the patsy here; they thought they were getting a great deal, but they were just another pawn in SCO's (Microsoft's?) smear campaign against Linux.

Searching news.google.com on "collective licensing" turned up this bit of news from yesterday:

Senators Ron Wyden and John Ensign ... called a meeting in Washington today encouraging the music industry and a new trade group for file-swapping companies to find a resolution.

The article is here

Also found was this where the RIAA has responded to the EFF proposal, saying [the RIAA]summarily dismissed the EFF's proposal as too "drastic"

There must be accountability on the web. Period.

Breaking News! Ding Dong, Foonet's Gone!
Perhaps the blackest of the black hat networks is finally gone, raided by the FBI.Foonet [CITHosting] was home of spammers, packet kiddies, script kiddies, carders, and other illegal activities, as documented in the links below.

SPEWS's rapsheet on Foonet
Usenet postings in regards to Foonet
GBLX yanks Foonet's pipe
Foonet hosting carders (credit card thieves) and here
More on foonet's hosting of spammers, and possible traceroute forging
Foonet's Page
theWHIR article

I do wonder how cooperative CIT was. After several hours of requests for the info (with a warrent) the FBI must have been riled to say "F-this-S, haul it away!". Think about how much extra work that must have been. There's more to this story, pity no news service has looked into it yet.

Basically they just spouted the SCO byline with no effort to avail themselves of any information concerning the origin and purpose of the virus.

Now why would you want to concern yourselves with anything else they write.

The original netcraft article on the "Migration" to Windows Server 2003 hints at the fact that that most of the migration is occuring on hosted systems, where the hosting providers have received very favorable terms ( read as bribes ) to switch to Windows2003. Myhosting.com continues to be the top hoster of active Windows Server 2003 sites, and now has over 98% of their active sites migrated to Windows 2003. The month before, Myhosting.com was hosting 13,504 , in comparison to last months 32,810, an increase which accounts for the 5%. Yes, one provider.

What the Microsoft spin doctors do not mention is the continuing market share loss to Apache overall

Today, a new bunch of Microsoft advocates use the opposite argument as was used in September, by NOT counting deployments on hosting providers to spin the numbers in their favor.

Meanwhile the overall drop in Microsoft's share continues.

What the Microsoft spin doctors do not mention is the continuing market share loss to Apache overall.

Just spend some time reading Microsoft's own product announcements, interviews, etc... they don't make any effort to hide any of this. You'd pretty much have to be blind not to see what's going on... oh wait, that pretty much describes most of /. poster community.

First, there's Longhorn...
TechWeb
WinSuperSite

But don't forget to research Jupiter, Yukon and Kodiak, and be sure to look at the extended feature sets of these products and how they can interoperate.

A quick search for some time lines got me this, but there are lots of places that keep track of this stuff:
Internet.com

Some general info on Jupiter
JupiterResearch

...and don't forget MS' own efforts to push rights enabled content into the marketplace:

for one example there is...
Microsoft
...but don't forget, games, their deal with small movie studios, etc...

MS is working with British Telecom to develop online applications and media support including appication rental that can be used for an added nominal monthly fee... all of this is web browser accessable, and while the dot's are pretty thin to find, I've heard in the developer circles that once it is stablized around MSN 9, MS is looking to offer this service out to XBox live subscribers.
news.com"

...and then there is the MIIS layer that just was released to support data tracking.
MetaConnections
"MIIS has its own data store (the metaverse) into which it consolidates information drawn from the connected systems. Rules can be applied to determine how objects in a connected system are projected into, or join with objects already in, the metaverse and to create objects in the connected system (i.e. provisioning). Other rules specify how each attribute within the object should flow into or out of the metaverse. The sophistication of these rules allows customers to create fully automated identity data integration solutions."

...or this quote:
TheWhir
"Customers have told us they need an end-to-end solution for managing identity information and access rights," said Bill Veghte, corporate vice president for the Windows Server Group at Microsoft. "With today's delivery of MIIS, we bring provisioning and metadirectory capabilities together in a single solution that enables customers to create and manage user identities with a single consistent view across the enterprise and throughout the complete life cycle of identity management."

I would point you to the Market announcements on the MS site, but they are oddly missing... but then Google saves the day here...
MS care of Google #1
MS care of Google #2

...and on and on and on... Do I really need to give you more links... I suppose it's pointless because with most of the people who can't see this, I could drop a bible of text proof in your face and you'd still denign it.

Microsoft makes no efforts to hide what they're planning, and doing. It's all out there in your face if you bother to take the time to read it.

Big business wants start-to-end accountability for ALL DATA, and they are going to get it, and Microsoft is going

With all due respect, I'm amazed at how you publish your ill-conceived notions as fact. The site generates close to a million dollars in revenue per month, from a multitude of services including PPC (pay-per-click) listings, banner advertising, and XML feeds to other search engines. It's a shame that the most vocal people of the slashdot community are also the least knowledgeable. Read the lawsuits, dummy.

In case you're wondering, I've worked in setting up the initial sex.com network, and software. You can read about it here and here. I cite this in case you say, "what proof do you have of this?" Though I encourage you to educate and elighten yourself before espousing your ignorance on this or any other forum.

• Some yearly awards given out by plumbers' unions and industry groups
• Yearly award given out by the American Welding Society
• AFPA Industry Business Award -- "This annual award has been established to formally recognize and honour the efforts of those individuals who have made significant and lasting contributions to the growth of the food processing industry in Alberta [Canada]."
• Developer.com Web Services Industry Product of the Year award
• Awards won by Slashdot

This is disturbingly similar to the doomed effort of Enron to make Internet Bandwidth a commodity. http://thewhir.com/king/enron.cfm This effort is considered by some to be the "beginning of the end" for Enron For the IBM effort to work it must overcome the hurdles that tripped Enron. 1. Creating a market. In order to make this work, IBM must change the way that corporations think about computing power. Only after this change in thinking will a "computing" market appear. 2. Temptation to Over invest Enron invested far more than they got out of bandwidth trading. Essentially they bet the farm before the results of the "creating market" were in. IBM should make sure that this is going to work by investing in increments.

According to this report, AT&T is looking at them..

That will nicely co-incide with the company's new corporate strategy.

Here's another interview with SANS. Interesting.

The same thing is happening in Europe as well.