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Online advertising no longer works like that. It is all programmatic.

By "programmatic" do you refer to it having become standard practice to run nonfree scripts on viewers' computers to perform large-scale surveillance of viewer's browsing history across multiple unrelated websites? If so, then perhaps online advertising needs to cease being programmatic in this way.

I couldn't find anything in Google's DFP (most popular ad serving tool) that says "don't show flashing animation".

Is there anything saying "report this ad for standards violations, such as inaccessibility to viewers with a seizure disorder"?

No one sells ads directly on their sites to advertisers, that is not a viable model because advertisers want to get their message out to a variety of sites instead of "sponsoring" one or more pages on a single site.

Publishers of newspapers and magazines never printed ads customized to each individual subscriber, and certainly not to readers who encounter a publication through a newsstand or public library. How did advertisers and publishers survive then?

if they know a user is potentially interested in going to St. Kitt's (because they searched for that island), they want to show that person St. Kitt's ads whether they are on a travel site or on a cooking site.

This is called "data leakage", allowing an advertiser to target high-value sites cheaply by advertising on low-value sites that the same viewer also visits. "Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful" by Don Marti and "WTF is data leakage?" by John McDermott describe problems with this race to the bottom.

There will always be sleazy advertisers out there, looking to game the system.

And you as a publisher are responsible for allowing these sleazy advertisers onto your site via these exchanges, whether or not you have meaningful control of what these exchanges serve. In fact, the lack of meaningful control ideally ought to be a reason not to use a particular exchange.

“Mind Control: To control mental output you have to control mental input. Take control of the channels by which developers receive information, then they can only think about the things you tell them. Thus, you control mindshare!” ref

Excellent point. Print magazines are in many ways the ideal ad medium. They allow advertisers to choose the type of content that the ad is attached to, but it's impractical to target individual users.

http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/#what-does-print-have-that-online-doesnt

Which is why Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends presentations keep showing an out-of-proportion percentage of ad spending going to print, and lower percentages going to more trackable media.

But for the medium as a whole, targeting costs revenue.

http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/

The less targetable a medium is, the more valuable it is.

APOLOGIES!

I got my numbers confused, instead of half, it's one-fourth of respondents, not half. I read this before my morning caffeine.

The point is the same, as pointed out here: http://zgp.org/~dmarti/business/hands-up-who-likes-me/ this is the definition of a self-serving survey.

These are current users of Linux, they tend to report bugs and contribute code at amazingly higher proportion than the general linux user population, are members of a Linux user organization AND choose to respond to the survey. Not one respondent that does not run Linux - you don't join a users group if you don't run the OS/application...

If you want to survey the industry, reach out to the Forbes 500 and ask them what the run in the server room, on the desktop this year (as a percentage), and what they did last year and what their plans are for next year. That will tell you everything you need to know about the state of Linux adoption in the commercial sector.

Any survey that equates General Electric's response with Pete's totally cool web design and PC repair service is meaningless.

Don Marti tears the methodology and the point of the whole survey to pieces: http://zgp.org/~dmarti/business/hands-up-who-likes-me/

This sort of surveys may have value but used like this they're just embarrassing.

No. Older than that. It's an SROM.

So something like this?

Is this a flaw in the Operating System or a flaw in the application like the Adobe one and who is to blame this time ...

http://srom.zgp.org/

Yes, it does run Linux, with a garmin GPS mounted on it. Although technically, it doesn't run it *yet*, but it will:

http://zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2006-April /011522.html

"the incident apparently occurred when an employee downloaded a contaminated file from a porn site"

What OS did this trojan run on?

WinCE doesn't have enough comments to rate its own position on the scale.

No. Any tool that requires the Linux kernel and linux kernel code to run is to GPL.

Same goes with Autoconf. Does your project use and link against Autoconf during run time? If not then it doesn't need to be GPL'd.

With a kernel driver when your running this it is running AS PART of the kernel. It's kernel-derived.

As a End user you don't have to give a shit. You can pile millions of lines of Windows code into the kernel and nobody cares as far as the GPL goes. GPL only applies to you when you distribute software.

This is the ENTIRE POINT of the GPL vs LGPL. Why else would there be a point to making 2 licenses?

If you don't beleive me, then you can talk to This fellow about it.
http://zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2005-Octob er/011317.html


---- [1] Witness Torvalds's meandering (if consistently imperious) policy,
---- which I've tracked here: "Proprietary Kernel Modules" on
---- http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Kernel/

I, and others who hold copyrights on portions of the kernel are saying
very clear things about this now, "proprietary kernel modules are
illegal." It's pretty simple. Lots of major companies agree with us
too, along with their legal departments, so we aren't just pissing in
the wind here.

Oh, and at least one major distro has been served with legal papers due
to them shipping closed source kernel drivers, and more are on the way.
That's the direction some developers are taking. Others, myself
included, as taking the technical way and just making it so damn hard to
write and ship a closed kernel module, that they will just give up
eventually. Combine that with the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() stuff in the
kernel, and I give it about 1-2 more years before it's just technically
impossible to write such a module.

thanks,

greg k-h

That's been tried and failed. Maybe it's because human-readability is
important. Maybe it's because of the difficulties of revocation and all
that. Maybe it's because the costs of adopting a new namespace are quite
large and the benefits are quite small. In any case, I've seen people
follow that path and fall flat on their face. I wish you well, but be
aware of the difficulty.

Really? How do you know?

Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter
http://srom.zgp.org/

This may not be a scientifically reliable survey, but it shows a lot of people are unhappy. I would like to see good data to back your point.

In its canonical implementation it works in roughly 80% of cases where it can be applied.

It may sound like a lot, but it's not - it's 1 out 5 failure rate.

And while it is possible to get it to nearly 100%, hole-punching is still far from being mainstream technology.

...the OS sucks-rules-o-meter. There's also an editor sucks-rules-o-meter (vi vs. emacs) among others.

Like you said, meaningless but fun.

Linky here.

The main thing that worries me about this article's headline is that it may boost SCO's score on the operating system sucks-rules-o-meter. Ah, I see it's not included in the list. A narrow escape.

I started a thread on the P2P-Hackers mailing list abuot this, and a number of people have responded with examples of prior art and other relevant information. You can find the post that starts this thread here.

I've had the following in my signature file rotation for some time. Looks as if it's starting to be fulfilled:

The black hat community is drooling over the possibility of a secure execution environment that would allow applications to run in a secure area which cannot be attached to via debuggers.
- Jason Spence, on Palladium aka NGCSB aka "Trusted Computing"

Don't forget there's pro-Linux FUD too.

It's worth stating that there are a couple of ways to actually avoid getting sued altogether. This may be a really good option if you work for an image-conscious company that avoids the legal limelight like the plague. One is to simply to pay SCO $699 per server for a perpetual license or $149 per server for an annual license. According to SCO's Stowell, "The license that we are offering to commercial end users of Linux is called the SCO Intellectual Property License. The end user is provided with a license that allows them to run SCO's intellectual property as it is found in Linux in binary form only. This license is meant to apply to any version of Linux (based on the 2.2 kernel and later) that is being run in a commercial environment."

Have fun!

This is a combination of using simple X- header lines for the top error part, as well as the "'begin'-then-two-spaces" bug, which lets you create a bogus MIME section that only MS mail readers fall for -- useful for suppressing the message part. The begin-with-two-spaces trigger makes an excellent quoted text header. :)

This is still true, for the time being.

Unfortunately, Microsoft and the music industry are already taking steps to prevent this from happening in the future.

No kidding. See one man's adventure in trying to give SCO money, part one and part two.

No kidding. See one man's adventure in trying to give SCO money, part one and part two.

Something that could be added to a potential complaint is based on the following article posted elsewhere. ICYDWTRTFA (In case you don't want to read the f**king article), the bottom line is that SCO will gladly sell you the license BUT they will not send you a copy of it through the mail! I wonder if they know they could be committing mail fraud by doing so? It is just very, very strange that they will take your money for a license that you are not allowed to have a copy of. But then again, you do strange things when smoking large quantities of crack.

I should also add that the idea wasn't initially mine -- writing Carly was suggested on the Linux Elitists mailing list -- a low-traffic mailing list with some very well thought out posts, plus Mr. Bad!

Best info I see on that is here, or possibly here, which doesn't quite dispel the "rumor"-ness of it (sorry).

I bet he's gone. I almost feel a little sorry for him -- you can bet he will be in court for awhile. I wonder whose side he will testify for?

The BSD license is ananthema to any coder who wants to make sure his/her code remains open. Pure and simple. Assuming I were any good at coding, I'd only work on a BSD if the problem was extremely Interesting. In other words, my interest would have to outweigh my reservation about providing MS, et. al, with the chance to gobble up my code in return for... nothing.

There are more Open Source programmers who care about what happens to their code than not, so the GPL license attracts more programmers, which means the BSD's are fighting their own license just to gain momentum. And momentum is clearly on the side of GPL-ed OS's (evidence at Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter).

That said, if SCO wins the FUD war & the BSD's emerge unscathed, the license issue won't matter as much, and the BSD's could move to center stage.

If you release your code into the public domain you are practising communism and advancing the cause of communism. Communism is working for the greater good.

I don't understand what you have against working for the greater good.

I don't have a problem releasing my code into the public domain, assuming it isn't something I think I can sell. If someone else can make a buck off something I wrote then more power to them. (Although I would appreciate it if they had the courtesy to offer me a job.) I do, however, have a problem with releasing my code only to have it co-opted by a bunch of communists who are hell intent on destroying the software industry.

That's why I disagree with your categorization of BSD/public domain as communism. Communism involves manifestos and propaganda and cults of personality. Communism is about destroying the capitalist establishment; something that public domain code doesn't do.

GPL may not be capitalism in the sense that you perceive capitalism but there is no denying that GPLed code comes with a price.

As I tried to explain before, capitalism is not just about buying goods for money; communist countries have money too. Capitalism is a specific economic system that has certain predictable behaviours (due to game theory). GPL'ed software does not exhibit these properties, but it does bear a strong resemblance to communism (again, in game theory terms).

That's just downright stupid. Do you leave your bike unlocked? DO you leave your house unlocked? Why make it easy or safe for people to steal your labor. That's communism.

As I said, I was only paraphrasing a common /. motto.

-a

The OS Sucks-o-Metter sez that windows really sucks, and linux sucks almost as much, but not as much proportionally. Then again, how slanted are metrics they are using? LOL!! Amiga doesnt suck at all? And MacOs: sucks = blows.

Yeah, I'm amazed how many Perl programs don't handle error conditions well. By "don't handle well" I mean "ignore completely". When I first saw this page (it's written in Perl), some of the values were zero when they shouldn't have been. They get the data by scraping altavista, but they don't check for errors when they retreive the data. Lucky it's just a novelty site and isn't actually showing something important.

Slashdot (written in Perl) randomly gives me some some weird "formkey" error when I try to post -- that's a step up, at least it's recognizing that an error occured -- but it's caught too late, and the software tries to blame the error on me. It says I had pressed the back button (I hadn't) or I have a firewall (I have, but I don't see what that's got to do with random errors on Slashdot). Clearly an error had occured earlier, but they didn't catch it at its origin.

Also on Slashdot, when the site is under heavy load, the front page sometimes shows ads -- the same ad repeated -- between each story. I don't think that's meant to happen.

Then there's the famous story of the two high-school kids who were suspected of taking a shotgun to school because of a subtle Perl error.

That's just some anecdotal evidence, but it's representative of my personal experience with software written in Perl. I don't know if it's the language or the programmers. I suspect it's both. Some more anti-Perl material:

What's wrong with Perl by Lars Marius Garshol

Is Perl Difficult? by Paul Prescod

• OS Sucks-Rules-O-Meter
• Editors Sucks-Rules-o-Meter
• Vegetarion Sucks-Rules-O-Meter
• What [Programming] Languages Rule (alternative)
• Linux Distribution Comparison

In case if you're wondering how to stop double click from tracking your answers, here is an answer from a site. I copied the material here:

Theory: If you tell your name server that it is in charge of the domain "doubleclick.net" then it will happily answer all requests for "Where's doubleclick.net" with the smug answer, "I know everything there is to know about doubleclick.net, and I can tell you with complete confidence that there is No Such Place." If browsers can't find doubleclick.net, then doubleclick.net can't track those users.

Because many users typically use each name server, this is not only one of the the fastest ad blocking techniques known to freedom-loving humanity, it's also the technique that protects the most users per minute spent on it. Step 1. Log in to the name server as root.

Step 2. Find your named.conf file. It may be in the /etc or /etc/bind directory. If you have trouble finding it, use this command: find / -name named.conf

Step 3. Open the named.conf file for editing in your favorite text editor. Locate the "localhost" zone. It should look something like this: zone "localhost" { type master; file "/etc/bind/db.local"; }; It doesn't matter if the filename on the line beginning with "file" is different. Make a copy of the localhost zone elsewhere in the file. Change the copy to read "doubleclick.net" instead of "localhost". zone "doubleclick.net" { type master; file "/etc/bind/db.local"; }; Save the file and exit the text editor. If you mess up the file, exit without saving and do step 3 again.

Step 4. Find out the process id of named with the command ps ax | grep named Let's say you get something like this: 7907 ? S 0:03 /usr/sbin/named Then just do a kill -HUP 7907 Use whatever process ID your named has, not "7907". You're done. Clear your browser cache and rejoice.


This is an easier way than using /etc/hosts or firewalls.

Here is a plan for patent reform. I sent it (slightly modified) to my local congresscritter; if more peope did this, maybe we'd finally see a change.

Is there a site or a HOWTO that gives hints on how to start getting the upper management in a company thinking about alternatives like this?

Yup.

Linux Advocacy mini-HOWTO
Bad Linux Advocacy FAQ
Don Marti's "Linuxmanship"

I recommend "Linuxmanship" the most highly.

-Waldo Jaquith

I can, right this very minute, go out and get any number of alternatives to their products for a wide variety of prices.

You are saying that you can go down to CompUSA, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Ultimate Electronics, Sears or any other national retailer and buy a big name brand (IBM, HP, Compaq, etc.) desktop or laptop computer with "any number of alternatives" OS on it? I don't believe it at all! You must be shopping on some other planet. Excluding Apple, I have NEVER seen in ANY national retail store, ANY name brand PC with any OS except Windows. In fact I have asked several times if I could buy a PC without an OS on it and you can't even buy that. Until I can walk into Sears, K-Mart or Wal-Mart and buy a PC running Linux, BeOS, OS/2 or *BSD on it, Microsoft has a Monopoly.

Using exclusive contracts and binding OEMs to license argreements may sound odious, but those companies didn't have to sign them.

No, they could have chosen to go out of business instead.

They could have taken their business elsewhere.

Where else are they going to take their business? They can't sell enought PC's to stay in business, until there is a competitive OS that has enough users to sustain it. There aren't going to be enough users of an OS, until there are enough Apps for it. And there aren't going to be enough Apps for it until there are enough users to make it worthwhile for the developers.

The only way then for a competitor to Windows to break into the biz is to do what Be tried to do. Get a hardware manufacturer to put your OS on a machine alongside of Windows, until you have enough users for the developers to start making apps. Then once you've got the ball rolling and you have enough users THEN you have a viable alternative to Windows and the hardware manufacturers can tell Microsoft to stick their contracts.

But the thing is that all Microsoft had to do to maintain their monopoly was keep the hardware guys from ever putting another OS anywhere near a PC (as they did with Hitachi and Be). If you can enlighten us as to how Be could have (or any other alternative OS can) break into the market, I and many others would really like to hear it.

There is NO WAY you can convice me that there isn't a market out there for a competitor to Windows. Of all the people I know (most of them are in the computer business), I can count on one hand how many of them claim to like Windows. Wheras, I know a hundred or more who would drop Windows like a rock if they had a viable alternative. For an real good laugh (at Microsoft's expense) scope out the Operating System Sucks o' Rules Meter. That alone is enough to convince me that there is a market for an alternative to Windows, if somebody can stop Microsoft from continuing their monopoly maintaince tactics.

Finally, I want to say that choice is a *GOOD* thing. When there is no competition, there is no incentive to create a quality product. In fact it's quite the opposite, if there is no other choice they can keep selling you buggy version after buggy version because that's how they make money and you have NO other choice but to keep buying the upgrades. I firmly believe that if Microsoft didn't have *BSD and Linux breathing down their necks, Windows would be every bit as buggy and unreliable as it has been for years. (I'm talking about servers here.)

Personally, I think it's great that everybody is lining up to take a swipe at Microsoft. Bill and CO. have cheated their way to the top and they deserve every blow. I especially hope that Be gets a huge chunk of change from Microsoft, because it was truly a crime the way Bill & Co. deprived the world of an excellent computing platform.

Since this will now result in the total demise of copyright infringement, the movie, recording, and video game industries then immediately pay taxes on the hojillions of dollars they claim to be losing per year, at the prevailing highest corporate tax rate, with no writeoffs on this amount. These additional taxes should be a small price for industry to pay for the increased profits that would result from all that sudden demand now that their material isn't available for copying in digital form, now that general purpose computers would be outlawed.

Oh--you mean they aren't going to sell all that, because the people they claimed as having been costing them money wouldn't have bought the product anyway? That's OK--we can just sell the assets of the companies benefiting from the SSSCA to take care of the taxes, then.

Since this will now result in the total demise of copyright infringement, the movie, recording, and video game industries then immediately pay taxes on the hojillions of dollars they claim to be losing per year, at the prevailing highest corporate tax rate, with no writeoffs on this amount. These additional taxes should be a small price for industry to pay for the increased profits that would result from all that sudden demand now that their material isn't available for copying in digital form, now that general purpose computers would be outlawed.

Oh--you mean they aren't going to sell all that, because the people they claimed as having been costing them money wouldn't have bought the product anyway? That's OK--we can just sell the assets of the companies benefiting from the SSSCA to take care of the taxes, then.

Since this will now result in the total demise of copyright infringement, the movie, recording, and video game industries then immediately pay taxes on the hojillions of dollars they claim to be losing per year, at the prevailing highest corporate tax rate.

Oh--you mean they aren't going to sell all that, because the people they claimed as having been costing them money wouldn't have bought the product anyway? Guess we can just sell the industries to pay the taxes, then.

A just as scientific and much more amusing rating can be found at Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter

faq about oal here.
interesting discussion on list group here.
radio station on live365 playing OAL here.

The emerging P2P scene is still pretty interesting. For the curious there are a few good resources out there for the latest info on peer networks in general:

www.infoanarchy.org

www.peertal.com

Decentralization mailing list

P2P-hackers mailing list

I control my own network (hey, three whole boxen ;-), and a local DNS service. x10.com has been added to my list of locally managed addresses, effectively blackholing the entire shootin' match.

That said, yes, Junkbuster is useful and effective as well. And I use it.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

From their page:
This operating system quality and approval metric is based on a periodic AltaVista search for each of several operating systems, directly followed by "sucks", "rules", or "rocks".

there's also one for programming languages and some other things - check out the bottom of the first page.

-f

We made more than a few enemies by poking fun at the reams of poor journalism about NC. I wish I could point you to archives of the articles, but I'm not aware of any way to reach them. The campaign against NC was ultimately successful. For that among other reasons, the magazine folded, and the content disappeared forever, at least as far as I know.

Enjoy!

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Remember if you opt out they can replace your opt-out cookie with a real tracking cookie at any time without notifiying you. If you don't trust them, use a proxy. If you don't have time to set up a proxy, read the Blocking doubleclick.net For Total Fucking Retards at http://zgp.org/rbhl/frg/