Slashback: Legislation, Samplification, Knaves

More information this evening (below) on Daniel Gomez-Ibanez' digital turntable, the Coble-Berman [T: not "Sherman," sorry] bill, moral-free domain registrars, Gator's un-requested link substitutions, and more. Enjoy!

Wouldn't be be nice if this didn't need to be a surprise? dklon writes: "I just got off the phone with Senate Warner's Office (R-VA). Senator Warner, and his compadre, Senator George Allen, both sit on the High Tech Committee, of which Senator Allen is the chairman. After sending them a strongly-worded letter yesterday, Mr. Warner's office was kind enough to call me back and let me know that the likelihood of Coble-Berman becoming law is slim-to-none. It is committee at the moment, and has only 1 sponsor at the moment in the Senate."

Make a joyful noise, and keep repeating it. mrspin writes "stage4 has an interview with Daniel Gomez-Ibanez a graduate from Stanford University who has designed and produced a 'Digital Turntable' that allows DJs to mix and scratch digital music using what looks like a conventional record player.

Daniel recently posted a short piece on Slashdot about his 'Digital Turntable'. In an email interview with stage4 he talks about what makes it different from other such products and the inspiration behind this hardware hack. stage4 is a community site dedicated to creative uses of technology and features a weekly music webcast via PirateTV"

Daniel also says (by email) that if "anyone would want a very unique sampling turntable I would sell more of them for around the cost of the parts because it would be fun to get them out there and get people playing with them." Even those parts aren't cheap (totaling around a thousand dollars) but handcrafted audio tools rarely are. Check his site for email address ;)

Please keep your Gator away from my eyeballs. EyesWideOpen writes "The New York Times is reporting that a preliminary injunction will be issued against Gator Corporation as a result of the company being sued by 10 web site publishers last month because they felt that the company's use of online pop-up ads violated copyright and trademark laws. 'In court Friday, Judge Hilton said that he found enough evidence to support the plaintiffs' claim that Gator's advertisements violated trademark laws in particular...he indicated that one issue was the proximity of Gator's pop-up ads to the publishers' trademarks.'"

You may already have won! We've had to run a number of pieces on unsavory renewal practices among the various registrars competing for your name-claiming business, but domain name scamming is sadly not confined to the U.S. kungfuftr writes: "I'm currently registering all my domains names through a company in the uk called 123reg who are very reasonable and run a good company. Today i got a letter from a company called "Domain Registry of Europe" saying that my domain name "kungfuftr.com" must be renewed. The form they sent looks like a bill and for someone who doesn't know too much about the DNS process it looks like something that should be filled in if they want to keep their domain. Of course if they do this their control of their domain will be transferred to a new registrar. Giving the company an official name as if they are the 'only' registrar in europe is pretty shady. Are companies reaching a new low?"

For when I get a larger hard drive ... TheRedHorse writes "The Yellow Dog Linux 2.3 ISO's have been released . Slashdot did a story about it YDL 2.3 before. Please remember to use the mirrors. Have fun."

You knew this would happen, right? JUSTONEMORELATTE writes "LightReading is reporting today that the EBone portion of KPNQwest's network has been bought for pennies on the dollar (or is that cents on the Euro?) by U.K.-based service provider Interoute Telecommunications. EBone had been valued at EU645 million back in March, today's deal is rumoured to be at about EU15 million, or about a 98% loss of value. Slashdot has covered the heroic efforts to keep the network alive, and talked about the shutdown of the same."

Genetics is never having to say "Am I your type, baby?" Teluial writes "Slashdot's previous story about ColonelPanic's genetic keyboard layout is taking an interesting development. *cue Spidey music* When we last left PMK he was trying his latest layout. Having found it "usable," he is now collecting Dvorak keystroke data and requesting volunteers of the QWERTY breed to also collect data to compare interesting findings against. Details near bottom of project page."

Comments

It's the Coble-Berman bill

[noser]

I was wondering what the hell we were talking about here until I found this discussion of the Coble-Berman bill that would restrict fair use...

Re:It's the Coble-Berman bill

[rmohr02]

Article:
the likelihood of Coble-Berman becoming law

You:
of the Coble-Berman bill that

Isn't that what the article said?

Re:It's the Coble-Berman bill

[YanceyAI]

Do you mean publishing?

No surprising....

[neksys]

Are companies reaching a new low?

In an era where billions of dollars are misreported to show a profit, where companies trade our personal data as commodities, where advertising has become universally prevalent (let us not forget TV pop-ups), where predatory business practices are the norm and "moral" is a bad word.... is this truly a low? It seems to me that it is par for the course.

Not only in US and UK, but also Canada

[Sandman1971]

We've had to run a number of pieces on unsavory renewal practices among the various registrars competing for your name-claiming business, but domain name scamming is sadly not confined to the U.S


This isn't just happening in the US or the UK. I received what looked like a bill from the Domain Registry Institute of Canada for one of my domains (which incidentally is a .org domain and not .ca). I couldn't believe I would receive such a thing after the big Verisign hoopla. I wrote them back stating that they had just ensured that I will never use their services for any of my domains (5 in all, all .org, .com or .net). What I found even more ironic is that the particular domain in question isn't due for another year and some months! What are these people thinking?

Re:Not only in US and UK, but also Canada

[Em Emalb]

Is funny that everyone assumes corrupt people doing unsavory things are only prevelant in the US and the UK. Corrupt assholes live everywhere.

Unscrupolous people will alway try to take advantage of other people no matter where they live.

It should come as no surprise.

keyboards

[YanceyAI]

I'm glad to see someone is addressing the issue of poorly laid out keyboards. The only shortcoming that I can see is as follows:

More and more in regular usage, I need easy access to numbers. Most of my passwords are number/letter combos, and I'm constantly having to type addresses (often my own for online registration). More importantly, it's nice to be able to quickly type 'l4m3r' into a console while gaming.

Does anyone know of experiments being done to better incorporate numbers into regular type?

Re:keyboards

[bentini]

And it won't fix the problem. The reason those characters get used is because they weren't used before and hence can be given a new meaning without ruining old communication as well as seeming new.

So what happens when we move x,z, other letters not frequently used to the outside and start writing uber-dense perl code where the $, [,], etc. keys are in the center of the keyboard?
The x and z keys will be used in l33t speak. It's just language evolution, all over. They use the meta-characters in their meta-language to describe the language.

Linguistics is cool.

Re:keyboards

[jaffray]

Several split keyboard designs, including the Kinesis Contour and the FingerWorks Stealth, have an embedded numeric keypad in the right-hand home keys. For instance, the numeral 1 is available either in its usual location, or as a chord with the "Number" modifier and the J key. Same way you get a capital letter by chording with the "Shift" modifier.

I don't have much use for easier access to numbers, but I do use the embedded punctuation pad on my Stealth. AltGr-K emits underscore, for instance. AltGr-Y emits double-slash, for URLs or C++/Java comments.

I did something similar many years ago when I was using a Kinesis, abusing the reprogramming features to completely redefine the "numeric keypad". HJKL became arrow keys, left-hand home keys became tab and escape and such, other keys became various punctuation.

Another way to make more characters easily accessible is to use gestures more heavily in combination with typing, in the same physical area. The FingerWorks devices do this, as do some PDA input methods which combine virtual keyboards and gesture strokes, but there's a lot more to explore in this area...

Re:keyboards

[PhilHibbs]

So what happens when we move x,z, other letters not frequently used to the outside and start writing uber-dense perl code where the $, [,], etc. keys are in the center of the keyboard?

What the true hacker really needs is a keyboard with lcd displays on the top of the keys, that automatically reorganises itself to move frequently-used keys near the 'home' positions.

Shady Registrar Practices

[dlek]

Giving the company an official name as if they are the 'only' registrar in europe is pretty shady. Are companies reaching a new low?

A similar thing happened in Canada. A while back I got a renewal notice from "The domain registry of Canada". It was printed on letterhead deviously designed to look like stationery of the federal government. I'm sure many people got sucked in by the presentation alone.

I got a notice similar to this one from my registrar. I'm sure a lot of those had to go out.

Sending targeted junk mail is one thing; trying to appear to be a government service is another. I find the practice repugnant.

dlek.

re: You may already have won...

[Crash Gordon]

How come it's so easy for someone to transfer a domain registrar via social engineering and yet it's so hard to do it legitimately?

My recent attempt to move a domain from Verisign to Namesecure ended up taking the domain off the air for over a month... Namesecure has completely dropped telephone support -- their email support being consistently unhelpful and clueless I ended up moving the domain to Register.com instead.

New Low ?

[Catskul]

HA ! This in most certainly not a new low... Shady companies are not a new thing in the world...

Im not sure if they still exist,
but there used to be several phone companies that named themselves things like: "Idontcare", "Whatever", "Itdoesntmatter" so that when collect callers were asked what carrier they wished to use and they answer "I dont care" they would be put through "Idontcare" and charged exorbetant(sp?) amounts of money...

Re:New Low ?

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

I used to work for one of the baby bells, and at one point I pulled up the valid PIC code listing for my home phone number. There was a HUGE number of legal LD carriers, but no "Whatever" "ItDoesntMatter" or the other apocryphal scam names. The closest thing to criminal was one company named "The Phone Company" although after talking to a few of the service reps, each and every one of them said that they wouldn't assume the customer was asking for that one by name. They'd likely do the same if someone registered "IDontCare"

And before someone from The Phone Company sues me, let me just state that I can only assume their rates are reasonable, their customer service is exemplary and their ethics are beyond compare.
Really
Honest.

Re:New Low ?

[SEE]

See
this repost of a news story.

In summary, back six years ago, there was a long-distance provider operating in Texas, KT&T Communications, registered under the names "I Don't Know", "I Don't Care", and "It Doesn't Matter".

Frankly, it's unlikely that anybody was tricked, because the operator would, like in the quoted story, ask if you were sure. But you don't need to trick them, you just need the caller-who-doesn't-care to respond to the operator with "just put me through" or "why not" or "sure".

Nothing that's going to translate to a lot of money even at 60% higher than AT&T rates, but it's a bit of buisness that doesn't require advertising to get.

Re:New Low ?

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

Indeed, I remember seeing a dateline/20/60minutes/whatever segment about this company, complete with a raking-over-the-coals with the company's founder, Dennis Dees.
The reason I call it an apocyphal scam is that nobody has yet produced a victim. The TV segment talked about how easy it would be to be tricked, but they didn't dig up anyone who HAD been tricked. The Houston Chronicle reporter placed a few test calls, and claims to have been scammed, but he was TRYING to get scammed. Even the BBB of Ft Worth (which had opened an investigation as of this article, 1996) admitted that they had not received any complaints.

Sure, it's cheesy, but it's no Worldcom

Domain Registry Of Europe

[hattig]

Yes, I also work for a UK domain name registrar, and some of our customers have also received these bills from the Domain Registry of Europe.

The addresses were harvested from whois records against the terms and conditions of using the whois records as far as I can see.

Naturally I reported this to the registry we use, OpenSRS/Tucows, so they can handle it. UKReg also use OpenSRS/Tucows IIRC, so hopefully they are also reporting these letters their customers get.

Re:Domain Registry Of Europe

[dsb3]

I got a bunch from "Domain Registry of America". If I'd not already shredded and recycled them I would type in some of the text.

From memory, though, it looks like a bill. First glance and it looks very much like the bills that NSI pumped out a couple of years ago.

If, however, you read the first paragraph it says (perhaps even in bold) something to the effect of "this is not a bill", and then "you are free to register through any registrar, this is an easy method for you to choose us. check our details and decide for yourself".

My first reaction was fury, but after READING THE FIRST PARAGRAPH I had calmed down over it.

Re:Domain Registry Of Europe

[Jason Levine]

I had gotten one of those. Verisign/Network Solutions is worse. I looked all over the "renewal bill" they sent me and couldn't find anything saying that it was a domain transfer. I finally found it, in tiny print on the back. The other one at least kept saying "Domain transfer and renewal" even if the form was designed to look like a bill.

Re:Domain Registry Of Europe

[ivan256]

READING THE FIRST PARAGRAPH

It's fortunate for you that you got the chance to do that. It's a pain in the ass when you don't hear anything about it until after some stupid secretary that can't read puts it in a pile of bills, and the finance department just assumes it's a bill and pays it. Then, as the technical and administrative contact, you get an e-mail requesting the necissary PGP signed e-mail to allow the transfer and you have to figure out how to get the money back.

Domain Names

[RobPiano]

I got a piece of snall mail telling me to renew my domain name. It had all my info, but it was from Verisign... I don't use Verisign. I was not very pleased..

Rob

Congressional Politics 101

[timotten]

...Senate Warner's Office (R-VA). Senator Warner, and his compadre, Senator George Allen, both sit on the High Tech Committee, of which Senator Allen is the chairman...

Short answer: Um, no.

Long answer: Senate Republicans have a para-legislative policy committee, which recommends "The Republican" positions on issues in the Senate. George Allen chairs a subunit of that organization, the high-tech task force. The Democrats have a comparable organization, but they don't publicize it right now because they hold a majority in the Senate.

In fairness, Allen is labelled the ranking member of the Science, Technology, and Space subcommittee. This, however, is misleading because Allen is only a freshman Senator, and all the other Republicans on that subcommittee are actually more senior than he.

Gator: unpopular, but in the right?

[Palarran]

Gator may be unsavory, but it looks to me like this lawsuit is yet another display of cluelessness by the Powers That Be. It ranks up there with deep linking in my sight.

Displaying pop up ads over web sites without publisher's permission...

So when I'm browsing in multiple windows, and a background page pops up an ad over top of someone else's page, that could be a violation of trademark law? (this is a far fetched analogy, but:)

At best, it(Gator) is one program watching and responding to the actions of a separate program.

Re:Gator: unpopular, but in the right?

[jsdkl]

The issue is that it pops up ads *without* the permission of either the owner of the site's content or the person browsing (unless you consider that really really fine print when it's installed to be permission). If you go to a site that puts popups over another window, it's *your* fault for those popups since you went to that site and explicitly caused it.

Re:Gator: unpopular, but in the right?

[behrman]

This is true. However, if you look at the lawsuit, it's being filed by the advertisers and the websites that are selling the advertising. It is not being brought by the persons viewing the pages. Ergo, the advertisers, pending a win in court, will set a precedent that it violates copyright to alter the advertising. Follow that through to the next logical conclusion: Will it be a similar violation of copyright to use junkbuster proxies or Mozilla's "Block images from this server" option?

For this reason, and this reason alone, I belive Gator is in the right -- Once the page is served up, we have the right to view it however we choose (with graphics, without graphics, in Courier New, 72-point font, without sound, through a translator, etc etc etc).

Now, if the USERS were suing Gator for altering their web-browsing experience without their permission, Gator should lose.

this is insightful?

[JeanBaptiste]

I agree the trading of personal data sucks, not sure I agree with the advertising statement, but

predatory buisness practices are not the norm.
Name me 50 companies that have predatory buisness practices and I will name you 50,000 that dont. This is the norm? I agree those that dont play by the rules need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And you show me one person that says "moral" is a bad word and I can show you ~30 million.
Buisness!=Evil, as much as some wish it was the case.

Re: You may already have won...

[reaper20]

I ended up moving the domain to Register.com [register.com] instead.

Which will promptly spam the crap out of *@yourdomain.com, forcing you to move to another registrar, thus continuing the cycle of registrar stupidity. If only ICANN would do something ... no wait, that would make things worse ....

Meanwhile, on the CyberCrime Bill Front

[Alien54]

Meantime, the House Cyber Crime Bill has been under reported, althought it did make Wired (story here)

CNet reports on this with the Headline: House OKs life sentences for hackers

This seems to have almost no opposition, passing in the House passed 385-3 on Monday evening.

features include new and improved (Tougher! Stronger!) survelliance provisions.

It is very strange which bills get attention in tech forums, and which slipp through with barely a whisper.

not that I care all that much any more.

No One Wants To Get Into His Genes!

[baudtender]

The genetic keyboard layout's author says he doesn't want to go back and re-learn QWERTY.

My observation is that in his attempt to pursue personal efficiency, he has effectively isolated himself from 99+% of the keyboards/layouts in the English speaking world.

The irony is that when this guy leaves the safety of his office, his typing skills are reduced to those of a lowbrow backwoods hunt-and-pecker. That means chicks will laugh at him and won't reproduce with him, which puts him in the penalty box of natural selection. How do you feel about toying with genetics now, Brainiac?

QWERTY isn't popular because it's pretty or efficient, but because of its popularity.

Baudtender

My opinions reflect those of the company I work for,
because I own the goddamn company I work for.

Re:No One Wants To Get Into His Genes!

[drDugan]

wait, after this line:

"""
QWERTY isn't popular because it's pretty or efficient, but because of its popularity.
"""

you're calling HIM a brainiac? Whoa.

Programmers Layout?

[Zaffle]

I've been using Dvorak for awhile, and though it did help with my RSI (yey), I still feel there could be a layout more improved for programmers. (especially C programmers).

{ } ( ) all require shifting, then again, there isn't really any place you could move them down from. everything that isn't shifted is important to coding C.

I'd be tempted to design a new keyboard layout using his program, but put in 4 extra keys, maybe between the backspace/enter/shift column and the rest of the board.

It would atleast mean my pinky doesn't get stretched on almost every line of code. (how many C lines don't have a ( or { on them?

I think the best solution other than 4 new keys would be moving the shift key on the left to the home row (switch with capslock).

keyboards ... and games

[drDugan]

As I break from America's Army Shooting Range (Try number 39 to qualify), I wonder:

it seems that if I have a wierd (non QWERTY) keyboard layout, I'd have to remap
the controls on all those games that use keyboard layout for controls (W == forward,
S== back, A/D for left/right)

That would get annoying and possibly would eliminate the time savings gained by
normal typing. Just no way to win.

Word of mouth

[Catskul]

The information about the companies being named "whatever" and so forth was told to me via word of mouth. I did not experience it myself. The person who told me this lived in Texas and said that it only happend where they live and not here(Pennsylvania). The companies may not have been actual carriers, but just purchasing time on the phone networks and reselling it via collect calls. But then again maybe this person was only repeating a rumor. I dont know... I couldnt find any info about it via google, so I dont know what to think.

I don't think so...!

[itwerx]

I've registered various domains with Register.Com over the years and always given them unique contact emails. I have NEVER gotten spam on any of them. Are you sure you're not talking about some other registrar?

FYI, it took me three months and a total of 7 faxes, 12 phone calls and an ungodly number of emails to get Verisign to turn loose of a domain awhile back. By the end of it I was ready to sic our legal eagle on them. God those bastards pissed me off!

(But I never got spam from them either... Maybe I just lead a charmed life. :)

Re:I don't think so...!

[Fjord]

The goal is to make it so expensive to switch, that it's cheaper just to pay their high prices.

pennies?

[sofar]

pennies on the dollar (or is that cents on the Euro?)

Doesn't matter anymore, since 1$=1E now!

Re: You may already have won...

[Electrum]

I used to use Register.com, since it had what I thought was a good interface, and free DNS. Then I found out about directNIC, transferred all my domains without problems and have never looked back. directNIC has an awesome interface (great if you have lots of domains), is less than half the price ($15) and a lot of optional extras (free hosting, free email forwarding, free parking and redirection, DNS, POP3 accounts).

Do something about domain slamming

[NetBoy]

At least here in Maine US, a solicitation
sent in guise of an invoice is illegal.

link at state

Check with your local AG, get some nastly letters
sent, get them to get in touch with the powers
that be where the registrar operates. Maybe get
them shut down in your state.

That will be the day, when a domain scammer gets
busted on facial recognition software at your
local airport. :-)

STOP DOMAIN NAME TERRORISTS

Colon and semicolon are used more than full stop!?

[Sebbo]

From the genetic keyboard word frequency table:

37358 :
17483 ;
11985 .

Is this just 'cause of all the C code he fed in? In that case, that suggests that the resulting keyboard is rather specialized.