What do we do about underaged people who take pictures of themselves naked, delibrately, and delibrately share them?
Technically, they just produced child porn, and can indeed be punished under the law, assuming they can be legally charged as adults, which is 17 here, not 18. Yes, at 17, you aren't responsible enough to agree to pose nude, but you're responsible enough you can be charged as an adult if you take pictures of someone who's posing nude. Yes, even yourself.
As this is idiotic, no DA ever pressed charges, but the solution to idiotic laws isn't 'not press charges', it's to fix the laws.
It's even more absurd with age of consent laws being, for example, 16 here. A 17 year old girl can have sex with an 18 year old, or even a 93 year old, but heaven forbid they send a photo of themselve posing topless. They can be arrested for child porn and sent to an adult prison and forced to shower naked with other prisoners.
Oh, yeah, we're really making a lot of sense here.
Name lookups can tell you domains, but that's not helpful.
It's all well and good to know an IP address is mail.example.com, but good luck looking up everything example.com. Even if you could look up all IP address that *.example.com point at, which you can't, that wouldn't give you all the IPs the company that owns example.com has.
Now, it is possible to do a whois, and get that single netblock, that's not that hard. That at least tells you this it's a class B or a/26 or whatever it is, and you could trivially block that. Some of the 'single IP' lists I was talking about will erect blocks on whole netblocks if they are small enough. (For example, there's a IP in a class/28 that's spamming. Probably want to block all 14 computers in that/28, because that more than likely is a single entity.)
But that won't tell you everything that company owns. You'd have to look up the owner of a netblock, which is easy, and then lookup up everything they own, which you can't do using traditional lookups...you'd have to have a copy of the database. And even then companies can have more than one 'id' code, because they're different divisions or used to be seperate companies or all sort of reasons.
It's not that hard doing it manually, especially if you're experienced at that sort of thing. You quickly learn what's going on. It would be a real bitch to write a tool to do completely automated.
And while MAPS may block too many address, this specific block wasn't too many. This article was about a quite-correct block on Pier1. Pier1 is a hosting company that spams, and should be blocked.
(Because I don't want people to get the wrong impression, I define 'spam' as 'sends a certain kind of email', or 'knowingly continues to connect to the internet people who spam'. And, no, that defination is not debatable.)
No, as in, his netblock was not added automatically.
There are only three modes of operation for a blacklist:
a) There is a spamtrap, an address only spammers have, and any single IP sending to it is automatically blocked for a limited time. These are actual 'real time blackholes', they're designed to come and go very quickly, and only block machines actually sending spam at this moment.
b) Someone manually blocks netblocks after review. Sometimes these block are nominated in, sometimes they are learned from spamtraps. Everyone who is added first gets alerted. (Or has been alerted repeatedly in the past and ignored warnings.)
c) They are a list designed to block a specific entity. (For example, China.) IPs just get updated as they change owners.
The closest 'automatically add netblocks' comes is blacklists that add network blocks manually, but 're-up' the blocks with spamtraps, and otherwise ages them off. (SPEWS, for example, appears to do this.)
I have never heard of any other method of operation. Like I said, I, personally, am not familiar with MAPS, but I seriously doubt they have any other mode of operation.
In fact, any other mode of operation is nearly impossible. Figuring out the actual size of a network an IP belongs to, and who you should block, is not something that's automated easily, or would make much sense.
Many of them block IPs spam come from. Some block known open relays/proxy, regardless of any spam coming from the ATM. Some block ISPs that harbour spammers, yes, the whole thing.
And there are quite a lot that list named ISPs or entire countries without making any value judgements at all. There exist solely if you wish to block that entity, you can, and they keep the list up to date with IPs that entity possesses.
There's even one that block all of the IP network space, and one that rolls a random number generator when you ask about a certain IP.
That's not what happened. He's on Pier1. Pier1 shouldn't have gotten out of the blacklist in the first place, it's harbouring at least 10 ROSKO spammers.
Yeah, almost everyone who complains isn't a mail admin.
I don't want to hear about MAPS, I personally don't trust MAPS from so far back I'd need google to figure out why, but I use plenty of blacklists, like the SBL and CBL, in addition to a bunch of open proxy and zombie machine lists. And the SBL explicitly include collateral damage, to wit, they deliberately block the corporate mailservers of ISPs that allow spamming.
We're a small company, we get about 200 legit mail messages a day. We get about 400 spam messages in addition to that, and we block with RBLs over a thousand attempts to send us spam daily.
And we've recently started getting an extra thousand invalid recepients a day, because apparent some fucktard spammer apparently took a domain of ours, dictionary prepended a bunch of names, and sold it as an actual list of email address, probably more due to the fact he's so stupid a trained sheep would beat him at chess than any actual attempt to defraud. But that's not relevant to this discussion.
And I really wish I could use SPEWS, but it blocks too much mail we need. Someday I'll figure out how to get postfix to take RBL lookups and shunt them to a different set of restrictions, like it can do with lookup tables, so I can examine people who are on SPEWS with a microscope. (Or maybe I could just pull in SPEWS and run it as a CIDR map, hrm...) It does come in on spamassassin, but we don't block on that, we just run it to let users block.
Also I want to implement 'reverse greylisting', where anyone who sends email to an invalid user gets temp rejections for mail sent to valid users. We can't do real greylisting. We tried it, but too many clients think email is real time, yet use mail servers where the retry is two hours or more, so they're like 'I sent you the email ten minutes ago, where is it?', and we have to explain that not only do we not have it because of what we did, we cannot get it, we have to wait for their mail server to try again.
Almost all blacklists do, indeed, report spam, and then block based on failure to respond to the reports. Or they're a 'one IP at a time' blocklist. No blacklist that I know of blocks whole ISPs because someone there spams once.
However, I don't know about MAPS, but I wouldn't trust MAPS anyway.
No one's saying that switching between programs is seemless, or that setting up a Unix mail server is easy, they're saying that OSS programs use open standards to store data.
Postfix, qmail, courier, sendmail, etc, all mail servers on Unix use one of two standard file formats to store mail in, either mbox or maildir, which what your data is. (Which is actually more a function of your delivery agent than your actual mail server.) And they store it in the same place, or at least in whatever place you want, so there's not even any 'migration', it's just 'Who's putting stuff there at this time?'. You can switch over without losing any data at all, with no downtime at all. You install and configure the new mail server, turn the old one off, and turn the new one on.
BTW, both sendmail and qmail are very bad examples of OSS programs. sendmail is decade-old crap, and qmail isn't actually open source at all. Setting up postfix and courier are both fairly easy.
And, yes, commerical software tends to include convertors...from anything equal in popularity or greater, or anything older than a certain point. This means, while you might be able to convert mail from MS Exchange to Third Party Mailer(TM), you probably can't go the other way. And maybe you can only convert it from an older version of exchange, and maybe you have to export it from Exchange first, which requires you actually have a working copy...etc etc.
How many hundreds of people will be out of a job? Did you atually just write that?
Gee, I dunno how many hundreds would be out of a job. Would it be anywhere near the thousands of programmers out of a job because the work moved to India? Would it be anywhere near the thousand of developers out of a job because Microsoft steamrollered their company?
I really like that some software developers to are afraid of progress, BTW. That's what it is, progress. In any other industry, the ability to get a few people to do what a lot of people is doing is progress, and it's even better when the results of that are suddenly free instead of expensive.
That's almost the very defination of progress. It's like discovering how to do cold fusion using old banana peels, a DC power supply, and a can of Mellow Yellow, and having electrical engineers in arms because some of them work developing and selling the now-pointless power line transformers. Computer geeks are supposed to be the ultimate neophiles, but heaven forbid if someone invents a process that underbids us.
And I am a software developer, and I am paid to work on open source software internally for my own company's use. We could not afford to be where we are if not for OSS.
Likewise, I can't understand why they sell motor oil to consumers. Sure, only a few people use it, but is destroying 10% of the lube business worth it?
And remember back when we employed people to clean our ovens? Who the hell decided it was a good idea to start selling self-cleaning ovens? Or dishwashers! That used to be a profession, now it's a machine.
And barcodes with electronic inventory management systems. We used to pay people to keep track of inventory. It was an honored profession, and now a few swipes of a laser every time something arrives or is sold and, no more profession.
You, my friend, have fallen victim to the 'broken window fallacy'. Doing makework is not good for the economy. Operating unneeded companies is makework.
The 10% of the software that everyone uses does not need to be sold. By defination, 'everyone' includes 'people capable of writing the software', so we can just let them do it, and there's less makework. (You can question why they want to do it for free, but, they obviously are doing it for free, so the question is rather moot.)
Anyway, while your point would be silly in any normal software enviroment, it's incredibly stupid in our MS-dominated world. Either you work at MS, or you'll be out of a job anyway.
What happened in the Eastern Europe was a combination of these two things: you had to have a stupid permit for everything. Most people never really agreed with these laws, and in the end even those who were supposed to enforce them found it all too painful and difficult, so after a while nobody really gave a hoot. You ended up with a society where everybody was perpetually braking the law. In such situation, anybody who wanted could squeal on you fow whatever reason, and if you were unlucky enough to run into a cop that needed to fullfill his quota, you could easily get into lot of trouble without doing anything wrong at all.
In the end, there was no increase in security, bad guys could still do whatever they wanted. The effect was instead more controll over ordinary citizens. Everybody was vulnerable, and that was exactly what the Party wanted.
MOD PARENT UP!
You're exactly right. People forget how many different failures of security there are. Non-terrorists breaking the laws designed to catch terrorists is a security failure if they get caught or no. If they get caught, they're more noise that need to be filtered out, and if they don't get cause, they've suddenly become blackmailable. In Eastern Europe, if you got caught, you could bride your way out, and now you're blackmailable even more, this time by the government.
Some people think of it is as 'This idiotic security isn't needed.'. Some people pay a bit more attention and think 'This idiotic security isn't making things more secure.'. The ones really looking at what's going on say 'This is fascist security that isn't intended to secure anyone, just to gain control over people.'.
However, it's not only the latter, it's 'his is fascist security that isn't intended to secure anyone, just to gain control over people, and it's discouraging people cooperating with useful security measures and encouraging a nation of lawbreakers.
Idiotic security measure produce people who can be blackmailed into working for terrorists, guards who are used to looking the other way, and a black market dedicated to getting around all this.
It's much much much less secure to have security no one wants than to have almost no security at all. Security no one wants results in...anarchy, or thuggism, if that's a form of government. I guess the word there is 'fascism'.
Of course, Eastern Europe governments actually didn't want security, they wanted a nation of panic-stricken people, with a tiny scattering of violent malcontents they blew up into a state-threatening security issue, allowing them to make as harse restrictions as they want, do large government crackdowns, and marginize the much larger peaceful malcontents.
Good thing our government doesn't fall in that category. (It's not in Eastern Europe, for example.)
That's crazy. There's no such thing as 'relative to the universe'. That's what caused relativity to be postulated, because both the 'slow' side and the 'fast' side of earth measure the speed of light at exactly the same speed relative to them. It doesn't matter which direction you go, or how fast, or where the light comes from, it is always going at the same speed, and thus it is you who are deformed in time and space, to match up with the speed of light.
Postulating it's some weird electron effect ignores the other ways of measuring time. It ignores the reality of momentum, postulating energy that comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere.
It ignores the fact that objects in freefall towards a gravity source also show the same time dilation. Which only works if gravity is somehow acting harder or softer on electrons, but doesn't make any sense when you consider that objects standing on a gravity source show the same time dilation and they aren't 'moving' at all.
It also ignores the fact we've measured 'frame dragging', in which an object moving at one speed is near (but does not touch) another object going at a different speed and 'pulls' space along with it, causing time dilation in the second object.
Scientists tried for fifty years to explain this, and all ways except relativity failed. Now, that's not to say it is the end all and be all, but there is something that acts exactly like a distortion of spacetime, regardless of what it really is. Not weird effects on matter, but weird effects on whatever it is that matter is located 'in'.
The other posts have a good point, but there's something they're missing.
The right to travel within the US is a right, one that can't be revoked without due process.
If you are a US citizen, you have the right to enter the US, period, if you show up at the border or fly in at an airport. (Whether you are allowed on the plane being an interesting side note. John Gilmore has a case going to the Surpreme Court partially about that very issue.)
However, a US passport can be revoked, on no grounds at all except the State Department doesn't like you. Yes, yes, you can contest it in court, and you might get your passport back...five years later. But they don't have to show you've commited a crime, or are even a threat, they just have to have some actual reason to not want you in other countries.
This hasn't been a legal issue, because US passports used to be letters of reference to other countries only. Yes, almost everyone who went to non-NAFTA countries had to have them already, so it was an easy way to prove you were a citizen...but lack of them did not prove you were not, even if you were coming from a place that wouldn't have allowed you in without one.
And if the US was denying you a passport for political reasons, you could always just get the other country's okay to visit, and go without the US's permission, and there wasn't a damn thing they could do about it. They had to let you out (Although getting out via plane could be hard.), and they had to let you back in.
But not, the government is asserting it has the right to keep out any US cizitens it doesn't like. Which it does not have. Exile is not even currently a legal punishment in this country, and even if it was, it would require due process. (I'm not saying exile would be illegal, I'm just saying it's not currently the punishment for any crime. (Actually, exile would only be a legal punishment under Federal law...states can't deny entry to other US citizens, that's in the Constitution somewhere, although it's not stated exactly that way.))
It doesn't matter that you (at this point in time) have to leave the US voluntarily to end up exiled. That's like the government saying 'people wearing green shirts don't have freedom of speech'. It doesn't matter that wearing a green shirt is a choice and people can choose not to do that, free speech is a right.
And there's the fun question: What if they revoke my passport while I'm out of the country?
Here's another fun question: What if they (quite legally) arrest me on some silly charge, haul me to the border, push me across, and refuse to let me back in? Before you say 'they wouldn't do that', need I remind you of the little operation they're running in Cuba so they can deny people access to US courts? Pushing someone into Canada is child's play compared to that.
There's a reason the right to travel freely in this country is there. Neither states nor the Fed can deny entry to any citizen of the US.
That's because a laws that citizens think is stupid will immediately produce a black market in getting around said laws, and even people not participating in the black market will not turn it in if they learn of it.
Witness the drug market. How many people out there that don't use drugs know someone who uses drugs? How many of you people could pretend to have enough interest in said drugs to learn enough about who they bought them from to file an anonymous tip?
Probably a good half of the population could, with almost no work at all, and the possiblity of a reward. Including many police officers. I know I could, at least three times. (That is, I know three completely different sets of drug users, who I assume do not have the same supplier as they live very far apart.)
How many people actually do that?
Almost no one.
How many people know someone who's a murderer and don't turn them in?
Almost no one. They'd have to be a real good friend or close relative, or you'd have to think the murder was justified in some way.
If it requires a valid passport to get into the US, and people commonly, for whatever reason, need to sneak in without them, there will be a black market up and down the Canadian border within a year. Everyone will know a guy who knows who to get you in touch with, exactly like drugs are now. (Well, everyone who lives near the border will know a guy, I guess. Probably not people in Florida. OTOH, people in Florida probably already know a guy who knows a guy who can get people out of Cuba.)
The only way there won't be a black market is if everyone gets passports, or they start not letting US citizens into Canada without a US passport, so no one has a problem getting back.
People who whine about how the owners of a criminal corporation can be 'hurt' in the stock market are fucking morons.
Nowadays, we have 'limited liability' corporations and owners can't lose anything beyond the amount of their ownership, ie, the value of their stock.
Without limited liability, if you owned 0.01% of a company that, say, dumped toxic waste, and the other guy who owned 99.99% of the company ran off, you could be fined for the entire amount of cleanup and personally sued by everyone injured, and for any outstanding debts.
People who own stock in criminal companies are damn lucky nowadays, even if their $500,000 worth of stocks plummets to $10,000.
No, he's claiming it's a human right, and corporations have human rights, and it's a right that cannot be taken away via due process.
However, the Berne convention would seem to stop them from being able to take away the copyright of Windows and stay within Berne. However, they could stop enforcing the copyright, and put insanely low fines on copyright violations of it, like two euros a copy. Or put mandatory license fees on OSes of five euros, like the US has on music.
Or all sorts of things that effectively make it free to copy, while technically leaving the copyright intact.
Erm, we've demonstrated time dilation, using clocks in orbit. In fact, GPS wouldn't work if it didn't take into account time dilation.
And it has nothing to do with the type of clock. We've measured clocks in zero-G moving and not moving, or, at least, moving much slower. They're different. What's more, they're different in a way that's identical to what was predicted 90 years ago. The whole 'Yes, but it might be weird clocks' worked when it was one experiment. We've got thousands for satellites in orbit, and all of them demonstrate time dilation, at least all the ones that are accurate enough to measure it and can be allowed to let their clocks get out of sync.
And unless you have a better theory of why Mercury is rotating with 43 extra acrsecs a century, perhaps you better be quiet. For those of you who don't know, Mercury is suffering spacetime distortion from the sun. It's got slightly less time and slightly more space than we do, and thus our measurements of it are 'wrong'. If we measured it from Mercury it would be right and all the other planets would be in weird orbits.
I don't know where people get crazy ideas that all of physics is some absurd pie-in-the-sky shit. This isn't philosophy....if a scientific theory isn't disprovable, it's not a fucking scientific theory. Relativity is disprovable, and repeated experiments have demonstrated that it works reasonable well.
However, it allows anyone arguing against the DMCA to say that a movie company itself has admitted that ripping things to a computer is covered under Fair Use.
Granted, you could have proven that it was Fair Use anyway, but the point is, you don't have to....MGM just admitted it.
Whereas, if they'd sued a distributor of CSS breaking software before, they could have argued that ripping things to your computer isn't Fair Use.
So you don't mind if, for example, the police come in and look through your house, as long as they do when you're gone so as not to inconvience you and it's against the law for them to report on your porno?
And you have no problems with random areas of roads designed with a much lower speed limit, and automated sensors to send people tickets?
I'm just wondering here. You seem to have fallen into the mindset that the law exists to serve the police.
In my state, Georgia, we have many laws designed to limit the police from actually enforcing the law because we don't want them to do it that way. For example, they park on the side of the road and give traffic tickets unless they are visible for 100 feet. We have laws against entrapment. We have laws against using illegally obtained evidence.
We also have laws against pulling people over solely to check their insurance and license. Why?
It's not because it would delay people, it's because it's not what we pay the police for. The police, contrary to what almost everyone seems to think, are not there to enforce the law, they are there to keep the peace, and to do that, they stop people from breaking the law.
If they actually wanted to get people without insurance off the road (Which would be very helpful.), it would be trivial to do with a system that costs less. Just, duh, tied their tag to their insurance and when they cancel send a nice meter maid around to collect any tags that do not currently have insurance.
The police like this one because it lets them automatically ticket people driving without insurance and give them tickets, instead of stopping people from driving without insurance, which wouldn't make them any money at all.
Which is really the danger of any automated 'crime billing' system. If the police can set up a machine on the side of the road that generates X amount of money when someone breaking a law goes by, it seems rather hard to figure out a reason they would try to stop people from breaking that law. As the entire fucking point of laws is so that police can stop you from doing that behavior, which supposedly regains the peace, that seems rather counterproductive.
Which is why, in general, we don't let people enforce the law in an automated manner. We've already gone down that slope with traffic lights, and look at the governments ignoring the studies that say you can reduce traffic light fatalities if you give people an additional.5 seconds of yellow light, because that would cut into traffic camera revenue. They want people breaking the law.
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What do we do about underaged people who take pictures of themselves naked, delibrately, and delibrately share them?
Technically, they just produced child porn, and can indeed be punished under the law, assuming they can be legally charged as adults, which is 17 here, not 18. Yes, at 17, you aren't responsible enough to agree to pose nude, but you're responsible enough you can be charged as an adult if you take pictures of someone who's posing nude. Yes, even yourself.
As this is idiotic, no DA ever pressed charges, but the solution to idiotic laws isn't 'not press charges', it's to fix the laws.
It's even more absurd with age of consent laws being, for example, 16 here. A 17 year old girl can have sex with an 18 year old, or even a 93 year old, but heaven forbid they send a photo of themselve posing topless. They can be arrested for child porn and sent to an adult prison and forced to shower naked with other prisoners.
Oh, yeah, we're really making a lot of sense here.
It's all well and good to know an IP address is mail.example.com, but good luck looking up everything example.com. Even if you could look up all IP address that *.example.com point at, which you can't, that wouldn't give you all the IPs the company that owns example.com has.
Now, it is possible to do a whois, and get that single netblock, that's not that hard. That at least tells you this it's a class B or a /26 or whatever it is, and you could trivially block that. Some of the 'single IP' lists I was talking about will erect blocks on whole netblocks if they are small enough. (For example, there's a IP in a class /28 that's spamming. Probably want to block all 14 computers in that /28, because that more than likely is a single entity.)
But that won't tell you everything that company owns. You'd have to look up the owner of a netblock, which is easy, and then lookup up everything they own, which you can't do using traditional lookups...you'd have to have a copy of the database. And even then companies can have more than one 'id' code, because they're different divisions or used to be seperate companies or all sort of reasons.
It's not that hard doing it manually, especially if you're experienced at that sort of thing. You quickly learn what's going on. It would be a real bitch to write a tool to do completely automated.
And while MAPS may block too many address, this specific block wasn't too many. This article was about a quite-correct block on Pier1. Pier1 is a hosting company that spams, and should be blocked.
(Because I don't want people to get the wrong impression, I define 'spam' as 'sends a certain kind of email', or 'knowingly continues to connect to the internet people who spam'. And, no, that defination is not debatable.)
There are only three modes of operation for a blacklist:
a) There is a spamtrap, an address only spammers have, and any single IP sending to it is automatically blocked for a limited time. These are actual 'real time blackholes', they're designed to come and go very quickly, and only block machines actually sending spam at this moment.
b) Someone manually blocks netblocks after review. Sometimes these block are nominated in, sometimes they are learned from spamtraps. Everyone who is added first gets alerted. (Or has been alerted repeatedly in the past and ignored warnings.)
c) They are a list designed to block a specific entity. (For example, China.) IPs just get updated as they change owners.
The closest 'automatically add netblocks' comes is blacklists that add network blocks manually, but 're-up' the blocks with spamtraps, and otherwise ages them off. (SPEWS, for example, appears to do this.)
I have never heard of any other method of operation. Like I said, I, personally, am not familiar with MAPS, but I seriously doubt they have any other mode of operation.
In fact, any other mode of operation is nearly impossible. Figuring out the actual size of a network an IP belongs to, and who you should block, is not something that's automated easily, or would make much sense.
Many of them block IPs spam come from. Some block known open relays/proxy, regardless of any spam coming from the ATM. Some block ISPs that harbour spammers, yes, the whole thing.
And there are quite a lot that list named ISPs or entire countries without making any value judgements at all. There exist solely if you wish to block that entity, you can, and they keep the list up to date with IPs that entity possesses.
There's even one that block all of the IP network space, and one that rolls a random number generator when you ask about a certain IP.
That's not what happened. He's on Pier1. Pier1 shouldn't have gotten out of the blacklist in the first place, it's harbouring at least 10 ROSKO spammers.
Dude: You're supposed to be on blacklists. All of them. You are not not supposed to be able to send mail anywhere.
I don't want to hear about MAPS, I personally don't trust MAPS from so far back I'd need google to figure out why, but I use plenty of blacklists, like the SBL and CBL, in addition to a bunch of open proxy and zombie machine lists. And the SBL explicitly include collateral damage, to wit, they deliberately block the corporate mailservers of ISPs that allow spamming.
We're a small company, we get about 200 legit mail messages a day. We get about 400 spam messages in addition to that, and we block with RBLs over a thousand attempts to send us spam daily.
And we've recently started getting an extra thousand invalid recepients a day, because apparent some fucktard spammer apparently took a domain of ours, dictionary prepended a bunch of names, and sold it as an actual list of email address, probably more due to the fact he's so stupid a trained sheep would beat him at chess than any actual attempt to defraud. But that's not relevant to this discussion.
And I really wish I could use SPEWS, but it blocks too much mail we need. Someday I'll figure out how to get postfix to take RBL lookups and shunt them to a different set of restrictions, like it can do with lookup tables, so I can examine people who are on SPEWS with a microscope. (Or maybe I could just pull in SPEWS and run it as a CIDR map, hrm...) It does come in on spamassassin, but we don't block on that, we just run it to let users block.
Also I want to implement 'reverse greylisting', where anyone who sends email to an invalid user gets temp rejections for mail sent to valid users. We can't do real greylisting. We tried it, but too many clients think email is real time, yet use mail servers where the retry is two hours or more, so they're like 'I sent you the email ten minutes ago, where is it?', and we have to explain that not only do we not have it because of what we did, we cannot get it, we have to wait for their mail server to try again.
Almost all blacklists do, indeed, report spam, and then block based on failure to respond to the reports. Or they're a 'one IP at a time' blocklist. No blacklist that I know of blocks whole ISPs because someone there spams once.
However, I don't know about MAPS, but I wouldn't trust MAPS anyway.
No, the working on the clone wasn't even using BK at all, he was just working for OSDL.
Postfix, qmail, courier, sendmail, etc, all mail servers on Unix use one of two standard file formats to store mail in, either mbox or maildir, which what your data is. (Which is actually more a function of your delivery agent than your actual mail server.) And they store it in the same place, or at least in whatever place you want, so there's not even any 'migration', it's just 'Who's putting stuff there at this time?'. You can switch over without losing any data at all, with no downtime at all. You install and configure the new mail server, turn the old one off, and turn the new one on.
BTW, both sendmail and qmail are very bad examples of OSS programs. sendmail is decade-old crap, and qmail isn't actually open source at all. Setting up postfix and courier are both fairly easy.
And, yes, commerical software tends to include convertors...from anything equal in popularity or greater, or anything older than a certain point. This means, while you might be able to convert mail from MS Exchange to Third Party Mailer(TM), you probably can't go the other way. And maybe you can only convert it from an older version of exchange, and maybe you have to export it from Exchange first, which requires you actually have a working copy...etc etc.
Gee, I dunno how many hundreds would be out of a job. Would it be anywhere near the thousands of programmers out of a job because the work moved to India? Would it be anywhere near the thousand of developers out of a job because Microsoft steamrollered their company?
I really like that some software developers to are afraid of progress, BTW. That's what it is, progress. In any other industry, the ability to get a few people to do what a lot of people is doing is progress, and it's even better when the results of that are suddenly free instead of expensive.
That's almost the very defination of progress. It's like discovering how to do cold fusion using old banana peels, a DC power supply, and a can of Mellow Yellow, and having electrical engineers in arms because some of them work developing and selling the now-pointless power line transformers. Computer geeks are supposed to be the ultimate neophiles, but heaven forbid if someone invents a process that underbids us.
And I am a software developer, and I am paid to work on open source software internally for my own company's use. We could not afford to be where we are if not for OSS.
And remember back when we employed people to clean our ovens? Who the hell decided it was a good idea to start selling self-cleaning ovens? Or dishwashers! That used to be a profession, now it's a machine.
And barcodes with electronic inventory management systems. We used to pay people to keep track of inventory. It was an honored profession, and now a few swipes of a laser every time something arrives or is sold and, no more profession.
You, my friend, have fallen victim to the 'broken window fallacy'. Doing makework is not good for the economy. Operating unneeded companies is makework.
The 10% of the software that everyone uses does not need to be sold. By defination, 'everyone' includes 'people capable of writing the software', so we can just let them do it, and there's less makework. (You can question why they want to do it for free, but, they obviously are doing it for free, so the question is rather moot.)
Anyway, while your point would be silly in any normal software enviroment, it's incredibly stupid in our MS-dominated world. Either you work at MS, or you'll be out of a job anyway.
In the end, there was no increase in security, bad guys could still do whatever they wanted. The effect was instead more controll over ordinary citizens. Everybody was vulnerable, and that was exactly what the Party wanted.
MOD PARENT UP!
You're exactly right. People forget how many different failures of security there are. Non-terrorists breaking the laws designed to catch terrorists is a security failure if they get caught or no. If they get caught, they're more noise that need to be filtered out, and if they don't get cause, they've suddenly become blackmailable. In Eastern Europe, if you got caught, you could bride your way out, and now you're blackmailable even more, this time by the government.
Some people think of it is as 'This idiotic security isn't needed.'. Some people pay a bit more attention and think 'This idiotic security isn't making things more secure.'. The ones really looking at what's going on say 'This is fascist security that isn't intended to secure anyone, just to gain control over people.'.
However, it's not only the latter, it's 'his is fascist security that isn't intended to secure anyone, just to gain control over people, and it's discouraging people cooperating with useful security measures and encouraging a nation of lawbreakers. Idiotic security measure produce people who can be blackmailed into working for terrorists, guards who are used to looking the other way, and a black market dedicated to getting around all this.
It's much much much less secure to have security no one wants than to have almost no security at all. Security no one wants results in...anarchy, or thuggism, if that's a form of government. I guess the word there is 'fascism'.
Of course, Eastern Europe governments actually didn't want security, they wanted a nation of panic-stricken people, with a tiny scattering of violent malcontents they blew up into a state-threatening security issue, allowing them to make as harse restrictions as they want, do large government crackdowns, and marginize the much larger peaceful malcontents.
Good thing our government doesn't fall in that category. (It's not in Eastern Europe, for example.)
Postulating it's some weird electron effect ignores the other ways of measuring time. It ignores the reality of momentum, postulating energy that comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere.
It ignores the fact that objects in freefall towards a gravity source also show the same time dilation. Which only works if gravity is somehow acting harder or softer on electrons, but doesn't make any sense when you consider that objects standing on a gravity source show the same time dilation and they aren't 'moving' at all.
It also ignores the fact we've measured 'frame dragging', in which an object moving at one speed is near (but does not touch) another object going at a different speed and 'pulls' space along with it, causing time dilation in the second object.
Scientists tried for fifty years to explain this, and all ways except relativity failed. Now, that's not to say it is the end all and be all, but there is something that acts exactly like a distortion of spacetime, regardless of what it really is. Not weird effects on matter, but weird effects on whatever it is that matter is located 'in'.
The right to travel within the US is a right, one that can't be revoked without due process.
If you are a US citizen, you have the right to enter the US, period, if you show up at the border or fly in at an airport. (Whether you are allowed on the plane being an interesting side note. John Gilmore has a case going to the Surpreme Court partially about that very issue.)
However, a US passport can be revoked, on no grounds at all except the State Department doesn't like you. Yes, yes, you can contest it in court, and you might get your passport back...five years later. But they don't have to show you've commited a crime, or are even a threat, they just have to have some actual reason to not want you in other countries.
This hasn't been a legal issue, because US passports used to be letters of reference to other countries only. Yes, almost everyone who went to non-NAFTA countries had to have them already, so it was an easy way to prove you were a citizen...but lack of them did not prove you were not, even if you were coming from a place that wouldn't have allowed you in without one.
And if the US was denying you a passport for political reasons, you could always just get the other country's okay to visit, and go without the US's permission, and there wasn't a damn thing they could do about it. They had to let you out (Although getting out via plane could be hard.), and they had to let you back in.
But not, the government is asserting it has the right to keep out any US cizitens it doesn't like. Which it does not have. Exile is not even currently a legal punishment in this country, and even if it was, it would require due process. (I'm not saying exile would be illegal, I'm just saying it's not currently the punishment for any crime. (Actually, exile would only be a legal punishment under Federal law...states can't deny entry to other US citizens, that's in the Constitution somewhere, although it's not stated exactly that way.))
It doesn't matter that you (at this point in time) have to leave the US voluntarily to end up exiled. That's like the government saying 'people wearing green shirts don't have freedom of speech'. It doesn't matter that wearing a green shirt is a choice and people can choose not to do that, free speech is a right.
And there's the fun question: What if they revoke my passport while I'm out of the country?
Here's another fun question: What if they (quite legally) arrest me on some silly charge, haul me to the border, push me across, and refuse to let me back in? Before you say 'they wouldn't do that', need I remind you of the little operation they're running in Cuba so they can deny people access to US courts? Pushing someone into Canada is child's play compared to that.
There's a reason the right to travel freely in this country is there. Neither states nor the Fed can deny entry to any citizen of the US.
Witness the drug market. How many people out there that don't use drugs know someone who uses drugs? How many of you people could pretend to have enough interest in said drugs to learn enough about who they bought them from to file an anonymous tip?
Probably a good half of the population could, with almost no work at all, and the possiblity of a reward. Including many police officers. I know I could, at least three times. (That is, I know three completely different sets of drug users, who I assume do not have the same supplier as they live very far apart.)
How many people actually do that?
Almost no one.
How many people know someone who's a murderer and don't turn them in?
Almost no one. They'd have to be a real good friend or close relative, or you'd have to think the murder was justified in some way.
If it requires a valid passport to get into the US, and people commonly, for whatever reason, need to sneak in without them, there will be a black market up and down the Canadian border within a year. Everyone will know a guy who knows who to get you in touch with, exactly like drugs are now. (Well, everyone who lives near the border will know a guy, I guess. Probably not people in Florida. OTOH, people in Florida probably already know a guy who knows a guy who can get people out of Cuba.)
The only way there won't be a black market is if everyone gets passports, or they start not letting US citizens into Canada without a US passport, so no one has a problem getting back.
DVD codecs don't have to be licensed. There's no patent behind CSS.
We already tried that trick. You can't fight the Fed.
Nowadays, we have 'limited liability' corporations and owners can't lose anything beyond the amount of their ownership, ie, the value of their stock.
Without limited liability, if you owned 0.01% of a company that, say, dumped toxic waste, and the other guy who owned 99.99% of the company ran off, you could be fined for the entire amount of cleanup and personally sued by everyone injured, and for any outstanding debts.
People who own stock in criminal companies are damn lucky nowadays, even if their $500,000 worth of stocks plummets to $10,000.
However, the Berne convention would seem to stop them from being able to take away the copyright of Windows and stay within Berne. However, they could stop enforcing the copyright, and put insanely low fines on copyright violations of it, like two euros a copy. Or put mandatory license fees on OSes of five euros, like the US has on music.
Or all sorts of things that effectively make it free to copy, while technically leaving the copyright intact.
I think large parts of the EU would like the diplomatic row this would create with the U.S.
And it has nothing to do with the type of clock. We've measured clocks in zero-G moving and not moving, or, at least, moving much slower. They're different. What's more, they're different in a way that's identical to what was predicted 90 years ago. The whole 'Yes, but it might be weird clocks' worked when it was one experiment. We've got thousands for satellites in orbit, and all of them demonstrate time dilation, at least all the ones that are accurate enough to measure it and can be allowed to let their clocks get out of sync.
And unless you have a better theory of why Mercury is rotating with 43 extra acrsecs a century, perhaps you better be quiet. For those of you who don't know, Mercury is suffering spacetime distortion from the sun. It's got slightly less time and slightly more space than we do, and thus our measurements of it are 'wrong'. If we measured it from Mercury it would be right and all the other planets would be in weird orbits.
I don't know where people get crazy ideas that all of physics is some absurd pie-in-the-sky shit. This isn't philosophy....if a scientific theory isn't disprovable, it's not a fucking scientific theory. Relativity is disprovable, and repeated experiments have demonstrated that it works reasonable well.
Granted, you could have proven that it was Fair Use anyway, but the point is, you don't have to....MGM just admitted it.
Whereas, if they'd sued a distributor of CSS breaking software before, they could have argued that ripping things to your computer isn't Fair Use.
You mean Iran. We've never been at war with Iraq, Iraq is our friend.
And you have no problems with random areas of roads designed with a much lower speed limit, and automated sensors to send people tickets?
I'm just wondering here. You seem to have fallen into the mindset that the law exists to serve the police.
In my state, Georgia, we have many laws designed to limit the police from actually enforcing the law because we don't want them to do it that way. For example, they park on the side of the road and give traffic tickets unless they are visible for 100 feet. We have laws against entrapment. We have laws against using illegally obtained evidence.
We also have laws against pulling people over solely to check their insurance and license. Why?
It's not because it would delay people, it's because it's not what we pay the police for. The police, contrary to what almost everyone seems to think, are not there to enforce the law, they are there to keep the peace, and to do that, they stop people from breaking the law.
If they actually wanted to get people without insurance off the road (Which would be very helpful.), it would be trivial to do with a system that costs less. Just, duh, tied their tag to their insurance and when they cancel send a nice meter maid around to collect any tags that do not currently have insurance.
The police like this one because it lets them automatically ticket people driving without insurance and give them tickets, instead of stopping people from driving without insurance, which wouldn't make them any money at all.
Which is really the danger of any automated 'crime billing' system. If the police can set up a machine on the side of the road that generates X amount of money when someone breaking a law goes by, it seems rather hard to figure out a reason they would try to stop people from breaking that law. As the entire fucking point of laws is so that police can stop you from doing that behavior, which supposedly regains the peace, that seems rather counterproductive.
Which is why, in general, we don't let people enforce the law in an automated manner. We've already gone down that slope with traffic lights, and look at the governments ignoring the studies that say you can reduce traffic light fatalities if you give people an additional .5 seconds of yellow light, because that would cut into traffic camera revenue. They want people breaking the law.