In the US, we just get lame commercials about 'getting all you deserve' from your insurance company. (Ignoring the grammarical point you don't 'deserve' anything from them, if you pay for a service and don't get it, you say you're 'owed' it. Someone saying they 'deserve' something makes them sound like a little kid whining how life isn't fair. But that's a side rant.)
These commercials usually come on during the day or late at night, right next to the Paxil and the computer training ads. Presumably these ads are for unemployeed people who keep random hours.
I believe you're talking about ACLs (access control lists). Linux has a few patches that can do that, but they aren't in the main source tree, don't ask me why.
Also interesting is LIDS, which lets you set various system permissions from programs called CAPs. While CAPs are built in, all they area apprently used for default-wise is telling the difference between root and not-root, but with LIDS you can set them manually.
What happens is that someone doesn't read the article very well, and then everyone else reads his posts and not the article at all.
Frankly, I want 'Foes' working correctly for those of us reading at -1 so I don't have to see uninformed people like this. I don't understand why they've got this big complicated system up and won't got the tiny last step and let killfiles work.
Like I said, the way to do it would be to only have the sky marshal respond after the plane is taken over. Then he has the gun and the hijackers just have knifes.
And I don't see how you could threaten an entire airplane with one gun, anyway, they have many separate areas. Even if you try to herd everyone into one area, while you do that people will have a chance to jump the guy in the area without the gun.
Obviously, there would have to be some sort of calculation on how much fuel to dump based on how far from land you are. Or hell, just give everyone parachutes and have them leap out.
I don't even know why I bother responding to nitpicks like this. The idea was obviously off the top of my head, and it's a sound concept: Allow any passenger to disable the plane and force it to land. How you disable a plane safely is an interesting question, and it's certainly possible that it cannot be currently done, but that doesn't make the concept invalid, just inpractical.
If you want to argue that diabling the plane is a bad idea, go ahead.
A glass knife is certainly a weapon. When you hold people hostage, you don't want the same weapons you want when attacking people. A baton is a great weapon to attack someone with. A knife is a great weapon to hold against someone's throat to keep other people from attacking you with batons. It's fairly easy enough to walk up behind someone with a palmed knife and grab them.
Heck, three people attacking at once can pretty much disarm anyone, no matter if they're carrying a knife, baton, gun, whatever. If you're a super-kickass fighter, or have swords or something, you might hold off two people, but not three. That's the whole point of hostage taking, so you don't have to hold them off.
Yes, you can tell it if he's carrying the fucking medal at the time. That's what made them suspicious in the first place. That, and a bullet on a keychain.
The obvious conclusion to reach about an 85 year old guy carrying a metal star that says 'Congressional Medal of Honor' and a bullet on a keychain is that he is going to hurl the medal at someone like a throwing star and then hold the rest of the plane hostage by threatening to throw the bullet at them, instead of, oh, assuming he was in WWII.
Let's call the devices microwave cookers and the EM spectrum microwave waves. (Yes, 'microwave waves' is silly, but it makes things much clearer.)
If microwave waves messed up someone's pacemaker, he was standing in a really bad place.
The reason that microwave cookers used to screw up pacemakers is that they gave off big rotating fields of magnetism. It didn't have a thing to do with the microwave waves themselves. Pacemakers are programmed using magnets, and exposing them to giant rotating magnetic fields is a bad idea.
People operating a microwave cooker shouldn't be hit with microwave waves at all. Microwave waves, while fairly harmless to a pacemaker, will cook you. Anyone being hit with them is a bad idea, it's like getting a sunburn inside your body, hence the whole shielded door interlock thing. Small amounts of them are okay, but microwave waves are able to cook a turkey, they're certainly able to cook you, and unlike conventional stoves, you cannot feel the microwave waves, as they are heating the inside of you up, where you do not have nerve endings.
Of course, none of this applies any more, as current microwave cookers don't give off that much magnetism anymore, and current pacemakers are much less sensitive to random magnetism. (And there are no people with 'old' pacemakers out there, they have to be replaced every ten years or so when the batteries fail.) So the old 'can't have pacemakers around microwaves' doesn't apply anymore.)
In case anyone cares, yes, I do have a pacemaker, and I microwave all the time. The only time I get nervous is when people run those handheld metal detectors all over my body. And I don't stand go into power planets because of the giant generators.
So, the results is that...terrorists have control of the airplane. As opposed to not having a sky marshal, and having the terrorist pull out a glass knife from where he's sown it inside his shoe, and...take over the plane without a fight?
Just because you can think of situtations where a sky marshal fails doesn't mean that having one is worse than not having one. The situtation you gave is in no way worse than not having a sky marshal, except that the terrorists now have a single gun.
And your situtation is silly, anyway. Airlines already have people to deal with drunken passagers. You specifically write the rules where sky marshals only react if people take over the plane, not any random drunk.
(Of course, another way to keep anyone from ever taking over an airplane again is to stop worrying about security, or who you let on the plane, or if they're carrying a small nuclear bomb. You just give everyone a 'dump all fuel' button at their seat. Someone's going to push their button when terrorists take over the plane, forcing the plane to land right then, terrorist's plans be damned. The only problem there is idiots who press their button when terrorists haven't taken over the plane, but five years in prison for that ought to cure most people of it. (If it's not safe to dump the fuel randomly, substitute 'jam close the fuel lines', or anyting which requires the plane to land in five minutes or less.))
People always get confused about the fire thing. It's perfectly legal to shout 'fire' in a crowded theather, even if there isn't a fire. Later, you will be arrested for starting a panic, not 'shouting fire'. In fact, that's the reason that you don't get in trouble if there is a fire...you didn't start the panic, the fire did. And if you yelling 'fire' doesn't start a panic, even if there isn't a fire, you probably won't get arrested, though the police might 'have a few words' with you about attempting to start a panic, and the theater wouldn't be too happy with you either. (Don't try that at home, for all I know, 'attempted panic starting' is also a crime in some places.)
Just like if you hire someone to murder someone else, you get arrested for murder, not 'telling someone to murder someone else'.
Same thing with libel and slander. Telling falsehoods about people is legal. Damaging their reputation with falsehoods is not. (Hence the reason that Larry Flint got away with calling someone a pig fucker or whatever, as there's no way anyone thought he was serious.)
The speech is legal, but the results (or the attempted results) of the speech, which have caused (or tried to cause) direct harm to others, are not. Which is the reason this doesn't apply at all to what the DOJ is trying to do, these sites aren't causing harm to anyone. Encouraging people to break the law isn't illegal in any form or fashion in the United States. (Unless you don't tell them it's illegal, in which case you could be causing harm to them, but that's more a civil matter they would sue you over then anything illegal.)
The point of feeding millions of bad addresses to people isn't to get rid of spammers per se, it's to make the 'millions of addresses' CDs wronger.
In other words, while a fake address wouldn't be that useful to give to one spammer, a lot of the harvester bots are just people selling the addresses to other people. Hence, a single bad address might got to a thousand people. If they get sold 'a million addresses', and 50% of those are crap, then we've just cut the amount of spam sent in half. (And, just as importantly, we've cut the number of responses in half.)
Some email address sellers claim the addresses are 'verified', but they usually aren't.
Some people consider it an added bonus that this make email address harvesters look unreliable, which they are anyway, but that really is counteracted by the people that are being 'helped' by this are the spammers. But sowing distrusts in that industry is a good thing, even if it does indirectly help some spammers realize that address sellers are lying.
No, Tier 1 NTP servers, like the one's run by the government, usually don't run anything else at all. Running HTTP just slows things down.
That's my point, that no address at tier 1 NTP servers MUST be valid. Yes, there are hopefully other servers in said organization that will have contract information, but that doesn't change the fact there is no mandated contact address for that server.
And 'noc' isn't for infrastructure problems with a server, it's for infrastructure problems with a network. Unless said server is a run by the people in charge of network infrastructure, it is not required to have a noc@ address.
You know, all this is very simply proven by the fact no one is complaining about dialup users not having RFC mandated contact addresses.;)
Here is a fun experiment to decide whether or not common carriers have the right to decide what devices are hooked up to their network.
Take a standard computer power cable. Slice it open, figure out which is the ground, and ignore it. Go outside out house, or in your backroom, whereever the phone junction box is located. Open it. Plug the cable in, being careful not to short the ends. Now, touch one of the non-ground ends to the red and the other to the green plug. (You probably want to unhook all the phones in your house first.)
And see how goddamn fast the phone company cuts off your service. In fact, they will not only disconnect your service, they will physically cut your wires. And I bet they don't even have a 'wiring the power grid into the phone line' termination clause, unlike most ISPs, which do have 'hooking an open relay up to your connection' termination clause.
Common carriers cannot ban content. They can certainly decide you can't send 120 volts though their phone lines, or send unsolicted bulk email (or allow other people to send UBE, which is what he's doing), or hook up a train car that's seventy-five feet tall to the common carrier railroads, etc, as none of those are bans on content, just networking standards.
No, that still won't always give you the correct address, even if they follow the RFC to the letter. If they are running a http server, webmaster should always be valid. But if they are running, say, only a ntp, or a gopher server, there are no names listed for those services.
OTOH, if they aren't running an HTTP server, you couldn't run a harvester anyway.;)
I guess 'noc' might always supposed to be valid, but it's possible to argue a certain server doesn't have a network infrastructor. (And, in the real world, almost no one use noc anyway.)
God, I was being to think that I was the only person suspecting them, and if I was just paranoid or something.
I was just in a debate about this yesterday about how it's nonsensical to give out GPL'd software with ads in it, that's not a valid business model at all, as anyone can just remove the ads and give out the same product, ad-free.
Re:Obfuscated source code is not GPLable.....
on
Abusing the GPL?
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It's a lawsuit, you simply force the developers to appear and testify.
If they lie, you make ask them to make any modifications to the program, and they will fail.
You would be able to argue that tar and gzip are normally including in an OS, and 'However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.'
Hence, it's possible to argue that as while tar and gzip are needed for compiling the code, they come with the OS. However, that doesn't exactly work, as they are also needed for modifying the source. However, once you get into that, you could just as easily argue that you need a text editor and a shell to modify the code.
Legally, it may be possible to demand, under the GPL, that you receive non-compressed, non-archived files, along with a means to modify them. This is probably a flaw in the GPL, it should list some standard formats, or just say 'archive format customarily used for software interchange', like it says 'medium customarily used for software interchange'.
However, this is just a valid way to annoy GPL software providers, and not really any sort of loophole.
Re:Source code = preferred form for modification
on
Abusing the GPL?
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Doesn't work that way. While is is trivial to add a file to a GPL'd project that is itself under the LGPL, or BSD, or whatever license, or, hell, even public domain, the product itself has to abide by the 'harshest' license, and hence the entire thing is GPL. Yes, you can take the LGPL file out and use it like an LGPL file, but while it's being compiled into a GPL project it's GPL.
And you cannot use GPL 'hooks' from a non-GPL project.
Re:Why did it take so many posts?
on
Abusing the GPL?
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If copyright was set up correctly OSS developers would get the full source code.
To copyright something, you used to have to submit the entire thing. It wouldn't be that hard to write a law saying when you copyrighted something, nowdays, you had to submit the entire thing. (Now, I can see just making some part of it public, we don't want the library of congress to turn into a way to steal code from everyone. OTOH, if everyone was required to turn over all their code, then there would be a lot less code stealing in the first place.)
But, anyway, it doesn't matter. 14 year old code is not that useful, as almost none of it is unique. If commercial software hasn't been able to reinvent certain code in 14 years, then I feel pretty sorry for them, and I'll let them have the code.
Actaully, I think the best way would be to impliment my first idea, require all software distributed whatsoever to have all source code at the copyright office, and all of it dumped into the public domain every three years. Yes, three years, that's all the time you get from writing software.
But 14 years is a reasonable middle group, and is the shortest I want to go unless commerical software gets the source code dumped into the public domain, not just the binaries.
Re:The GNU GPL has a clause against this
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 1
The only logical possible way to interpet 'preferred' is to make it mean 'the language that the distributer itself uses'. If this GPL-loophole company itself uses a certain version of the code to make changes, then that is the version they have to release.
Whch has the added bonus, if you disassemble a GPL app that, for whatever reason, you have no source to (Say it's been lost.), and you modify the assembly language, you can then issue patches in that assembly language, as that is your 'preferred' way of editing the program.
It can only be libel or slander if someone besides you sees it. As a matter of fact, I believe 'the public' has to see it, for sufficent values of 'the public', so just one or two other people seeing it may not count. (Presumably, you could correct the misconceptions of a few people easily, and a few people having a bad opinion of you isn't going to hurt anything.) Regardless, if it's only sent to you, you can't sue.
But, of course, I am receiving plenty of emails with 50 names in the To: field. If one of them said something like 'We are sending this to you because you have indicated an interest in pre-teen girls.', and other people saw it (Even if they had received the same massage.), you certainly have grounds for a suit, as implying that someone enjoys child pornography is a damned good way to try to ruin their reputation. I don't know if you win, but it should be interesting.
including allegations of murder by Anmesty International.
For those of you keeping track at home, it's the allegations of murder that are by Anmesty International, not someone making allegations that Anmesty International murdered people.;)
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In the US, we just get lame commercials about 'getting all you deserve' from your insurance company. (Ignoring the grammarical point you don't 'deserve' anything from them, if you pay for a service and don't get it, you say you're 'owed' it. Someone saying they 'deserve' something makes them sound like a little kid whining how life isn't fair. But that's a side rant.)
These commercials usually come on during the day or late at night, right next to the Paxil and the computer training ads. Presumably these ads are for unemployeed people who keep random hours.
Also interesting is LIDS, which lets you set various system permissions from programs called CAPs. While CAPs are built in, all they area apprently used for default-wise is telling the difference between root and not-root, but with LIDS you can set them manually.
You can always just extract the scripts and view them before install. Most of them are less then a hundred lines, if they even exist at all.
Frankly, I want 'Foes' working correctly for those of us reading at -1 so I don't have to see uninformed people like this. I don't understand why they've got this big complicated system up and won't got the tiny last step and let killfiles work.
And I don't see how you could threaten an entire airplane with one gun, anyway, they have many separate areas. Even if you try to herd everyone into one area, while you do that people will have a chance to jump the guy in the area without the gun.
I don't even know why I bother responding to nitpicks like this. The idea was obviously off the top of my head, and it's a sound concept: Allow any passenger to disable the plane and force it to land. How you disable a plane safely is an interesting question, and it's certainly possible that it cannot be currently done, but that doesn't make the concept invalid, just inpractical.
If you want to argue that diabling the plane is a bad idea, go ahead.
Heck, three people attacking at once can pretty much disarm anyone, no matter if they're carrying a knife, baton, gun, whatever. If you're a super-kickass fighter, or have swords or something, you might hold off two people, but not three. That's the whole point of hostage taking, so you don't have to hold them off.
The obvious conclusion to reach about an 85 year old guy carrying a metal star that says 'Congressional Medal of Honor' and a bullet on a keychain is that he is going to hurl the medal at someone like a throwing star and then hold the rest of the plane hostage by threatening to throw the bullet at them, instead of, oh, assuming he was in WWII.
If microwave waves messed up someone's pacemaker, he was standing in a really bad place.
The reason that microwave cookers used to screw up pacemakers is that they gave off big rotating fields of magnetism. It didn't have a thing to do with the microwave waves themselves. Pacemakers are programmed using magnets, and exposing them to giant rotating magnetic fields is a bad idea.
People operating a microwave cooker shouldn't be hit with microwave waves at all. Microwave waves, while fairly harmless to a pacemaker, will cook you. Anyone being hit with them is a bad idea, it's like getting a sunburn inside your body, hence the whole shielded door interlock thing. Small amounts of them are okay, but microwave waves are able to cook a turkey, they're certainly able to cook you, and unlike conventional stoves, you cannot feel the microwave waves, as they are heating the inside of you up, where you do not have nerve endings.
Of course, none of this applies any more, as current microwave cookers don't give off that much magnetism anymore, and current pacemakers are much less sensitive to random magnetism. (And there are no people with 'old' pacemakers out there, they have to be replaced every ten years or so when the batteries fail.) So the old 'can't have pacemakers around microwaves' doesn't apply anymore.)
In case anyone cares, yes, I do have a pacemaker, and I microwave all the time. The only time I get nervous is when people run those handheld metal detectors all over my body. And I don't stand go into power planets because of the giant generators.
Just because you can think of situtations where a sky marshal fails doesn't mean that having one is worse than not having one. The situtation you gave is in no way worse than not having a sky marshal, except that the terrorists now have a single gun.
And your situtation is silly, anyway. Airlines already have people to deal with drunken passagers. You specifically write the rules where sky marshals only react if people take over the plane, not any random drunk.
(Of course, another way to keep anyone from ever taking over an airplane again is to stop worrying about security, or who you let on the plane, or if they're carrying a small nuclear bomb. You just give everyone a 'dump all fuel' button at their seat. Someone's going to push their button when terrorists take over the plane, forcing the plane to land right then, terrorist's plans be damned. The only problem there is idiots who press their button when terrorists haven't taken over the plane, but five years in prison for that ought to cure most people of it. (If it's not safe to dump the fuel randomly, substitute 'jam close the fuel lines', or anyting which requires the plane to land in five minutes or less.))
No one were against slavery laws 100 years ago, at least not in the US, considering slavery was outlawed about 135 years ago. ;)
Just like if you hire someone to murder someone else, you get arrested for murder, not 'telling someone to murder someone else'.
Same thing with libel and slander. Telling falsehoods about people is legal. Damaging their reputation with falsehoods is not. (Hence the reason that Larry Flint got away with calling someone a pig fucker or whatever, as there's no way anyone thought he was serious.)
The speech is legal, but the results (or the attempted results) of the speech, which have caused (or tried to cause) direct harm to others, are not. Which is the reason this doesn't apply at all to what the DOJ is trying to do, these sites aren't causing harm to anyone. Encouraging people to break the law isn't illegal in any form or fashion in the United States. (Unless you don't tell them it's illegal, in which case you could be causing harm to them, but that's more a civil matter they would sue you over then anything illegal.)
In other words, while a fake address wouldn't be that useful to give to one spammer, a lot of the harvester bots are just people selling the addresses to other people. Hence, a single bad address might got to a thousand people. If they get sold 'a million addresses', and 50% of those are crap, then we've just cut the amount of spam sent in half. (And, just as importantly, we've cut the number of responses in half.)
Some email address sellers claim the addresses are 'verified', but they usually aren't.
Some people consider it an added bonus that this make email address harvesters look unreliable, which they are anyway, but that really is counteracted by the people that are being 'helped' by this are the spammers. But sowing distrusts in that industry is a good thing, even if it does indirectly help some spammers realize that address sellers are lying.
wget -r obeys robots.txt by default. Watch it next time, it will suck in robots.txt without you telling it to.
That's my point, that no address at tier 1 NTP servers MUST be valid. Yes, there are hopefully other servers in said organization that will have contract information, but that doesn't change the fact there is no mandated contact address for that server.
And 'noc' isn't for infrastructure problems with a server, it's for infrastructure problems with a network. Unless said server is a run by the people in charge of network infrastructure, it is not required to have a noc@ address.
You know, all this is very simply proven by the fact no one is complaining about dialup users not having RFC mandated contact addresses. ;)
Take a standard computer power cable. Slice it open, figure out which is the ground, and ignore it. Go outside out house, or in your backroom, whereever the phone junction box is located. Open it. Plug the cable in, being careful not to short the ends. Now, touch one of the non-ground ends to the red and the other to the green plug. (You probably want to unhook all the phones in your house first.)
And see how goddamn fast the phone company cuts off your service. In fact, they will not only disconnect your service, they will physically cut your wires. And I bet they don't even have a 'wiring the power grid into the phone line' termination clause, unlike most ISPs, which do have 'hooking an open relay up to your connection' termination clause.
Common carriers cannot ban content. They can certainly decide you can't send 120 volts though their phone lines, or send unsolicted bulk email (or allow other people to send UBE, which is what he's doing), or hook up a train car that's seventy-five feet tall to the common carrier railroads, etc, as none of those are bans on content, just networking standards.
OTOH, if they aren't running an HTTP server, you couldn't run a harvester anyway. ;)
I guess 'noc' might always supposed to be valid, but it's possible to argue a certain server doesn't have a network infrastructor. (And, in the real world, almost no one use noc anyway.)
I was just in a debate about this yesterday about how it's nonsensical to give out GPL'd software with ads in it, that's not a valid business model at all, as anyone can just remove the ads and give out the same product, ad-free.
If they lie, you make ask them to make any modifications to the program, and they will fail.
Hence, it's possible to argue that as while tar and gzip are needed for compiling the code, they come with the OS. However, that doesn't exactly work, as they are also needed for modifying the source. However, once you get into that, you could just as easily argue that you need a text editor and a shell to modify the code.
Legally, it may be possible to demand, under the GPL, that you receive non-compressed, non-archived files, along with a means to modify them. This is probably a flaw in the GPL, it should list some standard formats, or just say 'archive format customarily used for software interchange', like it says 'medium customarily used for software interchange'.
However, this is just a valid way to annoy GPL software providers, and not really any sort of loophole.
And you cannot use GPL 'hooks' from a non-GPL project.
To copyright something, you used to have to submit the entire thing. It wouldn't be that hard to write a law saying when you copyrighted something, nowdays, you had to submit the entire thing. (Now, I can see just making some part of it public, we don't want the library of congress to turn into a way to steal code from everyone. OTOH, if everyone was required to turn over all their code, then there would be a lot less code stealing in the first place.)
But, anyway, it doesn't matter. 14 year old code is not that useful, as almost none of it is unique. If commercial software hasn't been able to reinvent certain code in 14 years, then I feel pretty sorry for them, and I'll let them have the code.
Actaully, I think the best way would be to impliment my first idea, require all software distributed whatsoever to have all source code at the copyright office, and all of it dumped into the public domain every three years. Yes, three years, that's all the time you get from writing software.
But 14 years is a reasonable middle group, and is the shortest I want to go unless commerical software gets the source code dumped into the public domain, not just the binaries.
Whch has the added bonus, if you disassemble a GPL app that, for whatever reason, you have no source to (Say it's been lost.), and you modify the assembly language, you can then issue patches in that assembly language, as that is your 'preferred' way of editing the program.
But, of course, I am receiving plenty of emails with 50 names in the To: field. If one of them said something like 'We are sending this to you because you have indicated an interest in pre-teen girls.', and other people saw it (Even if they had received the same massage.), you certainly have grounds for a suit, as implying that someone enjoys child pornography is a damned good way to try to ruin their reputation. I don't know if you win, but it should be interesting.
For those of you keeping track at home, it's the allegations of murder that are by Anmesty International, not someone making allegations that Anmesty International murdered people. ;)