It's a marketing success. Everyone has now heard the AJAX buzzword. Technically, though, it's still a solution in search of a problem. HTML+JS is a compatibility nightmare as Internet Explorer development repeatedly creates a JavaScript/JScript incompatibility. First it was DOM, and now that Firefox and IE agree on DOM, it's time to bastardize JavaScript into the next, incompatible JScript. The whole point of AJAX and using the Web Browser as a basic app client is that it's portable. JScript will find a way to make sure it isn't.
I am still waiting patiently for someone who actually wants to get beyond the ZERO sysadmin skills. As long as you believe that maintaining a computer is a black art done only by hackers and engineers, you have lost. I teach people how to use Linux. And until there were more trolls and flame wars than there was intelligent conversation, I used to post free support to many Linux and OSS mailing lists.
Believe it or not, RTFM is not an insult. Every time someone has told me to RTFM, it's been good use of my time. It is an acknowledgment that the person who wrote the manual did a good job, and can probably explain things better than I can. The Linux knowledge that I maintain in my brain for everyday use is more an index of useful articles and books than the accumulated trivia of 15 years of Linux.
Wait all you like; my guess is you won't ever get a result you like out of the Linux community, because those of use who use it are happy with it. I'm not speaking for other Linux users, but my time for advocacy is over. I've wasted too much time with the trolls, been the target of too many flame wars and frustrated myself trying to explain ridiculously technical issues to a layman. If you want to use Linux, go LEARN how to use it. That is, kindly RTFM. Thank you.
Someone pointed this out on the TransGaming forum, and it seems appropriate here. When you install things with Cedega, the EULA is often entirely unreadable. It seems that one of two things is true: either TransGaming has read the EULA on your behalf and provided the button to click on, or clicking on the button shows acceptance of an EULA that was not possible to read. It seems pretty clear that using Cedega to execute Windows programs is not illegal in any way (Microsoft executables aren't protected by DRM -- yet!) (and certainly not in Canada or any other locale that doesn't have DMCA-style legislation), but the result is that the EULA is mangled. I can't see how either of the above interpretations can be construed as me reading and accepting the license agreement as it was written by the software manufacturer.
I think it is becoming necessary to bind you to the EULA in a non-software-based manner. Any non-Linux vendor isn't going to test their software EULA in either WINE or Cedega, so what does this mean for Linux people? Will I blindly accept EULAs whose content I am completely unaware of (not that that's much different than now, but still...)? Does TransGaming's reading my EULA for me bind me in the same legal sense as me reading it? Does TransGaming need to provide a disclaimer about this?
In short, what's the effect of accepting a license agreement on a platform other than the one it was tested on when the license has been mangled by the time it reaches the end-user?
You can't. All security software needs to be OSS for this reason.
That being said, OSS had a 2-factor authentication mechanism available years ago. Encrypt your hard drive, save the key to a USB key and enter a passphrase. You'll need to both insert the USB key and type your passphrase for the root disk to get mounted. That's pretty much the entire system locked down.
I wonder how up-to-date Law Enforcement is on Cybercrime, i.e. crimes that are perpetrated in Cyberspace. There's just so many things that place them at a disadvantage. First, there's often the argument that no crime has even been committed. The 'net is a wild and crazy place, and if you're on it, there's personal responsibility for protecting yourself against the constant background of malware. Most people haven't been educated in this respect.
Second, IP forensics is a rather arcane art. Few are schooled, even fewer are of the calibre that Law Enforcement would need on their side. I'd guess that it's still more lucrative to be on the wrong side of the law, and given the nebulous nature of many of these crimes, there's just not much attraction to being a computer cop. There is a process, if you're interested, to become an expert witness in this field. That's a step in the right direction, but it's only part of the overall legal process. We still need Law Enforcement officials who are willing to press charges and a judge who's willing to sign required warrants.
Finally, there's the anonymity factor. Even IP forensics won't get your man. It'll get you their IP address, but it's a long way from the IP address to the culprit. There's dozens of arguments which could explain why your Internet connection has been implicated in a Cybercrime, most of them raising reasonable doubt.
It's possible, however. "Where there's a will, there's a way." We have to take these crimes out of Cyberspace, and start correlating information between network and reality. After all, there's generally financial transactions associated with large spam deliveries and 10k+ botnet DDoSing. It's a lot harder to claim that you're a victim of circumstance when not only was your IP spotted crawling through an ISPs subnet in suspicious ways, but you also received a few grand just before a mysterious DDoS that brought down a major website.
I know, they've been involved in all kinds of terrible anti-customer sorts of things lately. The fact is, I've never been unhappy with a Sony product. I think that their product quality is excellent. My portable CD player would be stolen or misplaced before breaking down, while I've lost two competing brands to a mis-aligned laser. They consistently had better battery life in their portable products than their competitors. PS/2 is an amazing platform; it's 4 years old now, and there's still new titles being released for it. There's some excellent titles for PSP. I'm planning to purchase a PS/3 in the next year or so, and I expect I'll be equally happy with it. I also don't expect that I'll have to replace it within 5 years.
Overall, Sony has a good track record. I think that there will be people who boycott them over the blinking PS/3 fiasco or the PSP astroturfing, but overall business will be good and many terrific titles will make their way to PS/3.
I've mostly curbed my blatantly piratical activities and gone back into grey-area piracy (television, backing up my own DVDs, copying CDs to my iPod, etc.), but I think that's because the novelty has worn off. Yes, I can download using a torrent, but the quality is usually not as good as what I can rip myself from the original, so I give preference to buying/renting the media. BitTorrent is useful; it is unquestionably the best distribution network available today. My initial experience with it was basically "whoa! magic!", and I'm sure that's a major factor today. Everyone I've introduced to BitTorrent is equally enthralled.
People are curious about what you can get on the wide-open Internet. Free stuff is all over the place. Downloading gives near-instant gratification (well, unless you're on a modem) without leaving your house. There is practically no competition to the ubiquity and convenience of P2P file sharing. Satellite and Digital Cable aren't IP-based solutions, so it's an extra service on top of your Internet fee. None of the major television networks allow you to pay them directly and get an Internet-based feed, nor do any of the major motion picture production houses.
I think a more sane approach to P2P piracy is to increase the rate at which people get bored with BitTorrent. Offer competing, low-cost alternatives to buying or renting the media. Provide television service on the Internet. I'm certain that I would pay money for high-quality Internet-based content delivery. I *really* want to watch live sports on the Internet. I'd love to log into my local television network and download archived copies of stuff they aired. And I'm quite willing to pay for it. I've already chosen my distribution medium, and the pirates are the only guys catering to it. Don't complain about the piracy, offer an alternative.
How does a series of RSS subscriptions duplicate the simplicity of having a single final destination for per-user messages? It seems that under your scheme I would have to subscribe to every user community that involves a person I wish to communicate with. Or do you have an idea about how per-user messages would be passed from community to community? That's called relaying, and is still prone to the same abuses as SMTP relaying. How does an online community know that a machine hasn't been compromised? If I trojan your machine, I can tell it to do anything it's capable of, including spamming dozens of RSS channels using the identity of the machine I compromised. Good luck tracking that down, or preventing it.
Your proposition does one of two things, though I'm not sure which you're advocating. It either makes e-mail more complicated for the end-user, requiring them to subscribe to a dozen different user communities, or it fails to solve the relaying issue. SMTP "allows" spam the same way you "allow" somebody to break into your home, steal your credit card or otherwise impersonate you. No matter what, you've got one hell of a hill to climb to replace the overall simplicity and ubiquity of e-mail.
The protocol is the problem in that it's vulnerable to things like these. No, inept sysadmins are the reason it's vulnerable to things like these. Any additional information in the protocol would just point back to the open relay or pwned box, which is a dead end. The only way to stop an pwned box from sending spam would be to prevent the same box from sending e-mail, period. Or are you seriously suggesting that it's possible to have a protocol that determines the sanity of the sender's machine?
Open relays are the protocol's fault? What idiot configured the mail server to accept mail from unindentified users, or from another network? I'm gonna guess you, since you clearly need changes to a well-established protocol to prevent your server from being used to send spam. Maybe you should learn how to administer a mail server before talking out your ass.
See the form above. Your "solution" falls into the "everyone needs to adopt it all at once" category. Not to mention that it solves absolutely nothing.
First of all, SMTP does not lack authentication or authorization methods. SMTP+SASL allows for authentication via login. You can also authenticate via SSL certificates. Once identity has been established by one of these methods, authorization is trivial. You can restrict relaying access based on IP. Most spam gets sent through open relays and pwned boxen, so the protocol isn't the issue: the open relays and pwned boxen are.
I think you misunderstand the concept of "delivery" here. Just like the mailman doesn't drop by your house to make sure you read your mail, delivery simply means that the recipient mail server dropped a copy of the e-mail in the location that corresponds to the address you sent it to. Whether the server is correctly configured to then make the e-mail available to the actual person who's supposed to read it, or any other reason that could cause the person to not read your mail is beyond the scope of a mail server. Most mail clients allow you to request a read certificate anyway. I'm not sure what other "nice details" you'd like to see, but "250 - Message accepted for delivery" and "550 - User not found" are useful details from my point of view.
I'm not trying to discourage you from implementing this new messaging protocol. When you're ready for primetime, write an RFC describing how it works and convince some other people to implement your idea. Also, make sure you lobby for legislation requiring everyone to use the new protocol, since that's the only hope in hell you have for widespread adoption. Good luck!
OMG Microsoft is only one company away from getting it's filthy hands on the Linux codebase! It's only months before pre-packaged Shaftnix (supported by Novell) hits the market followed by a storm of Novell-specific Linux trojans! This will make Linux people out of (shudder) LUSERS! Why should we taint our beautiful GNU/Linux with the wretched eye-candy that consumers demand?! Attacks on the GPL will continue unabated, and only prostrating yourself at the feet of the mighty RMS and installing Debian will save you from the apocalypse that will come to destroy this unholy union.
Therefore if they're marking an install as non-genuine, they aren't keeping to their own agreement Yes, that was exactly the point I was making. Please read my disclaimer more carefully; I am referring to the fact that Microsoft has some very cleverly worded license agreements that appear from experience to suggest that Microsoft doesn't keep to their own agreement. I agree that the spirit of the AA license agreement claims to allow you to keep the software after you finish school. However, you do not receive installation media in case your OS installation fails which mine did after 4 months. Therefore, their license agreement effectively allowed them to terminate my license agreement after 4 months by disabling my software. Of course, if I'd cared I could have borrowed the disks and installed again. However, a deliberate error in the burned CD that I borrowed made copying effectively impossible to even a reasonably competent user. I didn't really feel like following up in a courtroom since I don't have years of my life or millions of dollars to waste on an OS I don't care about.
Heh. That's exactly why most/.'s have their hate on for Microsoft. There is no such thing as competition in the Desktop OS market, because Microsoft used their monopoly to illegally take control of all distribution channels. Specifically, they forced vendors to either sell Microsoft products exclusively, or to pay more money if they offered a competing product. There were other anti-competitive behaviours cited in the original US v. Microsoft, but this was the most prominent. When a judgement was made against them, Microsoft funded all kinds of politicians and civil officials to take over the Department of Justice and overturn the decision. I'd even go so far as to say that Bill Gates personally helped G.W. Bush cheat at the 2004 US Election.
Most of us would love to see free and open competition between Linux, Microsoft, OSX and *BSD. Such competition would encourage software vendors to support platforms other than Microsoft/x86 and would prevent discrimination of technicians on the basis of their favourite platform. However, Microsoft didn't play by the rules 10 years ago, and we all still suffer as a result. I admit that many/.ers go over the top when they talk about Microsoft, but it's certainly hard to do so in a calm and collected manner. We all want the original judgement enforced. And we want it yesterday.
But I do hate it for the gamers, man. What are they going to do? This has become less of an issue lately. Cedega is reasonably effective for running many of the more popular titles (no, it's not free, but the subscription is cheap. In practice, you can subscribe for as long as it takes to install all your stuff and then cancel. Seriously, it's really cheap if you need it to be). Pretty much every PC MMO is available now: WoW (including the BC expansion), EVE, SWG, D&D:Stormreach, Guild Wars). A few other really good titles (mostly FPS, though some RTS in there too) rounds out the platform.
For the PC gamer who insists on running every new title as soon as it comes out, there's not much you can do. Exclusive deals are and should be worth what was paid for them. If they're not tied to PC, then the next-gen consoles look like they will see 95% of new titles in coming years. I know I'm going to pick up a PS3 instead of worrying about DX10. But if they're just an MMORPG junkie, there's a good chance that a Linux box will do the trick. In fact, they might even notice those few less milliseconds of latency.
Heh. I bet you didn't read your license agreement very carefully. If you received Microsoft software at your institution through the Academic Alliance, then you did not receive a full Windows XP license. Rather, you were given a license which allowed you to borrow their copy to install on your machine at home and a license key that allowed installation. However, you don't have any rights whatsoever to the software beyond what your classroom needs are. So, they can revoke your license without warning, or otherwise change the terms of what "genuine" means. At any rate, the expected lifespan of the software you received in school is exactly the length of the course you are taking that uses the software (and it wasn't even that long for me, not that I cared since I devoted myself to Linux anyway).
Disclaimer: this applies to Microsoft software obtained through the Academic Alliance program only. The actual words of the license agreement and my actual experience may disagree; however I'm going with my experience on this one, since it's similar to all other Microsoft licenses I've had to deal with.
Judge Wells asked IBM to help SCO out in any way he could. ROFL! This is legalese for "I'm sorry your opponent is incompetent, but we do have to get through the trial." I wonder if they get to send SCO a bill for consulting services rendered.
And just like the DMCA doesn't prevent the Fair Use defense:
Protection for technological protection
measures and exceptions and limitations consistent with international
treaties remain critical components for any convention. So, no, the narrower signal-based treaty doesn't grant exclusive rights to broadcasters, just the right to implement DRM and have it be illegal via this treaty to circumvent said measures. In fact, a copy of the broadcast signal would probably be considered "evidence" that you had deliberately circumvented the DRM. All it takes is one sentence to entirely change the meaning of this document, and clearly it works since you think the Americans have taken a reasonable stand on this issue.
We're gonna spend lots of money I researched moving to India a while back since they were and still are the hotspot for Linux/Java solutions. Like any geek, my biggest concern was "Can I get DSL?" The answer is "Yes." You also don't have to fight an uphill battle against Microsoft brainwashing, so you've got fresh minds to educate. For those who are willing to travel, India looks like a lucrative change in scenery.
So where can I go to hire you to clean up my code repository with all the lovely new Flash 9 features, then port the J2EE app I managed to coerce onto JRun onto a server that isn't broken? Oh yeah, I used the Flash gateway servlet, too, so you'll need to redo the client-server with one of the numerous other options. Or have I kinda been hosed by a Macro-dobe legacy? Besides, why should I pay you when my pure Java solution is still really easy to maintain?
Your post is like an advertisement for every vendor that offers the lock-in feature: "Company X -- We sucked the big one for the last 7 years, but we promise it's all better with this release." I stopped listening to that crap a long time ago. If Adobe really wanted me to consider Flash a real application development environment, maybe they shouldn't have let me make those complaints -- ever.
Flash is not useful for developing rich Internet applications because:
It is almost entirely client-side code, and not very efficient at that. Java applets are more portable (because Sun releases Java on more platforms simultaneously) and faster (Flash UIs are soooo sloooow) for executing client-side code. Even some JavaScript is a better choice in many cases.
The stuff that executes server-side has to go through the "Flash gateway servlet" which won't work with anything but JRun, a horrible, unsupported, poorly documented, crash-happy piece of crap masquerading as a J2EE server. Applet-Servlet, JSP or even AJAX RPC (god forbid!) make for better server-side code.
You can't separate the ActionScript into separate files. Every VCS that I've seen Flash developers use gets filled up with dozens of binary versions of the.FLA source. Some even version-control the.SWF as well. Yuck. Obviously Flash developers weren't meant to use version control, which makes collaborating with them a real PITA.
Flash is useful for making animations, and only for making animations. Why the output couldn't be a standard movie file format instead, I'll never know. Adobe needs to stop trying to get into the web market and stick to PhotoShop.
Disabled!? It's like buying a car with turbo and finding out after buying it that this turbo 'feature' was disabled. What's not clear about that? It's accurate, too, since VT is listed as a feature of the chip they were buying and was specifically disabled by HP. If you read the linked forum thread, you will see that the people who got screwed over by this did their research and knew what they wanted. Calling these complaints "whining" really trivializes HP's screw-up.
In the words of a SOX-IS Project Manager I once worked with, "Incompetence is an excuse." That certainly doesn't inspire any confidence in me that SOX-IS controls actually do anything useful.
Sounds like the "early" days of DSL service here in Canada. DSL had a range of about 3km from the CO, provided that the CO was correctly outfitted. Most communities weren't close enough to an upgraded CO when DSL service was first offered, so cable got really popular for broadband. Most network-savvy people quickly realized that cable companies are teh sux0r when it comes to Internet service, so switched to DSL as soon as it was available in their area.
However, unlike the United States, Canada has laws that forced Telcos to eventually upgrade all the COs, regardless of what they felt the market would actually be in a particular area. In the end, I think that it was good for business anyway; there's very healthy broadband competition: 2 large Telcos that provide residential and business connections as well as reselling bandwidth to smaller DSL and WiFi providers and a cable company in case you don't like DSL or don't really care about quality, just quantity.
My understanding is that the United States has very similar network infrastructure to Canada at the time everything started rolling out in 1998. There are some concentrations of high-bandwidth, low-latency networks, but everything is mostly dial-up or cheap broadband. Unfortunately, the difference between the quality of network service you will find in Canada and your average provider in the States is considerable. Maybe the US will prove that capitalism and market forces can bring the aging infrastructure up to snuff in short order, but it's almost 10 years behind Canada and large parts of Europe right now. Believe me, I feel for you.
I was skeptical when I saw the first article about HDDVDBackup, but there's definitely a posted title key on the Doom9 forum to correspond with this release. I guess the other 2 keys they posted should be released soon as well. The only way to truly implement volume encryption that can't be beaten is to avoid the software player altogether, as the title key needs to be in memory, if only briefly. The posts on the Doom9 forum claim that this is the way that title keys are extracted, and I'm inclined to believe them.
Good job beating the DRM MAFIAA again! Information truly was meant to be free:)
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It's a marketing success. Everyone has now heard the AJAX buzzword. Technically, though, it's still a solution in search of a problem. HTML+JS is a compatibility nightmare as Internet Explorer development repeatedly creates a JavaScript/JScript incompatibility. First it was DOM, and now that Firefox and IE agree on DOM, it's time to bastardize JavaScript into the next, incompatible JScript. The whole point of AJAX and using the Web Browser as a basic app client is that it's portable. JScript will find a way to make sure it isn't.
/me yawns wide enough to drive a truck through.
/me goes back to sleep.
What's that? Vista? Oh well, SWG and WoW still run on Linux.
I am still waiting patiently for someone who actually wants to get beyond the ZERO sysadmin skills. As long as you believe that maintaining a computer is a black art done only by hackers and engineers, you have lost. I teach people how to use Linux. And until there were more trolls and flame wars than there was intelligent conversation, I used to post free support to many Linux and OSS mailing lists.
Believe it or not, RTFM is not an insult. Every time someone has told me to RTFM, it's been good use of my time. It is an acknowledgment that the person who wrote the manual did a good job, and can probably explain things better than I can. The Linux knowledge that I maintain in my brain for everyday use is more an index of useful articles and books than the accumulated trivia of 15 years of Linux.
Wait all you like; my guess is you won't ever get a result you like out of the Linux community, because those of use who use it are happy with it. I'm not speaking for other Linux users, but my time for advocacy is over. I've wasted too much time with the trolls, been the target of too many flame wars and frustrated myself trying to explain ridiculously technical issues to a layman. If you want to use Linux, go LEARN how to use it. That is, kindly RTFM. Thank you.
Someone pointed this out on the TransGaming forum, and it seems appropriate here. When you install things with Cedega, the EULA is often entirely unreadable. It seems that one of two things is true: either TransGaming has read the EULA on your behalf and provided the button to click on, or clicking on the button shows acceptance of an EULA that was not possible to read. It seems pretty clear that using Cedega to execute Windows programs is not illegal in any way (Microsoft executables aren't protected by DRM -- yet!) (and certainly not in Canada or any other locale that doesn't have DMCA-style legislation), but the result is that the EULA is mangled. I can't see how either of the above interpretations can be construed as me reading and accepting the license agreement as it was written by the software manufacturer.
I think it is becoming necessary to bind you to the EULA in a non-software-based manner. Any non-Linux vendor isn't going to test their software EULA in either WINE or Cedega, so what does this mean for Linux people? Will I blindly accept EULAs whose content I am completely unaware of (not that that's much different than now, but still...)? Does TransGaming's reading my EULA for me bind me in the same legal sense as me reading it? Does TransGaming need to provide a disclaimer about this?
In short, what's the effect of accepting a license agreement on a platform other than the one it was tested on when the license has been mangled by the time it reaches the end-user?
You can't. All security software needs to be OSS for this reason.
That being said, OSS had a 2-factor authentication mechanism available years ago. Encrypt your hard drive, save the key to a USB key and enter a passphrase. You'll need to both insert the USB key and type your passphrase for the root disk to get mounted. That's pretty much the entire system locked down.
This article appears to detail that process.
I wonder how up-to-date Law Enforcement is on Cybercrime, i.e. crimes that are perpetrated in Cyberspace. There's just so many things that place them at a disadvantage. First, there's often the argument that no crime has even been committed. The 'net is a wild and crazy place, and if you're on it, there's personal responsibility for protecting yourself against the constant background of malware. Most people haven't been educated in this respect.
Second, IP forensics is a rather arcane art. Few are schooled, even fewer are of the calibre that Law Enforcement would need on their side. I'd guess that it's still more lucrative to be on the wrong side of the law, and given the nebulous nature of many of these crimes, there's just not much attraction to being a computer cop. There is a process, if you're interested, to become an expert witness in this field. That's a step in the right direction, but it's only part of the overall legal process. We still need Law Enforcement officials who are willing to press charges and a judge who's willing to sign required warrants.
Finally, there's the anonymity factor. Even IP forensics won't get your man. It'll get you their IP address, but it's a long way from the IP address to the culprit. There's dozens of arguments which could explain why your Internet connection has been implicated in a Cybercrime, most of them raising reasonable doubt.
It's possible, however. "Where there's a will, there's a way." We have to take these crimes out of Cyberspace, and start correlating information between network and reality. After all, there's generally financial transactions associated with large spam deliveries and 10k+ botnet DDoSing. It's a lot harder to claim that you're a victim of circumstance when not only was your IP spotted crawling through an ISPs subnet in suspicious ways, but you also received a few grand just before a mysterious DDoS that brought down a major website.
So what?
I know, they've been involved in all kinds of terrible anti-customer sorts of things lately. The fact is, I've never been unhappy with a Sony product. I think that their product quality is excellent. My portable CD player would be stolen or misplaced before breaking down, while I've lost two competing brands to a mis-aligned laser. They consistently had better battery life in their portable products than their competitors. PS/2 is an amazing platform; it's 4 years old now, and there's still new titles being released for it. There's some excellent titles for PSP. I'm planning to purchase a PS/3 in the next year or so, and I expect I'll be equally happy with it. I also don't expect that I'll have to replace it within 5 years.
Overall, Sony has a good track record. I think that there will be people who boycott them over the blinking PS/3 fiasco or the PSP astroturfing, but overall business will be good and many terrific titles will make their way to PS/3.
I've mostly curbed my blatantly piratical activities and gone back into grey-area piracy (television, backing up my own DVDs, copying CDs to my iPod, etc.), but I think that's because the novelty has worn off. Yes, I can download using a torrent, but the quality is usually not as good as what I can rip myself from the original, so I give preference to buying/renting the media. BitTorrent is useful; it is unquestionably the best distribution network available today. My initial experience with it was basically "whoa! magic!", and I'm sure that's a major factor today. Everyone I've introduced to BitTorrent is equally enthralled.
People are curious about what you can get on the wide-open Internet. Free stuff is all over the place. Downloading gives near-instant gratification (well, unless you're on a modem) without leaving your house. There is practically no competition to the ubiquity and convenience of P2P file sharing. Satellite and Digital Cable aren't IP-based solutions, so it's an extra service on top of your Internet fee. None of the major television networks allow you to pay them directly and get an Internet-based feed, nor do any of the major motion picture production houses.
I think a more sane approach to P2P piracy is to increase the rate at which people get bored with BitTorrent. Offer competing, low-cost alternatives to buying or renting the media. Provide television service on the Internet. I'm certain that I would pay money for high-quality Internet-based content delivery. I *really* want to watch live sports on the Internet. I'd love to log into my local television network and download archived copies of stuff they aired. And I'm quite willing to pay for it. I've already chosen my distribution medium, and the pirates are the only guys catering to it. Don't complain about the piracy, offer an alternative.
How does a series of RSS subscriptions duplicate the simplicity of having a single final destination for per-user messages? It seems that under your scheme I would have to subscribe to every user community that involves a person I wish to communicate with. Or do you have an idea about how per-user messages would be passed from community to community? That's called relaying, and is still prone to the same abuses as SMTP relaying. How does an online community know that a machine hasn't been compromised? If I trojan your machine, I can tell it to do anything it's capable of, including spamming dozens of RSS channels using the identity of the machine I compromised. Good luck tracking that down, or preventing it.
Your proposition does one of two things, though I'm not sure which you're advocating. It either makes e-mail more complicated for the end-user, requiring them to subscribe to a dozen different user communities, or it fails to solve the relaying issue. SMTP "allows" spam the same way you "allow" somebody to break into your home, steal your credit card or otherwise impersonate you. No matter what, you've got one hell of a hill to climb to replace the overall simplicity and ubiquity of e-mail.
Open relays are the protocol's fault? What idiot configured the mail server to accept mail from unindentified users, or from another network? I'm gonna guess you, since you clearly need changes to a well-established protocol to prevent your server from being used to send spam. Maybe you should learn how to administer a mail server before talking out your ass.
See the form above. Your "solution" falls into the "everyone needs to adopt it all at once" category. Not to mention that it solves absolutely nothing.
First of all, SMTP does not lack authentication or authorization methods. SMTP+SASL allows for authentication via login. You can also authenticate via SSL certificates. Once identity has been established by one of these methods, authorization is trivial. You can restrict relaying access based on IP. Most spam gets sent through open relays and pwned boxen, so the protocol isn't the issue: the open relays and pwned boxen are.
I think you misunderstand the concept of "delivery" here. Just like the mailman doesn't drop by your house to make sure you read your mail, delivery simply means that the recipient mail server dropped a copy of the e-mail in the location that corresponds to the address you sent it to. Whether the server is correctly configured to then make the e-mail available to the actual person who's supposed to read it, or any other reason that could cause the person to not read your mail is beyond the scope of a mail server. Most mail clients allow you to request a read certificate anyway. I'm not sure what other "nice details" you'd like to see, but "250 - Message accepted for delivery" and "550 - User not found" are useful details from my point of view.
I'm not trying to discourage you from implementing this new messaging protocol. When you're ready for primetime, write an RFC describing how it works and convince some other people to implement your idea. Also, make sure you lobby for legislation requiring everyone to use the new protocol, since that's the only hope in hell you have for widespread adoption. Good luck!
OMG Microsoft is only one company away from getting it's filthy hands on the Linux codebase! It's only months before pre-packaged Shaftnix (supported by Novell) hits the market followed by a storm of Novell-specific Linux trojans! This will make Linux people out of (shudder) LUSERS! Why should we taint our beautiful GNU/Linux with the wretched eye-candy that consumers demand?! Attacks on the GPL will continue unabated, and only prostrating yourself at the feet of the mighty RMS and installing Debian will save you from the apocalypse that will come to destroy this unholy union.
Heh. That's exactly why most /.'s have their hate on for Microsoft. There is no such thing as competition in the Desktop OS market, because Microsoft used their monopoly to illegally take control of all distribution channels. Specifically, they forced vendors to either sell Microsoft products exclusively, or to pay more money if they offered a competing product. There were other anti-competitive behaviours cited in the original US v. Microsoft, but this was the most prominent. When a judgement was made against them, Microsoft funded all kinds of politicians and civil officials to take over the Department of Justice and overturn the decision. I'd even go so far as to say that Bill Gates personally helped G.W. Bush cheat at the 2004 US Election.
/.ers go over the top when they talk about Microsoft, but it's certainly hard to do so in a calm and collected manner. We all want the original judgement enforced. And we want it yesterday.
Most of us would love to see free and open competition between Linux, Microsoft, OSX and *BSD. Such competition would encourage software vendors to support platforms other than Microsoft/x86 and would prevent discrimination of technicians on the basis of their favourite platform. However, Microsoft didn't play by the rules 10 years ago, and we all still suffer as a result. I admit that many
For the PC gamer who insists on running every new title as soon as it comes out, there's not much you can do. Exclusive deals are and should be worth what was paid for them. If they're not tied to PC, then the next-gen consoles look like they will see 95% of new titles in coming years. I know I'm going to pick up a PS3 instead of worrying about DX10. But if they're just an MMORPG junkie, there's a good chance that a Linux box will do the trick. In fact, they might even notice those few less milliseconds of latency.
Heh. I bet you didn't read your license agreement very carefully. If you received Microsoft software at your institution through the Academic Alliance, then you did not receive a full Windows XP license. Rather, you were given a license which allowed you to borrow their copy to install on your machine at home and a license key that allowed installation. However, you don't have any rights whatsoever to the software beyond what your classroom needs are. So, they can revoke your license without warning, or otherwise change the terms of what "genuine" means. At any rate, the expected lifespan of the software you received in school is exactly the length of the course you are taking that uses the software (and it wasn't even that long for me, not that I cared since I devoted myself to Linux anyway).
Disclaimer: this applies to Microsoft software obtained through the Academic Alliance program only. The actual words of the license agreement and my actual experience may disagree; however I'm going with my experience on this one, since it's similar to all other Microsoft licenses I've had to deal with.
So where can I go to hire you to clean up my code repository with all the lovely new Flash 9 features, then port the J2EE app I managed to coerce onto JRun onto a server that isn't broken? Oh yeah, I used the Flash gateway servlet, too, so you'll need to redo the client-server with one of the numerous other options. Or have I kinda been hosed by a Macro-dobe legacy? Besides, why should I pay you when my pure Java solution is still really easy to maintain?
Your post is like an advertisement for every vendor that offers the lock-in feature: "Company X -- We sucked the big one for the last 7 years, but we promise it's all better with this release." I stopped listening to that crap a long time ago. If Adobe really wanted me to consider Flash a real application development environment, maybe they shouldn't have let me make those complaints -- ever.
- It is almost entirely client-side code, and not very efficient at that. Java applets are more portable (because Sun releases Java on more platforms simultaneously) and faster (Flash UIs are soooo sloooow) for executing client-side code. Even some JavaScript is a better choice in many cases.
- The stuff that executes server-side has to go through the "Flash gateway servlet" which won't work with anything but JRun, a horrible, unsupported, poorly documented, crash-happy piece of crap masquerading as a J2EE server. Applet-Servlet, JSP or even AJAX RPC (god forbid!) make for better server-side code.
- You can't separate the ActionScript into separate files. Every VCS that I've seen Flash developers use gets filled up with dozens of binary versions of the
.FLA source. Some even version-control the .SWF as well. Yuck. Obviously Flash developers weren't meant to use version control, which makes collaborating with them a real PITA.
Flash is useful for making animations, and only for making animations. Why the output couldn't be a standard movie file format instead, I'll never know. Adobe needs to stop trying to get into the web market and stick to PhotoShop.mandelbr0t
In the words of a SOX-IS Project Manager I once worked with, "Incompetence is an excuse." That certainly doesn't inspire any confidence in me that SOX-IS controls actually do anything useful.
mandelbr0t
Sounds like the "early" days of DSL service here in Canada. DSL had a range of about 3km from the CO, provided that the CO was correctly outfitted. Most communities weren't close enough to an upgraded CO when DSL service was first offered, so cable got really popular for broadband. Most network-savvy people quickly realized that cable companies are teh sux0r when it comes to Internet service, so switched to DSL as soon as it was available in their area.
However, unlike the United States, Canada has laws that forced Telcos to eventually upgrade all the COs, regardless of what they felt the market would actually be in a particular area. In the end, I think that it was good for business anyway; there's very healthy broadband competition: 2 large Telcos that provide residential and business connections as well as reselling bandwidth to smaller DSL and WiFi providers and a cable company in case you don't like DSL or don't really care about quality, just quantity.
My understanding is that the United States has very similar network infrastructure to Canada at the time everything started rolling out in 1998. There are some concentrations of high-bandwidth, low-latency networks, but everything is mostly dial-up or cheap broadband. Unfortunately, the difference between the quality of network service you will find in Canada and your average provider in the States is considerable. Maybe the US will prove that capitalism and market forces can bring the aging infrastructure up to snuff in short order, but it's almost 10 years behind Canada and large parts of Europe right now. Believe me, I feel for you.
mandelbr0t
I was skeptical when I saw the first article about HDDVDBackup, but there's definitely a posted title key on the Doom9 forum to correspond with this release. I guess the other 2 keys they posted should be released soon as well. The only way to truly implement volume encryption that can't be beaten is to avoid the software player altogether, as the title key needs to be in memory, if only briefly. The posts on the Doom9 forum claim that this is the way that title keys are extracted, and I'm inclined to believe them.
:)
Good job beating the DRM MAFIAA again! Information truly was meant to be free
mandelbr0t