banks, and other such institutions will accept laughably trivial factoids as incontrovertible evidence that somebody is you, and then try to stick you with the bag when the mistake is discovered.
Not to mention that it's more of an annoyance to the end user than it is security. I can never remember exact capitalization/spacing/punctuation to those "security questions". And sometimes I wonder if there's someone out there, compiling a list of these trivial factoids. One day, they will know more about me than I do myself.
It's the same story it's been for the last decade. Massive problems with current methods of government/financial institution/credit bureau validating your identity, better technicial solutions exist, but are expensive to implement, and require skilled individuals to do so. Most large organizations would rather make it a legal problem than hire people capable of making the transition. Of course, the enforcement has been a problem for a long time. And so the cycle continues, until those who are employed are more skilled than those who are not. In addition, proposed changes usually involve some kind of central government ID database that includes your retinal scan, fingerprints, DNA and some frozen zygotes. No wonder this news seems like it's from the nineties -- that's where the government still is.
The shady part seems only to be that the converter boxes are rented. I had to replace a DSL box when I switched providers, for a one-time fee. IANAL, but I would imagine that if Comcast is changing their delivery due to a federal requirement, any agreements that were made prior to the requirement would no longer be valid, since Comcast cannot both meet the updated federal requirements and the customer agreement without incurring extra costs not considered by the original agreement. At any rate, there's no way this gets decided without spending a long time in court.
Sorry, but sometimes hardware has to be upgraded, and it's not always fair to stick the vendor with the upgrade costs. I don't like settop rentals - you keep paying and paying even after paying more than the original cost of the hardware. Example: my new DSL box was $75CDN. At $3 a month, I'd be giving my ISP extra money after only 2 years. I think the best way would be to charge the customer for the box, and find a way that a customer can take their box to a different provider (much like the cell phone issue). Admittedly, a much more difficult solution, but it takes away any question of "bad faith" about the reason for changing the broadcast signal.
Because all the distro's packages were tested against kernel 2.6.27. Integration testing is a badly overlooked phase by many distros. However, I've seen that Debian-based stuff undergoes extensive integration testing, thus making a kernel version upgrade a huge testing process. Fixing the bug in the kernel version used by the distro saves a lot of testing time, and is much less likely to break distro-specific applications.
And that's why violent action against the corporate gangsters is now the only way.
Sigh. We've gotten so angry that we have started to look like the bad guys. As somebody here cleverly pointed out, a large number of/.ers are advocating murder and violence in a public forum. This makes it very easy for the MAFIAA to point at us and say "Look at how horrible the pirates are." If we behave to their expectations, we've already lost
I've taken the point home, especially with recent stories about people being arrested for comments they make on Facebook. The Internet is a public place, and talking the way you do is only doing the MAFIAA a favor. If we are to win the struggle for reasonable end-user rights in Copyright law, we must appear to be the more reasonable.
So, by all means, pirate away. Share with your friends. Download whatever you want, and justify it on philosophical grounds. Hell, even spread propoganda about the MAFIAA. But, please, please, please, do not advocate violence, even in jest. The world has gone so crazy it's become impossible to tell when someone is joking.
the copyright laws themselves are absurd, anti-consumer, bad for culture, bad for humanity, bad in almost every way, and thus any action to subvert them is righteous.
The problem with situations where the law is at odds with philosophy, is that the law prevails until such time as it as changed. Ironically, the law will not change unless people place themselves at risk of violating it as it is written today. It is definitely righteous to subvert such laws, but many do not want to take the risk. It is important that people stand up for the change they want, but also important to understand that it is not an option for a lot of people.
In all fairness, these are the unwritten rules that the IT market plays by. However, if Google were to start playing these games, it would definitely go against their "Don't be evil" motto. A little regulation would probably go a long way in forcing big business to be reasonable in their competitive practice.
Conversation is doomed when signal and noise can be distinguished only by intent.
Which, as you've cleverly pointed out, is actually quite useful at times. If nothing truthful is being reported, what better than a whole bunch more untruths to make it a bit more colorful?
We have officially reached insane levels of polarization in the reporting of this event. Law claims he is basically a terrorist, but claim that he is an independent researcher seeing how well our tax dollars are being spent holds water, and gives the police a very good reason to lie.
Give all the info, and let people actually make some self-judgements rather than expecting us to just swallow the spoon fed self-loathing of the far left.
Like the no-bid oil contracts that everyone wanted to keep quiet? I don't argue that the Taliban and Saddam Hussein have done horrible things. I do, however, argue that the United States' reasoning for being in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is not as virtuous as you would like people to believe. The U.S. is there to profit from the war. The fact that occassionally positive side effects will come from it allows for the PR position that you take.
Believes in Christ's message from the New Testament, supplanting Old Testament beliefs where appropriate
Believes in Christ's resurrection from the dead
Anything else is politics. But you'd be hard pressed to find a Christian that didn't claim to believe all of the above. Of course, the difference between practice and belief is a problem in all religions.
All of the advantages of modern America without all the ultra-right-wing bullshit and wars.
Not really. I have become increasingly distressed at the direction Canadian politics have headed. The only thing saving the politicians from selling Canada to the United States wholesale is this minority government. The problem with this is that it paralyzes the government, and generally lets things be run by big business, which is precisely what is wrong with the United States.
You make the "follow the rules" argument very well, and I can respect that. But, having waited a decade for reasonable laws governing the use of the Internet, and a viable commercial alternative that lets me continue to use the Internet as my main source for media, I've given up following the rules. And, frankly, your argument about traction doesn't hold up in practice.
Audio pirates changed the way the music industry does business, I'd say for the better. Admittedly, there are times when what I do appears to be self-absorbed narcissism, but that's only until you look at me up close. I've sacrificed a career in IT to stand up for what I believe is right, and have contributed countless hours, and even some code, to the Free Software community. I'm willing to take the chance and be civilly disobedient to show the absurdity of attempting to enforce private infringement. I don't pretend to be a law-abiding citizen; I've just had positive experiences from not obeying.
The fact is, the world wouldn't change if either of our views were the only one. It is the extremism of both sides that points out the insanity of either your overly conservative view and my overly liberal view. Ultimately, my hope is that people will get tired of the insanity, and exclaim, "Everybody is freaking nuts! What will it take to have laws on the Internet that protect the rights of copyright holders without invading everyone's privacy, or assuming that everyone is a criminal until proven otherwise?"
The issue is not about an expectation of privacy. It's about an expectation of anonymity, which is reasonable. Ultimately, this information was gained by way of warrantless wiretapping, or a crawler with access to federal data, or some other mechanism unavailable to the general public. It's not a problem if reams of data are collected about what is going on in public as long as using that data requires a warrant. The law has generally disallowed the prosecution to go on fishing expeditions through any kind of confidential documents, or to seek legal recourse against an unidentified person, especially when the person can be identified through the fishing expedition.
Put in the context of this case, I guess what I'm saying is that while its ok to crawl through publicly accessible Facebook pages, it is the connection between the Facebook account and the poster that should require a warrant. Likewise, if some Carnivore-like system alerts the FBI to a potential threat, they should be required to prove to the court that they need to identify the person making the threat.
Simply put, I can't write a spider to do what the FBI did, because they are correlating publicly available information with information that is not (ISP billing records possibly; I'm not sure). While it's reasonable to expect that a statement made in public is recorded, I should also feel quite secure in the knowledge that no human will ever look at it, except in passing, unless a judge is convinced it is in the public interest to investigate further. If you don't feel this way, consider that dictatorial regimes often employ secret police, to do precisely what the FBI did, with the intent of showing the public how much safer they were. It's the negative, unintended consequences of all of this investigation that I'm concerned about.
This isn't as bad an idea as it sounds. A good designer can make this happen with very little additional effort beyond the company's own uses. Basically, the thought is "If my applications work with the framework I've designed, then so should somebody else's". True, a designer doesn't think of every possible use, but that's what the design process is about - a feasible object model that supports all of the use cases you can think of, and even some you didn't think about. To me, this is the true power of OO design, that each class of objects is considered in isolation, and methods and behaviours thought of that aren't necessarily required at present.
The flipside, of course, is that your API will be prescriptive. To keep the cost of development similar to only developing internal uses, it wouldn't be feasible to really consider uses brought forward by the public. Basically, you get the "if I didn't think of it, then you can't do it" trap. To me, though, that's the challenge from the design perspective: to provide mechanisms to do things I didn't think of. When someone tells me they've used my code to do something I never dreamed of, I know I've done a great job.
The entertainment industry does not have either a) a right to exist or b) a right to make money. Agreements such as ACTA and laws like the DMCA provide those rights. The MAFIAA wants to have it both ways: it's a free market when it comes to pricing, competition and business practices, but it's draconian laws when it comes to finding ways to support it's aging business model, and force people to pay when there are better alternatives available.
The guilt card about lack of employment for software and media producers is priceless. Not to mention that the business value of "production" versus "creation" is questionable. Never mind how many of those in Mr. Stallman's world have lost their jobs to precisely the unethical business practices he rails against. Like me, they will have to find ways of adapting to a world with changing ideas. Or, like you say, maybe they can just go on welfare. I, for one, won't pity them, for none was shown to me.
We are already starting to lose the hardware battle to Apple. Apple owns the hardware, not you. RIAA and MPAA owns the content, not you. Then they can make deals without bothering with pesky details such as customers.
Slashdot Mirror
banks, and other such institutions will accept laughably trivial factoids as incontrovertible evidence that somebody is you, and then try to stick you with the bag when the mistake is discovered.
Not to mention that it's more of an annoyance to the end user than it is security. I can never remember exact capitalization/spacing/punctuation to those "security questions". And sometimes I wonder if there's someone out there, compiling a list of these trivial factoids. One day, they will know more about me than I do myself.
It's the same story it's been for the last decade. Massive problems with current methods of government/financial institution/credit bureau validating your identity, better technicial solutions exist, but are expensive to implement, and require skilled individuals to do so. Most large organizations would rather make it a legal problem than hire people capable of making the transition. Of course, the enforcement has been a problem for a long time. And so the cycle continues, until those who are employed are more skilled than those who are not. In addition, proposed changes usually involve some kind of central government ID database that includes your retinal scan, fingerprints, DNA and some frozen zygotes. No wonder this news seems like it's from the nineties -- that's where the government still is.
The shady part seems only to be that the converter boxes are rented. I had to replace a DSL box when I switched providers, for a one-time fee. IANAL, but I would imagine that if Comcast is changing their delivery due to a federal requirement, any agreements that were made prior to the requirement would no longer be valid, since Comcast cannot both meet the updated federal requirements and the customer agreement without incurring extra costs not considered by the original agreement. At any rate, there's no way this gets decided without spending a long time in court.
Sorry, but sometimes hardware has to be upgraded, and it's not always fair to stick the vendor with the upgrade costs. I don't like settop rentals - you keep paying and paying even after paying more than the original cost of the hardware. Example: my new DSL box was $75CDN. At $3 a month, I'd be giving my ISP extra money after only 2 years. I think the best way would be to charge the customer for the box, and find a way that a customer can take their box to a different provider (much like the cell phone issue). Admittedly, a much more difficult solution, but it takes away any question of "bad faith" about the reason for changing the broadcast signal.
Because all the distro's packages were tested against kernel 2.6.27. Integration testing is a badly overlooked phase by many distros. However, I've seen that Debian-based stuff undergoes extensive integration testing, thus making a kernel version upgrade a huge testing process. Fixing the bug in the kernel version used by the distro saves a lot of testing time, and is much less likely to break distro-specific applications.
But you don't see me complaining
And that's why violent action against the corporate gangsters is now the only way.
Sigh. We've gotten so angry that we have started to look like the bad guys. As somebody here cleverly pointed out, a large number of /.ers are advocating murder and violence in a public forum. This makes it very easy for the MAFIAA to point at us and say "Look at how horrible the pirates are." If we behave to their expectations, we've already lost
I've taken the point home, especially with recent stories about people being arrested for comments they make on Facebook. The Internet is a public place, and talking the way you do is only doing the MAFIAA a favor. If we are to win the struggle for reasonable end-user rights in Copyright law, we must appear to be the more reasonable.
So, by all means, pirate away. Share with your friends. Download whatever you want, and justify it on philosophical grounds. Hell, even spread propoganda about the MAFIAA. But, please, please, please, do not advocate violence, even in jest. The world has gone so crazy it's become impossible to tell when someone is joking.
Nope, walking directions from my house to the Sydney Opera House includes:
218. Kayak across the Pacific Ocean (Entering Japan)
No wonder it's estimated at 184 days!
the copyright laws themselves are absurd, anti-consumer, bad for culture, bad for humanity, bad in almost every way, and thus any action to subvert them is righteous.
The problem with situations where the law is at odds with philosophy, is that the law prevails until such time as it as changed. Ironically, the law will not change unless people place themselves at risk of violating it as it is written today. It is definitely righteous to subvert such laws, but many do not want to take the risk. It is important that people stand up for the change they want, but also important to understand that it is not an option for a lot of people.
In all fairness, these are the unwritten rules that the IT market plays by. However, if Google were to start playing these games, it would definitely go against their "Don't be evil" motto. A little regulation would probably go a long way in forcing big business to be reasonable in their competitive practice.
One exec has decided to stake his name on adopting Firefox and will blame the every development group that only supports IE when this fails.
I fail to see why this is a bad thing.
Conversation is doomed when signal and noise can be distinguished only by intent.
Which, as you've cleverly pointed out, is actually quite useful at times. If nothing truthful is being reported, what better than a whole bunch more untruths to make it a bit more colorful?
Put simply from another perspective, without a job, there is no Slashdot for me. Okay, slight hyperbole, but you get my drift.
We have officially reached insane levels of polarization in the reporting of this event. Law claims he is basically a terrorist, but claim that he is an independent researcher seeing how well our tax dollars are being spent holds water, and gives the police a very good reason to lie.
Give all the info, and let people actually make some self-judgements rather than expecting us to just swallow the spoon fed self-loathing of the far left.
Like the no-bid oil contracts that everyone wanted to keep quiet? I don't argue that the Taliban and Saddam Hussein have done horrible things. I do, however, argue that the United States' reasoning for being in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is not as virtuous as you would like people to believe. The U.S. is there to profit from the war. The fact that occassionally positive side effects will come from it allows for the PR position that you take.
SSH traffic is very, very hard to filter effectively, so many districts turn it off, simply block SSH traffic for kids period.
Which would require that your firewall now whitelist traffic instead of blacklist it. Because I don't have to run SSH on port 22.
All I could think while reading this is "wow, all those students learned a lot about how networks work!"
And this is a surprise why? Necessity is the mother of invention.
You cannot judge IT things by non-IT things. We need new laws that cover all of this shit.
QFE. An Insightful AC, a rare thing indeed :)
Christianity isn't really that hard:
Anything else is politics. But you'd be hard pressed to find a Christian that didn't claim to believe all of the above. Of course, the difference between practice and belief is a problem in all religions.
All of the advantages of modern America without all the ultra-right-wing bullshit and wars.
Not really. I have become increasingly distressed at the direction Canadian politics have headed. The only thing saving the politicians from selling Canada to the United States wholesale is this minority government. The problem with this is that it paralyzes the government, and generally lets things be run by big business, which is precisely what is wrong with the United States.
You make the "follow the rules" argument very well, and I can respect that. But, having waited a decade for reasonable laws governing the use of the Internet, and a viable commercial alternative that lets me continue to use the Internet as my main source for media, I've given up following the rules. And, frankly, your argument about traction doesn't hold up in practice.
Audio pirates changed the way the music industry does business, I'd say for the better. Admittedly, there are times when what I do appears to be self-absorbed narcissism, but that's only until you look at me up close. I've sacrificed a career in IT to stand up for what I believe is right, and have contributed countless hours, and even some code, to the Free Software community. I'm willing to take the chance and be civilly disobedient to show the absurdity of attempting to enforce private infringement. I don't pretend to be a law-abiding citizen; I've just had positive experiences from not obeying.
The fact is, the world wouldn't change if either of our views were the only one. It is the extremism of both sides that points out the insanity of either your overly conservative view and my overly liberal view. Ultimately, my hope is that people will get tired of the insanity, and exclaim, "Everybody is freaking nuts! What will it take to have laws on the Internet that protect the rights of copyright holders without invading everyone's privacy, or assuming that everyone is a criminal until proven otherwise?"
The issue is not about an expectation of privacy. It's about an expectation of anonymity, which is reasonable. Ultimately, this information was gained by way of warrantless wiretapping, or a crawler with access to federal data, or some other mechanism unavailable to the general public. It's not a problem if reams of data are collected about what is going on in public as long as using that data requires a warrant. The law has generally disallowed the prosecution to go on fishing expeditions through any kind of confidential documents, or to seek legal recourse against an unidentified person, especially when the person can be identified through the fishing expedition.
Put in the context of this case, I guess what I'm saying is that while its ok to crawl through publicly accessible Facebook pages, it is the connection between the Facebook account and the poster that should require a warrant. Likewise, if some Carnivore-like system alerts the FBI to a potential threat, they should be required to prove to the court that they need to identify the person making the threat.
Simply put, I can't write a spider to do what the FBI did, because they are correlating publicly available information with information that is not (ISP billing records possibly; I'm not sure). While it's reasonable to expect that a statement made in public is recorded, I should also feel quite secure in the knowledge that no human will ever look at it, except in passing, unless a judge is convinced it is in the public interest to investigate further. If you don't feel this way, consider that dictatorial regimes often employ secret police, to do precisely what the FBI did, with the intent of showing the public how much safer they were. It's the negative, unintended consequences of all of this investigation that I'm concerned about.
This isn't as bad an idea as it sounds. A good designer can make this happen with very little additional effort beyond the company's own uses. Basically, the thought is "If my applications work with the framework I've designed, then so should somebody else's". True, a designer doesn't think of every possible use, but that's what the design process is about - a feasible object model that supports all of the use cases you can think of, and even some you didn't think about. To me, this is the true power of OO design, that each class of objects is considered in isolation, and methods and behaviours thought of that aren't necessarily required at present.
The flipside, of course, is that your API will be prescriptive. To keep the cost of development similar to only developing internal uses, it wouldn't be feasible to really consider uses brought forward by the public. Basically, you get the "if I didn't think of it, then you can't do it" trap. To me, though, that's the challenge from the design perspective: to provide mechanisms to do things I didn't think of. When someone tells me they've used my code to do something I never dreamed of, I know I've done a great job.
The entertainment industry does not have either a) a right to exist or b) a right to make money. Agreements such as ACTA and laws like the DMCA provide those rights. The MAFIAA wants to have it both ways: it's a free market when it comes to pricing, competition and business practices, but it's draconian laws when it comes to finding ways to support it's aging business model, and force people to pay when there are better alternatives available.
The guilt card about lack of employment for software and media producers is priceless. Not to mention that the business value of "production" versus "creation" is questionable. Never mind how many of those in Mr. Stallman's world have lost their jobs to precisely the unethical business practices he rails against. Like me, they will have to find ways of adapting to a world with changing ideas. Or, like you say, maybe they can just go on welfare. I, for one, won't pity them, for none was shown to me.
Or for legal services.
Richard Stallman explains the practical ideology behind software patents. Parent states the gist of how it works.
We are already starting to lose the hardware battle to Apple. Apple owns the hardware, not you. RIAA and MPAA owns the content, not you. Then they can make deals without bothering with pesky details such as customers.
This has always been the case with Apple.