Disable javascript globally and enable it for sites you like and need it.
But the sites I like might include some that I don't like being tracked by...
In my crystal ball, I see a changing user agent string and ditching of arcane fonts & plugins.
I tested my three browsers (Opera 10.10, Firefox 3.5.7, Chromium 5.0.306.0) on Ubuntu 9.10, and all three were rated "unique" among 18100 to 18200 signatures. In fact, they were all unique on browser plug-ins alone, and Firefox was also unique in its reported set of system fonts. This is troubling.
On other items, they were not unique, but often in a small set. The combination of a few rare settings could easily make the browser nearly unique in a far larger set. Chromium was nearly unique in fonts (2 browsers with the same set) and in user agent (about 10 browsers with the same user agent string). On screen size, about 9 browsers reported 3840x1080x24 resolution, and 3 of them were probably mine...
So, cleaning cookies and temporary files and flash droppings regularly may no longer be enough. [donning a tinfoil hat] do we have to install or remove some fonts every day, or change screen resolution and user agent string every few hours?
For the stoning itself, I think we should televize it live. We can auction off the right to throw the first stones, and we can sell tickets to throw the rest of the stones.
With a bonus extra stoning, if anyone says "Jehovah" during the show, or if a stone-thrower's beard falls off.
I hope he warns them about FBI posing as 13-year-old choirboys.
No need, and no point. Some priests might be dumb enough to post videos featuring their 13-year-old altarboys performing biblical acts. "But your honor, we were just re-enacting the parable of Sodom and Gomorrah, as it is told in the Book of Genesis..."
Some context would be helpful, including what's behind the firewall, the kinds of traffic you think you're accepting, and public expectations of the services available.
Exactly. Without context, we can merely speculate that the server is pwned or under attack. This conjecture could be assessed better if there were also logs of outbound traffic as well as inbound. Also, it's not clear if the packets were being rejected (attack resisted), or being passed through (active attack or already pwned).
The stripes in the inbound packets look rather like botnet c&c traffic, which is presumably distributed worldwide. There are not many other activities which would be synchronous worldwide. Traffic from specific countries rises and stays high for extended times after some of the stripes. This could be payload updates, or other nefarious activity. Was there outbound traffic to the same sites also?
What kind of services does this site provide? One would not expect the same traffic profile for a LOC or NASA web server as for a stratum 1 or 2 NTP server, for instance. Maybe the traffic pattern is all innocent, maybe not...
The formula for Coca-Cola would not be a copyright issue. It would be considered a trade secret.
Exactly. Copyright is not the only means of keeping ownership of information (whether on documents, films, digital, etc.). That's why the assertion that documents containing the Coca-Cola formula are "public domain" (some date from before 1888) is so humourous. They have not been revealed or published, and thus their copyright status is irrelevant. Their owner owns them.
Similar reasoning holds for any other material which has not been published, such as the studio recordings of TFA. The fact that copyright has expired does not make them available to the public.
I'm sure many corporations would gladly give up free speech if they were not taxed like individuals.
Corporations are taxed like individuals? That's a good one!
Can an individual deduct all of his/her operating costs from income before tax? If so, expenditure on food, accommodation, and utilities would be deductible just like corporate office rentals and utilities. You'd be declaring only the $20k you can save/invest as taxable instead of most of your $100k gross income. A 40% rate on that "surplus" income would not hurt so much...
Yes, they do. They have never been sleepers, even when babies.
However, your time estimates are a little off, as they appear to assume the maximum of each range can occur on a school day. Using the lower end of each range, and adding another hour for meals, means they're in bed around 11:30, which is almost right. Actually they're mostly in bed around 11:00, but some of the reading time is while in bed.
The upper end of the range occurs on weekend days, when there may be more Playstation, or a few hours of horseriding/ballet/skiing/etc. instead of school. They sleep in until 08:00 on weekends, but that leaves lots of time for them to fill.
TV (pay channels): about 1 hour
Playstation: 1-2 hours
Computer (mostly web): 1-2 hours
MP3 & suchlike: less than 1 hour
Reading (overlaps with MP3, and includes homework): 2-4 hours
The Playstation games are nonviolent or relatively low violence (Afrika, LittleBigPlanet, a few Ratchet&Clank). Reading time does not include PC time. They also get 2-4 hours of outside playing or at various hobby activities. This is the routine that we have right now, based largely on the kids' preferences.
It seems that the kids in the survey don't have much time left over for hobbies or being outside, or even for reading books...
TFS says "The auroch weighed 2,200 pounds (1000kg) and its shoulders stood at 6'6". The beasts once roamed most of Asia and northern Africa. The animal was depicted in cave paintings and Julius Caesar described it as being a little less in size than an elephant."
Some modern horses weigh over a ton (shire horse is up to 1½ ton, brabant horse average over 1 ton, clydesdale horses typically about 1 ton), bulls in some breeds of cattle can be up to 1½ tons, and the American Bison occasionally exceeds a ton also. These animals would hardly be described as just a little less than an elephant in size, so we're looking at a certain amount of exaggeration or hoopla in TFS and TFA.
BTW, the record weight for a bull is 1740 kg, so the Auroch hardly merits being referred to as a "giant"
Public domain is what happens when copyright expires. Copyright is tied to creation - not publication - of a work. What makes you think that lack of broadcast would change the copyright status of the work?
By your logic, the original documents (and any copies) containing the formula for Coca-Cola are public domain; they date from the 19th century, and the inventor died in 1888. Try telling the Coca Cola company's lawyers that such documents are public domain, just for a giggle. The documents which record the Coca-Cola formula have never been published and are thus private. The implied copyright may have expired, but that does not mean they become part of the public domain - merely that one monopoly on copying has expired. The traditional monopoly on copying by simply not sharing with others does not expire until you want it to (even with limited sharing using stringent NDAs or other contracts).
Similar arguments apply to photographs or letters of your ancestors. Someone may claim that letters written by your great great grandparents to each other in the 19th century are public domain, but if you are the owner of those letters, you can ignore such absurd claims. You are under no obligation to allow your property to be copied, or even to show it to anyone who asks. Tell them to look for copies elsewhere; if any exist, perhaps they can be copied.
I'm not saying that keeping them private would be socially responsible in every case, merely that it is your right to do so.
Publication (even by broadcast) is significant, since there thus will likely be other surviving copies, even if imperfect. When you are the owner of the only copy of a work, its copyright status is irrelevant; it's yours.
Possibly true, although TFA does not provide much to justify this assertion. The shows were not broadcast (i.e. unpublished), so it is not at all certain that they will enter the public domain. The copyright status was not stated in TFA, which quoted a CBS exec as saying the rights situation was muddled.
If a work is kept private, it need not ever enter the public domain. Its owner may choose to release it, but there is no obligation to do so. If a work is published under copyright, it will eventually enter the public domain (although the wait is appallingly long). If it is published without copyright, it is immediately in the public domain.
From the third-hand information in TFS & TFA, it seems that these shows were not broadcast or released in other form. Unpublished works are private property, so CBS' stance is legally correct, whatever the wishes of others.
Grow up, this has nothing to do with copyright law. ... ...they're refusing to hand over tape reels which they own to someone else. It's not the right thing for them to do, but it is within their rights, and would be within their rights even if intellectual property were outlawed.
And this is what makes the copyright vs public domain issue moot. Even if everyone has the right to copy them, CBS is not a public library and is under no obligation to hand over their tapes. But if they were registered for copyright, should not a copy have been submitted to a library of record (e.g. LOC)?
Yep. That was one of them. Note that McAfee says the trojan will NOT be spotted if you are using signatures dated earlier than 6 January 2010 (abput 12 days ago). I can't say whether it's a false positive or not. Let's wait for the next update to the virus scanners instead. If it's really a false positive, then the Format Factory makers will notify them.
Another comment which resulted from discovering a trojan signature in Format Factory. It may be "free as in beer", but it's yet another example of a Chinese company appropriating "free as in freedom" software, and claiming ownership of it. The Format Factory installer contains mplayer, mencoder and avcodec compiled with support for libamr, libfaac, xvid and x264. However, contrary to the licensing conditions for all of these, there are no sources provided or made available, and Format Factory claims copyright on everything (does not even acknowledge the FOSS items it includes).
If your running Windows you might try a program called Format Factory its free and it is amazing in that it can convert almost any format with very little loss in quality.
FYI, Format Factory 2.2 (the newest version, released in December) appears to have the Generic.dx!kdh trojan, according to McAfee. This is a recently reported trojan, and is only discovered with DAT files less than 12 days old. I downloaded Format Factory 2.2 from 3 different sites and while the zip file names were slightly different, all three were reported as having an exe file infected with Generic.dx!kdh.
http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_252791.htm
There is not much information on this trojan right now, but it appears to be a member of a family which disable protective software and install IRC back doors for DDOS attacks or for later installation of other malware.
http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_141693.htm
Maybe it's a false positive. And maybe the developer's machine is spreading something unpleasant.
Kurosawa also made Ran, a Japanese samurai adaptation and interpretation of Shakespeare's King Lear, with additions based also on Japanese history http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089881. It's well worth seeing, as elements of King Lear are revealed in different contexts, and often in changed form.
I hope they use this to make all those twentysomething actors actually look like the teenagers they are supposed to be portraying.
Just skinning the actors may not be enough. If they need a teenage character, they should use a teenager (not necessarily a professional actor teenager, although it might help). Gawkiness is hard to get right in acting after you've lost it naturally.
One of the movies with excellent teenage performances was Batoru Rowaiaru / Battle Royale, which concerned a whole class of teenagers placed in an extremely difficult situation. The actors were mostly kids, 14-17 years old during production, and I doubt if older actors could have done better. For many of them it was a first or second or only acting appearance (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0266308/fullcredits#cast).
Like, why can't a black or asian guy play the lead in MacBeth?
It's been done. It's been done more than once, and not just as "modern" reinterpretations. For example, there was a 1937 U.S. theater production of Macbeth in which the whole cast was black, and the setting was Haiti rather than Scotland. Orson Welles did the adaptation which employs bullwhips and muskets as well as swordplay, but kept the spoken words unchanged from Shakespeare's version. It was apparently quite successful, and toured widely. There's a video excerpt of one performance at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PiZYGfRDgo and the Orson Welles script is available at http://dspace.wrlc.org/doc/bitstream/2041/60695/Macbethdisplay.pdf Note that the PDF is a scanned version of the typewritten original, and hence rather large.
He'll interview himself, of course. Possibly a whole debating panel of Conans in CGI.
TV celebrities are as bad as any other at being narcissistic attention whores.
Was that due to competition or what the unions did which drove costs up for the US steel plants?
It was competition using a different technology. Have you read "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen? The steel industry is one of the examples he deals with, where a change in technology forces large incumbents to be utterly trapped by business logic and their extensive installed base of a previous technology.
The unions chipped in, of course, but were far from the major factor.
Just make sure that the option "Allow scripts to detect context menu events" is left unchecked (this is the default). Then you can select text/graphics/whatever, and copy operations via right mouse click are not observable by javascript.
In fact, javascript can't detect any right click actions in Opera unless you explicitly allow it. So copy, paste, translate, search, dictionary, encyclopedia, etc. actions can't be monitored by javascript in a web page.
This feature was in earlier versions of Opera as well, but the checkbox was named differently.
I'm a consultant. I have honestly NEVER encountered any user at any company encrypting disk/usb/cd/dvd/email.
Where I work (company has over 10^5 employees worldwide), whole disk encryption is standard on all laptops. It is uncommon on desktops, however, and not compulsory on removable devices. All remote access is always encrypted, and requires the correct encryption package and authorizations. A similar situation existed at the place I worked before (about 3.10^4 employees worldwide).
Due to the support and policy infrastructure needed, I suspect encryption is much commoner in large organizations than small ones. How the statistics on use of encryption (TFA says 27%) are formed is another matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Disable javascript globally and enable it for sites you like and need it.
But the sites I like might include some that I don't like being tracked by...
In my crystal ball, I see a changing user agent string and ditching of arcane fonts & plugins.
I tested my three browsers (Opera 10.10, Firefox 3.5.7, Chromium 5.0.306.0) on Ubuntu 9.10, and all three were rated "unique" among 18100 to 18200 signatures. In fact, they were all unique on browser plug-ins alone, and Firefox was also unique in its reported set of system fonts. This is troubling.
On other items, they were not unique, but often in a small set. The combination of a few rare settings could easily make the browser nearly unique in a far larger set. Chromium was nearly unique in fonts (2 browsers with the same set) and in user agent (about 10 browsers with the same user agent string). On screen size, about 9 browsers reported 3840x1080x24 resolution, and 3 of them were probably mine...
So, cleaning cookies and temporary files and flash droppings regularly may no longer be enough. [donning a tinfoil hat] do we have to install or remove some fonts every day, or change screen resolution and user agent string every few hours?
For the stoning itself, I think we should televize it live. We can auction off the right to throw the first stones, and we can sell tickets to throw the rest of the stones.
With a bonus extra stoning, if anyone says "Jehovah" during the show, or if a stone-thrower's beard falls off.
holier-than-thou atheist
It might be better to stay silent on topics which confuse you so much.
I hope he warns them about FBI posing as 13-year-old choirboys.
No need, and no point. Some priests might be dumb enough to post videos featuring their 13-year-old altarboys performing biblical acts. "But your honor, we were just re-enacting the parable of Sodom and Gomorrah, as it is told in the Book of Genesis..."
Some context would be helpful, including what's behind the firewall, the kinds of traffic you think you're accepting, and public expectations of the services available.
Exactly. Without context, we can merely speculate that the server is pwned or under attack. This conjecture could be assessed better if there were also logs of outbound traffic as well as inbound. Also, it's not clear if the packets were being rejected (attack resisted), or being passed through (active attack or already pwned).
The stripes in the inbound packets look rather like botnet c&c traffic, which is presumably distributed worldwide. There are not many other activities which would be synchronous worldwide. Traffic from specific countries rises and stays high for extended times after some of the stripes. This could be payload updates, or other nefarious activity. Was there outbound traffic to the same sites also?
What kind of services does this site provide? One would not expect the same traffic profile for a LOC or NASA web server as for a stratum 1 or 2 NTP server, for instance. Maybe the traffic pattern is all innocent, maybe not...
The formula for Coca-Cola would not be a copyright issue. It would be considered a trade secret.
Exactly. Copyright is not the only means of keeping ownership of information (whether on documents, films, digital, etc.). That's why the assertion that documents containing the Coca-Cola formula are "public domain" (some date from before 1888) is so humourous. They have not been revealed or published, and thus their copyright status is irrelevant. Their owner owns them.
Similar reasoning holds for any other material which has not been published, such as the studio recordings of TFA. The fact that copyright has expired does not make them available to the public.
I'm sure many corporations would gladly give up free speech if they were not taxed like individuals.
Corporations are taxed like individuals? That's a good one!
Can an individual deduct all of his/her operating costs from income before tax? If so, expenditure on food, accommodation, and utilities would be deductible just like corporate office rentals and utilities. You'd be declaring only the $20k you can save/invest as taxable instead of most of your $100k gross income. A 40% rate on that "surplus" income would not hurt so much...
Your kids go to bed pretty late then.
Yes, they do. They have never been sleepers, even when babies.
However, your time estimates are a little off, as they appear to assume the maximum of each range can occur on a school day. Using the lower end of each range, and adding another hour for meals, means they're in bed around 11:30, which is almost right. Actually they're mostly in bed around 11:00, but some of the reading time is while in bed.
The upper end of the range occurs on weekend days, when there may be more Playstation, or a few hours of horseriding/ballet/skiing/etc. instead of school. They sleep in until 08:00 on weekends, but that leaves lots of time for them to fill.
TV (pay channels): about 1 hour
Playstation: 1-2 hours
Computer (mostly web): 1-2 hours
MP3 & suchlike: less than 1 hour
Reading (overlaps with MP3, and includes homework): 2-4 hours
The Playstation games are nonviolent or relatively low violence (Afrika, LittleBigPlanet, a few Ratchet&Clank). Reading time does not include PC time. They also get 2-4 hours of outside playing or at various hobby activities. This is the routine that we have right now, based largely on the kids' preferences.
It seems that the kids in the survey don't have much time left over for hobbies or being outside, or even for reading books...
TFS says "The auroch weighed 2,200 pounds (1000kg) and its shoulders stood at 6'6". The beasts once roamed most of Asia and northern Africa. The animal was depicted in cave paintings and Julius Caesar described it as being a little less in size than an elephant."
Some modern horses weigh over a ton (shire horse is up to 1½ ton, brabant horse average over 1 ton, clydesdale horses typically about 1 ton), bulls in some breeds of cattle can be up to 1½ tons, and the American Bison occasionally exceeds a ton also. These animals would hardly be described as just a little less than an elephant in size, so we're looking at a certain amount of exaggeration or hoopla in TFS and TFA.
BTW, the record weight for a bull is 1740 kg, so the Auroch hardly merits being referred to as a "giant"
Public domain is what happens when copyright expires. Copyright is tied to creation - not publication - of a work. What makes you think that lack of broadcast would change the copyright status of the work?
By your logic, the original documents (and any copies) containing the formula for Coca-Cola are public domain; they date from the 19th century, and the inventor died in 1888. Try telling the Coca Cola company's lawyers that such documents are public domain, just for a giggle. The documents which record the Coca-Cola formula have never been published and are thus private. The implied copyright may have expired, but that does not mean they become part of the public domain - merely that one monopoly on copying has expired. The traditional monopoly on copying by simply not sharing with others does not expire until you want it to (even with limited sharing using stringent NDAs or other contracts).
Similar arguments apply to photographs or letters of your ancestors. Someone may claim that letters written by your great great grandparents to each other in the 19th century are public domain, but if you are the owner of those letters, you can ignore such absurd claims. You are under no obligation to allow your property to be copied, or even to show it to anyone who asks. Tell them to look for copies elsewhere; if any exist, perhaps they can be copied.
I'm not saying that keeping them private would be socially responsible in every case, merely that it is your right to do so.
Publication (even by broadcast) is significant, since there thus will likely be other surviving copies, even if imperfect. When you are the owner of the only copy of a work, its copyright status is irrelevant; it's yours.
TFA even says that they're in the public domain.
Possibly true, although TFA does not provide much to justify this assertion. The shows were not broadcast (i.e. unpublished), so it is not at all certain that they will enter the public domain. The copyright status was not stated in TFA, which quoted a CBS exec as saying the rights situation was muddled.
If a work is kept private, it need not ever enter the public domain. Its owner may choose to release it, but there is no obligation to do so. If a work is published under copyright, it will eventually enter the public domain (although the wait is appallingly long). If it is published without copyright, it is immediately in the public domain.
From the third-hand information in TFS & TFA, it seems that these shows were not broadcast or released in other form. Unpublished works are private property, so CBS' stance is legally correct, whatever the wishes of others.
Grow up, this has nothing to do with copyright law.
...
...they're refusing to hand over tape reels which they own to someone else. It's not the right thing for them to do, but it is within their rights, and would be within their rights even if intellectual property were outlawed.
And this is what makes the copyright vs public domain issue moot. Even if everyone has the right to copy them, CBS is not a public library and is under no obligation to hand over their tapes. But if they were registered for copyright, should not a copy have been submitted to a library of record (e.g. LOC)?
...as Microsoft once enjoyed its level of control.
Jumping the gun a little, there.
We're not exactly out of Microsoft's clammy clutches yet.
Probably a false positive if you got it from here.
http://www.brothersoft.com/download-formatfactory-98431.html
Yep. That was one of them. Note that McAfee says the trojan will NOT be spotted if you are using signatures dated earlier than 6 January 2010 (abput 12 days ago). I can't say whether it's a false positive or not. Let's wait for the next update to the virus scanners instead. If it's really a false positive, then the Format Factory makers will notify them.
Another comment which resulted from discovering a trojan signature in Format Factory. It may be "free as in beer", but it's yet another example of a Chinese company appropriating "free as in freedom" software, and claiming ownership of it. The Format Factory installer contains mplayer, mencoder and avcodec compiled with support for libamr, libfaac, xvid and x264. However, contrary to the licensing conditions for all of these, there are no sources provided or made available, and Format Factory claims copyright on everything (does not even acknowledge the FOSS items it includes).
If your running Windows you might try a program called Format Factory its free and it is amazing in that it can convert almost any format with very little loss in quality.
FYI, Format Factory 2.2 (the newest version, released in December) appears to have the Generic.dx!kdh trojan, according to McAfee. This is a recently reported trojan, and is only discovered with DAT files less than 12 days old. I downloaded Format Factory 2.2 from 3 different sites and while the zip file names were slightly different, all three were reported as having an exe file infected with Generic.dx!kdh.
http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_252791.htm
There is not much information on this trojan right now, but it appears to be a member of a family which disable protective software and install IRC back doors for DDOS attacks or for later installation of other malware.
http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_141693.htm
Maybe it's a false positive. And maybe the developer's machine is spreading something unpleasant.
Kurosawa also made Ran, a Japanese samurai adaptation and interpretation of Shakespeare's King Lear, with additions based also on Japanese history http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089881. It's well worth seeing, as elements of King Lear are revealed in different contexts, and often in changed form.
I hope they use this to make all those twentysomething actors actually look like the teenagers they are supposed to be portraying.
Just skinning the actors may not be enough. If they need a teenage character, they should use a teenager (not necessarily a professional actor teenager, although it might help). Gawkiness is hard to get right in acting after you've lost it naturally.
One of the movies with excellent teenage performances was Batoru Rowaiaru / Battle Royale, which concerned a whole class of teenagers placed in an extremely difficult situation. The actors were mostly kids, 14-17 years old during production, and I doubt if older actors could have done better. For many of them it was a first or second or only acting appearance (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0266308/fullcredits#cast).
Like, why can't a black or asian guy play the lead in MacBeth?
It's been done. It's been done more than once, and not just as "modern" reinterpretations. For example, there was a 1937 U.S. theater production of Macbeth in which the whole cast was black, and the setting was Haiti rather than Scotland. Orson Welles did the adaptation which employs bullwhips and muskets as well as swordplay, but kept the spoken words unchanged from Shakespeare's version. It was apparently quite successful, and toured widely. There's a video excerpt of one performance at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PiZYGfRDgo and the Orson Welles script is available at http://dspace.wrlc.org/doc/bitstream/2041/60695/Macbethdisplay.pdf Note that the PDF is a scanned version of the typewritten original, and hence rather large.
But then who is Conan going to interview?
He'll interview himself, of course. Possibly a whole debating panel of Conans in CGI.
TV celebrities are as bad as any other at being narcissistic attention whores.
Was that due to competition or what the unions did which drove costs up for the US steel plants?
It was competition using a different technology. Have you read "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen? The steel industry is one of the examples he deals with, where a change in technology forces large incumbents to be utterly trapped by business logic and their extensive installed base of a previous technology.
The unions chipped in, of course, but were far from the major factor.
Just make sure that the option "Allow scripts to detect context menu events" is left unchecked (this is the default). Then you can select text/graphics/whatever, and copy operations via right mouse click are not observable by javascript.
In fact, javascript can't detect any right click actions in Opera unless you explicitly allow it. So copy, paste, translate, search, dictionary, encyclopedia, etc. actions can't be monitored by javascript in a web page.
This feature was in earlier versions of Opera as well, but the checkbox was named differently.
Their famous "Don't be evil" motto will be very slightly clarified as:
"Don't be evil (but being nasty to the Chinese government is not evil)."
I'm a consultant. I have honestly NEVER encountered any user at any company encrypting disk/usb/cd/dvd/email.
Where I work (company has over 10^5 employees worldwide), whole disk encryption is standard on all laptops. It is uncommon on desktops, however, and not compulsory on removable devices. All remote access is always encrypted, and requires the correct encryption package and authorizations. A similar situation existed at the place I worked before (about 3.10^4 employees worldwide).
Due to the support and policy infrastructure needed, I suspect encryption is much commoner in large organizations than small ones. How the statistics on use of encryption (TFA says 27%) are formed is another matter.