Israeli drivers are nuts, and that's coming from a Montrealer.
This query has to be coming from Israel, probably Tel Aviv.
Except that in Israel the electricity isn't crappy and there are a lot of street lights in all but the most rural communities. Driving laws are enforced... although not as strictly as I would have liked.
And although the people do drive like nuts, very aggressive and have a tendency to road-rage, motor vehicle related fatalities are lower than the US
For the longest time a friend and I have theorized about the reasons for those traffic jams. We've reached the inescapable conclusion that they are the results of a conspiracy.
Don't go your heads a-shaking now. It's really obvious. The oil companies make a bundle of those traffic jams. Every day just before rush hour a small fleet of inconspicuous unmarked vehicles, driven by selected elderly, are leashed upon the major freeways. They are trained to drive in such a pattern that makes it impossible for other cars to bypass them. Soon enough the traffic jam forms. Millions of cars are burning precious fuel while standing still, and the oil barons go cha-ching.
I fall right into the category they are referring to - I'm a legal alian in the US, with a work visa. For me, the decision is very simple to make: I will leave and give it no second thought.
I know some people will prefer to stay and make what is in their country top dollar. And this is the kind of people who send their money back to their home countries rather than spend it in the US.
Liable to a reasonable extent. That is, if you don't patch your system and get malware because of that, it's your fault. If you patch your system and get malware in spite of that, then, well, what can you do?
It's about reasonable liability, not total liability.
The default level, where every newbie can connect, where port 25 is screened, software is monitored and rate limits are in place, and the user has no liability for whatever malware that their computer runs and the ISP does its best to stop it from running even if it means restricting the services the user gets, and
The advanced level, where you have to sign a document making you liable for whatever traffic emanates from your node, and the ISP can't do anything to your access without you asking for it. No port blocking, no transparent proxying, nothing. They can however hold you liable for malware running on your setup, provided you neglected to promptly and properly patch your system.
The question is, can they prove someone has the infringing file, if they only transmit PART of the file?
What bittorrent is about is being able to send very small but verifiably authentic parts of the file - but is that enough for them to prove the person has the infringing content?
My guess is that this is going to be made into law in the US in the near future - that if they get a single BitTorrent packet from you that belongs to an infringing file, it's enough to convict you of a crime and haul your behind in jail.
In Portugal they have these very annoying devices. You are doing 90 (kilometers per hour) and then you have some small village or other, where the speed limit is 50. And if you fail to slow down in time, this thing goes red on you. Annoying as hell, but it was effective.
At least against me.
I estimate there are tens or hundreds of these in use in Portugal and in Spain. They don't have a yellow light, they go from green to red immediately.
The word Free has two meanings. "Free as in free beer" (which means you get something without paying for it) and "Free as in free speach" (which means that you enjoy some kind of freedom).
GPL
The GNU Public License is a software license. Like other licenses, the copyright holder can decide that the conditions to distribute the copyrighted material (source code) will be compliance with the license.
Unlike a commercial license, the conditions in the GPL are meant to preserve the freedom (Free in the latter form) of the source code.
One of the conditions set in the GPL is that if you create derivative work of the source code, you have to release your derivative work under the same license.
Another clause determines that the code protected under the GPL must be available in source code format, for free (not for money free), if it is available in binary form (such as inside a Cisco router).
These conditions were put there in order to preserve the freedom of the source code.
What right?
It is the right of the copyright owner to set conditions for use of their copyrighted material, and failure to comply with those conditions is a license violation. In this case, the various authors of the Linux OS have chosen the GPL as the set of rules, and as a licensee, Cisco has to abide by the license. Not abiding by the license is a violation of the said license.
The FSF then, as the copyright holder, has a right to use whatever means the law provides in order to make the said violator to comply with the license.
Linksys (before it was Cisco)
When the Linksys engineers have opted to use Linux as their operationg system, they did not do it because Linux had a monopoly in the embedded OS market, nor was their hand twisted in any way.
They chose Linux because it is available, and it is free. They got an OS, which was developed by a collective effort equal to thousands of man-hours, and they got it for free. Yay. More power to them.
And now those Linksys engineers built a device which includes this OS, and they had to change parts of the OS to make it work for them. Not a problem - that's the intention of the copyright holders. Take it and change it to your heart's content.
And so they did, and they took that (modified) source and compiled it into binaries and put the binaries in their router and released (sold) it. Again, no problem here. They sold the hardware, for-pay, with GPL-ed software in it.
What they failed to do was to comply with the GPL and re-release the modified source code - the derivative work. Like it or not, that's one of the conditions set by the GPL, and the GPL is the license under which the copyright holder released the code, and in order to comply with the GPL, that's what they have to do. They heve not.
The article
It is unfair to say that the FSF is now forcing these guys to burn down their house. These guys knew full well what they are getting into. They want to have an OS for free. Well, guess what - it comes with strings attached. No, not monetary strings - but you have to comply with the license.
If Linksys were violating some other company's license, a commercial license, they would go to court and either settle or get a ruling. If indeed they were in violation, they'd lose. They will be ending complying to the license.
The FSF
But the FSF, a voluntary organization, does not seek settlements. They seek compliance. They are a bunch of idealists, endowed with the ideals of the well known free software advocate Richard M. Stallman, and what they want is more free software. It hurts their feelings that companies take free (as in speech) software and make it un-free.
And you know what? They're within their rights.
"We'd like people to stop selling proprietary software. It's bad for the world," Kuhn says. And he's not saying that because he has some secret agenda. He truely believs that. I have
That stuff is all pretty transparent and traceable. Then how does that look if you get called on it? Person X gets your house? (oh, he made me sign that, it really is MY house!)Falsifying records gets added to some unrelated shit bag little court case and the jury is swayed into finding you guilty because of it? The risks are far greater than the protections.
I can answer that in two ways:
The contract is a regular, binding contract for the transfer of the rights of the properties, signed in the presence of several witnesses, and notarized. Just as it would be if you'd bought the house. Only the update to the public records pertaining to the house's ownership is "forgotten".
If the action is really illegal (like the id-switching idea), both sides have a strong incentive to keep the show going, even if they stop being friends.
It takes a true paranoid to endanger himself for real because of imagined dangers...
You don't have to delve into paranoya to do that. Just think of your car's insurance. However there is an element of danger here. I agree.
Subvert the system for fun and profit
on
Databases and Privacy
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It is obvious that privacy is an illusion. Once the information is out there and can be correlated, there is virtualy nothing you can do to keep it out of anybody's hands.
There is a way, however, to maintain your privacy where it matters. They want to collect information on you? Fine, let them. But insert some misleading data into those records. Here is just one way to do it:
Take two persons, of similar hight, eye color, skin color and hair color. They are good friends and developed a relationship of trust between them. They are not criminals and have no criminal intentions. These two persons can each have two copies of their identfications - say, two copies of a driver's license (say one is "lost"...). One copy they of course give to the other one. One of them must be the 'good person' and one must be the 'bad person'.
Now imagine one of these persons is stopped for a traffic violation. He hands over the 'bad person' ID, and the traffic violation is registered on his name. He doesn't own the car, though - because the car is registered to the 'good person'. When it's time to pay insurance, and the 'good person' record is being pulled, it's a clean slate.
The sample here is sketchy at best, won't work if the car history is checked as well (unless...), and I don't want to give any more ideas to anyone here, but it is possible to fake the records just such - have someone else buy your house, and have a contract with this person saying he has no claim in it, switch salaries with your neighbour, bank accounts... If it has a purpose.
Don't do it 'just to spite', because every such transaction has an inherent danger, but if done right and to an end, it can be beneficial to the people involved, despite the best efforts of those information correlators to the contrary.
Oh, yes, standard disclaimer apply, use this information at your own risk, don't come yelling to me, it's probably highly illegal, be warned.
I also live in Israel, and I have witnessed that on several occasions information in small news sites that was not released to the general media, even some that can be considered explosive, was available thrugh those channels until it became old news.
The policy not to reveal casualties names before the families are informed (which is enacted whenever there is any kind of high-profile death of people, it happens all the time, even in car accidents) is IMHO compassionate and humane. Just put yourself in place of one of the families.
Let those restricted programs run in a restricted environment - let them have their fun. I will enjoy redirecting the sound and video output away to a file.
If you had made those glasses today, you would have been in violation of the DMCA, for creating a circumvention device.
This security device would work ONLY in the US, where the law abiding citizens wouldn't dream of circumventing it. (and maybe EU soon). I wonder why it was reinvented in Tokio of all places.
Slashdot Mirror
Israeli drivers are nuts, and that's coming from a Montrealer.
This query has to be coming from Israel, probably Tel Aviv.
Except that in Israel the electricity isn't crappy and there are a lot of street lights in all but the most rural communities. Driving laws are enforced... although not as strictly as I would have liked.
And although the people do drive like nuts, very aggressive and have a tendency to road-rage, motor vehicle related fatalities are lower than the US
...with some fan art?
It's not like they're saying Asimov actually put pen to paper to write them.
-- Arik
Reading this only makes me appreciate my parents so much more. Thank you for your counter-example. Sheesh do I feel lucky.
For the longest time a friend and I have theorized about the reasons for those traffic jams. We've reached the inescapable conclusion that they are the results of a conspiracy.
Don't go your heads a-shaking now. It's really obvious. The oil companies make a bundle of those traffic jams. Every day just before rush hour a small fleet of inconspicuous unmarked vehicles, driven by selected elderly, are leashed upon the major freeways. They are trained to drive in such a pattern that makes it impossible for other cars to bypass them. Soon enough the traffic jam forms. Millions of cars are burning precious fuel while standing still, and the oil barons go cha-ching.
Denying it doesn't make it go away.
-- Arik
I fall right into the category they are referring to - I'm a legal alian in the US, with a work visa. For me, the decision is very simple to make: I will leave and give it no second thought.
I know some people will prefer to stay and make what is in their country top dollar. And this is the kind of people who send their money back to their home countries rather than spend it in the US.
-- Arik
Liable to a reasonable extent. That is, if you don't patch your system and get malware because of that, it's your fault. If you patch your system and get malware in spite of that, then, well, what can you do?
It's about reasonable liability, not total liability.
Thoughts?
What bittorrent is about is being able to send very small but verifiably authentic parts of the file - but is that enough for them to prove the person has the infringing content?
My guess is that this is going to be made into law in the US in the near future - that if they get a single BitTorrent packet from you that belongs to an infringing file, it's enough to convict you of a crime and haul your behind in jail.
-- Arik
In Portugal they have these very annoying devices. You are doing 90 (kilometers per hour) and then you have some small village or other, where the speed limit is 50. And if you fail to slow down in time, this thing goes red on you. Annoying as hell, but it was effective.
At least against me.
I estimate there are tens or hundreds of these in use in Portugal and in Spain. They don't have a yellow light, they go from green to red immediately.
-- Arik
Heck, Arabs in Israel have orders of magnitude more rights than corresponding Arabs in Arab countries.
I wonder how it's going to be done in Knoppix, without distributing a commercial DLL with the CD. Perhaps the following scheme could work:
Tricky. Depends on having the DLL somewhere on the disk.
-- Arik
Giant squids? Who said anything about giant squids?
The word Free has two meanings. "Free as in free beer" (which means you get something without paying for it) and "Free as in free speach" (which means that you enjoy some kind of freedom).
GPL
The GNU Public License is a software license. Like other licenses, the copyright holder can decide that the conditions to distribute the copyrighted material (source code) will be compliance with the license.
Unlike a commercial license, the conditions in the GPL are meant to preserve the freedom (Free in the latter form) of the source code.
One of the conditions set in the GPL is that if you create derivative work of the source code, you have to release your derivative work under the same license.
Another clause determines that the code protected under the GPL must be available in source code format, for free (not for money free), if it is available in binary form (such as inside a Cisco router).
These conditions were put there in order to preserve the freedom of the source code.
What right?
It is the right of the copyright owner to set conditions for use of their copyrighted material, and failure to comply with those conditions is a license violation. In this case, the various authors of the Linux OS have chosen the GPL as the set of rules, and as a licensee, Cisco has to abide by the license. Not abiding by the license is a violation of the said license.
The FSF then, as the copyright holder, has a right to use whatever means the law provides in order to make the said violator to comply with the license.
Linksys (before it was Cisco)
When the Linksys engineers have opted to use Linux as their operationg system, they did not do it because Linux had a monopoly in the embedded OS market, nor was their hand twisted in any way.
They chose Linux because it is available, and it is free. They got an OS, which was developed by a collective effort equal to thousands of man-hours, and they got it for free. Yay. More power to them.
And now those Linksys engineers built a device which includes this OS, and they had to change parts of the OS to make it work for them. Not a problem - that's the intention of the copyright holders. Take it and change it to your heart's content.
And so they did, and they took that (modified) source and compiled it into binaries and put the binaries in their router and released (sold) it. Again, no problem here. They sold the hardware, for-pay, with GPL-ed software in it.
What they failed to do was to comply with the GPL and re-release the modified source code - the derivative work. Like it or not, that's one of the conditions set by the GPL, and the GPL is the license under which the copyright holder released the code, and in order to comply with the GPL, that's what they have to do. They heve not.
The article
It is unfair to say that the FSF is now forcing these guys to burn down their house. These guys knew full well what they are getting into. They want to have an OS for free. Well, guess what - it comes with strings attached. No, not monetary strings - but you have to comply with the license.
If Linksys were violating some other company's license, a commercial license, they would go to court and either settle or get a ruling. If indeed they were in violation, they'd lose. They will be ending complying to the license.
The FSF
But the FSF, a voluntary organization, does not seek settlements. They seek compliance. They are a bunch of idealists, endowed with the ideals of the well known free software advocate Richard M. Stallman, and what they want is more free software. It hurts their feelings that companies take free (as in speech) software and make it un-free.
And you know what? They're within their rights.
"We'd like people to stop selling proprietary software. It's bad for the world," Kuhn says. And he's not saying that because he has some secret agenda. He truely believs that. I have
- Commercial SMS and calls from the provider
- Commercial SMS and calls from 3rd parties
- Commercial mailings by 3rd parties
I did this (I have a Cellcomm and an Orange phones), and I don't get these at all. They are required to remove you.--Arik
I can answer that in two ways:
- The contract is a regular, binding contract for the transfer of the rights of the properties, signed in the presence of several witnesses, and notarized. Just as it would be if you'd bought the house. Only the update to the public records pertaining to the house's ownership is "forgotten".
- If the action is really illegal (like the id-switching idea), both sides have a strong incentive to keep the show going, even if they stop being friends.
It takes a true paranoid to endanger himself for real because of imagined dangers...You don't have to delve into paranoya to do that. Just think of your car's insurance. However there is an element of danger here. I agree.
There is a way, however, to maintain your privacy where it matters. They want to collect information on you? Fine, let them. But insert some misleading data into those records. Here is just one way to do it:
Take two persons, of similar hight, eye color, skin color and hair color. They are good friends and developed a relationship of trust between them. They are not criminals and have no criminal intentions. These two persons can each have two copies of their identfications - say, two copies of a driver's license (say one is "lost"...). One copy they of course give to the other one. One of them must be the 'good person' and one must be the 'bad person'.
Now imagine one of these persons is stopped for a traffic violation. He hands over the 'bad person' ID, and the traffic violation is registered on his name. He doesn't own the car, though - because the car is registered to the 'good person'. When it's time to pay insurance, and the 'good person' record is being pulled, it's a clean slate.
The sample here is sketchy at best, won't work if the car history is checked as well (unless...), and I don't want to give any more ideas to anyone here, but it is possible to fake the records just such - have someone else buy your house, and have a contract with this person saying he has no claim in it, switch salaries with your neighbour, bank accounts... If it has a purpose.
Don't do it 'just to spite', because every such transaction has an inherent danger, but if done right and to an end, it can be beneficial to the people involved, despite the best efforts of those information correlators to the contrary.
Oh, yes, standard disclaimer apply, use this information at your own risk, don't come yelling to me, it's probably highly illegal, be warned.
No, but there will be a doctor present when you are informed. And the names of casualties are released within the day, most cases.
I also live in Israel, and I have witnessed that on several occasions information in small news sites that was not released to the general media, even some that can be considered explosive, was available thrugh those channels until it became old news.
The policy not to reveal casualties names before the families are informed (which is enacted whenever there is any kind of high-profile death of people, it happens all the time, even in car accidents) is IMHO compassionate and humane. Just put yourself in place of one of the families.
--Arik
I can see the fights over the GNU/Mandrake/Debian (or is it GNU/Debian/Mandrake) name.
Now you can crack the os and the skull over the Internet!
...Interoperability?
Meant dumpster-diving of course
Instead of spending time in a dumpster, just find out who upgrade the target's computers, and grab those disks.
Let those restricted programs run in a restricted environment - let them have their fun. I will enjoy redirecting the sound and video output away to a file.
-- Arik
If you had made those glasses today, you would have been in violation of the DMCA, for creating a circumvention device.
This security device would work ONLY in the US, where the law abiding citizens wouldn't dream of circumventing it. (and maybe EU soon). I wonder why it was reinvented in Tokio of all places.
-- Arik