Note the section in 6d above where they explicitly say you give them the right to use your information for targeted marketing.
...
I'd personally recommend becoming a member of the OpenSRS project, and being your own registrar.
Except that section 3 of the OpenSRS domain registration agreement reads like this:
As further consideration for the Services, you agree to: (1) provide certain current, complete and accurate information about you as required by the registration process and (2) maintain and update this information as needed to keep it current, complete and accurate. All such information shall be referred to as account information ("Account Information"). You hereby grant us the right to disclose to third parties such Account Information
Hmmm...sounds like a right to spam you to me. But domain registration information has always been publically available, so this doesn't worry my too much. I'm much more concerned about he UDRP
When you register a domain, youre just buying the rights to a domain, right? Or wrong? I'm trying to figure out where the DNS comes in.
DNS is a distributed database system. Everybody who owns a domain name is responsible for keeping their domain's entries in the database correct and up to date. You can do this yourself, or pay your ISP to do it. When you go to a URL, you ask your (or your ISP's) DNS for the IP address of the site. If the server knows the IP, it tells you. If it doesn't know the IP, it has to ask somebody else.
This is where the registrars come in. They maintain the "root servers" which basically keep a list of all the domains that are registered, and the DNS servers that contain the information about that domain. When you register a domain, you're paying for an entry in these "root servers".
When somebody else looks for your domain name, their DNS server asks one of the root servers where they can find the information, and the root server points it to your DNS server. Their DNS server then asks your DNS server for the information, and your DNS server gives it to them. That's why you need a DNS server.
Are we updating people's DNS servers everytime we request a page that our DNS server is unsure about and and then has to query another DNS server out there until it finds an answer?
I just finished getting my business set up as an OpenSRS affiliate. I wouldn't recommend it if you're only going to be registering 1 or 2 domains -- for one thing, they make you prepay for at least 25. It's also a bit of work to get approved by them (they require you to take a test). But $10/year for a domain is pretty much free, and they give you (*and* your end-users) a lot more control over your domain information than NSI does.
MS has a technological head start, both in browsers and streaming media.
MS can use patents and trade secrets to lock OSS out of it's markets.
Working for us:
Linux & OSS have a lot more people working on it that MS does (We're catching up!)
We can create solutions for *all* OS'es, MS can't.
We have an entire Norway of teenagers just waiting to reverse engineer Windows media streams:)
What will decide this battle:
Tech. developments that make Windows Media obsolete (these probably need to be open standards)
How well (& how quickly) the OSS community brings out cross-platform streaming solutions.
Development of emulators (WINE, VMWare, etc.)
Education: if we can convince content providers that they're locking out a significant portion of their user base by going to WM, we can prevent it taking over the streaming market.
How quickly linux desktops spread. There aren't many people (at least not now) that are going to choose a desktop OS purely based on what streaming media is available. They're more concerned with "usablility" and office apps. If linux can catch up (& move ahead!) here, we can grab desktop market share. That helps us convince content providers to use open standards.
Summary: streaming media is an *extremely* young technology. Of the 10% or so of the population with net access, probably only 5% (the DSL/Cable/University crowd) or so of those can even use streaming media effectively. (Most people can't deal with static images very well.) We have some time before streaming media becomes the 'killer app'. Even if we don't win on streaming media, we're the 'small, nimble competitor'. Microsoft is the 'large, entrenched industry leader'. Call it manifest destiny, if you like. We're bound to win one of these days.:)
<gripe> Why is it that every graphical MP3 players has to have its own "special" look? I want my title bar, dammit! </gripe>
I've got three of these on my system (freeamp, gqmpeg, and now xmms) and I don't use any of them, because of this -- mpg123 in an xterm is less painful.
I still say, for them to deliver a physical piece of paper in a few days to any house, anywhere in the country is damn impressive.
Yeah, how would we ever do this without the government-insured monopoly of the USPS. Odin knows nobody else could ever do the job. That's why we're propping up UPS and FedEx with government subsidies, too. Oh, wait...
Sorry, but this article just screams "Another Government Bureaucray can't keep up with technology"
You won't notice a difference between SSH and Telnet for text login, even over a modem. This means of course you should go with SSH.
I think this statement needs to be qualified a bit. When I switched from telnet to ssh, I didn't notice a *bandwidth* hit, but the *latency* of the connection went up. This makes sense, really, when you think about all the processing involved.
In any case, the difference was hardly noticeable over a 33.6K modem. So, yeah, you should go with SSH. OpenSSH is based on the original SSH1 source code, with lots o' bug fixes. SSH2 fixes some problems with the SSH1 protocol, but is non-free for commercial use (AFAIR).
There is no reason that it could not be centrally published.
I agree. My point was that because the government wouldn't be publishing a list, somebody would have to figure out what to mirror, in addition to the actual work of mirroring it. I don't think this is necessarily an insurmountable problem, but *it* is more work for the maintainers.
All the satalite banned site lists could feed off of peacefire.org or something via XML.
What I'd like to see is a system where every mirror site also acts as a server, and each webmaster can decide how many other sites to pull information from. When new data is added, it propagates through the entire system, so the loss of any one site doesn't cause data to be lost. I think having one "main" site provides a weak point for the Entrenched Powers(tm) to attack.
I think it would be a good idea to exclude porn (but not art) from the blocked site of the day.
To me, the most important speech to protect is that which is most objectionable. I may not agree with pornography, neo-nazism, or mormons, but I don't think that that silencing them is a solution.
First, it doesn't really solve the problem. People who hate are going to hate whether they've read the Turner Diaries or not. Born again christians are going to try to convert me even after a nuclear holocaust:) Consumers of pornography will have to start going back to 7-eleven. Seriously, though -- restricting availablity of something (porn, hate literature, breastfeeding information,...) doesn't alter *demand* for that thing. The *demand* is the problem, the consumption is only a symptom.
Second, once you censor the first, most objectionable group, there's both a precedent and a *mechanism* for censoring. The next group that comes under fire is much easier to silence -- just add them into the existing regulation. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A "REASONABLE AMOUNT" OF CENSORSHIP. You've either got a right to free speech or you don't. (Here's a recent ne ws story from BBC that's related to this thread.)
Hey, what dose everyone think about solving the censorship problem by creating a means for people to find out what was censored and connect to it?
Hey, this would be just like what the CSS folks are doing!
The problem, of course, is that the list of banned sites won't be centrally published -- you'd have to get each webmaster (or a fan) to sign his site up after it was banned. I'm not sure what you mean by 'removing all the porn from the lists...', but that sounds like it would be defeating the purpose of the list in the first place!
I think we're going to see a lot more distributed mirrors in the near future, as entrenched powers try to regulate or intimidate the 'net. Our flexibility and speed is our greatest strength (as long as linking stays legal), and we need to use it.
A newsreader with a killfile in today's USENET is a must. You also would like one with good filters that can rank messages based on subject or author.
Can anybody recommend a good newsreader for X? I used to use YA-Newswatcher on my Mac, and I loved it. It would be nice if it could handle inline images, too (gotta get my daily prawn allowance)
I recently saw a tv program about a man that had had a sort of electrode implanted in his head that allowed him to control a pointer on a screen simply by thinking.
Did anybody else read this and say "Ooh, where do I get one of these?"
Why do we feel so moved by this guy risking his neck against the Movie industry when thousands of penniless college students are doing the same against the music industry?
Well, for one thing, they're *not* doing the same thing.
The CMU students were actively *pirating* MP3's -- distributing from the campus LAN. This is pretty much explicitly illegal anywhere in the world.
LiVid project was trying to develop a DVD player for Linux, so that people could *watch* DVD's on their boxen.
If the CSS/DVD community had a mature, fully working product, I'd agree with the "locking the barn door..." sentiments, but it's not. What the DVD people and their lawyers are doing is trying to scare off any serious developers from working on CSS. And it's working. Simple fact: most people who would be interested in developing and using FREE (beer and speech) DVD players don't have the money to fight the teams of lawyers that are being sicced on them. The same thing happened with the 8Hz MP3 decoder. The corporations that are making the money off of digital media don't WANT to go to court. As long as the legal status of DVD/MP3 is the least bit murky, they have the advantage. Once they get into court, they either win or lose BIG.
what we read in mass media about/. isn't necessarily what they think we think. It's what they think people would like to read about us thinking. A lot (most?) of the time they're the same thing, though
The article doesn't say that the government is the one collecting this information. The content providers themselves do this. (Mind you, it sounds like the gov. has the right to look at your records any time someone makes a "complaint", so this may be a pointless distinction in reality, see my rant below)
The article also doesn't say anything about requiring a credit card as part of the registration process -- it simply provides that as one possiblility (the others being a "digital signature -- whatever that gets legislated to mean -- or a standard government ID).
Now that I've shown that it's not as bad as it seems, I'll tell you why it's worse than it looks...
The scary thing is (well, the first scary thing, there are a few) the way this is likely to work in the real world. It costs money to run a "registration service", especially if there are government-defined hoops you need to jump through. A lot of people will just decide that it isn't worth it, and pull their information off the web. The sad part is that these will most likely be the non-profits and artistic sites, not the "Cum-guzzling teen sluts" (register that, you bastards!) that most (uninformed) people where thinking about when they passed this law.
The scary thing (part 2 in a series) is that even the people who stay online and register users are unlikely to maintain the databases themselves -- they'll contract out to another company (like AdultCheck). Competition will slowly drive most of these companies out of business. Then there are maybe a half dozen companies with the keys to our privacy. And these companies depend on their government licence to stay in business. So when the police ask for "just a peek" into the database (without a warrant, of course), they'll have the implicit them down if they say no.
The (third and final) scary thing about this is that the list of offensive material is likely to be a lot longer than most (again, uninformed) people think. This isn't just about "pornography"! This is where the online community is failing in its education efforts. Most people love this kind of law. Whenever you can say "but, what about the children", you've automatically got most of the public on your side. (see "drug war", "gun control", "COPA" for details) It takes a lot of activism on our part to counteract that.
There is one major benefit of this legislation for the linux community. All of these registered users will be counted in the new W2K server pricing model, driving prices up dramatically and forcing even more webmasters to dump their IIS for Linux/Apache!
Slashdot Mirror
Ironic how the NY Time article on the web has a Double-click banner.
More ironic that you can't even view the page without accepting a cookie from them (it will loop for apparently ever, asking you over and over again.)
Another reason to boycott this movie:
Why put money into their pockets? There are plenty of other things to do on a Friday night, some of them not even involving computers! ;-)
Note the section in 6d above where they explicitly say you give them the right to use your information for targeted marketing.
...
I'd personally recommend becoming a member of the OpenSRS project, and being your own registrar.
Except that section 3 of the OpenSRS domain registration agreement reads like this:
Hmmm...sounds like a right to spam you to me. But domain registration information has always been publically available, so this doesn't worry my too much. I'm much more concerned about he UDRP
When you register a domain, youre just buying the rights to a domain, right? Or wrong? I'm trying to figure out where the DNS comes in.
DNS is a distributed database system. Everybody who owns a domain name is responsible for keeping their domain's entries in the database correct and up to date. You can do this yourself, or pay your ISP to do it. When you go to a URL, you ask your (or your ISP's) DNS for the IP address of the site. If the server knows the IP, it tells you. If it doesn't know the IP, it has to ask somebody else.
This is where the registrars come in. They maintain the "root servers" which basically keep a list of all the domains that are registered, and the DNS servers that contain the information about that domain. When you register a domain, you're paying for an entry in these "root servers".
When somebody else looks for your domain name, their DNS server asks one of the root servers where they can find the information, and the root server points it to your DNS server. Their DNS server then asks your DNS server for the information, and your DNS server gives it to them. That's why you need a DNS server.
Are we updating people's DNS servers everytime we request a page that our DNS server is unsure about and and then has to query another DNS server out there until it finds an answer?
Yes.
I just finished getting my business set up as an OpenSRS affiliate. I wouldn't recommend it if you're only going to be registering 1 or 2 domains -- for one thing, they make you prepay for at least 25. It's also a bit of work to get approved by them (they require you to take a test). But $10/year for a domain is pretty much free, and they give you (*and* your end-users) a lot more control over your domain information than NSI does.
The answer is: it depends.
Working against us:
Working for us:
What will decide this battle:
Summary: streaming media is an *extremely* young technology. Of the 10% or so of the population with net access, probably only 5% (the DSL/Cable/University crowd) or so of those can even use streaming media effectively. (Most people can't deal with static images very well.) We have some time before streaming media becomes the 'killer app'. Even if we don't win on streaming media, we're the 'small, nimble competitor'. Microsoft is the 'large, entrenched industry leader'. Call it manifest destiny, if you like. We're bound to win one of these days. :)
<gripe>
Why is it that every graphical MP3 players has to have its own "special" look? I want my title bar, dammit!
</gripe>
I've got three of these on my system (freeamp, gqmpeg, and now xmms) and I don't use any of them, because of this -- mpg123 in an xterm is less painful.
I still say, for them to deliver a physical piece of paper in a few days to any house, anywhere in the country is damn impressive.
Yeah, how would we ever do this without the government-insured monopoly of the USPS. Odin knows nobody else could ever do the job. That's why we're propping up UPS and FedEx with government subsidies, too. Oh, wait...
Sorry, but this article just screams "Another Government Bureaucray can't keep up with technology"
You won't notice a difference between SSH and Telnet for text login, even over a modem. This means of course you should go with SSH.
I think this statement needs to be qualified a bit. When I switched from telnet to ssh, I didn't notice a *bandwidth* hit, but the *latency* of the connection went up. This makes sense, really, when you think about all the processing involved.
In any case, the difference was hardly noticeable over a 33.6K modem. So, yeah, you should go with SSH. OpenSSH is based on the original SSH1 source code, with lots o' bug fixes. SSH2 fixes some problems with the SSH1 protocol, but is non-free for commercial use (AFAIR).
There is no reason that it could not be centrally published.
I agree. My point was that because the government wouldn't be publishing a list, somebody would have to figure out what to mirror, in addition to the actual work of mirroring it. I don't think this is necessarily an insurmountable problem, but *it* is more work for the maintainers.
All the satalite banned site lists could feed off of peacefire.org or something via XML.
What I'd like to see is a system where every mirror site also acts as a server, and each webmaster can decide how many other sites to pull information from. When new data is added, it propagates through the entire system, so the loss of any one site doesn't cause data to be lost. I think having one "main" site provides a weak point for the Entrenched Powers(tm) to attack.
I think it would be a good idea to exclude porn (but not art) from the blocked site of the day.
To me, the most important speech to protect is that which is most objectionable. I may not agree with pornography, neo-nazism, or mormons, but I don't think that that silencing them is a solution.
First, it doesn't really solve the problem. People who hate are going to hate whether they've read the Turner Diaries or not. Born again christians are going to try to convert me even after a nuclear holocaust :) Consumers of pornography will have to start going back to 7-eleven. Seriously, though -- restricting availablity of something (porn, hate literature, breastfeeding information, ...) doesn't alter *demand* for that thing. The *demand* is the problem, the consumption is only a symptom.
Second, once you censor the first, most objectionable group, there's both a precedent and a *mechanism* for censoring. The next group that comes under fire is much easier to silence -- just add them into the existing regulation. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A "REASONABLE AMOUNT" OF CENSORSHIP. You've either got a right to free speech or you don't. (Here's a recent ne ws story from BBC that's related to this thread.)
Hey, what dose everyone think about solving the censorship problem by creating a means for people to find out what was censored and connect to it?
Hey, this would be just like what the CSS folks are doing!
The problem, of course, is that the list of banned sites won't be centrally published -- you'd have to get each webmaster (or a fan) to sign his site up after it was banned. I'm not sure what you mean by 'removing all the porn from the lists ...', but that sounds like it would be defeating the purpose of the list in the first place!
I think we're going to see a lot more distributed mirrors in the near future, as entrenched powers try to regulate or intimidate the 'net. Our flexibility and speed is our greatest strength (as long as linking stays legal), and we need to use it.
A newsreader with a killfile in today's USENET is a must. You also would like one with good filters that can rank messages based on subject or author.
Can anybody recommend a good newsreader for X? I used to use YA-Newswatcher on my Mac, and I loved it. It would be nice if it could handle inline images, too (gotta get my daily prawn allowance)
I recently saw a tv program about a man that had had a sort of electrode implanted in his head that allowed him to control a pointer on a screen simply by thinking.
Did anybody else read this and say "Ooh, where do I get one of these?"
Anybody have a link to this info?
Why do we feel so moved by this guy risking his neck against the Movie industry when thousands of penniless college students are doing the same against the music industry?
Well, for one thing, they're *not* doing the same thing.
The CMU students were actively *pirating* MP3's -- distributing from the campus LAN. This is pretty much explicitly illegal anywhere in the world.
LiVid project was trying to develop a DVD player for Linux, so that people could *watch* DVD's on their boxen.
Different, see?
If someone posts a URL (or emails me a tarball) for the source, I'll put it up on my server.
If the CSS/DVD community had a mature, fully working product, I'd agree with the "locking the barn door..." sentiments, but it's not. What the DVD people and their lawyers are doing is trying to scare off any serious developers from working on CSS. And it's working. Simple fact: most people who would be interested in developing and using FREE (beer and speech) DVD players don't have the money to fight the teams of lawyers that are being sicced on them. The same thing happened with the 8Hz MP3 decoder. The corporations that are making the money off of digital media don't WANT to go to court. As long as the legal status of DVD/MP3 is the least bit murky, they have the advantage. Once they get into court, they either win or lose BIG.
what we read in mass media about /. isn't necessarily what they think we think. It's what they think people would like to read about us thinking. A lot (most?) of the time they're the same thing, though
The article doesn't say that the government is the one collecting this information. The content providers themselves do this. (Mind you, it sounds like the gov. has the right to look at your records any time someone makes a "complaint", so this may be a pointless distinction in reality, see my rant below)
The article also doesn't say anything about requiring a credit card as part of the registration process -- it simply provides that as one possiblility (the others being a "digital signature -- whatever that gets legislated to mean -- or a standard government ID).
Now that I've shown that it's not as bad as it seems, I'll tell you why it's worse than it looks...
The scary thing is (well, the first scary thing, there are a few) the way this is likely to work in the real world. It costs money to run a "registration service", especially if there are government-defined hoops you need to jump through. A lot of people will just decide that it isn't worth it, and pull their information off the web. The sad part is that these will most likely be the non-profits and artistic sites, not the "Cum-guzzling teen sluts" (register that, you bastards!) that most (uninformed) people where thinking about when they passed this law.
The scary thing (part 2 in a series) is that even the people who stay online and register users are unlikely to maintain the databases themselves -- they'll contract out to another company (like AdultCheck). Competition will slowly drive most of these companies out of business. Then there are maybe a half dozen companies with the keys to our privacy. And these companies depend on their government licence to stay in business. So when the police ask for "just a peek" into the database (without a warrant, of course), they'll have the implicit them down if they say no.
The (third and final) scary thing about this is that the list of offensive material is likely to be a lot longer than most (again, uninformed) people think. This isn't just about "pornography"! This is where the online community is failing in its education efforts. Most people love this kind of law. Whenever you can say "but, what about the children", you've automatically got most of the public on your side. (see "drug war", "gun control", "COPA" for details) It takes a lot of activism on our part to counteract that.
There is one major benefit of this legislation for the linux community. All of these registered users will be counted in the new W2K server pricing model, driving prices up dramatically and forcing even more webmasters to dump their IIS for Linux/Apache!