Example: there are armed anarchist revolutions going on in Iraq and France right now today
No, there aren't. Go and read up on the real anarchist revolutions that happened in Barcelona in the late 30s. George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" would be a good start.
I can disable a copy protection system on my own computer - specifically removing it. They didn't have permission to put it there, and I think it would be a tough case to prosecute me for repairing my own computer.
Unfortunately, you're mistaken in your understanding of the DMCA. But where they've *really* got you by the short and curlies is that you *have* given them permission. Isn't there a license agreement of some sort that comes with the CD? Either a hidden file, or a normal click-thru scroll-past-and-hit-accept type EULA? If so, I guarantee that installing a rootkit is covered by the small print. When Apple's iTunes license includes provisions enabling them to retroactively change the agreement *however they want*, and that by installing the sw you agree with this, that means that if Steve Jobs decides he wants you to come over and lick the tyres clean on his new Lexus, he just has to say "Make it so" - your iTunes license is changed to force you to go and lick his tyres, and you've already agreed to do it, and anything else he wants you to do, too.Of course, nice trustworthy Mr Jobs would never do a thing like that,... which makes me wonder why that clause is in the license in the first place? As with this broken CD from Sony, the only way to win the game is not to take part.
...to point out that, in these days of mass panic over the current (relatively harmless to humans) H5N1 avian flu virus, there is but one cry we all think of.... "Bring out yer dead!" (For non-UK readers: a tabloid panic over bird flu has just swept the country - hundreds of tabloid hacks have cottoned onto the notion of an inevitable pandemic leading to mass graves, collapse of society as the economy grinds to a halt, etc, and totally failed to understand the connection between the current bird flu epidemic, and the potential future human pandemic. Retroviruses are such pesky buggers...
this comment's powered by a Pentium Pro/233Mhz, a 1997 Dell Dimension now fully tricked out with 320Mb RAM and a fancy Matrox Millenium graphics card rather than the crappy non-accelerated STB Velocity 128 it arrived with. It's running KDE 3.2 on Mandrake GNU/Linux. I haven't specifically turned down any graphics settings. Oh and this instance of Firefox has been up for six and half days. Interactive perf isn't snappy, exactly, but it's perfectly usable. I wouldn't play games on here but then I got bored with games after 18 months playing Quake 2 over a 33.6 dialup line. But for text editing, config experimentation, Apache, ntpd, oh yeah a snort management station,.. etc, it's just fine.
I shudder to think what WInXP would look like on here. It arrived with w95 and ran NT4 for a while whilst I experimented with Debian 2.0... *sigh* miserable days, hand-editing xf86config, BOY! was that fun! uphill, both ways, magnets on the inodes, and so on.
Anyway, more seriously: Why is this story tagged as humor? I read the article, and there's really nothing funny in it.
You beat me to it. I was going to say: the Slashdot editors have answered the questions "slacker or sick?" by adding the Python foot icon. Illness isn't funny, but (for some reason) slacking off from work or AT work, _is_ considered funny. Therefore, the answer is that these so-called scientists with their fancy book-larnin' don't know what they're talking about; people who perform badly at work at simply lazy or work-shy.
Lucky us to have Smazenpus available to make that clear! Now, back to my 80 hour work week...
As a long-time Reg fan (from last century in fact!) and having lived round the corner from their first office and drunk very near their new(er) offices many times - tho' not knowingly in their company, more's the pity - I reckon I can be confident that they've mentioned the capitalisation believing it to be significant. Recall that they say that they (the Reg hacks) know which bank it was.
There were four main British clearing banks operating at the time:
National Westminster
The Midland / HSBC Bank (they renamed themselves after merging with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank; for some reason, the marketing people thought 'HSBC' would be better received by the British public;
Barclays
Lloyds
(Sidenote: these companies were commemorated (before the Midland / HSBC name change) in the second track on the Manic Street Preachers' first album: Natwest-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds).
Since then things have got much more confusing; various Building Societies have de-mutualised and converted into banks, legally speaking (and they now offer the same current account / chequebook / cheque guarantee / ATM / credit / debit cards.) There's also First Direct, an early phone-only bank pitched up-market - and owned by HSBC, the Scottish banks have tried to enter the UK market, American and European banks have their own chunks of the market, there are now internet-only banks (also owned to varying degrees by other banks and/or building societies (or ex-building societies that are now banks.) Then there's my bank, the Co-Operative Bank, who make a big deal of their ethical policies, their normal banking services and their terrible shortage of bricks-and-mortar branches without making up for it with a good phone banking service...
Anyway, 'R.B.' is presumably supposed to point to 'Royal Bank of Scotland'. Or are there others with those initials?
Damn, this story's three days old, I'll never know:)
Sounds like an early 90s "men's fragrance" don't it? "Doop! For _men_..."
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/0 3/0221226&tid=236&tid=14
Nothing wrong with that, it's just nice to see an acknowledgement with a link to the previous story with "since we _last_discussed_ this topic, foo bar and whizz have happened".
Then again, it wouldn't be slashdot without the screams of "doop!":)
hours and hours too late to mention this, but Real Climate,where the stores are written by serious academic climate prediction/modelling/reasearch types, had a piece on the hurricane/GW connection (or IS it?) that appeared just before Katrina, IIRC. Here it is: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=181. If I recall correctly the bottom line is that models indicate loose coupling between the number of storms and GW factors, but that storminess (how energetic a storm is.) It's a couple of months since I read it and my memory's not great, though, so I wouldn't take my word for it;)
I'm sure I heard a piece on this machine on the radio this week. It would probably have been the early-morning (6AM) "Farming today" proggy, essential tractor-cab listening all over the country;)...I've had a look at the prog's page at bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/farmingtoday/index.shtml but can't find it... anyone want to volunteer to hit "listen again" for all five progs this week? They're 30 mins long, I believe. lots of interesting stuff if you like that sort of thing...
My employer is on the 'critical infrastructure' list and we have a Tamiflu stockpiled. However I have a big argument with my boss (who's been involved in the prep work, and has met with various national security / health government types around this issue). As I understand it, a pandemic flu (ie high mortality, h2h transmission - a 1919 type event) would not be treatable. Tamiflu is an anti-viral agent (think: reverse transcriptase inhibition, the classic anti-HIV therapy) which has only been shown to improve the illness course in human trials by reducing the time you're sick by one and a half days. It is certainly not likely to be a cure for a pandemic strain. In other words: my boss thinks that stockpiled Tamiflu will protect us from pandemic strain; I think it's a chocolate teapot that won't significantly reduce mortality rates.
Re:FFS, what a fucking dreadful summary
on
Tier One ISPs Dying
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
However, L3 has been having "issues" this month that have left a lot of lower-tier ISPs in the uncomfortable position of explaining to their customers "We know the internet is down but there's nothing we can do about it." This outage really can't be good for their reputation, and I can see more potential customers taking their money elsewhere because of this.
Just because the technical issues have been fixed doesn't mean their finances have been fixed as well.
See now that's a story, if you add a couple of links to back it up. Not saying there's any problem with L3's finances, though of course we're all still waiting to hear the story behind the Cogent issue. Incidentally (as has also been discussed on NANOG recently) there's increasing pressure on not only ISPs but even corporate networks whose parent orgs are large enough to merit audits and certifications (think NIST, SOx, ISO17799,..) to start thinking that being multi-homed is a necessary precondition to really `being on the Internet`. (And who's to say they're not right?) One thing's for sure - demand for BGP-clued bodies with experience with 'enable is on an upwards curve. (Interestingly, routing is one of those IT areas that can't easily be distilled into a "...in 28 days" type crash course, ie,. commodified - along with systems programming, solid C++ coding, DBA-dom, and lots of things under the umberella of 'security'.)
Testing compares actual application behaviour to a defined list of expected behaviour. Security bugs often fall outside the remit of testing (tho' fuzzing has , uhm, blurred the line somewhat) because they often manifest themselves in scenarios that were not forseen at design time (which is when the spec's definde, and of course QA tests are defined by the spec. Specs rarely describe what software should NOT do, only what it SHOULD do.
Yes I have done professional QA on well-known software products, as well as pentests and vuln dev work.
FFS, what a fucking dreadful summary
on
Tier One ISPs Dying
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Is this the end for Level 3?
No, of course not, you blithering imbecile. L3 had a 2 hour global routing meltdown. Now, it's fixed. Whilst their routes were flapping, other carriers saw transient increases in latency and some problems with reachability, to some sites. However, everything continued to work properly for non-L3 customers. Two hours later L3's routes are back and working properly. End of story, nothing to see here, move along please.
Slashdot editors, do you really expect us to believe that no-one had submitted a more coherent or accurate story than this one? Come on, for heaven's sake.
I guess that means they're focussing on larger organisations rather than bedroom operations - ie those big enough to have dedicated mail servers separate from database servers...
(i) the community DID contribute to Nessus, when they were allowed to; (ii) there are more ways to contribute than writing code - what I meant in the GPP about using Nessus being a contribution towards promoting, testing and distributing it ; (iii) I don't take it as a personal attack, I'm just very sad Renaud's done this, tho' I'm hopeful about the Gnessus fork.
I agree with you that there are a lot of sad comments posted on stories that touch even indirectly on the topic of "USA vs The World" - that includes stories such as this, which mention another nation achieving something. This is pathetic (as it reveals the deeply unattractive mixture of ignorance, arrogance, and insecurity that infests part of the Slashdot community. And yes, I agree that for some of those comments, the line between ignorance and racism is crossed.
On the other hand, China IS a profoundly unfree society, and I personally regret that so many western corporations are so willing to pinch their noses and trade with a regieme that's still shooting people for expressing the wrong opinions (or disappearing them into prisons.) And yes, Tibet is being occupied and it's culture systematically eradicated, which may not be genocide but certainly counts as a war crime in _my_ book. Yes, western societies aren't perfect. Yes, we should engage constructively with unpleasant states in order to encourage them towards greater freedom and openness... but yes, when you wear a pair of cheap made-in-China jeans (or use a C-M-i-C wifi card, or whatever) you are profiting directly from other people's misery and oppression.
oh, OK, let me be amongst the first ten to say... FUD! (on the part of the EU, that is. The report that they've said this ludicrous thing is presumably factual.) Someone needs to tell the EU that "Collapse of Internet imminent" is a joke, to which the punchline is "film at 11."
No, because when I'm forced to use their software I do so against my wishes (OK, the argument could be made that I could get a job elsewhere. I find myself the wrong side of the convenience line to do so at the moment but that's my call.) But when I use Free software I'm making a political statement, that freedom is more important to me than features, usability or whatever. Alas economic and social forces are the main reason why anyone does things that they would rather not do, all things being equal. But that's just life.
So, Microsoft spit in my face by trying to sell me the "right" to use their software, whilst denying me lots of other rights - the right to sell it, read the source or to change it, say, to print "Linnux iz teh suxx0r!!" when it boots. When software I've used and promoted other people (and companies) to use changes in such a fundamental way, I feel that Renaud's taking the good faith of the community and throwing it back as unwanted. Well, fine, I don't want your closed proprietary software, even if it IS much more featureful and faster than the GPL'd fork. Have fun getting rich selling it to corporations. I'm going to continue having fun using (and exploring and learning and promoting and sometimes actually contributing to) Free software.
Although it's up to Renaud how he licenses his software, I really hope no-one uses it. Perhaps now we'll see where the real dividing line between the "open source" and the "free software" communities really is. (Well, no,... the Nessus v3 source itself won't be available, but I bet the same "best tool for the job" crowd will sell their souls and carry on using it as would if the source was available available on a read-only basis.
And Cally falls to it's knees and gives thanks that SOMEONE actually read the meaning rather than the words in my post. (That throwaway comment about AJAX being the first new thing I'd seen in five years has got 27 responses at the time of writing, of which three-quarters were smartarses leaping up and down saying "Actually, I think you'll find..."
If I was feeling uber-pedantic I'd draw attention to my use of the personal pronoun "I" in that phrase. Being a lame, clueless twerp, believe it or not, I wasn't aware of AJAX of XMLhttpRequest until Google maps turned up on Slashdot.
The combination of technologies and the use to which they are being put which are currently being called AJAX have been in play for at least five years.
Oh FFS, what is this, pedant's corner? Of course Javascript and the DOM aren't new, but [blatant abuse snipped]* notice that no-one was really using it until Google Maps first came along (was it earlier this year, or last year?) Now suddenly you can't move for startups using, yes, AJAX technologies. What's new isn't the libraries, it's the use to which it is being put. "IT" meaning AJAX, meaning (as the acronym says) *THE COMBINATION OF PRE-EXISTING TECHNOLOGIES IN A NOVEL COMBINATION*.
Pardon my gnarliness, I had to get up at 6am this morning to sit through 90 minutes of Powerpoint and marketing at a "Breakfast briefing" and I seem to have picked up a light touch of misanthropy. If you can call day-dreaming about slowly lowering shapemakers who burble about Flash into a dip of boiling polyethylene.
(* removed: [if you pull your heads out of your arses for a moment you would] )
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, you're mistaken in your understanding of the DMCA. But where they've *really* got you by the short and curlies is that you *have* given them permission. Isn't there a license agreement of some sort that comes with the CD? Either a hidden file, or a normal click-thru scroll-past-and-hit-accept type EULA? If so, I guarantee that installing a rootkit is covered by the small print. When Apple's iTunes license includes provisions enabling them to retroactively change the agreement *however they want*, and that by installing the sw you agree with this, that means that if Steve Jobs decides he wants you to come over and lick the tyres clean on his new Lexus, he just has to say "Make it so" - your iTunes license is changed to force you to go and lick his tyres, and you've already agreed to do it, and anything else he wants you to do, too.Of course, nice trustworthy Mr Jobs would never do a thing like that,... which makes me wonder why that clause is in the license in the first place? As with this broken CD from Sony, the only way to win the game is not to take part.
...to point out that, in these days of mass panic over the current (relatively harmless to humans) H5N1 avian flu virus, there is but one cry we all think of.... "Bring out yer dead!" (For non-UK readers: a tabloid panic over bird flu has just swept the country - hundreds of tabloid hacks have cottoned onto the notion of an inevitable pandemic leading to mass graves, collapse of society as the economy grinds to a halt, etc, and totally failed to understand the connection between the current bird flu epidemic, and the potential future human pandemic. Retroviruses are such pesky buggers...
this comment's powered by a Pentium Pro/233Mhz, a 1997 Dell Dimension now fully tricked out with 320Mb RAM and a fancy Matrox Millenium graphics card rather than the crappy non-accelerated STB Velocity 128 it arrived with. It's running KDE 3.2 on Mandrake GNU/Linux. I haven't specifically turned down any graphics settings. Oh and this instance of Firefox has been up for six and half days. Interactive perf isn't snappy, exactly, but it's perfectly usable. I wouldn't play games on here but then I got bored with games after 18 months playing Quake 2 over a 33.6 dialup line. But for text editing, config experimentation, Apache, ntpd, oh yeah a snort management station,.. etc, it's just fine. I shudder to think what WInXP would look like on here. It arrived with w95 and ran NT4 for a while whilst I experimented with Debian 2.0 ... *sigh* miserable days, hand-editing xf86config, BOY! was that fun! uphill, both ways, magnets on the inodes, and so on.
You beat me to it. I was going to say: the Slashdot editors have answered the questions "slacker or sick?" by adding the Python foot icon. Illness isn't funny, but (for some reason) slacking off from work or AT work, _is_ considered funny. Therefore, the answer is that these so-called scientists with their fancy book-larnin' don't know what they're talking about; people who perform badly at work at simply lazy or work-shy.
Lucky us to have Smazenpus available to make that clear! Now, back to my 80 hour work week...
There were four main British clearing banks operating at the time:
(Sidenote: these companies were commemorated (before the Midland / HSBC name change) in the second track on the Manic Street Preachers' first album: Natwest-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds). Since then things have got much more confusing; various Building Societies have de-mutualised and converted into banks, legally speaking (and they now offer the same current account / chequebook / cheque guarantee / ATM / credit / debit cards.) There's also First Direct, an early phone-only bank pitched up-market - and owned by HSBC, the Scottish banks have tried to enter the UK market, American and European banks have their own chunks of the market, there are now internet-only banks (also owned to varying degrees by other banks and/or building societies (or ex-building societies that are now banks.) Then there's my bank, the Co-Operative Bank, who make a big deal of their ethical policies, their normal banking services and their terrible shortage of bricks-and-mortar branches without making up for it with a good phone banking service...
Anyway, 'R.B.' is presumably supposed to point to 'Royal Bank of Scotland'. Or are there others with those initials?
Damn, this story's three days old, I'll never know :)
Then again, it wouldn't be slashdot without the screams of "doop!" :)
hours and hours too late to mention this, but Real Climate,where the stores are written by serious academic climate prediction/modelling/reasearch types, had a piece on the hurricane/GW connection (or IS it?) that appeared just before Katrina, IIRC. Here it is: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=181. If I recall correctly the bottom line is that models indicate loose coupling between the number of storms and GW factors, but that storminess (how energetic a storm is.) It's a couple of months since I read it and my memory's not great, though, so I wouldn't take my word for it ;)
I'm sure I heard a piece on this machine on the radio this week. It would probably have been the early-morning (6AM) "Farming today" proggy, essential tractor-cab listening all over the country ;).. .I've had a look at the prog's page at bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/farmingtoday/index.shtml but can't find it... anyone want to volunteer to hit "listen again" for all five progs this week? They're 30 mins long, I believe. lots of interesting stuff if you like that sort of thing...
So, Slashdot -- who's right?
NSP sued... for... having... outage.
Riiiiiight.
Yes I have done professional QA on well-known software products, as well as pentests and vuln dev work.
No, of course not, you blithering imbecile. L3 had a 2 hour global routing meltdown. Now, it's fixed. Whilst their routes were flapping, other carriers saw transient increases in latency and some problems with reachability, to some sites. However, everything continued to work properly for non-L3 customers. Two hours later L3's routes are back and working properly. End of story, nothing to see here, move along please.
Slashdot editors, do you really expect us to believe that no-one had submitted a more coherent or accurate story than this one? Come on, for heaven's sake.
Anyway, a network engineer's view can be seen in the overnight traffic on NANOG: http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/2005-10/ "Tier One ISPs dying" indeed. Worst. Story. EVER.
I guess that means they're focussing on larger organisations rather than bedroom operations - ie those big enough to have dedicated mail servers separate from database servers...
(i) the community DID contribute to Nessus, when they were allowed to; (ii) there are more ways to contribute than writing code - what I meant in the GPP about using Nessus being a contribution towards promoting, testing and distributing it ; (iii) I don't take it as a personal attack, I'm just very sad Renaud's done this, tho' I'm hopeful about the Gnessus fork.
I agree with you that there are a lot of sad comments posted on stories that touch even indirectly on the topic of "USA vs The World" - that includes stories such as this, which mention another nation achieving something. This is pathetic (as it reveals the deeply unattractive mixture of ignorance, arrogance, and insecurity that infests part of the Slashdot community. And yes, I agree that for some of those comments, the line between ignorance and racism is crossed.
On the other hand, China IS a profoundly unfree society, and I personally regret that so many western corporations are so willing to pinch their noses and trade with a regieme that's still shooting people for expressing the wrong opinions (or disappearing them into prisons.) And yes, Tibet is being occupied and it's culture systematically eradicated, which may not be genocide but certainly counts as a war crime in _my_ book. Yes, western societies aren't perfect. Yes, we should engage constructively with unpleasant states in order to encourage them towards greater freedom and openness... but yes, when you wear a pair of cheap made-in-China jeans (or use a C-M-i-C wifi card, or whatever) you are profiting directly from other people's misery and oppression.
oh, OK, let me be amongst the first ten to say... FUD! (on the part of the EU, that is. The report that they've said this ludicrous thing is presumably factual.) Someone needs to tell the EU that "Collapse of Internet imminent" is a joke, to which the punchline is "film at 11."
So, Microsoft spit in my face by trying to sell me the "right" to use their software, whilst denying me lots of other rights - the right to sell it, read the source or to change it, say, to print "Linnux iz teh suxx0r!!" when it boots. When software I've used and promoted other people (and companies) to use changes in such a fundamental way, I feel that Renaud's taking the good faith of the community and throwing it back as unwanted. Well, fine, I don't want your closed proprietary software, even if it IS much more featureful and faster than the GPL'd fork. Have fun getting rich selling it to corporations. I'm going to continue having fun using (and exploring and learning and promoting and sometimes actually contributing to) Free software.
Although it's up to Renaud how he licenses his software, I really hope no-one uses it. Perhaps now we'll see where the real dividing line between the "open source" and the "free software" communities really is. (Well, no,... the Nessus v3 source itself won't be available, but I bet the same "best tool for the job" crowd will sell their souls and carry on using it as would if the source was available available on a read-only basis.
If I was feeling uber-pedantic I'd draw attention to my use of the personal pronoun "I" in that phrase. Being a lame, clueless twerp, believe it or not, I wasn't aware of AJAX of XMLhttpRequest until Google maps turned up on Slashdot.
Pardon my gnarliness, I had to get up at 6am this morning to sit through 90 minutes of Powerpoint and marketing at a "Breakfast briefing" and I seem to have picked up a light touch of misanthropy. If you can call day-dreaming about slowly lowering shapemakers who burble about Flash into a dip of boiling polyethylene.
(* removed: [if you pull your heads out of your arses for a moment you would] )