Such a school does indeed exist, though it has the word "International" in it: London International School of Performing Arts (LIPSA). However, LIPSA denies Keanu was there. I'm surprised Wired didn't bother to do a little more research to determine whether the school exists. I'm also surprised Warner Bros was so snide in its proclamation that the school didn't exist as that could be construed as an attempt at a cover-up (except for the fact that event never happened anyway).
This is the same story as spam (though we'd be happy eliminating spam); it started out as a novelty ("look what I can do!") and slowly migrated into an extremely profitable (and largely criminal) business. The fact that it's so poorly policed (I'm not talking filters here) makes it a perfect vehicle for all sorts of criminal ventures that vastly pre-date email, the internet, and even the fax machine (though most of these scams were seen as faxes 40+ years ago). Specifically, drug peddling, advance-fee fraud (Nigerian 419 scams), fake charities, crap merchandise, and the list goes on.
Congratulations, BitTorrent pirate networks, you are now "mature" because the criminals have you in their cross-hairs.
As to whether this is "the end of" anything... I strongly disagree. People forget that BitTorrent is a protocol. Piracy may be one of its more visible applications, but there is so very much more. Criminal spam destroyed joke spam and most bulk email, but email has remained (well, it might eventually be obsoleted by Facebook Messages, SMS, IM, etc, but that's not really spam's fault... and is an entirely different debate).
This is really about the use of BitTorrent to transfer copyrighted material and not about the protocol itself. Malware will persist in pirated software and media and people will get better at detecting and eliminating it. There are invite-only BitTorrent communities that closely monitor their userbase and content library for this sort of thing. These will only get more popular. There in an increased volume of free anti-virus applications out there (Avira, AVG, and Avast, ClamAV, and more), and there is also an increased variety of platforms people use (Mac OS is on the rise, as are the various smartphones, not to mention the less-notable increases in F/OSS OSs). There is also the legal fight against the MPAA/RIAA (MAFIAA) conglomerates, which seems to be heading in a good (albeit slow) direction for fair use.
We're seeing legitimate software and media increasing its adoption of free distribution; upcoming artists are embracing Creative Commons licenses, Free Software is immensely popular and will get a major bump once China, Russia, and other governments start to make good on their promises to dump Windows, and mobile phones are entering the arena.
Phones' 4G technology symbolizes the marriage of high bandwidth with high computational power, which trivializes things like streaming TV over your phone. 4G also represents an IP telephony model (VoIP), which means any cellular carrier that offers TV (currently all of the major players) must offer it as IPTV. Even my cable connection is IPTV (I can see my router's downstream byte count add up while watching TV). Couple this with Netflix and its competitors having quickly adopted their paradigms to allow streaming their content to any computer connected to your TV (video game consoles, smarter TVs and DVD/BluRay players, specialty boxes) as well as other vendors like Boxee and Hulu and you have a streaming-TV revolution.
How will this play out with respect to "piracy" remains to be seen, but I think we can see hints of its hopeful outcome in looking at the past battle of music, won by iTunes and Grooveshark; why get a questionable copy when a legitimate one is so much easier to obtain?
TLDs like.gov and.edu get a massive multiplier in Google's PageRank. Spamvertising effectiveness is therefore amplified in kind.
On a more alarming note, the system may have been blessed in some manner that might make it useful as a launching point for attacking a more important site which might implicitly trust the hacked server due to its ownership or similar relationships. The most sensitive systems are completely firewalled and therefore inaccessible from the outside, and these systems might extend a level of trust to servers like those for sale on this list. Of course, that might be one of the reasons those servers were hacked and are being turned around for sale at so low a price (i.e. they don't grant such access, so the crackers are flipping them).
Your solution of taking identical photos of a clock is charming, but it raises the question - if you're doing a coordinated effort to get the time right anyway, why not just synchronize the clocks on the cameras?:)
It's far easier this way, especially if other photographers aren't technically inclined and you're not interested in setting their phones' clocks. They may also insist on staying in their home time zone. My trick also works half-way through the trip whereas setting internal clocks doesn't retroactively edit image timestamps.
This is a bit off-topic in that it doesn't relate to storing photos, but it does relate to merging collections of photos from the same event (several different cameras from a family vacation, wedding, etc). When you have multiple cameras, you typically run into the issue of different time zones, blatantly incorrect timestamps, and differences of several minutes which might make for chronologically sorting the entire collection a bit awkward.
If possible, plan. Have everybody take the same photo at least once, ideally of a clock that includes the seconds. This gives you a reference. Now you need only determine the difference between the timestamps and then adjust them. I wrote a shell script called timefix to do that for a vacation a few years ago. It can be aided by my timecalc script so as to take inputs like 15:43 instead of just seconds. Use find and/or xargs if you have too many inputs. After this, you can view all photos by timestamp regardless of which camera was used.
You're trying to support this given existing standards, I'm proposing an alteration to the standard.
It keys on an element in question, be it a tag name, attribute type, or something else entirely (each case would have its own implementation and/or would be an acceptable query string to the support detection function, which merely returns false if it doesn't recognize the input). Perhaps I should have named the function navigator.HTMLsupports() or navigator.supportedTagName() instead.
This is just another form of DRM. Instead of keying on payments, it is based on a date, but the premise is the same; it is an unnecessary locking of a file which is trivially defeated (worst case scenario: take a screenshot!) and therefore not worth the annoyance. How about just adding the expiration date to the EXIF (or other meta-) data in existing media formats? Any site (specifically Facebook, MySpace, etc) would then be able to revoke the media based on the expiration date. Adding an expiration field to the submission process would do the same thing. Look ma, no end-user annoyances!
As to emails and other similar avenues, live and learn (and use better judgment in picking your friends!). DRM isn't going to stop the issue; it might even exacerbate it ("oh, this image is set to expire. I'd better save an unprotected copy and use it as blackmail later.")
I think the "vector of flags" idea has merit, but it introduces worse issues than those it solves. Consider privacy and user-tracking issues; this vector would make it trivial to uniquely identify users because it contains that much more information (see also the EFF's Panopticlick).
We still need "milestones" which can be marked, even if they are years, quarters, or months instead of versions. In this manner, we can still determine compatibility without introducing millions of different combinations of flags.
Another approach is the way javascript already does this. If there is a chance a function or object isn't supported, test it first, e.g. if ( document.getElementById ) { } It shouldn't be too hard to do this for HTML properties in a similar manner, perhaps like if ( document.supportsElement("video") ) { } (like document.createElement() but returning a boolean instead of an element). The important piece here is that there is no array containing this information. You would have to construct it if you really wanted it, which makes it harder to observe minor differences in ways that browsers structure it.
Is there any risk of epilepsy? I'm guessing there isn't (since it's way too fast), but the right combination of bits might be able to do it, though probably only if intentionally rigged. The point is that this technology makes that possible, perhaps also untraceable.
Diaspora is not peer to peer. It's a federated service like smtp or xmpp/jabber. The identity model is also that of the web which may not be rich enough to do a fine grained web-of-trust or get around despotic governments in its current form.
I'm skeptical of your assessment given its primary focus is decentralization, though Diaspora has such a small amount of documentation that I could be mistaken. If it does use an intermediary before it goes direct between the parties involved, that opens up a vector for a man-in-the-middle attack by Big Brother or whomever else. I'm sure that would be deemed unacceptable, so I am confident that Diaspora won't have this problem (assuming it even gets off the ground).
With an authoritarian regime, license does not matter. GLP/APL violations. It doesn't matter, all governments have sovereign immunity. You can sue them only if they allow it.
Ignoring the law, it might create some stigma when a violator is looking for community support, especially when that community includes an allied nation. Exposing massive teams of developers to something like a F/OSS project will also expose them to its origins (since scrubbing that information would be too harmful to be worthwhile), which might make for some appreciation for the idea, even if it takes a generation or two to sink in... though don't forget the intense parallels between socialism and Free Software. The two work well together, especially in the bazaar model.
Clearly the fact that Google and Facebook are built largely on open source software is meaningless.
This article is mostly about desktop software rather than web services. The WSJ author doesn't look at web apps and phone apps and the fact that they're going to obsolete the entire desktop software industry. Instead, the story focuses on servers and applications in general (think of Stuxnet's impact on Iran's nuclear reactor program and Skype's supposed back-doors). The cloud is another issue altogether and (outside of the protections afforded by the AGPL) tangential, in a longer-term scope of the problem. We still need short term solutions to tide us over.
With cyber warfare looming on the horizon, governments need to be ready. I'd be surprised if another GhostNet-like system doesn't currently exist, and even more surprised if there weren't a few governments --and corporations-- developing identical projects. Microsoft and the AntiVirus++ flavor of the month can't be expected to be able to fully defend, so the answer is to diversify.
Don't use the dominant platform and you won't be hit as hard. Make sure that the platform you choose is very well supported, and not exclusively supported by a group or company that might be aligned with "the enemy." For China, Russia, Iran, and many others, that means getting the hell off of Windows and MS Office and banning things like Flash and Silverlight. For major players that aren't tightly aligned with China, Russia, or the US, I suspect OpenBSD might be preferable to Linux (yeah, the example to give is de Raat's email about OpenBSD's compromise, but I'm pretty sure things like that will target the Linux kernel in the future).
In that short term, end-users will win. In the longer term, at least within this scope, the article pretty fairly outlines the kinds of walled worlds we're headed to.... Don't forget that companies like Facebook are independently erecting their own walls (e.g. Facebook messages already trump email with teenagers). Diaspora and other P2P systems might be one of our last chances on that front (which I noted earlier).
This article is very well composed, but does not mention peer-to-peer solutions, which avoid the big-brother problem. Projects like Diaspora are working on systems that implement this kind of P2P-based web using web-of-trust. I assume that Diaspora apps will be able to facilitate various services, hopefully including things like communication.
The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corporation (Fox News), which is probably why it didn't mention things like MySpace being owned by Murdock's political powerhouse, which is clearly along a similar (if not identical) line. Free Software best combats this with the Affero General Public License, which closes the "ASP loophole" by marking an implementation of the software as the same as its distribution (thus modifications must be made public). Examples include Diaspora (social media), Gitorious (software forge), and Identi.ca (micro-blogging) among others.
An observation: spammers celebrate holidays too; it's hard to recover from a series of shutdowns while dealing with family affairs. I hope their holidays were joyful and full of lasting distractions...
Nice job walking the line, Ebert! That's easily (improperly!) read as anti-censorship while supporting the move in phrasing; in comparing insults, one would 'rather' be called the less offensive term -- Ebert is saying that, ignoring the censorship issue, the book has more impact using the term slave.
I don't know what to think here. Proper perspective might be glimpsed if it were known what 'injun' will be transformed into. Based solely on nigger -> slave, I tend to support the idea since the former word is connoted with brotherhood in certain circumstances and its roots (brotherhood in bondage) might be mistaken for a measure of exclusivity. This interpretation would serve to reinforce racism rather than to highlight the lasting effects of slavery on this nation. Using the term 'slave' might therefore better address the original intent.
This kind of debate is really valuable in the classroom. If teachers could address this specific issue and then talk about it, the students might learn far more than the book had to offer. If changing the phrasing of the book sparks this kind of debate, it was worth doing.
Even if you're not eligible for joining their team as a lawyer (which isn't necessarily a given), you can still volunteer or at least network with them.
Light therapy for Seasonal Affective Disorder ("SAD") can be implemented with LEDs. While it's typically used in 30min bursts first thing in the morning, I wonder if it can be spread out through a longer time and worked into standard lighting via this kind of array. Very intersting...
Is FF gaining more speed by gobbling up resources or actually refactoring/removing/etc code? I run FF on a few older machines and performance is *horrible*. I keep at it because of several add-ons and extensions that make my life easier. I'm nearly to the point where I'm moving to gChrome because of the resource-gobbling. (Side note, even with every addon/extension disabled, it still eats up RAM like a fat kid and cake)
I'm not a FF dev and am no longer terribly active on bugzilla, but I'd wager the improvements have reduced resource hoarding greatly. We know JS has been refactored a dozen times over and should therefore assume it is better in all regards even if they're mostly touting performance. The Mozilla team can't speak to the inefficiency of your various add-ons, but disabling them should solve that issue. Keep in mind that XUL (the graphical interface) is implemented in JS, so even that will improve from the JS boosts alone, though there are almost certainly a massive collection of improvements (1415 fixed bugs!) in addition to that.
If your older systems don't have hardware-based graphics acceleration, some of the rendering optimizations will be lost, but it should still represent a significant boost above FF3.
Chrome has its advantages too, specifically in its segregation -- tabs have their own processes, flash is now bundled for optimal support and also sandboxed for performance and security. It also releases faster (due to a larger budget and salaried dev team).
Are we fast yet.com shows the measurements used by the Mozilla Javascript development team, comparing performance of ff4 to chrome/v8 and safari/nitro using both the sunspider (Mozilla) and v8bench (Google) test suites. LOTS of movement in Firefox over the past few months, including the apparent surpassing of Safari's Nitro engine in both tests and even beating Chrome's V8 in the Mozilla test suite.
Right, it needs help. I was hoping its mention would bring Miro to the attention of indie producers that were told their programs were listed here (who wouldn't want to learn more about their peers?). In that regard, I suppose this is kind of a meta post, but independent shows can only go so far on word of mouth and forums with questions like this.
The Wikipedia links should be useful too, but again they are limited in ways that I'm hoping IPTV loses soon.
No, he's looking for a media aggregator with broadcatching capabilities. Miro is fine, but it's no more the "answer" to that than "firefox" is the answer to "I'm looking for a worldwide network of hypertext pages".
Huh? This article is titled "Finding Independently Produced TV Shows" and clearly states that that is the objective for the submitter (bornagainpenguin) when its summary says (emphasis mine):
I'm wondering what else is available that is independently produced and has a greater emphasis on plot and actually finishing the story? I'm already a fan of efforts like [...] so I know that great things are possible, I just don't know where to find them! Can you help by making some recommendations?"
So how does he appear to be looking for a media aggregator with "broadcasting capabilities?" The question is akin to "I'm looking for web sites to go to" and Miro answers like "try Slashdot."
However, if the question were about broadcasting, see the Miro Publishing page (how do you think it gets its content?). YouTube does this too...
First, thanks for participating in this thread (and for submitting the article, and for making OWL).
Second, the documentation on owl-control is very sparse; I can't even find an HTML-rendered version of its man page (as noted in my GGP) let alone a more detailed description of its features, uses, advantages, etc. It is obviously central to the security model of the system. Please reply to the GGP with a link to more detail on owl-control (assuming you have one) as assembling it from your comments is not easy.
So what you're saying is that Google has decided to fully claim reputation-ownership of the mail their users are sending. They're staking their reputation that their users don't generally spam. If it was a big enough problem you would blackhole all of gmail, right now you're upset because due to the large volume that gmail sends, any percentage of spam is a problem.
I see no reason for that kind of gall. It's merely not a priority for them to open up that kind of information because it helps third party spam filters. Suppressing that data grants a competitive advantage to the GMail (and possibly Postini) services as using that internal information would lead to better filtering of a large email source.... Don't forget that Google wants to manage your corporate email.
If you're considering the privacy angle, that's rather far-fetched. All other email systems (including webmail and SMTP) track this (so there is no reasonable expectation to place on this sort of behavior; those who want to hide their IP should be using TOR or some other anonymizing proxy).
If it's encrypted, any properly configured MTA won't care; you're authenticated (and therefore trusted). Blocklists and friends (including IP reputation systems) only examine the last external connection if it is untrusted.
Slashdot Mirror
Such a school does indeed exist, though it has the word "International" in it: London International School of Performing Arts (LIPSA). However, LIPSA denies Keanu was there. I'm surprised Wired didn't bother to do a little more research to determine whether the school exists. I'm also surprised Warner Bros was so snide in its proclamation that the school didn't exist as that could be construed as an attempt at a cover-up (except for the fact that event never happened anyway).
Don't forget there's also the fact that Facebook has trademarked the word 'face', and more disturbingly, Facebook now has facial recognition software which enables them to recognize it trivially. While that might be useful in helping people get tagged in photos, it also has dangerous implications for privacy and advertising.
This is the same story as spam (though we'd be happy eliminating spam); it started out as a novelty ("look what I can do!") and slowly migrated into an extremely profitable (and largely criminal) business. The fact that it's so poorly policed (I'm not talking filters here) makes it a perfect vehicle for all sorts of criminal ventures that vastly pre-date email, the internet, and even the fax machine (though most of these scams were seen as faxes 40+ years ago). Specifically, drug peddling, advance-fee fraud (Nigerian 419 scams), fake charities, crap merchandise, and the list goes on.
Congratulations, BitTorrent pirate networks, you are now "mature" because the criminals have you in their cross-hairs.
As to whether this is "the end of" anything ... I strongly disagree. People forget that BitTorrent is a protocol. Piracy may be one of its more visible applications, but there is so very much more. Criminal spam destroyed joke spam and most bulk email, but email has remained (well, it might eventually be obsoleted by Facebook Messages, SMS, IM, etc, but that's not really spam's fault ... and is an entirely different debate).
This is really about the use of BitTorrent to transfer copyrighted material and not about the protocol itself. Malware will persist in pirated software and media and people will get better at detecting and eliminating it. There are invite-only BitTorrent communities that closely monitor their userbase and content library for this sort of thing. These will only get more popular. There in an increased volume of free anti-virus applications out there (Avira, AVG, and Avast, ClamAV, and more), and there is also an increased variety of platforms people use (Mac OS is on the rise, as are the various smartphones, not to mention the less-notable increases in F/OSS OSs). There is also the legal fight against the MPAA/RIAA (MAFIAA) conglomerates, which seems to be heading in a good (albeit slow) direction for fair use.
We're seeing legitimate software and media increasing its adoption of free distribution; upcoming artists are embracing Creative Commons licenses, Free Software is immensely popular and will get a major bump once China, Russia, and other governments start to make good on their promises to dump Windows, and mobile phones are entering the arena.
Phones' 4G technology symbolizes the marriage of high bandwidth with high computational power, which trivializes things like streaming TV over your phone. 4G also represents an IP telephony model (VoIP), which means any cellular carrier that offers TV (currently all of the major players) must offer it as IPTV. Even my cable connection is IPTV (I can see my router's downstream byte count add up while watching TV). Couple this with Netflix and its competitors having quickly adopted their paradigms to allow streaming their content to any computer connected to your TV (video game consoles, smarter TVs and DVD/BluRay players, specialty boxes) as well as other vendors like Boxee and Hulu and you have a streaming-TV revolution.
How will this play out with respect to "piracy" remains to be seen, but I think we can see hints of its hopeful outcome in looking at the past battle of music, won by iTunes and Grooveshark; why get a questionable copy when a legitimate one is so much easier to obtain?
TLDs like .gov and .edu get a massive multiplier in Google's PageRank. Spamvertising effectiveness is therefore amplified in kind.
On a more alarming note, the system may have been blessed in some manner that might make it useful as a launching point for attacking a more important site which might implicitly trust the hacked server due to its ownership or similar relationships. The most sensitive systems are completely firewalled and therefore inaccessible from the outside, and these systems might extend a level of trust to servers like those for sale on this list. Of course, that might be one of the reasons those servers were hacked and are being turned around for sale at so low a price (i.e. they don't grant such access, so the crackers are flipping them).
Your solution of taking identical photos of a clock is charming, but it raises the question - if you're doing a coordinated effort to get the time right anyway, why not just synchronize the clocks on the cameras? :)
It's far easier this way, especially if other photographers aren't technically inclined and you're not interested in setting their phones' clocks. They may also insist on staying in their home time zone. My trick also works half-way through the trip whereas setting internal clocks doesn't retroactively edit image timestamps.
This is a bit off-topic in that it doesn't relate to storing photos, but it does relate to merging collections of photos from the same event (several different cameras from a family vacation, wedding, etc). When you have multiple cameras, you typically run into the issue of different time zones, blatantly incorrect timestamps, and differences of several minutes which might make for chronologically sorting the entire collection a bit awkward.
If possible, plan. Have everybody take the same photo at least once, ideally of a clock that includes the seconds. This gives you a reference. Now you need only determine the difference between the timestamps and then adjust them. I wrote a shell script called timefix to do that for a vacation a few years ago. It can be aided by my timecalc script so as to take inputs like 15:43 instead of just seconds. Use find and/or xargs if you have too many inputs. After this, you can view all photos by timestamp regardless of which camera was used.
You're trying to support this given existing standards, I'm proposing an alteration to the standard.
It keys on an element in question, be it a tag name, attribute type, or something else entirely (each case would have its own implementation and/or would be an acceptable query string to the support detection function, which merely returns false if it doesn't recognize the input). Perhaps I should have named the function navigator.HTMLsupports() or navigator.supportedTagName() instead.
This is just another form of DRM. Instead of keying on payments, it is based on a date, but the premise is the same; it is an unnecessary locking of a file which is trivially defeated (worst case scenario: take a screenshot!) and therefore not worth the annoyance. How about just adding the expiration date to the EXIF (or other meta-) data in existing media formats? Any site (specifically Facebook, MySpace, etc) would then be able to revoke the media based on the expiration date. Adding an expiration field to the submission process would do the same thing. Look ma, no end-user annoyances!
As to emails and other similar avenues, live and learn (and use better judgment in picking your friends!). DRM isn't going to stop the issue; it might even exacerbate it ("oh, this image is set to expire. I'd better save an unprotected copy and use it as blackmail later.")
I think the "vector of flags" idea has merit, but it introduces worse issues than those it solves. Consider privacy and user-tracking issues; this vector would make it trivial to uniquely identify users because it contains that much more information (see also the EFF's Panopticlick).
We still need "milestones" which can be marked, even if they are years, quarters, or months instead of versions. In this manner, we can still determine compatibility without introducing millions of different combinations of flags.
Another approach is the way javascript already does this. If there is a chance a function or object isn't supported, test it first, e.g. if ( document.getElementById ) { } It shouldn't be too hard to do this for HTML properties in a similar manner, perhaps like if ( document.supportsElement("video") ) { } (like document.createElement() but returning a boolean instead of an element). The important piece here is that there is no array containing this information. You would have to construct it if you really wanted it, which makes it harder to observe minor differences in ways that browsers structure it.
Is there any risk of epilepsy? I'm guessing there isn't (since it's way too fast), but the right combination of bits might be able to do it, though probably only if intentionally rigged. The point is that this technology makes that possible, perhaps also untraceable.
Diaspora is not peer to peer. It's a federated service like smtp or xmpp/jabber. The identity model is also that of the web which may not be rich enough to do a fine grained web-of-trust or get around despotic governments in its current form.
I'm skeptical of your assessment given its primary focus is decentralization, though Diaspora has such a small amount of documentation that I could be mistaken. If it does use an intermediary before it goes direct between the parties involved, that opens up a vector for a man-in-the-middle attack by Big Brother or whomever else. I'm sure that would be deemed unacceptable, so I am confident that Diaspora won't have this problem (assuming it even gets off the ground).
With an authoritarian regime, license does not matter. GLP/APL violations. It doesn't matter, all governments have sovereign immunity. You can sue them only if they allow it.
Ignoring the law, it might create some stigma when a violator is looking for community support, especially when that community includes an allied nation. Exposing massive teams of developers to something like a F/OSS project will also expose them to its origins (since scrubbing that information would be too harmful to be worthwhile), which might make for some appreciation for the idea, even if it takes a generation or two to sink in ... though don't forget the intense parallels between socialism and Free Software. The two work well together, especially in the bazaar model.
Clearly the fact that Google and Facebook are built largely on open source software is meaningless.
This article is mostly about desktop software rather than web services. The WSJ author doesn't look at web apps and phone apps and the fact that they're going to obsolete the entire desktop software industry. Instead, the story focuses on servers and applications in general (think of Stuxnet's impact on Iran's nuclear reactor program and Skype's supposed back-doors). The cloud is another issue altogether and (outside of the protections afforded by the AGPL) tangential, in a longer-term scope of the problem. We still need short term solutions to tide us over.
With cyber warfare looming on the horizon, governments need to be ready. I'd be surprised if another GhostNet-like system doesn't currently exist, and even more surprised if there weren't a few governments --and corporations-- developing identical projects. Microsoft and the AntiVirus++ flavor of the month can't be expected to be able to fully defend, so the answer is to diversify.
Don't use the dominant platform and you won't be hit as hard. Make sure that the platform you choose is very well supported, and not exclusively supported by a group or company that might be aligned with "the enemy." For China, Russia, Iran, and many others, that means getting the hell off of Windows and MS Office and banning things like Flash and Silverlight. For major players that aren't tightly aligned with China, Russia, or the US, I suspect OpenBSD might be preferable to Linux (yeah, the example to give is de Raat's email about OpenBSD's compromise, but I'm pretty sure things like that will target the Linux kernel in the future).
In that short term, end-users will win. In the longer term, at least within this scope, the article pretty fairly outlines the kinds of walled worlds we're headed to. ... Don't forget that companies like Facebook are independently erecting their own walls (e.g. Facebook messages already trump email with teenagers). Diaspora and other P2P systems might be one of our last chances on that front (which I noted earlier).
This article is very well composed, but does not mention peer-to-peer solutions, which avoid the big-brother problem. Projects like Diaspora are working on systems that implement this kind of P2P-based web using web-of-trust. I assume that Diaspora apps will be able to facilitate various services, hopefully including things like communication.
The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corporation (Fox News), which is probably why it didn't mention things like MySpace being owned by Murdock's political powerhouse, which is clearly along a similar (if not identical) line. Free Software best combats this with the Affero General Public License, which closes the "ASP loophole" by marking an implementation of the software as the same as its distribution (thus modifications must be made public). Examples include Diaspora (social media), Gitorious (software forge), and Identi.ca (micro-blogging) among others.
(alphabetically)
SANS Internet Storm Center (I can't get the graph working, ymmv)
SenderBase
SpamCop (a feed to SenderBase)
Symantec
ThreatPost (TFA)
Websense Monthly reports (December not yet available, Websense is TFA's source)
An observation: spammers celebrate holidays too; it's hard to recover from a series of shutdowns while dealing with family affairs. I hope their holidays were joyful and full of lasting distractions...
Roger Ebert's response to this: I'd rather be called a Nigger than a Slave.
Nice job walking the line, Ebert! That's easily (improperly!) read as anti-censorship while supporting the move in phrasing; in comparing insults, one would 'rather' be called the less offensive term -- Ebert is saying that, ignoring the censorship issue, the book has more impact using the term slave.
I don't know what to think here. Proper perspective might be glimpsed if it were known what 'injun' will be transformed into. Based solely on nigger -> slave, I tend to support the idea since the former word is connoted with brotherhood in certain circumstances and its roots (brotherhood in bondage) might be mistaken for a measure of exclusivity. This interpretation would serve to reinforce racism rather than to highlight the lasting effects of slavery on this nation. Using the term 'slave' might therefore better address the original intent.
This kind of debate is really valuable in the classroom. If teachers could address this specific issue and then talk about it, the students might learn far more than the book had to offer. If changing the phrasing of the book sparks this kind of debate, it was worth doing.
Even if you're not eligible for joining their team as a lawyer (which isn't necessarily a given), you can still volunteer or at least network with them.
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/
Light therapy for Seasonal Affective Disorder ("SAD") can be implemented with LEDs. While it's typically used in 30min bursts first thing in the morning, I wonder if it can be spread out through a longer time and worked into standard lighting via this kind of array. Very intersting...
Is FF gaining more speed by gobbling up resources or actually refactoring/removing/etc code? I run FF on a few older machines and performance is *horrible*. I keep at it because of several add-ons and extensions that make my life easier. I'm nearly to the point where I'm moving to gChrome because of the resource-gobbling. (Side note, even with every addon/extension disabled, it still eats up RAM like a fat kid and cake)
I'm not a FF dev and am no longer terribly active on bugzilla, but I'd wager the improvements have reduced resource hoarding greatly. We know JS has been refactored a dozen times over and should therefore assume it is better in all regards even if they're mostly touting performance. The Mozilla team can't speak to the inefficiency of your various add-ons, but disabling them should solve that issue. Keep in mind that XUL (the graphical interface) is implemented in JS, so even that will improve from the JS boosts alone, though there are almost certainly a massive collection of improvements (1415 fixed bugs!) in addition to that.
If your older systems don't have hardware-based graphics acceleration, some of the rendering optimizations will be lost, but it should still represent a significant boost above FF3.
Chrome has its advantages too, specifically in its segregation -- tabs have their own processes, flash is now bundled for optimal support and also sandboxed for performance and security. It also releases faster (due to a larger budget and salaried dev team).
Are we fast yet.com shows the measurements used by the Mozilla Javascript development team, comparing performance of ff4 to chrome/v8 and safari/nitro using both the sunspider (Mozilla) and v8bench (Google) test suites. LOTS of movement in Firefox over the past few months, including the apparent surpassing of Safari's Nitro engine in both tests and even beating Chrome's V8 in the Mozilla test suite.
This boost is likely due in part to the recently added hardware acceleration. This is listed as supported on all major operating systems (see the Firefox 4 Beta Technology page).
Right, it needs help. I was hoping its mention would bring Miro to the attention of indie producers that were told their programs were listed here (who wouldn't want to learn more about their peers?). In that regard, I suppose this is kind of a meta post, but independent shows can only go so far on word of mouth and forums with questions like this.
The Wikipedia links should be useful too, but again they are limited in ways that I'm hoping IPTV loses soon.
No, he's looking for a media aggregator with broadcatching capabilities. Miro is fine, but it's no more the "answer" to that than "firefox" is the answer to "I'm looking for a worldwide network of hypertext pages".
Huh? This article is titled "Finding Independently Produced TV Shows" and clearly states that that is the objective for the submitter (bornagainpenguin) when its summary says (emphasis mine):
I'm wondering what else is available that is independently produced and has a greater emphasis on plot and actually finishing the story? I'm already a fan of efforts like [...] so I know that great things are possible, I just don't know where to find them! Can you help by making some recommendations?"
So how does he appear to be looking for a media aggregator with "broadcasting capabilities?" The question is akin to "I'm looking for web sites to go to" and Miro answers like "try Slashdot."
However, if the question were about broadcasting, see the Miro Publishing page (how do you think it gets its content?). YouTube does this too...
Solardiz (and/or gm.outside):
First, thanks for participating in this thread (and for submitting the article, and for making OWL).
Second, the documentation on owl-control is very sparse; I can't even find an HTML-rendered version of its man page (as noted in my GGP) let alone a more detailed description of its features, uses, advantages, etc. It is obviously central to the security model of the system. Please reply to the GGP with a link to more detail on owl-control (assuming you have one) as assembling it from your comments is not easy.
So what you're saying is that Google has decided to fully claim reputation-ownership of the mail their users are sending. They're staking their reputation that their users don't generally spam. If it was a big enough problem you would blackhole all of gmail, right now you're upset because due to the large volume that gmail sends, any percentage of spam is a problem.
I see no reason for that kind of gall. It's merely not a priority for them to open up that kind of information because it helps third party spam filters. Suppressing that data grants a competitive advantage to the GMail (and possibly Postini) services as using that internal information would lead to better filtering of a large email source. ... Don't forget that Google wants to manage your corporate email.
If you're considering the privacy angle, that's rather far-fetched. All other email systems (including webmail and SMTP) track this (so there is no reasonable expectation to place on this sort of behavior; those who want to hide their IP should be using TOR or some other anonymizing proxy).
If it's encrypted, any properly configured MTA won't care; you're authenticated (and therefore trusted). Blocklists and friends (including IP reputation systems) only examine the last external connection if it is untrusted.