On an ironic note to that criticism, I tried to visit http://kiro5hin.org just then only to find the below error message. I have never seen Slashdot down before. However, I don't want a flame war either cause I'm a supporter of both sites. Competition keeps the quality of all services higher, most Slashdotters seem to know that. So don't wish for the downfall of Slashdot, cause it'll give kiro5hin a reason to slacken off a bit too. The vice versa applies. It's called a free market.
Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, rusty@kuro5hin.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Apache/1.3.9 Server at www.kuro5hin.org Port 80
It was only a week or two ago that the French government introduced legislation that prevent ISPs in France to host anonymously posted websites. Now English law states that ISPs be held responsible for defamatory material posted on their servers. How many more threats will there be to the democratic principles of the Internet in Europe?
Even if Laurence Godfrey wanted to sue for damages caused against him, shouldn't he be pursing the poster of the material and not the medium? In most cases that I've seen, the plaintiff would normally pursue restitution from the defamer and not from the media that broadcasted it on television or published in the press.
Filtering of information posted on the Internet by ISPs is also open to abuse. Imagine if a media conglomerate owning an ISP decides to start filtering out posted opinions contrary to those held by the corporation? This would cause an outrage in most Western democracies.
Being an Australian, we are about to suffer from the restrictive online policies instituted by the right wing John Howard and Richard Alston. This will possibly have a devastating impact on our already slow internet speeds (due to our geographic location to the rest of the world) and hamper the development of e-commerce as ISPs will be forced to screen all incoming data for pornographic and criminal data. Britain may also see a slow in the growth if they force their ISPs to screen their Internet traffic too for defamatory postings.
But getting back to the point of online democracy being threatened in Europe, this sets a disturbing trend as less and less people will be unable to post their opinions and criticisms without fear of being clamped down upon by an authoritarian judicial system. The best weapon to combat defamatory or racist, sexist or offensive sites on the net is information itself and raising awareness so the public can make their own minds up on what is the truth.
Governments cannot claim to be morally right and democratic on one hand, and hypocritically crush the right of to make criticisms (whether anonymous or openly)with the other. Europeans must draw the line now.
A cash incentive in an extremely capitalist environment such as the United States will only encourage students to dob in students they only have a slight inclination towards being depressed, dangerous or potentially violent. When this type of person is in this type of state of mind they are confused enough about their own mental self without having to deal with peers anonymously dobbing them in for a cash benefit.
Sure this program is a right step in early detection and prevention by raising awareness, but a depressed teenager is more likely to see themselves as being or try to conform to the image that their peers attribute them with.
A violent person who is dobbed in may receive a boost to their violent irrational thinking when they realise that their attitudes strike fear in the minds of their peers. Depressed people will only withdraw further into themselves when others point out to them that they are depressed and thus socially inept in a peer group, leaving them contemplating suicide as their only escape. Encouraging other to start labelling and categorising these people in boxes will only further exacerbate their problems and leave them feeling isolated without solving the problem immediately.
Personally coming from Australia, which in fact has one of the world's highest youth suicide rates in the world, it is rather fortunate (in a twisted sense) way that our tough gun laws prevent the distressed from taking out their anger on the rest of society, but onto themselves. I know that I shall be flamed by the pro-gun NRA lobby, but taking away the right to a gun from teenagers is obviously the first step in controlling the situation and reducing violence and copycat incidents in the United States.
After that is done, it is essential that the depressed and troubled teenagers of America not be filtered, separated and isolated by their peers as a result of the judgements of inexperienced watchdogs in the form of teenagers, but by closer-nit school communities that can diagnose and counsel together. The last thing troubled teenagers want is to tagged and become a target for ridicule by 'poachers'. Counselling cannot be applied nation-wide. There is no one quick cure for depression and mental instability that is applicable en masse.
Everyone must be treated and diagnosed as individual, no matter what their state of mind is, by trained professionals who have the patient in mind not their wallets.
I think everyone here at Slashdot should give a very big round of applause to bero-rh from RedHat who taken so much of his time to answer all our questions and address our opinions on RedHat 6.2.
As of 12:39pm, Aust. EST, I've counted 26 posts from him. It's probably a record for any Linux company representative (Anyone have statistics on this?) on PR duty. Just curious bero, what position do you have at RedHat?
I recently had the pleasure of meeting Robert Young, the CEO of RedHat at the Australian Linux Expo, and he said that a majority of Slashdoters held the conception that they were the M$ of the Linux world and out to profit from the OSS community. From this misconception, some might believe that RedHat had lost touch with the OpenSource Community, but as bero-rh has clearly shown us during the last two days this is far from the truth.
Being a Debian user, I hope that someone from Debian will also make such a commitment to Slashdot posts. I hope you're listening out there Vicent, Deb, and Ian! But as a past RH user, I'd like to congradulate and thank bero-rh for his work at Slashdot. You've set a fine example to Linux distributers everywhere.
On behalf of Slashdot, thank you very much bero-rh
Debian Linux does public betas too.
on
RedHat 6.2 - RSN
·
· Score: 4
"I think that the beta idea was a really good one (and I know lots of problems have been fixed since the beta was out - look at the rawhide directory in their FTP server). I hope other Linux distributions will follow RedHat with a public beta test before releasing a new version."
I'm not trying to rain in the RedHat parade here or start a distro flamewar (trust me, I've seen enough already), but Debian - the non-profit Linux distribution has had public betas for each of their distributions for years now. It is under a development tree called "frozen" as opposed to the "stable" tree and the "unstable" tree (alpha testing).
However, Debian's testing periods, aka. freezes last for quarters on ends (the current freeze "Potato" has lasted for three months already, and I still haven't seen it about to end anytime soon) just to iron out nearly every bug as compared to other distrubutions. Just check out the update trees and see how short Debian's one is! Being a Debian user myself (and past RedHat user as well), I find it very frustrating that Debian takes forever to include new versions of packages, despite the advantages of the mature and proven.
But when one thinks about it, if anyone downloads the latest source code from each programmer that contributes to distros, then you'd have a distribution more cutting edge than any distro could provide you with. The only problem is that you risk cutting your hand off with a system filled with packages so new that they collide with each other due to inital teething. No one really has time for that, so let the distros do the packaging.
It's nice to see RedHat following Debian's innitiative of releasing public betas and publicising it too. I've always admired how cutting edge RedHat is when it comes to bundling new packages, but I've never really liked downloading 80MB worth of patches for every version of a distribution 6 months after the initial release. Let's hoped RedHat's upped the ante for the other commercial releases.
Wouldn't it be great if Linux could recognise what YOU were saying? hmmm...I just realised something, if you keep talking to your Linux box, wouldn't be a higher chance of buffer overrunning?
me:"cat/dev/firstpost double right bracket www.slashdot.org"
Linux:LAMER ACCESS DENIED
me:"flame newbie-disto lovers on slashdot"
Linux: "Are you sure? Yes/No."
me:"yes"
Linux: "LAMER ACCESS DENIED. Now flaming localhost. Reason: you are too lazy to use bash.Therefore you are Lamer."
Watch out Captain America and Iron Man cause here comes CmdrTaco in his Taco suit!
Now people won't mistake him for being a superhero with that tacky nick of his.
It looks like ARPA has given up working on innovative things such as the Internet. It's probably time they had a break and start inventing toys for big boys like the Pentagon! Hmmm...maybe they'll also start inventing those plastic toy soldiers to recon work in future too.
One has to wonder whether will end up with giant mecha one day. Hopefully someone from Slashdot might build that giant penguin mecha from those Penguin Computing banners, so we can all pay a nice visit to someone at Redmond = ).
Apologies to all Jewish people out there. Yes, you are right. How did I forget my history leasons! Zionism was the movement for a Jewish homeland, thus "Zion" must have come way earlier than any anime series! Hmmm...it seems like Zion seems to be so readily adopted by the sci-fi community because it is a funky name.
On the note of The Matrix lifting the name Zion from the SnowCrash, any Anime fan could point out that the name Zion itself actually originates from the anime series "Gundam" which has been around since the 1970's! In the legendary and revolutionary Mecha series, Zion is the name of the Duchy which invades Earth.
By mentioning this, I'm just being informative, and not nit-picking or just trying to score brownie points with the moderators, but does anyone remember the
"Windows 95 OSR3" debacle?
For those who don't remember how to what hilarious lengths Microsoft would go to in order to look like a cute little harmless bunny of the computing industry, they went as far as removing IE4 from the operating system to prove that it was impossible to remove the browser form the OS during one stage of the Anti-Trust case. Suprise, suprise! The system wouldn't work, thus proving that:
1) Microsoft's engineers are inedpt at modifying their own software (perhaps true considering their record at squatting bugs), but still, for their own purposes, good enough to permanently bond IE with Win95. 2) They're masters at Public Relations and brainwashing anti-trust judges.
Personally, I think that M$ just modified Win95OSR2.5 in OSR3 by "del C:\windows\shell32.dll". Still has anyone seen OSR3?
And two last additions that should be made to that list:
95Lite & 98lite (2000lite coming soon)
Even when I'm forced to use Win98 (please, no flames); I'm proving M$ wrong. I'm proud to be IE free. (Mozilla forever = P ) the guys at http://www.98lite.net should be congradulated for doing something that M$ said they couldn't remove and under oath too! But to keep the moderators and flamers happy, X beats 98lite down anyday for speed and stability.
Man went to the moon with 4K RAM. M$ can't get a PC to run properly with 256MB!
Now if only I could debug source code with Post-It(tm) Notes then I'll be extremely happy with the guys at 3M. Just a note of curiousity, how would this new wacky medium cope with "multi-roll" spanning archives? Someone better work out how to perfectly link up one end of tape to the start of another roll during untarring or else I'll never have enough room to store all the BSD vs. Linux flame wars on Slashdot! Better still, I could use the tape to shut some lame flamers up and bring some relief to us all.
...impossible to counterfeit, then the smarter half of the whole Linux community (who verify packages before installation) should be safe from viruses and trojans. Let's cross our fingers and hope the heavily used mirrors don't let their security down. Perhaps a review board of mirror site security should be establish. Even the most parnoid should be be able to sleep at night knowing that someone checked their mirror before they downloaded that last package. On the issue of trojans, no one has seemed to have brought up the issue of trojans that could possibly make unannounced changes to source code as it is being compiled. Wouldn't that be harder to detect than a trojan as signatures can't protect uncompressed source? Imagine if your copy of Tripware, Necruss, GnuGP or perhaps even the kernel being comprised at compiliation time, meaning that your security could be comprimised without being able to realise it or detect it until it is too late? Now that's scary. For the really paranoid, I recommend that you check out Kurt Seifried's extremely comprehensive Linux Administator's Security Guide (aka. LASG) at https://www.seifried.org/lasg/ If followed, it can put anyone's mind at ease.
We need more people in this world like Jon Johnsansen. Without brave people like him in this world would be a lot worse off. Companies that don't develop secure products in the first place shouldn't be rewarded or protected and be allowed to profit from their shoddy development. They should be punished so they can learn from their mistakes. The blame solely belongs with them for cutting corners, not with those who reveal their weaknesses. Instead of embracing these "hackers" for their work in "debugging", governments and corporations around the world rush to imprison or sue every time someone proves once again their naivety in their attitudes towards the digital age. Long live the Open Source movement. The net is a democracy. Always has, Always will! Kevin Mitnick, Jon Johnsansen, who's next? You? I'm proud to support Electronic Frontiers Australia. http://www.efa.org.au. Please sign their petition and stop Australia's Howard government becoming a digital totalitarian regime.
Slashdot Mirror
Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, rusty@kuro5hin.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Apache/1.3.9 Server at www.kuro5hin.org Port 80
Even if Laurence Godfrey wanted to sue for damages caused against him, shouldn't he be pursing the poster of the material and not the medium? In most cases that I've seen, the plaintiff would normally pursue restitution from the defamer and not from the media that broadcasted it on television or published in the press.
Filtering of information posted on the Internet by ISPs is also open to abuse. Imagine if a media conglomerate owning an ISP decides to start filtering out posted opinions contrary to those held by the corporation? This would cause an outrage in most Western democracies.
Being an Australian, we are about to suffer from the restrictive online policies instituted by the right wing John Howard and Richard Alston. This will possibly have a devastating impact on our already slow internet speeds (due to our geographic location to the rest of the world) and hamper the development of e-commerce as ISPs will be forced to screen all incoming data for pornographic and criminal data. Britain may also see a slow in the growth if they force their ISPs to screen their Internet traffic too for defamatory postings.
But getting back to the point of online democracy being threatened in Europe, this sets a disturbing trend as less and less people will be unable to post their opinions and criticisms without fear of being clamped down upon by an authoritarian judicial system. The best weapon to combat defamatory or racist, sexist or offensive sites on the net is information itself and raising awareness so the public can make their own minds up on what is the truth.
Governments cannot claim to be morally right and democratic on one hand, and hypocritically crush the right of to make criticisms (whether anonymous or openly)with the other. Europeans must draw the line now.
Sure this program is a right step in early detection and prevention by raising awareness, but a depressed teenager is more likely to see themselves as being or try to conform to the image that their peers attribute them with.
A violent person who is dobbed in may receive a boost to their violent irrational thinking when they realise that their attitudes strike fear in the minds of their peers. Depressed people will only withdraw further into themselves when others point out to them that they are depressed and thus socially inept in a peer group, leaving them contemplating suicide as their only escape. Encouraging other to start labelling and categorising these people in boxes will only further exacerbate their problems and leave them feeling isolated without solving the problem immediately.
Personally coming from Australia, which in fact has one of the world's highest youth suicide rates in the world, it is rather fortunate (in a twisted sense) way that our tough gun laws prevent the distressed from taking out their anger on the rest of society, but onto themselves. I know that I shall be flamed by the pro-gun NRA lobby, but taking away the right to a gun from teenagers is obviously the first step in controlling the situation and reducing violence and copycat incidents in the United States.
After that is done, it is essential that the depressed and troubled teenagers of America not be filtered, separated and isolated by their peers as a result of the judgements of inexperienced watchdogs in the form of teenagers, but by closer-nit school communities that can diagnose and counsel together. The last thing troubled teenagers want is to tagged and become a target for ridicule by 'poachers'. Counselling cannot be applied nation-wide. There is no one quick cure for depression and mental instability that is applicable en masse.
Everyone must be treated and diagnosed as individual, no matter what their state of mind is, by trained professionals who have the patient in mind not their wallets.
As of 12:39pm, Aust. EST, I've counted 26 posts from him. It's probably a record for any Linux company representative (Anyone have statistics on this?) on PR duty. Just curious bero, what position do you have at RedHat?
I recently had the pleasure of meeting Robert Young, the CEO of RedHat at the Australian Linux Expo, and he said that a majority of Slashdoters held the conception that they were the M$ of the Linux world and out to profit from the OSS community. From this misconception, some might believe that RedHat had lost touch with the OpenSource Community, but as bero-rh has clearly shown us during the last two days this is far from the truth.
Being a Debian user, I hope that someone from Debian will also make such a commitment to Slashdot posts. I hope you're listening out there Vicent, Deb, and Ian! But as a past RH user, I'd like to congradulate and thank bero-rh for his work at Slashdot. You've set a fine example to Linux distributers everywhere.
On behalf of Slashdot, thank you very much bero-rh
I'm not trying to rain in the RedHat parade here or start a distro flamewar (trust me, I've seen enough already), but Debian - the non-profit Linux distribution has had public betas for each of their distributions for years now. It is under a development tree called "frozen" as opposed to the "stable" tree and the "unstable" tree (alpha testing).
However, Debian's testing periods, aka. freezes last for quarters on ends (the current freeze "Potato" has lasted for three months already, and I still haven't seen it about to end anytime soon) just to iron out nearly every bug as compared to other distrubutions. Just check out the update trees and see how short Debian's one is! Being a Debian user myself (and past RedHat user as well), I find it very frustrating that Debian takes forever to include new versions of packages, despite the advantages of the mature and proven.
But when one thinks about it, if anyone downloads the latest source code from each programmer that contributes to distros, then you'd have a distribution more cutting edge than any distro could provide you with. The only problem is that you risk cutting your hand off with a system filled with packages so new that they collide with each other due to inital teething. No one really has time for that, so let the distros do the packaging.
It's nice to see RedHat following Debian's innitiative of releasing public betas and publicising it too. I've always admired how cutting edge RedHat is when it comes to bundling new packages, but I've never really liked downloading 80MB worth of patches for every version of a distribution 6 months after the initial release. Let's hoped RedHat's upped the ante for the other commercial releases.
Wouldn't it be great if Linux could recognise what YOU were saying? hmmm...I just realised something, if you keep talking to your Linux box, wouldn't be a higher chance of buffer overrunning?
/dev/firstpost double right bracket www.slashdot.org"
me:"cat
Linux:LAMER ACCESS DENIED
me:"flame newbie-disto lovers on slashdot"
Linux: "Are you sure? Yes/No."
me:"yes"
Linux: "LAMER ACCESS DENIED. Now flaming localhost. Reason: you are too lazy to use bash.Therefore you are Lamer."
me:"cat 'fuck you' >> kernel; rm hyphen rf slash"
Now people won't mistake him for being a superhero with that tacky nick of his.
It looks like ARPA has given up working on innovative things such as the Internet. It's probably time they had a break and start inventing toys for big boys like the Pentagon! Hmmm...maybe they'll also start inventing those plastic toy soldiers to recon work in future too.
One has to wonder whether will end up with giant mecha one day. Hopefully someone from Slashdot might build that giant penguin mecha from those Penguin Computing banners, so we can all pay a nice visit to someone at Redmond = ).
Apologies to all Jewish people out there. Yes, you are right. How did I forget my history leasons! Zionism was the movement for a Jewish homeland, thus "Zion" must have come way earlier than any anime series! Hmmm...it seems like Zion seems to be so readily adopted by the sci-fi community because it is a funky name.
On the note of The Matrix lifting the name Zion from the SnowCrash, any Anime fan could point out that the name Zion itself actually originates from the anime series "Gundam" which has been around since the 1970's! In the legendary and revolutionary Mecha series, Zion is the name of the Duchy which invades Earth.
By mentioning this, I'm just being informative, and not nit-picking or just trying to score brownie points with the moderators, but does anyone remember the
"Windows 95 OSR3" debacle?
For those who don't remember how to what hilarious lengths Microsoft would go to in order to look like a cute little harmless bunny of the computing industry, they went as far as removing IE4 from the operating system to prove that it was impossible to remove the browser form the OS during one stage of the Anti-Trust case. Suprise, suprise! The system wouldn't work, thus proving that:
1) Microsoft's engineers are inedpt at modifying their own software (perhaps true considering their record at squatting bugs), but still, for their own purposes, good enough to permanently bond IE with Win95.
2) They're masters at Public Relations and brainwashing anti-trust judges.
Personally, I think that M$ just modified Win95OSR2.5 in OSR3 by "del C:\windows\shell32.dll". Still has anyone seen OSR3?
And two last additions that should be made to that list:
95Lite & 98lite
(2000lite coming soon)
Even when I'm forced to use Win98 (please, no flames); I'm proving M$ wrong. I'm proud to be IE free.
(Mozilla forever = P )
the guys at http://www.98lite.net should be congradulated for doing something that M$ said they couldn't remove and under oath too!
But to keep the moderators and flamers happy, X beats 98lite down anyday for speed and stability.
Man went to the moon with 4K RAM. M$ can't get a PC to run properly with 256MB!
Now if only I could debug source code with Post-It(tm) Notes then I'll be extremely happy with the guys at 3M. Just a note of curiousity, how would this new wacky medium cope with "multi-roll" spanning archives? Someone better work out how to perfectly link up one end of tape to the start of another roll during untarring or else I'll never have enough room to store all the BSD vs. Linux flame wars on Slashdot! Better still, I could use the tape to shut some lame flamers up and bring some relief to us all.
...impossible to counterfeit, then the smarter half of the whole Linux community (who verify packages before installation) should be safe from viruses and trojans. Let's cross our fingers and hope the heavily used mirrors don't let their security down. Perhaps a review board of mirror site security should be establish. Even the most parnoid should be be able to sleep at night knowing that someone checked their mirror before they downloaded that last package.
On the issue of trojans, no one has seemed to have brought up the issue of trojans that could possibly make unannounced changes to source code as it is being compiled. Wouldn't that be harder to detect than a trojan as signatures can't protect uncompressed source? Imagine if your copy of Tripware, Necruss, GnuGP or perhaps even the kernel being comprised at compiliation time, meaning that your security could be comprimised without being able to realise it or detect it until it is too late? Now that's scary.
For the really paranoid, I recommend that you check out Kurt Seifried's extremely comprehensive Linux Administator's Security Guide (aka. LASG) at https://www.seifried.org/lasg/
If followed, it can put anyone's mind at ease.
We need more people in this world like Jon Johnsansen. Without brave people like him in this world would be a lot worse off. Companies that don't develop secure products in the first place shouldn't be rewarded or protected and be allowed to profit from their shoddy development. They should be punished so they can learn from their mistakes. The blame solely belongs with them for cutting corners, not with those who reveal their weaknesses. Instead of embracing these "hackers" for their work in "debugging", governments and corporations around the world rush to imprison or sue every time someone proves once again their naivety in their attitudes towards the digital age. Long live the Open Source movement. The net is a democracy. Always has, Always will! Kevin Mitnick, Jon Johnsansen, who's next? You? I'm proud to support Electronic Frontiers Australia. http://www.efa.org.au. Please sign their petition and stop Australia's Howard government becoming a digital totalitarian regime.