Or just speak to someone, tell them the system you want, get them to beat the web prices to get the sale, then say "I really want 512Mb of ram but your prices are so bad I'll just put in in myself, unless..." and then they'll give it to you for something close if not equivalent or less than the market price! That's what I did and I ended up getting more and more upgrades and hardware the longer I talked, all for peanuts/respectible prices (processor jumped from 1.7GHz to 2.0GHz for EUR50 not the EUR200 from the site, and that EUR50 was to go to 1.8GHz but he whacked it up to 2GHz to get the sale). The only part I ended up upgrading from them where the price was any issue was the hard disk, but as I had no need for a second laptop drive it was cheaper to pay a little over the odds to them to get what I wanted straight up. I can only assume the sales guy didn't care after he had a sale and that he was more than willing for Dell to make next to nothing off the increased spec as long as I bought.
Not entirely retorical and no I pay little attention to hotmails workings so I wasn't aware of that! But if the user is using an anonymiser and/or hotmail dropped this IP address......
Any mail sent between two users of the same webmail system may never hit network smtp (i.e. local delivery).
A webmail user connecting by https cannot be connected to outgoing mails from the webmail server so just because 1.2.3.4 connected to the webmail system and a mail was sent from 1234@webmail.tld to saddam@terror.tld does not mean that they can state that 1.2.3.4 is 1234! This assumes of course that the webmail system has a significant volume of traffic which prevents simple analysis correlating the two events.
Do you think they would have a clue who has mailing who if hotmail used https?
It would be very interesting to know if they are actually tracking who e-mails who and personally I doubt it! Why? Well I know of at least one small hosting company here in Ireland who do not keep (beyond standard log files they don't touch let alone preserve) these sorts of records for themselves let alone anyone else, and certainly have received no requests not to use encrypted channels for email communications, or not to offer webmail or..... If an Irish person is using webmail, then some carnivore type system would be required to snoop the communications and parse the requests to give them a record of who emailed who! If the webmail is under ssl then they are stuffed n'est pas? All they could really track is that you are using a https server!
Sorry if I bugged you with my reply but how many/.ers would have known it was a joke? How many could even tell you anything about cricket (except it's relevance to Hitchhikers)?
And the processor I am using right now and their breed, the Mobile versions of chips. It would also have been nice if they had managed to include the Motorola chips, Alpha and Sparc, though I guess they would have had to test on Linux. Come to think of it, perhaps someone should try and do this for all oof Debian's supported architectures (does anything else run on as many platforms)?
Well, I live in Ireland so no, I don't crack directTV cards. The only things I do crack are DVDs so I can watch them under Linux (and I would do this even if there was readily available legal (and hence commercial) software for linux that did this and games which I have purchased that I occassionally use noCD cracks on (not to play extra copies, but just so I don't have to have the CDs with me if I fancy a game). Now, the question is what odds is it to me if they redflag my bogus information from a net-cafe and are you not suggesting that these 2.2 million cards are being cancelled which is not the case (excluding 8000 afaik)? In the current state of affairs, if I had a copy of the list the only way they could stop me is if the purchases were unusual enough to catch the systems attention. A few greps of the list could easily get you a list of CC# that you should have a high success rate with quite easily (i.e. grep Seamus ccnums.txt would give me a high percentage of Irish results and grep Randy ccnums.txt a bunch of Americans).
I presume that's why we have so many Anonymous Cowards in here!
But more seriously, what % of Iraqi's have economic and physical access to these cafés? What monitoring takes place within Iraq to detect dissident net users? Do the cafe's offer cryptography and anonymous surfing?
And seeing as though I am going to get moderated to hell anyway, here's a poll result (telephone poll as part of a much larger poll on irish politics) that made my week when I read it on Sunday in the Irish Independent (can't find it online unfortunately):
Sorry, but no cricket championship (well none I've ever heard of and I play) ends in a tie! Any cricket match can end in a tie. Test matches (which are played over 5 days) drawn if neither side has defeated the other before the end of the last day. A one day cricket match (as played in the World Cup, the only real cricket championship which is on as we speak in South Africa) is tied if both teams end up scoring the same number of runs AND losing the same number of wickets (this could apply to a test match to, but I suspect that less than 0.01% of test matches are tied), this probably happens around 0.5% of the time. The only other thing that could really be regarded as a "championship" in cricket is the "league" table of test playing nations, which is based upon the results of test matches for the last few years, and awards each team a rating based on their results against each other (like a chess rating), this could be tied, but it would not be likely to remain so for long, and it isn't a championship really as there is no timescale to provide winners.
Seeing as though this is/. and I love to point out the UScentric attitudes on here, I must mention the fact that American Football matches can be tied more easily than a cricket match (getting through an overtime or two without scoring is more likely than the net result of two cricket innings both ending up with the same number of runs scored and the same number of players out). If you want an example of a championship with a distinctive tie possibility, look no further than any race based championship where close competitors would be expected to finish within insignificant amounts of each other. Athletics (one photo with inseperable athletes) or Formula 1 (two drivers with the same number of points and wins at the end of the season).
Well, I can imagine that if EVERYONE in the world got a list of a few million credit card numbers, you would suddenly see an awful lot of fraudulent purchases! I for one would be tempted, not to do something to get me in trouble (well they can try), but more likely a visit to my local net cafe to send some presents. Let's see:
A full compendium of all O'Reilly Free software books, Debian DVD sets and an X-Box with the LinuxBios Mod installed for Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Scott McNeilly, Michael Dell and anyone else on those lines who took my fancy and whose address I could find. I might even send one to every elected official in my country while I'm at it!
Amazon's entire porn collection (they have one I presume) for every censor on the planet.
A cross sending of every spammers products I could come up with to all the other spammers.
God only knows what else could take my fancy, and god only knows how many orders would actually be filled. Heaven forbid anyone found a well known persons card in there, say Jack Valenti, I think he would find himself making some massive (or massive numbers of) donations to Mplayer, Freenet and any projects people could find which he campagins against.
Do you REALLY think that people would hear on the radio about the 2.2 million credit card numbers 100 million people just recieved and think, "oooooooh they're gonna catch me if I touch them!"
The far more probable outcome is that an email of about 4 Mb (2,200,000 CC# * 20 bytes @ 90% compression) sent to 100 million people (or whatever the latest net use figures are) would be stopped at most ISPs very, very, very quickly as it would be lauching a large spam based DDOS against them (unless I underestimate the backbone out there). Sure it would get through to a lot of people, but unless it gets through to 10+% of hotmail or something similar, most users will have the fear you describe put into them.
A far more interesting prospect would be if instead of plain e-mailing the list around, a virus was used to propagate the data covertly by infecting web and/or email servers. If you get a web-server, you get it to gather the list and take part in attacking more hosts and passing it onto them, you also get it to add a link to every page at the trigger time so all visitors to that site gain access to the list. If you get an e-mail server, you just need to get the data there once and explode it out to all local mailboxes at the same trigger time (aswell as using the host to propagate). Then it comes down to a question of trying to balance the timings to maximise the number of boxes unchecked by the time of revelation.
Of course is there anything to stop the crackers from just dumping the data into all the P2P networks and letting it spread from there?
Finally I have to point out that I have no interest in obtaining these numbers (or any others, except my own:-) and I am certainly not advocating credit card fraud. Just saying that if an opportunity like you described (every email box got the list) came my way, I would be very tempted to try and enjoy myself with some humourous (to me) exploits from a safe place and that there would probably be tens or hundreds of thousands of other following suit. Damages would rack up pretty quickly.
If only someone had proof the USPTO had this on their site before the patent was found! We could have a USPTO-killer on our hands even if we don't have that evidence! Could they have been using anything to search for existing patents that didn't "infringe" on this patent? Seriously, if the EFF (or similar with appropriate skills) wrote up a 100 word description of this occurance and combined it with a 100 word summary of the US-led attempts to foist this system on the world, I would love to take it to my elective representitives to get them working against US-led patent extensions. I'd have a copy ready for every canvasser calling to my door! In fact, I think I have an idea!
One point, who controls the DNS? Is it the TLDs? Is it the hardware/software/isps who setup systems? My own personal money goes on the largest power being the combined international tld owners. If they want something like I suggested, they lobby their governments to use national and supernational (UN, G7, EU, whoever) powers to change the status quo! I think even U.S. politicians could be persuaded to endorse these changes if net stability enhanced (as it should be).
Perhaps it would be the case that porn providers will go to both, but you could (most probably) get a huge number of users to start far more agressive filtering. Imagine a broser plugin marked "sex-ban" which lets you turn on and off the.sex tld, then you add the ability to mark visited pages/servers as "sex" which gets blocked on your machine when it is in clean mode (in sex mode they appear). The.sex users would help update the non.sex content themselves for when they don't want anyone else to see smut, and if the plugin built distributed lists of sites (using weighting and trust to build the most reasonable global list) outside.sex but sex related they would get filtered to oblivion. Use those lists for mail fitering too! Then finally add the ability for users to block.sex sites based on related non.sex sites, then if.sex users want everyone to move to.sex and drop the rest they will have a method to push them with, if they don't then you are absolutely right, but it would provide the force around which filtering would become a whole lot better (come to think of it could we not train some browsers to recognise porn using bayenisian filtering, a large body (hehe) of work is easily available and it should be a lot more obvious than spam).
.sex would work, if only because most of the money in porn is for legal stuff, and the people who pay it don't want it to go on illegal stuff so knowing companies were happy about defining themselves as a sex company and behaving responsibly (making it easy for kids not to see it) would make them more likely to purchse there (think hardcore.sex or hardcore.com). Having said that, if you want to really try and ensure that no sexual content gets through to a browser,.kids or.safe is a better bet though it is at the expense of filtering virtually the entire web. It's the lost traffic from being outside.sex (anything that's interested at least offers the chance to filter you based ips serving sex outside.sex) that makes it work, not the extra traffic gained from being in.sex.
So what we really need to do is to allow anyone to buy their own tld... at a price! First setup the dns "root server consortium" who are the central administration and funding source for the root servers. Anyone who wishes to setup a tld should then have to go through the following steps:
Deposit $PRICE1 (5000) to reserve their tld for up to $RESERVETIME.
Provide a correct (by the consortiums requirements) dns configuration for yourtld.test during your one year for a cost of $PRICE2 per attempt after the 1st.
Maintain the.test tld until a large enough access sample has been acquired to establish the stability of the servers (i.e. step 2 must run for at least $TESTMINDURATION (2 months)).
Deposit $BALANCEMINTIME (2 years) of the initial estimated costs (to the consortium) for your tld. You must pay this while your test site is active and before your reservation expires (maximum of reservation date + $RESERVETIME + $TESTMAXDURATION + $DECISIONTIME).
Every month you will receive a bill from the consortium which adjusts your deposit so as to have $BALANCEMINTIME worth of funds after paying for the last months root servers service. If your deposit runs out, your tld lapses.
What happens when a tld lapses is an interesting question though. I think a tld registrar should have to declare whether subdomains are sub-owned of not, and if they are they would be required to update a central (universal) database with the list of sub-owners. Then when the tld lapses, all sub-domains (and the tld itself) fall under the control of the public registrar who bills the sub-owners directly to continue the service (a nicety would be e-mail services so that e-mail addresses could live on aswell as domains). Who gets to run the public registrar and set it's prices? How about giving each tld registrar a vote and awarding the contract every 3-10 years? If a tld is not sub-owned at all (probably rare), then the tld should cease for 3 years, then be available to everyone except the original owener for another 3 years, then back available to all! They could even allow the normally 1 year reservation fee to be a lifetime delayed fee on any domain which is not sub-owned (if you really want.dot and your second there, you can put down $PRICE1 and it's yours if they drop it).
The best thing would be if the dns itself held an additional record to indicate the owner of each (every) item so that if you are meant to own blah.blah you can check the dns and see that you do so you know that your.blah is yours even if.blah falls (as long as you can live with the public registrars rules/prices). The only issue left is if the.blah registrar decides to give all it's dns space to another company and then fold and the only way to solve this is with the likes of ICANN accredditing registrars. When I say ICANN, I mean that when you go to buy blah.blah, you check out the.blah regitrar to see what (if any) protection you have and then you buy or pass.
I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for Tivo or any inclination towards not subverting their system! Why? Well to put it simply, if I am paying someone to provide me with a TV signal, I feel it is well within my rights to acquire the TV-Listings (not to acquire reviews, but listings). If I can acquire the listings for all the services I am allowed to access (and even the ones I can't would only be potential teaser material to get me to sign up) then I have the material upon which to base a tivo system. Tivo wanted to go to the Sky's of this world and say "look, we can sell them your Tv-Listings again and make you even more money" and Sky went "sure", but sky now doesn't have a teletext service (that I know of) so instead you need to access their digital service to get tv listings so now they are controlling an extra revenue stream and generating extra revenue that could and should be freely available. That being said, I didn't buy a Tivo from abroad and start hacking because a base standard is required, one that works with any system that manipulates TV-Listings (Tivo, Freevo, ATI stuff, Sky+, anything) and then let the manufacturers run to any local DMCA like laws and test them out when people drop the "services" required to use the free service instead because they can't see any advantage to using the pay service (if they can then we should work harder). I would be (I'm sure) a Tivo hacker if it really existed in my country, instead I want to build my own. If you didn't have Tivo, what would the quality of Free Media devices be, I suspect improved as would be Free Media hackers are hacking Tivos. Oh well, when I figure out what bloody card will do PAL TV to MPEG2 or similar without chewing a machine to pieces under linux I'll leave you all alone to get hacking on something:-)
Cool, so I'll be able to go back and play Sim City 3000 and Madden 97 (for example, both of which I own) on my laptop under WinXP in how many years when they release it online. I try and encourage my copyfriendly friends to make sure they buy the games that they like, at least a few of them, but when I get a laptop (with Windows pre-installed and staying for work related reasons, though I dual boot) and can't install any (well F1GP3 but that's it great though it is) of my games that I mainly have from when I used to have windows around (99? but SimCity 3000 is a couple of Christmas's old) it makes me wonder whether we shouldn't devote more attention to getting some top quality open games done to make the games companies really earn their money if they want some!
Ooops, talking to myself again, going mad!
I meant to put in a link to pace, so here it is. I hope I don't have half a link in the parent, it looks of here (mozilla could be forgiving me).
Also does anyone know reasonably priced cards with decent drivers providing hardware accelerated TV Capture? What about hardware accelerated Video capture? And btw I mean under Linux and full PAL (preferably all audio formats aswell)? No matter how many times I try to find a card I can feel happy buying, I just can't! How come these guys can build Tivo's so cheap? How come no-one is building PC hardware from the same chips etc or if they are is the code all locked away?
I live in Ireland, a country of around 4 million people compared to the U.K. (our closest neighbour and fellow island just north-west of France, in Europe, about 4000k east of New York) at about 60 million. We were lucky enough to get a half-baked Sky service in Ireland for quite a while, but they never really treated us the same. For example, Tivo's were out, no service:-( They were meant to come in along with a Sky+ box (which is made by pace and which a sky rep told me just before it was being launched had "stolen the bits they needed from Tivo". BTW a quick call to sky's freephone number (yes at 3am) confirmed Sky+ STILL isn't available here and won't be til they launch the interactive services which are coming (and have been for over a year).
Now I had been thinking for a while that an open/distributed tv listings service for Ireland would be great, but that I might find little help in putting it together! But perhaps if Tivo is closing in the U.K. there might be an existing marketplace who were paying £10/month who are looking for an alternative. I can't imagine it would be the most impossible task to fool a present tv into using the free service. You'd have to reverse engineer the format used by the service, and then (to save making people solder) you'd need to deal with the fact the Tivo has a telephone connection and dials it's own number. You could establish some phone numbers to feed the demand and use a simple router to translate all dialed numbers to the new number or you could make a server to run on a PC (with a modem) that answers the calls and feeds it the data (which the server keeps up to date). There is only one response to this (and sky's attempt to take the £10/month for themselves) and that's to take the money away from them!
I'd suspect the programming routine for the scanner was like the Florida system for eliminating ex-felons from the election register, the more false positives the better! In the florida case it was the simple probability that they would likely be casting the net around the felons and therefore catching a group more likely to vote for Gore. In this case it would be to simply gather as many "licence violations" as possible so as to maximise the "bill" upon which settlement is based.
I don't pay a premium for the buttons, I pay the premium for ergonomics and build quality, though at the price I bought them all for, the only alternative cheaper was 5 keyboards, but that's Ireland for you!
Well I just don't bother installing the drivers! It's just a keyboard damn it! I hardly ever seem to end up with them myself though, so I can't even tell you if you can just map the extra keys (though I'm sure someone can!). I like the ergonomics (at least my arms do if I have to do a lot of typing) and it's a hassle to get a half decently made keyboard at a reasonable price here in Ireland!
Perhaps an Anti MS sentiment? Personally I kind of like their natural keyboards and have bought a good few for various people. I have a pair at home that both have 2 USB ports. Want a link to some PC keyboards with USB ports?
How about this on Linux anyway, and I can't imagine it's any different on other Free OS's (now Windows might be more hassle). Is there any reason why an OS could not just use an automounter for ftp filesystems (when you access/ftp/user:pass@site it logs you in and mounts it)? Is there a reason why it needs to be at the level of the toolkit/window manager and therefore only partially available? Now please note that what I really mean is that we should implement these sorts of features lower down the chain, but if people higher up want to re-implement them because they think they can offer something else then that's ok to!
There is no problem but I think he should (as the deals on the table currently allow) set himself up independently of any label to allow everyone give him a few like a patron while still being able to give distribution rights to labels for a price, and I think you understand the thrust of the question. What is an artist who has not yet put his name to paper on deals to do to take advantage of the opportunities everyone believes the net is and that the RIAA want to fight? Your suggestions are to sign up to a label, give away the high quality files or sign up with mp3.com? I'd be most interested in hearing how your diy model would work for him? Where would he get revenues from? Are you saying he should do his work for nothing or that he should do it to build popularity so he can sell out for cash in the future?
Slashdot Mirror
Or just speak to someone, tell them the system you want, get them to beat the web prices to get the sale, then say "I really want 512Mb of ram but your prices are so bad I'll just put in in myself, unless ..." and then they'll give it to you for something close if not equivalent or less than the market price! That's what I did and I ended up getting more and more upgrades and hardware the longer I talked, all for peanuts/respectible prices (processor jumped from 1.7GHz to 2.0GHz for EUR50 not the EUR200 from the site, and that EUR50 was to go to 1.8GHz but he whacked it up to 2GHz to get the sale). The only part I ended up upgrading from them where the price was any issue was the hard disk, but as I had no need for a second laptop drive it was cheaper to pay a little over the odds to them to get what I wanted straight up. I can only assume the sales guy didn't care after he had a sale and that he was more than willing for Dell to make next to nothing off the increased spec as long as I bought.
Not entirely retorical and no I pay little attention to hotmails workings so I wasn't aware of that! But if the user is using an anonymiser and/or hotmail dropped this IP address ......
- Any mail sent between two users of the same webmail system may never hit network smtp (i.e. local delivery).
- A webmail user connecting by https cannot be connected to outgoing mails from the webmail server so just because 1.2.3.4 connected to the webmail system and a mail was sent from 1234@webmail.tld to saddam@terror.tld does not mean that they can state that 1.2.3.4 is 1234! This assumes of course that the webmail system has a significant volume of traffic which prevents simple analysis correlating the two events.
Do you think they would have a clue who has mailing who if hotmail used https?It would be very interesting to know if they are actually tracking who e-mails who and personally I doubt it! Why? Well I know of at least one small hosting company here in Ireland who do not keep (beyond standard log files they don't touch let alone preserve) these sorts of records for themselves let alone anyone else, and certainly have received no requests not to use encrypted channels for email communications, or not to offer webmail or ..... If an Irish person is using webmail, then some carnivore type system would be required to snoop the communications and parse the requests to give them a record of who emailed who! If the webmail is under ssl then they are stuffed n'est pas? All they could really track is that you are using a https server!
Sorry if I bugged you with my reply but how many /.ers would have known it was a joke? How many could even tell you anything about cricket (except it's relevance to Hitchhikers)?
And the processor I am using right now and their breed, the Mobile versions of chips. It would also have been nice if they had managed to include the Motorola chips, Alpha and Sparc, though I guess they would have had to test on Linux. Come to think of it, perhaps someone should try and do this for all oof Debian's supported architectures (does anything else run on as many platforms)?
Well, I live in Ireland so no, I don't crack directTV cards. The only things I do crack are DVDs so I can watch them under Linux (and I would do this even if there was readily available legal (and hence commercial) software for linux that did this and games which I have purchased that I occassionally use noCD cracks on (not to play extra copies, but just so I don't have to have the CDs with me if I fancy a game). Now, the question is what odds is it to me if they redflag my bogus information from a net-cafe and are you not suggesting that these 2.2 million cards are being cancelled which is not the case (excluding 8000 afaik)? In the current state of affairs, if I had a copy of the list the only way they could stop me is if the purchases were unusual enough to catch the systems attention. A few greps of the list could easily get you a list of CC# that you should have a high success rate with quite easily (i.e. grep Seamus ccnums.txt would give me a high percentage of Irish results and grep Randy ccnums.txt a bunch of Americans).
I presume that's why we have so many Anonymous Cowards in here!
But more seriously, what % of Iraqi's have economic and physical access to these cafés? What monitoring takes place within Iraq to detect dissident net users? Do the cafe's offer cryptography and anonymous surfing?
And seeing as though I am going to get moderated to hell anyway, here's a poll result (telephone poll as part of a much larger poll on irish politics) that made my week when I read it on Sunday in the Irish Independent (can't find it online unfortunately):
Who do you fear most?
Bush: 60%
Saddam: 39%
Sorry, but no cricket championship (well none I've ever heard of and I play) ends in a tie! Any cricket match can end in a tie. Test matches (which are played over 5 days) drawn if neither side has defeated the other before the end of the last day. A one day cricket match (as played in the World Cup, the only real cricket championship which is on as we speak in South Africa) is tied if both teams end up scoring the same number of runs AND losing the same number of wickets (this could apply to a test match to, but I suspect that less than 0.01% of test matches are tied), this probably happens around 0.5% of the time. The only other thing that could really be regarded as a "championship" in cricket is the "league" table of test playing nations, which is based upon the results of test matches for the last few years, and awards each team a rating based on their results against each other (like a chess rating), this could be tied, but it would not be likely to remain so for long, and it isn't a championship really as there is no timescale to provide winners.
Seeing as though this is /. and I love to point out the UScentric attitudes on here, I must mention the fact that American Football matches can be tied more easily than a cricket match (getting through an overtime or two without scoring is more likely than the net result of two cricket innings both ending up with the same number of runs scored and the same number of players out). If you want an example of a championship with a distinctive tie possibility, look no further than any race based championship where close competitors would be expected to finish within insignificant amounts of each other. Athletics (one photo with inseperable athletes) or Formula 1 (two drivers with the same number of points and wins at the end of the season).
Well, I can imagine that if EVERYONE in the world got a list of a few million credit card numbers, you would suddenly see an awful lot of fraudulent purchases! I for one would be tempted, not to do something to get me in trouble (well they can try), but more likely a visit to my local net cafe to send some presents. Let's see:
- A full compendium of all O'Reilly Free software books, Debian DVD sets and an X-Box with the LinuxBios Mod installed for Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Scott McNeilly, Michael Dell and anyone else on those lines who took my fancy and whose address I could find. I might even send one to every elected official in my country while I'm at it!
- Amazon's entire porn collection (they have one I presume) for every censor on the planet.
- A cross sending of every spammers products I could come up with to all the other spammers.
God only knows what else could take my fancy, and god only knows how many orders would actually be filled. Heaven forbid anyone found a well known persons card in there, say Jack Valenti, I think he would find himself making some massive (or massive numbers of) donations to Mplayer, Freenet and any projects people could find which he campagins against.Do you REALLY think that people would hear on the radio about the 2.2 million credit card numbers 100 million people just recieved and think, "oooooooh they're gonna catch me if I touch them!"
The far more probable outcome is that an email of about 4 Mb (2,200,000 CC# * 20 bytes @ 90% compression) sent to 100 million people (or whatever the latest net use figures are) would be stopped at most ISPs very, very, very quickly as it would be lauching a large spam based DDOS against them (unless I underestimate the backbone out there). Sure it would get through to a lot of people, but unless it gets through to 10+% of hotmail or something similar, most users will have the fear you describe put into them.
A far more interesting prospect would be if instead of plain e-mailing the list around, a virus was used to propagate the data covertly by infecting web and/or email servers. If you get a web-server, you get it to gather the list and take part in attacking more hosts and passing it onto them, you also get it to add a link to every page at the trigger time so all visitors to that site gain access to the list. If you get an e-mail server, you just need to get the data there once and explode it out to all local mailboxes at the same trigger time (aswell as using the host to propagate). Then it comes down to a question of trying to balance the timings to maximise the number of boxes unchecked by the time of revelation.
Of course is there anything to stop the crackers from just dumping the data into all the P2P networks and letting it spread from there?
Finally I have to point out that I have no interest in obtaining these numbers (or any others, except my own :-) and I am certainly not advocating credit card fraud. Just saying that if an opportunity like you described (every email box got the list) came my way, I would be very tempted to try and enjoy myself with some humourous (to me) exploits from a safe place and that there would probably be tens or hundreds of thousands of other following suit. Damages would rack up pretty quickly.
If only someone had proof the USPTO had this on their site before the patent was found! We could have a USPTO-killer on our hands even if we don't have that evidence! Could they have been using anything to search for existing patents that didn't "infringe" on this patent? Seriously, if the EFF (or similar with appropriate skills) wrote up a 100 word description of this occurance and combined it with a 100 word summary of the US-led attempts to foist this system on the world, I would love to take it to my elective representitives to get them working against US-led patent extensions. I'd have a copy ready for every canvasser calling to my door! In fact, I think I have an idea!
One point, who controls the DNS? Is it the TLDs? Is it the hardware/software/isps who setup systems? My own personal money goes on the largest power being the combined international tld owners. If they want something like I suggested, they lobby their governments to use national and supernational (UN, G7, EU, whoever) powers to change the status quo! I think even U.S. politicians could be persuaded to endorse these changes if net stability enhanced (as it should be).
Perhaps it would be the case that porn providers will go to both, but you could (most probably) get a huge number of users to start far more agressive filtering. Imagine a broser plugin marked "sex-ban" which lets you turn on and off the .sex tld, then you add the ability to mark visited pages/servers as "sex" which gets blocked on your machine when it is in clean mode (in sex mode they appear). The .sex users would help update the non .sex content themselves for when they don't want anyone else to see smut, and if the plugin built distributed lists of sites (using weighting and trust to build the most reasonable global list) outside .sex but sex related they would get filtered to oblivion. Use those lists for mail fitering too! Then finally add the ability for users to block .sex sites based on related non .sex sites, then if .sex users want everyone to move to .sex and drop the rest they will have a method to push them with, if they don't then you are absolutely right, but it would provide the force around which filtering would become a whole lot better (come to think of it could we not train some browsers to recognise porn using bayenisian filtering, a large body (hehe) of work is easily available and it should be a lot more obvious than spam).
.sex would work, if only because most of the money in porn is for legal stuff, and the people who pay it don't want it to go on illegal stuff so knowing companies were happy about defining themselves as a sex company and behaving responsibly (making it easy for kids not to see it) would make them more likely to purchse there (think hardcore.sex or hardcore.com). Having said that, if you want to really try and ensure that no sexual content gets through to a browser, .kids or .safe is a better bet though it is at the expense of filtering virtually the entire web. It's the lost traffic from being outside .sex (anything that's interested at least offers the chance to filter you based ips serving sex outside .sex) that makes it work, not the extra traffic gained from being in .sex.
What happens when a tld lapses is an interesting question though. I think a tld registrar should have to declare whether subdomains are sub-owned of not, and if they are they would be required to update a central (universal) database with the list of sub-owners. Then when the tld lapses, all sub-domains (and the tld itself) fall under the control of the public registrar who bills the sub-owners directly to continue the service (a nicety would be e-mail services so that e-mail addresses could live on aswell as domains). Who gets to run the public registrar and set it's prices? How about giving each tld registrar a vote and awarding the contract every 3-10 years? If a tld is not sub-owned at all (probably rare), then the tld should cease for 3 years, then be available to everyone except the original owener for another 3 years, then back available to all! They could even allow the normally 1 year reservation fee to be a lifetime delayed fee on any domain which is not sub-owned (if you really want .dot and your second there, you can put down $PRICE1 and it's yours if they drop it).
The best thing would be if the dns itself held an additional record to indicate the owner of each (every) item so that if you are meant to own blah.blah you can check the dns and see that you do so you know that your .blah is yours even if .blah falls (as long as you can live with the public registrars rules/prices). The only issue left is if the .blah registrar decides to give all it's dns space to another company and then fold and the only way to solve this is with the likes of ICANN accredditing registrars. When I say ICANN, I mean that when you go to buy blah.blah, you check out the .blah regitrar to see what (if any) protection you have and then you buy or pass.
I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for Tivo or any inclination towards not subverting their system! Why? Well to put it simply, if I am paying someone to provide me with a TV signal, I feel it is well within my rights to acquire the TV-Listings (not to acquire reviews, but listings). If I can acquire the listings for all the services I am allowed to access (and even the ones I can't would only be potential teaser material to get me to sign up) then I have the material upon which to base a tivo system. Tivo wanted to go to the Sky's of this world and say "look, we can sell them your Tv-Listings again and make you even more money" and Sky went "sure", but sky now doesn't have a teletext service (that I know of) so instead you need to access their digital service to get tv listings so now they are controlling an extra revenue stream and generating extra revenue that could and should be freely available. That being said, I didn't buy a Tivo from abroad and start hacking because a base standard is required, one that works with any system that manipulates TV-Listings (Tivo, Freevo, ATI stuff, Sky+, anything) and then let the manufacturers run to any local DMCA like laws and test them out when people drop the "services" required to use the free service instead because they can't see any advantage to using the pay service (if they can then we should work harder). I would be (I'm sure) a Tivo hacker if it really existed in my country, instead I want to build my own. If you didn't have Tivo, what would the quality of Free Media devices be, I suspect improved as would be Free Media hackers are hacking Tivos. Oh well, when I figure out what bloody card will do PAL TV to MPEG2 or similar without chewing a machine to pieces under linux I'll leave you all alone to get hacking on something:-)
Cool, so I'll be able to go back and play Sim City 3000 and Madden 97 (for example, both of which I own) on my laptop under WinXP in how many years when they release it online. I try and encourage my copyfriendly friends to make sure they buy the games that they like, at least a few of them, but when I get a laptop (with Windows pre-installed and staying for work related reasons, though I dual boot) and can't install any (well F1GP3 but that's it great though it is) of my games that I mainly have from when I used to have windows around (99? but SimCity 3000 is a couple of Christmas's old) it makes me wonder whether we shouldn't devote more attention to getting some top quality open games done to make the games companies really earn their money if they want some!
Ooops, talking to myself again, going mad!
I meant to put in a link to pace, so here it is. I hope I don't have half a link in the parent, it looks of here (mozilla could be forgiving me).
Also does anyone know reasonably priced cards with decent drivers providing hardware accelerated TV Capture? What about hardware accelerated Video capture? And btw I mean under Linux and full PAL (preferably all audio formats aswell)? No matter how many times I try to find a card I can feel happy buying, I just can't! How come these guys can build Tivo's so cheap? How come no-one is building PC hardware from the same chips etc or if they are is the code all locked away?
I live in Ireland, a country of around 4 million people compared to the U.K. (our closest neighbour and fellow island just north-west of France, in Europe, about 4000k east of New York) at about 60 million. We were lucky enough to get a half-baked Sky service in Ireland for quite a while, but they never really treated us the same. For example, Tivo's were out, no service :-( They were meant to come in along with a Sky+ box (which is made by pace and which a sky rep told me just before it was being launched had "stolen the bits they needed from Tivo". BTW a quick call to sky's freephone number (yes at 3am) confirmed Sky+ STILL isn't available here and won't be til they launch the interactive services which are coming (and have been for over a year).
Now I had been thinking for a while that an open/distributed tv listings service for Ireland would be great, but that I might find little help in putting it together! But perhaps if Tivo is closing in the U.K. there might be an existing marketplace who were paying £10/month who are looking for an alternative. I can't imagine it would be the most impossible task to fool a present tv into using the free service. You'd have to reverse engineer the format used by the service, and then (to save making people solder) you'd need to deal with the fact the Tivo has a telephone connection and dials it's own number. You could establish some phone numbers to feed the demand and use a simple router to translate all dialed numbers to the new number or you could make a server to run on a PC (with a modem) that answers the calls and feeds it the data (which the server keeps up to date). There is only one response to this (and sky's attempt to take the £10/month for themselves) and that's to take the money away from them!
March 17th == St. Patricks Day
Washington D.C. != Dublin, Ireland
Dublin, Ireland == my.home
I'd suspect the programming routine for the scanner was like the Florida system for eliminating ex-felons from the election register, the more false positives the better! In the florida case it was the simple probability that they would likely be casting the net around the felons and therefore catching a group more likely to vote for Gore. In this case it would be to simply gather as many "licence violations" as possible so as to maximise the "bill" upon which settlement is based.
I don't pay a premium for the buttons, I pay the premium for ergonomics and build quality, though at the price I bought them all for, the only alternative cheaper was 5 keyboards, but that's Ireland for you!
Well I just don't bother installing the drivers! It's just a keyboard damn it! I hardly ever seem to end up with them myself though, so I can't even tell you if you can just map the extra keys (though I'm sure someone can!). I like the ergonomics (at least my arms do if I have to do a lot of typing) and it's a hassle to get a half decently made keyboard at a reasonable price here in Ireland!
Perhaps an Anti MS sentiment? Personally I kind of like their natural keyboards and have bought a good few for various people. I have a pair at home that both have 2 USB ports. Want a link to some PC keyboards with USB ports?
How about this on Linux anyway, and I can't imagine it's any different on other Free OS's (now Windows might be more hassle). Is there any reason why an OS could not just use an automounter for ftp filesystems (when you access /ftp/user:pass@site it logs you in and mounts it)? Is there a reason why it needs to be at the level of the toolkit/window manager and therefore only partially available? Now please note that what I really mean is that we should implement these sorts of features lower down the chain, but if people higher up want to re-implement them because they think they can offer something else then that's ok to!
There is no problem but I think he should (as the deals on the table currently allow) set himself up independently of any label to allow everyone give him a few like a patron while still being able to give distribution rights to labels for a price, and I think you understand the thrust of the question. What is an artist who has not yet put his name to paper on deals to do to take advantage of the opportunities everyone believes the net is and that the RIAA want to fight? Your suggestions are to sign up to a label, give away the high quality files or sign up with mp3.com? I'd be most interested in hearing how your diy model would work for him? Where would he get revenues from? Are you saying he should do his work for nothing or that he should do it to build popularity so he can sell out for cash in the future?