Adobe is open, just not open source. Jobs threw out a subtle straw-man and everybody bit, hook, line and sinker.
Adobe is very good about making its products available, transparent, and easy to use. They work with their customers a lot. It's why the rule their markets. People see the word "open" though, and immediately think "open source", when they shouldn't. For example, the PDF specification is open, but PDF isn't exactly open source. Same with SWF and FLV file format specifications, both open (though only relatively recently).
An enterprising individual could write an unofficial Flash plugin for the iPhone OS, Adobe gives you everything you need for free, if they could ever get it through the App Store.
This is 100% an Apple restriction, and it's because they don't like how popular Flash is. There are plenty of valid reasons to have flash, and more options never hurt anybody. I'm afraid they're just going to end up going from the most popular smartphone on the market to the least popular if they keep this up.
Android is getting full flash support in the next release, btw, if anybody is interested.;)
You either need a new level of "open source" here or some RMS style ranting to really understand what I assume you mean when you say "open source."
RMS is not the last word on open source. He probably could have been, if he weren't such an ass about it. Most people have been ignoring him for a decade or more now, he's pretty much irrelevant.
Open source means, literally, that the source code is available for free. The "Source" is "Open". Open Source. Hey, that's amazing! It means exactly what it says!
You are free to fork the code at anytime and run with it so long as it remains open source.
That is a feature of the GPL, not open source, and it actually makes it less "open" than the pure definition of open source. Closed source code can actually be forked as well, this happens all the time in specialized industries, where there are only a handful of companies creating software for an application. Often the customer will buy the source code in addition to the software itself, so they can make changes as needed. It gets forked, but it definitely is not open source because that source code didn't come with the software, it cost a hell of a lot extra (usually more than the software itself by a wide margin).
The direction of the code and feature set has at least some amount of community influence. I'm not saying you're required to implement it but if someone hacks together a new encoding for Flash video and everyone in the community is using it, it's your responsibility to at least investigate merging the decoder into the trunk. This is regulated by the function of my first point.
That has never been a tenant of open source, though the nature of open source encourages community involvement. That isn't even a feature of the GPL, so I don't know where you came up with it. For example, most of the original GNU operating system (created by RMS and his cronies, and released open source) does not fit this definition any more than Windows does (which obviously is not open source). In fact, Windows probably had a hell of a lot more community involvement in developing its feature set than GNU did.
Most, in fact you could probably say all, successful closed source applications are heavily influenced by the community of users. This has nothing at all to do with open source, it's just good software development practice.
Whatever open source code you release cannot ever be proprietary. No backsies.
Again, GPL, not open source. They aren't the same thing (though the GPL attempts to force the app to remain open source). The BSD license is a much freeer open source license, and it allows for proprietary source code, so long as the code that is not originally yours is distributed as well. It's basically a "This is mine, but you can do whatever you want with it" license, whereas GPL is a "This is mine, and I'll let you do whatever you want with it IF you do x, y, and z". Both open source, but if you rate them by how they follow the spirit of open source, BSD wins.
You're confusing the GPL, which does all the things you state, with open source, which is a classification/description that has no license directly associated with it. The closest thing to a pure open source license is the BSD license. The code is open, but there is nothing locking you in to releasing your changes if you don't want to. It is complete freedom. Anything that forces something to be "open" is, by its very nature, less free than something that does not.
If you don't consider the above then (by your definition) the Flex SDK is actually open source [adobe.com]
I missed the part where you get the source code for Flex or its SDK for free, which is definition of "open source". Like all SDKs, it is nothing more than a collection of tools, samples, and documentation to help you build Flex apps. They don't give you the source code, so it
It is entirely dependent on your familiarity with the words and your ability to put them into context. Basically, if you subvocalize at all it won't work - so unfamiliar words will throw you, as will an unfamiliar context.
First, the paragraph they gave has a lot of context and flow going for it, and it's mostly comprised of short, easy words.
Context is vital to reading in general, if there is no context you can follow it doesn't matter if the words are spelled correctly, it will simply be a confusing mess. Large words are no problem as long as you recognize them on sight. If you don't recognize it such that you need to sound it out, then it isn't going to work, obviously. It relies on you already knowing the words you're reading.
With even a few random letters not in the original word jumbled in to each word, I suspect it'd be substantially harder to read.
You'd be wrong, the first time I saw this the letters were substituted randomly instead of jumbled, and it worked fine. Jumbling is actually harder than substituting for a single letter - for example replacing the middle of the words with all x's makes what is going on abundantly clear, and actually easier to read. Your brain is not un-jumbling it in your head, it's comparing cues in the word with what you already know - for example "audacity": The first and last letters are easiest to recognize, a and y, and you see it's 8 letters long. There are maybe 15-20 common 8 letter words that start with "a" and end with "y", and given the context of a sentence using "audacity", there generally isn't any other option to confuse it with. Your brain is very good at this kind of estimation, so this process lets you read twice as fast or more as someone who sub-vocalizes.
If you had to read every single letter, you'd never be able to read faster than 300 words a minute or so, which is pretty slow. That's the whole idea behind breaking out of the sub-vocalizing stage. The next step up is to read whole phrases at a time, instead of just looking at words. After that are blocks of paragraphs, which you read in quick succession and put together the sentences in your head - you essentially read whole paragraphs at a time. That's extremely fast reading there, and not many people can do it. Reading phrases is not rare, and reading individual words by sight is common.
That doesn't disprove anything, because you'll pick the correct word based on context, even if the incorrect word was stated.
The only time it won't work are the rare occasions where two such anagrams can also be applied in the same context. For example, it would be hard to come up with a scenario where protuberantial and perturbational can be used interchangeably in a sentence and still be correct. Same with undefinability and unidentifiably.
Such occasions are extremely rare, and you're just as likely to infer the incorrect word when it is spelled correctly as you are when it is jumbled, for exactly the reason this technique works.
Just look at how many times someone on slashdot says "At first I thought it said X", almost always with odd acronyms that are very similar to other acronyms. The exact same thing is going on there, they aren't looking at the whole word, just cues, and the cues were the same for both words, so at first glance they picked the one they are most familiar with. When that seemed odd they re-read it more carefully and realized the mistake.
The fact that this is a problem at all is strong evidence that the brain really does work this way.
For most situations the first and last letter plus the context are enough. Occasionally it doesn't work. Give it a shot, it's pretty cool.
You do have to be familiar with the words you're reading (i.e. a strong vocabulary), and beyond sub-vocalizing, so if you suck at reading it won't work. As long as you can sight read though, it works just fine. It's also easier the faster you read.
You do realize that they can track it down to the boarders AP and will know with reasonable accuracy (within 100 meters or so) where the downloader must live, right?
Then it's just a matter of getting a search warrant to find the PC with the right MAC address. Even spoofing your MAC won't protect you at this stage, unless you catch wind of what is going on and remove all traces of spoofing from your machine.
Fortunately, the police aren't that interested in downloaders, and are the only ones with the kind of authority to get a warrant for a whole group of people at a time. Fishing for a defendant is pretty difficult for a civil action, and I can't see it happening if all you have is a list of 50 people who it may be.
Still, technically there is nothing preventing such a situation.
If they get enough to get a search warrant, you're screwed, because even if you're masking you're MAC they'll be able to figure that out once they have access to your machine and make a positive link to the IP address.
If you use whole-drive encryption, recent court cases have shown you've opened up a whole new can of worms, and didn't really save yourself any trouble.
If you try hard enough at hiding it, you could be in a situation where the circumstantial evidence is enough to push a jury past the "reasonable doubt" threshold, in which case you've saved yourself nothing.
It really is not easy to shield yourself when you use a protocol that by its very nature must identify your machine uniquely. The best you can do is hide and make your discovery more difficult. You can't completely prevent it completely and still access the internet in any useful way.
That doesn't change the fact that they can narrow it down to the access point you connect to, and its physical address. That gives you about a 150 meter range assuming conditions are excellent (it's potentially much higher if conditions are absolutely perfect, but you then become obvious for other reasons, like the giant wifi dish on your car). From there, if they ever do catch you (like if you use the same AP's over and over) and you aren't spoofing your MAC address they can directly link the IP to your machine.
Granted you've made the task much more difficult, but you still have not solved the problem.
Now, connecting to all torrents on the net would take some effort, but if you were able to do that then you would be able to see everyone using BitTorrent.
Not really, there are a relatively small number of tracker servers, once you have access to the tracker it should be pretty trivial scripting out a request for each torrent they have on the server.
Private servers I'd expect they would not be able to connect to, but otherwise most of the trackers are public enough that they could crawl for most of them. It certainly not an easy undertaking, but it's far from shocking in my opinion. I think the OP just had no real concept of how BitTorrent works.
If you can get an IP, you can narrow down the area quite a lot without the ISP's cooperation, possibly enough to force the ISP's cooperation. With ISP cooperation you can narrow an IP down to a physical address. At that point, you're screwed.
What people who don't understand how networking works is, if there is a connection then there is an IP address trail to follow. You cannot spoof an IP address and maintain a connection. You can spoof a MAC address just fine, because that is only used on the last leg of the connection, but the IP address is used the rest of the way and a link must be maintained if data is ever to get back to the source. Pretty much all IP spoofing is good for are cases where you don't want to receive the response, like a DOS attack (there are elaborate network hacks using IP spoofing, but they require direct access to the destination network). That's obviously no good for a BitTorrent connection.
What you can do is sort of "launder" the IP address to make it difficult to trace - that is, to route it through multiple NAT services. Each NAT maintains an IP trail to the previous address though, or the connection would fail, so this is only obscuring the source, not erasing the trail. Someone diligent enough (and with sufficient authority to force cooperation from various ISP's) could potentially track any sufficiently current IP address from destination back to source. Also, setting up such a route would go a long way to establishing intent to commit a crime, which will blow most of your defense out of the water in such a case.
There might be some honeybuckets in the tracker's list, which would be clever, but all it is going to do is waste a little bit of time for whoever is tracking these IP's, it's certainly no protection for anybody but the tracker (who would be monitoring the honeybucket, one would assume).
There is absolutely nothing democratic about the FTC regulating anything. All executive agencies are autocratic in nature. They follow the directives of the President, and if they over step their bounds they are struck down by the court system (which sometimes is, sometimes isn't democratic).
The democratic functions of the government are well above their level, and only serve to increase or decrease their power or jurisdiction. There is nothing about the agency itself or who runs it that is in any way democratic, nor is there anything democratic about their day to day operations. The same is true for all executive functions after the initial democratic election of the president (excluding functions that directly involve the Congress, like cabinet appointments, SC justice nominations, and the government's yearly budget).
I'd personally STRONGLY AVOID OpenDNS, which does lots of bad things to DNS: NXDOMAIN wildcarding ANY address (not just www. addresses), SERVFAIL wildcarding, wildcarding addresses which HAVE valid records but just no A record, and even man-in-the-middling Google!
Most of what OpenDNS does are things their customers want, and are opt-in - things like website filtering and the like. However, they did MITM the main Google search domain and all search related domains for Google (but no other Google sub-domains) in response to some borderline spyware that Dell installed on all their machines as a result of a Dell/Google partnership (it basically did annoying DNS redirection at the user's machine, instead of via a DNS server).
That is completely inappropriate for ANY DNS. Who is OpenDNS to say what software Dell should press upon their customers? Dell and their customers, that's who. Not OpenDNS. The most they should have done was a blog on how to remove it if you don't want it, because the software was slightly hidden (it was given a not immediately obvious but accurate name). Instead they redirected google.com for all OpenDNS users, breaking a number of people's network configurations in the process. That's absolutely ridiculous.
That kind of self-righteous heavy-handedness is one reason I'll never use OpenDNS.
Which only exists by the good grace of mainland China.
They are a separate entity only because China decided it would be economically beneficial to allow them to remain separate. It's not a strong position for HK to be in.
Confirmed this with a few of my friends who are using PCCW Netvigator. I have the same ISP, but use OpenDNS, so haven't notice anything was amiss for some time.
Wait till they start hijacking all your DNS requests, whether they are going to their DNS or not. That's the next logical step in this progression.
Next thing you know you'll be signing up with a DNS service and they'll be sending you a private key in the mail. That's going to suck. Friggin dirty ISP's.
Does OpenDNS still redirect all google.com addresses? The GGP's forum thread was from three years ago. It seems like a pretty insane response to what software one company installed on their servers.
Redirecting all Google traffic because one company decides to load up shitty software on their machines? Seriously? If people don't like what Dell is doing, they'll either find a way to fix it or not buy Dell again, or both. If Google's reputation gets damaged because their partner went overboard, so much the better in a free market system.
I really don't see why OpenDNS did any of that. The correct response was a blog post on where the software is and how to remove it, since Google/Dell doesn't make it immediately clear. They also said "Browser Error Redirection" was unclear even to techies. WTF kind of techies do they have over there? When your browser is redirected on an error, and the page tells you it's "Browser Error Redirection" software, what's not clear? GoogleAFE is unclear (the original name of the software), but the other is not.
OpenDNS just seems like a bunch of self-righteous control freaks, I'm glad I have nothing to do with them. Google and Dell were definitely not doing the right thing, but OpenDNS screwed over most of their customers to fix it. How is that any better?
That doesn't solve anything, because DNS requests still go through the default DNS first generally, and then the DNS on the VPN network.
This cuts down VPN traffic for external links, but I know from first hand experience that DNS re-direction it can really screw up intranet connections over VPN. I recently had to switch my DNS to Google's because the local ISP's redirection was hijacking the DNS fail procedure, thus preventing any intranet connections (obviously my ISP had no IP addresses for the intranet sites).
ISP: VPN's are for work only, and you have to pay $100/mo for a business plan. Response, I was connecting to school for educational purposes and the computer lab requires a VPN.
ISP: In that case, you have to pay $100/mo for our business plan. Have a nice day.:)
Nope, sure doesn't. And they can sniff out a DNS request even if you find a DNS host that was amiable to using another port.
So what you really need as a DNS service that sends and receives encrypted requests over a non-standard port.
Then you can get around it. Hosting your own DNS does no good, as it still comes through your ISP's DNS first. Hard-coding Google's IP address would work short term for Google search, but if it catches on they'll just start redirecting all Google traffic instead of just DNS requests.
My host only reroutes failed DNS requests to their own shitty search, but it's still annoying as hell.
Slashdot Mirror
Adobe is open, just not open source. Jobs threw out a subtle straw-man and everybody bit, hook, line and sinker.
Adobe is very good about making its products available, transparent, and easy to use. They work with their customers a lot. It's why the rule their markets. People see the word "open" though, and immediately think "open source", when they shouldn't. For example, the PDF specification is open, but PDF isn't exactly open source. Same with SWF and FLV file format specifications, both open (though only relatively recently).
An enterprising individual could write an unofficial Flash plugin for the iPhone OS, Adobe gives you everything you need for free, if they could ever get it through the App Store.
This is 100% an Apple restriction, and it's because they don't like how popular Flash is. There are plenty of valid reasons to have flash, and more options never hurt anybody. I'm afraid they're just going to end up going from the most popular smartphone on the market to the least popular if they keep this up.
Android is getting full flash support in the next release, btw, if anybody is interested. ;)
You either need a new level of "open source" here or some RMS style ranting to really understand what I assume you mean when you say "open source."
RMS is not the last word on open source. He probably could have been, if he weren't such an ass about it. Most people have been ignoring him for a decade or more now, he's pretty much irrelevant.
Open source means, literally, that the source code is available for free. The "Source" is "Open". Open Source. Hey, that's amazing! It means exactly what it says!
You are free to fork the code at anytime and run with it so long as it remains open source.
That is a feature of the GPL, not open source, and it actually makes it less "open" than the pure definition of open source. Closed source code can actually be forked as well, this happens all the time in specialized industries, where there are only a handful of companies creating software for an application. Often the customer will buy the source code in addition to the software itself, so they can make changes as needed. It gets forked, but it definitely is not open source because that source code didn't come with the software, it cost a hell of a lot extra (usually more than the software itself by a wide margin).
The direction of the code and feature set has at least some amount of community influence. I'm not saying you're required to implement it but if someone hacks together a new encoding for Flash video and everyone in the community is using it, it's your responsibility to at least investigate merging the decoder into the trunk. This is regulated by the function of my first point.
That has never been a tenant of open source, though the nature of open source encourages community involvement. That isn't even a feature of the GPL, so I don't know where you came up with it. For example, most of the original GNU operating system (created by RMS and his cronies, and released open source) does not fit this definition any more than Windows does (which obviously is not open source). In fact, Windows probably had a hell of a lot more community involvement in developing its feature set than GNU did.
Most, in fact you could probably say all, successful closed source applications are heavily influenced by the community of users. This has nothing at all to do with open source, it's just good software development practice.
Whatever open source code you release cannot ever be proprietary. No backsies.
Again, GPL, not open source. They aren't the same thing (though the GPL attempts to force the app to remain open source). The BSD license is a much freeer open source license, and it allows for proprietary source code, so long as the code that is not originally yours is distributed as well. It's basically a "This is mine, but you can do whatever you want with it" license, whereas GPL is a "This is mine, and I'll let you do whatever you want with it IF you do x, y, and z". Both open source, but if you rate them by how they follow the spirit of open source, BSD wins.
You're confusing the GPL, which does all the things you state, with open source, which is a classification/description that has no license directly associated with it. The closest thing to a pure open source license is the BSD license. The code is open, but there is nothing locking you in to releasing your changes if you don't want to. It is complete freedom. Anything that forces something to be "open" is, by its very nature, less free than something that does not.
If you don't consider the above then (by your definition) the Flex SDK is actually open source [adobe.com]
I missed the part where you get the source code for Flex or its SDK for free, which is definition of "open source". Like all SDKs, it is nothing more than a collection of tools, samples, and documentation to help you build Flex apps. They don't give you the source code, so it
It is entirely dependent on your familiarity with the words and your ability to put them into context. Basically, if you subvocalize at all it won't work - so unfamiliar words will throw you, as will an unfamiliar context.
First, the paragraph they gave has a lot of context and flow going for it, and it's mostly comprised of short, easy words.
Context is vital to reading in general, if there is no context you can follow it doesn't matter if the words are spelled correctly, it will simply be a confusing mess. Large words are no problem as long as you recognize them on sight. If you don't recognize it such that you need to sound it out, then it isn't going to work, obviously. It relies on you already knowing the words you're reading.
With even a few random letters not in the original word jumbled in to each word, I suspect it'd be substantially harder to read.
You'd be wrong, the first time I saw this the letters were substituted randomly instead of jumbled, and it worked fine. Jumbling is actually harder than substituting for a single letter - for example replacing the middle of the words with all x's makes what is going on abundantly clear, and actually easier to read. Your brain is not un-jumbling it in your head, it's comparing cues in the word with what you already know - for example "audacity": The first and last letters are easiest to recognize, a and y, and you see it's 8 letters long. There are maybe 15-20 common 8 letter words that start with "a" and end with "y", and given the context of a sentence using "audacity", there generally isn't any other option to confuse it with. Your brain is very good at this kind of estimation, so this process lets you read twice as fast or more as someone who sub-vocalizes.
If you had to read every single letter, you'd never be able to read faster than 300 words a minute or so, which is pretty slow. That's the whole idea behind breaking out of the sub-vocalizing stage. The next step up is to read whole phrases at a time, instead of just looking at words. After that are blocks of paragraphs, which you read in quick succession and put together the sentences in your head - you essentially read whole paragraphs at a time. That's extremely fast reading there, and not many people can do it. Reading phrases is not rare, and reading individual words by sight is common.
That doesn't disprove anything, because you'll pick the correct word based on context, even if the incorrect word was stated.
The only time it won't work are the rare occasions where two such anagrams can also be applied in the same context. For example, it would be hard to come up with a scenario where protuberantial and perturbational can be used interchangeably in a sentence and still be correct. Same with undefinability and unidentifiably.
Such occasions are extremely rare, and you're just as likely to infer the incorrect word when it is spelled correctly as you are when it is jumbled, for exactly the reason this technique works.
Just look at how many times someone on slashdot says "At first I thought it said X", almost always with odd acronyms that are very similar to other acronyms. The exact same thing is going on there, they aren't looking at the whole word, just cues, and the cues were the same for both words, so at first glance they picked the one they are most familiar with. When that seemed odd they re-read it more carefully and realized the mistake.
The fact that this is a problem at all is strong evidence that the brain really does work this way.
For most situations the first and last letter plus the context are enough. Occasionally it doesn't work. Give it a shot, it's pretty cool.
You do have to be familiar with the words you're reading (i.e. a strong vocabulary), and beyond sub-vocalizing, so if you suck at reading it won't work. As long as you can sight read though, it works just fine. It's also easier the faster you read.
You do realize that they can track it down to the boarders AP and will know with reasonable accuracy (within 100 meters or so) where the downloader must live, right?
Then it's just a matter of getting a search warrant to find the PC with the right MAC address. Even spoofing your MAC won't protect you at this stage, unless you catch wind of what is going on and remove all traces of spoofing from your machine.
Fortunately, the police aren't that interested in downloaders, and are the only ones with the kind of authority to get a warrant for a whole group of people at a time. Fishing for a defendant is pretty difficult for a civil action, and I can't see it happening if all you have is a list of 50 people who it may be.
Still, technically there is nothing preventing such a situation.
If they get enough to get a search warrant, you're screwed, because even if you're masking you're MAC they'll be able to figure that out once they have access to your machine and make a positive link to the IP address.
If you use whole-drive encryption, recent court cases have shown you've opened up a whole new can of worms, and didn't really save yourself any trouble.
If you try hard enough at hiding it, you could be in a situation where the circumstantial evidence is enough to push a jury past the "reasonable doubt" threshold, in which case you've saved yourself nothing.
It really is not easy to shield yourself when you use a protocol that by its very nature must identify your machine uniquely. The best you can do is hide and make your discovery more difficult. You can't completely prevent it completely and still access the internet in any useful way.
That doesn't change the fact that they can narrow it down to the access point you connect to, and its physical address. That gives you about a 150 meter range assuming conditions are excellent (it's potentially much higher if conditions are absolutely perfect, but you then become obvious for other reasons, like the giant wifi dish on your car). From there, if they ever do catch you (like if you use the same AP's over and over) and you aren't spoofing your MAC address they can directly link the IP to your machine.
Granted you've made the task much more difficult, but you still have not solved the problem.
Come on now, it could reasonably be his second or third. Don't be so hard on the guy!
You'll also be surprised to know that when you tell everybody what you're downloading, everybody knows what you're downloading.
Shocking, I know, and completely counter-intuitive, but there it is.
[This post removed under the first rule of USENET.]
Don't tell me, "Don't talk about USENET?"
Now, connecting to all torrents on the net would take some effort, but if you were able to do that then you would be able to see everyone using BitTorrent.
Not really, there are a relatively small number of tracker servers, once you have access to the tracker it should be pretty trivial scripting out a request for each torrent they have on the server.
Private servers I'd expect they would not be able to connect to, but otherwise most of the trackers are public enough that they could crawl for most of them. It certainly not an easy undertaking, but it's far from shocking in my opinion. I think the OP just had no real concept of how BitTorrent works.
If you can get an IP, you can narrow down the area quite a lot without the ISP's cooperation, possibly enough to force the ISP's cooperation. With ISP cooperation you can narrow an IP down to a physical address. At that point, you're screwed.
What people who don't understand how networking works is, if there is a connection then there is an IP address trail to follow. You cannot spoof an IP address and maintain a connection. You can spoof a MAC address just fine, because that is only used on the last leg of the connection, but the IP address is used the rest of the way and a link must be maintained if data is ever to get back to the source. Pretty much all IP spoofing is good for are cases where you don't want to receive the response, like a DOS attack (there are elaborate network hacks using IP spoofing, but they require direct access to the destination network). That's obviously no good for a BitTorrent connection.
What you can do is sort of "launder" the IP address to make it difficult to trace - that is, to route it through multiple NAT services. Each NAT maintains an IP trail to the previous address though, or the connection would fail, so this is only obscuring the source, not erasing the trail. Someone diligent enough (and with sufficient authority to force cooperation from various ISP's) could potentially track any sufficiently current IP address from destination back to source. Also, setting up such a route would go a long way to establishing intent to commit a crime, which will blow most of your defense out of the water in such a case.
There might be some honeybuckets in the tracker's list, which would be clever, but all it is going to do is waste a little bit of time for whoever is tracking these IP's, it's certainly no protection for anybody but the tracker (who would be monitoring the honeybucket, one would assume).
There is absolutely nothing democratic about the FTC regulating anything. All executive agencies are autocratic in nature. They follow the directives of the President, and if they over step their bounds they are struck down by the court system (which sometimes is, sometimes isn't democratic).
The democratic functions of the government are well above their level, and only serve to increase or decrease their power or jurisdiction. There is nothing about the agency itself or who runs it that is in any way democratic, nor is there anything democratic about their day to day operations. The same is true for all executive functions after the initial democratic election of the president (excluding functions that directly involve the Congress, like cabinet appointments, SC justice nominations, and the government's yearly budget).
*WOOOOOOOOOSH!*
It's called humor, you should really get a sense of it.
I'd personally STRONGLY AVOID OpenDNS, which does lots of bad things to DNS: NXDOMAIN wildcarding ANY address (not just www. addresses), SERVFAIL wildcarding, wildcarding addresses which HAVE valid records but just no A record, and even man-in-the-middling Google!
Most of what OpenDNS does are things their customers want, and are opt-in - things like website filtering and the like. However, they did MITM the main Google search domain and all search related domains for Google (but no other Google sub-domains) in response to some borderline spyware that Dell installed on all their machines as a result of a Dell/Google partnership (it basically did annoying DNS redirection at the user's machine, instead of via a DNS server).
That is completely inappropriate for ANY DNS. Who is OpenDNS to say what software Dell should press upon their customers? Dell and their customers, that's who. Not OpenDNS. The most they should have done was a blog on how to remove it if you don't want it, because the software was slightly hidden (it was given a not immediately obvious but accurate name). Instead they redirected google.com for all OpenDNS users, breaking a number of people's network configurations in the process. That's absolutely ridiculous.
That kind of self-righteous heavy-handedness is one reason I'll never use OpenDNS.
Which only exists by the good grace of mainland China.
They are a separate entity only because China decided it would be economically beneficial to allow them to remain separate. It's not a strong position for HK to be in.
Confirmed this with a few of my friends who are using PCCW Netvigator. I have the same ISP, but use OpenDNS, so haven't notice anything was amiss for some time.
Wait till they start hijacking all your DNS requests, whether they are going to their DNS or not. That's the next logical step in this progression.
Next thing you know you'll be signing up with a DNS service and they'll be sending you a private key in the mail. That's going to suck. Friggin dirty ISP's.
I thought it was funny, apparently there aren't as many HHGTTU fans on Slashdot as I thought.
And it's perfectly a on-topic reference.
Does OpenDNS still redirect all google.com addresses? The GGP's forum thread was from three years ago. It seems like a pretty insane response to what software one company installed on their servers.
Redirecting all Google traffic because one company decides to load up shitty software on their machines? Seriously? If people don't like what Dell is doing, they'll either find a way to fix it or not buy Dell again, or both. If Google's reputation gets damaged because their partner went overboard, so much the better in a free market system.
I really don't see why OpenDNS did any of that. The correct response was a blog post on where the software is and how to remove it, since Google/Dell doesn't make it immediately clear. They also said "Browser Error Redirection" was unclear even to techies. WTF kind of techies do they have over there? When your browser is redirected on an error, and the page tells you it's "Browser Error Redirection" software, what's not clear? GoogleAFE is unclear (the original name of the software), but the other is not.
OpenDNS just seems like a bunch of self-righteous control freaks, I'm glad I have nothing to do with them. Google and Dell were definitely not doing the right thing, but OpenDNS screwed over most of their customers to fix it. How is that any better?
That doesn't solve anything, because DNS requests still go through the default DNS first generally, and then the DNS on the VPN network.
This cuts down VPN traffic for external links, but I know from first hand experience that DNS re-direction it can really screw up intranet connections over VPN. I recently had to switch my DNS to Google's because the local ISP's redirection was hijacking the DNS fail procedure, thus preventing any intranet connections (obviously my ISP had no IP addresses for the intranet sites).
ISP: VPN's are for work only, and you have to pay $100/mo for a business plan. Response, I was connecting to school for educational purposes and the computer lab requires a VPN.
ISP: In that case, you have to pay $100/mo for our business plan. Have a nice day. :)
Nope, sure doesn't. And they can sniff out a DNS request even if you find a DNS host that was amiable to using another port.
So what you really need as a DNS service that sends and receives encrypted requests over a non-standard port.
Then you can get around it. Hosting your own DNS does no good, as it still comes through your ISP's DNS first. Hard-coding Google's IP address would work short term for Google search, but if it catches on they'll just start redirecting all Google traffic instead of just DNS requests.
My host only reroutes failed DNS requests to their own shitty search, but it's still annoying as hell.
Yeah, I just felt like cursing. Foul mood for some reason.