So, what TFA is saying is that the phishing community is just another community of skiddies, just like the rest of the modern "hacker underground" or whatever you want to call it. This is news how?
Besides the obvious hacker/cracker naming issue, the fact is that today's "hacking" community bears little resemblance to the real hacker heroes of the past. The hacking/cracking issue has been hashed out enough around here, so i'll leave that issue alone.
Of the people that call themselves hackers in the modern, media-approved sense, there are only a few out there with the intelligence to write their own stuff. The rest are script kiddies, and just mooch off of the work that has already been done.
So now someone spends months wandering around the phishing scene, and is surprised to discover that its not any different then the rest of the hackers of today's world. I fail to see how this is newsworthy.
The whole basis of the deal between Novell and Microsloth is that they're working together to improve interoperability between their respective OSs. According to the way they market it, this applies only to Novell's openSUSE distro. However, under the GPL2, there's no reason to believe that the code won't be freely available and get integrated into other distros as well. So yes, it is mostly marketing spin, but in the beginning at least they may actually have a leg up on other distros.
No matter what the intentions behind this decree, I don't think anything will change. If J. Random Memorial School sends Facebook a message demanding that they remove a person's comment about a student of theirs, and it does not violate Facebook's TOS, then why would they do it? Most social networking sites aren't based in the UK; frankly, its unenforcible.
Also, even if social networking sites were affected, wouldn't the "cyberbullies" just find another medium, i.e. AIM/YIM/MSN/IRC/Insert your own acronym? Or independent blogging? There's really no way to enforce this reliably.
There's really no reason to be up in arms about this. You can put your torch and pitchfork down.
Firefox is open-source. They're not trying to hide anything. One of the side-effects of FOSS is that the developers can't hide anything in the code without someone looking through it and pointing it out. This has happened countless times in the past (Azureus, etc.), but we've got no indication that they're actually trying to keep it from us. Actually, quite the opposite is true; they seem to be making it public knowledge.
Another effect of being open source is that you are free to fork it if you like. If y'all don't like this new direction, then why not produce something better?
As much as I hate things phoning home, with a phishing filter there's really not much of a choice. It has to check the site against SOMETHING, and as Google is the closest to being the standard repository of URLs, then I think it makes the most sense.
Just think about it. When you want information about a certain bug or scam, what's the first place you go? Generally, its Google. Yes, Google is probably paying Mozilla for it, but who cares? Even if they weren't, its the most logical choice anyway. Plus, the feature is off by default, and you have to deliberately turn it on. There's no deception going on here.
These aren't the droids you're looking for. Move along.
There's really no surprise there, Vista is just not that great an operating system. There's not very much innovation it offers; M$ seems to be relying on their monopoly to keep making money.
Really, all that Vista is is XP, but buggier and with more chrome. Yes, chrome is shiny, which is generally a good thing, but not when it hides the fact that there's little to offer customers. There's no substance there. I'd take a minimal GUI on a functional OS than a pretty piece of OS crap any day.
I agree with you that SCO's lies attempted to smear our reputations (funded by M$, of course), but now that they've been proven wrong, they're trying to get as much media coverage as possible by suggesting that "Linux made us fail" and maintaining their own innocence. The most sadistic thing we could do, IMO, would be to not give them the attention. They've now been reduced to the level of a Livejournal attention whore, so it would me best to just let them become an hero in their own quiet little corner, denying them the attention they seek.
Plus, anybody that knew about the case at all knew that it was a load of bollocks. Of all the people i've tried to discuss it with, they've all been like "uhhh...what's lunix?" or "bah, SCO is just flapping their gums".
As much as I like seeing these guys suffer, I'm starting to think that its about enough of that. I know everyone was nervous during the suit; even though we all knew they had no legal leg to stand on, the US court system is not what it used to be. So most of us were afraid of the future of linux, and now we can justifiably laugh at them.
However, i'm starting to get tired of hearing about The SCO Group in every third/. post. Really, we're giving them more attention then they deserve. The company never put out anything useful (SCO did. Caldera did. The SCO Group didn't), so its no wonder they're dying. Now really, can't we just let them die without all this coverage?
Given the current composition of the Supreme Court and the rulings they've handed down recently, I have serious doubts about their ability to uphold the Constitution. Free speech doesn't seem very important anymore.
IANAL (yet), but I don't think there should be any room for interpretation when Congress passes a law limiting free speech. I'd like to quote the First Amendment in support of this:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This doesn't mean that Congress can make laws within reason that limit speech, religion, and all that other fun stuff, and I don't see where the room for interpretation is. CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW____ is an absolute.
So yeah, if they can't interpret an absolute correctly, I seriously doubt that they would resist such a large corporation if it becomes an issue. Also, considering the current influence the religious right has over government, I would not at all be surprised if someone tried to force censorship of "immoral" content through these filters.
I think there's a really important point here that we're missing. Now that AT&T has admitted that they have the ability to filter content, and have plans to implement it in the future, what's to stop them and other ISPs from taking it a step further and filtering out "immoral" content such as pornography, or even to head even farther down the slippery slope and enter into the political game?
Net neutrality is a huge issue on more than one front.
One could argue that if they did drop the fees voluntary, when everyone else was still charging them, they would be able to give the same plans as other providers for a cheaper price. Imagine all the money that could bring in, form both new customers shopping around and from people fed up with their current plan, and all its hidden fees.
i find it interesting that Former Senator Mike Gravel was not mentioned in TFA. Although he's far from a mainstream candidate (much to my chagrin), he's been the oevrall biggest supporter of net neutrality among the candidates. From his official platform:
Net Neutrality aims to keep the Internet free from large companies who are using their networks to limit the amount of websites their customers can view, and the speed at which they can view them. Examples range from, being forced to use the search engines your Internet Service Providers (ISP), only being able to view streaming videos that your ISP deems acceptable, and charging a website an extra fee to maintain the usual connection speed. Senator Gravel guarantees a free and open Internet with no restricted access to any site, for any reason. He will do this by supporting legislation and regulation that keeps you in control of your Internet usage.
Intelligent replies welcome, redirect flames to/dev/null
This sounds like it could be useful for visually impaired people. I know a lot of people that are blind or nearly so, and for those that aren't completely blind they say that depth perception is the hardest part, though they can usually see that there is an object somewhere.
Also, maybe this could replace those canes that blind people are constantly tapping around everywhere with.
I'm not insinuating that the journals and peer-review process is the problem, or if I am, its unintentional. What I meant to say was that scientists in general are so quick to get things published nowadays that they fail to make ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that what they publish is factual and backed up by the data. Mixing up data files happens, as they're only human, but they should triple- and quadruple-check everything to make sure that they catch those sort of errors, rather than running straight to the journals so they can be published. IMO, if there was a longer wait before publishing studies, they would tend to be more accurate, the first time.
He doesn't have a legal leg to stand on; parody has been a form of protected speech for centuries.
And to Mr. Jack Thompson:
You, sir, are an idiot. Are you attempting to claim that you are copyrighted, or a piece of IP? Even if you were, you still wouldn't have a case, because parody falls under fair use, something which someone as intelligent as you must surely know.
Yes, I know that there isn't the slightest chance he's going to read that, but it still helps vent frustrations about how such an educated man can be so moronic.
Or, we could just skip that step, too, and just move right on to how this supports the fact that Microsoft is evil, as that's where every story on/. ends up eventually.
With our current education system and a public that's not willing to scrutinize things carefully enough, I don't find it shocking at all that science journals are publishing bogus studies. It is a shame, certainly, but its inevitable until the scientific community as a whole moves in a different direction.
I RTFA, and it does seem like taking on M$ Exchange is a possibility in the future. Remember, none of this has actually be done yet, so anyone saying they know how its going to turn out is merely speculating.
I disagree, email is still the dominant form of communication online. Although instant messaging and facebook are creeping up, especially amongst youth, the VAST majority of people still use email. Although some integration with Facebook would be pretty cool, Facebook itself is a fad. In 10 years, will it still be as popular as it is today? Just consider the examples set by Xanga, MySpace, and the rest that have fallen or are falling by the wayside. Email, however, will be around for a long time, and an improvement in the protocols would ensure its staying power.
You're right, there really IS no need. The kernel, as it currently exists, is easily adaptable to server distros, home-oriented distros, and anything else you could think of. Hell, i've even seen coffee machines run off linux using the standard kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
So, what TFA is saying is that the phishing community is just another community of skiddies, just like the rest of the modern "hacker underground" or whatever you want to call it. This is news how?
Besides the obvious hacker/cracker naming issue, the fact is that today's "hacking" community bears little resemblance to the real hacker heroes of the past. The hacking/cracking issue has been hashed out enough around here, so i'll leave that issue alone.
Of the people that call themselves hackers in the modern, media-approved sense, there are only a few out there with the intelligence to write their own stuff. The rest are script kiddies, and just mooch off of the work that has already been done.
So now someone spends months wandering around the phishing scene, and is surprised to discover that its not any different then the rest of the hackers of today's world. I fail to see how this is newsworthy.
The whole basis of the deal between Novell and Microsloth is that they're working together to improve interoperability between their respective OSs. According to the way they market it, this applies only to Novell's openSUSE distro. However, under the GPL2, there's no reason to believe that the code won't be freely available and get integrated into other distros as well. So yes, it is mostly marketing spin, but in the beginning at least they may actually have a leg up on other distros.
I officially call Rule 34 on her. Anyone have anything?
No matter what the intentions behind this decree, I don't think anything will change. If J. Random Memorial School sends Facebook a message demanding that they remove a person's comment about a student of theirs, and it does not violate Facebook's TOS, then why would they do it? Most social networking sites aren't based in the UK; frankly, its unenforcible.
Also, even if social networking sites were affected, wouldn't the "cyberbullies" just find another medium, i.e. AIM/YIM/MSN/IRC/Insert your own acronym? Or independent blogging? There's really no way to enforce this reliably.
There's really no reason to be up in arms about this. You can put your torch and pitchfork down.
Firefox is open-source. They're not trying to hide anything. One of the side-effects of FOSS is that the developers can't hide anything in the code without someone looking through it and pointing it out. This has happened countless times in the past (Azureus, etc.), but we've got no indication that they're actually trying to keep it from us. Actually, quite the opposite is true; they seem to be making it public knowledge.
Another effect of being open source is that you are free to fork it if you like. If y'all don't like this new direction, then why not produce something better?
As much as I hate things phoning home, with a phishing filter there's really not much of a choice. It has to check the site against SOMETHING, and as Google is the closest to being the standard repository of URLs, then I think it makes the most sense.
Just think about it. When you want information about a certain bug or scam, what's the first place you go? Generally, its Google. Yes, Google is probably paying Mozilla for it, but who cares? Even if they weren't, its the most logical choice anyway. Plus, the feature is off by default, and you have to deliberately turn it on. There's no deception going on here.
These aren't the droids you're looking for. Move along.
There's really no surprise there, Vista is just not that great an operating system. There's not very much innovation it offers; M$ seems to be relying on their monopoly to keep making money.
Really, all that Vista is is XP, but buggier and with more chrome. Yes, chrome is shiny, which is generally a good thing, but not when it hides the fact that there's little to offer customers. There's no substance there. I'd take a minimal GUI on a functional OS than a pretty piece of OS crap any day.
I agree with you that SCO's lies attempted to smear our reputations (funded by M$, of course), but now that they've been proven wrong, they're trying to get as much media coverage as possible by suggesting that "Linux made us fail" and maintaining their own innocence. The most sadistic thing we could do, IMO, would be to not give them the attention. They've now been reduced to the level of a Livejournal attention whore, so it would me best to just let them become an hero in their own quiet little corner, denying them the attention they seek. Plus, anybody that knew about the case at all knew that it was a load of bollocks. Of all the people i've tried to discuss it with, they've all been like "uhhh...what's lunix?" or "bah, SCO is just flapping their gums".
As much as I like seeing these guys suffer, I'm starting to think that its about enough of that. I know everyone was nervous during the suit; even though we all knew they had no legal leg to stand on, the US court system is not what it used to be. So most of us were afraid of the future of linux, and now we can justifiably laugh at them.
/. post. Really, we're giving them more attention then they deserve. The company never put out anything useful (SCO did. Caldera did. The SCO Group didn't), so its no wonder they're dying. Now really, can't we just let them die without all this coverage?
However, i'm starting to get tired of hearing about The SCO Group in every third
Given the current composition of the Supreme Court and the rulings they've handed down recently, I have serious doubts about their ability to uphold the Constitution. Free speech doesn't seem very important anymore. IANAL (yet), but I don't think there should be any room for interpretation when Congress passes a law limiting free speech. I'd like to quote the First Amendment in support of this:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This doesn't mean that Congress can make laws within reason that limit speech, religion, and all that other fun stuff, and I don't see where the room for interpretation is. CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW____ is an absolute.
So yeah, if they can't interpret an absolute correctly, I seriously doubt that they would resist such a large corporation if it becomes an issue. Also, considering the current influence the religious right has over government, I would not at all be surprised if someone tried to force censorship of "immoral" content through these filters.
I think there's a really important point here that we're missing. Now that AT&T has admitted that they have the ability to filter content, and have plans to implement it in the future, what's to stop them and other ISPs from taking it a step further and filtering out "immoral" content such as pornography, or even to head even farther down the slippery slope and enter into the political game? Net neutrality is a huge issue on more than one front.
One could argue that if they did drop the fees voluntary, when everyone else was still charging them, they would be able to give the same plans as other providers for a cheaper price. Imagine all the money that could bring in, form both new customers shopping around and from people fed up with their current plan, and all its hidden fees.
i find it interesting that Former Senator Mike Gravel was not mentioned in TFA. Although he's far from a mainstream candidate (much to my chagrin), he's been the oevrall biggest supporter of net neutrality among the candidates. From his official platform:
/dev/null
Net Neutrality aims to keep the Internet free from large companies who are using their networks to limit the amount of websites their customers can view, and the speed at which they can view them. Examples range from, being forced to use the search engines your Internet Service Providers (ISP), only being able to view streaming videos that your ISP deems acceptable, and charging a website an extra fee to maintain the usual connection speed. Senator Gravel guarantees a free and open Internet with no restricted access to any site, for any reason. He will do this by supporting legislation and regulation that keeps you in control of your Internet usage. Intelligent replies welcome, redirect flames to
This sounds like it could be useful for visually impaired people. I know a lot of people that are blind or nearly so, and for those that aren't completely blind they say that depth perception is the hardest part, though they can usually see that there is an object somewhere. Also, maybe this could replace those canes that blind people are constantly tapping around everywhere with.
Note the sarcasm.
I'm not insinuating that the journals and peer-review process is the problem, or if I am, its unintentional. What I meant to say was that scientists in general are so quick to get things published nowadays that they fail to make ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that what they publish is factual and backed up by the data. Mixing up data files happens, as they're only human, but they should triple- and quadruple-check everything to make sure that they catch those sort of errors, rather than running straight to the journals so they can be published. IMO, if there was a longer wait before publishing studies, they would tend to be more accurate, the first time.
He doesn't have a legal leg to stand on; parody has been a form of protected speech for centuries. And to Mr. Jack Thompson: You, sir, are an idiot. Are you attempting to claim that you are copyrighted, or a piece of IP? Even if you were, you still wouldn't have a case, because parody falls under fair use, something which someone as intelligent as you must surely know. Yes, I know that there isn't the slightest chance he's going to read that, but it still helps vent frustrations about how such an educated man can be so moronic.
Or, we could just skip that step, too, and just move right on to how this supports the fact that Microsoft is evil, as that's where every story on /. ends up eventually.
With our current education system and a public that's not willing to scrutinize things carefully enough, I don't find it shocking at all that science journals are publishing bogus studies. It is a shame, certainly, but its inevitable until the scientific community as a whole moves in a different direction.
No, I haven't, actually. What is this "sarcasm" of which you speak?
I RTFA, and it does seem like taking on M$ Exchange is a possibility in the future. Remember, none of this has actually be done yet, so anyone saying they know how its going to turn out is merely speculating.
I disagree, email is still the dominant form of communication online. Although instant messaging and facebook are creeping up, especially amongst youth, the VAST majority of people still use email. Although some integration with Facebook would be pretty cool, Facebook itself is a fad. In 10 years, will it still be as popular as it is today? Just consider the examples set by Xanga, MySpace, and the rest that have fallen or are falling by the wayside. Email, however, will be around for a long time, and an improvement in the protocols would ensure its staying power.
You're right, there really IS no need. The kernel, as it currently exists, is easily adaptable to server distros, home-oriented distros, and anything else you could think of. Hell, i've even seen coffee machines run off linux using the standard kernel.