This blackmail method of dealing with spammers is wrong and obviously just doesn't work given the amount of spam everyone is still getting. Taking down innocent, third party sites via blacklist in order to extort action from the ISP seems hard to justify ethically, no matter how much you hate spam.
Playing whack-a-mole with spammer ISPs doesn't work. they get a new dialup, they bounce off mail relays, they up the ante in this arms race. We should spend more effort making these spammers not want to spam: take away the incentive to do so and the problem goes away without hurting bystanders.
Some very simple legislation that targets the *businesses* (not the spamhouses that they subcontract to) that are advertising by spam could be very effective. Similar to the fax laws in place, the business would have to show that each and every email sent was opted-in somehow. When actual businesses start getting sued for $500/email, they will simply stop doing business with spamhouses that don't work via opt-in. Selling giant email address lists becomes useless, and harvesting the free webmail accounts via vrfy becomes useless. Necessarily, the advertising business must be findable. No need to crawl through ip logs of hacked relay boxes to find the spamhouse, go straight to the TRUE source of the spam.
While this does little for foreign owned, foreign originated spam, it goes a long way towards reducing spam responsibly. Any foreign companies who continue to do this could have some of their assets in the US frozen. If any employee of the company were to set foot in the US they could be arrested Dmitry style. Other governments can implement similar laws if their people hate spam enough.
no matter how much you hate spam, taking action against non-spammers in order to force action from an ISP is unjustifiable. Shame on organizations that use such reprehensible tactics, they must be staffed with persons of "leisurely moral growth"*.
*Thank you, Larry Wall, for such a great phrase.:)
...public's right to fair use of copyright materials. From the shutdown of Napster...
exactly which part of downloading mp3s without paying anyone a dime is "fair use"? I didn't think anyone actually believed that Napster was used for anything other than wholesale copyright infringement.
Gee... That certainly looks to be a snide comment to me. Kind of like the guy who insults your entire family, and then thinks a "just kidding" at the end makes up for it.
Jeez... I can't believe how many people fell for this. It was obviously a deliberately snide comment intended to produce posts exactly like yours. I've never seen a more obvious attempt to "rattle some cages" than this and/. editors routinely post flamebait on purpose!! You and 50,000 other/.ers seem to have fallen for it yet again.
Next time you see some ridiculously inflammatory comment by an editor (Apple and one button mice anyone?)... stop before you flame back and wonder if they aren't all laughing their asses off at the lot of you. I know I am.:)
Indeed, if you think about it there IS no such thing as "intellectual property." That "property" of any kind is also an illusion is left as an excersise to the reader.
That being said, why have these illusions at all? you think you "own" your car because you paid for it, but anybody can just take it from you if they have the means to do so, and now "your property" is now theirs. Allowing such actions to go unpunished means that society decays into a sort of anarchy, where the only property you can "own" is what you can physically defend from everyone else.
So society and governments come up with this fiction called property, and then attempt to enforce it for the sake of order. Intellectual property is also a fiction, but it exists and is enforced for a different reason.
The concept of intellectual property (and it's attendant enforcement by the government) exists to promote the creation of more "works of the intellect" by people who might otherwise have to spend their time working at McDonalds rather than writing a new piece of music. This is based on the posit that more arts and innovation and knowledge are "good" for society, and less is "bad."
If the "intellectual property" fiction were to vanish tomorrow, and anyone could obtain information according to whatever means they can employ without any repercussions, what would be the outcome? It might become quite difficult to be compensated for long hours (or any hours) spent creating something intellectually new, if the products of your labor can be obtained by anyone essentially free of charge.
If it became too difficult to profit from works of the intellect, then fewer people would invest the effort. Society would have fewer people working on arts, innovation and knowledge. Only those who were independantly wealthy could afford to spend lots of time creating new things, and most other people would have to squeeze in creative work between shifts at the local wal-mart. If you accept the premise that more works of the mind are "good" (whatever you think "good" is) then you can see how this leads to compensation systems. And THAT leads to the intellectual property fantasy and enforcement.
However, while more knowledge may be a "good" thing, it should not be sought after at all costs. There needs to be a balance between promoting independent research and creativity and other values we have as a society.
Therefore, the point of the Ars article is not to simply change the words around (s/rights/structures/g), but rather to remind people that all forms of property really ARE a fiction, one that we subscribe to for the sake of bettering our society. What you percieve as a double standard is in fact the crux of the idea that IP is fantasy; we want it to exist but not at any cost. Finding the balance without resorting to "God Given Intellectual Property Rights," or "Artists should only be paid in T-shirt sales when we feel like it" is the essential endeavor.
They say the sign of a real monopoly is the ability to set any price. But Microsoft can't do that. It can't price WinXP to the OEM's at $1000
Question: If Microsoft decided to raise the price of Windows XP by 20%, would they get away with it? Since you will no longer be able to buy any previous version of windows when XP is out, what will the average IT manager do? Pay up, of course. Even if the price were raised +50%, there would be grumbling but everyone would be forced to pay.
Converting everyone over to Macintoshes would be ridiculous for a decently sized company. Linux is in no way a replacement. What about all the thousands of custom MS apps that are running rampant in the corporate world? Applications are they key. If the choice were shutting down all business operations while you convert every app and retrain every user to click on a foot instead of a start button, OR pay an extra few bucks for the CEO's new workstation, what will people choose?
Then there's the problem of The Killer App, namely Office. If you can't open up the word doc from your PR agency or vendor with 100% accuracy, there will be hell to pay. So everyone is tied to Office, and Office is tied to Windows.
Of course, MS can't start charging $10,000 per copy of XP, simply because few people could afford to pay it. But then again, at the height of the Ma Bell monopoly, they could never charge $10,000 for a phone either. But in either case, the company can set whatever price it wants within the customer's raw ability to pay. And there is no viable alternative other than to pony up.
Sounds like the signs of a real monopoly to me, even according to your definition.
Of course. Just because now nobody knows that this 10kg of weapons grade ever existed, doesn't mean that the poor nuclear tech who hasn't been paid in 5 years will be tempted to sell it.
I also fully agree that since no rogue nation has ever detonated a bomb in downtown Manhattan, it is obvious that it can never happen. History proves that it is completely impossible, so we should just stop sweating it.
So if somebody stole material that was recovered, it would be a one time deal.
Sure, I mean, why should we really care, since if they blew up Jerusalem once, they couldn't possibly do it twice. We'd track that software bug right down in that case. All those people killed in the blast and subsequent radiation posioning can rest easy in the knowledge that at least the same bug won't be exploited again. Probably.
microsoft upgrade cds also provide an option where you just insert the old version's cdrom during the installation process. the installer will run a verify process on it and then proceed.
this is how you install an "upgrade" version on a freshly formatted box, without reinstalling the old version. check it out.
Indeed, the miniseries was utterly unintelligible to anyone who hadn't already read the book. I've read the entire series so I was able to follow it, but *all* of the people I know who saw it without having read the book were completely, utterly lost. The series completely failed to deliver the cool concepts and experiences of Dune.
The miniseries was successful only because it invoked nostalgia in the people who loved the book. If you ever watch the series again (I never will, it was painful) try watching it *without* mentally filling in the gaping plot holes and subtle references.
Reports from the field indicate that companies who rent you expensive equipment want it back at the end of the contract. Evil middle managers are even daring to send you a postage paid BOX to ship it back in, requiring no EFFORT on the customer's part to fulfill the CONTRACT. The devils!!
It is your right and DESTINY to keep rented equipment after the contract, and convert it into whatever you want (taco would convert his into a "sweet little mp3 server", like he does everything else). Fight the power!! Write your congressman! Donate to the EFF!!!
according to the article, lots of the "closed source" stuff is application level (i.e. not required to be gpld just because it *runs on* linux.)
There are indeed a few smaller distro makers that are not releasing source to kernel mods, but this is by no means all of them. China is a big place, try not to paint them all with the same brush.
As more and more customers come to us with new ideas that require new technology, but find that Management has kept the IT department from being current in the newer technologies, our business will die.
To place things in perspective, remember that it is not "our business," it's "their business." You just work there, and if firing you would make the bottom line look better to shareholders (or owners), you would be canned in an instant.
It sucks to have to think this way, but I have yet to work for a company that I could honestly consider "mine" or "ours." Maintaining personal integrity is important, but you will get further if you remember that you are nothing to them, and so they should be nothing to you.
Absolutely correct. I mean, really, you can just pop open your registry editor and go to HKLM\SW\MS\Secret\FUD\{0123-4321} and change the hex value from 0xDEADBEEF to that day's date ROT-13d and disable the whole thing.
Anybody's grandmother could easily overwrite the defaults just by a little creative grepping through the latest MSDN docs.
Additionally, web authors can include meta tags to disable Smart Tags 1.0. Of course, nobody can guarantee that the same meta tags will disable Smart Tags 2.0 and the new, improved Smart Defaults that come with it. But hey, if you want your content to keep the meaning you intend, it's YOUR responsibility to stay on top of every patch to I.E. and every revision of Smart Tags, so you can effectively "opt out" of any editorial changes made by Bill Gates.
You have no right to say what you mean when viewed through I.E. Get over it.
depending on the contracts involved, this might not work in the US. Recently a bunch of telcos get slammed for running data lines over land leased from railroad operators. Apparently, the right-of-way for a railroad track does not confer any right of way for data lines, which had to be licensed separately from each property owner along the route.
So I guess these power companies should double check the fine print before laying any fiber optics alongside their power lines.
yeah, there are legal and ethical issues with counter-zombieing. That Max Butler story is sobering, it looks like the feds turned on him after he refused to rat on a friend. nice.
I wonder if, now that Gibson knows the bot code operation, he could execute a command to have all the machines "clean" themselves of the bot code and possibly harden them vs. future infections.
with the techniques he employed, it seems quite possible to create an anti-zombie "team" to go out and defuse ddos nets. I'd probably even pay a team to do just that, if I was losing real dollars to a ddos.
If you actually read my post, you'll notice that I never said it was hard or impossible to PLACE agents, merely that it was undesirable to KEEP them there. See, they can insert an agent for a few months to be the monitor man, do their trick with the submarine, then extract the agent. Once the tap is in place you don't need to expose your people. It's never too late to learn to read.
The entire premise of my original post is that IF the NSA wanted to tap transatlantic fibers using methods that can be detected at implementation time, then they could add a layer of secrecy by temporarily putting agents in the right places. The russian tunnel is an example of the government using exactly such a tactic. Therefore it is entirely plausible that the NSA could be planning this because
1. they have the technology.
2. they have the money.
3. they have already used mechanisms to assure secrecy of such operations by planting agents in companies. (this was in the news recently due to the FBI double agent)
4. it would make sense to have tapping gear completely out of sight of anyone (THAT's why they'd look at putting tapping gear in the middle of the ocean rather than on the wall of some British telecom data center.)
I suggest you find a local community college and inquire about remedial reading comprehension courses. After you have attained literacy, try listening to the news.
the thing is they eventually want their agents back, and they want to be able to tap forever without being caught. Even if their agents get reassigned or discovered, the tap would remain useful and they could put as much equipment as they wanted to in place. If the NSA were spending millions of dollars to tap an undersea link, is it so inconceivable that they would also place an agent as a 3rd shift NOC screen-watcher to reduce the chances of being noticed? Um, agents DO exist you know.
If it were so easy to do long term covert taps right at the telco, then why is the NSA actually investing billions of dollars in equipment to do undersea taps? The very existence of this modified submarine project puts a hole in your theory.
Why don't you do some research on the russian embassy tunnel before assuming a post is a troll? Try to be less lazy.
given the resources of the US Government, it would be trivial to insert agents into a telecom company as engineers. That way, if a splice attempt were to be detected, the people watching the monitors would just look the other way.
I recall one of the US intelligence agencies placed people in a large variety of construction companies YEARS in advance of a new russian embassy building being built in DC, so that no matter who the russians chose to do the work, US agents would be in place to make sure secret rooms and tunnels were in place underneath.
It doesn't matter if a relatively short interruption takes place.
Perhaps this story headline should be "Apple violates GPL on Non-GPL'd Software." Or maybe "Apple Complies with BSD License." But that would hardly generate frantic posting and pageviews.
the patent in question does checksums of *parts* of an html document, so the system is more complex than just wget | md5gen or whatever. It's supposed to be able to fetch only the diffs. Perhaps still not patentable, but still different from what has already been done.
Slashdot Mirror
Playing whack-a-mole with spammer ISPs doesn't work. they get a new dialup, they bounce off mail relays, they up the ante in this arms race. We should spend more effort making these spammers not want to spam: take away the incentive to do so and the problem goes away without hurting bystanders.
Some very simple legislation that targets the *businesses* (not the spamhouses that they subcontract to) that are advertising by spam could be very effective. Similar to the fax laws in place, the business would have to show that each and every email sent was opted-in somehow. When actual businesses start getting sued for $500/email, they will simply stop doing business with spamhouses that don't work via opt-in. Selling giant email address lists becomes useless, and harvesting the free webmail accounts via vrfy becomes useless. Necessarily, the advertising business must be findable. No need to crawl through ip logs of hacked relay boxes to find the spamhouse, go straight to the TRUE source of the spam.
While this does little for foreign owned, foreign originated spam, it goes a long way towards reducing spam responsibly. Any foreign companies who continue to do this could have some of their assets in the US frozen. If any employee of the company were to set foot in the US they could be arrested Dmitry style. Other governments can implement similar laws if their people hate spam enough.
no matter how much you hate spam, taking action against non-spammers in order to force action from an ISP is unjustifiable. Shame on organizations that use such reprehensible tactics, they must be staffed with persons of "leisurely moral growth"*.
*Thank you, Larry Wall, for such a great phrase. :)
Satellite nerd: OK sir, we're ready to register the exact position of this here spy satellite with the UN.
Colonel Korn: (twirls moustache) That's top secret info. Classify it and "spill coffee" all over the UN paperwork.
Satellite Nerd: But you realize that any third grader with binoculars will instantly find out? How can we keep the brightest thing in the sky secret?
Colonel Korn: Hmf. Well, it'll at least be secret from all the second graders, and thats enough for me! Make it so!
exactly which part of downloading mp3s without paying anyone a dime is "fair use"? I didn't think anyone actually believed that Napster was used for anything other than wholesale copyright infringement.
Jeez... I can't believe how many people fell for this. It was obviously a deliberately snide comment intended to produce posts exactly like yours. I've never seen a more obvious attempt to "rattle some cages" than this and /. editors routinely post flamebait on purpose!! You and 50,000 other /.ers seem to have fallen for it yet again.
Next time you see some ridiculously inflammatory comment by an editor (Apple and one button mice anyone?)... stop before you flame back and wonder if they aren't all laughing their asses off at the lot of you. I know I am. :)
Indeed, if you think about it there IS no such thing as "intellectual property." That "property" of any kind is also an illusion is left as an excersise to the reader.
That being said, why have these illusions at all? you think you "own" your car because you paid for it, but anybody can just take it from you if they have the means to do so, and now "your property" is now theirs. Allowing such actions to go unpunished means that society decays into a sort of anarchy, where the only property you can "own" is what you can physically defend from everyone else.
So society and governments come up with this fiction called property, and then attempt to enforce it for the sake of order. Intellectual property is also a fiction, but it exists and is enforced for a different reason.
The concept of intellectual property (and it's attendant enforcement by the government) exists to promote the creation of more "works of the intellect" by people who might otherwise have to spend their time working at McDonalds rather than writing a new piece of music. This is based on the posit that more arts and innovation and knowledge are "good" for society, and less is "bad."
If the "intellectual property" fiction were to vanish tomorrow, and anyone could obtain information according to whatever means they can employ without any repercussions, what would be the outcome? It might become quite difficult to be compensated for long hours (or any hours) spent creating something intellectually new, if the products of your labor can be obtained by anyone essentially free of charge.
If it became too difficult to profit from works of the intellect, then fewer people would invest the effort. Society would have fewer people working on arts, innovation and knowledge. Only those who were independantly wealthy could afford to spend lots of time creating new things, and most other people would have to squeeze in creative work between shifts at the local wal-mart. If you accept the premise that more works of the mind are "good" (whatever you think "good" is) then you can see how this leads to compensation systems. And THAT leads to the intellectual property fantasy and enforcement.
However, while more knowledge may be a "good" thing, it should not be sought after at all costs. There needs to be a balance between promoting independent research and creativity and other values we have as a society.
Therefore, the point of the Ars article is not to simply change the words around (s/rights/structures/g), but rather to remind people that all forms of property really ARE a fiction, one that we subscribe to for the sake of bettering our society. What you percieve as a double standard is in fact the crux of the idea that IP is fantasy; we want it to exist but not at any cost. Finding the balance without resorting to "God Given Intellectual Property Rights," or "Artists should only be paid in T-shirt sales when we feel like it" is the essential endeavor.
Question: If Microsoft decided to raise the price of Windows XP by 20%, would they get away with it? Since you will no longer be able to buy any previous version of windows when XP is out, what will the average IT manager do? Pay up, of course. Even if the price were raised +50%, there would be grumbling but everyone would be forced to pay.
Converting everyone over to Macintoshes would be ridiculous for a decently sized company. Linux is in no way a replacement. What about all the thousands of custom MS apps that are running rampant in the corporate world? Applications are they key. If the choice were shutting down all business operations while you convert every app and retrain every user to click on a foot instead of a start button, OR pay an extra few bucks for the CEO's new workstation, what will people choose?
Then there's the problem of The Killer App, namely Office. If you can't open up the word doc from your PR agency or vendor with 100% accuracy, there will be hell to pay. So everyone is tied to Office, and Office is tied to Windows.
Of course, MS can't start charging $10,000 per copy of XP, simply because few people could afford to pay it. But then again, at the height of the Ma Bell monopoly, they could never charge $10,000 for a phone either. But in either case, the company can set whatever price it wants within the customer's raw ability to pay. And there is no viable alternative other than to pony up.
Sounds like the signs of a real monopoly to me, even according to your definition.
I also fully agree that since no rogue nation has ever detonated a bomb in downtown Manhattan, it is obvious that it can never happen. History proves that it is completely impossible, so we should just stop sweating it.
So if somebody stole material that was recovered, it would be a one time deal.
Sure, I mean, why should we really care, since if they blew up Jerusalem once, they couldn't possibly do it twice. We'd track that software bug right down in that case. All those people killed in the blast and subsequent radiation posioning can rest easy in the knowledge that at least the same bug won't be exploited again. Probably.
King Kong of Kernels:
Hackers love you, and create
Rootkits infernal.
King Kong of Kernels: Hackers love you, and create Rootkits infernal.
this is how you install an "upgrade" version on a freshly formatted box, without reinstalling the old version. check it out.
The miniseries was successful only because it invoked nostalgia in the people who loved the book. If you ever watch the series again (I never will, it was painful) try watching it *without* mentally filling in the gaping plot holes and subtle references.
It is your right and DESTINY to keep rented equipment after the contract, and convert it into whatever you want (taco would convert his into a "sweet little mp3 server", like he does everything else). Fight the power!! Write your congressman! Donate to the EFF!!!
There are indeed a few smaller distro makers that are not releasing source to kernel mods, but this is by no means all of them. China is a big place, try not to paint them all with the same brush.
To place things in perspective, remember that it is not "our business," it's "their business." You just work there, and if firing you would make the bottom line look better to shareholders (or owners), you would be canned in an instant.
It sucks to have to think this way, but I have yet to work for a company that I could honestly consider "mine" or "ours." Maintaining personal integrity is important, but you will get further if you remember that you are nothing to them, and so they should be nothing to you.
Anybody's grandmother could easily overwrite the defaults just by a little creative grepping through the latest MSDN docs.
Additionally, web authors can include meta tags to disable Smart Tags 1.0. Of course, nobody can guarantee that the same meta tags will disable Smart Tags 2.0 and the new, improved Smart Defaults that come with it. But hey, if you want your content to keep the meaning you intend, it's YOUR responsibility to stay on top of every patch to I.E. and every revision of Smart Tags, so you can effectively "opt out" of any editorial changes made by Bill Gates.
You have no right to say what you mean when viewed through I.E. Get over it.
I stand corrected. No need to be rude, however.
So I guess these power companies should double check the fine print before laying any fiber optics alongside their power lines.
yeah, there are legal and ethical issues with counter-zombieing. That Max Butler story is sobering, it looks like the feds turned on him after he refused to rat on a friend. nice.
with the techniques he employed, it seems quite possible to create an anti-zombie "team" to go out and defuse ddos nets. I'd probably even pay a team to do just that, if I was losing real dollars to a ddos.
The entire premise of my original post is that IF the NSA wanted to tap transatlantic fibers using methods that can be detected at implementation time, then they could add a layer of secrecy by temporarily putting agents in the right places. The russian tunnel is an example of the government using exactly such a tactic. Therefore it is entirely plausible that the NSA could be planning this because 1. they have the technology. 2. they have the money. 3. they have already used mechanisms to assure secrecy of such operations by planting agents in companies. (this was in the news recently due to the FBI double agent) 4. it would make sense to have tapping gear completely out of sight of anyone (THAT's why they'd look at putting tapping gear in the middle of the ocean rather than on the wall of some British telecom data center.) I suggest you find a local community college and inquire about remedial reading comprehension courses. After you have attained literacy, try listening to the news.
If it were so easy to do long term covert taps right at the telco, then why is the NSA actually investing billions of dollars in equipment to do undersea taps? The very existence of this modified submarine project puts a hole in your theory.
Why don't you do some research on the russian embassy tunnel before assuming a post is a troll? Try to be less lazy.
I recall one of the US intelligence agencies placed people in a large variety of construction companies YEARS in advance of a new russian embassy building being built in DC, so that no matter who the russians chose to do the work, US agents would be in place to make sure secret rooms and tunnels were in place underneath.
It doesn't matter if a relatively short interruption takes place.
Perhaps this story headline should be "Apple violates GPL on Non-GPL'd Software." Or maybe "Apple Complies with BSD License." But that would hardly generate frantic posting and pageviews.
the patent in question does checksums of *parts* of an html document, so the system is more complex than just wget | md5gen or whatever. It's supposed to be able to fetch only the diffs. Perhaps still not patentable, but still different from what has already been done.
to insert paragraph breaks. A giant block of text is really hard to read.