3. Atkins's program, as with other low-carb programs, work well initially but are extremely difficult to maintain. (The same is true of low-fat diets, incidentally.) This is acknowledged by the research community.
Not true. My physician put me on it. She wants blood and urine regularly. I've been on it for a year. Lost 60 lbs. I've tried other diets. I understand the yo-yo effect. This diet WORKED. I've lost 60 lbs. I never feel hungry. I am required to eat snacks all day. Nuts, smallish amounts of fruit, sunflower kernels, other things low in carbohydrates. I feel completely satisfied. I never feel deprived in any way. I plan to do this forever. Incidentially, my lab blood work is now great compared to starting out at 4 times the normal risk for a heart attack. I now actually feel like exercising.
5. An "Atkins diet without excess fat" (page 7) is a low-fat diet. Someone needs to get over himself.
People always tell me that I can't eat nuts, they are high in fat! I don't go out of my way to eat fat, but I eat things containing lots of fat. I get the leanest meat I can because I prefer it, but still I eat lots of fat.
For dessert, I can make instant sugar free chocolate jell-o. Instead of using skim milk (low fat high carb) I use whipping cream (high fat zero carb). I top it off with a can of whipped cream. (Not cool whip but real whipping cream -- the kind that once saw the inside of a cow -- the kind that goes bad in two or three days.) Yes, I could even eat an entire can of whipped cream, it has no carbs. But I get full too fast. Plus I don't care for that much fat. But it makes a point.
I love this diet. I'm healther (lab results) and feel better than I have in 20 years! Sitting in front of a comptuer for 22 years day and night can have a big effect on your health.
I'm not debating anything about the research. I'm simply stating that my primary care physician put me on this and it works.
An interesting anecdote. When she was planning my menu with me. Dr. What are you going to eat for breakfast? me I don't eat breakfast. Haven't since I started working with computers, going to bed late and waking very late. Dr. You MUST eat breakfast. Non negotiable. me Okay. What can I eat? Dr. Unlimited eggs, meat, cheese. No sugar or juice. (etc., etc.) me That sounds wonderful, but cooking breakfast doesn't fit my lifestyle very well. Quick carb-filled cold serial or carb-loaded quick breakfast bars fit. Dr. Then go through McDonalds. me (picking up jaw from floor) me Did you say McDonalds? Is my doctor telling me to eat at McDonalds? Dr. Yes. McDonalds. Get something like a McSomething with eggs, sausage and cheese. Throw the biscuit/bagel away. Eat as many as you want. Eat until you are stuffed.
I started out on the diet eating three of those McSomething's each day. Now I eat one. Similarly at all other meals after about a year the total volume of food I eat is way lower now. (Indeed, I just can't eat as much anymore.)
Since it's just my story, it's anecdotal evidence. If I were part of some study group it would be "research".
Re:Possible MS Project Names - bad chemicals
on
Microsoft Freon
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Introducing Microsoft Agent Orange!
This remote agent is downloaded into your computer overnight by Microsoft. It works behind the scenes in your computer to help keep it secure. (against you, the enemy) While you're using your computer, Agent Orange is hard at work maintaining the integrity and security of your system.
Microsoft Agent Orange can also notify you of special offers that you might be interested in. Such as how to increase the length of your... oh wait.
I'd download them.... But the cable company set a lower bandwidth cap
Any reasonable cap shouldn't be a huge problem for downloading MP3's. MP3's are small compared to things that even "normal" users might download. I suppose it depenes on how many MP3's you plan to download, or upload to others. Or how many gnutella packets will pass through your system.
The bandwidth cap is more likely to prevent you from running:
Gnutella
An OpenNap server (but not client, depending on how much uploading you allow)
10. Why is bash configured with --disable-net-redirections?
It can produce completely unexpected results. This kind of feature should not be part of a shell but a special. tool. And that tool has existed for years already, it's called netcat.
The problem with netcat is that I cannot assume it is present on every system on which my malware might be run. Efforts such as LSB and United Linux need to guarantee malware authors of a least-common-denominator system in order to attract malware development.
Basically, these will be considered controlled substances like drugs and whoever's trying to get ahold of one will be treated as a narcotics dealer/user.
I disagree.
Whoever's trying to get ahold of these will be considered terrorists. Get with the times.
I dont understand how something can be licensed under both LGPL and GPL at the same time.. That seems like a contradiction.
If I write a program, then I own the copyright on it. That is, I have the exclusive right to reproduce the program in any form. If you reproduce it, or even posess a copy, without the right to do so, then you are guilty of copyright infringement.
If I want to, I can grant you a license to my copyrighted work. Maybe I would do this in exchange for money, sex, or just because I'm a nice guy.
Closed source licenses (often EULA's) may require you to agree to certian terms in exchange for the grant of a license. In other words, I may not choose to grant you a license unless you (A) pay me, (B) promise not to decompile the program, (C) promise to run through the streets in your underwear screaming at 3 AM, etc.
Once you are granted a license, you are entitled to a copy under the terms of that license. The license may or may not include the right to reproduce the program in either source or binary form.
As the exclusive copyright owner, I can license the program to as many as I would like under whatever terms I would like. I can license you the right to have one copy of the program, and 3 backup copies. But I can license Joe the right to give his 25 closest friends copies, because I like him better. I could (probably in exchange for $$) license Microsoft to reproduce the program in binary form only as part of their closed source product. Finally, I could still turn around and license the program under the GPL. (A commercial vendor might rather pay for an alternative license rather than use the GPL.)
Finally, back to your question. As the copyright holder, I can grant different licenses. In fact, if I am a really nice guy, I can put the program under several different open licenses. You choose which license you wish to agree to, and then you better abide by the terms of that license. Nothing, other than the grant of a license by the copyright owner, gives you any right whatsoever to the program! For instance, with the GPL, if you don't agree to it, then you are not granted a license, and nothing else gives you a right to the program, so you are guilty of copyright infringement.
Other software, such as Open Office, for instance, is dual licensed. I'm sure others can point out even more dual licensed software. One or more public licenses do not prevent the copyright owner from also offering closed source licenses to other parties.
This week's reward challenge will require your tribe to successfully unpack, assemble and erect your habitat module. Wanna know what you're playing for? Show them.
Yes, that's right, the winners will receive space suits with breathing aparatus.
Added bonus, the dark side on the moon (the one we never see) is in the earth's RF shadow. All the better for radio astronomers, scientists, etc...
All the more reason why the far side (not dark side) of the moon is the side most in need of being developed with cities, cell phone towers, microwave relay stations, etc. Or at least some permanent satellites in lunar-stationary orbit that can bathe the entire far side in communications chatter.
You must be too young to remember how things were in 1982.
Microsoft killed off all their competition with inferior products.
If you have only recently joined the party now that the evil deed is acomplished, and you don't know how they got to where they are, then you must wonder why a company that is rich and makes reasonably good products is so bad?
If all ISP's simply provided a standard API to Law Enforcement (LE) so that LE could search anything they wanted, whenever they wanted, then this problem would be solved. We wouldn't even be discussing whether LE should be present.
It could even be developed as a standard module for popular OSes. For instance, for Linux, a Kernel Module which provided this remote monitoring facility would be beneficial for everyone. It would conform to the standard remote monitoring API.
Problem solved. This would be beneficial for everyone.
It saves your manpower. You avoid LE people at your facility. Your engineers don't need to waste time performing the search. It saves LE manpower, because they don't need to visit your facility each time they want to search something. In fact, for additional savings, LE could start obtaining search warrants retroactively.
Really? Then how exactly do you explain their billions of dollars in sales, versus, say, Redhat's few million?
Anticompetitive business practices.
Most people don't care. They just want the best product at the best value.
Which implies a choice and the ability to choose. A concept that a monopolist cannot stand.
Get a clue. Every company is run the same way.
But every company does not have monopoly control of the market.
I really hope that you do that much research into the internal workings of Colgate-Palmolive before you buy your toothpaste.
This is not a valid comparison because they have competitors.
What if Colgate could work some kind of scheme such that anyone buying toothpaste had to pay Colgate, regardless of which toothpaste they wanted to buy? This would drive all competitors out of the market. If I bought Crest, I would have to pay for Crest, and for Colgate. If I bought Colgate, I would only have to pay for Colgate. This is how MS got to where they are. Not through providing superior products.
Today, they have superior products. But only because they can pour buckets of money into development. Money they can extort at artificially high prices due to lack of any competition.
Brilliant's spyware network, Altnet, should incorporate this hack. If the hack will work on your particular modem, then Altnet would be able to make use of more bandwidth.
Mine did. They began upgrading the system all over town. Vastly improved. Many new services. They started gradually switching sections of town over to DOCSIS. There was a window of time in which you could use both the old ugly Zenith modems or the new SurfBoard modems. But by a certian date you had to bring in your cable modem and replace it with a DOCSIS modem. Unfortunantly, I had to change all of my static IP's at the same time.
it would have been even more worthwhile for me if, rather than formulating objections of a general nature [...] you had gathered solid arguments for the advantages that proprietary software could bring [...] since this would have allowed a more enlightening exchange in respect of each of our positions.
If MS would submit arguments in favor of proprietary software instead of submitting FUD in opposition to free software, then this would allow an even more enlightening exchange! Wow! Just the exchange in this letter was enlightening enough. Probably so enlightening that MS doesn't want to draw any more attention.
Great idea, but the implementation can be improved.
I don't think your suggestion is really an improvement. If you are say, 5 seconds away from the hour, generate the URL for this hour and dish it out to someone. 20 seconds later they click the link, and it doesn't work.
The links need to expire a certian length of time from when they were issued. Thus I suggested encrypting an expiration time. Only the server needs to know the encryption key using ordinary crypto (3DES) because the server is the only one encrypting and later decrypting the timestamp out of the url.
Another possibility is to always have two overlapping time ranges. Each time range is, say, 1 hour long. The first time range always expires on the hour, and the second one on the half hour. Thus you are always well into one of the time ranges, even if you just crossed over the boundary of the other time range. Now just put both random numbers into the URL. When the server gets the url back, it can make sure that at least one of the two numbers is still the "current" number to access this linked story. (This prevents the scenerio above where the user crosses over the expiration time boundary.)
I don't think you want this to happen to someone who has bookmarked an article. I, for one, would assume the article was no longer available.
Excellent observation.
If I were clueless enough to want to prevent deep linking, then it would desirable to give them a page that says: Sorry. You deep linked to this article. You must click here to go back to the main page. View the ads. Then jump through all of the following hoops in order to see the article.
This technique is to be considered as highly antisocial, as it not only forbids deep linking, but also forces the user to enable javascript.
Yes it is. I'm only pointing out the technical possibilities. Not the ethical ones. Nor of how stupid such an approach really is. All of which have been already well argued here.
Moreover, if you push javascript too much, it may well only run correctly in one single browser
Yes. However, simple operations such as decoding something and writing text into a document are not exercising most of the non-portable features of javascript.
By using such techniques, you'll be perceived as a moron who does this in order to force users to use Internet Explorer, rather than as somebody who wants to protect your deep links.
Well, suppose now, hypothetically, that the code was non portable, only working on IE. To someone who would actually be this obnoxious, they might not consider lack of non-IE browsers a big drawback in exchange for the security of protecting their precious deep links.
Actually, such techniques can be defeated even without analysis: just run a sniffer and log the URL's that your browser tries to access. You'd be inconveniencing the legitimate user without really impeding a determined attacker.
True only if your URL's don't expire. The obfuscation of URL's makes them difficult to obtain. But expiring URL's make them useless to bookmark. Both techniques can be used together.
You're earlyer suggestions (session ids or timestamps embedded in URLs) are much more user friendly.
Yes. But as you no doubt would agree, if they got a clue and let people deep link would be even more user friendly.
You could use an expiring url. That is, encrypt an expiration timestamp into the url. Now, your main page could have links which work, for an hour, into stories in your site. But if you bookmarked those links and use them after they expire, then those expired links simply give you back the main page again. Suppose you use 3DES to encrypt the expiration timestamp, you just keep the key private. Since only your server knows the key, only you can decrypt it. Or use other crypto.
Another possibility is through the use of sessions. Some web systems keep track of you by a "session", such as a shopping site might need to do. Within the session, links to stories within the site have the session id (or some function thereof) embedded into the url. Once the session has expired, or the user has logged out of the site, or even closes their browser window, the old links no longer would work.
Other techniques could be used with varying degrees of success. Instead of sending a <a href="story382728.html"> tag, send some javascript which is heaviliy obfuscated, but which eventually writes into the document the actual link. All kinds of code obfuscation techniques could be used, including implementing a small code interpreter with the actual code to write the url written in the interpreted code, with a layer of crypto thrown in just to make analysis of the interpreted bytecode more difficult. (The crypto decode key must be part of what is downloaded, so this doesn't defeat analysys, just complicates it.)
Other techniques include a challenge/response system implemented in Javascript. If they're on your main page, then clicking on the link to the story, creates a hidden layer (or frame) and sends a tiny <form> to the server with variables requesting a challenge. The script on the server generates some challenge code. The javascript computes a response and encodes the response into the url link to the story. Now the difficulty here is that you must hit some other magic url via. a form with hidden variables and a POST request in order to obtain the challenge code, before you compute a response to it to include into the url. The story links could expire fairly quickly so that the Javascript code has only 60 seconds to compute and hit the url with the correct response code before it expires. This makes it very difficult to try to even hit the story using netcat connected to port 80 of the server. Again, you would have to analyze the javascript code.
I'm sure I could think of other techniques if I thought about it longer than it took to write this message.
That is wrong. Linux will succeed or fail on its own merits and the inertia of the market.
While I agree with almost everything you said in your post, this sentence was the one that got me.
Other factors can cause a product to suceed or fail other than its merits. This is especially true with (1) a monopoly, and (2) an entrenched monopoly, and (3) a monopololistic player who plays dirty, even willing to commit illegal acts.
I agree completely that a law is not going to make Linux magically appear on everyone's desktop. And I especially agree with what you say about making Linux usable by Joe User. But supposing that these conditions were to be met, I disagree that the merits alone will cause a product to succeed when an entrenched monopoly is willing to play dirty.
It is also good that you seem to observe that the inertia of the market can cause a superior product to fail.
Slashdot Mirror
3. Atkins's program, as with other low-carb programs, work well initially but are extremely difficult to maintain. (The same is true of low-fat diets, incidentally.) This is acknowledged by the research community.
Not true. My physician put me on it. She wants blood and urine regularly. I've been on it for a year. Lost 60 lbs. I've tried other diets. I understand the yo-yo effect. This diet WORKED. I've lost 60 lbs. I never feel hungry. I am required to eat snacks all day. Nuts, smallish amounts of fruit, sunflower kernels, other things low in carbohydrates. I feel completely satisfied. I never feel deprived in any way. I plan to do this forever. Incidentially, my lab blood work is now great compared to starting out at 4 times the normal risk for a heart attack. I now actually feel like exercising.
5. An "Atkins diet without excess fat" (page 7) is a low-fat diet. Someone needs to get over himself.
People always tell me that I can't eat nuts, they are high in fat! I don't go out of my way to eat fat, but I eat things containing lots of fat. I get the leanest meat I can because I prefer it, but still I eat lots of fat.
For dessert, I can make instant sugar free chocolate jell-o. Instead of using skim milk (low fat high carb) I use whipping cream (high fat zero carb). I top it off with a can of whipped cream. (Not cool whip but real whipping cream -- the kind that once saw the inside of a cow -- the kind that goes bad in two or three days.) Yes, I could even eat an entire can of whipped cream, it has no carbs. But I get full too fast. Plus I don't care for that much fat. But it makes a point.
I love this diet. I'm healther (lab results) and feel better than I have in 20 years! Sitting in front of a comptuer for 22 years day and night can have a big effect on your health.
I'm not debating anything about the research. I'm simply stating that my primary care physician put me on this and it works.
An interesting anecdote. When she was planning my menu with me.
Dr. What are you going to eat for breakfast?
me I don't eat breakfast. Haven't since I started working with computers, going to bed late and waking very late.
Dr. You MUST eat breakfast. Non negotiable.
me Okay. What can I eat?
Dr. Unlimited eggs, meat, cheese. No sugar or juice. (etc., etc.)
me That sounds wonderful, but cooking breakfast doesn't fit my lifestyle very well. Quick carb-filled cold serial or carb-loaded quick breakfast bars fit.
Dr. Then go through McDonalds.
me (picking up jaw from floor)
me Did you say McDonalds?
Is my doctor telling me to eat at McDonalds?
Dr. Yes. McDonalds. Get something like a McSomething with eggs, sausage and cheese. Throw the biscuit/bagel away. Eat as many as you want. Eat until you are stuffed.
I started out on the diet eating three of those McSomething's each day. Now I eat one. Similarly at all other meals after about a year the total volume of food I eat is way lower now. (Indeed, I just can't eat as much anymore.)
Since it's just my story, it's anecdotal evidence. If I were part of some study group it would be "research".
Introducing Microsoft Agent Orange!
This remote agent is downloaded into your computer overnight by Microsoft. It works behind the scenes in your computer to help keep it secure. (against you, the enemy) While you're using your computer, Agent Orange is hard at work maintaining the integrity and security of your system.
Microsoft Agent Orange can also notify you of special offers that you might be interested in. Such as how to increase the length of your... oh wait.
Yeah, but a lot of people dont read anon comments, or browse at a higher rating so would miss it.
That's fine if you want to read Slashdot that way. But then, please DON'T moderate!!
Any reasonable cap shouldn't be a huge problem for downloading MP3's. MP3's are small compared to things that even "normal" users might download. I suppose it depenes on how many MP3's you plan to download, or upload to others. Or how many gnutella packets will pass through your system.
The bandwidth cap is more likely to prevent you from running:
10. Why is bash configured with --disable-net-redirections?
It can produce completely unexpected results. This kind of feature should not be part of a shell but a special. tool. And that tool has existed for years already, it's called netcat.
The problem with netcat is that I cannot assume it is present on every system on which my malware might be run. Efforts such as LSB and United Linux need to guarantee malware authors of a least-common-denominator system in order to attract malware development.
From the screen of the computer, I can see that he builds a DIY UPS, but he doesn't run a DIY operating system.
- MP3's
- Warez
- Pr0n
- Explosives making instructions
And worst of all....- DeCSS
We've got to stop all of the terrorists in the categories mentioned above!Basically, these will be considered controlled substances like drugs and whoever's trying to get ahold of one will be treated as a narcotics dealer/user.
I disagree.
Whoever's trying to get ahold of these will be considered terrorists. Get with the times.
This format would only be used in China.
Quick! The MPAA needs to lobby Congress to make it illegal for China to do this!
I dont understand how something can be licensed under both LGPL and GPL at the same time.. That seems like a contradiction.
If I write a program, then I own the copyright on it. That is, I have the exclusive right to reproduce the program in any form. If you reproduce it, or even posess a copy, without the right to do so, then you are guilty of copyright infringement.
If I want to, I can grant you a license to my copyrighted work. Maybe I would do this in exchange for money, sex, or just because I'm a nice guy.
Closed source licenses (often EULA's) may require you to agree to certian terms in exchange for the grant of a license. In other words, I may not choose to grant you a license unless you (A) pay me, (B) promise not to decompile the program, (C) promise to run through the streets in your underwear screaming at 3 AM, etc.
Once you are granted a license, you are entitled to a copy under the terms of that license. The license may or may not include the right to reproduce the program in either source or binary form.
As the exclusive copyright owner, I can license the program to as many as I would like under whatever terms I would like. I can license you the right to have one copy of the program, and 3 backup copies. But I can license Joe the right to give his 25 closest friends copies, because I like him better. I could (probably in exchange for $$) license Microsoft to reproduce the program in binary form only as part of their closed source product. Finally, I could still turn around and license the program under the GPL. (A commercial vendor might rather pay for an alternative license rather than use the GPL.)
Finally, back to your question. As the copyright holder, I can grant different licenses. In fact, if I am a really nice guy, I can put the program under several different open licenses. You choose which license you wish to agree to, and then you better abide by the terms of that license. Nothing, other than the grant of a license by the copyright owner, gives you any right whatsoever to the program! For instance, with the GPL, if you don't agree to it, then you are not granted a license, and nothing else gives you a right to the program, so you are guilty of copyright infringement.
Other software, such as Open Office, for instance, is dual licensed. I'm sure others can point out even more dual licensed software. One or more public licenses do not prevent the copyright owner from also offering closed source licenses to other parties.
Does that clarify things?
This week's reward challenge will require your tribe to successfully unpack, assemble and erect your habitat module. Wanna know what you're playing for? Show them.
Yes, that's right, the winners will receive space suits with breathing aparatus.
Survivors ready? Go!!!
why don't we develop Antartica as well?
Because if you plaster a giant blinking advertisement across Antartica, there is virtually nobody to see it.
Added bonus, the dark side on the moon (the one we never see) is in the earth's RF shadow. All the better for radio astronomers, scientists, etc...
All the more reason why the far side (not dark side) of the moon is the side most in need of being developed with cities, cell phone towers, microwave relay stations, etc. Or at least some permanent satellites in lunar-stationary orbit that can bathe the entire far side in communications chatter.
No Competition?
You're talking about now.
You must be too young to remember how things were in 1982.
Microsoft killed off all their competition with inferior products.
If you have only recently joined the party now that the evil deed is acomplished, and you don't know how they got to where they are, then you must wonder why a company that is rich and makes reasonably good products is so bad?
C'mon folks. Think!
If all ISP's simply provided a standard API to Law Enforcement (LE) so that LE could search anything they wanted, whenever they wanted, then this problem would be solved. We wouldn't even be discussing whether LE should be present.
It could even be developed as a standard module for popular OSes. For instance, for Linux, a Kernel Module which provided this remote monitoring facility would be beneficial for everyone. It would conform to the standard remote monitoring API.
Problem solved. This would be beneficial for everyone.
It saves your manpower. You avoid LE people at your facility. Your engineers don't need to waste time performing the search. It saves LE manpower, because they don't need to visit your facility each time they want to search something. In fact, for additional savings, LE could start obtaining search warrants retroactively.
Are you serious? Or just trolling?
Really? Then how exactly do you explain their billions of dollars in sales, versus, say, Redhat's few million?
Anticompetitive business practices.
Most people don't care. They just want the best product at the best value.
Which implies a choice and the ability to choose. A concept that a monopolist cannot stand.
Get a clue. Every company is run the same way.
But every company does not have monopoly control of the market.
I really hope that you do that much research into the internal workings of Colgate-Palmolive before you buy your toothpaste.
This is not a valid comparison because they have competitors.
What if Colgate could work some kind of scheme such that anyone buying toothpaste had to pay Colgate, regardless of which toothpaste they wanted to buy? This would drive all competitors out of the market. If I bought Crest, I would have to pay for Crest, and for Colgate. If I bought Colgate, I would only have to pay for Colgate. This is how MS got to where they are. Not through providing superior products.
Today, they have superior products. But only because they can pour buckets of money into development. Money they can extort at artificially high prices due to lack of any competition.
Brilliant's spyware network, Altnet, should incorporate this hack. If the hack will work on your particular modem, then Altnet would be able to make use of more bandwidth.
Or, maybe they shouldn't.
providers don't "switch to DOCSIS".
Mine did. They began upgrading the system all over town. Vastly improved. Many new services. They started gradually switching sections of town over to DOCSIS. There was a window of time in which you could use both the old ugly Zenith modems or the new SurfBoard modems. But by a certian date you had to bring in your cable modem and replace it with a DOCSIS modem. Unfortunantly, I had to change all of my static IP's at the same time.
it would have been even more worthwhile for me if, rather than formulating objections of a general nature [...] you had gathered solid arguments for the advantages that proprietary software could bring [...] since this would have allowed a more enlightening exchange in respect of each of our positions.
If MS would submit arguments in favor of proprietary software instead of submitting FUD in opposition to free software, then this would allow an even more enlightening exchange! Wow! Just the exchange in this letter was enlightening enough. Probably so enlightening that MS doesn't want to draw any more attention.
Great idea, but the implementation can be improved.
I don't think your suggestion is really an improvement. If you are say, 5 seconds away from the hour, generate the URL for this hour and dish it out to someone. 20 seconds later they click the link, and it doesn't work.
The links need to expire a certian length of time from when they were issued. Thus I suggested encrypting an expiration time. Only the server needs to know the encryption key using ordinary crypto (3DES) because the server is the only one encrypting and later decrypting the timestamp out of the url.
Another possibility is to always have two overlapping time ranges. Each time range is, say, 1 hour long. The first time range always expires on the hour, and the second one on the half hour. Thus you are always well into one of the time ranges, even if you just crossed over the boundary of the other time range. Now just put both random numbers into the URL. When the server gets the url back, it can make sure that at least one of the two numbers is still the "current" number to access this linked story. (This prevents the scenerio above where the user crosses over the expiration time boundary.)
I don't think you want this to happen to someone who has bookmarked an article. I, for one, would assume the article was no longer available.
Excellent observation.
If I were clueless enough to want to prevent deep linking, then it would desirable to give them a page that says: Sorry. You deep linked to this article. You must click here to go back to the main page. View the ads. Then jump through all of the following hoops in order to see the article.
This technique is to be considered as highly antisocial, as it not only forbids deep linking, but also forces the user to enable javascript.
Yes it is. I'm only pointing out the technical possibilities. Not the ethical ones. Nor of how stupid such an approach really is. All of which have been already well argued here.
Moreover, if you push javascript too much, it may well only run correctly in one single browser
Yes. However, simple operations such as decoding something and writing text into a document are not exercising most of the non-portable features of javascript.
By using such techniques, you'll be perceived as a moron who does this in order to force users to use Internet Explorer, rather than as somebody who wants to protect your deep links.
Well, suppose now, hypothetically, that the code was non portable, only working on IE. To someone who would actually be this obnoxious, they might not consider lack of non-IE browsers a big drawback in exchange for the security of protecting their precious deep links.
Actually, such techniques can be defeated even without analysis: just run a sniffer and log the URL's that your browser tries to access. You'd be inconveniencing the legitimate user without really impeding a determined attacker.
True only if your URL's don't expire. The obfuscation of URL's makes them difficult to obtain. But expiring URL's make them useless to bookmark. Both techniques can be used together.
You're earlyer suggestions (session ids or timestamps embedded in URLs) are much more user friendly.
Yes. But as you no doubt would agree, if they got a clue and let people deep link would be even more user friendly.
There are other technical solutions.
You could use an expiring url. That is, encrypt an expiration timestamp into the url. Now, your main page could have links which work, for an hour, into stories in your site. But if you bookmarked those links and use them after they expire, then those expired links simply give you back the main page again. Suppose you use 3DES to encrypt the expiration timestamp, you just keep the key private. Since only your server knows the key, only you can decrypt it. Or use other crypto.
Another possibility is through the use of sessions. Some web systems keep track of you by a "session", such as a shopping site might need to do. Within the session, links to stories within the site have the session id (or some function thereof) embedded into the url. Once the session has expired, or the user has logged out of the site, or even closes their browser window, the old links no longer would work.
Other techniques could be used with varying degrees of success. Instead of sending a <a href="story382728.html"> tag, send some javascript which is heaviliy obfuscated, but which eventually writes into the document the actual link. All kinds of code obfuscation techniques could be used, including implementing a small code interpreter with the actual code to write the url written in the interpreted code, with a layer of crypto thrown in just to make analysis of the interpreted bytecode more difficult. (The crypto decode key must be part of what is downloaded, so this doesn't defeat analysys, just complicates it.)
Other techniques include a challenge/response system implemented in Javascript. If they're on your main page, then clicking on the link to the story, creates a hidden layer (or frame) and sends a tiny <form> to the server with variables requesting a challenge. The script on the server generates some challenge code. The javascript computes a response and encodes the response into the url link to the story. Now the difficulty here is that you must hit some other magic url via. a form with hidden variables and a POST request in order to obtain the challenge code, before you compute a response to it to include into the url. The story links could expire fairly quickly so that the Javascript code has only 60 seconds to compute and hit the url with the correct response code before it expires. This makes it very difficult to try to even hit the story using netcat connected to port 80 of the server. Again, you would have to analyze the javascript code.
I'm sure I could think of other techniques if I thought about it longer than it took to write this message.
That is wrong. Linux will succeed or fail on its own merits and the inertia of the market.
While I agree with almost everything you said in your post, this sentence was the one that got me.
Other factors can cause a product to suceed or fail other than its merits. This is especially true with (1) a monopoly, and (2) an entrenched monopoly, and (3) a monopololistic player who plays dirty, even willing to commit illegal acts.
I agree completely that a law is not going to make Linux magically appear on everyone's desktop. And I especially agree with what you say about making Linux usable by Joe User. But supposing that these conditions were to be met, I disagree that the merits alone will cause a product to succeed when an entrenched monopoly is willing to play dirty.
It is also good that you seem to observe that the inertia of the market can cause a superior product to fail.
Criminals that want to organize any criminal actions are known to use the telephone system to communicate!
Criminals wanting to conspire to commit criminal action are known to sit in corporate boardrooms in closed, secret conferences.