Re:If our county can afford to do it right...
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 2
I think one state, Nevada, has the ability to include "None of the Above" on the ballot; watching CNN on Tuesday as the polls came in , I know that "None of the Above" was getting 2-3% in the various elections (including Presidental) in that state.
I do think that requiring an Abstain/NotA choice for EVERY ballot question, and then requiring that every ballot question be answered in order to validate the ballot *before the voter hands it in*.
The court order specifically refered to protecting the identity of the students, something that the articles suggest the school board in question was fighting for. Given that, there will probably have to be concessions in the identity filtered list that are reasonable under this order, such as removing anything after a ? in the URLs (that is, arguements for a GET method).
As for maintaining logs, it's become quite evident that having old logs can both harm you as well as help you in court cases. It's probably in the school's best interest to hold on to these logs, especially since the school is accountable to the public in that system.
The challenge for the records started in 1998, while his kids were still at the public school system. He withdraw his children and moved them to the public school system apparently when he couldn't get the records and started the legal battle. I believe that he does have sufficent interest in the matter (if he had those logs from day 1, would he have withdrawn the children and spent the money on private school?)
The lists that the guy will be given will be stripped of any identity or specific machine. Remember, the computer network was also used by staff and faculty, so the rights of adults are at stake here as well. The judge specifically mentioned the balance between privacy and right-to-know laws.
First, some say the guy has no right to be asking for this information as his children now attend private school. Realize, however that this case started two years ago, appearently near the time when the guy transferred his children from the public school system in question to the private schools.
Also note that the judge specifically balanced the privacy of the students *AND* faculty vs the state's right to know law, and said that a program can be used to strip out all identifible information: the guy is only going to get a list of sites that were visited by the school system,
so privacy *is* protected. If he wanted to go one step farther and find out who visited whitehouse.com, for example, he would then probably have another court battle to face, and given the expressed interest of the privacy of the students *AND* faculty, he probably wouldn't get it. In any case, all this guy wants is evidence that children visited explicit sites such that he can fight for mandatory filtering.
This is a PUBLIC institution, and therefore was not exempt from the public right-to-know law. Some here appear to be worried that it will extend to ISPs and whatnot. But those are for the most part private institutions, and therefore do not have to respond to public requests like this. The only way such log files will be revealed to third parties is if they are subpena'd.
Some are trying to compare a real world example, and the best way to think of this result is that if I wanted information from a public library on it's lending records, all I can expect as a public citizen is a list of books and how many times they were checked out. I would not expect to be able to trace back who borrowed a specific book without further legal action.
This does create an instresting situation for those in public colleges however. Yes, I would expect that a similar challenge on log files will give a similar result (only getting the list of sites, not names and such), but this is college, and I would expect to see a more diverse list. May be something to watch for.
And there is a good point on pg 2 of the Times version: if this decision is held throughout it challenge, then groups like Peacefire can easily get infomation on real-world lists of sites that were blocked if filters become mandated, and thus fight for removing such filters or emphasizing more public input into better filters.
The polls in western FL would have closed at the same time the polls in the rest of FL did, and I was watching the news that day; it wasn't until at least 9pm EST (2 hrs after FL polls closed) that the TV stations first gave FL to Gore. There's no way the media influenced that sort of voting pattern in FL.
As an earlier link to the SDMI thing, I remember reading that the sound engineers that were selected to test the quality were all from RIAA organizations. And of course, RIAA wants the cracks to fail.
What's odd about this is that we have a means to break SDMI and produce a file which probably has excellent (given that the people to submit said cracks would be sufficiently happy with their results), but not quite excellent (failing the golden ear test), but free of copy protection.
When it comes to "distributing" free music, what will the average user of such services look for?
I'd argue that only true sound affectionados would be the ones to get the CD given the option between it and digital music files, and they'd be the only ones that could hear that difference that the golden ears tests revealed.
Basically meaning that since it can be hacked to remove the watermark, SDMI is pretty much defeated.
Save for that stupid little thing we call the DMCA.
Filtering is done at the delievery end; the goal of filtering is to limit what content that a select subgroup of the whole can see; the content still goes out regardless.
Censoring is done at the producing end; the goal of censoring is to prevent content from even being distributed to anyone.
A lot of/.ers related these two issues, and they *are* closely related. However, we are talking about filters for children (who do NOT enjoy all the rights given by the Bill of Rights, by law), which is a small subgroup of the entire internet audience.
Compare filtering in the states to what's happening in China; the government is *censoring* web sites such that only offically approved news stories and other information is carried.
The arguement that groups like Peacefire and others make is not the filtering is bad, but filter programs that are out there today are inheriently bad such that at times they will act as biased filters (blocking certain information when other similar information isn't). An excellent example is this story; if even just one political site is blocked, assuming the site to be legitamite, then the filter software is bad, because that one candidate or issue is unfairly biased against. Another example are the number of sites on abortions that tend to get blocked... are the filter writers pro-life, or is it just the software catching one word that triggers an offensive flag?
Now imaging all the possible situations of where and when you'd want filtering, and all the possible problems that could come up. You'd realize quickly that there is no way that current software today can unbiasly filter the net; the only alternative is to constantly monitor the activities of the children as they use the net such that you can evaluate the page in real time and decide if your child can look or not. Thus, making the arguement that the ideal filter program is a dream, and anything that currently claims to filter the net is a failure and should be tossed aside.
Deja's old archives (at least, as far back as 96, from what I can tell) are up, been up for at least 3 weeks now.
However, considering the pending sale of Deja, the existing usenet archives do need to be recorded (if just for the Big 7 minus alt., just as references) instead of being sent to the bit bucket.
One of my concerns with implements the RBL or similar block lists is that it will get legitimate email to me in addition to spams; e.g. all or nothing. Because I do run web sites, I get legit email from people I've never conversed with before asking questions or commenting, and I'd rather not lose those.
I found a procmail recipe set called "SpamBouncer" which has catches for most common spams and can read from RBL and other sources for more spam goodies. Besides being able to install as either a machine-wide or a individual user setup, it can also have several options for dealing with spam:/dev/null, bouncing the mail back to the domain for possible spam dealings, or, my favorite, dumping all spam to a specific mailbox. This way, I can read through the spam that was sent and see if any messages were truly legit (and in a list of subjects which is mostly spam, it's easy to pick out the legit headers, as opposed to picking out spam headers in a bunch of legit mail).
Only drawback with this is that it is processor heavy; a long overdue fetchmail that pulled up a 100 messages got my CPU usage on a 200MHz to 15+. But the program is actively maintained, usually with weekly updates.
What I've read is that Nader wants Nader to win. No one else.
He's critical of Gore because, being the encumbant VP in an adminstration where the economy is high (I don't think as strong as the rising tide analogy, but it is undenibly good), Gore should have already won this election hands down. Instead, he made signifiacnt blunders in his campaign and gave Bush edges that should have never been there. If Gore happens to win, will he continue to make similar blunders in his policies and thus screw up America?
If you've ever been online when a major significant event occurs where there is continuing coverage (the last best one I can remember is Ted Kennedy's plane crash), CNN converts their normal front page into one that just covers that story; the related articles will be located on the main server, but any stories other than that main one, as well as the normal front page, will be pointed to a backup server, maybe not as fast, but able to handle the normal volume load of CNN. I bet the same thing will happen tomorrow; about noonish EST, CNN main site will be strictly election coverage, while the backup site will be everythjing else. I also figure that most major news sites will follow suit.
Besides, most people will probably check in only once or twice while their at work (as only the exit poll results will be available), and traffic will only be heavy once people get home, and since few people have dedicated connections at home, it will not be that heavy as if it was happening during the day. You also will have all major stations covering this, so it won't be that hard to find info.
Bush was in Florida yesterday (sunday), and was attacking Gore. From what I remember on NPR, his speech was something like this. "Take Gore, he claims to have invented the Internet! If so, then why does every internet address start with 'dubya'?!? 'Dubya, dubya, dubya!'". Oy, and people want to trust him with the presidency??
(For those not following the campaigh, Bush Jr is advocating that those following him go around with his middle initial 'W', either with fingers on the hand, or on t-shirts, or chanting it, as a rally cry.)
I don't understand why more IT departments have daycare -- think of how much MORE code you could produce in a day if you put the tykes to work (and the working are paying the company to keep them there!). And since they are 'temporary' , you don't need to worry about stock options!
I do believe that there needs to be some sort of middle ground between basically obtaining old games without compensation to the owners, and having no access to the games. (Hint, look at BMG/Napster).
One thing to concider is how 'abandoned' is Abandonware? A good recent example is the
classic game Reach for the Stars; the original was out in the early 90s, DOS text mode based. It was probably the first commercial turn-based 4X game out there (predated by similar games on BBSes). Of course, the game disappeared up till recently; a company has now basically put a nice DirX GUI on top of the underlying gameplay and released it. From the demo, it plays nearly the same as I remember from the original game. Now, in 1998 , it would have been called Abandonware, but now it's a real product. Would the text-mode version still be considered Abandonware?
IMO, what the companies should do is create secure sites where you can pay a small fee ($10/yr?) to gain access to the sites and can download games under the company's controlled environment; the company would not be responsible for any tech support or any documentation (save for cases where you had manual based copy protection). If a company decides to revamp a title, it can remove it from the server under their control. End result, more profits, abet small, for the company, and the games would not disappear forever, keeping classic gamers happy.
But of course, this is logical, and we all know how most companies operate...
Record created on 11-Dec-1998.
That's iffy; 2 years is not an unreasonable timeframe between announcing that a movie will be filmed, and the release of that movie. (Look at Star Wars, LotR, etc)
But you are right too; if Dreamworks wanted that domain, they should have registered it as soon as the script was accepted. It's just that the taunting this guy appears to be doing is not helping his case.
From my understanding of the SDMI challenge and why it was done, there probably is no SDMI-enabled players out there today. SDMI will not be implemented by the hardware makers until they know that the SDMI format is finalized lest they lose money. Given that the SDMI challenge was taken and completed, this will slow the completion of the finalization of SDMI probably until at least next Christmas.
If RIAA does go ahead and put out SDMI silently,
I'm sure you'll hear people complaining about how a certain device cannot play their old CDs, at whihc point you know that it's out, but I'm sure that this will be a well-document blemish for RIAA if they did it this way.
I can't look at the site from work, but given the name (a fictional one from a movie) and what the first poster said, this definitely has the starts of a classic cybersquatting case. Specifically, if the site was registered at some point after the movie was announced, and the text that is reported to be on the front page, I think the guy will lose. If, on the other hand, it was a true fan site of the movie, then I'd say that it should be ok.
I do see more and more studies stickign their movie sites under their main site. Although I've started to see the use of Internet Keywords akin to AOL keywords (specifically, in the case of Little Nicky); since these actually cost a bit more money to obtain, I think it's more reasonable to go that way as well.
UCITA basically gives strength to click through licenses. What if, in every WinXX OS cd license, there was a phrase, "By agreeing to this license, Microsoft may demand that you prove your ownership of this license at any time at your expense." Is there any fair comparison to non-software items whereby the *company* can demand to prove ownership? (The police can, but they have been given that responsibility). This gives software makers law-enforcement powers, which they should not even begin to think they have.
IIRC, Virginia was the first state to enact UCITA, which allows such tactics (forcing software owners to prove they have licenses). Could this be a case of MS testing the waters on something large, but not significantly large, to make sure UCITA can hold up?
It would seem to me that given the size and the like, this tag has a very limited range, maybe measured in meters. Not strong enough, even, such that someone standing outside your house could determine the identity of any objects within it, even if on the other side of the wall. Add to that a limited shelf life, and I don't see how this can be used as a 'permanent' identity system.
On the other hand, it can bring about two major application uses: shoplifting is one, as this type of id would be harder to tear off compared to the various tags they have now. The other is from an AT&T commercial (I think), where you push your grocery cart into a stall, wait a moment, and your total rings up, speeding checkout lines.
Possibly even 'smart' cupboards and refridgerators could come from this.
Sure, there's privacy issues in some of these cases, but they're the same privacy issues that we deal with now with those frequent shopper cards. The technology really doesn't introduce anything new.
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I do think that requiring an Abstain/NotA choice for EVERY ballot question, and then requiring that every ballot question be answered in order to validate the ballot *before the voter hands it in*.
As for maintaining logs, it's become quite evident that having old logs can both harm you as well as help you in court cases. It's probably in the school's best interest to hold on to these logs, especially since the school is accountable to the public in that system.
The lists that the guy will be given will be stripped of any identity or specific machine. Remember, the computer network was also used by staff and faculty, so the rights of adults are at stake here as well. The judge specifically mentioned the balance between privacy and right-to-know laws.
Also note that the judge specifically balanced the privacy of the students *AND* faculty vs the state's right to know law, and said that a program can be used to strip out all identifible information: the guy is only going to get a list of sites that were visited by the school system, so privacy *is* protected. If he wanted to go one step farther and find out who visited whitehouse.com, for example, he would then probably have another court battle to face, and given the expressed interest of the privacy of the students *AND* faculty, he probably wouldn't get it. In any case, all this guy wants is evidence that children visited explicit sites such that he can fight for mandatory filtering.
This is a PUBLIC institution, and therefore was not exempt from the public right-to-know law. Some here appear to be worried that it will extend to ISPs and whatnot. But those are for the most part private institutions, and therefore do not have to respond to public requests like this. The only way such log files will be revealed to third parties is if they are subpena'd.
Some are trying to compare a real world example, and the best way to think of this result is that if I wanted information from a public library on it's lending records, all I can expect as a public citizen is a list of books and how many times they were checked out. I would not expect to be able to trace back who borrowed a specific book without further legal action.
This does create an instresting situation for those in public colleges however. Yes, I would expect that a similar challenge on log files will give a similar result (only getting the list of sites, not names and such), but this is college, and I would expect to see a more diverse list. May be something to watch for.
And there is a good point on pg 2 of the Times version: if this decision is held throughout it challenge, then groups like Peacefire can easily get infomation on real-world lists of sites that were blocked if filters become mandated, and thus fight for removing such filters or emphasizing more public input into better filters.
The polls in western FL would have closed at the same time the polls in the rest of FL did, and I was watching the news that day; it wasn't until at least 9pm EST (2 hrs after FL polls closed) that the TV stations first gave FL to Gore. There's no way the media influenced that sort of voting pattern in FL.
What's odd about this is that we have a means to break SDMI and produce a file which probably has excellent (given that the people to submit said cracks would be sufficiently happy with their results), but not quite excellent (failing the golden ear test), but free of copy protection. When it comes to "distributing" free music, what will the average user of such services look for? I'd argue that only true sound affectionados would be the ones to get the CD given the option between it and digital music files, and they'd be the only ones that could hear that difference that the golden ears tests revealed.
Basically meaning that since it can be hacked to remove the watermark, SDMI is pretty much defeated.
Save for that stupid little thing we call the DMCA.
"Coming soon from Valve Software: BSA Counterstrike 1.0! Make sure to install a copy on every machine on your network!"
Filtering is done at the delievery end; the goal of filtering is to limit what content that a select subgroup of the whole can see; the content still goes out regardless.
Censoring is done at the producing end; the goal of censoring is to prevent content from even being distributed to anyone.
A lot of /.ers related these two issues, and they *are* closely related. However, we are talking about filters for children (who do NOT enjoy all the rights given by the Bill of Rights, by law), which is a small subgroup of the entire internet audience.
Compare filtering in the states to what's happening in China; the government is *censoring* web sites such that only offically approved news stories and other information is carried.
The arguement that groups like Peacefire and others make is not the filtering is bad, but filter programs that are out there today are inheriently bad such that at times they will act as biased filters (blocking certain information when other similar information isn't). An excellent example is this story; if even just one political site is blocked, assuming the site to be legitamite, then the filter software is bad, because that one candidate or issue is unfairly biased against. Another example are the number of sites on abortions that tend to get blocked... are the filter writers pro-life, or is it just the software catching one word that triggers an offensive flag?
Now imaging all the possible situations of where and when you'd want filtering, and all the possible problems that could come up. You'd realize quickly that there is no way that current software today can unbiasly filter the net; the only alternative is to constantly monitor the activities of the children as they use the net such that you can evaluate the page in real time and decide if your child can look or not. Thus, making the arguement that the ideal filter program is a dream, and anything that currently claims to filter the net is a failure and should be tossed aside.
However, considering the pending sale of Deja, the existing usenet archives do need to be recorded (if just for the Big 7 minus alt., just as references) instead of being sent to the bit bucket.
>ln -s /usr/bin/su /usr/bin/god
/" > /usr/bin/noclip
>echo "#!/bin/sh\n\nsudo chmod -R a+rw
I found a procmail recipe set called "SpamBouncer" which has catches for most common spams and can read from RBL and other sources for more spam goodies. Besides being able to install as either a machine-wide or a individual user setup, it can also have several options for dealing with spam: /dev/null, bouncing the mail back to the domain for possible spam dealings, or, my favorite, dumping all spam to a specific mailbox. This way, I can read through the spam that was sent and see if any messages were truly legit (and in a list of subjects which is mostly spam, it's easy to pick out the legit headers, as opposed to picking out spam headers in a bunch of legit mail).
Only drawback with this is that it is processor heavy; a long overdue fetchmail that pulled up a 100 messages got my CPU usage on a 200MHz to 15+. But the program is actively maintained, usually with weekly updates.
He's critical of Gore because, being the encumbant VP in an adminstration where the economy is high (I don't think as strong as the rising tide analogy, but it is undenibly good), Gore should have already won this election hands down. Instead, he made signifiacnt blunders in his campaign and gave Bush edges that should have never been there. If Gore happens to win, will he continue to make similar blunders in his policies and thus screw up America?
Besides, most people will probably check in only once or twice while their at work (as only the exit poll results will be available), and traffic will only be heavy once people get home, and since few people have dedicated connections at home, it will not be that heavy as if it was happening during the day. You also will have all major stations covering this, so it won't be that hard to find info.
Bush was in Florida yesterday (sunday), and was attacking Gore. From what I remember on NPR, his speech was something like this. "Take Gore, he claims to have invented the Internet! If so, then why does every internet address start with 'dubya'?!? 'Dubya, dubya, dubya!'". Oy, and people want to trust him with the presidency??
(For those not following the campaigh, Bush Jr is advocating that those following him go around with his middle initial 'W', either with fingers on the hand, or on t-shirts, or chanting it, as a rally cry.)
One thing to concider is how 'abandoned' is Abandonware? A good recent example is the classic game Reach for the Stars; the original was out in the early 90s, DOS text mode based. It was probably the first commercial turn-based 4X game out there (predated by similar games on BBSes). Of course, the game disappeared up till recently; a company has now basically put a nice DirX GUI on top of the underlying gameplay and released it. From the demo, it plays nearly the same as I remember from the original game. Now, in 1998 , it would have been called Abandonware, but now it's a real product. Would the text-mode version still be considered Abandonware?
IMO, what the companies should do is create secure sites where you can pay a small fee ($10/yr?) to gain access to the sites and can download games under the company's controlled environment; the company would not be responsible for any tech support or any documentation (save for cases where you had manual based copy protection). If a company decides to revamp a title, it can remove it from the server under their control. End result, more profits, abet small, for the company, and the games would not disappear forever, keeping classic gamers happy.
But of course, this is logical, and we all know how most companies operate...
But you are right too; if Dreamworks wanted that domain, they should have registered it as soon as the script was accepted. It's just that the taunting this guy appears to be doing is not helping his case.
If RIAA does go ahead and put out SDMI silently, I'm sure you'll hear people complaining about how a certain device cannot play their old CDs, at whihc point you know that it's out, but I'm sure that this will be a well-document blemish for RIAA if they did it this way.
I do see more and more studies stickign their movie sites under their main site. Although I've started to see the use of Internet Keywords akin to AOL keywords (specifically, in the case of Little Nicky); since these actually cost a bit more money to obtain, I think it's more reasonable to go that way as well.
On the other hand, it can bring about two major application uses: shoplifting is one, as this type of id would be harder to tear off compared to the various tags they have now. The other is from an AT&T commercial (I think), where you push your grocery cart into a stall, wait a moment, and your total rings up, speeding checkout lines. Possibly even 'smart' cupboards and refridgerators could come from this.
Sure, there's privacy issues in some of these cases, but they're the same privacy issues that we deal with now with those frequent shopper cards. The technology really doesn't introduce anything new.
Digital:Convergence's business model is ruined!