A lot of the more respectable groups started moderation systems back when the spam onslaught started, but they were afterthoughts on a system not designed for them. The problem with moderator systems is that it requires a small handful of trusted moderators, and what do you do when they grow tired of the subject and leave? Electing a small group of moderators (technically, it's rarely an election, they're usually self appointed) always seems to start the slow death of a newsgroup.
You're right on about the moderation, but a small centralized group isn't really a big issue because that's how almost all web forums operate.
The big technical issue with Usenet is that there was no way to moderate after the fact. Posts had to be pre-approved, but they couldn't go back and remove them or block specific posters. The moderation system just didn't scale beyond some small highly-focused groups.
And as bad as the spam was in the mid-1990s, what really brought Usenet to its knees was the prolonged assult from kooks, trolls, and just plain awful people. The modern internet user just has zero tolerence for that kind of stuff.
No they didn't do the right thing. The right thing is to offer DRM-free music in a variety of formats (lossless included) in the first place under a license that allows non-commercial and verbatim sharing.
No, the right thing to do would be to kick you in the balls until you bleed to death. And my suggestion is more realistic than yours.
I, for one, cannot wait for the first big scale internet apps to shut down. Imagine flick shutting down with all you pictures, or gmail taking away all you mail.
This is bound to occur, and will be a joy to watch.
Your examples are so large that someone would buy them just for the userbase. Maintaining a bunch of servers is actually quite cheap.
The whole reason that Yahoo was able offer this is because hardly anyone used their music service in the first place.
I think this entire discussion of "Is Software Math?" misses the point that many software patents have nothing to do with the calculation or "math" involved.
The Google PageRank patent in TFA is a methodology for ranking web pages (you could by hand if you wanted to). The Amazon One-Click patent covers a specific business function of a web button.
It's only when you get into the LZW "GIF" patents that you're talking a something that's pure algorithm.
This isn't completely true. I have a 10.4 "Upgrade" DVD that will only install if OS X is already present. This was sent out for ~$25 to people who bought back-inventory Macs after 10.4 was announced.
So, Apple does have a distinction between "upgrade" and "full" versions, although they don't use it very widely. The regular retail OS X box doesn't say anything about "upgrade" on it.
Realize the term "web developer" applies to two distinct group of people. Either front-end coders who are HTML/CSS experts or backend programmers who know Java, C#, etc but generally have very minimal understanding of the browser front-end.
The real solution to this braces and indent problems is to change the editors and IDEs so that they can display and allow code to be entered according to the coder's preferences but store the code in a neutral form.
Pretty much every form of BASIC (up through VB6/VBA) did this by storing the code in a tokenized form.
In the general case though, you would have to pry plain-old-text out of most programmers' cold dead fingers.
That's not a crime. It's a tort. The FBI isn't interested in torts. It's not even a tort if it's not in the contract. Learn the difference and then get back to me.
Wrong again. (You love being wrong, don't you?) Unauthorized access to computer systems is illegal, even if the person is in employ as an system admin. There is no "sheild" no matter how much you wish there was. People have been convicted of this, notably that guy who wrote Perl books.
The executive summary of what I've been talking about and what you've been talking out your ass about:
Maybe you should re-read it again slowly, especially the part where it state the law applies to "providing an electronic communication service to the public"
It is the case that employers have the rights to monitor employee email.
However nowhere in your link is claimed that "administrators" have some sort of "shield" which allows them to snoop in their boss' email in violation of organizational policy.
Such a claim doesn't even pass a basic common sense test. It is exactly the sort of pigheaded nerd-logic that could land you in jail.
LOL You really think that in the tech capital of the universe, only minutes away from Cisco HQ, they couldn't find someone else with equal or greater networking skills?
Because if so, you better be shorting Ebay, Google, Yahoo, and so on.
Engineers take the work so *personally*. "No one can touch that code but me... " blah... blah.
I dunno. There's a fundamental difference between someone being naturally protective over their work and someone who volunteers to be on call 24/7 because he doesn't trust his coworkers with the passwords.
I've been in both positions. Shitty political situations where I hand over documentation and walk out the door with my head held up. And as the guy who comes in to inherit the mess when the "indispensable guru" quit.
Neither situation is really all that life-threatening. Nobody is really indispensable.
I don't believe for a second that the guy was irreplaceable except for the passwords that he intentionally withheld. The city could easily make a call and have an even bigger Cisco genius on site within a week. (After all the Bay Area is where Cisco is HQed.) A legend in his own mind.
The ECPA only seems to apply to common carriers and public information services. I don't see any evidence it provides any liability for the sysadmins of internal networks.
1. I know two people who were hit by buses while working in the financial district in SF.
On one occasion I was about to step out into the street and all-of-a-sudden, there was a bus about 6 inches front of my face. Always been a good motivation for me to get my documentation complete.:)
Putting a network card into promiscuous mode is not the same as using root access to copy your boss's email store, nor is it running the password file through jack the ripper.
This sort of logic is where nerd myopia falls right on its four-eyed face. If he was reading in on personnel-related email, it really doesn't matter what measures he used, he still fucked up. Especially so if he acted on them.
The argument that his bosses were l00s3rz because they were conducting normal business through email without any special encryption doesn't fly anywhere sorry. Professional job, professional rules, l335ness does not apply.
In the good old days, I could depend on 2.5 being bleeding edge and 2.4 being ready for production. Since 2.6, I either depend on a distro to track the kernel versions(which I do at home), or watch the kernel forums to see which should be the next "stable" kernel version (which we do at work).
Haha, that's not what happened at all. The vendors forked 2.4 and backported all the fancy new 2.5 features. So most users were running something that was nothing like the 'official' kernel. Meanwhile 2.5/2.6 went into dev hell because it wasn't relevant for the people paid to develop Linux.
Odd/Even was a nice simple system in theory, in practice it didn't work out so great.
Slashdot Mirror
Every internet community has a "remember when it was good" meme.
The difference is that Usenet was a mostly serious environment where almost everyone posted under their real names with their real email addresses.
Also when Usenet went to shit, it was still the very early days of the WWW and there weren't any adequate replacements.
A lot of the more respectable groups started moderation systems back when the spam onslaught started, but they were afterthoughts on a system not designed for them. The problem with moderator systems is that it requires a small handful of trusted moderators, and what do you do when they grow tired of the subject and leave? Electing a small group of moderators (technically, it's rarely an election, they're usually self appointed) always seems to start the slow death of a newsgroup.
You're right on about the moderation, but a small centralized group isn't really a big issue because that's how almost all web forums operate.
The big technical issue with Usenet is that there was no way to moderate after the fact. Posts had to be pre-approved, but they couldn't go back and remove them or block specific posters. The moderation system just didn't scale beyond some small highly-focused groups.
And as bad as the spam was in the mid-1990s, what really brought Usenet to its knees was the prolonged assult from kooks, trolls, and just plain awful people. The modern internet user just has zero tolerence for that kind of stuff.
No they didn't do the right thing. The right thing is to offer DRM-free music in a variety of formats (lossless included) in the first place under a license that allows non-commercial and verbatim sharing.
No, the right thing to do would be to kick you in the balls until you bleed to death. And my suggestion is more realistic than yours.
I, for one, cannot wait for the first big scale internet apps to shut down. Imagine flick shutting down with all you pictures, or gmail taking away all you mail.
This is bound to occur, and will be a joy to watch.
Your examples are so large that someone would buy them just for the userbase. Maintaining a bunch of servers is actually quite cheap.
The whole reason that Yahoo was able offer this is because hardly anyone used their music service in the first place.
I'm worried about the fact that it depends on the DirectX SDK and Windows Driver Kit - would the terms of either of those 'poison' the binaries?
The GPL has an exception for operating system components
Right, why would anyone download a mystery binary from a torrent, when it's so much easier to just ignore the EULA?
Also that license is very similar to the old Netscape free eval/edu license that everyone ignored.
This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the Apache HTTP server. Apache also does tons of Java stuff.
I think this entire discussion of "Is Software Math?" misses the point that many software patents have nothing to do with the calculation or "math" involved.
The Google PageRank patent in TFA is a methodology for ranking web pages (you could by hand if you wanted to). The Amazon One-Click patent covers a specific business function of a web button.
It's only when you get into the LZW "GIF" patents that you're talking a something that's pure algorithm.
This isn't completely true. I have a 10.4 "Upgrade" DVD that will only install if OS X is already present. This was sent out for ~$25 to people who bought back-inventory Macs after 10.4 was announced.
So, Apple does have a distinction between "upgrade" and "full" versions, although they don't use it very widely. The regular retail OS X box doesn't say anything about "upgrade" on it.
Realize the term "web developer" applies to two distinct group of people. Either front-end coders who are HTML/CSS experts or backend programmers who know Java, C#, etc but generally have very minimal understanding of the browser front-end.
Fun flamewar though :)
The real solution to this braces and indent problems is to change the editors and IDEs so that they can display and allow code to be entered according to the coder's preferences but store the code in a neutral form.
Pretty much every form of BASIC (up through VB6/VBA) did this by storing the code in a tokenized form.
In the general case though, you would have to pry plain-old-text out of most programmers' cold dead fingers.
"in violation of organizational policy."
That's not a crime. It's a tort. The FBI isn't interested in torts. It's not even a tort if it's not in the contract. Learn the difference and then get back to me.
Wrong again. (You love being wrong, don't you?) Unauthorized access to computer systems is illegal, even if the person is in employ as an system admin. There is no "sheild" no matter how much you wish there was. People have been convicted of this, notably that guy who wrote Perl books.
The executive summary of what I've been talking about and what you've been talking out your ass about:
Maybe you should re-read it again slowly, especially the part where it state the law applies to "providing an electronic communication service to the public"
It is the case that employers have the rights to monitor employee email.
However nowhere in your link is claimed that "administrators" have some sort of "shield" which allows them to snoop in their boss' email in violation of organizational policy.
Such a claim doesn't even pass a basic common sense test. It is exactly the sort of pigheaded nerd-logic that could land you in jail.
LOL You really think that in the tech capital of the universe, only minutes away from Cisco HQ, they couldn't find someone else with equal or greater networking skills?
Because if so, you better be shorting Ebay, Google, Yahoo, and so on.
Whatever. "I was a BBS Op" is like the worst qualification ever.
The burden of proof is on you to back up your bullshit, and I'm a calling you on it. Quote some laws here, if you can.
Open source routers are missing the same security features as Cisco?
Engineers take the work so *personally*. "No one can touch that code but me... " blah... blah.
I dunno. There's a fundamental difference between someone being naturally protective over their work and someone who volunteers to be on call 24/7 because he doesn't trust his coworkers with the passwords.
I've been in both positions. Shitty political situations where I hand over documentation and walk out the door with my head held up. And as the guy who comes in to inherit the mess when the "indispensable guru" quit.
Neither situation is really all that life-threatening. Nobody is really indispensable.
I don't believe for a second that the guy was irreplaceable except for the passwords that he intentionally withheld. The city could easily make a call and have an even bigger Cisco genius on site within a week. (After all the Bay Area is where Cisco is HQed.) A legend in his own mind.
I think you're full of brown smelly stuff.
The ECPA only seems to apply to common carriers and public information services. I don't see any evidence it provides any liability for the sysadmins of internal networks.
If you're not IANAL, here it is:
http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/wiretap2510_2522.htm
And even if so, you're being really retarded if you think that reading his bosses' email falls under the "system monitoring" provision of the law.
1. I know two people who were hit by buses while working in the financial district in SF.
On one occasion I was about to step out into the street and all-of-a-sudden, there was a bus about 6 inches front of my face. Always been a good motivation for me to get my documentation complete. :)
What if he is right? What if all the other network admins are incompetent buffoons?
Doesn't make any difference if they are? He doesn't work there anymore, it is factually not his problem.
But I think the management is probably blowing this out of proportion to cover their own asses.
Covering their own asses = Why did we hire this toolshed in the first place?
Obviously there was a huge breakdown in managing this guy here, but the problem is still that guy.
Putting a network card into promiscuous mode is not the same as using root access to copy your boss's email store, nor is it running the password file through jack the ripper.
This sort of logic is where nerd myopia falls right on its four-eyed face. If he was reading in on personnel-related email, it really doesn't matter what measures he used, he still fucked up. Especially so if he acted on them.
The argument that his bosses were l00s3rz because they were conducting normal business through email without any special encryption doesn't fly anywhere sorry. Professional job, professional rules, l335ness does not apply.
I could provide quotes, but its not worth the trouble. Like I said, keep an eye out for this decision in future flamewars.
In the good old days, I could depend on 2.5 being bleeding edge and 2.4 being ready for production. Since 2.6, I either depend on a distro to track the kernel versions(which I do at home), or watch the kernel forums to see which should be the next "stable" kernel version (which we do at work).
Haha, that's not what happened at all. The vendors forked 2.4 and backported all the fancy new 2.5 features. So most users were running something that was nothing like the 'official' kernel. Meanwhile 2.5/2.6 went into dev hell because it wasn't relevant for the people paid to develop Linux.
Odd/Even was a nice simple system in theory, in practice it didn't work out so great.