Rather than do an "ask slashdot" submission, I might as well ask this here. In recent days I've encountered my first cases of a spammer using MY email address in the "From:" field. (I know this to be the case, because a bounce message was delivered to me.) I would dearly love to sue the utter fsck out of this cretin, but I have little to no idea how to go about it.
I've already sent a stern email off to the responsible service provider (xo.com), but the details of the case make it tricky. The POP used to inject the spam appears to have been in the USA (NY), then bounced off an open relay in Japan (which I'm ignoring as a useless target for litigation), but I'm in Australia.
Any suggestions as to how to cause the spammer in question major pain for this fraudulent use of my email address?
Find the element of A that shares the most similarities with B.
Declare said element to be the link between A and B on the basis of evidence. (If anyone challenges this conclusion, challenge them in return to come up with a better link candidate.)
The article left me a bit flat because I went in with false expectations: I thought they were going to talk about the enormous gulf between pre-biotic soup and algae, not algae and land plants.
Bit I say in the electronic age, little security is left anyway. This security we're concerned about is largely an illusion. All we have to give up is the illusion of privacy to gain the illusion of security.
The @Home service to which I subscribe does indeed have this restriction, but they never did define what a "server" is. In order to use the service, you need to have a DHCP client, and the DHCP client listens on UDP port 68 for DHCP server requests. If a server is defined as "software which listens on a TCP or UDP port for incoming connections or packets and generates responses to those requests", then both the DHCP client and the DHCP server are "servers".
Perhaps they mean "servers" in a less formal sense, like "mail servers" and "web servers". That definition still allows various "peer to peer" software which is simultaneously client and server. On the other hand, maybe they do mean servers in a formal sense, but the DHCP client is implicitly excepted from this rule because they mandate its use.
Whatever the case, it's a rule that pisses me off because my servers are always more reliable than their servers, and I hate being forced to pay for service that's worse than self service.
I've read my TOS and it sucks.
on
Broadband Crackdown
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I would definitely like to take issue with the idea that "users" means "client applications". It is my opinion that the ISP should not care one whit whether my applications use the Internet by initiating outbound TCP connections, or by accepting inbound TCP connections. The distinction with UDP is even less relevant. All of these schemes result in inbound and outbound traffic. If they wish to say something about traffic volumes, then let them do so, but I do not want them dictating how I use that volume (other than reasonable constraints on network abuse, and other legal matters).
If anyone can explain a good reason for banning servers rather than limiting data volumes, I'm all ears. I think it's either a combination of laziness and sloppy thinking on the part of the providers, or a desire to force the "users" to also be "content consumers" rather than "content providers". Hanlon's razor, I believe, favours the former explanation.
we're quaking away
i don't know what
i'm to say i'll say it anyway
today's another day to find you
shying away
i'll be coming for your hide ok
take on me
take me on
you'll be gone
in a sec or two
so needless to say
you're odds and ends
and that's me ducking away
quickly learning that life is ok
say after me
it's much better to be safe than sorry
take on me
take me on
you'll be gone
in a sec or two
oh the things that you say
is it live or
just to play my worries away
you're all the things i've got to dismember
you're shying away
i'll be coming for you anyway
take on me
take me on
you'll be gone
in a sec or two
The RFC should give simple measures that won't be onerous to spammers, such as placing "ADV:" in the subject lines of emails.
Not good enough. The subject is contained in the body of the email, the entirety of which is sent in the DATA part of the SMTP. In other words, I have to accept entire delivery of the email before I can tell that I don't want it, and by then it's already consumed disk space, bandwidth, and money (because I'm bandwidth billed). If they were to retro-fit some kind of tagging mechanism into SMTP, the only one I'd be happy with is a well-known "MAIL From:" address, such as "friend@public.com", or "anyone@evilspammingbastards.com". That way I can reject the mail at that point and not incur any significant resource costs.
Even better still, spammers should just nominate themselves for the MAPS RBL. Not that any of this will happen, because the vast majority of spammers are evil, lying scam artists. Giving them suggestions on how to be honest misunderstands the problem.
I've pondered this article as a background process for a couple of hours now because the motive for suicide bothered me. Even if the kid thought he might go to jail (regardless of how unlikely that is as an actual scenario), is that really something to kill yourself over? Then it occurred to me that this kid has a Hundu upbringing, so he may well believe in reincarnation. Whereas most Westeners (regardless of theistic or atheistic leanings) would consider suicide to be the final Game Over, if you believe in reincarnation then suicide is more like quitting your current game and starting over. Perhaps this kid wanted to live a more-or-less perfect life, and the suspension and/or threat of imprisonment was enough to make him consider his record blemished. Rather than live with a blemished record, he hit the reset switch and started over.
In the absence of any better suggestion, that was the most plausible theory I was able to formulate. And in some sense I find it more disturbing than the prospect that he was driven to despair.
Re:GCC optimizations and benchmarking
on
Kernel Benchmarks
·
· Score: 5
...which just goes to prove that optimization is (justifiably, as it happens) much -maligned.
Far simpler would be to use an acrostic. Acrostics, for those of you not in the know, are where the first letters of sentences or lines form other words, or adhere to some special pattern. Many authors have used this: Lewis Carroll is one famous example, and even one of the Psalms in the Bible is an acrostic. Of course, you have to make sure that your acrostic is embedded in such a way that it will be copied by the plagiarist, unnoticed. Usually it's not all that hard to "watermark" your work in this manner. See this post for an example of a reasonably subtle acrostic.
I'd moderate this up, but it's already at 5. My theory is that you shouldn't be able to be sued for public domain software written in good faith. If you write a virus or something like that, then sure, you deserve to be sued to hell and back, but I was rather hoping the fact that a program is not sold as a product would effectively indemnify the programmer against any kind of "merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose" type of claims. Say I write FooMail, a public domain mail client for [insert OS of your choice], and a bug in it causes your mail folders to be corrupted beyond repair under certain circumstances. Could a user of that program sue me for damages under any reasonable legal doctrine? Would it be advisable for me to slap UPPER CASE DISCLAIMERS all over the program, or wouldn't that help? I don't see how no-sue clauses in the GPL and BSD licenses can help, since you don't need to accept the license in order to use the programs in either case -- only to make copies and derived works.
To summarise, what's the most effective means of doing a public service without risk of being sued for your efforts?
CmdrTaco et al can take pride in the fact that everything2 was cited as a reference in RFC3092 for its entry on "Prince Foo". I had my personal 15 minutes of fame last year with RFC2795 (reference number one, no less).
[This is an extract from a log entry I wrote about the Stallman/Allchin "GPL is Unamerican" saga.]
I have a somewhat different theory about the Microsoft attitude to the GPL. I think they fear the GPL because they fear that they will be trapped by it someday. Microsoft's culture is an extremely proprietary one: they guard their intellectual property with the covetousness of a dragon guarding its treasure hoard. I think they fear that someday some careless employee will incorporate tainted GPL code into a program, and they may then be obliged to share some of their treasure. Horrors! The old dragon wants to keep all of its treasure and acquire more at every opportunity, and the idea that this GPL code is out there with the intention of making them part with it is anathema to them.
I think that RMS is operating under a misapprehension if he sincerely thinks that the GPL is any realistic kind of defence against Microsoft. Given that it can't defend against embrace and extend, then what exactly does it defend against? Stallman uses the GPL as a tool of obstruction, not defence. (The GPL can be used in a defensive mode, but Stallman doesn't use it that way.) He wants the GPL to be a stumbling block to Microsoft: if they won't play by his rules, he wants it to be hard for them to gain any benefit from his code. Microsoft isn't intimidated by such defences, really, but they are appalled that a tool like the GPL can exist at all -- a tool the intent of which is to force them to share their hoard.
This, I think, is what Allchin meant when he called the GPL "un-American". Allchin is living in the Gordon Gekko Wall Street world of "greed is good". If greed is good, then Microsoft is a saint and the GPL is a tool of the devil, since its raison d'être is to enforce sharing, not selfishness. I think that Allchin was being entirely sincere, and that the concept of sharing intellectual property (as a good in its own right, as opposed to a means to the end of acquiring more property) evokes revulsion in members of the Microsoft subculture. The concept of being under a legal obligation to share, as the GPL would have it, must grate against every virtual fibre of their corporate being.
To put it another way, the "American way" (as I imagine Allchin sees it) is to be able to do as one damn well pleases with one's own property; to have an inalienable right to be selfish, or not, as one chooses. The GPL would take that choice from you (for the greater good). Microsoft have no problem with people choosing to give away their property if they want to do that, but the concept of revoking their divine right to be selfish with their own property, as and when they please, is appalling.
[The original log entry is currently hosted at a temporary URL. I realise that this story is probably just another case of April Fool irony, but I thought I'd make a serious comment anyhow since I had a ready-rolled post.]
If the public actually gave a shit, they would take a peek at campaign finance records (which are generally publically available) and figure out who was on the take.
The problem is voter apathy.
Are you saying it's possible to vote only for politicians who haven't been funded by corporate interests? I didn't think there were enough such politicians to fill all the available places.
Ylönen said he's not sure of his next step if the OpenSSH team doesn't back down. "I have tried to be polite, stick to facts, and reason with everyone," he said. "I hope that we can find a solution that will cause minimal disruption in the network security community and will also allow us to protect our trademark rights. It would be shame if this issue escalated to something that damages everyone."
If he doesn't want it to escalate, then he'd best compromise. I think that there's a broad feeling of indignance in the OpenSSH developer and user community that there's a "submarine trademark" (if I may put it that way) on something which we consider to be the name of a protocol. I think there's going to be a great reluctance to go ahead with a name change, because it would let the nose of the camel into the tent. What next -- remove all mention of "SSH" from the documentation?
If Ylönen demands no less than the removal of "SSH" from the project name, and OpenSSH isn't willing to do this, then he has the choice of either backing down or going ahead and making himself really unpopular by suing a free software project. This whole direction does not strike me as being one that can result in a net win for Ylönen. If he wins his trademark rights he'll establish himself as an enemy of the OpenSSH community; if he loses his trademark he looks like a poor businessman.
Instead, he should cut his losses and suddenly realise that he can license the use of the trademark to the OpenSSH project for free, on condition that they clearly distinguish themselves from his product, and perhaps provide linkage to his web site as a clarifying measure. If the real problem is customer confusion, then let's deal with the confusion without all this ugly legal sabre-rattling nonsense.
Does Ylönen realise that he's setting himself up as an enemy of the Free Software Republic? This isn't sensible.
Due to the number of highly-moderated recommendations I've seen of this software on Slashdot, I decided to look into it. First up, I noted it's not in Debian, so I went hunting at cr.yp.to to see what the issue might be that keeps it out. My conclusion is that I'd be most happy to try it in principle, but there are two problems with it.
It's free beer. I don't mind free beer software: I use quite a bit of it. I prefer stuff that can actually be modified as needed, however, and not by distributing patches. If this were the only problem, Debian might be able to distribute it as non-free sotware, but then there's the second problem...
You can't modify it, and it has its own ideas about where to install stuff in the name of compatibility. Now I'm all for compatibility, but I think this kind of fiat is a really wrong way to try to go about it. I don't want to install this program on the grounds that it's going to mess up my nicely-structured Debian system. Debian's layout is as arbitrary as any other, really, but they've made it nice and consistent. The kind of solipsism demonstrated here by Bernstein is not welcome on my computer.
Maybe BIND sucks, but it's still got my vote for now. I'd buy Mr Vixie lunch if he was ever in the area.
So you're a professing ActiveUpdate bigot? Well, far be it from me to tell you you're wrong. ActiveUpdate seems to do its job quite well and with very little need for expertise on the part of the end user. My main reservation with ActiveUpdate is that I don't trust the company providing the service.
I'd be happy to give FreeBSD a try, but I'm only going to do it when it's distributed by Debian. Yes folks, I'm afraid I'm another one of those apt-thing bigots. I've no particular desire to go clambering up the FreeBSD learning curve for its own sake, any more than I'm interested in doing the same with other Linux distros. Debian FreeBSD sounds like a fine idea to me, though.
Diamond age already? Weren't we supposed to have the genetic age first, or did I miss it? Can someone please plot out the civilization advances here -- I'm getting confused.
First up, a general comment: the best thing about this Slashdot article is not the free books at the other end (I'm not planning on reading any of them -- no time for it at the moment) but rather the remarkably clueful commentary about why giving away free e-books is a good idea. Read it. I doubt I'll read anything else more interesting than it today.
But now, in direct response to the previous poster, advances in publishing technologies (like laser printers and CD burners) are not going to put authors and musicians out of business. They might put publishers out of business eventually, but that's just the nature of change. On the other hand, maybe publishers will just change what it is they do and become marketers rather than manufacturers.
But authors and musicians, as the article on the site points out, are in no danger of being replaced by machines. If people want to read books and listen to music, then someone needs to be writing the books and composing and playing the music. If there are enough people willing to part with enough money to create a market for books and music, then the market will arise one way or another, with "copyright" or without.
At the moment, all remuneration for copyrighted works is done retrospectively: the artist or author has already done all their work by the time you pay for a CD or book. If this scheme breaks down because of rampant "piracy", then it may eventually mutate into a scheme whereby artists and authors start with loss leaders, making some works available for free, then saying "there's more where that came from if enough people send me money".
There's a technological hurdle to overcome here, of course. It can't work without extraordinary ease of communication and payment. We've basically got the former now, but not the latter. The payment technologies which do exist still haven't quite managed to be killer apps. Reading the author's book is pretty easy, but getting him a payment easily is another matter. When it becomes as easy as tossing a coin in a busker's hat, the economics of the information-based markets will change almost overnight.
When such technology manages to break past the widespread-acceptance barrier, my prediction is that the giant faceless corporations of the entertainment industry will be badly undermined by the fact that new artists will get a much better deal in the free marketplace than by signing up with them. The publishers will find their supply of new talent cut off, and eventually have nothing new to sell. Their reduced dominance may persuade lawmakers to stop extending their copyrights retrospectively and making draconian "protective" laws. Then what will they do? They'll actually have to start providing a service to artists and audiences, or nobody will notice their passing.
"American corporation kowtows to foreign nation's irrelevant laws."
Translated roughly as, "you can't do this to me, I'm an American!" [Raiders of the Lost Ark et al.] If it were an American corporation, there would be no issue. It is, however, a multinational corporation. Yahoo could solve the issue, as has been pointed out, by getting their physical presence out of France. They've decided to go for lowest common denominator instead.
I don't see that this is bad news for the Internet so much as bad news for corporate interests on the Internet. A corporate interest like Yahoo that wants to have an office here and there is going to suffer from the same old real-world restrictions that brick-and-mortar businesses have had since year dot.
But on the other hand, this creates a niche for the purely virtual store and the virtual co-op. Whether for profit or not, pick whatever country best suits you (Sealand, perhaps) and set up your server there and there only. There's been no indication so far that any other country can do much about you other than the usual fairly ineffectual IP blocking. I'm also confident that freenet-like technologies will improve such that the "physical location of the server" becomes a null concept: it's a cloud, not a box.
Even so, it's good to have ranting paranoiacs like Jamie to keep us on our toes. Keep up the good work.
This whole Peacefire/Media3/RBL thing seems to trigger so many emotional responses that it's impossible to have a rational debate about it. It doesn't help that spammers usually yelp about freedom of speech and anti-censorship sentiments to back their supposed right to spam.
Let's be clear on this. Media3 is what's in the RBL, not Peacefire specifically. Media3 is a spam-friendly provider, and given the spam problem that I face on a daily basis, I'm very pleased that they're on the list. If they weren't, I'd add them to my own blacklist. Of course, I'd just be blacklisting them at the SMTP level, not the IP level, which is what certain other organisations (like above.net, at least for some of the time) have done.
Why blacklist Media3 at the IP level? It's not because they have people selling spam-tools, believe it or not. Nowhere in the mail-abuse guidelines does it talk about blacklisting people for selling spamming tools. Personally I detest spamming tools and the people that sell them, but I'm aware that one can't easily pick and choose about blocking sites on this basis. That is a form of censorship, and I think censoring the Internet is futile, even if it would serve my particular desires.
So if it's not about the tools, then what's it about? It's about the spam, stupid! The people who sell the spamming tools use the spamming tools to advertise their wares. The spam isn't necessarily originating from Media3's network: I expect that their terms and conditions prohibit it. So what does a spammer do? They host their permanent web page at Media3, then spam-advertise that web page via some other service entirely. Create a throw-away account, spam until it gets terminated, rinse, repeat. Under these circumstances, the only real way to hurt the spammer is to target their web page. It's getting close to borderline, but I believe that the RBL is still quite justified in their actions here.
My advice to Peacefire (all 2 cents worth, discounted and donated to the public domain) is to stop dealing with a spam-friendly service provider. It's one thing to support freedom of speech, but spam is nonconsensual speech. It's noise thrust upon you by a sociopathic git who's playing the numbers game. I do my level best to avoid spam, and I've had to deal with several items in the last day. I'm all for freedom of speech, so long as I maintain the freedom to not have everyone else's junk arbitrarily delivered to my inbox when I don't want it. Freedom of speech is only a valid concept when there exists an audience who will willingly listen to that speech. When it comes to imposing speech on an unwilling audience, that's a violation of the rights of the audience, not an affirmation of the rights of the speaker.
Peacefire, from all that I've seen, is doing a valuable job. Don't spoil it by confusing anti-spam measures with censorship. Both issues are too important to conflict like this.
As I recall, both Betacam and Betacam-SP were component recording formats, with the difference being in the grade of tape. Hell, weren't they cross-compatible to some extent, or am I thinking of BVU and BVU-SP? In any case, neither of these technologies are current anymore: last time I dealt with Sony they were pushing Betacam-SX, which is an MPEG based digital format. And don't forget good old Digital Betacam -- still very much mainstream in the high end last time I checked. The tape form factor is still the same as the Betamax home system, but the media itself is totally different now in terms of bearer, binder, and substrate.
It's still a damned shame that Beta died as a home format. It is just soooo much nicer than VHS despite many years of incremental tweaking to VHS. Still -- it's only television, and it will all go digital sooner or later, and then crappy VHS will be history. Beta tapes are the classic example of superior technology losing out to superior marketing, though, no?
Slashdot Mirror
I've already sent a stern email off to the responsible service provider (xo.com), but the details of the case make it tricky. The POP used to inject the spam appears to have been in the USA (NY), then bounced off an open relay in Japan (which I'm ignoring as a useless target for litigation), but I'm in Australia.
Any suggestions as to how to cause the spammer in question major pain for this fraudulent use of my email address?
The article left me a bit flat because I went in with false expectations: I thought they were going to talk about the enormous gulf between pre-biotic soup and algae, not algae and land plants.
Bit I say in the electronic age, little security is left anyway. This security we're concerned about is largely an illusion. All we have to give up is the illusion of privacy to gain the illusion of security.
Perhaps they mean "servers" in a less formal sense, like "mail servers" and "web servers". That definition still allows various "peer to peer" software which is simultaneously client and server. On the other hand, maybe they do mean servers in a formal sense, but the DHCP client is implicitly excepted from this rule because they mandate its use.
Whatever the case, it's a rule that pisses me off because my servers are always more reliable than their servers, and I hate being forced to pay for service that's worse than self service.
If anyone can explain a good reason for banning servers rather than limiting data volumes, I'm all ears. I think it's either a combination of laziness and sloppy thinking on the part of the providers, or a desire to force the "users" to also be "content consumers" rather than "content providers". Hanlon's razor, I believe, favours the former explanation.
we're quaking away
i don't know what
i'm to say i'll say it anyway
today's another day to find you
shying away
i'll be coming for your hide ok
take on me
take me on
you'll be gone
in a sec or two
so needless to say
you're odds and ends
and that's me ducking away
quickly learning that life is ok
say after me
it's much better to be safe than sorry
take on me
take me on
you'll be gone
in a sec or two
oh the things that you say
is it live or
just to play my worries away
you're all the things i've got to dismember
you're shying away
i'll be coming for you anyway
take on me
take me on
you'll be gone
in a sec or two
(With apologies to A-Ha)
Not good enough. The subject is contained in the body of the email, the entirety of which is sent in the DATA part of the SMTP. In other words, I have to accept entire delivery of the email before I can tell that I don't want it, and by then it's already consumed disk space, bandwidth, and money (because I'm bandwidth billed). If they were to retro-fit some kind of tagging mechanism into SMTP, the only one I'd be happy with is a well-known "MAIL From:" address, such as "friend@public.com", or "anyone@evilspammingbastards.com". That way I can reject the mail at that point and not incur any significant resource costs.
Even better still, spammers should just nominate themselves for the MAPS RBL. Not that any of this will happen, because the vast majority of spammers are evil, lying scam artists. Giving them suggestions on how to be honest misunderstands the problem.
In the absence of any better suggestion, that was the most plausible theory I was able to formulate. And in some sense I find it more disturbing than the prospect that he was driven to despair.
...which just goes to prove that optimization is (justifiably, as it happens) much -maligned.
Far simpler would be to use an acrostic. Acrostics, for those of you not in the know, are where the first letters of sentences or lines form other words, or adhere to some special pattern. Many authors have used this: Lewis Carroll is one famous example, and even one of the Psalms in the Bible is an acrostic. Of course, you have to make sure that your acrostic is embedded in such a way that it will be copied by the plagiarist, unnoticed. Usually it's not all that hard to "watermark" your work in this manner. See this post for an example of a reasonably subtle acrostic.
To summarise, what's the most effective means of doing a public service without risk of being sued for your efforts?
There's something strangely subliminal about the presence of the string "$date$" on the index page of this piece.
CmdrTaco et al can take pride in the fact that everything2 was cited as a reference in RFC3092 for its entry on "Prince Foo". I had my personal 15 minutes of fame last year with RFC2795 (reference number one, no less).
I have a somewhat different theory about the Microsoft attitude to the GPL. I think they fear the GPL because they fear that they will be trapped by it someday. Microsoft's culture is an extremely proprietary one: they guard their intellectual property with the covetousness of a dragon guarding its treasure hoard. I think they fear that someday some careless employee will incorporate tainted GPL code into a program, and they may then be obliged to share some of their treasure. Horrors! The old dragon wants to keep all of its treasure and acquire more at every opportunity, and the idea that this GPL code is out there with the intention of making them part with it is anathema to them.
I think that RMS is operating under a misapprehension if he sincerely thinks that the GPL is any realistic kind of defence against Microsoft. Given that it can't defend against embrace and extend, then what exactly does it defend against? Stallman uses the GPL as a tool of obstruction, not defence. (The GPL can be used in a defensive mode, but Stallman doesn't use it that way.) He wants the GPL to be a stumbling block to Microsoft: if they won't play by his rules, he wants it to be hard for them to gain any benefit from his code. Microsoft isn't intimidated by such defences, really, but they are appalled that a tool like the GPL can exist at all -- a tool the intent of which is to force them to share their hoard.
This, I think, is what Allchin meant when he called the GPL "un-American". Allchin is living in the Gordon Gekko Wall Street world of "greed is good". If greed is good, then Microsoft is a saint and the GPL is a tool of the devil, since its raison d'être is to enforce sharing, not selfishness. I think that Allchin was being entirely sincere, and that the concept of sharing intellectual property (as a good in its own right, as opposed to a means to the end of acquiring more property) evokes revulsion in members of the Microsoft subculture. The concept of being under a legal obligation to share, as the GPL would have it, must grate against every virtual fibre of their corporate being.
To put it another way, the "American way" (as I imagine Allchin sees it) is to be able to do as one damn well pleases with one's own property; to have an inalienable right to be selfish, or not, as one chooses. The GPL would take that choice from you (for the greater good). Microsoft have no problem with people choosing to give away their property if they want to do that, but the concept of revoking their divine right to be selfish with their own property, as and when they please, is appalling.
[The original log entry is currently hosted at a temporary URL. I realise that this story is probably just another case of April Fool irony, but I thought I'd make a serious comment anyhow since I had a ready-rolled post.]
Are you saying it's possible to vote only for politicians who haven't been funded by corporate interests? I didn't think there were enough such politicians to fill all the available places.
If he doesn't want it to escalate, then he'd best compromise. I think that there's a broad feeling of indignance in the OpenSSH developer and user community that there's a "submarine trademark" (if I may put it that way) on something which we consider to be the name of a protocol. I think there's going to be a great reluctance to go ahead with a name change, because it would let the nose of the camel into the tent. What next -- remove all mention of "SSH" from the documentation?
If Ylönen demands no less than the removal of "SSH" from the project name, and OpenSSH isn't willing to do this, then he has the choice of either backing down or going ahead and making himself really unpopular by suing a free software project. This whole direction does not strike me as being one that can result in a net win for Ylönen. If he wins his trademark rights he'll establish himself as an enemy of the OpenSSH community; if he loses his trademark he looks like a poor businessman.
Instead, he should cut his losses and suddenly realise that he can license the use of the trademark to the OpenSSH project for free, on condition that they clearly distinguish themselves from his product, and perhaps provide linkage to his web site as a clarifying measure. If the real problem is customer confusion, then let's deal with the confusion without all this ugly legal sabre-rattling nonsense.
Does Ylönen realise that he's setting himself up as an enemy of the Free Software Republic? This isn't sensible.
Maybe BIND sucks, but it's still got my vote for now. I'd buy Mr Vixie lunch if he was ever in the area.
So you're a professing ActiveUpdate bigot? Well, far be it from me to tell you you're wrong. ActiveUpdate seems to do its job quite well and with very little need for expertise on the part of the end user. My main reservation with ActiveUpdate is that I don't trust the company providing the service.
I'd be happy to give FreeBSD a try, but I'm only going to do it when it's distributed by Debian. Yes folks, I'm afraid I'm another one of those apt-thing bigots. I've no particular desire to go clambering up the FreeBSD learning curve for its own sake, any more than I'm interested in doing the same with other Linux distros. Debian FreeBSD sounds like a fine idea to me, though.
I feel that The Register had a better take on the "Microsoft goes Open Source" thing. Puts it into perspective.
Diamond age already? Weren't we supposed to have the genetic age first, or did I miss it? Can someone please plot out the civilization advances here -- I'm getting confused.
First up, a general comment: the best thing about this Slashdot article is not the free books at the other end (I'm not planning on reading any of them -- no time for it at the moment) but rather the remarkably clueful commentary about why giving away free e-books is a good idea. Read it. I doubt I'll read anything else more interesting than it today.
But now, in direct response to the previous poster, advances in publishing technologies (like laser printers and CD burners) are not going to put authors and musicians out of business. They might put publishers out of business eventually, but that's just the nature of change. On the other hand, maybe publishers will just change what it is they do and become marketers rather than manufacturers.
But authors and musicians, as the article on the site points out, are in no danger of being replaced by machines. If people want to read books and listen to music, then someone needs to be writing the books and composing and playing the music. If there are enough people willing to part with enough money to create a market for books and music, then the market will arise one way or another, with "copyright" or without.
At the moment, all remuneration for copyrighted works is done retrospectively: the artist or author has already done all their work by the time you pay for a CD or book. If this scheme breaks down because of rampant "piracy", then it may eventually mutate into a scheme whereby artists and authors start with loss leaders, making some works available for free, then saying "there's more where that came from if enough people send me money".
There's a technological hurdle to overcome here, of course. It can't work without extraordinary ease of communication and payment. We've basically got the former now, but not the latter. The payment technologies which do exist still haven't quite managed to be killer apps. Reading the author's book is pretty easy, but getting him a payment easily is another matter. When it becomes as easy as tossing a coin in a busker's hat, the economics of the information-based markets will change almost overnight.
When such technology manages to break past the widespread-acceptance barrier, my prediction is that the giant faceless corporations of the entertainment industry will be badly undermined by the fact that new artists will get a much better deal in the free marketplace than by signing up with them. The publishers will find their supply of new talent cut off, and eventually have nothing new to sell. Their reduced dominance may persuade lawmakers to stop extending their copyrights retrospectively and making draconian "protective" laws. Then what will they do? They'll actually have to start providing a service to artists and audiences, or nobody will notice their passing.
Translated roughly as, "you can't do this to me, I'm an American!" [Raiders of the Lost Ark et al.] If it were an American corporation, there would be no issue. It is, however, a multinational corporation. Yahoo could solve the issue, as has been pointed out, by getting their physical presence out of France. They've decided to go for lowest common denominator instead.
I don't see that this is bad news for the Internet so much as bad news for corporate interests on the Internet. A corporate interest like Yahoo that wants to have an office here and there is going to suffer from the same old real-world restrictions that brick-and-mortar businesses have had since year dot.
But on the other hand, this creates a niche for the purely virtual store and the virtual co-op. Whether for profit or not, pick whatever country best suits you (Sealand, perhaps) and set up your server there and there only. There's been no indication so far that any other country can do much about you other than the usual fairly ineffectual IP blocking. I'm also confident that freenet-like technologies will improve such that the "physical location of the server" becomes a null concept: it's a cloud, not a box.
Even so, it's good to have ranting paranoiacs like Jamie to keep us on our toes. Keep up the good work.
Let's be clear on this. Media3 is what's in the RBL, not Peacefire specifically. Media3 is a spam-friendly provider, and given the spam problem that I face on a daily basis, I'm very pleased that they're on the list. If they weren't, I'd add them to my own blacklist. Of course, I'd just be blacklisting them at the SMTP level, not the IP level, which is what certain other organisations (like above.net, at least for some of the time) have done.
Why blacklist Media3 at the IP level? It's not because they have people selling spam-tools, believe it or not. Nowhere in the mail-abuse guidelines does it talk about blacklisting people for selling spamming tools. Personally I detest spamming tools and the people that sell them, but I'm aware that one can't easily pick and choose about blocking sites on this basis. That is a form of censorship, and I think censoring the Internet is futile, even if it would serve my particular desires.
So if it's not about the tools, then what's it about? It's about the spam, stupid! The people who sell the spamming tools use the spamming tools to advertise their wares. The spam isn't necessarily originating from Media3's network: I expect that their terms and conditions prohibit it. So what does a spammer do? They host their permanent web page at Media3, then spam-advertise that web page via some other service entirely. Create a throw-away account, spam until it gets terminated, rinse, repeat. Under these circumstances, the only real way to hurt the spammer is to target their web page. It's getting close to borderline, but I believe that the RBL is still quite justified in their actions here.
My advice to Peacefire (all 2 cents worth, discounted and donated to the public domain) is to stop dealing with a spam-friendly service provider. It's one thing to support freedom of speech, but spam is nonconsensual speech. It's noise thrust upon you by a sociopathic git who's playing the numbers game. I do my level best to avoid spam, and I've had to deal with several items in the last day. I'm all for freedom of speech, so long as I maintain the freedom to not have everyone else's junk arbitrarily delivered to my inbox when I don't want it. Freedom of speech is only a valid concept when there exists an audience who will willingly listen to that speech. When it comes to imposing speech on an unwilling audience, that's a violation of the rights of the audience, not an affirmation of the rights of the speaker.
Peacefire, from all that I've seen, is doing a valuable job. Don't spoil it by confusing anti-spam measures with censorship. Both issues are too important to conflict like this.
It's still a damned shame that Beta died as a home format. It is just soooo much nicer than VHS despite many years of incremental tweaking to VHS. Still -- it's only television, and it will all go digital sooner or later, and then crappy VHS will be history. Beta tapes are the classic example of superior technology losing out to superior marketing, though, no?