Yeah, what a complete waste of a story. It is installed with java which preloads core java so that when your browser runs applets, they start faster...
They start faster because every time you open a browser window, the "Java quick start" has to take time to load, even if it was already loaded. If you don't believe me, try timing it.
Also, you now have memory used by a program "just in case you might want to use it someday". And, it's possible to configure the Java runtime to not be available as a browser add-on, but still allow you to run Java apps on your computer. Any bets on whether this extension will load regardless of your browser settings for Java?
I believe Wisconsin internet vendors can only tax Wisconsin buyers. Out-of-state taxation would basically be taxation without representation, which is what previous legal precedents have disallowed... that is, until the federal government decides to pass a law enabling states to cooperate on internet sales taxation.
Although you're probably right about the co-operation being federally mandated someday, until then I think I'll just "forget" to change the address on one of my credit cards if I move out of my current state, and then use that card only for digital downloads.
The best thing to do would be to get a credit card with a New Hampshire address and use it, since although they have property tax that is through the roof, they don't seem to have any of these silly taxes.
The guy running a hotdog stand only has to know the sales tax codes applicable that single location and submit receipts to the government entities with jurisdiction over that location.
In addition, most sales tax laws do not require the buyer to pay...they merely require the seller within the taxing jurisdiction to pay the state the correct percentage of gross sales.
Now, every business deals with this by adding the tax to what the customer pays, because regarless of whether the customer pays, the business has to, since they are in the taxing jurisdiction.
But, if the business is outside the taxing jurisdiction (i.e., has no physical presence), then there is no requirement that the business pay sales tax, and it would be illegal for the taxing jurisdiction to try.
This is where the stupid "use tax" came in to being, and now the purchaser is responsible for making sure the payment is made. Since this rarely happens (really, except for things like cars that you register, have any of us paid "use tax"?), I don't think the "tax on downloads" will bring in quite as much money as the state thinks it will.
Not password fields per se, but any unencrypted POST can result in a warning dialog with pretty much any popular browser.
Firefox 3.x has the config on the Security tab in the options dialog...the "Warnings" section.
IE has the config on the Security tab in the options dialog...click the zone you want to affect, then click "Custom Settings" and find the "Submit non-encrypted form data" under "Miscellaneous".
As you can tell from my descriptions of how to find these, they aren't that "in your face", so maybe that could be improved.
OK, then, how about substituting "Internet Movie Database" for "The Pirate Bay"?
Both make money in exactly the same way...with ads that appear on a site that has a lot of information about copyrighted material.
Heck, if you treat copyright the way the Associated Press does, IMDB is far worse, as they directly host things like quotes from movies and TV shows, which means they should pay up to the copyright holders.
That's the whole point of this trial...despite what the big copyright holders want you to believe about copyright law, it's generally not actually written the way they claim it is.
Surely it must be possible to create a system that acts as a proxy for phonecalls?
Perhaps something like the SpoofCard caller ID spoofing service, created by the same company that has created this new service, and mentioned in both TFA and TFS.
So, the abuser uses this service and finds out you are calling from a cell phone...perhaps even the same cell phone number you have had for years. How does this help them find out exactly where you are?
Of course, if you did not disable their ability to get Google Latitude updates about your location, perhaps you are Darwin Award worthy.
It's already possible to reduce that simply by using passwords, or using various hokey port 25 authentication methods like receive-before-send; this cleans up the process a bit.
There is no requirement for any "hokey" authentication...port 25 for connections from inside an ISP could be routed (netcat, iptables, etc.) straight to where an MTA that allows relaying would be listening. For bonus points, any connection from inside the ISP to port 25 on any machine would end up at the same ISP "internal" MTA.
Meanwhile, connections to port 25 from outside the ISP would be routed to a "normal" MTA that doesn't require authentication and will not relay...it would only accept e-mail for domains local to "isp.com".
You don't even need authentication to make this work...authentication just gives you one more piece of proof where a connection came from.
But lots of ISPs have been jumping on the "Block Port 25" bandwagon (with no apologies to Linux users who run their own sendmail), so maybe the zombies will go back to using ISP mail servers more often.
Many ISPs will let you use outbound port 25 if you request it. This usually means only responsible users will have the ability.
Also, you can configure sendmail to use port 587 on another server as the relay, so you could still use your own sendmail and relay through the ISP server.
I send out a newsletter with about 250 subscribers. After talking with SORBS, I contacted Verizon and found out that, even though we signed up for Verizon Business, they limit the amount of email I can send a week to 500 messages.
Verizon Business accounts assume that you will probably be running a business, and have your own domain.
If you do things this more professional way, there are no limits with Verizon DSL or FiOS (other than the speed you pay for being a "limit").
You can get around that by cryptographically signing the new.plist yourself, using the provided tools and your administrator credentials.
An OS that prevents accidental or malicious tampering but has documented ways for the administrator to "tamper" is fine.
The trouble with all Microsoft OS after XP is that each one has more and more of the attitude that "Microsoft knows best".
In Windows 2008, the default install has data files that cannot be altered in any way by the "Administrator" account. I found this out because I generally edit the default MMC files (like compmgmt.msc) since their default layout assumes a very low resolution screen and a "beginner" user, with all tips enabled. You can't do this in Win 2008 since you can't write to the files, you can't take ownership of them, and you can't alter permissions on the directory they reside in.
And, unlike a *nix system, there is no way to "su" to the system account that does have permissions to make these changes.
If one of the competing virtualization products gave you the ability to mirror local storage between two physical servers, that would be a killer feature for branch/small office settings where the budget doesn't justify a SAN.
Yes, it runs as a VM, but it can run as a VM on multiple ESX servers and provide redundancy and mirroring. You essentially allocate almost all the local storage on the ESX machine to the XVS VM, then carve out iSCSI LUNs from it, which the ESX server uses as storage for all the other VMs.
As a previous poster has said, despite the wording of copyright law, it's all about distribution.
If you buy a book, you can make a thousand copies of it and store them in your basement without infringing on copyright. As soon as you pass one of those copies along to someone else (distribute it), you are infringing copyright.
Likewise, you could re-write parts of the book to make it more to your liking (the hero doesn't die, etc.). As long as you did this for personal use and did not distribute it (no posting to your blog, no passing out copies to friends), you have not infringed copyright.
The gray area with software in a business situation is the "personal use" part, along with the fact that despite how any of us feel about EULA, we all pretty much understand and accept "licensed per user". So, for software that is intended to be installed on an individual machine and run by a single user, modifying it to place one copy on the network and allowing multiple users to run it is definitely copyright infingement, even though you haven't increased the number of copies. Modifying "single-user" software that doesn't increase the number of simultaneous users would almost certainly be OK under the "personal use" idiom.
Otherwise, it comes down to whether a copy of "server" software being sold to a company allows that company to be treated as a person for "personal use". In other words, if the software is "server" software and intended to be used by multiple people simultaneously, and there is only one copy purchased, then the company might be able to make changes to it under the "personal use and not redistributed" fair use copyright defense.
ALL TV broadcasters have the option of continuing to use their newly alloted UHF channel, or keeping their old (sometimes VHF, sometimes UHF) channel. In either case, they had to notify the FCC long ago.
Even this is more restrictive than what the FCC allowed.
Basically, a station could request any frequency (within channels 2-51) as their final digital location, and as long as it was going to be available, they would get it. Stations with a "relationship" with an existing channel got right of first refusal, so any that asked for their old analog or temporary digital to be their final digital were always awarded it.
WSUS allows you to apply Microsoft patches to your network whenever you want - AFTER they have been released. You still have to wait until Patch Tuesday before you actually get your hands on the patches.
If you read what I wrote, you would understand that there is now no more reason for "Patch Tuesday". You seem to understand that by what you posted:
The main purpose of WSUS is to allow corporate users to test new patches in their environment before deploying them to the computers on the network. In other words, WSUS will allow you to delay your patches indefinitely after they are released by Microsoft.
You see how this works...now Microsoft could (if they wished) release patches at any time, and corporate users no longer have a valid complaint of "we don't want to reboot every 3 days". Sure, they could still whine, but Microsoft could just say "use WSUS".
In the digital age, copyright is all about contracts.
When Amazon sells you a hardcopy book, they don't need any permission to copy the book because they don't create the copy. When they sell you a Kindle book, they create the copy themselves, so they need a contract that grants them that right.
We're rather quickly approaching the point at which a serious legal challenge is going to come up against some of the more brain dead provisions of things like the DMCA and I really don't know which way things are going to fall.
I suspect it will be quite a while before the "anti-circumvention" provision of the DMCA is tested in a courtroom, because the way the law is written, only copyright holders can initiate a lawsuit that would test this provision.
The companies that use some sort of encryption that is covered by the DMCA are very careful about the battles they fight on this front. There really is no chance that Joe Average User will get sued because he ripped a DVD and put it on his iPod/media server/whatever. Only the makers of the software or hardware that does the ripping will be targeted in lawsuits.
Microsoft used to release patches as soon as they were discovered. They worked that way for decades. A hole was found, a fix was built, tested, and released. Patches would come out almost daily sometimes. The big companies didn't like that because besides the plethora of standard 3rd party apps that MS and others tested the patch against, they also all had tons of custom in-house software that each patch had to be tested against.
Microsoft has a free product that allows updates to be released as needed, but still give corporate users the time they need to test: Windows Server Update Services.
So, there is now no excuse for Microsoft not releasing patches as soon as they have finished their own testing.
Maybe the problem is that the Wikipedia editors think Der Spiegel is an authoritative source.
The problem is that if some "fact" is posted on the Internet and there is nothing else posted on the Internet that contradicts that "fact", then that is "authoritative" to Wikipedia.
So, it's not really an issue over the quality (or lack thereof) of work Der Speigel produces. If you substitute the New York Times website, an official government web page, or even a "scholarly journal" for Der Speigel, you could just as easily end up with the same kind of mistake.
Re:No, I think the converse is true
on
You Are Not a Lawyer
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
So far, as far as I know, all the prosecutions have involved machines in private homes or apartments, so what exactly are you arguing?
I haven't kept detailed notes, so I can't say how many actual RIAA-initiated lawsuits that ended up in a court involved "public" computers, but many of the "pay up or else" letters that they send involve DHCP computers on a college campus somewhere.
I suspect that there are a decent number of people who can't actually be identified accurately enough for a lawsuit who have just paid the settlement, regardless of whether they infringed copyright of exactly the item the RIAA claims.
The Washington Post is $40/mo home delivery, $10 Kindle wireless delivery (No ads, classifieds, comics, or crosswords, not as many images), or free with popups online.
I don't know where you are getting your Post delivered, but it must be Siberia to cost that much...most people pay about $6-10/month for home delivery anywhere within about 100 miles of DC.
If you are just getting the Post because it's a good paper for news on politics and such...well, not really anymore, at least not compared to everyplace else on the Internet.
Although some TVs 30 years ago turned off completely, you have to go back considerably farther to get to the point where every TV was completely off when the switch was off.
Frankly, my time is worth enough that spending more than three or four hours shopping for a new TV (or any other appliance) is a bad idea.
I could see that spending extra time sweating relatively small stuff would be counterproductive, but unless you have a very good relationship with a store that lets you return things because "I didn't like it", you probably need to spend more than 3 hours deciding when you are buying something that will last 10 or more years.
I have quite literally spent 3 hours helping a friend pick out a new home-theater receiver because he needs to answer the question "will it work with my existing stuff?" One of the only ways to find out is to read the manual for each model. Worse, the same manufacturer doesn't always keep features consistent, so a "better" model might not have features that lesser models have.
Without the Internet, this would have been 10-12 hour job, as the only way would be to go to stores and ask to read the manual.
Sure, just install your own caching DNS server on your machine and set your DNS server to 127.0.0.1.
For Linux, it's trivial...most distros include a caching nameserver package.
For Windows, it's a little harder to set up some of the open source nameservers, but you also have some free closed source and commercial software to choose from. Try searching for "DNS server Windows" and the results should get you started.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, what a complete waste of a story. It is installed with java which preloads core java so that when your browser runs applets, they start faster...
They start faster because every time you open a browser window, the "Java quick start" has to take time to load, even if it was already loaded. If you don't believe me, try timing it.
Also, you now have memory used by a program "just in case you might want to use it someday". And, it's possible to configure the Java runtime to not be available as a browser add-on, but still allow you to run Java apps on your computer. Any bets on whether this extension will load regardless of your browser settings for Java?
I believe Wisconsin internet vendors can only tax Wisconsin buyers. Out-of-state taxation would basically be taxation without representation, which is what previous legal precedents have disallowed... that is, until the federal government decides to pass a law enabling states to cooperate on internet sales taxation.
Although you're probably right about the co-operation being federally mandated someday, until then I think I'll just "forget" to change the address on one of my credit cards if I move out of my current state, and then use that card only for digital downloads.
The best thing to do would be to get a credit card with a New Hampshire address and use it, since although they have property tax that is through the roof, they don't seem to have any of these silly taxes.
The guy running a hotdog stand only has to know the sales tax codes applicable that single location and submit receipts to the government entities with jurisdiction over that location.
In addition, most sales tax laws do not require the buyer to pay...they merely require the seller within the taxing jurisdiction to pay the state the correct percentage of gross sales.
Now, every business deals with this by adding the tax to what the customer pays, because regarless of whether the customer pays, the business has to, since they are in the taxing jurisdiction.
But, if the business is outside the taxing jurisdiction (i.e., has no physical presence), then there is no requirement that the business pay sales tax, and it would be illegal for the taxing jurisdiction to try.
This is where the stupid "use tax" came in to being, and now the purchaser is responsible for making sure the payment is made. Since this rarely happens (really, except for things like cars that you register, have any of us paid "use tax"?), I don't think the "tax on downloads" will bring in quite as much money as the state thinks it will.
Or netbOOks.
Would that be a small, network-connected portable computer specifically designed for looking at pictures of women's breasts?
If so, that would be a solid trademark that was fairly defensible.
Not password fields per se, but any unencrypted POST can result in a warning dialog with pretty much any popular browser.
Firefox 3.x has the config on the Security tab in the options dialog...the "Warnings" section.
IE has the config on the Security tab in the options dialog...click the zone you want to affect, then click "Custom Settings" and find the "Submit non-encrypted form data" under "Miscellaneous".
As you can tell from my descriptions of how to find these, they aren't that "in your face", so maybe that could be improved.
OK, then, how about substituting "Internet Movie Database" for "The Pirate Bay"?
Both make money in exactly the same way...with ads that appear on a site that has a lot of information about copyrighted material.
Heck, if you treat copyright the way the Associated Press does, IMDB is far worse, as they directly host things like quotes from movies and TV shows, which means they should pay up to the copyright holders.
That's the whole point of this trial...despite what the big copyright holders want you to believe about copyright law, it's generally not actually written the way they claim it is.
Surely it must be possible to create a system that acts as a proxy for phonecalls?
Perhaps something like the SpoofCard caller ID spoofing service, created by the same company that has created this new service, and mentioned in both TFA and TFS.
So, the abuser uses this service and finds out you are calling from a cell phone...perhaps even the same cell phone number you have had for years. How does this help them find out exactly where you are?
Of course, if you did not disable their ability to get Google Latitude updates about your location, perhaps you are Darwin Award worthy.
It's already possible to reduce that simply by using passwords, or using various hokey port 25 authentication methods like receive-before-send; this cleans up the process a bit.
There is no requirement for any "hokey" authentication...port 25 for connections from inside an ISP could be routed (netcat, iptables, etc.) straight to where an MTA that allows relaying would be listening. For bonus points, any connection from inside the ISP to port 25 on any machine would end up at the same ISP "internal" MTA.
Meanwhile, connections to port 25 from outside the ISP would be routed to a "normal" MTA that doesn't require authentication and will not relay...it would only accept e-mail for domains local to "isp.com".
You don't even need authentication to make this work...authentication just gives you one more piece of proof where a connection came from.
But lots of ISPs have been jumping on the "Block Port 25" bandwagon (with no apologies to Linux users who run their own sendmail), so maybe the zombies will go back to using ISP mail servers more often.
Many ISPs will let you use outbound port 25 if you request it. This usually means only responsible users will have the ability.
Also, you can configure sendmail to use port 587 on another server as the relay, so you could still use your own sendmail and relay through the ISP server.
I send out a newsletter with about 250 subscribers. After talking with SORBS, I contacted Verizon and found out that, even though we signed up for Verizon Business, they limit the amount of email I can send a week to 500 messages.
Verizon Business accounts assume that you will probably be running a business, and have your own domain.
If you do things this more professional way, there are no limits with Verizon DSL or FiOS (other than the speed you pay for being a "limit").
You can get around that by cryptographically signing the new .plist yourself, using the provided tools and your administrator credentials.
An OS that prevents accidental or malicious tampering but has documented ways for the administrator to "tamper" is fine.
The trouble with all Microsoft OS after XP is that each one has more and more of the attitude that "Microsoft knows best".
In Windows 2008, the default install has data files that cannot be altered in any way by the "Administrator" account. I found this out because I generally edit the default MMC files (like compmgmt.msc) since their default layout assumes a very low resolution screen and a "beginner" user, with all tips enabled. You can't do this in Win 2008 since you can't write to the files, you can't take ownership of them, and you can't alter permissions on the directory they reside in.
And, unlike a *nix system, there is no way to "su" to the system account that does have permissions to make these changes.
If one of the competing virtualization products gave you the ability to mirror local storage between two physical servers, that would be a killer feature for branch/small office settings where the budget doesn't justify a SAN.
XtraVirt Virtual SAN is free and does exactly what you want.
Yes, it runs as a VM, but it can run as a VM on multiple ESX servers and provide redundancy and mirroring. You essentially allocate almost all the local storage on the ESX machine to the XVS VM, then carve out iSCSI LUNs from it, which the ESX server uses as storage for all the other VMs.
As a previous poster has said, despite the wording of copyright law, it's all about distribution.
If you buy a book, you can make a thousand copies of it and store them in your basement without infringing on copyright. As soon as you pass one of those copies along to someone else (distribute it), you are infringing copyright.
Likewise, you could re-write parts of the book to make it more to your liking (the hero doesn't die, etc.). As long as you did this for personal use and did not distribute it (no posting to your blog, no passing out copies to friends), you have not infringed copyright.
The gray area with software in a business situation is the "personal use" part, along with the fact that despite how any of us feel about EULA, we all pretty much understand and accept "licensed per user". So, for software that is intended to be installed on an individual machine and run by a single user, modifying it to place one copy on the network and allowing multiple users to run it is definitely copyright infingement, even though you haven't increased the number of copies. Modifying "single-user" software that doesn't increase the number of simultaneous users would almost certainly be OK under the "personal use" idiom.
Otherwise, it comes down to whether a copy of "server" software being sold to a company allows that company to be treated as a person for "personal use". In other words, if the software is "server" software and intended to be used by multiple people simultaneously, and there is only one copy purchased, then the company might be able to make changes to it under the "personal use and not redistributed" fair use copyright defense.
ALL TV broadcasters have the option of continuing to use their newly alloted UHF channel, or keeping their old (sometimes VHF, sometimes UHF) channel. In either case, they had to notify the FCC long ago.
Even this is more restrictive than what the FCC allowed.
Basically, a station could request any frequency (within channels 2-51) as their final digital location, and as long as it was going to be available, they would get it. Stations with a "relationship" with an existing channel got right of first refusal, so any that asked for their old analog or temporary digital to be their final digital were always awarded it.
WSUS allows you to apply Microsoft patches to your network whenever you want - AFTER they have been released. You still have to wait until Patch Tuesday before you actually get your hands on the patches.
If you read what I wrote, you would understand that there is now no more reason for "Patch Tuesday". You seem to understand that by what you posted:
The main purpose of WSUS is to allow corporate users to test new patches in their environment before deploying them to the computers on the network. In other words, WSUS will allow you to delay your patches indefinitely after they are released by Microsoft.
You see how this works...now Microsoft could (if they wished) release patches at any time, and corporate users no longer have a valid complaint of "we don't want to reboot every 3 days". Sure, they could still whine, but Microsoft could just say "use WSUS".
In the digital age, copyright is all about contracts.
When Amazon sells you a hardcopy book, they don't need any permission to copy the book because they don't create the copy. When they sell you a Kindle book, they create the copy themselves, so they need a contract that grants them that right.
We're rather quickly approaching the point at which a serious legal challenge is going to come up against some of the more brain dead provisions of things like the DMCA and I really don't know which way things are going to fall.
I suspect it will be quite a while before the "anti-circumvention" provision of the DMCA is tested in a courtroom, because the way the law is written, only copyright holders can initiate a lawsuit that would test this provision.
The companies that use some sort of encryption that is covered by the DMCA are very careful about the battles they fight on this front. There really is no chance that Joe Average User will get sued because he ripped a DVD and put it on his iPod/media server/whatever. Only the makers of the software or hardware that does the ripping will be targeted in lawsuits.
Microsoft used to release patches as soon as they were discovered. They worked that way for decades. A hole was found, a fix was built, tested, and released. Patches would come out almost daily sometimes. The big companies didn't like that because besides the plethora of standard 3rd party apps that MS and others tested the patch against, they also all had tons of custom in-house software that each patch had to be tested against.
Microsoft has a free product that allows updates to be released as needed, but still give corporate users the time they need to test: Windows Server Update Services.
So, there is now no excuse for Microsoft not releasing patches as soon as they have finished their own testing.
Maybe the problem is that the Wikipedia editors think Der Spiegel is an authoritative source.
The problem is that if some "fact" is posted on the Internet and there is nothing else posted on the Internet that contradicts that "fact", then that is "authoritative" to Wikipedia.
So, it's not really an issue over the quality (or lack thereof) of work Der Speigel produces. If you substitute the New York Times website, an official government web page, or even a "scholarly journal" for Der Speigel, you could just as easily end up with the same kind of mistake.
So far, as far as I know, all the prosecutions have involved machines in private homes or apartments, so what exactly are you arguing?
I haven't kept detailed notes, so I can't say how many actual RIAA-initiated lawsuits that ended up in a court involved "public" computers, but many of the "pay up or else" letters that they send involve DHCP computers on a college campus somewhere.
I suspect that there are a decent number of people who can't actually be identified accurately enough for a lawsuit who have just paid the settlement, regardless of whether they infringed copyright of exactly the item the RIAA claims.
The Washington Post is $40/mo home delivery, $10 Kindle wireless delivery (No ads, classifieds, comics, or crosswords, not as many images), or free with popups online.
I don't know where you are getting your Post delivered, but it must be Siberia to cost that much...most people pay about $6-10/month for home delivery anywhere within about 100 miles of DC.
If you are just getting the Post because it's a good paper for news on politics and such...well, not really anymore, at least not compared to everyplace else on the Internet.
Although some TVs 30 years ago turned off completely, you have to go back considerably farther to get to the point where every TV was completely off when the switch was off.
It was 1971 when RCA patented "instant on" for TVs.
Frankly, my time is worth enough that spending more than three or four hours shopping for a new TV (or any other appliance) is a bad idea.
I could see that spending extra time sweating relatively small stuff would be counterproductive, but unless you have a very good relationship with a store that lets you return things because "I didn't like it", you probably need to spend more than 3 hours deciding when you are buying something that will last 10 or more years.
I have quite literally spent 3 hours helping a friend pick out a new home-theater receiver because he needs to answer the question "will it work with my existing stuff?" One of the only ways to find out is to read the manual for each model. Worse, the same manufacturer doesn't always keep features consistent, so a "better" model might not have features that lesser models have.
Without the Internet, this would have been 10-12 hour job, as the only way would be to go to stores and ask to read the manual.
Sure, just install your own caching DNS server on your machine and set your DNS server to 127.0.0.1.
For Linux, it's trivial...most distros include a caching nameserver package.
For Windows, it's a little harder to set up some of the open source nameservers, but you also have some free closed source and commercial software to choose from. Try searching for "DNS server Windows" and the results should get you started.