There is some belief that there is no reason to preserve information at all. Most of what is created is just tripe anyway, and we should be more focused on creating content than preserving it. There are two reasons why some sort of preservation is important. First of all, it is inefficient to recreate information that already exists. [Point 1] Human energy is better spent on building upon existing knowledge to create new wisdom. How much do we already spin our wheels as several people collect the same data? What more could we be doing if we spent the energy instead on new pursuits? [Point 2] Secondly, there is some data that is irreplacable.
Point 1: With the amount of data that we produce, archiving it will take an increasing amount of time. How much new content is created daily? At best, we will plateu in a state where as much effort is required to archive content as is needed to create new content.
With the emphasis placed squarely on non-duplication of effort, archiving becomes a secondary issue. Indexing, searching, sorting and categorizing of the archive becomes a first priority, since creative efforts should now check if they are redundant.
If the bold statement is to be a guideline, than the idea of an archive is moot, since all new work depends on old work, and so tracks well with where the author feels human effor should go. Much like with biological evolution, new data is the fittest of the old data that was applicable to the new context. I suppose that the call for archives is little more than a suggestion that we need an organized and deliberate fossil record of how we got to where we will be at some point in the future.
What is needed is an archive, yes, but an archive of what? Not of content, but of the essence of the content. The lessons learned, the conclusions drawn and the optimizations realized in the process of creating the content. The content is fleeting - though arguably of inherent value... Which brings us to...
Point 2: Yes, some things are irreplacable. Who decides? Who defines what is art, what is fact, and what deserves eternal life?
Some things are of immediate and significant value, but for an unknown duration. The value of other things can not be realized for a very long time, and so the alternative is to store everything. Further more, the value of certain data is totally subjective, and this begs the question of "who's in charge" of defining that 1% that is to be kept.
On the small scale, this will lead to vanity. Any 'artist' will consider their work a masterpiece, and save it. (I have code I wrote in CS101, don't you?) Companies will store and archive all email, all financials, anything that can potentially be used to mine data or identify trends or fertalize litigation. People will pigeon-hole videos of their baby's first steps, though nobody outside themselves really cares - unless the child grows up to be the next Einstein, or Hitler.
"Hitler" raises an interesting question on the larger scale. Who has the responsibility of deciding what 'big' facts to store? And isn't that the path to propaganda, history-making, and such things?
And then, when the leadership changes, and the 'book burning' starts...
To bring the concept down from the paranoid-sphere, let's recall the/. article about Nikola Tesla. His work is not well known to most, because it was not made prominent, and subsequently, not well archived. We know of him, and we can dig for more about him, but the credit goes where it may not necessarily belong.
Same issue with Newton and Leibnitz. Leibnitz was the German Mathematician who beat Newton to the concepts of Calculus. Newton, a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences (or something to that effect) politicised HIS influence, and so was credited with all of the work - where his contribution was not complete.
Some things are not outright lies, but oral histories get lost while written records persist.
So now the alternative to cheaply buying a badly copied DVD or VHS cassette is a choppy, blurry, jerky and most of all time-consuming download. Great!!
You can watch it the old way, for $5, fuzzy, with the occasional scan-line mangle, on a TV, at your leisure, repeatedly, fast-forwarding, rewinding, frame-freezing..
Or, you can log into a site which tracks who you are and where you come from, sit and wait for a stable connection (which you won't get), squint at a 320x200 (at best!) box on your monitor, watch in stream-time without the option of jumping past the boring part (maybe you can pause the stream to take a leak or get a beer - without dropping the connection and starting over), raise your blood-pressure at the dropped frames and jerky playback, and should you want to see the film again, you get to rinse-lather-repeat the whole process.
Someone should introduce the people responsible for this to the folks behind content-filtering software and CSS. They'd have a lot in common.
Aren't there dual-bay VCR's out in the far east? I mean, how many times can you watch a movie in the first place, to make rental charges excessive? How many movies can you own to need to buy pirate copies? If you're that poor, you should worry about food, not getting a deal on Titanic, ferchrisakes!
Is there some reason why the one true DeCSS hasn't been reimplemented under a different name (or 3 dozen)?
After all, the source is a matter of public record now, and it's been on T-shirts and all... Why not re-implment it in any and all programming languages out there. Java, Pascal, Fortran, Perl, VB, Befunge (ferchrisakes!)..
Differently named, all of them.
This new DeCSS is litigation chaff, and we should follow the blow with another, and another.
Let's add the string "DeCSS" to comment fields of web pages, to give the spiders and bots something to chew on. Let's integrate the DeCSS source code into web page background images.
Slashdot, Andover, VA, whoever you are now, and whoever is in charge...
Who cares about The Beach or Leonardio DiCrapio?
Since the VA buyout, Katz is posting pure crap!!! Entertainment stories and fluff-pieces seem to get priority over News For Nerds! WHY?
Is this what/.'s coprporate handlers think interests us?? If so, and if VA is driving Linux's future, than we're on the wrong side.
I'm sorry, I know this will get mod'd out of existence, but I just have to spew!!
Rob, if you have any control over/. at all, PLEASE take away Katz posting rights. Subject his articles to the same level of scrutiny that you have over normal users articles.
Katz is making/. into a clone of Ain't It Cool News!! At least AICN makes no qualms about being an MPAA rumor-mill and hype pump.
Wow, the idea of occular implants came to me too. Closely followed by an image of Tipper Gore masturbating at the very thought of finally being able to protect the children of America from all the smut out there on the internet.
Imagine cochlear implants, keyed just so that they cut out briefly when they decode a 'naughty' word.
Imagine, keys that enable you to view porno only being available when you turn 18... For a fee.. A porno tax. And filing an application for the keys puts you into an FBI database of potential trench-coat mafia members.
Imagine that after a vegetarian gets elected to a higher office, (or better yet, appointed to the Purina board of directors) you are no longer allowed to enjoy the taste of bloody meat.
Where's a brilliant sci-fi writter when you need him to write another techno-dystopian novel? Hey Katz! Why don't you write something useful for a change?
Well, not a solution, but a workaround... Provided that this 'scheme' is not made ubiquitous.
A quality digital video camera, aimed at the monitor. Yeah, it's lower quality than the HDTV/DVD image that's being displayed... But the content can't be protected if it is to be accessible.
Just like with the audio encryption that is sure to follow this piece of drivvel. If you can play it over headphones and speakers, you can wrap those into a tape deck... Unless they force you to wear microprocessors in your ear-bud speakers. Ha!
Point being, if a person is to be able to experience the signal, be it audio, video, whatever - then that signal has to be made analog at some point - and that's where it WILL be 'exposed' from whatever encryption is used.
I'd like to see the MPAA/RIAA try to force the government to force the population to have digital sensory pick-ups and decoders implanted in their skulls. That's how far it will have to go, to keep their precious IP/content 'safe'!
That's what it is - Jeff Bezos is probably in this up to his neck.
Think about it. Encrypted video will put the same sort of strangle-hold on computer displays that the MPAA is trying to get via DVD encryption. Can you imagine buying your whole PC in a 'region' that will only work with monitors bought there? It goes without saying that you'll need to buy all new hardware. Sort of like the Microsoft upgrade cycle, as applied to video boards and monitors.
Then of cource, to protect their collective IP, the software will come with 'regional' keys. So you can only buy compatible software here, not there - and at a premium, since the big, bad hackers can't read your encrypted monitor from 2 miles away after they hack into the international Echelon system that doesn't exist.
So what's Bezos got to gain? Well, after people figure out how duped they've been, they'll buy little software, few monitors, and lots of books!:)
I'll just have to wait for the encryption-enabled keyboards and mice, so nobody can tap my input either. Then I'll learn to speak Navaho.
W.R.T. women in the CS/IT field, I'm all for it. Working with women makes for a much more interesting environment.
My concern with studies like this one is that the 'wrong' people will get fired-up, and over-zealously try to correct the situation the WRONG way. Quotas come to mind.
The RIGHT way is to make the field appealing to women, and provide them with means to develop technical competency. An unfortunate fact is that the sciences are not as accessible to girls as they are to boys, during the early years of education.
After the sour experience of grade-school, most girls avoid science in HS, and tend to avoid it in college, or they get brave and go into those sciences labeled as 'soft' (psych, socio).
Hard science is fun, and it needs to be advocated better. Not only for the benefit of young girls but all children. The U.S. in particular is shooting itself in the foot by making science and math HARD to learn and HARD to like.
There's a big issue hidden in here I think. I'm a CS grad student, and easily a third of my classmates are oriental, and another quarter is eastern European (Russian and thereabout). Maybe a quarter of the students are female. Now, I have no problem with race, but I find this disproportionate number of foreigners (I'm Polish BTW). There is much prejudice in the working world directed against non-male non-whites, yet few of them seek higher degrees.
These white males are the ones who scream loudest about work-visa restrictions and foreigners taking away 'American' jobs. As if these guys wanted to pick lettuce for 12 hours a day, or hack code for $10/hr...
Bothers me to think about it, so I don't.;)
67% of all statistics are worthless
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LonelyNet
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News Flash! New study concludes that University professors are more concerned with PUBLISHING a study, than with reaching worthwhile conclusions!!
So the net gives people something else to do besides socializing. So what? It's no different than television, or book for that matter...
"That there Guttenberg is polluting the children's minds, keeping them from fornicating in the corn fields..."
Perhaps another point of view is needed. These researches seem to presume, or at least imply, that net-people SHOULD spend lot's of time with other humans in meat-space. They seem to suggest that being a social butterfly is good and normal, while being an introverted thinker is somehow inferior.
I wonder at what coctail party they discovered this... Oh, wait, it was done late at night, poring over print-outs all alone, eyes blurry with statistical findings.
News Flash! New study finds that behavioral researchers are asocial introverts. They should be profiled and monitored, just in case they all turn into unabomber copycats. Remember, Ted Kaczynski had a PhD in math, and was an introvert.
A "GUI" that I would love to see for Linux would be one based on the Quake 1
A few months back, there was a slashdot article about exactly this sort of thing. Well, sort of. It's here
I know that SGI had a similar thing for IRIX as seen in Jurassic Park
Yeah, that was real.. And so were the dinosaurs.:) As others noted, it was a model for a tool. Much like the T-rex. I did get the warm-and-fuzzies when the 12 year old girl said: This is UNIX... I KNOW THIS!
1. A rotten looking apple, with a worm sticking out ot it. 2. An upward extended middle finger in rainbow colors. 3. The now defunct (maybe) SGI cube. 4. A window of many colors, flapping in the wind - from right to left so we don't offend MS-Anyone(TM). 5. Tux, eating an apple. 6. A nicely rendered drop of water that just screams "Aqua!".
I don't want women around me who are underqualified, so I have to carry my load and some of theirs.
I don't want women around me if they wear a low-cut blouse, a hiked-up skirt and sit next to the boss, keep dropping pencils and taking way too long to retrieve them - while the boss just leans back, smiles and I get assigned the shit work. (Yeah, I'm bitter!)
I don't want women around me if they bat their eyelashes, and chat all day on the phone, and cry when you point out a hole in their code that's big enough to drive a truck through.
The people I want around me at work are competent professionals, educated and interesting people who will preferably have a slightly warped sense of humor - and will NOT scream 'sexual harassment' when you suggest passing her a pointer.
Unfortunatelly, at this point, there aren't many women like this. There are two in my 12 person group. The fault may be education - may be cultural bias - may be psychology. When you figure it out, you'll win the Nobel.
When I was going through the CS program, several women were in my classes. Maybe 10%. By the time we graduated, ONE was left, and she stepped down to part-time for a year (for whatever reasons she had). This one last woman was competent, capable, and I would be glad to work with her on any project. The others opted out and went into MIS and Business and Lib Arts.
Was it them as individuals, or was it an indication of women's interests in general? I won't even attempt to guess.
Seems to me that women just think differently than men do - on the average. They want different things out of life than men do - on the average.
Why isn't there an uproar about the disproportionate number of men in Nursing or Childcare?
What is the popular opinion of the man who chooses to stay home to take care of the kids? Is this right? I think we should just open source career choices. You want it, do it.
As for getting ahead in a field you are unqualified for, by using gender to your advantage... Well, that should be a persecutable as doing so on false credentials - because that's what it is.
In real simple terms, HotSpot is a run-time optimizer for bytecode. It sees what pieces of code are getting used over and over (hot spots) and optimizes them - in a way that I believe is similar to storing data in registers instead of memory; whatever that means in JVM parlance.
While I agree with Katz (Whoa!!) that technology makes it possible to work outside work, and that this is sometimes abusive, I have a different perspective.
How much time do I spend 'working' at work? Less than 40 hours. I pursue personal interests as well and professional duties. I read/., I check out a bunch of developer sites, I flip through books, heck - sometimes I even do my grad-school homework.
I spend most of my 'free' time doing the same sort of stuff. I write some code, read a few articles, argue with friends (who are in the same field).
Often-times I'll wake up in the middle of the night, with my head cranking away at some problem, either work related or personal-interest related.
It's all the same. The lines have blurred to the point where work is hobby and hobby is academics, and academics is work. The symbiosis of interests, the new paradigm or leveraged synergies (well, slap me with a halibut - I could be an MBA) is the matter of fact lifestyle of the technology worker.
In the course of a week, I probably put in 80 to 120 hours of mind-time into things that are somehow relevant to what I do for a living. If I were to broaden the definition more, I'd also count eating and sleeping, since it enables me to work and learn. The lines really are THAT fuzzy.
We LIKE what we do. We're not piece-workers whose productivity is measured by the number of boxes we stuff on an assembly line. The 3am revelation on a work-related data structure isn't time I charge for, and I don't clock out to write this post.
We work hard, long-hours, beacuse we ENJOY what we do. I think I speak of more than just myself, but, if I were independently wealthy, I'd still do what I do - the way that I do it. I might be a little more cocky with the boss, but that's a matter of choice in today's job market.
Those of us who feel they work 'too hard' have the option of throttling back, slowing down or going elsewhere, thanks to the market being as it is.
We've come full-circle to the times before the industrial revolution, I think. We're sort of farming/home-steading IT. It's what we do. It's what we love. We work to live AND live to work, both at the same time.
This is not to say that we do not have non-tech interests or lives, but WHAT we do is part of WHO we are. IT's not just a job, it's a choice of life-style.
There are a few good points in the article. The ease of set-up and configuration, the addition of peripherals and automated integration of new software... These are things that make a computer easier to use.
The point about the purpose of computers being to make tasks easier - instead of forcing people to do things the way the system dictates, is very valid. But down this path lays the animated paper-clip and an application named Bob.
My question to the author is, Why do you address the open source/Linux/GNU community as a company?
Why should the people responsible for GNU/Linux be afraid of the fate of DEC and Linux? We do this for free, and few of our paychecks depend on the number of bugs fixed in the next version of the Apache.
I'd be curious to see what would happen if a powerful corporation who embraced Linux suddenly started dictating 'hot list' items...
Sure, that would suck for people who are on that task, in that company... But trying to dictate features to 'the community' would be like trying to herd cats.. "You want WHAT?! WHEN?!"
Linux exists in it's present form because millions (are we there yet?) of developers made these things a priority instead of those things. Companies made some things harder to do (i.e. closed specs) so development proceeded along the path of least resistance.
I pity the project manager who tries to dictate policy and priorities to a bunch of competent volunteers. Don't look a gift-horse in the mouth. You can ask, you may suggest, and your request will be considered.
You can offer free hardware and services, and that might make the minds of the able a little more willing to see things your way. But you try strong-arming people who do charity work to work harder, and they'll take their toys and go home.
It's really hard to delineate the Internet into distinct areas. Anyone who tries is likely to chop a lot of people into pieces, and leave them straddling virtual oceans (wow, deep metaphor).
I agree with the areas defined, but I see them more as layers. After all, we all have varrying degrees of technical interest (even those without any, who uses the net, have some interest in tech). We all have some sort of a belief system, be it religious or ethical - and even a lack of gnosis is a system of belief.
Each of these strata can be more specifically divided, horizontally this time, so that the Belief Strata would contain not continents and oceans but peaks and valleys. Say you'd have a Catholic peak and a Catholic valley, correspondent to the strength of that belief held by an individual. You would also have a Taoist peak and valley. If you're on one peak, you can not be on another, in a particular strata - since religions, for example, tend to be mutually exclusive in the extreme of subscription (a devout Catholic tends to reject other faiths). But the neat thing is that you can be half-way up two peeks, or complimentary faiths. The valley between some two is not that deep, while between another pair it is abysmal.
We all check up on product info online, and most of us shop here, so the continental divide between the shopping continent and the religious one does not apply (unless your religion forbids online shopping:) ). So again, strata. Some people only buy books and CD's online, so there are still peaks, but they're flatenning by the minute. Slashdot flashes banner ads all the time, and now is owned by VA Linux Systems, so they are far from separate, and the gentlemen (Rob, Hemos) do protest too much.
Commercial and ISP's are also not continents. They were before the net became ubiquitous. Remember how cool it was when Compuserve email could reach Prodigy for the first time. That's when the continents began to sink. A huge percentage of us reach the net via ISP, many via business access and many via.edu links. Few have personal backbone taps, so maybe those men are an island..
I guess that the membership of the net defies classification, since so many of us share interests of one kind, and are diametrically opposed in others.
Oh, and Jon, I hope that the brevity and 'pro-discussion' angle of your article is caused by lack of time, and not because we finally stuck it to the pachyderm after the interview.
The EM spectrum is far from infinite, especially if you're interested in the portion that's referred to as RADIO.
The RF range is relatively narrow, compared to the other sections of EM, but it's characteristics are such that it's very useful. Omnidirectional transmission, and the ability to propagate the signal through solid objects is of great benefit. Unfortunatelly the data carrying capacity of RF is relatively small.
The amount of data that can be crammed into EM is proportional to the frequency, and if you jack up the freq, you lose the neat properties of RF. You go unidirectional, and you start cooking whatever meat you transmit through. Yes, that's right, the high side of RF is called microwave. Then there's X-ray, gamma radiation.. You really want that beaming your data into your house?
Along with the adverse effects of high-freq EM comes the energy considerations. It takes a lot of power to push high freq signals, and they tend to dissipate in water vapor, so distance transmissions via air become a problem.
In order to push a large amount of data through RF you need to spread the signal across sevaral frequencies. These frequencies must be relatively discrete. This improves your thruput, but it fills the medium more quickly, and as far as communication is concerned, air is the wire. Lots of collisions in a spread RF area.
So, radio is of fantastic use where better options are not available, and for short and bursty traffic, but as far as web-browsing... Man, banner ads alone would kill the airwaves.
Ha, it only goes to show that brains and muscles have a lot in comon.
Muscles fire (contract) individual fibers to provide the needed amount of force. A fiber either fires, or it does not. After a fiber fires, it needs to rest and heal.
Sore muscles result from many fibers needing rest and healing. Muscle fatigue comes from many fibers having fired, and few being left available to keep the work going.
The speed with which muscle fibers recover is proportional to their level of conditioning. So an athletic person is ready to go again sooner that a sofa-spud.
What does this have to do with brains?
A conditioned brain is able to recover from effort more quickly, while a stagnant one needs a long weekend.
A brain that has used up it's 'normal' operating capacity (analog to 'conditioned' fibers) will start to recruit typically unused areas to keep the work going. Sleep deprivation is a way of keeping the normally used areas from getting adequare recoup time, thereby forcing the 'lazy' areas to take up some slack.
Sleep deprivation cycles, along with an inter-disciplinary training regiment (variance in modes of thought, analytical, creative, perceptive, linguistic, mathematical...) is for the brain exactly like cross-training is for the body.
And it sounds suspiciously like going to college.:)
It MIGHT just be facetious sarcasm. You see, by posting this in an entertainment related article (one which is sure to get our collective asses to spend money on movie tickets), the poster might be trying to make the point that there are too many commercially slanted articles since/.'s commercialization (buyout).
This might be a cry of disgust, a call to arms, "Revolution! Revolution!". This man is our champion, trying to save us lemmings from falling off the VA cliff. He's our Catcher in the Rye, our Messiah, our Neo - reclaiming our lost souls from the Pied Piper of Andover.
Or maybe I'm giving the troll too much credit. Maybe I paid a little too much attention in English Lit, and am interpretting tea leaves for content.
Here's my take on the extreme case, disclosing first that I don't know backbone capacities, and the point may be moot if they're adequate.
Since after all, the internet was designed to withstand a nuclear war, with all the damage and (possibly) EMP issues that go with it.
There's a quote by Robert(?) Reinhold (from Virtual Communities): "The Internet interprets censorship as a failure, and routes around it."
Well, considering that, the 'ping tidal wave' (tm) would just go the other way, wouldn't it? China would effectively sever itself from the internet, but in the process cut all westbound links from the Americas, and all the eastbound links from EurAsia and Africa... (Yeah, they can do that with a backhoe too) The trans-Atlantic links would buckle under the added strain of valid traffic... Mayham.
I guess my question becomes: Just how reliant/dependant are we (we being variable) on their (again variable) infrastructure.
Yes, the advancement of technology has eroded our privacy. Credit card transactions are all in some database, susceptable to cracking - and what's worse (maybe), susceptable to corporate data mining. Use cash if it really bothers you. Don't want to use the ATM, see a teller. The cost of your convenience is a little privacy. Is that bad?
Is data mining evil, if with it a business provides a better product?
Those pesky little Stop&Shop discount cards keep track of what you buy. Does Stop&Shop really care that you're buying condoms and pregnancy kits and KY Jelly, and your last name is the same as that of the local minister? Hell no! Will they print in their flier that the town Rabbi buys pork? Nah!
What Stop&Shop cares about is their mass market. They want to know if an area is predominantly consuming pork or beef, so they can stock accordingly, and not have food rotting in a warehouse. They care about the brands that are selling, so they can smartly bid against their competitors for the things that sell, and not buy too much of what doesn't.
Could any individual or small group out there compromise this data? Sure. Could they exploit it to nefarious and pointed goals? I doubt it. All you could really do is convince the S&S reordering system that everyone (EVERYONE) wants more Sam Adams Wheat - thank you by the way.
So that's what privacy buys you.
If all of the minutae of our daily lives was publically available, would that be bad? Well, I don't particularly want people to know when and for how long I pick my nose - but does anyone really care?
Privacy is not Liberty, and neither is Freedom. Freedom is not about being able to do anything you want behind closed doors, and get away with it. The whole issue of morality and ethical behaviour lies this way, and I don't want to wrestle with it this morning.
IMHO, in the US this (privacy) is a big deal because of the strong Puritanical core of the society. Remember, sex is a dirty word, and if the word 'masturbation' appears in a song lyric at a political function - it makes the news. You (hypothetically) don't want your neighbors to know that you like it standing up and against a wall, do you?
That's what this is about to the pop-culture. The same culture, I might add, that salivates over the subject matter of the current Jerry Springer - justifying their own kinks as lesser, and therefore acceptible.
It's been a while wince I've been in the European mindset, but I suspect that there the issue is entirely different. It's not about your personal freedoms and the right to take liberties with the babysitter. It's more about the 'government' gaining undue control of the population (This is what worries/. , but that's not what the US population considers - it's a foreign (no pun int) topic to them). Austria just got sanctioned by the EU, because a right-wing government is now in charge there. We all remember the last time that a strong right-wing controlled Germanic people, don't we? Europeans are VERY sensitive to these matters. The populace of the US (again,/. being more globally aware) doesn't really think in these terms - case in point, who runs the Kansas B.O.E.?
Anyway, enough ranting for the morning. I should do some work.
One last point on privacy though. JenniCAM. Now, I'm not a subscriber, but I peek in now and again. I'm intrigued. The girl freely and intentionally exposes her private life (sometimes more than others) to the Internet.. Is her life somehow lessened by that? Hell, it's a claim to fame! Read over her journal entries sometime. Does my knowing about her parent's difficulties, or her recent asthma attacks, impinge on her personal liberties in any way? Absolutely not. Does it help me relate, and let me know that I'm not the only person with real problems? Yeah, and that helps. And maybe, in some karmic sense, my compassion for her experiences (which without my knowledge would be impossible) actually helps her deal, and helps me deal - and I just hope that this little blurb about Jennifer doesn't bring JonKatz's guns to bear on her life. She has enough problems.
PPS: Let's hear it for a techno-lobby!!! Stick it to the MPAA! Could you imagine the power of a strike threat from a lobby of technologists?
As the saying goes: Never attribute to malice that which an be explained by ignorance.
While I'm as willing to blame the guys with the black choppers on this as the next guy, the fault lies with poor network administration.
Not that the targets have any choice about landing hard on their knees when beaten over the head with a DoS. There are things they can do... As has been elloquently pointed out in this post. In a nut-shell, shut down unused ports, shut down unneeded services, filter out the offending networks (would you rather limit your availability, or end it?), and most importantly LOG IT ALL.
Logging is crucial when you are being beaten. You may not be able to prevent it, but you CAN collect evidence.
As for the poor network administration... Universities, small/midsize ISPs and break-neck businesses leave far too many doors open. These are the people to blame - unwitting accomplices.
Legislation may help, but it has to be careful. It must require proof - and in cases such as these it's hard.
The conspiracy theory does bring to mind an interesting scenario though. What if all 1 billion Chinese, all running Linux, suddenly started pinging all of the US biggest eCommerce sites? Global slashdot effect levied directly against our infrastructure, and indirectly against our fast-movers on Wall Street. And no amount of legislation would get our servers off their knees.
Slashdot Mirror
There is some belief that there is no reason to preserve information at all. Most of what is created is just tripe anyway, and we should be more focused on creating content than preserving it. There are two reasons why some sort of preservation is important. First of all, it is inefficient to recreate information that already exists. [Point 1] Human energy is better spent on building upon existing knowledge to create new wisdom. How much do we already spin our wheels as several people collect the same data? What more could we be doing if we spent the energy instead on new pursuits? [Point 2] Secondly, there is some data that is irreplacable.
/. article about Nikola Tesla. His work is not well known to most, because it was not made prominent, and subsequently, not well archived. We know of him, and we can dig for more about him, but the credit goes where it may not necessarily belong.
Point 1:
With the amount of data that we produce, archiving it will take an increasing amount of time. How much new content is created daily? At best, we will plateu in a state where as much effort is required to archive content as is needed to create new content.
With the emphasis placed squarely on non-duplication of effort, archiving becomes a secondary issue. Indexing, searching, sorting and categorizing of the archive becomes a first priority, since creative efforts should now check if they are redundant.
If the bold statement is to be a guideline, than the idea of an archive is moot, since all new work depends on old work, and so tracks well with where the author feels human effor should go. Much like with biological evolution, new data is the fittest of the old data that was applicable to the new context. I suppose that the call for archives is little more than a suggestion that we need an organized and deliberate fossil record of how we got to where we will be at some point in the future.
What is needed is an archive, yes, but an archive of what? Not of content, but of the essence of the content. The lessons learned, the conclusions drawn and the optimizations realized in the process of creating the content. The content is fleeting - though arguably of inherent value... Which brings us to...
Point 2:
Yes, some things are irreplacable. Who decides? Who defines what is art, what is fact, and what deserves eternal life?
Some things are of immediate and significant value, but for an unknown duration. The value of other things can not be realized for a very long time, and so the alternative is to store everything. Further more, the value of certain data is totally subjective, and this begs the question of "who's in charge" of defining that 1% that is to be kept.
On the small scale, this will lead to vanity. Any 'artist' will consider their work a masterpiece, and save it. (I have code I wrote in CS101, don't you?) Companies will store and archive all email, all financials, anything that can potentially be used to mine data or identify trends or fertalize litigation. People will pigeon-hole videos of their baby's first steps, though nobody outside themselves really cares - unless the child grows up to be the next Einstein, or Hitler.
"Hitler" raises an interesting question on the larger scale. Who has the responsibility of deciding what 'big' facts to store? And isn't that the path to propaganda, history-making, and such things?
And then, when the leadership changes, and the 'book burning' starts...
To bring the concept down from the paranoid-sphere, let's recall the
Same issue with Newton and Leibnitz. Leibnitz was the German Mathematician who beat Newton to the concepts of Calculus. Newton, a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences (or something to that effect) politicised HIS influence, and so was credited with all of the work - where his contribution was not complete.
Some things are not outright lies, but oral histories get lost while written records persist.
Who gets to choose what to write down?
So now the alternative to cheaply buying a badly copied DVD or VHS cassette is a choppy, blurry, jerky and most of all time-consuming download. Great!!
You can watch it the old way, for $5, fuzzy, with the occasional scan-line mangle, on a TV, at your leisure, repeatedly, fast-forwarding, rewinding, frame-freezing..
Or, you can log into a site which tracks who you are and where you come from, sit and wait for a stable connection (which you won't get), squint at a 320x200 (at best!) box on your monitor, watch in stream-time without the option of jumping past the boring part (maybe you can pause the stream to take a leak or get a beer - without dropping the connection and starting over), raise your blood-pressure at the dropped frames and jerky playback, and should you want to see the film again, you get to rinse-lather-repeat the whole process.
Someone should introduce the people responsible for this to the folks behind content-filtering software and CSS. They'd have a lot in common.
Aren't there dual-bay VCR's out in the far east? I mean, how many times can you watch a movie in the first place, to make rental charges excessive? How many movies can you own to need to buy pirate copies? If you're that poor, you should worry about food, not getting a deal on Titanic, ferchrisakes!
Is there some reason why the one true DeCSS hasn't been reimplemented under a different name (or 3 dozen)?
After all, the source is a matter of public record now, and it's been on T-shirts and all... Why not re-implment it in any and all programming languages out there. Java, Pascal, Fortran, Perl, VB, Befunge (ferchrisakes!)..
Differently named, all of them.
This new DeCSS is litigation chaff, and we should follow the blow with another, and another.
Let's add the string "DeCSS" to comment fields of web pages, to give the spiders and bots something to chew on. Let's integrate the DeCSS source code into web page background images.
Slashdot, Andover, VA, whoever you are now, and whoever is in charge...
/.'s coprporate handlers think interests us?? If so, and if VA is driving Linux's future, than we're on the wrong side.
/. at all, PLEASE take away Katz posting rights. Subject his articles to the same level of scrutiny that you have over normal users articles.
/. into a clone of Ain't It Cool News!! At least AICN makes no qualms about being an MPAA rumor-mill and hype pump.
Who cares about The Beach or Leonardio DiCrapio?
Since the VA buyout, Katz is posting pure crap!!! Entertainment stories and fluff-pieces seem to get priority over News For Nerds! WHY?
Is this what
I'm sorry, I know this will get mod'd out of existence, but I just have to spew!!
Rob, if you have any control over
Katz is making
Rob, slashdot is bleeding out.
Wow, the idea of occular implants came to me too.
Closely followed by an image of Tipper Gore masturbating at the very thought of finally being able to protect the children of America from all the smut out there on the internet.
Imagine cochlear implants, keyed just so that they cut out briefly when they decode a 'naughty' word.
Imagine, keys that enable you to view porno only being available when you turn 18... For a fee.. A porno tax. And filing an application for the keys puts you into an FBI database of potential trench-coat mafia members.
Imagine that after a vegetarian gets elected to a higher office, (or better yet, appointed to the Purina board of directors) you are no longer allowed to enjoy the taste of bloody meat.
Where's a brilliant sci-fi writter when you need him to write another techno-dystopian novel? Hey Katz! Why don't you write something useful for a change?
Well, not a solution, but a workaround... Provided that this 'scheme' is not made ubiquitous.
A quality digital video camera, aimed at the monitor. Yeah, it's lower quality than the HDTV/DVD image that's being displayed... But the content can't be protected if it is to be accessible.
Just like with the audio encryption that is sure to follow this piece of drivvel. If you can play it over headphones and speakers, you can wrap those into a tape deck... Unless they force you to wear microprocessors in your ear-bud speakers. Ha!
Point being, if a person is to be able to experience the signal, be it audio, video, whatever - then that signal has to be made analog at some point - and that's where it WILL be 'exposed' from whatever encryption is used.
I'd like to see the MPAA/RIAA try to force the government to force the population to have digital sensory pick-ups and decoders implanted in their skulls. That's how far it will have to go, to keep their precious IP/content 'safe'!
Morons!
That's what it is - Jeff Bezos is probably in this up to his neck.
:)
Think about it. Encrypted video will put the same sort of strangle-hold on computer displays that the MPAA is trying to get via DVD encryption. Can you imagine buying your whole PC in a 'region' that will only work with monitors bought there? It goes without saying that you'll need to buy all new hardware. Sort of like the Microsoft upgrade cycle, as applied to video boards and monitors.
Then of cource, to protect their collective IP, the software will come with 'regional' keys. So you can only buy compatible software here, not there - and at a premium, since the big, bad hackers can't read your encrypted monitor from 2 miles away after they hack into the international Echelon system that doesn't exist.
So what's Bezos got to gain? Well, after people figure out how duped they've been, they'll buy little software, few monitors, and lots of books!
I'll just have to wait for the encryption-enabled keyboards and mice, so nobody can tap my input either. Then I'll learn to speak Navaho.
W.R.T. women in the CS/IT field, I'm all for it. Working with women makes for a much more interesting environment.
;)
My concern with studies like this one is that the 'wrong' people will get fired-up, and over-zealously try to correct the situation the WRONG way. Quotas come to mind.
The RIGHT way is to make the field appealing to women, and provide them with means to develop technical competency. An unfortunate fact is that the sciences are not as accessible to girls as they are to boys, during the early years of education.
After the sour experience of grade-school, most girls avoid science in HS, and tend to avoid it in college, or they get brave and go into those sciences labeled as 'soft' (psych, socio).
Hard science is fun, and it needs to be advocated better. Not only for the benefit of young girls but all children. The U.S. in particular is shooting itself in the foot by making science and math HARD to learn and HARD to like.
There's a big issue hidden in here I think. I'm a CS grad student, and easily a third of my classmates are oriental, and another quarter is eastern European (Russian and thereabout). Maybe a quarter of the students are female. Now, I have no problem with race, but I find this disproportionate number of foreigners (I'm Polish BTW). There is much prejudice in the working world directed against non-male non-whites, yet few of them seek higher degrees.
These white males are the ones who scream loudest about work-visa restrictions and foreigners taking away 'American' jobs. As if these guys wanted to pick lettuce for 12 hours a day, or hack code for $10/hr...
Bothers me to think about it, so I don't.
News Flash! New study concludes that University professors are more concerned with PUBLISHING a study, than with reaching worthwhile conclusions!!
So the net gives people something else to do besides socializing. So what? It's no different than television, or book for that matter...
"That there Guttenberg is polluting the children's minds, keeping them from fornicating in the corn fields..."
Perhaps another point of view is needed. These researches seem to presume, or at least imply, that net-people SHOULD spend lot's of time with other humans in meat-space. They seem to suggest that being a social butterfly is good and normal, while being an introverted thinker is somehow inferior.
I wonder at what coctail party they discovered this... Oh, wait, it was done late at night, poring over print-outs all alone, eyes blurry with statistical findings.
News Flash! New study finds that behavioral researchers are asocial introverts. They should be profiled and monitored, just in case they all turn into unabomber copycats. Remember, Ted Kaczynski had a PhD in math, and was an introvert.
A "GUI" that I would love to see for Linux would be one based on the Quake 1
:) As others noted, it was a model for a tool. Much like the T-rex. I did get the warm-and-fuzzies when the 12 year old girl said: This is UNIX... I KNOW THIS!
A few months back, there was a slashdot article about exactly this sort of thing. Well, sort of. It's here
I know that SGI had a similar thing for IRIX as seen in Jurassic Park
Yeah, that was real.. And so were the dinosaurs.
1. A rotten looking apple, with a worm sticking out ot it.
2. An upward extended middle finger in rainbow colors.
3. The now defunct (maybe) SGI cube.
4. A window of many colors, flapping in the wind - from right to left so we don't offend MS-Anyone(TM).
5. Tux, eating an apple.
6. A nicely rendered drop of water that just screams "Aqua!".
I don't want women around me who are underqualified, so I have to carry my load and some of theirs.
I don't want women around me if they wear a low-cut blouse, a hiked-up skirt and sit next to the boss, keep dropping pencils and taking way too long to retrieve them - while the boss just leans back, smiles and I get assigned the shit work. (Yeah, I'm bitter!)
I don't want women around me if they bat their eyelashes, and chat all day on the phone, and cry when you point out a hole in their code that's big enough to drive a truck through.
The people I want around me at work are competent professionals, educated and interesting people who will preferably have a slightly warped sense of humor - and will NOT scream 'sexual harassment' when you suggest passing her a pointer.
Unfortunatelly, at this point, there aren't many women like this. There are two in my 12 person group. The fault may be education - may be cultural bias - may be psychology. When you figure it out, you'll win the Nobel.
When I was going through the CS program, several women were in my classes. Maybe 10%. By the time we graduated, ONE was left, and she stepped down to part-time for a year (for whatever reasons she had). This one last woman was competent, capable, and I would be glad to work with her on any project. The others opted out and went into MIS and Business and Lib Arts.
Was it them as individuals, or was it an indication of women's interests in general? I won't even attempt to guess.
Seems to me that women just think differently than men do - on the average. They want different things out of life than men do - on the average.
Why isn't there an uproar about the disproportionate number of men in Nursing or Childcare?
What is the popular opinion of the man who chooses to stay home to take care of the kids? Is this right? I think we should just open source career choices. You want it, do it.
As for getting ahead in a field you are unqualified for, by using gender to your advantage... Well, that should be a persecutable as doing so on false credentials - because that's what it is.
In real simple terms, HotSpot is a run-time optimizer for bytecode. It sees what pieces of code are getting used over and over (hot spots) and optimizes them - in a way that I believe is similar to storing data in registers instead of memory; whatever that means in JVM parlance.
While I agree with Katz (Whoa!!) that technology makes it possible to work outside work, and that this is sometimes abusive, I have a different perspective.
/., I check out a bunch of developer sites, I flip through books, heck - sometimes I even do my grad-school homework.
How much time do I spend 'working' at work? Less than 40 hours. I pursue personal interests as well and professional duties. I read
I spend most of my 'free' time doing the same sort of stuff. I write some code, read a few articles, argue with friends (who are in the same field).
Often-times I'll wake up in the middle of the night, with my head cranking away at some problem, either work related or personal-interest related.
It's all the same. The lines have blurred to the point where work is hobby and hobby is academics, and academics is work. The symbiosis of interests, the new paradigm or leveraged synergies (well, slap me with a halibut - I could be an MBA) is the matter of fact lifestyle of the technology worker.
In the course of a week, I probably put in 80 to 120 hours of mind-time into things that are somehow relevant to what I do for a living. If I were to broaden the definition more, I'd also count eating and sleeping, since it enables me to work and learn. The lines really are THAT fuzzy.
We LIKE what we do. We're not piece-workers whose productivity is measured by the number of boxes we stuff on an assembly line. The 3am revelation on a work-related data structure isn't time I charge for, and I don't clock out to write this post.
We work hard, long-hours, beacuse we ENJOY what we do. I think I speak of more than just myself, but, if I were independently wealthy, I'd still do what I do - the way that I do it. I might be a little more cocky with the boss, but that's a matter of choice in today's job market.
Those of us who feel they work 'too hard' have the option of throttling back, slowing down or going elsewhere, thanks to the market being as it is.
We've come full-circle to the times before the industrial revolution, I think. We're sort of farming/home-steading IT. It's what we do. It's what we love. We work to live AND live to work, both at the same time.
This is not to say that we do not have non-tech interests or lives, but WHAT we do is part of WHO we are. IT's not just a job, it's a choice of life-style.
There are a few good points in the article. The ease of set-up and configuration, the addition of peripherals and automated integration of new software... These are things that make a computer easier to use.
The point about the purpose of computers being to make tasks easier - instead of forcing people to do things the way the system dictates, is very valid. But down this path lays the animated paper-clip and an application named Bob.
My question to the author is, Why do you address the open source/Linux/GNU community as a company?
Why should the people responsible for GNU/Linux be afraid of the fate of DEC and Linux? We do this for free, and few of our paychecks depend on the number of bugs fixed in the next version of the Apache.
I'd be curious to see what would happen if a powerful corporation who embraced Linux suddenly started dictating 'hot list' items...
Sure, that would suck for people who are on that task, in that company... But trying to dictate features to 'the community' would be like trying to herd cats.. "You want WHAT?! WHEN?!"
Linux exists in it's present form because millions (are we there yet?) of developers made these things a priority instead of those things. Companies made some things harder to do (i.e. closed specs) so development proceeded along the path of least resistance.
I pity the project manager who tries to dictate policy and priorities to a bunch of competent volunteers. Don't look a gift-horse in the mouth.
You can ask, you may suggest, and your request will be considered.
You can offer free hardware and services, and that might make the minds of the able a little more willing to see things your way. But you try strong-arming people who do charity work to work harder, and they'll take their toys and go home.
Here kitty-kitty...
It's really hard to delineate the Internet into distinct areas. Anyone who tries is likely to chop a lot of people into pieces, and leave them straddling virtual oceans (wow, deep metaphor).
:) ). So again, strata. Some people only buy books and CD's online, so there are still peaks, but they're flatenning by the minute. Slashdot flashes banner ads all the time, and now is owned by VA Linux Systems, so they are far from separate, and the gentlemen (Rob, Hemos) do protest too much.
.edu links. Few have personal backbone taps, so maybe those men are an island..
I agree with the areas defined, but I see them more as layers. After all, we all have varrying degrees of technical interest (even those without any, who uses the net, have some interest in tech). We all have some sort of a belief system, be it religious or ethical - and even a lack of gnosis is a system of belief.
Each of these strata can be more specifically divided, horizontally this time, so that the Belief Strata would contain not continents and oceans but peaks and valleys. Say you'd have a Catholic peak and a Catholic valley, correspondent to the strength of that belief held by an individual. You would also have a Taoist peak and valley. If you're on one peak, you can not be on another, in a particular strata - since religions, for example, tend to be mutually exclusive in the extreme of subscription (a devout Catholic tends to reject other faiths). But the neat thing is that you can be half-way up two peeks, or complimentary faiths. The valley between some two is not that deep, while between another pair it is abysmal.
We all check up on product info online, and most of us shop here, so the continental divide between the shopping continent and the religious one does not apply (unless your religion forbids online shopping
Commercial and ISP's are also not continents. They were before the net became ubiquitous. Remember how cool it was when Compuserve email could reach Prodigy for the first time. That's when the continents began to sink. A huge percentage of us reach the net via ISP, many via business access and many via
I guess that the membership of the net defies classification, since so many of us share interests of one kind, and are diametrically opposed in others.
Oh, and Jon, I hope that the brevity and 'pro-discussion' angle of your article is caused by lack of time, and not because we finally stuck it to the pachyderm after the interview.
The EM spectrum is far from infinite, especially if you're interested in the portion that's referred to as RADIO.
The RF range is relatively narrow, compared to the other sections of EM, but it's characteristics are such that it's very useful. Omnidirectional transmission, and the ability to propagate the signal through solid objects is of great benefit. Unfortunatelly the data carrying capacity of RF is relatively small.
The amount of data that can be crammed into EM is proportional to the frequency, and if you jack up the freq, you lose the neat properties of RF. You go unidirectional, and you start cooking whatever meat you transmit through. Yes, that's right, the high side of RF is called microwave. Then there's X-ray, gamma radiation.. You really want that beaming your data into your house?
Along with the adverse effects of high-freq EM comes the energy considerations. It takes a lot of power to push high freq signals, and they tend to dissipate in water vapor, so distance transmissions via air become a problem.
In order to push a large amount of data through RF you need to spread the signal across sevaral frequencies. These frequencies must be relatively discrete. This improves your thruput, but it fills the medium more quickly, and as far as communication is concerned, air is the wire. Lots of collisions in a spread RF area.
So, radio is of fantastic use where better options are not available, and for short and bursty traffic, but as far as web-browsing... Man, banner ads alone would kill the airwaves.
Ha, it only goes to show that brains and muscles have a lot in comon.
:)
Muscles fire (contract) individual fibers to provide the needed amount of force. A fiber either fires, or it does not. After a fiber fires, it needs to rest and heal.
Sore muscles result from many fibers needing rest and healing. Muscle fatigue comes from many fibers having fired, and few being left available to keep the work going.
The speed with which muscle fibers recover is proportional to their level of conditioning. So an athletic person is ready to go again sooner that a sofa-spud.
What does this have to do with brains?
A conditioned brain is able to recover from effort more quickly, while a stagnant one needs a long weekend.
A brain that has used up it's 'normal' operating capacity (analog to 'conditioned' fibers) will start to recruit typically unused areas to keep the work going. Sleep deprivation is a way of keeping the normally used areas from getting adequare recoup time, thereby forcing the 'lazy' areas to take up some slack.
Sleep deprivation cycles, along with an inter-disciplinary training regiment (variance in modes of thought, analytical, creative, perceptive, linguistic, mathematical...) is for the brain exactly like cross-training is for the body.
And it sounds suspiciously like going to college.
It MIGHT just be facetious sarcasm. /.'s commercialization (buyout).
You see, by posting this in an entertainment related article (one which is sure to get our collective asses to spend money on movie tickets), the poster might be trying to make the point that there are too many commercially slanted articles since
This might be a cry of disgust, a call to arms, "Revolution! Revolution!". This man is our champion, trying to save us lemmings from falling off the VA cliff. He's our Catcher in the Rye, our Messiah, our Neo - reclaiming our lost souls from the Pied Piper of Andover.
Or maybe I'm giving the troll too much credit. Maybe I paid a little too much attention in English Lit, and am interpretting tea leaves for content.
Go back under your bridge.
Jeff Garner is going to be Anakin Skywalker. At least if Ain't It Cool News has got the ruour straight. Looks the part, IMHO.
Shoo! Begone, foul beastie!
Away with you!
Shoo! Beat it!
You're not fooling anyone.
Ok corporate, listen up..
OPEN THE HARDWARE SPECS, and sit back to watch the magic happen.
Would it really be that easy?
Here's my take on the extreme case, disclosing first that I don't know backbone capacities, and the point may be moot if they're adequate.
Since after all, the internet was designed to withstand a nuclear war, with all the damage and (possibly) EMP issues that go with it.
There's a quote by Robert(?) Reinhold (from Virtual Communities): "The Internet interprets censorship as a failure, and routes around it."
Well, considering that, the 'ping tidal wave' (tm) would just go the other way, wouldn't it? China would effectively sever itself from the internet, but in the process cut all westbound links from the Americas, and all the eastbound links from EurAsia and Africa... (Yeah, they can do that with a backhoe too) The trans-Atlantic links would buckle under the added strain of valid traffic... Mayham.
I guess my question becomes: Just how reliant/dependant are we (we being variable) on their (again variable) infrastructure.
Marginally OT, but it came to mind:
/. , but that's not what the US population considers - it's a foreign (no pun int) topic to them). Austria just got sanctioned by the EU, because a right-wing government is now in charge there. We all remember the last time that a strong right-wing controlled Germanic people, don't we? Europeans are VERY sensitive to these matters. The populace of the US (again, /. being more globally aware) doesn't really think in these terms - case in point, who runs the Kansas B.O.E.?
Yes, the advancement of technology has eroded our privacy. Credit card transactions are all in some database, susceptable to cracking - and what's worse (maybe), susceptable to corporate data mining. Use cash if it really bothers you. Don't want to use the ATM, see a teller. The cost of your convenience is a little privacy. Is that bad?
Is data mining evil, if with it a business provides a better product?
Those pesky little Stop&Shop discount cards keep track of what you buy. Does Stop&Shop really care that you're buying condoms and pregnancy kits and KY Jelly, and your last name is the same as that of the local minister? Hell no! Will they print in their flier that the town Rabbi buys pork? Nah!
What Stop&Shop cares about is their mass market. They want to know if an area is predominantly consuming pork or beef, so they can stock accordingly, and not have food rotting in a warehouse. They care about the brands that are selling, so they can smartly bid against their competitors for the things that sell, and not buy too much of what doesn't.
Could any individual or small group out there compromise this data? Sure. Could they exploit it to nefarious and pointed goals? I doubt it. All you could really do is convince the S&S reordering system that everyone (EVERYONE) wants more Sam Adams Wheat - thank you by the way.
So that's what privacy buys you.
If all of the minutae of our daily lives was publically available, would that be bad? Well, I don't particularly want people to know when and for how long I pick my nose - but does anyone really care?
Privacy is not Liberty, and neither is Freedom. Freedom is not about being able to do anything you want behind closed doors, and get away with it. The whole issue of morality and ethical behaviour lies this way, and I don't want to wrestle with it this morning.
IMHO, in the US this (privacy) is a big deal because of the strong Puritanical core of the society. Remember, sex is a dirty word, and if the word 'masturbation' appears in a song lyric at a political function - it makes the news. You (hypothetically) don't want your neighbors to know that you like it standing up and against a wall, do you?
That's what this is about to the pop-culture. The same culture, I might add, that salivates over the subject matter of the current Jerry Springer - justifying their own kinks as lesser, and therefore acceptible.
It's been a while wince I've been in the European mindset, but I suspect that there the issue is entirely different. It's not about your personal freedoms and the right to take liberties with the babysitter. It's more about the 'government' gaining undue control of the population (This is what worries
Anyway, enough ranting for the morning. I should do some work.
One last point on privacy though. JenniCAM. Now, I'm not a subscriber, but I peek in now and again. I'm intrigued. The girl freely and intentionally exposes her private life (sometimes more than others) to the Internet.. Is her life somehow lessened by that? Hell, it's a claim to fame! Read over her journal entries sometime. Does my knowing about her parent's difficulties, or her recent asthma attacks, impinge on her personal liberties in any way? Absolutely not. Does it help me relate, and let me know that I'm not the only person with real problems? Yeah, and that helps. And maybe, in some karmic sense, my compassion for her experiences (which without my knowledge would be impossible) actually helps her deal, and helps me deal - and I just hope that this little blurb about Jennifer doesn't bring JonKatz's guns to bear on her life. She has enough problems.
PPS: Let's hear it for a techno-lobby!!! Stick it to the MPAA! Could you imagine the power of a strike threat from a lobby of technologists?
As the saying goes: Never attribute to malice that which an be explained by ignorance.
While I'm as willing to blame the guys with the black choppers on this as the next guy, the fault lies with poor network administration.
Not that the targets have any choice about landing hard on their knees when beaten over the head with a DoS. There are things they can do... As has been elloquently pointed out in this post. In a nut-shell, shut down unused ports, shut down unneeded services, filter out the offending networks (would you rather limit your availability, or end it?), and most importantly LOG IT ALL.
Logging is crucial when you are being beaten. You may not be able to prevent it, but you CAN collect evidence.
As for the poor network administration... Universities, small/midsize ISPs and break-neck businesses leave far too many doors open. These are the people to blame - unwitting accomplices.
Legislation may help, but it has to be careful. It must require proof - and in cases such as these it's hard.
The conspiracy theory does bring to mind an interesting scenario though. What if all 1 billion Chinese, all running Linux, suddenly started pinging all of the US biggest eCommerce sites? Global slashdot effect levied directly against our infrastructure, and indirectly against our fast-movers on Wall Street. And no amount of legislation would get our servers off their knees.