the internet is a very young medium...
Wait until online buying settles down... wait for VISA to become more secure... THEN we can start to evaluate models.
Yes, if you wait long enough you will be able to know with certainty... but by that point, how useful will that knowledge be??
From studies already available, it's looking like the final conclusive model will be end up along the lines of Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda. If you believe these numbers, it looks like there may yet be time left to learn from the success of Amazon and others and apply it in other categories (hey, I oughta take that advise for my little site....) Doing it without massive debt would be the real trick!
So how does the open source community hope to gain anything by fighting a pointless "browser war"? Why not just focus on making a better browser AND a better desktop environment, so they have something to BUNDLE it with?
I see this sort of talk all the time, about strategic maneuvers. I just want to throw my two cents in by stating the obvious (or what should be obvious)....
The large collective mass of unpaid (often part time) free-software/open-source coders don't "focus" on a particular project or goal. Perhaps some small groups might, but talk about the "open source community" somehow "should focus on" something or another for strategic reasons is just silly.
...the GPL allows him to charge a "distribution fee", which the license doesn't even say must be reasonable. He could offer to ship the Lindows source on another CD for $1000, or even $100,000 and it would be perfectly GPL compliant.
I don't know where you got this idea, but it certainly wasn't from section 3 of the GNU General Public License, specificly:
3: You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) (option C only applies to non-commercial distribution, which Lindows certainly is not)
it isn't primarily about privacy or Free Speech. It's about the doctrine of Fair Use
Silly me.
I thought it was about:
Gateway selling new PC for the new "killer app" of downloading/burning music.
RIAA selling CDs at $15-20 each, no singles allowed.
Does anyone really believe that Gateway truely cares about fair use and first sale? I'm pretty sure they care a lot about selling new machines for a new purpose, and the bleak alternative of selling crippled machines that only encourage buys to hold onto their existing computers (which work perfectly fine as is).
I think that if we showed the senators/representatives and the American people that we are behind everyone else in consumer technology...
I recall reading an article years ago from a lobbist regarding stragegy for removing the export restrictions on strong encryption. It wasn't long ago when it was nearly impossible to export more than 40 bit encryption.... which was a pain, but then it did bring us the weak DVD algorithms:)
Anyway, this guy's point was that "it puts American companies at an economic disadvantage" was a losing strategy. He made his point primarily by showing various actions our elected and non-elected officials took, which basically ammounted to putting pressure on the rest of the world to enact and enforce similar restrictions. After all, if the problem was off-shore companies had an advantage, the obvious solution (to those in power) was to level the playing field. Why compromise on other important objectives, like "national security" and "law enforcement" (whatever the DOJ/FBI happens to want) when the "goal" can be accomplished in some other creative way. Much as that sucks.... they really were doing their jobs, trying to make policies to balance all the needs, and the anti-encryption need was a level playing field among off-shore software companies.
The winning strategy that he proposed was "with e-commerce and internet fraud, we can't afford not to allow encryption". The premise was that there's a giant carrot dangling out there... e-commerce (remember, this was before the giant dot-com bust) and the pro-encyption arguement went along the lines of "we gotta have encryption to enable e-commerce and the new ecomony, yadda, yadda...".
Of course, I didn't really follow that whole battle closely, so I can't really say what a factor that lobbist and his e-commerce based strategy had. In fact, I can't even find the original article anymore.
Anyway, the point is to be careful what you wish for. At least once before, with the encryption export regulations, the "American companies are at a disadvantage" strategy was a dismal failure for several years.... and the natural conclusion lawmakers had was "well, we just need to export our restrictions, and we're the USA, so we can eventually pressure everyone else into them".
In the meantime, at t = 31.58 msec, the application had finished drawing frame 3. It swapped buffers again, before the graphics card got a chance to display frame 2. Frame 2 disappeared from the display buffer, never having been shown on the monitor. That's a dropped frame, and it's a bad thing. ... But don't just assume that because your game runs consistently at a rate higher than your monitor, you won't be dropping frames.
Isn't that what the vsync setting is for??? (to only render a new frame each time the monitor is refreshed, so you don't get "tearing"). It's turned on by default with the few cards I've installed, but they always need to turn it off to run these benchmarks.
If this thing goes through, it'll probably mean the end of my little mp3 player project. I was planning to do quite a bit of reverse engineering on several car stereo decks to add support to emulate various CD changer control protocols (all open source, of course). If this crazy legistration goes through, I'll probably have to throw in the towel. I wonder if it'll even be legel to keep the web pages up with the schematic, source code, etc??
I should have mentioned that Apreche (User #239272), (who is not an idiot) started this thread by trolling:
I'm not an idiot..... I don't put my e-mail in public places where spammers would look to pick it up. As far as I'm concerned if you get spammed, it's your fault.
The very first link on the home page is News Archive, that leads to a non-existant page. The university's server generates a much-nicer-than-usual 404 error page, which includes among other info Apreche's email address, specifically "slr2777@osfmail.rit.edu" (which wouldn't have been very difficult to guess based on the user-style url for his site).
Also on each interior page is a mailto: link to "apreche@mail.rit.edu", preceeded with the text "Clik here to e-mail me".
Apreche, you really should fix that link... but when someone types http://www.rit.edu/~slr2777/somerandomename, they're gonna see your email address. At least it won't be due to a broken link on your own home page!
I'm not an idiot. I don't use the address book. I do use PGP. I remove myself from any and all non-spam newletters and announcements I don't want. And I don't put my e-mail in public places where spammers would look to pick it up. As far as I'm concerned if you get spammed, it's your fault.
Pure flamebait!
Certainly someone not an idiot would realize the potential that email has to enable persons previously unaquainted to communicate with one another, even if he personally never intended to participate in public discourse, offer assistance to others, or receive feedback.
But while spamming is still a problem, deal with it and don't be an idiot.
Indeed, slashdot trolling at its finest. Congratulations.
That still doesn't change the fact that their EULA is not legally enforcable.
Would they sue you over it?
No, that's not the way the "system" works.
The BSA gets a tip from a disgruntled ex-employee. It does not even matter if the informant is lying, the BSA shows up and demands an audit. No due process is involved, the BSA presumes that every installed piece is software is a violation unless the original registration info is documented to their stringent satisfaction. There are plenty of stories about software being considered pirated despite an invoice showing that the PC shipped with the installed software from a reputable vendor, only because the little hologram was lost years ago.
The audit process is expensive, even if the organization is fully compliant and every piece of software is properly licensed. Even if a good faith effort has been maintained for many years, inevitably there's some machines without documentation or a few machines where someone copied some software (rushing to meet a deadline and needed a program, damn thing wouldn't print unless some-such version re-installed, etc, etc).
So the BSA demands a settlement, which consists of a large payment to the BSA, and purchase of licenses for all the unlicensed (or simply undocumented, but was legally purchaed) software. The details about these payments are a bit fuzzy, since they're negotiated, and techie types who share stories about being audited aren't usually involved in that phase. Rumor has it that they're based on some fraction of the allowable penalty based on copyright law. It recently came to light that the (for-profit) BSA keeps all of that money... none of it goes to the software vendors. The vendors only get the sale of additional licenses, and another customer who creates a bunch of ultra-paranoid policies about acquisition of new software, so that their assed will be properly covered in the unlikely case of another audit.
And indeed, that sense of fear and the resulting policies among customers is quite valuable to software vendors. Organizations thereafter tend to "dot their I's and cross their T's" when it comes to software. They tend to review the EULAs and ask questions about what licenses they need to be fully compliant. They don't take chances. They know that it doesn't matter what would or would not hold up in court. What truely matters is what the outcome of a BSA audit will be, and what sort of position the BSA will be in the demand/extort a "settlement".
Now, in a brief effort to on-topic, this EULA clause seems to say that MS believes you need an XP license on any "terminal" that would access another XP remotely. The exceptions for their own apps are a bit suspicious... I suppose one would have to consult with a attorney. But questions about what is and isn't allowed will most likely be directed to a Microsoft sales rep. If the rep says XYZ licenses are needed, then that is the answer and the purchase decision will weigh the business needs for the software against the costs for those licenses. The process doesn't usually involve having a lawyer review the EULA, when the sales rep will give a definitive answer (at no hourly charge). A lawyer would usually not give a definitive answer anyway, since nobody's gone to court over it.
But a lawsuit is a moot point. It does not matter what would "hold up" in court, because it won't come to that. What matters is satisfying software acquisition policies that are written with a "cover your ass" slant, due to fear of a BSA audit... either bitter memory from a past "experience" or fear of what might happen based on stories from other organizations and scare-tactic literature from the BSA.
Did I mention that it doesn't matter one damn bit what might or might not hold up in court??
I really must admit that this post is based on about a dozen stories I've heard of BSA audits, 2 of them directly from people (that I know, and in told in person) who worked at the audited company shortly after they were nailed by the BSA.
It would be interesting to hear from folks in IT departments with cautious software acquisition policies about how they handle these unknowns in licensing requirements. (hint hint... if anyone even manages to read this among so many other posts).
They copy the entire article text and redistribute it from their own server, without ads and even the "branding" from the original site. That's a very different animal that slashdot, which just links to the original material at the original site.
Sure, their main page just briefly quotes, which is probably ok, but all the links point to local copies of the copyrighted news articles.
The purpose and character of their use isn't academic or educational, it's a news service just like the original sites they got the text from. The fact that it's hosted from a.edu domain doesn't change anything.
The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole is darn close to 100% of the copyrighted material.
The effect of the use upon the potential market for or the value of the copyrighted work is particularily bad... if people can easily get the news from this convienent summary site, why would they bother to visit the original site (and thus be an audience for their advertising, become "loyal" readers, etc).
Now the nature of the copyrighted work is informational news, and not really expressive (like songs, movies, etc), so at least they've sort-of got one of the four criteria for fair-use.
Re:How to Google Whack...
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Assumming about 3,000,000 words in the English Language.... So, I would say it is some time before that is exhausted.
All that's needed is one page with a list of those 3M words, and of course for google to index all of them as belonging to that one page.
Well, technically, two copies of that list would need to exist:)
Comment Reading Small Fraction Slashdot Audience
on
Slashdot IRC Forum
·
· Score: 3
Just wanted to point out this little bit from the IRC logs, at 16:31:
An accepted story submission is seen by 300,000 people.
A Score:-1 comment is seen by a few hundred.
A Score:5 comment, perhaps a few thousand. The value of comments is questionable.
Considering the percentage of readers who care.
Submissions, I could see a reward.
Comments, I have a harder time.
Just want to try and keep things in perspective... or at least keep some view of Taco and Hemo's perspective.
This isn't flamebait, but what is the point of doing all of this?
So now the spammers have a lot of worthless addresses.
I believe the point is/was to trick the spammers into wasting their time sending out emails to a server that they believed would relay them, but in fact was not.
This concept is a separate tactic from hosting pages filled with bogus addresses intended to "poison" the spammers lists.
Re:This still won't work!
on
Peek-a-Boo(ty)
·
· Score: 2
The obvious solution, and the one used for Gnutella and other peer-to-peer apps, is to publish a list of nodes (or at least one). But that won't work here -- because then the censors can use the same list to track down the nodes and block and/or disable them.
If a node list is published on many sites which also have desirable content, filtering becomes much more difficult. Not impossible, but consider publishing node lists inside discussion forums such as slashdot, yahoo groups, bravenet, ezboard, myforum, hostboard, etc.
Sure, a censor could search out the node lists, but a simple countermeasure would be to make sure the node lists are updated regularily with short-lived hosts. Another simple countermeasure would be to poison the list with hosts a censor would not wish to block. The software could maintain a local cache of hosts NOT running the proxy to avoid swamping normal sites with invalid proxy requests. Forged node-lists posted by censors could (maybe) be detected by checking signatures and some sort of "ring of trust" public key infrastructure, PGP style.
It's probably impossible to make censorship completely impossible... but it is possible to make it more difficult and expensive for censors. It sounds like a lot more is yet to be done. There are a lot of creative people out there and I'm sure some of them won't have any problem coming up with some really good ideas (I just made up these on the spot as I read your message... and there are certainly a lot of people who've put a lot more throught into this than I have).
.... and it looks like I might also be a "slashdot weenie". (karma cap, 327 comments over the last couple years, even trolled a couple times). I graduated (BSEE) in 1992 and have been working since, so I guess that's 10 years of experience programming... though much of what I do is hardware design.
FWIW, the only sourceforge-based project I participate in is SDCC (a C compiler for 8-bit microcontrollers), and my contributions to that project have been fairly minor. Most of my free software work in on my website.
Though not mentioned in the Register story, their purpose behind the survey was obviously to find ways to "harness" the open-source spirit within businesses, or something like that. Silly as it sounded, I filled the thing out anyway.
I'm having a hard time reconciling these two statements:
At the office, I *MUST* use LookOut! At home, I use Netscape
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety -B.F.
Perhaps giving up one's liberty of "a little temporary safety" is unacceptable, but a regular paycheck from a particular company is ?? Ok, maybe choice of mail client isn't really "essential" liberty... but what is?
Personally, I don't really agree with Ben's famous (politically motivated) quote of more than 200 years ago. I just found it interesting to see it attached as a sig to a message declaring the necessity to abandon choice (liberty) in ones computing environment.
What the net was "supposed to be"
on
Browsing Alone
·
· Score: 2
I've been ignoring the Katz postings for some time... did I remember him worse than he was or has is writing improved recently?
The fundamental assumption Katz seems to make about the net appears as:
... since the Net was supposed to be one of the most powerful devices ever for connecting with humans.
I'm wondering where the design goal of "most powerful device ever for connecting humans" became a design goal in evolution of the internet?
It probably wasn't anywhere in the early days of DARPA, where military dollars almost certainly were spent with the hope of someday having redundant (attack resistant) communication... or at least just keeping up with the Soviets.
It probably didn't come about under the National Science Foundation funding, where aside from continuing to fund "computer science", the 'net was a tool for collerabation between scientists. Admittedly, that's closer to what Katz believes the net was "supposed to be".
And finally, in the transition away from NSF funding to private funding, perhaps the 'net did change to a new fundamental goal.... but somehow I doubt that the telcos and other backbone providers, Network Solutions/ICANN, ISPs and the vast number of companies who now fund the internet infrastructure ever believed the net was "supposed to be" what Katz has in mind.
Sure, it would be nice and probably the world would be a better place if the internet did somehow empower the majority of the population to truely communicate with each other.
But wishful thinking doesn't make it so. And to believe it was "supposed to be" is simply
delusion.
Isn't the whole idea behind the net to share information *without* any boundaries?
.... wasn't the original idea behind the 'net to do the fundamental research to create redundantly connected switched packet networks that could automatically re-route traffic, originally funded by DARPA (military) with some vauge hope of a truely fault tollerant (attack resistant) communication network for guiding missles or something like that ??
Well, whatever DARPA's reasons were for funding the research, it probably wasn't because "information wants to be free". Perhaps some of the NSF funding later may have had more noble motivation, as did the mindset of students as Berkeley (who made BSD that ultimately drove much of the adoption of TCP/IP)...... but this came later. Certainly the original funding was from military spending.
This has nothing to do with spam, that's the problem. This ruling, should it stand, makes you subject to any state's law if you mail into the state, even if you didn't know you were mailing into the state
Don't forget the part where the statue can only be upheld...
... if it serves a legitimate local public interest and if the burden it imposes on interstate commerce is not excessive when viewed in light of its local benefits.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait until online buying settles down
Yes, if you wait long enough you will be able to know with certainty... but by that point, how useful will that knowledge be??
From studies already available, it's looking like the final conclusive model will be end up along the lines of Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda. If you believe these numbers, it looks like there may yet be time left to learn from the success of Amazon and others and apply it in other categories (hey, I oughta take that advise for my little site....) Doing it without massive debt would be the real trick!
I see this sort of talk all the time, about strategic maneuvers. I just want to throw my two cents in by stating the obvious (or what should be obvious)....
The large collective mass of unpaid (often part time) free-software/open-source coders don't "focus" on a particular project or goal. Perhaps some small groups might, but talk about the "open source community" somehow "should focus on" something or another for strategic reasons is just silly.
I don't know where you got this idea, but it certainly wasn't from section 3 of the GNU General Public License, specificly:
You have a point, so I wandered over to dictionary.com to look up "piracy".
To save you a mouse click, here is is:
Silly me.
I thought it was about:
Does anyone really believe that Gateway truely cares about fair use and first sale? I'm pretty sure they care a lot about selling new machines for a new purpose, and the bleak alternative of selling crippled machines that only encourage buys to hold onto their existing computers (which work perfectly fine as is).
I recall reading an article years ago from a lobbist regarding stragegy for removing the export restrictions on strong encryption. It wasn't long ago when it was nearly impossible to export more than 40 bit encryption.... which was a pain, but then it did bring us the weak DVD algorithms :)
Anyway, this guy's point was that "it puts American companies at an economic disadvantage" was a losing strategy. He made his point primarily by showing various actions our elected and non-elected officials took, which basically ammounted to putting pressure on the rest of the world to enact and enforce similar restrictions. After all, if the problem was off-shore companies had an advantage, the obvious solution (to those in power) was to level the playing field. Why compromise on other important objectives, like "national security" and "law enforcement" (whatever the DOJ/FBI happens to want) when the "goal" can be accomplished in some other creative way. Much as that sucks.... they really were doing their jobs, trying to make policies to balance all the needs, and the anti-encryption need was a level playing field among off-shore software companies.
The winning strategy that he proposed was "with e-commerce and internet fraud, we can't afford not to allow encryption". The premise was that there's a giant carrot dangling out there... e-commerce (remember, this was before the giant dot-com bust) and the pro-encyption arguement went along the lines of "we gotta have encryption to enable e-commerce and the new ecomony, yadda, yadda...".
Of course, I didn't really follow that whole battle closely, so I can't really say what a factor that lobbist and his e-commerce based strategy had. In fact, I can't even find the original article anymore.
Anyway, the point is to be careful what you wish for. At least once before, with the encryption export regulations, the "American companies are at a disadvantage" strategy was a dismal failure for several years.... and the natural conclusion lawmakers had was "well, we just need to export our restrictions, and we're the USA, so we can eventually pressure everyone else into them".
But don't just assume that because your game runs consistently at a rate higher than your monitor, you won't be dropping frames.
Isn't that what the vsync setting is for??? (to only render a new frame each time the monitor is refreshed, so you don't get "tearing"). It's turned on by default with the few cards I've installed, but they always need to turn it off to run these benchmarks.
I thought I'd chime in that the LCD looks a lot like the CrystalFontz 634 with PC Mounting Bracket, which sells for $92.20.
If this thing goes through, it'll probably mean the end of my little mp3 player project. I was planning to do quite a bit of reverse engineering on several car stereo decks to add support to emulate various CD changer control protocols (all open source, of course). If this crazy legistration goes through, I'll probably have to throw in the towel. I wonder if it'll even be legel to keep the web pages up with the schematic, source code, etc??
In fact, Apreche is a CS student at Rochester, and has this little website.
The very first link on the home page is News Archive, that leads to a non-existant page. The university's server generates a much-nicer-than-usual 404 error page, which includes among other info Apreche's email address, specifically "slr2777@osfmail.rit.edu" (which wouldn't have been very difficult to guess based on the user-style url for his site).
Also on each interior page is a mailto: link to "apreche@mail.rit.edu", preceeded with the text "Clik here to e-mail me".
Apreche, you really should fix that link... but when someone types http://www.rit.edu/~slr2777/somerandomename, they're gonna see your email address. At least it won't be due to a broken link on your own home page!
I'm not an idiot. I don't use the address book. I do use PGP. I remove myself from any and all non-spam newletters and announcements I don't want. And I don't put my e-mail in public places where spammers would look to pick it up. As far as I'm concerned if you get spammed, it's your fault.
Pure flamebait!
Certainly someone not an idiot would realize the potential that email has to enable persons previously unaquainted to communicate with one another, even if he personally never intended to participate in public discourse, offer assistance to others, or receive feedback.
But while spamming is still a problem, deal with it and don't be an idiot.
Indeed, slashdot trolling at its finest. Congratulations.
Would they sue you over it?
No, that's not the way the "system" works.
The BSA gets a tip from a disgruntled ex-employee. It does not even matter if the informant is lying, the BSA shows up and demands an audit. No due process is involved, the BSA presumes that every installed piece is software is a violation unless the original registration info is documented to their stringent satisfaction. There are plenty of stories about software being considered pirated despite an invoice showing that the PC shipped with the installed software from a reputable vendor, only because the little hologram was lost years ago. The audit process is expensive, even if the organization is fully compliant and every piece of software is properly licensed. Even if a good faith effort has been maintained for many years, inevitably there's some machines without documentation or a few machines where someone copied some software (rushing to meet a deadline and needed a program, damn thing wouldn't print unless some-such version re-installed, etc, etc).
So the BSA demands a settlement, which consists of a large payment to the BSA, and purchase of licenses for all the unlicensed (or simply undocumented, but was legally purchaed) software. The details about these payments are a bit fuzzy, since they're negotiated, and techie types who share stories about being audited aren't usually involved in that phase. Rumor has it that they're based on some fraction of the allowable penalty based on copyright law. It recently came to light that the (for-profit) BSA keeps all of that money... none of it goes to the software vendors. The vendors only get the sale of additional licenses, and another customer who creates a bunch of ultra-paranoid policies about acquisition of new software, so that their assed will be properly covered in the unlikely case of another audit.
And indeed, that sense of fear and the resulting policies among customers is quite valuable to software vendors. Organizations thereafter tend to "dot their I's and cross their T's" when it comes to software. They tend to review the EULAs and ask questions about what licenses they need to be fully compliant. They don't take chances. They know that it doesn't matter what would or would not hold up in court. What truely matters is what the outcome of a BSA audit will be, and what sort of position the BSA will be in the demand/extort a "settlement".
Now, in a brief effort to on-topic, this EULA clause seems to say that MS believes you need an XP license on any "terminal" that would access another XP remotely. The exceptions for their own apps are a bit suspicious... I suppose one would have to consult with a attorney. But questions about what is and isn't allowed will most likely be directed to a Microsoft sales rep. If the rep says XYZ licenses are needed, then that is the answer and the purchase decision will weigh the business needs for the software against the costs for those licenses. The process doesn't usually involve having a lawyer review the EULA, when the sales rep will give a definitive answer (at no hourly charge). A lawyer would usually not give a definitive answer anyway, since nobody's gone to court over it.
But a lawsuit is a moot point. It does not matter what would "hold up" in court, because it won't come to that. What matters is satisfying software acquisition policies that are written with a "cover your ass" slant, due to fear of a BSA audit... either bitter memory from a past "experience" or fear of what might happen based on stories from other organizations and scare-tactic literature from the BSA.
Did I mention that it doesn't matter one damn bit what might or might not hold up in court??
I really must admit that this post is based on about a dozen stories I've heard of BSA audits, 2 of them directly from people (that I know, and in told in person) who worked at the audited company shortly after they were nailed by the BSA.
It would be interesting to hear from folks in IT departments with cautious software acquisition policies about how they handle these unknowns in licensing requirements. (hint hint... if anyone even manages to read this among so many other posts).
They copy the entire article text and redistribute it from their own server, without ads and even the "branding" from the original site. That's a very different animal that slashdot, which just links to the original material at the original site.
.edu domain doesn't change anything.
Sure, their main page just briefly quotes, which is probably ok, but all the links point to local copies of the copyrighted news articles.
(In the USA) there are four criteria for judging what is a fair use of copyrighted material.
The purpose and character of their use isn't academic or educational, it's a news service just like the original sites they got the text from. The fact that it's hosted from a
The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole is darn close to 100% of the copyrighted material.
The effect of the use upon the potential market for or the value of the copyrighted work is particularily bad... if people can easily get the news from this convienent summary site, why would they bother to visit the original site (and thus be an audience for their advertising, become "loyal" readers, etc).
Now the nature of the copyrighted work is informational news, and not really expressive (like songs, movies, etc), so at least they've sort-of got one of the four criteria for fair-use.
All that's needed is one page with a list of those 3M words, and of course for google to index all of them as belonging to that one page.
Well, technically, two copies of that list would need to exist :)
Just want to try and keep things in perspective... or at least keep some view of Taco and Hemo's perspective.
With 0.9.7's ability to shut off the truely annoying javascript features and disable animation, Junkbuster hasn't been quite as essential.
Still, I'm going to update my Junkbuster tonight. Thanks for the tip. I really appreciate it.
At least in case of IE, all I have to clean out are the favorites it creates, in Media and Links. Not that bad.
Don't forget to
So now the spammers have a lot of worthless addresses. I believe the point is/was to trick the spammers into wasting their time sending out emails to a server that they believed would relay them, but in fact was not.
This concept is a separate tactic from hosting pages filled with bogus addresses intended to "poison" the spammers lists.
If a node list is published on many sites which also have desirable content, filtering becomes much more difficult. Not impossible, but consider publishing node lists inside discussion forums such as slashdot, yahoo groups, bravenet, ezboard, myforum, hostboard, etc.
Sure, a censor could search out the node lists, but a simple countermeasure would be to make sure the node lists are updated regularily with short-lived hosts. Another simple countermeasure would be to poison the list with hosts a censor would not wish to block. The software could maintain a local cache of hosts NOT running the proxy to avoid swamping normal sites with invalid proxy requests. Forged node-lists posted by censors could (maybe) be detected by checking signatures and some sort of "ring of trust" public key infrastructure, PGP style.
It's probably impossible to make censorship completely impossible... but it is possible to make it more difficult and expensive for censors. It sounds like a lot more is yet to be done. There are a lot of creative people out there and I'm sure some of them won't have any problem coming up with some really good ideas (I just made up these on the spot as I read your message... and there are certainly a lot of people who've put a lot more throught into this than I have).
FWIW, the only sourceforge-based project I participate in is SDCC (a C compiler for 8-bit microcontrollers), and my contributions to that project have been fairly minor. Most of my free software work in on my website.
Though not mentioned in the Register story, their purpose behind the survey was obviously to find ways to "harness" the open-source spirit within businesses, or something like that. Silly as it sounded, I filled the thing out anyway.
- At the office, I *MUST* use LookOut! At home, I use Netscape
- They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety -B.F.
Perhaps giving up one's liberty of "a little temporary safety" is unacceptable, but a regular paycheck from a particular company is ?? Ok, maybe choice of mail client isn't really "essential" liberty... but what is?Personally, I don't really agree with Ben's famous (politically motivated) quote of more than 200 years ago. I just found it interesting to see it attached as a sig to a message declaring the necessity to abandon choice (liberty) in ones computing environment.
The fundamental assumption Katz seems to make about the net appears as:
I'm wondering where the design goal of "most powerful device ever for connecting humans" became a design goal in evolution of the internet?
It probably wasn't anywhere in the early days of DARPA, where military dollars almost certainly were spent with the hope of someday having redundant (attack resistant) communication... or at least just keeping up with the Soviets.
It probably didn't come about under the National Science Foundation funding, where aside from continuing to fund "computer science", the 'net was a tool for collerabation between scientists. Admittedly, that's closer to what Katz believes the net was "supposed to be".
And finally, in the transition away from NSF funding to private funding, perhaps the 'net did change to a new fundamental goal.... but somehow I doubt that the telcos and other backbone providers, Network Solutions/ICANN, ISPs and the vast number of companies who now fund the internet infrastructure ever believed the net was "supposed to be" what Katz has in mind.
Sure, it would be nice and probably the world would be a better place if the internet did somehow empower the majority of the population to truely communicate with each other.
But wishful thinking doesn't make it so. And to believe it was "supposed to be" is simply delusion.
Well, whatever DARPA's reasons were for funding the research, it probably wasn't because "information wants to be free". Perhaps some of the NSF funding later may have had more noble motivation, as did the mindset of students as Berkeley (who made BSD that ultimately drove much of the adoption of TCP/IP)...... but this came later. Certainly the original funding was from military spending.
Don't forget the part where the statue can only be upheld...