Since the Internet has failed to realize its goal of making it possible for the little guy to be on an even playing field with the large companies, I would say that it's par for the course that the rich people will take over.
The promise of open standards and democratic information have been destroyed with the enthusiastic participation of the very people who told us open standards were the way forward. E-mail has been abandoned for Twitter. The web has been abandoned for Facebook and the PC has been abandoned for the iPhone. And you love it.
This all happened after the U.S. high tech industry was strangled and dumped in a drainage ditch naked in 2000 and the space program was raped and left for dead somewhere in northern Asia.
It's too late to cry about it now. You got exactly what you wanted, and every step of the way when people pointed out we were on the wrong path you shouted them down with your smartass memes and your neckbearded atheist-habit self-assurance you are the smartest people in the world.
In ten years the Internet will be destroyed completely, and since there is nobody left under the age of 50 with an attention span longer than ten seconds the people who lose it won't have any idea what the hell happened.
And it will be your fault.
You had me until "... athiest". What the fuck does athiesm have to do with it?
Sadly not; at best you can only exclude yourself from certain demographics.
I've come to the conclusion that the best way (as an individual) to handle this sort of thing is to create personas for different contexts. You'll need fake ids, but you won't be using them for anything technically illegal (no fraud, no underage drinking). You just show them to people/systems that want the info to track you - like loyalty cards (that you then only use with cash).
That way you end up with a handful of distinct personas that all have data trails but only have data trails in specific contexts so that cross-referencing is impossible.
I agree somewhat however you might want to check on the legality of this in some jurisdictions.
If you're wanting to simply edit text there are plenty of simple text editors out there that are more than up to the task and less crash prone than word.
If you want it to look good or are archving and indexing large numbers of documents then you need a DTP or document markup system: eg. Interleaf, latex (steep learning curve and other issues aside), proprietary solutions from companies such as Canon.
It's not until you have to assemble a set of conference papers for example when you see word and latex documents side-by-side do you realise how truly horrible word's output looks.
In spite of the fact that the end result tends to look better both markup and document databases emphasise document structure and content vs the look.
So in short; if it's short or ephemeral use a text editor, if it's long or has to be kept for a long time use something designed for the task, not word.
On the other hand, an institution that is regularly criticized by folks like Dr. Ben Goldacre of http://www.badscience.net/ and Prof. Mark Liberman of Language Log for the incredibly poor quality of their science reporting may not be the source you really want to trust on this or any other topic.
Granted, few general-purpose new sources are particularly good when it comes to their coverage of science, but the BBC does have a bit of a reputation for being above average--a reputation which seems to be rather undeserved, as far as I can tell.
Science journalism from the news desk isn't so hot I would I agree however I beg to differ with your summation - when you look at their output when taken as a whole (non just science stories) I would rate them well above the average. The picture is similar here in Australia with the ABC. Though I would say that in both instances standards have fallen somewhat in the last 20 years they are still head and shoulders above the for-profit newagencies.
Whilst I appreciate the concern many have with a government funded mouthpiece I think that the proof is is the pudding and (in the english speaking world at least) publicly funded broadcasters consistently do a better job than thier for-profit peers because unfortunately when it comes to informing the public the profit motive seems only able to provide a race to the bottom.
why is the bbc first to report on this? It happens in CA, and we get scooped? wtf??
Given that a lot of formerly serious news agencies have resorted to the tabloid approach for everything it shouldn't be overly surprising that an institution that isn't beholden to market forces and has a long history of effective (and independant) investigative journalism would be first.
In other words perhaps having a "stiff upper lip" isn't such a bad thing after all.
Probably because stuff that matters to nerds is often (not always) related to stuff you mostly find in the richest 20% of the world (population). Probably only 30% of that 20%, in reality.
If only 20% of slashdotters RTFA and approximately 30,000 RTFA (seems to be the common stats recently), that means there are approximately 150,000 active slashdotters, which easily fits within 6% of the world's population.
Oh, and "first world" ceased meaning anything useful when the cold war ended. You want "industrialized nation".
not sure what you're trying to say here, I'm sure you didn't mean that 150,000 is 6% of 7 billion.
Never forget that. It's the JEWS who are destroying your country - who runs your media, your Congress, who tells you what the 'truth' is every day on their T.V. stations, and through their (crappy) films? The JEW.
So Rupert Murdoch is a Jew eh?
The next thing you'll be telling us all is that Osama Bin-Laden was a Jew too.
I got a call from a guy from The Alien Touch with the same scam, in fact it sounded exactly the guy in the video, so I wouldn't be surprised if it weren't the same dude. I was only able to keep him on the phone for about 4.5 minutes when I finally told him I run Linux. He asked me "Then why the f* are you wasting my time?!?!" To which I replied, "Because you're a f*ing scam artist scumbag!" Then he hung up.
The sad thing is that they have a Facebook page with 56 followers (victims, probably).
Telling them you run Linux is lame... we should all follow Tom Mabe's lead.
Do they even comprehend the amount of data this will be? This is just one step away from recording all telephone calls as well. 1984, we didn't learn anything.
Oh I think "we" did... "we" being our overlords - they read 1984 as a howto guide.
I don't know what's better, a government that determines and redefines your rights at their leisure or a government that defines your rights, and then passes secret and not-so-secret laws that supersede and suspend your rights for the government's convenience.
The net effect is equivalent; therefore, I prefer the former because it is less hypocritical.
As an American I've become so cynical and frustrated by my government's deliberate evisceration of the Constitution that I wish we didn't have one. The countries of the former British Empire seem to get by with unwritten constitutions. They don't have to pretend they are adhering to. a written Constitutiom while violating it egregiously, which is so much more honest.
America's slippery slope really accelerated once the Progressives seized power in the early 20th century. Wickard v. Filburn was farcical, but it laid the foundation for the insanity of the Raich decision and later upholding Obamacare.
Basically, because of twisted, specious legal sophistry, simply being alive is tantamount to interstate commerce (or the lack interstate commerce, which is *also* interstate commerce thanks to Wickard v. Filburn), and therefore is the complete jurisdiction of the federal government. Because, you know, that's what the Founders meant when they proposed the Constitution.
I kinda get what you meant except manyformerBritishcolonieshavewrittenconstitutions. Ironically it is Britian itself that is notable in not having a single document as a written constitution (although there may be other examples).
Combined voluntary will of the people is a force of nature, it's quite physical as well. It's why you have more leisure time, why you, personally, don't have to fish or hunt or farm to eat today, you can call it the force of self-interest.
Isn't that missing the entire point? Or is the do-not-track specification one of those Orwellian-titled things whereby the net effect is exactly the opposite of the name?
No it's just that advertisers are a bunch of assholes who think that free speech = unfettered right to harass everyone even when they're sleeping, eating, screwing, working or taking a dump.
It's about time people woke up and realised that there should be limits to what _both_ companies and governments aught to be able to do.
Lets take your argument to its logical conclusion - somewhere inside of Google's secret evil HQ in the base of a volcano, Sergei and Larry are laughing maniacally, "Now we can login as everyone because we will know their passwords! MWAHAHAHA!" as they stroke their evil kittens with eyepatches.
Or realistically, that google would login as people and impersonate their accounts.
You can have my tinfoil hat, you need it more than me.
So M$ is patenting being a dick? Well, they do have Balmer to prove their program theory works...
They are patenting a mechanism that uses AI to detect when you are behaving like a dick. Hook this thing up to a electric shocker built into to a collar fitted around every employee's neck and the possibilities are endless. Every time you criticize management, badmouth some oligarch, gaze too long in the general direction of a female coworker's posterior or simply engage in a combination of seemingly unrelated behaviors that trigger a match in this gizmo and tzzzzzzzzzt.........
For some reason it's common in the US to consider desktop support, networking, and administration as "IT". Odd, as here in AU everything tech related is "IT".
I'm also in AU and whilst it's true that the industry here seems to use "IT" as an umbrella term that doesn't mean that it is easy to move between Development roles and Supoort/Admin roles.
Although I personally think that Developers aught to be required to have some support experience I would have to say that the fears of the article's author are well founded... once you have one type of role on your CV management _will_ pigeonhole you.... my advice would be if you really desire to work in development then under no circumstances take a support/admin role... it's like a black-hole... nothing can escape.
Actually, something rather like homeopathy's ridiculous dilution does work for some food allergies. You start by taking a tiny bit of whatever it is you're allergic to. Then you take a tiny bit more. It's called oral immunotherapy.
Oral Immunotherapy and Homeopathy are nothing alike.
Why? Because as you say the former involves taking a "tiny bit" of something that you are allergic to and slowly increasing the amount and thus "training" your immune system.
Homeopathy on the other hand requires you to dilute the substance to such a degree that all is left is solvent (water, alcohol, etc.). There is none of the original material that is being dissolved left!
In other words. Your "tiny bit" of food is an absolutely massive amount in comparison to no food at all and even if the homeopath decides to not dilute to the point to which they claim to do a "tiny bit" of food will probably amount to a few grams vs the femtograms left over after a series of dilutions.
A transparent proxy shouldn't involve DNS lookups as your local machine would be resolving the hostname and sending traffic to the IP address. A non-transparent proxy (i.e. one using the HTTP proxy protocol) does do DNS lookups on the proxy server.
Of course, a transparent proxy could be doing reverse DNS lookups, but since it's impossible to determine what site you're intending to visit (machines may have multiple names) filtering based on that would potentially produce many false positives.
I think it's more likely that the Telstra DNS servers serving double duty as transparent proxies (assuming they have them) which would result in the same symptoms as you're describing.
Doh! I'd never considered the possibility that the proxy software was on the same box/boxes as the DNS server. My understanding was that a "transparent proxy" was one that didn't require the end-user to explicitly configure its use (ie. in the browser settings) and that it operated without the consent or knowledge of the machine on which the browser was running. Obviously your definition differs from mine so the emphasis of my original post has been lost.
I guess the point of my original post was to outline that Telstra have most likely had the parts in place for filtering for a long time now (the timeline for the above events predates even the first hint of any filtering legislation) and I'm guessing that they've probably been filtering or at least monitoring what and where people have been surfing for years and that nobody has been making a fuss until relatively recently.
It's not blindingly obvious; but try checking the forums on opendns.org as they've been working on this problem since at least 2008, if not earlier (Aus isn't the first nation to try a transparent proxy for dns). What I ended up doing involved using router features to push DNS from inside my network over a different port (one used for non-dns traffic, but that I don't use for anything) that isn't picked up by the proxy and having it go to an out of country device which would relay it to opendns on the normal port, and then relay the answer back to me on my stealth dns port. I'm sure SOMEONE has simplified this, though I lack the expertise to do it myself.
I think you've misread what I posted. Telstra aren't proxying DNS but I suspect that they are proxying HTTP since surfing fails when their DNS servers fall over but everything else keeps working fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the Internet has failed to realize its goal of making it possible for the little guy to be on an even playing field with the large companies, I would say that it's par for the course that the rich people will take over.
The promise of open standards and democratic information have been destroyed with the enthusiastic participation of the very people who told us open standards were the way forward. E-mail has been abandoned for Twitter. The web has been abandoned for Facebook and the PC has been abandoned for the iPhone. And you love it.
This all happened after the U.S. high tech industry was strangled and dumped in a drainage ditch naked in 2000 and the space program was raped and left for dead somewhere in northern Asia.
It's too late to cry about it now. You got exactly what you wanted, and every step of the way when people pointed out we were on the wrong path you shouted them down with your smartass memes and your neckbearded atheist-habit self-assurance you are the smartest people in the world.
In ten years the Internet will be destroyed completely, and since there is nobody left under the age of 50 with an attention span longer than ten seconds the people who lose it won't have any idea what the hell happened.
And it will be your fault.
You had me until "... athiest". What the fuck does athiesm have to do with it?
Sadly not; at best you can only exclude yourself from certain demographics.
I've come to the conclusion that the best way (as an individual) to handle this sort of thing is to create personas for different contexts. You'll need fake ids, but you won't be using them for anything technically illegal (no fraud, no underage drinking). You just show them to people/systems that want the info to track you - like loyalty cards (that you then only use with cash).
That way you end up with a handful of distinct personas that all have data trails but only have data trails in specific contexts so that cross-referencing is impossible.
I agree somewhat however you might want to check on the legality of this in some jurisdictions.
If you're wanting to simply edit text there are plenty of simple text editors out there that are more than up to the task and less crash prone than word.
If you want it to look good or are archving and indexing large numbers of documents then you need a DTP or document markup system: eg. Interleaf, latex (steep learning curve and other issues aside), proprietary solutions from companies such as Canon.
It's not until you have to assemble a set of conference papers for example when you see word and latex documents side-by-side do you realise how truly horrible word's output looks.
In spite of the fact that the end result tends to look better both markup and document databases emphasise document structure and content vs the look.
So in short; if it's short or ephemeral use a text editor, if it's long or has to be kept for a long time use something designed for the task, not word.
On the other hand, an institution that is regularly criticized by folks like Dr. Ben Goldacre of http://www.badscience.net/ and Prof. Mark Liberman of Language Log for the incredibly poor quality of their science reporting may not be the source you really want to trust on this or any other topic.
- Bad Science's BBC category
- Enhance Breast Size by 80%
- Parrot Telepathy at the BBC
- More Junk Science from the BBC
- It's Always Silly Season in the BBC Science Section
Granted, few general-purpose new sources are particularly good when it comes to their coverage of science, but the BBC does have a bit of a reputation for being above average--a reputation which seems to be rather undeserved, as far as I can tell.
Science journalism from the news desk isn't so hot I would I agree however I beg to differ with your summation - when you look at their output when taken as a whole (non just science stories) I would rate them well above the average. The picture is similar here in Australia with the ABC. Though I would say that in both instances standards have fallen somewhat in the last 20 years they are still head and shoulders above the for-profit newagencies.
Whilst I appreciate the concern many have with a government funded mouthpiece I think that the proof is is the pudding and (in the english speaking world at least) publicly funded broadcasters consistently do a better job than thier for-profit peers because unfortunately when it comes to informing the public the profit motive seems only able to provide a race to the bottom.
Weapons research always trickles down into practical applications.
Hard to believe anyone still falls for this nonsense - perhaps we should apply it to defense. Oh wait we already have... worked out well didn't it?
why is the bbc first to report on this? It happens in CA, and we get scooped? wtf??
Given that a lot of formerly serious news agencies have resorted to the tabloid approach for everything it shouldn't be overly surprising that an institution that isn't beholden to market forces and has a long history of effective (and independant) investigative journalism would be first.
In other words perhaps having a "stiff upper lip" isn't such a bad thing after all.
Probably because stuff that matters to nerds is often (not always) related to stuff you mostly find in the richest 20% of the world (population). Probably only 30% of that 20%, in reality.
If only 20% of slashdotters RTFA and approximately 30,000 RTFA (seems to be the common stats recently), that means there are approximately 150,000 active slashdotters, which easily fits within 6% of the world's population.
Oh, and "first world" ceased meaning anything useful when the cold war ended. You want "industrialized nation".
not sure what you're trying to say here, I'm sure you didn't mean that 150,000 is 6% of 7 billion.
Do you mind re-phrasing?
Never forget that. It's the JEWS who are destroying your country - who runs your media, your Congress, who tells you what the 'truth' is every day on their T.V. stations, and through their (crappy) films? The JEW.
So Rupert Murdoch is a Jew eh?
The next thing you'll be telling us all is that Osama Bin-Laden was a Jew too.
I got a call from a guy from The Alien Touch with the same scam, in fact it sounded exactly the guy in the video, so I wouldn't be surprised if it weren't the same dude. I was only able to keep him on the phone for about 4.5 minutes when I finally told him I run Linux. He asked me "Then why the f* are you wasting my time?!?!" To which I replied, "Because you're a f*ing scam artist scumbag!" Then he hung up.
The sad thing is that they have a Facebook page with 56 followers (victims, probably).
Telling them you run Linux is lame... we should all follow Tom Mabe's lead.
Do they even comprehend the amount of data this will be?
This is just one step away from recording all telephone calls as well.
1984, we didn't learn anything.
Oh I think "we" did... "we" being our overlords - they read 1984 as a howto guide.
Touche. I remembered the Constitution of Canada after I posted and realized my generalization was in error. Thanks for educating me.
Any time ;)
I don't know what's better, a government that determines and redefines your rights at their leisure or a government that defines your rights, and then passes secret and not-so-secret laws that supersede and suspend your rights for the government's convenience.
The net effect is equivalent; therefore, I prefer the former because it is less hypocritical.
As an American I've become so cynical and frustrated by my government's deliberate evisceration of the Constitution that I wish we didn't have one. The countries of the former British Empire seem to get by with unwritten constitutions. They don't have to pretend they are adhering to. a written Constitutiom while violating it egregiously, which is so much more honest.
America's slippery slope really accelerated once the Progressives seized power in the early 20th century. Wickard v. Filburn was farcical, but it laid the foundation for the insanity of the Raich decision and later upholding Obamacare.
Basically, because of twisted, specious legal sophistry, simply being alive is tantamount to interstate commerce (or the lack interstate commerce, which is *also* interstate commerce thanks to Wickard v. Filburn), and therefore is the complete jurisdiction of the federal government. Because, you know, that's what the Founders meant when they proposed the Constitution.
I kinda get what you meant except many former British colonies have written constitutions. Ironically it is Britian itself that is notable in not having a single document as a written constitution (although there may be other examples).
Oh, so you are a subsistence farmer?
This is not wikipedia, citation is not required. It is called 'thinking', but you can cite me if you like.
well at least I don't subsist on a exclusive diet of Ayn Rand
Combined voluntary will of the people is a force of nature, it's quite physical as well. It's why you have more leisure time, why you, personally, don't have to fish or hunt or farm to eat today, you can call it the force of self-interest.
Citation still required.
...market forces are unstoppable, they are forces of nature...
Gravity, strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic... nope no market in there... citation required.
Isn't that missing the entire point? Or is the do-not-track specification one of those Orwellian-titled things whereby the net effect is exactly the opposite of the name?
No it's just that advertisers are a bunch of assholes who think that free speech = unfettered right to harass everyone even when they're sleeping, eating, screwing, working or taking a dump.
It's about time people woke up and realised that there should be limits to what _both_ companies and governments aught to be able to do.
Assume you want the entire police force of some place - say, New South Wales - to be too busy and way less effective.
What would you do?
Elect Barry O'Farrell as Premier.
I just can't decide if I should mod this Informative, Insightful or Funny... all 3 apply equally.
Microsoft: where "five nines" means 9.9999%.
Nah, I think it was more like this:
Gates to Balmer: our Enterprise products need to have 5x9 uptime.
Balmer: ok Boss.
Balmer to VP of Engineering: Bill wants all our products to only work between 5pm and 9am. ...
Lets take your argument to its logical conclusion - somewhere inside of Google's secret evil HQ in the base of a volcano, Sergei and Larry are laughing maniacally, "Now we can login as everyone because we will know their passwords! MWAHAHAHA!" as they stroke their evil kittens with eyepatches.
Or realistically, that google would login as people and impersonate their accounts.
You can have my tinfoil hat, you need it more than me.
meow... that eye patch tickles ya know
So M$ is patenting being a dick? Well, they do have Balmer to prove their program theory works...
They are patenting a mechanism that uses AI to detect when you are behaving like a dick. Hook this thing up to a electric shocker built into to a collar fitted around every employee's neck and the possibilities are endless. Every time you criticize management, badmouth some oligarch, gaze too long in the general direction of a female coworker's posterior or simply engage in a combination of seemingly unrelated behaviors that trigger a match in this gizmo and tzzzzzzzzzt.........
Microsoft already did this years ago...
For some reason it's common in the US to consider desktop support, networking, and administration as "IT". Odd, as here in AU everything tech related is "IT".
I'm also in AU and whilst it's true that the industry here seems to use "IT" as an umbrella term that doesn't mean that it is easy to move between Development roles and Supoort/Admin roles.
Although I personally think that Developers aught to be required to have some support experience I would have to say that the fears of the article's author are well founded... once you have one type of role on your CV management _will_ pigeonhole you.... my advice would be if you really desire to work in development then under no circumstances take a support/admin role... it's like a black-hole... nothing can escape.
Apple already tried this once... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300
Actually, something rather like homeopathy's ridiculous dilution does work for some food allergies. You start by taking a tiny bit of whatever it is you're allergic to. Then you take a tiny bit more. It's called oral immunotherapy.
Oral Immunotherapy and Homeopathy are nothing alike.
Why? Because as you say the former involves taking a "tiny bit" of something that you are allergic to and slowly increasing the amount and thus "training" your immune system.
Homeopathy on the other hand requires you to dilute the substance to such a degree that all is left is solvent (water, alcohol, etc.). There is none of the original material that is being dissolved left!
In other words. Your "tiny bit" of food is an absolutely massive amount in comparison to no food at all and even if the homeopath decides to not dilute to the point to which they claim to do a "tiny bit" of food will probably amount to a few grams vs the femtograms left over after a series of dilutions.
A transparent proxy shouldn't involve DNS lookups as your local machine would be resolving the hostname and sending traffic to the IP address. A non-transparent proxy (i.e. one using the HTTP proxy protocol) does do DNS lookups on the proxy server.
Of course, a transparent proxy could be doing reverse DNS lookups, but since it's impossible to determine what site you're intending to visit (machines may have multiple names) filtering based on that would potentially produce many false positives.
I think it's more likely that the Telstra DNS servers serving double duty as transparent proxies (assuming they have them) which would result in the same symptoms as you're describing.
Doh! I'd never considered the possibility that the proxy software was on the same box/boxes as the DNS server. My understanding was that a "transparent proxy" was one that didn't require the end-user to explicitly configure its use (ie. in the browser settings) and that it operated without the consent or knowledge of the machine on which the browser was running. Obviously your definition differs from mine so the emphasis of my original post has been lost.
I guess the point of my original post was to outline that Telstra have most likely had the parts in place for filtering for a long time now (the timeline for the above events predates even the first hint of any filtering legislation) and I'm guessing that they've probably been filtering or at least monitoring what and where people have been surfing for years and that nobody has been making a fuss until relatively recently.
It's not blindingly obvious; but try checking the forums on opendns.org as they've been working on this problem since at least 2008, if not earlier (Aus isn't the first nation to try a transparent proxy for dns).
What I ended up doing involved using router features to push DNS from inside my network over a different port (one used for non-dns traffic, but that I don't use for anything) that isn't picked up by the proxy and having it go to an out of country device which would relay it to opendns on the normal port, and then relay the answer back to me on my stealth dns port.
I'm sure SOMEONE has simplified this, though I lack the expertise to do it myself.
I think you've misread what I posted. Telstra aren't proxying DNS but I suspect that they are proxying HTTP since surfing fails when their DNS servers fall over but everything else keeps working fine.