You need to check your head, because you don't even notice the subtle Microsoftening going on. Of course docs for various languages and libraries are on the associated developers' sites; this is normal. It won't kill you to click on a link to go to the SDL web site, any more than it hurts to click on links throughout MSDN. It's only on a platform where one company requires such strict control of all development that you have everything rolled up into one documentation conglomeration. You're thinking that that's the way it's supposed to be, but Microsoft is the aberration, not the norm. In the real world where one organization hasn't swallowed up everything, you actually can get information from more than one place at a time.
AFAICT, MSDN is ~ok if you're trying to do things "the Microsoft Way", and if I were an MCSE from the beginning I imagine it would work just fine. But if you already know how to program and you already know what you want to do, it's sometimes very difficult to beat MSDN and Microsoft's development tools into letting you do it. Those are the cases where you really need the documentation to stand out, and those are the situations where MSDN falls down. With open source, often your complex question will be answered by just searching for a mailing list or newsgroup post, rarely you might actually have to post a question yourself, and in the end you can always look through the source to see what's going on.
The same reason that I wanted DeCSS.zip, even though I don't own a DVD drive. To fight the power, if only in a little way, and make sure that this genie never gets put back into the bottle.
The funny thing is, even after he said he was being ironic (I would have called it sarcasm instead, but either way), some moderator didn't read that part and just blindly "-1, Troll"ed it. I didn't think it was a scintillatingly brilliant comment, but even I can recognize satire when I see it.
I know you'll hate me for this, but IE IS the best browser. It'S a very fast and spiffy piece of software (Yes, ok,
it's insecure).
If we just had it under Linux it would definitely dominate everything.
Not among those of us who consider security to be the primary need, and all the eye candy to be secondary. Nice to hear you're willing to settle for second-best for the rest of us just to make your job a little easier; hope your boss is reading:)
It's just too damn bad that the real trolls never get moderated as such...
Yeah, I guess you'd have to find an ISP which didn't, which was a lot more possible a few years back. Thank you, vast ISP monopolies...
Here's a great Ask Slashdot question, then: is it still profitable to run a small ISP that caters to the technical user, by providing complete connectivity, optional spam filtering, maybe some hosting, etc.? And, is it possible to run that ISP in such a manner that you won't get bought out by one of the big national ISPs that don't have all the nice perks?
That makes sense and it wouldn't surprise me if that were the case universally; I threw out the idea of configuring it per-account off of the top of my head. I could see how doing such a calculation per-user would probably chew up as many resources as just handling all of the spam in the first spot.
OK, here's a good ISP idea: just add a header to the mail saying that the ISP tagged the email as being MAPS-blacklisted. X-ISP-MAPS-Found, or something like that. Then the user could very easily configure their client to drop mail with that header, or not.
...lack of notification that your ISP uses MAPS is the problem. Any ISP that uses MAPS without saying so should be sued for fraud; since they're not providing the complete connectivity that they advertise. ISPs should just put their MAPS usage in their TOS, or even (if possible) allow the user to choose MAPS or not for their email accounts. Some ISPs could advertise that they use MAPS and are spam-safe; others could advertise that they don't use MAPS and are freedom-enabled (or something like that).
As long as there is sufficient notification and user choice, then there's nothing wrong with MAPS. It's only when their somewhat strong-arm tactics are combined with ISP coercion that the user really has a problem.
As most people here would agree, their business practices range from sucking to disasterous.
On the contrary, most people agree that their business practices have been among the best in the world ever, right up there with Standard Oil and the other great monopolies of yore. As long as they can skate by without a breakup or a significant penalty from the government, they'll continue to have those world-beating business practices.
Now, if you're talking about their ethical practices or legal standing before the law, then I think you've got a point. But you've got to hand it to Microsoft-the-business: all the business school students are being told to study and try to repeat Microsoft's business success.
...ethereal, who remembers a SW engineering class where we were supposed to emulate Microsoft's coding practices. Apparently our prof thought they made their money the honest way:)
We'll solve this problem the slashdot way: repost the stories as they happen, and bitch about how the editors never read the site, this is old news, it's a repeat, etc., etc.
In fact, both egotistical and lame (although what can you expect for a low-number Slashdot
user.
Wow, I never thought I'd see the day when a high-uid user displays prejudice against a low-uid user. All along we've been thinking that it was you latecomers who just showed up to troll, Mr. #452960. "What can you expect for a post-200000 uid?" I've often thought (no offense to the many sterling posters out there > 200000.
Hmmm, maybe/. is destined to go away at user #500000, and all of the sudden the users are getting more old-school and elitist as we approach that vanishing point? Kind of like the big crunch that follows the big bang - it's an expansionary model of/.:)
MAC Customers: MSN is working on a MAC solution for your Internet access needs. Until that time, there will
not be any changes to your Qwest.net Internet Access service.
So: it works just fine now, but we're busy fixing it the Microsoft Way (c) anyway. How do people get so that they think this way, heavy drug usage?
It is true that in some cases there are legal principles governing these interactions, although in most of the cases you mentioned I imagine the deciding factor is the legal and financial firepower brought into play by the victim, rather than the actual point of law. In some cases these are entirely new areas of law - requests for a public server to do something do not immediately become "trespass", any more than unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material are automatically "piracy". IMHO we will see the legal system adjust to the new way of the world.
Even if it doesn't, though, my point is that legal principles are insufficient to truly govern access to your property on the Internet, just like laws against trespassing and theft will not always protect your car if you leave it unlocked all the time, and especially if you left it unlocked in a part of the world which was instantly accessible from all other parts of the world. McDonald's doesn't have to have a computerized straw dispenser; they have a minimum-wage drone there to tell mischief-makers to knock it off. That is what eBay, Yahoo, et al. need, and what they are lacking so far - a way to protect their property against the many people on the 'net who do act in lawless and discourteous ways, either because they are careless, ignorant, malicious, or believe themselves (sometimes with good reason) to be beyond the reach of the law. Some of those actions are blockable with current technology, but others will definitely need some improvements in the state of the art before they can be prevented.
Why not just rely on the law instead? You can have laws all you want, but the 'net is still the Wild West and (unlike the original Wild West) it can never be completely fenced in and tamed. There will always be countries with more liberal policies on cybercrimes from which such misuses will come. Therefore, relying only on the law will never protect eBay, Yahoo, or anyone else. One might say that it would be juvenile to assert otherwise.
I'm just following the thought to its logical conclusion: if the law is no protection, then it's really not accomplishing anything to have that particular law. It's an overhead on society to attempt and fail to enforce it, and it leads to a false sense of security (which you seem to share). Don't be fooled - in this case, the law will not really protect you. Maybe someday it will be able to, but not yet.
No, it does not. It does not represent a decision by the computer's owner as to whether you had a right to request the file and
whether they should supply it to you. If I walked up to your computer and started deleting files, would the fact that your
computer deleted the files mean that I had your permission to do so? That's what you are arguing: That the computer has power
of attorney for its owner.
If I did that in your office, then I would be trespassing. If you left your computer set up on a busy city street, with a big red "Delete" button to push, then it would appear to me and an average passerby that file deletion was OK with you. Thus also with files on servers on the 'net. Your machine does not have power of attorney, but if you set up an automatic file dispenser, you can't complain if people take files off of it, any more than you could complain if people took all the gumballs out of a free gumball machine that you set up. Of course, the eBay example is a little different than the gumball or "Delete" analogies, because eBay didn't run out of files, although they may have been marginally lower on server capacity and bandwidth at the time.
(Your honor, I had McDonalds' permission to take 2,372 straws because their machine gave me a straw
each time I pushed the button...)?
Ah, but that's exactly my point - one straw at a time is OK, it's the overall pattern of straw usage that McD's should worry about. They would want to either alter their straw dispensers, or more likely just toss you out if you started doing that. The dispensers themselves aren't labeled "only take what you need" - how many times have you seen people take twice as many napkins or packets of ketchup than they need?
A computer responding to a file transfer
request is not equivalent to the company giving you permission to transfer the file.
If the company didn't want their machine to post the files, why didn't they just tell it not to? If they set up an automatic process that affects their property and is freely available to the public, why shouldn't they be liable for what happens to it?
I think of a server as sort of a secretary. If you told your secretary to accept file submissions and store them on a global bulletin board, and she didn't know any better than to take pr0n too, then the failure is really in your instructions. What is needed is a more sophisticated way to describe to a web server what access patterns are acceptable, just like you would tell your secretary to only accept files with a legitimate business purpose. You can continue to curse the pranksters that keep submitting polaroids of women with Shetland ponies, but in the end you can't track them all down. You have to fix the problem at the source.
Now you are arguing about the practicality of enforcing a policy rather than the legalities. The most effective way to get people
to follow your rules is to identify someone who violated them, sue them for civil damages, and make an example of them.
You haven't been reading the news much, have you? MP3 trading continues, DeCSS can be had for a 2-second Google search, software piracy flourishes - plenty of examples haven't really helped those issues. These are situations where you can't police everybody in the world at once, if not due to the unending variety of local law, then due to the sheer expense that would be required to do so. The only way to solve an Internet-scale problem is with a distributed technological solution.
Shutting down illicit ftp sites through legal means is, well, legal. Shutting them down via vigilante justice is a crime, hopefully a federal felony computer crime. Illegal actions by some "pirates" does not justify illegal action by the harmed party.
On the plus side, if the RIAA manages to return us to the Law of the Old West on the 'net, then it's open season on spam havens:)
Granting an HTTP request constitutes permission for you to download the file you asked for. Since each image scanned is a separate request and response, eBay individually authorized each and every request. It is not permission to do anything with their server, but it is permission for that one file. If Yahoo posts porn for you on their web site, then they didn't even have to give you permission since they already went ahead and did it. Don't you see - it's silly to say that you didn't give permission to do something that you yourself (or your proxy) already did. You are the sole arbiter of what is permissible for you; if you act in ways which are opposite to your stated permissions because someone asked you to, then you really only have yourself to blame.
Should eBay be able to defend themselves against this? Sure - by an appropriate technical means, like limiting traffic to a particular IP address, or some other way to aggregate the individual permissible accesses and realize that the overall access pattern is not permissible. I'm just saying that judging on the basis of "intended use" is not a helpful basis for the decision, and it doesn't help anyway since people can still go and spider eBay without any consequences. Just figure out the technology to lock your property down like you want, rather than relying on a crowd of mostly-anonymous, undisciplinable Internet users to follow your rules.
But, eBay did grant permission for the download. Somebody's client said "GET http://www.ebay.com/image/something", and eBay said "OK, here it is, catch!". If they didn't want to spend the bandwidth to send it to you, they shouldn't have done so. At no point did eBay not have a choice.
You may think I'm being needlessly literal here (and in a sense I am), but really this points out the fact that HTTP isn't a suitable protocol to use if you want to shape and/or limit your traffic in certain non-basic ways like eBay does. Not that I'm in favor of traffic limitations, though - anyone who can type a/. comment in less than 20 seconds will agree with me there:)
Re:A great example of open-source at work.
on
Five Years of KDE
·
· Score: 1
Use kpackage for your mouse-clicking needs. What's amazing is that it's been available for 3 years and people still don't know about it. I mean, you don't go around telling people that Linux has no graphics, doesn't run on the latest processors, and doesn't support USB, do you?
And don't discount that "flimsy click-through contract" either; your click-through constitutes a
legally binding signature, and you can be held liable if you break anything in that contract, even if you didn't
bother to read it.
Source, please? I don't remember that click-throughs have been enshrined into law just yet.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to check your head, because you don't even notice the subtle Microsoftening going on. Of course docs for various languages and libraries are on the associated developers' sites; this is normal. It won't kill you to click on a link to go to the SDL web site, any more than it hurts to click on links throughout MSDN. It's only on a platform where one company requires such strict control of all development that you have everything rolled up into one documentation conglomeration. You're thinking that that's the way it's supposed to be, but Microsoft is the aberration, not the norm. In the real world where one organization hasn't swallowed up everything, you actually can get information from more than one place at a time.
AFAICT, MSDN is ~ok if you're trying to do things "the Microsoft Way", and if I were an MCSE from the beginning I imagine it would work just fine. But if you already know how to program and you already know what you want to do, it's sometimes very difficult to beat MSDN and Microsoft's development tools into letting you do it. Those are the cases where you really need the documentation to stand out, and those are the situations where MSDN falls down. With open source, often your complex question will be answered by just searching for a mailing list or newsgroup post, rarely you might actually have to post a question yourself, and in the end you can always look through the source to see what's going on.
http://www.gtk.org/faq/
http://www.gtk.org/tutorial/
http://www.gtk.org/api/
All of which are referenced in the README that comes with gtk+. You're welcome.
The same reason that I wanted DeCSS.zip, even though I don't own a DVD drive. To fight the power, if only in a little way, and make sure that this genie never gets put back into the bottle.
The funny thing is, even after he said he was being ironic (I would have called it sarcasm instead, but either way), some moderator didn't read that part and just blindly "-1, Troll"ed it. I didn't think it was a scintillatingly brilliant comment, but even I can recognize satire when I see it.
Not among those of us who consider security to be the primary need, and all the eye candy to be secondary. Nice to hear you're willing to settle for second-best for the rest of us just to make your job a little easier; hope your boss is reading :)
It's just too damn bad that the real trolls never get moderated as such...
Yeah, I guess you'd have to find an ISP which didn't, which was a lot more possible a few years back. Thank you, vast ISP monopolies...
Here's a great Ask Slashdot question, then: is it still profitable to run a small ISP that caters to the technical user, by providing complete connectivity, optional spam filtering, maybe some hosting, etc.? And, is it possible to run that ISP in such a manner that you won't get bought out by one of the big national ISPs that don't have all the nice perks?
That makes sense and it wouldn't surprise me if that were the case universally; I threw out the idea of configuring it per-account off of the top of my head. I could see how doing such a calculation per-user would probably chew up as many resources as just handling all of the spam in the first spot.
OK, here's a good ISP idea: just add a header to the mail saying that the ISP tagged the email as being MAPS-blacklisted. X-ISP-MAPS-Found, or something like that. Then the user could very easily configure their client to drop mail with that header, or not.
As long as there is sufficient notification and user choice, then there's nothing wrong with MAPS. It's only when their somewhat strong-arm tactics are combined with ISP coercion that the user really has a problem.
"Electric Youth" - wait, that one was kind of catchy.
As read on /.:
- Dennis Miller
On the contrary, most people agree that their business practices have been among the best in the world ever, right up there with Standard Oil and the other great monopolies of yore. As long as they can skate by without a breakup or a significant penalty from the government, they'll continue to have those world-beating business practices.
Now, if you're talking about their ethical practices or legal standing before the law, then I think you've got a point. But you've got to hand it to Microsoft-the-business: all the business school students are being told to study and try to repeat Microsoft's business success.
...ethereal, who remembers a SW engineering class where we were supposed to emulate Microsoft's coding practices. Apparently our prof thought they made their money the honest way :)
We'll solve this problem the slashdot way: repost the stories as they happen, and bitch about how the editors never read the site, this is old news, it's a repeat, etc., etc.
Sorry, CmdrTaco, but you really can't win :)
Wow, I never thought I'd see the day when a high-uid user displays prejudice against a low-uid user. All along we've been thinking that it was you latecomers who just showed up to troll, Mr. #452960. "What can you expect for a post-200000 uid?" I've often thought (no offense to the many sterling posters out there > 200000.
Hmmm, maybe /. is destined to go away at user #500000, and all of the sudden the users are getting more old-school and elitist as we approach that vanishing point? Kind of like the big crunch that follows the big bang - it's an expansionary model of /. :)
So: it works just fine now, but we're busy fixing it the Microsoft Way (c) anyway. How do people get so that they think this way, heavy drug usage?
For once, entirely apropos:
"When you program open source, you're programming COMMUNISM."
It is true that in some cases there are legal principles governing these interactions, although in most of the cases you mentioned I imagine the deciding factor is the legal and financial firepower brought into play by the victim, rather than the actual point of law. In some cases these are entirely new areas of law - requests for a public server to do something do not immediately become "trespass", any more than unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material are automatically "piracy". IMHO we will see the legal system adjust to the new way of the world.
Even if it doesn't, though, my point is that legal principles are insufficient to truly govern access to your property on the Internet, just like laws against trespassing and theft will not always protect your car if you leave it unlocked all the time, and especially if you left it unlocked in a part of the world which was instantly accessible from all other parts of the world. McDonald's doesn't have to have a computerized straw dispenser; they have a minimum-wage drone there to tell mischief-makers to knock it off. That is what eBay, Yahoo, et al. need, and what they are lacking so far - a way to protect their property against the many people on the 'net who do act in lawless and discourteous ways, either because they are careless, ignorant, malicious, or believe themselves (sometimes with good reason) to be beyond the reach of the law. Some of those actions are blockable with current technology, but others will definitely need some improvements in the state of the art before they can be prevented.
Why not just rely on the law instead? You can have laws all you want, but the 'net is still the Wild West and (unlike the original Wild West) it can never be completely fenced in and tamed. There will always be countries with more liberal policies on cybercrimes from which such misuses will come. Therefore, relying only on the law will never protect eBay, Yahoo, or anyone else. One might say that it would be juvenile to assert otherwise.
I'm just following the thought to its logical conclusion: if the law is no protection, then it's really not accomplishing anything to have that particular law. It's an overhead on society to attempt and fail to enforce it, and it leads to a false sense of security (which you seem to share). Don't be fooled - in this case, the law will not really protect you. Maybe someday it will be able to, but not yet.
If I did that in your office, then I would be trespassing. If you left your computer set up on a busy city street, with a big red "Delete" button to push, then it would appear to me and an average passerby that file deletion was OK with you. Thus also with files on servers on the 'net. Your machine does not have power of attorney, but if you set up an automatic file dispenser, you can't complain if people take files off of it, any more than you could complain if people took all the gumballs out of a free gumball machine that you set up. Of course, the eBay example is a little different than the gumball or "Delete" analogies, because eBay didn't run out of files, although they may have been marginally lower on server capacity and bandwidth at the time.
Ah, but that's exactly my point - one straw at a time is OK, it's the overall pattern of straw usage that McD's should worry about. They would want to either alter their straw dispensers, or more likely just toss you out if you started doing that. The dispensers themselves aren't labeled "only take what you need" - how many times have you seen people take twice as many napkins or packets of ketchup than they need?
If the company didn't want their machine to post the files, why didn't they just tell it not to? If they set up an automatic process that affects their property and is freely available to the public, why shouldn't they be liable for what happens to it?
I think of a server as sort of a secretary. If you told your secretary to accept file submissions and store them on a global bulletin board, and she didn't know any better than to take pr0n too, then the failure is really in your instructions. What is needed is a more sophisticated way to describe to a web server what access patterns are acceptable, just like you would tell your secretary to only accept files with a legitimate business purpose. You can continue to curse the pranksters that keep submitting polaroids of women with Shetland ponies, but in the end you can't track them all down. You have to fix the problem at the source.
You haven't been reading the news much, have you? MP3 trading continues, DeCSS can be had for a 2-second Google search, software piracy flourishes - plenty of examples haven't really helped those issues. These are situations where you can't police everybody in the world at once, if not due to the unending variety of local law, then due to the sheer expense that would be required to do so. The only way to solve an Internet-scale problem is with a distributed technological solution.
Shutting down illicit ftp sites through legal means is, well, legal. Shutting them down via vigilante justice is a crime, hopefully a federal felony computer crime. Illegal actions by some "pirates" does not justify illegal action by the harmed party.
On the plus side, if the RIAA manages to return us to the Law of the Old West on the 'net, then it's open season on spam havens :)
Granting an HTTP request constitutes permission for you to download the file you asked for. Since each image scanned is a separate request and response, eBay individually authorized each and every request. It is not permission to do anything with their server, but it is permission for that one file. If Yahoo posts porn for you on their web site, then they didn't even have to give you permission since they already went ahead and did it. Don't you see - it's silly to say that you didn't give permission to do something that you yourself (or your proxy) already did. You are the sole arbiter of what is permissible for you; if you act in ways which are opposite to your stated permissions because someone asked you to, then you really only have yourself to blame.
Should eBay be able to defend themselves against this? Sure - by an appropriate technical means, like limiting traffic to a particular IP address, or some other way to aggregate the individual permissible accesses and realize that the overall access pattern is not permissible. I'm just saying that judging on the basis of "intended use" is not a helpful basis for the decision, and it doesn't help anyway since people can still go and spider eBay without any consequences. Just figure out the technology to lock your property down like you want, rather than relying on a crowd of mostly-anonymous, undisciplinable Internet users to follow your rules.
But, eBay did grant permission for the download. Somebody's client said "GET http://www.ebay.com/image/something", and eBay said "OK, here it is, catch!". If they didn't want to spend the bandwidth to send it to you, they shouldn't have done so. At no point did eBay not have a choice.
You may think I'm being needlessly literal here (and in a sense I am), but really this points out the fact that HTTP isn't a suitable protocol to use if you want to shape and/or limit your traffic in certain non-basic ways like eBay does. Not that I'm in favor of traffic limitations, though - anyone who can type a /. comment in less than 20 seconds will agree with me there :)
Use kpackage for your mouse-clicking needs. What's amazing is that it's been available for 3 years and people still don't know about it. I mean, you don't go around telling people that Linux has no graphics, doesn't run on the latest processors, and doesn't support USB, do you?
Source, please? I don't remember that click-throughs have been enshrined into law just yet.
And, amazingly, can still watch the other Star Trek series. I bet Bill Shatner can't say that :)
Heck, my ideas weren't even worth ripping off in Stories from the Hellmouth.
Isn't it always "the people of ... vs so-and-so"? Perhaps I've watched too much Law and Order, though.