Not to deflect the conversation too far away from the original, but that is why good security practices are more than just about code. Where do you keep your servers, and who has physical access to them is an equally valid concern.
So are things like maintainability, usability and so on.
Security is a kind of risk, and everyone accepts a certain amount of risk. I *could* insure my car to a $50 deductable and let the insurance co. take all the risk beyond that, but that would cost me $500/month. Instead I assume $500 worth of risk and I pay only $100 month.
You're absolutely right that there are other concerns, but in some organizations the costs associated with a specially locked room, time/money/effort maintaining boxes is more cost than percieved risk that some internal user in a 50 person company may decide to try to hack sendmail 8.9.
If you have a real business, but use spam to advertise your product,
I don't know about *your* spam, but mine has almost never been for something I'd consider a legitimate product, even when legitimate is stretching the bounds of imagination.
It's always penis tricks, porn, stock swindles, pyramid schemes and health scams. It's never anything else.
Caller ID is of minimal use -- many outbound trunks have incorrect or no calling party numbers, and most cell phones don't display names anyway, just numbers.
Turning it off is the equivilent of shutting a machine down when its getting DoS'd. It's an effective strategy when you don't want any calls.
Wireless is a new technology. Now to you its not that new, but most people are just now getting used to the idea that its "OK" to call people on their cell phone. Used to be you didn't want to -- the thing was in their car. Then you didn't want to because wasn't important.
Now most people feel comfortable doing it all the time -- why call the office, just the cell, or always call the cell after the office.
Technologies such as this might allows us to alter the paradigm and give workers less reason to need to 'get away from it all'
That's been one of the premises of technology for a long time, but it always seems to accomplish the opposite -- tethering instead of freeing.
My wife has a marketing job. Her cell rang 4 times this morning before 6:30 AM, simply because someone *could* call her, they did. No emergency, no 5 alarm fire, just someone who had the number.
Re:check your facts please....
on
Carnivore Update
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· Score: 3, Insightful
OK, now prove it. No one likes their communications being monitored. Has anyone actually gone out and ASKED people if they mind being monitored? Or is this more of the well, they don't seem to mind because they aren't bitching about it type of logic?
I thought that in countless studies when the bill of rights was presented to people as a set of proposed laws at least a plurality if not a majority of those asked were opposed to them.
Look at other trends in personal privacy, like urine testing. It has almost no bearing on how well you're actually doing your job, and there's no testing for alcohol -- the most widely abused drug. But if you asked most people if they were in favor of it they'd say they are in favor of it. Its now widespread and considered "normal" to piss in a cup before you can get hired and often *after* on a periodic basis. If you're not using drugs, you don't have anything to worry about, right? And the only people opposed to it are people who do use drugs, right?
It does not and will not surprise me that most people are in favor of fairly intrusive security measures as long as they perceive that there is a threat and that the security measures are a direct impact on "someone else". They only try to escape them when they become a burden on them. Most people have logically concluded that the extensive airport security requirements are a ridiculous burden for frequent business travelers (aka First Class passengers).
When I was in college, I found that the overall grade for a course was usually about 50% exams and 50% coursework. The coursework usually invovled applying some basic elements of the class that were usually identifiable from the syllabus or the first day's class outline lecture.
The exams were usually well over 80% based on the course lectures, which tended to be an overview of the reading. The better professors threw in some easy nuggets that were never discussed in class, only in the readings. The weaker ones lectured basically the books plus some fill-in material, but the fill in was just glue to give the course some coherency.
I found that I could ace most classes if I wrote an A paper and scored an A on the exam. The work it took to do this involved light reading of research material and great class notes. The actual assigned reading I generally just skimmed to make sure there was no great deviation from the lectures. I seldom if ever actually "read" it, except for literature assignments. Just going to class, writing notes and doing the paper was all it took.
I discussed this with a friend who is a history professor and he said that undergrad land its pretty difficult to have significant test material on assigned readings without 2/3s of the class getting Ds or Fs -- even if he announces on day 1 that 50% of the exams will be taken exclusively from readings not lectured in class. He thinks its legit to do this, but hes gotten flak from department people who say its beyond the scope of the average undergrad to assimilate meaning from academic readings.
I would assume at serious classes at high-end academic places like Harvard would have lectures that didn't cover the readings AND readings not included in the lectures, making it impossible (without notes from somebody who WAS there) to get more than C if you skipped lectures.
At other schools (mine was a big 10 university), skipping lectures was suicide but skipping the reading was not.
Imagine everyone carrying around, in their wallet, next to their credit cards, a card labelled 'emergency' that simply dials 911 when you push a button on it.
Imagine how much more useless 911 would be in most major areas when anyone would have 911 capabilities with them at all times. The service would be saturated with non-emergency calls, the cost to run the service would skyrocket just to expand to a size where they could actually answer the flood of calls, and the resources needed to respond to those calls would skyrocket as well.
If, if, if. Without DMCA, Copyright, ad nauseum it could still be a crime "if" the right conditions were met, not the least of which includes fraudulent intent.
Simply violating a contract isn't in and of itself a violation of the law. If you insist on dragging all kinds of other laws into the mix or specific contractual situations you're not arguing that violating the terms of a contract is illegal generally, but that breaking a specific kind of contract in a specific way is illegal -- which it always has been.
I doubt there has been a moment in civilized history when there hasn't been some law put on the books putting the force of law behind specific types of contracts in order to make breaking them undesirable. It may be good intent -- ie, one party has to risk a lot when entering the contract -- or it may be dubious intent -- UCITA, copyright, etc.
But the entire *point* of a contract is to outline an agreement in the absence of some other overriding rule of law. You and I don't need a contract governing whether or not you can come take my TV -- there's a law saying you can't. But there is no law governing on what terms I might willingly *give* you my TV, which is why you and I would negotiate a contract to do so.
When you come down off that crack, realize that a "legal contract" means that the terms of the contract are not in violation of law, it doesn't mean that violation of the terms of the contract opens you to criminal liability.
Contract: You agree to pay me $10 and I agree to provide you with cigarettes. Its legal if you're of smoking age, its illegal if you're not. Violation of the contract -- eg, you don't pay me for the smokes or I don't give you the smokes but take your money is not per se a violation of the law.
You could get sued or the contract party(-ies) could possibly take action in civil court to rememdy the contrac violation, but you cannot go to jail except in very limited circumstances involving deliberate fraud.
Since Open Source code is, well, Open, absolutely any service provider or consultant has access to the same software. If company A pays programmers to write code which is contributed to the community and makes their money selling services related to that code, and company B has no programmers but offers the exact same services for the exact same code, the company B will always be able to make more profit than company A.
What kind of services can company B sell without any programmers? Probably only basic services related to installation, troubleshooting and basic support. They can't fix the application's bugs, expand the applications capabilities or customize it without programmers. Thus Company B can only provide the same kind of consulting services that a zillion shops provide for Win2k -- installation/maintenance for places too small to do it themselves. It's a low-profit model thats also dependent on Company A continuing to maintain the application. No development, no future for Company B.
Furthermore, Company A may actually *want* Companies B/C/D/E/F to provide low-end support for their product, since there's little margin for them in low-end support and it provides better market push for their application. Company A can stay focused on high-end, high-margin installations that need customizations or other custom services.
They may also hedge their bets by releasing a version of their application that only hints at its capabilities and *requires* customization to make it scale/integrate precisely to limit parasites or to encourage purchase of their services. This is a tightrope to walk tho -- not enough goodness in your free app may prevent interest in a customized version.
If it was a new service (adding secondary ISP to cablemodem infrastucture), isn't a more likely explanation that whatever technology was being used to siphon off Earthlink traffic wasn't working well yet?
Isn't Cablemodem treated kind of like ethernet, at least at the neighborhood level? That'd mean some pretty heavy-duty trunking to segregate traffic at every neighborhood aggregation point. It seems more likely that they hadn't quite gotten it down and were probably tweaking the infrastructure as they went, or even totally re-engineering it (oops, that design won't work, we'll re-do it on the fly..). I'm not saying it doesn't equal sucky service -- it does -- but it's certainly not a conspiracy.
If you think using another provider over your cable company's cable is a good idea, think again. It's the same shit as DSL. Just like the phone companies make it about impossible to get DSL service from someone else, and just like the phone company and your third party DSL provider keep sending you back and forth when you have a tech problem.. the cable company will do the same thing if you try to get another provider over the cable lines.
I've had two flavors of DSL, CLEC carrier/indepedent ISP and ILEC carrier/indepdendant ISP. In neither case has the fact that I've had an ISP not associated with the DSL carrier been an issue. The CLEC carrier experience made for a really slow install, but once installed the service performed flawlessly other than a minor hiccup at the ISP (misconfigured duplex on switch port).
My current indepdent ISP/ILEC carrier setup was so well integrated that I didn't even talk to the phone company -- I ordered everything from the ISP and its worked flawlessly since then.
National People's Radio has easily 10 minutes per hour of "This program was sponsored in part by a grant from the the I.M. Rich and U.R. Not Foundation and an endowment from Big Money, Incorporated" during peak hours (AM/PM drive).
And then there's pledge weak, where its 10 minutes of programming and 50 minutes of whining for money, 4 times per year at least.
I'm not sure they're all that different, although the sponsors are more low-key on People's Radio than they are on commercial.
One was caught up wondering where the dot-com lessons were and one was hung up on the fact it wasn't a mouse he wanted to use.
Neither one told me jack about these guys' business experience, their business acumen, strategy and so on.
Better would have been someone with real experience starting companies and selling things who could have given a useful critique of their business experience instead of a dot-com refugee and tech weenie.
My house, my rules is based on my property ownership of the house. Depriving me of the right to control what occurs in my house is depriving me of my property. Its why property rights and private property are often considered essential for any liberty.
The President does not personally own anything and his legal right to control private property is very limited, and his right to control government property is limited as well.
I think in some monarchies and maybe the Roman Empire under the Caesars, the state actually BELONGED as property to the head of state, ie they were considered his personal property.
Amen. I don't give a shit if you're 16 or 61, if you live in MY house you live by MY rules. If you pay me rent SOME of the rules are negotiable. That's why its MY house and not YOUR house.
Not that many, as I recall, seem to be outspoken against music sharing...
How many are outspoken proponents of it?
I think by and large the artists themselves, with some exceptions, are either just too lacking in personal intellectual skills (how smart do you think Spears REALLY is?) or just too caught up in being artists to form opinions on something not of the artistic realm. Yes, this is a stereotype and there are exceptions, but I don't think by and large that most artists have much of an opinion or it parallels that of the average person who probably thinks that music sharing is legitimate within reason.
But realize this-- the RIAA's spin will claim that any falloff in revenue is due to piracy, not a boycott-- hence their need for the copy protection.
But the RIAA will always use some kind of spaghetti logic to claim that sales are down due to piracy. This is an projecting answer -- it enables them to project business failure onto others, as well as justify copy protection, pay-per-play and other schemes that are unpopular with end users.
The other answers -- the music sucks, the business model is flawed, etc will never be considered or publicly advanced. These are reflective answers -- they reflect on the RIAA member entities poor management and don't allow them to blame forces outside their control.
One of the objectives of this approach to bio research is to *reduce* its cost. Reduced research cost should equate to reduced treatment costs.
Any treatments developed by this will be priced comperably with other treatments of a given effectiveness. Reducing the development costs only allows them to increase their profit margins, in effect subsidizing other drug development efforts with higher costs and less competitive pricing opportunities. Or more cynically increasing the compensation available to high-level executives, which will likely happen anyway.
Capitalists almost NEVER use reduced production costs as an incentive to lower prices without serious competitive pressure, and even then the greater temptation is to act like an illegal cartel and keep prices higher. They almost always price goods and services comperable to like goods in the market and enjoy the higher profit margins.
You can argue that this is good for business, or you can argue its good for consumers in the long run, I think there's points to be made on both ends. But it still leaves a nagging question about who dies and who doesn't because some marketing guy needs a bigger boat.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it? We have tons of beta decks here and I don't think you can play home beta on these decks.
Not to deflect the conversation too far away from the original, but that is why good security practices are more than just about code. Where do you keep your servers, and who has physical access to them is an equally valid concern.
So are things like maintainability, usability and so on.
Security is a kind of risk, and everyone accepts a certain amount of risk. I *could* insure my car to a $50 deductable and let the insurance co. take all the risk beyond that, but that would cost me $500/month. Instead I assume $500 worth of risk and I pay only $100 month.
You're absolutely right that there are other concerns, but in some organizations the costs associated with a specially locked room, time/money/effort maintaining boxes is more cost than percieved risk that some internal user in a 50 person company may decide to try to hack sendmail 8.9.
If you have a real business, but use spam to advertise your product,
I don't know about *your* spam, but mine has almost never been for something I'd consider a legitimate product, even when legitimate is stretching the bounds of imagination.
It's always penis tricks, porn, stock swindles, pyramid schemes and health scams. It's never anything else.
Caller ID is of minimal use -- many outbound trunks have incorrect or no calling party numbers, and most cell phones don't display names anyway, just numbers.
Turning it off is the equivilent of shutting a machine down when its getting DoS'd. It's an effective strategy when you don't want any calls.
Wireless is a new technology. Now to you its not that new, but most people are just now getting used to the idea that its "OK" to call people on their cell phone. Used to be you didn't want to -- the thing was in their car. Then you didn't want to because wasn't important.
Now most people feel comfortable doing it all the time -- why call the office, just the cell, or always call the cell after the office.
You're tethered again to the phone.
Technologies such as this might allows us to alter the paradigm and give workers less reason to need to 'get away from it all'
That's been one of the premises of technology for a long time, but it always seems to accomplish the opposite -- tethering instead of freeing. My wife has a marketing job. Her cell rang 4 times this morning before 6:30 AM, simply because someone *could* call her, they did. No emergency, no 5 alarm fire, just someone who had the number.
OK, now prove it. No one likes their communications being monitored. Has anyone actually gone out and ASKED people if they mind being monitored? Or is this more of the well, they don't seem to mind because they aren't bitching about it type of logic?
I thought that in countless studies when the bill of rights was presented to people as a set of proposed laws at least a plurality if not a majority of those asked were opposed to them.
Look at other trends in personal privacy, like urine testing. It has almost no bearing on how well you're actually doing your job, and there's no testing for alcohol -- the most widely abused drug. But if you asked most people if they were in favor of it they'd say they are in favor of it. Its now widespread and considered "normal" to piss in a cup before you can get hired and often *after* on a periodic basis. If you're not using drugs, you don't have anything to worry about, right? And the only people opposed to it are people who do use drugs, right?
It does not and will not surprise me that most people are in favor of fairly intrusive security measures as long as they perceive that there is a threat and that the security measures are a direct impact on "someone else". They only try to escape them when they become a burden on them. Most people have logically concluded that the extensive airport security requirements are a ridiculous burden for frequent business travelers (aka First Class passengers).
It's a DoS attack. Rather than a good rootshell exploit, he's instead decided to do the equivilent of SYN flooding.
I thought they all sucked.
When I was in college, I found that the overall grade for a course was usually about 50% exams and 50% coursework. The coursework usually invovled applying some basic elements of the class that were usually identifiable from the syllabus or the first day's class outline lecture.
The exams were usually well over 80% based on the course lectures, which tended to be an overview of the reading. The better professors threw in some easy nuggets that were never discussed in class, only in the readings. The weaker ones lectured basically the books plus some fill-in material, but the fill in was just glue to give the course some coherency.
I found that I could ace most classes if I wrote an A paper and scored an A on the exam. The work it took to do this involved light reading of research material and great class notes. The actual assigned reading I generally just skimmed to make sure there was no great deviation from the lectures. I seldom if ever actually "read" it, except for literature assignments. Just going to class, writing notes and doing the paper was all it took.
I discussed this with a friend who is a history professor and he said that undergrad land its pretty difficult to have significant test material on assigned readings without 2/3s of the class getting Ds or Fs -- even if he announces on day 1 that 50% of the exams will be taken exclusively from readings not lectured in class. He thinks its legit to do this, but hes gotten flak from department people who say its beyond the scope of the average undergrad to assimilate meaning from academic readings.
I would assume at serious classes at high-end academic places like Harvard would have lectures that didn't cover the readings AND readings not included in the lectures, making it impossible (without notes from somebody who WAS there) to get more than C if you skipped lectures.
At other schools (mine was a big 10 university), skipping lectures was suicide but skipping the reading was not.
Imagine everyone carrying around, in their wallet, next to their credit cards, a card labelled 'emergency' that simply dials 911 when you push a button on it.
Imagine how much more useless 911 would be in most major areas when anyone would have 911 capabilities with them at all times. The service would be saturated with non-emergency calls, the cost to run the service would skyrocket just to expand to a size where they could actually answer the flood of calls, and the resources needed to respond to those calls would skyrocket as well.
If, if, if. Without DMCA, Copyright, ad nauseum it could still be a crime "if" the right conditions were met, not the least of which includes fraudulent intent.
Simply violating a contract isn't in and of itself a violation of the law. If you insist on dragging all kinds of other laws into the mix or specific contractual situations you're not arguing that violating the terms of a contract is illegal generally, but that breaking a specific kind of contract in a specific way is illegal -- which it always has been.
I doubt there has been a moment in civilized history when there hasn't been some law put on the books putting the force of law behind specific types of contracts in order to make breaking them undesirable. It may be good intent -- ie, one party has to risk a lot when entering the contract -- or it may be dubious intent -- UCITA, copyright, etc.
But the entire *point* of a contract is to outline an agreement in the absence of some other overriding rule of law. You and I don't need a contract governing whether or not you can come take my TV -- there's a law saying you can't. But there is no law governing on what terms I might willingly *give* you my TV, which is why you and I would negotiate a contract to do so.
He's arguing the semantics of the word "illegal" by trying to adapt a meaning use elswhere where it doesn't apply.
The only point he has is the one at the top of his head.
Violation of that contract IS illegal. Sheesh.
When you come down off that crack, realize that a "legal contract" means that the terms of the contract are not in violation of law, it doesn't mean that violation of the terms of the contract opens you to criminal liability.
Contract: You agree to pay me $10 and I agree to provide you with cigarettes. Its legal if you're of smoking age, its illegal if you're not. Violation of the contract -- eg, you don't pay me for the smokes or I don't give you the smokes but take your money is not per se a violation of the law.
You could get sued or the contract party(-ies) could possibly take action in civil court to rememdy the contrac violation, but you cannot go to jail except in very limited circumstances involving deliberate fraud.
Since Open Source code is, well, Open, absolutely any service provider or consultant has access to the same software. If company A pays programmers to write code which is contributed to the community and makes their money selling services related to that code, and company B has no programmers but offers the exact same services for the exact same code, the company B will always be able to make more profit than company A.
What kind of services can company B sell without any programmers? Probably only basic services related to installation, troubleshooting and basic support. They can't fix the application's bugs, expand the applications capabilities or customize it without programmers. Thus Company B can only provide the same kind of consulting services that a zillion shops provide for Win2k -- installation/maintenance for places too small to do it themselves. It's a low-profit model thats also dependent on Company A continuing to maintain the application. No development, no future for Company B.
Furthermore, Company A may actually *want* Companies B/C/D/E/F to provide low-end support for their product, since there's little margin for them in low-end support and it provides better market push for their application. Company A can stay focused on high-end, high-margin installations that need customizations or other custom services.
They may also hedge their bets by releasing a version of their application that only hints at its capabilities and *requires* customization to make it scale/integrate precisely to limit parasites or to encourage purchase of their services. This is a tightrope to walk tho -- not enough goodness in your free app may prevent interest in a customized version.
If it was a new service (adding secondary ISP to cablemodem infrastucture), isn't a more likely explanation that whatever technology was being used to siphon off Earthlink traffic wasn't working well yet?
Isn't Cablemodem treated kind of like ethernet, at least at the neighborhood level? That'd mean some pretty heavy-duty trunking to segregate traffic at every neighborhood aggregation point. It seems more likely that they hadn't quite gotten it down and were probably tweaking the infrastructure as they went, or even totally re-engineering it (oops, that design won't work, we'll re-do it on the fly..). I'm not saying it doesn't equal sucky service -- it does -- but it's certainly not a conspiracy.
If you think using another provider over your cable company's cable is a good idea, think again. It's the same shit as DSL. Just like the phone companies make it about impossible to get DSL service from someone else, and just like the phone company and your third party DSL provider keep sending you back and forth when you have a tech problem.. the cable company will do the same thing if you try to get another provider over the cable lines.
I've had two flavors of DSL, CLEC carrier/indepedent ISP and ILEC carrier/indepdendant ISP. In neither case has the fact that I've had an ISP not associated with the DSL carrier been an issue. The CLEC carrier experience made for a really slow install, but once installed the service performed flawlessly other than a minor hiccup at the ISP (misconfigured duplex on switch port).
My current indepdent ISP/ILEC carrier setup was so well integrated that I didn't even talk to the phone company -- I ordered everything from the ISP and its worked flawlessly since then.
National People's Radio has easily 10 minutes per hour of "This program was sponsored in part by a grant from the the I.M. Rich and U.R. Not Foundation and an endowment from Big Money, Incorporated" during peak hours (AM/PM drive).
And then there's pledge weak, where its 10 minutes of programming and 50 minutes of whining for money, 4 times per year at least.
I'm not sure they're all that different, although the sponsors are more low-key on People's Radio than they are on commercial.
Is 120k for the licenses?
We have E2k for 500 users w/antivirus on a dual PIII 933 box w/2GB of RAM and the CPU meter seldom bleeps about 10% util.
One was caught up wondering where the dot-com lessons were and one was hung up on the fact it wasn't a mouse he wanted to use.
Neither one told me jack about these guys' business experience, their business acumen, strategy and so on.
Better would have been someone with real experience starting companies and selling things who could have given a useful critique of their business experience instead of a dot-com refugee and tech weenie.
My house, my rules is based on my property ownership of the house. Depriving me of the right to control what occurs in my house is depriving me of my property. Its why property rights and private property are often considered essential for any liberty.
The President does not personally own anything and his legal right to control private property is very limited, and his right to control government property is limited as well.
I think in some monarchies and maybe the Roman Empire under the Caesars, the state actually BELONGED as property to the head of state, ie they were considered his personal property.
Amen. I don't give a shit if you're 16 or 61, if you live in MY house you live by MY rules. If you pay me rent SOME of the rules are negotiable. That's why its MY house and not YOUR house.
Not that many, as I recall, seem to be outspoken against music sharing...
How many are outspoken proponents of it?
I think by and large the artists themselves, with some exceptions, are either just too lacking in personal intellectual skills (how smart do you think Spears REALLY is?) or just too caught up in being artists to form opinions on something not of the artistic realm. Yes, this is a stereotype and there are exceptions, but I don't think by and large that most artists have much of an opinion or it parallels that of the average person who probably thinks that music sharing is legitimate within reason.
That's really rich, since Mobutu Sese Seko was the dictator of Zaire, and not Nigeria.
But realize this-- the RIAA's spin will claim that any falloff in revenue is due to piracy, not a boycott-- hence their need for the copy protection.
But the RIAA will always use some kind of spaghetti logic to claim that sales are down due to piracy. This is an projecting answer -- it enables them to project business failure onto others, as well as justify copy protection, pay-per-play and other schemes that are unpopular with end users.
The other answers -- the music sucks, the business model is flawed, etc will never be considered or publicly advanced. These are reflective answers -- they reflect on the RIAA member entities poor management and don't allow them to blame forces outside their control.
One of the objectives of this approach to bio research is to *reduce* its cost. Reduced research cost should equate to reduced treatment costs.
Any treatments developed by this will be priced comperably with other treatments of a given effectiveness. Reducing the development costs only allows them to increase their profit margins, in effect subsidizing other drug development efforts with higher costs and less competitive pricing opportunities. Or more cynically increasing the compensation available to high-level executives, which will likely happen anyway.
Capitalists almost NEVER use reduced production costs as an incentive to lower prices without serious competitive pressure, and even then the greater temptation is to act like an illegal cartel and keep prices higher. They almost always price goods and services comperable to like goods in the market and enjoy the higher profit margins.
You can argue that this is good for business, or you can argue its good for consumers in the long run, I think there's points to be made on both ends. But it still leaves a nagging question about who dies and who doesn't because some marketing guy needs a bigger boat.