Well, part of the problem is the way the trademark process works. If you don't show reasonable defense of your trademark (interpreted by marketing droids and lawyers as buying all companyname.* domains), some other group has the potential to take your trademark in court. Never heard of this happening, but that's the logic.
My point was that this is a something that is quite likely well understood by Verisign, Register.com and Icann, et al.
The whole mess is an indication that things are really broken in the business world and the Internet and dns are caught in the middle.
MLM for registrars and icann
on
Plans For New TLDs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
At this point in the game, the primary customers of the recent 'new' domains (.biz,.info) are trademark holders who are forced to register yet more domains. Its quite a boon for registrars when the name registrations start slowing down.
I agree with many of the other posters here - dns is outdated and it doesn't fit how the Internet is used any more, particularly with respect to businesses online with trademarks, etc. The downside is that replacing it will happen just shortly after we all convert to IPv6 which should be about 3523 A.D.
It's becoming more and more attractive of an idea, and I think there are some companies that sell ide arrays for just this purpose. The only think I would worry about is being able to actually connect to an 'ancient IDE drive' in 10 years. If you're just going to pack some data on it and put it in a box, longevity shouldn't be a problem.
I think one of the single biggest reasons is that people's home email addresses are sold by ISPs, are used when shopping online [1], posting on message boards/mail lists/newsgroups which are harvested [1], etc etc etc.
Most companies don't sell their employee lists (but I see an opportunity for increasing the bottom line), and most employees, while they surf voraciously at work, use non-work email addresses when shopping online, viewing porn, etc. Further, many companies don't have their email systems connected to the Internet. I think its the minority of companies that are acutally employing effective anti-spam techniques.
I think many/.ers also have the misfortune of being a member of common lists @theircompanydomain.com, ie. webmaster, postmaster, etc etc. There are many many many spammers that walk the domain registries sending to those addresses. That certainly skews my view of the world, as I get about 200 to 400 spams a day.
It's too bad damages aren't factored in as part of determining whether a DMCA suit is valid. Not that they wouldn't come up with something...
You know, any time you distribute a STATIC form of any kind of media, such that everyone has the same file, no matter what kind of copy protection or DRM you apply, circumventing it by the masses will be trivial. DVDs, CDs, ebooks, whatever. That should be called Jerry's postulate.
The likelyhood of this is being real is pretty low, but if true, it would likely stand atomic & quantum theory on its ear. I know that I don't know enough to say for sure, but I have to think that the fundamental basis of the proposition hear, that electrons are a sort of 'bubble' versus the accepted 'cloud', would require a lot of coincidental observations for the bubble theory to actually be true while the cloud theory appears to be true.
I'm very skeptical, but I'm sooo ready to see *some* kind of advance in the area of power generation.
I think its clear that verio needs to change their ways, but is using a system designed to weed out spam as a punitive punishment against an organization that we don't feel is "doing the right thing" appropriate?
Should we blacklist companies that discrimate? Should BL repressive governments? Should we BL abortion rights groups, aethist groups, porn sites?
Maybe I'm naive and idealistic, but I think blacklists should be used to block spam sources [open relays, open proxies, known spam sources].
I'm confused. The netblock that verio's mail servers are on have been blacklisted. The message states that they're being places on the BL because of knowningly hosting spammers, and in one case selling hundreds of high speed connections to a known spammer (presumably with the intent of fliiling them up withoutbound spam).
How likely is it that the spammers get gobs of bandwidth and turn around and relay off of verio's mail servers? Isn't it *much* more likely that the spam is being sent directly from the IP addresses assigned to or owned by the spammers?
Unless I'm way off base, I think this is more a punative measure against verio than a real reduction in spam.
And yes, I do support blacklisting.
Re:New COMDEX 5.0 Platinum! With 30 free hours!
on
The Last Comdex?
·
· Score: 1
Its clear that most of the revenue comes from advertising and booth space, but recently most booths have contracted from mutli story monsters to small 'craft fair' size tables.
I can't see comdex completely going away, but at the latest N+I a few months ago in Atlanta, the trade show market ain't doing so well. It was about 1/3 the size of the previous year, which was more or less dessimated due to 9/11/01.
I see some complications here. Aside from the constitutional problems, there are matters such as 'which state gets the revenue?', 'should actual internet access be taxed to make up for the revenue that we know is being lost?' and on and on.
Other problems are collections. It's easy to say that retailers will just collect it at the time of purchase, but consider the case where you as a shopper live in a place where you have to pay state sales tax, county sales tax and city sales tax. The permutations are surely too much to reasonably expect retailers to be able to support. Now, I didn't think this would be a problem until I moved to Georgia last year. I know better now.
Technically, this would also affect auctions as well. Imaging trying to unload your wife's stash of rubber stamps and having to try to collect the tax and send it off to the proper collector. My head hurts...
One final thought... if all the other problems are resolved, what will happen if micropayments and microcharges ever get off the ground? You have to pay 3% of $.0005?
Others have said that the constitution is useless. That's not entirely false. The great thing about our republic is that the whole of the constitution is subject to interpretation by the courts. This allows the law of the land to change with the times without requiring actual changes to the document.
The down side is that tax matters are, for the most part, the jusidiction of a court system run by the IRS. "Thems not good odds"
It was my understanding that you are already "required" declare non taxed mail order/Internet purchases on your state income tax form. I can't say that I ever remember seeing the place where you would do so, but there's probably some special form (1040e3453459345345.34) that you have to fill out for it. Doubt many people offer it up, though.
I'm no MS flag waver by any means, but I do think there is a way around these concerns by using MS' windows update server and client: http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/wind owsupdate/sus/default.asp and http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/downloads/r ec ommended/susclient/default.asp
If you block access from your servers to MS and use this system, I believe you'll probably able to get away from MS probing your computer.
What do the cable companies do with all the excess outbound capacity? At the endpoints of attbi or comcast or the like's networks, they are buying symmetric connections to the naps/pnaps. In the attbi example, both the old and the new service have about a 10 to 1 inbound to outbound ratio. That theoretically means that 90% of the outbound capacity is going unused.
1) If the AG goes to the trouble of getting a court order to ban a site, the AG apprently knows something about the site and therefore could/should just as easily go after the supplier, not the consumer [there are already laws for this] 2) Left up to the discretion of an AG, judge, angry mom, sites like pampers.com, johnsons & johnsons, and all other manner of sites that have infants in 'explict' nude or semi nude pictures would be blocked. 3) As others have stated, this opens the door to more restriction. The next to come will be other 'offensive' sites, such as: - Information on strange fetishes - Information on hate groups (race/orientation/etc) These sites could be considered indefensible. Once we have those out of the way, then we go after: - Information on abortion - Information on contraception - hardcore pornography - Gay/Lesbian information
Then, of course, it's not a big stretch to include other things like political information, like anarchy, communism, etc.
This isn't something that happens overnight, and it isn't something that most people will realize is happening. It took a long time to get the rights we have here in the US, and it's taken a long time to pull back some of those rights.
It's unfortunate, but the legislators, law enforcement and judges don't have the foresight to see how a seemingly legitimate act can contribute to the downfall of a society over an extended period of time.
for normal distances, you're talking time differences in the nanoseconds, even considering the travel differences and velocity factor. Whereas repeat/transmit/receive/decode operation times are typically in the milliseconds.
Hypertext in its current incarnation is truely is a client side implementation. Web browsers actually perform the 'linking', though the linked address is supplied by the content.
Web servers are nothing more than file servers, and do nothing to enhance or restrict hypertext.
Hypertext content are still just flat text files with bibliographic type references to other documents.
ASP/PHP/Perl/etc muddy the waters a little, but essentially the same is true.
The client is what actually decodes the hypertext links and presents them to the user. Hypertext documents work just fine from FTP servers, windows file servers and your local hard drive, all because of the web browser.
Even if the patent holds any water, there are tens of thousands of ISP's to sue, some of which are very very large, and likely hold a considerable influence to BT's well being.
Most software applications now-a-days use hypertext quite extensively. They would also need to be sued. MS would probably have a problem with that and may need to buy BT.
There are billions of web pages on the internet, and billions more on intranets. Logistically, there's no way to enforce the patent on content creators or deliverers.
But, there are only so many web browser companies. And many of them are now open source. The best BT could hope for, in my opinion, is a cut of the royalties from web browser sales. With the landscape the way it is, I don't see that being too profitible.
I'm certain there are a few exec's at BT sitting around a table saying 'if we could even get $.01US per link, we would be filthy rich!'
I've been using Samba/FreeBSD for about 2.5 years to serve about 30 PC's. I took it down once to add new hard dirves/upgrade software, once due to an extended power outage, and now it needs to be upgraded to FreeBSD 3.1. It's sad to take it down with an uptime of 260 days.
Pursuant to a patent regarding the "transfer of text between computers" that I retain, I am requesting that you cease and decist the unauthorized communications being conducted on this and other Internet sites. Failure to comply will result in swift legal action.
I appreciate your understanding and cooperation in this matter.
Using the chip id to identify 'hot' PC's should be a resounding failure since 1) not all chips will have the id and therefore cannot be required and 2) a determined theif would use the 'patch' that would be out shortly after the release of the new chips to mask the chip id. Since overclocking is more a function of the motherboard/chipset than of the processor, Intel would be reliant on MB manufacturers to enfore the no overclocking mandate, and that should be unlinkely. The only possible benefits I would see out of this is from a consumer standpoint of being able to identify that a chip really is rated at the advertised speed, and possibly using the id as an alternative to the hardware keys ("dongle") on expensive software. Again, since it's only on Intel PC's the usefulness is REALLY limited.
Where will it end? I realize companies have to protect their trade names, but there needs to be some sanity to this process, or we will soon run out of words.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, part of the problem is the way the trademark process works. If you don't show reasonable defense of your trademark (interpreted by marketing droids and lawyers as buying all companyname.* domains), some other group has the potential to take your trademark in court. Never heard of this happening, but that's the logic.
My point was that this is a something that is quite likely well understood by Verisign, Register.com and Icann, et al.
The whole mess is an indication that things are really broken in the business world and the Internet and dns are caught in the middle.
At this point in the game, the primary customers of the recent 'new' domains (.biz, .info) are trademark holders who are forced to register yet more domains. Its quite a boon for registrars when the name registrations start slowing down.
I agree with many of the other posters here - dns is outdated and it doesn't fit how the Internet is used any more, particularly with respect to businesses online with trademarks, etc. The downside is that replacing it will happen just shortly after we all convert to IPv6 which should be about 3523 A.D.
It's becoming more and more attractive of an idea, and I think there are some companies that sell ide arrays for just this purpose. The only think I would worry about is being able to actually connect to an 'ancient IDE drive' in 10 years. If you're just going to pack some data on it and put it in a box, longevity shouldn't be a problem.
Cut the guy some slack, I think he was *trying* to be funny.
I think one of the single biggest reasons is that people's home email addresses are sold by ISPs, are used when shopping online [1], posting on message boards/mail lists/newsgroups which are harvested [1], etc etc etc.
/.ers also have the misfortune of being a member of common lists @theircompanydomain.com, ie. webmaster, postmaster, etc etc. There are many many many spammers that walk the domain registries sending to those addresses. That certainly skews my view of the world, as I get about 200 to 400 spams a day.
Most companies don't sell their employee lists (but I see an opportunity for increasing the bottom line), and most employees, while they surf voraciously at work, use non-work email addresses when shopping online, viewing porn, etc. Further, many companies don't have their email systems connected to the Internet. I think its the minority of companies that are acutally employing effective anti-spam techniques.
I think many
[1] and hence sold
It's too bad damages aren't factored in as part of determining whether a DMCA suit is valid. Not that they wouldn't come up with something...
You know, any time you distribute a STATIC form of any kind of media, such that everyone has the same file, no matter what kind of copy protection or DRM you apply, circumventing it by the masses will be trivial. DVDs, CDs, ebooks, whatever. That should be called Jerry's postulate.
Jerry
The likelyhood of this is being real is pretty low, but if true, it would likely stand atomic & quantum theory on its ear. I know that I don't know enough to say for sure, but I have to think that the fundamental basis of the proposition hear, that electrons are a sort of 'bubble' versus the accepted 'cloud', would require a lot of coincidental observations for the bubble theory to actually be true while the cloud theory appears to be true.
I'm very skeptical, but I'm sooo ready to see *some* kind of advance in the area of power generation.
I think its clear that verio needs to change their ways, but is using a system designed to weed out spam as a punitive punishment against an organization that we don't feel is "doing the right thing" appropriate?
Should we blacklist companies that discrimate? Should BL repressive governments? Should we BL abortion rights groups, aethist groups, porn sites?
Maybe I'm naive and idealistic, but I think blacklists should be used to block spam sources [open relays, open proxies, known spam sources].
I'm confused. The netblock that verio's mail servers are on have been blacklisted. The message states that they're being places on the BL because of knowningly hosting spammers, and in one case selling hundreds of high speed connections to a known spammer (presumably with the intent of fliiling them up withoutbound spam).
How likely is it that the spammers get gobs of bandwidth and turn around and relay off of verio's mail servers? Isn't it *much* more likely that the spam is being sent directly from the IP addresses assigned to or owned by the spammers?
Unless I'm way off base, I think this is more a punative measure against verio than a real reduction in spam.
And yes, I do support blacklisting.
Its clear that most of the revenue comes from advertising and booth space, but recently most booths have contracted from mutli story monsters to small 'craft fair' size tables.
The marketing budgets just aren't there any more.
I can't see comdex completely going away, but at the latest N+I a few months ago in Atlanta, the trade show market ain't doing so well. It was about 1/3 the size of the previous year, which was more or less dessimated due to 9/11/01.
I see some complications here. Aside from the constitutional problems, there are matters such as 'which state gets the revenue?', 'should actual internet access be taxed to make up for the revenue that we know is being lost?' and on and on.
Other problems are collections. It's easy to say that retailers will just collect it at the time of purchase, but consider the case where you as a shopper live in a place where you have to pay state sales tax, county sales tax and city sales tax. The permutations are surely too much to reasonably expect retailers to be able to support. Now, I didn't think this would be a problem until I moved to Georgia last year. I know better now.
Technically, this would also affect auctions as well. Imaging trying to unload your wife's stash of rubber stamps and having to try to collect the tax and send it off to the proper collector. My head hurts...
One final thought... if all the other problems are resolved, what will happen if micropayments and microcharges ever get off the ground? You have to pay 3% of $.0005?
Others have said that the constitution is useless. That's not entirely false. The great thing about our republic is that the whole of the constitution is subject to interpretation by the courts. This allows the law of the land to change with the times without requiring actual changes to the document.
The down side is that tax matters are, for the most part, the jusidiction of a court system run by the IRS. "Thems not good odds"
It was my understanding that you are already "required" declare non taxed mail order/Internet purchases on your state income tax form. I can't say that I ever remember seeing the place where you would do so, but there's probably some special form (1040e3453459345345.34) that you have to fill out for it. Doubt many people offer it up, though.
I'm no MS flag waver by any means, but I do think there is a way around these concerns by using MS' windows update server and client:d owsupdate /sus/default.aspr ec ommended/susclient/default.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/win
and
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/downloads/
If you block access from your servers to MS and use this system, I believe you'll probably able to get away from MS probing your computer.
What do the cable companies do with all the excess outbound capacity? At the endpoints of attbi or comcast or the like's networks, they are buying symmetric connections to the naps/pnaps. In the attbi example, both the old and the new service have about a 10 to 1 inbound to outbound ratio. That theoretically means that 90% of the outbound capacity is going unused.
1) If the AG goes to the trouble of getting a court order to ban a site, the AG apprently knows something about the site and therefore could/should just as easily go after the supplier, not the consumer [there are already laws for this]
2) Left up to the discretion of an AG, judge, angry mom, sites like pampers.com, johnsons & johnsons, and all other manner of sites that have infants in 'explict' nude or semi nude pictures would be blocked.
3) As others have stated, this opens the door to more restriction. The next to come will be other 'offensive' sites, such as:
- Information on strange fetishes
- Information on hate groups (race/orientation/etc)
These sites could be considered indefensible. Once we have those out of the way, then we go after:
- Information on abortion
- Information on contraception
- hardcore pornography
- Gay/Lesbian information
Then, of course, it's not a big stretch to include other things like political information, like anarchy, communism, etc.
This isn't something that happens overnight, and it isn't something that most people will realize is happening. It took a long time to get the rights we have here in the US, and it's taken a long time to pull back some of those rights.
It's unfortunate, but the legislators, law enforcement and judges don't have the foresight to see how a seemingly legitimate act can contribute to the downfall of a society over an extended period of time.
for normal distances, you're talking time differences in the nanoseconds, even considering the travel differences and velocity factor. Whereas repeat/transmit/receive/decode operation times are typically in the milliseconds.
The difference is that with BSD you don't have to include the source code with the proprietary version.
Hypertext content are still just flat text files with bibliographic type references to other documents.
ASP/PHP/Perl/etc muddy the waters a little, but essentially the same is true.
The client is what actually decodes the hypertext links and presents them to the user. Hypertext documents work just fine from FTP servers, windows file servers and your local hard drive, all because of the web browser.
Even if the patent holds any water, there are tens of thousands of ISP's to sue, some of which are very very large, and likely hold a considerable influence to BT's well being. Most software applications now-a-days use hypertext quite extensively. They would also need to be sued. MS would probably have a problem with that and may need to buy BT. There are billions of web pages on the internet, and billions more on intranets. Logistically, there's no way to enforce the patent on content creators or deliverers.
But, there are only so many web browser companies. And many of them are now open source. The best BT could hope for, in my opinion, is a cut of the royalties from web browser sales. With the landscape the way it is, I don't see that being too profitible.
I'm certain there are a few exec's at BT sitting around a table saying 'if we could even get $.01US per link, we would be filthy rich!'
Here's my contribution to the problem :)
http://www.syslog.org
I feel like such a criminal.
I've been using Samba/FreeBSD for about 2.5 years to serve about 30 PC's. I took it down once to add new hard dirves/upgrade software, once due to an extended power outage, and now it needs to be upgraded to FreeBSD 3.1. It's sad to take it down with an uptime of 260 days.
two words: web tv.
Argh...
Dear Sir or Madam:
Pursuant to a patent regarding the "transfer of text between computers" that I retain, I am requesting that you cease and decist the unauthorized communications being conducted on this and other Internet sites. Failure to comply will result in swift legal action.
I appreciate your understanding and cooperation in this matter.
Bah.
Hey, Intel isn't the only game in town.
Using the chip id to identify 'hot' PC's should be a resounding failure since 1) not all chips will have the id and therefore cannot be required and 2) a determined theif would use the 'patch' that would be out shortly after the release of the new chips to mask the chip id.
Since overclocking is more a function of the motherboard/chipset than of the processor, Intel would be reliant on MB manufacturers to enfore the no overclocking mandate, and that should be unlinkely.
The only possible benefits I would see out of this is from a consumer standpoint of being able to identify that a chip really is rated at the advertised speed, and possibly using the id as an alternative to the hardware keys ("dongle") on expensive software. Again, since it's only on Intel PC's the usefulness is REALLY limited.
The prng should be interesting, though.
Where will it end? I realize companies have to protect their trade names, but there needs to be some sanity to this process, or we will soon run out of words.