From the Constitution of the United States, Article III, Section 3:
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overy Act, or on Confession in open Court."
In other words, "challenging authority and laws" is in no sense treason according to the Constitution. It's possible that the FBI wish to refer not to treason but to "sedition", which is (roughly) the "crime" of speaking against the government. Obviously, the First Amendment has a lot to say about the legal status of that "crime"!
The status of sedition under U.S. law has in fact varied quite a lot. There have been several anti-sedition laws, from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the Smith Act of 1940, and so on. However, the prevailing sense of the Supreme Court has been that unless a speech act creates "clear and present danger" of lawless behavior, it is protected by the First Amendment from being held as seditious.
In short, the FBI seem to be on extremely shaky ground here. However, I am not a lawyer, and the article is rather vague on what the charges being investigated actually are. So let's wait and see what comes of this one....
{Sp0ng}By the way, you moderators fucking blow today.
What a remarkably braindead thing to say! If a person driving a blue Ford Taurus cuts you off in traffic, do you say "You Ford Taurus drivers are rude today"? If you get into an argument with a woman, do you say "Women are pissy today"? Of course not. One moderator did something you don't like -- not all moderators. Your "logic" is the same kind of thinking which is used to justify racism, sexism, and all sorts of other major social ills: "One Jew cost me my job, therefore Jews as a whole are out to ruin the economy"; "One man mistreated me, therefore all men are rapists", and so forth down the litany of braindead prejudices.
Consider also that it's overall pretty silly to complain about "you moderators" when there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of active moderators at present. If you are right, then one of them will no doubt see the post and moderate it back up -- and you will look like a fool for making a fuss.
Here are a few of what I think of as great hacks, in various different fields:
The Macintosh. Regardless of what you think of the current MacOS, it's incredibly impressive that the computing world was transformed by a 128KB machine that fits in a backpack. Desktop publishing emerged because of the Mac and the LaserWriter; the Mac also brought networking (in the form of AppleTalk) to the small office.
The RFCs and the Internet standards process. A social hack: formulating and documenting protocols out in the open instead of in back rooms under NDAs. Out of this hack emerged essentially all the protocols which run the Net.
The organ transplant. A medical/biological hack: The ability of surgeons to patch a running system is impressive in and of itself; the ability to patch a running system out of components from another, mostly-compatible, system, is simply amazing.
The GPL. A legal hack: The GPL is in one sense the "Intellectual Property" equivalent of Gödel's (First) Incompleteness Theorem: it turns copyright and licensing laws back on themselves in order to create restrictions upon their power, just as Gö turns mathematical logic back on itself to demonstrate its limits.
For that matter, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems themselves, for pretty obvious reasons. Mathematical hacks.
The Washington Times is not known as a particularly reliable newspaper. It's owned and operated by the Unification Church -- better known as the Moonies -- and runs to the extreme right wing quite a bit of the time.
If something is reported in the Washington Times and not picked up by the Post or the New York Times, you can bet that it's the Moonies getting it wrong yet again.
As a comparison, here's the "redistribution clause" from the Thelemic "Liber AL vel Legis", aka "Book of the Law", aka "Gospel according to St. Aleister":
III:47. This book shall be translated into all tongues: but always with the original in the writing of the Beast; for in the chance shape of the letters and their position to one another: in these are mysteries that no Beast shall divine....
Now that sounds a little bit more like the GPL: you've got to redistribute the original source when you port it.
(FWIW: I'm not a Thelemite, but I play one on the Net occasionally.)
(Following up on my own post to elaborate on an idea...)
As I understand it, the Hotline system depends largely on "trackers", which are systems which serve lists of Hotline servers. A server owner registers his/her server with one or more trackers; trackers are more widely-advertised (in the non-commercial sense of the word) than servers are; hence, users who discover a tracker discover all servers listed on it. Trackers, unlike the DNS root, are not global, and some of them may be quite difficult to locate; indeed, there are now meta-trackers (tracker-trackers) and (I'm told) even meta^2-trackers. Trackers serve to publicize servers, but they are not global nor are they as reliable as nameservice. Furthermore, they do not serve the authentication function which DNS does (through the IN-ADDR system, aka Reverse DNS).
A similar system could be constructed for names. Each client system (resolver) would need to know about some set of nameservers and meta-nameservers, through which it could search to find a machine or domain with a particular name. When an application gives the resolver a name to resolve, the name is passed to any or all of the nameservers, which return addresses -- just as DNS nameservers do.
The difference is that the resolver would have to query multiple nameservers, because of the lack of central organization to the system. Some servers would know about a particular name; others would not. Some servers might know that certain other servers knew an address for a name -- just as DNS has the forwarding system and routers have their route-advertisement protocols. However, since no one server could be guaranteed to find a name, the resolver would be best off querying every server it knows about.
Furthermore, because of the lack of a central authority, servers could disagree on the proper address for a given name. A resolver could look up "Slashdot" on a set of nameservers and get back two different answers -- or ten different answers. At that point, a decision of trust must be made: which servers do you trust to have the "real" Slashdot's address? All the problems of a PGP-style web of trust enter into the system here: a nameserver is acting as an introducer, just as a signer of a PGP key does.
Such a system would be by nature nondeterministic. It would be prone to all manner of reliability problems. However, it would be largely free of policy problems: since there would be no central authority, there could be no centralized injustice, such as some accuse NSI of exhibiting.
The decision between DNS and such a system is the decision between a centralized regime and a radically distributed regime: a cathedral and a bazaar -- or, more to the point, a hierarchy ("hieroi-archoi" -- holy leaders) and an anarchy ("an-archoi" -- no leaders). I make no claim as to which would be better for users, for the market, or for the Net as a system.
Vixie is of the well-considered opinion that the DNS tree can only have one root. DNS is designed around the idea that each zone, including the top-level zone, can only have a single authority record. This means that delegation can emanate only from one place, namely the top-level SOA (Start Of Authority) record.
Whoever controls the top-level SOA controls the delegation for the top-level domains (com, edu, de, jp, etc.) and hence the rest of the system. This was true when InterNIC was run not-for-profit, and remains true now that InterNIC is run for profit: it is not an artifact of the management of the DNS directory, but rather of its design.
It would be possible to create a new name-service system which permitted multiple roots, search engines or Hotline-style "trackers", a directed-graph model instead of a tree model, &c. However, this would not be DNS, and these features should not be slapped onto the side of DNS. They would require a new architecture.
If you want it, please feel free to design it. Distribute your resolver libraries far and wide. However, don't commit the errors of AlterNIC, such as committing computer crimes (forgery of DNS entries) in order to popularize your system.
One problem of any data security system that requires the user to remember a lot of data (passwords, phrases, &c.) is that users are prone to do silly things like write their passwords down and keep them in their wallets or desks.
I'm guessing that most Slashdot readers are already used to having twenty zillion different passwords, passphrases, PINs, and other secrets in memory. However, the bulk of users whom I deal with every day (I'm a sysadmin at a small college) put up quite a bit of resistance to having even one decently secure password. The office staff by and large set up Eudora to cache their mail passwords so they never have to enter them, and leave their systems unprotected. After the release of PGP 5.0 for Mac, I started an initiative to encourage them to use PGP for mail, but even with 5.0's an easy-to-use graphical interface, they didn't use it, because they didn't want to remember another bloody password. That we don't have massive intrusions of privacy going on here all the time says more about how boring it would be to read these people's email than it does about our security.
(Consider also that the two most popular desktop operating systems -- Windows and MacOS -- both now have 'keychain' systems which can cache all your passwords, protected only by a single system password, a single point of security failure.)
Currently, users don't want more passwords, and when they're required to have more passwords, they will take steps to circumvent them, thus reducing the effective security of the systems they use by some stupid factor. If we want secure systems, therefore, either we need to get the users to be as used to memorizing zillions of passwords as we computer geeks are, or else we need to start relying on something easier on the users' brains than passwords are.
At some point, "computer literacy" is going to have to come to mean more than just knowing how to maneuver around a GUI. Security, encryption, and the like are no longer merely technical issues; they are now issues of public policy, and in order for a democratic republic to function, issues of public policy need to be publicly understood.
The average user today is woefully uneducated about how computers work -- how information is represented and stored, how it is transmitted over a network, and so forth -- and thus is unable to make reasoned judgments about related issues. A person who does not understand that his love letters, written in Word, are stored on his hard disk as files cannot understand that a security hole that permits a remote cracker to read files off his hard disk would permit that cracker to read his love letters. A person who does not understand that information travels over a network in packets which can be intercepted cannot understand the need for end-to-end encryption.
I am not sure how to solve this problem. It is clear that the government, and government schools, cannot be expected to educate the populace about those technical issues which have become critical public policy issues. Why? Because government has, time and again, demonstrated that on these issues it prefers an illiterate populace. A computer-illiterate populace will not demand privacy, encryption rights, or other troublesome things.
Perhaps the industry should get directly involved. I'm not sure how well that would work, considering that the biggest names in the industry (Microsoft, for instance) oppose, through their actions, privacy and literacy for the masses.
I got much better sex ed from alt.sex.* (back before they were spam-havens) and the relevant FAQs than I ever got in high school. Don't underestimate the ability of literate experts in a field, even one like sex or S&M, to produce useful and entertaining documentation.
Censoring "sex" will not just block out the "dirty pictures"; it will also block out the real, high-quality, grassroots-produced information. Why? Because a lot of the people who want to stomp out the dirty pictures also want to keep people ignorant.
(Notice that I didn't say "... to keep children ignorant.")
Obviously Lotus does not work in the Internet-service industry, nor the Web-publishing industry, nor the education industry (which often runs its IT budgets on a shoestring and definitely can't support expensive filtering, and further has age-old political objections to censorship).
Lotus makes application software. Internet censorship wouldn't affect their business one bit, any more than regulation of the bicycle industry would affect airplane pilots.
If you want to see a Dungeons-&-Dragons-like show with some actual plot and no Yoda-oid floating deus-ex-machina, may I recommend the anime series Slayers?
Wizards, fighters, goblins, incantations, elves, demons (well, mazoku... same thing), magic shops, trolls, dragons, dragon gods... what else do you want?:)
Autism is a very misunderstood condition, and one which has been repeatedly mischaracterized, misdiagnosed, and mistreated.
I strongly suggest that before anyone jump to conclusions on what it means for some "geeks" to be characterized as "autistic", "borderline autistic", "Asperger's syndrome", or "shadow autistic", that you familiarize yourself with some of the material available at www.autistics.org. Something which might be especially appropriate is "Autistic Adults and Adolescents", an essay by a woman with "atypical autism" who might also very well fall into the "geek" category some ways.
You will find that "autism" does not mean "mental retardation", nor does it mean "insanity", nor does it mean "inability to function in society". As for what it does mean, well, that's still rather up in the air....
I work for the computing department of a small Massachusetts liberal-arts college. Now you mightn't think that a school of those characteristics would be a haven for Linux-based systems, but we are.
First off, all our central information services except the administrative databases (MacOS - FileMaker Pro), the library catalog (AIX), the voicemail system, and two legacy servers (one SunOS, one NT 3.51) run on Debian GNU/Linux systems. That includes mail, user accounts, DNS, Web service, Web proxy service, Web-based database applications, networked backup, file and print service (samba and netatalk), and routing / firewalling / network monitoring.
Further, we have an extensive Linux (and to a lesser extent BSD) subculture among our students. My boss teaches courses involving Linux, Perl, and other related Unixoid topics, and is in the process of building a CS curriculum on the basis of students' interest in Unix. Our computing staffing situation is dependent on student interest in Unix, as we tend to recruit from our own recent graduates.
We received last year an offer from Microsoft for cheap software in exchange for a mindshare monopoly. We seriously considered it -- for about five seconds. Then it went in the circular file. We may be liberal-arts flakes, but we're not idiots!
You don't need to do it at the IP level, especially considering that IPv6 will be getting serious use Real Soon. Under IPv6, DNS is all the more important, because IP addresses are too long to remember.
So create your free network at the DNS level -- make a new top-level domain, *.free or *.foo or something. Get users to add your root nameserver to their resolver configuration, or better yet, get various distributors of nameservers (e.g. the Debian package maintainer for BIND) to add it to their default set of root nameservers. (Just don't be an idiot like Mr. AlterNIC did, trying to crack into the "official" DNS.) DNS is just a distributed database system, so nobody can force people to use a particular set of nameservers...
Use Secure DNS for key exchange, thus enabling IPSec for opportunistic end-to-end encryption. (IPSec support is a mandatory part of the IPv6 standard...) Use DNS to direct people's connections to anonymizing proxies, so people's own computers don't ever see the IP addresses of the Web servers or other facilities they're accessing.
Most likely someone will come along and try to make it illegal to distribute BIND or a resolver with "unofficial" root nameservers in its config... but I think that'd look rather ridiculous in court, at least in the USA. The current gods of DNS need to be taken down a notch anyway...
M. Barbrook appears to be a critic of the sort who makes money by selling to lit-crit fans material which would, if posted to Slashdot or USENET, be dismissed as flamage, trolling, or miscellaneous nonsense.
For another example of his postmodern "brilliance", see this Brain Tennis debate between him and Aaron Lynch (also not my favorite guy) on the subject of memetics.
Right now the higher-ups at Be are clearly indulging their hatred of Apple rather than making clear technology decisions. They claim that BeOS can't run on a G3 or G4 because Apple sabotaged it, tied the hardware up to lock users in to MacOS. This is a claim similar to that of the barber, back in the days of desegregation, who said that he wouldn't serve black customers because he didn't know how to cut black people's hair.
If Linux runs on a G3 or G4, why shouldn't BeOS be able to? Linux has no secrets, no NDAs with Apple that let it get around lock-in. There is no lock-in. Be's hierarchs are whining about Apple at BeOS's users' expense, while hoping beyond hope that x86 will pull ahead of the G4 in performance and save their asses before Be's user base all turn to Linux on IBM PPC boards, or (worse yet, from Be's perspective) to MacOS X.
(Speaking of BeOS and Linux... does anyone know if Be has gotten to the starting line on IA-64 yet?)
DO NOT block ICMP ECHO_REQUEST / ECHO_RESPONSE ("ping") packets. If you do, you will confuse systems, such as some routers, which use pings to determine shortest paths. A Net-connected host is required to respond to pings.
Suppose Windows dominion does end next year. Without the platform holding people back, I think we can expect a few other changes.
First off, Linux-based systems will not be the only ones to benefit. The Macintosh will be right there, of course --- Apple's holding a comeback, and everyone's invited. The iMac has already done a bit to cut into Windows's market share, and we can expect the iBook to do likewise. Other OSes can also take their share, of course --- if Amiga ever gets its rear in gear, they can do nicely; so can Be, for that matter. Still, as there's little evidence Amiga or Be can get their rears in gear, I think we'll see Linux-based systems and the MacOS as the primary successors to Windows on the desktop.
Second off, x86 dominion will go away slowly. Macintoshes, of course, are non-x86 systems. So are Amigas. However, a good portion of the non-x86 market will be running Linux-based systems, not MacOS or the Amiga OE. Already there are the NetWinder and Qube which use non-x86 processors; there's also Linux for the PowerPC chip, though so far PPCs outside of Macintoshes are hard to come by. Non-x86 Linux systems will start as servers (like the Qube and NetWinder) and expand in the direction of the consumer desktop as demand materializes. The x86 isn't that great to begin with; it's been held on to largely because of binary compatibility, which isn't an issue in the world of free software.
Finally, the applications field will change. It's possible that Microsoft could lose Windows and yet keep the Office dominion by porting to Linux and other systems as they emerge. However, I suspect that in their hubris they will fail to do so in time. Thus, applications diversity will increase. This may mean a world of using translator applications all the time --- or it may mean a world of public standards for word processing documents, just as we now have public standards for images (JPEG, PNG) and sound (MP3). I for one would greatly prefer the latter...
It's an exciting time to be in the field. Let's not blow it.
When has regulation been the solution to questions of access? Consider radio. The FCC was started under the erroneous principle that radio stations would drown each other out in the absence of regulation, even though that wasn't happening and showed no signs of happening. (In fact, FM technology makes it pretty hard for radio stations to interfere with each other in normal operation -- the capture effect, as someone mentioned in comments to another article recently, prevents that.) And what has the FCC done? It's increased the cost of radio stations doing business so that average people can't start their own commercial radio station -- the licensure costs too much! It's restricted speech on the airwaves (ever heard of the Pacifica case?). And it's granted government more and more power, power it has no business wielding.
The government does not need to take a stance on the Internet business, any more than it needed to take a stance on the radio business. If it does so, it will only proceed to violate people's rights the way it has in radio -- restricting speech, limiting control to those who are rich enough to pay for a license. (Should you have to be licensed to run an ISP? To operate a Web site? How much will that license cost you? What restrictions will come with it? Ham radio operators aren't even allowed to say "shit", or to discuss politics, on the air...)
The government does not need to create competition; it needs to stop endowing monopolies like the monopolies so many cable companies have. (Many people seem to think that government is opposed to monopolies, because of antitrust laws. As it happens, antitrust is the exception; almost always, where there is a monopoly, it was created by the government. Just consider NSI...)
I, for one, expect Windows 2000 to flop rather nicely in the server market. Here's why:
1. Anyone who has been paying attention to the past few Microsoft releases would know that they have been increasingly less popular than expectations predicted. IIRC, MS shipped about half as many Windows 98 upgrades as they expected in the first few months; 98 became dominant not on the strength of upgrades but on the strength of the growth of the new-PC market. The idea that people need to upgrade just for the sake of upgrading is declining.
2. NT itself has peaked and is in decline in some server markets, notably the Web server market. Microsoft Web servers have been declining in market share for months on the Netcraft survey of Web servers. People are realizing that Microsoft systems are not reliable and scalable, much less enterprise-ready. Why buy more of the same?
3. W2k will break some third-party software that runs fine under current NT releases. This is just how MS operates. Sites which expect not to have catastrophic failures will wait and test W2k for some time before deploying it as a replacement for current NT systems, as the Gartner Group recommended several months ago. In the meantime, sites which rush ahead and move to W2k will have the usual early-adopter problems that any new system has. This will generate horror stories which will reduce other sites' interest in W2k. Vendors of Unix- and Linux-based systems will, if they know what they're doing, capitalize on these failures. (They may even FUD Microsoft back, though of course I wouldn't support that....)
4. W2k will not live up to the hype. MS has already (quietly) admitted that the widely-hyped Active Directory is not a directory at all (in the sense of X.500 and LDAP) but rather a flat pseudo-directory. Expect more of the same.
5. Finally, there's Y2k. Nobody's going to make any major changes to their mission-critical now, and in January there will be enough mopping-up to do that they'll delay still more.
Windows 2000 may well be a good deal better than NT. But will people gamble their businesses on it to the degree they've gambled them on NT? I think we can expect not.
Meanwhile, Linux-based systems are doing nothing but growing. What's the safe bet if you want to be using a platform that will continue to grow, survive, and thrive over the next ten years?
If you read the C|NET article, you will find that the study refers to the "server appliance" market, not the "server market". This refers to out-of-the-box server "solutions" like the NetWinder.
The article also says that Dataquest predicts Linux-based systems will account for 8.1 percent of the "traditional server" market. I think that's underrating Linux by quite a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
From the Constitution of the United States, Article III, Section 3:
....
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overy Act, or on Confession in open Court."
In other words, "challenging authority and laws" is in no sense treason according to the Constitution. It's possible that the FBI wish to refer not to treason but to "sedition", which is (roughly) the "crime" of speaking against the government. Obviously, the First Amendment has a lot to say about the legal status of that "crime"!
The status of sedition under U.S. law has in fact varied quite a lot. There have been several anti-sedition laws, from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the Smith Act of 1940, and so on. However, the prevailing sense of the Supreme Court has been that unless a speech act creates "clear and present danger" of lawless behavior, it is protected by the First Amendment from being held as seditious.
In short, the FBI seem to be on extremely shaky ground here. However, I am not a lawyer, and the article is rather vague on what the charges being investigated actually are. So let's wait and see what comes of this one
{Sp0ng} By the way, you moderators fucking blow today.
What a remarkably braindead thing to say! If a person driving a blue Ford Taurus cuts you off in traffic, do you say "You Ford Taurus drivers are rude today"? If you get into an argument with a woman, do you say "Women are pissy today"? Of course not. One moderator did something you don't like -- not all moderators. Your "logic" is the same kind of thinking which is used to justify racism, sexism, and all sorts of other major social ills: "One Jew cost me my job, therefore Jews as a whole are out to ruin the economy"; "One man mistreated me, therefore all men are rapists", and so forth down the litany of braindead prejudices.
Consider also that it's overall pretty silly to complain about "you moderators" when there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of active moderators at present. If you are right, then one of them will no doubt see the post and moderate it back up -- and you will look like a fool for making a fuss.
The Washington Times is not known as a particularly reliable newspaper. It's owned and operated by the Unification Church -- better known as the Moonies -- and runs to the extreme right wing quite a bit of the time.
If something is reported in the Washington Times and not picked up by the Post or the New York Times, you can bet that it's the Moonies getting it wrong yet again.
As a comparison, here's the "redistribution clause" from the Thelemic "Liber AL vel Legis", aka "Book of the Law", aka "Gospel according to St. Aleister":
....
III:47. This book shall be translated into all tongues: but always with the original in the writing of the Beast; for in the chance shape of the letters and their position to one another: in these are mysteries that no Beast shall divine
Now that sounds a little bit more like the GPL: you've got to redistribute the original source when you port it.
(FWIW: I'm not a Thelemite, but I play one on the Net occasionally.)
(Following up on my own post to elaborate on an idea...)
As I understand it, the Hotline system depends largely on "trackers", which are systems which serve lists of Hotline servers. A server owner registers his/her server with one or more trackers; trackers are more widely-advertised (in the non-commercial sense of the word) than servers are; hence, users who discover a tracker discover all servers listed on it. Trackers, unlike the DNS root, are not global, and some of them may be quite difficult to locate; indeed, there are now meta-trackers (tracker-trackers) and (I'm told) even meta^2-trackers. Trackers serve to publicize servers, but they are not global nor are they as reliable as nameservice. Furthermore, they do not serve the authentication function which DNS does (through the IN-ADDR system, aka Reverse DNS).
A similar system could be constructed for names. Each client system (resolver) would need to know about some set of nameservers and meta-nameservers, through which it could search to find a machine or domain with a particular name. When an application gives the resolver a name to resolve, the name is passed to any or all of the nameservers, which return addresses -- just as DNS nameservers do.
The difference is that the resolver would have to query multiple nameservers, because of the lack of central organization to the system. Some servers would know about a particular name; others would not. Some servers might know that certain other servers knew an address for a name -- just as DNS has the forwarding system and routers have their route-advertisement protocols. However, since no one server could be guaranteed to find a name, the resolver would be best off querying every server it knows about.
Furthermore, because of the lack of a central authority, servers could disagree on the proper address for a given name. A resolver could look up "Slashdot" on a set of nameservers and get back two different answers -- or ten different answers. At that point, a decision of trust must be made: which servers do you trust to have the "real" Slashdot's address? All the problems of a PGP-style web of trust enter into the system here: a nameserver is acting as an introducer, just as a signer of a PGP key does.
Such a system would be by nature nondeterministic. It would be prone to all manner of reliability problems. However, it would be largely free of policy problems: since there would be no central authority, there could be no centralized injustice, such as some accuse NSI of exhibiting.
The decision between DNS and such a system is the decision between a centralized regime and a radically distributed regime: a cathedral and a bazaar -- or, more to the point, a hierarchy ("hieroi-archoi" -- holy leaders) and an anarchy ("an-archoi" -- no leaders). I make no claim as to which would be better for users, for the market, or for the Net as a system.
Vixie is of the well-considered opinion that the DNS tree can only have one root. DNS is designed around the idea that each zone, including the top-level zone, can only have a single authority record. This means that delegation can emanate only from one place, namely the top-level SOA (Start Of Authority) record.
Whoever controls the top-level SOA controls the delegation for the top-level domains (com, edu, de, jp, etc.) and hence the rest of the system. This was true when InterNIC was run not-for-profit, and remains true now that InterNIC is run for profit: it is not an artifact of the management of the DNS directory, but rather of its design.
It would be possible to create a new name-service system which permitted multiple roots, search engines or Hotline-style "trackers", a directed-graph model instead of a tree model, &c. However, this would not be DNS, and these features should not be slapped onto the side of DNS. They would require a new architecture.
If you want it, please feel free to design it. Distribute your resolver libraries far and wide. However, don't commit the errors of AlterNIC, such as committing computer crimes (forgery of DNS entries) in order to popularize your system.
One problem of any data security system that requires the user to remember a lot of data (passwords, phrases, &c.) is that users are prone to do silly things like write their passwords down and keep them in their wallets or desks.
I'm guessing that most Slashdot readers are already used to having twenty zillion different passwords, passphrases, PINs, and other secrets in memory. However, the bulk of users whom I deal with every day (I'm a sysadmin at a small college) put up quite a bit of resistance to having even one decently secure password. The office staff by and large set up Eudora to cache their mail passwords so they never have to enter them, and leave their systems unprotected. After the release of PGP 5.0 for Mac, I started an initiative to encourage them to use PGP for mail, but even with 5.0's an easy-to-use graphical interface, they didn't use it, because they didn't want to remember another bloody password. That we don't have massive intrusions of privacy going on here all the time says more about how boring it would be to read these people's email than it does about our security.
(Consider also that the two most popular desktop operating systems -- Windows and MacOS -- both now have 'keychain' systems which can cache all your passwords, protected only by a single system password, a single point of security failure.)
Currently, users don't want more passwords, and when they're required to have more passwords, they will take steps to circumvent them, thus reducing the effective security of the systems they use by some stupid factor. If we want secure systems, therefore, either we need to get the users to be as used to memorizing zillions of passwords as we computer geeks are, or else we need to start relying on something easier on the users' brains than passwords are.
At some point, "computer literacy" is going to have to come to mean more than just knowing how to maneuver around a GUI. Security, encryption, and the like are no longer merely technical issues; they are now issues of public policy, and in order for a democratic republic to function, issues of public policy need to be publicly understood.
The average user today is woefully uneducated about how computers work -- how information is represented and stored, how it is transmitted over a network, and so forth -- and thus is unable to make reasoned judgments about related issues. A person who does not understand that his love letters, written in Word, are stored on his hard disk as files cannot understand that a security hole that permits a remote cracker to read files off his hard disk would permit that cracker to read his love letters. A person who does not understand that information travels over a network in packets which can be intercepted cannot understand the need for end-to-end encryption.
I am not sure how to solve this problem. It is clear that the government, and government schools, cannot be expected to educate the populace about those technical issues which have become critical public policy issues. Why? Because government has, time and again, demonstrated that on these issues it prefers an illiterate populace. A computer-illiterate populace will not demand privacy, encryption rights, or other troublesome things.
Perhaps the industry should get directly involved. I'm not sure how well that would work, considering that the biggest names in the industry (Microsoft, for instance) oppose, through their actions, privacy and literacy for the masses.
On the contrary, bondage and sadomasochism websites are a place to learn about bondage and sadomasochism, obviously. :)
I got much better sex ed from alt.sex.* (back before they were spam-havens) and the relevant FAQs than I ever got in high school. Don't underestimate the ability of literate experts in a field, even one like sex or S&M, to produce useful and entertaining documentation.
Censoring "sex" will not just block out the "dirty pictures"; it will also block out the real, high-quality, grassroots-produced information. Why? Because a lot of the people who want to stomp out the dirty pictures also want to keep people ignorant.
(Notice that I didn't say "... to keep children ignorant.")
By "education" I meant colleges and universities, which do have a tradition of "academic freedom" and resistance to censorship.
:)
If I meant public high schools, I'd say "indoctrination" or "alienation" or "degradation" maybe.
(Just to clear things up...)
Obviously Lotus does not work in the Internet-service industry, nor the Web-publishing industry, nor the education industry (which often runs its IT budgets on a shoestring and definitely can't support expensive filtering, and further has age-old political objections to censorship).
Lotus makes application software. Internet censorship wouldn't affect their business one bit, any more than regulation of the bicycle industry would affect airplane pilots.
If you want to see a Dungeons-&-Dragons-like show with some actual plot and no Yoda-oid floating deus-ex-machina, may I recommend the anime series Slayers?
... same thing), magic shops, trolls, dragons, dragon gods ... what else do you want? :)
Wizards, fighters, goblins, incantations, elves, demons (well, mazoku
Autism is a very misunderstood condition, and one which has been repeatedly mischaracterized, misdiagnosed, and mistreated.
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I strongly suggest that before anyone jump to conclusions on what it means for some "geeks" to be characterized as "autistic", "borderline autistic", "Asperger's syndrome", or "shadow autistic", that you familiarize yourself with some of the material available at www.autistics.org. Something which might be especially appropriate is "Autistic Adults and Adolescents", an essay by a woman with "atypical autism" who might also very well fall into the "geek" category some ways.
You will find that "autism" does not mean "mental retardation", nor does it mean "insanity", nor does it mean "inability to function in society". As for what it does mean, well, that's still rather up in the air
I work for the computing department of a small Massachusetts liberal-arts college. Now you mightn't think that a school of those characteristics would be a haven for Linux-based systems, but we are.
First off, all our central information services except the administrative databases (MacOS - FileMaker Pro), the library catalog (AIX), the voicemail system, and two legacy servers (one SunOS, one NT 3.51) run on Debian GNU/Linux systems. That includes mail, user accounts, DNS, Web service, Web proxy service, Web-based database applications, networked backup, file and print service (samba and netatalk), and routing / firewalling / network monitoring.
Further, we have an extensive Linux (and to a lesser extent BSD) subculture among our students. My boss teaches courses involving Linux, Perl, and other related Unixoid topics, and is in the process of building a CS curriculum on the basis of students' interest in Unix. Our computing staffing situation is dependent on student interest in Unix, as we tend to recruit from our own recent graduates.
We received last year an offer from Microsoft for cheap software in exchange for a mindshare monopoly. We seriously considered it -- for about five seconds. Then it went in the circular file. We may be liberal-arts flakes, but we're not idiots!
You don't need to do it at the IP level, especially considering that IPv6 will be getting serious use Real Soon. Under IPv6, DNS is all the more important, because IP addresses are too long to remember.
...
... but I think that'd look rather ridiculous in court, at least in the USA. The current gods of DNS need to be taken down a notch anyway ...
So create your free network at the DNS level -- make a new top-level domain, *.free or *.foo or something. Get users to add your root nameserver to their resolver configuration, or better yet, get various distributors of nameservers (e.g. the Debian package maintainer for BIND) to add it to their default set of root nameservers. (Just don't be an idiot like Mr. AlterNIC did, trying to crack into the "official" DNS.) DNS is just a distributed database system, so nobody can force people to use a particular set of nameservers
Use Secure DNS for key exchange, thus enabling IPSec for opportunistic end-to-end encryption. (IPSec support is a mandatory part of the IPv6 standard...) Use DNS to direct people's connections to anonymizing proxies, so people's own computers don't ever see the IP addresses of the Web servers or other facilities they're accessing.
Most likely someone will come along and try to make it illegal to distribute BIND or a resolver with "unofficial" root nameservers in its config
M. Barbrook appears to be a critic of the sort who makes money by selling to lit-crit fans material which would, if posted to Slashdot or USENET, be dismissed as flamage, trolling, or miscellaneous nonsense.
For another example of his postmodern "brilliance", see this Brain Tennis debate between him and Aaron Lynch (also not my favorite guy) on the subject of memetics.
Right now the higher-ups at Be are clearly indulging their hatred of Apple rather than making clear technology decisions. They claim that BeOS can't run on a G3 or G4 because Apple sabotaged it, tied the hardware up to lock users in to MacOS. This is a claim similar to that of the barber, back in the days of desegregation, who said that he wouldn't serve black customers because he didn't know how to cut black people's hair.
... does anyone know if Be has gotten to the starting line on IA-64 yet?)
If Linux runs on a G3 or G4, why shouldn't BeOS be able to? Linux has no secrets, no NDAs with Apple that let it get around lock-in. There is no lock-in. Be's hierarchs are whining about Apple at BeOS's users' expense, while hoping beyond hope that x86 will pull ahead of the G4 in performance and save their asses before Be's user base all turn to Linux on IBM PPC boards, or (worse yet, from Be's perspective) to MacOS X.
(Speaking of BeOS and Linux
Clearly Paramount has been taking sequel-naming lessons from the makers of the animé series Slayers ...
...)
(whose sequels have names like "Slayers NEXT", "Slayers GREAT", "Slayers GORGEOUS"
DO NOT block ICMP ECHO_REQUEST / ECHO_RESPONSE ("ping") packets. If you do, you will confuse systems, such as some routers, which use pings to determine shortest paths. A Net-connected host is required to respond to pings.
Actually, AbiSource claims that AbiWord does not run on the Macintosh.
Suppose Windows dominion does end next year. Without the platform holding people back, I think we can expect a few other changes.
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First off, Linux-based systems will not be the only ones to benefit. The Macintosh will be right there, of course --- Apple's holding a comeback, and everyone's invited. The iMac has already done a bit to cut into Windows's market share, and we can expect the iBook to do likewise. Other OSes can also take their share, of course --- if Amiga ever gets its rear in gear, they can do nicely; so can Be, for that matter. Still, as there's little evidence Amiga or Be can get their rears in gear, I think we'll see Linux-based systems and the MacOS as the primary successors to Windows on the desktop.
Second off, x86 dominion will go away slowly. Macintoshes, of course, are non-x86 systems. So are Amigas. However, a good portion of the non-x86 market will be running Linux-based systems, not MacOS or the Amiga OE. Already there are the NetWinder and Qube which use non-x86 processors; there's also Linux for the PowerPC chip, though so far PPCs outside of Macintoshes are hard to come by. Non-x86 Linux systems will start as servers (like the Qube and NetWinder) and expand in the direction of the consumer desktop as demand materializes. The x86 isn't that great to begin with; it's been held on to largely because of binary compatibility, which isn't an issue in the world of free software.
Finally, the applications field will change. It's possible that Microsoft could lose Windows and yet keep the Office dominion by porting to Linux and other systems as they emerge. However, I suspect that in their hubris they will fail to do so in time. Thus, applications diversity will increase. This may mean a world of using translator applications all the time --- or it may mean a world of public standards for word processing documents, just as we now have public standards for images (JPEG, PNG) and sound (MP3). I for one would greatly prefer the latter
It's an exciting time to be in the field. Let's not blow it.
When has regulation been the solution to questions of access? Consider radio. The FCC was started under the erroneous principle that radio stations would drown each other out in the absence of regulation, even though that wasn't happening and showed no signs of happening. (In fact, FM technology makes it pretty hard for radio stations to interfere with each other in normal operation -- the capture effect, as someone mentioned in comments to another article recently, prevents that.) And what has the FCC done? It's increased the cost of radio stations doing business so that average people can't start their own commercial radio station -- the licensure costs too much! It's restricted speech on the airwaves (ever heard of the Pacifica case?). And it's granted government more and more power, power it has no business wielding.
The government does not need to take a stance on the Internet business, any more than it needed to take a stance on the radio business. If it does so, it will only proceed to violate people's rights the way it has in radio -- restricting speech, limiting control to those who are rich enough to pay for a license. (Should you have to be licensed to run an ISP? To operate a Web site? How much will that license cost you? What restrictions will come with it? Ham radio operators aren't even allowed to say "shit", or to discuss politics, on the air...)
The government does not need to create competition; it needs to stop endowing monopolies like the monopolies so many cable companies have. (Many people seem to think that government is opposed to monopolies, because of antitrust laws. As it happens, antitrust is the exception; almost always, where there is a monopoly, it was created by the government. Just consider NSI...)
I, for one, expect Windows 2000 to flop rather nicely in the server market. Here's why:
....)
1. Anyone who has been paying attention to the past few Microsoft releases would know that they have been increasingly less popular than expectations predicted. IIRC, MS shipped about half as many Windows 98 upgrades as they expected in the first few months; 98 became dominant not on the strength of upgrades but on the strength of the growth of the new-PC market. The idea that people need to upgrade just for the sake of upgrading is declining.
2. NT itself has peaked and is in decline in some server markets, notably the Web server market. Microsoft Web servers have been declining in market share for months on the Netcraft survey of Web servers. People are realizing that Microsoft systems are not reliable and scalable, much less enterprise-ready. Why buy more of the same?
3. W2k will break some third-party software that runs fine under current NT releases. This is just how MS operates. Sites which expect not to have catastrophic failures will wait and test W2k for some time before deploying it as a replacement for current NT systems, as the Gartner Group recommended several months ago. In the meantime, sites which rush ahead and move to W2k will have the usual early-adopter problems that any new system has. This will generate horror stories which will reduce other sites' interest in W2k. Vendors of Unix- and Linux-based systems will, if they know what they're doing, capitalize on these failures. (They may even FUD Microsoft back, though of course I wouldn't support that
4. W2k will not live up to the hype. MS has already (quietly) admitted that the widely-hyped Active Directory is not a directory at all (in the sense of X.500 and LDAP) but rather a flat pseudo-directory. Expect more of the same.
5. Finally, there's Y2k. Nobody's going to make any major changes to their mission-critical now, and in January there will be enough mopping-up to do that they'll delay still more.
Windows 2000 may well be a good deal better than NT. But will people gamble their businesses on it to the degree they've gambled them on NT? I think we can expect not.
Meanwhile, Linux-based systems are doing nothing but growing. What's the safe bet if you want to be using a platform that will continue to grow, survive, and thrive over the next ten years?
If you read the C|NET article, you will find that the study refers to the "server appliance" market, not the "server market". This refers to out-of-the-box server "solutions" like the NetWinder.
The article also says that Dataquest predicts Linux-based systems will account for 8.1 percent of the "traditional server" market. I think that's underrating Linux by quite a bit.