There's one piece of this fraud that isn't being talked about, but it is where the REAL crime is happening.
We have been accepting donations for several years now using PayPal, and very recently, we've seen this happening with donations being given to our project.
Example: We receive a $5.00 donation from someone through PayPal. Roughly two weeks later, after we've withdrawn the funds to our bank account, the original donator disputes the "charge we made" to their credit card (we make no such charges, and the person who donated the $5.00 had to type that amount into the PayPal form, it's not an automated process).
PayPal investigates the dispute, refunds the $5.00 to the credit card holder, and charges US the extra $10.00 chargeback fee for the reversal. If our bank balance for donations is $0.00, that just cost us $10.00 out of our own pockets. 100 of those in a month, and we're out $1,000, out of our own salaries.
I've disputed this practice with PayPal many times, including logs of the hits, dates, times, bank transaction history, etc. and they just don't seem to care.
Accepting donations to OSS projects has become very risky, because of this exact practice. CCV would eliminate it, but PayPal and similar outfits do not require it.
Have you SEEN AT&T's data plan? I have, because I've been a Cingular customer for years and years.. you pay THROUGH THE NOSE for every kilobyte of data you use. They currently charge $0.01/kb of data. So if you fetch 200k of emails to your device from your IMAP account, that just cost you $2.00.
But there's good news! You can get an "unlimited" data plan for an additional $39.95 from AT&T.. how nice of them.
I have over 4,700 saved minutes ("rollover minutes") on my account, and my monthly bill is still hovering between $150 and $180 every month, and I don't use data AT ALL because its so expensive.
My phone usage is pretty standard, with no crazy long-distance or international calls. They do, however... charge $0.10/text message, or you can "upgrade" to a 200/month plan for an additional $5.99/month. But oh, that doesn't cover "international" text messages (say, texting US -> Canada)... those are $0.20/text message, and there's no way to lower that cost under ANY plan. I got stung by that quite a bit.
So I can either send my non-US friends an email from my phone, and pay $0.01/kb, or I can text them for $0.20 per-message. Whee. Not.
Unless they're going to comp iPhone users with some miraculous data plan that non-iPhone users aren't allowed to use, I can't see this being useful at all.
This is part of Microsoft's new Vista campaign for 2007 and 2008:
"If you can't innovate... LITIGATE!"
I RTFA, and I don't see an itemized list of the FOSS packages which they claim infringe, and the relevant patent numbers that are apparently infringed-upon. Until I see an itemized list, I can't properly audit my collection of FOSS to replace or rewrite those referenced packages.
Until I see an itemized list of FOSS packages and relevant patent numbers, this is all just smoke.
My wife and I have tried Snapsfish, Shutterfly and others, and have found that HANDS DOWN, the best quality for final prints nad photos comes from York Photo.
Not only are they cheaper per-print, but the paper and the finish and the overall speed and quality blew all of the others away (and we have the prints from all of them to hold side-by-side to prove it).
I don't work for any of these companies, but when it comes to printing keepsake photos for albums, family members and framed photos we give away as gifts, nothing we've tried so far beats York.
Sure it shouldn't take more than a year for a one click patent to come into use, but if you discover cold fusion, well it might take some time to get the funding and actually build a state of the art first ever cold fusion power plant.
But see, you've hit the nail right on the head... you shouldn't be able to patent things you can't create or produce.. If you can't prove that the patent will result in some actual, physical thing... then it shouldn't be approved. Period.
I agree with the OP: Patents do nothing but stifle innovation and improvment of existing ideas. Besides, we already have protection for original creations... it's called Copyright.
Can you download into a non-shared folder? If not, then it's not the p2p for me (which is why I only use bittorrent for distros).
Uhm... Bittorrent is p2p, because as you're downloading, its uploading your already-fetched blocks to other p2p clients awaiting receipt of those blocks. You don't need to have files in a "shared folder" to share files over Bittorrent (or most p2p protocols, in fact).
Access, the company now stifling innovation with the dormant BeOS code, is also the Japanese mobile phone corporate giant that bought out PalmOS, lying about offering a smartphone running Linux with a PalmOS GUI/compatibility layer.
The answer is smart cards. I had a credit card with a smartchip in it from 2000-2005 and the chip was used exactly three times, twice at burger kings and once at a haircut place.
How is THAT the answer, when only 3 places in the 5 years you've used the card, support reading the chip on it? Doesn't sound very pervasive to me.
Can it open ODF, Lotus, WordPerfect, etc. formats natively within its own OS or office applications?
No
Does it support writing to PDF natively?
No
Can it natively play all of my media audio and video formats, including FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Theora and others?
No
Does it support onboard IM clients using standards-compliant protocols (Jabber? irc? Others?)
No
Can I use freely available tools to build software on it, and do those tools come with the OS itself?
No
Can I read multiple filesystems at the same time on multiple different external and internal media? Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X and other filesystems?
No
Can I mount NFS shares to other non-Vista resources with existing, included applications/tools?
No
Remind me again what Vista does that my Linux box can't? Oh wait... purty jellybean graphics and melted-crayon menus and icons. Right.
No thanks, Linux does more, on less resources, at less cost, and is more extensible, secure and updates are MUCH easier to manage.. oh, and I KNOW what's running under the covers, and if I don't, I can go look and see for myself.
All we wanted, was for them to bring themselves into compliance... and they insisted that they were, and we were wrong, and that the GPL was "...subject to interpretation". So we contacted the FSF and they gave us Wendy. It's been a few years now, and we never really got final closure on the situation, so I'm not sure where it stands at this point. (past copyright infringement does not just vanish if you stop violating it in the present, however).
I have collaborated with Wendy over numerous dozens of emails and personally met her to sit down with the CEO of aforementioned alleged-infringing company in New York, and I can say that she really knows her field. I'm happy that she's doing good things for the EFF, they need someone of her skillset on-staff.
I have nothing but praise for her abilities and her skills. She was a brick wall between our project and the commercial company who tried to threaten us many times with their millions of dollars of investor money to try to silence us.
If Wendy is on your side, it's a good thing. It's where she shines the best.
I guess you haven't tried Amarok recently then... it blows away iTunes in so many ways I could never have imagined. Things are dramatically more intuitive, it supports at least 30 features that iTunes does not (and will not support), and most of all, it works on my platforms, with all of my media players (not just iPods).
More features, more support, more functionality, more platforms, and the GUI that is just useful and intuitive? Using iTunes is like using rocks and sticks to manage my music. No thanks.
I've posted my list back about a year ago, and I still use every single one of them every day... (I also describe how to get around a "bug" in FF that forbids non-standard port connections). Check it out here. I also spoke at my local LUG about the same thing in January.
Here's a list of the extensions I'm currently using in my Firefox build (you can see how I have it tricked out with all of my theming and extensions over here):
Sage, a really slick and fast rss aggregator/reader for Firefox. It docks on the sidebar and is visible with a simple Alt-S keystroke. Very nice, and easy for me to catch up on some quick headlines when I need to.
AdBlock Plus with the AdBlock Filterset G Updater to stop the flood of useless ads from coming at me. I did have to add one small rule for Google's ads, because I do actually like the recommendations they provide from time to time, and it helps out sites I visit with a little revenue. That regex looks like this:
@@*.googlesyndication.com/*
Web Developer, a very useful and slick toolbar/menu driven suite that allows me to do all kinds of things to websites I'm viewing, including validation, showing where their css classes are, manipulating forms, cookies, images, and dozens of other features. Hands-down, the most-useful extension I have as a developer/tweaker of web content.
PrefBar, another powerful extension I use every single day. This one allows me to change the capabilities of my browser with a simple click of a checkbox. Want Java enabled? Click. Sick of popups? Click. I have Colors, Images, Javascript, Java, Flash, Popups, Proxies, Pipelining, Referers, Cache on my bar. Its completely customizable, and very well-done.
SwitchProxy lets me manage and switch between multiple proxy configurations quickly and easily. I can also use it as an anonymizer to protect my system from prying eyes. I have Squid, Squid + Privoxy, Privoxy + Tor and i2p enabled in my configuration at the moment. Quick and easy, and one status-bar dropdown lets me change from one to another.
FasterFox gives me a little boost by auto-configuring some parameters for faster browsing, such as link prefetching, pipelining, DNS cache, paint delay, and others.
ForecastFox, weather.. in my status bar. I've changed the icons a bit with a separate icon pack called Lansing, which is nice adn small and out of the way. Minimal is the way to go on my toolbars and status bars.
Linky lets me open or download all or selected links in a page, image links and even web addresses found in the text in separate or different tabs or windows. A simple right-click on any link or web address, and away I go.
Google PageRank Status gives me a quick overview of the PR of a site in the current view. This is useful as I do a lot of web work, and knowing what kind of sites get a decent or poor PR is useful information.
"The title of this article is totally off. This is nothing more than a way to analyze battlefield intel better. It's got nothing to do with any kind of surveillance programs or anything other than being able to better catagorize threats and analyze data after a conflict."
Except that it is...
What they're talking about, is aggregating all of the "public" surveillance data from hundreds of systems, tying it all together, and using that to "play back" everything from the point where you leave your house, drive to the farm supply store, buy that "fertilizer", drive to the mall to get a duffel bag, drive out of the mall to the target location and blow yourself and your car up.
Traffic cameras, ATM machine cameras, store surveillance cameras, mall cameras, etc. Add it all together, tie it all together with timepoints and events, and you can see where this is heading.
Leave your house in the morning. Your movements are captured by the neighbor's webcam.
You drive down the road, and your movements are captured by the various traffic and speedcams along the route.
You pull into the bank to use the ATM machine. Your face and withdrawl details are captured by the ATM camera.
You drive to the mall, your movements are captured by more traffic cameras.
You enter the mall and your purchase at the sports store is captured on the store surveillance camera, as well as the mall security cameras.
You leave and switch cars, and drive to the target location (more traffic cameras track your movements).
...
I don't see a far leap from here to having to "register" your surveillance camera, webcam, store camera with the.gov, so they can be sure to ask you for your footage when a crime happens that requires your "pieces" of the evidence chain. It's already happening.
And your "battlefield intel" analysis is spot-on, because the.gov IS at war, with its own people.
Don't forget, WE give the government their power and their rights, they dont' give them to us. We can just as easily take them away too (and we are, piece by piece; getting us back to our roots).
Obviously, a quarantine means that you won't see the false positive until you specifically go check, but you won't lose it, unless you don't check for it before the quarantine's auto-delete timeout.
There is no auto-delete timeout for the quarantine, not by default, and not that I can manually set without futzing in the code itself. I'm thankful for that, and so are my users.
Graylisting, by definition, introduces a delay in mail transmission.
A delay of 25 minutes is barely perceptable. Email is not IM, even though people assume the two to be interchangeable. They're not.
Besides, you could also use nolisting instead, if you so choose. I prefer to receive ALL of my mail, not potentially lose it without even knowing about it.
"This is a risk management practice, and you need to decide where you want to put your risk. Would you rather risk getting spam with lower risk of losing/delaying messages you actually wanted to get, or would you rather risk losing/delaying legitimate messages with lower risk of spam? You can't have both, no matter how loudly you scream."
Yes you can, its called dspam, and it works beautifully.
I, and none of my users, have seen an single spam email in over 3 years. I added graymilter and Project Zen from Spamhaus very recently, and its helped even more.
Sure, there are false positives that get caught and quarantined, but dspam has a nice webui that let's me retrain them and forward them on to my mailbox. The users have the same web interface and can manage their own false-positives in the same way. They can set it to catch more, or catch less with a few clicks in the interface. Some of my users love HTML email from online stores, and some do not. Everyone can tweak and train the heuristics for their own mail, however they wish.
I have no problem now making any of my email addresses visible on the Internet, on forums, wikis, mailing lists or webpages, because I simply do not get spam, so its not a problem anymore.
Are we really making it better for us, or worse?
on
Finding New Code
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If we create this grand, uber code-searching portal, which can search the context of the code, aren't we making it easier for commercial entities to go ahead and and pick and choose those bits of code to use in their products, knowing full well that they're going to violate the GPL (or other OSS licensing models) by doing so?
I've talked to NO LESS THAN a dozen commercial companies in the last 2-3 years where they're actively taking FOSS source and incorporating it into their products, because.. (and I quote) "..Its freeware, so we can use it however we wish."
The licensing differences between "freeware" and "free software" seem to escape them. Just google around and you'll see thousands of FOSS projects listed on sites like TUCOWS, download.com and others, as "freeware" and not the proper "free software" that they are. There are also people who think "free software" means just that (lowercase "F" there).
Let's be sure that if we have a search engine that let's brainless developers look like experts by cutting and pasting bits of OSS code from here and there together to make their software work, that they know what the license is and that they must be in compliance with it to use it.
Collection approaches vary by state. I'm in California. I had a court judgement against a retail store, and after some non-fruitful phone calls and letters, I paid for a "till tap" and an "8 hour keeper", services of the County Sheriff.
I'm curious... what was the initial complaint against the retail store for?
Slashdot Mirror
There's one piece of this fraud that isn't being talked about, but it is where the REAL crime is happening.
We have been accepting donations for several years now using PayPal, and very recently, we've seen this happening with donations being given to our project.
Example: We receive a $5.00 donation from someone through PayPal. Roughly two weeks later, after we've withdrawn the funds to our bank account, the original donator disputes the "charge we made" to their credit card (we make no such charges, and the person who donated the $5.00 had to type that amount into the PayPal form, it's not an automated process).
PayPal investigates the dispute, refunds the $5.00 to the credit card holder, and charges US the extra $10.00 chargeback fee for the reversal. If our bank balance for donations is $0.00, that just cost us $10.00 out of our own pockets. 100 of those in a month, and we're out $1,000, out of our own salaries.
I've disputed this practice with PayPal many times, including logs of the hits, dates, times, bank transaction history, etc. and they just don't seem to care.
Accepting donations to OSS projects has become very risky, because of this exact practice. CCV would eliminate it, but PayPal and similar outfits do not require it.
Have you been stealing my .sig again? (conveniently nicked from someone else here on Slashdot, who I can't recall at this point)
"There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Use in that order. Starting now."
And I vote we amend that to state something that supports the claim of the defendant...
"Innocent UNLESS proven guilty."
But in our current government under the oppressive King Bush, we won't see these kinds of citizen-centric things passed down.
We need to stop including verbage that assumed everyone is guilty, and its only a matter of time until there's enough evidence to prove it.
Have you SEEN AT&T's data plan? I have, because I've been a Cingular customer for years and years.. you pay THROUGH THE NOSE for every kilobyte of data you use. They currently charge $0.01/kb of data. So if you fetch 200k of emails to your device from your IMAP account, that just cost you $2.00.
But there's good news! You can get an "unlimited" data plan for an additional $39.95 from AT&T.. how nice of them.
I have over 4,700 saved minutes ("rollover minutes") on my account, and my monthly bill is still hovering between $150 and $180 every month, and I don't use data AT ALL because its so expensive.
My phone usage is pretty standard, with no crazy long-distance or international calls. They do, however... charge $0.10/text message, or you can "upgrade" to a 200/month plan for an additional $5.99/month. But oh, that doesn't cover "international" text messages (say, texting US -> Canada)... those are $0.20/text message, and there's no way to lower that cost under ANY plan. I got stung by that quite a bit.
So I can either send my non-US friends an email from my phone, and pay $0.01/kb, or I can text them for $0.20 per-message. Whee. Not.
Unless they're going to comp iPhone users with some miraculous data plan that non-iPhone users aren't allowed to use, I can't see this being useful at all.
This is part of Microsoft's new Vista campaign for 2007 and 2008:
"If you can't innovate... LITIGATE!"
I RTFA, and I don't see an itemized list of the FOSS packages which they claim infringe, and the relevant patent numbers that are apparently infringed-upon. Until I see an itemized list, I can't properly audit my collection of FOSS to replace or rewrite those referenced packages.
Until I see an itemized list of FOSS packages and relevant patent numbers, this is all just smoke.
My wife and I have tried Snapsfish, Shutterfly and others, and have found that HANDS DOWN, the best quality for final prints nad photos comes from York Photo.
Not only are they cheaper per-print, but the paper and the finish and the overall speed and quality blew all of the others away (and we have the prints from all of them to hold side-by-side to prove it).
I don't work for any of these companies, but when it comes to printing keepsake photos for albums, family members and framed photos we give away as gifts, nothing we've tried so far beats York.
But see, you've hit the nail right on the head... you shouldn't be able to patent things you can't create or produce.. If you can't prove that the patent will result in some actual, physical thing... then it shouldn't be approved. Period.
I agree with the OP: Patents do nothing but stifle innovation and improvment of existing ideas. Besides, we already have protection for original creations... it's called Copyright.
Wrong again...
Of course, I have had the MySQL Manuals in "pocket" (Palm, mobile) format for quite some time... you can get them over here in Plucker format.
I also have the PostgreSQL documentation in Plucker format as well.
(Don't forget to check the rest of my mobile work if you're interested in some of the other custom conversions I've done: FreeBSD docs, PHP docs, Cygwin/CygwinX FAQ, and dozens of others).
Uhm... Bittorrent is p2p, because as you're downloading, its uploading your already-fetched blocks to other p2p clients awaiting receipt of those blocks. You don't need to have files in a "shared folder" to share files over Bittorrent (or most p2p protocols, in fact).
Obviously you are very mistaken.
How is THAT the answer, when only 3 places in the 5 years you've used the card, support reading the chip on it? Doesn't sound very pervasive to me.
Can it open ODF, Lotus, WordPerfect, etc. formats natively within its own OS or office applications?
Does it support writing to PDF natively?
Can it natively play all of my media audio and video formats, including FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Theora and others?
Does it support onboard IM clients using standards-compliant protocols (Jabber? irc? Others?)
Can I use freely available tools to build software on it, and do those tools come with the OS itself?
Can I read multiple filesystems at the same time on multiple different external and internal media? Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X and other filesystems?
Can I mount NFS shares to other non-Vista resources with existing, included applications/tools?
Remind me again what Vista does that my Linux box can't? Oh wait... purty jellybean graphics and melted-crayon menus and icons. Right.
No thanks, Linux does more, on less resources, at less cost, and is more extensible, secure and updates are MUCH easier to manage.. oh, and I KNOW what's running under the covers, and if I don't, I can go look and see for myself.
Where are your patches to the mainline source tree? Did you contribute all of your "hacks" or fixes back upstream?
"If you pour water in the harbor, all boats rise at once"
I'm sure many dozens of people could benefit from your changes. They might even re-energize the project.
Wendy Seltzer was our pro-bono, FSF-appointed attorney for a few years when we were investigating a commercial company (not intentionally linked here, they don't deserve the hits) for using our GPL code without complying with the license.
All we wanted, was for them to bring themselves into compliance... and they insisted that they were, and we were wrong, and that the GPL was "...subject to interpretation". So we contacted the FSF and they gave us Wendy. It's been a few years now, and we never really got final closure on the situation, so I'm not sure where it stands at this point. (past copyright infringement does not just vanish if you stop violating it in the present, however).
I have collaborated with Wendy over numerous dozens of emails and personally met her to sit down with the CEO of aforementioned alleged-infringing company in New York, and I can say that she really knows her field. I'm happy that she's doing good things for the EFF, they need someone of her skillset on-staff.
I have nothing but praise for her abilities and her skills. She was a brick wall between our project and the commercial company who tried to threaten us many times with their millions of dollars of investor money to try to silence us.
If Wendy is on your side, it's a good thing. It's where she shines the best.
Seen on one of the very first episodes of Battlestar Galactica:
I think it fits perfectly here.
I guess you haven't tried Amarok recently then... it blows away iTunes in so many ways I could never have imagined. Things are dramatically more intuitive, it supports at least 30 features that iTunes does not (and will not support), and most of all, it works on my platforms, with all of my media players (not just iPods).
More features, more support, more functionality, more platforms, and the GUI that is just useful and intuitive? Using iTunes is like using rocks and sticks to manage my music. No thanks.
I've posted my list back about a year ago, and I still use every single one of them every day... (I also describe how to get around a "bug" in FF that forbids non-standard port connections). Check it out here. I also spoke at my local LUG about the same thing in January.
Here's a list of the extensions I'm currently using in my Firefox build (you can see how I have it tricked out with all of my theming and extensions over here):
I thought it was "...turtles all the way down".
Except that it is...
What they're talking about, is aggregating all of the "public" surveillance data from hundreds of systems, tying it all together, and using that to "play back" everything from the point where you leave your house, drive to the farm supply store, buy that "fertilizer", drive to the mall to get a duffel bag, drive out of the mall to the target location and blow yourself and your car up.
Traffic cameras, ATM machine cameras, store surveillance cameras, mall cameras, etc. Add it all together, tie it all together with timepoints and events, and you can see where this is heading.
I don't see a far leap from here to having to "register" your surveillance camera, webcam, store camera with the .gov, so they can be sure to ask you for your footage when a crime happens that requires your "pieces" of the evidence chain. It's already happening.
And your "battlefield intel" analysis is spot-on, because the .gov IS at war, with its own people.
Don't forget, WE give the government their power and their rights, they dont' give them to us. We can just as easily take them away too (and we are, piece by piece; getting us back to our roots).
There is no auto-delete timeout for the quarantine, not by default, and not that I can manually set without futzing in the code itself. I'm thankful for that, and so are my users.
A delay of 25 minutes is barely perceptable. Email is not IM, even though people assume the two to be interchangeable. They're not.
Besides, you could also use nolisting instead, if you so choose. I prefer to receive ALL of my mail, not potentially lose it without even knowing about it.
Yes you can, its called dspam, and it works beautifully.
I, and none of my users, have seen an single spam email in over 3 years. I added graymilter and Project Zen from Spamhaus very recently, and its helped even more.
Sure, there are false positives that get caught and quarantined, but dspam has a nice webui that let's me retrain them and forward them on to my mailbox. The users have the same web interface and can manage their own false-positives in the same way. They can set it to catch more, or catch less with a few clicks in the interface. Some of my users love HTML email from online stores, and some do not. Everyone can tweak and train the heuristics for their own mail, however they wish.
I have no problem now making any of my email addresses visible on the Internet, on forums, wikis, mailing lists or webpages, because I simply do not get spam, so its not a problem anymore.
If we create this grand, uber code-searching portal, which can search the context of the code, aren't we making it easier for commercial entities to go ahead and and pick and choose those bits of code to use in their products, knowing full well that they're going to violate the GPL (or other OSS licensing models) by doing so?
I've talked to NO LESS THAN a dozen commercial companies in the last 2-3 years where they're actively taking FOSS source and incorporating it into their products, because.. (and I quote) "..Its freeware, so we can use it however we wish."
The licensing differences between "freeware" and "free software" seem to escape them. Just google around and you'll see thousands of FOSS projects listed on sites like TUCOWS, download.com and others, as "freeware" and not the proper "free software" that they are. There are also people who think "free software" means just that (lowercase "F" there).
Let's be sure that if we have a search engine that let's brainless developers look like experts by cutting and pasting bits of OSS code from here and there together to make their software work, that they know what the license is and that they must be in compliance with it to use it.
Please?
I'm sure you already have been told this, but it bears reinforcement:
The brain is NOT a muscle!
I'm curious... what was the initial complaint against the retail store for?