I mentioned this in another post.. but why would you really want to block this type of thing? In all likelyhood, the only time you will probably ever see this thing in action around your home (if at all) is after a natural disaster when your home is levelled and you are trapped under an uncomfortable pile of debris.
If you "privacy-proof" your home like you suggest, they might never find you.
Probably not, since your walls are not similarly "protected".
Of course, why in the world would you want to build your home so that it *blocked* these types of things? In all likelyhood, the only time you might EVER see one of these things in action near your home is after an earthquake or an explosion that has demolished your house and you are trapped beneath a rather heavy pile of debris.
Fireman: "Nope, I'm getting no reading at all from under this structure..."
While I have nothing to hide, I am content living with the fact that if a cop *does* abuse this technology and I catch him, not only will he be in a world of hurt, but I stand to make a reasonable profit from my lawsuit.
He knows this; I know this. For that reason, I think the chances of my privacy being invaded (without just cause and/or a search warrant, obviously) are pretty slim, and the benefits gained by allowing law enforcement access to these types of devices FAR outweigh that extremely slim chance.
I don't find any of the laws regarding how and when "sniffing" and "wire-tapping" can be done to be particularly privacy-invading. Thus, any true invasions of my privacy are illegal and I can prosecute those that do it.
If you guys that keep preaching "privacy invasion!" have actually been so invaded, please contact a lawyer. You will end up rich.
They still need a search warrant. It's just as illegal to use a device like this in the manner you suggest as it is for cops to poke their heads inside your window and do a similar visual inspection of your home without your permission.
Search warrants aren't slips of paper giving law enforcement the permission to enter your home, they're slips of paper allowing them to do just what their name implies: Search. Without one of those warrants, anything they discover through non-obvious means can't be held against you.
Cops can easily listen to your wireless phone conversations just like the 13-year-old down the street with a radio scanner. Does that mean it's legal? Does that mean they do it? No, of course not. Stop being so paranoid.
If you really don't trust your police force, perhaps it's time you voted some new elected officials into office, wrote some letters to them and your local police department, or if nothing else, move to some other town where you can actually trust your local cops.
The amount of uneducated paranoia on Slashdot just amazes me sometimes...
Yes, I believe active RF "scramblers" are illegal in the US. FCC rules prohibit any device from knowingly/wilfully causing "harmful interference" to any other RF signal/device.
It depends on the task. For back-end stuff (servers) or for people that know what they're doing and need power/stability in their workstations, I'll tend to promote non-MS products. For Jane Q. Secretary desktop stuff, I'll promote MS.
Though my network at home is run by a Linux system acting as a NAT/gateway, I spend most of my time sitting in front of a Win98 system (running an X server of course). Though I'm thinking I'll try Be out here eventually...
There's also a second NT head and a Linux/AfterStep box in the same room that I use occasionally.
The best OS all depends on the task at hand... Windows is not the best OS for all tasks any more than Linux is.
I tend to bring this attitude to Slashdot in my posts. Sometimes I'll step up and defend Microsoft because of unfounded/stupid/uneducated anti-MS posts, but just as frequently I'll be backing up posts that are critical of MS oeprating systems. It works the other way around, too.
I rarely see many other "pro-MS" posts on Slashdot, except for the inevitable idiot/troll that's just trying to be funny/annoying.
Of course, I doubt I'd ever come out and say that "MS' OSes were coded well or stable", but coding and stability aren't the only reasons one can prefer one OS over another for a particular task.
Why the fuck can't you lame-ass script kiddies and l33t coders just LEAVE THEM ALONE. Why in God's name do you feel you must insist on forcing everybody to be totally secure and have their networks and systems completely impervious to all the lame crap you can throw at them?
And don't even THINK about calling yourselves "white hat" hackers here. The white-hats would try to find vulnerabilities and in quiet confidentiality contact the vulnerable with information on what they can do to fix the problems. Contrast that with the pests you moron packet kiddies consistently make of yourselves. You're not l33t or k-rad, you're fuckin' gimps. Knock it off.
D.net is doing COOL STUFF. You should be HELPING THEM reach their end goals, not pulling stupid shit like breaking their protocols and hacking up clients to "prove" to them that they're not totally secure.
Sure, releasing it open-source will help make the client more secure. It will also expose vulnerabilities (a necessary part of that process) and will attract more l33t hax0rZ and lame-ass packet kiddies to the sport of breaking into D.net. Why do you even need to do this to begin with? So it's theoretically possible to thwart their security measures and cause trouble. So why do it?
Whenever somebody pulls crap like this they always say, "I was doing it to show you you are vulnerable in this respect." Who the fuck cares? JUST LEAVE THEM ALONE AND LET US ALL WORK AS QUICKLY AND EFFICIENTLY AS WE CAN.
Time is the enemy here. By continuing to pull this shit and "force" them to keep adding all these countermeasures against your lamity, all you're doing is HURTING the effort. You may think you're helping by forcing them to keep it secure, but you aren't.
If you idiots would just fucking GROW UP and find something useful to do with this vast warehouse of knowledge you think you have, the world would be a much more efficient place.
Though you can receive signals with just about any type/length of antenna (though antennas tuned for specific frequencies are usually better at it, though few people seem to notice), TRANSMITTING signals is something entirely different. If you attach antennas of the wrong type/length to a transmitter expecting a tuned antenna (usually the antenna that comes with the equipment), you will eventually fry the transmitter.
Basically radio waves are exactly that: waves. They have a measurable wavelength. Tuned antennas are "tuned" by matching the end of the antenna with the ends of those wavelengths (or some nice fraction thereof). When you transmit, the wave basically travels along the length of the antenna and when it hits the end, *reflects* back (and, as I understand it, a similar effect happens on the opposite end, where the antenna is attached). If everything is nice and in phase, the wave looks and acts really nice and you get a nice strong signal radiated without much of it being reflected back into the equipment. However, with an improperly tuned antenna (for example a TV antenna), you will not get a nice, in-phase reflection and you'll get a significant amount of the signal reflected back into the equipment, which fries it.
It may not happen immediately, but it will certainly decrease the lifetime of the equipment.
Bottom line: If you have equipment that transmits RF, don't fuck around with the antenna if you value the equipment.
If, as part of my ISP signup, my ISP asked me, "Would you like us to add an additional 50 cents to your bill which would go to a UN fund to aid in the development of the Internet in lesser-fortunate countries?"
I'd say "Sure, that sounds nifty."
Even if it was just a general-purpose "Internet for the poorer" type of fund, I'd still have no problem spending an extra 50 cents a month for it.
Using a flat-rate voluntary fee would have a minimal impact on the ISP (they just have to write a check each month) and the administrative/collection requirements on the part of the organization collecting the money would be trivial in comparison with a "tax".
Re:Broadband will make Spam a Huge Burden
on
Austria Bans Spam
·
· Score: 2
I got a spam recently that ended up being from an ADSL customer. His ISP (bcnet.com? I don't remember) e-mailed me back (not a form letter, which was nice) to let me know that not only had they cancelled his ADSL account, but they'd actually gone out and REMOVED THE EQUIPMENT from his residence. That felt good.:)
This ISP also had a rather novel method for using dynamic hostnames with dynamically assigned IP addresses: They place the MAC address in the hostname. Quite excellent not only for tracking purposes, but for network services (such as IRC) where losers on dynamic IP addresses usually give us headaches.
Well whatever, I'm not going to get into an argument over this stupid little topic. I'm amazed it's gotten this much attention.
I'm just annoyed by everyone labeling one person's side of things as gospel truth before even hearing the other side of the story. When you do hear things from all THREE parties (including Harvard), stuff starts to make a LOT more sense.
I think I've done more than enough research into this whole fiasco.
The fact is that Williams e-mailed Slashdot with his whiny story, and Slashdot went with it. They simply thought to themselves, "Wow, the evil guy with money destroyed a valuable resource!" They made no effort to look at the "other" side of the story or validate any of the things Williams said. They simply assumed that what he said was FACT. For things like factual articles, where people are offering links to *real* news sites, this is a PERFECTLY FINE way to run a news site like Slashdot, but when you get into personal things like this, you're basically posting an editorial, not objective news.
That's what I was objecting to.
I don't expect Slashdot to do its own reporting and investigating, but I DO expect them to at least TRY not to be biased or partisan when they do post things like this. The instant I read the abstract I *knew* there was a lot more to this story than what was being said. Everyone else should have been smart enough to realize this as well.
FYI I've probably read more Slashdot articles and posted more informative Slashdot comments than you ever will. Don't go tell me to "Try reading" before I post, and *especially* don't do it as an AC.
It was probably their position all along -- Somebody else above posted a reply to a comment that I think summed up Harvard's side of things perfectly.
Remember, this entire Slashdot thread was started by a message from Williams (the "victim"), and included only his side of the story. It's quite possible he embellished quite heavily.
No offense to Williams, but in this case I'm more inclined to believe the contents of the original complaint e-mail sent to Harvard over Williams' "statement".
Why would he send a letter to Harvard describing pornographic content when Harvard would just be able to look for themselves and see that he was just blowing a lot of hot air? The fact that Harvard DID act quickly and finally lends credence to the original complaint.
Thank God there are still some people with a clue on this sorry planet.
On one hand I'm really glad Slashdot is as popular and has so many posters as it does, but on the other hand, it's really quite embarassing how many people here go off on what OBVIOUSLY little information that's been provided.
The Slashdot authors are just as guilty as anybody else. Read the headlines/abstracts for some of these stories. It's very easy to believe just one side of an obviously partisan story instead of trying to get the full range of facts.
Apparently you don't seem to be aware of the "extra" stuff Williams posted on his web site. It was all sorts of rather nasty comments, pornographic imagery, etc. Very very bad stuff.
Remember, Harvard agreed to host this site as a FAVOR, and Williams abused their trust by using the site for rather scandalous personal reasons. I think Harvard was perfectly justified in doing what they did.
An institution's belief in the "facts" has nothing to do with this.
I don't think Harvard was being very spineless at all. If I offered to host a friend's web site AS A FAVOR, and he abused my trust by using it as a private forum for his personal vendetta against someone, complete with pornographic parodies and all sorts of rather nasty stuff, I wouldn't hesitate to drop him.
Depending on how friendly I was with him, I *might* just ask him to get rid of the extra content, but with Harvard upper management now in the loop, I don't think they were out of line in the least by refusing to further host his site.
Remember -- this was done as a favor, not a contractual agreement.
I believe the FreeBSD box he was talking about is the one that's now dedicated to serving up images. Any Slashdot "speed increase" or stability improvements you see (aside from those dealing with the images themselves) can't possibly be attributed to this OS switch.
I didn't say it *was* switched, I was offering that as an extension to the ethernet segment analogy.
Cable modems share bandwidth, but they don't share *data*. To my knowledge, you can't sniff your neighbor's cable modem packets. That would be one HUGE privacy/security problem for obvious reasons. No real public network would go online if that were the case.
Slashdot Mirror
I mentioned this in another post.. but why would you really want to block this type of thing? In all likelyhood, the only time you will probably ever see this thing in action around your home (if at all) is after a natural disaster when your home is levelled and you are trapped under an uncomfortable pile of debris.
If you "privacy-proof" your home like you suggest, they might never find you.
Probably not, since your walls are not similarly "protected".
Of course, why in the world would you want to build your home so that it *blocked* these types of things? In all likelyhood, the only time you might EVER see one of these things in action near your home is after an earthquake or an explosion that has demolished your house and you are trapped beneath a rather heavy pile of debris.
Fireman: "Nope, I'm getting no reading at all from under this structure..."
You (whisper): "Urmmph..! hh..hhell..hhellpp..."
It's probably not legal where there are littering laws... Heh.
While I have nothing to hide, I am content living with the fact that if a cop *does* abuse this technology and I catch him, not only will he be in a world of hurt, but I stand to make a reasonable profit from my lawsuit.
He knows this; I know this. For that reason, I think the chances of my privacy being invaded (without just cause and/or a search warrant, obviously) are pretty slim, and the benefits gained by allowing law enforcement access to these types of devices FAR outweigh that extremely slim chance.
I don't find any of the laws regarding how and when "sniffing" and "wire-tapping" can be done to be particularly privacy-invading. Thus, any true invasions of my privacy are illegal and I can prosecute those that do it.
If you guys that keep preaching "privacy invasion!" have actually been so invaded, please contact a lawyer. You will end up rich.
They still need a search warrant. It's just as illegal to use a device like this in the manner you suggest as it is for cops to poke their heads inside your window and do a similar visual inspection of your home without your permission.
Search warrants aren't slips of paper giving law enforcement the permission to enter your home, they're slips of paper allowing them to do just what their name implies: Search. Without one of those warrants, anything they discover through non-obvious means can't be held against you.
Cops can easily listen to your wireless phone conversations just like the 13-year-old down the street with a radio scanner. Does that mean it's legal? Does that mean they do it? No, of course not. Stop being so paranoid.
If you really don't trust your police force, perhaps it's time you voted some new elected officials into office, wrote some letters to them and your local police department, or if nothing else, move to some other town where you can actually trust your local cops.
The amount of uneducated paranoia on Slashdot just amazes me sometimes...
Yes, I believe active RF "scramblers" are illegal in the US. FCC rules prohibit any device from knowingly/wilfully causing "harmful interference" to any other RF signal/device.
It depends on the task. For back-end stuff (servers) or for people that know what they're doing and need power/stability in their workstations, I'll tend to promote non-MS products. For Jane Q. Secretary desktop stuff, I'll promote MS.
Though my network at home is run by a Linux system acting as a NAT/gateway, I spend most of my time sitting in front of a Win98 system (running an X server of course). Though I'm thinking I'll try Be out here eventually...
There's also a second NT head and a Linux/AfterStep box in the same room that I use occasionally.
The best OS all depends on the task at hand... Windows is not the best OS for all tasks any more than Linux is.
I tend to bring this attitude to Slashdot in my posts. Sometimes I'll step up and defend Microsoft because of unfounded/stupid/uneducated anti-MS posts, but just as frequently I'll be backing up posts that are critical of MS oeprating systems. It works the other way around, too.
I rarely see many other "pro-MS" posts on Slashdot, except for the inevitable idiot/troll that's just trying to be funny/annoying.
Of course, I doubt I'd ever come out and say that "MS' OSes were coded well or stable", but coding and stability aren't the only reasons one can prefer one OS over another for a particular task.
Why the fuck can't you lame-ass script kiddies and l33t coders just LEAVE THEM ALONE. Why in God's name do you feel you must insist on forcing everybody to be totally secure and have their networks and systems completely impervious to all the lame crap you can throw at them?
And don't even THINK about calling yourselves "white hat" hackers here. The white-hats would try to find vulnerabilities and in quiet confidentiality contact the vulnerable with information on what they can do to fix the problems. Contrast that with the pests you moron packet kiddies consistently make of yourselves. You're not l33t or k-rad, you're fuckin' gimps. Knock it off.
D.net is doing COOL STUFF. You should be HELPING THEM reach their end goals, not pulling stupid shit like breaking their protocols and hacking up clients to "prove" to them that they're not totally secure.
Sure, releasing it open-source will help make the client more secure. It will also expose vulnerabilities (a necessary part of that process) and will attract more l33t hax0rZ and lame-ass packet kiddies to the sport of breaking into D.net. Why do you even need to do this to begin with? So it's theoretically possible to thwart their security measures and cause trouble. So why do it?
Whenever somebody pulls crap like this they always say, "I was doing it to show you you are vulnerable in this respect." Who the fuck cares? JUST LEAVE THEM ALONE AND LET US ALL WORK AS QUICKLY AND EFFICIENTLY AS WE CAN.
Time is the enemy here. By continuing to pull this shit and "force" them to keep adding all these countermeasures against your lamity, all you're doing is HURTING the effort. You may think you're helping by forcing them to keep it secure, but you aren't.
If you idiots would just fucking GROW UP and find something useful to do with this vast warehouse of knowledge you think you have, the world would be a much more efficient place.
Though you can receive signals with just about any type/length of antenna (though antennas tuned for specific frequencies are usually better at it, though few people seem to notice), TRANSMITTING signals is something entirely different. If you attach antennas of the wrong type/length to a transmitter expecting a tuned antenna (usually the antenna that comes with the equipment), you will eventually fry the transmitter.
Basically radio waves are exactly that: waves. They have a measurable wavelength. Tuned antennas are "tuned" by matching the end of the antenna with the ends of those wavelengths (or some nice fraction thereof). When you transmit, the wave basically travels along the length of the antenna and when it hits the end, *reflects* back (and, as I understand it, a similar effect happens on the opposite end, where the antenna is attached). If everything is nice and in phase, the wave looks and acts really nice and you get a nice strong signal radiated without much of it being reflected back into the equipment. However, with an improperly tuned antenna (for example a TV antenna), you will not get a nice, in-phase reflection and you'll get a significant amount of the signal reflected back into the equipment, which fries it.
It may not happen immediately, but it will certainly decrease the lifetime of the equipment.
Bottom line: If you have equipment that transmits RF, don't fuck around with the antenna if you value the equipment.
Damn that was funny.
You were joking, right?
If, as part of my ISP signup, my ISP asked me, "Would you like us to add an additional 50 cents to your bill which would go to a UN fund to aid in the development of the Internet in lesser-fortunate countries?"
I'd say "Sure, that sounds nifty."
Even if it was just a general-purpose "Internet for the poorer" type of fund, I'd still have no problem spending an extra 50 cents a month for it.
Using a flat-rate voluntary fee would have a minimal impact on the ISP (they just have to write a check each month) and the administrative/collection requirements on the part of the organization collecting the money would be trivial in comparison with a "tax".
I got a spam recently that ended up being from an ADSL customer. His ISP (bcnet.com? I don't remember) e-mailed me back (not a form letter, which was nice) to let me know that not only had they cancelled his ADSL account, but they'd actually gone out and REMOVED THE EQUIPMENT from his residence. That felt good. :)
This ISP also had a rather novel method for using dynamic hostnames with dynamically assigned IP addresses: They place the MAC address in the hostname. Quite excellent not only for tracking purposes, but for network services (such as IRC) where losers on dynamic IP addresses usually give us headaches.
Well whatever, I'm not going to get into an argument over this stupid little topic. I'm amazed it's gotten this much attention.
I'm just annoyed by everyone labeling one person's side of things as gospel truth before even hearing the other side of the story. When you do hear things from all THREE parties (including Harvard), stuff starts to make a LOT more sense.
I think I've done more than enough research into this whole fiasco.
The fact is that Williams e-mailed Slashdot with his whiny story, and Slashdot went with it. They simply thought to themselves, "Wow, the evil guy with money destroyed a valuable resource!" They made no effort to look at the "other" side of the story or validate any of the things Williams said. They simply assumed that what he said was FACT. For things like factual articles, where people are offering links to *real* news sites, this is a PERFECTLY FINE way to run a news site like Slashdot, but when you get into personal things like this, you're basically posting an editorial, not objective news.
That's what I was objecting to.
I don't expect Slashdot to do its own reporting and investigating, but I DO expect them to at least TRY not to be biased or partisan when they do post things like this. The instant I read the abstract I *knew* there was a lot more to this story than what was being said. Everyone else should have been smart enough to realize this as well.
FYI I've probably read more Slashdot articles and posted more informative Slashdot comments than you ever will. Don't go tell me to "Try reading" before I post, and *especially* don't do it as an AC.
It was probably their position all along -- Somebody else above posted a reply to a comment that I think summed up Harvard's side of things perfectly.
Remember, this entire Slashdot thread was started by a message from Williams (the "victim"), and included only his side of the story. It's quite possible he embellished quite heavily.
No offense to Williams, but in this case I'm more inclined to believe the contents of the original complaint e-mail sent to Harvard over Williams' "statement".
Why would he send a letter to Harvard describing pornographic content when Harvard would just be able to look for themselves and see that he was just blowing a lot of hot air? The fact that Harvard DID act quickly and finally lends credence to the original complaint.
That's my opinion, anyways.
Thank God there are still some people with a clue on this sorry planet.
On one hand I'm really glad Slashdot is as popular and has so many posters as it does, but on the other hand, it's really quite embarassing how many people here go off on what OBVIOUSLY little information that's been provided.
The Slashdot authors are just as guilty as anybody else. Read the headlines/abstracts for some of these stories. It's very easy to believe just one side of an obviously partisan story instead of trying to get the full range of facts.
Apparently you don't seem to be aware of the "extra" stuff Williams posted on his web site. It was all sorts of rather nasty comments, pornographic imagery, etc. Very very bad stuff.
Remember, Harvard agreed to host this site as a FAVOR, and Williams abused their trust by using the site for rather scandalous personal reasons. I think Harvard was perfectly justified in doing what they did.
An institution's belief in the "facts" has nothing to do with this.
I don't think Harvard was being very spineless at all. If I offered to host a friend's web site AS A FAVOR, and he abused my trust by using it as a private forum for his personal vendetta against someone, complete with pornographic parodies and all sorts of rather nasty stuff, I wouldn't hesitate to drop him.
Depending on how friendly I was with him, I *might* just ask him to get rid of the extra content, but with Harvard upper management now in the loop, I don't think they were out of line in the least by refusing to further host his site.
Remember -- this was done as a favor, not a contractual agreement.
I doubt Harvard ever intended to do that. They might have implied it, but more likely it was just something Williams said to bolster support.
That's what happens when you only read one side of the story and judge prematurely.
I think Harvard acted very professionaly here.
I believe I indirectly mentioned this already.
I believe the FreeBSD box he was talking about is the one that's now dedicated to serving up images. Any Slashdot "speed increase" or stability improvements you see (aside from those dealing with the images themselves) can't possibly be attributed to this OS switch.
...or are you just being an AC troll?
Yah but can you get 5.1-channel surround or are you stuck with the inferior (though still better than 2-channel stereo) Dolby ProLogic (or worse)?
I didn't say it *was* switched, I was offering that as an extension to the ethernet segment analogy.
Cable modems share bandwidth, but they don't share *data*. To my knowledge, you can't sniff your neighbor's cable modem packets. That would be one HUGE privacy/security problem for obvious reasons. No real public network would go online if that were the case.