I don't have stereovision. One eye does near vision, the other does far, the images don't fuse. Our brains are incredibly adept at estimating distances based on expected sizes of things.
How do you do in a boxing ring?
Natural selection doesn't care about most of the things we use depth perception for today. It's there to allow you to effectively fend off a lion lunging for you, or to succeed in a battle with a warrior from another tribe.
While you can probably make do without much of a problem in today's world, remember that that's not what stereo vision evolved to do for you. I suspect you would have a hard (but not impossible) time performing survival functions as our distant ancestors did. You might get by OK, but those with properly functioning stereo vision would probably have a competitive advantage.
Natural selection doesn't care whether or not you can tell how far away trees or the hills are. More likely, better depth perception was an advantage in hand-to-hand or hand-to-paw combat. In the fraction of a second that you have between whipping your head around to face your opponent and your only opportunity to effectively attack, it's far easier to use stereo vision to gauge depth than it's going to be to dodge your head around or take in shadows and lighting to estimate distance.
Round up 10 people that were born with a single eye, throw them into a room with another 10 people that have both of their eyes, and give them all clubs. I strongly suspect the dualies are going to have an advantage.
I agree. But either way, it's not too unusual for a company's most prized employee to deserve some company-provided protection at home. $1.1M isn't a lot of money when you consider that it probably pays for a very modest but skilled staff and equipment to do the job. I can imagine the cost of a security shack, a handful of guards, surveillance equipment, etc., could easily end up costing this much.
Re:An idiotic idea that shows domain names are bro
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Is It Time For .tel?
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Which one of these would you propose organizations place in their advertisements? Is the identifier guaranteed to take the person to the company's home page, even if 99.9% of the people volunteering tags hate the company and desire to harm them? Is it memorable enough that someone can hear it on the radio and type it into their web browser an hour later? How do you keep people from naming their site with the name of another company, or another company's trade or service mark?
This problem exists because users seem to place an unhealthy emphasis on a DNS domain name as a web topic. Perhaps we should be looking at ways of de-emphasizing a DNS domain name's importance in identifying content and start looking for ways to let users find specific pieces of information in a reliable manner using some other tool (such as an X.500 or LDAP directory of official organization names, registered trade marks, service marks, etc.).
Until users stop thinking that they can just add a.com to their search term and get "official" content, this will remain a problem. Determining what domain names are squatters and what domains aren't is fairly easy today, but it will only be a matter of time (and a brief amount of time at that) before these typosquatters just dress their pages up to look a little more substantial and your horribly subjective test will start to fail.
I was assuming you'd probably be doing an entire room at once, not just one chunk of the wall. If you're going through all of the effort, why not refurbish the whole room? Most of your up front time is going to be spent preparing for and cleaning up/finishing.
New drywall isn't necessarily a big deal either. Rip down whatever's up there (you can be graceless) and screw in some sheets of drywall. Apply tape/joint compound and paint. This approach will probably also save you a lot of electricion time/cost, since he doesn't have to worry about snaking wires through walls.
The articles were light on this information. Does anyone know more about this $1 million penalty for breaking into someone's computer without their permission? I'm all for nailing spyware companies to the wall, but if Jane decides one day to cross a line and read her boyfriend's e-mail without his permission, does that mean she's going to be paying off a $1M debt for the rest of her life? That seems a bit excessive.
And what happens when similar legislation appears advocating a "kids" domain? Maybe one for medical information would be nice too, because that way we can make sure they're being responsible with their medical content. Another content category for financials would be helpful, because then we can just point the SEC at this top-level domain. Maybe one for law too, because we can't just have people out there spouting legal advice unless they're proper lawyers, can we?
So now you have one publisher that, today, uses "example.com" as the domain for their entire Internet operation. But now you have to break them up into 10 different DNS domains because their *content* now has to be split up? This is not only inappropriate, but an unreasonable maintenance and cost burden for the affected parties.
DNS domains are intended to reflect administrative domains, not content labels for one particular service (HTTP) on one particular system within that domain. If you want a content label, apply it to the content, not to the thing that labels my organization on the Internet.
What happens when one day someone points their non-.xxx domain at an IP address where my.xxx content can be retrieved, and sends children there? DNS is wholly inappropriate for these types of purposes. Label the content itself, and it doesn't matter how someone retrieved it. It's still labeled as porn.
I don't think memorability is as useful here as you think it is.
Isn't feet.com just as memorable as feet.xxx? Isn't sexcity-47.eroticanetimagesinc.com just as unmemorable as sexcity-47.eroticanetimagesinc.xxx? The ".xxx" just says "this is a porn site" but does nothing to enhance memorability any more than ".com" does. It's the stuff to the left of the TLD that matters from a memorability perspective.
If a.xxx domain existed, porn sites would move to it because it would make them easier to find and recognize
I suspect that more people are searching for their porn by using search engines, or following links provided by others. I suspect the number of people looking for a particular category of porn by typing www..xxx (or.com) is relatively low.
If they are following a link and not typing a URL as above, by the time the URL appears in the address field, the page is already being displayed. At that point there's no benefit to having a meaningful content label in the URL when you can simply look at the page's content to see what type of site it is.
it would make them easier to filter, which is something that right now most prefer, since it reduces their wasted bandwidth and complaints.
I think you will discover that most sites will opt out of schemes that make it easier for their content to be filtered. Porn sites receive revenue from people browsing them while at work, or while in a public library. I would argue that the revenue they would lose by making themselves easily blocked would be dwarfed by the amount they lose handling complaints.
I'm not sure why you think of extra bandwidth usage as a con here. Porn sites would love for more people to be introduced to their content. Some people that aren't necessarily looking for the content would nevertheless remember what they saw, and their curiousity might lead to a subscription at a later date. This isn't very different from run-of-the-mill advertising.
Why do you think porn sites have the reputation of being banner ad swamps?
Major porn sites, generally, register with filtering programs now to make them easier to filter.
These types of sites generally cater more to topics of sexuality than outright gratification-by-Internet. It is in their best interests, and in the interests of their subscribers, to appear to be morally responsible. Your run-of-the-mill porn site, however, could care less if their content were properly labeled and would likely advocate against forced labeling, because they do, in fact, get some (probably small) percentage of their memberships by way of accidental visits.
Sites would then appear in other domains to cater to the market.
Or you can just presume that that's going to happen, skip the middle step, and avoid using a domain that can be so easily stomped on.
Do you truly believe feet.xxx would not be registered within hours of the xxx domain going live? Having a.xxx domain is just extra advertising and continuing the already popular trend of making themselves easily filterable. I think people would slowly shift to it.
Oh, I have no doubt that there would be lots of people registering names there, especially category/content label-style names, such as feet.xxx. But I strongly suspect that most of these domain registrations will end up pointing to servers that simply issue HTTP redirects to other, existing porn sites, most likely on more established DNS domains (.com).
A more robust solution that does not involve turning DNS into a content label would be ratings, such as what is provided by ICRA (formerly RSAC). Have a site rate itself as being a porn site, or being child-friendly, and get the ratings bureau to sign off on this. Browsers can then be configured only to permit access to this type of site.
This technology exists today. It's just that nobody uses it. Perhaps people don't actually care as much about this issue as they'd like others to think?
Though your comment is marked as Funny, this concern is a touch more legitimate than people might like to think. A lot of money is spent on Internet access specifically for this reason. I imagine ISPs are stuck between the positive PR of trying to promote a child-friendly environment, and the brutal truth about why a lot of people spend so much on their high-speed Internet access.
Both.xxx and.kids are bad ideas because the Internet is not "teh interweb". DNS domains are not "web sites" and it's dangerous to say you want to standardize on "web site content labels" by way of DNS.
What happens when a company publishes both pornographic and non-pornographic content? Do they now have to split up into two DNS domains?
We already have content labels today: PICS and ratings bureaus like ICRA (which actually uses RDF instead of PICS lately).
If you want a kids-safe browsing experience, get the kids-safe web sites to start labeling their content. IE, at least, can be configured to only display pages that meet certain minimum requirements defined by the type of label you use.
If you merely want a safe-from-porn browsing experience, get the porn sites to label their content and indicate that the content is porn. They're just as likely to do this as they are to voluntarily move to.xxx.
Unless this move is made mandatory, many (most?) porn site operators are not going to move to.xxx because they'll look at it the same way that businesses look at.biz: it's for low-budget operations.
If.xxx ever comes to be, it will be looked upon like.biz: only for low-budget operations. Unless it's mandatory, porn sites will still prefer to be dot-coms.
I completely agree. This is perhaps the #1 reason I have stayed away from things like nice home security systems and decent home automation: I'm locked into that one solution. I can't easily hack it and I can't integrate it into "something else" that comes along later. I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars on something that could conceivably be obsolete soon afterwards, with no ability to swap out components or add components without the blessing of the manufacturer.
I recently got a low-end wireless weather station, but it's the same thing: I can't do anything useful with it because it's all proprietary. Some day someone will hack up GNURadio to sniff on the wireless exchange, and then I'll be able to do some useful stuff with it, but until then, it's a "siloed" technology. I can't make it work with anything else. I shouldn't have to buy 5 different temperature-sensing solutions if I want 5 different temperature-driven things.
I work at a company with over 100k employees. We use Exchange and have mailbox sizes capped at 25MB. They encourage local PST files, but that isn't always desirable if you're frequently moving between PCs and need access to e-mail everywhere. The people in that unfortunate category have to rely heavily on automatic filters and manual screening to make sure they can squirrel away attachments or important messages somewhere that doesn't impact their Exchange quota.
In practice, this is a huge headache for this class of user. I can't count the number of times I've needed an e-mail from someone, or needed to send someone an e-mail, where the quota system was preventing the e-mail from being created/sent. The recipients would have to wait for a while until the sender could find the time to clean up their mail box.
Looking at the other responses, we seem to be on the exceptionally low end of the size restriction. In practice, we're spending an awful lot of time trying to stay below that minimum. Given that hard disks are so cheap, I have to seriously wonder if the people coming up with these things have ever heard of a cost-benefit analysis.
Quotas are good. But bad quotas are bad. If someone has a legitimate need to hold on to a lot of large things, buy the storage to let them do that. If they can't justify a legitimate need, set a quota low enough to be reasonable but high enough so that they're not spending all of the company's time/money keeping their mailbox cleaned up. Don't follow our lead with the one-size-fits-all-except-upper-management mold.
In civil torts you also have to consider the other side's contribution. If you know very well that your cell service is not 100% reliable, and you are betting your life (or someone else's life) on the availability of that cell service, "reasonable expectation" or not, you have no case. A judge in such a case is going to wonder why you knew that cell phones weren't 100% reliable, but you still relied on it for something so important. There's no answer you can give here that is likely to have that judge decide in your favor.
But either way, when you start talking about contributory negligence and comparative negligence, you're entering a realm that's heavily state-dependent, so different localities are going to deal with this situation differently.
Or even better, why can't the locks be configured to accept arbitrary keys? Give me one randomly-generated key, and let the owner of each lock tell it to accept my key.
If we're worried about power, maybe the very act of me pushing my key into the lock could be enough to generate at least a tiny amount of electricity—maybe enough to fetch the permissible key permissions from non-volatile storage and check them.
I'm not sure I agree. When you step into an elevator, do you always have phone service? When you take that elevator to a floor underground, do you always have phone service? While one might argue that a reasonable person might not reasonably think they should have cell service in these areas, why is that so?
Over time, people become aware of the areas of their locality or building where cell service is present or troublesome. Troublesome spots are all around us, but you don't see signs warning potential cell phone users about that. It's expected.
If a building decided to use a building material (either really thick concrete walls, or a special kind of paint) that had the effect (intended or not) of blocking cell signals, why should they be required to announce that?
If someone's curious about their cell phone signal, they can look at their cell phone's signal strength meter. To require signage in areas where cell phone signals are known to be weak opens up a whole can of worms and ultimately would probably be cost prohibitive, since you have a lot of places where cell signals are weak through no deliberate action of anyone, or perhaps a wide area that's known to be weak, where the cell provider did it deliberately (no market). Where do you draw the line?
It is illegal to jam (cause harmful RF interference). But this isn't jamming. It's just the application of a material that radio waves find difficult to penetrate.
You have no guaranteed right to pass radio waves through the walls of my business. I'm certainly not allowed to broadcast my own radio waves just to mess with your own, but that's not what's happening here.
I work for a large telecommunications company, and this is effectively our approach to language standardization. There are no hard standards that apply to the entire enterprise, but each solution domain (which sometimes loosely maps to organization boundaries) has its own standards, sometimes official.
For example, in the "web" domain, our standard language is Java. Our standard web publishing platform is J2EE. We have an awful lot of Java developers, and they can all move around between projects and we have no trouble getting replacements. This particular standard is official and exclusive of all other web publishing platforms.
In our "system administration" domain, our de facto standard is sh (for the lighter stuff) and Perl (for the heavier stuff). This isn't an official standard, but the tools to run shell and Perl scripts are standardized and widely available, so there's less of a headache to run these than some other type of script.
At the enterprise level, we do have technology standards dictating what versions of things like a JRE, and a perl installation, so that code that we do write will run predictably everywhere, but they don't go so far as to dictate when each language should be used.
Finally, we have an exception process, where if you can justify the need to use something non-standard, you can. You just have to justify it, and people have to weigh in with the cost risks, etc. I think our approach works well.
In the US, this differs from state to state. I suspect "intent" factors more into the discretion of the prosecution than the actual law. While I can't recall a case where someone was convicted solely due to a small number of clearly inadvertant retrievals, I have heard of cases where the bulk (if not the entirety) of the case against them was images stored in a browser cache. The sheer quantity of images suggested he was actually hunting for them, but the word of the law didn't care one way or the other. He was convicted because the images were stored on his hard drive. Even though they were in the browser cache, it was still possession. In this situation, even a single clearly inadvertant retrieval would mean the person broke a law. It's just up to the discretion of the police/prosecutors to decide whether it should be pursued.
Now, I have no idea what state this was in. I should reiterate that every state has its own (possibly completely different and even contradictory) laws about this type of thing. I personally don't care for laws that require human discretion to keep it from being applied unfairly.
While I agree somewhat with your sentiment, I want to offer a little of my own insight, on the periphery of the corporate security world for a large corporation:
f it's preventing you from getting work done, you should have no problem convincing them -- and if you do, light a fire under your manager; that's what managers are there for.
Frequently there will be official channels for obtaining "exceptions" for getting around web site blocks. Our filter banned any search with the term "anonymous" in it. The group that managed blocks wasn't actually part of information security, so any time someone would gripe about being blocked for hunting for information about "anonymous ftp" or "ldap anonymous binds", their first response would be, "Why do you want to do these things anonymously?" Surely there can't be a valid business reason for trying to hide your identity while you do something!
Consequently, requests would be denied, or would be delayed, impacting the employee's ability to do work. Why? Because the company providing the filtering solution decided that things about anonymity might be bad in a corporate setting, and someone detached from the actual operation of the business agreed.
Taking it up with your manager might not help either. "Find another way to research what you're after," would be the response of many. Others might not pursue it because they don't want to make waves. The few that might try to help would run into the same wall that the employee did. The only way to get over the wall is to escalate up the chain of command. At some point you have to question whether it's worth it. If you have to go all the way up to the VP to get some obscure filtering practice changed, he's going to look at you funny.
(This is probably less of a "security" issue and more of a "corporate bureaucracy" issue.)
it's important to apply these patches.
You're absolutely right about our desktop group getting complaints every time a patch rolls out. Unfortunately they frequently elect not to give the user any discretion as to when the patch should be installed, or when the PC should be rebooted. If an employee has a long-running job going, the forced automatic reboot will kill it. The desktop group is deciding that they know, in advance, that the patch is more important than anything the user could possibly be running.
I've seen a presentation made to a packed auditorium interrupted by the desktop group pushing a patch and forcing a reboot. It's embarrassing and annoying. "Take ten, everybody."
On the other hand, patches are indeed important. Normally this type of treatment is reserved for serious security issues where remaining unpatched puts the company at risk. But there really ought to be a way to do that gracefully, balancing the urgency of the update with the short-term harm that it will do. IT groups are unsympathetic.
I also have a suggestion for groups considering implementing web proxies to curb abuse: try converting your work spaces to shared spaces where everyone can see everyone else's computer monitors. Unreasonable non-business use of the Internet will all but disappear.
I completely agree, and this is my thought as well. But on top of that, when I'm reading through an article, trying to focus my thoughts on what it's saying, my attention is diverted to the spelling and grammar errors that pop out. The human brain thrives on patterns and catching anomalies. While I have the utmost respect for Rob and have been a long-time Slashdot reader and participator, I think this subtle point was missed. With all of the attention on length and content, with the desire to keep the reader's attention focused on what matters, it seems like it's a deliberate decision to avoid dealing with what could easily be an even larger distraction.
On the other hand, as already stated, Slashdot is not the New York Times. It doesn't try to be. I'd just rather not be constantly reminded of that by what are perceived as quality control problems.:)
But certainly, you can't please everybody. There will always be things to complain about, and Rob I think should try harder to not let it bother him. I suspect with the growth of Slashdot over the years, the quantity of complaints has reached a critical mass. Hopefully articles like this will curb that somewhat. Maybe he needs to hire someone to weed out some of these types of e-mails he gets?
In case you are reading this, Rob, keep up the good work and don't feel obligated to change anything unless you want to.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have stereovision. One eye does near vision, the other does far, the images don't fuse. Our brains are incredibly adept at estimating distances based on expected sizes of things.
How do you do in a boxing ring?
Natural selection doesn't care about most of the things we use depth perception for today. It's there to allow you to effectively fend off a lion lunging for you, or to succeed in a battle with a warrior from another tribe.
While you can probably make do without much of a problem in today's world, remember that that's not what stereo vision evolved to do for you. I suspect you would have a hard (but not impossible) time performing survival functions as our distant ancestors did. You might get by OK, but those with properly functioning stereo vision would probably have a competitive advantage.
Natural selection doesn't care whether or not you can tell how far away trees or the hills are. More likely, better depth perception was an advantage in hand-to-hand or hand-to-paw combat. In the fraction of a second that you have between whipping your head around to face your opponent and your only opportunity to effectively attack, it's far easier to use stereo vision to gauge depth than it's going to be to dodge your head around or take in shadows and lighting to estimate distance.
Round up 10 people that were born with a single eye, throw them into a room with another 10 people that have both of their eyes, and give them all clubs. I strongly suspect the dualies are going to have an advantage.
I agree. But either way, it's not too unusual for a company's most prized employee to deserve some company-provided protection at home. $1.1M isn't a lot of money when you consider that it probably pays for a very modest but skilled staff and equipment to do the job. I can imagine the cost of a security shack, a handful of guards, surveillance equipment, etc., could easily end up costing this much.
Which one of these would you propose organizations place in their advertisements? Is the identifier guaranteed to take the person to the company's home page, even if 99.9% of the people volunteering tags hate the company and desire to harm them? Is it memorable enough that someone can hear it on the radio and type it into their web browser an hour later? How do you keep people from naming their site with the name of another company, or another company's trade or service mark?
This problem exists because users seem to place an unhealthy emphasis on a DNS domain name as a web topic. Perhaps we should be looking at ways of de-emphasizing a DNS domain name's importance in identifying content and start looking for ways to let users find specific pieces of information in a reliable manner using some other tool (such as an X.500 or LDAP directory of official organization names, registered trade marks, service marks, etc.).
.com to their search term and get "official" content, this will remain a problem. Determining what domain names are squatters and what domains aren't is fairly easy today, but it will only be a matter of time (and a brief amount of time at that) before these typosquatters just dress their pages up to look a little more substantial and your horribly subjective test will start to fail.
Until users stop thinking that they can just add a
I was assuming you'd probably be doing an entire room at once, not just one chunk of the wall. If you're going through all of the effort, why not refurbish the whole room? Most of your up front time is going to be spent preparing for and cleaning up/finishing.
With some help you could do this over a weekend.
New drywall isn't necessarily a big deal either. Rip down whatever's up there (you can be graceless) and screw in some sheets of drywall. Apply tape/joint compound and paint. This approach will probably also save you a lot of electricion time/cost, since he doesn't have to worry about snaking wires through walls.
The articles were light on this information. Does anyone know more about this $1 million penalty for breaking into someone's computer without their permission? I'm all for nailing spyware companies to the wall, but if Jane decides one day to cross a line and read her boyfriend's e-mail without his permission, does that mean she's going to be paying off a $1M debt for the rest of her life? That seems a bit excessive.
And what happens when similar legislation appears advocating a "kids" domain? Maybe one for medical information would be nice too, because that way we can make sure they're being responsible with their medical content. Another content category for financials would be helpful, because then we can just point the SEC at this top-level domain. Maybe one for law too, because we can't just have people out there spouting legal advice unless they're proper lawyers, can we?
.xxx content can be retrieved, and sends children there? DNS is wholly inappropriate for these types of purposes. Label the content itself, and it doesn't matter how someone retrieved it. It's still labeled as porn.
So now you have one publisher that, today, uses "example.com" as the domain for their entire Internet operation. But now you have to break them up into 10 different DNS domains because their *content* now has to be split up? This is not only inappropriate, but an unreasonable maintenance and cost burden for the affected parties.
DNS domains are intended to reflect administrative domains, not content labels for one particular service (HTTP) on one particular system within that domain. If you want a content label, apply it to the content, not to the thing that labels my organization on the Internet.
What happens when one day someone points their non-.xxx domain at an IP address where my
I don't think memorability is as useful here as you think it is.
Isn't feet.com just as memorable as feet.xxx? Isn't sexcity-47.eroticanetimagesinc.com just as unmemorable as sexcity-47.eroticanetimagesinc.xxx? The ".xxx" just says "this is a porn site" but does nothing to enhance memorability any more than ".com" does. It's the stuff to the left of the TLD that matters from a memorability perspective.
If a .xxx domain existed, porn sites would move to it because it would make them easier to find and recognize
.com) is relatively low.
.xxx domain is just extra advertising and continuing the already popular trend of making themselves easily filterable. I think people would slowly shift to it.
I suspect that more people are searching for their porn by using search engines, or following links provided by others. I suspect the number of people looking for a particular category of porn by typing www..xxx (or
If they are following a link and not typing a URL as above, by the time the URL appears in the address field, the page is already being displayed. At that point there's no benefit to having a meaningful content label in the URL when you can simply look at the page's content to see what type of site it is.
it would make them easier to filter, which is something that right now most prefer, since it reduces their wasted bandwidth and complaints.
I think you will discover that most sites will opt out of schemes that make it easier for their content to be filtered. Porn sites receive revenue from people browsing them while at work, or while in a public library. I would argue that the revenue they would lose by making themselves easily blocked would be dwarfed by the amount they lose handling complaints.
I'm not sure why you think of extra bandwidth usage as a con here. Porn sites would love for more people to be introduced to their content. Some people that aren't necessarily looking for the content would nevertheless remember what they saw, and their curiousity might lead to a subscription at a later date. This isn't very different from run-of-the-mill advertising.
Why do you think porn sites have the reputation of being banner ad swamps?
Major porn sites, generally, register with filtering programs now to make them easier to filter.
These types of sites generally cater more to topics of sexuality than outright gratification-by-Internet. It is in their best interests, and in the interests of their subscribers, to appear to be morally responsible. Your run-of-the-mill porn site, however, could care less if their content were properly labeled and would likely advocate against forced labeling, because they do, in fact, get some (probably small) percentage of their memberships by way of accidental visits.
Sites would then appear in other domains to cater to the market.
Or you can just presume that that's going to happen, skip the middle step, and avoid using a domain that can be so easily stomped on.
Do you truly believe feet.xxx would not be registered within hours of the xxx domain going live? Having a
Oh, I have no doubt that there would be lots of people registering names there, especially category/content label-style names, such as feet.xxx. But I strongly suspect that most of these domain registrations will end up pointing to servers that simply issue HTTP redirects to other, existing porn sites, most likely on more established DNS domains (.com).
A more robust solution that does not involve turning DNS into a content label would be ratings, such as what is provided by ICRA (formerly RSAC). Have a site rate itself as being a porn site, or being child-friendly, and get the ratings bureau to sign off on this. Browsers can then be configured only to permit access to this type of site.
This technology exists today. It's just that nobody uses it. Perhaps people don't actually care as much about this issue as they'd like others to think?
Though your comment is marked as Funny, this concern is a touch more legitimate than people might like to think. A lot of money is spent on Internet access specifically for this reason. I imagine ISPs are stuck between the positive PR of trying to promote a child-friendly environment, and the brutal truth about why a lot of people spend so much on their high-speed Internet access.
Both .xxx and .kids are bad ideas because the Internet is not "teh interweb". DNS domains are not "web sites" and it's dangerous to say you want to standardize on "web site content labels" by way of DNS.
.xxx.
.xxx because they'll look at it the same way that businesses look at .biz: it's for low-budget operations.
What happens when a company publishes both pornographic and non-pornographic content? Do they now have to split up into two DNS domains?
We already have content labels today: PICS and ratings bureaus like ICRA (which actually uses RDF instead of PICS lately).
If you want a kids-safe browsing experience, get the kids-safe web sites to start labeling their content. IE, at least, can be configured to only display pages that meet certain minimum requirements defined by the type of label you use.
If you merely want a safe-from-porn browsing experience, get the porn sites to label their content and indicate that the content is porn. They're just as likely to do this as they are to voluntarily move to
Unless this move is made mandatory, many (most?) porn site operators are not going to move to
If .xxx ever comes to be, it will be looked upon like .biz: only for low-budget operations. Unless it's mandatory, porn sites will still prefer to be dot-coms.
I completely agree. This is perhaps the #1 reason I have stayed away from things like nice home security systems and decent home automation: I'm locked into that one solution. I can't easily hack it and I can't integrate it into "something else" that comes along later. I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars on something that could conceivably be obsolete soon afterwards, with no ability to swap out components or add components without the blessing of the manufacturer.
I recently got a low-end wireless weather station, but it's the same thing: I can't do anything useful with it because it's all proprietary. Some day someone will hack up GNURadio to sniff on the wireless exchange, and then I'll be able to do some useful stuff with it, but until then, it's a "siloed" technology. I can't make it work with anything else. I shouldn't have to buy 5 different temperature-sensing solutions if I want 5 different temperature-driven things.
I work at a company with over 100k employees. We use Exchange and have mailbox sizes capped at 25MB. They encourage local PST files, but that isn't always desirable if you're frequently moving between PCs and need access to e-mail everywhere. The people in that unfortunate category have to rely heavily on automatic filters and manual screening to make sure they can squirrel away attachments or important messages somewhere that doesn't impact their Exchange quota.
In practice, this is a huge headache for this class of user. I can't count the number of times I've needed an e-mail from someone, or needed to send someone an e-mail, where the quota system was preventing the e-mail from being created/sent. The recipients would have to wait for a while until the sender could find the time to clean up their mail box.
Looking at the other responses, we seem to be on the exceptionally low end of the size restriction. In practice, we're spending an awful lot of time trying to stay below that minimum. Given that hard disks are so cheap, I have to seriously wonder if the people coming up with these things have ever heard of a cost-benefit analysis.
Quotas are good. But bad quotas are bad. If someone has a legitimate need to hold on to a lot of large things, buy the storage to let them do that. If they can't justify a legitimate need, set a quota low enough to be reasonable but high enough so that they're not spending all of the company's time/money keeping their mailbox cleaned up. Don't follow our lead with the one-size-fits-all-except-upper-management mold.
In civil torts you also have to consider the other side's contribution. If you know very well that your cell service is not 100% reliable, and you are betting your life (or someone else's life) on the availability of that cell service, "reasonable expectation" or not, you have no case. A judge in such a case is going to wonder why you knew that cell phones weren't 100% reliable, but you still relied on it for something so important. There's no answer you can give here that is likely to have that judge decide in your favor.
But either way, when you start talking about contributory negligence and comparative negligence, you're entering a realm that's heavily state-dependent, so different localities are going to deal with this situation differently.
Or even better, why can't the locks be configured to accept arbitrary keys? Give me one randomly-generated key, and let the owner of each lock tell it to accept my key.
If we're worried about power, maybe the very act of me pushing my key into the lock could be enough to generate at least a tiny amount of electricity—maybe enough to fetch the permissible key permissions from non-volatile storage and check them.
I'm not sure I agree. When you step into an elevator, do you always have phone service? When you take that elevator to a floor underground, do you always have phone service? While one might argue that a reasonable person might not reasonably think they should have cell service in these areas, why is that so?
Over time, people become aware of the areas of their locality or building where cell service is present or troublesome. Troublesome spots are all around us, but you don't see signs warning potential cell phone users about that. It's expected.
If a building decided to use a building material (either really thick concrete walls, or a special kind of paint) that had the effect (intended or not) of blocking cell signals, why should they be required to announce that?
If someone's curious about their cell phone signal, they can look at their cell phone's signal strength meter. To require signage in areas where cell phone signals are known to be weak opens up a whole can of worms and ultimately would probably be cost prohibitive, since you have a lot of places where cell signals are weak through no deliberate action of anyone, or perhaps a wide area that's known to be weak, where the cell provider did it deliberately (no market). Where do you draw the line?
It is illegal to jam (cause harmful RF interference). But this isn't jamming. It's just the application of a material that radio waves find difficult to penetrate.
You have no guaranteed right to pass radio waves through the walls of my business. I'm certainly not allowed to broadcast my own radio waves just to mess with your own, but that's not what's happening here.
I work for a large telecommunications company, and this is effectively our approach to language standardization. There are no hard standards that apply to the entire enterprise, but each solution domain (which sometimes loosely maps to organization boundaries) has its own standards, sometimes official.
For example, in the "web" domain, our standard language is Java. Our standard web publishing platform is J2EE. We have an awful lot of Java developers, and they can all move around between projects and we have no trouble getting replacements. This particular standard is official and exclusive of all other web publishing platforms.
In our "system administration" domain, our de facto standard is sh (for the lighter stuff) and Perl (for the heavier stuff). This isn't an official standard, but the tools to run shell and Perl scripts are standardized and widely available, so there's less of a headache to run these than some other type of script.
At the enterprise level, we do have technology standards dictating what versions of things like a JRE, and a perl installation, so that code that we do write will run predictably everywhere, but they don't go so far as to dictate when each language should be used.
Finally, we have an exception process, where if you can justify the need to use something non-standard, you can. You just have to justify it, and people have to weigh in with the cost risks, etc. I think our approach works well.
In the US, this differs from state to state. I suspect "intent" factors more into the discretion of the prosecution than the actual law. While I can't recall a case where someone was convicted solely due to a small number of clearly inadvertant retrievals, I have heard of cases where the bulk (if not the entirety) of the case against them was images stored in a browser cache. The sheer quantity of images suggested he was actually hunting for them, but the word of the law didn't care one way or the other. He was convicted because the images were stored on his hard drive. Even though they were in the browser cache, it was still possession. In this situation, even a single clearly inadvertant retrieval would mean the person broke a law. It's just up to the discretion of the police/prosecutors to decide whether it should be pursued.
Now, I have no idea what state this was in. I should reiterate that every state has its own (possibly completely different and even contradictory) laws about this type of thing. I personally don't care for laws that require human discretion to keep it from being applied unfairly.
While I agree somewhat with your sentiment, I want to offer a little of my own insight, on the periphery of the corporate security world for a large corporation:
f it's preventing you from getting work done, you should have no problem convincing them -- and if you do, light a fire under your manager; that's what managers are there for.
Frequently there will be official channels for obtaining "exceptions" for getting around web site blocks. Our filter banned any search with the term "anonymous" in it. The group that managed blocks wasn't actually part of information security, so any time someone would gripe about being blocked for hunting for information about "anonymous ftp" or "ldap anonymous binds", their first response would be, "Why do you want to do these things anonymously?" Surely there can't be a valid business reason for trying to hide your identity while you do something!
Consequently, requests would be denied, or would be delayed, impacting the employee's ability to do work. Why? Because the company providing the filtering solution decided that things about anonymity might be bad in a corporate setting, and someone detached from the actual operation of the business agreed.
Taking it up with your manager might not help either. "Find another way to research what you're after," would be the response of many. Others might not pursue it because they don't want to make waves. The few that might try to help would run into the same wall that the employee did. The only way to get over the wall is to escalate up the chain of command. At some point you have to question whether it's worth it. If you have to go all the way up to the VP to get some obscure filtering practice changed, he's going to look at you funny.
(This is probably less of a "security" issue and more of a "corporate bureaucracy" issue.)
it's important to apply these patches.
You're absolutely right about our desktop group getting complaints every time a patch rolls out. Unfortunately they frequently elect not to give the user any discretion as to when the patch should be installed, or when the PC should be rebooted. If an employee has a long-running job going, the forced automatic reboot will kill it. The desktop group is deciding that they know, in advance, that the patch is more important than anything the user could possibly be running.
I've seen a presentation made to a packed auditorium interrupted by the desktop group pushing a patch and forcing a reboot. It's embarrassing and annoying. "Take ten, everybody."
On the other hand, patches are indeed important. Normally this type of treatment is reserved for serious security issues where remaining unpatched puts the company at risk. But there really ought to be a way to do that gracefully, balancing the urgency of the update with the short-term harm that it will do. IT groups are unsympathetic.
I also have a suggestion for groups considering implementing web proxies to curb abuse: try converting your work spaces to shared spaces where everyone can see everyone else's computer monitors. Unreasonable non-business use of the Internet will all but disappear.
I completely agree, and this is my thought as well. But on top of that, when I'm reading through an article, trying to focus my thoughts on what it's saying, my attention is diverted to the spelling and grammar errors that pop out. The human brain thrives on patterns and catching anomalies. While I have the utmost respect for Rob and have been a long-time Slashdot reader and participator, I think this subtle point was missed. With all of the attention on length and content, with the desire to keep the reader's attention focused on what matters, it seems like it's a deliberate decision to avoid dealing with what could easily be an even larger distraction.
:)
On the other hand, as already stated, Slashdot is not the New York Times. It doesn't try to be. I'd just rather not be constantly reminded of that by what are perceived as quality control problems.
But certainly, you can't please everybody. There will always be things to complain about, and Rob I think should try harder to not let it bother him. I suspect with the growth of Slashdot over the years, the quantity of complaints has reached a critical mass. Hopefully articles like this will curb that somewhat. Maybe he needs to hire someone to weed out some of these types of e-mails he gets?
In case you are reading this, Rob, keep up the good work and don't feel obligated to change anything unless you want to.