They're making a reasonable effort to cease their improper distribution of unlicensed/copyrighted code. If "their timetable" is such that you can demonstrate that they are acting in bad faith or are otherwise trying to hold out and continue distributing these drivers illegally, then you have grounds to bitch.
But they're not. They have to do a review of their code, see if there's anything else they've missed, take out the GPL'ed part(s) and replace them with stuff of their own. Then they have to run it through a quality assurance process to be sure the damn thing actually compiles and runs. These things aren't done overnight. They have no reason to pull a few all-nighters just to appease the more zealous GPL folks. They're making a "reasonable effort" (which is a legal term) and are acting in good faith to rectify an accidental copyright/distribution infringement.
There is no way you are going to win a court case on these grounds (thank God).
YRO does suck. It's filled with paranoid conspiracy theorists. Count up all of the theories and speculations that have appeared in YRO and follow up on them. How many of these things have actually come to pass?
If people would just think about things logically and rationally and stop the wild speculation and jumping on respective bandwagons, YRO threads could be SO much more productive. Everyone is too eager to assume that just because something is possible, or one company said something and had their words twisted so that it hinted that something was possible, that automatically they and all of the companies you do business with are going to rise up and start invading your privacy and selling your dirty secrets. This is just stupid.
And I never ever recall saying anything that indicated 'privacy is for criminals.' Perhaps you're confusing me with somebody else? "Go back to watching TV?" I assume by that you're trying to say that my intention is to placate people? That I want people to just quietly go along with what's happening in the world? If that's the case, then perhaps you've never read any of my comments. All I'm trying to do is inject some rationality into this discussion. All we keep seeing are conspiracy theories and wild speculation that NEVER COME TO PASS. People are too busy saying, "Look out! The evil companies are banding together again to steal our dirty secrets and invade our privacy!" that they don't realize that every time they've said this in the past it's never come to pass. I don't know if they think that they're actually making a difference with these speculations or what.
All I want people to do is think about things rationally. Look at this from the company's point of view. What do they stand to gain? Will they lose customers? Will they break any laws? Does this new company image help them?
Generally, answers are "not a lot", "yes -- they'll lose quite a lot" and "arguably."
Rarely do these offset the gains, so it makes ZERO sense for companies to indulge in the behavior people are speculating about. THINK ABOUT IT.
Companies just don't turn "evil" and start tracking all of their customers and deliberately and openly invade their privacy like this. Shady companies have appeared and tried to gradually do this, and there are other companies that make it their business to give you something for free in exchange for this type of concession, but you don't have Internet providers just going rogue like this.
It doesn't make any sense.
If your cable modem provider is doing evil things like this, and you have no other alternatives (DSL?), then write them a letter. Write your city or state a letter. Make change.
I just wish all of this wild speculation about how all of the companies in the world are just going to rise up and start invading everyone's privacy would stop. There is zero reason to think these companies will step up and start doing all of these evil things.
All I'm trying to say is THINK ABOUT IT. Everyone seems too eager to equate "technologically possible" with "going to happen".
MIT AI Infolab/START project
on
Ask Gneeves?
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· Score: 3
Perhaps this could be a potential use for a beefed-up version of MIT's START system. It essentially does natural language parsing and is hooked into resources feeding it all sorts of geopolitical information, movies/entertainment (via IMDB), dictionary lookups, etc., etc.
The system was built in 1993 and seems to be maintained to a minor extent, with features added and updated, but to get it to the scale required for something like this would require a lot more processor power I'd imagine as well as some serious expansion.
Stereotypically YRO, it seems as though none of you have taken any business classes and have no idea how things like "supply and demand" work.
If a company does not have the trust of its customers, the company will die. (For those that will undoubtedly mention Microsoft, remember that people like us make up a tiny fraction of Microsoft's customer base.)
If all ISP's were to suddenly decide that it would be really neat if all of their customers could be tracked, there would suddenly be a HUGE market for ISP's that did no such tracking. There would be no shortage of alternatives for customers leaving these ISP's in droves.
It was mentioned that ISP's could possibly offer two account classes, one that was tracked and would be possibly cheaper than one that wasn't. There was further speculation that the un-monitored version could possibly be more expensive than average accounts are today, in an effort to force people to subscribe to the tracked accounts.
Am I the only one that just doesn't understand why ISP's would collectively do this? Why hike rates for no apparent reason, especially when competitors aren't doing the same? If you really think all of the ISP's in the country would get together and agree to raise rates in an effort to force everyone to subscribe to accounts that track their browsing habits, you're talking conspiracy theories again. (Also stereotypical YRO.)
The kernel httpd stuff is very simplified. It's not like they're merging Apache into the kernel source here. Since it is very lean and limited in functionality to providing simple, static content, the potential for instability is minimized. For people using their Linux systems for serving up static web content, this definitely makes things faster and more efficient.
And you don't have to "un-compile" it. You have to explicitely turn it on if you want to use it. If you don't want the feature, leave the damn thing turned off when building your kernel.
Besides, everyone knows (or I'd have thought) subliminal messages don't really work. There was a story last fall about how it was just a hoax to get funding out of the government.
This section is just like any other Slashdot section. When an article is approved to be posted on Slashdot, it's assigned a section (if applicable), and if it's deemed worthy, it even gets an appearance on the "main" Slashdot page.
If all articles approved for all sections were shown on the main page, the number of articles appearing would be unwieldy. That's why we have Slashboxes for certain sections, and links for things like "Apache" and "BSD" on the left for all approved articles in these areas, not just the ones that appear on the main page.
This lets us tailor our Slashdot experiences more to our topics of interest, while seeing the important articles on the main page, regardless of their section.
A variation of the idea could be used to insert copyright text or whatever at the start of your own original genetic sequences.. Heh.
Organism felis.domesticus v-ig318 build 3 genetic code copyright (c) 2000 inGen, Inc. Unauthorized use of copyrighted, non-naturally-occuring code is prohibited. Contains visual cortex code from the University of California at Berkeley.
or
Organism drosophilia melanogaster base-315j+joehacker20000315c - Magnetic sensory sequences copyright Joe Hacker 2000. This code is released under the GNU Genetic Public License...
Just use standard, known header sequences that both tell any biological processes to skip this chunk of DNA while making it easy to locate the text.:)
Just tell them it's a gift and won't be in use for another month or two. You'll sign up with ISP service at that time. I'd imagine this would be a relatively common request... *shrug*.
This is more of an API for the program to tell the hardware (or drivers) how it should render the sound. It would be up to the drivers/hardware to encode this into an output signal (be it DTS, ProLogic, analog stereo, whatever) suitable to your needs.
The cool thing is that this supports mobile "listeners", so given the right hardware (like orientation-tracking VR goggles), you can adjust your character's head's (the "listener's") orientation with the API, thus getting a different angle on the sound. Cool stuff.:)
Of course, when we get better sound setups (with speakers above *and* below the listening plane), this API would let us take advantage of those extra speakers without needing new versions of the games.
While not in the "cheapie" range, Vservers and Alabanza are more for the 'power' user, and charge anywhere from 20$ - 60$ depending on whether or not you need things like multiple domains, lots of space, etc.
I started off with Alabanza for a year or two. Absolutely horrible tech support:
E-mail 1: "Do you guys support mod_perl under Apache?"
Response 1: "yes"
E-mail 2: "Could you give me a little more information?"
Response 2: "Pearl [sic] is installed under/usr/local/bin/perl5"
...
Response 6 (not joking): "No, we don't support mod_perl."
I probably had cause to contact them for about 5 separate incidents in the year and a half I was with them, and I *consistently* had conversations like this. Connectivity problems were *quite* frequent, and all I could get out of them was a promise that their T3 through another provider was going to be installed Any Day Now for like 6 months, which I never stuck around to see. Their techs couldn't seem to read a traceroute, and kept insisting that it was general "Internet" problems, since everything was fine and dandy at the present time. The last straw was when I attempted to have them add a delegated subdomain pointing to a name server managed by me. Despite an e-mail 6 months previous and another 3 months previous where I explained what I wanted in exhaustive detail and got an "OK" on both occasions (they had a minor history of saying "yes" in one e-mail and then saying "hell no" when I tried to actually do it, so I tried to be very explicit and ask more than one person), they said, "Uhh, no, we don't do this," after I bought the hardware and finally got everything set up. They made a half-hearted apology, but made NO efforts to even compromise (which I would have been happy to do), much less try to keep my business (60-100$/month, I don't remember). When I asked them if I could quote their support e-mails on a web page where I could show the world exactly what their crack team of technical support specialists was capable of, they basically told me that they'd take legal action against any libelous material. Not a pleasant experience all-around.
So now I'm with Vservers, and was immediately *very* impressed with their setup. You get your own "virtual" filesystem, with whatever software you want to have installed, control of sendmail configuration, Apache server configuration, etc. You have almost as much control over all of these things as you'd have with your own dedicated piece of hardware. Very slick. And if you go with a free DNS service, there's zero additional cost to add new domains (since you get full access to Apache and sendmail's configuration), assuming you don't need any additional HD space (100MB I think is what they give you with my 'Lite' account).
My only complaint to date has been rather frequent MySQL lock-ups and connection failures in the past month and a half, which (apparently) they knew/know nothing about, which tells me their automated systems monitoring is missing or inadequate. Still waiting for that to be resolved, though their tech support is quite responsive, despite the fact that they seem to abhor tech support e-mails, instead infinitely preferring some web form where I have to fill out a bunch of (sometimes unnecessary) form fields. They even go out of their way to say e-mails get their absolute lowest priority. They don't have an 800 tech support number either, though to be honest, I haven't needed it very much. when I do have to call, I never have to wait on hold (average Alabanza hold time = 15 minutes).
If you seriously consider your government to be on the same level as petty thieves, I would advise you to IMMEDIATELY relocate yourself to another country. If for some reason your country is forcing you to remain a resident, or you have other reasons for wanting to stay, I'd see about organizing some sort of armed revolt and overthrow your evil, fascist government.
I'm quite thankful for my government here, in the United States, and the fact that we *can* effect change through established standards bodies, instead of relying on the government to force us to adopt what they think we need. Too bad most YRO folks seem to disagree. I'm also quite pleased that it's difficult for law enforcement to improperly "spy" on me, since there's such a large danger of them being discovered, and since we have so many privacy groups that would make such a stink about it so as to get the people responsible in some serious trouble. Thank goodness for our SEPARTE judicial system, the only authority out there that can approve search warrants and wiretaps like this to begin with, which makes evil "big brother" corruption a bit harder.
If your government has these bodies and you STILL consider them to be evil, abusive "thieves", you desperately need to GET OUT and find somewhere better to live. You should probably take your family with you. All of them. Please.
I'm unsure as to how this relates to the thread, so I'm going to assume by this you mean you wish to abolish wiretapping in favor of prosecution and imprisonment. If this isn't what you mean, by all means clarify.
How do you propose to convict and imprison people if you limit (or remove altogether) law enforcement's per-case court approved intelligence gathering abilities?
And what makes you think you can effect this change? Wiretapping abilities are going to be extended to computer networks, like it or not. You are in the minority here by wishing it not to be the case. The question is: HOW do you want it to come about? Do you want the government to mandate something not-very-well-thought-out, or do you want to have a team of people (historically always putting the good of the Internet first) to design something with your best interests in mind?
You've already voted OVERWHELMINGLY in favor of the former. I'm just trying to point that out.
It's this attitude that I don't quite understand. Everyone bitches and moans about how the evil government is spying on innocents and suspected criminals alike, yet when smart people step up and say, "Well why don't we design a better system so that the privacy of innocents is better protected," you fight against that all the harder.
What exactly do you want to see happen here? The end to wiretapping entirely? That's never going to happen, sorry.
There seems to be a fundamental difference between what posters are talking about here and what this commission seems to be advocating.
No matter how we tweak or upgrade the Internet infrastructure, there will always be ways of posting messages online anonymously. There will NEVER be laws in the US requiring all online content to be attributed to its author. Freedom of speech is not an issue here.
What the commission thinks the Internet needs is a way to track online crime back to the perpetrator. This has little to do with posting messages online (unless it's something like a ransom note, in which case there's not much you can do). The ability to do things like spoof IP addresses and bounce from compromised network to compromised network undetected needs to be addressed. Presently, the only way to track a packet kiddie like this down to his originating dialup is through ad-hoc, unstandardized cooperation between every network link in the chain, and that's assuming somebody is on call 24/7 at every step of the way. Presently this is very tedious, and assuming you can find your way to the user's dialup link, there's no guarantee that the ISP will have accurate information about the user at all.
Remember when the IETF said, "What do we think about building some wiretapping abilities into Internet protocols and hardware?" Remember the unified YRO response to that?
Now when the law is passed forcing ad-hoc Internet wiretapping techniques upon us, everyone's going to start bitching and moaning about how the government won't be able to do this securely and while maintaining the privacy of innocent 3rd parties who happen to be utilizing the same links.
NOW do you folks understand the reason the IETF wanted to consider *designing* such a system in the first place? The government is going to monitor our Internet connections whether we want to or not. They can do so under existing wiretapping laws. But instead of having *us* design the system for them to do so, we just shouted a big "fuck you!", crossed our arms, and pretended like the problem was going to go away, all the while patting ourselves on the backs for our unified anti-Big Brother stance.
And now when we're on the brink of legislation that will most certainly pass, aren't you oh so glad you hopped on the privacy bandwagon and talked the IETF out of constructing a secure, safe and privacy-honoring method for doing what everyone knew the government was going to impose on us anyway?
Note that Google (www.google.com) caches pages in precisely this manner. Think of it as a proxy or a cache. Your ISP doesn't need to obtain written consent from every content provider on the 'Net in order to set up a proxy server. Why should this be any different? The content itself is left unmolested and they aren't making an effort to lay claim to it or keep the viewer from going to the original source.
Though I do remember reading that Malda's chief concern with doing mirroring/caching of this sort of thing was copyright. But hey, if Google is doing it, why not Slashdot?
What packet kiddies like this don't seem to realize is that there is always a trail. All it takes is a few competant admins and a few phone calls.
There are already tools out there for the detection of these types of DDoS attacks, and there are already procedures (and software in some cases) for quickly tracing back spoofed IP addresses. Adding a relay in there just makes it take a little longer (assuming the initial request for a DDoS attack wasn't already detected by the attacker's ISP or any system in between).
Depending on how many Hax0ReD systems you're bouncing between to request a typical smurf attack, and depending on the time it takes the victim/victim's ISP to notice, your true origin can be discovered in as little as a few minutes. Work is already underway on automating the process of tracing back spoofed IP's. With a quick phone call to each of the sites you're bouncing from, you can be tracked down in a matter of seconds. All the victim has to do is activate software and tell it the nature of the attack. In fact, any site along the way that detects the attack itself or the instructions to instigate the attack can do the same thing.
You think you're invincible? Impossible to find? When you have a half dozen angry, highly intelligent people methodically following the trail back to your PC (one of which could be working for the ISP you're dialed up to), how long before you think you'll be caught? Do you honestly think that the only people caught pulling crap like this are the ones that show up on TV? Contact your local police or FBI office for statistics.
When you are caught, then the real ass fucking begins. A major DoS attack (like most smurf attacks or any of these DDoS attacks) can cost an ISP hundreds of thousands of dollars (that's six digits). If you're a minor, that means your parents probably get stuck footing the bill. They'll lose their house, their car, your college tuition (but I guess you probably didn't really want to go to college anyways so that's no big loss), to say nothing about the computer equipment you might have in your home (even if it's not yours). We haven't even touched on the compromised accounts yet. Each one of your DDoS client hosts constitutes a breakin and unauthorized use (minimum -- actual charges will probably be a lot more), each with its own penalties and fines. You think Mitnick was imprisoned for too long? They're going to have a hundred times the amount of evidence on you than they had on them. How long do you think you'll end up being behind bars?
Is this really worth it, kids? Is your l33tness really that important? You know, in a few short years (months or weeks for the more pathetic), nobody is going to remember who the fuck you are, much less any of your l33t conquests. Do you really think you're going to get in the newspapers and have a bunch of "security firms" offer you nice cushy $150,000 jobs working with nice state-of-the-art computer hardware? I suggest you stop buying into what your kiddie friends are saying on IRC and do a little hard research on your own. I imagine you're going to be pretty disappointed.
You don't have to have two separate pages. It's a common misconception (typically among inexperienced web authors) that in order to have a good looking web page accessible to people light on bandwidth or handicapped, that you have to have a separate version of the site for them.
Any professional web author will tell you that it really can be done on the same page:
1. Never use images to convey textual information. This prevents the information from being indexed in search engines and otherwise made available to non-graphical clients.
2. Use HTML markup intelligently. Lots of today's sites are simply huge tables with a bunch of images in it. HTML tags are incorrectly used for things like spacing and fonts, when instead they should be used to designate different types of text in the document.
It really isn't difficult at all to build a very nice-looking web site that works well with lesser browsers. All it takes is some education/training on the part of the author. HTML people are a dime a dozen nowadays, and, sadly, many large firms think that they're all the same. I mean, if two different web authors can end up building web pages that look basically the same, they must both be of equal skill, right? Try looking at the HTML source code once in a while, and try viewing those pages in a variety of other browsers.
As people start migrating to 4.x and higher browsers, it's time we started paying attention to things like strict HTML4 and CSS. If you can build a page correctly using HTML4 (which forbids HTML attributes and tags designed to change how a page is displayed) and CSS (which is designed to precisely control how a page is rendered), it will typically look great in text-to-speech browsers (and even better in those that themselves support CSS).
He's referring to the actual story, not the movie. In the book, a US/Russian join expedition heads to the Discovery, and without warning, a Chinese expedition shows up with the same intentions. It ends up being a race to get there.
Slashdot Mirror
They're making a reasonable effort to cease their improper distribution of unlicensed/copyrighted code. If "their timetable" is such that you can demonstrate that they are acting in bad faith or are otherwise trying to hold out and continue distributing these drivers illegally, then you have grounds to bitch.
But they're not. They have to do a review of their code, see if there's anything else they've missed, take out the GPL'ed part(s) and replace them with stuff of their own. Then they have to run it through a quality assurance process to be sure the damn thing actually compiles and runs. These things aren't done overnight. They have no reason to pull a few all-nighters just to appease the more zealous GPL folks. They're making a "reasonable effort" (which is a legal term) and are acting in good faith to rectify an accidental copyright/distribution infringement.
There is no way you are going to win a court case on these grounds (thank God).
YRO does suck. It's filled with paranoid conspiracy theorists. Count up all of the theories and speculations that have appeared in YRO and follow up on them. How many of these things have actually come to pass?
If people would just think about things logically and rationally and stop the wild speculation and jumping on respective bandwagons, YRO threads could be SO much more productive. Everyone is too eager to assume that just because something is possible, or one company said something and had their words twisted so that it hinted that something was possible, that automatically they and all of the companies you do business with are going to rise up and start invading your privacy and selling your dirty secrets. This is just stupid.
And I never ever recall saying anything that indicated 'privacy is for criminals.' Perhaps you're confusing me with somebody else? "Go back to watching TV?" I assume by that you're trying to say that my intention is to placate people? That I want people to just quietly go along with what's happening in the world? If that's the case, then perhaps you've never read any of my comments. All I'm trying to do is inject some rationality into this discussion. All we keep seeing are conspiracy theories and wild speculation that NEVER COME TO PASS. People are too busy saying, "Look out! The evil companies are banding together again to steal our dirty secrets and invade our privacy!" that they don't realize that every time they've said this in the past it's never come to pass. I don't know if they think that they're actually making a difference with these speculations or what.
All I want people to do is think about things rationally. Look at this from the company's point of view. What do they stand to gain? Will they lose customers? Will they break any laws? Does this new company image help them?
Generally, answers are "not a lot", "yes -- they'll lose quite a lot" and "arguably."
Rarely do these offset the gains, so it makes ZERO sense for companies to indulge in the behavior people are speculating about. THINK ABOUT IT.
Regardless, this will never happen.
Companies just don't turn "evil" and start tracking all of their customers and deliberately and openly invade their privacy like this. Shady companies have appeared and tried to gradually do this, and there are other companies that make it their business to give you something for free in exchange for this type of concession, but you don't have Internet providers just going rogue like this.
It doesn't make any sense.
If your cable modem provider is doing evil things like this, and you have no other alternatives (DSL?), then write them a letter. Write your city or state a letter. Make change.
I just wish all of this wild speculation about how all of the companies in the world are just going to rise up and start invading everyone's privacy would stop. There is zero reason to think these companies will step up and start doing all of these evil things.
All I'm trying to say is THINK ABOUT IT. Everyone seems too eager to equate "technologically possible" with "going to happen".
Perhaps this could be a potential use for a beefed-up version of MIT's START system. It essentially does natural language parsing and is hooked into resources feeding it all sorts of geopolitical information, movies/entertainment (via IMDB), dictionary lookups, etc., etc.
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/infolab/
The system was built in 1993 and seems to be maintained to a minor extent, with features added and updated, but to get it to the scale required for something like this would require a lot more processor power I'd imagine as well as some serious expansion.
Stereotypically YRO, it seems as though none of you have taken any business classes and have no idea how things like "supply and demand" work.
If a company does not have the trust of its customers, the company will die. (For those that will undoubtedly mention Microsoft, remember that people like us make up a tiny fraction of Microsoft's customer base.)
If all ISP's were to suddenly decide that it would be really neat if all of their customers could be tracked, there would suddenly be a HUGE market for ISP's that did no such tracking. There would be no shortage of alternatives for customers leaving these ISP's in droves.
It was mentioned that ISP's could possibly offer two account classes, one that was tracked and would be possibly cheaper than one that wasn't. There was further speculation that the un-monitored version could possibly be more expensive than average accounts are today, in an effort to force people to subscribe to the tracked accounts.
Am I the only one that just doesn't understand why ISP's would collectively do this? Why hike rates for no apparent reason, especially when competitors aren't doing the same? If you really think all of the ISP's in the country would get together and agree to raise rates in an effort to force everyone to subscribe to accounts that track their browsing habits, you're talking conspiracy theories again. (Also stereotypical YRO.)
Try to think about this logically, folks.
I'm reminded of Homer "Thompson" wearing his flashy "WITNESS PROTECTION PROGRAM" shirt and matching cap.
The kernel httpd stuff is very simplified. It's not like they're merging Apache into the kernel source here. Since it is very lean and limited in functionality to providing simple, static content, the potential for instability is minimized. For people using their Linux systems for serving up static web content, this definitely makes things faster and more efficient.
And you don't have to "un-compile" it. You have to explicitely turn it on if you want to use it. If you don't want the feature, leave the damn thing turned off when building your kernel.
Besides, everyone knows (or I'd have thought) subliminal messages don't really work. There was a story last fall about how it was just a hoax to get funding out of the government.
This section is just like any other Slashdot section. When an article is approved to be posted on Slashdot, it's assigned a section (if applicable), and if it's deemed worthy, it even gets an appearance on the "main" Slashdot page.
If all articles approved for all sections were shown on the main page, the number of articles appearing would be unwieldy. That's why we have Slashboxes for certain sections, and links for things like "Apache" and "BSD" on the left for all approved articles in these areas, not just the ones that appear on the main page.
This lets us tailor our Slashdot experiences more to our topics of interest, while seeing the important articles on the main page, regardless of their section.
St. Louis, MO. We picked up the last 2 units available in the St. Louis area (we actually had to drive into Illinois)! Whew..
We just picked 2 of them up. They require no contract at purchase time, so we own the units without being required to purchase service.
Just tell them it's a gift and won't be in use for another month or two. You'll sign up with ISP service at that time. I'd imagine this would be a relatively common request... *shrug*.
This is more of an API for the program to tell the hardware (or drivers) how it should render the sound. It would be up to the drivers/hardware to encode this into an output signal (be it DTS, ProLogic, analog stereo, whatever) suitable to your needs.
The cool thing is that this supports mobile "listeners", so given the right hardware (like orientation-tracking VR goggles), you can adjust your character's head's (the "listener's") orientation with the API, thus getting a different angle on the sound. Cool stuff. :)
Of course, when we get better sound setups (with speakers above *and* below the listening plane), this API would let us take advantage of those extra speakers without needing new versions of the games.
I started off with Alabanza for a year or two. Absolutely horrible tech support:I probably had cause to contact them for about 5 separate incidents in the year and a half I was with them, and I *consistently* had conversations like this. Connectivity problems were *quite* frequent, and all I could get out of them was a promise that their T3 through another provider was going to be installed Any Day Now for like 6 months, which I never stuck around to see. Their techs couldn't seem to read a traceroute, and kept insisting that it was general "Internet" problems, since everything was fine and dandy at the present time. The last straw was when I attempted to have them add a delegated subdomain pointing to a name server managed by me. Despite an e-mail 6 months previous and another 3 months previous where I explained what I wanted in exhaustive detail and got an "OK" on both occasions (they had a minor history of saying "yes" in one e-mail and then saying "hell no" when I tried to actually do it, so I tried to be very explicit and ask more than one person), they said, "Uhh, no, we don't do this," after I bought the hardware and finally got everything set up. They made a half-hearted apology, but made NO efforts to even compromise (which I would have been happy to do), much less try to keep my business (60-100$/month, I don't remember). When I asked them if I could quote their support e-mails on a web page where I could show the world exactly what their crack team of technical support specialists was capable of, they basically told me that they'd take legal action against any libelous material. Not a pleasant experience all-around.
So now I'm with Vservers, and was immediately *very* impressed with their setup. You get your own "virtual" filesystem, with whatever software you want to have installed, control of sendmail configuration, Apache server configuration, etc. You have almost as much control over all of these things as you'd have with your own dedicated piece of hardware. Very slick. And if you go with a free DNS service, there's zero additional cost to add new domains (since you get full access to Apache and sendmail's configuration), assuming you don't need any additional HD space (100MB I think is what they give you with my 'Lite' account).
My only complaint to date has been rather frequent MySQL lock-ups and connection failures in the past month and a half, which (apparently) they knew/know nothing about, which tells me their automated systems monitoring is missing or inadequate. Still waiting for that to be resolved, though their tech support is quite responsive, despite the fact that they seem to abhor tech support e-mails, instead infinitely preferring some web form where I have to fill out a bunch of (sometimes unnecessary) form fields. They even go out of their way to say e-mails get their absolute lowest priority. They don't have an 800 tech support number either, though to be honest, I haven't needed it very much. when I do have to call, I never have to wait on hold (average Alabanza hold time = 15 minutes).
If you seriously consider your government to be on the same level as petty thieves, I would advise you to IMMEDIATELY relocate yourself to another country. If for some reason your country is forcing you to remain a resident, or you have other reasons for wanting to stay, I'd see about organizing some sort of armed revolt and overthrow your evil, fascist government.
I'm quite thankful for my government here, in the United States, and the fact that we *can* effect change through established standards bodies, instead of relying on the government to force us to adopt what they think we need. Too bad most YRO folks seem to disagree. I'm also quite pleased that it's difficult for law enforcement to improperly "spy" on me, since there's such a large danger of them being discovered, and since we have so many privacy groups that would make such a stink about it so as to get the people responsible in some serious trouble. Thank goodness for our SEPARTE judicial system, the only authority out there that can approve search warrants and wiretaps like this to begin with, which makes evil "big brother" corruption a bit harder.
If your government has these bodies and you STILL consider them to be evil, abusive "thieves", you desperately need to GET OUT and find somewhere better to live. You should probably take your family with you. All of them. Please.
I'm unsure as to how this relates to the thread, so I'm going to assume by this you mean you wish to abolish wiretapping in favor of prosecution and imprisonment. If this isn't what you mean, by all means clarify.
How do you propose to convict and imprison people if you limit (or remove altogether) law enforcement's per-case court approved intelligence gathering abilities?
And what makes you think you can effect this change? Wiretapping abilities are going to be extended to computer networks, like it or not. You are in the minority here by wishing it not to be the case. The question is: HOW do you want it to come about? Do you want the government to mandate something not-very-well-thought-out, or do you want to have a team of people (historically always putting the good of the Internet first) to design something with your best interests in mind?
You've already voted OVERWHELMINGLY in favor of the former. I'm just trying to point that out.
It's this attitude that I don't quite understand. Everyone bitches and moans about how the evil government is spying on innocents and suspected criminals alike, yet when smart people step up and say, "Well why don't we design a better system so that the privacy of innocents is better protected," you fight against that all the harder.
What exactly do you want to see happen here? The end to wiretapping entirely? That's never going to happen, sorry.
There seems to be a fundamental difference between what posters are talking about here and what this commission seems to be advocating.
No matter how we tweak or upgrade the Internet infrastructure, there will always be ways of posting messages online anonymously. There will NEVER be laws in the US requiring all online content to be attributed to its author. Freedom of speech is not an issue here.
What the commission thinks the Internet needs is a way to track online crime back to the perpetrator. This has little to do with posting messages online (unless it's something like a ransom note, in which case there's not much you can do). The ability to do things like spoof IP addresses and bounce from compromised network to compromised network undetected needs to be addressed. Presently, the only way to track a packet kiddie like this down to his originating dialup is through ad-hoc, unstandardized cooperation between every network link in the chain, and that's assuming somebody is on call 24/7 at every step of the way. Presently this is very tedious, and assuming you can find your way to the user's dialup link, there's no guarantee that the ISP will have accurate information about the user at all.
Remember when the IETF said, "What do we think about building some wiretapping abilities into Internet protocols and hardware?" Remember the unified YRO response to that?
Now when the law is passed forcing ad-hoc Internet wiretapping techniques upon us, everyone's going to start bitching and moaning about how the government won't be able to do this securely and while maintaining the privacy of innocent 3rd parties who happen to be utilizing the same links.
NOW do you folks understand the reason the IETF wanted to consider *designing* such a system in the first place? The government is going to monitor our Internet connections whether we want to or not. They can do so under existing wiretapping laws. But instead of having *us* design the system for them to do so, we just shouted a big "fuck you!", crossed our arms, and pretended like the problem was going to go away, all the while patting ourselves on the backs for our unified anti-Big Brother stance.
And now when we're on the brink of legislation that will most certainly pass, aren't you oh so glad you hopped on the privacy bandwagon and talked the IETF out of constructing a secure, safe and privacy-honoring method for doing what everyone knew the government was going to impose on us anyway?
Hooray for the YRO crowd!
Note that Google (www.google.com) caches pages in precisely this manner. Think of it as a proxy or a cache. Your ISP doesn't need to obtain written consent from every content provider on the 'Net in order to set up a proxy server. Why should this be any different? The content itself is left unmolested and they aren't making an effort to lay claim to it or keep the viewer from going to the original source.
Though I do remember reading that Malda's chief concern with doing mirroring/caching of this sort of thing was copyright. But hey, if Google is doing it, why not Slashdot?
What packet kiddies like this don't seem to realize is that there is always a trail. All it takes is a few competant admins and a few phone calls.
There are already tools out there for the detection of these types of DDoS attacks, and there are already procedures (and software in some cases) for quickly tracing back spoofed IP addresses. Adding a relay in there just makes it take a little longer (assuming the initial request for a DDoS attack wasn't already detected by the attacker's ISP or any system in between).
Depending on how many Hax0ReD systems you're bouncing between to request a typical smurf attack, and depending on the time it takes the victim/victim's ISP to notice, your true origin can be discovered in as little as a few minutes. Work is already underway on automating the process of tracing back spoofed IP's. With a quick phone call to each of the sites you're bouncing from, you can be tracked down in a matter of seconds. All the victim has to do is activate software and tell it the nature of the attack. In fact, any site along the way that detects the attack itself or the instructions to instigate the attack can do the same thing.
You think you're invincible? Impossible to find? When you have a half dozen angry, highly intelligent people methodically following the trail back to your PC (one of which could be working for the ISP you're dialed up to), how long before you think you'll be caught? Do you honestly think that the only people caught pulling crap like this are the ones that show up on TV? Contact your local police or FBI office for statistics.
When you are caught, then the real ass fucking begins. A major DoS attack (like most smurf attacks or any of these DDoS attacks) can cost an ISP hundreds of thousands of dollars (that's six digits). If you're a minor, that means your parents probably get stuck footing the bill. They'll lose their house, their car, your college tuition (but I guess you probably didn't really want to go to college anyways so that's no big loss), to say nothing about the computer equipment you might have in your home (even if it's not yours). We haven't even touched on the compromised accounts yet. Each one of your DDoS client hosts constitutes a breakin and unauthorized use (minimum -- actual charges will probably be a lot more), each with its own penalties and fines. You think Mitnick was imprisoned for too long? They're going to have a hundred times the amount of evidence on you than they had on them. How long do you think you'll end up being behind bars?
Is this really worth it, kids? Is your l33tness really that important? You know, in a few short years (months or weeks for the more pathetic), nobody is going to remember who the fuck you are, much less any of your l33t conquests. Do you really think you're going to get in the newspapers and have a bunch of "security firms" offer you nice cushy $150,000 jobs working with nice state-of-the-art computer hardware? I suggest you stop buying into what your kiddie friends are saying on IRC and do a little hard research on your own. I imagine you're going to be pretty disappointed.
Get a life, man.
You don't have to have two separate pages. It's a common misconception (typically among inexperienced web authors) that in order to have a good looking web page accessible to people light on bandwidth or handicapped, that you have to have a separate version of the site for them.
Any professional web author will tell you that it really can be done on the same page:
1. Never use images to convey textual information. This prevents the information from being indexed in search engines and otherwise made available to non-graphical clients.
2. Use HTML markup intelligently. Lots of today's sites are simply huge tables with a bunch of images in it. HTML tags are incorrectly used for things like spacing and fonts, when instead they should be used to designate different types of text in the document.
It really isn't difficult at all to build a very nice-looking web site that works well with lesser browsers. All it takes is some education/training on the part of the author. HTML people are a dime a dozen nowadays, and, sadly, many large firms think that they're all the same. I mean, if two different web authors can end up building web pages that look basically the same, they must both be of equal skill, right? Try looking at the HTML source code once in a while, and try viewing those pages in a variety of other browsers.
As people start migrating to 4.x and higher browsers, it's time we started paying attention to things like strict HTML4 and CSS. If you can build a page correctly using HTML4 (which forbids HTML attributes and tags designed to change how a page is displayed) and CSS (which is designed to precisely control how a page is rendered), it will typically look great in text-to-speech browsers (and even better in those that themselves support CSS).
He's referring to the actual story, not the movie. In the book, a US/Russian join expedition heads to the Discovery, and without warning, a Chinese expedition shows up with the same intentions. It ends up being a race to get there.