the ISP is involved when the existance of (potentially) defamatory material on their servers is brought to their attention
But wasn't it the case that the 'defamatory' post was actually on a deja server and the demon server posts in question contained only URL's to deja? From reading the post on demon's site I'm led to beleive that the problem is deeper than just cancelling news posts on your (the ISP's) own server.
I found a way to do this also, quite by accident. I got a JVC DV camcorder last christmas with a firewire/1394 interface so I went and got an adaptec scsi/1394 combo card so I could grab video off my DV camcorder and burn home movies onto a CDRW. I also have a TV tuner card in this box and the video capture software I ended up using (Ulead Studio) recognized my 1394 and tv card as video sources. I hooked up my Panasonic DVD deck to the tv card with s-video cable and captured a good chunk of The Matrix onto my SCSI drive. I was surprised how well this worked.
I then played the clip back full screen through my Matrox G400 Max with the second head's output patched into my VCR. Made a perfectly good quality copy of the clip onto VHS.
I didn't copy the entire movie, and I'm not sure I ever would, but it would be easy engough to make a good-quality VHS copy of any DVD movie and bypass macrovision with this setup. I'm sure there are plenty of other (faster, better, cheaper) ways but I had to pipe up with my version.
Well, not legal precedents, for sure. But this settlement could have the effect that others in the future will also be unwilling/unable to stand up for themselves. In fact, the absence of a precedent in that there was no actual judgement (assuming it would go against Mattel) is what hurts. Next time something like this comes up, the lawyers won't be able to cite Mattel vs 'whoever' as a precedent to make an argument against the bogus charges being brought by the next evil corporation who feels like throwing a few lawyers after a couple college students that have publicly humiliated them for crappy internet-filtering software.
Well, you make a very good point. Their personal inconvenience aside, (not that it wouldn't be substantial, to say the least) this doesn't do much for the cause of free speech and freedom from information. I guess if it was me, I'd have to think hard about sacrificing a few good years of my life for this cause, but the end result is that (assuming they had won) future conflicts will not have the benefit of legal precedent.
The evil corporation has shoved cash at the would-be exposers of oppressive information and free-speech suppressors, and they went home and deposited the checks. (ok, overdramatization, but you get the idea...)
So what did we really prove? Nothing in the eyes of the law, much less to the public at large. Maybe some of us have a good idea of what was really going on, but the rest of the USA Today-reading public thinks the evil hackers gladly took a deal to keep from going to jail.
The authors of Web sites must give their identity to their shelterer before any public communication under sorrow prison. In the absence of identification the shelterers are responsible for the contents and liable six months to prison.
Now that's great. You give shelter to some poor anonymous coward with a web site, and the French Government rewards you with 6 months in Papillon.
Along those lines, I remember a while back a story about how they could put DNA-like information into ink to be used to authenticate signatures. I think it was 'Next Step' on the Discovery Channel or something... the eample they gave was either Hanna or Barberra having lelments of his DNA put into the ink he used to sign copies of animation cells, in that way his signature was supposed to be authenticated so no one could sell phony autographed cells. Pretty cool.
>Computers for the smart, x-box for the stupid and the uninformed!
Well, yeah.. exactly. You just summed up M$'s whole marketing strategy. Remember that _average_ IQ is 100. The ratio of smart vs stupid and uninformed is in Microsoft's favor!
Yeah, not much of a contingency plan when there's only one female and she gets the bad freezer. Duh.
"Well, Taylor, _NOW_ what the fsck do we do?"
"Do? I don't know about you two, bit I'm gonna scout around looking for hot babes in two-piece sheepskin outfits that can't speak. A couple months and I'll be _running_ this place!"
How about just "Really big conglomerates of matter, not big enough to form a star, floating free in the universe until they find something better to do"?
I know, but I'm bored and have nothing better to do.:-)
Yeah, but that's the exception, not the rule. Most of the discs I own get to the menu in <30 seconds. Overall, it beats the hell out of VHS on a number of points. I sure like being able to jump straight to a scene in a movie and do slo-mo and freeze and stuff (not to mention that you never have to rewind ever again:-) ) Too bad there's so much crap with CSS... I waited to buy a player until DiVX died and now this crap starts up.
>Is it really true that some DVDs contain commercials that standard DVD players won't let you skip or fast-forward over?
I've only encountered one such situation that seemed really bad: the Disney release of Tarzan on DVD. Normally, you pop a disc into the player and you sit thru a few seconds of "FBI WARNING" screen that you cannot skip, then the interactive menu screen comes up to let you pick subtitles, alternate languages, special features and play the movie.
But this damned Tarzan disc shows about 3 minutes of ads and movie trailers that you can't skip past. When I hit the menu, skip or FF buttons, I just get the little red circle with the slash through it just like if I try to skip the FBI warning. Damn annoying. I think I heard someone say that they did this by putting this crap on the same track as the FBI stuff which the player is pre-programmed to always play. Seems pretty shifty to me and if Disney makes a habit out of this, then they will really piss consumers off.
I beleive it does in fact allow you to extract the admin password so you could effectively disable the filtering, no? So, yes the software itself does not directly circumvent the filter, but the ability to reveal the encrypted password is obviously the justification Mattel is using to block sites which contain a mirror of the software.
On a side note, anyone able to tell me just how CP works? Is it a proxy that runs on the client where you point the browser to it ala Junk Buster? If so, could you not just install IJB on a machine and redirect the proxy settings to the IJB port to sidestep CP, or does it use a different mechanism?
Really, I saw that and thought the same thing! <p> Plus, it's always been <i>pissing contest</i> when I've heard the expression.
Re:Oh my God, another "what is the best distributi
on
Slackware Updates
·
· Score: 2
Well, I find this discussion helpful. I'm a relative newbie who started on Redhat 5.0 a couple years back and I'm very interested in trying out different distro's to learn, if nothing else. It is helpful here to see what people like about Slack so I can decide if it's something I want to bother with.
For example, I recently set up a new box and decided to give Debian a try. Having been spoiled by the RedHat installs, I kind of had a few quirks getting everything going, especially the network. I'm not an old-school unix expert so I was unaware of the sysV vs BSD-style init script differences, so it took a little digging and tinkering to learn how Slink is set up, but now I have a happily working box sitting in the corner running Deb, and I have a real sense of accomplishment for having gone though and learned something new instead of just installing another RedHat 6.1 box.
I'll have another opportunity soon to try out another distro, my Mom's pentium has finally run out of gas (yep, she tried to upgrade to Win98 and it barfed) so I'm building her a new machine and I'll end up scavenging her old box. Right now I've got a FreeBSD CD that came with something I ordered from LinuxMall and I might try installing that to see what it's all about. From the comments here, I'm now curious about Slack, so I might just download that and give it a try.
I agree that distribution flamewars are counter-productive, but what I read here (comments sorted by age) up until I got to your post was most positive, informative comments expressing differences and preferences. I don't see anything wrong with that. Seems to me that this is the real strength of Linux anyway, that if you don't like the way RedHat works, you can use something else... if you think that text-based install isn't for you, you can use RedHat until you outgrow it, etc.
Sure, depends on the system they are using (if any). One company that we do contract work for is one of the biggest telemarketers in the US and their system can easily tell a live call from a machine, keeps track of what times you actually answer, how many rings you wait on average and other evil things like that. One way to defeat this system is to turn on your fax software to answer incoming calls and then plug your modem into your voice line for a few days. The system will think it has a fax line and mark that number in its database and never call it again for 18 months.
Yeah, but I think the difference is that, apart from the possibility that life might exist on Europa but not on Jupiter, is that Jupiter is so incredibly massive that it is probably a safe bet that Gallileio would be completely incinerated in the atmosphere. I don't know what kind of atmosphere Europa has, but there must be some possibility being considered that dormant microbes could survive re-entry and cause biological contamination. Pretty far-fetched, I agree... but even if the remote possibility exists, why chance it?
>fade in/out pull down menus in Win2k?! I mean, really - it's a menu, not an ancient scroll from D&D
Warning: OT
Heh, I'm glad I'm not the only one who was really annoyed by this. First thing I did was find where to turn this off. Seems like Microsoft can't stop themselves from making little UI tweaks like that... must be so _something_ looks and feels a little different to the user so there is some impression that the new version is different from NT4. IIRC, there was some slight change in icons or something in the W98 UI that was kind of the same thing, just different enough to make it distinguishable from 95.
Right, this is called a predictive dialer. It runs the call list and rings multiple lines at the same time and is able to distinguish live people from answering macines and then forward the live person to the next operator who starts in on the script. Annoying as hell when the dialers get ahead of the operators and hang up on you because there is not a free operator to connect you to.
I have my answering machine set to answer after 2 rings (seems to take this long for caller ID to show up) and I never pick up unless a name show up of someone I want to talk to or if someone starts leaving a message. My phone rings all evening with 'out of area' caller-id that hang up when they reach the machine. Damn pain in the ass.
>Does anyone else think that country is worthy of ridicule, that will crash $1.5 billion of equipment...
No, I don't agree. First, they are not crashing $1.5 billion worth of anything. The cost of the program was $1.5 billion. The residual value of the 'equipment' that will wind up its work Feb 2001 is about $0. The incremental cost to work out what to do with it and send whatever instructions to the vehicle and then monitor what happens at the end has to be marginal.
>Do those mythical one-celled motes from outer space have more rights than human children?
No more, no less - IMO. All life is valuable, precious and rare and deserving of respect and any protection that is resonably possible. It's all relative. I won't even begin an argument on the "right to (choice/life)" debate here. I have my opinion just like everyone else. I really don't see what it has to do with the topic of Gallileo.
>There are no life forms on any of those moons.
And how can you know that (for sure)? Yeah, it's very unlikely that there is anything there, and that even if it were, that Gallileo crashing into Europa would really cause any harm, but it costs very little (I would assume) to take this simple precaution.
Yep, I think the problem is that they will soon not be able to control it at all and they'd rather just make sure it crashes into Jupiter or Io rather than try to put it into some kind of 'stable/permanent' orbit that might decay over time for some unforeseen reason (passing of an unknown comet) and end up falling into Europa and possibly causing biological contamination. (Yeah, I know but someone already said there is a theory which says it might be possible for bacteria to still be viable, even after 11 years in the frozen vacuum of space.)
Makes sense to me. It's already performed it's original mission and then some so it's not like wasting billions of dollars when this craft is 11 years old and has reached the end of it's useful life anyway. Rather than letting this thing float around as so much space junk, they are thinking about of 'disposing' of it as best they can at this point. Plunge it into Jupiter, take a few snapshots on the way in for the evening news. So what's the diff? Option A) have a dead spacecraft floating around with the extremely small possibility that it might mess up Europa someday, or B) use the remaining fuel to send it into Jupiter where it won't cause any trouble and you might just eek out the last shred of science out of a very successful program. No contest.
But doesn't the iStore have some of these costs as well? Surely it's not a simple as setting up a server, you still have to sell a product. Granted, you don't have to set up in commercial zoned property, set up a sign and all kinds of things that you have to do to start a walk-in customer type store. But you probably need a warehouse, a few employees to process orders and suchlike.
Probably more of a stretch, but don't the telecommunication providers receive some benefit from the state or local governments (right-of-way waivers, etc)?
Slashdot Mirror
But wasn't it the case that the 'defamatory' post was actually on a deja server and the demon server posts in question contained only URL's to deja? From reading the post on demon's site I'm led to beleive that the problem is deeper than just cancelling news posts on your (the ISP's) own server.
Now go a-way, or I will taunt yuu a second time-uh.
I found a way to do this also, quite by accident. I got a JVC DV camcorder last christmas with a firewire/1394 interface so I went and got an adaptec scsi/1394 combo card so I could grab video off my DV camcorder and burn home movies onto a CDRW. I also have a TV tuner card in this box and the video capture software I ended up using (Ulead Studio) recognized my 1394 and tv card as video sources. I hooked up my Panasonic DVD deck to the tv card with s-video cable and captured a good chunk of The Matrix onto my SCSI drive. I was surprised how well this worked.
I then played the clip back full screen through my Matrox G400 Max with the second head's output patched into my VCR. Made a perfectly good quality copy of the clip onto VHS.
I didn't copy the entire movie, and I'm not sure I ever would, but it would be easy engough to make a good-quality VHS copy of any DVD movie and bypass macrovision with this setup. I'm sure there are plenty of other (faster, better, cheaper) ways but I had to pipe up with my version.
Well, not legal precedents, for sure. But this settlement could have the effect that others in the future will also be unwilling/unable to stand up for themselves. In fact, the absence of a precedent in that there was no actual judgement (assuming it would go against Mattel) is what hurts. Next time something like this comes up, the lawyers won't be able to cite Mattel vs 'whoever' as a precedent to make an argument against the bogus charges being brought by the next evil corporation who feels like throwing a few lawyers after a couple college students that have publicly humiliated them for crappy internet-filtering software.
Well, you make a very good point. Their personal inconvenience aside, (not that it wouldn't be substantial, to say the least) this doesn't do much for the cause of free speech and freedom from information. I guess if it was me, I'd have to think hard about sacrificing a few good years of my life for this cause, but the end result is that (assuming they had won) future conflicts will not have the benefit of legal precedent.
The evil corporation has shoved cash at the would-be exposers of oppressive information and free-speech suppressors, and they went home and deposited the checks. (ok, overdramatization, but you get the idea...)
So what did we really prove? Nothing in the eyes of the law, much less to the public at large. Maybe some of us have a good idea of what was really going on, but the rest of the USA Today-reading public thinks the evil hackers gladly took a deal to keep from going to jail.
The authors of Web sites must give their identity to their shelterer before any public communication under sorrow prison. In the absence of identification the shelterers are responsible for the contents and liable six months to prison.
Now that's great. You give shelter to some poor anonymous coward with a web site, and the French Government rewards you with 6 months in Papillon.
Along those lines, I remember a while back a story about how they could put DNA-like information into ink to be used to authenticate signatures. I think it was 'Next Step' on the Discovery Channel or something... the eample they gave was either Hanna or Barberra having lelments of his DNA put into the ink he used to sign copies of animation cells, in that way his signature was supposed to be authenticated so no one could sell phony autographed cells. Pretty cool.
>Computers for the smart, x-box for the stupid and the uninformed!
Well, yeah.. exactly. You just summed up M$'s whole marketing strategy. Remember that _average_ IQ is 100. The ratio of smart vs stupid and uninformed is in Microsoft's favor!
Yeah, not much of a contingency plan when there's only one female and she gets the bad freezer. Duh.
"Well, Taylor, _NOW_ what the fsck do we do?"
"Do? I don't know about you two, bit I'm gonna scout around looking for hot babes in two-piece sheepskin outfits that can't speak. A couple months and I'll be _running_ this place!"
How about just "Really big conglomerates of matter, not big enough to form a star, floating free in the universe until they find something better to do"?
:-)
I know, but I'm bored and have nothing better to do.
Sheesh, beat me to it! :-)
...gee, but can it run Linux?
Yeah, but that's the exception, not the rule. Most of the discs I own get to the menu in <30 seconds. Overall, it beats the hell out of VHS on a number of points. I sure like being able to jump straight to a scene in a movie and do slo-mo and freeze and stuff (not to mention that you never have to rewind ever again :-) ) Too bad there's so much crap with CSS... I waited to buy a player until DiVX died and now this crap starts up.
Then you obviously haven't bought the Disney DVD release of Tarzan.
>Is it really true that some DVDs contain commercials that standard DVD players won't let you skip or fast-forward over?
I've only encountered one such situation that seemed really bad: the Disney release of Tarzan on DVD. Normally, you pop a disc into the player and you sit thru a few seconds of "FBI WARNING" screen that you cannot skip, then the interactive menu screen comes up to let you pick subtitles, alternate languages, special features and play the movie.
But this damned Tarzan disc shows about 3 minutes of ads and movie trailers that you can't skip past. When I hit the menu, skip or FF buttons, I just get the little red circle with the slash through it just like if I try to skip the FBI warning. Damn annoying. I think I heard someone say that they did this by putting this crap on the same track as the FBI stuff which the player is pre-programmed to always play. Seems pretty shifty to me and if Disney makes a habit out of this, then they will really piss consumers off.
I beleive it does in fact allow you to extract the admin password so you could effectively disable the filtering, no? So, yes the software itself does not directly circumvent the filter, but the ability to reveal the encrypted password is obviously the justification Mattel is using to block sites which contain a mirror of the software.
On a side note, anyone able to tell me just how CP works? Is it a proxy that runs on the client where you point the browser to it ala Junk Buster? If so, could you not just install IJB on a machine and redirect the proxy settings to the IJB port to sidestep CP, or does it use a different mechanism?
Really, I saw that and thought the same thing!
<p>
Plus, it's always been <i>pissing contest</i> when I've heard the expression.
Well, I find this discussion helpful. I'm a relative newbie who started on Redhat 5.0 a couple years back and I'm very interested in trying out different distro's to learn, if nothing else. It is helpful here to see what people like about Slack so I can decide if it's something I want to bother with.
For example, I recently set up a new box and decided to give Debian a try. Having been spoiled by the RedHat installs, I kind of had a few quirks getting everything going, especially the network. I'm not an old-school unix expert so I was unaware of the sysV vs BSD-style init script differences, so it took a little digging and tinkering to learn how Slink is set up, but now I have a happily working box sitting in the corner running Deb, and I have a real sense of accomplishment for having gone though and learned something new instead of just installing another RedHat 6.1 box.
I'll have another opportunity soon to try out another distro, my Mom's pentium has finally run out of gas (yep, she tried to upgrade to Win98 and it barfed) so I'm building her a new machine and I'll end up scavenging her old box. Right now I've got a FreeBSD CD that came with something I ordered from LinuxMall and I might try installing that to see what it's all about. From the comments here, I'm now curious about Slack, so I might just download that and give it a try.
I agree that distribution flamewars are counter-productive, but what I read here (comments sorted by age) up until I got to your post was most positive, informative comments expressing differences and preferences. I don't see anything wrong with that. Seems to me that this is the real strength of Linux anyway, that if you don't like the way RedHat works, you can use something else... if you think that text-based install isn't for you, you can use RedHat until you outgrow it, etc.
Sure, depends on the system they are using (if any). One company that we do contract work for is one of the biggest telemarketers in the US and their system can easily tell a live call from a machine, keeps track of what times you actually answer, how many rings you wait on average and other evil things like that. One way to defeat this system is to turn on your fax software to answer incoming calls and then plug your modem into your voice line for a few days. The system will think it has a fax line and mark that number in its database and never call it again for 18 months.
Yeah, but I think the difference is that, apart from the possibility that life might exist on Europa but not on Jupiter, is that Jupiter is so incredibly massive that it is probably a safe bet that Gallileio would be completely incinerated in the atmosphere. I don't know what kind of atmosphere Europa has, but there must be some possibility being considered that dormant microbes could survive re-entry and cause biological contamination. Pretty far-fetched, I agree... but even if the remote possibility exists, why chance it?
>fade in/out pull down menus in Win2k?! I mean, really - it's a menu, not an ancient scroll from D&D
Warning: OT
Heh, I'm glad I'm not the only one who was really annoyed by this. First thing I did was find where to turn this off. Seems like Microsoft can't stop themselves from making little UI tweaks like that... must be so _something_ looks and feels a little different to the user so there is some impression that the new version is different from NT4. IIRC, there was some slight change in icons or something in the W98 UI that was kind of the same thing, just different enough to make it distinguishable from 95.
Right, this is called a predictive dialer. It runs the call list and rings multiple lines at the same time and is able to distinguish live people from answering macines and then forward the live person to the next operator who starts in on the script. Annoying as hell when the dialers get ahead of the operators and hang up on you because there is not a free operator to connect you to.
I have my answering machine set to answer after 2 rings (seems to take this long for caller ID to show up) and I never pick up unless a name show up of someone I want to talk to or if someone starts leaving a message. My phone rings all evening with 'out of area' caller-id that hang up when they reach the machine. Damn pain in the ass.
>Does anyone else think that country is worthy of ridicule, that will crash $1.5 billion of equipment ...
No, I don't agree. First, they are not crashing $1.5 billion worth of anything. The cost of the program was $1.5 billion. The residual value of the 'equipment' that will wind up its work Feb 2001 is about $0. The incremental cost to work out what to do with it and send whatever instructions to the vehicle and then monitor what happens at the end has to be marginal.
>Do those mythical one-celled motes from outer space have more rights than human children?
No more, no less - IMO. All life is valuable, precious and rare and deserving of respect and any protection that is resonably possible. It's all relative. I won't even begin an argument on the "right to (choice/life)" debate here. I have my opinion just like everyone else. I really don't see what it has to do with the topic of Gallileo.
>There are no life forms on any of those moons.
And how can you know that (for sure)? Yeah, it's very unlikely that there is anything there, and that even if it were, that Gallileo crashing into Europa would really cause any harm, but it costs very little (I would assume) to take this simple precaution.
>This is incredibly stupid.
No, I think this is very prudent.
Yep, I think the problem is that they will soon not be able to control it at all and they'd rather just make sure it crashes into Jupiter or Io rather than try to put it into some kind of 'stable/permanent' orbit that might decay over time for some unforeseen reason (passing of an unknown comet) and end up falling into Europa and possibly causing biological contamination. (Yeah, I know but someone already said there is a theory which says it might be possible for bacteria to still be viable, even after 11 years in the frozen vacuum of space.)
Makes sense to me. It's already performed it's original mission and then some so it's not like wasting billions of dollars when this craft is 11 years old and has reached the end of it's useful life anyway. Rather than letting this thing float around as so much space junk, they are thinking about of 'disposing' of it as best they can at this point. Plunge it into Jupiter, take a few snapshots on the way in for the evening news. So what's the diff? Option A) have a dead spacecraft floating around with the extremely small possibility that it might mess up Europa someday, or B) use the remaining fuel to send it into Jupiter where it won't cause any trouble and you might just eek out the last shred of science out of a very successful program. No contest.
But doesn't the iStore have some of these costs as well? Surely it's not a simple as setting up a server, you still have to sell a product. Granted, you don't have to set up in commercial zoned property, set up a sign and all kinds of things that you have to do to start a walk-in customer type store. But you probably need a warehouse, a few employees to process orders and suchlike.
Probably more of a stretch, but don't the telecommunication providers receive some benefit from the state or local governments (right-of-way waivers, etc)?