If you hadn't been such a cluefuck on the NLUG list (and the LUNA list and the GOLUM list and the...) maybe you'd still be around to see all the traffic about these bills, the hearings, the strategies to get them killed, amended, tabled, etc.
There's a shitload going on here. Just because nobody bothered to fill you in doesn't mean it ain't so.
For those wondering whether this applies to Mozilla
In xpfe components search datasets NetscapeSearch dot src there are 6 matches (see below).
Looks to me like if you enable Netscape searches in Mozilla you get the same thing, but I don't see Mozilla reporting other searches to Netscape.
As far as Alexa goes, since I see people asking about that too (results removed due to lameness filter), there is only one match of relevance, in the xpfe components related resources related-paned (dot) js file (see below).
So, it looks like the "What's Related" panel is the only place where Alexa gets info from the browser.
I had posted a find and grep command which showed 6 hits for the Netscape info information, and 5 hits for Alexa information in the Mozilla 0.9.8 source tree. Informative, terse, useful (IMHO). What follows is my commentary as I tried to get this post under the lameness filter -- resulting in the useless shit post you see above.
Now evidently the last part of this triggered the wondrous lameness filter, so I'd like to say a few things here in hopes of getting this post past:
first of all CmdrTaco is a fucking moron. Second what is the deal (and yes, I clearly have the source) with Mozilla's textarea entry widget? This thing is a nightmare to use. Don't even pretend to try to cut-and-paste into this thing if you want to produce readable results.
That doesn't appear to be sufficient so I've removed the lines from the Alexa grep which just provide a copyright notice. CmdrTaco is a fucking mongoloid retard. Still no dice. Fucktard. Lamer fucking idiot. Fuck you and your monolithic Perl script.
Ok. Gone are the info search lines which are in the layout bug tests (and not part of searching). Here's hoping. Nope, no dice. God I wish I were as fucking 1337 as CmdrTaco. I bet I'd get my ass slammed by homeless guys every fucking weekend. This site has become a shithole. How fucking useless. Censoring fucking retard. As if they have any fucking taste.
Now I've taken out all the non-matching Alexa hits. Still no dice. Oh the fucking wisdom in enabling intellectual exchange by censoring trolls and spammers. Oh you've really done the community a fucking service by making it possible for us to edit our posts 12 times so we can have a truly enlightened exchange. You back-assed Michigan Nazi fuck.
Took out the search path, no help, still too many "junk" characters. Too many junk-addicted assholes running this fucking site. I've now actually taken out the find and grep command I used to perform the searches, since I guess that's not informative. Let's see if that works. Nope. Colon off the end of the first sentence... Nope. I removed the path info for the files matching the netscape site... no help.
This is the stupidest shit I have ever seen. I just took out all the matches for info.netscape.com and I'm still triggering the lameness filter. Finally, I removed the Alexa results as well and now the post passes the lameness filter.
So, basically I can't provide a post with any information in it if I want it to appear on the site.
Bye, slashdot, and CmdrTaco -- one last FUCK YOU to you. Shithead.
Re:Should I send this to my congressmen?
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I posted mine on my website after I dropped it in the mailbox last night (here), but since it's short and sweet I'll re-post the text here:
Senator Hollings,
You are a shill.
You do this nation and the office of U.S. Senator a grave injustice by lining your pockets with the filthy dollars of Jack Valenti, Michael Eisner, and their greedy ilk.
In case you've forgotten your constituency, let me remind you that it doesn't reside in California. Drop the SSSCA nonsense or We, The People
will run your sorry ass out of Washington on a rail.
..etc.
Enclosed was a copy of his contribution record with the donations from the entertainment industry circled with a red marker.
SBC pulled a bait-and-switch on me, multiple multiple-$100 overcharges, slammed my long distance, etc. I had 8 typed pages of complaints, which it took 6 months to resolve to my satisfaction.
For those in similar positions I recorded the whole process and it's online here.
For the record I'm very against the Tauzin-Dingell bill. I've written several letters over the past few months asking my reps to oppose this legislation. If I hadn't read the bill the fact that SBC is in favor of it is indication enough that it's bad law.
I always use real addresses, just those of the people I think more likely to be interested in cheap Viagra, weight loss, and 12-year old girls:
hotline@mpaa.org and cdreward@riaa.org.
Actually a number of us have been taking turns calling tonerbuys.com (on their friggin' 800 number) after receiving their spam. The admin/billing contact is reachable
at the phone # in the whois records. I called him
today, but this time he was "out of the office."
We've told Mr. Grant and some of his lackeys that they're in violation of California state law (where they are) as well as TN state law (where some of our hosting customers are who are receiving the mails). If we get another spam he gets an invoice. If they don't pay it we sue his ass personally and use discovery to sort out the details.
Third party or not we didn't ask for this bullshit and those motherfuckers are going to pay for it, even if it's just through legal fees. They can fight over the check.
Your efforts (and your unwillingness to flinch in the face of 800-lb. corporate and governmental gorillas) have made cryptome an invaluable resource, for which I certainly thank you. At least once in recent memory you've made a call for mirroring sensitive software and information.
1. What can normal people do to help out with mirroring important information (e.g., crypto information, documentation on civil liberties threats, reverse engineering and Fair Use securing tools, etc.)? How can we stay out of trouble with the law while we're helping out?
2. Have you ever considered providing a mirroring clearing house? That is, devoting a section of cryptome to listing, in an up-to-date manner, resources which need mirroring in various parts of the world?
You're dead right. There was no mention of Microsoft in that article. No comments by
Microsoft executives. No spin doctoring, FUD, or
outright Microsoft bullshit.
I submitted this story last night (times are in GMT):
Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:
2001-10-31 04:51:37 Amazon says "Linux saved us millions" (articles,linuxbiz) (rejected)
Summary:
rejected (1)
It was rejected within just a couple of minutes of submission, yet a nearly identical submission makes it to the front page today. This is why I don't bother to post stories to/. -- the maintainers are troglodytes with no idea whether something is newsworthy, or what anyone else in their organization is doing. If this is how day-to-day operations in the rest of VA are conducted it's no wonder they're going down the tubes.
If I had mod points at the moment you'd be getting them.
The open source / free software community has made almost incomprehensible strides. I can barely believe how badass the offerings are. I used to add "... compared to {a year, six months, etc.}" to that, but it's not a relative term any more. We're about 1-2 major releases away from having the best OSs w/ tools on the planet (that's Linux and the various BSDs). It doesn't matter if anyone else makes money off that, or whether we "dominate the world", since the software that's already been created is Free, free, and isn't going away.
It's a shame that VA isn't selling their hardware any more, as I quite liked it. They converted a lot of evil VC funds into quality open source man-hours. If they did it on purpose they deserve a place in free software valhalla. If they didn't, we still got the benefits from it.
3 - Not everyone on/. grew up installing RedHat on web servers; I didn't.
4 - Fuck you very much for waving your worthless Sun cert and touting your "hardcore financial applications". I've written them and supported them alongside people whose names you know if you have any knowledge of Unix history. Let that sink in, you parochial fuck.
5 - It's not possible or desirable to sync dev with test with production in the face of a non-trivial version push (whether that's due to internal or external software). You're naive if you think there's any point in having three identical systems for these purposes.
6 - When I was doing production support on a large in-house 24-hour trading center, running applications my team designed and developed, we never needed to rush code from development into production. in spite of the fact that we were indeed dealing with systems that handled tens of millions of dollars in transactions an hour. Oddly, in eight years we never got to use our hot off-site backup trading center to do active trading. You did have one of those, didn't you? You know, "best practices" and all.
7 - Nobody called your workplace a nightmare (reread my post), although considering that an annoying fuck like you works there I might consider calling it one.
8 - Our company evaluated NT systems numerous times over the course of 4 years for various different applications and never allowed any installations other than the Reuters Dealer systems which Reuters was forced to support. Why? Because NT was never deemed robust enough to exist in our production environment.
The DMCA doesn't require them to do anything. The law doesn't compell the copyright holder to act in any specific fashion. It does, however, give the copyright holder a new and egregious means of attacking those who would lawfully exercise their fair use rights. It's not clear in this case whether Sony is justified in hammering the aibopet author with the DMCA, but I feel pretty certain they know he won't fight them in court so it doesn't matter. They could threaten him with racketeering charges and the validity of the charges wouldn't matter since he's not going to defend himself in court.
While what you're saying is valid, it's a matter of apples and oranges. Bad production management is causing the problems you describe, which should have nothing to do with the developers' client environments.
In a system on the scale of which you speak, with the problems you describe, you should have a dedicated test network (logistically) between your development network and your production network. The test network should be identical to your production network. Changes moving to production come only from the test network (where they have been for a pre-determined amount of time/usage) and are approved on an item-by-item basis before they are moved. Development changes move to the test network after being approved on an item-by-item basis, at which time a non-coder sets the schedule and criteria for a successful migration to the production network. Failures at least reset the clock.
You can document your processes all you want, but if you don't know how to run a large-scale production environment you'll need titanium boots to keep from shooting your feet off. Sensible production controls address every issue you're talking about and have no bearing on the question of whether IT and development get to fight over desktop admin rights.
Btw, if your IT people are good, your managers are good, and your developers are good they help each other and don't have turf battles. I'd hate to try to find the weak links in the story poster's company. What a fucking nightmare that place must be to work at.
Of course, if you've picked NT systems for a production site then you've got more serious endemic problems than underdeveloped production control.
Will someone please mod up the parent? I just sent a fax to my two
Senators this way. This is an easy and fast way to get out message
in front of a LOT of senators.
They read faxes and this method doesn't even cost a
phone call (sorry, now I sound like Sally Struthers... for less
than the cost of a cup of coffee..., ACK.).
Monopolies have not such privileges. You can rant all what you want, but MS is a de facto monopoly, and it should be treated accordingly.
Actually, Microsoft is a de jure monopoly. The Court ruled that Microsoft
is a monopoly, and that ruling stands, regardless of what happens in the new
penalty phase.
Yes, they will listen to you. There's nothing that requires you to state your age or voter registration status when corresponding with your elected representatives (I'm not recommending you lie to them, however). Place the burden upon their administrative staff to determine whether you are a registered voter. IMHO the sending of the letter is what counts.
The draft as it reads in the version posted outlines a ludicrous piece of law. It's
not hard to see how this puts a burden on industry, further restricts Fair Use (especially in conjunction with the DMCA) and strengthens the rights of the copyright holders (especially in conjunction with the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension -- aka "Mickey Mouse Copyright" -- Act) at the expense of the public domain. It's easy to see how vague the bill will be and how perilous the law: consider the definition of "interactive digital device"... "any... technology... that is... used for the primary purpose of storing..." -- an HP calculator with 2K RAM would qualify; have fun with the myriad valid ways to read that overly-broad definition.
While that's obvious to us that doesn't mean that the bill won't be ram-rodded through now that the most recent batch of MPAA/RIAA checks have cleared the Senators' banks. The only way to stop this is to raise such a howl that they dare not go forward. If we act now (when the bill is just a draft) we can make it clear to them that we can't even allow them to get past that stage.
I am going to be writing letters to Senators and will be sending letters and emails to press outlets (using the list of a few hundred addresses scraped from "Mr. Smith Writes..."). This is regardless of what other/.-ers do.
The reason I'm posting this is that I'd like to get a little feedback (some ideas, which is what an open forum like this is great at) concerning the people to whom I should send letters to make the biggest impact. Of course the Senators directly involved, and my own Senators/Reps. Who else?
"Imagine a Linux network where applications are all stored on central file servers. "
Yes you can do that, but you'll have to upgrade your network to 100baseT to the desktop, switched to gigabit in the closet with each closet having a file/print server that did nothing but provide the read-only executable content to the clients.
While I agree with the rest of your post, this is utter nonsense. For 30 users 10bT handles the job nicely. Get above that range and you'll probably want to go to 100bT to keep things snappy. If you get above a couple hundred users it would probably be a good idea to do some network segmenting and fan out to a few application servers but even that's not necessary if your server has good redundancy wrt disk / power supplies / NICs, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Damnit, Nagy.
If you hadn't been such a cluefuck on the NLUG list (and the LUNA list and the GOLUM list and the...) maybe you'd still be around to see all the traffic about these bills, the hearings, the strategies to get them killed, amended, tabled, etc.
There's a shitload going on here. Just because nobody bothered to fill you in doesn't mean it ain't so.
Christ.
Read. Become less ignorant.
In xpfe components search datasets NetscapeSearch dot src there are 6 matches (see below).
Looks to me like if you enable Netscape searches in Mozilla you get the same thing, but I don't see Mozilla reporting other searches to Netscape.
As far as Alexa goes, since I see people asking about that too (results removed due to lameness filter), there is only one match of relevance, in the xpfe components related resources related-paned (dot) js file (see below).
So, it looks like the "What's Related" panel is the only place where Alexa gets info from the browser.
I had posted a find and grep command which showed 6 hits for the Netscape info information, and 5 hits for Alexa information in the Mozilla 0.9.8 source tree. Informative, terse, useful (IMHO). What follows is my commentary as I tried to get this post under the lameness filter -- resulting in the useless shit post you see above.
Now evidently the last part of this triggered the wondrous lameness filter, so I'd like to say a few things here in hopes of getting this post past: first of all CmdrTaco is a fucking moron. Second what is the deal (and yes, I clearly have the source) with Mozilla's textarea entry widget? This thing is a nightmare to use. Don't even pretend to try to cut-and-paste into this thing if you want to produce readable results.
That doesn't appear to be sufficient so I've removed the lines from the Alexa grep which just provide a copyright notice. CmdrTaco is a fucking mongoloid retard. Still no dice. Fucktard. Lamer fucking idiot. Fuck you and your monolithic Perl script.
Ok. Gone are the info search lines which are in the layout bug tests (and not part of searching). Here's hoping. Nope, no dice. God I wish I were as fucking 1337 as CmdrTaco. I bet I'd get my ass slammed by homeless guys every fucking weekend. This site has become a shithole. How fucking useless. Censoring fucking retard. As if they have any fucking taste.
Now I've taken out all the non-matching Alexa hits. Still no dice. Oh the fucking wisdom in enabling intellectual exchange by censoring trolls and spammers. Oh you've really done the community a fucking service by making it possible for us to edit our posts 12 times so we can have a truly enlightened exchange. You back-assed Michigan Nazi fuck.
Took out the search path, no help, still too many "junk" characters. Too many junk-addicted assholes running this fucking site. I've now actually taken out the find and grep command I used to perform the searches, since I guess that's not informative. Let's see if that works. Nope. Colon off the end of the first sentence... Nope. I removed the path info for the files matching the netscape site... no help.
This is the stupidest shit I have ever seen. I just took out all the matches for info.netscape.com and I'm still triggering the lameness filter. Finally, I removed the Alexa results as well and now the post passes the lameness filter.
So, basically I can't provide a post with any information in it if I want it to appear on the site.
Bye, slashdot, and CmdrTaco -- one last FUCK YOU to you. Shithead.
Fuck that dumbass cracker sellout.
For those in similar positions I recorded the whole process and it's online here.
For the record I'm very against the Tauzin-Dingell bill. I've written several letters over the past few months asking my reps to oppose this legislation. If I hadn't read the bill the fact that SBC is in favor of it is indication enough that it's bad law.
hotline@mpaa.org and cdreward@riaa.org.
We've told Mr. Grant and some of his lackeys that they're in violation of California state law (where they are) as well as TN state law (where some of our hosting customers are who are receiving the mails). If we get another spam he gets an invoice. If they don't pay it we sue his ass personally and use discovery to sort out the details.
Third party or not we didn't ask for this bullshit and those motherfuckers are going to pay for it, even if it's just through legal fees. They can fight over the check.
Back in your hole, bitch.
1. What can normal people do to help out with mirroring important information (e.g., crypto information, documentation on civil liberties threats, reverse engineering and Fair Use securing tools, etc.)? How can we stay out of trouble with the law while we're helping out?
2. Have you ever considered providing a mirroring clearing house? That is, devoting a section of cryptome to listing, in an up-to-date manner, resources which need mirroring in various parts of the world?
Thanks!
Read before you post :-)
Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:
2001-10-31 04:51:37 Amazon says "Linux saved us millions" (articles,linuxbiz) (rejected)
Summary:
rejected (1)
It was rejected within just a couple of minutes of submission, yet a nearly identical submission makes it to the front page today. This is why I don't bother to post stories to /. -- the maintainers are troglodytes with no idea whether something is newsworthy, or what anyone else in their organization is doing. If this is how day-to-day operations in the rest of VA are conducted it's no wonder they're going down the tubes.
The open source / free software community has made almost incomprehensible strides. I can barely believe how badass the offerings are. I used to add "... compared to {a year, six months, etc.}" to that, but it's not a relative term any more. We're about 1-2 major releases away from having the best OSs w/ tools on the planet (that's Linux and the various BSDs). It doesn't matter if anyone else makes money off that, or whether we "dominate the world", since the software that's already been created is Free, free, and isn't going away.
It's a shame that VA isn't selling their hardware any more, as I quite liked it. They converted a lot of evil VC funds into quality open source man-hours. If they did it on purpose they deserve a place in free software valhalla. If they didn't, we still got the benefits from it.
2 - "Proof in the pudding"
3 - Not everyone on /. grew up installing RedHat on web servers; I didn't.
4 - Fuck you very much for waving your worthless Sun cert and touting your "hardcore financial applications". I've written them and supported them alongside people whose names you know if you have any knowledge of Unix history. Let that sink in, you parochial fuck.
5 - It's not possible or desirable to sync dev with test with production in the face of a non-trivial version push (whether that's due to internal or external software). You're naive if you think there's any point in having three identical systems for these purposes.
6 - When I was doing production support on a large in-house 24-hour trading center, running applications my team designed and developed, we never needed to rush code from development into production. in spite of the fact that we were indeed dealing with systems that handled tens of millions of dollars in transactions an hour. Oddly, in eight years we never got to use our hot off-site backup trading center to do active trading. You did have one of those, didn't you? You know, "best practices" and all.
7 - Nobody called your workplace a nightmare (reread my post), although considering that an annoying fuck like you works there I might consider calling it one.
8 - Our company evaluated NT systems numerous times over the course of 4 years for various different applications and never allowed any installations other than the Reuters Dealer systems which Reuters was forced to support. Why? Because NT was never deemed robust enough to exist in our production environment.
9 - Fuck Marimba and fuck you too.
The DMCA doesn't require them to do anything. The law doesn't compell the copyright holder to act in any specific fashion. It does, however, give the copyright holder a new and egregious means of attacking those who would lawfully exercise their fair use rights. It's not clear in this case whether Sony is justified in hammering the aibopet author with the DMCA, but I feel pretty certain they know he won't fight them in court so it doesn't matter. They could threaten him with racketeering charges and the validity of the charges wouldn't matter since he's not going to defend himself in court.
In a system on the scale of which you speak, with the problems you describe, you should have a dedicated test network (logistically) between your development network and your production network. The test network should be identical to your production network. Changes moving to production come only from the test network (where they have been for a pre-determined amount of time/usage) and are approved on an item-by-item basis before they are moved. Development changes move to the test network after being approved on an item-by-item basis, at which time a non-coder sets the schedule and criteria for a successful migration to the production network. Failures at least reset the clock.
You can document your processes all you want, but if you don't know how to run a large-scale production environment you'll need titanium boots to keep from shooting your feet off. Sensible production controls address every issue you're talking about and have no bearing on the question of whether IT and development get to fight over desktop admin rights.
Btw, if your IT people are good, your managers are good, and your developers are good they help each other and don't have turf battles. I'd hate to try to find the weak links in the story poster's company. What a fucking nightmare that place must be to work at.
Of course, if you've picked NT systems for a production site then you've got more serious endemic problems than underdeveloped production control.
They read faxes and this method doesn't even cost a phone call (sorry, now I sound like Sally Struthers... for less than the cost of a cup of coffee..., ACK.).
How's that? Last time I checked Greenwich is east of the US, but not 20 hours east of us.
Actually, Microsoft is a de jure monopoly. The Court ruled that Microsoft is a monopoly, and that ruling stands, regardless of what happens in the new penalty phase.
Which is a good enough reason to be using the mirrors as well.
Those who think the two are unrelated are a primary reason we can now laugh about the "dot-bombs".
While that's obvious to us that doesn't mean that the bill won't be ram-rodded through now that the most recent batch of MPAA/RIAA checks have cleared the Senators' banks. The only way to stop this is to raise such a howl that they dare not go forward. If we act now (when the bill is just a draft) we can make it clear to them that we can't even allow them to get past that stage.
I am going to be writing letters to Senators and will be sending letters and emails to press outlets (using the list of a few hundred addresses scraped from "Mr. Smith Writes ..."). This is regardless of what other /.-ers do.
The reason I'm posting this is that I'd like to get a little feedback (some ideas, which is what an open forum like this is great at) concerning the people to whom I should send letters to make the biggest impact. Of course the Senators directly involved, and my own Senators/Reps. Who else?
Yes you can do that, but you'll have to upgrade your network to 100baseT to the desktop, switched to gigabit in the closet with each closet having a file/print server that did nothing but provide the read-only executable content to the clients.
While I agree with the rest of your post, this is utter nonsense. For 30 users 10bT handles the job nicely. Get above that range and you'll probably want to go to 100bT to keep things snappy. If you get above a couple hundred users it would probably be a good idea to do some network segmenting and fan out to a few application servers but even that's not necessary if your server has good redundancy wrt disk / power supplies / NICs, etc.