I think the purpose of fighting the RIAA on a technological level is fighting their attempt to stop legal and legitimate file sharing.
When we say, "We'll just work around their stupidity", it's because we're trying to let them know they can't stop us without using the law ; and they can't get laws made against our legal rights.
At least, that's what I meant when I said I wouldn't allow them to stop me from transfering files I may very well (and do) have legal rights to. Fuck them.
If they can DDOS legal file trading, are we in turn allowed to DDOS their servers? Say for example, if we had an open-source server-client based ddos tool that reads IPs and data from a central server locating these bastards?
My only concern about music swapping is the RIAAs attempt to make their concerns look legitimate. "We're going after people who don't pay us money"; forget whether or not they're actually breaking the law, just shut them down? that's rediculous.
Post any and all knowledge of how to shut these idiots down. I will dedicate all the bandwidth I can.
One day, in the not so far future, I think the ECA will be given this prestigious prize... and everyone will say, "I knew they were gonna get that darned prize all along... if only I had done more to support them in the beginning"...
Or atleast... that's what people who don't know how to support the ECA would say, but luckily you can support the ECA just by spreading word of the Eggplant in all it's forms and variations.... but how do you do that? easy... click Eggplants!.
Is that like the NAZI SS, because voluntarily giving up your individual freedoms and privacy pretty much equates to the same thing.
You want to talk about abuse? Talk about the potential for abuse of that system by companies and by the government. National ID cards have been used in other countries, and in one country (which one escapes me right now) the supreme court (or their equivilant) overturned the law requiring national ID cards because (and this is just one of many many reasons) the police began requesting the cards like they request drivers licenses. Then they found people whose cards listed them in a bad neighbourhood were freuquently mistreated by the police.
Encryption and the fight for privacy is not only for those people with nothing to hide. It's to ensure our freedoms, and to ensure others have the same rights we EXPECT.
I'm pretty sure Our technology will be as useful in this "new war" as it was in the last, "New war" fought in the same area of the world. The media will be given images of successful bombings, we will hear nobody who wasn't, "Evil" was hurt and we will wonder what the truth really is.
A year or so later we will see a few images of thousands of injured innocent people, lots of destroyed buildings with no "terrorist" connection - and we will all go, "oh... well I guess that's to be expected with war".
The difference is, this is a great excuse for the US to just keep on fighting until the economy is super number 1 again. Go samurai cowboys! stamp out evil in all it's forms!
The last thing any of us wants is to be attacked in our own countries. The difference between giving your government the ability to "go to war" with anybody they choose - and actually going after the people responsible is a pretty severe difference.
Use your heads when voting for the next president.
My favouritest part in the movie was that scene where Denzel Washington is in the really really bad ghetto house with the drug people, and he's all sweating, and has his pants around his ankles staring dead in the eyes of Sandra Bullock. She tries to tell him that his whole history is being erased by an evil multi-national corporation known only as "Pi". And then after like 10 or 15 minutes of her telling this story, while Washington just kinda nods his head once in a while and goes, "uh huh... oh yeah.... oh yeah... ya, I heard a that somewhere I think.... oh? oh really?"... and then she mentions they may even go after his "mama" and he gets up, penis flaying wildly and shouts, "I'm the Poe Leece! KING KONG ain't got NUTHHIIIN ONNN ME!", and Sandra's all weirded out for a while so she tells him, "I said they're going after your family", and he's like, "Ohhhhhhh........ I thought you said something else"....
That was funny, it really added realism to the scene.
Advertising may be pollution, but the greater evil is giving that kind of power to any single organization.
Since so many companies voluntarily broke their own privacy agreements last week ; regardless of major media icons denouncing the American fight against Personal Freedoms - I think it's disgusting that normal people would volunteer their data be channelled through one organization ; no matter what that data is comprised of. Remember, the point of Encryption isn't to hide something illegal or immoral - it's to ensure privacy from corporate and Powerful-Organizations interests.
Everyone arguing for personal freedoms through privacy quotes Hitler's choice to brand Jews with Stars, and everyone else says "that's too far fetched". How far fetched is the US Government performing keyword searches on all of your email? Now they actually admit to it.
I think one of the potential problems with Spammers is their progression towards legitimate markets. Take monsterhut, a huge spamming company that slashdot has featured before. I know the owner and "brain" behind monsterhut, and truthfully, he could care less. If he were to go out of business, a hundred others would jump in to take his place.
In fact, he was excited when Slashdot did an article on Monsterhut - any fame is good fame when it comes to Spamming companies - because legitimate companies more and more are looking at Spam as a legitimate advertising medium.
I think what *would* happen if these laws were passed however, would be that the Spamming companies may still be allowed to operate - but they would have to operate their servers in foreign countries and effectively Run from law enforcement. This in turn would scare legitimate business away from spammers, reducing their market and leaving Spam open only to small timers who don't have the resources to generate huge email lists or fight court cases.
The trick I think is not to go after the Spamming companies directly, but to pass legislation that allows the gov't to go after any companies who knowingly use Spamming agencies - most companies dont' see "Spamming" or 'advertising" as their business, so they won't look any further into promoting themselves through their own Spam - business just tends to use what's available when it's outside their knowledge base.
there is nothing "nifty" about 6,700 innocent Americans dying in the most horrible way possible at the hands of a few highly irrational people
Some of those people were Canadian, quite a few of them were other nationalities as well.
I personally don't need a flag to bring me together with other people ; I feel horrible for those people who died, and their families - but more importantly, I refuse to think of them as Americans. They were people. Like you and me.
If I die in a tragedy similiar to that, I would hope the people who witness it don't assume I am of their nationality, believe in their religion, or that I would necessarily condone what they do to avenge my death.
Not everyone who doesn't think like you doesn't believe what you believe ; they just believe it differently. And I believe in Freedom, the type of Freedom you don't get from Killing people, Wearing a Flag, or necessarily by calling yourself a member of a larger group.
We're all feeling a lot of anger after this tragedy, let's just admit that and stop with the paranoia regarding people who "Live amongst us". When we seperate ourselves from "Them", we fight the notion that some people don't agree with status quo. That some people don't believe in our Government, or all of Our Laws. It is that diversity that gives us our freedom. It is MURDER, that takes our freedoms away.
So while Murderers live amongst us (as has always been the case) ; those who don't believe everything we believe as a whole are good for the economy, for our diversity, and for our way of life; they represent our Acknowledgement of Freedom and our Acknowledgement that we personally do not see eye to eye with everyone else in our country.
The greatest risk to our freedom as a whole is accepting that we have freedom as a whole.
I believe the easiest way to setup a good firewall is to find an old system (or assemble one). A 486 66mhz with 16MB of ram works incredibly well; but an even lesser system is also good.
Put in two Ethernet cards, and install Coyote linux. A distribution that works off of a standard 1.44Mb Floppy Disk. It reads its config. and binaries from the disk at bootup, and never touches the disk again - to ensure the drive lasts as long as possible, as well as the disk.
This solution is so good, (in my humble opinion), that just last year me and my makeshift consulting company were selling 486 boxes configured for just this purpose at about $300CDN. 1 of the 5 boxes we sold went defunct; it's Cmos battary died. So we replaced the whole box (for nothing) to save time and still made an 'ok' profit.
The benefit to using a whole system, especially an outdated one is the amount of customization you can make to the firewall; ie: displaying attacks of a certain nature on the monitor, respond to attacks of a certain nature maliciously, and automatically. etc. etc. And it's cheap. Super cheap!
The only disadvantage to Coyote is that the distro. doesn't support HDDs, so you can't keep extensive log files.
I would only buy Hardware Routing / Firewall Devices for small business that may wish to go with another, less "knowledgable" consulting company in the near future. Otherwise, Linux boxes are the best for Networking.
Re:What the hell happened to science education?
on
Excess Heat
·
· Score: 2
"Yet even today we find this crap on systems like slashodot. Systmes that purport to cater to some sort of intellectual elite."
News For Nerds: Stuff That Matters
(Or how I learned to start caring and love the intellectual elite)
[Our story begins in the hallows of Devenshire, a small town, with lush green fields visible from the hole left by a missing stained glass window. Two workers attempt to install the window back-stage-left for the entirety of our play. Our stage is a study, filled with classic novellas and rich victorian Candelabras, various golden knick-knacks and experimental apparutus as seen in many chemistry lab or a tories. Old Mr. Flotsum sits upper-stage left, in an elegant, yet aged musty green chair, "Punks or Villinous Murderers: A novel by John Kats" laid neatly across his lap]
Mr. Flotsum: By Joe, have you read todays most fascinating article from the gentlemen of Slashdot? The manner in which it elucidates the electrical schisms of the most popular Furby toy are, to say the least, mesmerizing. In addition, the article makes reference to a hundred pound reward for any persons working alone, or in partnership whom can make the Furby cuss! Pass me my Laptop and PLC writer old Jeeves, would you?
[...]
Apologies to the intellectual elite of the United Kingdom for my misappropriation of your dialect.
Don't worry about accelerating the descent of the Moon into the earth; The moon is leaving earth orbit and is expected to be free from earths gravity in like 10,000 years or something just as stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually found some info on the Woz just the other day. I thought it was kinda cool, but the same thing he discusses on his website.
Eggplants!
I think the purpose of fighting the RIAA on a technological level is fighting their attempt to stop legal and legitimate file sharing.
When we say, "We'll just work around their stupidity", it's because we're trying to let them know they can't stop us without using the law ; and they can't get laws made against our legal rights.
At least, that's what I meant when I said I wouldn't allow them to stop me from transfering files I may very well (and do) have legal rights to. Fuck them.
Eggplants!
If they can DDOS legal file trading, are we in turn allowed to DDOS their servers? Say for example, if we had an open-source server-client based ddos tool that reads IPs and data from a central server locating these bastards?
My only concern about music swapping is the RIAAs attempt to make their concerns look legitimate. "We're going after people who don't pay us money"; forget whether or not they're actually breaking the law, just shut them down? that's rediculous.
Post any and all knowledge of how to shut these idiots down. I will dedicate all the bandwidth I can.
Eggplants!
One day, in the not so far future, I think the ECA will be given this prestigious prize... and everyone will say, "I knew they were gonna get that darned prize all along... if only I had done more to support them in the beginning"...
Or atleast... that's what people who don't know how to support the ECA would say, but luckily you can support the ECA just by spreading word of the Eggplant in all it's forms and variations.... but how do you do that? easy... click Eggplants!.
Eggplants!
Is that like the NAZI SS, because voluntarily giving up your individual freedoms and privacy pretty much equates to the same thing. You want to talk about abuse? Talk about the potential for abuse of that system by companies and by the government. National ID cards have been used in other countries, and in one country (which one escapes me right now) the supreme court (or their equivilant) overturned the law requiring national ID cards because (and this is just one of many many reasons) the police began requesting the cards like they request drivers licenses. Then they found people whose cards listed them in a bad neighbourhood were freuquently mistreated by the police.
Encryption and the fight for privacy is not only for those people with nothing to hide. It's to ensure our freedoms, and to ensure others have the same rights we EXPECT.
You got that right! Eggplants!
Just check this out for example....
Ace905
Does they keylogging system check for instances of, Eggplants!?
I'm pretty sure Our technology will be as useful in this "new war" as it was in the last, "New war" fought in the same area of the world. The media will be given images of successful bombings, we will hear nobody who wasn't, "Evil" was hurt and we will wonder what the truth really is.
A year or so later we will see a few images of thousands of injured innocent people, lots of destroyed buildings with no "terrorist" connection - and we will all go, "oh... well I guess that's to be expected with war".
The difference is, this is a great excuse for the US to just keep on fighting until the economy is super number 1 again. Go samurai cowboys! stamp out evil in all it's forms!
The last thing any of us wants is to be attacked in our own countries. The difference between giving your government the ability to "go to war" with anybody they choose - and actually going after the people responsible is a pretty severe difference.
Use your heads when voting for the next president.
I really think it's unfair that because my tagline has been used by trolls, my legitimate posts are being marked trolls also.
I posted a funny comment here, and it was completely relevant to the topic. Eggplants!
My favouritest part in the movie was that scene where Denzel Washington is in the really really bad ghetto house with the drug people, and he's all sweating, and has his pants around his ankles staring dead in the eyes of Sandra Bullock. She tries to tell him that his whole history is being erased by an evil multi-national corporation known only as "Pi". And then after like 10 or 15 minutes of her telling this story, while Washington just kinda nods his head once in a while and goes, "uh huh... oh yeah.... oh yeah... ya, I heard a that somewhere I think.... oh? oh really?"... and then she mentions they may even go after his "mama" and he gets up, penis flaying wildly and shouts, "I'm the Poe Leece! KING KONG ain't got NUTHHIIIN ONNN ME!", and Sandra's all weirded out for a while so she tells him, "I said they're going after your family", and he's like, "Ohhhhhhh........ I thought you said something else"....
That was funny, it really added realism to the scene.
Eggplants!
I seriously doubt Virginia Tech... umm.. ... er
Eggplants!
If you really wanna slashdot something, slashdot this website. These guys rule! And what's more is, they need advertising.
Eggplants!
I'm pretty sure what he said was
Eggplants!
I would like to er.... uh, Hmmm...
Eggplants!
jeez, I hope nobody goes out and copyright's "Eggplant". The ECA would be screwed!
Eggplants!
Ace905
[President] The Eggplant Coders Association
Whoa whoa there samurai cowboy, I'm a free individual to tell you not to do it. Welcome to the free world (Otherwise known as, 'Not just USA').
I'm also free to say you can't, but I didn't.
Eggplants!
Advertising may be pollution, but the greater evil is giving that kind of power to any single organization.
Since so many companies voluntarily broke their own privacy agreements last week ; regardless of major media icons denouncing the American fight against Personal Freedoms - I think it's disgusting that normal people would volunteer their data be channelled through one organization ; no matter what that data is comprised of. Remember, the point of Encryption isn't to hide something illegal or immoral - it's to ensure privacy from corporate and Powerful-Organizations interests.
Everyone arguing for personal freedoms through privacy quotes Hitler's choice to brand Jews with Stars, and everyone else says "that's too far fetched". How far fetched is the US Government performing keyword searches on all of your email? Now they actually admit to it.
Eggplants!
Hahaha, you better watch out or they'll be able to sue for that!
Eggplants!
Ace905
[President] The Eggplant Coders Association
I don't have a president.
I think one of the potential problems with Spammers is their progression towards legitimate markets. Take monsterhut, a huge spamming company that slashdot has featured before. I know the owner and "brain" behind monsterhut, and truthfully, he could care less. If he were to go out of business, a hundred others would jump in to take his place.
In fact, he was excited when Slashdot did an article on Monsterhut - any fame is good fame when it comes to Spamming companies - because legitimate companies more and more are looking at Spam as a legitimate advertising medium.
I think what *would* happen if these laws were passed however, would be that the Spamming companies may still be allowed to operate - but they would have to operate their servers in foreign countries and effectively Run from law enforcement. This in turn would scare legitimate business away from spammers, reducing their market and leaving Spam open only to small timers who don't have the resources to generate huge email lists or fight court cases.
The trick I think is not to go after the Spamming companies directly, but to pass legislation that allows the gov't to go after any companies who knowingly use Spamming agencies - most companies dont' see "Spamming" or 'advertising" as their business, so they won't look any further into promoting themselves through their own Spam - business just tends to use what's available when it's outside their knowledge base.
there is nothing "nifty" about 6,700 innocent Americans dying in the most horrible way possible at the hands of a few highly irrational people
Some of those people were Canadian, quite a few of them were other nationalities as well.
I personally don't need a flag to bring me together with other people ; I feel horrible for those people who died, and their families - but more importantly, I refuse to think of them as Americans. They were people. Like you and me.
If I die in a tragedy similiar to that, I would hope the people who witness it don't assume I am of their nationality, believe in their religion, or that I would necessarily condone what they do to avenge my death.
Not everyone who doesn't think like you doesn't believe what you believe ; they just believe it differently. And I believe in Freedom, the type of Freedom you don't get from Killing people, Wearing a Flag, or necessarily by calling yourself a member of a larger group.
We're all feeling a lot of anger after this tragedy, let's just admit that and stop with the paranoia regarding people who "Live amongst us". When we seperate ourselves from "Them", we fight the notion that some people don't agree with status quo. That some people don't believe in our Government, or all of Our Laws. It is that diversity that gives us our freedom. It is MURDER, that takes our freedoms away.
So while Murderers live amongst us (as has always been the case) ; those who don't believe everything we believe as a whole are good for the economy, for our diversity, and for our way of life; they represent our Acknowledgement of Freedom and our Acknowledgement that we personally do not see eye to eye with everyone else in our country.
The greatest risk to our freedom as a whole is accepting that we have freedom as a whole.
I believe the easiest way to setup a good firewall is to find an old system (or assemble one). A 486 66mhz with 16MB of ram works incredibly well; but an even lesser system is also good.
Put in two Ethernet cards, and install Coyote linux. A distribution that works off of a standard 1.44Mb Floppy Disk. It reads its config. and binaries from the disk at bootup, and never touches the disk again - to ensure the drive lasts as long as possible, as well as the disk.
This solution is so good, (in my humble opinion), that just last year me and my makeshift consulting company were selling 486 boxes configured for just this purpose at about $300CDN. 1 of the 5 boxes we sold went defunct; it's Cmos battary died. So we replaced the whole box (for nothing) to save time and still made an 'ok' profit.
The benefit to using a whole system, especially an outdated one is the amount of customization you can make to the firewall; ie: displaying attacks of a certain nature on the monitor, respond to attacks of a certain nature maliciously, and automatically. etc. etc. And it's cheap. Super cheap!
The only disadvantage to Coyote is that the distro. doesn't support HDDs, so you can't keep extensive log files.
I would only buy Hardware Routing / Firewall Devices for small business that may wish to go with another, less "knowledgable" consulting company in the near future. Otherwise, Linux boxes are the best for Networking.
Check it out:
Coyote Linux Dot Com
Ace905
[Admin] www.MyHomeTechie.com
"Yet even today we find this crap on systems like slashodot. Systmes that purport to cater to some sort of intellectual elite."
News For Nerds: Stuff That Matters
(Or how I learned to start caring and love the intellectual elite)
[Our story begins in the hallows of Devenshire, a small town, with lush green fields visible from the hole left by a missing stained glass window. Two workers attempt to install the window back-stage-left for the entirety of our play. Our stage is a study, filled with classic novellas and rich victorian Candelabras, various golden knick-knacks and experimental apparutus as seen in many chemistry lab or a tories. Old Mr. Flotsum sits upper-stage left, in an elegant, yet aged musty green chair, "Punks or Villinous Murderers: A novel by John Kats" laid neatly across his lap]
Mr. Flotsum: By Joe, have you read todays most fascinating article from the gentlemen of Slashdot? The manner in which it elucidates the electrical schisms of the most popular Furby toy are, to say the least, mesmerizing. In addition, the article makes reference to a hundred pound reward for any persons working alone, or in partnership whom can make the Furby cuss! Pass me my Laptop and PLC writer old Jeeves, would you?
[...]
Apologies to the intellectual elite of the United Kingdom for my misappropriation of your dialect.
Yeah... you're right; I missed that one.
Don't worry about accelerating the descent of the Moon into the earth; The moon is leaving earth orbit and is expected to be free from earths gravity in like 10,000 years or something just as stupid.