Yes BitTorrent has a real need, but until these protocols are managed to stop piracy nothing will change.
If the protocol tries to prevent the data from going through, the data treats it as an outage and works around it. If BitTorrent is changed to not allow (insert some content class someone hates here), then either that content will masquerade as some other content, or another form of BitTorrent will be used. Same goes for HTTP (make that HTTPS) and other protocols. If BitTorrent gets entirely blocked, something will replace it that doesn't look like BitTorrent anymore, but is BitTorrent in functionality.
There's too much other stuff going over BitTorrent for it to just quietly disappear.
The politicians have never understood the people. But they have lost their power to restrict the people from knowing what is going on. The internet has empowered the people to stand up against the politicians. If the politicians try to bite off more than they can chew (which is not as much as they think it is these days), they will find they are the ones having been bitten.
Politicians need to get more clues about the real world since they don't control it anymore.
Many kinds of work really can be done at home by telecommuting. That can eliminate many of the costs to the business, such as the desk and the computer and the space they occupy. Software development in many cases (but not all) is just such work. System administration is less so, but even that can be done to a great deal by telecommuting (virtualization helps this in many cases).
In other cases, shared desk/computer/space can be done between people scheduled to not overlap for other than meetings. Usually we're talking 50% or less for this.
The health benefits are still a big issue. That's why I have for the past couple decades taken the position that it would be better for business, and for creation of jobs, if health costs structures were shifted away from employers. I'll let others fight it out whether that should be individual direct insurance or a government provided social system. The taxes on business would be higher if the government was providing it, of course, but at least it should be proportional to the employee's scale of employment.
For every hour someone wanting part time is not interested in working, there's an hour of work available for someone that's looking. The government should be doing things to provide incentives to get businesses to let people work part time (and to work by telecommuting which also helps reduce energy costs and impacts) so that those fixed costs that still remain can be at least partially offset.
Although I have no particular knowledge of the school administration of whatever middle school is involved here, or of the Austin Independent School District, if the general competency in computers and other technologies of school and school system administrators I have encountered is any indication, there is a better than 95% chance every single person above her in the chain of command from her direct supervisor all the way to the superintendent of the district, is no more knowledgeable about this than she is.
One of my most fun "first month" programming projects was a perpetual calendar. I did that in Fortran back then. These days it could be used to not only learn applying arithmetic in programming, but also an opportunity to learn something like HTML by having the program produce its output as a web page. Or maybe even learn JavaScript (after learning C first... to learn how computers work) and do it as a live web page.
I fully agree. It's about knowing what is going on inside computers. If they don't do this, then things like "binary arithmetic" are invisible and nothing more than a "mathematical oddity" to try as a toy project. Definitely stay away from languages like BASIC. I'll leave my bias against C++ and Perl out of this, for now.
Your point applies to why the students should not be allowed to simply wipe Windows off the school computers and replace it with Linux, without permission from the school authorities responsible for managing the computers. Demonstrating that Linux is fully capable of running from a Live CD/DVD by booting that disk on a school PC may even be a policy violation (if the school authorities were smart enough to realize such a thing could even be done, which I highly doubt).
Mere possession of such disks by a student is in no way the kind of wrong thing the teacher makes it out to be.
If the teacher didn't want the student doing what he did, she should have told him (even if making it up on the fly) that school policy does not permit running an operating system on school computers that is not authorized by the school, and then told him he is not allowed to put those disks in the computer in the future. If she's wise (which I highly doubt), she would extend that dictate to cover USB keys and other external storage devices.
Instead, she confiscated the disks as if they were some form of piracy. I hope the kid's parents sue her and the AISD if she fails to give them back soon. In the mean time, as soon as we can track down this kid, or any of his friends, I'm sure he will get plenty of replacements.
My solution is that each time I start a web browser, it first runs through a script that creates a replica of the.mozilla directory in a unique place. The HOME environment variable is set to the unique directory. When it's done, I exit and just wipe out that directory.
The legal system has many defects. Expecting every single person to show up on the first hearing, without the court investigating, is just one of them. This is a defect that also gets abused a lot by debt collectors that perform improper service to the wrong address when they know it is the wrong address. The courts need to oversee these things better to eliminate these abuses. In the case of Ms. Sauro, they could have determined her situation and arranged to accomodate her limitations right from the beginning.
If you still disagree, then it's a difference of opinion that remains.
In order for the ISP to censor a specific page, and not the whole site, they have to intercept the TCP connections and see what is going on. They can do this by setting routing table entries for the destination IP address for Wikipedia over to the interception proxy machine. What Wikipedia would need to do is set up the redirect for ALL requests coming from those proxy IPs. Once the redirect to HTTPS is done, all links go to HTTPS. The only case where this won't work is someone going directly to the censored page. If they go first to any page on Wikipedia, it will either work because the ISP did not block all of Wikipedia, or it will fail for every Wikipedia page because the ISP decides to either block Wikipedia entirely, or it will fail because the ISP decides to falsify the redirect (because Wikipedia will only deliver redirects on HTTP for that IP as the client).
If it was you, and you knew you didn't do the downloading, and you knew that your absent father had opened an internet account in your name, and you were charged with downloading, wouldn't you conclude it must have been him? I sure would.
But the case against Ms. Sauro is not legally sound. They just managed to get a judgment due to an arcane provision in the law that fails to require the courts themselves to verify a complaint before letting it impact the vic^h^h^hdefendant. We would not have so many cases that end up being lost by innocent people that cannot afford a defense, if this one aspect of civil process were to be changed.
The solution I have in mind will not only instantly fix Ms. Sauro's case, but will also start turning the economy around. Given the economic problem, people and businesses that are owed money know it is unlikely they will get it, especially if the economy ends up where it is obviously headed. My solution would require Congress to pass it as a law and the (new) president to sign it. It would not be an instant fix as in bringing things back to normal overnight, but it would turn things around and start heading in the up direction. That solution is "total debt amnesty". That is, there is a declaration that every person and every business no longer owes what they owed as of a specified date (when it passes). All debts are cleared just like in discharge bankruptcy, but without the disbursement of remaining money. All civil court judgments are cleared. All records of these debts are removed (all negative entries on all credit reports are removed). Ms. Sauro's would owe no money (not even her medical bills accumulated so far). This would be a very very drastic action, but I believe it would work. Only debt collectors would be put out on the street for a while, and that's a good thing (the best ones would be slowly hired back as dumb people re-acquire debt and fail to pay). The survival of the economy isn't about the debt we have now. It's more about the confidence we (don't) have in the future.
When a connection comes from an IP address known to be doing involuntary proxying of users, and they are on HTTP, then what Wikipedia should do is redirect these HTTP requests to the HTTPS URL. Then all the proxy can do with that is either pass the connection as is, or block it entirely. Then it would be the choice of the ISP to completely break Wikipedia access for their customers, or not. They would not have the ability to see what page the user is accessing, or make decisions based on it.
I run one of my Linux systems with no swap space. What I did was after calculating the most RAM I expected to need, I doubled that amount. That machine has been the most stable of all of them. I should do this more often.
Might as well just block by IP address. If you block by URL, web site operators wanting to be sure their content is available down under will just make it available on other ports (if only port 80 is routed through the filter device), or via HTTPS. Then what IPs are blocked, the porn operators will partner with the spam operators to create a dynamic DNS layer over the spam botnets so the number of IPs to filter becomes way too large.
My interest is in merely open hardware. That is, I want hardware I can use with my open source software. If the hardware is sealed, that's probably fine by me. But all OS components need to be open source (that means drivers and loadable blobs). This would apply to both attachable devices as well as whole systems (such as a phone).
That said, open source hardware is a plus, since that means there can be competition in the manufacturing processes.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes BitTorrent has a real need, but until these protocols are managed to stop piracy nothing will change.
If the protocol tries to prevent the data from going through, the data treats it as an outage and works around it. If BitTorrent is changed to not allow (insert some content class someone hates here), then either that content will masquerade as some other content, or another form of BitTorrent will be used. Same goes for HTTP (make that HTTPS) and other protocols. If BitTorrent gets entirely blocked, something will replace it that doesn't look like BitTorrent anymore, but is BitTorrent in functionality.
There's too much other stuff going over BitTorrent for it to just quietly disappear.
The politicians have never understood the people. But they have lost their power to restrict the people from knowing what is going on. The internet has empowered the people to stand up against the politicians. If the politicians try to bite off more than they can chew (which is not as much as they think it is these days), they will find they are the ones having been bitten.
Politicians need to get more clues about the real world since they don't control it anymore.
Many kinds of work really can be done at home by telecommuting. That can eliminate many of the costs to the business, such as the desk and the computer and the space they occupy. Software development in many cases (but not all) is just such work. System administration is less so, but even that can be done to a great deal by telecommuting (virtualization helps this in many cases).
In other cases, shared desk/computer/space can be done between people scheduled to not overlap for other than meetings. Usually we're talking 50% or less for this.
The health benefits are still a big issue. That's why I have for the past couple decades taken the position that it would be better for business, and for creation of jobs, if health costs structures were shifted away from employers. I'll let others fight it out whether that should be individual direct insurance or a government provided social system. The taxes on business would be higher if the government was providing it, of course, but at least it should be proportional to the employee's scale of employment.
For every hour someone wanting part time is not interested in working, there's an hour of work available for someone that's looking. The government should be doing things to provide incentives to get businesses to let people work part time (and to work by telecommuting which also helps reduce energy costs and impacts) so that those fixed costs that still remain can be at least partially offset.
... if it is running in a restricted userid?
Would YOU even read email with a subject line like that? I've deleted spam like that three times without ever reading it.
And once the codes to do this leak into the wild, laptop hijacking and ransoms will be next.
Although I have no particular knowledge of the school administration of whatever middle school is involved here, or of the Austin Independent School District, if the general competency in computers and other technologies of school and school system administrators I have encountered is any indication, there is a better than 95% chance every single person above her in the chain of command from her direct supervisor all the way to the superintendent of the district, is no more knowledgeable about this than she is.
What about 64-bit Slackware?
One of my most fun "first month" programming projects was a perpetual calendar. I did that in Fortran back then. These days it could be used to not only learn applying arithmetic in programming, but also an opportunity to learn something like HTML by having the program produce its output as a web page. Or maybe even learn JavaScript (after learning C first ... to learn how computers work) and do it as a live web page.
I fully agree. It's about knowing what is going on inside computers. If they don't do this, then things like "binary arithmetic" are invisible and nothing more than a "mathematical oddity" to try as a toy project. Definitely stay away from languages like BASIC. I'll leave my bias against C++ and Perl out of this, for now.
Your point applies to why the students should not be allowed to simply wipe Windows off the school computers and replace it with Linux, without permission from the school authorities responsible for managing the computers. Demonstrating that Linux is fully capable of running from a Live CD/DVD by booting that disk on a school PC may even be a policy violation (if the school authorities were smart enough to realize such a thing could even be done, which I highly doubt).
Mere possession of such disks by a student is in no way the kind of wrong thing the teacher makes it out to be.
If the teacher didn't want the student doing what he did, she should have told him (even if making it up on the fly) that school policy does not permit running an operating system on school computers that is not authorized by the school, and then told him he is not allowed to put those disks in the computer in the future. If she's wise (which I highly doubt), she would extend that dictate to cover USB keys and other external storage devices.
Instead, she confiscated the disks as if they were some form of piracy. I hope the kid's parents sue her and the AISD if she fails to give them back soon. In the mean time, as soon as we can track down this kid, or any of his friends, I'm sure he will get plenty of replacements.
What if every Slashdotter that does Linux were to send a variety pack of disks of various Linux distributions to that school?
The itmanagement.earthweb.com webmaster(s) have some learning to do, too.
Seems to me to be a cheap company hiring cheap developers.
What makes you think that?
My solution is that each time I start a web browser, it first runs through a script that creates a replica of the .mozilla directory in a unique place. The HOME environment variable is set to the unique directory. When it's done, I exit and just wipe out that directory.
The legal system has many defects. Expecting every single person to show up on the first hearing, without the court investigating, is just one of them. This is a defect that also gets abused a lot by debt collectors that perform improper service to the wrong address when they know it is the wrong address. The courts need to oversee these things better to eliminate these abuses. In the case of Ms. Sauro, they could have determined her situation and arranged to accomodate her limitations right from the beginning.
If you still disagree, then it's a difference of opinion that remains.
In order for the ISP to censor a specific page, and not the whole site, they have to intercept the TCP connections and see what is going on. They can do this by setting routing table entries for the destination IP address for Wikipedia over to the interception proxy machine. What Wikipedia would need to do is set up the redirect for ALL requests coming from those proxy IPs. Once the redirect to HTTPS is done, all links go to HTTPS. The only case where this won't work is someone going directly to the censored page. If they go first to any page on Wikipedia, it will either work because the ISP did not block all of Wikipedia, or it will fail for every Wikipedia page because the ISP decides to either block Wikipedia entirely, or it will fail because the ISP decides to falsify the redirect (because Wikipedia will only deliver redirects on HTTP for that IP as the client).
If it was you, and you knew you didn't do the downloading, and you knew that your absent father had opened an internet account in your name, and you were charged with downloading, wouldn't you conclude it must have been him? I sure would.
But the case against Ms. Sauro is not legally sound. They just managed to get a judgment due to an arcane provision in the law that fails to require the courts themselves to verify a complaint before letting it impact the vic^h^h^hdefendant. We would not have so many cases that end up being lost by innocent people that cannot afford a defense, if this one aspect of civil process were to be changed.
The solution I have in mind will not only instantly fix Ms. Sauro's case, but will also start turning the economy around. Given the economic problem, people and businesses that are owed money know it is unlikely they will get it, especially if the economy ends up where it is obviously headed. My solution would require Congress to pass it as a law and the (new) president to sign it. It would not be an instant fix as in bringing things back to normal overnight, but it would turn things around and start heading in the up direction. That solution is "total debt amnesty". That is, there is a declaration that every person and every business no longer owes what they owed as of a specified date (when it passes). All debts are cleared just like in discharge bankruptcy, but without the disbursement of remaining money. All civil court judgments are cleared. All records of these debts are removed (all negative entries on all credit reports are removed). Ms. Sauro's would owe no money (not even her medical bills accumulated so far). This would be a very very drastic action, but I believe it would work. Only debt collectors would be put out on the street for a while, and that's a good thing (the best ones would be slowly hired back as dumb people re-acquire debt and fail to pay). The survival of the economy isn't about the debt we have now. It's more about the confidence we (don't) have in the future.
OK, sorry, off-topic a bit.
When a connection comes from an IP address known to be doing involuntary proxying of users, and they are on HTTP, then what Wikipedia should do is redirect these HTTP requests to the HTTPS URL. Then all the proxy can do with that is either pass the connection as is, or block it entirely. Then it would be the choice of the ISP to completely break Wikipedia access for their customers, or not. They would not have the ability to see what page the user is accessing, or make decisions based on it.
I run one of my Linux systems with no swap space. What I did was after calculating the most RAM I expected to need, I doubled that amount. That machine has been the most stable of all of them. I should do this more often.
The porn operators will soon fix that. Lots of them are technical experts or can afford to hire them.
Might as well just block by IP address. If you block by URL, web site operators wanting to be sure their content is available down under will just make it available on other ports (if only port 80 is routed through the filter device), or via HTTPS. Then what IPs are blocked, the porn operators will partner with the spam operators to create a dynamic DNS layer over the spam botnets so the number of IPs to filter becomes way too large.
My interest is in merely open hardware. That is, I want hardware I can use with my open source software. If the hardware is sealed, that's probably fine by me. But all OS components need to be open source (that means drivers and loadable blobs). This would apply to both attachable devices as well as whole systems (such as a phone).
That said, open source hardware is a plus, since that means there can be competition in the manufacturing processes.