Fine. Personally, I am all for crippling Americans' personal freedoms in the interest of national security.
As soon as this legislation is passed, I hereby volunteer to deliver the latest build of PGP+NSA directly to Osama Bin Laden, and I have no doubt that he will immediately delete his old software and begin using NSA crippleware. While I'm there, I'll also politely ask him to stop crashing planes into our buildings. Riiiight.
Always a hallmark of a well-written site. Taking input from a user and spitting it back verbatim is NEVER a good thing.. there are plenty of worse things people can do with that than just redirecting you to a different page..
When I visit a site, I implicitly give them my permission to show me ads. I understand that ads are what support their site, and I'm not going to go and sue Yahoo! for putting an ad on my screen, just as I won't sue NBC for showing that gross Enleve commercial where they're wiping hair off some dude's back.. eww.. they have a right to show that.
Spammers, on the other hand, deserve no such protection. When I pay my $46/mo for my internet connection, nowhere on my check do I write "Please send me offers for pr0n, MMF, and degrees at prestigious non-accredited universities!" Spammers are wasting bandwidth I paid for, without my permission. If and when Mass. passes a spam law, I'll take 'em to court myself.
Well, sites are going to want to fight this kind of thing, but I don't know if they have any legal grounds to stop Gator. Nobody is obligated to view ads on the internet - there's nothing in the TOS of most sites that says you can block the ads.
Of course, this may change. I could see sites requiring you to run a small plug-in, or analyzing your traffic to make sure you actually downloaded their banner ads.. When you agree to the terms of service, you'd be agreeing to view all the ads, and only the ads, that the site indended for you to view.
Companies like Yahoo will probably make a stink about this software, but I don't think there's any law supporting them. Even if Gator released software that redirected you (say if you went to Amazon.com, bn.com would come up instead) I doubt it would be illegal.
Overall, what Gator's doing is irresponsible. There is plenty of crap advertising, but as little as it may pay, sites depend on it. With software like Gator out there, ad rates will only drop even lower.
I don't see any reason why future peer to peer networks would have to be harder to use than present ones. Software has been becoming both more powerful and easier to use over the years. Peer to peer file sharing software is very new, and it's far from being a mature technology.
Against all the arguments as to why copy protection will NEVER work, we have this gem: "Because e-books can't do two things at once." This is about the best argument in the article, and it's still awful. It's true, it would be kind of hard to run a debugger on that Rocket eBook, but why not crack that eBook on a PC?
This article holds no water if any of the three myths are actually true - and surprise, there are problems with all 3 myths, particularly numbers 2 and 3.
The assumption that you need central servers, or identifiable traffic in order to run an efficient decentralized file sharing network is just plain wrong. The fact that something hasn't been done yet does not mean it can't be accomplished, you know. FreeNet itself is proof of concept that you can have a completely distributed network where no one node knows the whole story. As a programmer I see no reason why you couldn't design a system with traffic indistinguishable from SSH or a VPN, with adequate performance, that was completely decentralized.
I'm surprised at how well written this article is. There are bound to be opposing views on any subject, and I guess it's a good thing that this isn't filled with more FUD or pro-media propaganda. But as it goes, the arguments in this article just don't work. If you had a file-sharing network where you could publish anything, available to anyone at a high speed, how could you justify to the courts that you wanted it shut down? Does the availability of copyrighted material outweigh the overall benefit of the system? Of course not! As the article even says, in order to shut that kind of network down, you'd have to turn off the Internet.
Look at a magazine story involving programmers / IT people / scientists. Chances are you'll see a picture with one guy pointing at a monitor / instrument / dial, with 1-2 other folks looking on. Now, remember that this picture was STAGED, with a pushy photographer running around placing lights and fixing hair.
Does this ever happen where you work or go to school? I can count on one hand the number of times I have gathered around co-workers (only on one side, wouldn't want to block the camera) while they pointed at a screen. Yet this image has become almost universal in the media's coverage of computers and science!
The Boston Globe did a feature on a place I used to work. They tore the place up, taking pictures and disrupting everything.. and then people read the story thinking they just took candid pictures while everyone was working!
Amen, brotha! I haven't seen any of their commercials in a while, but by god they sucked. It was a bunch of silhouettes dancing around and there was "data" flowing around the screen (you know, a bunch of numbers floating around). If i remember right, there were also people saying dumb things.
I didn't mean HDTV broadcasts.. as you said, the standard was finalized many years ago. It took way too long from the moment the engineers said, "it's done" until there were actual HDTV broadcasts and sets available. HDTV's are still overpriced.
HDTV has been around for what, 10 years? Only now is it gaining some acceptance. If HDTV is going to be the factor that drives us towards REAL bandwidth (10Mbps+ into your home), it might take some time. For now, I'll be very happy if I can get TV quality video on demand that doesn't suck.
What a market.. if you could beat the cable providers to good VOD, you could take a lot of business from them. They don't deserve that business either - they've been working on digital cable for years, and it doesn't look any better than crappy NTSC, or give you video on demand. My box doesn't even have S-video or digital audio.
I don't want to rain on your parade or anything, but you can get the Fax API for Win98. Microsoft didn't change it at all between 95 and 98, but it still works fine in 98. You just have to download it from them and install it..
Serves you right for writing spamware, though. I don't blame you for not admitting what crook you worked for.
The way I heard it, they trained it using pictures of tanks, and pictures that weren't tanks. Of course, the pictures of tanks were taken in broad daylight, while the control group pictures were taken later the same day, when it wasn't as bright.
Who knows if this actually happened.. It's really too bad that AI professors can't get their own material. I'm sure EVERY compsci student who took a software engineering class heard the anecdote about the computer-controlled radiation/x-ray machine, that killed a patient by giving them like 10,000 times the normal dose. This error was traced to a lack of bounds checking in software.
That script is formmail.pl, which comes from Matt's Script Archive, one of the first repositories for CGI scripts on the net (I remember visiting that site as early as 1996). Formmail.pl is old, and I'm sure there are better scripts for form to mail gateways, but I can assure you it's secure.
Thousands of sites are using formmail.pl - if there was some vulnerability there, it would have been abused by now. I have seen this script abused as an open relay, but I think you can restrict the recipient in a configuration file or in the code..
Funny, I was just wondering why shower curtains got sucked inwards. I always assumed it was due to a Bernoulli-type of effect, where air flowing across the curtain would create lower air pressure than on the other side. Of course I didn't read the article, so maybe that is part of it.
A mini-hurricane.. so does this mean that given an arbitrarily large shower and curtain, you could control the weather? My plan to take over the world is coming together at last..
that churns out millions of bootleg DVDs and VCDs? I don't really understand what technology they are missing, it seams like they have pretty much streamlined the process of making fake DVDs. My neighborhood video store has all four Star Wars movies on DVD (not VCD).
When is this going to end? I too had AT&T road runner until a week ago.. my e-mail address is still @ne.mediaone.net, as I'm assuming yours is.. don't know how long that is going to last. We've gone from Mediaone (which was only around for a couple of years), to AT&T Road Runner, to AT&T @Home (but only in name), and now maybe it's Comcast? How long until the next big fish comes along and gobbles up the market? I'm sick of this..
In the past year, my bank (BankBoston) became Fleet, my phone company (Bell Atlantic) became Verizon, and my cable company (Mediaone) became AT&T Broadband! Is it a coincidence that all three of these companies really suck? I'm just sick of all these take overs.
Speaking from experience, cable companies and set-top boxes just don't mix. Guarantee they get stuff in this wrong, and leave stuff out that will make you say "How could they make a set-top box that hooks up to your stereo, without any streaming audio?" or something like that.
I just got digital cable from AT&T Broadband, and it came with a Motorola set-top box that is - no joke - wider than my TV. The thing freakin sucks! The manual calls it "Interactive Television." There is absolutely nothing interactive about my piece of crap cable box. It is a step backwards - channel surfing is impossible, because it takes 2-3 seconds to tune in each channel, and you can't go to the next channel until the last one is done loading. My grandparents' 3 year old WebTV changes channels about 50 times quicker than my new box. And the on-screen guide is crap, too. No matter what channel you're on, it starts out on channel 2. The guide can only show a half hour at a time, and there's no way to skip forward by more than a half hour, so if it's 7 AM and I want to find out what's on TV tonight, I have to hold the button down for like a minute! This box sucks!
The thing doesn't even have digital audio outputs or s-video out! Who in the world would make a digital cable box without any kind of hi-fi outputs? Who are they trying to sell this to, anyway?
As broadband gets to more and more homes, you're bound to see more people getting on servers who just SUCK. I don't care about people who are just bad, but there are plenty of a-holes on servers now who might not have played when they had AOL. Everyone sucked at one point, but not everyone acted like an idiot.
However, here's the thing I despise. I HATE HATE HATE when someone says "You're only good because of your ping," which basically means that if you're an LPB and you're winning, you must suck, and you're just winning because of your connection. It's just not true - I've had my ass whupped by plenty of modem users, and I've schooled many of my fellow LPB's.
It doesn't matter if you're a pro or if you're just some kid with a cable modem - I don't care how good or bad you are, as long as you don't say stupid shit like that.
Also, remember the boards that would call you back to verify your phone number? Remember the ultra high security boards where the Sysop would actually voice verify new users? New User Voting? You fill out some form answering a quiz that determines if you are 'leet enough to be a member, then the old users vote on whether you get an account. It was a status symbol just to have an account on some boards!
The BBS period was a unique time in the progression from offline to online computing, and I don't think it is something that can be revisited. Remember commercial boards? There were boards that took $10, $20, even ones where you paid by the hour. I don't think the level of dedication to a BBS by a Sysop would be there any more, when anyone with an AOL account and a new iMac can go over to eGroups and set up what's more or less a BBS.
Whether it was the level of technical knowledge you needed to even connect to a board, geographical / area code barriers, or just the fact that nobody would DREAM of spamming a BBS, I think those days are over. I'm not saying the online community is dead, you just have to look harder. Isn't the Well still around? The Internet makes it so easy to reach the critical mass where you have to whore your site out to an ad network just to pay for hosting. Throw a million lamers shouting "a/s/l" into the mix, and the chance of a real community emerging is pretty low.
I do agree that there was an art to the BBS culture..
If you value not being tracked, you really should opt out of Doubleclick's tracking. For those not familiar, they use cookies attached to every ad in order to track which of their member sites you view. If this bothers you just a little, go to
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Fine. Personally, I am all for crippling Americans' personal freedoms in the interest of national security.
As soon as this legislation is passed, I hereby volunteer to deliver the latest build of PGP+NSA directly to Osama Bin Laden, and I have no doubt that he will immediately delete his old software and begin using NSA crippleware. While I'm there, I'll also politely ask him to stop crashing planes into our buildings. Riiiight.
Always a hallmark of a well-written site. Taking input from a user and spitting it back verbatim is NEVER a good thing.. there are plenty of worse things people can do with that than just redirecting you to a different page..
When I visit a site, I implicitly give them my permission to show me ads. I understand that ads are what support their site, and I'm not going to go and sue Yahoo! for putting an ad on my screen, just as I won't sue NBC for showing that gross Enleve commercial where they're wiping hair off some dude's back.. eww.. they have a right to show that.
Spammers, on the other hand, deserve no such protection. When I pay my $46/mo for my internet connection, nowhere on my check do I write "Please send me offers for pr0n, MMF, and degrees at prestigious non-accredited universities!" Spammers are wasting bandwidth I paid for, without my permission. If and when Mass. passes a spam law, I'll take 'em to court myself.
Well, sites are going to want to fight this kind of thing, but I don't know if they have any legal grounds to stop Gator. Nobody is obligated to view ads on the internet - there's nothing in the TOS of most sites that says you can block the ads.
Of course, this may change. I could see sites requiring you to run a small plug-in, or analyzing your traffic to make sure you actually downloaded their banner ads.. When you agree to the terms of service, you'd be agreeing to view all the ads, and only the ads, that the site indended for you to view.
Companies like Yahoo will probably make a stink about this software, but I don't think there's any law supporting them. Even if Gator released software that redirected you (say if you went to Amazon.com, bn.com would come up instead) I doubt it would be illegal.
Overall, what Gator's doing is irresponsible. There is plenty of crap advertising, but as little as it may pay, sites depend on it. With software like Gator out there, ad rates will only drop even lower.
I don't see any reason why future peer to peer networks would have to be harder to use than present ones. Software has been becoming both more powerful and easier to use over the years. Peer to peer file sharing software is very new, and it's far from being a mature technology.
This article holds no water if any of the three myths are actually true - and surprise, there are problems with all 3 myths, particularly numbers 2 and 3.
The assumption that you need central servers, or identifiable traffic in order to run an efficient decentralized file sharing network is just plain wrong. The fact that something hasn't been done yet does not mean it can't be accomplished, you know. FreeNet itself is proof of concept that you can have a completely distributed network where no one node knows the whole story. As a programmer I see no reason why you couldn't design a system with traffic indistinguishable from SSH or a VPN, with adequate performance, that was completely decentralized.
I'm surprised at how well written this article is. There are bound to be opposing views on any subject, and I guess it's a good thing that this isn't filled with more FUD or pro-media propaganda. But as it goes, the arguments in this article just don't work. If you had a file-sharing network where you could publish anything, available to anyone at a high speed, how could you justify to the courts that you wanted it shut down? Does the availability of copyrighted material outweigh the overall benefit of the system? Of course not! As the article even says, in order to shut that kind of network down, you'd have to turn off the Internet.
Does this ever happen where you work or go to school? I can count on one hand the number of times I have gathered around co-workers (only on one side, wouldn't want to block the camera) while they pointed at a screen. Yet this image has become almost universal in the media's coverage of computers and science!
The Boston Globe did a feature on a place I used to work. They tore the place up, taking pictures and disrupting everything.. and then people read the story thinking they just took candid pictures while everyone was working!
Amen, brotha! I haven't seen any of their commercials in a while, but by god they sucked. It was a bunch of silhouettes dancing around and there was "data" flowing around the screen (you know, a bunch of numbers floating around). If i remember right, there were also people saying dumb things.
I didn't mean HDTV broadcasts.. as you said, the standard was finalized many years ago. It took way too long from the moment the engineers said, "it's done" until there were actual HDTV broadcasts and sets available. HDTV's are still overpriced.
What a market.. if you could beat the cable providers to good VOD, you could take a lot of business from them. They don't deserve that business either - they've been working on digital cable for years, and it doesn't look any better than crappy NTSC, or give you video on demand. My box doesn't even have S-video or digital audio.
So spam and junk faxes aren't the first things to pop into your head when you see "CRM" and "bulk email and faxes" in the same sentence?
Serves you right for writing spamware, though. I don't blame you for not admitting what crook you worked for.
Who knows if this actually happened.. It's really too bad that AI professors can't get their own material. I'm sure EVERY compsci student who took a software engineering class heard the anecdote about the computer-controlled radiation/x-ray machine, that killed a patient by giving them like 10,000 times the normal dose. This error was traced to a lack of bounds checking in software.
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until this becomes just another "All your base"?
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Thousands of sites are using formmail.pl - if there was some vulnerability there, it would have been abused by now. I have seen this script abused as an open relay, but I think you can restrict the recipient in a configuration file or in the code..
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For those of you who might not get the joke, Ralph Wiggum of the Simpsons says "At my house we call them uh-oh's".
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A mini-hurricane.. so does this mean that given an arbitrarily large shower and curtain, you could control the weather? My plan to take over the world is coming together at last..
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Damn straight. The above should be a +5. Amen brotha.
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that churns out millions of bootleg DVDs and VCDs? I don't really understand what technology they are missing, it seams like they have pretty much streamlined the process of making fake DVDs. My neighborhood video store has all four Star Wars movies on DVD (not VCD).
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In the past year, my bank (BankBoston) became Fleet, my phone company (Bell Atlantic) became Verizon, and my cable company (Mediaone) became AT&T Broadband! Is it a coincidence that all three of these companies really suck? I'm just sick of all these take overs.
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I just got digital cable from AT&T Broadband, and it came with a Motorola set-top box that is - no joke - wider than my TV. The thing freakin sucks! The manual calls it "Interactive Television." There is absolutely nothing interactive about my piece of crap cable box. It is a step backwards - channel surfing is impossible, because it takes 2-3 seconds to tune in each channel, and you can't go to the next channel until the last one is done loading. My grandparents' 3 year old WebTV changes channels about 50 times quicker than my new box. And the on-screen guide is crap, too. No matter what channel you're on, it starts out on channel 2. The guide can only show a half hour at a time, and there's no way to skip forward by more than a half hour, so if it's 7 AM and I want to find out what's on TV tonight, I have to hold the button down for like a minute! This box sucks!
The thing doesn't even have digital audio outputs or s-video out! Who in the world would make a digital cable box without any kind of hi-fi outputs? Who are they trying to sell this to, anyway?
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However, here's the thing I despise. I HATE HATE HATE when someone says "You're only good because of your ping," which basically means that if you're an LPB and you're winning, you must suck, and you're just winning because of your connection. It's just not true - I've had my ass whupped by plenty of modem users, and I've schooled many of my fellow LPB's.
It doesn't matter if you're a pro or if you're just some kid with a cable modem - I don't care how good or bad you are, as long as you don't say stupid shit like that.
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Also, remember the boards that would call you back to verify your phone number? Remember the ultra high security boards where the Sysop would actually voice verify new users? New User Voting? You fill out some form answering a quiz that determines if you are 'leet enough to be a member, then the old users vote on whether you get an account. It was a status symbol just to have an account on some boards!
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Whether it was the level of technical knowledge you needed to even connect to a board, geographical / area code barriers, or just the fact that nobody would DREAM of spamming a BBS, I think those days are over. I'm not saying the online community is dead, you just have to look harder. Isn't the Well still around? The Internet makes it so easy to reach the critical mass where you have to whore your site out to an ad network just to pay for hosting. Throw a million lamers shouting "a/s/l" into the mix, and the chance of a real community emerging is pretty low.
I do agree that there was an art to the BBS culture..
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http://www.doubleclick.net:80/us/corporate/privacy /opt-out.asp?asp_object_1=&
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