It's not as bad as all that: if you use a detuned TV for watching videos, DVDs and computer games this is legal. I don't know how it is for other countries but tvlicensing.co.uk says:
If you use or install television receiving equipment to receive or record television programme services you are required by law to have a valid TV Licence.
(emphasis mine) I agree their advertising is pretty heavy-handed, but those "TV detector vans" just drive roun full of cheese, they can't detect the smell of an unlicensed TV any more than they detect the porn under my mattress. They just have a database compiled from TV sales which they cross-reference with their list of licensees.
So take a breath, tell 'em your TV is detuned and not used for receiving or recording broadcast signals. And stop looking for porn under my mattress, I don't have any:)
The VentrAssist has two tubes, one drawing blood in from the left ventricle and the other sending it out to the aorta, the body's main artery. A cord emerges from the abdomen, where patients connect it to a rechargeable battery.
Could be a bummer to go on holiday and forget to bring your charger, then.
We've been doing a Virtual Machines based on User-Mode Linux since the end of 2002, so you get root access to a whole system. See this similar discussion from a few months back (where we get a good mention naturally:-) ). I'm not sure how anyone can offer a shell service that's both free and reliable in these days of spammers and IRC networks attracting 100Mb denial-of-service attacks. But we own and run our own network and were one of the first two or three UML providers, so do take a look!
This is not agreed-on "DNS behaviour", it's a flawed feature of BIND designed to try to prevent cache poisoning. See Dan Berstein's notes on BIND's credibility mechanism . We don't need any encouragement to make DNS less secure!
So for all secure DNS resolvers, TTL will still be 48 hours until Verisign works out a way to let people update it themselves.
I remember some software which pulled a stunt like this in the name of "copy protection", and in the same way I think the CD's operation may be illegal under the "Computer Misuse Act 1984. Section 3 says
3.-(1) A person is guilty of an offence if-
(a) he does any act which causes an unauthorised modification of the contents of any computer; and
(b) at the time when he does the act he has the requisite intent and the requisite knowledge.
(2) For the purposes of subsection (1)(b) above the requisite intent is an intent to cause a modification of the contents of any computer and by so doing-
(a) to impair the operation of any computer;
(b) to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer; or
(c) to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data.
Doesn't that sound like exactly what this is? Unauthorised modification of data on a computer to impair its normal operation? Absolutely no consent or knowledge from the purchaser of the CD?
Any Beastie-Boy-fan lawyers reading who agree? The sentence could be up to five years in jail:-)
I can't remember when the trend started, but a lot of Windows installations include the complete contents of the install CDs (i.e. all the cabs) on the hard disc. Of course this bloats the size a bit but for most users it's 650MB they won't miss in exchange for never having to hunt for the install CD.
Well depending on what name you're selling under, it is the basis of a "passing off" suit. Our name is our trade mark. If competitors are using our trade mark to advertise their competing product, this is called passing off and is a type of unfair competition (according to British law at least). It is unfair because they are benefitting from the reputation associated with our name to sell their product, and may create confusion in the mind of the consumer. It also unfairly rides on the back of the considerable sum of money we've spent promoting our services. This is unfair to both the consumer and to us, so I hope you can see why it's immoral at the very least.
If our name was not obviously a trade mark (i.e. Brilliant UK Hosting Services or something generic) or the competitor were selling something in a completely different market sector (lipstick, fire engines, livestock...) which couldn't easily be confused with hosting services, then there would be no problem. But neither of those was the case when we took action last time.
I think this was pretty standard practice at one point, to put your competitors names as triggers for your Adword advert. A competitor tried to do that to us, which we thought was a bit scummy but we didn't have the resources to do anything about it. Someone pointed us at Google's compaints procedure: we wrote to them, and after a long delay the offending advert was taken down. I found another article which implies that they will be reversing this policy and allowing you to bid on anybody's name and trademark, and take down adverts only where a particular jurisdiction makes it awkward for them (i.e. outside of US and Canada). This sucks of course but TBH I'm not sure said competitor would have got many hits from our name at the time. Now I suspect they might but this time we'd be able to do something about it:-)
The computer labs at my old uni now have a shiny new William Gates Building which the Compscis moved into the year I left. The old building was too tall, weird and creaky but at least there were some good pubs nearby:-)
Snap, my bank's ATM machines have these uncomfortable delays: like when I put my card in for the first time, I have to wait for whatever Flash animation advertising the bank's newest product has finished before it will acknowledge me and ask for a PIN. My record wait is about 25 seconds. It wouldn't surprise me if the whole damn interface was built in Macromedia Director:-)
That reminds me: if you read the info page to (I think) gcc you'll find an old idea of Stallman's which puts forward an idea for how software companies can make money out of free software: everyone sell the same (free) software, and compete on the amount they give to the furtherance of the free software cause. Customers can then assess who they buy the same software from by who gives the most to its development for all, but everyone can still get it for no cost if they like.
This always seemed a bit of a silly (or at best, far-off) plan for selling software, but it makes a hell of a lot of sense for hosting companies. Everyone already uses the same catalogue of free software to run their business, they compete on how well they configure it and the quailty of their business relationships with other networks. But some also compete (*cough*advert) on how much they give back to the free software community, as well as providing cheap/good/fast/reliable hosting services, which is all that many hosting customers may care about.
SCO have provided a unqiue outlet for an ISP business to show their customers that they are actively working to destroy the community that built the software that made it profitable. Not something I'd put a press release out about:-)
Who compensates the artists when the selfish pirate consumer scratches their CDs and continues to hear the music under the scratch for free? Those record companies pad out the audio data by at least 1/8th with their so-called "error-resistant encoding" and artists are being ripped off!
If you're on a dynamic IP you'll find a lot of your email gets bounced by Yahoo/AOL (at least) already for being on a dial-up blacklist. You simply can't send mail reliably from a dynamic IP these days, but I won't miss the spam.
In the UK we have plenty of choice for broadband ISPs who offer fixed IPs at no extra cost (which is why I'm moving away from BT Openworld who charge an extra 10 a month for the privilege)
It means that any system administrator can configure their mail transfer agent to bin any spam pretending to come from aol.com with a 100% success rate. And this goes for anyone else publishing an SPF record for your domain.
SPF is a proposed standard for a domain owner to tell mailers where mail From: that domain may originate. The domain owner publishes a DNS TXT record for their domain with (at the simplest) list of IP addresses. Participating mail transfer agents can then look this record up and make a policy decision on whether the mail is likely to be legitimate. The presence of an SPF record on a domain at present means that while you still can't be sure when you're handling spam, you can be sure when you have a piece of non-spam because the SPF record tells you so.
SPF is not a wholly original idea (e.g. up "designated mailer protocol"), and certainly not the simplest implementation but the important factor is that its proponent, Meng Wong, is an excellent lobbyer and spokesperson, as well as someone who as the nous to put forward a useful protocol (he founded pobox.com). It's currently at the point where lots of implementation are being written, with the canonical version being Meng's Perl modules. Currently I'm helping to finish the C implementation which will shortly be integrated into qmail and exim.
The tipping point (I hope) will be when a domain not publishing an SPF record or publishing a globaly permissive one will be considered "obviously" untrustworthy. Combining SPF authorisation with a more traditional "From: domain blacklist" will give spammers a very very hard time indeed forging mail. But AOL publishing a record (we hope) shows the way the wind is blowing: the rest of the world does seem to have to change their mail server configuration to keep mail flowing to AOL.
So go on, it's dead easy, publish a record for your domain now. Tell people where your mail comes from. Look, there's even a wizard to help you.
You could always try the card game Mao. Unfortunately the only rule you're allowed to tell people about Mao is that you're not allowed to explain the rules. So without someone who knows it to play with, you're stuffed of course:-)
From what I could find out XFS is the only Linux filesystem which stores quota information as meta-data-- there's no risk of an XFS filesystem getting its quotas "out of sync" with the contents of the disc and having to run a tedious quotacheck. We recently deployed it as a backup server and it's working very well!
After speaking to one of the chaps behind ddos.com I'm very excited by this kind of emerging technology: essentially ethernet/fibre "filters" which can scan and dump "unwanted" traffic without a noticeable lag on the network. I'm less excited by how much it costs at the moment: $18k list price for one of the 100Mb boxes at DDoS.com, but I suspect as competition opens up, the waffle about exciting and complicated patented technologies will give way to a decent and open discussion about the best algorithms for doing this.
As an example of the current waffle on this topic, the white paper at ddos.com promises in one of their upcoming *cough* products a wire-speed spam filter which is 100% accurate and needs no training. Sure, sure... it's this ridiculous claim which calls into question the "zero training" aspect of their DDoS prevention-- I'm sure some configuration and known "signature" patterns of abusive traffic will help matters.
I'm not here to pick on ddos.com, I'm sure they have an excellent and useful product. But since they are one of a very small number of people with such a product, they are prone to making wild claims and charging extortionate fees. I'm convinced a Linux/BSD kernel module could achieve the same effect and I'd be very interested to see the algorithms, training and so on needed to achieve it. But for the moment we're still subject to these pretty wild claims without much in the way of algorithmic detail.
rproxy is a really interesting project, and back when I tried it over a 56K dial-up connection, it did actually work to speed things up. You sit an rproxy web cache at each end of the dial-up connection (so you need somewhere to deply your custom proxy to make it work, but bear with me...) and then request web pages as usual. Each end caches the pages that pass through it, but the clever part is that when you re-request a page, the proxy at the far end (on the fast connection) can fetch the page and compare with the last copy in the cache. Then it transmits only the differences using the rsync algorithm. Unforunately it's not being actively developed any more given the increasing availability of high-bandwidth connections, and the decreasing fraction of web traffic that is suitable for delta-compression. Shame, since it did seem to be a real "web accelerator" without any of the illusory techniques used by the garish banner-ad accelerators.
4 or 8-port 3Ware controllers which have good Linux driver support. For RAID-1 they're as good as software RAID, for RAID-5 you should still use the 3ware controllers to give you hot-plug functionality but use Linux software RAID because it beats the hardware performance by a mile.
This program behaviour was previously hilighted as a breach of the Computer Misuse Act 1990-- software which causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer. i.e. the software firm is illegally securing access to licensing data (i.e. that the program is pirated) by sending an email without the computer owner's authorisation. I remember the author of an Acorn program a few years back being forced to remove this behaviour from his software for this reason.
Not such a crazy idea, Disney (well go.com) allowed the release of Tea, a Java servlet-based scripting language which is a cracking piece of work, coming as it does with great manuals, an IDE with some really smart auto-completion, and providing a statically type, fully compiled web programming environment. We used it on an eCommerce site to great effect, though I'm not sure how much development it's going through these days.
Slashdot Mirror
I stand corrected. Just off to change the sheets then.
It's not as bad as all that: if you use a detuned TV for watching videos, DVDs and computer games this is legal. I don't know how it is for other countries but tvlicensing.co.uk says:
:)
If you use or install television receiving equipment to receive or record television programme services you are required by law to have a valid TV Licence.
(emphasis mine) I agree their advertising is pretty heavy-handed, but those "TV detector vans" just drive roun full of cheese, they can't detect the smell of an unlicensed TV any more than they detect the porn under my mattress. They just have a database compiled from TV sales which they cross-reference with their list of licensees.
So take a breath, tell 'em your TV is detuned and not used for receiving or recording broadcast signals. And stop looking for porn under my mattress, I don't have any
The VentrAssist has two tubes, one drawing blood in from the left ventricle and the other sending it out to the aorta, the body's main artery. A cord emerges from the abdomen, where patients connect it to a rechargeable battery.
Could be a bummer to go on holiday and forget to bring your charger, then.
We've been doing a Virtual Machines based on User-Mode Linux since the end of 2002, so you get root access to a whole system. See this similar discussion from a few months back (where we get a good mention naturally :-) ). I'm not sure how anyone can offer a shell service that's both free and reliable in these days of spammers and IRC networks attracting 100Mb denial-of-service attacks. But we own and run our own network and were one of the first two or three UML providers, so do take a look!
cheers,
This is not agreed-on "DNS behaviour", it's a flawed feature of BIND designed to try to prevent cache poisoning. See Dan Berstein's notes on BIND's credibility mechanism . We don't need any encouragement to make DNS less secure!
So for all secure DNS resolvers, TTL will still be 48 hours until Verisign works out a way to let people update it themselves.
Any Beastie-Boy-fan lawyers reading who agree? The sentence could be up to five years in jail
I can't remember when the trend started, but a lot of Windows installations include the complete contents of the install CDs (i.e. all the cabs) on the hard disc. Of course this bloats the size a bit but for most users it's 650MB they won't miss in exchange for never having to hunt for the install CD.
Well depending on what name you're selling under, it is the basis of a "passing off" suit. Our name is our trade mark. If competitors are using our trade mark to advertise their competing product, this is called passing off and is a type of unfair competition (according to British law at least). It is unfair because they are benefitting from the reputation associated with our name to sell their product, and may create confusion in the mind of the consumer. It also unfairly rides on the back of the considerable sum of money we've spent promoting our services. This is unfair to both the consumer and to us, so I hope you can see why it's immoral at the very least.
If our name was not obviously a trade mark (i.e. Brilliant UK Hosting Services or something generic) or the competitor were selling something in a completely different market sector (lipstick, fire engines, livestock...) which couldn't easily be confused with hosting services, then there would be no problem. But neither of those was the case when we took action last time.
I think this was pretty standard practice at one point, to put your competitors names as triggers for your Adword advert. A competitor tried to do that to us, which we thought was a bit scummy but we didn't have the resources to do anything about it. Someone pointed us at Google's compaints procedure: we wrote to them, and after a long delay the offending advert was taken down. I found another article which implies that they will be reversing this policy and allowing you to bid on anybody's name and trademark, and take down adverts only where a particular jurisdiction makes it awkward for them (i.e. outside of US and Canada). This sucks of course but TBH I'm not sure said competitor would have got many hits from our name at the time. Now I suspect they might but this time we'd be able to do something about it :-)
The computer labs at my old uni now have a shiny new William Gates Building which the Compscis moved into the year I left. The old building was too tall, weird and creaky but at least there were some good pubs nearby :-)
Snap, my bank's ATM machines have these uncomfortable delays: like when I put my card in for the first time, I have to wait for whatever Flash animation advertising the bank's newest product has finished before it will acknowledge me and ask for a PIN. My record wait is about 25 seconds. It wouldn't surprise me if the whole damn interface was built in Macromedia Director :-)
A computer virus isn't what Google thinks a Witty Worm is (not at all work safe :-) ).
That reminds me: if you read the info page to (I think) gcc you'll find an old idea of Stallman's which puts forward an idea for how software companies can make money out of free software: everyone sell the same (free) software, and compete on the amount they give to the furtherance of the free software cause. Customers can then assess who they buy the same software from by who gives the most to its development for all, but everyone can still get it for no cost if they like.
:-)
This always seemed a bit of a silly (or at best, far-off) plan for selling software, but it makes a hell of a lot of sense for hosting companies. Everyone already uses the same catalogue of free software to run their business, they compete on how well they configure it and the quailty of their business relationships with other networks. But some also compete (*cough*advert) on how much they give back to the free software community, as well as providing cheap/good/fast/reliable hosting services, which is all that many hosting customers may care about.
SCO have provided a unqiue outlet for an ISP business to show their customers that they are actively working to destroy the community that built the software that made it profitable. Not something I'd put a press release out about
Who compensates the artists when the selfish pirate consumer scratches their CDs and continues to hear the music under the scratch for free? Those record companies pad out the audio data by at least 1/8th with their so-called "error-resistant encoding" and artists are being ripped off!
If you're on a dynamic IP you'll find a lot of your email gets bounced by Yahoo/AOL (at least) already for being on a dial-up blacklist. You simply can't send mail reliably from a dynamic IP these days, but I won't miss the spam.
In the UK we have plenty of choice for broadband ISPs who offer fixed IPs at no extra cost (which is why I'm moving away from BT Openworld who charge an extra 10 a month for the privilege)
He could publish his local ISP's mail server's IP address in his domain's SPF record. This is not a problem at all.
It means that any system administrator can configure their mail transfer agent to bin any spam pretending to come from aol.com with a 100% success rate. And this goes for anyone else publishing an SPF record for your domain.
SPF is a proposed standard for a domain owner to tell mailers where mail From: that domain may originate. The domain owner publishes a DNS TXT record for their domain with (at the simplest) list of IP addresses. Participating mail transfer agents can then look this record up and make a policy decision on whether the mail is likely to be legitimate. The presence of an SPF record on a domain at present means that while you still can't be sure when you're handling spam, you can be sure when you have a piece of non-spam because the SPF record tells you so.
SPF is not a wholly original idea (e.g. up "designated mailer protocol"), and certainly not the simplest implementation but the important factor is that its proponent, Meng Wong, is an excellent lobbyer and spokesperson, as well as someone who as the nous to put forward a useful protocol (he founded pobox.com). It's currently at the point where lots of implementation are being written, with the canonical version being Meng's Perl modules. Currently I'm helping to finish the C implementation which will shortly be integrated into qmail and exim.
The tipping point (I hope) will be when a domain not publishing an SPF record or publishing a globaly permissive one will be considered "obviously" untrustworthy. Combining SPF authorisation with a more traditional "From: domain blacklist" will give spammers a very very hard time indeed forging mail. But AOL publishing a record (we hope) shows the way the wind is blowing: the rest of the world does seem to have to change their mail server configuration to keep mail flowing to AOL.
So go on, it's dead easy, publish a record for your domain now. Tell people where your mail comes from. Look, there's even a wizard to help you.
You could always try the card game Mao. Unfortunately the only rule you're allowed to tell people about Mao is that you're not allowed to explain the rules. So without someone who knows it to play with, you're stuffed of course :-)
From what I could find out XFS is the only Linux filesystem which stores quota information as meta-data-- there's no risk of an XFS filesystem getting its quotas "out of sync" with the contents of the disc and having to run a tedious quotacheck. We recently deployed it as a backup server and it's working very well!
After speaking to one of the chaps behind ddos.com I'm very excited by this kind of emerging technology: essentially ethernet/fibre "filters" which can scan and dump "unwanted" traffic without a noticeable lag on the network. I'm less excited by how much it costs at the moment: $18k list price for one of the 100Mb boxes at DDoS.com, but I suspect as competition opens up, the waffle about exciting and complicated patented technologies will give way to a decent and open discussion about the best algorithms for doing this.
As an example of the current waffle on this topic, the white paper at ddos.com promises in one of their upcoming *cough* products a wire-speed spam filter which is 100% accurate and needs no training. Sure, sure... it's this ridiculous claim which calls into question the "zero training" aspect of their DDoS prevention-- I'm sure some configuration and known "signature" patterns of abusive traffic will help matters.
I'm not here to pick on ddos.com, I'm sure they have an excellent and useful product. But since they are one of a very small number of people with such a product, they are prone to making wild claims and charging extortionate fees. I'm convinced a Linux/BSD kernel module could achieve the same effect and I'd be very interested to see the algorithms, training and so on needed to achieve it. But for the moment we're still subject to these pretty wild claims without much in the way of algorithmic detail.
rproxy is a really interesting project, and back when I tried it over a 56K dial-up connection, it did actually work to speed things up. You sit an rproxy web cache at each end of the dial-up connection (so you need somewhere to deply your custom proxy to make it work, but bear with me...) and then request web pages as usual. Each end caches the pages that pass through it, but the clever part is that when you re-request a page, the proxy at the far end (on the fast connection) can fetch the page and compare with the last copy in the cache. Then it transmits only the differences using the rsync algorithm. Unforunately it's not being actively developed any more given the increasing availability of high-bandwidth connections, and the decreasing fraction of web traffic that is suitable for delta-compression. Shame, since it did seem to be a real "web accelerator" without any of the illusory techniques used by the garish banner-ad accelerators.
4 or 8-port 3Ware controllers which have good Linux driver support. For RAID-1 they're as good as software RAID, for RAID-5 you should still use the 3ware controllers to give you hot-plug functionality but use Linux software RAID because it beats the hardware performance by a mile.
This program behaviour was previously hilighted as a breach of the Computer Misuse Act 1990-- software which causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer. i.e. the software firm is illegally securing access to licensing data (i.e. that the program is pirated) by sending an email without the computer owner's authorisation. I remember the author of an Acorn program a few years back being forced to remove this behaviour from his software for this reason.
I paid for Ext2FS Anywhere with a similar problem in mind-- it does now support ext3 and works very well.
Not such a crazy idea, Disney (well go.com) allowed the release of Tea, a Java servlet-based scripting language which is a cracking piece of work, coming as it does with great manuals, an IDE with some really smart auto-completion, and providing a statically type, fully compiled web programming environment. We used it on an eCommerce site to great effect, though I'm not sure how much development it's going through these days.