For one thing, as the article said (it was a whole section titled "The Internet is Different"), a conventional wiretap would be on one or a few persons, with this software you could monitor thousands, and it would be very hard to control what the FBI (or anybody) is doing.
You know, times change. There are people nowadays that I would like to see nailed, child porn, drug traffic, etc. So, it is legitimite to use this software to nail those. However, if you give authorities such a tool, then you run the risk that the political climate changes and it suddenly becomes politically correct to nail people for anything. Like witch-hunts. So, if you have a bad tool for witch hunts, you're not going to burn as many innocents as you do if you have a good tool for witch-hunts.
So, yes, there are legitimate uses, but one must proceed with extreme caution.
I think everybody's at fault.... Anyway, what we need is an objective data base of products, that lists product specifications, independent reviews, tests, benchmarks and so on. So that it is possible to make an informed decision. Nowadays, it is simply not possible to make an informed decision, because it will take you years to research everything you needed to know to buy a tube of toothpaste...:-)
BTW, it has been ahuge debate in many countries in Europe about these auctions. Pretty much, the debate has been over the problem that if you auction, some currently huge companies might establish near-monopolies, criplling competition. Some countries has chosen not to auction off the frequencies, but release them for a fixed prize.
I think you have a real point here. I'm a native of Norway, but I have lots of friends and a few relatives in the US, studying in different fields, among them, technology. The US has a huge advantage in research. It seems like americans to some degree acknowledge that technology built their wealth, and that the spending in research into e.g. physics is still huge, and that it is no doubt that US research groups are leading in most fields of research, and that this benefits society. However, you shouldn't bury your head in the sand and think everything is OK, cause it is clear that you do have a problem.
Here in Norway, we have a really hard time convicing policy-makers it is worth doing research that has a horizon before it is profitable of more than three years. The situation for research is really bad. OTOH, we have some groups that are highly influential. For example, the GSM system was greatly influenced by Norwegian Engineers, with the result that it fits perfectly to Norwegian topography and demographics. The place is so hilly we would need an antenna everywhere anyway, so the GSM system requires antennas everywhere. Also, people are conscious about using technology (not developing it), so technologies are easily accepted. There is also a certain amount of consciousness about public responsibility in building high-tech infrastructure, e.g. the minister of communication has said that a national broadband-net is as important as roads. A recent non-governmental report predicted that 35% of Norwegian homes will be connected by a link better than 10MBits/s by 2005.
I have a friend studying at Cornell, and when he got over there, the two things that he noticed at once, was first that the cell phone net was so crappy, pretty much all over New York State, that it was totally useless. In Norway (and Finland and Sweden), everybody has a cellphone, the kids get a cellphone before they're twelve and are among the most frequent users. The second thing was that people still use cheques (you know, those things made from dead trees?). They're gone in Norway. Most banks doesn't issue them anymore, and very few shops accept them. Some shops does accept them, but only from senior citizens... It's all cards. I seldom have more than 200NOK (=~ $25) in my wallet. My bank is offering a card with no charges for making payments.
Now, when talking to people, I get the impression that you have two problems: First, the corps are more concerned with fighting each other than making useful products and compete on that basis. Instead, they sue for the smallest thing, all the resources available for developing better products go to legal costs, or to marketing to cover up the
fact that their product sucks. Like in Ithaca, were there are a bunch of companies offering cell phone networks, one should think that the competition would drive the development so that you get some services at least as good as in the Nordic countries. Not so. They all suck, but since the market is stupid, consumers are unaware that they are not given good services. RMS has a good point that capitalism does a good job in advancing development as long as the companies are actually competing, but it fails when they start attacking each other.
The other problem is excessive, privatized beaurocracy. One friend who had been around a lot in communist countries told me that the governmental beaurocracy in those countries is nothing compared to the private beaurocracy in the US. Another friend had $250000 on an account in Norway, but he couldn't get a house because you have to have an insurance on the house, but you can't get an insurance if you haven't got a credit history in an american bank... He did meet one bank clerk who thought the whole system was stupid, but he couldn't do anything because of the fear of getting fired and/or sued... It ended with him paying in cash... Hell, that's primitive. That's just one of the stories I've heard.
Allow between 5 and 10 times more effort to develop a decently cross-browser
page, rather than nice simple CSS.
I can imagine. I'm using Netscape 4.74 myself, and I've been pretty fed up with it, but actually, it has been IE3 that has caused most of my problems, especially font size handling. One of my pages has a comment on the top saying IE3 users should turn off their stylesheets.... The ultimate goal is of course to make my pages as accessible as possible, so the usual response to Netscape's CSS trouble has been to drop sophistication. I am quite sure my pages (at least those I wrote since RTFM) are very accessible, especially since turning off stylesheets isn't a big thing. One difficulty is not only making sure the pages are readable on todays top browsers, but also on any future stuff, voice browsers, PDAs, hell, I bet that if people had written good HTML instead of tag soup, I would have had full web on my cell phone by now, and WAP-crap would never have emerged...:-)
I hear ViolaWWW was a beautiful browser. I have unsuccesfully tried to compile it here. Anyway, it was the type of browser that actually let the surfers control the pages, instead of the current Mosaic-clones (Navigator and IE, and to pretty great extent Opera), that lets the designer control everything. The current situation is that you've got a bunch of designers trying to grab surfers' senses and stuff as much as they can into them as they can, instead of providing something that the surfer can experience as the surfer sees fit. It's kind of saying "Let us decide what makes the page best for you, you are totally incapable of doing that yourself!" That's today's rant...:-)
I'm not a pro, but I have become more and more inclined to write pages that actually conforms with the standards, most notably HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS1, and go on to validate the stuff. If the browsers can't handle that, *$%^#* them. And, browsers can't handle that...:-( so, I practice, I have to make compromises. The ideal is that pages should conform with the standards, but I am willing to admit that I am myself not able to live up to my ideals.
I came across The Homework Reporting System on Freshmeat the other day, I forwarded the URL to my mother, she's a teacher and have been asking me whether I could hack up something like that. This one is based on PHP and MySQL. They have a couple of other nice things there as well. Point being, they could contribute to useful Open Source Projects.
AFAICS, nobody goes for the complete abolishment of copyright law, it is only being pointed out that the way copyright laws may be used now, is not how they we intended to be used.
I realized that something were fundamentally wrong with copyright laws when I realized that Disney owns the right to Winnie-the-Pooh. In my mind, Disney has no moral right whatsoever to make any profits from the ongoing abuse of the Winnie-the-Pooh character, in fact, what Disney is doing to the character, I find mostly highly immoral.
Yes, space junk is becoming a real problem for astronomy. Now, first there are lots of satelites out there that occasionally cross your field, destroying the exposure. This happens several times a night if you have a 6' field of view. Then, there are lots of tiny flakes of paint and stuff like that, that may also become a problem. Now, astronomy is the science which boosts space exploration. If we start launching lots and lots of things, we run the risk of closing us into our little earth and never be able to look out. That would be a tragedy, if you ask me.
OK, I guess you're right in that. The only use I've had is to see if rm -rf * written with some cute stuff around in a search box would erase everything....:-)
Because people like me, who run a web server with a few Perl scripts to do certain things, without really being a programmer, need run run the scripts to check certain exploits, to discover flaws in my code so as to be able to fix it.
If nobody codes the bitch, people like me, who are not highly skilled but concerned, will not be able to find holes in my own code so easily, and therefore have a problem patching them.
But, OK, you have a point, skript kiddiez are a problem, they are simply very annoying. Besides, they put food on the anti-virus software writers table, and they really don't deserve it.
What scares me with this guy, however, is that he mentions stuff like the ILOVEYOU trojan as the problem. ILOVEYOU isn't a problem compared to what a highly skilled professional using the same holes that made ILOVEYOU possible for e.g. industrial espionage. It really amazes me that people fail to see this.
A few days ago Jupiter Communications issued a Press release where they said that their research indicated that Napster users are 45% more likely to increase spending on music. I don't know how good this research is, or who is behind it, but a lot of people here have argued the same.
My personal position on Napster is that they are trying to make big bucks with little value added, so while the music industry is (as usual) being closed-minded and ignorant, Napster are not the big heroes in my book.
I agree with your point that it has a lot to do with PR. I also agree that we most certainly need both, BUT
Particle accelerators have done much more to advance our understanding of the physical laws than telescopes (or most other instruments).
I can't agree with you here. I claim that the telescope is the single instrument that has historically advanced our physical understanding the most. Mostly because of Galileo and Kepler, it started a new way of thinking in causal processes. Now, particle accelerators, from Rutherford to today has indeed done a lot of nice work, that has overthrown many theories, and confirmed many theories. So have telescopes. Take the expanding universe for example. Neither have, lately, provided a kick for a real scientific revolution, though, so I think they are pretty equal in merit in this century. And, who would like to guess in what direction the next revolution will be? We won't know untill we are there...
Rather imagine coming home one day, go to your favorite chair, say "browse web", start talking to your browser. Instead of sitting staring at a screen, the browser will read pages for you, you will surf laid back in your chair, telling it where to go in simple instructions. Now, it is just a matter of choosing the right tool for the job... If the "job" is relaxing, I'd say VUI is preferable. And I think it has a great future.
I'm torn on whether this is a Good Thing [tm]. All articles posted on USENET are copyrighted by the posters, I'm pretty sure about that. So, the question is whether Deja must display them verbatim, or if they may alter posts in any way.
You know, I'm pretty sure this will be useful to someone, and I think that having links here and there is a good thing. A link doesn't have any implied meaning, it's just a reference. As long as they are not sponsored links, it's ok.
They should clearly indicate that the links was inserted by them, beyond just including this little arrow.
Now, this seems to pretty much kill the Semantic Web TimBL has been dreaming about, doesn't it? He devoted most of his book on the topic, and it is a really important part when he discusses design issues.
If you can't go to a web site and extract the information on it for no other use than viewing it on a graphical browser, which is what most web sites are designed for these days, then, it's dead, isn't it?
Now, I agree that the robots.txt file should be respected. It is important to make sure robots don't enter e.g. eternal loops in scripts. I think that those using it to block robots out so robots can't extract useful information are just narrow-minded, and that's their problem, they will die as the market gets a clue (if it ever will). But when the courts decide on topics where they have little understanding prematurely, that's a problem.
I must say that I had the feeling after reading the Memorandum Opinion that either the judge had to be in the pockets of the film industry, or he would be ignorant. Now, one of my principles as that one should never attribute to maliciousness what can adequately be explained by stupidity, so I thought it was the latter. But, it seems it is not and adequate explanation after all...:-(
Yep. What I don't understand is that people are actually worried about viruses (or rather trojans), they should be concerned about the mechanisms that lets them thrive. I mean, a trojan that attacks randomly and with a lot of kaboom is going to make people aware of it and act against it. A trojan for e.g. industrial espionage may use the same methods as e.g. the love-trojan to infect computers and make them send e-mail with sensitive information. E.g., spread a virus to Wall Street with a script that makes Excel send you (or just put it open on the web) the latest spreadsheets from everybody's computers. Silently. I'm not too into it, but I would be surprised if it couldn't be done. If it can be done, that's what they should be worried about.
Slashdot Mirror
For one thing, as the article said (it was a whole section titled "The Internet is Different"), a conventional wiretap would be on one or a few persons, with this software you could monitor thousands, and it would be very hard to control what the FBI (or anybody) is doing.
You know, times change. There are people nowadays that I would like to see nailed, child porn, drug traffic, etc. So, it is legitimite to use this software to nail those. However, if you give authorities such a tool, then you run the risk that the political climate changes and it suddenly becomes politically correct to nail people for anything. Like witch-hunts. So, if you have a bad tool for witch hunts, you're not going to burn as many innocents as you do if you have a good tool for witch-hunts.
So, yes, there are legitimate uses, but one must proceed with extreme caution.
Yeah, so what are you worrying about? If the smell is to strong for the sniffer, it will just fold under stress like any Windoze system.... :-)
I think everybody's at fault.... Anyway, what we need is an objective data base of products, that lists product specifications, independent reviews, tests, benchmarks and so on. So that it is possible to make an informed decision. Nowadays, it is simply not possible to make an informed decision, because it will take you years to research everything you needed to know to buy a tube of toothpaste... :-)
BTW, it has been ahuge debate in many countries in Europe about these auctions. Pretty much, the debate has been over the problem that if you auction, some currently huge companies might establish near-monopolies, criplling competition. Some countries has chosen not to auction off the frequencies, but release them for a fixed prize.
spam.abuse.net is your friend.
Here in Norway, we have a really hard time convicing policy-makers it is worth doing research that has a horizon before it is profitable of more than three years. The situation for research is really bad. OTOH, we have some groups that are highly influential. For example, the GSM system was greatly influenced by Norwegian Engineers, with the result that it fits perfectly to Norwegian topography and demographics. The place is so hilly we would need an antenna everywhere anyway, so the GSM system requires antennas everywhere. Also, people are conscious about using technology (not developing it), so technologies are easily accepted. There is also a certain amount of consciousness about public responsibility in building high-tech infrastructure, e.g. the minister of communication has said that a national broadband-net is as important as roads. A recent non-governmental report predicted that 35% of Norwegian homes will be connected by a link better than 10MBits/s by 2005.
I have a friend studying at Cornell, and when he got over there, the two things that he noticed at once, was first that the cell phone net was so crappy, pretty much all over New York State, that it was totally useless. In Norway (and Finland and Sweden), everybody has a cellphone, the kids get a cellphone before they're twelve and are among the most frequent users. The second thing was that people still use cheques (you know, those things made from dead trees?). They're gone in Norway. Most banks doesn't issue them anymore, and very few shops accept them. Some shops does accept them, but only from senior citizens... It's all cards. I seldom have more than 200NOK (=~ $25) in my wallet. My bank is offering a card with no charges for making payments.
Now, when talking to people, I get the impression that you have two problems: First, the corps are more concerned with fighting each other than making useful products and compete on that basis. Instead, they sue for the smallest thing, all the resources available for developing better products go to legal costs, or to marketing to cover up the fact that their product sucks. Like in Ithaca, were there are a bunch of companies offering cell phone networks, one should think that the competition would drive the development so that you get some services at least as good as in the Nordic countries. Not so. They all suck, but since the market is stupid, consumers are unaware that they are not given good services. RMS has a good point that capitalism does a good job in advancing development as long as the companies are actually competing, but it fails when they start attacking each other.
The other problem is excessive, privatized beaurocracy. One friend who had been around a lot in communist countries told me that the governmental beaurocracy in those countries is nothing compared to the private beaurocracy in the US. Another friend had $250000 on an account in Norway, but he couldn't get a house because you have to have an insurance on the house, but you can't get an insurance if you haven't got a credit history in an american bank... He did meet one bank clerk who thought the whole system was stupid, but he couldn't do anything because of the fear of getting fired and/or sued... It ended with him paying in cash... Hell, that's primitive. That's just one of the stories I've heard.
I can imagine. I'm using Netscape 4.74 myself, and I've been pretty fed up with it, but actually, it has been IE3 that has caused most of my problems, especially font size handling. One of my pages has a comment on the top saying IE3 users should turn off their stylesheets.... The ultimate goal is of course to make my pages as accessible as possible, so the usual response to Netscape's CSS trouble has been to drop sophistication. I am quite sure my pages (at least those I wrote since RTFM) are very accessible, especially since turning off stylesheets isn't a big thing. One difficulty is not only making sure the pages are readable on todays top browsers, but also on any future stuff, voice browsers, PDAs, hell, I bet that if people had written good HTML instead of tag soup, I would have had full web on my cell phone by now, and WAP-crap would never have emerged... :-)
I hear ViolaWWW was a beautiful browser. I have unsuccesfully tried to compile it here. Anyway, it was the type of browser that actually let the surfers control the pages, instead of the current Mosaic-clones (Navigator and IE, and to pretty great extent Opera), that lets the designer control everything. The current situation is that you've got a bunch of designers trying to grab surfers' senses and stuff as much as they can into them as they can, instead of providing something that the surfer can experience as the surfer sees fit. It's kind of saying "Let us decide what makes the page best for you, you are totally incapable of doing that yourself!" That's today's rant... :-)
I'm not a pro, but I have become more and more inclined to write pages that actually conforms with the standards, most notably HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS1, and go on to validate the stuff. If the browsers can't handle that, *$%^#* them. And, browsers can't handle that... :-( so, I practice, I have to make compromises. The ideal is that pages should conform with the standards, but I am willing to admit that I am myself not able to live up to my ideals.
I came across The Homework Reporting System on Freshmeat the other day, I forwarded the URL to my mother, she's a teacher and have been asking me whether I could hack up something like that. This one is based on PHP and MySQL. They have a couple of other nice things there as well. Point being, they could contribute to useful Open Source Projects.
I realized that something were fundamentally wrong with copyright laws when I realized that Disney owns the right to Winnie-the-Pooh. In my mind, Disney has no moral right whatsoever to make any profits from the ongoing abuse of the Winnie-the-Pooh character, in fact, what Disney is doing to the character, I find mostly highly immoral.
Yes, space junk is becoming a real problem for astronomy. Now, first there are lots of satelites out there that occasionally cross your field, destroying the exposure. This happens several times a night if you have a 6' field of view. Then, there are lots of tiny flakes of paint and stuff like that, that may also become a problem. Now, astronomy is the science which boosts space exploration. If we start launching lots and lots of things, we run the risk of closing us into our little earth and never be able to look out. That would be a tragedy, if you ask me.
Exactly. Which would be a Good Thing [tm]! :-)
OK, I guess you're right in that. The only use I've had is to see if rm -rf * written with some cute stuff around in a search box would erase everything.... :-)
4. If it is easy, it's not going to make your balls bigger, so stay off.... :-)
I have been thinking about putting something like this in a CRACKERS.README in my root dir.... :-)
Because people like me, who run a web server with a few Perl scripts to do certain things, without really being a programmer, need run run the scripts to check certain exploits, to discover flaws in my code so as to be able to fix it.
But, OK, you have a point, skript kiddiez are a problem, they are simply very annoying. Besides, they put food on the anti-virus software writers table, and they really don't deserve it.
What scares me with this guy, however, is that he mentions stuff like the ILOVEYOU trojan as the problem. ILOVEYOU isn't a problem compared to what a highly skilled professional using the same holes that made ILOVEYOU possible for e.g. industrial espionage. It really amazes me that people fail to see this.
My personal position on Napster is that they are trying to make big bucks with little value added, so while the music industry is (as usual) being closed-minded and ignorant, Napster are not the big heroes in my book.
I can't agree with you here. I claim that the telescope is the single instrument that has historically advanced our physical understanding the most. Mostly because of Galileo and Kepler, it started a new way of thinking in causal processes. Now, particle accelerators, from Rutherford to today has indeed done a lot of nice work, that has overthrown many theories, and confirmed many theories. So have telescopes. Take the expanding universe for example. Neither have, lately, provided a kick for a real scientific revolution, though, so I think they are pretty equal in merit in this century. And, who would like to guess in what direction the next revolution will be? We won't know untill we are there...
Rather imagine coming home one day, go to your favorite chair, say "browse web", start talking to your browser. Instead of sitting staring at a screen, the browser will read pages for you, you will surf laid back in your chair, telling it where to go in simple instructions. Now, it is just a matter of choosing the right tool for the job... If the "job" is relaxing, I'd say VUI is preferable. And I think it has a great future.
You know, I'm pretty sure this will be useful to someone, and I think that having links here and there is a good thing. A link doesn't have any implied meaning, it's just a reference. As long as they are not sponsored links, it's ok.
They should clearly indicate that the links was inserted by them, beyond just including this little arrow.
Yep, good point. So, what eBay is afraid of, is probably that this site shows that eBay sucks...
If you can't go to a web site and extract the information on it for no other use than viewing it on a graphical browser, which is what most web sites are designed for these days, then, it's dead, isn't it?
Now, I agree that the robots.txt file should be respected. It is important to make sure robots don't enter e.g. eternal loops in scripts. I think that those using it to block robots out so robots can't extract useful information are just narrow-minded, and that's their problem, they will die as the market gets a clue (if it ever will). But when the courts decide on topics where they have little understanding prematurely, that's a problem.
I must say that I had the feeling after reading the Memorandum Opinion that either the judge had to be in the pockets of the film industry, or he would be ignorant. Now, one of my principles as that one should never attribute to maliciousness what can adequately be explained by stupidity, so I thought it was the latter. But, it seems it is not and adequate explanation after all... :-(
Yep. What I don't understand is that people are actually worried about viruses (or rather trojans), they should be concerned about the mechanisms that lets them thrive. I mean, a trojan that attacks randomly and with a lot of kaboom is going to make people aware of it and act against it. A trojan for e.g. industrial espionage may use the same methods as e.g. the love-trojan to infect computers and make them send e-mail with sensitive information. E.g., spread a virus to Wall Street with a script that makes Excel send you (or just put it open on the web) the latest spreadsheets from everybody's computers. Silently. I'm not too into it, but I would be surprised if it couldn't be done. If it can be done, that's what they should be worried about.