But in contrast to petty criminals and warring gangs, Internet piracy groups have a worldwide impact of at least tens of millions of dollars, if not more.
Me, i'd much rather have warez groups hanging
around trading (but rarely using) software in the recluse of their bedrooms than have armed gangs killing poeple in a neighbourhood..
These devices are available from lots of
electronics suppliers, such as here, and simply run off a standard serial port.
I have been monitoring the temperature inside and outside my house for months using
these things. I use a quick perl script to read these devices from my gateway box, and run RRDtool to graph it.
Has anyone actually implemented a distributed email system based on NNTP? Not like the simple email to nntp gateways, but something far more featureful. This would work as follows:
Every system that you would like to have full email access from has a local NNTP server. All these systems are hooked up using mostly standard NNTP configurations and protocols. Only relatively minor modifications would be need to support authentication and the other features. Your domain(s) are configured to use all of these (net-reachable) systems as MX hosts. And each mailbox/mailspool is setup as a separate 'newsgroup', allowing for hierarchial mailboxes. Presumably your top level hierarchies are local usernames, and the server only allows authenticated users access to their 'mailbox'(hierarchy). Group mailboxes would be easy to implement though. Something like this:
Whenever a mail comes into one of the MX hosts, it is filtered out, using procmail or something, and dropped into the appropriate newsgroup. Alternatively have only the primary MX handle this, but then you cannot get any new mail if this box is unreachable.
The magic of NNTP then comes into play, distributing that email across all of the hosts in the NNTP group.
You then read your email using any nntp capable client. To delete messages, your client sends a usenet 'cancel' type message to the local server, and this gets distributed around the network.
But to start with, it'd be simple to create a wrapper that gave an IMAP interface, so (almost) any mail client will work. But that would limit you to read and delete. Having sent items and saving items probably isnt supported in IMAP. Not a bad start though, a "full" client would be able to do the works, such as automatically moving messages across "folders", saving sent messages, etc.
Sending an email sends via normal SMTP protocols, and optionally puts a message out via NNTP to update the sent-messages groups.
This is incredibly useful especially with intermittently connected hosts like laptops. You can read/send/delete messages there, and when it gets put on line again, it will send the cancel messages, sent-messages and other things via the NNTP net to all other hosts, ensuring a consistent system across all hosts.
What would be the limitations/weaknesses/etc that would make this a bad idea?
Re:You should hear what the robot has to say...
on
Hospital Robots
·
· Score: 1
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
Considering the crap thats been spewing out of Chinese controlled IP space, I wouldn't be adverse to some reverse censorship. i.e. no chinsese IP's allowed in my network. The Chinese may not like what the NET has to offer their people, but they sure seem to dish out pretty silly stuff for the rest of us (My penis is much to big NOW, no more PLEASE).
All of the censorship and 'punishment' dished out to those who use the net for 'bad' things does have advantages in one way.
Next time you receive chinese spam, reply to it
with something like this:
Thank you for the insight into your new Falun Gong group, and your proposal for increased awareness of human rights violations in China. We have sent the information requested to your house, and it will arrive within the next few
days. Down with Chinese communism!
I think there'll be a lot less spam from that spammer after sending this!
I send them off a nice fax, on a 50% grey scale, full page background which orders them to stop spamming..
You need to add an extra 'twist' to this, by looping the paper back around to itself in the fax machine, and taping it together so you get an endless loop.
Set that one up and leave it overnight. *That* will really make the spammer reconsider.
The legaleze says that if you don't agree, you can return it for a full refund. So I suggest everyone go and buy these CDs, and then return them the next day, stating that 'i dont agree with the license'. Presumably the license is not printed on the outside of the cover?
Ironically, the return policy does not seem to cover 'disagreements with the license'.
If it is true that viruses create BGP instability, one can extrapolate that this is a form of
terrorism, by disrupting international communications.
Now - as Microsoft has done almost nothing to effectively eliminate the threat of viruses, and
hence a form of terrorism, MS can then be seen as "harbouring terrorism".
Didn't George W himself say that those who harbour terrorists will receive the same fate?
It's therefore in the international communities best interests to destroy Microsoft!
Actually, it is documented by the Australian police, that there was a new type of crime being committed -
People were reporting their garden hoses being shortened by around ten centimetres, overnight.
Investigations determined that the cause of this was due to pot users looking for 'construction materials'.
Google would be permitted under the following analogy:
Survey-type person knocks on door (googlebot opens port 80)
Homeowner opens door (web server answers tcp connection)
Surveyor asks person 'can i ask some info' (googlebot gets/robots.txt)
owner goes 'ok/no' (robots.txt permits/allows)
Surveyor gets information or leaves (googlebot gets pages or leaves if not allowed).
That, sir, is the best analogy to a search engine.
Unless _your_ survey-person rattles every door and window. Perhaps door to door mormons will be banned as an extension to this proposed law? Don't
they port scan houses?
It would seem that the path towards solving this problem would involve a licence variant - One which would require that as well as having to supply source to people who receive binaries, it is also required that people who will _use_ your application have the source available too.
"This and all derivative works must have the source available to End Users of the application" or something more legalese..
If you only speak English, you will find the Netherlands is very welcoming. The population is fluent in English, there are various cities to choose from (Utrecht, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, etc), and there is a booming IT industry - one of the fastest in EU. For geekiness, most households in the cities have access to cable modem and soon DSL. The location to the rest of EU is great also.
I came from Australia and have been here 9 months. I prefer here to working in a native-English speaking country because there is so much more culture. However you should do your own research on the culture in the places you're considering (eg the Dutch live on meetings:)..
The other great thing about.nl is that grog is cheap (and there's no minimum drinking age - i was at my girfriends old school last night for her bro's graduation and they were giving beers to the (15yo) kids), geek toys are amongst the cheapest in EU, and all the cities are very compact so dont require cars to get around.
Anyway, as I said - do your own research on the culture in the various countries, but do keep.nl in mind as it is a great place to experience.
What Debian is trying to do seems to be very ironic given their promotion of the concepts of free software.
Free software is widely promoted as primarily about being freedom of choice and freedom of what to do with the software. However it seems that they are taking away the freedom to choose whether you wish to install the non-free software. Of course this would be a very different game if it included commercial software requiring mandatory payment, but the inclusion of free-beer type software is a choice, and hence freedom, that users would demand. It is unfortunately not the case that there are always free alternatives that are corporate-environment quality to some programs. For example web designers cannot be expected to create professional web pages with only w3m or current gtk/qt browsers.
The choice to install non free-software serves as an indication to newbies that there is much interest in Linux for all forms of software, which is great for convincing corporate types. Of course we wish they didnt need convincing with non-free software, however compromises must be made.
As long as it is clearly indicated what the problems with using non-free software are, then the choice to install them as part of the distribution should be available.
So true - it's just market-droids attempts at creating a "fabulous new product".
It's very sad to have been seeing this over the last few months. It appears as if all these "marketing managers" are starting to realise that ISPs have two core products only - COLO and bandwidth - and are digging into even deeper stuff just to keep their jobs. This excite@home thing is just peering - which ironically is the oldest thing on the net.
I would have thought that these guys would be peering already, because it would benefit both sides - excite@home for making faster access for their users, and the content provider for being able to offload their content even faster.
Congratulations marketing - what is going to be next? ** New Product ** Optimised ping priority??
>Data havens will happen, but not at Sealand. There is far too much shady history tainting Sealand, and, other than a few >amateur porn sites and "l33t d00dz" warez sites, no real investor will even think of storing secure data there.
I'm not so sure about no real investor storing stuff there. I personally know a couple of the investors of Havenco, and I know that these guys are serious and beleive in what they are investing in. They aren't crackpots or commando guys, just people who genuinely believe in the freedom of the net. They are also very respected in the general community. You will notice Avi Freedman on the team. He's definately not an anti-government fundamentalist type, but someone who has given countless contributions to the net (more network-wise than culture-wise), purely to ensure it scales in the future.
Installation of the co-lo is not that hard - they are actually pre-building the colo on a barge (whose location I wont reveal) and then just towing it out to Sealand.
These guys seem to just want to have a safe place for things like DeCSS, CPHack, etc to reside on, protecting that American infatuation with free speech (oops dont flame on that:)
The real issue behind the difficulties with installation appears to be a side effect of how open source works. There appears to be a good side and a bad side with this all.
One one side, we have open source making these drivers and applications available to try out from day one. You try it in its development state, and you you get the drivers available almost as soon as someone starts working on them. This is great for someone wanting to use only the basic initial features of any code.
On the bad side though, as any coder knows, the installation and aesthetic appearance of the finished product is something that only comes about after the core of the application/driver is complete. Aesthetics and installation is only a wrapper around the core code, and hence comes last.
So although the installation of Linux ports of games is not an entirely painless process at the moment, we will have to wait until code devel of the various drivers are completed. As the article states, 3d drivers will be shortly integrated into the XFree86 codebase, once their primary functions have been written. It will be from this time that we will see all of the QuakeIII/HereticII installs being as simple as running one script from the CDROM. (I am not a fan of Windozes cd auto-run "feature" though, as it presents obvious security issues).
3D video/audio development is currently in its peak (or about to reach it), so I think we will be seeing built in support for these in all the major distributions before the end of the year.
Give the driver code base a chance to be developed first.
I am very impressed with the fact that the interview was so candid and casual. In these times is is almost universal that someone discussing legal issues would consult their lawyer and have carefully written responses. But not Metallica - all the ums, 'arrs' and general method of interview has made me respect them so much more, and diffused ideas about the RIAA being behind all this.
Cheers to them for their honesty!
It still begs the question though - where are the other Metallica members in all this? They seem to be much more silent than Lars, who almost seems to be going solo.
Slashdot Mirror
But in contrast to petty criminals and warring gangs, Internet piracy groups have a worldwide impact of at least tens of millions of dollars, if not more.
Me, i'd much rather have warez groups hanging around trading (but rarely using) software in the recluse of their bedrooms than have armed gangs killing poeple in a neighbourhood..
I have been monitoring the temperature inside and outside my house for months using these things. I use a quick perl script to read these devices from my gateway box, and run RRDtool to graph it.
Are you implying that trekkies actually get the opportunity to perform sexual acts?
Unless you mean "alone"...
Next!
Has anyone actually implemented a distributed email system based
. sent-mail.lists.slugx
on NNTP? Not like the simple email to nntp gateways, but something
far more featureful. This would work as follows:
Every system that you would like to have full email access from has
a local NNTP server. All these systems are hooked up using
mostly standard NNTP configurations and protocols. Only relatively
minor modifications would be need to support authentication and
the other features.
Your domain(s) are configured to use all of these (net-reachable)
systems as MX hosts. And each mailbox/mailspool is setup as a
separate 'newsgroup', allowing for hierarchial mailboxes. Presumably
your top level hierarchies are local usernames, and the server
only allows authenticated users access to their 'mailbox'(hierarchy).
Group mailboxes would be easy to implement though.
Something like this:
bb.inbox
bb.inbox.lists.slug
bb.sent-mail
bb
[..]
public.somegroup.inbo
etc
Whenever a mail comes into one of the MX hosts, it is filtered
out, using procmail or something, and dropped into the appropriate
newsgroup. Alternatively have only the primary MX handle this,
but then you cannot get any new mail if this box is unreachable.
The magic of NNTP then comes into play, distributing that
email across all of the hosts in the NNTP group.
You then read your email using any nntp capable client. To delete
messages, your client sends a usenet 'cancel' type message to the
local server, and this gets distributed around the network.
But to start with, it'd be simple to create a wrapper that
gave an IMAP interface, so (almost) any mail client
will work. But that would limit you to read and delete.
Having sent items and saving items probably isnt supported in
IMAP.
Not a bad start though, a "full" client would be able to
do the works, such as automatically moving messages across
"folders", saving sent messages, etc.
Sending an email sends via normal SMTP protocols, and optionally
puts a message out via NNTP to update the sent-messages groups.
This is incredibly useful especially with intermittently connected
hosts like laptops. You can read/send/delete messages there, and
when it gets put on line again, it will send the cancel messages,
sent-messages and other things via the NNTP net to all other
hosts, ensuring a consistent system across all hosts.
What would be the limitations/weaknesses/etc that would make
this a bad idea?
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are
you getting the picture?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
[with apologies]
What's "sunlight"?
All of the censorship and 'punishment' dished out to those who use the net for 'bad' things does have advantages in one way.
Next time you receive chinese spam, reply to it with something like this:
Thank you for the insight into your new Falun Gong group, and your proposal for increased awareness of human rights violations in China. We have sent the information requested to your house, and it will arrive within the next few days. Down with Chinese communism!
I think there'll be a lot less spam from that spammer after sending this!
You need to add an extra 'twist' to this, by looping the paper back around to itself in the fax machine, and taping it together so you get an endless loop.
Set that one up and leave it overnight. *That* will really make the spammer reconsider.
The legaleze says that if you don't agree, you can return it for a full refund. So I suggest everyone go and buy these CDs, and then return them the next day, stating that 'i dont agree with the license'. Presumably the license is not printed on the outside of the cover?
Ironically, the return policy does not seem to cover 'disagreements with the license'.
I believe Microsoft has implemented this ever since Windows 1.0.
So...on a related note.
If it is true that viruses create BGP instability, one can extrapolate that this is a form of
terrorism, by disrupting international communications.
Now - as Microsoft has done almost nothing to effectively eliminate the threat of viruses, and
hence a form of terrorism, MS can then be seen as "harbouring terrorism".
Didn't George W himself say that those who harbour terrorists will receive the same fate?
It's therefore in the international communities best interests to destroy Microsoft!
Investigations determined that the cause of this was due to pot users looking for 'construction materials'.
Drug paraphenalia, indeed.
Google would be permitted under the following analogy: Survey-type person knocks on door (googlebot opens port 80) Homeowner opens door (web server answers tcp connection) Surveyor asks person 'can i ask some info' (googlebot gets /robots.txt)
owner goes 'ok/no' (robots.txt permits/allows)
Surveyor gets information or leaves (googlebot gets pages or leaves if not allowed).
That, sir, is the best analogy to a search engine.
Unless _your_ survey-person rattles every door and window. Perhaps door to door mormons will be banned as an extension to this proposed law? Don't
they port scan houses?
They are able to sue Slashdot for associating spam email with the meat-esque stuff....look at the topic icon. :)
--
BB
IP over HTTP implementation:
http://www.nocrew.org/software/httptunnel.html
"This and all derivative works must have the source available to End Users of the application" or something more legalese..
I came from Australia and have been here 9 months. I prefer here to working in a native-English speaking country because there is so much more culture. However you should do your own research on the culture in the places you're considering (eg the Dutch live on meetings :)..
The other great thing about .nl is that grog is cheap (and there's no minimum drinking age - i was at my girfriends old school last night for her bro's graduation and they were giving beers to the (15yo) kids), geek toys are amongst the cheapest in EU, and all the cities are very compact so dont require cars to get around.
Anyway, as I said - do your own research on the culture in the various countries, but do keep .nl in mind as it is a great place to experience.
Free software is widely promoted as primarily about being freedom of choice and freedom of what to do with the software. However it seems that they are taking away the freedom to choose whether you wish to install the non-free software. Of course this would be a very different game if it included commercial software requiring mandatory payment, but the inclusion of free-beer type software is a choice, and hence freedom, that users would demand. It is unfortunately not the case that there are always free alternatives that are corporate-environment quality to some programs. For example web designers cannot be expected to create professional web pages with only w3m or current gtk/qt browsers.
The choice to install non free-software serves as an indication to newbies that there is much interest in Linux for all forms of software, which is great for convincing corporate types. Of course we wish they didnt need convincing with non-free software, however compromises must be made.
As long as it is clearly indicated what the problems with using non-free software are, then the choice to install them as part of the distribution should be available.
It's very sad to have been seeing this over the last few months. It appears as if all these "marketing managers" are starting to realise that ISPs have two core products only - COLO and bandwidth - and are digging into even deeper stuff just to keep their jobs. This excite@home thing is just peering - which ironically is the oldest thing on the net.
I would have thought that these guys would be peering already, because it would benefit both sides - excite@home for making faster access for their users, and the content provider for being able to offload their content even faster.
Congratulations marketing - what is going to be next? ** New Product ** Optimised ping priority??
I'm not so sure about no real investor storing stuff there. I personally know a couple of the investors of Havenco, and I know that these guys are serious and beleive in what they are investing in. They aren't crackpots or commando guys, just people who genuinely believe in the freedom of the net. They are also very respected in the general community. You will notice Avi Freedman on the team. He's definately not an anti-government fundamentalist type, but someone who has given countless contributions to the net (more network-wise than culture-wise), purely to ensure it scales in the future.
Installation of the co-lo is not that hard - they are actually pre-building the colo on a barge (whose location I wont reveal) and then just towing it out to Sealand.
These guys seem to just want to have a safe place for things like DeCSS, CPHack, etc to reside on, protecting that American infatuation with free speech (oops dont flame on that :)
One one side, we have open source making these drivers and applications available to try out from day one. You try it in its development state, and you you get the drivers available almost as soon as someone starts working on them. This is great for someone wanting to use only the basic initial features of any code.
On the bad side though, as any coder knows, the installation and aesthetic appearance of the finished product is something that only comes about after the core of the application/driver is complete. Aesthetics and installation is only a wrapper around the core code, and hence comes last.
So although the installation of Linux ports of games is not an entirely painless process at the moment, we will have to wait until code devel of the various drivers are completed. As the article states, 3d drivers will be shortly integrated into the XFree86 codebase, once their primary functions have been written.
It will be from this time that we will see all of the QuakeIII/HereticII installs being as simple as running one script from the CDROM. (I am not a fan of Windozes cd auto-run "feature" though, as it presents obvious security issues).
3D video/audio development is currently in its peak (or about to reach it), so I think we will be seeing built in support for these in all the major distributions before the end of the year.
Give the driver code base a chance to be developed first.
Cheers to them for their honesty!
It still begs the question though - where are the other Metallica members in all this? They seem to be much more silent than Lars, who almost seems to be going solo.