Could you give some more information about "flatplanet?" When using Gnutella, I've been
amazed at the amount of trash that flies by my screen (i.e. 500 zero-length files that always get displayed no matter what search criteria I specify, all of which originate from the same IP).
It would be so nice if the next version of Gnuetlla gave one the ability to filter out certain trouble-making IPs.
Currently, there aren't so many good, easy-to-remember, domain names left in.com,.net, and.org. Wouldn't adding more TLDs alleviate the problem?
Not exactly.
All you're doing by creating more TLDs is moving the problem up one level. Sure, people can create toys.store to compete with toys.com, but do you really think that once all the good toys.[insert-new-TLD-here] domains have been taken anybody will really want to have a domain named toys.a-new-tld-for-me? I think not. In fact, if you create 100 new TLDs, I can still see only a small handful like.com and.store actually becoming popular. All that's happened is that the problem has been moved up one level.
Now, I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't open up *some* new TLDs simply to alleviate the pressure. Unfortunately, a real solution will have to come from somewhere else, like creating a system where the geographical location of the company plays a part in the domain name. Thus, amazon.com might become amazon.seattle.wa.us. Suddenly, there's no longer any real need guard your domain name so viciously because all the "prime" real estate in TLDs has been removed.
Yes, I know that a.us geographical already exists. I also understand that some locations may be more popular than others. Finally, this isn't a real suggestion that I expect ICANN to act on, but more of an example how the TLDs could be expanded in a real meaningful way rather than just adding more TLDs which will again differentiate between prime real estate and trash.
Have you ever personally seen a terrorist? Anyone here at Slashdot ever met a real live terrorist? I doubt it. There just aren't that many of them. "Anti-terrorism" is just the cover story, folks.
You should be glad that your world is so small.
Have I ever personally met a terrorist? No.
Have I personally known and worked with somebody whose life was cut short by a terrorist? Unfortunately, yes.
I can tell you this: I would be willing to accept a certain level of government monitoring if it would bring back a young life which was needlessly cut short because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I'm also sure that if that government had not been involved in some type of monitoring that many more people might have been murdered -- yes, murdered -- as well.
I want my privacy. I want my rights. I don't want to live in a complete anarchy. Most of us are capable of understanding that in order to live in a free society where one can jump on a bus and not worry about being blown to bits by a terrorist's bomb we need to give up certain parts -- though not all -- of our privacy. It's a trade-off. What's most important to discuss is precisely where that line is drawn.
If your world is too small to have ever experienced the grief and shock that I and many others have, consider yourself lucky.
Re:Public needs to stop pretending there is no iss
on
CNet On Online Freedom
·
· Score: 1
"Netsnipe" wrote:
I am dismayed when my friends exclaim that the CIA will never read my email, because I am not important, nor have I done anything wrong or have something to hide.
This attitude extends much farther than that. Most people take a very liberal view of their privacy right up until somebody points out in drastic detail what can be done with the information.
I used to be the administrator of a network within a department at a university. On quite a few occasions, I would discover major security problems that were completely social in nature. For example, one professor insisted on a password that was a single digit.
I attempted to explain why this was a bad idea, but the answer was always "We don't care if other people read our e-mail. We have nothing to hide." Since the person in question was just a tenured professor and I was just the technical assistant, there was nothing I could do aside from voice concern. Disabling the users account was out of the question and would most likely have gotten me fired. At some point, I just gave up and took the easy route by never mentioning security to any of the users.
Eventually -- surprise!! -- we were broken into by a hacker who deleted some important files used by the department. I thought that this might be a wake-up call to the members of the department. It wasn't. Instead, they dealt with the matter so lightly that when I suggested contacting the police, my supervisor didn't seem in the least bit interested in talking to them. In fact, he told me that he didn't want me "wasting any more time" on the matter!
A fellow administrator at the university sent me a copy of university policy that was meant to explain to non-techies that people in charge of computers would need to devote at least 20% of their time to security issues. My boss wasn't in the least bit interested in looking at this policy.
Folks, this attitude towards system security is the same beast that causes people to not pay attention to their own privacy. Most people don't really care about their virtual security and privacy (which go hand-in-hand) because it never seems like real life. The same person who would call 911 if he saw a stranger following him down a street won't think twice about a stranger doing the same thing in cyberspace. Most people are much more scared about coming home to find their jewelry missing than they are about coming home to find that somebody has been through their personal files and left the jewelry in place. What they don't realize is that those personal files can be used to steal even more money through identity theft than the jewelry itself was ever worth and that cleaning up the mess caused by an identity thief who has had access to your personal data can take years.
Princess Mononoke is also a must-see!
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 1
As somebody who doesn't watch huge amounts of Anime, I've got to say that I was incredibly impressed by Princess Mononoke. I saw it in the theaters by accident a few months ago, and quickly realized that this was *not* a children's cartoon (warning for the squeamish: there are decapitation scenes in the film).
To begin with, the animation and scenery is absolutely gorgeous. These folks put huge amounts of time into the detail of creating the forest in which the characters live. The scenes with the transformation of the nightwalker had me going "oooh, aaahhh" in the theater.
In addition, the plot is incredibly complex and may actually require two watchings in order to fully appreciate. The story takes place in Japan towards the end of the middle ages, as modern industry began to develop and encroach upon the forest. A young price of a hidden tribe finds himself cursed and must travel to find the source of the curse so that he can eliminate it.
What's wonderful about the film is that it paints everything in shades of gray and really makes you think about why the characters are behaving the way they do. Lady Eboshi, the leader of Iron Town may seem up front to simply hate the forest, but once you realize the altruism that motivates her, you really wonder about how she can try to survive in co-existence with it.
The American voices chosen for the parts are an all-star cast and do a wonderful job. I've been told that Neil "Sandman" Gaiman, who adapted the translation, did a really good job in making the story accessible to English-speaking audiences. Since I haven't seen the sub-titled Japanese version (called "Mononoke Hime"), I can't comment on that. I will say that both the words and the animation frequently have some subtle humor embedded into them.
(Brief plug for Gaiman: He's also written a children's book called "The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish," which I recommend to anybody who wants to read some light-hearted fun.)
I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but if you have any interest in the administration of ICANN and the election of the At Large members, you should visit
ASAP so that you can say what you think about the current rules for nominating At Large members. Currently, in order for a nominated member to make it onto the ballot, it appears that a nominee must get the nomination vote of 10% or more of the *registered* people in the region. Yes, that's REGISTERED people, not VOTING people.
People should visit the page and speak their mind *politely* and *intelligently* so that the comments actually get read and understood.
My roommate ordered service through Flashcom last August. Originally, they scheduled the work order for approximately 4 weeks from the date of the order. My roommate made plans with his employer to be absent for part of the day since somebody needed to let in the Bell Atlantic guy who actually installed the line.
Around midnight the evening before the installation, he received a brief, cryptic e-mail informing him that the work order had been postponed. Never mind the fact that the e-mail gave no explanation of why the order had been cancelled with less than 8 hours notice, and that the company didn't have the courtesy to at least have a live human being call to reschedule and apologize.
After making a number of angry phone calls, he discovered that the order had been cancelled by Bell Atlantic -- the final part in the chain, and that because Flashcom could only deal with Covad, and only Covad could call Bell Atlantic, nobody could give him any concrete information about what had went wrong and how to prevent the same mistake from happening in the future. His DSL line finally got installed around late November, over 3 months after he had ordered it!
To be fair, there's probably not much that Flashcom can do about it since they also need to go through two other companies. Also, since the line's installation, it has behaved almost perfectly and with only very brief periods of down time. In fact, Flashcom even has an IRC channel where one can get updates about bad network connectivity. The one time I tried using the channel, a tech responded almost instantly.
The big bottleneck here appears to be somewhere between Bell Atlantic and Covad, where I doubt there's any impetus to improve things unless Flashcom makes complaints to a "higher authority." Since they're most certainly going to lose customers if this continues to occur, I'm sure that the people at Flashcom are well aware of the situation.
There seems to be a huge amount of confusion over the difference between a trademark, a patent, and a copyright.
A trademark only means that you have linked your product together with a particular symbol. The company in question is claiming that their use of the freshly-cut-grass smell is theirs exclusively to link to tennis balls. It does not mean that they have a copyright on the smell of grass or that they've patented the process for creating that smell. If at this moment you decide to create a perfume that smells like freshly-cut-grass, I doubt that this trademark would prevent you from doing so. I am not a lawyer, but as far as I can tell, this trademark only applies to the specific use of the scent on tennis balls. Their acquiring the trademark means that no other company can attempt to sell tennis balls with a marketing campaign that emphasize the scent.
Other common trademarks include the name "Walkman" for Sony's small portale stereo. Even though just about everybody calls the things "walkmans," only Sony can market the product using the name. "Kleenex" and "Popsicle" are also trademarked, even though these are also commonly used by your average Joe to indicate the type of product rather than the particular brand. Having a trademark protects you against competitors who may try to name their product in order to confuse consumers in the marketplace.
What makes this so interesting is that it's apparently the first attempt to trademark a scent by linking it to a product rather than an image or a name.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be so nice if the next version of Gnuetlla gave one the ability to filter out certain trouble-making IPs.
Currently, there aren't so many good, easy-to-remember, domain names left in .com, .net, and .org. Wouldn't adding more TLDs alleviate the problem?
Not exactly.
All you're doing by creating more TLDs is moving the problem up one level. Sure, people can create toys.store to compete with toys.com, but do you really think that once all the good toys.[insert-new-TLD-here] domains have been taken anybody will really want to have a domain named toys.a-new-tld-for-me? I think not. In fact, if you create 100 new TLDs, I can still see only a small handful like .com and .store actually becoming popular. All that's happened is that the problem has been moved up one level.
Now, I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't open up *some* new TLDs simply to alleviate the pressure. Unfortunately, a real solution will have to come from somewhere else, like creating a system where the geographical location of the company plays a part in the domain name. Thus, amazon.com might become amazon.seattle.wa.us. Suddenly, there's no longer any real need guard your domain name so viciously because all the "prime" real estate in TLDs has been removed.
Yes, I know that a .us geographical already exists. I also understand that some locations may be more popular than others. Finally, this isn't a real suggestion that I expect ICANN to act on, but more of an example how the TLDs could be expanded in a real meaningful way rather than just adding more TLDs which will again differentiate between prime real estate and trash.
Thoughts?
Have you ever personally seen a terrorist? Anyone here at Slashdot ever met a real live terrorist? I doubt it. There just aren't that many of them. "Anti-terrorism" is just the cover story, folks.
You should be glad that your world is so small.
Have I ever personally met a terrorist? No.
Have I personally known and worked with somebody whose life was cut short by a terrorist? Unfortunately, yes.
I can tell you this: I would be willing to accept a certain level of government monitoring if it would bring back a young life which was needlessly cut short because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I'm also sure that if that government had not been involved in some type of monitoring that many more people might have been murdered -- yes, murdered -- as well.
I want my privacy. I want my rights. I don't want to live in a complete anarchy. Most of us are capable of understanding that in order to live in a free society where one can jump on a bus and not worry about being blown to bits by a terrorist's bomb we need to give up certain parts -- though not all -- of our privacy. It's a trade-off. What's most important to discuss is precisely where that line is drawn.
If your world is too small to have ever experienced the grief and shock that I and many others have, consider yourself lucky.
I am dismayed when my friends exclaim that the CIA will never read my email, because I am not important, nor have I done anything wrong or have something to hide.
This attitude extends much farther than that. Most people take a very liberal view of their privacy right up until somebody points out in drastic detail what can be done with the information.
I used to be the administrator of a network within a department at a university. On quite a few occasions, I would discover major security problems that were completely social in nature. For example, one professor insisted on a password that was a single digit.
I attempted to explain why this was a bad idea, but the answer was always "We don't care if other people read our e-mail. We have nothing to hide." Since the person in question was just a tenured professor and I was just the technical assistant, there was nothing I could do aside from voice concern. Disabling the users account was out of the question and would most likely have gotten me fired. At some point, I just gave up and took the easy route by never mentioning security to any of the users.
Eventually -- surprise!! -- we were broken into by a hacker who deleted some important files used by the department. I thought that this might be a wake-up call to the members of the department. It wasn't. Instead, they dealt with the matter so lightly that when I suggested contacting the police, my supervisor didn't seem in the least bit interested in talking to them. In fact, he told me that he didn't want me "wasting any more time" on the matter!
A fellow administrator at the university sent me a copy of university policy that was meant to explain to non-techies that people in charge of computers would need to devote at least 20% of their time to security issues. My boss wasn't in the least bit interested in looking at this policy.
Folks, this attitude towards system security is the same beast that causes people to not pay attention to their own privacy. Most people don't really care about their virtual security and privacy (which go hand-in-hand) because it never seems like real life. The same person who would call 911 if he saw a stranger following him down a street won't think twice about a stranger doing the same thing in cyberspace. Most people are much more scared about coming home to find their jewelry missing than they are about coming home to find that somebody has been through their personal files and left the jewelry in place. What they don't realize is that those personal files can be used to steal even more money through identity theft than the jewelry itself was ever worth and that cleaning up the mess caused by an identity thief who has had access to your personal data can take years.
To begin with, the animation and scenery is absolutely gorgeous. These folks put huge amounts of time into the detail of creating the forest in which the characters live. The scenes with the transformation of the nightwalker had me going "oooh, aaahhh" in the theater.
In addition, the plot is incredibly complex and may actually require two watchings in order to fully appreciate. The story takes place in Japan towards the end of the middle ages, as modern industry began to develop and encroach upon the forest. A young price of a hidden tribe finds himself cursed and must travel to find the source of the curse so that he can eliminate it.
What's wonderful about the film is that it paints everything in shades of gray and really makes you think about why the characters are behaving the way they do. Lady Eboshi, the leader of Iron Town may seem up front to simply hate the forest, but once you realize the altruism that motivates her, you really wonder about how she can try to survive in co-existence with it.
The American voices chosen for the parts are an all-star cast and do a wonderful job. I've been told that Neil "Sandman" Gaiman, who adapted the translation, did a really good job in making the story accessible to English-speaking audiences. Since I haven't seen the sub-titled Japanese version (called "Mononoke Hime"), I can't comment on that. I will say that both the words and the animation frequently have some subtle humor embedded into them.
(Brief plug for Gaiman: He's also written a children's book called "The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish," which I recommend to anybody who wants to read some light-hearted fun.)
http://www.icann.org/mbx/selfnomination
ASAP so that you can say what you think about the current rules for nominating At Large members. Currently, in order for a nominated member to make it onto the ballot, it appears that a nominee must get the nomination vote of 10% or more of the *registered* people in the region. Yes, that's REGISTERED people, not VOTING people.
People should visit the page and speak their mind *politely* and *intelligently* so that the comments actually get read and understood.
Around midnight the evening before the installation, he received a brief, cryptic e-mail informing him that the work order had been postponed. Never mind the fact that the e-mail gave no explanation of why the order had been cancelled with less than 8 hours notice, and that the company didn't have the courtesy to at least have a live human being call to reschedule and apologize.
After making a number of angry phone calls, he discovered that the order had been cancelled by Bell Atlantic -- the final part in the chain, and that because Flashcom could only deal with Covad, and only Covad could call Bell Atlantic, nobody could give him any concrete information about what had went wrong and how to prevent the same mistake from happening in the future. His DSL line finally got installed around late November, over 3 months after he had ordered it!
To be fair, there's probably not much that Flashcom can do about it since they also need to go through two other companies. Also, since the line's installation, it has behaved almost perfectly and with only very brief periods of down time. In fact, Flashcom even has an IRC channel where one can get updates about bad network connectivity. The one time I tried using the channel, a tech responded almost instantly.
The big bottleneck here appears to be somewhere between Bell Atlantic and Covad, where I doubt there's any impetus to improve things unless Flashcom makes complaints to a "higher authority." Since they're most certainly going to lose customers if this continues to occur, I'm sure that the people at Flashcom are well aware of the situation.
A trademark only means that you have linked your product together with a particular symbol. The company in question is claiming that their use of the freshly-cut-grass smell is theirs exclusively to link to tennis balls. It does not mean that they have a copyright on the smell of grass or that they've patented the process for creating that smell. If at this moment you decide to create a perfume that smells like freshly-cut-grass, I doubt that this trademark would prevent you from doing so. I am not a lawyer, but as far as I can tell, this trademark only applies to the specific use of the scent on tennis balls. Their acquiring the trademark means that no other company can attempt to sell tennis balls with a marketing campaign that emphasize the scent.
Other common trademarks include the name "Walkman" for Sony's small portale stereo. Even though just about everybody calls the things "walkmans," only Sony can market the product using the name. "Kleenex" and "Popsicle" are also trademarked, even though these are also commonly used by your average Joe to indicate the type of product rather than the particular brand. Having a trademark protects you against competitors who may try to name their product in order to confuse consumers in the marketplace.
What makes this so interesting is that it's apparently the first attempt to trademark a scent by linking it to a product rather than an image or a name.