The monitor port looks like it's about 8-10 pins. So someone with electronics know-how, crack that and make convertors to normal monitor plugs. You can't expect a $100 device to have a $1000 LCD monitor.:)
I assume the QNX/Software comes on the 16MB flash chips, there is no disk to nuke. This page doesn't say anything about needing to re-flash, so when you decide you're done with it, you can just yank the HD and give it to a family member to use as it was originally intended.
The page says it's 800x600x16 and provides an XF86Config file. I have my desktop set to 1600x1200, but I was curious just how big my Netscape windows are. Well giving xwininfo a spin shows them as 855x767. That is pretty close to 800x600. So, for me at least, this thing would be tolerable as a simple web browsing device.
So just buy one month's service and cancel it next week. Sometimes it's just easier to do that than bother with talking to operators like this. They know how to subscribe you, they know how to unsubscribe you, don't throw them off with too much.;)
Aren't WinChip's the same pins as Pentiums? It could take some tweaking to figure out how to re-config the motherboard for different bus speeds/multipliers, but then you could drop in any K5/K6/Pentium/Winchip/Cyrix. I've got four various K6's lying around not doing anything. I'm sure the motherboard isn't 100Mhz, but get a nice multiplier and 66 isn't so bad for a simple device like this.
I'd buy a handfull of these units if it were completely hackable. Can you buy a real computer with monitor for $99? Sure it's not a full desktop kernel-compiling powerhouse, but it's decent for a kid computer, or family members who hate computers. The ISP charge ($21.95/mo) is a bit much to me, but slap Linux on and use any old local ISP for $10 or something.
So, keep on hacking devices and put Linux on them, people!
Does the USB in Linux support Ethernet adpaters yet? The last thing someone would want to do is buy an operating system that costs more than the unit just to use it.
Actually, a PCMCIA adaptor would be better to get connected. Then you can use any ethernet, wireless, token ring, etc card.
The worst that would happen is they sell more units. Let's face it, without a hack like this, 99.99% of the Slashdot crowd will never buy one. Blame it on QNX, proprietary ISP, dialup, etc. But now, this opens up a nice niche market. Their target is obviously the ol' computer novice who doesn't know what DSL/Cable modems are, and just want to get on and email their grandchildren. This seems like a very nice product for only $99 for these sorts of people. I don't see installing Linux undercutting them that much.
Now if someone manages to remove that modem card and install an ethernet, that could start hurting them.:)
Stick with the classics, Godfather, Goodfellas, UHF, Dune, Stargate, Monty Python stuff, etc. I don't see anyone making a movie featuring Wheel Of Fish again. I know, it's sad.
This administration has, like those before it (and probably after it) only done what the public wants: lock 'em up and throw away the fucking key.
Except for that little report a few months back saying that there were several thousand high school students found having weapons, and three were prosecuted. The politicians made grand speeches to stop school violence, passed laws for scanners and the like in schools, and what happens? They take the gun away and tell the criminal to go back to study hall.
The Democrat party especially uses emotion to convince the American people to elect them. So these incidents give them some prime spots on TV. But as we have seen in New York with Mayor Giuliani, actually enforcing the laws (even petty ones) sends the message that you won't get away with crime. That, my friend, is being Tough on Crime and being successful. When our young criminals' only fear is having to go back down the street to pick up a new gun, well that sends a message just as loud and clear.
The other AC pretty well explained the Conservative position of less laws. Each law like these gun/tobacco hot buttons only removes one more freedom. I'll leave you with this, "Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again." Violence in our schools is a bad thing, but I won't let it take away my freedoms.
Nah, man. The Indians were just hippies deep down. Peace, Love, not war. They wore mocassins and beads, just hung out at their teepees smoking, just like hippies. It's not like hippies went around killing people. Er wait, maybe a few. And scalping was just their attempt to reach a hand out and say, "I like your hair, let me study how you braid it like that.";)
Ah, but there's infinite flexibility with the imperial system. You can have wrenches in 1/32 increments, cigars in 1/64 amounts. Meanwhile there is nothing with you metric folks, I mean, what if I want something 12-13/32 millimeters wide?;)
For this administration, there can never be too many laws. Just wait until Mr. Gore discovers that this beast he created is far too evil. I picture a McCain sort of moment at a town hall meeting, a mother in tears steps up to a microphone and tells the horrors her family went through because little Jimmy was on a chat room and some old guy sends them a nude picture of himself.
Then the Internet will be upgraded to the status guns and tobacco are today. Who cares if the Columbine boys broke some 20ish laws, or if the drug addict mom/uncle of the Michigan six year old would ever pay attention to laws? Politicians will get up to their podiums during this race and proclaim more laws to not be enforced. No report like this will live long when it's an election year.
If my brakes work 99.5% of the time, are they a success?
Life/Death matters are up to a different set of standards than web browsing. That's just an insane argument.
If you are trying to sell a product meant for families and YOUR website is blocked, and as a result you go out of business and declare bankruptcy, is 99.5% a success?
My proposal considers this completely. First, the blacklist is open, you can see EXACTLY if your web site is being blocked; grep comes in handy there. Second, being community-oriented, a simple email from an admin explaining how a set of moderators are mistaken for marking them as bad would be sent off. The RBL has a similar method for reconciling errors. I hope to avoid that by the meta-moderation. Chances are if ten people declare a page as racist, it is. Naturally, it all could be discussed on a mail list or something. Third, applications being linked from the main web page for the project must be open source and allow users easy configuration of what they want to block, eg porn, racism, but not art.
If you are a college student and you want your parents to see your website but they can't and they get upset with you because their filter software says its porn, is 99.5% a success?
Ditto the above answer. A simple re-config saying to allow whatever.edu/~junior. As well, the parents could look in the database and see why it is their child is listed on the blacklist.
Out of 1 million sites, 5000 will be blocked incorrectly. If your site is one of the 5000, is 99.5% a success?
Yet again, I say ditto. I'm not proposing this as a, "How to browse web pages I authorize you to see" project, but something for the community, by the community. I'd imagine it would take quite a while to build that up to one million sites. But the other idea I proposed was continually rechecking web pages. How often would be a matter depending on how many sites are in the database and how many people volunteer to help out.
I realize there's no way to catalogue the entire Internet or anything close to that. But there is a market of people that wish to use this sort of service. There are always rises in the sales of censorware programs, the success of places like Mayberry Online. Most of them are probably parents that want to sit little junior down in front of the computer and go do other things. Personally, I'd keep the computer in the family room and apply the embarrassment pressure:) while teaching them what is appropriate for society and what isn't.
So the target audience is by no means the entire planet, or anything that would force the censorship on people. It is those that wish to add a hand to automating the regulation of someone's web browsing. A project for these types of people by these people, if you will. I know most Slashdotters aren't keen to the idea, but I hang out here and I know there are a lot of bright minds that will give good criticism.
I picture mass moderation and regularly checking up on sites as a means to balance out any one person's views. If one person finds something offensive and ten find it OK, it's obvious where the "majority" stands. Perhaps only sites that have a minimum number of ratings can be in the final blacklists. As I said in another message, there would be some means of a rule system to specify just what to/what not to block, like all of x.com but not x.com/breastcancer.
I think a lot of the errors typical censorware makes is due to just searching for keywords, like the "sex" and "cum." Then you get stuck banning Latin or Swedish sites. The best way to fix this that I can think of right now is what I proposed, having actual humans interested in this review and decide suspect web sites.
As to licensing, perhaps some open license, so hangers-on would be required to reveal what sites they've added internally. I wouldn't have a problem Symantec or whoever using the list. (No doubt they would never reveal their add-ons, so probably wouldn't use it.) Legally it seems shakey ground, is loading our blacklist file, then loading a second file considered adding on to the list? There may just be nothing that can be done about that.
From the main web site a list of links to open source programs that utilize the list would be provided. In the spirit of full disclosure, allowing a closed program to perhaps transmit your Windows serial number wouldn't be right. Keeping it a mere text list would allow anyone to write software using it, MacOS, BeOS, etc. I know Netscape has an SDK, perhaps someone could use that to write an automatic plugin. I certainly don't alone have the abilities to do ports for all operating systems/browsers, but could help with Linux/squid pieces.
We all know voluntarily rating your site will never work. There is no one authority for the 'net, so laws forcing people to are basically meaningless. No doubt this would take a large group of people to do the work, but I think it has some good benefit for everyone. As another said, it could become their porn finder as opposed to blocker. So it appeals to both camps.:)
Well, the same was said for DeCSS. It only views a movie, just as this allows you to view the list. I guess the movie folks could say they own the movie. Meanwhile, I doubt Symantec will say they own all the web sites.:) The fact is while there's no loser-pays-all-fees sort of law here in the US, the big money people will continue to sue as many people they can for anything they wish.
Sure there would be many categories and the like. All of which the user programs would have easy control over. Also implement a system of rules so say, "All of the domain bigtits.com is blocked, but not the/breastcancer directory." (I don't know that domain, or if they have such a directory.) The primary point of this being as open source and up-front as possible. Perhaps hide from users exactly who moderated what, like Slashdot does, but make it easy to see such-and-such site got six porn points and two art.
If a product is overal 99.5% accurate, I would consider that a success. The best way to debate these issues is with full disclosure of the facts. It adds great credibility to your cause, and takes away some arguments from the other side. Symantec can just simply say, "Well they didn't look at our whole list, so you can't make any real judgements against us."
I hear these sort of things in sporting events on TV all the time, "And that is the first time EVER a player scored two goals on a Tuesday in February when there was a marching band playing Amazing Grace on the sidelines, and in the rain." That's just nonsense. Sure stats can sound great, but in serious issues like this, don't skimp.
If a program like this really is making mistakes on 76% of it's overall list, or all.edu's, then that is a strong argument against it. But to only survey the first 50.edu URL, that's hardly enough to make strong statements. Take an extra few hours, a day or two, and come out with a full report. The more you come up with, the more likely you will succeed.
One large arguement I see from many of you is that censor proxies have too many valid sites blocked. Well, how about taking the Open Source/distributed.net approach? I know there are some for squid. How about a system where each morning/once a week/whatever a group of moderators are sent URLs to check up on. They do so, trying to determine if it's some directory, or the whole domain that gets listed. If there is porn (a set of standards would have to be established), they report back and it's added to the blacklist. I know I would be willing to take a few minutes every once in a while to do so. You could have a whole system of checks on the web site, if someone doesn't agree with a blacklisting, it's sent to two or three moderators and if they don't agree it's removed. If someone finds a new porn page, they can submit it and it's added to the queue. If there were hundreds of moderators, like Debian does with it's packs, each individual has only a small workload.
Then every week or so the HQ web site puts out a new blacklist. We can have all kinds of easy update utils to help those not squid-knowledgable, and some folks could make a Windows application to do it for those folks as well. Heck, if the existing censorware's methods are decrypted like this one, we could write utils to encrypt it again and drop it in to their directory.
I'm not going into whether you like blacklists or not, so let's keep these to ways of doing it correctly, since these other prorgams don't seem to do it very well. Using an open source list, and appropriate means of rectifying errors, we can do it properly.
The accusation is in the wording. As another one put it, this is much the same as asking, "Have you stopped beating your wife?" I'm not going to parse the literal meaning of each word a la President Clinton or Senator McCain (for those in the US). Whether it's calling someone a wife-beater or claiming they are collecting emails/personal information, you had better have some evidence to back it up.
But if you do wish to take it all literally, anyone could say the same about openssh.com, openbsd.org, slashdot.org, linux.com, you, me, etc. I will be against doing anything like this to anyone (even Microsoft) without just reason. Do not pollute our community like this.
Hehe, thank you, but people will see it under the original article. It's at Score 4 now, and so long, people that are interested in that will notice it.;) There is no need to post this sort of thing on another forum.
Slashdot Mirror
The monitor port looks like it's about 8-10 pins. So someone with electronics know-how, crack that and make convertors to normal monitor plugs. You can't expect a $100 device to have a $1000 LCD monitor. :)
I assume the QNX/Software comes on the 16MB flash chips, there is no disk to nuke. This page doesn't say anything about needing to re-flash, so when you decide you're done with it, you can just yank the HD and give it to a family member to use as it was originally intended.
The page says it's 800x600x16 and provides an XF86Config file. I have my desktop set to 1600x1200, but I was curious just how big my Netscape windows are. Well giving xwininfo a spin shows them as 855x767. That is pretty close to 800x600. So, for me at least, this thing would be tolerable as a simple web browsing device.
So just buy one month's service and cancel it next week. Sometimes it's just easier to do that than bother with talking to operators like this. They know how to subscribe you, they know how to unsubscribe you, don't throw them off with too much. ;)
Aren't WinChip's the same pins as Pentiums? It could take some tweaking to figure out how to re-config the motherboard for different bus speeds/multipliers, but then you could drop in any K5/K6/Pentium/Winchip/Cyrix. I've got four various K6's lying around not doing anything. I'm sure the motherboard isn't 100Mhz, but get a nice multiplier and 66 isn't so bad for a simple device like this.
I'd buy a handfull of these units if it were completely hackable. Can you buy a real computer with monitor for $99? Sure it's not a full desktop kernel-compiling powerhouse, but it's decent for a kid computer, or family members who hate computers. The ISP charge ($21.95/mo) is a bit much to me, but slap Linux on and use any old local ISP for $10 or something.
So, keep on hacking devices and put Linux on them, people!
Does the USB in Linux support Ethernet adpaters yet? The last thing someone would want to do is buy an operating system that costs more than the unit just to use it.
Actually, a PCMCIA adaptor would be better to get connected. Then you can use any ethernet, wireless, token ring, etc card.
Do 2.5" drives use the same IDE connector as normal ones? I'd hate to have to buy a laptop just to get the installation on there. ;)
The worst that would happen is they sell more units. Let's face it, without a hack like this, 99.99% of the Slashdot crowd will never buy one. Blame it on QNX, proprietary ISP, dialup, etc. But now, this opens up a nice niche market. Their target is obviously the ol' computer novice who doesn't know what DSL/Cable modems are, and just want to get on and email their grandchildren. This seems like a very nice product for only $99 for these sorts of people. I don't see installing Linux undercutting them that much.
:)
Now if someone manages to remove that modem card and install an ethernet, that could start hurting them.
Stick with the classics, Godfather, Goodfellas, UHF, Dune, Stargate, Monty Python stuff, etc. I don't see anyone making a movie featuring Wheel Of Fish again. I know, it's sad.
This administration has, like those before it (and probably after it) only done what the public wants: lock 'em up and throw away the fucking key.
Except for that little report a few months back saying that there were several thousand high school students found having weapons, and three were prosecuted. The politicians made grand speeches to stop school violence, passed laws for scanners and the like in schools, and what happens? They take the gun away and tell the criminal to go back to study hall.
The Democrat party especially uses emotion to convince the American people to elect them. So these incidents give them some prime spots on TV. But as we have seen in New York with Mayor Giuliani, actually enforcing the laws (even petty ones) sends the message that you won't get away with crime. That, my friend, is being Tough on Crime and being successful. When our young criminals' only fear is having to go back down the street to pick up a new gun, well that sends a message just as loud and clear.
The other AC pretty well explained the Conservative position of less laws. Each law like these gun/tobacco hot buttons only removes one more freedom. I'll leave you with this, "Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again." Violence in our schools is a bad thing, but I won't let it take away my freedoms.
Nah, man. The Indians were just hippies deep down. Peace, Love, not war. They wore mocassins and beads, just hung out at their teepees smoking, just like hippies. It's not like hippies went around killing people. Er wait, maybe a few. And scalping was just their attempt to reach a hand out and say, "I like your hair, let me study how you braid it like that." ;)
Ah, but there's infinite flexibility with the imperial system. You can have wrenches in 1/32 increments, cigars in 1/64 amounts. Meanwhile there is nothing with you metric folks, I mean, what if I want something 12-13/32 millimeters wide? ;)
For this administration, there can never be too many laws. Just wait until Mr. Gore discovers that this beast he created is far too evil. I picture a McCain sort of moment at a town hall meeting, a mother in tears steps up to a microphone and tells the horrors her family went through because little Jimmy was on a chat room and some old guy sends them a nude picture of himself.
Then the Internet will be upgraded to the status guns and tobacco are today. Who cares if the Columbine boys broke some 20ish laws, or if the drug addict mom/uncle of the Michigan six year old would ever pay attention to laws? Politicians will get up to their podiums during this race and proclaim more laws to not be enforced. No report like this will live long when it's an election year.
Oh, forgot this was a different thread. My proposal I talked about there is discussed in the thread with subject "How about doing it right then??"
If my brakes work 99.5% of the time, are they a success?
Life/Death matters are up to a different set of standards than web browsing. That's just an insane argument.
If you are trying to sell a product meant for families and YOUR website is blocked, and as a result you go out of business and declare bankruptcy, is 99.5% a success?
My proposal considers this completely. First, the blacklist is open, you can see EXACTLY if your web site is being blocked; grep comes in handy there. Second, being community-oriented, a simple email from an admin explaining how a set of moderators are mistaken for marking them as bad would be sent off. The RBL has a similar method for reconciling errors. I hope to avoid that by the meta-moderation. Chances are if ten people declare a page as racist, it is. Naturally, it all could be discussed on a mail list or something. Third, applications being linked from the main web page for the project must be open source and allow users easy configuration of what they want to block, eg porn, racism, but not art.
If you are a college student and you want your parents to see your website but they can't and they get upset with you because their filter software says its porn, is 99.5% a success?
Ditto the above answer. A simple re-config saying to allow whatever.edu/~junior. As well, the parents could look in the database and see why it is their child is listed on the blacklist.
Out of 1 million sites, 5000 will be blocked incorrectly. If your site is one of the 5000, is 99.5% a success?
Yet again, I say ditto. I'm not proposing this as a, "How to browse web pages I authorize you to see" project, but something for the community, by the community. I'd imagine it would take quite a while to build that up to one million sites. But the other idea I proposed was continually rechecking web pages. How often would be a matter depending on how many sites are in the database and how many people volunteer to help out.
Hmm, a prior art database. Why I could make one of those and patent it.
First, thank you and others for your comments.
:) while teaching them what is appropriate for society and what isn't.
:)
I realize there's no way to catalogue the entire Internet or anything close to that. But there is a market of people that wish to use this sort of service. There are always rises in the sales of censorware programs, the success of places like Mayberry Online. Most of them are probably parents that want to sit little junior down in front of the computer and go do other things. Personally, I'd keep the computer in the family room and apply the embarrassment pressure
So the target audience is by no means the entire planet, or anything that would force the censorship on people. It is those that wish to add a hand to automating the regulation of someone's web browsing. A project for these types of people by these people, if you will. I know most Slashdotters aren't keen to the idea, but I hang out here and I know there are a lot of bright minds that will give good criticism.
I picture mass moderation and regularly checking up on sites as a means to balance out any one person's views. If one person finds something offensive and ten find it OK, it's obvious where the "majority" stands. Perhaps only sites that have a minimum number of ratings can be in the final blacklists. As I said in another message, there would be some means of a rule system to specify just what to/what not to block, like all of x.com but not x.com/breastcancer.
I think a lot of the errors typical censorware makes is due to just searching for keywords, like the "sex" and "cum." Then you get stuck banning Latin or Swedish sites. The best way to fix this that I can think of right now is what I proposed, having actual humans interested in this review and decide suspect web sites.
As to licensing, perhaps some open license, so hangers-on would be required to reveal what sites they've added internally. I wouldn't have a problem Symantec or whoever using the list. (No doubt they would never reveal their add-ons, so probably wouldn't use it.) Legally it seems shakey ground, is loading our blacklist file, then loading a second file considered adding on to the list? There may just be nothing that can be done about that.
From the main web site a list of links to open source programs that utilize the list would be provided. In the spirit of full disclosure, allowing a closed program to perhaps transmit your Windows serial number wouldn't be right. Keeping it a mere text list would allow anyone to write software using it, MacOS, BeOS, etc. I know Netscape has an SDK, perhaps someone could use that to write an automatic plugin. I certainly don't alone have the abilities to do ports for all operating systems/browsers, but could help with Linux/squid pieces.
We all know voluntarily rating your site will never work. There is no one authority for the 'net, so laws forcing people to are basically meaningless. No doubt this would take a large group of people to do the work, but I think it has some good benefit for everyone. As another said, it could become their porn finder as opposed to blocker. So it appeals to both camps.
Well, the same was said for DeCSS. It only views a movie, just as this allows you to view the list. I guess the movie folks could say they own the movie. Meanwhile, I doubt Symantec will say they own all the web sites. :) The fact is while there's no loser-pays-all-fees sort of law here in the US, the big money people will continue to sue as many people they can for anything they wish.
Sure there would be many categories and the like. All of which the user programs would have easy control over. Also implement a system of rules so say, "All of the domain bigtits.com is blocked, but not the /breastcancer directory." (I don't know that domain, or if they have such a directory.) The primary point of this being as open source and up-front as possible. Perhaps hide from users exactly who moderated what, like Slashdot does, but make it easy to see such-and-such site got six porn points and two art.
If a product is overal 99.5% accurate, I would consider that a success. The best way to debate these issues is with full disclosure of the facts. It adds great credibility to your cause, and takes away some arguments from the other side. Symantec can just simply say, "Well they didn't look at our whole list, so you can't make any real judgements against us."
.edu's, then that is a strong argument against it. But to only survey the first 50 .edu URL, that's hardly enough to make strong statements. Take an extra few hours, a day or two, and come out with a full report. The more you come up with, the more likely you will succeed.
I hear these sort of things in sporting events on TV all the time, "And that is the first time EVER a player scored two goals on a Tuesday in February when there was a marching band playing Amazing Grace on the sidelines, and in the rain." That's just nonsense. Sure stats can sound great, but in serious issues like this, don't skimp.
If a program like this really is making mistakes on 76% of it's overall list, or all
One large arguement I see from many of you is that censor proxies have too many valid sites blocked. Well, how about taking the Open Source/distributed.net approach? I know there are some for squid. How about a system where each morning/once a week/whatever a group of moderators are sent URLs to check up on. They do so, trying to determine if it's some directory, or the whole domain that gets listed. If there is porn (a set of standards would have to be established), they report back and it's added to the blacklist. I know I would be willing to take a few minutes every once in a while to do so. You could have a whole system of checks on the web site, if someone doesn't agree with a blacklisting, it's sent to two or three moderators and if they don't agree it's removed. If someone finds a new porn page, they can submit it and it's added to the queue. If there were hundreds of moderators, like Debian does with it's packs, each individual has only a small workload.
Then every week or so the HQ web site puts out a new blacklist. We can have all kinds of easy update utils to help those not squid-knowledgable, and some folks could make a Windows application to do it for those folks as well. Heck, if the existing censorware's methods are decrypted like this one, we could write utils to encrypt it again and drop it in to their directory.
I'm not going into whether you like blacklists or not, so let's keep these to ways of doing it correctly, since these other prorgams don't seem to do it very well. Using an open source list, and appropriate means of rectifying errors, we can do it properly.
The accusation is in the wording. As another one put it, this is much the same as asking, "Have you stopped beating your wife?" I'm not going to parse the literal meaning of each word a la President Clinton or Senator McCain (for those in the US). Whether it's calling someone a wife-beater or claiming they are collecting emails/personal information, you had better have some evidence to back it up.
But if you do wish to take it all literally, anyone could say the same about openssh.com, openbsd.org, slashdot.org, linux.com, you, me, etc. I will be against doing anything like this to anyone (even Microsoft) without just reason. Do not pollute our community like this.
Hehe, thank you, but people will see it under the original article. It's at Score 4 now, and so long, people that are interested in that will notice it. ;) There is no need to post this sort of thing on another forum.
Heh, boy did I read it. You can click the User Info link there to see other comments I've submitted. Look at the one starting "A Proper Analysis..."
Even if they offered, openssh.org has the right to refuse it. That's not reason enough to put out a letter like this condemning the domain owner.