[...] suing unemployed people, disabled people, housewives, single mothers, home healthcare aids, all kinds of people who have no resources whatsoever to withstand these litigations
So, the unemployed and the "home healthcare aids" are allowed to infringe on copyright? How about crossing the street on red signal? Perhaps, they can also drive with a suspended license?
There are problems with our legal system being too expensive, but that's true in all cases, not just RIAA's...
How did the quoted crap even make it to the front page?
somewhere along the way, money and greed removed any politeness between lowly customer and huge corporation.
It is not "money and greed" in this case, but, rather, an explosion of hijacked PCs sending spam. ISPs are right blocking SMTP port (other than to their own server) by default, although I agree, that they should be making exceptions for those, who explicitly ask for it enabled.
That said, this is a completely different subject from the one, with which I started the thread...
All an end to network neutrality will do is raise the entrance bar to the online-gaming market.
I'm confused... Do we have net-neutrality now? Why then can't anyone connect to my port 80, and why can't I connect to port 25 of anyone other than my ISP's mail server?
There is nothing in the current laws, that requires ISPs to carry any particular type of traffic, yet the only stuff some of them have come around disabling is the outgoing port 25 (for good reasons), and the incoming ports 80 and 443 (for bad reasons)...
Few metaphors are as worn-out and abused as the "unleash" one. Please, leave it to the marketoids, so that we can continue to spot them the same way, we spot head-hunters by the "touch base" metaphor.
I hope, you don't mind my ascribing the earlier Anonymous Cowards' quotes to you — you seem to agree with their authors' sentiment.
So, launching thousands of explosive devices into residential areas in Southern Lebanon in the hope of frightening Lebanese civilians to give up purported Hezbollah fighters was not terrorism on the part of the Israeli state?
No, it is not. Unless you can prove, that Israel deliberately targeted civilians. Can you? I don't think so. In fact some evidence points to just the opposite — the number of Lebanese killed is minuscule compared to Israel's capabilities for death and destruction. Israel's army performed much better, than even NATO did, when they were bombing Serbia to stop Milosevic's thugs.
Generally, when intent is involved in a definition of an act, making an impassionate judgment is very difficult without the perpetrators' taking responsibility and/or stating their goals. Hezbollah, for example, makes it easy to judge its "purported" (LOL!) fighters as terrorists, because it is unabashed about its deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians:
We are going to make Israel not safe for Israelis. There will be no place they are safe," Safiadeen told a conference that included the Tehran-based representative of the Palestinian group Hamas and the ambassadors from Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian Authority. We will expand attacks," he said. "The people who came to Israel, (they) moved there to live, not to die. If we continue to attack, they will leave.
Whether or not you agree with their goal, their method is terrorism — by definition.
So "disappearing" hundreds of foreign civilians at home and abroad, keeping them incommunicado from family and friends, and resorting to abuse and torture to "make them talk", in violation of international law, is not terrorism on the part of the American state?
Of course not. Not everything you disapprove of is automatically "terrorism". However reprehensible it may be, these disappearings were not terrorism simply because the victims were not targeted as civilians. Even you state, that they were picked (legally or not) to extract information ("make them talk") — which means, their kidnappers believed (mistakingly or not) them to be connected to our enemies and thus automatically non-civilians...
It seems you have a warped definition of "terrorism such that it includes others but excludes, by definition, you and your allies.
My definition is self-consistent and taken directly from a dictionary. Yours (whatever it is — you never stated it) seems simply a bubble of passionate appeal — you are revolted by the gruesome effects of Acts of War and "terrorism" is just the worst label you can slap on it...
I think too many people here missed the "haha" at the start of my comment...
The justification of the means, which your preceded with "HAHA", is seriously used by a great number of people, including/. subscribers with mod-points...
Too many people have very vague idea of what "terrorism" means. Countless millions, for example, call G.W. Bush "the world #1 terrorist", for example — even though they can not name a single Act of Terror, that Bush has committed or ordered to have committed.
For another example, a different (although largely intersecting with the first) set of countless millions consider Israel a "terrorist state" — being likewise unable to name a single Act of Terror committed by the country in the last 20 years (or ever) does not stop them. The gruesome results of the unfortunate Acts of War are appealing to emotions directly bypassing any reason...
Haha, this confirms that the difference between a Freedom Fighter and a Terrorist resides only on who gets to write the history books afterwards.
Err, no. Terrorism has a fairly narrow definition, and most of the things, which are labeled "terrorism" really aren't. From WordNet
terrorism, act of terrorism, terrorist act -- (the calculated use of violence (or threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear)
Thus unleashing neither an insecure OS, nor the actual viruses taking advantage of that OS (which is done either for fame or monetary gain) qualifies.
But just what is illegal about vandalising something like Wikipedia, where all the text is freely editable as per the GNU FDL?
The license covers only what can and can not be done with the information outside of Wikipedia itself. And other sites suffering from web-form abuse may have totally different licensing/rule of conduct too — this is irrelevant.
As to "just what is illegal" — IANAL, but the vandal's intent may have something to do with it.
Ah, you were joking... right?
No, I was not. Vandalism is a very serious threat to Wikipedia — according to constant trickle of reports and articles (including those on/.), many people — including valuable would-be contributors — discount Wikipedia because of the vandalism.
For example, an expert on marsupials may decide to add something to an article on, say, wombats on a nice afternoon. Finding a comment like this (I've seen worse, actually) may put him/her off for good...
Similarly, the problem prevents the pages from being used in schools. If you think, the above vandalism on "Wombat" is benign, consider a history teacher discussing US Presidents and trying to use Wikipedia, when the most recent edition of "George H. W. Bush" is a work of vandal.
And I mean, web-forms vandalism. From spammers to Wikipedia vandals. The reaction is always "clean up and forget". Or, when a particular page is too frequent a target — protect it to registered users only.
Not enough, IMO. The vandals should by sought out and prosecuted — {RI|MP}AA style — making a few high-profile prosecutions against (semi-)randomly picked abusers to "drive it home" to others, that one's being far away does not make them immune.
As new versions of spam-filters get upgraded to detect text inside graphics and analyze it along with other text for spamminess, the spammers will, no doubt, start using "captchas" to make the detection harder.
Research on the detection will then improve (much of it -- in Open Source), allowing the spammers to defeat the captchas currently used on web-pages...
Information wants to be free, but there is something about keeping your designs secret from the enemy.
Actually, quite the opposite — Republicans' loss of Congress was reliably predicted for weeks. Rummsfeld's stepping down a month ago would've boosted Republicans (if only a little). That could've been called a "cowardly political move". The administration's waiting for after-Election Day is, actually, a remarkable show of integrity.
My server uses fairly sophisticated set of anti-spam defenses and most of the crap gets rejected. But the hi-jacked IP addresses keep coming back.
There is ought to be a way to notify their abuse-departments quickly and automatically (better than SpamCop).
Perhaps, by sending syslog messages their way? They will then be able to capture a bit of outgoing SMTP-traffic of the accused IP, analyze it (using a Bayesian-based method, for example), and block the SMTP-traffic, if the analysis confirms the complaint.
A blocked user will be able to turn the outgoing SMTP access back on by simply visiting a web-page and entering a text matching a picture and their ISP password — something, a bot can not do. The page will also offer them links to anti-virus and spyware-removal software and strong verbiage about running their PCs responsibly, or face more serious disconnects.
This will allow very swift (within minutes) shutdown of SMTP access for hijacked PCs, without noticably hurting the victims of "false positives" — and without the wholesale disabling of outgoing SMTP-traffic.
Lets be clear, no market, including the labour market, suffers a "shortfall".
Wrong. Wrong and not at all "insigtful". What you are referring to, is the market's ability to correct such problems quickly and automatically: a shortfall causes the prices (salaries) to rise, which
increases supply
switches resources (workers) from other areas, less paying.
The 2. helps determine (automatically), which areas get the available supplies (of "talent"), but there is still a shortfall, until 1. kicks in (a few-years process)...
I welcome such a shortfall.
I — being in this case a supplier like yourself — welcome it too. I hate it in just about any other area, though...
If that's true, then shouldn't it be rather easy to write a plugin from scratch?
It is true. Open a PDF "page" in your firefox (with the plugin), and use ps to see an instance of acroread...
Plugin and acroread communicate via a local domain socket (/tmp/a*). While it is possible to hack a "clean-room" implementation, the right thing to do is to get Adobe to release the official source. They don't have any "intellectual property" in the plugin — they should release its source for the benefit of all (Adobe included).
A state like Oregon, which votes entirely by mail (and has no polling stations), may adopt Internet voting soon too. Other states consider the following issues to be more important:
Ensuring privacy and freedom of choice
polling station offers some protection against coercement.
Maintaining the "civic ritual" of voting together
Ultimately, voting procedures come down to a State. And that's a good thing...
Anyway, I'm rambling, but it just seems very inefficient and error prone to roll out all these physical voting machines.
Consider, how much easier it is for a would-be hacker(s) to hijack a few central (Internet-exposed) servers, than it would be for the same criminal(s) to hack a meaningful number of voting machines or stuff a meaningful number of ballot-boxes...
Especially — the Acrobat-plugin. You may not know this, but the plugin does little work other than spawning off an instance of acroread (a separate process). This means, they can keep their proprietary secrets intact, and open the source code of the plugin itself.
This would allow various BSDs, for example, which can all run Linux executables, to have the plugin in their natively-compiled browsers. Same goes for 64-bit browsers on Linux (64-bit plugin can spawn off the 32-bit executable). Even on Linux, where native plugins are supplied by Adobe, it would allow bolder changes in the browser/plugin APIs (changes that may break the ABI).
For example, Real has gone "all the way" and open-sourced their entire player (except for a few codecs). This allowed to fish out their plugin code, build it natively and use it with Real's own Linux executables (and full set of codecs), wherever that can run (such as FreeBSD/amd64).
The whole FA is about nuclear bomb know-how — documents, which Saddam was supposed to destroy many years ago, but which were captured by Americans in 2003.
Turned out, he had no working bombs. But he was supposed — under the 1992 cease-fire deal — to get rid of the KNOW HOW (as in destroy the documents) as well...
Linux, BSD, Solaris... Whichever is your own poison.
Sure, there is "learning curve", but it is no steeper, than with Windows or anything else. All they are using is web-browser and e-mail (likely — through the browser), so they would not even notice...
Of course, this is not going to remove all threats, but it will severely diminish them.
Slashdot Mirror
So, the unemployed and the "home healthcare aids" are allowed to infringe on copyright? How about crossing the street on red signal? Perhaps, they can also drive with a suspended license?
There are problems with our legal system being too expensive, but that's true in all cases, not just RIAA's...
How did the quoted crap even make it to the front page?
You forgot to answer my question:
Please, try again...
I already connect at much lower speed than Google. Probably, it is because I pay a lot less for my connection...
It is not "money and greed" in this case, but, rather, an explosion of hijacked PCs sending spam. ISPs are right blocking SMTP port (other than to their own server) by default, although I agree, that they should be making exceptions for those, who explicitly ask for it enabled.
That said, this is a completely different subject from the one, with which I started the thread...
Why, then, can't anyone connect to my port 80, and why can't I connect to anyone's port 25 — except my own ISP's mail-server?
I'm confused... Do we have net-neutrality now? Why then can't anyone connect to my port 80, and why can't I connect to port 25 of anyone other than my ISP's mail server?
There is nothing in the current laws, that requires ISPs to carry any particular type of traffic, yet the only stuff some of them have come around disabling is the outgoing port 25 (for good reasons), and the incoming ports 80 and 443 (for bad reasons)...
Sorry, did not mean to offend at all.
Dear SlashDot!
Few metaphors are as worn-out and abused as the "unleash" one. Please, leave it to the marketoids, so that we can continue to spot them the same way, we spot head-hunters by the "touch base" metaphor.
Thank you very much! Sincerely,
The Audience
I hope, you don't mind my ascribing the earlier Anonymous Cowards' quotes to you — you seem to agree with their authors' sentiment.
No, it is not. Unless you can prove, that Israel deliberately targeted civilians. Can you? I don't think so. In fact some evidence points to just the opposite — the number of Lebanese killed is minuscule compared to Israel's capabilities for death and destruction. Israel's army performed much better, than even NATO did, when they were bombing Serbia to stop Milosevic's thugs.
Generally, when intent is involved in a definition of an act, making an impassionate judgment is very difficult without the perpetrators' taking responsibility and/or stating their goals. Hezbollah, for example, makes it easy to judge its "purported" (LOL!) fighters as terrorists, because it is unabashed about its deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians:
Whether or not you agree with their goal, their method is terrorism — by definition.
Of course not. Not everything you disapprove of is automatically "terrorism". However reprehensible it may be, these disappearings were not terrorism simply because the victims were not targeted as civilians. Even you state, that they were picked (legally or not) to extract information ("make them talk") — which means, their kidnappers believed (mistakingly or not) them to be connected to our enemies and thus automatically non-civilians...
My definition is self-consistent and taken directly from a dictionary. Yours (whatever it is — you never stated it) seems simply a bubble of passionate appeal — you are revolted by the gruesome effects of Acts of War and "terrorism" is just the worst label you can slap on it...
The justification of the means, which your preceded with "HAHA", is seriously used by a great number of people, including /. subscribers with mod-points...
Too many people have very vague idea of what "terrorism" means. Countless millions, for example, call G.W. Bush "the world #1 terrorist", for example — even though they can not name a single Act of Terror, that Bush has committed or ordered to have committed.
For another example, a different (although largely intersecting with the first) set of countless millions consider Israel a "terrorist state" — being likewise unable to name a single Act of Terror committed by the country in the last 20 years (or ever) does not stop them. The gruesome results of the unfortunate Acts of War are appealing to emotions directly bypassing any reason...
Err, no. Terrorism has a fairly narrow definition, and most of the things, which are labeled "terrorism" really aren't. From WordNet
Thus unleashing neither an insecure OS, nor the actual viruses taking advantage of that OS (which is done either for fame or monetary gain) qualifies.
The license covers only what can and can not be done with the information outside of Wikipedia itself. And other sites suffering from web-form abuse may have totally different licensing/rule of conduct too — this is irrelevant.
As to "just what is illegal" — IANAL, but the vandal's intent may have something to do with it.
No, I was not. Vandalism is a very serious threat to Wikipedia — according to constant trickle of reports and articles (including those on /.), many people — including valuable would-be contributors — discount Wikipedia because of the vandalism.
For example, an expert on marsupials may decide to add something to an article on, say, wombats on a nice afternoon. Finding a comment like this (I've seen worse, actually) may put him/her off for good...
Similarly, the problem prevents the pages from being used in schools. If you think, the above vandalism on "Wombat" is benign, consider a history teacher discussing US Presidents and trying to use Wikipedia, when the most recent edition of "George H. W. Bush" is a work of vandal.
And I mean, web-forms vandalism. From spammers to Wikipedia vandals. The reaction is always "clean up and forget". Or, when a particular page is too frequent a target — protect it to registered users only.
Not enough, IMO. The vandals should by sought out and prosecuted — {RI|MP}AA style — making a few high-profile prosecutions against (semi-)randomly picked abusers to "drive it home" to others, that one's being far away does not make them immune.
As new versions of spam-filters get upgraded to detect text inside graphics and analyze it along with other text for spamminess, the spammers will, no doubt, start using "captchas" to make the detection harder.
Research on the detection will then improve (much of it -- in Open Source), allowing the spammers to defeat the captchas currently used on web-pages...
Information wants to be free, but there is something about keeping your designs secret from the enemy.
Once the control is transfered to a UN agency by the world-friendly new Congress, proliferation of broadband will immediately sky-rocket in the US.
As Borat would say: NOT!
Same story... On the same page?
Actually, quite the opposite — Republicans' loss of Congress was reliably predicted for weeks. Rummsfeld's stepping down a month ago would've boosted Republicans (if only a little). That could've been called a "cowardly political move". The administration's waiting for after-Election Day is, actually, a remarkable show of integrity.
My server uses fairly sophisticated set of anti-spam defenses and most of the crap gets rejected. But the hi-jacked IP addresses keep coming back.
There is ought to be a way to notify their abuse-departments quickly and automatically (better than SpamCop).
Perhaps, by sending syslog messages their way? They will then be able to capture a bit of outgoing SMTP-traffic of the accused IP, analyze it (using a Bayesian-based method, for example), and block the SMTP-traffic, if the analysis confirms the complaint.
A blocked user will be able to turn the outgoing SMTP access back on by simply visiting a web-page and entering a text matching a picture and their ISP password — something, a bot can not do. The page will also offer them links to anti-virus and spyware-removal software and strong verbiage about running their PCs responsibly, or face more serious disconnects.
This will allow very swift (within minutes) shutdown of SMTP access for hijacked PCs, without noticably hurting the victims of "false positives" — and without the wholesale disabling of outgoing SMTP-traffic.
Wrong. Wrong and not at all "insigtful". What you are referring to, is the market's ability to correct such problems quickly and automatically: a shortfall causes the prices (salaries) to rise, which
The 2. helps determine (automatically), which areas get the available supplies (of "talent"), but there is still a shortfall, until 1. kicks in (a few-years process)...
I — being in this case a supplier like yourself — welcome it too. I hate it in just about any other area, though...
It is true. Open a PDF "page" in your firefox (with the plugin), and use ps to see an instance of acroread...
Plugin and acroread communicate via a local domain socket (/tmp/a*). While it is possible to hack a "clean-room" implementation, the right thing to do is to get Adobe to release the official source. They don't have any "intellectual property" in the plugin — they should release its source for the benefit of all (Adobe included).
A state like Oregon, which votes entirely by mail (and has no polling stations), may adopt Internet voting soon too. Other states consider the following issues to be more important:
Ensuring privacy and freedom of choice polling station offers some protection against coercement. Maintaining the "civic ritual" of voting togetherUltimately, voting procedures come down to a State. And that's a good thing...
Consider, how much easier it is for a would-be hacker(s) to hijack a few central (Internet-exposed) servers, than it would be for the same criminal(s) to hack a meaningful number of voting machines or stuff a meaningful number of ballot-boxes...
Especially — the Acrobat-plugin. You may not know this, but the plugin does little work other than spawning off an instance of acroread (a separate process). This means, they can keep their proprietary secrets intact, and open the source code of the plugin itself.
This would allow various BSDs, for example, which can all run Linux executables, to have the plugin in their natively-compiled browsers. Same goes for 64-bit browsers on Linux (64-bit plugin can spawn off the 32-bit executable). Even on Linux, where native plugins are supplied by Adobe, it would allow bolder changes in the browser/plugin APIs (changes that may break the ABI).
For example, Real has gone "all the way" and open-sourced their entire player (except for a few codecs). This allowed to fish out their plugin code, build it natively and use it with Real's own Linux executables (and full set of codecs), wherever that can run (such as FreeBSD/amd64).
The whole FA is about nuclear bomb know-how — documents, which Saddam was supposed to destroy many years ago, but which were captured by Americans in 2003.
Turned out, he had no working bombs. But he was supposed — under the 1992 cease-fire deal — to get rid of the KNOW HOW (as in destroy the documents) as well...
Linux, BSD, Solaris... Whichever is your own poison.
Sure, there is "learning curve", but it is no steeper, than with Windows or anything else. All they are using is web-browser and e-mail (likely — through the browser), so they would not even notice...
Of course, this is not going to remove all threats, but it will severely diminish them.
And you'll be able to help them remotely...