Similarly, a gun is fired using a set of simple, technical, legal steps.
No. Gun laws, however restrictive they may be in the United States, are generally sane compared to the DMCA!
I can purchase a gun; say, a Glock 19. I can purchase ammunition to fire from that gun, say, Winchester 115 grain 9mm Luger JHPs. The thing is, I can also make my own ammunition for that gun. I can buy the raw materials and load my own cartridges and create my own ~115 grain 9mm JHP bullets. And if I happen to do that, Winchester (or Federal, or anyone else who sells 9mm JHP cartridges) can't do a damned thing about it. Because there's nothing special or innovative about putting X amount of Y ingredient into Z container, and the Courts have recognized this.
(Re)loading is a common activity here in the US-and-A, and although they do stand to lose some money, none of the well-known ammunition manufacturers would dare challenge the right of the individual gun owner to load his own. Most gun owners are going to buy new manufactured ammo. Those of us who dare load our own are of no consequence to the ammo pushers, just as those of us who block ads are of no consequence to the "Firefox lets people block my ads" camp.
The DMCA is an entirely different beast, especially in cases like this. Here, it's as if BATF is raiding your home and saying "sorry, you can't throw away those bullets you made, even though you crafted them legally... They might be defective!" I can't delete files from my own PC? The fuck I can't, go to hell. If your method of "protecting" your assets is to determine whether or not I have a cookie set in my browser, you need to update your business model past 1999.
Ladies and gentlemen, wake up. Have you read a news article today that referred to you as a "consumer," instead of as a "person," or an "individual," or a goddamn "human being?" Companies are continuing to attempt to limit your ability to use your own personal computer. No matter what you want to use it for. "Intellectual property" is a parasite that's going to fuck all of us but the patent trolls. And when that day comes, I hope most of us own guns and know how to load our own cartridges...
Re:Fox News Reporter == Journalist?
on
Fox Hacks Fark
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· Score: 1
Darrell was an on-camera reporter and occasional anchor for WMC-TV here in Memphis before he went to the Fox station. The way our local market plays out, WMC-TV (NBC affiliate) and WREG-TV (CBS affiliate) own most of the news share. Once someone from WMC or WREG jumps to a different station in the market, they could be _the_ anchor and nobody would know it. WHBQ's most famous anchor of late is Ron Meroney, a morning staple who was extradited to Maryland last year on charges that he had sex with a child decades ago.
I keep up with local media yet I had no clue that WHBQ had launched their own news website independent of myfoxmemphis.com, much less that Darrell Phillips was running it. If the GP is local, I can't fault them for calling Darrell an anchor.
Or as few times as it takes me to notice them. Anytime a new ad server is hanging me up, it winds up in my local named.conf. I've found that running an instance of named is a very efficient method of blackholing ad servers. It's also less hassle than trying to keep up with a hosts file or browser plugins on multiple machines. Plus, instead of playing whack-a-mole with the continuing onslaught of new subdomains (2o7.net is bad about this), you can just "disappear" an entire domain forever.
Google Analytics/Urchin has earned a spot in my dead zone file - for that damned.js they so love to serve up - along with countless others. And yes, it speeds browsing up to have that junk not load.
I'm not familiar with InfoUSA, but from my retail days I have nightmares about Dun 'n Brad; they would call us as frequently as once a week trying to confirm various bits of information that we'd just confirmed the week prior. Most of the time I was suspicious that it was competitors "pretexting" (if only that term had existed ten years ago, thanks HP) to get the info, and most of the time I would give answers that were as ambiguous as possible, if not downright bullshit. Assuming the real D&B were ever calling, who knows what information they wound up with, but it probably wasn't accurate. One thing that D&B doesn't take into account is that whoever answers the phone/postcard/survey/etc. is quite likely just a grunt and has no incentive to be straight-up. To be quite honest if I were still managing the store today and I got a call from "Google," I'd probably respond with an equal volume of crap, depending upon my mood on that particular day.
However, it's worth pointing out that we got calls from D&B because we had been around long enough and did enough volume to be on D&B's radar. We were a large but privately owned packing and shipping outlet - think Mailboxes Etc. without the franchise - in a major city, and we had been in business for years. I co-owned a deli for several years after that, and we never heard a peep from D&B or any of the other "corporate who's who" people. I'm willing to bet that there are a whole hell of a lot of businesses out there that nobody but the local taxing authority knows or cares about. Can you get a list from the state? Sure, if you're willing to put up with delays and inaccuracies. I was a 1/3 partner in an Arizona LLC a couple of years ago and it took almost a year after we filed and became legit before we showed up on the state Commerce Department's website of registered business names.
My understanding of Google's BRR program is that they intend to bypass all the bureaucracy of state governments and licensing boards, and get the information straight from the people. I think it's going to work to an extent. I'm just worried that they're going to perturb a lot of people in the process.
Yep. As well as switchboard.com, and kevdb.infospace.com, etc. In fact, there's a nasty rumor going around that a few times a year, while you're at work and unable to catch them in the act, someone will toss a yellow bag into your yard, and if you open that yellow bag, there's a book full of phone numbers inside. I know it's passe, and it really isn't sexy, but it's usually pretty reliable. Most places don't change their phone numbers all that often.
Google is my first destination for many things, but phone listings aren't among them. I tend to have better luck with phone numbers (both ways: look up a business, or reverse-lookup a number who called me) on other sites. I've never used local.google.com for anything, and I use Google for a lot of stuff. The local aspect doesn't appeal to me, at least not yet. Maybe I'm out of touch with the current generation of web-2.0.71 users, but aside from internet cafes or eBay consignment stores, I can't imagine that "if you don't exist on local.google.com, you don't exist" really rings true in many cases.
Last month, I took a vacation. I found my hotel through Google (but not local.google), my directions through Google (won't do that again), and that was it. I showed up in town, found my room, and had good meals at a few locally owned restaurants that I found the old fashioned way... By driving past them and thinking "mmm, Mike's Steakhouse, that sounds good, I'll go there for dinner tonight." I have no problem with folks who want to use Google as a concierge to their city, or the myriad cities to which they travel. It blew my mind that I could get an up-close satellite view of my hotel and its surroundings from Google. But they're hardly a make-or-break thing for local businesses.
Tourists and natives alike will always be adventurous and they don't need Google to do so.
Having said all that, realistically Google already thought of this process and rejected it. So what's wrong with it?
The fact that it's the polar opposite of what Google is trying to accomplish. They don't want you to go out and compile information about the businesses they already know about, the impetus behind this project is (at least ostensibly) to allow Google to find out about local businesses they've never heard of.
This is especially true if you plan; hit 10 places in one day all in a row (heck, if you live in a downtown area, just take out the whole street in an afternoon).
The problem is the economy of scale. If you're in a relatively large-sized metropolitan area large enough to have 10 businesses per day not far out of your reach, chances are good that your city also has a lot of other cash-strapped college students who would also love $10 a pop. The competition would be insane, and remember, $8 of that $10 only comes after Google follows up with the business and they verify the information you collected. For each business you stop at, take some photos, ask the manager a few questions, then go home and upload it all, you're only guaranteed $2.
Personally, I think this will wind up backfiring and taking a lot of Google's goodwill with it. As someone who managed a retail store in a previous life, nothing used to piss me off more than people coming in trying to solicit (especially trying to push anything advertising related). Shop owners are going to get really frustrated at Google after they start having to explain to 10 people a day that "no, I'm not interested in AdWords and besides, 10 people a day have been trying to peddle this shit to me for two months now."
almost all the comments here have some sort of negative thought or smarmy remark on an aspect of this story. and yet a cop is the first person these same people will call upon and depend upon if they are ever victimized or robbed.
Yes, I want the cops to be there if I get victimized or robbed; responding to such a situation is their job. I'm not so keen on having them data-mining and looking for crimes before they happen. There's a big difference.
Apparently the "u" that I copied out of charmap got swallowed by the lameness filter, or something. "Torrent incarnation" and "never used Torrent" should read "uTorrent incarnation" and "never used uTorrent," respectively.
The article seems to be going in two or three different directions. I don't much care what happens to the "official BitTorrent client," be it what I downloaded the first time I tried BT, or the new Torrent incarnation.
I haven't used an official client in a very long time and I've never used Torrent. I use a client called "burst!" which hasn't been updated in more than a year. It works just fine for me right now, but I'm curious as to whether or not that's going to continue. I sense that the headline for this article is inflammatory, but if further development of BT clients is going to require an SDK license, is that going to lock out older open-source clients which are no longer being actively developed?
If this guy's getting 30 years, then whoever's behind the "United States National Medical Association" deserves the death penalty. I've never seen so much spam for one target site as I have for US-NMA, and what puzzles me is that the spam continues even though the domain has been parked at an error page for at least a week now. It's almost as if they no longer care about selling fake pills, they just want to annoy the hell out of everyone...
Oh well, kudos to those involved for putting another spammer away. Keep up the good work.
Add another vote for OTRS. It's what we use at work to manage all sorts of incoming helpdesk tickets, feature requests, bug reports, etc. It doesn't have any sort of calendaring/timetracking feature that I'm aware of, but it supports internal-only notes to be attached to any ticket. You could easily use this capability to keep track of the time you spend working on a particular issue.
I sort of like seeing the once-a-week news story about how some meth-head electrocuted himself in the process of stealing copper wire to sell for scrap. I'd hate to see the demand for copper go down!
Since it sounds like they were doing it with their DNS servers.
NO!! This goes far beyond DNS and is extremely irresponsible!!
A DNS response to a widespread bot infection, a worm attack, or other overwhelming threat would be to claim SOA for the offending domain on your network, and resolve the entire domain to 127.0.0.1. Even that's sketchy, but it's what we might call the internet equivalent of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. I've seen registrars themselves nullroute a domain and in general there's not much objection, because extreme action is only taken in extreme circumstances. That isn't what happened here at all.
What happened here is that multiple ISPs rerouted legitimate connection attempts to legitimate network servers to their own, pseudo-C&C servers. Through the hijacked connections, they issued commands (in the/topic and directly in the channel) that may alter or remove software installed on the client PC. Now, maybe the client wanted to have SpamBotFoo installed on their computer, and maybe they didn't, but at what point did they give their ISP permission to remove SpamBotFoo from their computer? Since when is it suddenly okay for an ISP to intercept outbound connections from a customer's PC, reroute those communications to a destination of their choice, and knowingly issue commands to software installed on their customer's PC that would alter the contents of said PC, or worse, remove software from it?
It would certainly not be legal for me, as Joe Blow, to intercept your packets (for any purpose, good or evil), nor would it be legal for me, as Joe Blow, to use those intercepted packets to attempt to "uninstall" software from your computer, regardless of what that software is. Why, then, is it okay for ISPs to do the same?
I know this doesn't really add anything to the discussion, but the fact that a cellphone has a built-in "tip calculator" is just depressing. Are there actually people who pull out the ol' Razr after a good meal, trying to figure out how much tip they should leave?
But how did the FBI get the spyware activated and past anti-virus defenses?
Easy, they sent it to some kid on MySpace. It's a rather large assumption that he had any anti-virus defenses at all, much less that AV vendors are being complicit with the FBI trojan.
Something seems fishy about the whole story, though. This guy was apparently savvy enough to use a proxy in Italy to send his Gmail bomb threat emails, so he was at least trying to cover his tracks... But he was dumb enough to open a random email attachment? It strikes me as more likely that the CIPAV is deployed through a browser exploit (or perhaps even "legitimately" as an ActiveX control or BHO, people will install anything).
Man, you know you're doing something right when you're the Minority Party and the radical left still blames you.
OK, I guess I must have been asleep for the past few years. I thought FBI Director Mueller was nominated by the President, and I seem to recall that some guy named Alberto Gonzales is running the show at the DoJ. Furthermore, we're talking about questionable behavior and potential abuses of power that have been ongoing for several years now. Y'know, while the conservatives held the majority, wiping their tender arses with the Constitution and making the largest federal powergrab in the history of the United States.
Yeah, the nerve of the "radical left" to cry foul... </eyeroll>
Anyone in any channel could be logging (and publishing) the conversation, even if not "officially." Much like Slashdot, don't say anything in IRC that you'd hate to have someone find via Google.
I don't pay any bandwidth fees or any additional fees, it's not my machine, and it's not my problem.
That's a lucky setup on your behalf. Not all of us are so fortunate. I have a dedicated server that I pay monthly fees on. It's my machine, so long as I pay the rent, but I do have to watch my bandwidth and disk space. I'm allocated a finite amount of each.
Really, I should waste REAL LIFE TIME chasing down ways to save a tiny bit of bandwidth, which only wastes A COMPUTER'S time?
Not if you're in a sweet situation where the wasted bandwidth isn't your concern, no. I wonder if you could hook me up with a machine on your network where bandwidth is not the user's responsibility?
I've had the same email address for 14 years, and I get fewer than 5 spams in my inbox daily. It's all over usenet and has been googleable since, well.. since before google:)
Those are the ones that hit your inbox... Post-filtering. To say that spam isn't a problem simply because you don't see it is, well, pretending. I'm in a similar boat in terms of address longevity and their availability in unmunged form on Usenet. I don't see a lot of spam either, but that's only after 1000+ per day (to one mbox) are killed by SpamAssassin. I might not see the spam but I still have to subsidize the bandwidth, disk space, time to maintain SA, etc. to receive those messages before they're filtered out.
Slashdot Mirror
I can purchase a gun; say, a Glock 19. I can purchase ammunition to fire from that gun, say, Winchester 115 grain 9mm Luger JHPs. The thing is, I can also make my own ammunition for that gun. I can buy the raw materials and load my own cartridges and create my own ~115 grain 9mm JHP bullets. And if I happen to do that, Winchester (or Federal, or anyone else who sells 9mm JHP cartridges) can't do a damned thing about it. Because there's nothing special or innovative about putting X amount of Y ingredient into Z container, and the Courts have recognized this.
(Re)loading is a common activity here in the US-and-A, and although they do stand to lose some money, none of the well-known ammunition manufacturers would dare challenge the right of the individual gun owner to load his own. Most gun owners are going to buy new manufactured ammo. Those of us who dare load our own are of no consequence to the ammo pushers, just as those of us who block ads are of no consequence to the "Firefox lets people block my ads" camp.
The DMCA is an entirely different beast, especially in cases like this. Here, it's as if BATF is raiding your home and saying "sorry, you can't throw away those bullets you made, even though you crafted them legally... They might be defective!" I can't delete files from my own PC? The fuck I can't, go to hell. If your method of "protecting" your assets is to determine whether or not I have a cookie set in my browser, you need to update your business model past 1999.
Ladies and gentlemen, wake up. Have you read a news article today that referred to you as a "consumer," instead of as a "person," or an "individual," or a goddamn "human being?" Companies are continuing to attempt to limit your ability to use your own personal computer. No matter what you want to use it for. "Intellectual property" is a parasite that's going to fuck all of us but the patent trolls. And when that day comes, I hope most of us own guns and know how to load our own cartridges...
Darrell was an on-camera reporter and occasional anchor for WMC-TV here in Memphis before he went to the Fox station. The way our local market plays out, WMC-TV (NBC affiliate) and WREG-TV (CBS affiliate) own most of the news share. Once someone from WMC or WREG jumps to a different station in the market, they could be _the_ anchor and nobody would know it. WHBQ's most famous anchor of late is Ron Meroney, a morning staple who was extradited to Maryland last year on charges that he had sex with a child decades ago.
I keep up with local media yet I had no clue that WHBQ had launched their own news website independent of myfoxmemphis.com, much less that Darrell Phillips was running it. If the GP is local, I can't fault them for calling Darrell an anchor.
He just wanted a catchy on-air slogan for when he jumped back over to the local NBC affiliate.
"Darrell Phillips... HACK-tion News 5!"
Or as few times as it takes me to notice them. Anytime a new ad server is hanging me up, it winds up in my local named.conf. I've found that running an instance of named is a very efficient method of blackholing ad servers. It's also less hassle than trying to keep up with a hosts file or browser plugins on multiple machines. Plus, instead of playing whack-a-mole with the continuing onslaught of new subdomains (2o7.net is bad about this), you can just "disappear" an entire domain forever.
.js they so love to serve up - along with countless others. And yes, it speeds browsing up to have that junk not load.
Google Analytics/Urchin has earned a spot in my dead zone file - for that damned
I'm not familiar with InfoUSA, but from my retail days I have nightmares about Dun 'n Brad; they would call us as frequently as once a week trying to confirm various bits of information that we'd just confirmed the week prior. Most of the time I was suspicious that it was competitors "pretexting" (if only that term had existed ten years ago, thanks HP) to get the info, and most of the time I would give answers that were as ambiguous as possible, if not downright bullshit. Assuming the real D&B were ever calling, who knows what information they wound up with, but it probably wasn't accurate. One thing that D&B doesn't take into account is that whoever answers the phone/postcard/survey/etc. is quite likely just a grunt and has no incentive to be straight-up. To be quite honest if I were still managing the store today and I got a call from "Google," I'd probably respond with an equal volume of crap, depending upon my mood on that particular day.
However, it's worth pointing out that we got calls from D&B because we had been around long enough and did enough volume to be on D&B's radar. We were a large but privately owned packing and shipping outlet - think Mailboxes Etc. without the franchise - in a major city, and we had been in business for years. I co-owned a deli for several years after that, and we never heard a peep from D&B or any of the other "corporate who's who" people. I'm willing to bet that there are a whole hell of a lot of businesses out there that nobody but the local taxing authority knows or cares about. Can you get a list from the state? Sure, if you're willing to put up with delays and inaccuracies. I was a 1/3 partner in an Arizona LLC a couple of years ago and it took almost a year after we filed and became legit before we showed up on the state Commerce Department's website of registered business names.
My understanding of Google's BRR program is that they intend to bypass all the bureaucracy of state governments and licensing boards, and get the information straight from the people. I think it's going to work to an extent. I'm just worried that they're going to perturb a lot of people in the process.
Yep. As well as switchboard.com, and kevdb.infospace.com, etc. In fact, there's a nasty rumor going around that a few times a year, while you're at work and unable to catch them in the act, someone will toss a yellow bag into your yard, and if you open that yellow bag, there's a book full of phone numbers inside. I know it's passe, and it really isn't sexy, but it's usually pretty reliable. Most places don't change their phone numbers all that often.
Google is my first destination for many things, but phone listings aren't among them. I tend to have better luck with phone numbers (both ways: look up a business, or reverse-lookup a number who called me) on other sites. I've never used local.google.com for anything, and I use Google for a lot of stuff. The local aspect doesn't appeal to me, at least not yet. Maybe I'm out of touch with the current generation of web-2.0.71 users, but aside from internet cafes or eBay consignment stores, I can't imagine that "if you don't exist on local.google.com, you don't exist" really rings true in many cases.
Last month, I took a vacation. I found my hotel through Google (but not local.google), my directions through Google (won't do that again), and that was it. I showed up in town, found my room, and had good meals at a few locally owned restaurants that I found the old fashioned way... By driving past them and thinking "mmm, Mike's Steakhouse, that sounds good, I'll go there for dinner tonight." I have no problem with folks who want to use Google as a concierge to their city, or the myriad cities to which they travel. It blew my mind that I could get an up-close satellite view of my hotel and its surroundings from Google. But they're hardly a make-or-break thing for local businesses.
Tourists and natives alike will always be adventurous and they don't need Google to do so.
Personally, I think this will wind up backfiring and taking a lot of Google's goodwill with it. As someone who managed a retail store in a previous life, nothing used to piss me off more than people coming in trying to solicit (especially trying to push anything advertising related). Shop owners are going to get really frustrated at Google after they start having to explain to 10 people a day that "no, I'm not interested in AdWords and besides, 10 people a day have been trying to peddle this shit to me for two months now."
Apparently the "u" that I copied out of charmap got swallowed by the lameness filter, or something. "Torrent incarnation" and "never used Torrent" should read "uTorrent incarnation" and "never used uTorrent," respectively.
The article seems to be going in two or three different directions. I don't much care what happens to the "official BitTorrent client," be it what I downloaded the first time I tried BT, or the new Torrent incarnation.
I haven't used an official client in a very long time and I've never used Torrent. I use a client called "burst!" which hasn't been updated in more than a year. It works just fine for me right now, but I'm curious as to whether or not that's going to continue. I sense that the headline for this article is inflammatory, but if further development of BT clients is going to require an SDK license, is that going to lock out older open-source clients which are no longer being actively developed?
If this guy's getting 30 years, then whoever's behind the "United States National Medical Association" deserves the death penalty. I've never seen so much spam for one target site as I have for US-NMA, and what puzzles me is that the spam continues even though the domain has been parked at an error page for at least a week now. It's almost as if they no longer care about selling fake pills, they just want to annoy the hell out of everyone...
Oh well, kudos to those involved for putting another spammer away. Keep up the good work.
Add another vote for OTRS. It's what we use at work to manage all sorts of incoming helpdesk tickets, feature requests, bug reports, etc. It doesn't have any sort of calendaring/timetracking feature that I'm aware of, but it supports internal-only notes to be attached to any ticket. You could easily use this capability to keep track of the time you spend working on a particular issue.
I sort of like seeing the once-a-week news story about how some meth-head electrocuted himself in the process of stealing copper wire to sell for scrap. I'd hate to see the demand for copper go down!
A DNS response to a widespread bot infection, a worm attack, or other overwhelming threat would be to claim SOA for the offending domain on your network, and resolve the entire domain to 127.0.0.1. Even that's sketchy, but it's what we might call the internet equivalent of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. I've seen registrars themselves nullroute a domain and in general there's not much objection, because extreme action is only taken in extreme circumstances. That isn't what happened here at all.
What happened here is that multiple ISPs rerouted legitimate connection attempts to legitimate network servers to their own, pseudo-C&C servers. Through the hijacked connections, they issued commands (in the
It would certainly not be legal for me, as Joe Blow, to intercept your packets (for any purpose, good or evil), nor would it be legal for me, as Joe Blow, to use those intercepted packets to attempt to "uninstall" software from your computer, regardless of what that software is. Why, then, is it okay for ISPs to do the same?
"Excepting Eris," you mean. :)
/me wonders how dnetc irc is going these days.
I think you totally missed the joke. For most users, Hotmail is a free service.
I know this doesn't really add anything to the discussion, but the fact that a cellphone has a built-in "tip calculator" is just depressing. Are there actually people who pull out the ol' Razr after a good meal, trying to figure out how much tip they should leave?
Something seems fishy about the whole story, though. This guy was apparently savvy enough to use a proxy in Italy to send his Gmail bomb threat emails, so he was at least trying to cover his tracks... But he was dumb enough to open a random email attachment? It strikes me as more likely that the CIPAV is deployed through a browser exploit (or perhaps even "legitimately" as an ActiveX control or BHO, people will install anything).
Yeah, the nerve of the "radical left" to cry foul... </eyeroll>
I'm not sure I want to know where this is going...
Anyone in any channel could be logging (and publishing) the conversation, even if not "officially." Much like Slashdot, don't say anything in IRC that you'd hate to have someone find via Google.