It's interesting to note that most legitimate casinos do the same thing, and do it "worse," in a more invasive sense. You're on camera from the moment you step into a casino until the moment you leave, and at all the big-name casinos, those cameras feed straight into photo recognition applications. Originally this software was installed and intended to monitor the casinos for people who had been identified (even by other casinos) as cheaters.
The kicker? Now, the technology is also used to identify known criminals. I don't remember whether the casinos check their video feeds against databases of criminals on-site, or whether the video feeds are sent out to LEA who do it on their end. It's one or the other though.
There was an episode of "MSNBC Investigates" recently which contained some interesting footage of the photo recognition in real time. It documented how a wanted felon was busted after he was spotted (and ID'd) by a camera monitoring the entrance to a casino. The photo recognition software ID'd him and police showed up to bust him within a few minutes.
Suffice it to say, if you're a known criminal (and the cops have a picture of you), stay the hell away from Vegas or Atlantic City.
>Most console games are stats based games? More stats based than
>Ultima? It's always appeared to me that PC RPGs have far more
>statistics and complicated math than console RPGs. Perhaps he
>has more complex in mind in his "stats-based" vs. "playing a
>role" categories.
I think what he's really trying to compare are the different styles of MMORPGs... Look at his mention of EverQuest, for example. In EQ, the only real goal is to "get better." Get items and level up. Get items and level up. Get items and level up. It's really a boring routine and it tends to prohibit a lot of interaction - if you're just starting out, few EQ gods are going to take you under their wing, because you'd just be getting in the way.
UO, on the other hand, is all about interaction, or at least that's what I took from it. Stats aren't the real priority for most people. Sure, when your mage is sitting there at 99.8 and you can't get those last two tenths no matter how much 8x8ing you do, you're gonna be concerned about stats... But I spent a lot more time in UO just talking to people and making spontaneous adventures with random people, than I did worrying about having 100int or GM parrying, etc.
I never got into Final Fantasy. I've played a few times with friends, but it's always seemed like too much for me. I'd sit there watching a friend get ambushed by a group of monsters, then he'd flip through pages upon pages of items, spells, etc etc only to finally die or beat the monsters, and check (you guessed it) his stats. There was never anything to show for all that page-flipping and button pushing. Maybe I'm just more suited to online games.
Garriott's on to something, I guess we'll just have to wait to find out what. But I know I won't be disappointed.
(Securing and Optimizing Linux, by Gerhard Mourani)
First let me say that I'm a reseller for Communitech, virtual accounts only, though I don't believe that makes me biased toward them; if anything, my experiences have biased me against CT. I've had my own nightmares with them and I'm still wrapped up in being double-billed on one resold account for almost a year. Personally I think you're lucky they reinstalled the OS for free the second time around; be sure to double-check your credit card bill when it comes in... CT is one of those companies you love and hate at the same time and their customer service does suck - that's why they have a lot of resellers. We can provide the personal service and support that they aren't capable of.
That said, the security of your box is your responsibility. It doesn't matter where your box is located or whose pipes it's connected to.
Communitech isn't responsible for making sure your box is secure any more than RoadRunner is responsible for making sure my local linux machine is locked down. Their responsibility is to make sure that your machine is connected, powered up, and able to serve traffic. When you order a dedicated server from CT, they slap on an installation of your chosen OS, along with Apache and some development tools. They don't make any promises or guarantees that your system will be secure or that they'll be patching your box every time an exploit is found.
CT still uses Redhat 6, and it says that on their dedicated server config page (the RaQ page just says Linux 2.2, but the more general pages indicate they're using Redhat 6). If I were to take on a box with a fresh installation of RH6, the first thing I'd do is upgrade bind - shot in the dark, but I bet that's how you were owned.
In any case, the bottom line is this, and you're free to disagree: if no one in your group is prepared to spend time finding patches and securing the box, your group isn't ready to be running a dedicated server.
Good luck and make sure to check that URL. You've got a dedicated server for at least a few more months, someone on your team needs to read up and get to work:)
Towards the end of the interview, he indicated that he composes text using voice recognition software, as opposed to typing everything up. Voice recognition is far from perfect, he probably spoke proper English but the software missed (or misinterpreted) some words here and there.
>How long will it be before these clients cause sufficient
>incompatibility that seperate, client specific networks arise?
>What we really need is an agreement between the different
>developers to pass on these extra packets, or agree on a
>central "feature set".
I agree with you 100% on this issue - in fact, "developer fragmentation" was the #1 problem I listed in a September 2000 overview of problems facing Gnutella. (Note: This article is rather outdated, especially in that I no longer use the original Nullsoft client!! BearShare, LimeWire, ToadNode, etc. were not released when I wrote this.)
Luckily, we've come a long way since last September, or at least that's how it appears to me. BearShare and LimeWire, the two most aggressively developed Windows clients, seem to be fully interoperable. They send extra information - host uptime, for example - within the Gnutella packets. But they appear to integrate without any problem. How this extra data affects some of the older clients, I'm not sure; but the leaders in the Gnutella front seem to be "cooperative competitors."
>As clients come online, they would find a server, report what they
>have in their swap folder, and start sharing data. requests
>for searches would only go to the highest bandwith systems,
>and then only those that are willing to serve in this capacity.
>If you come online with a nice fast machine, with a fat network
>pipe, you can become part of the search network.
I can't say much other than this is already being worked on to some extent. It's basically a tiering model, where clients will connect to other clients who have opted to function as "servers" or "superclients," and those servers bear a bit more of the network burden. Those of us with fatter pipes will be able to contribute to the routing, while the folks on dialup can search for files without worrying about their Gnutella client trying to route tens of MBs of traffic per hour.
There are some seriously smart people out there who are making sure this becomes a reality. It could be a few weeks, it could be a few months; but you'll see this in the future.
Shaun
Re:Has Gnutella source code been released yet?
on
Gnutella at One Year
·
· Score: 1
It's the protocol, not the client, which is open source. The original Gnutella client source will never be released, thanks to our friends at AOL-TW and the various record companies they're in bed with. The protocol specs are public and that's proven to be enough.
Several Gnutella clones, though, *are* open-source. Check here for a list of the clones whose source code is available to the public:
>That's why Napster is losing; the RIAA's lawyers portrayed it as
>being illegal
Napster was meant for sharing MP3s, and MP3s only. On Gnutella, you can share anything you want. I think that's a start at proving that p2p (or at least Gnutella) has more good potential than bad.
>Gnutella is a lousy protocol.
>It has some serious scalability problems.
Yep. That's what the naysayers were spouting a year ago, when there were 1000 hosts on the network. Now, there are over 20,000 hosts on the network (according to Limewire Hostcount), and guess what? The network hasn't collapsed.
There will be a saturation point, no doubt. But we haven't hit it yet.
>Many ISPs write into their TOS that you aren't allowed to
>run servers because they are afraid of the content providers,
>don't want to provide the bandwidth anyway, and want to charge
>much higher fees to supposedly commercial servers.
And, I dare say, many ISPs don't give a flying fuck about this particular TOS entry unless you're running a server that's a) taking up inordinate amounts of bandwidth or b) serving illegal material. Even at that, they still won't care about b) unless someone reports it.
A cursory glance at my BearShare hosts at any given moment shows mostly cable/DSL users. Most of those providers forbid running servers, but most of them have no real way to tell, unless you're congesting the network. I was a bit surprised that BearShare's latest version sets the default max number of simultaneous uploads to 10 (I keep mine set at 2) but for the most part, unless you're a total dumbass, running Gnutella isn't going to pop up any bandwidth-sucking red flags at your provider's NOC.
One of Gnutella's strong points - unlike a lot of standard protocols - is that you can dynamically change your listen port to whatever you want, and the changes are effective immediately to the rest of the network. If your ISP blocks/monitors 6346, you can change it to something else. If your ISP blocks that, you can change it again; and for the really paranoid, you could write a dirty VB bot or something to change your listen port every hour. Of course, you *could* do the same for FTP/HTTP/etc servers but it would make it more difficult for your visitors to find you.
Server-ban or no, most if not all ISPs have no reliable way to detect or block Gnutella traffic. I think that's quite an advantage.
As for bandwidth being on the rise, you have to consider that file sizes are increasing as well. 5 years ago, the end user surely couldn't download at 200+K/sec, but 5 years ago, the end user wasn't sharing 250MB pornos with the rest of the world, either. The pipes *are* getting fatter, but so are the files being sent across them.
There, I said it. This isn't bad news, it's good news, and I'd reckon a lot of other UO players feel that way. In the past year, the current incarnation has seen many times more than its share of serious bugs. Bugs that were left unchecked and went unfixed for far too long, even when being reported by tens or hundreds of people a day.
Why did this happen, why did UO in its current state fall into such a lapse of disrepair? Because they took half the UO development team and put them to work on UO:3D and UO2. They claimed they had separate dev teams - and yes, there were even some new faces working on UO2 - but eventually the truth came out.
One of the bigger flops of late, a "Veteran Rewards" program, was supposed to come out last fall. The program was launched in January, and pulled a week later because it was so bug-ridden. Months later it still hasn't been finished, and the reason? Yeah - "Our development resources are better spent on stuff like UO:3D and UO2." So much for all these different dev teams they were boasting about.
At least now they're presumably going to focus in one place; it's better to do one thing well than to do several things half-assed. This was a move they needed to make, and I think they probably (finally) wised up to that by looking at the churn rate of long time vets. They've already got a core playerbase, they need to work on keeping us happy, paying customers before branching off to bigger and (better|worse) things.
All three of the things you mentioned are beyond the scope of the person who wrote the article. She was working the TOSNames mailboxes, there are separate mailboxes (and separate teams) for files and user home pages.
Gotta admit though, I'd love to hear war stories from people who used to work TOSFiles. Imagine being "the guy who downloads porn all day, to see if it's really porn..."
>The plaintiff told AOL about the child pornography,
>identified the criminal, and provided evidence, yet AOL
>(which has policies against child pornography) refused to
>take action.
You don't know this. AOL may well have notified the authorities that very day. But terminating a pervert's AOL account doesn't give the authorities much of a chance to catch said pervert in the act, now does it? If you notify your landlord that there's a crackhouse in your apartment complex, and the property management calls the police, the police aren't going to say "evict that guy right now." The police are going to want to set up surveillance, etc etc.
Investigations take time. The fact that AOL didn't immediately shut down the freak's account doesn't mean they're irresponsible. In fact it's quite possible that law enforcement officials wanted the account to remain *open* so that they could track that account's activities.
>And this is legally different from (Slashdot sacred cow)
>Napster *HOW*?
You can do a lot of things on AOL. You can chat. You can read Usenet (albeit through a cruddy interface). You can post to message boards. You can get information on thousands of topics. You can visit thousands of forums. You can swap kiddie porn. You can swap legal porn.
On Napster, you can trade pirated MP3s. You can trade legal MP3s.
Getting clearer...? AOL is an ISP and provides access to the internet as a whole. Napster isn't, and doesn't.
The students who outright copied others' code into their projects deserved to get caught, and they deserve whatever consequences they get. When you copy someone else's (work|answers) instead of coming up with it yourself, that's cheating, plain and simple.
I can't possibly imagine how looking at someone else's code - for a different project - could be considered "academic dishonesty." I'm not taking any engineering courses, I have a concentration in C, but in all the courses I've taken so far, collaboration has been encouraged.
My instructors have all been very open-door, they give out their phone numbers and email addresses on the syllabus. Working outside of class is not only permitted, it's encouraged - I've never coded a single lab in class; I do it all at home where I'm comfortable and in my own environment. As for in-class activities, if you can't figure something out, you can look in the book; if that doesn't help, you can ask the guy next to you. And if he's clueless, you can look it up on the web. I tend to go for the latter solution as finding other peoples' example code has worked wonders for me.
Put simply, I would not be the programmer I am today had I never looked at or used someone else's code. Granted, I don't use other peoples' code verbatim in my own class projects; again that's cheating and nothing more. But I don't see anything wrong with looking at someone else's example, seeing how they did it, and then using that knowledge to do it again yourself. Many people - myself included - learn best not by lecture, but by example. Looking up some former student's code from a different project is no different than picking up my copy of the C++ Bible. And neither are dishonest practices, IMO.
I don't know anything about the instructors/professors involved here, but during my "college career" I've learned at least one important thing about instructors. The ones with a lot of cheaters or failing students in their class are the ones who aren't teaching the material well enough, and they often know it. In fact my C++ class just had 6 people transfer in from another instructor's class. Both instructors are using the same syllabus and book, but these folks all failed her first test. One of them told me he learned more from my instructor in one session than he'd learned from the other one in a month of classes.
An instructor who's there to teach and is willing to help students learn - as opposed to the batty old tenured guy who's just there to draw a salary - does not often need to worry about cheating.
>I had an idea for a lot of things people have ended up creating
>and patenting, would that give me the right to sue someone for it,
>because I was too lazy to capitalize on patenting and copyrights?
Not if you just had an idea. But if you formulated and *used* that idea - as Schuster apparently did in his defunct advertising service - then yes, you'd have a case against someone who tried to (or did) patent the idea.
I do agree with you though, I don't think there are many cases where code or implementation of code should be patentable.
You can pretty much bet that the "no bots" rule is just for show, it's certainly not legally binding. Think of it like your ISP's AUP. If your ISP forbids you from transferring more than 250MB/day from their news server, downloading 500MB of porn one lazy afternoon isn't going to land you in court. It's just going to get you disconnected.
Napster could add "No one affiliated with the RIAA is allowed to use this service" to their motd, that wouldn't keep RIAA and friends out. All a rule like this does is provide some recourse for them (e.g. terminating the offensive account) if they happen to discover that the account has violated their policies. Additionally it gives them a viable defense if they happen to get sued by a bot-user for unfair termination. They just point to their motd and say "look, it says right here that we'll nuke you for that."
I doubt that Napster has any bot-detection capability to begin with; if they do, I'd be embarassed to write a bot it caught. There's not much you could do to "detect" a Napster bot, so long as it wasn't performing tasks at inhuman speeds.
>Yes, but a subpoena is issued by a judge, right? We're talking
>about an email from a private individual here.
Any lawyer can issue a subpoena for any reason, but they're not necessarily binding. CCS' lawyers could subpoena your movie rental records, or your toilet paper purchase history if they wanted to, with no legal justification whatsoever; but subpoenas are not court orders. A subpoena is just a formal way of saying "I'm considering legal action and if I do take that action I'm going to want a copy of X, Y, and Z."
Most people comply with subpoenas up front because they're intimidated... But you can't be charged with obstruction of justice etc. unless the order actually came from a court. I don't know the regulations about ISPs being served, but I won't doubt the original poster that they have to comply even if it's not a legally binding situation.
>"He can have almost any Web page removed from the Internet in
>hours. He can have a suspect's Internet connection
>turned off -- pedestrian dial-up or fancy broadband
>-- within days. "
So can I, and I'm nobody. It's called abuse@ or noc@ and it works very well, whether it's copyright infringment or spam. The fact that this guy brags about his "superpower" of being able to shut sites down rapidly is nothing more than an ego trip. All it takes is one email, and any reputable ISP or webhost will take action if the material violates their AUP.
I'm only focusing on the usenet aspect of the story, but even at that, the government is heading down the wrong path here. Consider the following timeline:
2/16/01 Some ISP enters a guilty plea for carrying, say, alt.binaries.illegal-stuff. They face some sort of penalty.
2/20/01 ISPs across the country have quit carrying alt.binaries.illegal-stuff for fear of legal repercussions.
2/21/01 The regulars in alt.binaries.illegal-stuff figure out that they can't access their group anymore, even on premium news servers. After a quick round-robin email, they decide to take over a different group - alt.binaries.misc - with their illegal wares.
4/1/01 Some other ISP somewhere gets slammed with penalties for carrying alt.binaries.misc, which is now being used to traffic in the material once posted in alt.binaries.illegal-stuff.
4/5/01 ISPs across the country have dropped alt.binaries.misc, for fear of legal repercussions.
... And it goes around and around and around.
If we as the "technocrat" community have learned anything at all from the Napster debacle, it's that the government/corporations CANNOT stop a certain activity just by going after the source. If you go after Napster, people don't stop trading MP3s, they just create better p2p networks. If you go after alt.binaries.illegal-stuff, people won't stop posting illegal material; they'll just move to a different group.
It's time that the US government up and figured out that
a) the Internet is not a US-only entity, some things which are illegal here are not illegal elsewhere, and we cannot regulate the entire internet based on our own standards;
b) going after carriers is NOT effective and will only lead to fear-mongering, degradation of QoS, and perhaps worse, increased bandwidth usage as people start encrypting everything;
c) the only way to make a dent in the activity is to go after the perpetrators.
>Knowingly storing kiddie porn on your own NNTP server is wrong
Agreed, at least in a moral sense. But where do you draw the line? What if people start posting kiddie porn to alt.binaries.mp3? Are news admins supposed to know that? What if it becomes common knowledge that kiddie porn is showing up in alt.binaries.mp3? Should news servers drop the group? Should news admins who thought it was a group for music be held responsible because it's "widely known" that kiddie porn gets posted there?
Don't get me wrong - I AM NOT defending the type of material involved here. But to hold an ISP or a news admin responsible for something that someone else posted to a newsgroup (any group, regardless of the name) is inane.
Everyone seems to jump on kiddie porn, and say "kiddie porn is illegal, nobody should carry alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.children." But hacking, for the most part, is illegal as well. Should ISPs be forced to drop alt.hacking? What about alt.2600? What about alt.cellular?
You see, once you step down the slippery slope... There's no coming back up.
It's no wonder eReferee takes a licking and keeps on ticking, and referee.com is downright sluggish. Which one did you write to? I'm guessing eReferee.
By the way, Referee Magazine must be gearing up for a lot of lawsuits:
http://195.92.95.5/?restriction=site+contains&ho st =referee.com&lookup=Wait..&position=limited
>It's comprable (kinda.. sorta..) to targeted advertising on television
Less so than more. The cable company does not keep records that say "Citizen C. watches the sports channel 3 hours a day." The cable company cannot associate Citizen C. with the audience of a particular channel. And the cable company doesn't keep a SportsChannelViewers.xls or sell it off to ESPN Magazine for promo mailings. What you watch on TV is your business (assuming you don't have a Nielsen box and don't order pay-per-view movies) and nobody knows that information.
I agree, though, I don't want people knowing information about me unless I supply that information myself. There are ways to go about this - I've done a decent job of it, with ZERO junk postal mail or phone calls at my apartment in a year and a half - but I'm leery of the Census. Nobody needs to know the sort of things that they want to know about everyone.
>There was a paragraph stating that it is illegal for me to lie
>or to decline to report my census information. Is this incorrect?
>Could I in fact just simply refuse to participate?
IANAL, etc; but it's not incorrect as far as I know - you're required to participate. But "I never got the form in the mail" is pretty damn popular around here. Memphis had one of the lowest return rates in the entire country, something less than 50% of all households actually replied/got surveyed. I would have been one of the nonrespondents had I not actually been staked out by the census taker in charge of my address.
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting to note that most legitimate casinos do the same thing, and do it "worse," in a more invasive sense. You're on camera from the moment you step into a casino until the moment you leave, and at all the big-name casinos, those cameras feed straight into photo recognition applications. Originally this software was installed and intended to monitor the casinos for people who had been identified (even by other casinos) as cheaters.
The kicker? Now, the technology is also used to identify known criminals. I don't remember whether the casinos check their video feeds against databases of criminals on-site, or whether the video feeds are sent out to LEA who do it on their end. It's one or the other though.
There was an episode of "MSNBC Investigates" recently which contained some interesting footage of the photo recognition in real time. It documented how a wanted felon was busted after he was spotted (and ID'd) by a camera monitoring the entrance to a casino. The photo recognition software ID'd him and police showed up to bust him within a few minutes.
Suffice it to say, if you're a known criminal (and the cops have a picture of you), stay the hell away from Vegas or Atlantic City.
Shaun
>Most console games are stats based games? More stats based than
>Ultima? It's always appeared to me that PC RPGs have far more
>statistics and complicated math than console RPGs. Perhaps he
>has more complex in mind in his "stats-based" vs. "playing a
>role" categories.
I think what he's really trying to compare are the different styles of MMORPGs... Look at his mention of EverQuest, for example. In EQ, the only real goal is to "get better." Get items and level up. Get items and level up. Get items and level up. It's really a boring routine and it tends to prohibit a lot of interaction - if you're just starting out, few EQ gods are going to take you under their wing, because you'd just be getting in the way.
UO, on the other hand, is all about interaction, or at least that's what I took from it. Stats aren't the real priority for most people. Sure, when your mage is sitting there at 99.8 and you can't get those last two tenths no matter how much 8x8ing you do, you're gonna be concerned about stats... But I spent a lot more time in UO just talking to people and making spontaneous adventures with random people, than I did worrying about having 100int or GM parrying, etc.
I never got into Final Fantasy. I've played a few times with friends, but it's always seemed like too much for me. I'd sit there watching a friend get ambushed by a group of monsters, then he'd flip through pages upon pages of items, spells, etc etc only to finally die or beat the monsters, and check (you guessed it) his stats. There was never anything to show for all that page-flipping and button pushing. Maybe I'm just more suited to online games.
Garriott's on to something, I guess we'll just have to wait to find out what. But I know I won't be disappointed.
Shaun
You'd do well to read this guide, it's helped me out tremendously:
m l/ coverpage.html
:)
http://www.openna.com/resources/articles/v1.3-x
(Securing and Optimizing Linux, by Gerhard Mourani)
First let me say that I'm a reseller for Communitech, virtual accounts only, though I don't believe that makes me biased toward them; if anything, my experiences have biased me against CT. I've had my own nightmares with them and I'm still wrapped up in being double-billed on one resold account for almost a year. Personally I think you're lucky they reinstalled the OS for free the second time around; be sure to double-check your credit card bill when it comes in... CT is one of those companies you love and hate at the same time and their customer service does suck - that's why they have a lot of resellers. We can provide the personal service and support that they aren't capable of.
That said, the security of your box is your responsibility. It doesn't matter where your box is located or whose pipes it's connected to.
Communitech isn't responsible for making sure your box is secure any more than RoadRunner is responsible for making sure my local linux machine is locked down. Their responsibility is to make sure that your machine is connected, powered up, and able to serve traffic. When you order a dedicated server from CT, they slap on an installation of your chosen OS, along with Apache and some development tools. They don't make any promises or guarantees that your system will be secure or that they'll be patching your box every time an exploit is found.
CT still uses Redhat 6, and it says that on their dedicated server config page (the RaQ page just says Linux 2.2, but the more general pages indicate they're using Redhat 6). If I were to take on a box with a fresh installation of RH6, the first thing I'd do is upgrade bind - shot in the dark, but I bet that's how you were owned.
In any case, the bottom line is this, and you're free to disagree: if no one in your group is prepared to spend time finding patches and securing the box, your group isn't ready to be running a dedicated server.
Good luck and make sure to check that URL. You've got a dedicated server for at least a few more months, someone on your team needs to read up and get to work
Shaun
Towards the end of the interview, he indicated that he composes text using voice recognition software, as opposed to typing everything up. Voice recognition is far from perfect, he probably spoke proper English but the software missed (or misinterpreted) some words here and there.
Shaun
>How long will it be before these clients cause sufficient
>incompatibility that seperate, client specific networks arise?
>What we really need is an agreement between the different
>developers to pass on these extra packets, or agree on a
>central "feature set".
I agree with you 100% on this issue - in fact, "developer fragmentation" was the #1 problem I listed in a September 2000 overview of problems facing Gnutella. (Note: This article is rather outdated, especially in that I no longer use the original Nullsoft client!! BearShare, LimeWire, ToadNode, etc. were not released when I wrote this.)
Luckily, we've come a long way since last September, or at least that's how it appears to me. BearShare and LimeWire, the two most aggressively developed Windows clients, seem to be fully interoperable. They send extra information - host uptime, for example - within the Gnutella packets. But they appear to integrate without any problem. How this extra data affects some of the older clients, I'm not sure; but the leaders in the Gnutella front seem to be "cooperative competitors."
Shaun
>As clients come online, they would find a server, report what they
>have in their swap folder, and start sharing data. requests
>for searches would only go to the highest bandwith systems,
>and then only those that are willing to serve in this capacity.
>If you come online with a nice fast machine, with a fat network
>pipe, you can become part of the search network.
I can't say much other than this is already being worked on to some extent. It's basically a tiering model, where clients will connect to other clients who have opted to function as "servers" or "superclients," and those servers bear a bit more of the network burden. Those of us with fatter pipes will be able to contribute to the routing, while the folks on dialup can search for files without worrying about their Gnutella client trying to route tens of MBs of traffic per hour.
There are some seriously smart people out there who are making sure this becomes a reality. It could be a few weeks, it could be a few months; but you'll see this in the future.
Shaun
It's the protocol, not the client, which is open source. The original Gnutella client source will never be released, thanks to our friends at AOL-TW and the various record companies they're in bed with. The protocol specs are public and that's proven to be enough.
Several Gnutella clones, though, *are* open-source. Check here for a list of the clones whose source code is available to the public:
http://www.gnutelladev.com/source/
Shaun
>That's why Napster is losing; the RIAA's lawyers portrayed it as
>being illegal
Napster was meant for sharing MP3s, and MP3s only. On Gnutella, you can share anything you want. I think that's a start at proving that p2p (or at least Gnutella) has more good potential than bad.
Shaun
>Gnutella is a lousy protocol.
>It has some serious scalability problems.
Yep. That's what the naysayers were spouting a year ago, when there were 1000 hosts on the network. Now, there are over 20,000 hosts on the network (according to Limewire Hostcount), and guess what? The network hasn't collapsed.
There will be a saturation point, no doubt. But we haven't hit it yet.
>Many ISPs write into their TOS that you aren't allowed to
>run servers because they are afraid of the content providers,
>don't want to provide the bandwidth anyway, and want to charge
>much higher fees to supposedly commercial servers.
And, I dare say, many ISPs don't give a flying fuck about this particular TOS entry unless you're running a server that's a) taking up inordinate amounts of bandwidth or b) serving illegal material. Even at that, they still won't care about b) unless someone reports it.
A cursory glance at my BearShare hosts at any given moment shows mostly cable/DSL users. Most of those providers forbid running servers, but most of them have no real way to tell, unless you're congesting the network. I was a bit surprised that BearShare's latest version sets the default max number of simultaneous uploads to 10 (I keep mine set at 2) but for the most part, unless you're a total dumbass, running Gnutella isn't going to pop up any bandwidth-sucking red flags at your provider's NOC.
One of Gnutella's strong points - unlike a lot of standard protocols - is that you can dynamically change your listen port to whatever you want, and the changes are effective immediately to the rest of the network. If your ISP blocks/monitors 6346, you can change it to something else. If your ISP blocks that, you can change it again; and for the really paranoid, you could write a dirty VB bot or something to change your listen port every hour. Of course, you *could* do the same for FTP/HTTP/etc servers but it would make it more difficult for your visitors to find you.
Server-ban or no, most if not all ISPs have no reliable way to detect or block Gnutella traffic. I think that's quite an advantage.
As for bandwidth being on the rise, you have to consider that file sizes are increasing as well. 5 years ago, the end user surely couldn't download at 200+K/sec, but 5 years ago, the end user wasn't sharing 250MB pornos with the rest of the world, either. The pipes *are* getting fatter, but so are the files being sent across them.
Shaun
There, I said it. This isn't bad news, it's good news, and I'd reckon a lot of other UO players feel that way. In the past year, the current incarnation has seen many times more than its share of serious bugs. Bugs that were left unchecked and went unfixed for far too long, even when being reported by tens or hundreds of people a day.
Why did this happen, why did UO in its current state fall into such a lapse of disrepair? Because they took half the UO development team and put them to work on UO:3D and UO2. They claimed they had separate dev teams - and yes, there were even some new faces working on UO2 - but eventually the truth came out.
One of the bigger flops of late, a "Veteran Rewards" program, was supposed to come out last fall. The program was launched in January, and pulled a week later because it was so bug-ridden. Months later it still hasn't been finished, and the reason? Yeah - "Our development resources are better spent on stuff like UO:3D and UO2." So much for all these different dev teams they were boasting about.
At least now they're presumably going to focus in one place; it's better to do one thing well than to do several things half-assed. This was a move they needed to make, and I think they probably (finally) wised up to that by looking at the churn rate of long time vets. They've already got a core playerbase, they need to work on keeping us happy, paying customers before branching off to bigger and (better|worse) things.
Shaun
All three of the things you mentioned are beyond the scope of the person who wrote the article. She was working the TOSNames mailboxes, there are separate mailboxes (and separate teams) for files and user home pages.
Gotta admit though, I'd love to hear war stories from people who used to work TOSFiles. Imagine being "the guy who downloads porn all day, to see if it's really porn..."
Shaun
>The plaintiff told AOL about the child pornography,
>identified the criminal, and provided evidence, yet AOL
>(which has policies against child pornography) refused to
>take action.
You don't know this. AOL may well have notified the authorities that very day. But terminating a pervert's AOL account doesn't give the authorities much of a chance to catch said pervert in the act, now does it? If you notify your landlord that there's a crackhouse in your apartment complex, and the property management calls the police, the police aren't going to say "evict that guy right now." The police are going to want to set up surveillance, etc etc.
Investigations take time. The fact that AOL didn't immediately shut down the freak's account doesn't mean they're irresponsible. In fact it's quite possible that law enforcement officials wanted the account to remain *open* so that they could track that account's activities.
Just something to think about.
Shaun
>And this is legally different from (Slashdot sacred cow)
>Napster *HOW*?
You can do a lot of things on AOL. You can chat. You can read Usenet (albeit through a cruddy interface). You can post to message boards. You can get information on thousands of topics. You can visit thousands of forums. You can swap kiddie porn. You can swap legal porn.
On Napster, you can trade pirated MP3s. You can trade legal MP3s.
Getting clearer...? AOL is an ISP and provides access to the internet as a whole. Napster isn't, and doesn't.
Shaun
The students who outright copied others' code into their projects deserved to get caught, and they deserve whatever consequences they get. When you copy someone else's (work|answers) instead of coming up with it yourself, that's cheating, plain and simple.
I can't possibly imagine how looking at someone else's code - for a different project - could be considered "academic dishonesty." I'm not taking any engineering courses, I have a concentration in C, but in all the courses I've taken so far, collaboration has been encouraged.
My instructors have all been very open-door, they give out their phone numbers and email addresses on the syllabus. Working outside of class is not only permitted, it's encouraged - I've never coded a single lab in class; I do it all at home where I'm comfortable and in my own environment. As for in-class activities, if you can't figure something out, you can look in the book; if that doesn't help, you can ask the guy next to you. And if he's clueless, you can look it up on the web. I tend to go for the latter solution as finding other peoples' example code has worked wonders for me.
Put simply, I would not be the programmer I am today had I never looked at or used someone else's code. Granted, I don't use other peoples' code verbatim in my own class projects; again that's cheating and nothing more. But I don't see anything wrong with looking at someone else's example, seeing how they did it, and then using that knowledge to do it again yourself. Many people - myself included - learn best not by lecture, but by example. Looking up some former student's code from a different project is no different than picking up my copy of the C++ Bible. And neither are dishonest practices, IMO.
I don't know anything about the instructors/professors involved here, but during my "college career" I've learned at least one important thing about instructors. The ones with a lot of cheaters or failing students in their class are the ones who aren't teaching the material well enough, and they often know it. In fact my C++ class just had 6 people transfer in from another instructor's class. Both instructors are using the same syllabus and book, but these folks all failed her first test. One of them told me he learned more from my instructor in one session than he'd learned from the other one in a month of classes.
An instructor who's there to teach and is willing to help students learn - as opposed to the batty old tenured guy who's just there to draw a salary - does not often need to worry about cheating.
Shaun
>I had an idea for a lot of things people have ended up creating
>and patenting, would that give me the right to sue someone for it,
>because I was too lazy to capitalize on patenting and copyrights?
Not if you just had an idea. But if you formulated and *used* that idea - as Schuster apparently did in his defunct advertising service - then yes, you'd have a case against someone who tried to (or did) patent the idea.
I do agree with you though, I don't think there are many cases where code or implementation of code should be patentable.
Shaun
You can pretty much bet that the "no bots" rule is just for show, it's certainly not legally binding. Think of it like your ISP's AUP. If your ISP forbids you from transferring more than 250MB/day from their news server, downloading 500MB of porn one lazy afternoon isn't going to land you in court. It's just going to get you disconnected.
Napster could add "No one affiliated with the RIAA is allowed to use this service" to their motd, that wouldn't keep RIAA and friends out. All a rule like this does is provide some recourse for them (e.g. terminating the offensive account) if they happen to discover that the account has violated their policies. Additionally it gives them a viable defense if they happen to get sued by a bot-user for unfair termination. They just point to their motd and say "look, it says right here that we'll nuke you for that."
I doubt that Napster has any bot-detection capability to begin with; if they do, I'd be embarassed to write a bot it caught. There's not much you could do to "detect" a Napster bot, so long as it wasn't performing tasks at inhuman speeds.
Shaun
>Yes, but a subpoena is issued by a judge, right? We're talking
>about an email from a private individual here.
Any lawyer can issue a subpoena for any reason, but they're not necessarily binding. CCS' lawyers could subpoena your movie rental records, or your toilet paper purchase history if they wanted to, with no legal justification whatsoever; but subpoenas are not court orders. A subpoena is just a formal way of saying "I'm considering legal action and if I do take that action I'm going to want a copy of X, Y, and Z."
Most people comply with subpoenas up front because they're intimidated... But you can't be charged with obstruction of justice etc. unless the order actually came from a court. I don't know the regulations about ISPs being served, but I won't doubt the original poster that they have to comply even if it's not a legally binding situation.
IANAL.
Shaun
>"He can have almost any Web page removed from the Internet in
>hours. He can have a suspect's Internet connection
>turned off -- pedestrian dial-up or fancy broadband
>-- within days. "
So can I, and I'm nobody. It's called abuse@ or noc@ and it works very well, whether it's copyright infringment or spam. The fact that this guy brags about his "superpower" of being able to shut sites down rapidly is nothing more than an ego trip. All it takes is one email, and any reputable ISP or webhost will take action if the material violates their AUP.
Shaun
I'm only focusing on the usenet aspect of the story, but even at that, the government is heading down the wrong path here. Consider the following timeline:
2/16/01 Some ISP enters a guilty plea for carrying, say, alt.binaries.illegal-stuff. They face some sort of penalty.
2/20/01 ISPs across the country have quit carrying alt.binaries.illegal-stuff for fear of legal repercussions.
2/21/01 The regulars in alt.binaries.illegal-stuff figure out that they can't access their group anymore, even on premium news servers. After a quick round-robin email, they decide to take over a different group - alt.binaries.misc - with their illegal wares.
4/1/01 Some other ISP somewhere gets slammed with penalties for carrying alt.binaries.misc, which is now being used to traffic in the material once posted in alt.binaries.illegal-stuff.
4/5/01 ISPs across the country have dropped alt.binaries.misc, for fear of legal repercussions.
... And it goes around and around and around.
If we as the "technocrat" community have learned anything at all from the Napster debacle, it's that the government/corporations CANNOT stop a certain activity just by going after the source. If you go after Napster, people don't stop trading MP3s, they just create better p2p networks. If you go after alt.binaries.illegal-stuff, people won't stop posting illegal material; they'll just move to a different group.
It's time that the US government up and figured out that
a) the Internet is not a US-only entity, some things which are illegal here are not illegal elsewhere, and we cannot regulate the entire internet based on our own standards;
b) going after carriers is NOT effective and will only lead to fear-mongering, degradation of QoS, and perhaps worse, increased bandwidth usage as people start encrypting everything;
c) the only way to make a dent in the activity is to go after the perpetrators.
Shaun
>Knowingly storing kiddie porn on your own NNTP server is wrong
Agreed, at least in a moral sense. But where do you draw the line? What if people start posting kiddie porn to alt.binaries.mp3? Are news admins supposed to know that? What if it becomes common knowledge that kiddie porn is showing up in alt.binaries.mp3? Should news servers drop the group? Should news admins who thought it was a group for music be held responsible because it's "widely known" that kiddie porn gets posted there?
Don't get me wrong - I AM NOT defending the type of material involved here. But to hold an ISP or a news admin responsible for something that someone else posted to a newsgroup (any group, regardless of the name) is inane.
Everyone seems to jump on kiddie porn, and say "kiddie porn is illegal, nobody should carry alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.children." But hacking, for the most part, is illegal as well. Should ISPs be forced to drop alt.hacking? What about alt.2600? What about alt.cellular?
You see, once you step down the slippery slope... There's no coming back up.
Shaun
eReferee.com: Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) Red-Hat-Secure/3.2.1 PHP/4.0.3pl1 mod_ssl/2.6.4 BSA
o st =referee.com&lookup=Wait..&position=limited
referee.com: Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4/Windows 98
It's no wonder eReferee takes a licking and keeps on ticking, and referee.com is downright sluggish. Which one did you write to? I'm guessing eReferee.
By the way, Referee Magazine must be gearing up for a lot of lawsuits:
http://195.92.95.5/?restriction=site+contains&h
143 domains found which contain "referee."
Shaun
>Let me get this straight. You simultaneously feel sorry for
>him, and intentionally cause him the grief that you feel
>sorry he has?
Yes. Let me explain for the mentally impaired:
1. I feel sorry for him. He's an ordinary average guy. He had (or felt he had) to actually stake me out to get my Census information.
2. He's getting paid - however little - by the government, and volunteered to do the job.
#2 tends to negate #1. He was there because he signed up to be there and was getting paid to be there.
If I hadn't posted to this thread, I'd -1 Flamebait ya. Oh well.
Shaun
>It's comprable (kinda.. sorta..) to targeted advertising on television
Less so than more. The cable company does not keep records that say "Citizen C. watches the sports channel 3 hours a day." The cable company cannot associate Citizen C. with the audience of a particular channel. And the cable company doesn't keep a SportsChannelViewers.xls or sell it off to ESPN Magazine for promo mailings. What you watch on TV is your business (assuming you don't have a Nielsen box and don't order pay-per-view movies) and nobody knows that information.
I agree, though, I don't want people knowing information about me unless I supply that information myself. There are ways to go about this - I've done a decent job of it, with ZERO junk postal mail or phone calls at my apartment in a year and a half - but I'm leery of the Census. Nobody needs to know the sort of things that they want to know about everyone.
Shaun
>There was a paragraph stating that it is illegal for me to lie
>or to decline to report my census information. Is this incorrect?
>Could I in fact just simply refuse to participate?
IANAL, etc; but it's not incorrect as far as I know - you're required to participate. But "I never got the form in the mail" is pretty damn popular around here. Memphis had one of the lowest return rates in the entire country, something less than 50% of all households actually replied/got surveyed. I would have been one of the nonrespondents had I not actually been staked out by the census taker in charge of my address.
Shaun