Another interesting quirk. I subscribe to say HBO and send a buddie who doesn't get HBO every episode of Six Feet Under and in trade he sends me some series off of Showtime. The cable company loses money on two premium packages.
I'm afraid you're wrong about that. That's the same spurious argument that the IP cartels have been spoon feeding everyone who will eat it and it's completely wrong.
The cable company loses nothing. That's right, nothing, because those two buddies wouldn't necessarily have gone and bought those so-called premium packages in the first place. The assumption is that in absence of being able to trade that they would buy them, but this assumption is false, and so is the claim of loss. But then again, the IP cartels don't want you to be able to think for yourself on this issue...
I can only think that it's because the parents aren't really grown up themselves in terms of being comfortable with sexuality, and they can't even begin to contemplate it for their kids. They live in absolute dread of the day they'll have to give the "birds and bees" talk and will lash out at anything that threatens to hasten that day.
This is truer than you know. All this talk you hear of 'protecting children' is really about adult discomfort. And if you think that you're immune to this kind misplaced discomfort, I would suggest you check out this link.
Personally, I think that the people who advocate passing laws 'for the children' are really trying to infantilize the adult population--at least here in the good 'ol US of A... Is it just me, or do you feel like you're being talked down to by the media (especially in light of 9/11)?
And then what do you do when/. has to shut down?...
Why try to cheat? You obviously like/. or you wouldn't be here. Isn't it worth it to you for them to stay around? I know it is for me.
How would you feel if you struggled to keep something alive that you loved and all the people hitting the site blocked your only revenue generating system? I'd be really disappointed in humanity.
What do you do then? Something else. I might feel bad (for a second) until I realized that I and many others around here were the ones who were supplying the bulk of the content.
And who's to say that blocking ads is cheating? I feel absolutely NO obligation to view ANYBODY'S advertising. As a matter of fact, I feel it is my sacred duty as a thinking, rational human being to avoid them like the plague! Seriously, I don't understand why people are so willing to roll over when it comes to advertising. Advertising is not benign!
As to how I'd feel if all the people blocked my ads--I'd feel like an idiot for relying on advertising to fund my site!
On the one hand, you have/. which supplies the servers and seeds for discussion, while on the other you have the readers who supply the bulk of the content.
Seems like there's no clear cut line to draw here...
I would gladly give you a 3:15 chunk of my time, but it's not going to do any good without knowing exactly what chunk to do. We need a list of what's being worked on so we don't end up with say, 1,000 copies of the first/last ten minutes!
Shouldn't be that hard to put up a dynamic page that shows what still needs to be transcribed...
Would hierarchy nod its head and vacate its throne? Who knows.
Well, at least according to Daniel Quinn, it doesn't matter if heirarchy relinquishes its throne or not. Apparently, all one has to do to abolish heirarchy is to walk away. If everyone leaves the heirarchy, the heirarchy vanishes... Will that happen? Who knows...
-- Shamus
You there smoking mother nature, up against the wall!
I would suggest that you stop for a minute and think... Once again Daniel Quinn has put it eloquently:
A reader who is not online phoned me last night to get my take on the WTC attack. As with others who have contacted me, he wanted to see the possibility of something good coming from this calamity. As we talked on, I began to see that there is such a possibility--and it's entirely in our hands to bring it about. No one and nothing can prevent us from bringing it about--if we wish to.
We want to see an end to terrorism--on that we're agreed. To take aim at this goal, however, we must stand on the solid, level ground of truth, and this we're not doing as yet. Our leaders are not speaking the truth as they surely know it; they're posing (as they have consistently done for many decades). They're posing as knights in shining armor, as paragons of perfect virtue, as the champions of godliness and decency ready to smite evil-doers (as our enemies must be, by definition). We can find no firm footing in this pose, because it's false, and so our aim is going to be shaky.
The good we can bring about is to abandon this pose and to stand resolutely on the truth, which is that we can't pretend to bear no responsibility for the spread of terrorism and to have earned none of the hatred that drives it. (For more on this subject, see "Why a Military Response Won't Work -- Historic Roots of Mideast Grievances," by William O. Beeman, Pacific News Service, September 19, 2001.)
By saying this, I'm not in the least condoning terrorism. I'm just rejecting as useless the fiction that we are immaculate saints while our enemies are Satanic monsters. This kind of posing brings us no honor in the world community and does nothing to steady our aim against terrorism.
But where do we go from there?, my caller wanted to know. It seemed to him that the pose of righteousness gives us a clear program: Rage out into the world with our hands full of bombs to wreak vengeance on the tools of Satan. Yes, the pose of righteousness does give us that, whereas merely standing on the truth does not. You might say that standing in the pose of righteousness makes us lean toward wrath and violence, whereas standing on the truth merely puts us in balance. In this balanced state, we need to think about what to do. We need to listen to the wisdom of others and to understand what our enemies want--not to concede it to them but in order to defeat them. As Sun Tzu said in The Art of War, "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."
It's nothing more than the same old reactionary garbage legislation that's been coming down the pike. And it's not surprising that this is what congress has come up with either--after all, if it didn't work last year, then do more of it next year...
As David Quinn put it quite eloquently:
When the Israelites escaped from Egypt in the 13th century B.C., they were literally a lawless horde, because they'd left the Egyptian list of prohibitions behind. They needed their own list of prohibitions, which God provided--the famous ten. But of course ten didn't do it. Hundreds more followed, but they didn't do it either.
No number has ever done it for us. Not a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand. Even millions don't do it, and so every single year we pay our legislators to come up with more. But no matter how many prohibitions we come up with, they never do the trick, because no prohibited behavior has ever been eliminated by passing a law against it. Every time someone is sent to prison or executed, this is said to be "sending a message" to miscreants, but for some strange reason the message never arrives, year after year, generation after generation, century after century.
Naturally, we consider this to be a very advanced system.
Quite depressing, really. (The whole text can be found here, BTW)
But what can you expect when the whole world has bought into the idea that there is absolutely nothing that any one person can do to change things?
He does raise the issue that if we gave these teaching positions the pay-level and respect they deserve it would be much easier to attract Doctoral-level people to fill them.
This seems more than a little ridiculous to me--the school system is doing exactly what it was designed to do which is to stifle curiosity, critical thinking, and any joy of learning and prepare children for their lives as adults in low paying, dead-end jobs. Probably one of the best essays on schools that I've ever read (by Daniel Quinn) can be found here, if you'd like to know why...
... why people seem to think that IE and Netscape are the only choices for a decent browser out there when there's such wonderful browsers like Opera out there (not to mention Konqueror--but I digress). It's small (compared to MS and NS bloatware), fast, doesn't spy on you, and it's free (as in adware--oh well, three out of four ain't bad!). The ability to turn off images with the click of a button (or a single keystroke) does wonders for surfing sites with annoying graphics! Give it a whirl--you won't be sorry!
You can ditch MS and their crapware. All it takes it a little digging!
Not only that, but the Association for Computing Machinery is getting behind Dr. Felten as well. Methinks that the RIAA has blundered badly this time...
Is it just me, or does the speech synthesis part sound a lot like a refinement of a venerable old TI speech synthesizer (TMS5220 I believe?) that they used in the old Star Wars arcade machine? They were able to get a fairly reasonable approximation of the Star Wars cast members' voices out of that...
So, if Linux or some other flavor of *nix came with a decent desktop suite and an easy installer and finally caught on with the clueless masses, would you and Gibson then be whining about the dangers of placing its sockets in the hands of the ubiquitous laity?
Err, yes. Again, it's not sockets per se, but full raw sockets. If you had bothered to read the article you would know that this is a problem! For example:
Perhaps Microsoft hasn't been reading about the rapid rise (explosion) in the number of DDoS attacks which is already occurring. One must wonder how they could be unaware of this since they have, themselves, been frequent targets of those attacks. Furthermore, they must know, as I demonstrated above, that the widespread availability of Linux and Unix, with their "system-level functions to manipulate data packets" are clearly responsible and are a "critical factor" in the number of DDoS attacks.
It is precisely because of the rapid growth in the
number of hobbyist-owned Unix and Linux boxes
-- often configured insecurely then compromised
with Trojans -- that we are now seeing a rapid
growth in the number of DDoS attacks.
Also quoth the poster:
The solution to the DDoS problem is to smarten up the routers, not to dumb down the desktops!
Again, if you had read the article, you'd have seen:
Many thoughtful and well-informed people have suggested that the real responsibility for stopping these attacks lies not with the behavior of the user and/or their Internet-connected machine (e.g. Windows XP), but with the Internet's ISP's. These people point to well-known and long-established RFC's (Internet standards documents) (RFC 2267) (RFC 2827) and other Internet "Best Practice" documents which recommend that packets carrying spoofed source IP addresses should not be allowed to "egress" (leave) the ISP's locally-controlled network. Such clearly invalid packets should simply be discarded as they attempt to "escape" out onto the global Internet.
The beauty of "network egress filtering" is that each ISP becomes responsible for curtailing the IP spoofing of their own users. As I explain on my (still unfinished) DoS pages, once a forged packet "gets loose" from the ISP, and out onto the Internet, the task of tracking it back to its source is essentially impossible. The only opportunity to "block and drop" a spoofed packet is while it's still within the ISP's local network where it is EASILY identifiable as invalid and forged. Once that packet "egresses" onto the main Internet backbone, it's too late.
Adding Egress Filtering
For many ISP's, implementing egress filtering is as simple as adding a SINGLE LINE to the configurations of their various routers. For example, Cisco routers have included this option for years, merely requiring the addition of this single line:
ip verify unicast reverse-path
In most cases, that's all there is to it. However, despite the fact that this has been known and discussed for more than three years (the issue date on RFC2267) the vast majority of ISP's have simply not bothered with this simple security measure.
I believe that proponents of ISP network egress filtering are COMPLETELY correct. I have stated this at the conclusion of my previous page describing the Wicked DDoS Attacks. My announced plans for "Spoofarino", a free, user-oriented utility for encouraging ISP accountability for the lack of egress filtering, has already been discussed by the computer press. Today, the practice of network egress filtering is more the exception than the rule, but we can hope that it will be widely adopted as these issues attain increasing visibility in the future.
However, this potential for an improvement in the Internet's infrastructure notwithstanding, it is important to recognize that . . .
Egress filtering does NOT solve the whole problem.
While egress filtering will be a good thing once it exists, it fails to solve the problems of Denial of Service attacks in two ways:
* Local Domain Spoofing:
Egress filtering operates by verifying that a packet's "return address" lies within the local network domain. Egress filtering DOES NOT, and can not, verify that the packet ACTUALLY CAME FROM the designated machine within that domain. Since the local network domain being managed by a router often includes thousands of valid IP addresses, any machine may still generate forged packets which appear to be sourced from any other addresses within its immediate neighborhood.
Therefore, the site under attack will still have difficulty filtering the attack and/or identifying the true attacking machine(s). Rather than identifying and perhaps blocking the individual IP addresses of malicious machines, the inbound routers of a site under attack would need to temporarily ban entire "malicious networks" from access. The effect of this would be that sites under attack would "go dead" to whole regions of the Internet which contain "locally spoofing machines". This is hardly an optimum solution, and even so, it requires a degree of router-blocking sophistication which is uncommon.
* Non-Spoofing Attacks:
The widespread availability of trivial source IP address spoofing is only one of the problems created by Windows XP's support for full Raw Sockets. Unlike any previous, unmodified, consumer Windows operating system, Windows XP supports the generation of SYN-packet floods.
The Windows-hosted distributed attacks against grc.com employed 474 machines flooding our Internet connection with ICMP and UDP traffic. We were fortunately able to filter those attacks, and remain on the Web, only because those attack-hosting Windows machines were unable to generate SYN-floods.
Attacks hosted on the future Windows XP consumer operating system will have no such limitations. Non-spoofed attacks, which will never be blockable by egress filtering, will be far more damaging when hosted by Windows XP than previous consumer versions of Windows.
As this analysis demonstrates, network egress filtering is undoubtedly a good thing for the long term future of the Internet. But it does not, and can not, provide a cure-all solution to the problem of the Internet protocol abuse promoted by the existence of Windows XP's full Raw Socket support.
The larger concern is that XP will be shipped with full raw sockets. This makes it likely (assuming XP becomes as ubiquitous as Win9X) for it to become the platform of choice for DDoS attacks...
Elcomsoft has no right to *sell* products whose purpose is to disable Adobe's encryption, esp. when such knowledge was gained through reverse-engineering.
What makes you think that Elcomsoft has no right to sell a piece of software that disables Adobe's encryption? And just what's wrong with reverse engineering (morally or legally)? Your assertions are exactly the kind of ridiculous doublespeak that got us the DMCA in first place!
I just love this spin-and-deflect move they pull at the end of their PR:
Q: Did Adobe order the arrest?
A: Adobe did not order the arrest. That was the sole decision of the U.S. government. Adobe alerted the U.S. Attorney's office to investigate the activities of Elcomsoft regarding the possible illegal distribution of its "Advanced eBook Processor." Based on the information gathered in the investigation (see affidavit), the U.S. Government chose to take legal action.
Q: Who says that the United States gets to impose its laws (specifically, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act) on individuals and businesses in other countries?
A: Questions regarding the law and its enforcement in this case should be forwarded to the U.S. Attorney's office.
Q: What will happen next?
A: Any questions regarding this investigation should be forwarded to the U.S. Attorney's office.
I love how they deflect any questions about the case to the USAO, as if they don't know anything.
"Err, uh, we didn't order the arrest, we just uh, encouraged the U.S. Attorney's Office to do it for us. Uh, yeah! That's it! That's the ticket!"
They may not have ordered the arrest, but they are certainly guilty of initiating it! Adobe, your hands are still stained...
Step 1: Load debugger (SoftICE is a probable favorite).
Step 2: Breakpoint on the WinXP code entry screen.
Step 3: Trace code (perhaps lots of code). Look for interesting tidbits.
Step 4: Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
Really, this is not such a difficult thing to do...
BTW, this kind of software lock-out isn't all that uncommon--software written for certain classes of businesses have been using it for some time (and yes, I've actually written some--ah, the seduction of the dark side).
That's it. I'm done with Linux. Bye Bye, wish I could say it was fun - now I guess it's time for me to go back to the real world.
Hmm... That's too bad--I thought that he would have left his page up with his explanation for a little while longer than a few hours. Maybe you can find a copy cached on Google...
Eventually I go look at their website for the positive stuff, then I tag on the word "sucks" to their URL to see if there's an opposing viewoint. But a funny thing has happened in the year that I've been doing this... when I first started, I treated finding a "vendorsucks" website as a deficit. But lately, if I don't find a "vendorsucks" site for a bidder, I wonder if they're a serious contendor in the marketplace.
Well... I just checked to see if there were any slashdotsucks sites out there, and it seems there aren't any (slashdotsucks.com just gives a blank page,.net,.org yield nothing). So I guess slashdot is either a nothing site or a site that everyone is satisfied with!
Well, actually, there has been a bit of a flamewar on the kde-devel list between Waldo Bastian and Mosfet--mostly about differences in work styles. You can read Mosfet's take on the whole thing here.
Slashdot Mirror
The cable company loses nothing. That's right, nothing, because those two buddies wouldn't necessarily have gone and bought those so-called premium packages in the first place. The assumption is that in absence of being able to trade that they would buy them, but this assumption is false, and so is the claim of loss. But then again, the IP cartels don't want you to be able to think for yourself on this issue...
-- Shamus
Insert pithy saying here
Personally, I think that the people who advocate passing laws 'for the children' are really trying to infantilize the adult population--at least here in the good 'ol US of A... Is it just me, or do you feel like you're being talked down to by the media (especially in light of 9/11)?
-- Shamus
Insert pithy saying here
And who's to say that blocking ads is cheating? I feel absolutely NO obligation to view ANYBODY'S advertising. As a matter of fact, I feel it is my sacred duty as a thinking, rational human being to avoid them like the plague! Seriously, I don't understand why people are so willing to roll over when it comes to advertising. Advertising is not benign!
As to how I'd feel if all the people blocked my ads--I'd feel like an idiot for relying on advertising to fund my site!
Peace!
-- Shamus
Bleah!
On the one hand, you have /. which supplies the servers and seeds for discussion, while on the other you have the readers who supply the bulk of the content.
Seems like there's no clear cut line to draw here...
-- Shamus
This space for rent! EZ Terms!
How much will it cost to de-advertize? How about nothing?
If you use Opera that is. Simply press the 'G' key and viola! No ads!
Ahhhhhhhhh...
-- Shamus
I Hate Ads!
This space for rent! EZ terms!
Jeez, you'd think I would have taken the time to read the damn post...
Never mind...
-- Shamus
I would gladly give you a 3:15 chunk of my time, but it's not going to do any good without knowing exactly what chunk to do. We need a list of what's being worked on so we don't end up with say, 1,000 copies of the first/last ten minutes!
Shouldn't be that hard to put up a dynamic page that shows what still needs to be transcribed...
-- Shamus
Bleah!
Or does this sound like a response (an admittedly weak one) to the Gartner Group's calling for IT professionals to dump Microsoft?
"Uh, all these secutity holes aren't our fault, it's those damned jerks--Information Anarchists--who publish the details!"
-- Shamus
This space for rent! EZ terms!
-- Shamus
You there smoking mother nature, up against the wall!
-- Shamus
Bleah!
As David Quinn put it quite eloquently: Quite depressing, really. (The whole text can be found here, BTW)
But what can you expect when the whole world has bought into the idea that there is absolutely nothing that any one person can do to change things?
-- Shamus
Bleah!
-- Shamus
"Bleah!" -- overheard at a press conference
... why people seem to think that IE and Netscape are the only choices for a decent browser out there when there's such wonderful browsers like Opera out there (not to mention Konqueror--but I digress). It's small (compared to MS and NS bloatware), fast, doesn't spy on you, and it's free (as in adware--oh well, three out of four ain't bad!). The ability to turn off images with the click of a button (or a single keystroke) does wonders for surfing sites with annoying graphics! Give it a whirl--you won't be sorry!
You can ditch MS and their crapware. All it takes it a little digging!
-- Shamus
Bleah!
I wonder if this means that the BackOrifice(tm) plugin won't work anymore?
-- Shamus
Bleah!
Not only that, but the Association for Computing Machinery is getting behind Dr. Felten as well. Methinks that the RIAA has blundered badly this time...
-- Shamus
O Brave New World, with such People in it!
Is it just me, or does the speech synthesis part sound a lot like a refinement of a venerable old TI speech synthesizer (TMS5220 I believe?) that they used in the old Star Wars arcade machine? They were able to get a fairly reasonable approximation of the Star Wars cast members' voices out of that...
-- Shamus
This space for rent, EZ terms!
-- Shamus
O Brave New World, with such People in it!
The larger concern is that XP will be shipped with full raw sockets. This makes it likely (assuming XP becomes as ubiquitous as Win9X) for it to become the platform of choice for DDoS attacks...
-- Shamus
Insert pithy saying here
-- Shamus
Brain for sale, low miles!
They may not have ordered the arrest, but they are certainly guilty of initiating it! Adobe, your hands are still stained...
-- Shamus
This space for rent. EZ terms!
Step 1: Load debugger (SoftICE is a probable favorite).
Step 2: Breakpoint on the WinXP code entry screen.
Step 3: Trace code (perhaps lots of code). Look for interesting tidbits.
Step 4: Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
Really, this is not such a difficult thing to do...
BTW, this kind of software lock-out isn't all that uncommon--software written for certain classes of businesses have been using it for some time (and yes, I've actually written some--ah, the seduction of the dark side).
-- Shamus
This space for rent. EZ terms!
Micropayments are not very likely to take off in any significant way. This article explains why.
-- Shamus
O Brave New World, with such People in it!
-- Shamus
-- Shamus (with tongue stuck firmly in cheek)
This space for rent. EZ terms!
Well, actually, there has been a bit of a flamewar on the kde-devel list between Waldo Bastian and Mosfet--mostly about differences in work styles. You can read Mosfet's take on the whole thing here.
-- Shamus
This space for rent. EZ terms!