What a deal, you get "Amnesty" (as it is no doubt defined in 13 pages of double-incrinimating lawyerese) and they get a list of the first people to go after the next time something like P2P comes along.
The RIAA can't sue everyone and this seems like them running out of options. At the rate they are alienating customers and turning them into criminals in need of "Amnesty", they will be out of customers all-together.
"It's just strange Johnson, one minute we were discussing the quarterly financials, and the next thing you know, he starts breakdancing and shouting 'You've been 0wned'".
The question of whether this DOS attack was immature/brave/foolish/revolutionary is up for debate, but I hope that the attack at least brought some attention to the fact that what happened to the RIAA this weekend is exactly what they are trying to get the right to do leagally to P2P networks and users! We are talking about giving the RIAA the legal right to break and enter and vandalize. And for what? Because the have the money to have enough lobbyists and enough congressmen in thier pocket to earn them that right?
I for one smiled just a bit when I heard the new this morning, and it also reminded me that I had a letter to my congress(wo)man to write.
Interesting article, but I'm wondering what the benefits are of running IPCHAINS (or whatever) at init 0 as opposed to running a stripped down linux distro from read-only media or a RAM disk?
There seems to be more than one issue here, the first being a criminal act (i.e., defacing public websites) and the second being distributing information that has been criminalized. Is it in the interest of the FBI to prosecute people who deface websites? Of course. By defacing a companies website, you are violating thier right to free speech. Whether or not it's done in protest of a given organization or to prove that one is 37337 is not the concern of the law.
However, we have entered a period of American history where the government is taking to criminalizing information more and more. Information on making bombs? Not exactly a healthy pursuit. Information on making Meth? Ditto. However, as people become more and more accustomed to this kind of censorship and as we are asked to question less and less the people that are "protecting us from terrorists" we might just find ourselves with a constitution that has be rendered moot by the people who are allegedly protecting it.
Opps. so he only get's treated like a criminal with the probation, the community service and the fine. He just doesn't have that pesky criminal record to deal with, unless of course he decides to install any more naughty software on the machines of any company that should happen to hire him after this mess.
It frustrates the hell out of me to think that instead of a case like this, that could serve to temper a law with rediculous penalties for a broad range of actions, making it to court, get settled for a meager sum and leaves a fellow with a criminal record and gives companies that much more leverage in treating employees like criminals.
There should be criminal penalties for criminal activity. Using corporate computers to smuggle out trade secrets? Yeah, I can see why someone should spend time in jail for that, but should someone doing something as relativley innocous as installing SETI on a few machines face a 30 year in jail penalty for doing so?
I can totally understand why the defendant chose to settle. Trials cost money and you don't always win the good fight, but it is sad to see a chance for bonehead laws like these to face some challenge.
i remeber setting up my first Linux installation on a laptop and the hell that ensued when trying to figure out how to put together a custom kernel that would support PCMCIA. Yes, i did learn a lot about the kernel, the Linux boot process, compilers and all sorts of other stuff. Problem being, the average computer user has no desire to do any of these things. This is why the average user won't use Linux. If the goal is really to get Linux on more desktops, we're going to have to see WAY more wizards and configuration tools.
I think the beauty of linux is that I can manually edit config files to my hearts content, or I can fire up Linuxconf and do the same thing.
No one forces me to do either.
Choices are good.
People like Bill Gates and Steve Case and thier respective companies have succeded for primarily the same reason. They are good at buisness and know the power of a monopoly. Coolness and neatness amount to jack poo-poo if they don't make people money. Apple understands that there is a market for computers that are not middle-of-the-road and have done quite well despite being up against some of the biggest monopolies in the world. People should not stop admiring someone because, despite thier megalomania, they have some ideas about where technology is headed and it is not in the status quo. Some people will always buy safe and boring, does that mean that those on the vangaurd should be criticized for not playing to tastes of the masses? Should people not be encouraged to appreciate those things that are appreciably better simply on the merit that they are in fact better? Or maybe we should think simmilarly.
Anyone who has put in a few years doing IT or security at a big organization (University, large corporation, whatever) can attest to the fact that the people who are ultimately in charge of the Big Security Decisions (i.e. the ones that can write the checks or sign-off on policy) are often the ones that have the least clue about it. They don't see the "Bad Guys" parked outside with their tools and getaway cars, waiting to break in while your not looking, so they think worrying about security and user education is either a waste of time and that you're too paranoid for always talking about "security", or they've bought whatever line they were sold by whomever sold them the promise of "security" and delivers instead a world of Macro Viruses and Code Red worms.
While I have to believe the "really important super-secret stuff" is kept safely locked away by geeks wiser and smarter than us, it cannot come as a surprise that the state of government computer security is about the same as security on the internet at large... it mostly sucks. Why? We can blame the software companies that release easily exploited code, and maybe we should start making them more accountable, but as long as people keep picking dumb passwords, administrators keep letting them, and they in turn keep following poor practices (fricken clear-text password lists!?!), then this what happens.
i think your point here is mereley to be argumentative. Comparing an IPod, an over-priced piece of consumer hardware, to a computer would be stupid, the two have very little to do with each other. The Zap deivce IS very similar to a computer and can be compared more easily. What the hell is a home PC anyway if it's not a consumer elcetronic device? A fricken' marital aide? You sir mereley want someone to flame on, so I'm going to go outside, away from my computer, and leave you find more targets for your venting. Have a nice "life".
How do you presume to have any idea what my area of expertise is? For all you know, i could be the head of engineering at TiVo. For your information I am very aware of what goes into bringing a product to market, and bringing a product to a market that dosen't exist isn't terribly bright. I was not saying that you could build a consumer electronics product like this yourself. I was saying you could build a computer that provided most of this functionality for around $700.
Did the marketeers at Zap not realize that any geek that would shell out this much money for a system like this could easily build a box to do all this stuff and more for substantially less cost? Jeez. $700 and maybe I'd think about it.
So XP has debuted with all the fanfare and rock star trappings that $200 Million can buy. Sting, everyone's favorite "adult" rock star and Jaguar pitchman, swooning the masses for Microsoft and all the Usual Suspects singing the praises of this, "The Most Important Piece of Software in the World".
Aside from the obvious irony of Sting choosing to be pimped for Jaguar and Microsoft, two companies notorious for making products that require a full-time mechanic, I think it's really interesting to listen to what non-techies are saying about it. Listening to the news on TV and the radio in the car, I hear people asking "Well, what makes it so great?"
The answers, even from the most Microsoft friendly of places (e.g. PC Magazine) is one of ambivalence to near disingenuousness. The best I've heard about it is it's stable, but lacking the full feature set of Windows 2000, "it's prettier", and that it has features that make it arguably easier to use. If you call being able to burn a CD with none of the flexibility of a real CD mastering package, navigate zip files with none of the useful features of WinZip, or try to do anything involving this here internet without being railroaded to a Microsoft property, well, yeah, I guess it's easier to use. We'll skip a description of the hair-brained "activation" process, with the exception of a snippet I heard on NPR yesterday:
Announcer: "So, I hear that if I want to upgrade multiple computers in my house, I'll need to purchase multiple upgrade packages and the upgrade will only work on computers purchased after the holidays in 1999. Is this the case?"
PC Magazine Editor guy: "Well, you do need at least 128 MB of RAM...:
Announcer: "Isn't that the bare minimum?"
PMEG: "Well, it'll run just fine with 128, but with more, it'll run 'better'"
Announcer: "And the activation process? In the past, people have just used the same CD for multiple computers"
PMEG: "Well, that's always been illegal, Microsoft is just doing what they can to make sure people abide to the license agreement."
So what are we left with? An OS that gets crippled for consumers, shoved down their throat with every new PC purchase, and will achieve the ubiquity we've come to expect from Microsoft operating systems. A little bit of stability does not rescue XP from the kind of mediocrity that's synonymous with Windows, all the while being told that it's the greatest thing since ones and zeroes.
It's not the crashing that I find so interesting, I mean it would be beating a dead horse to accuse Microsoft of releasing things that don't always operate as expected. What I think is strange is the lack of Microsoft branding in the promotional kiosks and posters I've seen. Taco Bell is running this huge promotion for the Xbox and there is no mention of Microsoft anywhere on the signage. I've seen a simmilar lack of the ubiquitous microsoft logo on the few kiosks displaying Xbox games and systems that I've seen. Given that I can't boot up Windows without seeing the Microsoft logo 10 times, this seems a little odd. Is it perhaps because we expect things like video game consoles not to crash? Are they trying to distance their reputation for blue screens and error messages from their entry into the console market? Ever remember rebooting your SNES because it just stopped working? Ever had to upgrade your Playstation because of buggy code? Me neither.
Next time someone tries to say that the slippery slope argument is an invalid one in regards to the "adjustment" of ones liberties, remember this:
Clinton passed the Affective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism act, that amongst other rather non-liberal ideas made it possible to hold a non-US citizen for as long as we like, without letting them know the charges or evidence against them, and allows us to try them in what amounts to a secret court. You combine this with the legislation passed and pending referenced in the article and it doesn't take a political scientist to see a pattern.
So much for jurisprudence. Now we look to aim this thinking at "hackers"? We want to equate hacking with terrorism? To even mention someone damaging a computer system and killing thousands of innocent people in the same breath only serves to trivialize those that have died at the hands of real terrorists.
So what's next? If you protest the WTO, does that make you a terrorist? How about standing up for the rights of others, or god forbid, the planet? How about interfering with commerce by say, trafficking in copyrighted material?
Everyday I hear of more and more extreme measures to combat "terrorism". What point will there be in protecting our country if what we are left with is a government as totalitarian as those we claim to oppose?
What crap. You think enough people would have saw this for what it is, billionaire monopolist Ellison's ploy for more sales and further power. Gonna give the software to the government? I suppose the consulting fee's necissary to put this into effect will be donated as well. I'm sure Scott "There's no such thing as privacy anyway" McNealy will gladly donate all those Sparc boxes to run it on. Thank you Dianne "Let's make sure we keep those foreign students, I mean terrorists out of the country" Feinstein for again proving you're about just as fascist all the republicans you run against.
Can't help but think of the Human Battery stuff from the Matrix. We better watch out for those Aibo pet-things from Sony. It's just a matter of time...
Debates of the obvious privacy issues aside, I suppose Oracle will be happy to donate the billions of dollars a program like this will cost and all of the DBA's neccisary to maintain what would likely be the worlds largest database. Oh, and I'm sure Oracle would help to secure this database against all the people that would just love to get thier hands on all that juicy data.
Larry Ellison, Humani-fricken-tarian of the year.
~raum (wretching over the side of the boat of democracy)
Your argument is based on a false premise, there is no such thing as permanent saftey. Our own government is saying that this operation "infinite justice" may go on for years. We have to start worrying about our civil liberties now. We're being told that this is an attack on freedom. By giving our freedom away, we are handing a victory to those that would seek to do us harm.
Slashdot Mirror
What a deal, you get "Amnesty" (as it is no doubt defined in 13 pages of double-incrinimating lawyerese) and they get a list of the first people to go after the next time something like P2P comes along.
The RIAA can't sue everyone and this seems like them running out of options. At the rate they are alienating customers and turning them into criminals in need of "Amnesty", they will be out of customers all-together.
"It's just strange Johnson, one minute we were discussing the quarterly financials, and the next thing you know, he starts breakdancing and shouting 'You've been 0wned'".
"In addition, AOL *spam engineers* say they receive 5.5 million spam submissions each day"
Do you suppose they get to put "Spam Engineer" on their resume?
"steal your face".
The question of whether this DOS attack was immature/brave/foolish/revolutionary is up for debate, but I hope that the attack at least brought some attention to the fact that what happened to the RIAA this weekend is exactly what they are trying to get the right to do leagally to P2P networks and users! We are talking about giving the RIAA the legal right to break and enter and vandalize. And for what? Because the have the money to have enough lobbyists and enough congressmen in thier pocket to earn them that right?
I for one smiled just a bit when I heard the new this morning, and it also reminded me that I had a letter to my congress(wo)man to write.
aahhhh. duh.
thanks.
~raum
Interesting article, but I'm wondering what the benefits are of running IPCHAINS (or whatever) at init 0 as opposed to running a stripped down linux distro from read-only media or a RAM disk?
There seems to be more than one issue here, the first being a criminal act (i.e., defacing public websites) and the second being distributing information that has been criminalized. Is it in the interest of the FBI to prosecute people who deface websites? Of course. By defacing a companies website, you are violating thier right to free speech. Whether or not it's done in protest of a given organization or to prove that one is 37337 is not the concern of the law.
However, we have entered a period of American history where the government is taking to criminalizing information more and more. Information on making bombs? Not exactly a healthy pursuit. Information on making Meth? Ditto. However, as people become more and more accustomed to this kind of censorship and as we are asked to question less and less the people that are "protecting us from terrorists" we might just find ourselves with a constitution that has be rendered moot by the people who are allegedly protecting it.
Opps. so he only get's treated like a criminal with the probation, the community service and the fine. He just doesn't have that pesky criminal record to deal with, unless of course he decides to install any more naughty software on the machines of any company that should happen to hire him after this mess.
It frustrates the hell out of me to think that instead of a case like this, that could serve to temper a law with rediculous penalties for a broad range of actions, making it to court, get settled for a meager sum and leaves a fellow with a criminal record and gives companies that much more leverage in treating employees like criminals.
There should be criminal penalties for criminal activity. Using corporate computers to smuggle out trade secrets? Yeah, I can see why someone should spend time in jail for that, but should someone doing something as relativley innocous as installing SETI on a few machines face a 30 year in jail penalty for doing so?
I can totally understand why the defendant chose to settle. Trials cost money and you don't always win the good fight, but it is sad to see a chance for bonehead laws like these to face some challenge.
i remeber setting up my first Linux installation on a laptop and the hell that ensued when trying to figure out how to put together a custom kernel that would support PCMCIA. Yes, i did learn a lot about the kernel, the Linux boot process, compilers and all sorts of other stuff. Problem being, the average computer user has no desire to do any of these things. This is why the average user won't use Linux. If the goal is really to get Linux on more desktops, we're going to have to see WAY more wizards and configuration tools.
I think the beauty of linux is that I can manually edit config files to my hearts content, or I can fire up Linuxconf and do the same thing.
No one forces me to do either.
Choices are good.
People like Bill Gates and Steve Case and thier respective companies have succeded for primarily the same reason. They are good at buisness and know the power of a monopoly. Coolness and neatness amount to jack poo-poo if they don't make people money. Apple understands that there is a market for computers that are not middle-of-the-road and have done quite well despite being up against some of the biggest monopolies in the world. People should not stop admiring someone because, despite thier megalomania, they have some ideas about where technology is headed and it is not in the status quo. Some people will always buy safe and boring, does that mean that those on the vangaurd should be criticized for not playing to tastes of the masses? Should people not be encouraged to appreciate those things that are appreciably better simply on the merit that they are in fact better? Or maybe we should think simmilarly.
~raum
NYTIMES.com is up and has an AP article on the crash, foxnews is also unreachable.
CNN has just announced that the plane that crashed was an Airbus A300 AA headed to the Dominican Reublic from JFK.
Anyone who has put in a few years doing IT or security at a big organization (University, large corporation, whatever) can attest to the fact that the people who are ultimately in charge of the Big Security Decisions (i.e. the ones that can write the checks or sign-off on policy) are often the ones that have the least clue about it. They don't see the "Bad Guys" parked outside with their tools and getaway cars, waiting to break in while your not looking, so they think worrying about security and user education is either a waste of time and that you're too paranoid for always talking about "security", or they've bought whatever line they were sold by whomever sold them the promise of "security" and delivers instead a world of Macro Viruses and Code Red worms.
While I have to believe the "really important super-secret stuff" is kept safely locked away by geeks wiser and smarter than us, it cannot come as a surprise that the state of government computer security is about the same as security on the internet at large... it mostly sucks. Why? We can blame the software companies that release easily exploited code, and maybe we should start making them more accountable, but as long as people keep picking dumb passwords, administrators keep letting them, and they in turn keep following poor practices (fricken clear-text password lists!?!), then this what happens.
i think your point here is mereley to be argumentative. Comparing an IPod, an over-priced piece of consumer hardware, to a computer would be stupid, the two have very little to do with each other. The Zap deivce IS very similar to a computer and can be compared more easily. What the hell is a home PC anyway if it's not a consumer elcetronic device? A fricken' marital aide? You sir mereley want someone to flame on, so I'm going to go outside, away from my computer, and leave you find more targets for your venting. Have a nice "life".
so, it appears that name-calling makes you correct? You belong in government.
How do you presume to have any idea what my area of expertise is? For all you know, i could be the head of engineering at TiVo. For your information I am very aware of what goes into bringing a product to market, and bringing a product to a market that dosen't exist isn't terribly bright. I was not saying that you could build a consumer electronics product like this yourself. I was saying you could build a computer that provided most of this functionality for around $700.
Did the marketeers at Zap not realize that any geek that would shell out this much money for a system like this could easily build a box to do all this stuff and more for substantially less cost? Jeez. $700 and maybe I'd think about it.
So XP has debuted with all the fanfare and rock star trappings that $200 Million can buy. Sting, everyone's favorite "adult" rock star and Jaguar pitchman, swooning the masses for Microsoft and all the Usual Suspects singing the praises of this, "The Most Important Piece of Software in the World".
Aside from the obvious irony of Sting choosing to be pimped for Jaguar and Microsoft, two companies notorious for making products that require a full-time mechanic, I think it's really interesting to listen to what non-techies are saying about it. Listening to the news on TV and the radio in the car, I hear people asking "Well, what makes it so great?"
The answers, even from the most Microsoft friendly of places (e.g. PC Magazine) is one of ambivalence to near disingenuousness. The best I've heard about it is it's stable, but lacking the full feature set of Windows 2000, "it's prettier", and that it has features that make it arguably easier to use. If you call being able to burn a CD with none of the flexibility of a real CD mastering package, navigate zip files with none of the useful features of WinZip, or try to do anything involving this here internet without being railroaded to a Microsoft property, well, yeah, I guess it's easier to use. We'll skip a description of the hair-brained "activation" process, with the exception of a snippet I heard on NPR yesterday:
Announcer: "So, I hear that if I want to upgrade multiple computers in my house, I'll need to purchase multiple upgrade packages and the upgrade will only work on computers purchased after the holidays in 1999. Is this the case?"
PC Magazine Editor guy: "Well, you do need at least 128 MB of RAM...:
Announcer: "Isn't that the bare minimum?"
PMEG: "Well, it'll run just fine with 128, but with more, it'll run 'better'"
Announcer: "And the activation process? In the past, people have just used the same CD for multiple computers"
PMEG: "Well, that's always been illegal, Microsoft is just doing what they can to make sure people abide to the license agreement."
So what are we left with? An OS that gets crippled for consumers, shoved down their throat with every new PC purchase, and will achieve the ubiquity we've come to expect from Microsoft operating systems. A little bit of stability does not rescue XP from the kind of mediocrity that's synonymous with Windows, all the while being told that it's the greatest thing since ones and zeroes.
Bill Gates is not a pretty man naked.
It's not the crashing that I find so interesting, I mean it would be beating a dead horse to accuse Microsoft of releasing things that don't always operate as expected. What I think is strange is the lack of Microsoft branding in the promotional kiosks and posters I've seen. Taco Bell is running this huge promotion for the Xbox and there is no mention of Microsoft anywhere on the signage. I've seen a simmilar lack of the ubiquitous microsoft logo on the few kiosks displaying Xbox games and systems that I've seen. Given that I can't boot up Windows without seeing the Microsoft logo 10 times, this seems a little odd. Is it perhaps because we expect things like video game consoles not to crash? Are they trying to distance their reputation for blue screens and error messages from their entry into the console market? Ever remember rebooting your SNES because it just stopped working? Ever had to upgrade your Playstation because of buggy code? Me neither.
~raum
Next time someone tries to say that the slippery slope argument is an invalid one in regards to the "adjustment" of ones liberties, remember this:
Clinton passed the Affective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism act, that amongst other rather non-liberal ideas made it possible to hold a non-US citizen for as long as we like, without letting them know the charges or evidence against them, and allows us to try them in what amounts to a secret court. You combine this with the legislation passed and pending referenced in the article and it doesn't take a political scientist to see a pattern.
So much for jurisprudence. Now we look to aim this thinking at "hackers"? We want to equate hacking with terrorism? To even mention someone damaging a computer system and killing thousands of innocent people in the same breath only serves to trivialize those that have died at the hands of real terrorists.
So what's next? If you protest the WTO, does that make you a terrorist? How about standing up for the rights of others, or god forbid, the planet? How about interfering with commerce by say, trafficking in copyrighted material?
Everyday I hear of more and more extreme measures to combat "terrorism". What point will there be in protecting our country if what we are left with is a government as totalitarian as those we claim to oppose?
~raum
What crap. You think enough people would have saw this for what it is, billionaire monopolist Ellison's ploy for more sales and further power. Gonna give the software to the government? I suppose the consulting fee's necissary to put this into effect will be donated as well. I'm sure Scott "There's no such thing as privacy anyway" McNealy will gladly donate all those Sparc boxes to run it on. Thank you Dianne "Let's make sure we keep those foreign students, I mean terrorists out of the country" Feinstein for again proving you're about just as fascist all the republicans you run against.
re-reading 1984 and shivering,
~raum
Can't help but think of the Human Battery stuff from the Matrix. We better watch out for those Aibo pet-things from Sony. It's just a matter of time...
Debates of the obvious privacy issues aside, I suppose Oracle will be happy to donate the billions of dollars a program like this will cost and all of the DBA's neccisary to maintain what would likely be the worlds largest database. Oh, and I'm sure Oracle would help to secure this database against all the people that would just love to get thier hands on all that juicy data.
Larry Ellison, Humani-fricken-tarian of the year.
~raum (wretching over the side of the boat of democracy)
Your argument is based on a false premise, there is no such thing as permanent saftey. Our own government is saying that this operation "infinite justice" may go on for years. We have to start worrying about our civil liberties now. We're being told that this is an attack on freedom. By giving our freedom away, we are handing a victory to those that would seek to do us harm.