A couple of years ago when I chanced to be in London I went to visit the Houses of Parliament. On my way in I went through a metal detector -- standard stuff -- and then I had to stand for several seconds in an enclosed booth (think phone booth) while some electronics were sniffing at me. The point was to check for molecules of explosives (IRA was more pesky in those days).
Of course, I had to stand still in a small enclosed space... If similar techology is made to work for people just passing through, this is much more scary. I hesitate to call this progress.
All he was saying was that conducting massive scans on other peoples networks without providing a reason is considered bad practice.
Well, no. I was under the impression that he was making a stronger point. I understood him to mean that portscanning is a BAD THING, that people shouldn't be doing it, and those who do and are caught should be punished in some way. In other word, he was basically arguing for making portscanning illegal in some way.
And my point, spelled out in simple words, is that people in positions of authority and responsibility (e.g. sysadmins) dislike stuff which makes their life more complicated (e.g. portscanning) and often are inclined to make this stuff forbidden/illegal -- just to make their life easier. I don't think this is a good reason. I don't think that poking at a network is a harmful action that should be punished. Granted, it is a frequent prelude to an attack, but that by itself is not a good enough reason to outlaw it. And the increase in the sysadmins' stress level is not a good reason, either.
Ethics is in the eye of the beholder (no, not that beholder:-). What's ethical for me is probably not ethical for you and vice versa.
It is my personal belief that no corporate entity should be able to spy on their employees by sifting through their e-mail.
No problem here.
It violates all sorts of rights granted to us by the Bill of Rights.
But here you are wrong, sorry. To put it crudely, you do not have rights to privacy in other people's (as in, your employer) computer systems. If you want to be private, bring your own laptop. Anybody who wants to look in there -- tell them to fuck off. But what you do on not-yours computers is fair game IMHO.
This sounds like the court determined that what was essentially a contract between an employer and employee was invalid...
Err, no. That wasn't a contract. That was a promise and legally there is a world of difference between a promise and a contract (quick-and-dirty test: in a contract there is *exchange* of value, in a promise one side just gives and the other side just receives). Promises, generally, are not enforceable.
...but don't lie to each other?
I suspect that the promise was made by some mid-level manager who really had no authority to make these claims...
While it's pretty easy for a company to intrude on your privacy, especially among the Windows-using demographic where monitoring programs can very easily be installed on your computer
Not to defend Windows, but what is it about UNIX that would prevent a competent sysadmin to install monitoring programs on your, say, Sun box?
I've yet to hear of a case where someone was fired for using encryption, ssh or ssl to protect their privacy.
Some places (like mine) explicitly prohibit using any kind of encryption in the work place. You sign a piece of paper stating that you know and agree to this when you are hired.
One of the reasons I've been looking very carefully at PDAs lately is that I want a personal, as in really personal, machine that I can use at work and at home and tell the employer to fuck off if he wants to know what's in there. Laptops are too big and heavy, and Palms are too drain-bamaged. Psions and the latest crop of WinCE [pulls on asbestos underwear] devices look yummy.
Even now that the Cold War has finished there are any number of threats to people in every country that are dealt with by intelligence services all the time without people even realising it. And if these agencies cannot access information when it is required then they cannot do their jobs, and the chances of say, a terrorist bomb attack, goes up dramatically.
This is, basically, an argument for a police state.
Your point is that part of the government's job is to protect its citizens from threats and that taking away individual liberties makes this job easier. The problem, of course, is that historically governments were very, very consistent is abusing the advantages they have over individuals.
Consider that forcing everybody to carry at all times an internal passport with fingerprint/retina/DNA information would make law enforcement a lot easier. Consider that forcing everybody to wear and electronic anklet/bracelet which monitors their location (a la house-arrest devices) will make it even more easier. Consider that allowing to use torture and/or psychoactive drugs on suspects will considerably increase the percentage of crimes solved. So?
The problem is finding an acceptable trade-off between personal freedom and government needs and your post seems to be quite one-sided in this regard.
Muckraking is a good thing as long as it is carried out by legal means
Well, if you define muckraking as brave journalists saving the workers' lives, then sure, it's a good thing. To me, though, muckraking is searching for dirt -- any dirt -- in order to discredit an opponent. Look at any recent big-ticket election campaign and you'll see perfectly good examples of muckraking.
And just in case you are in doubt, no, I don't think it's a good thing.
I think it's reasonable for Oracle to investigate the ties between a group of "industry professionals" that support Microsoft and MS itself.
As I pointed out in some other post, if you believe that "business is war", then it's perfectly OK. However, then I don't see how you can have any objections to Microsoft's business tactics.
I would, of course, encourage the police to keep on the tail of anybody who hangs out on the street dressed like a gangster
Wonderful. But why stop at gangsters (you probably meant gang members, but that's OK)? Police should keep a close watch on people with weird haircuts or unusual tatoos, right? Of course if somebody is wearing a suit, he can never be a criminal -- he is too respectable for that -- but anybody wearing a T-shirt is fair game, I say.
Further, I would discourage them from hassling anybody behaving in a respectable ordinary fashion.
You mean you would just discourage them? I thought that police hassling of ordinary law-abiding citizens was illegal and led to dismissal of cops, lawsuits against police departments and other unpleasnatries.
Yes, we would be angry if Microsoft hired a private detective to dig up dirt on a rival. But that's because Microsoft's rivals are usually a) weaker than MS
Ahem. Are you going to judge the morality of the action based on market capitalization of the company? And it's not like Oracle is a struggling start-up...
and b) doing nothing wrong (other than pissing off MS).
And how would you know that? Or are you assuming that Microsoft has a monopoly on evil deeds, as well?
And just why do you suppose that one-third of black men aged 18-29 are awating trial, in jail, or on parole?
For several reasons, the major one being the government's so-called War On Drugs.
Could it have something to do with a culture of violence that most black people live in?
Sure it does. The interesting question, however, is "How did this culture of violence came about, and why it continues to exist?".
Any charges of "racism" will be met with the expectation that the person making the charge is capable of defining the term.
Charges? Racism? But since you've asked...
Racism is a belief that people of certain races have either more or less rights than people of other races. Two examples of racist organizations: KKK and NAACP.
Well, that's a wee bit more complicated than you make it out to be.
There are two ways for you to argue your point.
The first is to say that police are justified in using preventive measures (like going through trash or following people around) if they have a reasonable belief that the person or the company is likely to commit a crime. Basically, if the police have a reason to belive you are more likely than average to commit a crime, they are justified in committing additional resources to check on you. This is a utilitiarian viewpoint and under it following black men around is perfectly OK.
The second argument would be to say that people who have shown a pattern of offences lose some of their rights. For example, if I was caught shoplifting, police would be justified in following me into the stores -- not because they think I'll shoplift again (that's the first argument) but because they can: I lost some rights by shoplifting and the police now can follow me around because of that. There are people who feel comfortable in this framework (convicted criminals are not really humans, just do something so that I never see them again) and people who aren't.
So, again, why is it OK for Oracle to spy on Microsoft but it is not OK for Microsoft to spy on Oracle?
If we were investigating a company with no history of trouble whatsoever, I'd call the investigation muckraking.
This is still muckracking. If you think that Oracle is doing this out of its abstract sense of justice, think again. Larry Ellison has a personal vendetta against Bill Gates (for a variety of reasons, some of them having to do with being only the second richest man on earth) and that is why he is digging for dirt on Microsoft.
Do you think it's good business tactics to hire a private investigator to check that your competitors file their taxes correctly? Maybe their boss expensed a lunch with his wife? Sic the IRS on him and breath easier...
If you accept that "business is war" than Oracle is doing nothing unusual. But then, again, so does Microsoft.
I've had two speeding tickets in my driving career and, as a 21 year old guy am statistically fairly likely to speed. It'd be a little heavy-handed, but you could justify the pattern of behaviour if the police decided to follow me in unmarked cars to try and get me again.
Oh yeah? About a third of black men age 18-29 are either awaiting trial, in jail, or on parole. That perfectly justifies sending a plain-clothes cop to walk behind every young black male to see if he commits crimes, right?
Well, the hard part in all this is the legal stuff.
Ahem. Communication protocols do not solve legal problems.
instead of needing to sniff on a router, there was a "secret" stream of data that went to some big government of corporate harddrive?
With government this is not a problem. Evidence obtained without a warrant it inadmissible and besides this amounts to illegal wiretapping and will cause huge outcry when (note: not if, when) detected.
With corporation this is somewhat of a problem, yet I don't see any ways in which new protocols would make logging of my actions easier. Not to mention that forking a stream of data is rather trivial and does not need any special protocols.
Let's face it, the internet is still by and large a pretty anonymous place. If I want to be paranoid, I have the ability to pretty much move about undetected.
Well, that ain't so simple.
Internet has a lot of pseudo-privacy. This means that for Joe Q. Luser (and even for his sister Joanne D. Not-So-Luser) it is hard to find out who is the person behind a handle or a nick or a screen name or an e-mail address. However that's not true for for law enforcement. If you are not engaging in useful but inconvenient paranoia, it's fairly trivial for law enforcement (==gubmint) to trace you (usually courtesy of your IP) and produce a basic sequence of your activities (generally courtesy of your ISP's logs).
Thus "normal" internet usage is opaque to public but can be made transparent (at high cost in time and effort) to law enforcement agencies.
Of course, there are a bunch of tools that are capable, if skillfully used, to mask your identity. However by my highly scientific guess less than 0.001% of internent users actually use them.
government (and corporations) are kicking themselves that they didn't approach Gore and have him build in monitoring into the protocols since they would LOVE to watch every little thing we do
And what is it that you want to monitor? Most everything is unencrypted and freely readable by anybody with a sniffer or access to a router. If I want to know everything you do I can get a court warrant and attach a large hard drive to your ISP's gateway. I don't need anything from the protocols: the stream of IP packets is perfectly fine, thank you very much.
Nobody wants to be paying for content, only to have it become the highlight of another, more popular page
Well, yeah, but it's a business model problem, not a linking problem. Putting stuff on the web is publishing and I don't think it's reasonable to control information about where to find published material.
Cases such as DEEP LINKING are the real toughies
No, they are not. I understand you want people to go through you front page so that all these ad-impression counters click and whirr, but your wishes (even if they are wishes for money and have an important name like 'business plan') impose no obligations on other people.
Besides, it's not like it's hard to deal with that particular problem technologically.
I get nervous when judges come near the internet.
I get much more nervous when politicians come near it.
XML is basically a big ol' delimited text file. The only things separating it from a 30-year old text file is the fact that it's hierarchical and the fact that there are parsers that let you navigate the tree structure easily.
So what's wrong about it? Plain-vanilla text files are so useful because they are both human- and machine-readable. I'll take UNIX's gaggle of config files over that binary monster of a registry any day. Yes, it's not the most efficient use of bits, but who cares?
People are advocating XML is this great new technology for universal data exchange. Well, it's NOT... no more than a standard text file is.
Ah, but you see, a standard text file is is a great technology for data exchange. It's easily debuggable, you don't have to worry about big-/little-endianess (not the mention the horrors of binary representation of reals) and everybody in the world can deal with ASCII.
Yes, XML is just text structured in a certain way. That's a feature, not a bug.
Sales Tax is levied against the state of sale, not the state of purchase.use tax. You are expected to pay use tax to the state you live in on all items you buy anywhere in the world. By a strange coincidence, the use tax is exactly equivalent to the state's sales tax.
If you've paid sales tax to another state, you can use it to offset use tax: if you live in Pennsylvania and both Pennsylvania and Illionis have 7.5% sales tax, then paying sales tax to Illinois makes you not owe anything to Pennsylvania. However (AFAIK) if, say, PA has 7.5% sales tax and Illinois has only 5% sales tax, you still owe 2.5% use tax to PA.
Of course, if you paid no sales tax at all, you owe your state full amount of its sal^H^H^Huse tax.
In other words, fucked if you do and fucked if you don't.
f you call a store and order something by phone, you have to pay the tax.
Err, no you don't. When you order something over the phone from a company which has no presence in your state you pay no sales tax (theoretically you still owe use tax to your state).
In fact, internet retailers are currently operating under exactly the same rules as "phone" mail-order businesses. There is no difference at all.
When he says that the concept of an OS is dying, he means that interest in the how and why of an OS is dwindling, and eventually won't be able to support the development. Consumers like applications and don't care about the OS. Content providers deliver content and don't care about the OS, so long as the money keeps rolling in. etc. etc.
OK, I suspect you mean that OS is dying as a viable business product that can be sold. That may very well be so and this being Slashdot, a lot of people around will tell you that this is a good thing, too. That I have no problem with.
However if you think of an OS in the computer science sense, basically as something that sits between the hardware and the applications providing some standardized services, then it's hard to see how that concept can be dying.
Just because consumers and content providers do not care about it does not mean much. They care about the specific microprocessor that runs their code even less, yet nobody is saying that Intel and AMD are going to wither and die in the near future. People like Neal Stephenson have argued (In the Beginning Was the Command Line) that operating systems are not going to be viable business products any more and I tend to agree with them. But that doesn't mean they are not going to exist any more.
I'm feeling a bit nasty this morning so those of you with warm fuzzies may want to look away... The quotes are all from a VP-of-something from Amiga.
"The concept of an operating system has been dying for quite a long time.
Wow! Now that's an introduction that doesn't take prisoners. I guess we should be thankful for the guy telling us. I mean, it's not like OS implementations suck, it's the whole concept of the operating system that's dying. See, we are not going to have operating systems any more. We are going to have, like stuff, and then, like, other stuff will happen with it, and then, see, it's digital content in a Gibsonesque environment and we geeks will want to get nasty with it. But not an operating system, no sir, nothing like that. That concept is dead.
What we're looking at is creating a dynamic digital environment, in which the most important thing is the producers and consumers of digital [content] matter, and they don't really care how they got there, or what they used to get there, they just got into this environment.
Ah, yes. "Dynamic digital environment" -- sounds good, doesn't it? Of course we all here are stuck in a static analog environment, but the new Amiga will lead us into the new world.
Now, take producers and consumers of digital matter. These are free-wheeling guys, they don't care about anything. They don't care where they are, how they got there, what they are doing there, what kind of shit they are producing/consuming -- but, man, they got into this dynamic digital environment -- let's party!
You know, you can take it anywhere, you should be able to use any hardware with it.
Take what? The no-OS-digital-dynamic-whatever-something? Of course, since there is no OS the hardware doesn't matter. It's digital dynamic, baby, who cares about hardware! I'll just make a Beowulf cluster out of my toaster, microwave, and can opener and run it. I won't know how I got there, but, hey, it all doesn't matter, does it?
For the lynxey type, the hackers, the geeks, whatever you want to call them, they would want to get down dirty and nasty with the stuff. But even a lot of that stuff, a lot of them would rather get on and actually produce and do stuff, rather than having to go down and find that driver, and change their config files and all that stuff.
Ah, we get to the interesting bits. The wonderful lynxey type -- I presume, long-time users of lynx? Yee-haw, we really want to get dirty and nasty with that dead operating system concept, you know, hack that corpse to pieces -- that would be nasty, wouldn't it? Or is "stuff" some other stuff? Is it that dynamic digital thingy? Let's see... "But even a lot of that stuff, a lot of them would rather get on and actually produce and do stuff". Ah, I see. Now it's crystal clear. It's THAT stuff. Now I understand. And I really want to get dirty and nasty with it, oh yeah... Wait, there is more: "do stuff, rather than having to go down and find that driver, and change their config files and all that stuff". More stuff! How wonderful! And, of course, all these lynxey people just hate going down on a driver, err, scratch that, they hate finding drivers and changing config files. Changing config files is eeeeevil. Everybody who does this should be shot. Or dumped into the dynamic digital environment where they won't know where they came from or where they are going.
We're really trying to create this higher environment for developers and for users. It really is where we're moving towards the Gibson dream."
Higher? Oh well, I'm not even gonna ask. But I am really interested, what is the Gibson dream that we are moving towards?
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. `It's not like I'm using,' Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. `It's like my body's developed this massive drug deficiency."
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of years ago when I chanced to be in London I went to visit the Houses of Parliament. On my way in I went through a metal detector -- standard stuff -- and then I had to stand for several seconds in an enclosed booth (think phone booth) while some electronics were sniffing at me. The point was to check for molecules of explosives (IRA was more pesky in those days).
Of course, I had to stand still in a small enclosed space... If similar techology is made to work for people just passing through, this is much more scary. I hesitate to call this progress.
Kaa
All he was saying was that conducting massive scans on other peoples networks without providing a reason is considered bad practice.
Well, no. I was under the impression that he was making a stronger point. I understood him to mean that portscanning is a BAD THING, that people shouldn't be doing it, and those who do and are caught should be punished in some way. In other word, he was basically arguing for making portscanning illegal in some way.
And my point, spelled out in simple words, is that people in positions of authority and responsibility (e.g. sysadmins) dislike stuff which makes their life more complicated (e.g. portscanning) and often are inclined to make this stuff forbidden/illegal -- just to make their life easier. I don't think this is a good reason. I don't think that poking at a network is a harmful action that should be punished. Granted, it is a frequent prelude to an attack, but that by itself is not a good enough reason to outlaw it. And the increase in the sysadmins' stress level is not a good reason, either.
Kaa
it is most certainly unethical.
:-). What's ethical for me is probably not ethical for you and vice versa.
Ethics is in the eye of the beholder (no, not that beholder
It is my personal belief that no corporate entity should be able to spy on their employees by sifting through their e-mail.
No problem here.
It violates all sorts of rights granted to us by the Bill of Rights.
But here you are wrong, sorry. To put it crudely, you do not have rights to privacy in other people's (as in, your employer) computer systems. If you want to be private, bring your own laptop. Anybody who wants to look in there -- tell them to fuck off. But what you do on not-yours computers is fair game IMHO.
Kaa
This sounds like the court determined that what was essentially a contract between an employer and employee was invalid...
...but don't lie to each other?
Err, no. That wasn't a contract. That was a promise and legally there is a world of difference between a promise and a contract (quick-and-dirty test: in a contract there is *exchange* of value, in a promise one side just gives and the other side just receives). Promises, generally, are not enforceable.
I suspect that the promise was made by some mid-level manager who really had no authority to make these claims...
Kaa
Anyone who scans subnets/whole nets with pings for no official and very good reason should be shot really.
Anybody who tries to "look under the hood" of his hardware should be shot really.
Anybody who tries to read DVD discs on his own without a licensed reader should be shot really.
Anybody in Manhattan high-rises who has a telescope should be shot really.
Anybody who is disrespectful of authority should be shot really.
Shall I continue?
Kaa
While it's pretty easy for a company to intrude on your privacy, especially among the Windows-using demographic where monitoring programs can very easily be installed on your computer
Not to defend Windows, but what is it about UNIX that would prevent a competent sysadmin to install monitoring programs on your, say, Sun box?
I've yet to hear of a case where someone was fired for using encryption, ssh or ssl to protect their privacy.
Some places (like mine) explicitly prohibit using any kind of encryption in the work place. You sign a piece of paper stating that you know and agree to this when you are hired.
One of the reasons I've been looking very carefully at PDAs lately is that I want a personal, as in really personal, machine that I can use at work and at home and tell the employer to fuck off if he wants to know what's in there. Laptops are too big and heavy, and Palms are too drain-bamaged. Psions and the latest crop of WinCE [pulls on asbestos underwear] devices look yummy.
Kaa
Even now that the Cold War has finished there are any number of threats to people in every country that are dealt with by intelligence services all the time without people even realising it. And if these agencies cannot access information when it is required then they cannot do their jobs, and the chances of say, a terrorist bomb attack, goes up dramatically.
This is, basically, an argument for a police state.
Your point is that part of the government's job is to protect its citizens from threats and that taking away individual liberties makes this job easier. The problem, of course, is that historically governments were very, very consistent is abusing the advantages they have over individuals.
Consider that forcing everybody to carry at all times an internal passport with fingerprint/retina/DNA information would make law enforcement a lot easier. Consider that forcing everybody to wear and electronic anklet/bracelet which monitors their location (a la house-arrest devices) will make it even more easier. Consider that allowing to use torture and/or psychoactive drugs on suspects will considerably increase the percentage of crimes solved. So?
The problem is finding an acceptable trade-off between personal freedom and government needs and your post seems to be quite one-sided in this regard.
Kaa
WIMP - Windowed Interface with Mouse Pointer
Nitpick: WIMP actually stands for Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer.
Kaa
Katz's articles require more intelligence to understand than your television.
Ahem. Both are content-free, but to read Katz you at least have to be able to read... That probably requires some intelligence.
Kaa
Maybe I had a different history class in school
I am quite sure of that
Muckraking is a good thing as long as it is carried out by legal means
Well, if you define muckraking as brave journalists saving the workers' lives, then sure, it's a good thing. To me, though, muckraking is searching for dirt -- any dirt -- in order to discredit an opponent. Look at any recent big-ticket election campaign and you'll see perfectly good examples of muckraking.
And just in case you are in doubt, no, I don't think it's a good thing.
I think it's reasonable for Oracle to investigate the ties between a group of "industry professionals" that support Microsoft and MS itself.
As I pointed out in some other post, if you believe that "business is war", then it's perfectly OK. However, then I don't see how you can have any objections to Microsoft's business tactics.
Kaa
I would, of course, encourage the police to keep on the tail of anybody who hangs out on the street dressed like a gangster
Wonderful. But why stop at gangsters (you probably meant gang members, but that's OK)? Police should keep a close watch on people with weird haircuts or unusual tatoos, right? Of course if somebody is wearing a suit, he can never be a criminal -- he is too respectable for that -- but anybody wearing a T-shirt is fair game, I say.
Further, I would discourage them from hassling anybody behaving in a respectable ordinary fashion.
You mean you would just discourage them? I thought that police hassling of ordinary law-abiding citizens was illegal and led to dismissal of cops, lawsuits against police departments and other unpleasnatries.
Kaa
Yes, we would be angry if Microsoft hired a private detective to dig up dirt on a rival. But that's because Microsoft's rivals are usually a) weaker than MS
Ahem. Are you going to judge the morality of the action based on market capitalization of the company? And it's not like Oracle is a struggling start-up...
and b) doing nothing wrong (other than pissing off MS).
And how would you know that? Or are you assuming that Microsoft has a monopoly on evil deeds, as well?
Kaa
And just why do you suppose that one-third of black men aged 18-29 are awating trial, in jail, or on parole?
For several reasons, the major one being the government's so-called War On Drugs.
Could it have something to do with a culture of violence that most black people live in?
Sure it does. The interesting question, however, is "How did this culture of violence came about, and why it continues to exist?".
Any charges of "racism" will be met with the expectation that the person making the charge is capable of defining the term.
Charges? Racism? But since you've asked...
Racism is a belief that people of certain races have either more or less rights than people of other races. Two examples of racist organizations: KKK and NAACP.
Kaa
That's the issue here - justification
Well, that's a wee bit more complicated than you make it out to be.
There are two ways for you to argue your point.
The first is to say that police are justified in using preventive measures (like going through trash or following people around) if they have a reasonable belief that the person or the company is likely to commit a crime. Basically, if the police have a reason to belive you are more likely than average to commit a crime, they are justified in committing additional resources to check on you. This is a utilitiarian viewpoint and under it following black men around is perfectly OK.
The second argument would be to say that people who have shown a pattern of offences lose some of their rights. For example, if I was caught shoplifting, police would be justified in following me into the stores -- not because they think I'll shoplift again (that's the first argument) but because they can: I lost some rights by shoplifting and the police now can follow me around because of that. There are people who feel comfortable in this framework (convicted criminals are not really humans, just do something so that I never see them again) and people who aren't.
So, again, why is it OK for Oracle to spy on Microsoft but it is not OK for Microsoft to spy on Oracle?
Kaa
If we were investigating a company with no history of trouble whatsoever, I'd call the investigation muckraking.
This is still muckracking. If you think that Oracle is doing this out of its abstract sense of justice, think again. Larry Ellison has a personal vendetta against Bill Gates (for a variety of reasons, some of them having to do with being only the second richest man on earth) and that is why he is digging for dirt on Microsoft.
Do you think it's good business tactics to hire a private investigator to check that your competitors file their taxes correctly? Maybe their boss expensed a lunch with his wife? Sic the IRS on him and breath easier...
If you accept that "business is war" than Oracle is doing nothing unusual. But then, again, so does Microsoft.
Kaa
I've had two speeding tickets in my driving career and, as a 21 year old guy am statistically fairly likely to speed. It'd be a little heavy-handed, but you could justify the pattern of behaviour if the police decided to follow me in unmarked cars to try and get me again.
Oh yeah? About a third of black men age 18-29 are either awaiting trial, in jail, or on parole. That perfectly justifies sending a plain-clothes cop to walk behind every young black male to see if he commits crimes, right?
Kaa
Well, the hard part in all this is the legal stuff.
Ahem. Communication protocols do not solve legal problems.
instead of needing to sniff on a router, there was a "secret" stream of data that went to some big government of corporate harddrive?
With government this is not a problem. Evidence obtained without a warrant it inadmissible and besides this amounts to illegal wiretapping and will cause huge outcry when (note: not if, when) detected.
With corporation this is somewhat of a problem, yet I don't see any ways in which new protocols would make logging of my actions easier. Not to mention that forking a stream of data is rather trivial and does not need any special protocols.
Kaa
How cheap? Cheaper than plugging a Celery into a BX motherboard?
This looks like a platform for ARM-based prototyping. You probably can build a server (or a workstation) out of it, but why?
Kaa
Let's face it, the internet is still by and large a pretty anonymous place. If I want to be paranoid, I have the ability to pretty much move about undetected.
Well, that ain't so simple.
Internet has a lot of pseudo-privacy. This means that for Joe Q. Luser (and even for his sister Joanne D. Not-So-Luser) it is hard to find out who is the person behind a handle or a nick or a screen name or an e-mail address. However that's not true for for law enforcement. If you are not engaging in useful but inconvenient paranoia, it's fairly trivial for law enforcement (==gubmint) to trace you (usually courtesy of your IP) and produce a basic sequence of your activities (generally courtesy of your ISP's logs).
Thus "normal" internet usage is opaque to public but can be made transparent (at high cost in time and effort) to law enforcement agencies.
Of course, there are a bunch of tools that are capable, if skillfully used, to mask your identity. However by my highly scientific guess less than 0.001% of internent users actually use them.
government (and corporations) are kicking themselves that they didn't approach Gore and have him build in monitoring into the protocols since they would LOVE to watch every little thing we do
And what is it that you want to monitor? Most everything is unencrypted and freely readable by anybody with a sniffer or access to a router. If I want to know everything you do I can get a court warrant and attach a large hard drive to your ISP's gateway. I don't need anything from the protocols: the stream of IP packets is perfectly fine, thank you very much.
Kaa
Well, linking can be a sticky issue
Why is that? Looks pretty simple to me.
Nobody wants to be paying for content, only to have it become the highlight of another, more popular page
Well, yeah, but it's a business model problem, not a linking problem. Putting stuff on the web is publishing and I don't think it's reasonable to control information about where to find published material.
Cases such as DEEP LINKING are the real toughies
No, they are not. I understand you want people to go through you front page so that all these ad-impression counters click and whirr, but your wishes (even if they are wishes for money and have an important name like 'business plan') impose no obligations on other people.
Besides, it's not like it's hard to deal with that particular problem technologically.
I get nervous when judges come near the internet.
I get much more nervous when politicians come near it.
Kaa
XML is basically a big ol' delimited text file. The only things separating it from a 30-year old text file is the fact that it's hierarchical and the fact that there are parsers that let you navigate the tree structure easily.
So what's wrong about it? Plain-vanilla text files are so useful because they are both human- and machine-readable. I'll take UNIX's gaggle of config files over that binary monster of a registry any day. Yes, it's not the most efficient use of bits, but who cares?
People are advocating XML is this great new technology for universal data exchange. Well, it's NOT... no more than a standard text file is.
Ah, but you see, a standard text file is is a great technology for data exchange. It's easily debuggable, you don't have to worry about big-/little-endianess (not the mention the horrors of binary representation of reals) and everybody in the world can deal with ASCII.
Yes, XML is just text structured in a certain way. That's a feature, not a bug.
Kaa
Sales Tax is levied against the state of sale, not the state of purchase.use tax. You are expected to pay use tax to the state you live in on all items you buy anywhere in the world. By a strange coincidence, the use tax is exactly equivalent to the state's sales tax.
If you've paid sales tax to another state, you can use it to offset use tax: if you live in Pennsylvania and both Pennsylvania and Illionis have 7.5% sales tax, then paying sales tax to Illinois makes you not owe anything to Pennsylvania. However (AFAIK) if, say, PA has 7.5% sales tax and Illinois has only 5% sales tax, you still owe 2.5% use tax to PA.
Of course, if you paid no sales tax at all, you owe your state full amount of its sal^H^H^Huse tax.
In other words, fucked if you do and fucked if you don't.
Kaa
f you call a store and order something by phone, you have to pay the tax.
Err, no you don't. When you order something over the phone from a company which has no presence in your state you pay no sales tax (theoretically you still owe use tax to your state).
In fact, internet retailers are currently operating under exactly the same rules as "phone" mail-order businesses. There is no difference at all.
Kaa
When he says that the concept of an OS is dying, he means that interest in the how and why of an OS is dwindling, and eventually won't be able to support the development. Consumers like applications and don't care about the OS. Content providers deliver content and don't care about the OS, so long as the money keeps rolling in. etc. etc.
OK, I suspect you mean that OS is dying as a viable business product that can be sold. That may very well be so and this being Slashdot, a lot of people around will tell you that this is a good thing, too. That I have no problem with.
However if you think of an OS in the computer science sense, basically as something that sits between the hardware and the applications providing some standardized services, then it's hard to see how that concept can be dying.
Just because consumers and content providers do not care about it does not mean much. They care about the specific microprocessor that runs their code even less, yet nobody is saying that Intel and AMD are going to wither and die in the near future. People like Neal Stephenson have argued (In the Beginning Was the Command Line) that operating systems are not going to be viable business products any more and I tend to agree with them. But that doesn't mean they are not going to exist any more.
Kaa
I'm feeling a bit nasty this morning so those of you with warm fuzzies may want to look away... The quotes are all from a VP-of-something from Amiga.
"The concept of an operating system has been dying for quite a long time.
Wow! Now that's an introduction that doesn't take prisoners. I guess we should be thankful for the guy telling us. I mean, it's not like OS implementations suck, it's the whole concept of the operating system that's dying. See, we are not going to have operating systems any more. We are going to have, like stuff, and then, like, other stuff will happen with it, and then, see, it's digital content in a Gibsonesque environment and we geeks will want to get nasty with it. But not an operating system, no sir, nothing like that. That concept is dead.
What we're looking at is creating a dynamic digital environment, in which the most important thing is the producers and consumers of digital [content] matter, and they don't really care how they got there, or what they used to get there, they just got into this environment.
Ah, yes. "Dynamic digital environment" -- sounds good, doesn't it? Of course we all here are stuck in a static analog environment, but the new Amiga will lead us into the new world.
Now, take producers and consumers of digital matter. These are free-wheeling guys, they don't care about anything. They don't care where they are, how they got there, what they are doing there, what kind of shit they are producing/consuming -- but, man, they got into this dynamic digital environment -- let's party!
You know, you can take it anywhere, you should be able to use any hardware with it.
Take what? The no-OS-digital-dynamic-whatever-something? Of course, since there is no OS the hardware doesn't matter. It's digital dynamic, baby, who cares about hardware! I'll just make a Beowulf cluster out of my toaster, microwave, and can opener and run it. I won't know how I got there, but, hey, it all doesn't matter, does it?
For the lynxey type, the hackers, the geeks, whatever you want to call them, they would want to get down dirty and nasty with the stuff. But even a lot of that stuff, a lot of them would rather get on and actually produce and do stuff, rather than having to go down and find that driver, and change their config files and all that stuff.
Ah, we get to the interesting bits. The wonderful lynxey type -- I presume, long-time users of lynx? Yee-haw, we really want to get dirty and nasty with that dead operating system concept, you know, hack that corpse to pieces -- that would be nasty, wouldn't it? Or is "stuff" some other stuff? Is it that dynamic digital thingy? Let's see... "But even a lot of that stuff, a lot of them would rather get on and actually produce and do stuff". Ah, I see. Now it's crystal clear. It's THAT stuff. Now I understand. And I really want to get dirty and nasty with it, oh yeah... Wait, there is more: "do stuff, rather than having to go down and find that driver, and change their config files and all that stuff". More stuff! How wonderful! And, of course, all these lynxey people just hate going down on a driver, err, scratch that, they hate finding drivers and changing config files. Changing config files is eeeeevil. Everybody who does this should be shot. Or dumped into the dynamic digital environment where they won't know where they came from or where they are going.
We're really trying to create this higher environment for developers and for users. It really is where we're moving towards the Gibson dream."
Higher? Oh well, I'm not even gonna ask. But I am really interested, what is the Gibson dream that we are moving towards?
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. `It's not like I'm using,' Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. `It's like my body's developed this massive drug deficiency."
Ah, I see.
Kaa