We all telecommute, but those of us in Florida get together for a big Xmas party every year... a small group of us hangs out more frequently, but it's mostly because we work from our homes etc, and this gives us a chance to get to know each other on a more personal level.
With other jobs, we'd go out for drinks perhaps after completing (or landing) a large project, but never just for the heck of it.
I don't know if it's the "Personal danger" issue, maybe more that we aren't as social as most people...
I never thought 802.11b was that slow. I've been using it for my laptop since February, and at 11 megabits, it's plenty fast enough IMO. Sure, it's not 100 MB/sec but it is wireless...
If you're refering to range issues (eg, an alternative for more broad coverage), then I'll agree. But for home and office intranet usage, 802.11b is more than suitable. Even with cable/xDSL/T1, it's considerably faster than your external connection anyway...
The one really good thing that might come of this IMO is that 802.11b products may go way down in price once the faster alternative is made available...
I didn't want to get too detailed, but I always have quite a lot of things running. 100 Moz windows? Not quite, but I typically keep anywhere between 5 and 20 open at a given time...
And, anyone who uses Mozilla constantly knows that it doesn't seem to free memory, ever... it grows and grows. The "tabs" feature is great (so technically it's just the one "window" open) but unfortunately closing a tab does not free any memory. I rarely restart Moz because I'd have to then re-open all the pages I had going, etc...
Trust me, run Mozilla for a few days straight, you'll see quite a bit of memory usage (it's at 80 megs right now).
Then there's LICQ (11 megs for such a tiny lil program), KMail (10 megs), 5 terminals, BitchX, Nautilis (using 12 megs, I suppose just showing the desktop)... the list goes on.
So yes, I'm typically using the full 192 megs plus a bit of swap after running for a while, and the new kernel has, IMHO, improved performance under these conditions.
I can't speak for the differences between the two VM layers in the most recent versions of each, but I went from 2.4.7-2 (RH Roswell Beta stock kernel) to 2.4.13 (+ext3 patch), and I've noticed a serious improvement.
My notebook has 192 megs and 256 meg swap partition. I run Mozilla constantly (which seems to constantly grow in memory usage as the days pass). Prior to the upgrade (2.4.7-2, recompiled without the debugging options RH had on by default), swapping was ungodly slow. Switching between Mozilla and an xterm would literally take a few seconds waiting for the window to draw on the screen. Even switching between tabs in Moz was slow.
Since going to 2.4.13 with ext3 patch, I've noticed a serious improvement in this behavior. Under the same conditions (between 20 and 50 megs swap usage), switching between windows is quite fast. I don't know if it's faster at swapping per se, or if it's just swapping different things (eg, more intelligently deciding what to swap out), but for me it "seems" much faster for day-to-day usage.
I haven't yet tested in a server environment... but for desktop usage, 2.4.13 rocks. Can't wait for 2.4.14, to see if any noticable improvements are added...
Though it will be a non-issue once I add another 128 megs to this machine, it's nice to see such great VM performance under (relatively) low memory conditions.
I use KMail (under Gnome no less) for my email. It's a great client, and handles tens of thousands of emails without much fuss.
24 days ago yesterday, I transfered all of my account settings to a new username. Somehow I managed to forget to chown 'kmailrc', a few directories deep. I didn't notice this until I closed and re-opened KMail 24 days later...
So after 24 days of adding POPs, tweaking filters, etc, I find out these things never were written to the config file. I found this out NOT by an error message -- KMail pretended everything was fine. I only found the problem after losing the settings that had apparently been in memory for the last month...
Frustrating to say the least; I would have appreciated even "Can't open 'kmailrc': permission denied" or better yet a chance to chown and retry. Nonetheless, I haven't found anything better (and it was my screw-up), and I don't have time to try and get Evolution to compile... and anything beats going back to Windoze...
This just goes to show that every system is different. My desktop runs Win2k for the same reason (Unreal Tournament). UT crashes semi-frequently, but Windows hasn't had a single problem.
My laptop OTOH wasn't stable out of the factory (WinME -- locked up twice in the first hour). As soon as I put RedHat on it, it hasn't crashed once (close to a year now, almost constant use).
For me personally, the difference is that I have had unstable Windows systems, but have yet to have an unstable Linux (or FreeBSD) box. Win2k is a step in the right direction, and XP may or may not continue that (I haven't used it yet). But *nix for me is better.
I just downloaded the "talkback enabled" tarball, as I really don't care for RPMs in some cases. But one thing I've noticed is that each Mozilla release seems to install more smoothly. It wasn't three minutes from the time I found this article to the time I was re-reading it in a new "tab"...
Mozilla has really come a long way, and IMO on Linux, there simply is no better alternative right now (Konqueror included).
Then ya look at some of the minimal ones, notably Blackbox and Sawfish, they both do what they were intended to do.
Exactly. I use Sawfish and I love it. It's much lighter than E, hasn't crashed yet, and integrates nicely with Gnome 1.4. And it's not ugly (with the right theme).
Plus it supports xinerama pretty nicely, aside from dialogs popping up in between screens once in a while.
Maybe it's about time some new standards are formed? I bet the SPAM problem would be much better if we had some form of SMTP-authorization that was standardized. I know there have been many attempts, but no two clients support the same few methods... Open-relays worked 30 years ago, but times change.
On a lighter note, I couldn't imagine life without email.
i think the push of this article is that since aus only has two backbones. the blacklisting of Optus is really going to effect the population at large (in australia).
Only to those utilizing the blacklist (which is done by choice).
If I were an ISP using such a blacklist, and something this large were blacklisted, I'd stop using it. It seems thousands of people would get denied in the name of blocking one spammer...
There are many times I've been known to use Lynx on my server to hunt down information, files, etc. Javascript gets annoying, and I disable Java and Flash period. When I'm stuck on dialup I've been known to disable images when trying to find information; makes surfing a lot quicker.
So if I'm in any of these situations, forced ads would be a major annoyance.
I'm not sure if removing adds from a page is legal, even without the DCMA.
The author wrote a page with an add, and a filter app modifies the page and removes the add picture, without a permission from the author.
Most browsers allow you to override fonts and colors, toggle image downloading, disable scripting, and so on; blocking ads is only one more tiny modification to the page. Modifying the page is something that is commonly accepted for other purposes (accessibility, user preference, etc), so I don't think that argument will go far.
But modification is one of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner.
I'm not sure if this applies. You certainly can't modify a copyrighted work and distribute it, but if you purchase a book, you're free to scribble notes on the pages. If you listen to a CD, you can EQ it to taste. Thus, if you download a web page, you should be able to modify it as you wish for your own viewing.
Selling an app that's only purpose is to remove adverts from web pages could infringe the authors rights.
That's what some say about Tivo and Replay TV... and so far, I don't think a real big fuss has been raised. The difference of course is that commercial-skipping isn't the only use for the Tivo (nor is it an advertised feature), so ad-blocking software might have a more difficult time... but a general proxy with ad-blocking as an extra feature might be fine.
- The biggest problem I see is that many sites run ads from a third party network (eg, Doubleclick). More than likely this would only work for ads served by the same server.
- What if you simply disabled image downloading all together? Or use Lynx? Or disable whatever technology they are using (Java, JS, whatever) for other reasons, if that's the case?
- If you're behind a proxy, often times images are downloaded via a different IP than other content (images are generally considered cachable). I've seen this in my logs many times, mostly with scripts (which are generally non-cachable). Or, the user may download the image from a cache, and the server might assume the user hasn't seen it. With larger ISPs who cache content, this is easily conceivable.
- If you chose not to see ads, you probably aren't going to purchase any products advertised. So the advertisers get cheated, the visitors annoyed, and the site owner is the only one potentially gaining anything (though pissing everyone off isn't a good way to make money).
I'm so sick of ads personally, I've disabled Flash and Java (both of which seem to be used more for ads than anything else). I've also added *.doubleclick.net and a few others to my DNS cache (on my home network), so ads from those places simply come up empty for me (no ad servers at 127.0.0.1:)
This reminds me of the CD copy protection crap: trying to extend a basic technology for purposes it wasn't intended for, for corporate gain, that only serves to harm the consumer. It won't fly.
...have all sorts of rediculous clauses. What other industry makes you agree to a license which states that there is NO guarantee that it will even work out of the box for any purpose? You pay good money and can't even get some assurance that it will function. Naturally, the license isn't printed on the outside of the packaging, and you must actually make the purchase before even seeing this, but that's another issue.
Something else that occurred to me: what about when you sell a used PC to someone? You might have tons of software licensed on that box, and provided you aren't keeping a copy of any of it, you shouldn't be required by law to format the drive and sell them a doorstop, should you?
I've often wondered about the legality of some of these EULAs (like the FrontPage thing discussed a few days ago). We're always discussing the GPL and other open-source licenses, debating whether or not they'd hold up in court; commercial software licenses haven't really been tested in courts much (to my knowledge) either.
I suspect the GPL might actually have a bit more legal ground than most EULAs, simply because of the way the license is presented to the end user. A box pops up, requiring you to click 'Accept', and most people don't read them. The GPL is in the top of every source file, and it's not easily over-looked. Plus developers should have a bit more responsibility than end-users when it comes to using someone else's code...
In my opinion, if commercial software vendors want my business, some of these clauses must go and they must take some accountability (eg, MS is not liable in any way for CodeRed/Nimda/etc thanks to these EULAs). Otherwise, I have no reason to purchase software when I can get much more favorable terms -- for free. The GPL is strict, but from an end-user perspective (and for any responsible developer) it's great.
What is scaring you guys with these proposals??? The FBI may scan your emails? Log your web-traffic? What about every curious sys. admin. in every ISP that your traffic goes throu? They all already have the power to do this.
They already have the ability to do this, but not the legal right without a warrant (or at least it can't be used as evidence). Just because it's in plain text does not mean you have no rights protecting you.
They already have the ability to listen in on your phone line, but they do not have the legal right to do so without a warrant. This is not much different, really.
Mind you, some ISPs and web hosts have provisions in their agreements making sure they can view any data on their machines for whatever reason. In those particular situations, this proposal doesn't make much difference. Personally I will only view or give up information on my customers when required to do so by law (eg, a warrant); this proposal certainly changes things.
I think there's some confusion about "reasonable expectation of privacy". There should be no expectation of security, eg email is plain text and easily intercepted. But you should, in the United States, have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
If just anyone were reading someone's email without permission, certainly there would be legal recourse. That's where a "reasonable expectation of privacy" comes in. Just because they're in plain view doesn't mean people have a right to view it. Think 900 MHz (analog) cell phones and the ban on scanners/down-converters. This is really no different in my opinion.
As others have said, the punishment should fit the crime. If you walk into a bank and (this is probably a bad example) physically steal a box of credit cards, you most certainly would not get life in prison. But intoduce a computer into the mix, and suddenly you are an evil "hacker" deserving life in prison.
Computer crime should be a crime; however, the punishment should be fair. You can kill someone and get potentially 20 years, sometimes less. Kill a man's credit rating, get life? (I wonder if temporary insanity would be a valid plea in computer crimes?)
It seems that every time the internet is mentioned, everyone goes nuts. See the PGP story from earlier for a prime example. See all the other stories regarding encryption back doors etc.
Regarding issues such as this, my opinion is that the "hacker" (or "cracker" to be more appropriate) should be *appropriately* punished, and the company who was broken into should be investigated. If it turns out the exploit could have been prevented (eg, a patch has been available, or poor security measures were used), they should be held liable as well. This will be especially important when Passport starts to become popular... if fear of a bad reputation doesn't push companies to establish solid security/privacy policies, maybe fear of legal action will.
Software companies/service providers have been getting away with EULAs that allow them to be negligent, relieving them of any responsibility whatsoever. This will have to change. No other industry is run like this...
The reason I call it an argument is that I find many different "reasons" why QUERTY was invented/adopted. A google search turns up many theories about this... the one I link to is the one I hear the most, but on the same site are some myths, including the "slow typists down" and some others I've heard in the past. I tend to agree with the first one, the one I hinted at in my first post, that it was done to keep certain common letter combinations physically separated helping to avoid jamming in typewriters.
In general I have found people that can not use or do not like to use split keyboards are people who can't type correctly.
As I said, I know I don't type "correctly", but I do touch-type (eg, I don't look at the keyboard). I do use the wrong fingers for certain keys, which means using a split keyboard involves a bit of work on my part. As I mentioned earlier, I'm either stubborn or have no patience (or probably just plain lazy).
Besides qwerty was designed to [slow] a person down so the mechinical arms would not hit.
I've heard this argument before (article about DVORAK I believe), and I'm pretty sure it's bogus. The keys may have been strategically placed so the more common two-key combinations are more likely to be separated, but it wasn't to slow the typist down.
At any rate, I'm probably the only one, but I love a standard QWERTY keyboard. Tried a split keyboard once (MS "natural"), couldn't stand it. I don't hit all keys with the proper finger (namely, the "B" threw me off). DVORAK was a nightmare, tried it for about two days. Maybe I don't have the patience, maybe I'm stubborn, but I'm happy enough at 70 WPM -- not the fastest, but fast enough for me.
Thought I was the only one. I have the Roswell beta on two machines, a laptop (192 megs) and desktop (256). The laptop is constantly swapping. Gnome, 2 Mozilla windows and KMail, and I'm swapping. Slowly.
The desktop isn't nearly as bad (faster drive, more RAM, faster CPU), but it's still noticably slow...
I'll probably snag 2.4.10, once I get the ext3 and wvlan crap working... hopefully the swapping will not slow it down as much (at times, with a few windows open, the laptop drive is constantly grinding; battery time sucks in those situations).
There have been some 1500 workers at the scene constantly since Tuesday, and I believe they are working as fast as they can. You have to realize just how dangerous the rescue efforts are.
Consider that the only survivors they found (last I heard) were rescue workers -- fire department, police, etc. These were people who arrived after the fact, but before the buildings collapsed. There is still danger of more collapses, especially when dealing with the rubble that is piled on top of the massive basements of the WTC towers. One false move and you could lose any remaining survivors down there.
As for the subway, they did try, and it's hopeless at this point. I believe it was flooded or something to that affect, and possible the subway tunnel could collapse; there's simply too much risk in that route. I do know that they did consider that possibility, and came to the conclusion that it simply wasn't worth the risk.
I can certainly understand your feelings on this, but believe me they are and have been trying to move as fast as they possibly can. It's just very dangerous, not to mention just how massive the destruction is...
I don't recall what the limit is on open connections on a typical *nix system, but wouldn't this tie up connections? The longer you hold each connection open, the more simultaneous connections are being wasted.
IOW, don't use this on a production machine. Perhaps you could run this on a separate box that doesn't do much, but that sounds like a lot of work (compared to, oh, say, patching the NT boxen).
I don't know if it's going to work, but the theory is a good start.
Yes, or people could patch their fscking boxes...
I'm not saying the tarpit idea is bad, it could help to some small degree. But it's a solution that we, Unix admins, are having to use because some Windows "admins" who double-clicked on "Install Web Server" don't know WTF they're doing...
Of course I can't think of a better solution either. People have tried emailing admins of known infected boxes, etc, and so far none of this has helped...
Slashdot Mirror
We all telecommute, but those of us in Florida get together for a big Xmas party every year... a small group of us hangs out more frequently, but it's mostly because we work from our homes etc, and this gives us a chance to get to know each other on a more personal level.
With other jobs, we'd go out for drinks perhaps after completing (or landing) a large project, but never just for the heck of it.
I don't know if it's the "Personal danger" issue, maybe more that we aren't as social as most people...
I never thought 802.11b was that slow. I've been using it for my laptop since February, and at 11 megabits, it's plenty fast enough IMO. Sure, it's not 100 MB/sec but it is wireless...
If you're refering to range issues (eg, an alternative for more broad coverage), then I'll agree. But for home and office intranet usage, 802.11b is more than suitable. Even with cable/xDSL/T1, it's considerably faster than your external connection anyway...
The one really good thing that might come of this IMO is that 802.11b products may go way down in price once the faster alternative is made available...
Actually ClearType depends on "subpixels" found in LCD displays.
See this page for a decent explanation of how it works...
I didn't want to get too detailed, but I always have quite a lot of things running. 100 Moz windows? Not quite, but I typically keep anywhere between 5 and 20 open at a given time...
And, anyone who uses Mozilla constantly knows that it doesn't seem to free memory, ever... it grows and grows. The "tabs" feature is great (so technically it's just the one "window" open) but unfortunately closing a tab does not free any memory. I rarely restart Moz because I'd have to then re-open all the pages I had going, etc...
Trust me, run Mozilla for a few days straight, you'll see quite a bit of memory usage (it's at 80 megs right now).
Then there's LICQ (11 megs for such a tiny lil program), KMail (10 megs), 5 terminals, BitchX, Nautilis (using 12 megs, I suppose just showing the desktop)... the list goes on.
So yes, I'm typically using the full 192 megs plus a bit of swap after running for a while, and the new kernel has, IMHO, improved performance under these conditions.
I can't speak for the differences between the two VM layers in the most recent versions of each, but I went from 2.4.7-2 (RH Roswell Beta stock kernel) to 2.4.13 (+ext3 patch), and I've noticed a serious improvement.
My notebook has 192 megs and 256 meg swap partition. I run Mozilla constantly (which seems to constantly grow in memory usage as the days pass). Prior to the upgrade (2.4.7-2, recompiled without the debugging options RH had on by default), swapping was ungodly slow. Switching between Mozilla and an xterm would literally take a few seconds waiting for the window to draw on the screen. Even switching between tabs in Moz was slow.
Since going to 2.4.13 with ext3 patch, I've noticed a serious improvement in this behavior. Under the same conditions (between 20 and 50 megs swap usage), switching between windows is quite fast. I don't know if it's faster at swapping per se, or if it's just swapping different things (eg, more intelligently deciding what to swap out), but for me it "seems" much faster for day-to-day usage.
I haven't yet tested in a server environment... but for desktop usage, 2.4.13 rocks. Can't wait for 2.4.14, to see if any noticable improvements are added...
Though it will be a non-issue once I add another 128 megs to this machine, it's nice to see such great VM performance under (relatively) low memory conditions.
I use KMail (under Gnome no less) for my email. It's a great client, and handles tens of thousands of emails without much fuss.
24 days ago yesterday, I transfered all of my account settings to a new username. Somehow I managed to forget to chown 'kmailrc', a few directories deep. I didn't notice this until I closed and re-opened KMail 24 days later...
So after 24 days of adding POPs, tweaking filters, etc, I find out these things never were written to the config file. I found this out NOT by an error message -- KMail pretended everything was fine. I only found the problem after losing the settings that had apparently been in memory for the last month...
Frustrating to say the least; I would have appreciated even "Can't open 'kmailrc': permission denied" or better yet a chance to chown and retry. Nonetheless, I haven't found anything better (and it was my screw-up), and I don't have time to try and get Evolution to compile... and anything beats going back to Windoze...
I think the point is more about average traffic patterns for Slashdot...
This just goes to show that every system is different. My desktop runs Win2k for the same reason (Unreal Tournament). UT crashes semi-frequently, but Windows hasn't had a single problem.
My laptop OTOH wasn't stable out of the factory (WinME -- locked up twice in the first hour). As soon as I put RedHat on it, it hasn't crashed once (close to a year now, almost constant use).
For me personally, the difference is that I have had unstable Windows systems, but have yet to have an unstable Linux (or FreeBSD) box. Win2k is a step in the right direction, and XP may or may not continue that (I haven't used it yet). But *nix for me is better.
Except for games (in my experience)...
I just downloaded the "talkback enabled" tarball, as I really don't care for RPMs in some cases. But one thing I've noticed is that each Mozilla release seems to install more smoothly. It wasn't three minutes from the time I found this article to the time I was re-reading it in a new "tab"...
Mozilla has really come a long way, and IMO on Linux, there simply is no better alternative right now (Konqueror included).
Then ya look at some of the minimal ones, notably Blackbox and Sawfish, they both do what they were intended to do.
Exactly. I use Sawfish and I love it. It's much lighter than E, hasn't crashed yet, and integrates nicely with Gnome 1.4. And it's not ugly (with the right theme).
Plus it supports xinerama pretty nicely, aside from dialogs popping up in between screens once in a while.
Maybe it's about time some new standards are formed? I bet the SPAM problem would be much better if we had some form of SMTP-authorization that was standardized. I know there have been many attempts, but no two clients support the same few methods... Open-relays worked 30 years ago, but times change.
On a lighter note, I couldn't imagine life without email.
i think the push of this article is that since aus only has two backbones. the blacklisting of Optus is really going to effect the population at large (in australia).
Only to those utilizing the blacklist (which is done by choice).
If I were an ISP using such a blacklist, and something this large were blacklisted, I'd stop using it. It seems thousands of people would get denied in the name of blocking one spammer...
There are many times I've been known to use Lynx on my server to hunt down information, files, etc. Javascript gets annoying, and I disable Java and Flash period. When I'm stuck on dialup I've been known to disable images when trying to find information; makes surfing a lot quicker.
So if I'm in any of these situations, forced ads would be a major annoyance.
I'm not sure if removing adds from a page is legal, even without the DCMA.
The author wrote a page with an add, and a filter app modifies the page and removes the add picture, without a permission from the author.
Most browsers allow you to override fonts and colors, toggle image downloading, disable scripting, and so on; blocking ads is only one more tiny modification to the page. Modifying the page is something that is commonly accepted for other purposes (accessibility, user preference, etc), so I don't think that argument will go far.
But modification is one of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner.
I'm not sure if this applies. You certainly can't modify a copyrighted work and distribute it, but if you purchase a book, you're free to scribble notes on the pages. If you listen to a CD, you can EQ it to taste. Thus, if you download a web page, you should be able to modify it as you wish for your own viewing.
Selling an app that's only purpose is to remove adverts from web pages could infringe the authors rights.
That's what some say about Tivo and Replay TV... and so far, I don't think a real big fuss has been raised. The difference of course is that commercial-skipping isn't the only use for the Tivo (nor is it an advertised feature), so ad-blocking software might have a more difficult time... but a general proxy with ad-blocking as an extra feature might be fine.
Lots of problems with this:
:)
- The biggest problem I see is that many sites run ads from a third party network (eg, Doubleclick). More than likely this would only work for ads served by the same server.
- What if you simply disabled image downloading all together? Or use Lynx? Or disable whatever technology they are using (Java, JS, whatever) for other reasons, if that's the case?
- If you're behind a proxy, often times images are downloaded via a different IP than other content (images are generally considered cachable). I've seen this in my logs many times, mostly with scripts (which are generally non-cachable). Or, the user may download the image from a cache, and the server might assume the user hasn't seen it. With larger ISPs who cache content, this is easily conceivable.
- If you chose not to see ads, you probably aren't going to purchase any products advertised. So the advertisers get cheated, the visitors annoyed, and the site owner is the only one potentially gaining anything (though pissing everyone off isn't a good way to make money).
I'm so sick of ads personally, I've disabled Flash and Java (both of which seem to be used more for ads than anything else). I've also added *.doubleclick.net and a few others to my DNS cache (on my home network), so ads from those places simply come up empty for me (no ad servers at 127.0.0.1
This reminds me of the CD copy protection crap: trying to extend a basic technology for purposes it wasn't intended for, for corporate gain, that only serves to harm the consumer. It won't fly.
...have all sorts of rediculous clauses. What other industry makes you agree to a license which states that there is NO guarantee that it will even work out of the box for any purpose? You pay good money and can't even get some assurance that it will function. Naturally, the license isn't printed on the outside of the packaging, and you must actually make the purchase before even seeing this, but that's another issue.
Something else that occurred to me: what about when you sell a used PC to someone? You might have tons of software licensed on that box, and provided you aren't keeping a copy of any of it, you shouldn't be required by law to format the drive and sell them a doorstop, should you?
I've often wondered about the legality of some of these EULAs (like the FrontPage thing discussed a few days ago). We're always discussing the GPL and other open-source licenses, debating whether or not they'd hold up in court; commercial software licenses haven't really been tested in courts much (to my knowledge) either.
I suspect the GPL might actually have a bit more legal ground than most EULAs, simply because of the way the license is presented to the end user. A box pops up, requiring you to click 'Accept', and most people don't read them. The GPL is in the top of every source file, and it's not easily over-looked. Plus developers should have a bit more responsibility than end-users when it comes to using someone else's code...
In my opinion, if commercial software vendors want my business, some of these clauses must go and they must take some accountability (eg, MS is not liable in any way for CodeRed/Nimda/etc thanks to these EULAs). Otherwise, I have no reason to purchase software when I can get much more favorable terms -- for free. The GPL is strict, but from an end-user perspective (and for any responsible developer) it's great.
What is scaring you guys with these proposals??? The FBI may scan your emails? Log your web-traffic? What about every curious sys. admin. in every ISP that your traffic goes throu? They all already have the power to do this.
They already have the ability to do this, but not the legal right without a warrant (or at least it can't be used as evidence). Just because it's in plain text does not mean you have no rights protecting you.
They already have the ability to listen in on your phone line, but they do not have the legal right to do so without a warrant. This is not much different, really.
Mind you, some ISPs and web hosts have provisions in their agreements making sure they can view any data on their machines for whatever reason. In those particular situations, this proposal doesn't make much difference. Personally I will only view or give up information on my customers when required to do so by law (eg, a warrant); this proposal certainly changes things.
I think there's some confusion about "reasonable expectation of privacy". There should be no expectation of security, eg email is plain text and easily intercepted. But you should, in the United States, have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
If just anyone were reading someone's email without permission, certainly there would be legal recourse. That's where a "reasonable expectation of privacy" comes in. Just because they're in plain view doesn't mean people have a right to view it. Think 900 MHz (analog) cell phones and the ban on scanners/down-converters. This is really no different in my opinion.
As others have said, the punishment should fit the crime. If you walk into a bank and (this is probably a bad example) physically steal a box of credit cards, you most certainly would not get life in prison. But intoduce a computer into the mix, and suddenly you are an evil "hacker" deserving life in prison.
Computer crime should be a crime; however, the punishment should be fair. You can kill someone and get potentially 20 years, sometimes less. Kill a man's credit rating, get life? (I wonder if temporary insanity would be a valid plea in computer crimes?)
It seems that every time the internet is mentioned, everyone goes nuts. See the PGP story from earlier for a prime example. See all the other stories regarding encryption back doors etc.
Regarding issues such as this, my opinion is that the "hacker" (or "cracker" to be more appropriate) should be *appropriately* punished, and the company who was broken into should be investigated. If it turns out the exploit could have been prevented (eg, a patch has been available, or poor security measures were used), they should be held liable as well. This will be especially important when Passport starts to become popular... if fear of a bad reputation doesn't push companies to establish solid security/privacy policies, maybe fear of legal action will.
Software companies/service providers have been getting away with EULAs that allow them to be negligent, relieving them of any responsibility whatsoever. This will have to change. No other industry is run like this...
Its not an argument. Its the reason...
The reason I call it an argument is that I find many different "reasons" why QUERTY was invented/adopted. A google search turns up many theories about this... the one I link to is the one I hear the most, but on the same site are some myths, including the "slow typists down" and some others I've heard in the past. I tend to agree with the first one, the one I hinted at in my first post, that it was done to keep certain common letter combinations physically separated helping to avoid jamming in typewriters.
In general I have found people that can not use or do not like to use split keyboards are people who can't type correctly.
As I said, I know I don't type "correctly", but I do touch-type (eg, I don't look at the keyboard). I do use the wrong fingers for certain keys, which means using a split keyboard involves a bit of work on my part. As I mentioned earlier, I'm either stubborn or have no patience (or probably just plain lazy).
Besides qwerty was designed to [slow] a person down so the mechinical arms would not hit.
I've heard this argument before (article about DVORAK I believe), and I'm pretty sure it's bogus. The keys may have been strategically placed so the more common two-key combinations are more likely to be separated, but it wasn't to slow the typist down.
At any rate, I'm probably the only one, but I love a standard QWERTY keyboard. Tried a split keyboard once (MS "natural"), couldn't stand it. I don't hit all keys with the proper finger (namely, the "B" threw me off). DVORAK was a nightmare, tried it for about two days. Maybe I don't have the patience, maybe I'm stubborn, but I'm happy enough at 70 WPM -- not the fastest, but fast enough for me.
Thought I was the only one. I have the Roswell beta on two machines, a laptop (192 megs) and desktop (256). The laptop is constantly swapping. Gnome, 2 Mozilla windows and KMail, and I'm swapping. Slowly.
The desktop isn't nearly as bad (faster drive, more RAM, faster CPU), but it's still noticably slow...
I'll probably snag 2.4.10, once I get the ext3 and wvlan crap working... hopefully the swapping will not slow it down as much (at times, with a few windows open, the laptop drive is constantly grinding; battery time sucks in those situations).
There have been some 1500 workers at the scene constantly since Tuesday, and I believe they are working as fast as they can. You have to realize just how dangerous the rescue efforts are.
Consider that the only survivors they found (last I heard) were rescue workers -- fire department, police, etc. These were people who arrived after the fact, but before the buildings collapsed. There is still danger of more collapses, especially when dealing with the rubble that is piled on top of the massive basements of the WTC towers. One false move and you could lose any remaining survivors down there.
As for the subway, they did try, and it's hopeless at this point. I believe it was flooded or something to that affect, and possible the subway tunnel could collapse; there's simply too much risk in that route. I do know that they did consider that possibility, and came to the conclusion that it simply wasn't worth the risk.
I can certainly understand your feelings on this, but believe me they are and have been trying to move as fast as they possibly can. It's just very dangerous, not to mention just how massive the destruction is...
I don't recall what the limit is on open connections on a typical *nix system, but wouldn't this tie up connections? The longer you hold each connection open, the more simultaneous connections are being wasted.
IOW, don't use this on a production machine. Perhaps you could run this on a separate box that doesn't do much, but that sounds like a lot of work (compared to, oh, say, patching the NT boxen).
I don't know if it's going to work, but the theory is a good start.
Yes, or people could patch their fscking boxes...
I'm not saying the tarpit idea is bad, it could help to some small degree. But it's a solution that we, Unix admins, are having to use because some Windows "admins" who double-clicked on "Install Web Server" don't know WTF they're doing...
Of course I can't think of a better solution either. People have tried emailing admins of known infected boxes, etc, and so far none of this has helped...