They can try to monitor all they like, there are still ways around it. Soneone could set up multiple NAT/Masquerade servers with various encryptions. A sort of 'ring' similar in concept to a 'webring' could be established, where hundreds of server all send encrypted data back and forth, and only one of these servers, or only one of these servers per port connection actually makes the final request. Subscribers to this service would have to deal with some annoyances with protocols that don't like NAT/Masquerading, but I don't see why it wouldn't work. If no one can tell where the data request truly came from, it won't matter if it's being tracked or not. E-mail services could also run through something like this, encrypting email to the point that it'll take months to break that encryption. Some applications like the instant messaging programs won't work with this approach, but if this encrypted network is popular enough, I'm sure someone would find a way to let clients connect. To be honest, I don't think I would care nearly so much if I was potentially being monitored if I was behind such a system, for at that point it would be difficult enough to track that it probably wouldn't be worthwhile unless they already knew who I was, then they wouldn't even need carnivore, there'd be a TEMPEST van parked outside my house or something.
pardon the ranty nature of that, I haven't had my morning coffee...
... and it's a pretty nice place. They design and build minature electronics and have made accessories and small custom units for years. I'm glad that they've designed an actual PC now.
Okay, between this, Amazon, and that NAT patent attempt that is in the works, WHAT THE FUCK is wrong at the patent office? Don't they like, LOOK into technologies to see where they are being used already and to see if standards documents are published to be accessible? Are they issuing patents based on buzzwords that corporate entities are slipping in, or are they being bought off by corporations, or are they just so stupid that they can't say "no" to a computing technology patent request anymore?
"Effects in the cupboards, effects in the dishes!"
on
Palm Pilot Robot Kit
·
· Score: 1
"There's a Wizard of Speed and Time
Steppin' out by the Hollywood Sign!
To sing the joy and love he's found,
And bring it all to Movie Town..!"
I can just picture this thing being inspired by Mike Jittlov's movie...
Something that almost everyone ignores is that technology can be made transparent. Technological advancement has its drawbacks, and often has to fight issues it brings along with itself, but eventually a point is reached where technology can be disguised or engineered to how ever the market wants. Take Chrysler for example. They build cars that look like how they want them to look, not specifically how they function. The PT Cruiser, Ram, Viper, and Prowler are all examples of this change. I hope other automakers and groups follow a similar example.
Specifically speaking of computers, I don't see a reason why we need to have really obvious computers anymore. My DVD player is an old P-233 pc, and I have it placed where it is unobtrusive. I have discretely placed IR and radio mouse receivers, so my keyboard and mouse can sit on my coffee table when I am using them, but be put away when they are not needed. The display itself is on the TV, not a computer screen, further disguising it. In the future, I hope to be able to forego the TV in place of a discretely placed projector anyway, and not have any of it visible. Ultimately I want to do this for all of my electronics, specifically downplaying their importance while increasing their usefulness behind the scenes. Technology then becomes integrated into my life without intruding.
Most of the consumer market seems to go in for the gaudy, colourful, 'fruity' look with equipment now. The Apple line right now is a perfect example of this, as is the knockoff PC cases that have followed. Peripherals sit all over the place when people have scanners, printers, mice, keyboards, diskette drives, CD-burners, etc, when designs more like the IBM PS/2 Model 50 (the all in one with some actual expansion bays and an unobtrusive colour) proved that lots of the crap like drives and such could be feasibly integrated. "Natural" coloured equipment is available on the market, but it doesn't appear to sell very well. Until the consumer is told that this is what they want, it won't happen.
Much of the technology that is commonplace can be made to look like whatever we want. We can put massive computing systems into furniture like the old General Electric stereo cabinet, and never have to look at the innards again. Fighting the advance is not going to work, but working to make it as transparent as possible could be done. All that we have to do is convince the market that this is where to go.
"We could even go a step further. We could the entire Shuttle fleet! Instead of 'Enterprise', 'Endeavor', 'Columbia', we could have 'CmdrTaco', 'JonKatz', and 'Hemos'."
Hmm.... the museum piece "Enterprise" being renamed "CmdrTaco"... are you trying to say something here?
We know then that the P-IV will never see use in space, unless they integrate it into the climate control system instead of using conventional heating coils... hell, the mass of the chip and required heatsink (my god!) is probably too heavy to meet payload launch standards anyway...
I haven't looked into this at all, so I could be totally off in left field, but wouldn't it be possible to run a chroot jail's storage on a ramdisk? If the content of whatever is in the jail doesn't really change then I don't see how it would matter if the jail were lost, and I would assume that it would be easier to remove a potentially hacked jail by removing the ramdisk or restarting the computer (not that I am in favor of restarting, I don't think that it should ever be necessary). It would also be interesting to boot a box from CD, dump the 'live' distro into a very large ramdisk, and run it that way, so if someone rooted the box and installed their rootkit, a simple reboot would remove all their changes...
She's not against mp3s at all. read Salon's article if you don't believe that. Her suit is most like a counter suit to Universal. Her Salon article discusses the evils of the recording industry and how she doesn't want the industry making money by citing her work as what is infringed upon with regard to mp3.com. She wants to be able to decide the fate of her music. It appears that she doesn't want the industry to try to crush the non-RIAA distributers, since she wants the current establishment will go the way of the dinosaur and not make money. The Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend is what this suit looks like it is about...
I don't really like her music especially, but I liked her argument. It makes sense. Especially her views on the suckage of "Mambo Number 5"...<grin>
Wow... a *BSD ported to x86, that's impressive...
on
Darwin Booting On x86
·
· Score: 1
Had they been the first to port a BSD variant to the x86 platform, I'd be really impressed. I'll admit that getting the apple only code working is a little impressive, but we've got Linux for everything from the Compaq Ipaq to massive multiprocessor alphas, so I am not terribly thrilled that one commercial company got something of theirs cross platform, for FreeBSD is almost a spread as Linux...
I'll admit that I am impressed that they even did it at all, being unlike Apple to even acknowledge processors that don't start with 68, 60, or the letter "G" exist, but this is more of a trailing development as far as I can tell rather than "leading the industry" as it is trying to sound like...
"Apply the logic here. The advertising agency, an Apple employee (*not* Apple), does not want its copyrighted work to appear on websites which focus on Apple products that don't exist. It's one bad employee and has nothing to do with Apple."
An empowered employee speaks for his company. If the marketing department has this as a policy, well, it's Apple's policy. It doesn't matter if one carbon-based lifeform made this decision or not, they still made it. Corporate lawyers are enforcing it. Employees are heeding it. If "Joe Blow" of Apple personally stated something, your argument would hold water, but "Apple" is the entity involved. It may have many many employees, but ultimately the company Apple itself enforces decisions. If you are empowered to speak for a company, then that is the opinion/position of the company, not just yourself.
I picked up for $11.95 one of those GW2K Anykey boards, with 124 keys, extra Fkeys, fully macroprogrammable, supports 1024 max macros... 8 way directional pad... it rocks!
At work I have one with a calculator for a numeric keypad and PF keys too... <grin>
When I fly (which granted, is not very often), I like being able to get away from technology. I don't want to have Mr. Stock Trader on my left and Mr. IRC Junkie on my right while I'm trying to get some sleep on an aeroplane. National Public Radio had a commentary about this a month ago or so, where this woman didn't like this and cell phone usage becoming possible on the planes, because of the noise, stupid people who won't get off the fscking phone when they think that they can make a buck off of what they're doing, and the idiot on the aisle seat who won't put the @#%^ laptop away and tray table up so she could get up to get to the lavoratory. I LIKE getting away from electronics from time to time.
Sunday Afternoon in the summer...
on
The First Mouse
·
· Score: 1
as I picture a boy and girl sitting on top of the mouse in 19th century clothing, him in his slacks and suit coat and hat, her in her summer dress, with the umbrella that matches, him with his acoustic guitar singing to her, out on the mousepad for a sunday afternoon outing...
Well, Something that I doubt they are thinking about, and they _really_ should, is that many people in computing are staying within the current laws because there are some things that they can still do legally, or they can work around the restrictions. Eventually, they will have too many restrictions, and if they force people to break laws to do things that they are legally doing at this moment, what is to make these people not do other illegal things? I try to think that I do a pretty good job with not breaking laws; I run all open source software, so I'm not pirating, I don't go intentionally knocking people's PCs and servers out, I don't destroy property. What happens if they start restricting based on content, or other things? What happens when more commercial products are reverse engineered in GPL, and more companies start chopping down forests to send enough cease and desist orders? what happens when these are upheld in court as IP when all the reverse engineering people did was the _SAME THING_ that compaq did to IBM's bios back in the '80s? I don't think many of us will really care what the laws are, we'll do what we want anyway. Obviously, the MPAA's rabid enforcement of their faulty product's restrictions aren't affecting Joe User, who probably has the DeCSS code. Back before Linux was really an option, and we were all running (shudder) DOS, did we care if we made many systems boot if whe had only one copy of the OS? I doubt it... We generally seem to do what we want, and the more difficult they make it to do this legally, the harder they'll have to enforce. It may become almost impossible.
In other news today, a new Denial of Service attack, The Slashdot Effect was announced. To activate the DoS, the malicious user sends a story to the popular Slashdot web site, who posts this story, containing links to a web site that the story references. Slashdot users try to access the site with such frequency that the load causes general use of the site to be unavailable. This can effectively cripple the site for hours or days on end.
Fixes/Workarounds:
To prevent The Slashdot Effect, avoid doing anything noteworthy to "Nerds" or any technological group. Avoid getting into legal trouble with the Motion Picture Association of America, and most definitely, avoid anything to do with Linux, FreeBSD, X Windows, or Distributed File Sharing. Also, avoid interacting with the following companies professionally:
IBM
Micron
RedHat
Rambus
NEC
Compaq
Amazon
Yahoo
Google
id Software
AMD
Intel
Doing such could be hazardous, and increase the potential of being hit with this crippling DoS attack.
Hasn't it been set as a precedent in the past that when a patent is unenforced for an extended period of time, and blatlant patent infringement occurs to the point that the patented technology is _THE_ standard for everyone that the patent is struck down, since its maker obviously didn't care about its patents? Look at the fiasco with Compuserve and the GIF format, which is causing headaches all over. Historically, one could also look at film history. Edison patented the motion picture camera technology that was developed under his name (mostly for marketing purposes), but he didn't see money in it so he ignored the camera's use. Once financial profitability came about, he tried to enforce patent, but it didn't work, and all he did was make California really popular (this all originally occurred in New York). Maybe RamBus should get its head out of its ass and develop a new technology and actually enforce its patent...
Remember,/. had an article earlier where physics and General Theory of Relativity were questioned. We don't even know if black holes exist or not, and until physics gets to the point where we can truly prove that Relativity as Einstein theorized is basically unchallenged it could be a waste of money simply to search for black holes.
However, if the 'scope will be put to good use for more than _just_ black hole chasing it may be fine. I wonder what they would expect to 'see' at an event horizon anyway. I'd assume that it would be well, black, at a fine enough resolution and zoom anyway...
Slashdot Mirror
They can try to monitor all they like, there are still ways around it. Soneone could set up multiple NAT/Masquerade servers with various encryptions. A sort of 'ring' similar in concept to a 'webring' could be established, where hundreds of server all send encrypted data back and forth, and only one of these servers, or only one of these servers per port connection actually makes the final request. Subscribers to this service would have to deal with some annoyances with protocols that don't like NAT/Masquerading, but I don't see why it wouldn't work. If no one can tell where the data request truly came from, it won't matter if it's being tracked or not. E-mail services could also run through something like this, encrypting email to the point that it'll take months to break that encryption. Some applications like the instant messaging programs won't work with this approach, but if this encrypted network is popular enough, I'm sure someone would find a way to let clients connect. To be honest, I don't think I would care nearly so much if I was potentially being monitored if I was behind such a system, for at that point it would be difficult enough to track that it probably wouldn't be worthwhile unless they already knew who I was, then they wouldn't even need carnivore, there'd be a TEMPEST van parked outside my house or something.
pardon the ranty nature of that, I haven't had my morning coffee...
... maybe that stupid lawsuit with Apple's G4 Cube will be dropped, since Sun may actually remember the NeXT cubes...
... and it's a pretty nice place. They design and build minature electronics and have made accessories and small custom units for years. I'm glad that they've designed an actual PC now.
Okay, between this, Amazon, and that NAT patent attempt that is in the works, WHAT THE FUCK is wrong at the patent office? Don't they like, LOOK into technologies to see where they are being used already and to see if standards documents are published to be accessible? Are they issuing patents based on buzzwords that corporate entities are slipping in, or are they being bought off by corporations, or are they just so stupid that they can't say "no" to a computing technology patent request anymore?
"There's a Wizard of Speed and Time
Steppin' out by the Hollywood Sign!
To sing the joy and love he's found,
And bring it all to Movie Town..!"
I can just picture this thing being inspired by Mike Jittlov's movie...
/me sides with Paul on Dune... it's safer...
<rant>
Something that almost everyone ignores is that technology can be made transparent. Technological advancement has its drawbacks, and often has to fight issues it brings along with itself, but eventually a point is reached where technology can be disguised or engineered to how ever the market wants. Take Chrysler for example. They build cars that look like how they want them to look, not specifically how they function. The PT Cruiser, Ram, Viper, and Prowler are all examples of this change. I hope other automakers and groups follow a similar example.
Specifically speaking of computers, I don't see a reason why we need to have really obvious computers anymore. My DVD player is an old P-233 pc, and I have it placed where it is unobtrusive. I have discretely placed IR and radio mouse receivers, so my keyboard and mouse can sit on my coffee table when I am using them, but be put away when they are not needed. The display itself is on the TV, not a computer screen, further disguising it. In the future, I hope to be able to forego the TV in place of a discretely placed projector anyway, and not have any of it visible. Ultimately I want to do this for all of my electronics, specifically downplaying their importance while increasing their usefulness behind the scenes. Technology then becomes integrated into my life without intruding.
Most of the consumer market seems to go in for the gaudy, colourful, 'fruity' look with equipment now. The Apple line right now is a perfect example of this, as is the knockoff PC cases that have followed. Peripherals sit all over the place when people have scanners, printers, mice, keyboards, diskette drives, CD-burners, etc, when designs more like the IBM PS/2 Model 50 (the all in one with some actual expansion bays and an unobtrusive colour) proved that lots of the crap like drives and such could be feasibly integrated. "Natural" coloured equipment is available on the market, but it doesn't appear to sell very well. Until the consumer is told that this is what they want, it won't happen.
Much of the technology that is commonplace can be made to look like whatever we want. We can put massive computing systems into furniture like the old General Electric stereo cabinet, and never have to look at the innards again. Fighting the advance is not going to work, but working to make it as transparent as possible could be done. All that we have to do is convince the market that this is where to go.
</rant>
"We could even go a step further. We could the entire Shuttle fleet! Instead of 'Enterprise', 'Endeavor', 'Columbia', we could have 'CmdrTaco', 'JonKatz', and 'Hemos'."
Hmm.... the museum piece "Enterprise" being renamed "CmdrTaco"... are you trying to say something here?
We know then that the P-IV will never see use in space, unless they integrate it into the climate control system instead of using conventional heating coils... hell, the mass of the chip and required heatsink (my god!) is probably too heavy to meet payload launch standards anyway...
I haven't looked into this at all, so I could be totally off in left field, but wouldn't it be possible to run a chroot jail's storage on a ramdisk? If the content of whatever is in the jail doesn't really change then I don't see how it would matter if the jail were lost, and I would assume that it would be easier to remove a potentially hacked jail by removing the ramdisk or restarting the computer (not that I am in favor of restarting, I don't think that it should ever be necessary). It would also be interesting to boot a box from CD, dump the 'live' distro into a very large ramdisk, and run it that way, so if someone rooted the box and installed their rootkit, a simple reboot would remove all their changes...
She's not against mp3s at all. read Salon's article if you don't believe that. Her suit is most like a counter suit to Universal. Her Salon article discusses the evils of the recording industry and how she doesn't want the industry making money by citing her work as what is infringed upon with regard to mp3.com. She wants to be able to decide the fate of her music. It appears that she doesn't want the industry to try to crush the non-RIAA distributers, since she wants the current establishment will go the way of the dinosaur and not make money. The Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend is what this suit looks like it is about...
I don't really like her music especially, but I liked her argument. It makes sense. Especially her views on the suckage of "Mambo Number 5"...<grin>
Had they been the first to port a BSD variant to the x86 platform, I'd be really impressed. I'll admit that getting the apple only code working is a little impressive, but we've got Linux for everything from the Compaq Ipaq to massive multiprocessor alphas, so I am not terribly thrilled that one commercial company got something of theirs cross platform, for FreeBSD is almost a spread as Linux...
I'll admit that I am impressed that they even did it at all, being unlike Apple to even acknowledge processors that don't start with 68, 60, or the letter "G" exist, but this is more of a trailing development as far as I can tell rather than "leading the industry" as it is trying to sound like...
"Apply the logic here. The advertising agency, an Apple employee (*not* Apple), does not want its copyrighted work to appear on websites which focus on Apple products that don't exist. It's one bad employee and has nothing to do with Apple."
An empowered employee speaks for his company. If the marketing department has this as a policy, well, it's Apple's policy. It doesn't matter if one carbon-based lifeform made this decision or not, they still made it. Corporate lawyers are enforcing it. Employees are heeding it. If "Joe Blow" of Apple personally stated something, your argument would hold water, but "Apple" is the entity involved. It may have many many employees, but ultimately the company Apple itself enforces decisions. If you are empowered to speak for a company, then that is the opinion/position of the company, not just yourself.
...your claim that you rebooted to Windows only to watch DVDs...
Be one with the ways of the VMWare...
... roleplaying without constantly being interrupted with questions like "Where's the Cheetos?" and the like... Oh well...
I picked up for $11.95 one of those GW2K Anykey boards, with 124 keys, extra Fkeys, fully macroprogrammable, supports 1024 max macros... 8 way directional pad... it rocks!
At work I have one with a calculator for a numeric keypad and PF keys too... <grin>
When I fly (which granted, is not very often), I like being able to get away from technology. I don't want to have Mr. Stock Trader on my left and Mr. IRC Junkie on my right while I'm trying to get some sleep on an aeroplane. National Public Radio had a commentary about this a month ago or so, where this woman didn't like this and cell phone usage becoming possible on the planes, because of the noise, stupid people who won't get off the fscking phone when they think that they can make a buck off of what they're doing, and the idiot on the aisle seat who won't put the @#%^ laptop away and tray table up so she could get up to get to the lavoratory. I LIKE getting away from electronics from time to time.
as I picture a boy and girl sitting on top of the mouse in 19th century clothing, him in his slacks and suit coat and hat, her in her summer dress, with the umbrella that matches, him with his acoustic guitar singing to her, out on the mousepad for a sunday afternoon outing...
So we know that technological advancement was dog slow, and that advancements are usually ignored for a long, long time... anything else?
(rant)
Well, Something that I doubt they are thinking about, and they _really_ should, is that many people in computing are staying within the current laws because there are some things that they can still do legally, or they can work around the restrictions. Eventually, they will have too many restrictions, and if they force people to break laws to do things that they are legally doing at this moment, what is to make these people not do other illegal things? I try to think that I do a pretty good job with not breaking laws; I run all open source software, so I'm not pirating, I don't go intentionally knocking people's PCs and servers out, I don't destroy property. What happens if they start restricting based on content, or other things? What happens when more commercial products are reverse engineered in GPL, and more companies start chopping down forests to send enough cease and desist orders? what happens when these are upheld in court as IP when all the reverse engineering people did was the _SAME THING_ that compaq did to IBM's bios back in the '80s? I don't think many of us will really care what the laws are, we'll do what we want anyway. Obviously, the MPAA's rabid enforcement of their faulty product's restrictions aren't affecting Joe User, who probably has the DeCSS code. Back before Linux was really an option, and we were all running (shudder) DOS, did we care if we made many systems boot if whe had only one copy of the OS? I doubt it... We generally seem to do what we want, and the more difficult they make it to do this legally, the harder they'll have to enforce. It may become almost impossible.
(/rant)
In other news today, a new Denial of Service attack, The Slashdot Effect was announced. To activate the DoS, the malicious user sends a story to the popular Slashdot web site, who posts this story, containing links to a web site that the story references. Slashdot users try to access the site with such frequency that the load causes general use of the site to be unavailable. This can effectively cripple the site for hours or days on end.
Fixes/Workarounds:
To prevent The Slashdot Effect, avoid doing anything noteworthy to "Nerds" or any technological group. Avoid getting into legal trouble with the Motion Picture Association of America, and most definitely, avoid anything to do with Linux, FreeBSD, X Windows, or Distributed File Sharing. Also, avoid interacting with the following companies professionally:
IBM
Micron
RedHat
Rambus
NEC
Compaq
Amazon
Yahoo
Google
id Software
AMD
Intel
Doing such could be hazardous, and increase the potential of being hit with this crippling DoS attack.
Hasn't it been set as a precedent in the past that when a patent is unenforced for an extended period of time, and blatlant patent infringement occurs to the point that the patented technology is _THE_ standard for everyone that the patent is struck down, since its maker obviously didn't care about its patents? Look at the fiasco with Compuserve and the GIF format, which is causing headaches all over. Historically, one could also look at film history. Edison patented the motion picture camera technology that was developed under his name (mostly for marketing purposes), but he didn't see money in it so he ignored the camera's use. Once financial profitability came about, he tried to enforce patent, but it didn't work, and all he did was make California really popular (this all originally occurred in New York). Maybe RamBus should get its head out of its ass and develop a new technology and actually enforce its patent...
Sure, as long as they send me the pictures, hence the email addy...
Remember, /. had an article earlier where physics and General Theory of Relativity were questioned. We don't even know if black holes exist or not, and until physics gets to the point where we can truly prove that Relativity as Einstein theorized is basically unchallenged it could be a waste of money simply to search for black holes.
However, if the 'scope will be put to good use for more than _just_ black hole chasing it may be fine. I wonder what they would expect to 'see' at an event horizon anyway. I'd assume that it would be well, black, at a fine enough resolution and zoom anyway...