I was thinking the same thing, but more like just taking a screenshot and saving it out as a png or something. If its on the display it can be grabbed by a program which that browser plugin (or whatever) cant control.
In 1997 I wrote a program Cyber Sentry (as a consulting for Microsystems), which was intended as exactly this kind of copyright protector. The clients wishing to access sites with protection would install this small (70k) Cyber Sentry client, and the same client managed database of site copyright certificates, so only one client download was needed for all the sites using its protection.
The client would monitor and correlate multitude of system activities (winsock, gdi, user, display drivers, screen rectangles, file i/o, debugger presence, browser cache, etc; despite all the monitoring, there was no perceptible performance degradation during browsing). It would let you use screen capture utilities or various forms of saving from browser, as long as the rectangle captured wouldn't overlap with the copyrighted material rectangle. It would also block viewing the html source of the page.
In the final couple months of alpha testing, the product contractor had put up a web page with a gif of a $20 bill, and a group of testers were let loose to try capture & print the image, and if they could do it (and demonstrate how they did it, so they wouldn't cheat with old images), they would get the real $20 reward. They tried every screen capture they could download off the web, plus some they rigged themselves. In the final few weeks, not a single printout/capture was produced.
The same Cyber Sentry product would also protect multimedia files (music, video) and PDF/DOC files, including when inside third party viewers.
All the protection was done without the content provider having to do anything to their content (i.e. they could leave their html, media or other protected files unchanged), and it it didn't require some special viewers, allowing customer to use any viewer they wish.
So this kind of protection is perfectly doable (it does require lots of tricky code and undocumented windows stuff). The reason this newest try will not succeed in the market is the same as for the market flops of the earlier ones -- cutomers won't put up with it (even though we did everything imaginable not to block or interfere with any non-infringing save operations).
Re:Next breakthrough - reinvent the photography
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 1
It is funny to see a moderator (with probably no more than a high school "physical science" understanding) marking down a point in the post above from a theoretical physicist (grad school, Brown).
Those parasites, I mean Congressmen,
in Washington won't pass such a law because
they are getting too much money from the 'pro-spam' special interest group.
They would love to get their foot into the door of internet regulation, and this just offers one more excuse. They will probably do it, even if it means they risk doing accidentally something benefical.
The lawyers cite statistics showing that just 2.6 percent of Microsoft's
approximately 22,000 employees, and just 1.6 percent of its 5,155
managers, are black. "The numbers illustrate that Microsoft is guilty of
some of the most egregious discrimination in corporate America," Hoffler
said.
How about the racial figures in basketball and football, what do they illustrate? Or how about numbers of research papers published in Computer Science, papers on new algorithms, alogoritm patents. Or numbers for independent software consultants? In 17 years I have been in software business, I haven't run into a single black software consultant.
The only place where black computer, scientific and leadership geniuses dominate are Hollywood movies and PBS children programs. For example, in PBS cartoon Arthur, the class science & computer genius celebrates Kwanza, while the Jewish girl is top in sports and her father is a garbageman. The lightest skin kid is, as expected, the dumbest one and from a fatherless family.
As if Microsoft doesn't have at least dozens of full source backups, scattered over several locations, online and offline. The most hackers could modify would be few online copies. It probably didn't take MS more than an afternoon to check and restore all the source files.
The article on the CNN site (and the junk "study" they chose to publicize) is nonsense. Since Time-Warner owns CNN and AOL owns TW (or it is about to), and AOL is battling Microsoft, it is obvious why CNN would select to publicize that particular instance of junk science. Some little weasel at CNN is trying to get on the good side of the new bosses.
You missed the analogy. You're dealing in both cases with information, algorithms, be it for unfolding of a plant from a seed or for writing and calculating. Even if the evil western male copied them from Africans, plants or culture, that doesn't take them away from Africans. If I save this thread on my hard disk,/. site doesn't lose it.
For example, why would 3rd world have to buy those 'stolen' plants if they had them already? They buy them either because it is an improved variant (better yield, better resitance to pests, etc) or because their governments get bribed to switch over. If Chinese military can buy Clinton administration, why shouldn't American companies be allowed to buy Chinese or other countries agriculture or health ministers?
... transnational corporations are patenting genetic materials found in
Third World plants and animals, so that some Third World peoples actually have to pay to use seeds
and other genetic materials
that have been freely available to them for centuries.
It is absurd. This "logic" sounds exactly like the "multiculturally enriched history" they teach kids these days, where Greeks "stole" the culture, math and science from Africans, which somehow made Africans forget all they created (including wheel, alphabet, numbers beyond 3,...), and that is why they are now importing Western culture, which they had way back.
It is probably the same far left think-tanks behind both pieces of "wisdom."
See with drugs, they are fairly easy to produce (even the toughest once require little more than a
diligent chemist or botanist and a little inginuity - above the ability of the "average man" but not the average "trained chemist")
It takes only one skilful person to crack some protection to have unlimited number of copies. Unlike material contraband, which gets used up and needs to be replinished, the little capture driver and decoder can be copied by anyone, requiring no special skills, once created. The same goes for debugging/cracking tools. You can outlaw it but you can't root it out.
Couple years ago I was contracted to write a content protection software, which would allow viewing/reading (with various types of limitations, depending on payment) but not copying/printing (with graphics driver hooks even the low level screen capture was blocked). It was difficult explaining to the folks who ordered the job that there is no way to protect against a person with a debugger intent on breaking the protection. They kept imagining that some strong encryption and a long key will stop anyone. Unfortunately (for them) the plain data has to be produced at some point. The most they could get were multilayered checks for debuggers, which would slow down hackers a bit. But with enough patience, the hacker could still bypass them after several iterations.
These folks trying to hold onto their monoply on intelectual property are fighting a loosing battle, and they know it. If there was a technical solution for their problem, they wouldn't be buying politicians and laws to help them. Once you need laws to prop up your interests, you are in the same hopless situation as the folks who use laws to keep others from getting high on drugs. It doesn't work, not even in prisons.
So are speeding, underage drinking and smoking, drugs,... Authorities can't even stop the drug use in prisons. And no matter how bought the politicians are, they know there is a limit how far one can push the vast masses around before the backlash.
There is no way, even in principle, to get kind of protection they're looking for. The data has to be descrambled on the local machine, decompressed and sent off to the video and audio subsystems. User can have an intercept module sitting anywhere along that path to capture the data, re-compress them and save them to the disk or send them to a network card.
They keep calling these schemes encryption, when in fact in this situation it cannot be anything but fancy, CPU hungry, data scrambling. You don't have the encryption situation when your key and the "encrypted" data both reside at some point in the hostile hands.
They surely can ban p2p just as they banned alcohol at one time or various drugs today. As long as they can exaggerate and have media hype up the alleged harms from p2p, while downplaying the legitimate uses, they can ban it. The government warlike terminology (strategic infrastructure, cyber attack, info-warfare, info-terrorism,... etc) already hints at where they wish to go. There are many forces, from government agencies to various interest groups, aligned against the free, uncensored, unfiltered information distribution.
If internet weren't a gigantic intelligent system, a global brain of sorts, with its own emergent defense mechanisms and counter-strategies, it would have been muzzled, tamed and turned into a government / big-money / corporate mouthpiece already, just like the regular media.
Although I would put my bet on the 'global brain' against the petty old-style censors/totalitarians, that doesn't mean the result of its victory will necessarily be beneficial for the individuals. The power corrupts, and that holds not only for the network of neurons making up human brain but for any intelligent network
(complex system) thinking ahead and strategizing in pursuit of its own happiness. The early precursors of this corruption are already apparent in the loss of privacy, spam, computer viruses...
it is simple repackaging of existing ideas which look suspiciously like FTP...
You could have said similarly that http & browsers are "simple repackaging" of ftp. After all, using ftp and text files (containing addresses), with some cut & paste you could do with ftp anything you could do with http, html & browser. Yet, the internet didn't quite take off until the http & browsers made it easy to perform those operations (hyperlinking, viewing text & graphics, downloading files).
In other words, repackaging which substantially lowers the usability threshold makes all the difference. Similarly, the aim of various P2P designs, mashrooming all over in recent months, is to lower the threshold of turning every computer connected to the internet into a a web server, chat server, file server, message board,...
While you can certainly do this already with most connected computers (other than for some NAT/proxy configurations), and while dedicated servers have been doing it for years, you need much greater technical expertise than an average web user has (and often the additional ISP cost for fixed IP). When someone manages to convert that into a few simple, visually intuitive point & click operations, the P2P field will take off, just as Web did.
This evolution will inevitably occur since the increase in the bandwidth, the CPU speed & the storage capacity creates a void calling to be filled.
The plugin could even reuse the spammer's relays which passed the email to your mailbox. That way you double or triple their bandwidth load for every spam message they pass.
The line with that ISP (a private small company server) was only 28.8k through the laptop modem, so downloading even the 150 emails at 2-4 seconds a message took its time. I didn't want to wait to download all 750 that were reported to be waiting (with no way of knowing how much data is piled up out there). The email package on that laptop is an old one for 16-bit windows, which puts messages in order of arrival, so I still had to page through it to see if anything of importance got mixed up in between. After cancelling the download, I thought a few minute call to the tech support to delete everything from that source would be quicker, but by the time I got hold of a guy at the company who knew how to do it, the total time waste was over half an hour.
That takes too much time & effort for most people.
But an automated email plugin/add-on which can do all the lookups automatically and produce couple dozen of email complaints to the upstream ISPs for every spam they host or every email they blindly relay would force them to get rid of the spammer clients or fix their relays. Adding CC complaint to the Congress, FTC, spam promoting lobbies, etc. might also bring in some laws with teeth against the spammers.
On the other hand, there are many people all over the world who pay for their internet access per minute
or per byte or some other way (wireless especially). Then, the person getting the spam winds up paying
for it.
Even without per-minute charge, the receiver pays. Time spend dealing with spam can be much more expensive. A month ago I got 750 identical spam messages via one of the ISPs I use. After downloading and deleting about about 150 replicas, I gave up and called the ISP and have them delete the whole batch. The whole incident took over half an hour of my time during the busiest time of day, which, if it were done for most of my consulting clients, would have been worth $75 or more.
... they know they are doing something they shouldn't be doing. If no one was breaking the rules, then there'd be no problem.
By that logic, when you shut your doors when going to toilet, you have something to hide, you must be doing something wrong. Why not let the well meaning authorities have cameras in your bathroom and your bedroom if you have nothing to hide? Why not let whole neighborhood watch you on the monitors as well? You are not breaking any rules, so why not?
We celebrate nature defeating our anti-nature progress...
We and anything we do is a "nature" too. Spotted owl or a sequoia or a slime are no more "nature" than your computer or a coal burning electric plant.
So, we are not "anti-nature," we are only destroying and replacing one set of natural forms with another set, just as those forms being replaced did to the forms which preceded them. Otherwise universe would have still been a cloud of hydrogen gas, or quark plasma, etc.
Only an open source encryption package running on your own machine has some chance of being safe. Even that, under Microsoft Windows and their never ending series of loopholes (as if someone is putting them in on purpose), isn't 100 percent safe. Any proprietary encryption, api or stand alone package, from the big guys is almost certainly compromised.
The advantage of P2P is that the threshold for starting something, trying out something new, is much lower than on the current dedicated server model. On a P2P based network, anyone can try out their pet idea, some of which might turn into the next Slashdot or Yahoo. And those that do take off can at that point move up to dedicated servers with fast connection. Most sites would, of course, remain small or die off.
The net effect would be much faster generation and propagation of novelty, making the whole network more valuable.
Microsoft invented the VBscripting, with all its security and privacy problems. Web developers of course will jump on whatever will give them power to muscle and control how user can view their site. Whatever hooks design provides that let developers override user's preferences, snoop into their email address books or files, and spam useres screens and disks, they will use.
not only that, your complaining that IE5 supports it but gives you the option to NOT
install support for VB? wow.......
You're confusing causes and consequences. In your upside-down world, the way things came to be the way they are is that poor little Gates probably noticed that many sites had Vbscript support lately, and then he said to his VPs, lets include VB support into IE.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that, judging from the replies here, the admirers of IE appear to be a particular kind of self-selected sample biased toward aversion to logic, propensity for busy needless work ("why use brains when hands will do" breed),...
1. The don't have to be sorted alphabetically.
Just drag and drop any favorite to any position on the list - not Rocket Science.
Manually to undo the aphabetic sort on 5000 links? Thanks for the hot tip. You ought to publish your "IE Secrets," it would be a terrible thing for all that wisdom to go waste here on slashdot.
Just create subfolders and place the links inside them.
Again to restructure 5000 links manually? You probably also think it was a stroke of Microft genius to make each link be its own file, taking 20 times more disk space than the data it contains.
I guess, my wondering who could have thought up stuff like that is over. There are obviously folks for whom sorting manually lists of 5000 items (for which there was no reason or request for the browser to re-sort in the first place), is a neat way to spend a weekend.
I wrote the Cyber Patrol (except the GUI, as a consultunt for MSI; I also wrote a similar unix filtering engine for AOL, except that theirs searches in the compressed URL database and has tighter real-time constraints). CP has categories which the sysadmin (or the parent) can select as blocked. There are also multiple lists and multiple types of lists tailored to the customers. Some block acces to sites (based on belonging to a given category, a bit set in the record for that IP or URL). Other, similarly allow acces to sites with selected attribute (bit) set. Some lists, such as ADL list, can automatically redirect the browser from the blocked site to the site covering the same topic but from the ADL viewpoint.
Which clients select which lists and what attributes they enable is entirely their choice. The censors are the guys selecting the lists, setting up the blocking options or the guys mandating their use in libraries, schools, etc. Not the groups of little old ladies who spend their days looking for sites and rating them based on the instruction from the clients paying for the list. And neither is it the fault of the guys who created the tool, which can be used or abused. The guy who contracted me originally to write it, had in mind only the parental blocking of porn, drug and explosive recipes sites. It was a surprise to him when the primary demand came from government, libraries, schools and the groups which hate the (certain kind of) hate.
The invisible guys with the big bucks, who pay for the lists and for the "free" distribution of the filter to end-user or client machines, dictate the rating criteria for the sites. That's where this political censorship orginates from -- it is the same money which keeps these same "blocked" political candidates off the TV and the rest of mass media (other than to smear them), the same money which paid congressmen and local administrations to enact the laws and regulations requiring use of the filters.
IE 5 gives you the option to not install VBScript support
Then many sites don't work at all, not just Microsoft's MSDN. If they sense IE, they insist you turn VB on. With Netscape, some use Javascripts, yes, but that tends most of the time to cause minor problems (like font color or size not right if you don't override them).
I use IE only to view Microsoft's sites. Their primordial bookmarking "technology" as well as the safety & privacy problems will take some evolving before I'll use them for anything else. I'd rather put up with occasional Netscape's lockups (4.75 is a bit more stable) than get continuosly annoyed by the IE's nonsense.
I guess it's a matter of taste, like picking between Bush & Gore -- do you like your president more dumb than rotten or more rotten than dumb. I think the "more dumb than rotten" one can do less damage than the "more rotten than dumb" one.
Since Netscape 4.x (and I use 4.75 now) I tried switching to IE 4.5, 5, 5.5 and could not stand its nonsense. It imported about 5000 links from Netscape and insisted they have to be sorted alphabetically. What H1B moron at MS came up with that idiocy? Then, you have to scroll through a single menu column of 100 bookmarks, up or down (as opposed to the cascaded menus of Netscape). Again what MS genius figured that is the way to go?
Also, the bookmarks in IE are each a separate file of its own, each containing 100-300 bytes, but using up 4k-8k cluster size on the disk, which on my 5000 links list comes to 20Mb or 40Mb for bookmarks that in Netscape took 1/20th of that space. Who comes up with such idiocy?
Another problem is that you can't turn VBscripts off on many sites since when they detect IE they insist you turn them on, which becomes a safety and privacy nightmare. Every time someone finds and publicizes new security loophole in IE, which seems to be every couple months, MS fixes it and makes a new one, as if, God forbid, someone needs them in there. Wouldn't trust it the pile of junk in my backyard woodshed.
Unfortunately, each of the two main browsers is a piece of #@!~, each in its own way, although I think Netscape still has some ways to go to catch up with the idiocies, loopholes and intrusivness of the IE family. It still has few good things the big company creative genius hasn't ruined yet. But it surely is heading there and catching up fast. Back at 3.x Browsers, there was no contest. It seems NS 6.0 may have finally caught up with IE 5.5. Congratulations.
I don't know if Operah is any good nowdays. I tried it couple years ago when they just came out, it didn't work well, so I went back to Netscape.
Slashdot Mirror
In 1997 I wrote a program Cyber Sentry (as a consulting for Microsystems), which was intended as exactly this kind of copyright protector. The clients wishing to access sites with protection would install this small (70k) Cyber Sentry client, and the same client managed database of site copyright certificates, so only one client download was needed for all the sites using its protection.
The client would monitor and correlate multitude of system activities (winsock, gdi, user, display drivers, screen rectangles, file i/o, debugger presence, browser cache, etc; despite all the monitoring, there was no perceptible performance degradation during browsing). It would let you use screen capture utilities or various forms of saving from browser, as long as the rectangle captured wouldn't overlap with the copyrighted material rectangle. It would also block viewing the html source of the page.
In the final couple months of alpha testing, the product contractor had put up a web page with a gif of a $20 bill, and a group of testers were let loose to try capture & print the image, and if they could do it (and demonstrate how they did it, so they wouldn't cheat with old images), they would get the real $20 reward. They tried every screen capture they could download off the web, plus some they rigged themselves. In the final few weeks, not a single printout/capture was produced.
The same Cyber Sentry product would also protect multimedia files (music, video) and PDF/DOC files, including when inside third party viewers.
All the protection was done without the content provider having to do anything to their content (i.e. they could leave their html, media or other protected files unchanged), and it it didn't require some special viewers, allowing customer to use any viewer they wish.
So this kind of protection is perfectly doable (it does require lots of tricky code and undocumented windows stuff). The reason this newest try will not succeed in the market is the same as for the market flops of the earlier ones -- cutomers won't put up with it (even though we did everything imaginable not to block or interfere with any non-infringing save operations).
It is funny to see a moderator (with probably no more than a high school "physical science" understanding) marking down a point in the post above from a theoretical physicist (grad school, Brown).
They would love to get their foot into the door of internet regulation, and this just offers one more excuse. They will probably do it, even if it means they risk doing accidentally something benefical.
How about the racial figures in basketball and football, what do they illustrate? Or how about numbers of research papers published in Computer Science, papers on new algorithms, alogoritm patents. Or numbers for independent software consultants? In 17 years I have been in software business, I haven't run into a single black software consultant.
The only place where black computer, scientific and leadership geniuses dominate are Hollywood movies and PBS children programs. For example, in PBS cartoon Arthur, the class science & computer genius celebrates Kwanza, while the Jewish girl is top in sports and her father is a garbageman. The lightest skin kid is, as expected, the dumbest one and from a fatherless family.
The article on the CNN site (and the junk "study" they chose to publicize) is nonsense. Since Time-Warner owns CNN and AOL owns TW (or it is about to), and AOL is battling Microsoft, it is obvious why CNN would select to publicize that particular instance of junk science. Some little weasel at CNN is trying to get on the good side of the new bosses.
For example, why would 3rd world have to buy those 'stolen' plants if they had them already? They buy them either because it is an improved variant (better yield, better resitance to pests, etc) or because their governments get bribed to switch over. If Chinese military can buy Clinton administration, why shouldn't American companies be allowed to buy Chinese or other countries agriculture or health ministers?
It is absurd. This "logic" sounds exactly like the "multiculturally enriched history" they teach kids these days, where Greeks "stole" the culture, math and science from Africans, which somehow made Africans forget all they created (including wheel, alphabet, numbers beyond 3,...), and that is why they are now importing Western culture, which they had way back.
It is probably the same far left think-tanks behind both pieces of "wisdom."
It takes only one skilful person to crack some protection to have unlimited number of copies. Unlike material contraband, which gets used up and needs to be replinished, the little capture driver and decoder can be copied by anyone, requiring no special skills, once created. The same goes for debugging/cracking tools. You can outlaw it but you can't root it out.
Couple years ago I was contracted to write a content protection software, which would allow viewing/reading (with various types of limitations, depending on payment) but not copying/printing (with graphics driver hooks even the low level screen capture was blocked). It was difficult explaining to the folks who ordered the job that there is no way to protect against a person with a debugger intent on breaking the protection. They kept imagining that some strong encryption and a long key will stop anyone. Unfortunately (for them) the plain data has to be produced at some point. The most they could get were multilayered checks for debuggers, which would slow down hackers a bit. But with enough patience, the hacker could still bypass them after several iterations.
These folks trying to hold onto their monoply on intelectual property are fighting a loosing battle, and they know it. If there was a technical solution for their problem, they wouldn't be buying politicians and laws to help them. Once you need laws to prop up your interests, you are in the same hopless situation as the folks who use laws to keep others from getting high on drugs. It doesn't work, not even in prisons.
So are speeding, underage drinking and smoking, drugs,... Authorities can't even stop the drug use in prisons. And no matter how bought the politicians are, they know there is a limit how far one can push the vast masses around before the backlash.
They keep calling these schemes encryption, when in fact in this situation it cannot be anything but fancy, CPU hungry, data scrambling. You don't have the encryption situation when your key and the "encrypted" data both reside at some point in the hostile hands.
If internet weren't a gigantic intelligent system, a global brain of sorts, with its own emergent defense mechanisms and counter-strategies, it would have been muzzled, tamed and turned into a government / big-money / corporate mouthpiece already, just like the regular media.
Although I would put my bet on the 'global brain' against the petty old-style censors/totalitarians, that doesn't mean the result of its victory will necessarily be beneficial for the individuals. The power corrupts, and that holds not only for the network of neurons making up human brain but for any intelligent network (complex system) thinking ahead and strategizing in pursuit of its own happiness. The early precursors of this corruption are already apparent in the loss of privacy, spam, computer viruses...
You could have said similarly that http & browsers are "simple repackaging" of ftp. After all, using ftp and text files (containing addresses), with some cut & paste you could do with ftp anything you could do with http, html & browser. Yet, the internet didn't quite take off until the http & browsers made it easy to perform those operations (hyperlinking, viewing text & graphics, downloading files).
In other words, repackaging which substantially lowers the usability threshold makes all the difference. Similarly, the aim of various P2P designs, mashrooming all over in recent months, is to lower the threshold of turning every computer connected to the internet into a a web server, chat server, file server, message board,...
While you can certainly do this already with most connected computers (other than for some NAT/proxy configurations), and while dedicated servers have been doing it for years, you need much greater technical expertise than an average web user has (and often the additional ISP cost for fixed IP). When someone manages to convert that into a few simple, visually intuitive point & click operations, the P2P field will take off, just as Web did.
This evolution will inevitably occur since the increase in the bandwidth, the CPU speed & the storage capacity creates a void calling to be filled.
The plugin could even reuse the spammer's relays which passed the email to your mailbox. That way you double or triple their bandwidth load for every spam message they pass.
they were "identitical")
What language is that in, Englilish?
But an automated email plugin/add-on which can do all the lookups automatically and produce couple dozen of email complaints to the upstream ISPs for every spam they host or every email they blindly relay would force them to get rid of the spammer clients or fix their relays. Adding CC complaint to the Congress, FTC, spam promoting lobbies, etc. might also bring in some laws with teeth against the spammers.
Even without per-minute charge, the receiver pays. Time spend dealing with spam can be much more expensive. A month ago I got 750 identical spam messages via one of the ISPs I use. After downloading and deleting about about 150 replicas, I gave up and called the ISP and have them delete the whole batch. The whole incident took over half an hour of my time during the busiest time of day, which, if it were done for most of my consulting clients, would have been worth $75 or more.
... they know they are doing something they shouldn't be doing. If no one was breaking the rules, then there'd be no problem. By that logic, when you shut your doors when going to toilet, you have something to hide, you must be doing something wrong. Why not let the well meaning authorities have cameras in your bathroom and your bedroom if you have nothing to hide? Why not let whole neighborhood watch you on the monitors as well? You are not breaking any rules, so why not?
We and anything we do is a "nature" too. Spotted owl or a sequoia or a slime are no more "nature" than your computer or a coal burning electric plant.
So, we are not "anti-nature," we are only destroying and replacing one set of natural forms with another set, just as those forms being replaced did to the forms which preceded them. Otherwise universe would have still been a cloud of hydrogen gas, or quark plasma, etc.
Only an open source encryption package running on your own machine has some chance of being safe. Even that, under Microsoft Windows and their never ending series of loopholes (as if someone is putting them in on purpose), isn't 100 percent safe. Any proprietary encryption, api or stand alone package, from the big guys is almost certainly compromised.
The net effect would be much faster generation and propagation of novelty, making the whole network more valuable.
not only that, your complaining that IE5 supports it but gives you the option to NOT install support for VB? wow.......
You're confusing causes and consequences. In your upside-down world, the way things came to be the way they are is that poor little Gates probably noticed that many sites had Vbscript support lately, and then he said to his VPs, lets include VB support into IE.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that, judging from the replies here, the admirers of IE appear to be a particular kind of self-selected sample biased toward aversion to logic, propensity for busy needless work ("why use brains when hands will do" breed),...
Manually to undo the aphabetic sort on 5000 links? Thanks for the hot tip. You ought to publish your "IE Secrets," it would be a terrible thing for all that wisdom to go waste here on slashdot.
Just create subfolders and place the links inside them.
Again to restructure 5000 links manually? You probably also think it was a stroke of Microft genius to make each link be its own file, taking 20 times more disk space than the data it contains.
I guess, my wondering who could have thought up stuff like that is over. There are obviously folks for whom sorting manually lists of 5000 items (for which there was no reason or request for the browser to re-sort in the first place), is a neat way to spend a weekend.
Which clients select which lists and what attributes they enable is entirely their choice. The censors are the guys selecting the lists, setting up the blocking options or the guys mandating their use in libraries, schools, etc. Not the groups of little old ladies who spend their days looking for sites and rating them based on the instruction from the clients paying for the list. And neither is it the fault of the guys who created the tool, which can be used or abused. The guy who contracted me originally to write it, had in mind only the parental blocking of porn, drug and explosive recipes sites. It was a surprise to him when the primary demand came from government, libraries, schools and the groups which hate the (certain kind of) hate.
The invisible guys with the big bucks, who pay for the lists and for the "free" distribution of the filter to end-user or client machines, dictate the rating criteria for the sites. That's where this political censorship orginates from -- it is the same money which keeps these same "blocked" political candidates off the TV and the rest of mass media (other than to smear them), the same money which paid congressmen and local administrations to enact the laws and regulations requiring use of the filters.
Then many sites don't work at all, not just Microsoft's MSDN. If they sense IE, they insist you turn VB on. With Netscape, some use Javascripts, yes, but that tends most of the time to cause minor problems (like font color or size not right if you don't override them).
I use IE only to view Microsoft's sites. Their primordial bookmarking "technology" as well as the safety & privacy problems will take some evolving before I'll use them for anything else. I'd rather put up with occasional Netscape's lockups (4.75 is a bit more stable) than get continuosly annoyed by the IE's nonsense.
I guess it's a matter of taste, like picking between Bush & Gore -- do you like your president more dumb than rotten or more rotten than dumb. I think the "more dumb than rotten" one can do less damage than the "more rotten than dumb" one.
Also, the bookmarks in IE are each a separate file of its own, each containing 100-300 bytes, but using up 4k-8k cluster size on the disk, which on my 5000 links list comes to 20Mb or 40Mb for bookmarks that in Netscape took 1/20th of that space. Who comes up with such idiocy?
Another problem is that you can't turn VBscripts off on many sites since when they detect IE they insist you turn them on, which becomes a safety and privacy nightmare. Every time someone finds and publicizes new security loophole in IE, which seems to be every couple months, MS fixes it and makes a new one, as if, God forbid, someone needs them in there. Wouldn't trust it the pile of junk in my backyard woodshed.
Unfortunately, each of the two main browsers is a piece of #@!~, each in its own way, although I think Netscape still has some ways to go to catch up with the idiocies, loopholes and intrusivness of the IE family. It still has few good things the big company creative genius hasn't ruined yet. But it surely is heading there and catching up fast. Back at 3.x Browsers, there was no contest. It seems NS 6.0 may have finally caught up with IE 5.5. Congratulations.
I don't know if Operah is any good nowdays. I tried it couple years ago when they just came out, it didn't work well, so I went back to Netscape.