I don't like the fact that you will only have access to a select list of websites
If you read the articles closely, it looks like this (and the Air Canada effort that someone else mentions below) are really just onboard cache servers that hold a bunch of preloaded web sites. When the plane parks, it'll grab updated snapshots of the selected sites. If you try to go to some site not in its cache, it just won't be accessible.
The only thing that might be live is POP fetches from on-ground mail servers. Those might even be through a web interface that chokes large transfers and enables less-than-live response time (which would otherwise result in timeouts using a native POP client on the user's machine). I'm sure even the outgoing mail is batched.
This reminds me of the first "Internet cafe" in Saudi Arabia, before the country was allowing the public to access the net. As soon as I heard about it, I rushed over to interview the owner and find out how he was going to make it happen. It looked all fancy, with top-of-the line desktops, and lots of people stringing wires everywhere. But get this - Turns out they were having tapes sent once a week from the US, loaded with several gigs of the "most popular sites", and then loading those onto a local server. The cafe wasn't connected to the outside world at all.
It's far cheaper for the airline to install one or two wireless access points, than to run ethernet to every seat, and to repair the jacks every few weeks after some kid's stuck peanuts or jello into them.
Singapore's airport provides free internet access to anyone carrying one of these cards. Works great. There are signs scattered around the terminal indicating the areas in which it works, usually with nice comfy chairs nearby. They'll even lend you a card for your laptop if you don't have one. (Unfortunately people without computers are stuck paying about US$6/hour to use the airport's machines)
This is definitely the sort of thing more airports should do - maybe I wouldn't always be so late for flights because I need to finish my work, if I knew I could take care of it in the departure lounge after checking in.
This is very old news and has nothing to do with the current situation. It's just a side-effect of the way that Network Solutions' whois server works. You can add something to that list yourself - just register a host that begins with 'MICROSOFT.COM'.
I know several rather respectable people who work at Microsoft who have lost their mail.
How would that work out? Their mail will come through as soon as lookups are working again, as no MTA I'm aware of will bounce mail because of a DNS failure lasting less than several days. That's not exactly "lost".
Looks like people will have to go inside their TVs to get the signal they need to exercise their legally-granted rights to time-displace content.
Then what, the TV sets will be manufactured with an explosive charge which will destroy the insides unless a smart card is used to open it?
So people will have to use TEMPEST-like tactics to construct the signal from leakage and feed it to their recorders.
Then what, HDTV sets will be constructed with Faraday cages, adding a few dozen kg to the weight and several cm all around to the dimensions, requiring substantial extra power to make up for the intensity lost by viewing through a steel screen?
So people will use cameras to record the image displayed on the screen, together with software that counters the distortion created by the glass shape and pixel fuzziness.
Then what, TVs will display encrypted content directly on their screens and people who want to watch PPV wrestling events will have to have a chip mounted along their optic nerve to decrypt the signal en route to the brain?
I for one can't wait. I am sick and tired of all these morally bankrupt thieves thinking they can just watch shows they've paid for and listen to music they bought. I mean, where do they get off? Actually, "thieves" is too weak a word. I will henceforth refer to these foul malefactors as Intellectual Property Rights Murderers, for their offenses against the most hallowed recording and motion picture industries are tantamount to murder and should be punished as such. Until the State wises up and handles these heinous crimes accordingly, we can thank God that technology will provide suitable interim measures.
I don't see why people hate MS products so much. Your precious linux would probably not exist without it!
The delicious tomatoes in my salad probably wouldn't exist without the horse manure they were fertilized with, but you won't see me scooping the brown stuff on top of my arugula. I will, however, defend to the death your right to eat as much of it as you like.
That sounds like flamebait, but if you're opposed to Windows because Microsoft is "icky" or because you'd rather spend X thousand dollars to support 5% of your audience, you're a bad businessman.
Call me a bad businessman if you like, but I'd much rather spend my $2500 on a truly universal cross-platform streaming media solution, than on a PoS server operating system that would cost me hundreds of thousands in staff and support (been there, done that, attended the Microsoft seminars and ate the stale bagels).
Windows ain't free, you know. The up-front numbers work out roughly the same whether I use W2K+WMP or *x+RA. The real advantage of the latter comes down the road.
It shows how MacOS might now appeal to both the very technical, the very artistic, and the very newbie - something not normally possible.
I've long ago given up on worrying what might appeal to computer newcomers, but as a somewhat more experienced user I can say that there are plenty of times when I would have creamed my pants at the prospect of such a thing.
Some years ago I was doing hardcore publishing work: Pulling data from databases, doing transformations, and batch pre-formatting (often using RTF, which holds style info well) for import into QuarkXPress where the book and magazine designers could have at it and tinker with the pretty bits. Sticking a FreeBSD box under the desk and running Netatalk on it did the job, but it'd be a whole lot nicer (and smoother) to have it all in one place.
Even now, I use QuarkXPress and Excel almost daily for any number of tasks; no matter how much I like the command line, there are some tools where the GUI wins. And if you're going to use it, might as well use the best tools available (hence no Gnumeric for me today, thank you).
Yes, it's that bad. I think it reasonable to allow for a one-bedroom apartment in a non-deluxe building in the District of Columbia. Such an apartment will go for about $1200 to $2400 a month.
That's fantasy talk. I moved to DC two years ago, and live in a nice apartment on a safe street in Adams Morgan (arguably the best area in DC to live; certainly the only area that's more lively than a closed-down cemetary). My rent is $600/month, including utilities. It took me two days to find. From time to time, other apartments open up in the building, and the rent for new tenants isn't much more. A couple friends just moved out of a huge 2BR up the street (living room, dining room, study), top floor, corner, doorman building, gorgeous views of downtown, rent $1300/month. The new people who moved in are paying $1420.
People are always talking about how it's impossible to find decent housing here. Far as I can tell, it's because they're idiots (nothing personal). Everyone I know who has moved here has found something good in the same price range. Put down the newspaper and hit the streets. Talk to building managers. Make friends. The market is loose and easy.
Yet Germany has managed to do precisely that - with packaging, anyway. As of January 1, 1993, distributors must accept at their cost all packaging used to contain retail goods.
Consumers are required to place these items in special bags (separate from organic waste, and certain categories of generic recyclables such as glass and aluminum), which are picked up at curbside and centrally sorted. They are returned to the producing company which must recycle at least 60% of the material.
This responsibility is transferrable, so many companies have cooperated to achieve economies of scale by forming joint ventures to collectively handle classes of recyclable and/or disposable materials. The largest is a pan-industry cooperative called Duales System Deutschland which owns and licenses the right to the Grune Punkt logo that travelers to Germany have no doubt seen everywhere.
The effect has been that producers of retail goods in Germany have drastically improved their packaging, eliminating the insane crap you see in the USA (cookies in their own little plastic shells, single-serve crackers-and-cheese, etc.). Once consumers were faced with paying the actual passed-on costs of these shockingly wasteful products (rather than transferring the costs to their perhaps more responsible neighbors and fellow taxpayers), the demand dried up.
While the sorting and recycling process may be more expensive than dumping the stuff in a landfill or sending it off on a barge to Russia, the net cost may actually go down due to the decrease in wasteful material production. In any case the mitigation of environmental externalities is priceless.
A logical next step, and one that is being considered in Germany and elsewhere, is a similar requirement for goods themselves. The infrastructure is in place; it's a matter of working out the numbers.
It's rediculous to assume that a faster means of information will magically provide us with new experiences. The limits aren't in bandwidth but how content providers choose to use it.
I disagree (please don't cry).
Compare the internet to radio. In the beginning there were all sorts of avenues for exploration and development - live programming, news shows, dramas, music, higher-fidelity music, stereo, call-in shows. Then the ideas stopped coming. Radio has become stagnant (actually, worse; it's regressed as station ownership has become consolidated, but that's besides the point).
With the internet, on the other hand, we're still several technological generations behind being able to implement a lot of the things that people have already dreamed up. Video-on-demand, all sorts of interpersonal interactivity, remote 3-D printing, high-bandwidth wireless anywhere access, interconnectivity with all the appliances and systems in our homes, etc.
Look, when I started using the internet, you could squeeze mail through creaking gateways, and maybe get FTP to work to a couple of sites at certain times of the day. I dialed into an internet-connected Sun across a 2.4kb/s modem. 13 years on, the underlying protocols are the same, but everything else is basically unrecognizable. But we've barely done anything so far!
One of the biggest changes, one that's just beginning, is the digitificalization of all media. Newspapers and magazines are already sent by PDF to remote printing plants for simultaneous worldwide distribution; radio stations are all going online, TV and movies are distributed digitally to cable companies and now even cinemas. The converging availability of all these infotainment streams through one device (it's gonna happen, no two ways about it) will completely change the way we communicate with the outside world - and it with us.
As long as we have a full hopper of new ideas, and as long as the technological improvements necessary to realize those ideas keep being developed at a rapid pace, internet-related change is going to keep going. Everyone likes to make contrarian picks; if they're wrong, they're ignored, but if they're right, the predictor is hailed as a visionary. This makes them pretty cheap unless they're backed up better than this article is.
I guess it's possible that they stuck several of them together on the same machine, but if I were a spammer, the last thing I'd want on a server with me would be another spammer.
And never underestimate the joy spammers get out of making up fake names and addresses.
If the RIAA were even vaguely more sophisticated than the pack of Neanderthals with JDs that they are, this is the sort of thing they'd be spending their money on.
As a collective organization representing the recording industry, they could be shooting impulse music purchases into the stratosphere by embracing and supporting appliances like this. They could be working on standards, encouraging hardware and software manufacturers, generating consumer interest. Just imagine - You're listening to something you like, and instantly you can choose to buy songs that are (A) liked by the same people who like the current song, (B) listed as inspiration by the band that recorded the current song, (C) anything else clever people can imagine. They could - gasp - look forward for a change.
But no, it is not to be. Instead they are going to waste their time and further alienate consumers by focusing on low-return, antipathy-generating initiatives like pay-per-listen recordings and Quixotic lawsuits against software that courts can't touch.
Which is why I think they are on the way out. One of these days some other upstart organization - perhaps another industry group with an eye to expanding its constituency - is going to make the case to the big recording companies that the club they're sending checks to is doing nothing but hurting their interests.
They are blocking the ISP, which has hosted a whole mess of spammers for at least six months
To be fair, if you look at the data behind the graph, you'll see that it's only 2, and not really 21 spamhäuser. There are 20 ostensibly distinct Hormel subsidiaries on the same/24.
On the other hand, it's pretty clear that Media3's well aware of what's going on. All their spam customers are on the same two machines: ss2.media3.net and ss3.media3.net, a group that starts and ends there.
Just try calling your phone company and ask them to filter out calls from telemarketers and see how far you get.
Works for me. I called the phone company and told them I no longer wanted to receive calls from people who blocks their caller ID data (even though I don't have caller ID). It's pretty much put a stop to the telemarketing calls. I'm pleased that I can do the same in my choice of ISP: I can select one that uses an imperfect but fairly effective mechanism to screen out crap.
Spam is not content, spam is a method of communicating content. The content is the ad itself, and I have no problem with that. Purveyors of home-brew viagra are more than welcome, in my opinion, to set up a web site or buy newspaper ads or communicate their content in any appropriate manner.
As the First Amendment is generally interpreted by US courts, the government cannot take action based on content (with certain well-known exceptions), but it can make restrictions on the time, place, and manner of communication. For instance, the police can tell you that you are not allowed to stand in the lobby of city hall with a megaphone yelling at people as they come in.
Anti-spam measures are the same thing. They are actions against a particular manner of communication.
And if the police go to shut down a megaphone store, it has nothing to do with the First Amendment.
Easy. (forgive me if I'm loose with the facts here; it's the logic that matters)
An ISP hosts a spamware-for-sale site.
Peacefire pays connectivity fees to that ISP.
That ISP is profitable.
If Peacefire (and, obviously other clients like them) would move, or threaten to move, to a different, not-so-spam-friendly ISP, then the current ISP would start to ask themselves: "Wait, is it really worth it to host the spamware site?"
If Peacefire does not move, or complain about the spamware, then they are allowing the ISP to continue to make a profit in support of spam.
Is it Peacefire's battle to fight? Probably not. But here we are, and they've been tarred, as it were, by association with a disreputable party. Like anyone in such a situation, they have to decide to either ignore it or sever that association. MAPS only brings that decision to their attention.
That depends. MAPS also provides a BGP feed that can be used by routers to blackhole networks. In that case, the network does not exist from your perspective. No mail, no web, no ping, nothing.
This is the first thing I've ever read on Slashdot that made me laugh out loud.
Re:No more deja.com/usenet
on
Deja.com Vu!
·
· Score: 3
I didn't think anyone else cared! I thought I was the only one in the world who bothered to use deja for it's usenet search.
All the smart people I know lived by it. And the dumb person I know (me) did too.
There is nothing else like it for tracking down obscure information - web crawling search engines don't come close. Nowhere else can you find almost any question asked, answered, and debated to resolution by a community of knowledgeable people. The usenet archive - moreso before it got lobotomized to mid-1999 - was the number one most useful technical research tool on the internet.
Unfortunately, I don't see how it can be made profitable in these post-banner-ad days. But a public service like this needs to be maintained! All I can pray for is that an internet philanthropist like Brewster Kahle decides to buy up the archive and put it online at a loss. If I had the money I'd do it myself. (And no, I wouldn't charge for it - I consider that highly inappropriate since the postings were made freely)
Everyone's always talking about how with open source software there's nobody to call, nobody to hold responsible.
Sounds like a valid objection, I guess, except in the real world.
I was an IT manager in an organization large enough to make Microsoft ask "how high?" when we told them to jump (30K machines at our particular site). I could get real live engineers (not support techs) to call me back the same day, which is better support than most people would ever dream of getting from them.
Useless.
From time to time, we would uncover bugs in NT and associated products. We'd work with the MS people, who would disappear and come back in 3 or 4 weeks with a patch, generally accompanied by annoying workarounds, that would stop the crashing or other bug manifestations. The patch would wind up in the next service patch or hotfix or whatever, weeks to months later.
On the other hand, when we had problems with open source software, we'd put a team on it and more often than not, fix it that same night. Then, depending on our confidence in the fix, we'd release it to the community, so everyone else could benefit straight away.
The difference was night and day. It was far more cost-effective to devote some programmer-power to actually fixing the problems, than to deal with lost productivity or stalled projects for weeks. And our benefit was a win for everyone else as well.
In my current situation, a much smaller organization, we're almost entirely open-source, and I'd never go back.
Slashdot Mirror
(OT)
My only overseas vacations have been to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and I'd club a baby seal for the opportunity to go again.
Several airlines are doing it for $300 and under right now, no seal-clubbing required. What's stopping you?
Though if that's the only area you've been to, you really ought to broaden your horizons.
I don't like the fact that you will only have access to a select list of websites
If you read the articles closely, it looks like this (and the Air Canada effort that someone else mentions below) are really just onboard cache servers that hold a bunch of preloaded web sites. When the plane parks, it'll grab updated snapshots of the selected sites. If you try to go to some site not in its cache, it just won't be accessible.
The only thing that might be live is POP fetches from on-ground mail servers. Those might even be through a web interface that chokes large transfers and enables less-than-live response time (which would otherwise result in timeouts using a native POP client on the user's machine). I'm sure even the outgoing mail is batched.
This reminds me of the first "Internet cafe" in Saudi Arabia, before the country was allowing the public to access the net. As soon as I heard about it, I rushed over to interview the owner and find out how he was going to make it happen. It looked all fancy, with top-of-the line desktops, and lots of people stringing wires everywhere. But get this - Turns out they were having tapes sent once a week from the US, loaded with several gigs of the "most popular sites", and then loading those onto a local server. The cafe wasn't connected to the outside world at all.
What good does wireless networking do on a plane?
It's far cheaper for the airline to install one or two wireless access points, than to run ethernet to every seat, and to repair the jacks every few weeks after some kid's stuck peanuts or jello into them.
Singapore's airport provides free internet access to anyone carrying one of these cards. Works great. There are signs scattered around the terminal indicating the areas in which it works, usually with nice comfy chairs nearby. They'll even lend you a card for your laptop if you don't have one. (Unfortunately people without computers are stuck paying about US$6/hour to use the airport's machines)
This is definitely the sort of thing more airports should do - maybe I wouldn't always be so late for flights because I need to finish my work, if I knew I could take care of it in the departure lounge after checking in.
MICROSOFT.COM.IS.AT.THE.MERCY.OF.DETRIMENT.ORGS .NETR K.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.INSPIRES.COPYCAT.WANNABE.SUBVERSIVE
MICROSOFT.COM.HAS.NO.LINUXCLUE.COM
MICROSOFT.COM.HACKED.BY.PSYKOJOKO.ON.A.ROOT-NETWO
This is very old news and has nothing to do with the current situation. It's just a side-effect of the way that Network Solutions' whois server works. You can add something to that list yourself - just register a host that begins with 'MICROSOFT.COM'.
There is a point to this story. It points out how vulnerable DNS still is to cache poisoning.
How you figure? If this was a case of cache poisoning we'd be seeing incorrect information, not timeouts.
What this story does is point out how vulnerable MS shops are to extended downtimes.
I know several rather respectable people who work at Microsoft who have lost their mail.
How would that work out? Their mail will come through as soon as lookups are working again, as no MTA I'm aware of will bounce mail because of a DNS failure lasting less than several days. That's not exactly "lost".
Looks like people will have to go inside their TVs to get the signal they need to exercise their legally-granted rights to time-displace content.
Then what, the TV sets will be manufactured with an explosive charge which will destroy the insides unless a smart card is used to open it?
So people will have to use TEMPEST-like tactics to construct the signal from leakage and feed it to their recorders.
Then what, HDTV sets will be constructed with Faraday cages, adding a few dozen kg to the weight and several cm all around to the dimensions, requiring substantial extra power to make up for the intensity lost by viewing through a steel screen?
So people will use cameras to record the image displayed on the screen, together with software that counters the distortion created by the glass shape and pixel fuzziness.
Then what, TVs will display encrypted content directly on their screens and people who want to watch PPV wrestling events will have to have a chip mounted along their optic nerve to decrypt the signal en route to the brain?
I for one can't wait. I am sick and tired of all these morally bankrupt thieves thinking they can just watch shows they've paid for and listen to music they bought. I mean, where do they get off? Actually, "thieves" is too weak a word. I will henceforth refer to these foul malefactors as Intellectual Property Rights Murderers, for their offenses against the most hallowed recording and motion picture industries are tantamount to murder and should be punished as such. Until the State wises up and handles these heinous crimes accordingly, we can thank God that technology will provide suitable interim measures.
I don't see why people hate MS products so much. Your precious linux would probably not exist without it!
The delicious tomatoes in my salad probably wouldn't exist without the horse manure they were fertilized with, but you won't see me scooping the brown stuff on top of my arugula. I will, however, defend to the death your right to eat as much of it as you like.
That sounds like flamebait, but if you're opposed to Windows because Microsoft is "icky" or because you'd rather spend X thousand dollars to support 5% of your audience, you're a bad businessman.
Call me a bad businessman if you like, but I'd much rather spend my $2500 on a truly universal cross-platform streaming media solution, than on a PoS server operating system that would cost me hundreds of thousands in staff and support (been there, done that, attended the Microsoft seminars and ate the stale bagels).
Windows ain't free, you know. The up-front numbers work out roughly the same whether I use W2K+WMP or *x+RA. The real advantage of the latter comes down the road.
It shows how MacOS might now appeal to both the very technical, the very artistic, and the very newbie - something not normally possible.
I've long ago given up on worrying what might appeal to computer newcomers, but as a somewhat more experienced user I can say that there are plenty of times when I would have creamed my pants at the prospect of such a thing.
Some years ago I was doing hardcore publishing work: Pulling data from databases, doing transformations, and batch pre-formatting (often using RTF, which holds style info well) for import into QuarkXPress where the book and magazine designers could have at it and tinker with the pretty bits. Sticking a FreeBSD box under the desk and running Netatalk on it did the job, but it'd be a whole lot nicer (and smoother) to have it all in one place.
Even now, I use QuarkXPress and Excel almost daily for any number of tasks; no matter how much I like the command line, there are some tools where the GUI wins. And if you're going to use it, might as well use the best tools available (hence no Gnumeric for me today, thank you).
Yes, it's that bad. I think it reasonable to allow for a one-bedroom apartment in a non-deluxe building in the District of Columbia. Such an apartment will go for about $1200 to $2400 a month.
That's fantasy talk. I moved to DC two years ago, and live in a nice apartment on a safe street in Adams Morgan (arguably the best area in DC to live; certainly the only area that's more lively than a closed-down cemetary). My rent is $600/month, including utilities. It took me two days to find. From time to time, other apartments open up in the building, and the rent for new tenants isn't much more. A couple friends just moved out of a huge 2BR up the street (living room, dining room, study), top floor, corner, doorman building, gorgeous views of downtown, rent $1300/month. The new people who moved in are paying $1420.
People are always talking about how it's impossible to find decent housing here. Far as I can tell, it's because they're idiots (nothing personal). Everyone I know who has moved here has found something good in the same price range. Put down the newspaper and hit the streets. Talk to building managers. Make friends. The market is loose and easy.
Yet Germany has managed to do precisely that - with packaging, anyway. As of January 1, 1993, distributors must accept at their cost all packaging used to contain retail goods.
Consumers are required to place these items in special bags (separate from organic waste, and certain categories of generic recyclables such as glass and aluminum), which are picked up at curbside and centrally sorted. They are returned to the producing company which must recycle at least 60% of the material.
This responsibility is transferrable, so many companies have cooperated to achieve economies of scale by forming joint ventures to collectively handle classes of recyclable and/or disposable materials. The largest is a pan-industry cooperative called Duales System Deutschland which owns and licenses the right to the Grune Punkt logo that travelers to Germany have no doubt seen everywhere.
The effect has been that producers of retail goods in Germany have drastically improved their packaging, eliminating the insane crap you see in the USA (cookies in their own little plastic shells, single-serve crackers-and-cheese, etc.). Once consumers were faced with paying the actual passed-on costs of these shockingly wasteful products (rather than transferring the costs to their perhaps more responsible neighbors and fellow taxpayers), the demand dried up.
While the sorting and recycling process may be more expensive than dumping the stuff in a landfill or sending it off on a barge to Russia, the net cost may actually go down due to the decrease in wasteful material production. In any case the mitigation of environmental externalities is priceless.
A logical next step, and one that is being considered in Germany and elsewhere, is a similar requirement for goods themselves. The infrastructure is in place; it's a matter of working out the numbers.
It's rediculous to assume that a faster means of information will magically provide us with new experiences. The limits aren't in bandwidth but how content providers choose to use it.
I disagree (please don't cry).
Compare the internet to radio. In the beginning there were all sorts of avenues for exploration and development - live programming, news shows, dramas, music, higher-fidelity music, stereo, call-in shows. Then the ideas stopped coming. Radio has become stagnant (actually, worse; it's regressed as station ownership has become consolidated, but that's besides the point).
With the internet, on the other hand, we're still several technological generations behind being able to implement a lot of the things that people have already dreamed up. Video-on-demand, all sorts of interpersonal interactivity, remote 3-D printing, high-bandwidth wireless anywhere access, interconnectivity with all the appliances and systems in our homes, etc.
Look, when I started using the internet, you could squeeze mail through creaking gateways, and maybe get FTP to work to a couple of sites at certain times of the day. I dialed into an internet-connected Sun across a 2.4kb/s modem. 13 years on, the underlying protocols are the same, but everything else is basically unrecognizable. But we've barely done anything so far!
One of the biggest changes, one that's just beginning, is the digitificalization of all media. Newspapers and magazines are already sent by PDF to remote printing plants for simultaneous worldwide distribution; radio stations are all going online, TV and movies are distributed digitally to cable companies and now even cinemas. The converging availability of all these infotainment streams through one device (it's gonna happen, no two ways about it) will completely change the way we communicate with the outside world - and it with us.
As long as we have a full hopper of new ideas, and as long as the technological improvements necessary to realize those ideas keep being developed at a rapid pace, internet-related change is going to keep going. Everyone likes to make contrarian picks; if they're wrong, they're ignored, but if they're right, the predictor is hailed as a visionary. This makes them pretty cheap unless they're backed up better than this article is.
How'd you get two?
I just counted the number of separate machines.
I guess it's possible that they stuck several of them together on the same machine, but if I were a spammer, the last thing I'd want on a server with me would be another spammer.
And never underestimate the joy spammers get out of making up fake names and addresses.
If the RIAA were even vaguely more sophisticated than the pack of Neanderthals with JDs that they are, this is the sort of thing they'd be spending their money on.
As a collective organization representing the recording industry, they could be shooting impulse music purchases into the stratosphere by embracing and supporting appliances like this. They could be working on standards, encouraging hardware and software manufacturers, generating consumer interest. Just imagine - You're listening to something you like, and instantly you can choose to buy songs that are (A) liked by the same people who like the current song, (B) listed as inspiration by the band that recorded the current song, (C) anything else clever people can imagine. They could - gasp - look forward for a change.
But no, it is not to be. Instead they are going to waste their time and further alienate consumers by focusing on low-return, antipathy-generating initiatives like pay-per-listen recordings and Quixotic lawsuits against software that courts can't touch.
Which is why I think they are on the way out. One of these days some other upstart organization - perhaps another industry group with an eye to expanding its constituency - is going to make the case to the big recording companies that the club they're sending checks to is doing nothing but hurting their interests.
They are blocking the ISP, which has hosted a whole mess of spammers for at least six months
To be fair, if you look at the data behind the graph, you'll see that it's only 2, and not really 21 spamhäuser. There are 20 ostensibly distinct Hormel subsidiaries on the same /24.
On the other hand, it's pretty clear that Media3's well aware of what's going on. All their spam customers are on the same two machines: ss2.media3.net and ss3.media3.net, a group that starts and ends there.
Just try calling your phone company and ask them to filter out calls from telemarketers and see how far you get.
Works for me. I called the phone company and told them I no longer wanted to receive calls from people who blocks their caller ID data (even though I don't have caller ID). It's pretty much put a stop to the telemarketing calls. I'm pleased that I can do the same in my choice of ISP: I can select one that uses an imperfect but fairly effective mechanism to screen out crap.
Spam is not content, spam is a method of communicating content. The content is the ad itself, and I have no problem with that. Purveyors of home-brew viagra are more than welcome, in my opinion, to set up a web site or buy newspaper ads or communicate their content in any appropriate manner.
As the First Amendment is generally interpreted by US courts, the government cannot take action based on content (with certain well-known exceptions), but it can make restrictions on the time, place, and manner of communication. For instance, the police can tell you that you are not allowed to stand in the lobby of city hall with a megaphone yelling at people as they come in.
Anti-spam measures are the same thing. They are actions against a particular manner of communication.
And if the police go to shut down a megaphone store, it has nothing to do with the First Amendment.
Easy. (forgive me if I'm loose with the facts here; it's the logic that matters)
If Peacefire (and, obviously other clients like them) would move, or threaten to move, to a different, not-so-spam-friendly ISP, then the current ISP would start to ask themselves: "Wait, is it really worth it to host the spamware site?"
If Peacefire does not move, or complain about the spamware, then they are allowing the ISP to continue to make a profit in support of spam.
Is it Peacefire's battle to fight? Probably not. But here we are, and they've been tarred, as it were, by association with a disreputable party. Like anyone in such a situation, they have to decide to either ignore it or sever that association. MAPS only brings that decision to their attention.
That depends. MAPS also provides a BGP feed that can be used by routers to blackhole networks. In that case, the network does not exist from your perspective. No mail, no web, no ping, nothing.
This is the first thing I've ever read on Slashdot that made me laugh out loud.
I didn't think anyone else cared! I thought I was the only one in the world who bothered to use deja for it's usenet search.
All the smart people I know lived by it. And the dumb person I know (me) did too.
There is nothing else like it for tracking down obscure information - web crawling search engines don't come close. Nowhere else can you find almost any question asked, answered, and debated to resolution by a community of knowledgeable people. The usenet archive - moreso before it got lobotomized to mid-1999 - was the number one most useful technical research tool on the internet.
Unfortunately, I don't see how it can be made profitable in these post-banner-ad days. But a public service like this needs to be maintained! All I can pray for is that an internet philanthropist like Brewster Kahle decides to buy up the archive and put it online at a loss. If I had the money I'd do it myself. (And no, I wouldn't charge for it - I consider that highly inappropriate since the postings were made freely)
Everyone's always talking about how with open source software there's nobody to call, nobody to hold responsible.
Sounds like a valid objection, I guess, except in the real world.
I was an IT manager in an organization large enough to make Microsoft ask "how high?" when we told them to jump (30K machines at our particular site). I could get real live engineers (not support techs) to call me back the same day, which is better support than most people would ever dream of getting from them.
Useless.
From time to time, we would uncover bugs in NT and associated products. We'd work with the MS people, who would disappear and come back in 3 or 4 weeks with a patch, generally accompanied by annoying workarounds, that would stop the crashing or other bug manifestations. The patch would wind up in the next service patch or hotfix or whatever, weeks to months later.
On the other hand, when we had problems with open source software, we'd put a team on it and more often than not, fix it that same night. Then, depending on our confidence in the fix, we'd release it to the community, so everyone else could benefit straight away.
The difference was night and day. It was far more cost-effective to devote some programmer-power to actually fixing the problems, than to deal with lost productivity or stalled projects for weeks. And our benefit was a win for everyone else as well.
In my current situation, a much smaller organization, we're almost entirely open-source, and I'd never go back.
Aside from the intro, this MP3 is a rip of the sound track from the Summoner D&D-goof movie.
Um, it's the other way around.