Could someone please indulge me as to why there is such a dire focus on child pornography?
Because it's hard to think of any other justification for censorship that rings true with a majority of the public. It's become the fallback position of any would-be censor who is losing a debate.
It's a horrible crime, certainly, but I've never see the same status associated with other, and in my mind, just as horrible acts such as snuff films, brutal rape, torture, etc. Is this simply another act of 'think of the children' knee-jerking, or is there some reason why this is seen to be counted as worse than torture and murder by a large part of our population?
Certainly the act of exploting the kids is pretty horrible, and I can see the argument that due to its underground nature of the subculture it's effective to go after the consumers as well.
But worse than torture? I am not sure that question is really answerable. Is it useful to rank rape, torture, murder, child abuse, etc.? Aren't they all just things that should be put a stop to whenever possible? I am not aware of many situations where someone has 5 seconds to decide whether to stop a murder or a child rape, and would benefit from a handy pocket reference card to determine which is the more heinous crime.
I am pretty sure that the amount of kiddie porn-related child exploitation that goes on is pretty piddling compared to the amount of state-sponsored murder and other stuff that nobody seems to give a shit about. Perhaps that's another reason for all the alarmism about online pedophilia - to keep people's minds off the body bags elsewhere.
Write a program that takes an arbitrary.zip file, and embeds it in an image file. Further, study the resampling algorithm the Pirate Bay is using, so that at thumbnail size, the name of the.zip file is clearly readable. And at full size, it shows a URL to the program required to decode the image back into the.zip.
If you're not Chinese, they pretty much don't care. And if you're using openvpn, they certainly don't have the resources to intercept your communications on the off chance that you're emailing really racy Falun Gong porn or whatever.
people seem to forget this part "the US remains the largest broadband country in the world with more than 60.4 million subscribers in the quarter with 2.9 million new broadband additions
Nobody's forgetting it, they just paid enough attention in school to know it's irrelevant.
The US happens to be by far the highest-population rich country. So of course it will have more (DSL subscribers|rapes|babies born with one eye|malfunctioning toasters) than any other rich country. What matters is the proportion to population, and the growth rate. And that's where the US is not looking good these days.
Seriously in NYC its not uncommon to open up your laptop and see a half dozen open points in a given apartment / condo building.
Not sure that's terribly impressive. I live in a city where they use bamboo scaffolding, and monkeys sneak in through windows to steal food from people's kitchens. Right now in my apartment I see 14 access points.
I don't think it's as simple as that. You're can get a router to spread various sessions across different external links based on how much spare bandwidth it thinks each link still has - basic load balancing - but you will not be able to combine, for example, your 200kb/s GPRS and your 56kb/s dialup line to get a single channel that would give you 256kb/s downloads over a single TCP session.
If multiple links come from the same ISP, and they're cooperative, and the latencies are similar (i.e., you're not combining dialup and ADSL) then you can do it. But that doesn't seem to fit your scenario.
And a lot of people are purposely not paying for 'broadband' over dialup, because they don't need/want it. Rather they think they don't need it. There have been a LOT of people that have gone back to cheaper dialup from broadband, simply because they don't need it, and don't want to pay the extra.
But in a lot of countries outside the USA, broadband is cheaper than dialup for any normal usage level.
Thing is more than 80% of the nation *does* have a broadband option they just choose not to pay for it.
In that case the point is that it's too expensive, and something is keeping the market from bringing prices down to where it's compelling to as many people.
My parents pay EUR10/month for 3-megabit DSL. If they had to pay Verizon prices (125% the price for 25% of the speed, effectively 5 times as much) I'm not sure they'd do it.
No shit. Why on earth would I want to locate in a datacentre which was intentionally thrown together in a hurry? That's like buying a parachute that was made by the lowest bidder.
This seems like really bad advertising to me. Anyone who is careful in vendor selection will be unimpressed, and they'll have an uphill battle to convince these prospective customers that no corners were cut or harmful shortcuts taken.
I suppose if you wanted to be even more devious you could set extension 101 to divert to a premium rate number and make a bit of extra cash for every minute the dumb marketer stays listening to the 101 CD - this is probably illegal though (as most fun things are)...
I doubt it's illegal, as you'd be the one paying the premium rates for the call.
"Hi, Mr. Agency, I'd like to pay you a lot of money to call my employees repeatedly and check whether any of them feel like quitting yet. Please call several times a day so they can't get any work done."
This has already failed and failed miserably. There are hordes of zombies sending spam from my ISP's network. They all do as you recommend and use the ISP's SMTP server and this is why more than 80% of all spam comes from zombies.
Then your ISP is missing the other piece of the puzzle, which is to rate-limit outbound SMTP on a per-client basis. 250 messages per hour or something ought to deal with most normal users. And if they notice that someone is sending out thousands and thousands of messages, they should cut them off.
How can Higaran's idiotic response be moderated "Insightful"? He managed to read a very clear article and come away with an interpretation that was almost completely the opposite of what it said. It does provide some insight into the sorry state of education these days, but definitely not into the topic of this post.
There is no spyware on the Blockbuster or Netflix websites.
There is spyware that may get loaded onto your computer by companies like Zango, which then intercepts your visits to Blockbuster/Netflix, and inserts a cookie that scams Blockbuster/Netflix out of commission $$.
No legal department would put their stamp of approval on such a statement
There is no legal department. You think this is TimeWarner?
I haven't run into a company yet that is standardized on a Eudora mail client, nor one that would send official e-mail through an ISP.
Then you haven't been around much. Most companies use their ISPs' SMTP servers and have no policies about software. Remember that most companies are small businesses, and if they're online at all, it's with ADSL or AOL or some such thing.
and no direct connectivity to the internet from within the business (if they had, the e-mail would not have come through a dialup account). That's doubtful, since they actually broadcast shows over the web.
Upload your songs to the colo or streaming service, and broadcast. Far cheaper and more reliable than trying to do it directly over your own pipe.
And who says it's dialup? There's no relevant information about 65.37.133.42 in DNS or at rwhois.sys.atl.earthlink.net, and I can't traceroute it to see the latency (at least not at the moment). Can you?
There is also no signature or even a name of the individual that sent the message.
That's because there's just one person and a bunch of sock puppet email addresses. At least he has the pride not to invent fake names for himself.
Accept the email he received does say they have contacted their lawyer. Why in the world would they contact a lawyer unless they were thinking of suing?
Imagine, if you will, a world so topsy-turvy that people would actually claim to have contacted a lawyer when they have done no such thing. Boggles the mind, don't it?
But none of that will matter if the company can get even one claim to stick in court.
Atlanta Blue Skye's assets consist of the following:
One PC
One office chair, slightly squeaky
One almost-filled Subway Club card, damn those bastards for discontinuing the card when he was so close
79 CDs, 24 of which the president-CEO-CTO-caterer-janitor's ex would like back, thank you very much
One basement studio, soundproofed with pillows taped to the heating ducts, but that's no help when his mom comes down to do the laundry (coincidentally, that's when those "90-minute no-interruption jazz sets" get played)
One surplus letter 'e'
There are no lawyers. People with lawyers let their lawyers write the letters so they don't sound so stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's hard to think of any other justification for censorship that rings true with a majority of the public. It's become the fallback position of any would-be censor who is losing a debate.
Certainly the act of exploting the kids is pretty horrible, and I can see the argument that due to its underground nature of the subculture it's effective to go after the consumers as well.
But worse than torture? I am not sure that question is really answerable. Is it useful to rank rape, torture, murder, child abuse, etc.? Aren't they all just things that should be put a stop to whenever possible? I am not aware of many situations where someone has 5 seconds to decide whether to stop a murder or a child rape, and would benefit from a handy pocket reference card to determine which is the more heinous crime.
I am pretty sure that the amount of kiddie porn-related child exploitation that goes on is pretty piddling compared to the amount of state-sponsored murder and other stuff that nobody seems to give a shit about. Perhaps that's another reason for all the alarmism about online pedophilia - to keep people's minds off the body bags elsewhere.
Here's a project for some eager beaver:
Write a program that takes an arbitrary .zip file, and embeds it in an image file. Further, study the resampling algorithm the Pirate Bay is using, so that at thumbnail size, the name of the .zip file is clearly readable. And at full size, it shows a URL to the program required to decode the image back into the .zip.
Presto, share whatever you want.
Oh please. Out of all the people making trouble on this planet, the wacko animal rights activists are a freckle on a pimple on a pea.
Since there are Google ads on the pages, the boys in Mountain View knows who is doing what: They get the HTTP referer header and your Google cookies.
...so long as those people are willing to move to Sydney.
If you're not Chinese, they pretty much don't care. And if you're using openvpn, they certainly don't have the resources to intercept your communications on the off chance that you're emailing really racy Falun Gong porn or whatever.
Nobody's forgetting it, they just paid enough attention in school to know it's irrelevant.
The US happens to be by far the highest-population rich country. So of course it will have more (DSL subscribers|rapes|babies born with one eye|malfunctioning toasters) than any other rich country. What matters is the proportion to population, and the growth rate. And that's where the US is not looking good these days.
With a proxy server or a copy of openvpn it's exactly the same as your internet.
Not sure that's terribly impressive. I live in a city where they use bamboo scaffolding, and monkeys sneak in through windows to steal food from people's kitchens. Right now in my apartment I see 14 access points.
I don't think it's as simple as that. You're can get a router to spread various sessions across different external links based on how much spare bandwidth it thinks each link still has - basic load balancing - but you will not be able to combine, for example, your 200kb/s GPRS and your 56kb/s dialup line to get a single channel that would give you 256kb/s downloads over a single TCP session.
If multiple links come from the same ISP, and they're cooperative, and the latencies are similar (i.e., you're not combining dialup and ADSL) then you can do it. But that doesn't seem to fit your scenario.
But in a lot of countries outside the USA, broadband is cheaper than dialup for any normal usage level.
In that case the point is that it's too expensive, and something is keeping the market from bringing prices down to where it's compelling to as many people.
My parents pay EUR10/month for 3-megabit DSL. If they had to pay Verizon prices (125% the price for 25% of the speed, effectively 5 times as much) I'm not sure they'd do it.
No shit. Why on earth would I want to locate in a datacentre which was intentionally thrown together in a hurry? That's like buying a parachute that was made by the lowest bidder.
This seems like really bad advertising to me. Anyone who is careful in vendor selection will be unimpressed, and they'll have an uphill battle to convince these prospective customers that no corners were cut or harmful shortcuts taken.
This seems to be where the Dutch skill ends. Look at the masses queuing up for prestiguous home in quaint, charming Lelystad.
Any time you can pull a silly prank and kill trees at the same time, you're really onto something.
I doubt it's illegal, as you'd be the one paying the premium rates for the call.
"Hi, Mr. Agency, I'd like to pay you a lot of money to call my employees repeatedly and check whether any of them feel like quitting yet. Please call several times a day so they can't get any work done."
Can you say self-fulfilling prophecy?
Of course.
Get one of those plastic phone condoms for a bar phone and it's impervious to key-related harm.
Plus, after a few months the plastic gets sort of sticky and yellowed so nobody wants to steal your phone.
Then your ISP is missing the other piece of the puzzle, which is to rate-limit outbound SMTP on a per-client basis. 250 messages per hour or something ought to deal with most normal users. And if they notice that someone is sending out thousands and thousands of messages, they should cut them off.
Blockbuster didn't sign with Zango (the spyware company).
They signed with Linkshare, a reputable online advertising company.
The click gets laundered through successively less-sleazy companies on the way from the spyware-infested computer back to Blockbuster.
How can Higaran's idiotic response be moderated "Insightful"? He managed to read a very clear article and come away with an interpretation that was almost completely the opposite of what it said. It does provide some insight into the sorry state of education these days, but definitely not into the topic of this post.
There is no spyware on the Blockbuster or Netflix websites.
There is spyware that may get loaded onto your computer by companies like Zango, which then intercepts your visits to Blockbuster/Netflix, and inserts a cookie that scams Blockbuster/Netflix out of commission $$.
Earthlink == Mindspring... for at least ten years now. Surely a hotshot email header private dick would know that.
There is no legal department. You think this is TimeWarner?
Then you haven't been around much. Most companies use their ISPs' SMTP servers and have no policies about software. Remember that most companies are small businesses, and if they're online at all, it's with ADSL or AOL or some such thing.
Upload your songs to the colo or streaming service, and broadcast. Far cheaper and more reliable than trying to do it directly over your own pipe.
And who says it's dialup? There's no relevant information about 65.37.133.42 in DNS or at rwhois.sys.atl.earthlink.net, and I can't traceroute it to see the latency (at least not at the moment). Can you?
That's because there's just one person and a bunch of sock puppet email addresses. At least he has the pride not to invent fake names for himself.
Imagine, if you will, a world so topsy-turvy that people would actually claim to have contacted a lawyer when they have done no such thing. Boggles the mind, don't it?
Atlanta Blue Skye's assets consist of the following:
There are no lawyers. People with lawyers let their lawyers write the letters so they don't sound so stupid.