traceroute to www.yahoo.akadns.net (64.58.76.179), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 mombasa (10.0.6.3) 0.852 ms 0.730 ms 0.653 ms
2 ATM.VR1.DCA3.DSL.ALTER.NET (206.66.32.1) 8.271 ms 9.283 ms 8.340 ms
(lines deleted in heroic attempt to battle the lameness filter) 13 www10.dcx.yahoo.com (64.58.76.179) 11.132 ms 11.046 ms 11.528 ms
Like you, I've had consistently fabulous results with Covad DSL for a good long time. No sluggish times of day, no outages to speak of.
There are so many people in the tired old DSL v Cable debate that have one or the other - or know someone who has one or the other - and have thus proclaimed themselves ultimate arbiters of all situations in the universe. The simple fact is, service providers vary. Different companies, different parts of the country = different results.
One of the more powerful arguments in favor of DSL is the choice factor. Cable modems are almost always provided by huge monopolies that are only nice to you because they still have to be. DSL ISPs, on the other hand, are actually competing with each other (except of course the ILECs, who underprice everyone else). With DSL I can pick and choose a provider that gives me static addresses, reverse DNS, various other extra services. With cable you get what they offer, and if you decide one day that you don't like gruel, tough.
Sadly, though, my guess is that there aren't too many accademic reasons for putting a server in your dorm room instead of using a university managed server - other than to try to put up a server which doesn't fall under the normal AUP. Sure, it's a fun project and teaches a lot about administration - but it provides little academic gain that setting up a university-wide-only server would not.
I couldn't disagree more. Almost all of the current crop of gifted internet technicians (at least those that I'm aware of) learned their stuff by running servers in their college dorm rooms. Throwing static HTML up on a central web server isn't even the same ball game.
I would furthermore suggest that any university that imposes restrictions such as those mooted in this article is not serious about providing residence hall internet access as an academic resource, and is instead doing it for one of three reasons:
They think it's "the thing to do"; all the schools are doing it
It's cheaper than providing sufficient public terminals for web browsing in the library (don't get me started on web "research")
They see it as a competitive factor in drawing students (like a fancy lobby and nice donuts in the campus information building)
Sure there's abuse. So throw on some rate limiters. What's far more important is the amazing collaborative learning that takes place in this environment; students with no technological ability learning from others how to become content providers and participants in the internet information space just like huge corporations (CNN, Amazon, etc). It's empowering, it's educational, it's a crucial step toward preparing students for the real digital world past the campus gates.
As an undergrad, I attended a university with a strong technological focus and a solid commitment to exposing students to IT (U of Michigan). When I look at my classmates, and compare them to less fortunate students at other schools, the difference is shocking. My fellow alum are totally comfortable with email, with the web, with their computers, with the changes in the world around them. Ten years later I went to grad school at a university with basically no on-campus technology (Yale; though they have finally wired most of the dorms at least). Ten years later, with all this technology supposedly so much more pervasive, and the students at Yale don't have anywhere near the comfort with it. They're intimidated by computers, and just as important, they're BAD at using them.
I probably wouldn't have made it anywhere in the US (I checked some sample SAT tests, and I know I wouldn't have made it)
Don't sell yourself short. You write and reason more cogently than a good share of the morons I've seen in American colleges - even some of the best schools.
If you take a very liberal interpretation of the attorney general decision, it makes operation of an ISP or providing any type of internet access illegal in NYS.
As others have (thank God) pointed out, a guilty plea does not a precedent make. Furthermore, attorneys general do not make "decisions" of any more far-reaching weight than your decision to sue your neighbor for running over your dog. All they do is decide which cases to attempt to prosecute. The courts still decide who wins (not to mention who even gets to trial).
From reading the cited materials, it looks like the ISP rolled over because they took stock and realized that they failed to reply when notified of the presence of the objectionable materials, as required under the CDA, which - like it or not - is the law of the land.
I think (and hope) the case would have turned out very differently if the police had just shown up one day unannounced - or otherwise without following appropriate and published procedure - and attempted to bust them for materials which unbenownst to the ISP had passed through their network. This is exactly what happened in New York State a couple of years ago, and as you'll recall, it all turned out fine in the end.
For what it's worth, I wrote an angry letter to the tone-deaf demagogue attorney general (Dennis Vacco) behind the 1998 action, and his subsequent re-election bid failed. According to elementary cause-and-effect theory(*) the stirring moral resonance and excellent argumentation of my letter caused him to lose faith in himself and stumble in the polls (granted, the only outward sign was that he had an aide write me back with a bunch of press clippings about what a great guy he is, but I can read the writing on the wall), so you all owe me a debt of gratitude. If this current business turns sour, you can bet I'll dust off my fountain pen again and it'll all get taken care of.
- - - * Elementary cause-and-effect theory states that if I take a certain action with the intent of causing an outcome, and that outcome is later observed, then I was 100% responsible for that outcome. Unless it turns out to be a bad outcome, in which case it was all a coincidence.
May be they had a reason for having it the way they do. . . . Just because you think you know something (and what caused it) is wrong doesn't mean there is! There's more behind the scene that you may not know. They may have been in the process of installing a new router and were in the process of configuring it for the first time(make a change, put it in service to test, take it out....it's up so short of time when your doing this, it's not a security problem).
It sure is a security problem. The fact that he connected and had full access demonstrates that. He could have inserted rules that would have created a backdoor for him in the future. If that's how you run things, remind me not to hire you.
When you're delivering internet-connected equipment for installation at a customer site, you first connect it in an isolated network, then set up access control and passwords, THEN send it to the site.
As for the matter at hand, there is a big difference between poking around through random strangers' networks hunting for holes, and taking a closer look at a friend's network because you think there might be a problem she should know about. This clearly looks like a case of the latter. Fortunately it would be quite difficult to bring prosecution in most jurisdictions because the prosecutor would not have the support of the victim. It's like trying to prosecute someone for breaking and entering after they're observed climbing through a window - when it's later discovered that the window belonged to their mother's house and they climbed in because they saw a fire in the kitchen.
Sorry, there are just some things that open source software doesn't make sense for, and this is one of them. A single customer software package requiring highly customized and extremely expensive hardware to run, where a bug in the code can cause the death of close to 1000 people (think runway collision of two 747's) doesn't sound like something that would lend itself to community development.
Open source doesn't just mean community development. It means that everyone can audit the code. This includes the FAA, the airlines, the control tower engineers, the airplane manufacturers, anyone who has an interest in it being as good as possible and who can benefit from knowing its weaknesses.
The reason I use Linux and FreeBSD in production environments isn't because I have a pressing urge to write kernel code. It's because I want to see the code when something unexpected is happening, so I can maneuver my environment back into the realm of the expected.
The only thing even marginally innovative here is apt-get, a lame command line tool that works around the lack of software packaging standards in Linux. It's not present on other systems only because they have no need for it.
Spoken like someone who has absolutely no experience with what he's talking about.
To install some software on a Windows machine, you go find it online, download it, save it somewhere, run the installer, restart the computer, wait 5 minutes while it moves more things around and perhaps restarts again, and then finally you're done.
With apt-get, all you do is type that one command. Done.
And don't even get me started on removing stuff. The Windows way, you go to the Control Panel, find Add/Remove programs, hold your breath to see if there's an uninstaller, run it, look quizzically as it asks you 500 times whether you want to remove various permutations of X5466N7W.DLL, then restart your computer, and nothing works anymore.
Guess how it works with Debian? One command, program gone. All done.
The only thing that even comes close is the Mac; at least most of the time you can remove an application just by tossing the folder away.
Also, many countries do in fact require that you have an address in their country before registering one of their domains. And it would be much better if all the countries did that. Then the Cocos Islands wouldn't have so many thousand domains registered for their 700 citizens.
If I may pry, why do you care about the citizen-to-domain ratio of Cocos and Keeling Islands?
periodical (pr-d-kl) adj.
1. Periodic.
2. a. Published at regular intervals of more than one day.
Did you understand that phrase "more than one day?"
If you think that a usage has to satisfy all rather than any of the meanings supplied by a dictionary, you're going to have a hard time using a whole lot of words.
Let's take 'cleave'.
1. to adhere firmly and closely or loyally and unwaveringly
2. to separate into distinct parts and especially into groups having divergent views
America is actually a continent I think you'll find
Think harder. No map or atlas shows a continent named "America".
"America", on the other hand, is the universally-understood short name for "The United States of America", just as "Germany" is the universally-understood short name for "The Federal Republic of Germany".
I will join your self-righteous quest to rename America when you have joined mine to address the following egregious geoappelational injustices:
Ecuador has appropriated the Spanish name of the zero-latitude line crossing through such aggreived countries as Kenya, Indonesia, Malaysia (itself an offender, as we shall see below), Saudi Arabia, and many others.
Central African Republic infringes on Chad, which occupies Africa's geographical center of gravity.
And let's not forget South Africa, which has points far to the north of many other African nations, including Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe (the latter only by a few miles, but justice is justice).
Greenland is far less green than dozens of other countries. How dare they?
Does Liberia mean to discount the freedom enjoyed in other lands throughout the world? Their name certains indicates that they do. I hope you'll make sure they see the error of their ways.
New Zealand - well, I don't think I need to point out the flagrant harm being done here. The province of Zeeland in the Netherlands has vast polder (reclaimed land) areas which are far newer than anything the Kiwis can offer.
Malaysia usurps its name from the good people of Singapore and Thailand, who share with them the Malay peninusla. This case is particularly similar to the US/America issue so close to your heart. To add insult to injury, Malaysia has stolen the US flag and just substituted an Islamic crescent for the 50 stars.
United Kingdom diminishes with its very existence the achievement of so many other kingdoms worldwide that have achieved unity.
I would go on but the unfairness of it all reduces me to a sputtering rage.
I do hope that I can count on your support in consistently and equitably addressing all these horrific assaults against nomenclatural integrity worldwide. By your evident zeal I believe that I can.
It's like flipping a penny twice: odds are just as well that you'll get 2 heads or 2 tails as they are that you'll get 1 head and 1 tail.
You stand a better chance of getting one head and one tail than anything else.
Re-parse. He's saying that (the chance of 2 heads or 2 tails) = (chance of 1 head and 1 tail). And he's quite correct. 2/4 = 2/4.
To look at it another way: Remember, he's talking about flipping a penny twice. After you flip it the first time and note the outcome, you then have a 50% chance of matching it with the second flip.
Who else would have turned the English language into the most imperial language on the earth today, not because of any military conquest (though the US does have plenty) but because of corporate conquest?
What exactly is your point here? You're upset because the US didn't force its culture down people's throats the old-fashioned way: at the barrel of a gun?
Also, the computer facilities at the UM campus are among the best in the world.
Let me qualify that a little more. The teen in question is coming from outside the US, correct?
Having visited university campuses and computer facilities in almost 50 countries on 5 continents, I can say with confidence that the University of Michigan computer facilities will make any foreign kid who is into computers faint with exhilarated delight.
More secure. Communications travel through well-understood mechanisms (HTTP GET/POST) for which there are oodles of data-sanitizing code samples available. Protocol handlers themselves (browser and HTTP server) are under intense scrutiny, and chances are someone else will find a problem, leading to a public update, before someone on your site does.
Faster to develop. The main advantage of using a web browser as a client is that someone else has already written all the GUI and event-handling code, and abstracted it to a high level (HTML). This is typically the most annoying and painstaking part of software development, so consider yourself lucky.
Cross-platform. If you use a web interface, you are not shoving your choice of platform down anyone's throat. Your staff can use what they're comfortable with.
No need to play OS upgrade catch-up. When your users start using a new version of their favorite OS, you don't have to worry that it will break your client software.
Easier to find developers/maintainers. Competent web programmers are easier to find than competent application developers.
Familiar interface. Users already know how to interact with web-based applications.
Advantages of a roll-your-own client:
More flexible, powerful GUI. Because HTML forms are so generalized, there are some things they don't do well - oddball user interface elements, highly interactive elements, etc.
Speed. If you optimize your client for the specific purpose, you don't have the overhead created by all the unused functionality in a general-purpose browser, protocol, and server.
If MS tried to enforce a lawsuit regarding the name "Word" to any extent, they'd likely be laughed out of court.
On the contrary. If you released an equivalent product under the same name, they'd probably have quite a good case.
Nope. There's a litter of text editing programs with "Word" in the name. None of them is named simply "Word", because that wouldn't provide any protection to the vendor. There are, however: Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, AmiWord, WordStar, and so on.
All of these products are roughly "equivalent" in the sense that they provide the same functionality and can read each other's files - that's the same as the proportional level of similarity between the ssh implementations in question.
While it is an extreme example, I would shoot someone for entering my home and trying to steal my property. Wouldn't you work hard to protect your belongings?
Completely off-topic, but you would? You're saying that your VCR is more important than someone's life? These are truly bizarre times.
Sorry, but no. There is no documentation anywhere to tell you that you need to read the ata(4) man page to find out about the disk driver or the syscons(4) man page to find out about video modes.
Try 'apropos'. In both cases (disk driver, video mode) I was pointed to the correct man page on the first try.
But how do people find out they need to use apropos? I suppose that's where we look to the crucial Third Pillar of FreeBSD documentation: Slashdot.
Also, these fricking people are using GET for sending sensitive data to a cgi, specifically, my password!!
Unless you surf on a computer connected to the giant-screen TV at Times Square, why does this matter? If it's your own computer, turn it off when you're done. If it's someone else's, clear the history.
One of the few downsides I can think of to Deja[News] becoming groups.google.com is that all of the old links to specific messages on deja.com no longer work. (For instance, if you knew the Deja ID number of a Usenet post, you could provide a URL and link directly to it.) All internal links to deja.com now seem to point to the front page of groups.google.com.
I guess people that practiced direct linking to Deja's archive are SOL for now -- the message ID URLs seem to be different.
This is not difficult to fix, because Dejanews used the articles' own message-id header. As long as Google provides a way to reference articles by that field, the worst case would be that you'd have to write a local proxy to rewrite deja.com urls to the appropriate google.com analogue. More likely, the Google people will get around to it themselves in due time.
Google has been archiving USENET since August 2000, but they can't get posts before then because no one has them saved.
Last I heard, archive.org had tapes of at least a few years of Usenet. I don't think they make the data available online, but if you ask nicely you can show up in the Presidio and play with them.
Slashdot Mirror
No, your DSL sucks!
traceroute to www.yahoo.akadns.net (64.58.76.179), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets1 mombasa (10.0.6.3) 0.852 ms 0.730 ms 0.653 ms
2 ATM.VR1.DCA3.DSL.ALTER.NET (206.66.32.1) 8.271 ms 9.283 ms 8.340 ms
(lines deleted in heroic attempt to battle the lameness filter)
13 www10.dcx.yahoo.com (64.58.76.179) 11.132 ms 11.046 ms 11.528 ms
Like you, I've had consistently fabulous results with Covad DSL for a good long time. No sluggish times of day, no outages to speak of.
There are so many people in the tired old DSL v Cable debate that have one or the other - or know someone who has one or the other - and have thus proclaimed themselves ultimate arbiters of all situations in the universe. The simple fact is, service providers vary. Different companies, different parts of the country = different results.
One of the more powerful arguments in favor of DSL is the choice factor. Cable modems are almost always provided by huge monopolies that are only nice to you because they still have to be. DSL ISPs, on the other hand, are actually competing with each other (except of course the ILECs, who underprice everyone else). With DSL I can pick and choose a provider that gives me static addresses, reverse DNS, various other extra services. With cable you get what they offer, and if you decide one day that you don't like gruel, tough.
I couldn't disagree more. Almost all of the current crop of gifted internet technicians (at least those that I'm aware of) learned their stuff by running servers in their college dorm rooms. Throwing static HTML up on a central web server isn't even the same ball game.
I would furthermore suggest that any university that imposes restrictions such as those mooted in this article is not serious about providing residence hall internet access as an academic resource, and is instead doing it for one of three reasons:
Sure there's abuse. So throw on some rate limiters. What's far more important is the amazing collaborative learning that takes place in this environment; students with no technological ability learning from others how to become content providers and participants in the internet information space just like huge corporations (CNN, Amazon, etc). It's empowering, it's educational, it's a crucial step toward preparing students for the real digital world past the campus gates.
As an undergrad, I attended a university with a strong technological focus and a solid commitment to exposing students to IT (U of Michigan). When I look at my classmates, and compare them to less fortunate students at other schools, the difference is shocking. My fellow alum are totally comfortable with email, with the web, with their computers, with the changes in the world around them. Ten years later I went to grad school at a university with basically no on-campus technology (Yale; though they have finally wired most of the dorms at least). Ten years later, with all this technology supposedly so much more pervasive, and the students at Yale don't have anywhere near the comfort with it. They're intimidated by computers, and just as important, they're BAD at using them.
Yeah, and you won't have to pay income taxes or use license plates either...
Don't sell yourself short. You write and reason more cogently than a good share of the morons I've seen in American colleges - even some of the best schools.
Addendum: I am plainly a moron. The two cases I contrast are in fact the same case. One day I will learn how to read.
As others have (thank God) pointed out, a guilty plea does not a precedent make. Furthermore, attorneys general do not make "decisions" of any more far-reaching weight than your decision to sue your neighbor for running over your dog. All they do is decide which cases to attempt to prosecute. The courts still decide who wins (not to mention who even gets to trial).
From reading the cited materials, it looks like the ISP rolled over because they took stock and realized that they failed to reply when notified of the presence of the objectionable materials, as required under the CDA, which - like it or not - is the law of the land.
I think (and hope) the case would have turned out very differently if the police had just shown up one day unannounced - or otherwise without following appropriate and published procedure - and attempted to bust them for materials which unbenownst to the ISP had passed through their network. This is exactly what happened in New York State a couple of years ago, and as you'll recall, it all turned out fine in the end.
For what it's worth, I wrote an angry letter to the tone-deaf demagogue attorney general (Dennis Vacco) behind the 1998 action, and his subsequent re-election bid failed. According to elementary cause-and-effect theory(*) the stirring moral resonance and excellent argumentation of my letter caused him to lose faith in himself and stumble in the polls (granted, the only outward sign was that he had an aide write me back with a bunch of press clippings about what a great guy he is, but I can read the writing on the wall), so you all owe me a debt of gratitude. If this current business turns sour, you can bet I'll dust off my fountain pen again and it'll all get taken care of.
- - -
* Elementary cause-and-effect theory states that if I take a certain action with the intent of causing an outcome, and that outcome is later observed, then I was 100% responsible for that outcome. Unless it turns out to be a bad outcome, in which case it was all a coincidence.
It sure is a security problem. The fact that he connected and had full access demonstrates that. He could have inserted rules that would have created a backdoor for him in the future. If that's how you run things, remind me not to hire you.
When you're delivering internet-connected equipment for installation at a customer site, you first connect it in an isolated network, then set up access control and passwords, THEN send it to the site.
As for the matter at hand, there is a big difference between poking around through random strangers' networks hunting for holes, and taking a closer look at a friend's network because you think there might be a problem she should know about. This clearly looks like a case of the latter. Fortunately it would be quite difficult to bring prosecution in most jurisdictions because the prosecutor would not have the support of the victim. It's like trying to prosecute someone for breaking and entering after they're observed climbing through a window - when it's later discovered that the window belonged to their mother's house and they climbed in because they saw a fire in the kitchen.
Open source doesn't just mean community development. It means that everyone can audit the code. This includes the FAA, the airlines, the control tower engineers, the airplane manufacturers, anyone who has an interest in it being as good as possible and who can benefit from knowing its weaknesses.
The reason I use Linux and FreeBSD in production environments isn't because I have a pressing urge to write kernel code. It's because I want to see the code when something unexpected is happening, so I can maneuver my environment back into the realm of the expected.
Spoken like someone who has absolutely no experience with what he's talking about.
To install some software on a Windows machine, you go find it online, download it, save it somewhere, run the installer, restart the computer, wait 5 minutes while it moves more things around and perhaps restarts again, and then finally you're done.
With apt-get, all you do is type that one command. Done.
And don't even get me started on removing stuff. The Windows way, you go to the Control Panel, find Add/Remove programs, hold your breath to see if there's an uninstaller, run it, look quizzically as it asks you 500 times whether you want to remove various permutations of X5466N7W.DLL, then restart your computer, and nothing works anymore.
Guess how it works with Debian? One command, program gone. All done.
The only thing that even comes close is the Mac; at least most of the time you can remove an application just by tossing the folder away.
If I may pry, why do you care about the citizen-to-domain ratio of Cocos and Keeling Islands?
If you think that a usage has to satisfy all rather than any of the meanings supplied by a dictionary, you're going to have a hard time using a whole lot of words.
Let's take 'cleave'.
Okay, now let's see you use that in a sentence.
Think harder. No map or atlas shows a continent named "America".
"America", on the other hand, is the universally-understood short name for "The United States of America", just as "Germany" is the universally-understood short name for "The Federal Republic of Germany".
I will join your self-righteous quest to rename America when you have joined mine to address the following egregious geoappelational injustices:
I would go on but the unfairness of it all reduces me to a sputtering rage.
I do hope that I can count on your support in consistently and equitably addressing all these horrific assaults against nomenclatural integrity worldwide. By your evident zeal I believe that I can.
Yeah? Which country is that?
You stand a better chance of getting one head and one tail than anything else.
Re-parse. He's saying that (the chance of 2 heads or 2 tails) = (chance of 1 head and 1 tail). And he's quite correct. 2/4 = 2/4.
To look at it another way: Remember, he's talking about flipping a penny twice. After you flip it the first time and note the outcome, you then have a 50% chance of matching it with the second flip.
What exactly is your point here? You're upset because the US didn't force its culture down people's throats the old-fashioned way: at the barrel of a gun?
Also, the computer facilities at the UM campus are among the best in the world.
Let me qualify that a little more. The teen in question is coming from outside the US, correct?
Having visited university campuses and computer facilities in almost 50 countries on 5 continents, I can say with confidence that the University of Michigan computer facilities will make any foreign kid who is into computers faint with exhilarated delight.
I can vouch for that. Ann Arbor's a great place (safe, fun, diverse, active, naturey and culturey) to spend summers.
Also, the computer facilities at the UM campus are among the best in the world.
Pros of web-based client:
Advantages of a roll-your-own client:
Sorry, fair point. I forgot that there were people who actually allowed Referer: headers out of their networks.
On the contrary. If you released an equivalent product under the same name, they'd probably have quite a good case.
Nope. There's a litter of text editing programs with "Word" in the name. None of them is named simply "Word", because that wouldn't provide any protection to the vendor. There are, however: Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, AmiWord, WordStar, and so on.
All of these products are roughly "equivalent" in the sense that they provide the same functionality and can read each other's files - that's the same as the proportional level of similarity between the ssh implementations in question.
Completely off-topic, but you would? You're saying that your VCR is more important than someone's life? These are truly bizarre times.
Try 'apropos'. In both cases (disk driver, video mode) I was pointed to the correct man page on the first try.
But how do people find out they need to use apropos? I suppose that's where we look to the crucial Third Pillar of FreeBSD documentation: Slashdot.
Unless you surf on a computer connected to the giant-screen TV at Times Square, why does this matter? If it's your own computer, turn it off when you're done. If it's someone else's, clear the history.
On your next foray into Napster, check out Swamp Thing by The Grid.
Then come back and apologize!
This is not difficult to fix, because Dejanews used the articles' own message-id header. As long as Google provides a way to reference articles by that field, the worst case would be that you'd have to write a local proxy to rewrite deja.com urls to the appropriate google.com analogue. More likely, the Google people will get around to it themselves in due time.
Last I heard, archive.org had tapes of at least a few years of Usenet. I don't think they make the data available online, but if you ask nicely you can show up in the Presidio and play with them.