Exactly. These things will almost certainly be like swipe cards on steroids with multiple levels of validation as to what and what isn't permitted. In a typical swipe card system you divide your secured areas into zones, then assign each swipe card access on a zone by zone basis. That covers the "something you have" aspect of security, and you can still add in the "something you know" (keypad or other password system) and "something you are" (biometic) if you wish. Hell, you can even keep the people standing around with guns too if the situation merits it.
I've been at large multi-building, multi-location sites that have implemented this kind of thing using smartcards. The obvious gains of increased convenience, cost savings through having a common system and ease of management are all there, but a loss in operational security isn't. It's not that such systems are invulnerable (they're not by a long shot), but they are no more vulnerable than individual systems and it's *much* easier to be sure ex-employees are completely locked out.
Broadcast TV shows is about the only thing I use BitTorrent for, but not quite for the same reason you cite, and the occasional album I'm in two minds over getting the CD of, and usually end up getting anyway... Movies I'd rather see in a cinema, or just wait the extra few months and rent the DVD for the extra video/sound quality. I did try using it for Linux distros too, but since I usually wait a while after the release for any major bugs to come out that has two effects: the FTP mirrors are largely idle again and so are the trackers. It's far more convenient to just hit one of the geographically local mirrors overnight when their bandwidth is more likely to be idle anyway.
TV shows are my BitTorrent mainstay though; getting US shows outside the US is a nightmare; I thought the UK was bad, but while doing a little globe trotting at the moment I've found out I actually had it pretty good at home. By "pretty good" I mean that usually you can buy the DVDs of a show *before* the damn thing airs on terrestrial television which is, quite frankly, a ridiculous situation. I mean, who is going to watch a TV show, probably with adverts, if they already have an ad-free version of DVD? Plus, try as you might, if you like to watch shows without seeing any spoilers then grabbing the thing off BitTorrent is the only way to be sure.
Personally, I think a TV show/movie based version of something like iTunes would work; monthly subscription, per file billing or both doesn't matter. P2P has proven itself a viable distribution method for the media files, there's clearly an audience for data and it gives the MPAA the same "legal alternative" argument the RIAA likes to spout. It's not like they stand to lose much, unless they are worried that the DMCA won't stop a DRM removal tool from being released shortly after the launch...
The whole interview is also available as a 9MB MP3 from the Suprnova site (there's a minute or so of music first). That's a direct download of the MP3 itself, not a torrents, so I won't post a clickable link to avoid Slashdotting the site. Anyone got a mirror?
Let's face it, if spam isn't a big problem for you, then why would you want to pay money to BrightMail or some other spam filtering service in the first place? I think it's a pretty reasonable assumption that a large percentage of spam filtering services' customers have a problem with spam that they feel unable to cope with themselves. By definition then, they will have an above average percentage of spam in their legitimate email.
It's the wrong way of implementing the band-aid while we wait on 100% guaranteed Phish-proof browsers too. I mean, seriously, does this *need* a whole toolbar (that sounds like it needs to be visible to function), or would a single icon with an optional pop-up dialog when anything phishy (sorry) occurs suffice?
I mean, what's the idea here? Fill the screen with add-in toolbars so that you can't actually see the webpages? I've got five myself, but at least I know to switch off the ones I'm not using like Firefox's Web Developer toolbar extension until it's needed. Then again, I've seen people using Word with every single toolbar enabled and a tiny postcard sized view of their document which I assume they thought was better. Watching them hunting for specific buttons does tend to lend weight to the argument they are very wrong though.
Several of the larger Linux Distributions use BitTorrent as a method of distribution too, and it's also been the basis of the legal distribution of commercial software. However, while the RIAA went after the entire P2P network, despite the legal uses that is could, and to some extent was being put to, the MPAA is just going after copyright infringers. So far at least.
That makes it an entirely different ballgame in my book; while I found the RIAAs actions to be particulary loathesome, even if they did have the legal upperhand, the MPAA is being much better behaved. Sure Suprnova, LokiTorrent, et al may have carried the odd Linux ISO in their time, but the majority of their Torrents are for commercial apps, music, movies and TV shows. Last I checked, without explicit permission, the distribution of any of those was copyright infringement, which is a civil crime. What would be interesting would be the reaction to a site deleting all of its dodgy torrents and leaving just the truly free stuff before the nastygram arrives. Until we see that, or someone like LinuxISO.org getting sued, the MPAA is entirely within its rights as far as I am concerned.
Not that I think either the RIAA or the MPAA is going to have any more luck in their endeavors than the BSA did with cracking down on the Warez sites back in the day. Still, having clamped down on the MP3 sites, at least the RIAA somewhat reluctantly got behind legitimate alternatives like iTunes, the revived Napster and so on. Hopefully the MPAA will do the same PDQ; a subscription or per-view based system where I can get the latest TV episodes over P2P would be something I'd *seriously* consider.
What do they need $30,000 for, again?
on
LokiTorrent vs. MPAA
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· Score: 2, Funny
Why not just contact these guys for legal counsel. Apparently they are a sucker for hopeless legal causes and will work for a sliding scale of percentages of any settlement when suing multi-billion dollar adversaries if your own funds don't quite cover the costs...
From the Slashdotted article, the asteroid has a velocity of 12.59km/s and a diameter of 390m, which lessen things a little:
Impact Energy: 6.62 x 10e18 Joules (1.5GT - dead on the data given by JPL!)
Crater Formed in Seafloor: 2.63km
Earthquake: 5.8 on Richter Scale
The object is moving to slowly to generate a significant fireball.
I'd assume that the larger crater size is down to the slower speed means rhat less of the mass is vaporised by heat on the way through the atmosphere. So, less damage than yesterday's earthquake due to ground tremors, but the Tsunamis generated by the impact are going to be *much* worse; the crater opened in the water has a diameter of 6.92km which is one hell of big wave.
This isn't Hollywood, it's highly unlikely we would actually consider blowing it into little pieces. What is far more likely is that we'd try and give the thing a series of small taps at strategic points in its orbit to deflect it. Also, you'd more likely want to try and nudge an object not so much into a different orbit, but to change the angle of inclination. If the orrbit is changed to that it is mostly above or or below the plane of Earth's orbit and passes through it at a safe distance from the actual orbit, then the risk is permanently removed.
Sigh, the falling standards of education... "Gog" and "Magog" are two nations/tribes/persons that can be found referenced in the Bible, Koran, legends of Alexander the Great and numerous other places. In each case, Gog and Magog are usually connected with some great foe - for instance Marco Polo thought they were the Mongol hordes and the US and USSR were likened to Gog and Magog during the Cold War. In almost every case the legends/tales involve great devastation, the end of the world and general chaos. Given the topic at hand, it seemed a particurly appropriate combination of nations to use.
Actually, I read something about knocking the moon out of Earth's orbit, viz "Space 1999", on one of those bad Sci-Fi science sites some time back. In a nutshell, the amount of energy required in a single blast to force the moon out of Earth orbit would infact vaporise it. The article didn't go into great detail about what the knock on effects with the remains would be, although disruption of tides would be a given. Then again, maybe not... If the impact was within a certain energy range then although the moon would be come molten and a large quantity of ejecta would be blasted into space, the vast majority of the mass would, although molten, still maintain its orbit.
Or another possibility: what if it turns out that an impact will be on an industrialised country "Gog", sufficiently far from a political/economic rival "Magog" to offer no real threat to "Magog"? Would Magog dare to offer less than 100% of what it can offer to preventing the disaster, either publically or otherwise?
To get a clue as to the answers, look at the recent devastating earthquakes in Iran - even though Iran was on his "Axis of Evil", Bush was offering aid almost immediately. Sure, besides the humanitarian side, there is also political capital to be made on such a gesture, but that's by the by. I have absolutely no doubt that if this, or any other asteroid, is going to hit us then every capable nation will be working 100% to prevent the impact, no matter where it might be.
Talking of the Torino scale, does anyone have any idea at what percentage probablility of impact it would move up to the orange (threatening) section of the scale? As far as I can tell, both the orange and red (impact!) sections are based more on the predicted amount of damage rather than likelihood of a collision, so I'm guessing it's pretty high. Also, assuming that the estimated size and consistency of the object don't change, it looks like an object would not be given two separate orange or red scores. If that's the case then I'm guessing that if MN4 is going to hit us it'll go to five, then eight based on a play with the damage predictor.
In any case, we have 24 years and it's not *that* big. Plenty of time to nudge it off course with some of those surplus nukes we have lying around if it is going to hit...
I think it would have been better to wait for a denser format, since there are so few playback devices out there which can display in true HD anyway.
Exactly my view. There is just too much in flux within the home video market at the moment for my taste; HDTV, digital broadcasts, replacements for DVDs and, of course, PVR systems that can cope with it all. With so many choices, the chances of getting stuck with another Betamax are so much higher, especially with integrated media stations. A PVR with HDTV support, integrated digital broadcast receiver and DVD recorder is going to be of limited appeal if the DVD format used turns out to be as popular as Betamax.
As to the media sizes though, do we *really* need that much additional space? Think about what goes onto a typical 9GB DVD - a single copy of the video, one or more audio streams, and some extras. The only thing that changes with the switch to HDTV (which is likely to be the standard for some time) is the video, which roughly quadruples in resolution. Once you factor in compression of the video stream then 25GB should be sufficient capacity to enable the delivery of HDTV discs with the technology avaiable today. That's just perfect for today's corporate attitude that a small profit now is better than a much larger one further down the road.
it seems like almost all of the spamvertised web sites reside in China.
Not for long I suspect, I do quite a bit of statistical analysis of spam and there are definitely changes in progress. Over the two years or so, there has a swing from using open relays and "bullet proof" hosted servers to actually send the spam to using compromised boxes on broadband connections. This is reflected in the report; a move from IPs in China to those in DSL pools countries with sizable adoption of broadband connectivity.
The actual sites being spamvertised however have remained solidly in the traditional havens where ISPs with questionable anti-spam policies can be found. However, over the last few months in particular I have seen steadily growing numbers of spamvertised sites that are also being hosted in DSL pools, undoubtably on compromised boxes. From a spammer's perspective this is a no-brainer (no more hosting fees) so it's fairly obvious that this trend will continue I think.
There are both good and bad points to this. The bad is that it makes traditional SpamCop style IP reporting almost unworkable - there are so many unpatched boxes that an ISP has no chance at dealing with them all. It was a game of Whack-a-Mole to start with, only now the number of holes that the moles can pop up from has gone up by a few orders of magnitude. The good however is that DNSBLs of the actual domains being used instead of the IPs, such as the SURBL lists, that can be generated from SpamCop submissions are *incredibly* good indicators of spam - so keep up that SpamCop reporting!
More contentious though, is how ISPs might respond to this new spammer tactic. The simplest solution is probably going to be further restrictions on what an IP on a broadband connection can and cannot do. I expect to see more DSL services that are blocked prevented from running servers on certain ports, forced to send email through the ISP's gateway server, and possibly even outright firewalling of certain "remote access" ports like NetBIOS, RPC and so on.
Frankly, given the rising tide of spam, ever increasing port scans bouncing off my firewall and almost total apathy of J.Sixpack in keeping his/her PC patched, I'm getting more fond of this idea every day. What I'd like to see is ISPs offering "standard" DSL packages with the kind of restrictions I mentioned above stated up front, alongside an unrestricted "premium" package - it could even cost a little extra. Alternatively, there is the middleground approach that my ISP uses: you can't run an email server by default, but send tech support and email and they'll unblock port 25 for free and periodically check that you are not running an open relay.
One thing's for sure, if/when ISPs do respond to this latest spammer tactic, the spammers simply move the goalposts yet again.:(
Actually the Google link I gave specifically searched for "The Incredibles", chosen purely because it's the most recent film I saw at the cinema. The example I gave in the text following the link is the more generic format; replace "moviename" with whatever keyword(s) you want; TV show, album title, application name...
I was going to go with the slightly less contentious "linux" as a search term, but that same "Sponsored link" swung it. Besides, using a recent box office smash makes a point too: Supernova and other Torrent index sites are a convenience, nothing more. The horse has already bolted and all that the MPAA/RIAA lawsuits will achieve is to close the barn door. It wasn't that long ago that the BSA tried marching roughshod over all the sites offering cracks and keygens for applications. You don't have to look very hard to find that aspect of the Internet is still very much alive and well, so what makes anyone think that these lawsuits are the death knell for online distribution of music, movies and TV shows etc?
What, like this?
You just type "filetype:torrent moviename" into the seach box. Of course, this means that Google will be in violation of the INDUCE act should it ever get passed...
Nope. I should have seen the 7-ZIP error which is apparently caused by a truncated archive, but since I used the "non-existant" code signing (GPG, SHA, MD5) to check my partially downloaded binary, I must have missed it. Oh well, that's Microsoft for you - always failing to deliver on its promises...
Load that file into your audio editor of choice as a raw 16bit, 44.1KHz stereo audio file.
Trim the DRM and file system info from the start/end or whereever else it's been put.
Save each block of sound in the remainder as an audio track in your preferred format.
Fire up your digital media player and enjoy.
From CD insertion to listening to the digital music takes me about ten minutes on a bad day, and there simple isn't any method of DRM that can prevent this without breaking compatability with standard CD audio players. The only thing about all this that continues to amaze me is that the music companies are *still* throwing away their money this snake oil.
how are they going to recuperate the capital cost?
It's not just about voice: xDSL services also run over landlines. In the UK wireless broadband services are almost always significantly more expensive than wired, and are often considered as a last resort solution. Even with the considerably more dispersed population of the bulk of the US, I doubt that things are much different on the other side of the pond.
Hopefully the guys over at the mozilla.org website will take note of the current number of Firefox downloads to see what size surge this generates. I'd love to see a nice graph with key dates on it for that matter - the PR1 release, the 1.0 release, the announcement of the various IE exploits...:)
I'd have to agree that makes more sense from a human point of view - but try looking at it from the point of view of a shell script -/etc/rc in particular. Getting the list of scripts that need to be run is easy -(for i in/etc/rc$runlevel.d/S* ; do... fi). The problem is within that loop you can't see whether then next value of "i" has the same priority, so you can't tell whether you need to parallelise or not.
My suggested approach resolves that with a simple change ("S" to "[PS]") and a single additional if...then...else construct to detect the letter. I can think of several approaches that would implement your method, none of which lend themselves to particularly elegant shell script, and most are downright ugly, terribly inefficient, or both! In most cases the stumbling block is checking whether a given priority level is unique or shared, and acting accordingly, in an elegant way. I've got a way of doing it that uses the output from "ls S* | cut -b2-3 | uniq -c" and a pair of nested for loops, but that's only really suitable for an Obfuscated Shell Script competition...;)
The problem that I was alluding to with not having DNS available is down to the initialisation of the daemons. Specifically, when a daemon needs to bind itself to an IP, but that IP address is specified as a hostname in the config file. No DNS, means there is no way of getting an IP, so the daemon fails to initialise properly, if at all. I've actually seen this happen with a *very* popular distro: Apache was started before DNS, and the HTTPS server was configured by name, which caused the daemon to start on port 80 OK, but fail to bind to port 443. Once things are all up and running, then things are much more forgiving of services being restarted, or even totally absent for a limited period of time.
As to "P" - I did have a play around with "/etc/rc" some time back and managed to get things working very easily. It wasn't that tricky really: I just needed to replace (this is from Fedora) "for i in/etc/rc$runlevel.d/S*" with "for i in/etc/rc$runlevel.d/[PS]*" then add an extra "if...else...fi" conditional to add the extra apersand to those init scripts that were safe to start in parallel. However, those natty little coloured status indicators next to each daemon are bit of a problem - I took the easy way out and returned "OK" as soon as I'd run "some_daemon_init &", but ideally you would want to have a proper confirmation that the daemon was up and running.
Personally, I only reboot my Linux boxes once in a blue moon, or after a kernel update (which is pretty much the same thing) so the time saved (maybe a minute, tops) wasn't worth the effort. Plus you can get some "interesting" issues if you ever upgrade your initscripts and forget to restore your personalisations - you have been warned! Currently, I just use the standard non-parallel init scripts with the sole exception of NessusD which I'll parallelise by hacking its specific init script directly, provided that I remember to do so after each upgrade. Speaking of which...
The correct answer is that it works, but... As the original poster noted there are some dependencies within in the plethora of Linux daemons, and YMMV. For instance some SMTP and HTTP configurations require that DNS is available, so if you are also running your own DNS one the same box then you might have a problem. Realistically of course this scenario *should* mean we are talking about home servers only, but there are some really crappy (V)ISPs out there...
Still, it's a nice thing to experiment with for people who run Linux in situations where reboots are common, laptops for instance. It's also useful if you are running something like Nessus as a daemon which takes an *age* to initialise itself and obviously has no dependencies. A better solution would be to have an additional prefix on certain init scripts - "P" for "parallel" - to tell INIT that they can safely be started in the background, something that a couple of commercial Unicies do.
So, if "We don't run Unix. We don't run Linux.", then WTF did Microsoft feel the need to pay SCO all those millions of dollars for UNIX licenses? Unless, of course, the money actually came out of the "Marketing/FUD" budget instead the "Software Licenses" budget...
Slashdot Mirror
I've been at large multi-building, multi-location sites that have implemented this kind of thing using smartcards. The obvious gains of increased convenience, cost savings through having a common system and ease of management are all there, but a loss in operational security isn't. It's not that such systems are invulnerable (they're not by a long shot), but they are no more vulnerable than individual systems and it's *much* easier to be sure ex-employees are completely locked out.
TV shows are my BitTorrent mainstay though; getting US shows outside the US is a nightmare; I thought the UK was bad, but while doing a little globe trotting at the moment I've found out I actually had it pretty good at home. By "pretty good" I mean that usually you can buy the DVDs of a show *before* the damn thing airs on terrestrial television which is, quite frankly, a ridiculous situation. I mean, who is going to watch a TV show, probably with adverts, if they already have an ad-free version of DVD? Plus, try as you might, if you like to watch shows without seeing any spoilers then grabbing the thing off BitTorrent is the only way to be sure.
Personally, I think a TV show/movie based version of something like iTunes would work; monthly subscription, per file billing or both doesn't matter. P2P has proven itself a viable distribution method for the media files, there's clearly an audience for data and it gives the MPAA the same "legal alternative" argument the RIAA likes to spout. It's not like they stand to lose much, unless they are worried that the DMCA won't stop a DRM removal tool from being released shortly after the launch...
The whole interview is also available as a 9MB MP3 from the Suprnova site (there's a minute or so of music first). That's a direct download of the MP3 itself, not a torrents, so I won't post a clickable link to avoid Slashdotting the site. Anyone got a mirror?
Let's face it, if spam isn't a big problem for you, then why would you want to pay money to BrightMail or some other spam filtering service in the first place? I think it's a pretty reasonable assumption that a large percentage of spam filtering services' customers have a problem with spam that they feel unable to cope with themselves. By definition then, they will have an above average percentage of spam in their legitimate email.
I mean, what's the idea here? Fill the screen with add-in toolbars so that you can't actually see the webpages? I've got five myself, but at least I know to switch off the ones I'm not using like Firefox's Web Developer toolbar extension until it's needed. Then again, I've seen people using Word with every single toolbar enabled and a tiny postcard sized view of their document which I assume they thought was better. Watching them hunting for specific buttons does tend to lend weight to the argument they are very wrong though.
That makes it an entirely different ballgame in my book; while I found the RIAAs actions to be particulary loathesome, even if they did have the legal upperhand, the MPAA is being much better behaved. Sure Suprnova, LokiTorrent, et al may have carried the odd Linux ISO in their time, but the majority of their Torrents are for commercial apps, music, movies and TV shows. Last I checked, without explicit permission, the distribution of any of those was copyright infringement, which is a civil crime. What would be interesting would be the reaction to a site deleting all of its dodgy torrents and leaving just the truly free stuff before the nastygram arrives. Until we see that, or someone like LinuxISO.org getting sued, the MPAA is entirely within its rights as far as I am concerned.
Not that I think either the RIAA or the MPAA is going to have any more luck in their endeavors than the BSA did with cracking down on the Warez sites back in the day. Still, having clamped down on the MP3 sites, at least the RIAA somewhat reluctantly got behind legitimate alternatives like iTunes, the revived Napster and so on. Hopefully the MPAA will do the same PDQ; a subscription or per-view based system where I can get the latest TV episodes over P2P would be something I'd *seriously* consider.
Why not just contact these guys for legal counsel. Apparently they are a sucker for hopeless legal causes and will work for a sliding scale of percentages of any settlement when suing multi-billion dollar adversaries if your own funds don't quite cover the costs...
- Impact Energy: 6.62 x 10e18 Joules (1.5GT - dead on the data given by JPL!)
- Crater Formed in Seafloor: 2.63km
- Earthquake: 5.8 on Richter Scale
- The object is moving to slowly to generate a significant fireball.
I'd assume that the larger crater size is down to the slower speed means rhat less of the mass is vaporised by heat on the way through the atmosphere. So, less damage than yesterday's earthquake due to ground tremors, but the Tsunamis generated by the impact are going to be *much* worse; the crater opened in the water has a diameter of 6.92km which is one hell of big wave.This isn't Hollywood, it's highly unlikely we would actually consider blowing it into little pieces. What is far more likely is that we'd try and give the thing a series of small taps at strategic points in its orbit to deflect it. Also, you'd more likely want to try and nudge an object not so much into a different orbit, but to change the angle of inclination. If the orrbit is changed to that it is mostly above or or below the plane of Earth's orbit and passes through it at a safe distance from the actual orbit, then the risk is permanently removed.
Sigh, the falling standards of education... "Gog" and "Magog" are two nations/tribes/persons that can be found referenced in the Bible, Koran, legends of Alexander the Great and numerous other places. In each case, Gog and Magog are usually connected with some great foe - for instance Marco Polo thought they were the Mongol hordes and the US and USSR were likened to Gog and Magog during the Cold War. In almost every case the legends/tales involve great devastation, the end of the world and general chaos. Given the topic at hand, it seemed a particurly appropriate combination of nations to use.
Actually, I read something about knocking the moon out of Earth's orbit, viz "Space 1999", on one of those bad Sci-Fi science sites some time back. In a nutshell, the amount of energy required in a single blast to force the moon out of Earth orbit would infact vaporise it. The article didn't go into great detail about what the knock on effects with the remains would be, although disruption of tides would be a given. Then again, maybe not... If the impact was within a certain energy range then although the moon would be come molten and a large quantity of ejecta would be blasted into space, the vast majority of the mass would, although molten, still maintain its orbit.
To get a clue as to the answers, look at the recent devastating earthquakes in Iran - even though Iran was on his "Axis of Evil", Bush was offering aid almost immediately. Sure, besides the humanitarian side, there is also political capital to be made on such a gesture, but that's by the by. I have absolutely no doubt that if this, or any other asteroid, is going to hit us then every capable nation will be working 100% to prevent the impact, no matter where it might be.
In any case, we have 24 years and it's not *that* big. Plenty of time to nudge it off course with some of those surplus nukes we have lying around if it is going to hit...
Exactly my view. There is just too much in flux within the home video market at the moment for my taste; HDTV, digital broadcasts, replacements for DVDs and, of course, PVR systems that can cope with it all. With so many choices, the chances of getting stuck with another Betamax are so much higher, especially with integrated media stations. A PVR with HDTV support, integrated digital broadcast receiver and DVD recorder is going to be of limited appeal if the DVD format used turns out to be as popular as Betamax.
As to the media sizes though, do we *really* need that much additional space? Think about what goes onto a typical 9GB DVD - a single copy of the video, one or more audio streams, and some extras. The only thing that changes with the switch to HDTV (which is likely to be the standard for some time) is the video, which roughly quadruples in resolution. Once you factor in compression of the video stream then 25GB should be sufficient capacity to enable the delivery of HDTV discs with the technology avaiable today. That's just perfect for today's corporate attitude that a small profit now is better than a much larger one further down the road.
Not for long I suspect, I do quite a bit of statistical analysis of spam and there are definitely changes in progress. Over the two years or so, there has a swing from using open relays and "bullet proof" hosted servers to actually send the spam to using compromised boxes on broadband connections. This is reflected in the report; a move from IPs in China to those in DSL pools countries with sizable adoption of broadband connectivity.
The actual sites being spamvertised however have remained solidly in the traditional havens where ISPs with questionable anti-spam policies can be found. However, over the last few months in particular I have seen steadily growing numbers of spamvertised sites that are also being hosted in DSL pools, undoubtably on compromised boxes. From a spammer's perspective this is a no-brainer (no more hosting fees) so it's fairly obvious that this trend will continue I think.
There are both good and bad points to this. The bad is that it makes traditional SpamCop style IP reporting almost unworkable - there are so many unpatched boxes that an ISP has no chance at dealing with them all. It was a game of Whack-a-Mole to start with, only now the number of holes that the moles can pop up from has gone up by a few orders of magnitude. The good however is that DNSBLs of the actual domains being used instead of the IPs, such as the SURBL lists, that can be generated from SpamCop submissions are *incredibly* good indicators of spam - so keep up that SpamCop reporting!
More contentious though, is how ISPs might respond to this new spammer tactic. The simplest solution is probably going to be further restrictions on what an IP on a broadband connection can and cannot do. I expect to see more DSL services that are blocked prevented from running servers on certain ports, forced to send email through the ISP's gateway server, and possibly even outright firewalling of certain "remote access" ports like NetBIOS, RPC and so on.
Frankly, given the rising tide of spam, ever increasing port scans bouncing off my firewall and almost total apathy of J.Sixpack in keeping his/her PC patched, I'm getting more fond of this idea every day. What I'd like to see is ISPs offering "standard" DSL packages with the kind of restrictions I mentioned above stated up front, alongside an unrestricted "premium" package - it could even cost a little extra. Alternatively, there is the middleground approach that my ISP uses: you can't run an email server by default, but send tech support and email and they'll unblock port 25 for free and periodically check that you are not running an open relay.
One thing's for sure, if/when ISPs do respond to this latest spammer tactic, the spammers simply move the goalposts yet again. :(
I was going to go with the slightly less contentious "linux" as a search term, but that same "Sponsored link" swung it. Besides, using a recent box office smash makes a point too: Supernova and other Torrent index sites are a convenience, nothing more. The horse has already bolted and all that the MPAA/RIAA lawsuits will achieve is to close the barn door. It wasn't that long ago that the BSA tried marching roughshod over all the sites offering cracks and keygens for applications. You don't have to look very hard to find that aspect of the Internet is still very much alive and well, so what makes anyone think that these lawsuits are the death knell for online distribution of music, movies and TV shows etc?
What, like this? You just type "filetype:torrent moviename" into the seach box. Of course, this means that Google will be in violation of the INDUCE act should it ever get passed...
Nope. I should have seen the 7-ZIP error which is apparently caused by a truncated archive, but since I used the "non-existant" code signing (GPG, SHA, MD5) to check my partially downloaded binary, I must have missed it. Oh well, that's Microsoft for you - always failing to deliver on its promises...
- Make raw copy of entire disk using dd or similar.
- Load that file into your audio editor of choice as a raw 16bit, 44.1KHz stereo audio file.
- Trim the DRM and file system info from the start/end or whereever else it's been put.
- Save each block of sound in the remainder as an audio track in your preferred format.
- Fire up your digital media player and enjoy.
From CD insertion to listening to the digital music takes me about ten minutes on a bad day, and there simple isn't any method of DRM that can prevent this without breaking compatability with standard CD audio players. The only thing about all this that continues to amaze me is that the music companies are *still* throwing away their money this snake oil.It's not just about voice: xDSL services also run over landlines. In the UK wireless broadband services are almost always significantly more expensive than wired, and are often considered as a last resort solution. Even with the considerably more dispersed population of the bulk of the US, I doubt that things are much different on the other side of the pond.
Hopefully the guys over at the mozilla.org website will take note of the current number of Firefox downloads to see what size surge this generates. I'd love to see a nice graph with key dates on it for that matter - the PR1 release, the 1.0 release, the announcement of the various IE exploits... :)
My suggested approach resolves that with a simple change ("S" to "[PS]") and a single additional if...then...else construct to detect the letter. I can think of several approaches that would implement your method, none of which lend themselves to particularly elegant shell script, and most are downright ugly, terribly inefficient, or both! In most cases the stumbling block is checking whether a given priority level is unique or shared, and acting accordingly, in an elegant way. I've got a way of doing it that uses the output from "ls S* | cut -b2-3 | uniq -c" and a pair of nested for loops, but that's only really suitable for an Obfuscated Shell Script competition... ;)
As to "P" - I did have a play around with "/etc/rc" some time back and managed to get things working very easily. It wasn't that tricky really: I just needed to replace (this is from Fedora) "for i in /etc/rc$runlevel.d/S*" with "for i in /etc/rc$runlevel.d/[PS]*" then add an extra "if...else...fi" conditional to add the extra apersand to those init scripts that were safe to start in parallel. However, those natty little coloured status indicators next to each daemon are bit of a problem - I took the easy way out and returned "OK" as soon as I'd run "some_daemon_init &", but ideally you would want to have a proper confirmation that the daemon was up and running.
Personally, I only reboot my Linux boxes once in a blue moon, or after a kernel update (which is pretty much the same thing) so the time saved (maybe a minute, tops) wasn't worth the effort. Plus you can get some "interesting" issues if you ever upgrade your initscripts and forget to restore your personalisations - you have been warned! Currently, I just use the standard non-parallel init scripts with the sole exception of NessusD which I'll parallelise by hacking its specific init script directly, provided that I remember to do so after each upgrade. Speaking of which...
Still, it's a nice thing to experiment with for people who run Linux in situations where reboots are common, laptops for instance. It's also useful if you are running something like Nessus as a daemon which takes an *age* to initialise itself and obviously has no dependencies. A better solution would be to have an additional prefix on certain init scripts - "P" for "parallel" - to tell INIT that they can safely be started in the background, something that a couple of commercial Unicies do.
So, if "We don't run Unix. We don't run Linux.", then WTF did Microsoft feel the need to pay SCO all those millions of dollars for UNIX licenses? Unless, of course, the money actually came out of the "Marketing/FUD" budget instead the "Software Licenses" budget...