The SSL site cert problem is real, but to play devil's advocate, it's easy enough to forward the user back to the main domain when it comes time for the secure transaction, as this is the way most third-party small business ecommerce providers work (e.g. have the user browse your-id-here.domain.com, but have the billing done on sales.domain.com).
(But if you do this, then you still end up needing to use some traditional state mechanisms to pass around on the billing server. Oh well.)
Woo hoo. Better that someone homeless give up contact with other folks on the street, social workers, resource specialists at local agencies, etc. and turn to the Internet for all their information needs. Yeah. Right.
The net doesn't hurt, but it's at best just a single part of your well-balanced information breakfast. I've worked with agencies offering services to the homeless; they see the web as a way to reach donors, not clients. Given my lack of deep expertise being homeless, I figure maybe they know best.
First, you're referring to what's widely known as the "non-aligned movement"; the actual conferences were originally known as the "Conference of Non-Aligned Heads of State." (It's still an active movement of some 110 countries; their last meeting was held in South Africa (another "third world nation"?) back in 1998.)
Second, your history's all wrong. Pakistan and India have been separate nations for as long as they've been independent (1947), and certainly at the time when the NAM was just getting its start, back in the 1960s.
Making an economic argument using semantics doesn't work; using bad history to back it up sucks even worse.
Speaking of Mother Theresa, hsa anyone really examined the critics of her? I was brought up being told continuiosly that she was a saint despite religious differences. Latter I found some critcism in less trust worthy places that I can't quite discount because it adds up.
Free software folks also have a tendency to think they live in a post-national, post-race, era. It's a nice idea, but real life doesn't disappear just like that. The world of free software (or at least the public face of it) is very European American. Not a bad thing per se, but it's nice to see some faces from different places. Silicon Valley has a habit of brain-draining the best and brightest from the world over.
I like the idea of Miguel de Icaza being the first brown hero in the world of open source, not because of silly tokenism, but because he's a great coder, and he happened to be born somewhere more than 100 miles away from either Boston or Berkeley.
Like the previous posters, my reactions are mixed. I wish MdI well, but from a purely non-rational, feelgood, point of view, it would have been kind of neat to see him pursuing opportunities in Mexico.
You can't seriously be suggesting that MailBank is a squatter.
For those just tuning in, MailBank is a company that buys second level domain names, and rents third level namespace under that (e.g. if they own smith.com, they can rent out john.smith.com and the john@smith.com email address).
By buying yourname.com, you're explicitly preventing every other person with that name from getting some nice-sounding namespace of their own. The folks at MailBank aren't humanitarians, but at least it's democratic--they allow many people to share parts of the namespace that would have otherwise been hogged by a single buyer.
One could conceivably make the case that you're the "squatter," preventing other people with your last name from acquiring some decent namespace (after all, what gives you the right to essentially declare yourself the preeminent holder of your last name?)
Kim Polese, current CEO of Marimba, and part of Sun's original Java development team. She had amazing buzz around her circa 1996-97, the era of push and Java.
There's some more about her here, or just search for "Kim Polese" to find hundreds of articles about her.
DNS, for example, would have a very high priority, and be one of the last services to drop. Without DNS, the network becomes significantly less usable. The services designed for text communication also would have a high priority: smtp and the assorted email services (no attachments), nntp (again, no attachments), finger, time services, gopher, and the like. Even http might be allowed through, but filtered by mime type (text/plain, text/html, x-www-form-unencoded, etc.).
The problem here is that you couldn't realistically do much more than filtering by port, as its not possible for a router to reliably know it's routing enough of a connection that it can filter based off that (and for that matter, it's most definitely not reasonable to have big honkin' overloaded routers take every packet, decode, and analyze everything that's coming through).
It would also be difficult (though conceivably possible) for a local router to be doing this. Trivial example: email attachments are encoded as MIME. But you don't know whether a message is being sent MIME encoded or not until after the SMTP client and server go through their little authentication dance. For a stateful protocol like SMTP, there'd be no way to "ban" MIME unless the router was "listening in" to the whole conversation, and rudely cut it off somewhere in the middle. For stateless protocols like HTTP, the router would need to capture the entire outgoing before it's sent out, to evaluate it, i.e. if the query is broken up into 3 packets, the router would need to capture all 3 packets, reassemble them, and parse HTTP, in order to determine the content type.
What scares me is the courts: they have grown more and more liberal. If they go south, then we may as well kiss the constitution goodbye.
More and more liberal? Geez. Without going off on a rant, I'd like to point out that throughout American history, many self-described liberals have been the fiercest guardians of Constitutional rights. Without getting into an argument on political terminology, might I suggest that it may be more appropriate to say that courts may have grown more and more disrespectful of constitutional law (or alternatively, civil rights) rather than just saying they're becoming "liberal" (as there's a significant difference between the two).
ZKS' stuff is interesting, and I could see myself purchasing it, but that's not a general solution for everyone. Theoretically, privacy is an inherent freedom, not one that should have to be bought and paid for; some of us are lucky enough to live in our privacy-gated communities, but most people out there aren't.
...and because Taiwan has weak enforcement of foreign intellectual property laws, that automatically makes the market orders of magnitude more unfriendly for small, indie, creators. Small, artists would find that piracy in the Taiwanese marketplace deprives them of their ability to make a living off their work.
Taiwan may be a small enough market that it may not cause a huge impact on foreign copyright holders, but the idea that intellectual property can be done away with is ludicrous, and simply not generalizable. Just as with computers, scalability is an issue for artists as well. A writer who wants to work full time on writing needs to make enough money to support herself. The same goes for a musician, a graphic designer, or any other field where people make their living off IP. If IP is taken away, creation becomes a privilege only for those who can convince large corporations to invest in them, with the hope that they'll make enough money through the sheer quantity of mass distribution; mere mortals generally couldn't independently scale from the amateur to the semi-pro / pro stage without needing to sell out. The Internet may revolutionize the means of mass distribution, but no magic bullet has yet been invented to so revolutionize means of support.
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The SSL site cert problem is real, but to play devil's advocate, it's easy enough to forward the user back to the main domain when it comes time for the secure transaction, as this is the way most third-party small business ecommerce providers work (e.g. have the user browse your-id-here.domain.com, but have the billing done on sales.domain.com).
(But if you do this, then you still end up needing to use some traditional state mechanisms to pass around on the billing server. Oh well.)
Woo hoo. Better that someone homeless give up contact with other folks on the street, social workers, resource specialists at local agencies, etc. and turn to the Internet for all their information needs. Yeah. Right.
The net doesn't hurt, but it's at best just a single part of your well-balanced information breakfast. I've worked with agencies offering services to the homeless; they see the web as a way to reach donors, not clients. Given my lack of deep expertise being homeless, I figure maybe they know best.
Your history's way flawed.
First, you're referring to what's widely known as the "non-aligned movement"; the actual conferences were originally known as the "Conference of Non-Aligned Heads of State." (It's still an active movement of some 110 countries; their last meeting was held in South Africa (another "third world nation"?) back in 1998.)
Second, your history's all wrong. Pakistan and India have been separate nations for as long as they've been independent (1947), and certainly at the time when the NAM was just getting its start, back in the 1960s.
Making an economic argument using semantics doesn't work; using bad history to back it up sucks even worse.
Speaking of Mother Theresa, hsa anyone really examined the critics of her? I was brought up being told continuiosly that she was a saint despite religious differences. Latter I found some critcism in less trust worthy places that I can't quite discount because it adds up.
The canonical volume in this field is the surprisingly well-received The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice , by Christopher Hitchens. Highly recommended.
Free software folks also have a tendency to think they live in a post-national, post-race, era. It's a nice idea, but real life doesn't disappear just like that. The world of free software (or at least the public face of it) is very European American. Not a bad thing per se, but it's nice to see some faces from different places. Silicon Valley has a habit of brain-draining the best and brightest from the world over.
I like the idea of Miguel de Icaza being the first brown hero in the world of open source, not because of silly tokenism, but because he's a great coder, and he happened to be born somewhere more than 100 miles away from either Boston or Berkeley.
Like the previous posters, my reactions are mixed. I wish MdI well, but from a purely non-rational, feelgood, point of view, it would have been kind of neat to see him pursuing opportunities in Mexico.
You can't seriously be suggesting that MailBank is a squatter.
For those just tuning in, MailBank is a company that buys second level domain names, and rents third level namespace under that (e.g. if they own smith.com, they can rent out john.smith.com and the john@smith.com email address).
By buying yourname.com, you're explicitly preventing every other person with that name from getting some nice-sounding namespace of their own. The folks at MailBank aren't humanitarians, but at least it's democratic--they allow many people to share parts of the namespace that would have otherwise been hogged by a single buyer.
One could conceivably make the case that you're the "squatter," preventing other people with your last name from acquiring some decent namespace (after all, what gives you the right to essentially declare yourself the preeminent holder of your last name?)
And her name is.....?
Kim Polese, current CEO of Marimba, and part of Sun's original Java development team. She had amazing buzz around her circa 1996-97, the era of push and Java.
There's some more about her here, or just search for "Kim Polese" to find hundreds of articles about her.
DNS, for example, would have a very high priority, and be one of the last services to drop. Without DNS, the network becomes significantly less usable. The services designed for text communication also would have a high priority: smtp and the assorted email services (no attachments), nntp (again, no attachments), finger, time services, gopher, and the like. Even http might be allowed through, but filtered by mime type (text/plain, text/html, x-www-form-unencoded, etc.).
The problem here is that you couldn't realistically do much more than filtering by port, as its not possible for a router to reliably know it's routing enough of a connection that it can filter based off that (and for that matter, it's most definitely not reasonable to have big honkin' overloaded routers take every packet, decode, and analyze everything that's coming through).
It would also be difficult (though conceivably possible) for a local router to be doing this. Trivial example: email attachments are encoded as MIME. But you don't know whether a message is being sent MIME encoded or not until after the SMTP client and server go through their little authentication dance. For a stateful protocol like SMTP, there'd be no way to "ban" MIME unless the router was "listening in" to the whole conversation, and rudely cut it off somewhere in the middle. For stateless protocols like HTTP, the router would need to capture the entire outgoing before it's sent out, to evaluate it, i.e. if the query is broken up into 3 packets, the router would need to capture all 3 packets, reassemble them, and parse HTTP, in order to determine the content type.
What scares me is the courts: they have grown more and more liberal. If they go south, then we may as well kiss the constitution goodbye.
More and more liberal? Geez. Without going off on a rant, I'd like to point out that throughout American history, many self-described liberals have been the fiercest guardians of Constitutional rights. Without getting into an argument on political terminology, might I suggest that it may be more appropriate to say that courts may have grown more and more disrespectful of constitutional law (or alternatively, civil rights) rather than just saying they're becoming "liberal" (as there's a significant difference between the two).
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ZKS' stuff is interesting, and I could see myself purchasing it, but that's not a general solution for everyone. Theoretically, privacy is an inherent freedom, not one that should have to be bought and paid for; some of us are lucky enough to live in our privacy-gated communities, but most people out there aren't.
...and because Taiwan has weak enforcement of foreign intellectual property laws, that automatically makes the market orders of magnitude more unfriendly for small, indie, creators. Small, artists would find that piracy in the Taiwanese marketplace deprives them of their ability to make a living off their work.
Taiwan may be a small enough market that it may not cause a huge impact on foreign copyright holders, but the idea that intellectual property can be done away with is ludicrous, and simply not generalizable. Just as with computers, scalability is an issue for artists as well. A writer who wants to work full time on writing needs to make enough money to support herself. The same goes for a musician, a graphic designer, or any other field where people make their living off IP. If IP is taken away, creation becomes a privilege only for those who can convince large corporations to invest in them, with the hope that they'll make enough money through the sheer quantity of mass distribution; mere mortals generally couldn't independently scale from the amateur to the semi-pro / pro stage without needing to sell out. The Internet may revolutionize the means of mass distribution, but no magic bullet has yet been invented to so revolutionize means of support.