Huh? Sun owns nothing. SCO owns all code written in, on, for, next to, or in the same county with any version of Unix since the beginning of time. Haven't you been reading their press releases?
Um, the network only *appears* to be vacant. No packets come out of it, at least none that anybody else can see. You could have the address space stuffed to capacity with machines ingesting the passing traffic; they just don't accept connections from anyone but you. Like 'iptables -A INPUT various switches -j DROP' -- the packet goes in but nothing ever comes back out.
Or imagine a room. Someone is standing behind the curtain, listening to everything that's said, saying nothing and never moving.
I have 0% chance of that XP box being infected because I disabled File and Print service on the Internet interface during setup, without even thinking about it. It's something you just do, like locking the door as you take possession of your new house.
Unfortunately, as yet most people haven't been taught to think that way about computers.:-P
Yes, the checkbox should be unchecked by default, and I suppose that we must all endure a Danger Will Robinson!!! popup when checking it, but clueful users would greatly mitigate the problem posed by insecure defaults and poorly-organized system startup.
What is this "click" of which you speak? For me, Pine just says, "there's something in this message that's not text. What should I do with it, O master?" If it looks like an amusing new virus, I might save it and load it into a binary editor for inspection.
"I hope you mean that the ISP will only block you after looking for a specific patch signature on your box, and not that you're sending masses of spam email."
Egad, I hope it means no such thing. They'll never find the patch signature for any MS Windows hotfix on my Linux box, so they'd block me endlessly. (Sad to say that sounds just like something that Ameritech/Prodigy/Yahoo!/whoever it is this week would do.)
If my account is sending out verified UCE or malware, send me a note and suspend it. I'll clean out the mess, and then I expect to have my account reinstated on my say-so.
If they destroy the Internet like that, we'll just build another one. We did it once, when we had never seen one; the next time will be easier, and quicker.
I'm not especially careful with my address and I get a bucketful of junk everyday, but so? procmail zaps quite a lot of it and I spend about sixty seconds every morning deleting the rest, before looking at any message bodies at all. I'd spend more than sixty seconds/day to achieve significantly better filtering, so this is good enough for me.
Getting a UCE is not like taking a bullet; it's more like a mosquito landing on your arm. Slap it dead and forget it ever existed. Besides, some UCEs are so pathetically transparent that they're actually entertaining!
Despite my rants elsewhere about the unreality of the "real world" concept, I'd have to say no. I do not have any unfulfilled desire to meet people on the 'net (or anywhere else). I meet people all the time, netwise and otherwise, and I find this sufficient.
Please explain how skilful interaction with people of diverse views, backgrounds, and languages is any more real in personal presence than it is by other means.
Sure, it's hard to play a game of 1-on-1 basketball over the phone. But running around a court bouncing a ball is not social activity. "Playing a game together" is the social activity, and there are many games which work just fine when the players cannot or do not wish to come to the same place.
I'm meeting them right here and now. And in some cases it *is* a horrible experience, but other cases make up for the occasional unspeakable encounter.
Clue: community, society, etc. are all mental constructs having no real physicality in themselves. It's *all* the "real world", folks, or anyway it's all equally as "real" as it gets. Every relationship is intangible -- it's all in your head.
I'm always puzzled by this sort of reaction. In what way is meeting on a Web page any less "real" than meeting at a bus stop or over the phone? The other person is just as real.
Well, if we want to build fire-retardant structural components for computers, maybe we could go back to making them out of metal. I already hated these flimsy plastic cases...maybe I can get a doctor's note to have them replaced!
It may be that you "have no use for" Spamhaus services because your ISP is already using them on your behalf. So you might wind up paying for something you're already enjoying.
And of course you are still free to switch to an ISP that doesn't subscribe to the Spamhaus premium service. Spamhaus can't force you to pay for anything unless you agree to let them, perhaps implicitly by continuing to use an ISP which pays them.
Now Windows Update and BSA and HFNETCHK etc. will start whining once again that my servers, which have no sound cards and no possible use for anything "multimedia", desperately need a WMP upgrade.:-P
...to get some tips on surviving, if not thriving, in the face of foreign competition.:-/
BTW, notice that this tends to support the old argument that the business climates of trading partners tend to equalize in the long run. That doesn't help you buy bread in the short run but it's something to think about while shouting that dirty foreigners are stealing our jobs.
What I want to know is whether this would cripple my burner for uses unrelated to the labels' IP. Can I still make non-copy-limited disks of my own IP? (Yes, Virginia, "consumers" also create IP.) If I want to give out my work under a "copy as much as you like" agreement, I should be able to do so.
What happens when I make up a disk of individual selections for which I am licensed to do this?
If I do system backups to CD/DVD, do I run afoul of the new scheme at some point?
There are a number of perfectly legitimate and perfectly real uses of the affected hardware which are not addressed by the article, making me fear that they were not considered in developing the technology.
The labels should consider selling their product the way DEC used to sell software: licenses and copies on media are two separate products. Then I could:
o buy a package deal (license+1medium) in the store and just use it;
o buy a license and make my own copy legally, from someone else's copy or a download;
o buy additional licenses and make more copies when I want 'em;
o make licensed copies on any medium which suits me.
All with the blessing of the copyright owners.
Yes, I would buy licenses if they were sensibly priced.
Yes, I agree that reasonable security could and should be on by default. I was reacting to the "internet==WWW" assumption that I see far, FAR too often. A halfway (actually 1/65535-way) solution won't cut it.
A proper solution is for the wireless makers to admit that they are going to have to play nicely together, and work out a common way of describing security setup so that settings on one brand can be easily carried to another brand by just about anyone. Then they can default security on and tell you exactly what you need to tell your other equipment in order to make it all "just work" the right way.
It's a long way from a real domestic robot, though. 100 different single-purpose gadgets is not my idea of home roboticization. Wake me when they've got one that will do the ironing (and schedule ironing when it notices enough work to do), *and* vacuum, *and* take out the trash every Thursday because I said "take out the trash every Thursday" and answered its questions to specify exactly what "take out the trash" means in my house and how early the task has to be finished in order not to miss the trash collectors, *and* figure out on its own how to keep the cat from interfering with dusting without my having to go out for a new cat.
Don't get too smug -- we had automatic hardware detection in VMS back in the 80s, copied from PDP11 OSes much older than that. It's such fun to watch the PC industry rediscover all the stuff they ignored on the assumption that anything which came before them was automatically either wrong or unnecessary.
So true. My definition of "friendly" includes that when I say "get out of my way", the OS responds, "yes, master" and does so. The mass-market stuff requires too much study to get under the gooey frosting and just-do-it -- you try to simply edit something the way you've done for years, or run a maintenance script you've had forever, and discover next day that something else has undone all your work (or worse: half of it).
For me, Slackware was a nice simple way to get Linux and a nice set of tools onto a computer. That was a decade ago. Today there are maybe 58 bytes of real Slackware left on my herd of systems and most of those are comments in/etc . Nowadays I don't use a distro (you insensitive clod!:-) I pour enough tools into a new box to get it on the network and make an NFS connection, then just cp anyhing else I need from a working box.
You would think that "you didn't lock your network" is obvious, but what is obvious is that it is not at all obvious to most buyers nowadays. Kudos to CNN for wielding the cluebat. Their article will reach far more of those users than any number of/. discussions or articles on geek sites. Double plusgood of them to also tap the manufacturers for making unlocked the default and not writing clearer setup procedures.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? Sun owns nothing. SCO owns all code written in, on, for, next to, or in the same county with any version of Unix since the beginning of time. Haven't you been reading their press releases?
Um, the network only *appears* to be vacant. No packets come out of it, at least none that anybody else can see. You could have the address space stuffed to capacity with machines ingesting the passing traffic; they just don't accept connections from anyone but you. Like 'iptables -A INPUT various switches -j DROP' -- the packet goes in but nothing ever comes back out.
Or imagine a room. Someone is standing behind the curtain, listening to everything that's said, saying nothing and never moving.
Notice that, if only legally licensed boxes can be patched, it makes the other sort easier to identify. Hmmm.
I have 0% chance of that XP box being infected because I disabled File and Print service on the Internet interface during setup, without even thinking about it. It's something you just do, like locking the door as you take possession of your new house.
:-P
Unfortunately, as yet most people haven't been taught to think that way about computers.
Yes, the checkbox should be unchecked by default, and I suppose that we must all endure a Danger Will Robinson!!! popup when checking it, but clueful users would greatly mitigate the problem posed by insecure defaults and poorly-organized system startup.
What is this "click" of which you speak? For me, Pine just says, "there's something in this message that's not text. What should I do with it, O master?" If it looks like an amusing new virus, I might save it and load it into a binary editor for inspection.
"I hope you mean that the ISP will only block you after looking for a specific patch signature on your box, and not that you're sending masses of spam email."
Egad, I hope it means no such thing. They'll never find the patch signature for any MS Windows hotfix on my Linux box, so they'd block me endlessly. (Sad to say that sounds just like something that Ameritech/Prodigy/Yahoo!/whoever it is this week would do.)
If my account is sending out verified UCE or malware, send me a note and suspend it. I'll clean out the mess, and then I expect to have my account reinstated on my say-so.
If they destroy the Internet like that, we'll just build another one. We did it once, when we had never seen one; the next time will be easier, and quicker.
I'm not especially careful with my address and I get a bucketful of junk everyday, but so? procmail zaps quite a lot of it and I spend about sixty seconds every morning deleting the rest, before looking at any message bodies at all. I'd spend more than sixty seconds/day to achieve significantly better filtering, so this is good enough for me.
Getting a UCE is not like taking a bullet; it's more like a mosquito landing on your arm. Slap it dead and forget it ever existed. Besides, some UCEs are so pathetically transparent that they're actually entertaining!
Despite my rants elsewhere about the unreality of the "real world" concept, I'd have to say no. I do not have any unfulfilled desire to meet people on the 'net (or anywhere else). I meet people all the time, netwise and otherwise, and I find this sufficient.
Please explain how skilful interaction with people of diverse views, backgrounds, and languages is any more real in personal presence than it is by other means.
Sure, it's hard to play a game of 1-on-1 basketball over the phone. But running around a court bouncing a ball is not social activity. "Playing a game together" is the social activity, and there are many games which work just fine when the players cannot or do not wish to come to the same place.
I'm meeting them right here and now. And in some cases it *is* a horrible experience, but other cases make up for the occasional unspeakable encounter.
Clue: community, society, etc. are all mental constructs having no real physicality in themselves. It's *all* the "real world", folks, or anyway it's all equally as "real" as it gets. Every relationship is intangible -- it's all in your head.
I'm always puzzled by this sort of reaction. In what way is meeting on a Web page any less "real" than meeting at a bus stop or over the phone? The other person is just as real.
Well, if we want to build fire-retardant structural components for computers, maybe we could go back to making them out of metal. I already hated these flimsy plastic cases...maybe I can get a doctor's note to have them replaced!
Dear, please hang up the phone -- I need to use the dust precipitator to check our bank account.
Yah, now I'm gonna have to stop collecting all that dust and eating it for breakfast. Why can't they make computers without any chemicals in them?
Oh!
It may be that you "have no use for" Spamhaus services because your ISP is already using them on your behalf. So you might wind up paying for something you're already enjoying.
And of course you are still free to switch to an ISP that doesn't subscribe to the Spamhaus premium service. Spamhaus can't force you to pay for anything unless you agree to let them, perhaps implicitly by continuing to use an ISP which pays them.
Now Windows Update and BSA and HFNETCHK etc. will start whining once again that my servers, which have no sound cards and no possible use for anything "multimedia", desperately need a WMP upgrade. :-P
...to get some tips on surviving, if not thriving, in the face of foreign competition. :-/
BTW, notice that this tends to support the old argument that the business climates of trading partners tend to equalize in the long run. That doesn't help you buy bread in the short run but it's something to think about while shouting that dirty foreigners are stealing our jobs.
What I want to know is whether this would cripple my burner for uses unrelated to the labels' IP. Can I still make non-copy-limited disks of my own IP? (Yes, Virginia, "consumers" also create IP.) If I want to give out my work under a "copy as much as you like" agreement, I should be able to do so.
What happens when I make up a disk of individual selections for which I am licensed to do this?
If I do system backups to CD/DVD, do I run afoul of the new scheme at some point?
There are a number of perfectly legitimate and perfectly real uses of the affected hardware which are not addressed by the article, making me fear that they were not considered in developing the technology.
The labels should consider selling their product the way DEC used to sell software: licenses and copies on media are two separate products. Then I could:
o buy a package deal (license+1medium) in the store and just use it;
o buy a license and make my own copy legally, from someone else's copy or a download;
o buy additional licenses and make more copies when I want 'em;
o make licensed copies on any medium which suits me.
All with the blessing of the copyright owners.
Yes, I would buy licenses if they were sensibly priced.
Yes, I agree that reasonable security could and should be on by default. I was reacting to the "internet==WWW" assumption that I see far, FAR too often. A halfway (actually 1/65535-way) solution won't cut it.
A proper solution is for the wireless makers to admit that they are going to have to play nicely together, and work out a common way of describing security setup so that settings on one brand can be easily carried to another brand by just about anyone. Then they can default security on and tell you exactly what you need to tell your other equipment in order to make it all "just work" the right way.
It's a long way from a real domestic robot, though. 100 different single-purpose gadgets is not my idea of home roboticization. Wake me when they've got one that will do the ironing (and schedule ironing when it notices enough work to do), *and* vacuum, *and* take out the trash every Thursday because I said "take out the trash every Thursday" and answered its questions to specify exactly what "take out the trash" means in my house and how early the task has to be finished in order not to miss the trash collectors, *and* figure out on its own how to keep the cat from interfering with dusting without my having to go out for a new cat.
Don't get too smug -- we had automatic hardware detection in VMS back in the 80s, copied from PDP11 OSes much older than that. It's such fun to watch the PC industry rediscover all the stuff they ignored on the assumption that anything which came before them was automatically either wrong or unnecessary.
So true. My definition of "friendly" includes that when I say "get out of my way", the OS responds, "yes, master" and does so. The mass-market stuff requires too much study to get under the gooey frosting and just-do-it -- you try to simply edit something the way you've done for years, or run a maintenance script you've had forever, and discover next day that something else has undone all your work (or worse: half of it).
/etc . Nowadays I don't use a distro (you insensitive clod! :-) I pour enough tools into a new box to get it on the network and make an NFS connection, then just cp anyhing else I need from a working box.
For me, Slackware was a nice simple way to get Linux and a nice set of tools onto a computer. That was a decade ago. Today there are maybe 58 bytes of real Slackware left on my herd of systems and most of those are comments in
You would think that "you didn't lock your network" is obvious, but what is obvious is that it is not at all obvious to most buyers nowadays. Kudos to CNN for wielding the cluebat. Their article will reach far more of those users than any number of /. discussions or articles on geek sites. Double plusgood of them to also tap the manufacturers for making unlocked the default and not writing clearer setup procedures.