"The desktop" is uninteresting anyway. 99% of it is stuff I don't like and would rather not have to use. (Unfortunately people keep sending me these WP and spreadsheet attachments etc.) I'd be content to let MS Windows have the desktop if they'd stay out of my server room.
No, I do not know that you are right. Show us the bugs.
MS products have been targeted because (a) yes, they are widely deployed, (b) yes most MS Windows systems are run by people who don't know how to sysadmin, but also because (c) the Microsoft culture from day one has been "features first, safety last." Other OSes have different values and it shows in the frequency and scope of breakins.
The CA doesn't matter. Actually I was thinking of OpenPGP, not S/MIME, but S/MIME works even better. If I can verify the signature, then that means I was able to contact the CA. And if I can contact the CA then I have the address of someone who is supposed to know the sender. If it's self-signed then I have the sender's address (and a timestamp if it's dynamic). Anyone who is willing to let me identify him is probably okay. They ones I want to ignore would do *anything* to avoid being identified.
Agree 100% that assuming every dialup user on the planet to be a UCE pest is unfair, insulting, and incorrect. My solution so far has been special routing rules for sites that refuse to talk to my quite legitimate MTA: all mail to AOL addresses for example is sent through the "paranoids" router which uses my ISP's MTA to launder my address. Mail to properly run sites still goes direct from my MTA to theirs.
On the incoming side, I do use a couple of DNSBLs, but not the dialup lists.
I'm seriously considering adding a rule to the front of my filter list to accept any email with a verifiable crypto signature. If only enough people would sign, I'd probably cut the rest of the filter list and make the second rule "discard unconditionally". Comments?
Ah, tactical arguments. Good point. But I think you're missing something here. Much is made of the disparity of force between the parties, but nothing of the disparity of *culture*.
The RIAA and their members are businessmen, and that's the way you do business: you demand as much as you can possibly imagine because you *know* that the other guy is going to offer you nothing and then you two will hammer out an acceptable compromise.
The defendants here are mostly *not* business executives and they don't think that way at all. And those least likely to think that way are also least likely to hire lawyers who can think that way for them. So one side is "plaing the game", but the other side perceives this as "going for the jugular" and folds instantly.
The little guy *does* have some power, precisely *because* of the disparity of force, but he generally doesn't realize it, or doesn't trust it -- if he did, he wouldn't remain one of the little guys. Someone with the nerve to threaten to create a PR disaster for the Giants ought to be able to bargain the settlement down quite a bit. Defendants getting together and forming a united front to increase their visibility might win significant concessions. But it does take guts, because after all, you could lose.
Back when the Evil Corporate Giants tried to deal with their purported problem by shooting the messenger (Napster, ISPs, the Internet at large), you all said this was wrong and they should go after the real offenders. Now they are doing that and you object? Pah.
The situation is complex and this will work to simplify it. Eventually some of the defendants will choose to go to trial and make the Giants prove their case, which should expose some real data (as opposed to FUD^Wspeculation) about the nature and magnitude of the problem. There will be some chain-reaction suits when consumers stung because they had not bought what they thought they had, turn around and sue third parties for deceiving them and thus exposing them to legal liability. Some genuine thieves will be punished and that should decrease the incidence of such theft somewhat. Then maybe we'll be able to judge just how much of the music industry's current situation is actually due to theft and how much to making products that no longer appeal.
I'd very much like to see some of these cases go to trial. I think we'd learn a lot. But we'd all have to give up some of our prejudices. Wouldn't that be a shame.
...one of the things I greatly admire about Linux is that it does *not* have a FrontPage clone. Creating one would be a case of *subtracting* value from the base product.:-P
"I was thinking the other day that I spend $40/mo to watch 20+- minutes of advertising/hour. My TV/surround setup is probably worth about $2000. Something is wrong with the whole picture."
Something certainly is. I paid less than $250 for a very nice 27" TV from a respected manufacturer, and a bunch of networks send me programming through the air for free. You got a raw deal indeed.
*sigh* These programs can do very little to a corporate environment, because *you control the routers*. See floods of inappropriate traffic with certain address ranges? Sixty seconds of ACL editing makes those ranges disappear from the Internet (so far as your network can tell) and the adware starves.
If your users are on any recent version of MS Windows, you also control the directory and so the workstations. Add a policy forbidding Win32 to run known ad/spyware executables. Push out a startup script or IPSEC policy that turns off troublesome ports. You have more power than any emperor dared dream of! Use it for good!
By all means sue, if you find a way. But don't stop there and don't wait for the lawyers.
"They click on some link (these are teenagers for example.. they're click happy) and suddenly they have a wonderful new time syncing app or a datebook!"
Ha, that's one reason I popped for XP *Professional* for the family computer. Only the administrator account can install software. Definitely worth the extra $100, if you must run MS Windows at all.
Maybe, just maybe, learning to speak clearly and fully and precisely would go a lot further toward communicating the breadth of their offerings to the customer than does replacing one meaningless noise with another.
Maybe it was Friday afternoon, everybody was too full of unicorn to come up with anything useful, but they hadn't issued any memos lately to justify their existence, so: Claria!
Anybody following _Cathy_ this week? I think there's a lot of pent-up demand out there for *simple* phones with a small feature set -- you know, dial number and get connected, someone dials you and phone rings, when connected you can talk and listen, that's it. A telephone. Remember telephones?
I'm treating this StarTac *very* carefully, because if it breaks I'll have to accept a monster with 10x as many features as the set I don't use 10% of now.
I doubt Microsoft will match many Linux users' "write directly to product maintainer, get patch same day" experience, but there's another important metric here: how long does it take to get the patch into users' hands? IIRC Microsoft just announced that they're in effect going to give the black hats free hits for up to a month before releasing new security patches.
(And I seriously doubt we'll ever see Microsoft duplicate the "see problem, find cause in source, write patch, send to maintainer, see it in next release" experience that I recall fondly from my days as a DEC customer. One of the attractions of Linux for me is that it gives that same feeling that I'm *part of the team*, not some outsider to be placated or even defended against.)
That should be interesting. We never watch TV transmissions from the networks anymore except for Jeopardy! and emergency notices (weather, school closings). My kids' Thomas the Tank Engine tapes are more entertaining than 99% of the guff sent out over the airwaves and cable. I suspect we're far from alone. I'll be waiting to see the share figures for the following month or two.
I sure hope so. This morning CNN had a survey sidebar asking whether the event would spark a new "cold-war style space race" but I couldn't find a button for "about time, too." Somehow they managed to make it sound like a bad thing.
I still got the whole machine, man! DECpc LPx 433SX, still going strong running Linux 2.4 from the original 160MB disk. Design is vintage '92-3, purchased in '94. Orchid Fahrenheit 1280 also still running after all these years. (More than I can say for the crummy monitor currently hooked to it, which is ready for the boneyard after only about three years.) Original keyboard too. The mouse went spastic and had to be replaced, but everything else works. X still runs pretty well in 40MB. (Better than it did in 8MB when I first put Linux on the box.)
I have a saying about things like this copyright assignment jazz: "standard forms are for other people." If you've got a good paper, you have negotiating power. Tell the journal they can't have your paper unless you retain the copyright, or at least rights to delayed republication or self-archival.
If you're not a Web whiz, you probably know (or share an elevator daily with) one who could help. Your institution could get a bit of PR mileage out of setting up a repository of archived papers by its members, and again you don't have to maintain the pages yourself.
Even your institution doesn't have to cook up the whole thing in-house. See projects like www.dspace.org . Did I mention that DSpace is free and open-source?
Concerning the price of academic journals and who pays, there's this little ritual that libraries go through every year, where a committee notes that, once again, journal prices have risen an order of magnitude faster than library funding, so which journals will we cut from our subscription list this year? The rising cost of journals is not just reflected in tuition or taxes, but also in the *loss of access* to other journals and in *decisions not to buy books* because there's no room left in the materials budget for that one.
However, that's not an excuse for violating copyright. Try taking matters into your own hands in ways that the Establishment *can't* easily punish. Breaking the law just gives them an opportunity to put you out of their way.
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"The desktop" is uninteresting anyway. 99% of it is stuff I don't like and would rather not have to use. (Unfortunately people keep sending me these WP and spreadsheet attachments etc.) I'd be content to let MS Windows have the desktop if they'd stay out of my server room.
I mean, nobody has ever questioned any of this before....
[APPLAUSE]
No, I do not know that you are right. Show us the bugs.
MS products have been targeted because (a) yes, they are widely deployed, (b) yes most MS Windows systems are run by people who don't know how to sysadmin, but also because (c) the Microsoft culture from day one has been "features first, safety last." Other OSes have different values and it shows in the frequency and scope of breakins.
...if Intel doesn't want any Linux business, let's just not give them (or their OEMs) any.
The CA doesn't matter. Actually I was thinking of OpenPGP, not S/MIME, but S/MIME works even better. If I can verify the signature, then that means I was able to contact the CA. And if I can contact the CA then I have the address of someone who is supposed to know the sender. If it's self-signed then I have the sender's address (and a timestamp if it's dynamic). Anyone who is willing to let me identify him is probably okay. They ones I want to ignore would do *anything* to avoid being identified.
(3) Somebody watches _Death Wish_ one too many times and starts taking down spammers with extreme prejudice. THEN you'll see interest from LE!
I sincerely hope it doesn't come to that.
Agree 100% that assuming every dialup user on the planet to be a UCE pest is unfair, insulting, and incorrect. My solution so far has been special routing rules for sites that refuse to talk to my quite legitimate MTA: all mail to AOL addresses for example is sent through the "paranoids" router which uses my ISP's MTA to launder my address. Mail to properly run sites still goes direct from my MTA to theirs.
On the incoming side, I do use a couple of DNSBLs, but not the dialup lists.
I'm seriously considering adding a rule to the front of my filter list to accept any email with a verifiable crypto signature. If only enough people would sign, I'd probably cut the rest of the filter list and make the second rule "discard unconditionally". Comments?
Ah, tactical arguments. Good point. But I think you're missing something here. Much is made of the disparity of force between the parties, but nothing of the disparity of *culture*.
The RIAA and their members are businessmen, and that's the way you do business: you demand as much as you can possibly imagine because you *know* that the other guy is going to offer you nothing and then you two will hammer out an acceptable compromise.
The defendants here are mostly *not* business executives and they don't think that way at all. And those least likely to think that way are also least likely to hire lawyers who can think that way for them. So one side is "plaing the game", but the other side perceives this as "going for the jugular" and folds instantly.
The little guy *does* have some power, precisely *because* of the disparity of force, but he generally doesn't realize it, or doesn't trust it -- if he did, he wouldn't remain one of the little guys. Someone with the nerve to threaten to create a PR disaster for the Giants ought to be able to bargain the settlement down quite a bit. Defendants getting together and forming a united front to increase their visibility might win significant concessions. But it does take guts, because after all, you could lose.
Back when the Evil Corporate Giants tried to deal with their purported problem by shooting the messenger (Napster, ISPs, the Internet at large), you all said this was wrong and they should go after the real offenders. Now they are doing that and you object? Pah.
The situation is complex and this will work to simplify it. Eventually some of the defendants will choose to go to trial and make the Giants prove their case, which should expose some real data (as opposed to FUD^Wspeculation) about the nature and magnitude of the problem. There will be some chain-reaction suits when consumers stung because they had not bought what they thought they had, turn around and sue third parties for deceiving them and thus exposing them to legal liability. Some genuine thieves will be punished and that should decrease the incidence of such theft somewhat. Then maybe we'll be able to judge just how much of the music industry's current situation is actually due to theft and how much to making products that no longer appeal.
I'd very much like to see some of these cases go to trial. I think we'd learn a lot. But we'd all have to give up some of our prejudices. Wouldn't that be a shame.
...one of the things I greatly admire about Linux is that it does *not* have a FrontPage clone. Creating one would be a case of *subtracting* value from the base product. :-P
"I was thinking the other day that I spend $40/mo to watch 20+- minutes of advertising/hour. My TV/surround setup is probably worth about $2000. Something is wrong with the whole picture."
Something certainly is. I paid less than $250 for a very nice 27" TV from a respected manufacturer, and a bunch of networks send me programming through the air for free. You got a raw deal indeed.
*sigh* These programs can do very little to a corporate environment, because *you control the routers*. See floods of inappropriate traffic with certain address ranges? Sixty seconds of ACL editing makes those ranges disappear from the Internet (so far as your network can tell) and the adware starves.
If your users are on any recent version of MS Windows, you also control the directory and so the workstations. Add a policy forbidding Win32 to run known ad/spyware executables. Push out a startup script or IPSEC policy that turns off troublesome ports. You have more power than any emperor dared dream of! Use it for good!
By all means sue, if you find a way. But don't stop there and don't wait for the lawyers.
"They click on some link (these are teenagers for example.. they're click happy) and suddenly they have a wonderful new time syncing app or a datebook!"
Ha, that's one reason I popped for XP *Professional* for the family computer. Only the administrator account can install software. Definitely worth the extra $100, if you must run MS Windows at all.
Maybe, just maybe, learning to speak clearly and fully and precisely would go a lot further toward communicating the breadth of their offerings to the customer than does replacing one meaningless noise with another.
Maybe it was Friday afternoon, everybody was too full of unicorn to come up with anything useful, but they hadn't issued any memos lately to justify their existence, so: Claria!
Anybody following _Cathy_ this week? I think there's a lot of pent-up demand out there for *simple* phones with a small feature set -- you know, dial number and get connected, someone dials you and phone rings, when connected you can talk and listen, that's it. A telephone. Remember telephones?
I'm treating this StarTac *very* carefully, because if it breaks I'll have to accept a monster with 10x as many features as the set I don't use 10% of now.
...but I *would* miss the nice powerline remote control switches and all that gear. Remember those?
I couldn't care less about the cameras, thankyouverymuch.
(And I have popups turned off anyway. Go Mozilla!)
I doubt Microsoft will match many Linux users' "write directly to product maintainer, get patch same day" experience, but there's another important metric here: how long does it take to get the patch into users' hands? IIRC Microsoft just announced that they're in effect going to give the black hats free hits for up to a month before releasing new security patches.
(And I seriously doubt we'll ever see Microsoft duplicate the "see problem, find cause in source, write patch, send to maintainer, see it in next release" experience that I recall fondly from my days as a DEC customer. One of the attractions of Linux for me is that it gives that same feeling that I'm *part of the team*, not some outsider to be placated or even defended against.)
That should be interesting. We never watch TV transmissions from the networks anymore except for Jeopardy! and emergency notices (weather, school closings). My kids' Thomas the Tank Engine tapes are more entertaining than 99% of the guff sent out over the airwaves and cable. I suspect we're far from alone. I'll be waiting to see the share figures for the following month or two.
Time to cryptographically sign your pages, so at least the reader has some way to discover that your work has been tampered with.
"Ministry of Thought?"
That's Ministry of Truth, you insensitive clod! Off to the Ministry of Love with you!
I sure hope so. This morning CNN had a survey sidebar asking whether the event would spark a new "cold-war style space race" but I couldn't find a button for "about time, too." Somehow they managed to make it sound like a bad thing.
I still got the whole machine, man! DECpc LPx 433SX, still going strong running Linux 2.4 from the original 160MB disk. Design is vintage '92-3, purchased in '94. Orchid Fahrenheit 1280 also still running after all these years. (More than I can say for the crummy monitor currently hooked to it, which is ready for the boneyard after only about three years.) Original keyboard too. The mouse went spastic and had to be replaced, but everything else works. X still runs pretty well in 40MB. (Better than it did in 8MB when I first put Linux on the box.)
I have a saying about things like this copyright assignment jazz: "standard forms are for other people." If you've got a good paper, you have negotiating power. Tell the journal they can't have your paper unless you retain the copyright, or at least rights to delayed republication or self-archival.
If you're not a Web whiz, you probably know (or share an elevator daily with) one who could help. Your institution could get a bit of PR mileage out of setting up a repository of archived papers by its members, and again you don't have to maintain the pages yourself.
Even your institution doesn't have to cook up the whole thing in-house. See projects like www.dspace.org . Did I mention that DSpace is free and open-source?
Concerning the price of academic journals and who pays, there's this little ritual that libraries go through every year, where a committee notes that, once again, journal prices have risen an order of magnitude faster than library funding, so which journals will we cut from our subscription list this year? The rising cost of journals is not just reflected in tuition or taxes, but also in the *loss of access* to other journals and in *decisions not to buy books* because there's no room left in the materials budget for that one.
However, that's not an excuse for violating copyright. Try taking matters into your own hands in ways that the Establishment *can't* easily punish. Breaking the law just gives them an opportunity to put you out of their way.