Another testament to the fact that moderators don't have a clue. I cut-and-pasted the text in my reply directly from the article just to see how it would get moderated, and look at the results:
What does this imply? 2 out of 5 moderators don't read the articles 3 out of 5 moderators do read the articles
Those statistics might not be so disturbing if they only applied to people replying to the article, but these are the people who are actually moderating others' replies? That's pitiful.
Whose fault is that? The people who make Slashdot suck. (I'll give you a hint, it's not CmdrTaco or Hemos).
Do you forget that there is such a thing as PCMCIA modem? Why are they including a modem if you could just go buy a modem? In other words, it makes just as much sense to include Ethernet as it does to include a modem, given that they are both available as PCMCIA devices (that's all that the original poster was saying).
I think that's a great idea. In the interim, here is some more relevant contact info:
Jonathan Robinson 11, Clerkenwell Green, London EC1R0DP, England +44 171 3366777
Stephen Keay 10-11 Clerkenwell Green, London EC1N 0DN, England +44 171 336777
IP address allocation info can be found at whois.ripe.net under NETBENEFIT-NET-1 (They've got their own ASN and a/19).
There's a US branch, as well:
Netbenefit Inc. 55 Broad Street 18th Floor New York, NY 10004
Their upstream provider is:
COLT Telecom Group plc International Headquarters 15 Marylebone Road London NW1 5JD Telephone +44 20 7863 5000 Fax +44 20 7390 3701
They have a "fibre-optic" backbone that goes straight into London, and they offer services in several European countries. They've got 497 million pounds of equity, according to their latest financial statement, so we could probably milk them for tons of money if we threatened to bring suit against them for hosting NetBenefit which slandered Outcast (or just make them worry enough about us milking them for tons of money that they take down NetBenefit).
Be still, my beeping heart?!
on
Date Pagers
·
· Score: 2
This product is phenomenally lame. One site suggests that this would be good for parties or large gatherings even though the device is activated when a match is within 100m. Obviously, in a crowded room with tons of people who all have one, it's going to be nearly impossible to figure out who your match is.
But wait, there's more! If you can't find the person making you beep, then you've got their phone number and description at your fingertips.
Well that's just peachy, seeing as how I'm a serial rapist. I think I'll carry around a backpack full of the damn things, each with different settings and proceed to stalk every female that passes within 100m of me who happens to match any one of my "date pagers."
Far be it from me to throw meat to the trolls, but this comment should be 'Score: 5, Funny'; It expreses in only 6 words what every other post on this thread attempts to convey to us, the Slashdot readers: censorship sucks.
The Oscars are telling Trey to shut his fucking mouth and he shouldn't. He shouldn't be the uncle fucker that's within all of us. He must leverage his market space in the entertainment industry to further the censorship campaign by embarking on a new journey toward a greater good for the common folk: the uncle fucker.
What if I send the spam from Kuwait (or any other non-US country)? Are we going to impose UN sanctions on spamming nations?
What if the e-mail passes through Colorado (e.g. all of our incoming e-mail passes through one of Qwest's core routers in Denver)? Do you need Congressional packet sniffers now?
What if the spam is sent to a user's Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail account and the user happens to live in Colorado?
How the hell is an advertiser supposed to determine whether an individual lives in Colorado, or whether an e-mail address is owned by a resident of Colorado? Is any viable method provided for legitimate advertisers (or anyone, for that matter) to determine this?
What if I get an e-mail alias from a Denver ISP to point to my current e-mail address here in Kansas City (e-mail alias)? How does a company determine that it's not a Colorado address and since it touches a mail server in Colorado before being forwarded, does this apply?
As an ISP in Colorado, the first thing I would do is setup filters on anything with a subject line starting with 'ADV:' - I've instantly solved all of my spam problems? Umm.. probably not.
Isn't this just another form of censorship on the Net? </CANOFWORMS>
There are just a few of the matters which should have been addressed; all of them are equally difficult to overcome and are large enough stumbling blocks that, in my opinion, the bill is worthless.
It's my humble prediction that you're going to see people hacking boxes (if you can't trace the source, who can you sue?) to spam from as well as people outsourcing their direct e-mail marketing to ISPs in foreign countries.
"
I'm thinking that Crusoe chips, which are mostly software, should be open source and basically free,"
particularly because it points out the cluelessness of Bobby.
Oh, did anyone else notice that every single one of us was likened to an ignorant pig by Bobby? He was actually asserting that we were so dumb that we couldn't tell what was "really happening" in the open source world.
The article states, "A university spokesman confirmed that a flood of hacker messages had been sent to CNN's site via one of the servers at the campus."
To the hackers, wherever you are, whoever you are:
Please stop sending 'hacker messages' -- do it for the children.
By making icons and text vector graphics (or something along the same lines), you could make it entirely scaleable. That is, "rendered" real-time, although I'm sure that term isn't quite applicable.
Hmm.. better example: If you go into Adobe Photoshop and use the text tool to write "Hi Mom" and then resize the image (without flattening the layers) to be four times the pixel depth, which makes the image larger, you don't lose any image quality. It's not just zooming in, it's using the algorithms that define the curvature and lines of the letters (or vector graphics) to re-calculate the shape down to more specific pixels. It isn't "zooming in" in the traditional sense.
Your question (and opinions) have been responded to on approximately 4,392 occassions here on Slashdot. You should search the archives where you will find a plethora of intelligent responses that rationally explain why you are wrong. That's not to say that I don't understand where you're coming from or from where your doubts stem as I much felt the same way as you did until I took the initiative to educate myself (rather than waiting for people to educate me).
I will simply point you to the recent story, Northwest Searches Employees' Home Computers and see if you can extrapolate why this particular case might be relevant even though it only points out one specific utility for encryption among average folks.
I think that you attacked everything but the underlying point of my post. You may have weakened my analogy (except that you can't physically block people from entering a store or nail their doors shut, which is effectively what they're doing) and pointed out that a company isn't completely devastated by these attacks due to insurance coverage, but you entirely ignore the bulk of my reply. I dare you to enter into a rational debate defending the Parent post that I was responding to, as that's what I was attacking.
You forgot to mention, unless I missed it, what the hell they're fighting for. I find it entirely too ironic that you say:
The brats and miscreants may have gotten their shit together and started to fight for something worthwhile, rather than simply for the hell of it.
Umm.. hello? These stupid rebels attacked CNN. Why? For the hell of it. That's so phenomonally obvious that it's nauseating to see your comment rated a 5 when it's such hogwash. I am increasingly amazed at how little it takes to impress the Slashdot moderator. Maybe I'm overreacting; about 10% of me thinks that your post is sarcasm.
Social revolution against lame web sites? Give me a break. That's like blowing up Burger King because lots of stupid people in your town eat there.
Your assertion that they aren't throwing rocks at windows, but rather protesting is also entirely absurd. Let's see.. this analogy should be a tough one to come up with. Try this on for size: Sending packets to break a service is analogous to throwing rocks to break a window. Wow, that's complex. They are breaking companies' web sites. In addition, they broke buy.com's on the day they went public.
You don't think there's anything wrong with silly kiddies running around the Internet breaking random web sites in the name of.. let's see.. absolutely nothing? Give me (and us) a break.
How hard is it to see "Jon Katz" in an article and move your eyes upward (or downward) to the next story? How hard, again? This isn't rocket science, nor is it your God-given right to have story-filtering work 100% of the time for your nit-picking, bad self.
Why do people insist on analyzing every action that every entity (person, company, robotic dog, etc.) affiliated with Slashdot makes? The scrutiny that Slashdot is put under is phenomenal; you won't see it anywhere else on the entire Internet.
Why? Because you folks are impossible to please. Slashdot is so close to perfection and so customizable and tailor-made and such genius that you are spoiled; You expect it to continue to be perfect - every day in every way. It's simply not worth it. Slashdot is, to say the very least, adequate for getting Geek news. Now, if I must suffer so much as to have to glance at a few stories to find the jewels (HELLO?! THAT'S HOW IT IS AT EVERY NEWS RESOURCE ON THE PLANET), then so be it.
It is worthless to attempt to prove that Slashdot is horrible, determine the motivation behind everything that encompasses Slashdot or why Rob does everything he does, all in the name of "Well, I'm just curious why it's like this."
Go register slashdot-sucks-im-gonna-tell-my-mom.com and start a forum dedicated to whining; keep it the hell off of Slashdot.
Jon, I've read most of your articles. I will say that I think you do a great job of conveying your point to your intended audience. However, I'm curious what you think about your own writing/brainstorming ability:
Do you think that the stories you write or the ideas that you have about geek culture (or whatever) are very original? If so, don't you think that many Slashdot posters would be able to write articles just as well as you and argue strongly for them over and over, much the way that you do?
To explain where I'm coming from a bit, I'll point out that I think that many people get the feeling when they read your writings that you think you're some sort of geek saint who is enlightening us with your eternally insightful wisdom. I think that what you're saying probably is about as deep as the conversations most Slashdot readers have with their co-workers about Internet/geek culture or whatever.. but that's just me.
As many of the other question-posters, I have no intention of being hostile. We've all heard everyone's opinion of you, but I'd like to hear your opinion of you.
Apache has also put up an advisory of sorts, CSS Cross Site Scripting Info. They make several valid points; this is my favorite:
It is not an Apache problem. It is not a Microsoft problem. It is not a Netscape problem. In fact, it isn't even a problem that can be clearly defined to be a server problem or a client problem. It is an issue that is truly cross platform and is the result of unforeseen and unexpected interactions between various components of a set of interconnected complex systems.
No need to read further, these two just settled the war of Windows vs. OS/2. All further discussions related to this topic are now pointless given the astonishing revelations that these two folks have revealed to us.
What's interesting is that this may add weight to the whole RC5-64 distributed.net movement. I used to think (and still do, to a lesser degree) that it wouldn't accomplish much of anything to prove that "it took hundreds of thousands of computers several years to crack this encryption; therefore, it's too weak".
That statement used to strike me as ridiculous. However, in light of a case where the government had 5 years to work with the data while its contents remained relevant, it's hard to argue with the distributed.net effort.
Did it ever occur to you that Slashdot started out as Rob's personal homepage? Therefore, it makes perfect sense that Rob would continue to post anything and everything that interests him (not necessarily you)? *smack*
Do you have a clue what Slashdot is about? It isn't _just_ News for Nerds. It's about a site that has all of the stuff that Rob is interested in on it (and then some). This particular event interests Rob. He probably doesn't care whether or not you care. It's interesting to some of us, just like every other story (some I ignore, some are neat, some are stupid, etc.).
I'm not ignorant enough to think that every story on Slashdot is going to be so grand that I can sit around whimpering "who cares? so what?" to anything that's less than amazing. So why are you?
We should try to get an interview setup with this guy to see if he can actually defend his position. We always tear down everyone who patents ridiculous things like this, but this guy would probably be willing to open himself up to some (intelligent, not degrading) questions. I'm not asserting that he won't come off looking like an evil anti-open source, copyright-mongering, greedy person, but at least we'll be able to come to that conclusion through reasonable means rather than making assumptions.
Maybe (big maybe) he patented his idea so that it could be used and distributed freely to prevent a company from patenting it and charging licensing fees. Who knows? Certainly, none of us do.
"We have received information that at the above address there have been offers to provide instructions on defeating DVD encryption so that illegal copies of DVDs can be made."
Did the MPAA copyright the procedure for cracking their own encryption scheme? If not, I don't see how this relates to anything. I would think that providing instructions on building bombs would fall into the same category (illegal) if what the MPAA twits are asserting is true.. and it isn't.
They go on to say:
"offering goods or services which are primarily designed to circumvent technological protection measures"
Technological protection measures, eh? Well, I think that the sad part is that they have a much better case than they would've if the friggin' DMCA wouldn't have been passed. Nonetheless, this particular individual didn't even links to DeCSS; the notion that white papers on encryption technology could be illegal is quite startling.
These people suck.
However, they were kind enough to provide us with their e-mail address and phone number. I suggest that we NOT harass them, as this would only make their case seem stronger: "a bunch of out-of-control punk computer warriors are trying to destroy the motion picture industry".
Don't paint the wrong picture of the defendants in this case.
Maybe you misunderstood. The question was, "Or does the public own your car?" _not_ "Or does the public own the roads?" - you simply argued that you own some of the roads, which is tangential to everything under the sun.
You just made his case for him. You suggest that roads and airwaves are in the same category. I'll buy that. By the same token, your car on the road is owned by you, and the content on the airwaves is owned by its respective publisher.
Don't worry about nit-picking his arguments (e.g. "if you think about it backwards and upside down, I sort of own the tires that touch the road", etc.) It's really simple: if I make a movie and put it on TV, that doesn't give anyone else permission to redistribute it in another format (i.e. VHS, streaming video, etc.).. or does it?
That's the question. I, for one, don't think it's necessarily cut-and-dry.
Slashdot Mirror
Another testament to the fact that moderators don't have a clue. I cut-and-pasted the text in my reply directly from the article just to see how it would get moderated, and look at the results:
Moderation Totals:Redundant=3, Informative=2, Total=5.
What does this imply?
2 out of 5 moderators don't read the articles
3 out of 5 moderators do read the articles
Those statistics might not be so disturbing if they only applied to people replying to the article, but these are the people who are actually moderating others' replies? That's pitiful.
Whose fault is that? The people who make Slashdot suck. (I'll give you a hint, it's not CmdrTaco or Hemos).
"lew" is not a word.
If it were, it wouldn't mean what it would have to mean to make sense in that sentence.
Do you forget that there is such a thing as PCMCIA modem? Why are they including a modem if you could just go buy a modem? In other words, it makes just as much sense to include Ethernet as it does to include a modem, given that they are both available as PCMCIA devices (that's all that the original poster was saying).
I agree; it's not rocket science.
I think that's a great idea. In the interim, here is some more relevant contact info:
/19).
Jonathan Robinson
11, Clerkenwell Green, London EC1R0DP, England
+44 171 3366777
Stephen Keay
10-11 Clerkenwell Green, London EC1N 0DN, England
+44 171 336777
IP address allocation info can be found at whois.ripe.net under NETBENEFIT-NET-1 (They've got their own ASN and a
There's a US branch, as well:
Netbenefit Inc.
55 Broad Street
18th Floor
New York, NY 10004
Their upstream provider is:
COLT Telecom Group plc
International Headquarters
15 Marylebone Road
London
NW1 5JD
Telephone +44 20 7863 5000
Fax +44 20 7390 3701
They have a "fibre-optic" backbone that goes straight into London, and they offer services in several European countries. They've got 497 million pounds of equity, according to their latest financial statement, so we could probably milk them for tons of money if we threatened to bring suit against them for hosting NetBenefit which slandered Outcast (or just make them worry enough about us milking them for tons of money that they take down NetBenefit).
This product is phenomenally lame. One site suggests that this would be good for parties or large gatherings even though the device is activated when a match is within 100m. Obviously, in a crowded room with tons of people who all have one, it's going to be nearly impossible to figure out who your match is.
But wait, there's more! If you can't find the person making you beep, then you've got their phone number and description at your fingertips.
Well that's just peachy, seeing as how I'm a serial rapist. I think I'll carry around a backpack full of the damn things, each with different settings and proceed to stalk every female that passes within 100m of me who happens to match any one of my "date pagers."
It doesn't get much better than this.
shut your fucking mouth, uncle fucker.
Far be it from me to throw meat to the trolls, but this comment should be 'Score: 5, Funny'; It expreses in only 6 words what every other post on this thread attempts to convey to us, the Slashdot readers: censorship sucks.
The Oscars are telling Trey to shut his fucking mouth and he shouldn't. He shouldn't be the uncle fucker that's within all of us. He must leverage his market space in the entertainment industry to further the censorship campaign by embarking on a new journey toward a greater good for the common folk: the uncle fucker.
DON'T SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH, UNCLE FUCKER.
And what if Missouri requires the 'SPAM:' header?
As another poster pointed out, what's to keep this from growing out of hand? (e.g. "SPAM: ADV: BLAH: DOG: pyramid schemes are cool")
There are just a few of the matters which should have been addressed; all of them are equally difficult to overcome and are large enough stumbling blocks that, in my opinion, the bill is worthless.
It's my humble prediction that you're going to see people hacking boxes (if you can't trace the source, who can you sue?) to spam from as well as people outsourcing their direct e-mail marketing to ISPs in foreign countries.
particularly because it points out the cluelessness of Bobby.
Oh, did anyone else notice that every single one of us was likened to an ignorant pig by Bobby? He was actually asserting that we were so dumb that we couldn't tell what was "really happening" in the open source world.
The article states, "A university spokesman confirmed that a flood of hacker messages had been sent to CNN's site via one of the servers at the campus."
To the hackers, wherever you are, whoever you are:
Please stop sending 'hacker messages' -- do it for the children.
By making icons and text vector graphics (or something along the same lines), you could make it entirely scaleable. That is, "rendered" real-time, although I'm sure that term isn't quite applicable.
Hmm.. better example: If you go into Adobe Photoshop and use the text tool to write "Hi Mom" and then resize the image (without flattening the layers) to be four times the pixel depth, which makes the image larger, you don't lose any image quality. It's not just zooming in, it's using the algorithms that define the curvature and lines of the letters (or vector graphics) to re-calculate the shape down to more specific pixels. It isn't "zooming in" in the traditional sense.
Your question (and opinions) have been responded to on approximately 4,392 occassions here on Slashdot. You should search the archives where you will find a plethora of intelligent responses that rationally explain why you are wrong. That's not to say that I don't understand where you're coming from or from where your doubts stem as I much felt the same way as you did until I took the initiative to educate myself (rather than waiting for people to educate me).
I will simply point you to the recent story, Northwest Searches Employees' Home Computers and see if you can extrapolate why this particular case might be relevant even though it only points out one specific utility for encryption among average folks.
I think that you attacked everything but the underlying point of my post. You may have weakened my analogy (except that you can't physically block people from entering a store or nail their doors shut, which is effectively what they're doing) and pointed out that a company isn't completely devastated by these attacks due to insurance coverage, but you entirely ignore the bulk of my reply. I dare you to enter into a rational debate defending the Parent post that I was responding to, as that's what I was attacking.
Umm.. hello? These stupid rebels attacked CNN. Why? For the hell of it. That's so phenomonally obvious that it's nauseating to see your comment rated a 5 when it's such hogwash. I am increasingly amazed at how little it takes to impress the Slashdot moderator. Maybe I'm overreacting; about 10% of me thinks that your post is sarcasm.
Social revolution against lame web sites? Give me a break. That's like blowing up Burger King because lots of stupid people in your town eat there.
Your assertion that they aren't throwing rocks at windows, but rather protesting is also entirely absurd. Let's see.. this analogy should be a tough one to come up with. Try this on for size: Sending packets to break a service is analogous to throwing rocks to break a window. Wow, that's complex. They are breaking companies' web sites. In addition, they broke buy.com's on the day they went public.
You don't think there's anything wrong with silly kiddies running around the Internet breaking random web sites in the name of
How hard is it to see "Jon Katz" in an article and move your eyes upward (or downward) to the next story? How hard, again? This isn't rocket science, nor is it your God-given right to have story-filtering work 100% of the time for your nit-picking, bad self.
Why do people insist on analyzing every action that every entity (person, company, robotic dog, etc.) affiliated with Slashdot makes? The scrutiny that Slashdot is put under is phenomenal; you won't see it anywhere else on the entire Internet.
Why? Because you folks are impossible to please. Slashdot is so close to perfection and so customizable and tailor-made and such genius that you are spoiled; You expect it to continue to be perfect - every day in every way. It's simply not worth it. Slashdot is, to say the very least, adequate for getting Geek news. Now, if I must suffer so much as to have to glance at a few stories to find the jewels (HELLO?! THAT'S HOW IT IS AT EVERY NEWS RESOURCE ON THE PLANET), then so be it.
It is worthless to attempt to prove that Slashdot is horrible, determine the motivation behind everything that encompasses Slashdot or why Rob does everything he does, all in the name of "Well, I'm just curious why it's like this."
Go register slashdot-sucks-im-gonna-tell-my-mom.com and start a forum dedicated to whining; keep it the hell off of Slashdot.
GO AWAY!
Jon, I've read most of your articles. I will say that I think you do a great job of conveying your point to your intended audience. However, I'm curious what you think about your own writing/brainstorming ability:
Do you think that the stories you write or the ideas that you have about geek culture (or whatever) are very original? If so, don't you think that many Slashdot posters would be able to write articles just as well as you and argue strongly for them over and over, much the way that you do?
To explain where I'm coming from a bit, I'll point out that I think that many people get the feeling when they read your writings that you think you're some sort of geek saint who is enlightening us with your eternally insightful wisdom. I think that what you're saying probably is about as deep as the conversations most Slashdot readers have with their co-workers about Internet/geek culture or whatever.. but that's just me.
As many of the other question-posters, I have no intention of being hostile. We've all heard everyone's opinion of you, but I'd like to hear your opinion of you.
Apache has also put up an advisory of sorts, CSS Cross Site Scripting Info. They make several valid points; this is my favorite:
CERT has a collection of helpful stuff up about Understanding Malicious Content Mitigation for Web Developers.
(Disclaimer: This post is guaranteed to be free of malicious HTML tags embedded in client web requests by the author)
No need to read further, these two just settled the war of Windows vs. OS/2. All further discussions related to this topic are now pointless given the astonishing revelations that these two folks have revealed to us.
I've never seen anything like it!
Apologies in advance, but I must say this:
I, too, want to stick my finger in a digital dike.
I'm not talking about making simultaneous efforts to stick my finger in a digital dike; I'm talking about the real deal here.
What's interesting is that this may add weight to the whole RC5-64 distributed.net movement. I used to think (and still do, to a lesser degree) that it wouldn't accomplish much of anything to prove that "it took hundreds of thousands of computers several years to crack this encryption; therefore, it's too weak".
That statement used to strike me as ridiculous. However, in light of a case where the government had 5 years to work with the data while its contents remained relevant, it's hard to argue with the distributed.net effort.
Did it ever occur to you that Slashdot started out as Rob's personal homepage? Therefore, it makes perfect sense that Rob would continue to post anything and everything that interests him (not necessarily you)? *smack*
(see my other comment)
Do you have a clue what Slashdot is about? It isn't _just_ News for Nerds. It's about a site that has all of the stuff that Rob is interested in on it (and then some). This particular event interests Rob. He probably doesn't care whether or not you care. It's interesting to some of us, just like every other story (some I ignore, some are neat, some are stupid, etc.).
I'm not ignorant enough to think that every story on Slashdot is going to be so grand that I can sit around whimpering "who cares? so what?" to anything that's less than amazing. So why are you?
We should try to get an interview setup with this guy to see if he can actually defend his position. We always tear down everyone who patents ridiculous things like this, but this guy would probably be willing to open himself up to some (intelligent, not degrading) questions. I'm not asserting that he won't come off looking like an evil anti-open source, copyright-mongering, greedy person, but at least we'll be able to come to that conclusion through reasonable means rather than making assumptions.
Maybe (big maybe) he patented his idea so that it could be used and distributed freely to prevent a company from patenting it and charging licensing fees. Who knows? Certainly, none of us do.
It's worth a shot, in my humble opinion.
The 'demand letter' reads as follows:
"We have received information that at the above address there have been offers to provide instructions on defeating DVD encryption so that illegal copies of DVDs can be made."
Did the MPAA copyright the procedure for cracking their own encryption scheme? If not, I don't see how this relates to anything. I would think that providing instructions on building bombs would fall into the same category (illegal) if what the MPAA twits are asserting is true.. and it isn't.
They go on to say:
"offering goods or services which are primarily designed to circumvent technological protection measures"
Technological protection measures, eh? Well, I think that the sad part is that they have a much better case than they would've if the friggin' DMCA wouldn't have been passed. Nonetheless, this particular individual didn't even links to DeCSS; the notion that white papers on encryption technology could be illegal is quite startling.
These people suck.
However, they were kind enough to provide us with their e-mail address and phone number. I suggest that we NOT harass them, as this would only make their case seem stronger: "a bunch of out-of-control punk computer warriors are trying to destroy the motion picture industry".
Don't paint the wrong picture of the defendants in this case.
Maybe you misunderstood. The question was, "Or does the public own your car?" _not_ "Or does the public own the roads?" - you simply argued that you own some of the roads, which is tangential to everything under the sun.
You just made his case for him. You suggest that roads and airwaves are in the same category. I'll buy that. By the same token, your car on the road is owned by you, and the content on the airwaves is owned by its respective publisher.
Don't worry about nit-picking his arguments (e.g. "if you think about it backwards and upside down, I sort of own the tires that touch the road", etc.) It's really simple: if I make a movie and put it on TV, that doesn't give anyone else permission to redistribute it in another format (i.e. VHS, streaming video, etc.).. or does it?
That's the question. I, for one, don't think it's necessarily cut-and-dry.