Its interesting to note that firewalls and networking solutions are discussed in the conclusions of the article.
IMHO, only necessary ports/services should be available to the internet. Period.
Do I export my NFS shares to the world? No.
Do I expose my rpc portmapper to the world? No.
What percentage of Window's ports 135 need to be exposed to the internet? I did a search for "DCOM application" and "DCOM applications" and found nothing interesting except how to migrate from DCOM to.NET, and documentation. I've only seen DCOM used once in my life, and it was a very specialized application where DCOM was used to control a smartcard reader on another computer for enrollment purposes. Obviously, this kind of applicaton should _not_ be world accessble either.
I don't blame Microsoft for these exploits, they are networking/sysadmin issues.
I have never been compromised from network intrusion, ever. The last virus that I had on my machine was the "Monkey" virus (I belive) that a roomate brought onto my computer from a floppy that he used in a computer lab at school 10 years ago.
Again, I'd like to reiterate that these are networking/sysadmin issues, not OS issues. Although, its worth mentioning that these kinds of things have never seemed to affect Macs, which are almost always on the same network as window's machines.
From the article: 'Most websites have no idea how many people view their content. This inherent fuzziness is causing problems for commercial websites, especially online publications desperate to make money from Internet advertising... How can you charge for ads when it's nearly impossible to tell advertisers how many people will see them?'
Well, websites can just do things to make up numbers. Dead tree publications do it all the time. Ever notice how the the nation's most popular newspaper is probably so popular because almost every hotel room in the US has one at the hotel door in the morning (where it is most likely then placed in the trash). I would bet that its much easier to figure out how many people are actually reading what on a website vs any other medium.
To my knowledge, a software license is a contractual agreement. Can I join into two conflicting contractual agreements, and then later pick which one to ge oblicated to?
The size of the browser window I'm most comfortable with is around 1000x750. If it gets larger I have trouble following a line of text from one side of the window to the other.
I hear you. Maybe its because the sites we look at actually have text on them. Currently, my Safari web browser is 858x706 pixels including window decoration, etc.
My OS has this very advanced thing called a "windowing system" that allows me to have multiple windows visible on screen (partially) behind one another.
Yeah, the Macs come with that too. Its pretty cool.
Actually, when I did more web stuff, I had a problem with those that maximized their windows. I always tested smaller windows, but I never thought that a window as wide as my whole display would ever be done. Maybe we need a new trend of monitor aspect ratios where the verticle is larger than the horizontal? Hmm.
i want an efficient AC to DC UPS which connects directly to a DC powersupply for my box(en).
that would rock.
I too have thought about this recently, and yes it would rock. It would remove the heat from the power supply from being inside of the case of the computer, make the computer case smaller, and it would really rock in the sense of high density rackmount installations.
The only way to learn truly about an operating system is by doing things manually and this is done through CLIs.
Iff your OS has CLI parallel options.
It seems that as more and more people turn to Linux and the GUIs become better and better, people tend to forget how to use the console, henceforth, the incresing number of totally lame questions that could easily be answered with rtfm.
Honestly, with how broken, half implemented, and mutually redundant between the 'g' apps and the 'k' apps, I see the Linux GUI turning people away from Linux. (Disclamer, I do everything with vim and commandline tools).
Regarding terminal apps, they are like everything else, they all pretty much suck. However, I think the Apple Terminal.app app is about the best. Why? It does auto rewraping of lines when I resize the window. Now if it only could get the copy/paste thing right and allow me to configure what "cutchars" or something so that when I double click on somehing I get all of what I want. Speaking of the "cutchars", what is even worse with the Terminal.app is that the characters for word delimination are variable. Yes, in the terminal window if you double click on 127.0.0.1 it will highlight the whole thing, if you double click on the localhost.localdomain it will highlight "localhost", "localdomain", or the "." depending on where you click.
By this logic we could say that parents who have children born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome can sue all of the beer companies because "no one reads those warning labels by the Surgeon General/Government anyway."
Not really. The beer people didn't behave any differently before or after the user read (or didn't) the message. The airlines had a policy, the beer label is just a warning. Actually, if the beer people said that drinking lots of it could cause fetal alchohol syndrome, and they did, they held up to their word!
Forming arguments based on analogies and metaphors is like washing your shorts in a waterfall of gorilla piss to get the goat smell out.
1) determine what kind of problem you want to solve with your render farm 2) determine what software will solve this problem 3) determine what hardware supports the software 4) hire a competent admin to make it work
I admin a small mail server and trap mail with spamassassin. On average we get about 100 spams per day for only 7 active email accounts.
To check for false positives, I review all of the trapped mail from time to time, and I'm starting to get discusted with the whole spam thing. Here is some of the crap that I get:
GET VALIUM AND MANY OTHER DRUGS 4 L j China World Trade Corp making major breakthroughs GET YOUR UNI.VERSITY D|PLOMA tqlylsrvi Take advantage of low interest-rates! Powerful weightloss now available where you are. Fwd:re:Home del.very on all meds.
I'm also starting to get amused at how easy it is to identify spam with enough rules in spamassassin. These guys suck at sending mail.
I just can't believe that some people actually respond to some of the mails. The ones that get me are the mortage and loan ones. Who in their right mind would give all of their financial information to someone who randomly emails you with junk like this:
HellWo dear hom5ke oUwn5er,
We have b\eeQn notified that y<oiur mortgMage rate is fixed at a
vet6ry hoyigh interesNt rate. Therefore yhqou are current overpay[ing,
whick7h sumsRs-up to twhXo+usaEAnds of dollXLarws an5RnudPal0ly.
Lugckily for you we can [1]guoGaranteze th@e lowest r{ates in the U.S.
([2]3.50%). So hSVu=rry beQ0caNuse the ratHe f.orecast i|s not
l;oobrkincNg good!
Thesgre is no obligations, an6d i^t FykREAE
Locnk on the 3.50%, even wHSith bad credit3A!
Where all of the urls are behind a yahoo redirector, and its barely legible from all of the obfuscation techniques?
Fuck spam specific laws, it just should be illegal to try to get money from someone under the pretense of deception. Clearly mails like this are deception, and its getting out of hand.
It often takes loads of marketing hype and product leverage to leap over the competition, something that Firefox doesn't have in spades.
Or including the browser with the OS. Hell, even I know better than most users, and I use Safari on my mac because a) it came with it b) has the best OS integration and c) it pretty much works.
Camino is a close second, it might be better with future releases. I'm not sure if I have the newest Firefox on my mac, but the one I have doesn't even create a window. Mozilla isn't that pretty on osx either.
I don't need 400GB, hell I don't need 160GB; I need a hard drive that is more reliable
I need about 500GB and something that is reliable. I'm looking at 3 250GB drives with raid5 which should be close enough to 500GB after the hardrive manufacturers stretching of the facts and formatting.
My question is, where do you go to buy a harddrive nowadays at a good price. I've been looking at pricewatch for sometime, and I realized today that the prices there are too low to be true. Plus if you look at the feedback its miserable.
Does anyone know of a good place to buy harddrives at a decent honest price? (Meaning the price I pay, not the before we jack up the price price, or the charge your credit card and tell you its sold out, oh wanna buy an upgraded part price)
I would never use or buy a car that could only get me there 80% of the time. Think about it, I can't think of where 80% is good enough anywhere. Its one of those things that is OK because its on a computer.
The RIAA lives of the customers who buy "legal" music (they never remember the Creative Commons license, isn't that curious?).
Excellent comment. In fact, the part about the "legal" music is almost taken verbatim from their about us page.
They are not interested in the earnings of the artists, of course; they only stand for their own earnings. Take into account that a musician earns more money playing in concerts, than selling discs.
This is what I've been thinking about lately. Who else is remotely similar to the RIAA or the MPAA? Technically, they are classified as an industry trade group. And that industry trade groups are put together by a group of corporations that are in a common industry for the purpose of government legislation and public relations. Other industry trade groups are the American Plastics Council and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.
These other two organizations I know of though their TV comercials where they have slogans like "Beef, Its whats for dinner", or the plastics ads where they show how our lives have been improved with the advent of plasic materials.
Now, lets think of my interaction with the RIAA and the MPAA. Its been on the news, and how they are pissed off that people are downloading files, then suing these people, etc.
The RIAA and MPAA do not have a product. They are not a corporation. They cannot ever loose money. They are given money from membership fees from thier members. These fees are solely based on the market share and size of the corporation. They are like a voluntary tax!
Does this remind you of another organization that is purely based upon lawsuits and pres releases? You can find them by searching google for litigious bastards.
Dont worry about these guys. They will not be around too much more. SCO is almost out of amunition to prove thier existance, and being that the RIAA and MPAA have no more amunition than SCO, they too will just disipear.
OK, the nytimes article says that 182,456 people were laid off in the 1st 4 months of this year. That amounts to 45,614 people a month. This graph shows that the total number of unemployed people in the US at any given time for the past 10 years has been between 6,000 and 9,000 people.
Of the 182,456 people laid off, 4,633 (2.5%) of them lost thier jobs because the job was moved overseas. 4,633 people over four months is 1,158 a month.
According to these numbers, getting laid off is no big deal because most of them get another job immediately. I've been laid off once. It took me 6 months to start working again, and I was laid off in May, read the advertisement for my current job in June. Applied in August, and started working in October.
How pissed off are you when you go into a store in your hometown? I'm assuming your from some decently populated place in the US, and most every store has at least one camera by the register. Most of the larger stores have cameras that can zoom and pan to follow your every move throught the store and into the parking lot.
People, don't get in a tissy over this. This is yet another ploy for someone to make a buck. Just like the "war" in Iraq, just like the previous "war" in Iraq, just like the "Cold War".
The article says that they have $25mil in "free" money to do something. Odds are they will blow all this money on equipment. "Use" it for a couple of years or so, and then stop using it because its not worth the money to pay people to stare at tv all day.
Don't you think that a rentacop stopping people with large packages and otherwise "suspicious looking" and checking their ID would be much more effective than sitting in front of a tv screen watching the same people walking around? Do you really think that a suicide bomber will stop, scratch his head, and say "Damn, I can't blow this place up, they have video cameras". Or do you think the terrorist would invoke more terror by exploding a bomb, and then have the entire thing on tape for the world to see. Don't you think that if the people that work in the Inner Harbor were that concerned they would do something besides NOTHING? I mean, every other business takes care of their own security concerns without millions of dollars from the "Department Homeland Security", what makes the Inner Harbor so different?
The justification for this is "We are at war!". With whom? Bums and people shopping at the inner harbor? Give me a break.
I see nothing that the RFID tag adds to the current visual tag identification systems in place- except maybe to provide money to the RFID manufacturer.
The absense of the dependance of line of sight. Its very simple to put some other text on top of a license plate. They are still ugly. etc etc.
It's a good thing not everyone shares your philosophy.
Its a damn good thing, but if everyone did, life would be much easier for me. But the world would not be very diverse now would it?
All Darl McBride would have to do is call up a few backbone providers and tell them "redhat.com / gentoo.org / kernel.org / whatever is infringing on my copyrighted IP, pull them off the Net please." No substantiation or evidence required.
Common sense would apply. Like I said, I would imagine that the percentage of complaints about IP infringement being wrongly complained about are close to 0. If someone spends the time to complain about something, odds are it is someone who is particularly bothered by the material being available, and their complaint is valid.
If Darl actually had valid claims to Linux IP, I would imagine that there would be no complaints from the ISPs to take it off. However, being that the odds of the ISP running linux is very high, and ISP owners have some common sense and already know that Darl has been googlebombed as "litigious bastards", me and most people would ignore such a request.
I doubt its very widespread, nor is it a "problem". ISPs are a dime a dozen. You can find them to pump your spam, serve your porn, email, whatever. If you don't agree to the terms of use for any reason, simply go to another one.
The slashdot crowd is so wierd about copyright infringements. If I owned an ISP and someone reported that there was a problem with copyrighted material on my equipment, I would take the stuff down too. How much time should I spend seeing if the stuff is a problem. I guestimate 0. If the material is that important and really is OK to redistribute, then a counter from the original person suplying the material will prove to me that its OK to put back up, and I would do it. However, aside from this sample size of 2 "research" experiment, I would guestimate that close to 0.0% of all complaints to and ISP about copyright violations are not copyright violations. I would imagine that most every ISP has a zero tolerance policy (aside from the sleezy ones that will host anything for a price) regarding copyrights, and don't care to spend any time figuring it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Its interesting to note that firewalls and networking solutions are discussed in the conclusions of the article.
.NET, and documentation. I've only seen DCOM used once in my life, and it was a very specialized application where DCOM was used to control a smartcard reader on another computer for enrollment purposes. Obviously, this kind of applicaton should _not_ be world accessble either.
IMHO, only necessary ports/services should be available to the internet. Period.
Do I export my NFS shares to the world? No.
Do I expose my rpc portmapper to the world? No.
What percentage of Window's ports 135 need to be exposed to the internet? I did a search for "DCOM application" and "DCOM applications" and found nothing interesting except how to migrate from DCOM to
I don't blame Microsoft for these exploits, they are networking/sysadmin issues.
I have never been compromised from network intrusion, ever. The last virus that I had on my machine was the "Monkey" virus (I belive) that a roomate brought onto my computer from a floppy that he used in a computer lab at school 10 years ago.
Again, I'd like to reiterate that these are networking/sysadmin issues, not OS issues. Although, its worth mentioning that these kinds of things have never seemed to affect Macs, which are almost always on the same network as window's machines.
The VT cluster will probably never beat the EarthSim. Why? Because the interconnects....
The fact that the earth simulator has 130% more processors than vt's mac cluster, probably has nothing to do with it.
From the article: 'Most websites have no idea how many people view their content. This inherent fuzziness is causing problems for commercial websites, especially online publications desperate to make money from Internet advertising... How can you charge for ads when it's nearly impossible to tell advertisers how many people will see them?'
Well, websites can just do things to make up numbers. Dead tree publications do it all the time. Ever notice how the the nation's most popular newspaper is probably so popular because almost every hotel room in the US has one at the hotel door in the morning (where it is most likely then placed in the trash). I would bet that its much easier to figure out how many people are actually reading what on a website vs any other medium.
IANAL, but I read slashdot!
To my knowledge, a software license is a contractual agreement. Can I join into two conflicting contractual agreements, and then later pick which one to ge oblicated to?
The size of the browser window I'm most comfortable with is around 1000x750. If it gets larger I have trouble following a line of text from one side of the window to the other.
I hear you. Maybe its because the sites we look at actually have text on them. Currently, my Safari web browser is 858x706 pixels including window decoration, etc.
My OS has this very advanced thing called a "windowing system" that allows me to have multiple windows visible on screen (partially) behind one another.
Yeah, the Macs come with that too. Its pretty cool.
Actually, when I did more web stuff, I had a problem with those that maximized their windows. I always tested smaller windows, but I never thought that a window as wide as my whole display would ever be done. Maybe we need a new trend of monitor aspect ratios where the verticle is larger than the horizontal? Hmm.
i want an efficient AC to DC UPS which connects directly to a DC powersupply for my box(en).
that would rock.
I too have thought about this recently, and yes it would rock. It would remove the heat from the power supply from being inside of the case of the computer, make the computer case smaller, and it would really rock in the sense of high density rackmount installations.
And, of course, you can feel better that you are contributing slightly less to carbon dioxide emissions.
I only pollute with radioactive waste! They told me that nuclear energy was cleaner than burning fossil fuels.
The only way to learn truly about an operating system is by doing things manually and this is done through CLIs.
Iff your OS has CLI parallel options.
It seems that as more and more people turn to Linux and the GUIs become better and better, people tend to forget how to use the console, henceforth, the incresing number of totally lame questions that could easily be answered with rtfm.
Honestly, with how broken, half implemented, and mutually redundant between the 'g' apps and the 'k' apps, I see the Linux GUI turning people away from Linux. (Disclamer, I do everything with vim and commandline tools).
Regarding terminal apps, they are like everything else, they all pretty much suck. However, I think the Apple Terminal.app app is about the best. Why? It does auto rewraping of lines when I resize the window. Now if it only could get the copy/paste thing right and allow me to configure what "cutchars" or something so that when I double click on somehing I get all of what I want. Speaking of the "cutchars", what is even worse with the Terminal.app is that the characters for word delimination are variable. Yes, in the terminal window if you double click on 127.0.0.1 it will highlight the whole thing, if you double click on the localhost.localdomain it will highlight "localhost", "localdomain", or the "." depending on where you click.
Unless you installed GNU tail, the OSX tail does not have the --follow option.
Don't forget to run it as root.
You don't need root access, you only need to be in the admin group, which I would guess you already are if you have root access.
Plus, I would guess that the default option for playing an aiff file is via Quicktime, which may get intrusive.
Lesson learned, don't mod something as informative unless you know what it says.
Civilians attacking troops with deadly weapons (knives, thrown rocks etc.)
Do you or the government know something I don't?
Grandparent post says:
This is a weapon designed to use in case of protests or riots. What kinds of governments need this sort of weapon?
Good question.
By this logic we could say that parents who have children born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome can sue all of the beer companies because "no one reads those warning labels by the Surgeon General/Government anyway."
Not really. The beer people didn't behave any differently before or after the user read (or didn't) the message. The airlines had a policy, the beer label is just a warning. Actually, if the beer people said that drinking lots of it could cause fetal alchohol syndrome, and they did, they held up to their word!
Forming arguments based on analogies and metaphors is like washing your shorts in a waterfall of gorilla piss to get the goat smell out.
1) determine what kind of problem you want to solve with your render farm
2) determine what software will solve this problem
3) determine what hardware supports the software
4) hire a competent admin to make it work
I admin a small mail server and trap mail with spamassassin. On average we get about 100 spams per day for only 7 active email accounts.
.
To check for false positives, I review all of the trapped mail from time to time, and I'm starting to get discusted with the whole spam thing. Here is some of the crap that I get:
GET VALIUM AND MANY OTHER DRUGS 4 L j
China World Trade Corp making major breakthroughs
GET YOUR UNI.VERSITY D|PLOMA tqlylsrvi
Take advantage of low interest-rates!
Powerful weightloss now available where you are.
Fwd:re:Home del.very on all meds.
I'm also starting to get amused at how easy it is to identify spam with enough rules in spamassassin. These guys suck at sending mail.
I just can't believe that some people actually respond to some of the mails. The ones that get me are the mortage and loan ones. Who in their right mind would give all of their financial information to someone who randomly emails you with junk like this:
HellWo dear hom5ke oUwn5er,
We have b\eeQn notified that y<oiur mortgMage rate is fixed at a
vet6ry hoyigh interesNt rate. Therefore yhqou are current overpay[ing,
whick7h sumsRs-up to twhXo+usaEAnds of dollXLarws an5RnudPal0ly
Lugckily for you we can [1]guoGaranteze th@e lowest r{ates in the U.S.
([2]3.50%). So hSVu=rry beQ0caNuse the ratHe f.orecast i|s not
l;oobrkincNg good!
Thesgre is no obligations, an6d i^t FykREAE
Locnk on the 3.50%, even wHSith bad credit3A!
Where all of the urls are behind a yahoo redirector, and its barely legible from all of the obfuscation techniques?
Fuck spam specific laws, it just should be illegal to try to get money from someone under the pretense of deception. Clearly mails like this are deception, and its getting out of hand.
oh really.
It often takes loads of marketing hype and product leverage to leap over the competition, something that Firefox doesn't have in spades.
Or including the browser with the OS. Hell, even I know better than most users, and I use Safari on my mac because a) it came with it b) has the best OS integration and c) it pretty much works.
Camino is a close second, it might be better with future releases. I'm not sure if I have the newest Firefox on my mac, but the one I have doesn't even create a window. Mozilla isn't that pretty on osx either.
I don't need 400GB, hell I don't need 160GB; I need a hard drive that is more reliable
I need about 500GB and something that is reliable. I'm looking at 3 250GB drives with raid5 which should be close enough to 500GB after the hardrive manufacturers stretching of the facts and formatting.
My question is, where do you go to buy a harddrive nowadays at a good price. I've been looking at pricewatch for sometime, and I realized today that the prices there are too low to be true. Plus if you look at the feedback its miserable.
Does anyone know of a good place to buy harddrives at a decent honest price? (Meaning the price I pay, not the before we jack up the price price, or the charge your credit card and tell you its sold out, oh wanna buy an upgraded part price)
I would never use or buy a car that could only get me there 80% of the time. Think about it, I can't think of where 80% is good enough anywhere. Its one of those things that is OK because its on a computer.
The RIAA lives of the customers who buy "legal" music (they never remember the Creative Commons license, isn't that curious?).
Excellent comment. In fact, the part about the "legal" music is almost taken verbatim from their about us page.
They are not interested in the earnings of the artists, of course; they only stand for their own earnings. Take into account that a musician earns more money playing in concerts, than selling discs.
This is what I've been thinking about lately. Who else is remotely similar to the RIAA or the MPAA? Technically, they are classified as an industry trade group. And that industry trade groups are put together by a group of corporations that are in a common industry for the purpose of government legislation and public relations. Other industry trade groups are the American Plastics Council and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.
These other two organizations I know of though their TV comercials where they have slogans like "Beef, Its whats for dinner", or the plastics ads where they show how our lives have been improved with the advent of plasic materials.
Now, lets think of my interaction with the RIAA and the MPAA. Its been on the news, and how they are pissed off that people are downloading files, then suing these people, etc.
The RIAA and MPAA do not have a product. They are not a corporation. They cannot ever loose money. They are given money from membership fees from thier members. These fees are solely based on the market share and size of the corporation. They are like a voluntary tax!
Does this remind you of another organization that is purely based upon lawsuits and pres releases? You can find them by searching google for litigious bastards.
Dont worry about these guys. They will not be around too much more. SCO is almost out of amunition to prove thier existance, and being that the RIAA and MPAA have no more amunition than SCO, they too will just disipear.
OK, the nytimes article says that 182,456 people were laid off in the 1st 4 months of this year. That amounts to 45,614 people a month. This graph shows that the total number of unemployed people in the US at any given time for the past 10 years has been between 6,000 and 9,000 people.
Of the 182,456 people laid off, 4,633 (2.5%) of them lost thier jobs because the job was moved overseas. 4,633 people over four months is 1,158 a month.
According to these numbers, getting laid off is no big deal because most of them get another job immediately. I've been laid off once. It took me 6 months to start working again, and I was laid off in May, read the advertisement for my current job in June. Applied in August, and started working in October.
I should have studied gorilla math in college.
How pissed off are you when you go into a store in your hometown? I'm assuming your from some decently populated place in the US, and most every store has at least one camera by the register. Most of the larger stores have cameras that can zoom and pan to follow your every move throught the store and into the parking lot.
People, don't get in a tissy over this. This is yet another ploy for someone to make a buck. Just like the "war" in Iraq, just like the previous "war" in Iraq, just like the "Cold War".
The article says that they have $25mil in "free" money to do something. Odds are they will blow all this money on equipment. "Use" it for a couple of years or so, and then stop using it because its not worth the money to pay people to stare at tv all day.
Don't you think that a rentacop stopping people with large packages and otherwise "suspicious looking" and checking their ID would be much more effective than sitting in front of a tv screen watching the same people walking around? Do you really think that a suicide bomber will stop, scratch his head, and say "Damn, I can't blow this place up, they have video cameras". Or do you think the terrorist would invoke more terror by exploding a bomb, and then have the entire thing on tape for the world to see. Don't you think that if the people that work in the Inner Harbor were that concerned they would do something besides NOTHING? I mean, every other business takes care of their own security concerns without millions of dollars from the "Department Homeland Security", what makes the Inner Harbor so different?
The justification for this is "We are at war!". With whom? Bums and people shopping at the inner harbor? Give me a break.
I see nothing that the RFID tag adds to the current visual tag identification systems in place- except maybe to provide money to the RFID manufacturer.
The absense of the dependance of line of sight. Its very simple to put some other text on top of a license plate. They are still ugly. etc etc.
Could you make the following fine print at the bottom of every webpage that you serve a little larger?
It's a good thing not everyone shares your philosophy.
Its a damn good thing, but if everyone did, life would be much easier for me. But the world would not be very diverse now would it?
All Darl McBride would have to do is call up a few backbone providers and tell them "redhat.com / gentoo.org / kernel.org / whatever is infringing on my copyrighted IP, pull them off the Net please." No substantiation or evidence required.
Common sense would apply. Like I said, I would imagine that the percentage of complaints about IP infringement being wrongly complained about are close to 0. If someone spends the time to complain about something, odds are it is someone who is particularly bothered by the material being available, and their complaint is valid.
If Darl actually had valid claims to Linux IP, I would imagine that there would be no complaints from the ISPs to take it off. However, being that the odds of the ISP running linux is very high, and ISP owners have some common sense and already know that Darl has been googlebombed as "litigious bastards", me and most people would ignore such a request.
Exactly how widespread is the problem?
I doubt its very widespread, nor is it a "problem". ISPs are a dime a dozen. You can find them to pump your spam, serve your porn, email, whatever. If you don't agree to the terms of use for any reason, simply go to another one.
The slashdot crowd is so wierd about copyright infringements. If I owned an ISP and someone reported that there was a problem with copyrighted material on my equipment, I would take the stuff down too. How much time should I spend seeing if the stuff is a problem. I guestimate 0. If the material is that important and really is OK to redistribute, then a counter from the original person suplying the material will prove to me that its OK to put back up, and I would do it. However, aside from this sample size of 2 "research" experiment, I would guestimate that close to 0.0% of all complaints to and ISP about copyright violations are not copyright violations. I would imagine that most every ISP has a zero tolerance policy (aside from the sleezy ones that will host anything for a price) regarding copyrights, and don't care to spend any time figuring it out.
Ohhhh boy. Better get comfortable people, there's going to be yet more SCO stories for a while.
Not by my calculations. It should only take another four months or so.