I've not met the man in person, and I'm not an FSF true believer, but perhaps you weren't hearing when you listened to him? Someone who made his living selling GPLed code for many years isn't against selling code. He's against closing code.
Amongst other proposals he suggested that a good way to reduce the cost of high energy physics research would be to do it in space where there is a lot of vaccum. He did not really take in my points that we can create vaccum on earth pretty easily, the residual gas in an accelerator are not a major problem (they cause few collisions), and the cost of putting a machine 20 miles across into space are greater than the planetary GDP.
As for making his living from free source, bullshit! he lives mostly for free off MIT and picks up occasional speaking engagements through his celebrity status.
By saying what you just wrote, either you prove you have a weak understanding of english, or a deliberate intention to lie.
And yes, quite more than 30 minutes, thank you.
You sound like you are probably as barking mad as RMS himself.
RMS does not believe in money, he lives in his MIT office despite Hal Abelson buying him a house (it burned down and RMS didn't know). When he says that you can make a living from the GPL he really means you can live like him.
Its a religious cult we are talking about here, sure there will always be acolytes. Just don't accept the dogma blind.
Talk about trolling! You are correct in that Marc Andressen exploited the library, but totally wrong in using that to jusitfy an advertising cause.
How so? You simply deny, give no evidence or explanation and accuse me of being the troll.
I was there at CERN. I watched Marc do what he did. I lost my job at CERN when the management shut the Web down there, largely because Marc had stolen the credit.
Don't put your code out without requiring credit, it may seem trivial to ask, you don't know how you will be betrayed though.
The BSD license, and the MIT license are both GPL compatible. In fact, most licenses more liberal than the GPL are compatible with it.
Actually this is not really the case if you take GPL seriously. GPL is like a prion, anything it touches is meant to turn into itself. The whole objective of GPL is deliberately and explicitly to prevent commercial exploitation. If you think differently then you have never met RMS in person and listened to him for more than 30 minutes.
I used to share an office building with RMS. I think the only person who really takes RMS and the GPL seriously is Bill Gates. Bill does believe in IP rights and so he takes the GPL as RMS intends it to be read, not as most people read it.
Take the linked screed on the 'advertisement' clause. Not having an advertisement clause is the single biggest mistake we made with the Web. If libwww had had an advertisement clause Marc Andressen and NCSA could not have plagarised the work in the way they did, they would have had to tell people that the majority of the code in Mosaic had been written at CERN. With no advertisement clause there was no requirement to tell anyone about CERN and so until about 1995 almost every press report on the Web either did not mention Tim Berners-Lee and CERN at all or did so as an afterthought.
Meanwhile Marc Andressen created a huge PR machine at Netscape dedicated to promoting Marc as the lone inventor of the Web. The fact that Eric Bina not Marc really wrote Mosaic was also rewritten. Netscape even sponsored a book to promote this revisionist history - see Architects of the Web, not only is there no chapter on Tim, the only time he is mentioned is to attack him with lies.
So no, do not take RMS's advice he has only a slight connection with reality. RMS believes in a version of anti-corporativist activism that is considered fringe by the type of people who still believe that there is no difference between Al Gore and George Bush, and plan to vote for Ralph Nader in November.
So no, not being GPL compatible is not a bug, it is something very positive that should be applauded.
As for RMS's rant on the advertising clause, it would be very easy to write a C macro and some perl scripts that compile the relevant notice section automatically. BSD does not tell every user what it is the product of Berkley every time they start a shell script. If it writes anything to the console during boot well who reads that anyway? All you need is a single one line command to print out the list of contributors. Call it credits or something.
This is just further proof that the OS community can right good, solid, secure code. Pooring lots of money at a problem just makes prices higher, and a few high level management people richer. It's just adding overhead to the problem. OS can right good solid secure code. If only Microsoft could....
What, the decision by the IESG to approve a standard proves something?
Slashweenie ideology asside, have you any idea what has happened or how OSS is involved? There is an OSS implementation of the spec, well big whoopsie, we usually have at least one OSS implementation of any spec, often two. In some cases the OSS code has been written by Microsoft, they just release under BSD, not GPL for reasons that a lot of people involved with OSS share.
All that is proved here is that the IESG will agree to allow a spec to be published. The big problem here is that XMPP is only addressing one part of the problem which has since expanded to include the whole telephony space. so now we have SIP in the picture.
SIP is apparently a bit of a bear, but who cares, CISCO is backing it and at this point they are the only major Internet company that gives a wetslap about the IETF.
It looks like it's boiling down to a (deceptively) simple question: will you risk your life for your dreams? More importantly: will your country allow you to take that risk?
If we can't even justify servicing Hubble that means that the shuttle program is now completely dead. There is no other mission that could possibly be as important scientifically.
Of course everyone knows that the shuttle is dead, 14 dead people in two separate disasters mean that it won't be going back. But instead of facing up to that fact NASA will continue to burn money on projects that are meant to disguise the fact. The announcement of the Mars mission being an example, Bush announced the Mars mission as a way to cover the fact that shuttle was going to be all but terminated. The problem is that 'all but' part. Don't want to end all those jobs with contractors making juicy donations to the GOP, particularly not Halliburton.
There is a real failure of leadership here. Instead of saying it as it is we have a Karl Rove PR job that in effect will cost the tax payer a couple of billion dollars in futile attempts to fix a shuttle that no President is ever going to let fly again.
As for Hubble, the cheapest solution is probably to deorbit the current one into an ocean and send up a completely new Hubble. We already have a mirror for the thing, and it does not have spherical abberation defect. Kodak made a standby mirror for use in tests that they did not want to risk the real one on. Slap on the backups of the backups for the detection equipment and you can probably build Hubble II for $200 mil or so
Yes it is. Hopefully in the future, we can do more of these as MS is suppose to be taking similar actions against Linux down the road.
Since when has Microsoft attempted to enforce a patent in order to shut down Linux?
Microsoft could probably do this if they wanted to. But there are many reasons why they are unlikely to do so. First there is IBM, Linux almost certainly infringes some Microsoft patent, Windows almost certainly infringes some IBM patent. It is a zero sum game.
The other reason is anti-trust. If Microsoft tried that type of thing they would probably be ordered to license.
Finaly the whole Microsoft ethos is built on competition. They don't want to kill competition entirely, they want to beat it up a bit, ok a lot. But if they kill them they have to find some new opponent. Netscape really were somewhat stupid here, when Windows 95 launched Bill Gates gave a widely reported speech that said 'OK thats Apple done for, do't get complacent, there are lots of companies out there to replace us'. Then that twit Marc Andressen says 'we are going to leave Windows as no more than a baddly debugged set of device drivers'. Whammo! Bill finds his new opponent.
In fact the religous hate factor was increased because it is like a way of excape to the west supported orient dictatorships (like Saudi Arab monarchs, the Sha of Iran, etc). Western support dictatorships to keep the oil fuel. The people is oppresed, they goto religious extremists, the extremists attack west, west reacts and the wheel keeps turning.
That was demonstrated amply by the effects of operation Ajax, the CIA organized coup that replaced the democratic government in Iran with a dictatorship under the Shah.
The issue that led to operation Ajax was the nationalization of the oil fields by the nationalist governments. The background to this is that Anglo-Persian oil had been cheating the Iranians out of the royalties they were due for years. The original contract had been agreed with a 'monarch' of dubious legitimacy in any case. Rather than accept a 50:50 share in the royalties from the oil fields Anglo Persian went for broke and dared the nationalists to nationalise thinking that the Iranians would not be able to run the industry themselves. Turns out that they could.
The result of the 1953 coup was that the Shah's government toppled after two days of Saddam style misrule. The American Embassy had been the center of the 1953 coup which explains why the decision of Carter to allow the Shah to visit the US for hospital treatment resulted in the embassy siege and hostage crisis.
The CIA installed the mullahs in Iran as surely as if they had planned it that way. If you look at the history of CIA interventions none were a success in the long run. Every single one resulted in damage to US interests.
I wanted to see the Scouring of the Shire merely because it wraps up Sauruman and Wormtongue's characters. WIthout that you have no idea what happens to them, and you miss out on the sort of grim justice that Saruman gets in the end.
Get the extended edition then, it is apparently in that one.
ROTK was seven and a half hours long without the scouring of the shire, which would have added a week to the running time. Do you have a bladder of iron or do you go to the cinema wearing Depends?
to find the virus and found none. But the US and England launched a DDoS attack on Irag.gov
That is not quite true. They did find a vial of Botox. Ok that is a bacteria, not a virus, but you can't expect Republicans to know the difference.
Mind you they do seem to know the difference between desertion in the face of the enemy and desertion from post. Clearly GWB is not guilty of the former, otherwise known as 'cowardice', daddy and friends made sure that GWB never saw the enemy.
But the Boston Globe did prove their case on the desertion from post issue, Bush was AWOL for more than 31 days which makes him a deserter. Curiously he absented himself just after a test for drugs use was added to the compulsory medical.
Zero. I mean the number zero. Arabic numbers. That thing used to navigation by stars. A culture of religious tolerance that used to acept jews hunted by the inquisition. Buildings designed to be cool in the desert.
Yeah, and why was the West stuck in ignorance? It was the religious nutters who threatened to torture anyone who said that the earth goes round the sun.
Today the middle east is a mess because of the religious nutters - on both sides. And the religious biggots in the US 'bible' belt are doing their best to drag this country down to the same level with their creationism and their 'president' with the IQ of a wet sock and a mud brick combined. Gore Vidal was right, the US would have been better off loosing the civil war, letting the south east leave and become a second Mexico, just stop slavery spreading to Texas and the new territories.
China and India are the rising powers because they have a heck of a lot of people and they have been reasonably successful keeping the religious biggots from screwing everything up. Its a pity the loonies have made progress in India - the current lot in power are the gang who destroyed the Iodiah mosque. But people still have the guts to stand up to them so they don't get their way.
Religion is not biggotry, but Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson are using religion as a cloak for their hatreds and bigottries, and there are a lot like them.
Catchups are constantly designed to be undecodable by OCR. But the porn solution doesn't sound like rubbish at all. It actually sounds quite clever.
It is completely viable, it is simply a modification of the man in the middle attack.
Bob clicks on the 'register' button at Mallet's Web site
Mallet sends an automatically generated 'register' request to Alice's Web site
Alice's Web site responds with a page containing a challenge
Mallet relays the challenge to Bob
Bob decodes the turing test and submits the result to Mallet
Mallet automatically forwards the result to Alice
The forwarding operations are all automatic, there is no time out difference that would be perceptable to a human, maybe a delay of a couple of hundred msec. But Bob does not know how long the page should take.
Although it is possible in theory to decode the OCR it is very hard in practice since the obfuscating mechanism varies over time. It is not enough to break the OCR scheme, you have to do it quickly enough to be able to use the result before the generator is changed in some way.
If all you are trying to do is create 10,000 fake yahoo accounts it is probably easier to answer the Turing tests yourself than to work out how to do the cracking. This scheme is much more robust, it will work even if the test is changed.
Freeserve and Demon at the very least in the uk.... I got robb@embers-fire.freeserve.co.uk a long long time ago.....
Freeserve has done this since they started, if your email address is foo@freeserve.com you have a web site foo.members.freeserve.com.
That has to be the standard at a heck of a lot of ISPs. It means that you have to maintain a DNS link to the appropriate server but it means that it is pretty easy to do load balancing. If you give each user a subdirectory on a Web host it is pretty difficult to reorganize pages with URLs like http://members.freeserve.com/~foo.
The only imaginative step here was imagining he could get away with a patent.
I can tell you that 99% of the illegal or 'gray area' activities like SPAM that go on in the online porn community are likely performed by less than 1% of the companies.
You can tell us that but why would you be any more likely to know?
The spam-porn business appears to come from a very different community than the mainstream LA-based US porn industry. Providers like Vivid etc. who are established businesses with reputations like any other are going to avoid spam for the same reason that most established businesses do. Please no flames about how spam is commercial, it is not, most is pure criminal scams. The legit businesses who use spam are small fry with zilch non-spam related business at risk.
The spam-porn mostly seems to come from people who got into the spam business through prostitution and strip bars. Drug dealers like to run strip bars for several reasons, it gives them a good way to launder cash, they are lucrative in themselves and they get access to a ready supply of nubile females who are often willing to perform other services.
A lot of strip bar owners tried to go online in the dotcom heyday. It is pretty easy to set up a porn site, particularly if you do not pay for the material. They pay a couple of their girls a few hundred bucks and they can add their own hard core content. Some people tried to do one-on-one type services involving video cameras and chat room stuff.. quite how a girl is meant to look sexy while typing at a keyboard I am not sure, seems a bit artificial.
With the dotbust the online porn sites without a big name to bring in the visitors mostly started using spam.
Then when AOL and Microsoft started cracking down on spam with legal threats the porn sites were the first targets they hit. Porn spam created the greatest number of complaints and the businesses had quite a big incentive to go clean since they could bring in business in other ways. So the number of porn spams has gone down remarkably in the past 6 months or so.
I think half of us are going to flame on slashdot and the other half will go off to find the web site where you can get the free porn.
I hate these C/R schemes, they are OK when they are used for mailing lists or for checking signups to Yahoo! mail or some other forum where the intent is to protect ME. I do not accept that they are at all legitimate when the only purpose is to protect some dweeb who thinks he is really important.
Worst of all are the systems that send out C/R challenges in response to email that was a reply to something that the challenger sent. I get students asking me some question about a Web spec or something else I did. I spend time writing an answer and then get a C/R challenge. Like some student's time is much more important than mine...
Worst of all are the C/R systems that don't whitelist after the first challenge. Dan Bernstein is the worst offender here, I answered three of his challenges and still get his robot if I make the mistake of replying to one of his mails to me. So I have his robot blacklisted in my email.
So on balance I am not at all sad that the nuisance of C/R tests looks like it will be soon ended.
What is worrying though is that the fact such schemes have worked may well mean that hashcash and other CPU payment schemes are not viable either. The senders could run a java component on the porn viewers machine to generate message authentication ids.
Actually there is a black market in 'owned' machines between hacker groups and spammers. The type of spamers who do this stuff are mainly doing phishing/Identity theft type fraud.
It would be interesting to see whether any viruses have been used to harvest emails for spamming from address books. Certainly there have been 'virus' attacks that have actually been broadcast from a small group of machines using a pre-compiled dictionary.
I am getting something like 20 attack messages a day in my inbox, hate to think how many are trapped in the spam filter. This think hit so fast that only one of the virus filters had been updated - unfortunatley the second level catcher which still delivers a warning message to my mailbox.
One of the things that this shows is that current virus filtering code is useless. This type of reactive response will never work long term.
Much better would be to disable transfer of all active content from unauthenticated sources. Add an element to Microsoft Word, Java, HTML etc. to disable all active content in an easily checkable manner. Have the mail filters set the element automatically unless the sender was trusted and had signed the message. Zip files and other compound files would enforce 'no execute' recursively.
No thanks. If I were the worm writer, I'd hope to God that the virus can't be traced back to me. Either that, or I'd move to Iran or North Korea.
Iran is no good, the Bushies have been cuddling up to the hard line mullahs ever since they promised not to build a nuke. This is somewhat ironic since it was the mullahs who started to build the nuke in the first place.
The Sharia law punishment for writing a virus is unlikely to be much fun, probably cutting off a hand since it is a form of theft/vandalism.
Meanwhile the people of Iran are demanding a real democracy and we are doing nothing to help them. Instead we are trying to impose the same sort of sham democracy on Iraq, all the better to protect Halliburton's contracts.
So yes this SCO thing is all fucked up, but what do you expect when the country is so fucked up in general?
Bill did not suggest Micropayments. He suggested great big honking huge penalty payments to be paid by spammers. Completely different issue.
I have spent a lot of time trying to get micropayments to work and it is a really hard problem. Applied to email it would raise costs to levels that would eliminate many of the current uses of the net. Nobody could ever afford to run a mailing list like cipherpunks as a hobby.
Penalty payments is another issue, that can be done through well known commercial mechanisms, TrustE is already doing it, so is Ironport.
they make it xml so its open and easy to work with for developers... now they want to try and make it only the developers that pay them $$ ?
This is really amazingly stupid, so stupid that the obvious explanation does not seem very likely. There is ample prior art for use of XML as a markup for a word processing system. HTML and XHTML for example.
It is pretty difficult to see how a court could decide that the progression from HTML to XHTM was anything but obvious, the whole point of XML was to replace SGML after all (and yes it was replace, the SGML bigots never get it). So how can there be a patent claim on XHTML that a court would accept?
A court is unlikely to accept the claim, but the USPTO is a different matter, those rubes would accept a patent on the idea of patenting. Opps yes, they have done that, I forgot. Microsoft just got burned in a $half billion judgement over an idea that was as blindingly obvious as this one.
So don't leap to conclusions here guys. The VA Linux editorial team do not always have a clue.
Invasion of privacy? Well, only if you consider that they looked to see what you bought...but since you're volunteering to use the card, and volunteering to use correct contact information, I'd have to say no. Plus, they do see you when you check out, so it's not like you're keeping secrets anyway
You are all missing the issue here. The whole purpose of those cards is to invade privacy. They sell the demographic data to advertisers. The point is NOT to protect privacy it is to avoid making people aware that thier privacy is being violated.
People might stop using the cards and the scam would stop working.
Isn't it interesting that if you commit a felony (which I assume that this is, as a 15 year sentence is nothing to sneeze at), you can still run for president
You can be convicted for DUI and have the US press say that both the conviction and lying about it don't matter.
Come to that you can go AWOL from the National Guard for a year and later on have the US press fawn over you as you play dress up in the uniform you were so reluctant to wear in your youth.
Larouche is just Bush with worse media relations and running a cult for aging hippies rather than the super rich.
A while back I was listening to a story on NPR on the reaction of the big news rooms on 9/11. The thing that I found pretty jarring was the way that the ABC spokesman gave such an abject and grovelling description of how the sun shone out of Peter Jennings' nether regions. Up till then I had had quite a bit of respect for the guy, but I can't respect anyone who tolerates that kind of toadying, let alone demands it - as he obviously must.
If you watch ABC news you will see a big smile on Peter Jenning face whenever he gives a report about a Republican, when he talks about a Democrat he has a frown. It isn't a concious bias but it is definitely there.
At any rate, either of those candidates would have been capable of criticizing Bush on his record - and might have been better insulated against the inevitable RNC smear that they don't care about national security.
Rove belted Gephart silly in the mid sessionals. And as for Lieberman his sanctimonious attitude is as sickening as Bush.
You don't have to agree with Nader to realise that the quality of the candidate matters as much as the platform. The problem with Lieberman is that he has assiduously engaged in every practice voters dislike on the hill. He was still fighting stricter accounting rules when the justice department were turning up at Enron HQ with a search warrant.
Nader is going to be humilliated if he is stupid enough to run this time. He would be lucky to get a quarter of his 2000 vote, if the greens let him run the conclusion will be that the voters have turned of green politics. The number 1, 2 and 3 priorities for the green movement are to get rid of Bush, Cheney and Halliburton from the US government.
The only exception is if Lieberman gets the nomination. In that case more Deanies will bolt the party than Lieberman will bring in from the middle.
Rove's strategy is confuse the middle and deliver for the base. Delivering for the Democrat base is easy - anyone but Bush. The problem with Lieberman is that he does not deliver that for the anti-war faction.
You exagerate, or you are confusing LaRouche with Charles Manson. LaRouche was jailed for 15 years for fraud and tax evasion in 1988. He has been out on parole since 1993. I guess that the sentence probably expired completely last year (parole can extend longer than the original sentence).
Amazon don't state the basis that they used to compile the list of candidates. Each election there are a couple of thousand people who file for president, so there has to be a cut-off at some point. Probably sending reports to the SEC.
Its interesting the way that folk imediately translate dollars into votes. The fact that someone gives money to a campaign does not even mean they want them to be elected. Plenty of candidates in primaries get dollars from the other party, say there is a guy standing for re-election, folk will send dollars to a challenger in the primaries to help make it a rougher ride. I met a Democrat who freely admitted that 80% of his campaign dollars came from Republicans.
The big issue in this campaign has been whether the Democrats would run the type of pusilanimous campaign that Gephart ran with in the mid-sessionals. Under that strategy the party would nominate 'Bush-Lite' - Lieberman or Gephart, someone who would not criticize the invasion of Iraq, someone who would basically roll over when the GOP press did their smear campaign.
At this point Dean has made sure that whoever gets the nomination it will not be Gephart or Lieberman. Bush is going to be criticized on his record. Unfortunally for the poor Deaniacs they are now dispensible. We know full well that they will organize and vote for any Democrat candidate against Bush, except Lieberman that is.
At this point I don't think anyone can say with confidence who the winner of the nomination will be. I think Kerry, Clark and Edwards all have a chance, Dean might recover. One thing I am sure of is that Edwards is the most likely choice for Veep. I don't think Clark or Kerry would even want it - Clark would almost certainly prefer Secretary of State. But Edwards is one heck of a smooth speaker, unfortunately the poor chump does not really have enough of a Resume to run. Last time that a guy with as little experience as he did became President was 2000 - and the results show it.
No it doesn't. It talks about 3 "A" servers being available and predicts the death of the net if those three fail.
In reality, it's got 12 other friends with the creative names B,C,..., M, which are also serving the root-zone for the whole world.
In theory the B..M roots are fed from the A root so if they loose their update for 24 hours or so they could start shutting down. In practice the admins would soon clue up and they would just republish the last good update file they had received.
The problem comes with a bunch of pathological issues to do with what deployed DNS servers do if they cannot see root. It is not at all pretty.
Slashdot Mirror
Amongst other proposals he suggested that a good way to reduce the cost of high energy physics research would be to do it in space where there is a lot of vaccum. He did not really take in my points that we can create vaccum on earth pretty easily, the residual gas in an accelerator are not a major problem (they cause few collisions), and the cost of putting a machine 20 miles across into space are greater than the planetary GDP.
As for making his living from free source, bullshit! he lives mostly for free off MIT and picks up occasional speaking engagements through his celebrity status.
Or better yet, put the thing at the earth/moon lagrange point so you don't need to bother with the thing dropping to the earth.
You still need a stablization system, how about fixing a telescope at the stars? Its the way my trackball works out what is going on.
You sound like you are probably as barking mad as RMS himself.
RMS does not believe in money, he lives in his MIT office despite Hal Abelson buying him a house (it burned down and RMS didn't know). When he says that you can make a living from the GPL he really means you can live like him.
Its a religious cult we are talking about here, sure there will always be acolytes. Just don't accept the dogma blind.
How so? You simply deny, give no evidence or explanation and accuse me of being the troll.
I was there at CERN. I watched Marc do what he did. I lost my job at CERN when the management shut the Web down there, largely because Marc had stolen the credit.
Don't put your code out without requiring credit, it may seem trivial to ask, you don't know how you will be betrayed though.
Actually this is not really the case if you take GPL seriously. GPL is like a prion, anything it touches is meant to turn into itself. The whole objective of GPL is deliberately and explicitly to prevent commercial exploitation. If you think differently then you have never met RMS in person and listened to him for more than 30 minutes.
I used to share an office building with RMS. I think the only person who really takes RMS and the GPL seriously is Bill Gates. Bill does believe in IP rights and so he takes the GPL as RMS intends it to be read, not as most people read it.
Take the linked screed on the 'advertisement' clause. Not having an advertisement clause is the single biggest mistake we made with the Web. If libwww had had an advertisement clause Marc Andressen and NCSA could not have plagarised the work in the way they did, they would have had to tell people that the majority of the code in Mosaic had been written at CERN. With no advertisement clause there was no requirement to tell anyone about CERN and so until about 1995 almost every press report on the Web either did not mention Tim Berners-Lee and CERN at all or did so as an afterthought.
Meanwhile Marc Andressen created a huge PR machine at Netscape dedicated to promoting Marc as the lone inventor of the Web. The fact that Eric Bina not Marc really wrote Mosaic was also rewritten. Netscape even sponsored a book to promote this revisionist history - see Architects of the Web, not only is there no chapter on Tim, the only time he is mentioned is to attack him with lies.
So no, do not take RMS's advice he has only a slight connection with reality. RMS believes in a version of anti-corporativist activism that is considered fringe by the type of people who still believe that there is no difference between Al Gore and George Bush, and plan to vote for Ralph Nader in November.
So no, not being GPL compatible is not a bug, it is something very positive that should be applauded.
As for RMS's rant on the advertising clause, it would be very easy to write a C macro and some perl scripts that compile the relevant notice section automatically. BSD does not tell every user what it is the product of Berkley every time they start a shell script. If it writes anything to the console during boot well who reads that anyway? All you need is a single one line command to print out the list of contributors. Call it credits or something.
What, the decision by the IESG to approve a standard proves something?
Slashweenie ideology asside, have you any idea what has happened or how OSS is involved? There is an OSS implementation of the spec, well big whoopsie, we usually have at least one OSS implementation of any spec, often two. In some cases the OSS code has been written by Microsoft, they just release under BSD, not GPL for reasons that a lot of people involved with OSS share.
All that is proved here is that the IESG will agree to allow a spec to be published. The big problem here is that XMPP is only addressing one part of the problem which has since expanded to include the whole telephony space. so now we have SIP in the picture.
SIP is apparently a bit of a bear, but who cares, CISCO is backing it and at this point they are the only major Internet company that gives a wetslap about the IETF.
If we can't even justify servicing Hubble that means that the shuttle program is now completely dead. There is no other mission that could possibly be as important scientifically.
Of course everyone knows that the shuttle is dead, 14 dead people in two separate disasters mean that it won't be going back. But instead of facing up to that fact NASA will continue to burn money on projects that are meant to disguise the fact. The announcement of the Mars mission being an example, Bush announced the Mars mission as a way to cover the fact that shuttle was going to be all but terminated. The problem is that 'all but' part. Don't want to end all those jobs with contractors making juicy donations to the GOP, particularly not Halliburton.
There is a real failure of leadership here. Instead of saying it as it is we have a Karl Rove PR job that in effect will cost the tax payer a couple of billion dollars in futile attempts to fix a shuttle that no President is ever going to let fly again.
As for Hubble, the cheapest solution is probably to deorbit the current one into an ocean and send up a completely new Hubble. We already have a mirror for the thing, and it does not have spherical abberation defect. Kodak made a standby mirror for use in tests that they did not want to risk the real one on. Slap on the backups of the backups for the detection equipment and you can probably build Hubble II for $200 mil or so
Since when has Microsoft attempted to enforce a patent in order to shut down Linux?
Microsoft could probably do this if they wanted to. But there are many reasons why they are unlikely to do so. First there is IBM, Linux almost certainly infringes some Microsoft patent, Windows almost certainly infringes some IBM patent. It is a zero sum game.
The other reason is anti-trust. If Microsoft tried that type of thing they would probably be ordered to license.
Finaly the whole Microsoft ethos is built on competition. They don't want to kill competition entirely, they want to beat it up a bit, ok a lot. But if they kill them they have to find some new opponent. Netscape really were somewhat stupid here, when Windows 95 launched Bill Gates gave a widely reported speech that said 'OK thats Apple done for, do't get complacent, there are lots of companies out there to replace us'. Then that twit Marc Andressen says 'we are going to leave Windows as no more than a baddly debugged set of device drivers'. Whammo! Bill finds his new opponent.
That was demonstrated amply by the effects of operation Ajax, the CIA organized coup that replaced the democratic government in Iran with a dictatorship under the Shah.
The issue that led to operation Ajax was the nationalization of the oil fields by the nationalist governments. The background to this is that Anglo-Persian oil had been cheating the Iranians out of the royalties they were due for years. The original contract had been agreed with a 'monarch' of dubious legitimacy in any case. Rather than accept a 50:50 share in the royalties from the oil fields Anglo Persian went for broke and dared the nationalists to nationalise thinking that the Iranians would not be able to run the industry themselves. Turns out that they could.
The result of the 1953 coup was that the Shah's government toppled after two days of Saddam style misrule. The American Embassy had been the center of the 1953 coup which explains why the decision of Carter to allow the Shah to visit the US for hospital treatment resulted in the embassy siege and hostage crisis.
The CIA installed the mullahs in Iran as surely as if they had planned it that way. If you look at the history of CIA interventions none were a success in the long run. Every single one resulted in damage to US interests.
Get the extended edition then, it is apparently in that one.
ROTK was seven and a half hours long without the scouring of the shire, which would have added a week to the running time. Do you have a bladder of iron or do you go to the cinema wearing Depends?
That is not quite true. They did find a vial of Botox. Ok that is a bacteria, not a virus, but you can't expect Republicans to know the difference.
Mind you they do seem to know the difference between desertion in the face of the enemy and desertion from post. Clearly GWB is not guilty of the former, otherwise known as 'cowardice', daddy and friends made sure that GWB never saw the enemy.
But the Boston Globe did prove their case on the desertion from post issue, Bush was AWOL for more than 31 days which makes him a deserter. Curiously he absented himself just after a test for drugs use was added to the compulsory medical.
Yeah, and why was the West stuck in ignorance? It was the religious nutters who threatened to torture anyone who said that the earth goes round the sun.
Today the middle east is a mess because of the religious nutters - on both sides. And the religious biggots in the US 'bible' belt are doing their best to drag this country down to the same level with their creationism and their 'president' with the IQ of a wet sock and a mud brick combined. Gore Vidal was right, the US would have been better off loosing the civil war, letting the south east leave and become a second Mexico, just stop slavery spreading to Texas and the new territories.
China and India are the rising powers because they have a heck of a lot of people and they have been reasonably successful keeping the religious biggots from screwing everything up. Its a pity the loonies have made progress in India - the current lot in power are the gang who destroyed the Iodiah mosque. But people still have the guts to stand up to them so they don't get their way.
Religion is not biggotry, but Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson are using religion as a cloak for their hatreds and bigottries, and there are a lot like them.
It is completely viable, it is simply a modification of the man in the middle attack.
Bob clicks on the 'register' button at Mallet's Web site
Mallet sends an automatically generated 'register' request to Alice's Web site
Alice's Web site responds with a page containing a challenge
Mallet relays the challenge to Bob
Bob decodes the turing test and submits the result to Mallet
Mallet automatically forwards the result to Alice
The forwarding operations are all automatic, there is no time out difference that would be perceptable to a human, maybe a delay of a couple of hundred msec. But Bob does not know how long the page should take.
Although it is possible in theory to decode the OCR it is very hard in practice since the obfuscating mechanism varies over time. It is not enough to break the OCR scheme, you have to do it quickly enough to be able to use the result before the generator is changed in some way.
If all you are trying to do is create 10,000 fake yahoo accounts it is probably easier to answer the Turing tests yourself than to work out how to do the cracking. This scheme is much more robust, it will work even if the test is changed.
Freeserve has done this since they started, if your email address is foo@freeserve.com you have a web site foo.members.freeserve.com.
That has to be the standard at a heck of a lot of ISPs. It means that you have to maintain a DNS link to the appropriate server but it means that it is pretty easy to do load balancing. If you give each user a subdirectory on a Web host it is pretty difficult to reorganize pages with URLs like http://members.freeserve.com/~foo.
The only imaginative step here was imagining he could get away with a patent.
You can tell us that but why would you be any more likely to know?
The spam-porn business appears to come from a very different community than the mainstream LA-based US porn industry. Providers like Vivid etc. who are established businesses with reputations like any other are going to avoid spam for the same reason that most established businesses do. Please no flames about how spam is commercial, it is not, most is pure criminal scams. The legit businesses who use spam are small fry with zilch non-spam related business at risk.
The spam-porn mostly seems to come from people who got into the spam business through prostitution and strip bars. Drug dealers like to run strip bars for several reasons, it gives them a good way to launder cash, they are lucrative in themselves and they get access to a ready supply of nubile females who are often willing to perform other services.
A lot of strip bar owners tried to go online in the dotcom heyday. It is pretty easy to set up a porn site, particularly if you do not pay for the material. They pay a couple of their girls a few hundred bucks and they can add their own hard core content. Some people tried to do one-on-one type services involving video cameras and chat room stuff.. quite how a girl is meant to look sexy while typing at a keyboard I am not sure, seems a bit artificial.
With the dotbust the online porn sites without a big name to bring in the visitors mostly started using spam.
Then when AOL and Microsoft started cracking down on spam with legal threats the porn sites were the first targets they hit. Porn spam created the greatest number of complaints and the businesses had quite a big incentive to go clean since they could bring in business in other ways. So the number of porn spams has gone down remarkably in the past 6 months or so.
I think half of us are going to flame on slashdot and the other half will go off to find the web site where you can get the free porn.
I hate these C/R schemes, they are OK when they are used for mailing lists or for checking signups to Yahoo! mail or some other forum where the intent is to protect ME. I do not accept that they are at all legitimate when the only purpose is to protect some dweeb who thinks he is really important.
Worst of all are the systems that send out C/R challenges in response to email that was a reply to something that the challenger sent. I get students asking me some question about a Web spec or something else I did. I spend time writing an answer and then get a C/R challenge. Like some student's time is much more important than mine...
Worst of all are the C/R systems that don't whitelist after the first challenge. Dan Bernstein is the worst offender here, I answered three of his challenges and still get his robot if I make the mistake of replying to one of his mails to me. So I have his robot blacklisted in my email.
So on balance I am not at all sad that the nuisance of C/R tests looks like it will be soon ended.
What is worrying though is that the fact such schemes have worked may well mean that hashcash and other CPU payment schemes are not viable either. The senders could run a java component on the porn viewers machine to generate message authentication ids.
Actually there is a black market in 'owned' machines between hacker groups and spammers. The type of spamers who do this stuff are mainly doing phishing/Identity theft type fraud.
It would be interesting to see whether any viruses have been used to harvest emails for spamming from address books. Certainly there have been 'virus' attacks that have actually been broadcast from a small group of machines using a pre-compiled dictionary.
I am getting something like 20 attack messages a day in my inbox, hate to think how many are trapped in the spam filter. This think hit so fast that only one of the virus filters had been updated - unfortunatley the second level catcher which still delivers a warning message to my mailbox.
One of the things that this shows is that current virus filtering code is useless. This type of reactive response will never work long term.
Much better would be to disable transfer of all active content from unauthenticated sources. Add an element to Microsoft Word, Java, HTML etc. to disable all active content in an easily checkable manner. Have the mail filters set the element automatically unless the sender was trusted and had signed the message. Zip files and other compound files would enforce 'no execute' recursively.
Iran is no good, the Bushies have been cuddling up to the hard line mullahs ever since they promised not to build a nuke. This is somewhat ironic since it was the mullahs who started to build the nuke in the first place.
The Sharia law punishment for writing a virus is unlikely to be much fun, probably cutting off a hand since it is a form of theft/vandalism.
Meanwhile the people of Iran are demanding a real democracy and we are doing nothing to help them. Instead we are trying to impose the same sort of sham democracy on Iraq, all the better to protect Halliburton's contracts.
So yes this SCO thing is all fucked up, but what do you expect when the country is so fucked up in general?
Bill did not suggest Micropayments. He suggested great big honking huge penalty payments to be paid by spammers. Completely different issue.
I have spent a lot of time trying to get micropayments to work and it is a really hard problem. Applied to email it would raise costs to levels that would eliminate many of the current uses of the net. Nobody could ever afford to run a mailing list like cipherpunks as a hobby.
Penalty payments is another issue, that can be done through well known commercial mechanisms, TrustE is already doing it, so is Ironport.
This is really amazingly stupid, so stupid that the obvious explanation does not seem very likely. There is ample prior art for use of XML as a markup for a word processing system. HTML and XHTML for example.
It is pretty difficult to see how a court could decide that the progression from HTML to XHTM was anything but obvious, the whole point of XML was to replace SGML after all (and yes it was replace, the SGML bigots never get it). So how can there be a patent claim on XHTML that a court would accept?
A court is unlikely to accept the claim, but the USPTO is a different matter, those rubes would accept a patent on the idea of patenting. Opps yes, they have done that, I forgot. Microsoft just got burned in a $half billion judgement over an idea that was as blindingly obvious as this one.
So don't leap to conclusions here guys. The VA Linux editorial team do not always have a clue.
You are all missing the issue here. The whole purpose of those cards is to invade privacy. They sell the demographic data to advertisers. The point is NOT to protect privacy it is to avoid making people aware that thier privacy is being violated.
People might stop using the cards and the scam would stop working.
You can be convicted for DUI and have the US press say that both the conviction and lying about it don't matter.
Come to that you can go AWOL from the National Guard for a year and later on have the US press fawn over you as you play dress up in the uniform you were so reluctant to wear in your youth.
Larouche is just Bush with worse media relations and running a cult for aging hippies rather than the super rich.
A while back I was listening to a story on NPR on the reaction of the big news rooms on 9/11. The thing that I found pretty jarring was the way that the ABC spokesman gave such an abject and grovelling description of how the sun shone out of Peter Jennings' nether regions. Up till then I had had quite a bit of respect for the guy, but I can't respect anyone who tolerates that kind of toadying, let alone demands it - as he obviously must.
If you watch ABC news you will see a big smile on Peter Jenning face whenever he gives a report about a Republican, when he talks about a Democrat he has a frown. It isn't a concious bias but it is definitely there.
Rove belted Gephart silly in the mid sessionals. And as for Lieberman his sanctimonious attitude is as sickening as Bush.
You don't have to agree with Nader to realise that the quality of the candidate matters as much as the platform. The problem with Lieberman is that he has assiduously engaged in every practice voters dislike on the hill. He was still fighting stricter accounting rules when the justice department were turning up at Enron HQ with a search warrant.
Nader is going to be humilliated if he is stupid enough to run this time. He would be lucky to get a quarter of his 2000 vote, if the greens let him run the conclusion will be that the voters have turned of green politics. The number 1, 2 and 3 priorities for the green movement are to get rid of Bush, Cheney and Halliburton from the US government.
The only exception is if Lieberman gets the nomination. In that case more Deanies will bolt the party than Lieberman will bring in from the middle.
Rove's strategy is confuse the middle and deliver for the base. Delivering for the Democrat base is easy - anyone but Bush. The problem with Lieberman is that he does not deliver that for the anti-war faction.
You exagerate, or you are confusing LaRouche with Charles Manson. LaRouche was jailed for 15 years for fraud and tax evasion in 1988. He has been out on parole since 1993. I guess that the sentence probably expired completely last year (parole can extend longer than the original sentence).
Amazon don't state the basis that they used to compile the list of candidates. Each election there are a couple of thousand people who file for president, so there has to be a cut-off at some point. Probably sending reports to the SEC.
Its interesting the way that folk imediately translate dollars into votes. The fact that someone gives money to a campaign does not even mean they want them to be elected. Plenty of candidates in primaries get dollars from the other party, say there is a guy standing for re-election, folk will send dollars to a challenger in the primaries to help make it a rougher ride. I met a Democrat who freely admitted that 80% of his campaign dollars came from Republicans.
The big issue in this campaign has been whether the Democrats would run the type of pusilanimous campaign that Gephart ran with in the mid-sessionals. Under that strategy the party would nominate 'Bush-Lite' - Lieberman or Gephart, someone who would not criticize the invasion of Iraq, someone who would basically roll over when the GOP press did their smear campaign.
At this point Dean has made sure that whoever gets the nomination it will not be Gephart or Lieberman. Bush is going to be criticized on his record. Unfortunally for the poor Deaniacs they are now dispensible. We know full well that they will organize and vote for any Democrat candidate against Bush, except Lieberman that is.
At this point I don't think anyone can say with confidence who the winner of the nomination will be. I think Kerry, Clark and Edwards all have a chance, Dean might recover. One thing I am sure of is that Edwards is the most likely choice for Veep. I don't think Clark or Kerry would even want it - Clark would almost certainly prefer Secretary of State. But Edwards is one heck of a smooth speaker, unfortunately the poor chump does not really have enough of a Resume to run. Last time that a guy with as little experience as he did became President was 2000 - and the results show it.
In theory the B..M roots are fed from the A root so if they loose their update for 24 hours or so they could start shutting down. In practice the admins would soon clue up and they would just republish the last good update file they had received.
The problem comes with a bunch of pathological issues to do with what deployed DNS servers do if they cannot see root. It is not at all pretty.