Note also that if you sell someone GPL'd software you cannot then ask them to return the souce code if they return the product to you for a refund. Any kind of returns policy you try to apply to the GPL'd program is invalid because the GPL does not allow one to specify additional restrictions on the use of the software.
This is a great way to piss off those Linux based device vendors. Buy the device. Demand the source to the GPL'd software embedded in the device. Once they curse you and send you the disks. return the hardware for a refund. Free Linux! Woo! Hmm... that's funny... these are RedHat ISOs...:-)
A nice example of a government perpetuating a working concept instead of trying inventing new ways to break things.
HAHAHAHA! Okay, I couldn't have put this better myself. This IS indeed classic government in action. They can always be trusted to wade in too late, and then do exactly the least useful thing. Who here thinks that publishing their e-mail address to spammers is the best way not to get spammed? This is a bill written by people who have no idea how spam works.
Spam is THEFT. Is is theft at the SMTP server which is relay raped, theft of the bandwidth required by the victim to send out the millions of e-mails, theft of the bandwidth and disk space of the ISP storing this junk, and theft of my bandwidth and storage space to receive it. These are measurable expenses which are costing people billions a year, making a few hundred spammers enough to finally move out of the trailer park.
Spam is exactly like junk faxing, burning through other people's ink, paper, and telephone time to send them junk ads. This has been illegal forever. Commercial speach (advertising) is NOT free speach and is NOT a 1st amendment issue. Even the DMA has dropped their previous support for regulation free spam. What's the big deal here?
Jonathan Lathem is amazing. Do read all his stuff. All his books are unique and each of his books seem to be told from a different voice and perspective. He is writing for intelligent grown ups so if you're looking for more crap from Piers Anthony skip to the next post.
Gun With Occasional Music - Awesome twist on the noir detective novel full of cryogenic time travel, distopian society, great fun playing with cliches of the genre in new ways.
As She Reached Across the Table - A love triangle between a physicist, her boyfriend, and a black hole. How do you compete with a Singularity for the heart of your geeky girl? I laugh my ass off every time I read this.
Amnesia Moon - Very unusual post apocalyptic tale of journeying across the wasteland. Facinating and complicated.
Motherless Brooklyn - His best book IMHO is not sci fi. Most of the people I've recommended this to have come back saying it was the best thing they've read all year. Difficult to describe.
Anyone interested in Lathem should start with "Gun With Occasional Music" and if you like it, try Motherless Brooklyn. I noticed that someone else covered Vernor Vinge so I'll just put in another very very big thumbs up for him.
On a totally other track, if you just don't read Fiction because the stuff you had to read in school was booooring, try these on.
"London Fields" by Martin Amis "Ask the Dust" by John Fante "On A Winter's Night A Traveler" by Italo Calvino "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole
How is this "insightful"? The poster has not even read the article he's flaming... neither have the mods apparently. Bleh. Mikael Pawlo is clearly arguing that video games *need* to be rated to allow parents to make informed choices.
What he is responding to is the suggestion that the makers of GTA should be "stoned in the streets." Pawlo is saying that parents can hate the latest KISS album or Jackass The Movie or whatever the latest "think of the children!" threat to society is, but they do not have the right to forbid creative people from releasing such things in a free society.
Anyone interested in this kind of music should check this guy out. He puts out albums of this stuff, and they rock. I saw him live recently and he was mixing Star Wars books-on-tape, then Rush, then Nirvana, then Public Enemy, then Madonna, even some country music, and somehow it all just works, and the croud was jumping the whole time.
If you can find it, get "Uneasy Listening, Vol 1" although I think they only put out 1000 because he didn't license any of the songs he mixed on it.:-)
RedHat is a poor example because they're a late comer to the embedded world and only seemed to jump into it half way. Lynuxworks, maker of Bluecat Linux, recently laid off 30% according to FuckedCompany.com. Lineo is basically done. How is MontaVista doing these days? These are companies that are staking their whole business on embedding Linux.
However, just so people don't think it's just a Linux thing... Annasoft, a leading Microsoft embedded partner, just died.
Yeah? So put your source up on a website and let us benefit from your ideas! How does it benefit anyone that you solved this 6 years ago? As it stands, your work was wasted.
Okay, this one would be over in five seconds if the states would send someone to the Microsoft Embedded presentation in Mountain view on April 9th, stand up, and say, "I want to use XP Embedded in my industrial control application. Can I remove components like IE and the GUI so it'll fit on a 32Mb flash disk?" Microsoft technical sales people will gush for hours about how easy this is. "Of course, just uncheck the box! You can take out that media player too! It just works! Totally stable! XP is completely modularized!" The embedded industry gets a very different message from Microsoft than they say in the courts. It's all such a laughable farce...
I'm sure it'll just end up in a wastebin somewhere, but I just wrote the following letter to Diane Feinstein, who is my representative.
---------
Dear Mrs. Feinstein,
I'm just writing to let you know that I will not be voting for you in the next election. I've been a Californian all my life, and have always voted on Democratic party lines. However, due to your shamefull sponsorship of the so called "Digital Television Promotion Act" which is a direct attack on not only the technological innovation which makes the state you represent great, but also attack on the lives and careers of millions of the citizens you represent, I will never again vote for you.
Looking at the giant campaign contributions you have received from media groups, I somehow doubt that your decision was actually based on considering the pros and cons of the bill. In the unlikely event that you are actually interested in facts on the situation, I beg you to do a little research into the repeating, inevitable reaction that media groups have shown throughout this century to new technologies, from VCRs and digital audio all the way back to the original record players, change threatens the pocketbooks of these industries, and they fight with all their power against these ultimately unstoppable trends. The sad thing is that in almost every case these dinosaurs ultimately benefit from these trends in reaching broader audiences with more interesting products.
Are you blind to the fact that this last cycle was fought just 20 years ago, and that expensive Senators such as yourself rallied along side the movie industry to fight off the horror of the VCR, which (they claimed) would bring an end to American culture in waves of piracy? Instead, now billions of dollars each year are added to the banks of these same media companies because of that innovaction which they fought blindly to stop. What happened to that world where every living room was to feature a "copying device" (VCR) which would drain the entertainment industry dry? Today, the cast is the same, the script is the same, but the new terror is the threat of that den of piracy known as the Internet.
Looking back, you may see your own reflection in the voices of senators from 20, 50 or even 80 years ago, who having found themselves solidly in the pockets of these frightened elephants proclaimed that no effort should be spared to protect these monied interests from the horrors of change. Have some shame and reconsider your foolish stand with them, so that they will again wake up and take advantage of this new medium instead of fighting it. In any case, you have lost my vote, and it will be a happy day for me when you are out of office.
Apache 1.3 on Unix is multiprocess, and Robotcop uses libMM for sharing things like spider lists between these processes. Apache 1.3 on Win32 is multithreaded, and would require a totally different approach to this. At the time I thought Apache 2 was closer and let me avoid this work, but I'm thinking your estimate is more accurate now. I'm not too familiar with the Apache on Win32 community, but your comment is request #2 for Robotcop to support it, so I might go ahead and do it.
Regarding your src vs binary comments, you might be interested to know that about 95% of visitors to the Robotcop site choose to download the source instead of the much easier to install binary. It'll be interesting to see how Win32 is different once I have something up for that.
P.S. Don't call people "consumers". Even if they are Windows users, it's not nice.:-)
Why should it, therefore, be restricted to behaving like a search engine
Remember that robots.txt is there for the protection of the client as well as the server. There are infinite rabit holes in many websites and the robots.txt format was invented to stop software from falling in. IMHO anything that is not a browser being controlled interactively by a human should obey it.
Hmm. There's a robots civil rights lawsuit of the future waiting to happen...:-)
does robotcop have an 'Allow' feature to always allow certain ips?
Nope, but I can definitially add one. I did a lot of testing on my servers to make sure the big search engines or tools like wget wouldn't get into fights with Robotcop. Also, part of the *point* of Robotcop is to bring in enforcement behind the robots.txt file, so any "white hat" vendor currently ignoring that file should be bullied into doing so.
But I'll add a RobotcopAllow directive anyway.:-).
What would happen if crawler-01.nastybot.com grabs the robots.txt file, then crawler- 02.nastybot.com violates it?
If a spider can use multiple IPs then it can avoid being tracked, but it still has to worry about falling into trap directories and noticing that it is trapped. If the spider is in no hurry then this is no big deal either, as it can just wait out your ban or return as another IP. Robotcop, or any other software for that matter, can't protect you against a spider like that.
One thing to keep in mind is that much email address harvesting it done from cheap dialup accounts over short periods. Harvester vendors want to sell software to dumb users who think they are collecting "free" lists to spam at. These spiders don't have the option of working slowly or jumping IPs and are easy pray for Robotcop.
> How about tying both User-Agent and IP > address to form valid/invalid users?
This is a *fantastic* improvement. I'm going to add this to the next version.
Thanks for your other comments as well. I agree that some kind of, "We think you may be an evil spider. Do this to prove that you aren't..." would also be a good improvement. It's just a matter of coming up with the best method.
> hidden webbugs/urls? my bot avoids these.
Not to, uh, ask you to reveal trade secrets or anything, but does your bot actually fetch button images to make sure they're not transparent or something? I agree that it's possible to detect and avoid most of the common "fake link" techniques but 100% seems very unlikely.
Yeah, poisoned addresses are stupid. We put the feature in because it seemed like the previous solutions focused on this, but really what Robotcop is about is protecting the website. Screwing with the spider is a second priority.
It's trivial for email harvesters to run MX lookups on the collected domains to see if they're valid, and spammers are used to "test runs" of millions of addresses to weed out the bad ones, so giving them garbage e-mail addresses probably has little impact on their operation.
Sorry, you're right - I'll add some example honeypot links to the documentation. The simplest example I can think of is something like this:
<a href="/honeypot" alt=""><b></b></a>
There are infinite variations on this theme, like the transparent gif you mentioned, which makes it very difficult for evil spiders to avoid them. Just make sure you test with lynx/w3m first.:-)
You just put hidden links in your HTML which only a spider's HTML parser would notice and follow. This technique is already widely used by wpoison which is a Perl CGI solution to the spider problem.
Check out the robotcop.org site. It has examples of how to set all this up.
What, you don't think we can win an arms race against the degenerates who write email harvesting software?:-)
Right now it provides pretty good protection, especially if the spider needs to get in and out of the site within a set period of time. If you can think of ways to circumvent how Robotcop works, please point them out so we can figure out a solution!
A common thread in most recent future fiction is the idea of monolithic governments slowly becoming irrelevent to our lives. They are replaced in importance by communities or tribes that reflect the lifestyle choices of its members. These tribes are sometimes megacorporations which are an extended family to their employees, providing everything they need to live productive lives.
Sometimes they are special interest groups such as religions, philosophies, pop culture groups, hacker clans, etc.
For years I've felt like this was slowly becoming true. I think Card's vision of a future Democracy powered by highly sophisticated online discussion groups is the most likely form of government that would rise to manage such tribes.
Take the society described in Sterling's "Distraction" and add the tribal ideas in Stephenson's "Diamond Age" and then the government from Card's "Ender's Game". I think together that is an excellent picture of what the western world will look like 20 years from now.
Read Copland's "Microserfs" to see a good current example... or just realize how powerful Slashdot is in organizing (un)productive energy in the young tech community.
Also, I recommend that you seek out authors who genuinely come from scientific backgrounds or clearly take these subjects very seriously. David Brin, Vernor Vinge, Bruce Sterling are brilliant people who spend a lot of time thinking about these ideas.
Others (Gibson) are more interested in the pop culture metaphorical aspects and are in my opinion highly overrated. Gibson did not in any way "invent" virtual reality. Famously he refused to use e-mail for years. Not long ago he wrote for Wired about finally discovering the appeal of the Internet when he began shopping for antique watches on eBay. Whatever.
If you're interested in good idea sci-fi from the last few decades, find the authors who helped build The Well, or were writing stories inspired by the precursors to the Usenet in the 70s.
Is it because the controlling entity happens to be Microsoft? No, or the SAMBA developers would have been boiled alive a long time ago.
The concern is clearly coming from the fact that this proposed standard comes from Microsoft. Your point regarding Samba is a poor one, because SMB was a well established protocol, essentially ubiquitous in the business world. The Linux community choosing to support it was not a factor in making Microsoft's SMB succeed or not.
C# and CLI on the other hand are proposed standards, and still may or may not catch on with developers or business. The concern rises from the fact that Ximian's support of this proposed standard makes the chances of its success greater, and there are may theories about what greater warplan at Microsoft is behind this initiative, which Ximian may be unintentionally helping by joining that fight.
I think the above is pretty obvious. Your point about the oppressed Gnome being the secret reason the Linux community does not want to throw its weight behind a Microsoft developer standard is... a strange one.
I have seen a plethora of projects successfully that used Perl, and exactly zero that used Python.
Yahoo, Google, and eGroups all use Python extensively.
So in your future ignorant flames, you can now say: Besides the biggest portal, the best search engine, and the most popular e-list site, I know of zero sites that use Python.
For proof positive that Media3 knowingly hosts sites which spam, visit BulkIsp.com. Some quotes from that site:
"The agenda for our company is that 75% of our activities should be to promote our own products and services. Thus you know that we have to be good at what we do, as it is the way that we market business to business and business to consumer for ourselves."
"We guarantee that the mail that you hire us to send is based on the delivered pieces. We also guarantee that your site will stay up the full amount of time that you need to get the full results of the mailing."
So, to review:
BulkIsp.com sends spam to promote themselves.
BulkIsp.com sends spam for others for money.
BulkIsp.com guarantees your site will stay up because they don't have to worry about any pesky AUP.
Media3 has gotten complaints about them, and has decided to leave them running. To see some other spam sites Media3 is hosting, check out SpamHaus.org where they are by far the leader in spam hosting.
I'm amazed that the poster continues to quote the Media3 AUP and its CEO as if they had any credibility. Media3 hosts Spammers. This is not being debated. What this says about his character speaks far louder than his quibbling over whether they actually "spam" from his "service" per se. The fact is that Spammers pay a lot of money for bullet proof hosting of their mailservers, and Media3 is only too happy to take their checks.
MAPS is just a resource. We're the people who decide to apply their list on our mailservers and routers as a boycott against bad Net citizens until they learn to play by the rules. It works. I hope that PeaceFire chooses an alternative besides all out war against this important tool and our collective decision to use it.
Why is this marked as informative? It's incorrect. The PAO work was merged with 4.0 and PCMCIA in FreeBSD works great now. I am posting this from a FreeBSD 4.1 laptop via a Lucent Wavelan card which has been totally solid.
I. Do whatever the hell you want with this code providing that you:
i. release the source to any binaries you make public
ii. give credit to the original author(s) by listing their names in a "CREDITS" file distibuted with every copy of the program.
Fine, but what about people who release the source to their software, but place restrictions on how it is used? Just because the author has given you the source code doesn't mean you can do anything with it. The GPL therefore must guarantee that NO RESTRICTIONS are placed on the use of the source. Given the complexity of contract law, this is a very difficult task.
In any case, I feel that the X/BSD style license is a much more powerful expression of freedom. Anyone can take the code and do anything they want with it. They can recombine and reuse the code in any context. If the Open Source model is so much more powerful than commercial closed source development, why does RMS fear evil capitalists so much? Their endevours are doomed, and free code wins every time. Right? So what if Apple can borrow the hard work of *BSD and give almost nothing back. What does it matter?
The FSF is a dinosaur that does far more harm than good these days. He's fighting his own now. The revolutionaries factionalize and turn on themselves...
Slashdot Mirror
Note also that if you sell someone GPL'd software you cannot then ask them to return the souce code if they return the product to you for a refund. Any kind of returns policy you try to apply to the GPL'd program is invalid because the GPL does not allow one to specify additional restrictions on the use of the software.
:-)
This is a great way to piss off those Linux based device vendors. Buy the device. Demand the source to the GPL'd software embedded in the device. Once they curse you and send you the disks. return the hardware for a refund. Free Linux! Woo! Hmm... that's funny... these are RedHat ISOs...
HAHAHAHA! Okay, I couldn't have put this better myself. This IS indeed classic government in action. They can always be trusted to wade in too late, and then do exactly the least useful thing. Who here thinks that publishing their e-mail address to spammers is the best way not to get spammed? This is a bill written by people who have no idea how spam works.
Spam is THEFT. Is is theft at the SMTP server which is relay raped, theft of the bandwidth required by the victim to send out the millions of e-mails, theft of the bandwidth and disk space of the ISP storing this junk, and theft of my bandwidth and storage space to receive it. These are measurable expenses which are costing people billions a year, making a few hundred spammers enough to finally move out of the trailer park.
Spam is exactly like junk faxing, burning through other people's ink, paper, and telephone time to send them junk ads. This has been illegal forever. Commercial speach (advertising) is NOT free speach and is NOT a 1st amendment issue. Even the DMA has dropped their previous support for regulation free spam. What's the big deal here?
Jonathan Lathem is amazing. Do read all his stuff. All his books are unique and each of his books seem to be told from a different voice and perspective. He is writing for intelligent grown ups so if you're looking for more crap from Piers Anthony skip to the next post.
Gun With Occasional Music - Awesome twist on the noir detective novel full of cryogenic time travel, distopian society, great fun playing with cliches of the genre in new ways.
As She Reached Across the Table - A love triangle between a physicist, her boyfriend, and a black hole. How do you compete with a Singularity for the heart of your geeky girl? I laugh my ass off every time I read this.
Amnesia Moon - Very unusual post apocalyptic tale of journeying across the wasteland. Facinating and complicated.
Motherless Brooklyn - His best book IMHO is not sci fi. Most of the people I've recommended this to have come back saying it was the best thing they've read all year. Difficult to describe.
Anyone interested in Lathem should start with "Gun With Occasional Music" and if you like it, try Motherless Brooklyn. I noticed that someone else covered Vernor Vinge so I'll just put in another very very big thumbs up for him.
On a totally other track, if you just don't read Fiction because the stuff you had to read in school was booooring, try these on.
"London Fields" by Martin Amis
"Ask the Dust" by John Fante
"On A Winter's Night A Traveler" by Italo Calvino
"A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole
How is this "insightful"? The poster has not even read the article he's flaming... neither have the mods apparently. Bleh. Mikael Pawlo is clearly arguing that video games *need* to be rated to allow parents to make informed choices.
What he is responding to is the suggestion that the makers of GTA should be "stoned in the streets." Pawlo is saying that parents can hate the latest KISS album or Jackass The Movie or whatever the latest "think of the children!" threat to society is, but they do not have the right to forbid creative people from releasing such things in a free society.
If you can find it, get "Uneasy Listening, Vol 1" although I think they only put out 1000 because he didn't license any of the songs he mixed on it. :-)
A good review of the album
However, just so people don't think it's just a Linux thing... Annasoft, a leading Microsoft embedded partner, just died.
Check out this excellent article entitled XSL Considered Harmful by Michael Leventhal from 1999. IMHO it's as true now as it was then.
Yeah? So put your source up on a website and let us benefit from your ideas! How does it benefit anyone that you solved this 6 years ago? As it stands, your work was wasted.
Okay, this one would be over in five seconds if the states would send someone to the Microsoft Embedded presentation in Mountain view on April 9th, stand up, and say, "I want to use XP Embedded in my industrial control application. Can I remove components like IE and the GUI so it'll fit on a 32Mb flash disk?" Microsoft technical sales people will gush for hours about how easy this is. "Of course, just uncheck the box! You can take out that media player too! It just works! Totally stable! XP is completely modularized!" The embedded industry gets a very different message from Microsoft than they say in the courts. It's all such a laughable farce...
I'm sure it'll just end up in a wastebin somewhere, but I just wrote the following letter to Diane Feinstein, who is my representative.
---------
Dear Mrs. Feinstein,
I'm just writing to let you know that I will not be voting for you in the next election. I've been a Californian all my life, and have always voted on Democratic party lines. However, due to your shamefull sponsorship of the so called "Digital Television Promotion Act" which is a direct attack on not only the technological innovation which makes the state you represent great, but also attack on the lives and careers of millions of the citizens you represent, I will never again vote for you.
Looking at the giant campaign contributions you have received from media groups, I somehow doubt that your decision was actually based on considering the pros and cons of the bill. In the unlikely event that you are actually interested in facts on the situation, I beg you to do a little research into the repeating, inevitable reaction that media groups have shown throughout this century to new technologies, from VCRs and digital audio all the way back to the original record players, change threatens the pocketbooks of these industries, and they fight with all their power against these ultimately unstoppable trends. The sad thing is that in almost every case these dinosaurs ultimately benefit from these trends in reaching broader audiences with more interesting products.
Are you blind to the fact that this last cycle was fought just 20 years ago, and that expensive Senators such as yourself rallied along side the movie industry to fight off the horror of the VCR, which (they claimed) would bring an end to American culture in waves of piracy? Instead, now billions of dollars each year are added to the banks of these same media companies because of that innovaction which they fought blindly to stop. What happened to that world where every living room was to feature a "copying device" (VCR) which would drain the entertainment industry dry? Today, the cast is the same, the script is the same, but the new terror is the threat of that den of piracy known as the Internet.
Looking back, you may see your own reflection in the voices of senators from 20, 50 or even 80 years ago, who having found themselves solidly in the pockets of these frightened elephants proclaimed that no effort should be spared to protect these monied interests from the horrors of change. Have some shame and reconsider your foolish stand with them, so that they will again wake up and take advantage of this new medium instead of fighting it. In any case, you have lost my vote, and it will be a happy day for me when you are out of office.
Sincerely,
Apache 1.3 on Unix is multiprocess, and Robotcop uses libMM for sharing things like spider lists between these processes. Apache 1.3 on Win32 is multithreaded, and would require a totally different approach to this. At the time I thought Apache 2 was closer and let me avoid this work, but I'm thinking your estimate is more accurate now. I'm not too familiar with the Apache on Win32 community, but your comment is request #2 for Robotcop to support it, so I might go ahead and do it.
Regarding your src vs binary comments, you might be interested to know that about 95% of visitors to the Robotcop site choose to download the source instead of the much easier to install binary. It'll be interesting to see how Win32 is different once I have something up for that.
P.S. Don't call people "consumers". Even if they are Windows users, it's not nice. :-)
Remember that robots.txt is there for the protection of the client as well as the server. There are infinite rabit holes in many websites and the robots.txt format was invented to stop software from falling in. IMHO anything that is not a browser being controlled interactively by a human should obey it.
Hmm. There's a robots civil rights lawsuit of the future waiting to happen... :-)
Nope, but I can definitially add one. I did a lot of testing on my servers to make sure the big search engines or tools like wget wouldn't get into fights with Robotcop. Also, part of the *point* of Robotcop is to bring in enforcement behind the robots.txt file, so any "white hat" vendor currently ignoring that file should be bullied into doing so.
But I'll add a RobotcopAllow directive anyway. :-).
If a spider can use multiple IPs then it can avoid being tracked, but it still has to worry about falling into trap directories and noticing that it is trapped. If the spider is in no hurry then this is no big deal either, as it can just wait out your ban or return as another IP. Robotcop, or any other software for that matter, can't protect you against a spider like that.
One thing to keep in mind is that much email address harvesting it done from cheap dialup accounts over short periods. Harvester vendors want to sell software to dumb users who think they are collecting "free" lists to spam at. These spiders don't have the option of working slowly or jumping IPs and are easy pray for Robotcop.
> How about tying both User-Agent and IP
> address to form valid/invalid users?
This is a *fantastic* improvement. I'm going to add this to the next version.
Thanks for your other comments as well. I agree that some kind of, "We think you may be an evil spider. Do this to prove that you aren't..." would also be a good improvement. It's just a matter of coming up with the best method.
> hidden webbugs/urls? my bot avoids these.
Not to, uh, ask you to reveal trade secrets or anything, but does your bot actually fetch button images to make sure they're not transparent or something? I agree that it's possible to detect and avoid most of the common "fake link" techniques but 100% seems very unlikely.
Yeah, poisoned addresses are stupid. We put the feature in because it seemed like the previous solutions focused on this, but really what Robotcop is about is protecting the website. Screwing with the spider is a second priority.
It's trivial for email harvesters to run MX lookups on the collected domains to see if they're valid, and spammers are used to "test runs" of millions of addresses to weed out the bad ones, so giving them garbage e-mail addresses probably has little impact on their operation.
Sorry, you're right - I'll add some example honeypot links to the documentation. The simplest example I can think of is something like this:
<a href="/honeypot" alt=""><b></b></a>There are infinite variations on this theme, like the transparent gif you mentioned, which makes it very difficult for evil spiders to avoid them. Just make sure you test with lynx/w3m first. :-)
You just put hidden links in your HTML which only a spider's HTML parser would notice and follow. This technique is already widely used by wpoison which is a Perl CGI solution to the spider problem.
Check out the robotcop.org site. It has examples of how to set all this up.
What, you don't think we can win an arms race against the degenerates who write email harvesting software? :-)
Right now it provides pretty good protection, especially if the spider needs to get in and out of the site within a set period of time. If you can think of ways to circumvent how Robotcop works, please point them out so we can figure out a solution!
A common thread in most recent future fiction is the idea of monolithic governments slowly becoming irrelevent to our lives. They are replaced in importance by communities or tribes that reflect the lifestyle choices of its members. These tribes are sometimes megacorporations which are an extended family to their employees, providing everything they need to live productive lives. Sometimes they are special interest groups such as religions, philosophies, pop culture groups, hacker clans, etc.
For years I've felt like this was slowly becoming true. I think Card's vision of a future Democracy powered by highly sophisticated online discussion groups is the most likely form of government that would rise to manage such tribes.
Take the society described in Sterling's "Distraction" and add the tribal ideas in Stephenson's "Diamond Age" and then the government from Card's "Ender's Game". I think together that is an excellent picture of what the western world will look like 20 years from now. Read Copland's "Microserfs" to see a good current example... or just realize how powerful Slashdot is in organizing (un)productive energy in the young tech community.
Also, I recommend that you seek out authors who genuinely come from scientific backgrounds or clearly take these subjects very seriously. David Brin, Vernor Vinge, Bruce Sterling are brilliant people who spend a lot of time thinking about these ideas.
Others (Gibson) are more interested in the pop culture metaphorical aspects and are in my opinion highly overrated. Gibson did not in any way "invent" virtual reality. Famously he refused to use e-mail for years. Not long ago he wrote for Wired about finally discovering the appeal of the Internet when he began shopping for antique watches on eBay. Whatever.
If you're interested in good idea sci-fi from the last few decades, find the authors who helped build The Well, or were writing stories inspired by the precursors to the Usenet in the 70s.
Is it because the controlling entity happens to be Microsoft? No, or the SAMBA developers would have been boiled alive a long time ago.
The concern is clearly coming from the fact that this proposed standard comes from Microsoft. Your point regarding Samba is a poor one, because SMB was a well established protocol, essentially ubiquitous in the business world. The Linux community choosing to support it was not a factor in making Microsoft's SMB succeed or not.
C# and CLI on the other hand are proposed standards, and still may or may not catch on with developers or business. The concern rises from the fact that Ximian's support of this proposed standard makes the chances of its success greater, and there are may theories about what greater warplan at Microsoft is behind this initiative, which Ximian may be unintentionally helping by joining that fight.
I think the above is pretty obvious. Your point about the oppressed Gnome being the secret reason the Linux community does not want to throw its weight behind a Microsoft developer standard is... a strange one.
I have seen a plethora of projects successfully that used Perl, and exactly zero that used Python.
Yahoo, Google, and eGroups all use Python extensively.
So in your future ignorant flames, you can now say: Besides the biggest portal, the best search engine, and the most popular e-list site, I know of zero sites that use Python.
For proof positive that Media3 knowingly hosts sites which spam, visit BulkIsp.com. Some quotes from that site:
"The agenda for our company is that 75% of our activities should be to promote our own products and services. Thus you know that we have to be good at what we do, as it is the way that we market business to business and business to consumer for ourselves."
"We guarantee that the mail that you hire us to send is based on the delivered pieces. We also guarantee that your site will stay up the full amount of time that you need to get the full results of the mailing."
So, to review:- BulkIsp.com sends spam to promote themselves.
- BulkIsp.com sends spam for others for money.
- BulkIsp.com guarantees your site will stay up because they don't have to worry about any pesky AUP.
Media3 has gotten complaints about them, and has decided to leave them running. To see some other spam sites Media3 is hosting, check out SpamHaus.org where they are by far the leader in spam hosting.I'm amazed that the poster continues to quote the Media3 AUP and its CEO as if they had any credibility. Media3 hosts Spammers. This is not being debated. What this says about his character speaks far louder than his quibbling over whether they actually "spam" from his "service" per se. The fact is that Spammers pay a lot of money for bullet proof hosting of their mailservers, and Media3 is only too happy to take their checks.
MAPS is just a resource. We're the people who decide to apply their list on our mailservers and routers as a boycott against bad Net citizens until they learn to play by the rules. It works. I hope that PeaceFire chooses an alternative besides all out war against this important tool and our collective decision to use it.
Why is this marked as informative? It's incorrect. The PAO work was merged with 4.0 and PCMCIA in FreeBSD works great now. I am posting this from a FreeBSD 4.1 laptop via a Lucent Wavelan card which has been totally solid.
i. release the source to any binaries you make public ii. give credit to the original author(s) by listing their names in a "CREDITS" file distibuted with every copy of the program.
Fine, but what about people who release the source to their software, but place restrictions on how it is used? Just because the author has given you the source code doesn't mean you can do anything with it. The GPL therefore must guarantee that NO RESTRICTIONS are placed on the use of the source. Given the complexity of contract law, this is a very difficult task.
In any case, I feel that the X/BSD style license is a much more powerful expression of freedom. Anyone can take the code and do anything they want with it. They can recombine and reuse the code in any context. If the Open Source model is so much more powerful than commercial closed source development, why does RMS fear evil capitalists so much? Their endevours are doomed, and free code wins every time. Right? So what if Apple can borrow the hard work of *BSD and give almost nothing back. What does it matter?
The FSF is a dinosaur that does far more harm than good these days. He's fighting his own now. The revolutionaries factionalize and turn on themselves...