Seriously, I always thought that bit was a sort of safety net for electronics manufacturers. I.e. "if you are getting interference, you cant blame us."
I think this bit only applies to a certain class of devices, or maybe others, but not all. I've never read the passage in question, but I think there are other types of devices where they "do not accept interference" or "should not accept interference". Clearly there are some electronic devices which DO cause "harmful interference".
In fact, the Part 15 rules ("will not cause harmful interference, must accept harmful interference") sounds a lot like the Internet protocol guideline of "strict in what you send, robust in what you accept". --
People have correctly pointed out that most "decent" mp3 players have had this functionality for a while. Winamp actually didn't have it at first if I recall. Other than that though, the ability to stream MP3 has been around -- and been done the same way -- since the very first MP3 player, WinPlay3. Winamp's method was more or less copied WP3's.
Anyway, if you enter a URL in the Play Location: window of Winamp (ctrl-click on the eject button, or Ctrl-L), it will stream an MP3 at that location.
The bitch is that most web browsers will preempt streaming, waiting for the file to be fully downloaded before it passes it onto any helper app. This is in theory safer, but ya oughtta be able to turn off the deferral.
The answer of streaming from web links is to use M3U playlists for the file(s) you want to stream. The playlist contains the URL of the streamworthy file, and the web browser is none the wiser -- it passes the very small M3U onto the player, which then takes over the downloading of the file listed inside, streaming it in the meantime.
I suppose therefore you might want a script on your server that will generate M3U output on the fly for your online music collection. Such a script would be very simple -- in theory it only needs to output text data consisting of a URL to the actual file.
However, I usually just use "Copy Link Location" or "Copy Shortcut" from the right-click-over-link menu, and then paste it into the Winamp "Play Location" window. And there you have it, instant streaming on demand.:) --
Assuming upgrading those PCs to Linux isn't an option, I would recommend foregoing trying to do development via term progs.
Unless you have become comfortable with screen, or don't mind the slow updates of multi-window Emacs in an overexpanded terminal window -- or whatever you're using -- development via 24x80 windows, all requring new logins each time you want another window, is a miserable existence for the progger.
My advice is to invest in a site license for a PC X server. Xwin-32 is fine; Exceed is nicer, and comes with an interesting embedded mode where your X client windows mix in with your Win32 apps' windows, instead of an X root window plunked over your desktop.
You can also get buy with MI/X, which used to be free, but this still requires an ssh-able terminal prog (or something that will tunnel your X session) to be acceptably secure. If you're worried about that. It's also only X11R5, which is only usually an issue for really graphics-intensive X apps, IME.
Another option for you may be to look into Samba; sharing your src directories and accessing them via Windows, and then using Win32 editing software to do your coding. You still need a term prog to do compiling, etc; but the quality of your term prog isn't as important if all you're gonna do is type "make". Unless you're writing ncurses stuff and need to test it, I guess.
Seriously -- if there is some compelling reason not to move whole-hog over to Linux, then look into getting a PC X server for your workstations.
(PS: as for term progs, I hear good things about SecureCRT. Personally I still use Cedomir Igaly's SSH client, but I'm a freak.) --
Microsoft's newly released Internet Explorer 5.5 is trying to do something Microsoft was worried that Netscape might do -- make the browser a platform.
So now they theoretically make 2 OSes: IE and Windows. Which means when the dust settles after the antitrust appeals, IE will remain with the Windows side, because IE will (arguably) be an OS, and therefore will have to be part of the OS company under the terms of the breakup. And therefore they will still be able to bundle IE with Windows.
I don't have to tell you which one of the two companies Bill will want to stick with. --
the lack of a GUI standard on the platform doesn't appear likely to be resolved.
I don't want you telling me how my windows, menus, titlebars, and desktop are arranged or operated, thank you.
UNIX is about being able to get your hands dirty and being able to design an environment that suits you. That includes what my X desktop looks like -- or how it works.
Gnome pisses me off. KDE pisses me off. The various OEM's CDEs piss me off. olwm sucks. They pretty much are all an attempt to wield the same GUI/HCI stratification and conformity that the Microsoft family of products enforces. I don't like it much there, either (though with the greater tweakability of Win98+'s GUI, my desktops are almost unusable by anyone else besides me. That's too bad for them, who shouldn't be using my computer anyway.)
X is too deeply embedded in the Unix world to be easily dislodged
Look -- you either want a strict GUI standard, or you want choice. If it's GUI standardization you're after, having more than one windowing system is just an ineffectual attempt to try and uphold your open-source cred. What is gained by having (say) five different windowing systems that all look and work the same?
My point is, if you want an alternative to X, don't complain that everything doesn't look the same. If someone does replace X, it better actually BE different, not just be made by a different person.
Keith "you can have my peculiar fvwm2 config when you pull it from my cold dead fingertips" Tyler --
Gopher pages tend to be more content-rich than web pages -- Gopher simply does not allow Zero-Content sludge.
... I have never been to a horrible Gopher site.
I can tell by this comment that you never visited the Gopherserver at the old Adam-Curry owned mtv.com (now metaverse.com I believe), which went up near the end of Gopher's numbered days (1995-6).
This was basically a gopher server trying its best to be a Web site. Links to documents that weren't quite titled -- normally just meaningless filenames -- and many of the files were pictures. (Not useful pictures, either). It's worth mentioning that the only practical way to view this gophersite as it was intended (images and all) was via a Web browser. The whole intent was to use the gopher server as a repository and presentation piece for the projects started by post-MTV Curry and his associates. Of course, Gopher sucks at this, and they eventually ditched the gopher server (probably the same time they were forced to surrender the domain to MTV), but that's not saying they didn't try.
If you continue to think of Gopher as it was when it died, you're holding onto a broken "good ole days" dream. You can't believe that Gopher would somehow have been a haven from rampant commercialism and irresponsibility in the current age of the Internet. No corner is safe -- not email, not Web, not Usenet, and certainly not Gopher, if it still did practically exist.
Had there been no Web, you can bet your breeches that we would be using Gopher for pretty much the same things -- advertisements, used junk salesmen, and Personal Gopher Sites offered by ISPs to their customers. I'm sure we would have many FreeGopher providers as well, offering users the ability to create and upload content via telnet and FTP to their very own site on the Great Global Gopher (GGG). "Altaveronica" would still flood you with pages of directory links full of useless webtools and shopping gimmicks before you could reach the query window.
I'm sorry, but you gotta get real.
It should be noted too, that the same comments people make today (or did make 4-5 years ago) about the negative effects of the Web, were said about Gopher only about five years prior.
The process doesn't stop just because the technology doesn't advance. Just be thankful your beloved memories of Gopher weren't tarnished by having an AOL gopher server.
For all the web's faults -- which aren't really the Web's, but society's -- I have to say, I'm awfully glad I'm not trying to type this comment into a TurboGopher prompt window. --
Too bad you don't seem to have email. So, I'll reply here and pretend someone reads it.
[I]s owning the masters... important...? you can always record again...
I'm not a musician or a lawyer (though I used to think I was a journalist), but the way I gather it is this: 'owning the masters' is more or less analogous to 'owning the rights to our recordings'.
It goes something like this. When most bands sign to a label, the rights to publish, release, collect royalties, etc. belong to the record co.
When someone else wants to gain permission to that copyright (for something like a remix, or a cover, or even a sample), they contact the label, NOT (necessarily) the artist; because it's the label that has the copyright and the authority to grant those rights to others.
Of course, some bands are smarter (and less desperate) than others, so they can leverage for certain things in their contracts that prevent them from being totally screwed by the record company. (Some.) But even then, if you are to say, LEAVE a record company, you break that contract, and you dont get the same benefits that you got under the contract. And -- most importantly here -- the label (typically) still owns the copyrights to the songs you recorded while you were signed to them.
(I believe that bands who switch labels need to get permission from their older labels to perform older songs -- but I'm not sure. This would explain why Metallica performs more of their older songs at their concerts than, say, Kid Rock or even the Beastie Boys.)
There's a lot of ins an outs to this, but basically, Metallica, once successful, fought their previous label in court and managed to wrest those rights from that label.
Which is, incidentally, why it's Metallica, and not some label, which is at the forefront of this fight. The labels in fact feel more confident when they are working as part of an organized group -- namely the RIAA. (Another example of the usefulness of organizing.)
And it's also why lots of artists nowadays go through the pain of forming their own labels, to try and fend off some of all this, just so they can have expressive freedom and all that.
Keith "my last record wasn't pushed for shit, so Jive Records, go and suck a fat dick [-- Kid Rock]" Tyler --
Aside from the occasional precocious 12 year old who learned BASIC (or whatever they teach kids nowadays) in his diapers -- I wasn't one of these -- most of the kids on the Internet today are, well, kids: annoying, obnoxious, random, and.. to be blunt.. dumb.
Correct me if I'm off, but: Aren't most script kiddies alleged to be 13-year-olds who can't type, and who use exploits to "prove" their environmental dominance, coerce the respect of their peers, and attempt to fit in with others?
How much better would IRC be today if it weren't for all the 12-year olds who operated fludnets?
Not to mention, how much better would your average search engine result be?
I think ICQ is onto something here, man.
Keith "when I was a kid, we didn't have the Internet, we had to dial into bulletin boards! And there was only room for one person at a time! And we had to dial into them at 1200 baud! Both ways!" Tyler --
Before the World Wide Web caught on, I initially browsed through many gopher sites. Do people still run those servers?
No[1], because the Web does everything Gopher did, and more, and better.
It would interesting to see those sites for posterity sake.
That's true, but no one's going to maintain one just for that, unless that IS why they're doing it.
I speak as the person who personally turned off the law.harvard.edu gopher server, as no one had noticed it was still running, and it hadn't logged any usage in two years. (This was in early '98.) On the one hand I was sad to destroy a small piece of history; on the other, I was happy to reclaim some cycles on the primary web server.
Kdt
[1] Well, there are probably some universities in slow-developing countries who had Internet access in circa 1994 or prior, but their national technological infrastructure hasn't advanced to the point where the Web is practical, and they still maintain their Gopher servers instead. I doubt there are very many places like that anymore, though. I would start with a search for a working Veronica server. There are still some Archie [e2][ODP] servers in existence, so I'm sure there's at least one Veronica around. --
This is probably a good thing.
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Let's face it -- a publisher anonymized publishing method isn't needed by the MP3 trading community, and besides, they'd waste it. (From my experiences, and what I've heard/ssen lately, what people are looking for is a receiver anonymized transport. Which already exist, in practical terms; but the newbie MP3 traders aren't using them.)
Barring the file size limitation, I would say that this system would end up filled with two things:
Unauthorized copies of otherwise available material (i.e. mp3 and pron).
Rants from cranks and kooks.
On top of that, you'll get paranoid people (and kids) sending things like the bad things they said about so-and-so, or what they did at the Christmas party, or the love poem for the girl they have a crush on.
Personally, I'd rather see secret CIA reports, or troop movements in Chechnya, or IRA communiques -- but you know that anonymous or not, this stuff is few and far between, compared to the literal junk that kooks, cranks, trolls, and spammers can generate.
If we can a) manage to get those who have access to sensitive material also access to such a network, and b) manage to overcome their understandable fears, then we could see some good things come out of it. But the mechanism is really the least of our problems.
And besides, if no encryption is 100% uncrackable, and no system is 100% secure, (and no cruise ship is 110% unsinkable, etc.), then it follows that no publishing system will be 100% anonymous.
I agree it seems like a slim chance, but, if it turns out the Nike had reprehensibly bad security, and poor maintenance of their domain, etc., it seems to me that could be indicative of negligence. I don't think we will see that not having a 24/7 ERT will qualify as being negligent, but I wouldn't mind if being just plain irresponsible with your computing systems and DNS and etc. could qualify.
I know that my company's mail servers are queuing up a fair amount of D.O.A. mail due to companies that don't have the brains to set their MX records properly. It'd be nice if we could find a way to get those companies to make amends for that sort of thing; not just to compensate us for unnecessary use of our resources, but also to better encourage them to fix it and make sure they don't make stupid mistakes again.
Think about it; we can't allow every damn fool ISP and dot-com to make stupid mistakes that have negative side effects on our own networks. The old social mechanisms of peer scorn and of retaliatory blockading don't work so well anymore, both mainly because there are already too many damn fools who aren't even aware of what they're doing wrong or thatanyone else has a problem. (Many of the new-skool dot-com admins treat old-school admins with the same snideness that jocks treated the geeks in high school with; e.g. of being "too picky" or "too anal" about network config issues. Or even worse, will insist that the old schoolers are the ones breaking things.)
As for Nike, in terms of being negligent: Who is responsible for all the traffic going to the domain nike.com? It's Nike, who is the sole advertsier of the domain. Nike's target audience is a segment of the population that doesn't visit web sites unless (ironically) their URL has been advertised on TV. So the amount of traffic going to nike.com is no accident. I expect the plaintiff will argue that Nike is therefore accountable for where that traffic actually goes. If my dog, for example, gets loose and chews up the neighbor's azaleas, I can be found accountable for the damage, because I was negligible for not keeping him secured. Likewise, Nike.com may be held accountable for the traffic they have generated for the nike.com domain going to the wrongplace, if it turns out they didn't take sufficient measures to ensure that their domain wouldn't be rerouted.
Yes, this could have bad side effects on the Slashdot effect. I don't have any ideas on that one, but there are differences between being negligent with your OWN domain and simply drawing traffic to another person's site.
(Of course, if they rule this week that hyperlinks are illegal, that won't matter anyway.) --
Doesn't this qualify as a form of denial of service? Or just plain fraud (leading to personal damages)?
Let's see... If KMFDM remixes a Metallica song, KMFDM (assuming they care) had to secure rights from Metallica to make their song. The copyright of the remixed work however in its form as an audio recording, lies with KMFDM, not Metallica (though of course those common elements remain Metallica's, with KMFDM having limited rights to use them).
Therefore Metallica forced the blocking of people who hadn't violated their copyrights, but that of other people's (who may or may not have desired their works to be distributed over Napster).
There's gotta be something in that. I'm sure you're not the only person this happened to.
I wouldn't be the least surprised if the Metallica / NetPD tracking scheme picked up people for downloading files that Metallica had no rights to. I imagine when/if they go after Gnutella users, they'll be picking up people for trading the Napster BAD! video.
What recourses would a person have if, say, they were wrongfully removed from an Internet service as a result of (e.g.) an inaccurate abuse complaint? (I'm not aware if Napster requires new users to read a TOS that includes a "right to cancel at any time" clause.)
Metallica is one of few bands who actually do own the rights to their "masters", the original pressings of their songs. They did have to go to court in order to get this privilege, AFAIK.
Now, they'd like you to believe that, in the years since they were able to do this, that they've done something to help other bands get these same rights, but they really haven't.
Metallica actually likes to brag about this, flaunting it in front of other garage bands which, contrary to their suggestions, will probably have a harder time than even they did, as a result of their success, at getting a hold of the same rights.
There are a few other bands, mostly rock, that I've heard of owning their masters, but I can't think of them off hand. --
Once the practice of using hacked Gnut clients to display the IPs of requestors and searchers becomes common
(which, to someone who used to run FTP servers for pretty much the same purposes, is not a big deal),
the obvious proactive defense will be to use hacked clients which show you the IPs of the machines hosting the files you want.
Then there will be narcwatch.gnutella.org or some such, and hacked clients which automatically filter out DLs from IPs of known Gnutella narcs, based on an automatically DL'd narc list or query on a DNS record or something.
Nothing new under the sun, just me looking ahead a little.
(IYAM, until Freenet becomes viable, alt.binaries.* and a good feed [or a few decent ones] is still the way to go.) --
Hold on people... you didn't read the whole thing.
The question you ask is a good one -- I've been considering the idea of giving a user some mechanism to create faux bounce messages. This ability would stop all but the most brain-dead of spam lists cold. (Even if they caught on, it would be to their detriment to ignore all bounces.)
The cleanest way would be to write a setuid root or postmaster (etc.) program that a user can run with an argument of a target address. It would then send an email to the target looking identical to a bounce, claiming nondelivery for the address of the real uid. An even better version would accept a whole email as input, grep for the headers, and thereby figure out the sender and intended recipient. This could then easily be called from your.procmailrc. Of course, this being setuid and all, might not be a good idea and could introduce abuse.
The other way, rather kludgy, and depending on the configyration of your ISP's mail server, would be to write a script that forges the mail itself, by connecting to the local smtp server. Even better would be a smart one that nslookup's the mx record for the source domain and connects directly. This would have to run from a shell host though -- it would be too easy to detect that you weren't really a mail server by checking you against DUN. (Imagine that -- spammers using DUN to thwart antispam!)
Of course, the truly nice solution would be to develop an SMTP server (and/or procmail hook) that spits out 550 No such user depending on sending host or address.
Who knows, though -- maybe the successor to SMTP will solve some of our contemporary email troubles.
MAIL FROM: funmlm@earthlink.com RCPT TO: romulus@jerky.net
According to this article, some source ports use up to three different licenses, among them the GPL. So doesn't this make it GPL'd? But what about the other licenses? Do the authors have to stick to a single license and dispose of code which is covered by another license?
Congratulations Rob, you've managed to figure out RMS's most nagging anti-(insert commercial linux dist here) arguments.
Nicely put, too -- maybe the "post first, read laters" around here will start to get it too. --
The US could then (theoretically) impose tariffs on imported operating system software. I'm not aware if US has imposed tariffs against.ca products in the past century, so this could strain relations (though so might BC's offer) a bit.
Raising a percentage tariff against imported software, especially on a product as overpriced as MS, could either kill MS's success in the US, or kill it's US profits (arguably still their largest market) by forcing them to drop the price.
I'm not entirely brushed up on profits. In order to let the tariff go through without annoying.ca, we might need to apply the tariff to all imports, which would result in the strange situation where SuSe Linux would cost disproportionately more than RedHat Linux! You might even end up with a permanent kernel branching between the US and everywhere else. Which, uh, might be bad.
But if it were just MS vs. the world, I would be thrilled about a Windows tariff. --
Not necessarily. "Sick-outs" are fairly effective in some circles.
Besides, the publicity after a day of World Wide Where-did-it-go would be even more effective than making a big stink and risking making the news ho-hum by the time it's over.
I'd say that's only because they couldn't, or didn't know how.
Napster did state that Metallica would have to give them the id's of the users if they wanted this stopped... so Metallica did.
I don't think even Lars is clueless enough to think that Napster is directly responsible for their songs being listed. I mean... do they not realize that each ID they turned in is an actual person?
Metallica also gave fans permission to make bootleg tapes of concerts, they didn't give the fans permission to trade mpeg's of the cd's.
Which is an issue they have with the "fans" who have the MP3's, not anyone else.
There is a distinct difference between actions of differing magnitudes.
Still, a matter of muddled perspective. Say the average trader offering Metallica MP3's has an album worth of them taken say once or twice a day. That's a resonable quota for a kid in high school sharing his Metallica CD with friends who make a copy of it.
If I'm in high school and I tell my whole class that I have the new Metallica CD, and they can borrow it from me if they want, aren't I comitting the same crime at the same magnitude as the average MP3 trader?
This what they don't get. Despite their perception that the crime done via MP3 is somehow more damaging, it's not the case.
"Right now Metallica is just policing Napster's users for them." Because Napster refused to do it themselves (according to Lars, that is).
I have a hard time believing that Metallica thinks the 'controllers' of a society are responsible for the actions of that society's members. This is heavy metal we're talking about. It would be like Metallica taking responsibility for the guy in the mosh pit who lands on his head. --
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, I always thought that bit was a sort of safety net for electronics manufacturers. I.e. "if you are getting interference, you cant blame us."
I think this bit only applies to a certain class of devices, or maybe others, but not all. I've never read the passage in question, but I think there are other types of devices where they "do not accept interference" or "should not accept interference". Clearly there are some electronic devices which DO cause "harmful interference".
In fact, the Part 15 rules ("will not cause harmful interference, must accept harmful interference") sounds a lot like the Internet protocol guideline of "strict in what you send, robust in what you accept".
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By the way, mpg123 for linux/unix will also accept an http URL on the command line and will stream.
--
People have correctly pointed out that most "decent" mp3 players have had this functionality for a while. Winamp actually didn't have it at first if I recall. Other than that though, the ability to stream MP3 has been around -- and been done the same way -- since the very first MP3 player, WinPlay3. Winamp's method was more or less copied WP3's.
:)
Anyway, if you enter a URL in the Play Location: window of Winamp (ctrl-click on the eject button, or Ctrl-L), it will stream an MP3 at that location.
The bitch is that most web browsers will preempt streaming, waiting for the file to be fully downloaded before it passes it onto any helper app. This is in theory safer, but ya oughtta be able to turn off the deferral.
The answer of streaming from web links is to use M3U playlists for the file(s) you want to stream. The playlist contains the URL of the streamworthy file, and the web browser is none the wiser -- it passes the very small M3U onto the player, which then takes over the downloading of the file listed inside, streaming it in the meantime.
I suppose therefore you might want a script on your server that will generate M3U output on the fly for your online music collection. Such a script would be very simple -- in theory it only needs to output text data consisting of a URL to the actual file.
However, I usually just use "Copy Link Location" or "Copy Shortcut" from the right-click-over-link menu, and then paste it into the Winamp "Play Location" window. And there you have it, instant streaming on demand.
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Assuming upgrading those PCs to Linux isn't an option, I would recommend foregoing trying to do development via term progs.
Unless you have become comfortable with screen, or don't mind the slow updates of multi-window Emacs in an overexpanded terminal window -- or whatever you're using -- development via 24x80 windows, all requring new logins each time you want another window, is a miserable existence for the progger.
My advice is to invest in a site license for a PC X server. Xwin-32 is fine; Exceed is nicer, and comes with an interesting embedded mode where your X client windows mix in with your Win32 apps' windows, instead of an X root window plunked over your desktop.
You can also get buy with MI/X, which used to be free, but this still requires an ssh-able terminal prog (or something that will tunnel your X session) to be acceptably secure. If you're worried about that. It's also only X11R5, which is only usually an issue for really graphics-intensive X apps, IME.
Another option for you may be to look into Samba; sharing your src directories and accessing them via Windows, and then using Win32 editing software to do your coding. You still need a term prog to do compiling, etc; but the quality of your term prog isn't as important if all you're gonna do is type "make". Unless you're writing ncurses stuff and need to test it, I guess.
Seriously -- if there is some compelling reason not to move whole-hog over to Linux, then look into getting a PC X server for your workstations.
(PS: as for term progs, I hear good things about SecureCRT. Personally I still use Cedomir Igaly's SSH client, but I'm a freak.)
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ICANN is requiring new TLD registrars to screen and limit who can buy domains in that TLD
Seems to me they ought to start doing that with the existing TLDs before they try it on new ones.
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Microsoft's newly released Internet Explorer 5.5 is trying to do something Microsoft was worried that Netscape might do -- make the browser a platform.
So now they theoretically make 2 OSes: IE and Windows. Which means when the dust settles after the antitrust appeals, IE will remain with the Windows side, because IE will (arguably) be an OS, and therefore will have to be part of the OS company under the terms of the breakup. And therefore they will still be able to bundle IE with Windows.
I don't have to tell you which one of the two companies Bill will want to stick with.
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the lack of a GUI standard on the platform doesn't appear likely to be resolved.
I don't want you telling me how my windows, menus, titlebars, and desktop are arranged or operated, thank you.
UNIX is about being able to get your hands dirty and being able to design an environment that suits you. That includes what my X desktop looks like -- or how it works.
Gnome pisses me off. KDE pisses me off. The various OEM's CDEs piss me off. olwm sucks. They pretty much are all an attempt to wield the same GUI/HCI stratification and conformity that the Microsoft family of products enforces. I don't like it much there, either (though with the greater tweakability of Win98+'s GUI, my desktops are almost unusable by anyone else besides me. That's too bad for them, who shouldn't be using my computer anyway.)
X is too deeply embedded in the Unix world to be easily dislodged
Look -- you either want a strict GUI standard, or you want choice. If it's GUI standardization you're after, having more than one windowing system is just an ineffectual attempt to try and uphold your open-source cred. What is gained by having (say) five different windowing systems that all look and work the same?
My point is, if you want an alternative to X, don't complain that everything doesn't look the same. If someone does replace X, it better actually BE different, not just be made by a different person.
Keith "you can have my peculiar fvwm2 config when you pull it from my cold dead fingertips" Tyler
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Randolph said the probation office specifically approved four gigs for the 36-year-old Mitnick.
So I said, they wont let him have a computer, but they'll let him have a hard disk? Sheesh!
Followed by the thought "And 4 gigs isn't that much nowadays... he must be disappointed."
Keith "1.21 Gigabytes!" Tyler
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Get a new credit card number?
Just a guess.
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The mainstream press is doubly off with this one, Slashdot only singly off.
None of the stories have said anything about infiltration of NASA systems -- they simply say that the server was overloaded.
I bet it was a boring old ping flood. That doesn't even rank you as a script kiddie.
Keith "blah, who needs raw sockets?" Tyler
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Gopher pages tend to be more content-rich than web pages -- Gopher simply does not allow Zero-Content sludge.
... I have never been to a horrible Gopher site.
I can tell by this comment that you never visited the Gopherserver at the old Adam-Curry owned mtv.com (now metaverse.com I believe), which went up near the end of Gopher's numbered days (1995-6).
This was basically a gopher server trying its best to be a Web site. Links to documents that weren't quite titled -- normally just meaningless filenames -- and many of the files were pictures. (Not useful pictures, either). It's worth mentioning that the only practical way to view this gophersite as it was intended (images and all) was via a Web browser. The whole intent was to use the gopher server as a repository and presentation piece for the projects started by post-MTV Curry and his associates. Of course, Gopher sucks at this, and they eventually ditched the gopher server (probably the same time they were forced to surrender the domain to MTV), but that's not saying they didn't try.
If you continue to think of Gopher as it was when it died, you're holding onto a broken "good ole days" dream. You can't believe that Gopher would somehow have been a haven from rampant commercialism and irresponsibility in the current age of the Internet. No corner is safe -- not email, not Web, not Usenet, and certainly not Gopher, if it still did practically exist.
Had there been no Web, you can bet your breeches that we would be using Gopher for pretty much the same things -- advertisements, used junk salesmen, and Personal Gopher Sites offered by ISPs to their customers. I'm sure we would have many FreeGopher providers as well, offering users the ability to create and upload content via telnet and FTP to their very own site on the Great Global Gopher (GGG). "Altaveronica" would still flood you with pages of directory links full of useless webtools and shopping gimmicks before you could reach the query window.
I'm sorry, but you gotta get real.
It should be noted too, that the same comments people make today (or did make 4-5 years ago) about the negative effects of the Web, were said about Gopher only about five years prior.
The process doesn't stop just because the technology doesn't advance. Just be thankful your beloved memories of Gopher weren't tarnished by having an AOL gopher server.
For all the web's faults -- which aren't really the Web's, but society's -- I have to say, I'm awfully glad I'm not trying to type this comment into a TurboGopher prompt window.
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Too bad you don't seem to have email. So, I'll reply here and pretend someone reads it.
[I]s owning the masters... important...? you can always record again...
I'm not a musician or a lawyer (though I used to think I was a journalist), but the way I gather it is this: 'owning the masters' is more or less analogous to 'owning the rights to our recordings'.
It goes something like this. When most bands sign to a label, the rights to publish, release, collect royalties, etc. belong to the record co.
When someone else wants to gain permission to that copyright (for something like a remix, or a cover, or even a sample), they contact the label, NOT (necessarily) the artist; because it's the label that has the copyright and the authority to grant those rights to others.
Of course, some bands are smarter (and less desperate) than others, so they can leverage for certain things in their contracts that prevent them from being totally screwed by the record company. (Some.) But even then, if you are to say, LEAVE a record company, you break that contract, and you dont get the same benefits that you got under the contract. And -- most importantly here -- the label (typically) still owns the copyrights to the songs you recorded while you were signed to them.
(I believe that bands who switch labels need to get permission from their older labels to perform older songs -- but I'm not sure. This would explain why Metallica performs more of their older songs at their concerts than, say, Kid Rock or even the Beastie Boys.)
There's a lot of ins an outs to this, but basically, Metallica, once successful, fought their previous label in court and managed to wrest those rights from that label.
Which is, incidentally, why it's Metallica, and not some label, which is at the forefront of this fight. The labels in fact feel more confident when they are working as part of an organized group -- namely the RIAA. (Another example of the usefulness of organizing.)
And it's also why lots of artists nowadays go through the pain of forming their own labels, to try and fend off some of all this, just so they can have expressive freedom and all that.
Keith "my last record wasn't pushed for shit, so Jive Records, go and suck a fat dick [-- Kid Rock]" Tyler
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Aside from the occasional precocious 12 year old who learned BASIC (or whatever they teach kids nowadays) in his diapers -- I wasn't one of these -- most of the kids on the Internet today are, well, kids: annoying, obnoxious, random, and.. to be blunt.. dumb.
Correct me if I'm off, but: Aren't most script kiddies alleged to be 13-year-olds who can't type, and who use exploits to "prove" their environmental dominance, coerce the respect of their peers, and attempt to fit in with others?
How much better would IRC be today if it weren't for all the 12-year olds who operated fludnets?
Not to mention, how much better would your average search engine result be?
I think ICQ is onto something here, man.
Keith "when I was a kid, we didn't have the Internet, we had to dial into bulletin boards! And there was only room for one person at a time! And we had to dial into them at 1200 baud! Both ways!" Tyler
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Before the World Wide Web caught on, I initially browsed through many gopher sites. Do people still run those servers?
No[1], because the Web does everything Gopher did, and more, and better.
It would interesting to see those sites for posterity sake.
That's true, but no one's going to maintain one just for that, unless that IS why they're doing it.
I speak as the person who personally turned off the law.harvard.edu gopher server, as no one had noticed it was still running, and it hadn't logged any usage in two years. (This was in early '98.) On the one hand I was sad to destroy a small piece of history; on the other, I was happy to reclaim some cycles on the primary web server.
Kdt
[1] Well, there are probably some universities in slow-developing countries who had Internet access in circa 1994 or prior, but their national technological infrastructure hasn't advanced to the point where the Web is practical, and they still maintain their Gopher servers instead. I doubt there are very many places like that anymore, though. I would start with a search for a working Veronica server. There are still some Archie [e2][ODP] servers in existence, so I'm sure there's at least one Veronica around.
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Barring the file size limitation, I would say that this system would end up filled with two things:
- Unauthorized copies of otherwise available material (i.e. mp3 and pron).
- Rants from cranks and kooks.
On top of that, you'll get paranoid people (and kids) sending things like the bad things they said about so-and-so, or what they did at the Christmas party, or the love poem for the girl they have a crush on.Personally, I'd rather see secret CIA reports, or troop movements in Chechnya, or IRA communiques -- but you know that anonymous or not, this stuff is few and far between, compared to the literal junk that kooks, cranks, trolls, and spammers can generate.
If we can a) manage to get those who have access to sensitive material also access to such a network, and b) manage to overcome their understandable fears, then we could see some good things come out of it. But the mechanism is really the least of our problems.
And besides, if no encryption is 100% uncrackable, and no system is 100% secure, (and no cruise ship is 110% unsinkable, etc.), then it follows that no publishing system will be 100% anonymous.
(Shame.)
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had reprehensibly bad security, and poor maintenance of their domain,
etc., it seems to me that could be indicative of negligence. I don't think
we will see that not having a 24/7 ERT will qualify as being negligent,
but I wouldn't mind if being just plain irresponsible with your computing
systems and DNS and etc. could qualify.
I know that my company's mail servers are queuing up a fair amount of
D.O.A. mail due to companies that don't have the brains to set their MX
records properly. It'd be nice if we could find a way to get those
companies to make amends for that sort of thing; not just to compensate us
for unnecessary use of our resources, but also to better encourage them to
fix it and make sure they don't make stupid mistakes again.
Think about it; we can't allow every damn fool ISP and dot-com to make
stupid mistakes that have negative side effects on our own networks. The
old social mechanisms of peer scorn and of retaliatory blockading don't
work so well anymore, both mainly because there are already too many damn
fools who aren't even aware of what they're doing wrong or thatanyone else has a problem. (Many of the new-skool dot-com admins treat
old-school admins with the same snideness that jocks treated the geeks in
high school with; e.g. of being "too picky" or "too anal" about network
config issues. Or even worse, will insist that the old schoolers are the
ones breaking things.)
As for Nike, in terms of being negligent: Who is responsible for all the
traffic going to the domain nike.com? It's Nike, who is the sole
advertsier of the domain. Nike's target audience is a segment of the
population that doesn't visit web sites unless (ironically) their URL has
been advertised on TV. So the amount of traffic going to nike.com is no
accident. I expect the plaintiff will argue that Nike is therefore
accountable for where that traffic actually goes.
If my dog, for example, gets loose and chews up the neighbor's azaleas, I
can be found accountable for the damage, because I was negligible for not
keeping him secured. Likewise, Nike.com may be held accountable for the
traffic they have generated for the nike.com domain going to the wrongplace, if it turns out they didn't take sufficient measures to ensure that
their domain wouldn't be rerouted.
Yes, this could have bad side effects on the Slashdot effect. I don't have
any ideas on that one, but there are differences between being negligent
with your OWN domain and simply drawing traffic to another person's site.
(Of course, if they rule this week that hyperlinks are illegal, that won't
matter anyway.)
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IYAM,
Doesn't this qualify as a form of denial of service? Or just plain fraud (leading to personal damages)?
Let's see... If KMFDM remixes a Metallica song, KMFDM (assuming they care) had to secure rights from Metallica to make their song. The copyright of the remixed work however in its form as an audio recording, lies with KMFDM, not Metallica (though of course those common elements remain Metallica's, with KMFDM having limited rights to use them).
Therefore Metallica forced the blocking of people who hadn't violated their copyrights, but that of other people's (who may or may not have desired their works to be distributed over Napster).
There's gotta be something in that. I'm sure you're not the only person this happened to.
I wouldn't be the least surprised if the Metallica / NetPD tracking scheme picked up people for downloading files that Metallica had no rights to. I imagine when/if they go after Gnutella users, they'll be picking up people for trading the Napster BAD! video.
What recourses would a person have if, say, they were wrongfully removed from an Internet service as a result of (e.g.) an inaccurate abuse complaint? (I'm not aware if Napster requires new users to read a TOS that includes a "right to cancel at any time" clause.)
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As has been said lots of times...
Metallica is one of few bands who actually do own the rights to their "masters", the original pressings of their songs. They did have to go to court in order to get this privilege, AFAIK.
Now, they'd like you to believe that, in the years since they were able to do this, that they've done something to help other bands get these same rights, but they really haven't.
Metallica actually likes to brag about this, flaunting it in front of other garage bands which, contrary to their suggestions, will probably have a harder time than even they did, as a result of their success, at getting a hold of the same rights.
There are a few other bands, mostly rock, that I've heard of owning their masters, but I can't think of them off hand.
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the obvious proactive defense will be to use hacked clients which show you the IPs of the machines hosting the files you want.
Then there will be narcwatch.gnutella.org or some such, and hacked clients which automatically filter out DLs from IPs of known Gnutella narcs, based on an automatically DL'd narc list or query on a DNS record or something.
Nothing new under the sun, just me looking ahead a little.
(IYAM, until Freenet becomes viable, alt.binaries.* and a good feed [or a few decent ones] is still the way to go.)
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So who said the pad has to traipse across the net shouting "Look at me, I'm a pad!"?
:)
What if my pad is the GIF of the Penguin Computing ad on Slashdot? Who knows that?
Maybe my pad is the choral frames of a Metallica MP3.
Heck, if I were truly paranoid, I could use the Slashdot text headlines link as a pad. Which would only work until the next story arrives.
(And if I want to kill that pad early, I just send Rob a juicy love story involving Suse and Debian...)
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Hold on people ... you didn't read the whole thing.
.procmailrc.
The question you ask is a good one -- I've been considering the idea of giving a user some mechanism to create faux bounce messages. This ability would stop all but the most brain-dead of spam lists cold. (Even if they caught on, it would be to their detriment to ignore all bounces.)
The cleanest way would be to write a setuid root or postmaster (etc.) program that a user can run with an argument of a target address. It would then send an email to the target looking identical to a bounce, claiming nondelivery for the address of the real uid. An even better version would accept a whole email as input, grep for the headers, and thereby figure out the sender and intended recipient. This could then easily be called from your
Of course, this being setuid and all, might not be a good idea and could introduce abuse.
The other way, rather kludgy, and depending on the configyration of your ISP's mail server, would be to write a script that forges the mail itself, by connecting to the local smtp server. Even better would be a smart one that nslookup's the mx record for the source domain and connects directly. This would have to run from a shell host though -- it would be too easy to detect that you weren't really a mail server by checking you against DUN. (Imagine that -- spammers using DUN to thwart antispam!)
Of course, the truly nice solution would be to develop an SMTP server (and/or procmail hook) that spits out 550 No such user depending on sending host or address.
Who knows, though -- maybe the successor to SMTP will solve some of our contemporary email troubles.
MAIL FROM: funmlm@earthlink.com
RCPT TO: romulus@jerky.net
542 Recipient doesn't like you
:)
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According to this article, some source ports use up to three different licenses, among them the GPL. So doesn't this make it GPL'd? But what about the other licenses? Do the authors have to stick to a single license and dispose of code which is covered by another license?
Congratulations Rob, you've managed to figure out RMS's most nagging anti-(insert commercial linux dist here) arguments.
Nicely put, too -- maybe the "post first, read laters" around here will start to get it too.
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The US could then (theoretically) impose tariffs on imported operating system software. I'm not aware if US has imposed tariffs against .ca products in the past century, so this could strain relations (though so might BC's offer) a bit.
.ca, we might need to apply the tariff to all imports, which would result in the strange situation where SuSe Linux would cost disproportionately more than RedHat Linux! You might even end up with a permanent kernel branching between the US and everywhere else. Which, uh, might be bad.
Raising a percentage tariff against imported software, especially on a product as overpriced as MS, could either kill MS's success in the US, or kill it's US profits (arguably still their largest market) by forcing them to drop the price.
I'm not entirely brushed up on profits. In order to let the tariff go through without annoying
But if it were just MS vs. the world, I would be thrilled about a Windows tariff.
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Not necessarily. "Sick-outs" are fairly effective in some circles.
Besides, the publicity after a day of World Wide Where-did-it-go would be even more effective than making a big stink and risking making the news ho-hum by the time it's over.
Call it VDOS - voluntary denial of service.
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Metallica didn't *legally* go after the users.
I'd say that's only because they couldn't, or didn't know how.
Napster did state that Metallica would have to give them the id's of the users if they wanted this stopped... so Metallica did.
I don't think even Lars is clueless enough to think that Napster is directly responsible for their songs being listed. I mean... do they not realize that each ID they turned in is an actual person?
Metallica also gave fans permission to make bootleg tapes of concerts, they didn't give the fans permission to trade mpeg's of the cd's.
Which is an issue they have with the "fans" who have the MP3's, not anyone else.
There is a distinct difference between actions of differing magnitudes.
Still, a matter of muddled perspective. Say the average trader offering Metallica MP3's has an album worth of them taken say once or twice a day. That's a resonable quota for a kid in high school sharing his Metallica CD with friends who make a copy of it.
If I'm in high school and I tell my whole class that I have the new Metallica CD, and they can borrow it from me if they want, aren't I comitting the same crime at the same magnitude as the average MP3 trader?
This what they don't get. Despite their perception that the crime done via MP3 is somehow more damaging, it's not the case.
"Right now Metallica is just policing Napster's users for them."
Because Napster refused to do it themselves (according to Lars, that is).
I have a hard time believing that Metallica thinks the 'controllers' of a society are responsible for the actions of that society's members. This is heavy metal we're talking about. It would be like Metallica taking responsibility for the guy in the mosh pit who lands on his head.
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