You're doing something in a game of cards that gives you an unfair advantage so that you can win more money.
Which means the casinos are cheating doesn't it?
I mean, you are aware that they've rigged the games so that the odds are such that in the casino will win most of the time?
And presumably, given the technique you're condemning is using your brain - not looking over the dealer's shoulder, or slipping the dealer a bribe - but merely using knowledge and odds to make intelligent decisions about how much to bet and how far to go - all 21 players who do not blindly just ask for more cards and make the decision at random when to stop are "cheating"?
That's like saying "I killed someone with a portable rail gun but it's not murder because I had to really put my mind into making the gun".
No, it isn't. Murdering someone isn't a game, and someone who's the victim of a murder is unlikely to have encouraged you to believe that it is.
Wrong error. The bug here is not that a website is saying it's X when in fact it's Y, it's saying that it's X and saying Z has said it's X and Z hasn't. So I assume what's happened is you typed in "thoughtcrime.org" into your browser, it identified itself as "amazon.com" and you got the error you're describing.
Now, do the spoof as he suggests. Edit your hosts file so that www.amazon.com has www.thoughtcrime.org's IP address, ie put in the line:
66.93.78.63 www.amazon.com
into your hosts file. Where that file is depends on your system; in Unix it's in/etc, in Windows 9x it's in C:\WINDOWS (or whatever %WINDIR% is), in Windows NT it's something like C:\WINNT\System32\Drivers\etc. It's a plain text file. To confirm you've set it up right, type "ping www.amazon.com" afterwards, if it's pinging 66.93.78.63 then you're all set.
Now open your browser, and go to https://www.amazon.com/. If you don't get an error, your browser is vulnerable.
...and I can't see why nobody else has mentioned it. Battleship Potkemkin. Imagine the Odessa Steps scene ("The Odessa Staircase" and "Suddenly") in full IMAX.
Funny you should say that. The company that marketed Rabbit was called Hutchison Wampoah. It gave up, bid for a PCN licence (digital wireless in the 1800Mhz range), got it, and formed a company to run the franchise... called Orange.
So I guess with that, and with a certain hardware company pushing WiFi services, the article really is, literally, comparing Orange to Apple.
Currently GSM does do up to 56kbps, but it's up to the network to support it. GSM's design is heavily influenced by ISDN, and it supports an ISDN feature called "channel bonding" where multiple channels can be linked. The technology, when used to speed up a data connection on a GSM network to a single modem or ISDN channel, is called HSCSD, and is supported, in my experience, by a majority of modern GSM phones.
This is all without adding GPRS to the network. It's fairly cool, especially as a GSM connection to an ISDN line is close to instant, so if you're lucky enough to have an ISDN access point for your ISP, you have a very fast to connect, if expensive, way of accessing the internet.
Of course, the network has to support the feature. Many don't.
You don't, however, own the network its connecting to.
And if someone connects to the network, and the network says "Please tell me what phone you're using, so I can double check it hasn't been stolen and hence protect myself from fraud", and the person says they're using a phone that they are not using, for the network to claim that they're the victim of fraud. It might not be high fraud - it might be the idiot who changed the IMEI (I'll explain the use of the I-word in a second) - really does own the phone they're using, but they've made it impossible to use an unintrusive theft detection method, by lying and misrepresenting the hardware they're using. And that's fraud. And anyone engaging in deliberate and entirely unnecessary fraud should be prepared to suffer the well known and well publicised consequences.
An idiot? Yes. There is no value, whatsoever, in changing the IMEI. The IMEI merely identifies a phone. It is not an ESN, where the number is tied to an account, because IMEI's are a GSM feature. It is used when registering a phone with a cell transmitter, and that's the only time it ever gets used. If I were to build a GSM base station for use in my well shielded basement, I could legitimately build something that just ignored the IMEI sent by the phone entirely - it wouldn't be necessary for me to use it. So there simply is never a case where I'd have to change the IMEI, and the IMEI exists for one reason and one reason alone - preventing theft. It doesn't invade privacy - the network identifies you by the information in your SIM card, not by the IMEI number; it doesn't, in Britain, where this law is proposed, give the network some control over you - if Orange, et al, forced subscribers to use only their phones, they would lose money and would be hauled up in front of OFTEL, the Competition Commission, and quite probably the EC as well.
The fact that the phone belongs to the subscriber does not mean that they're able to make any changes they want to it, not as long as they plan to connect it to a third party network. (And if they plan to connect it to internal networks only, effing difficult in the case of a mobile in the UK, and somehow can guarantee it will never even attempt to roam on another network, the fact is they wouldn't be in any danger of being caught even if they were stupid enough to change the number.)
There is no harm in this law. There is plenty of demonstrable harm in allowing users to change IMEI numbers. This is not about people having the right to modify their own equipment, because the moment they deal with third parties, they have some responsibilities to ensure their equipment behaves according to the law of the land.
The FCC has banned ESN, the AMPS/IS-136-alike("TDMA")/IS-95-alike("CDMA") equivalent of IMEI numbers, cloning for years. This, ironically, has actually damaged the chances of AMPS derived network systems from being able to grow much in functionality because the ESN is linked to hardware and is the only "authentication" system the networks have to validate that a particular phone number is real. In GSM, the authentication is on the SIM card, not tied to the phone hardware, so this isn't an issue.
I've downloaded tools from the internet to remove the service provider locks on phones I've legally bought (these have nothing to do with the IMEI number, they're locks that prevent someone buying a phone with, say, BellSouth DCS, and then using it on a VoiceStream network), and the tools generally have the dodgy "change things like the IMEI and other things that shouldn't be changed" functionality as well as the useful bits. This is not, IMHO, a good thing...
I don't see any reason to oppose IMEI number protection laws, and see every reason to support what the British government are doing, unless service providors start preventing people from using their networks who haven't bought their "official" hardware, but given that no network makes a profit from the sales of hardware, I don't see such a foot-shooting exercise occuring any time soon. If ever.
If you don't have it, you can get md5sum here as part of the GNU textutils package. (It isn't shipped with many Unixes, including DEC Alpha Unix which I'm using right now, and thought this would be useful after finding that a Google search for "md5sum source code" was about as useful as a chocolate teapot...)
They're not trying to make a cheap buck. They're trying to pay for expensive infrastructure.
Currently eBay, Amazon, et al, pay for bandwidth to connect to anywhere in the US. This is why broadband is relatively cheap in the US, because everyone's paying their fair share. The buck stops, literally, at the US border. At that point, everyone outside of the US border has to pay all the costs of connecting to these content providers. You can imagine that the costs are astronomical when you're looking at an India-US link. They're expensive enough between, say, the UK and US.
Right now, Indian ISPs are subsidizing eBay's business model. They don't want to do that any more. I think it's pretty reasonable for them to ask companies that expect to make money from ecommerce with Indian users to pony up, or lose that business.
But that ISP will have to charge more, because it will have higher international bandwidth charges to pay. So in practice, Indian users would be back to square zero, use an affordable ISP, or pay more for "free" access to Yahoo, etc.
As an aside, I think the ISPs have a point. There's no reason why overseas ISPs, especially those in countries with lower incomes per capita, should shoulder the entire cost of connecting to US commercial entities. US ISPs don't have those levels of costs imposed on them, and Yahoo, eBay, etc, exist in order to make money from the people who connect to them. It's reasonable to suggest that they should help pay the costs. Any other outcome is essentially overseas ISPs subsidizing US businesses.
Generally I agree with the above, but note that IANA, ICANN's predecessor, was never a US Government agency. It was essentially Jon Postel, working within the limits of the RFCs as laid down by the IETF, and had no articles of incorporation of any (legal) form. To the best of my knowledge, legally, it didn't exist, its unwritten constitution being derived from consensus.
ICANN was initially a proposal of Postel as something he could hand the ropes to. He died, the governments got involved, and the current ICANN was the result.
But he's 100% correct. They don't like him. Esther Dyson admits to it here:
I probably should be very careful not to get messed up in a lawsuit. It's very unfortunate, and I would say both sides are to blame that Karl Auerbach cannot get along with them.
The board despises him, and they won't listen to his good ideas, and he has some. And so he's not productive. Look at me. The American at-large community despises me but I think I'm doing more good for At Large by working with ICANN than I would if I were out there simply criticizing them, not trying to improve them.
(my emphasis)
I recommend the interview to anyone who thinks that ICANN has a shred of legitimacy; Dyson - presumably without realising it - pretty much confirms that it's little more than a cliquish power-hungry quango with little or no redeeming features.
Re:Economic reasons to scare John Q. Public
on
What, Me Worry?
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· Score: 1
But if it's anything like the War on Drugs we'll just end up with more asteroids on collision courses with the Earth than we'd have had otherwise...
Re:A revered teacher and researcher
on
Forbes on Linux
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure he was wrong per-se, more that academic excellence and real world success are not necessarily related concepts.
The Linux kernel isn't something that'd be revered within a computer science institution. It's been built on the principle of "this works", rather than "This is how it should work." Linus took the existing 20 year old Unix monolithic kernel design and reproduced it. It's had to be substantially revised on places, most notably with the "modules" capability, to keep it scalable and there are some capabilities that are just plain difficult to get right under traditional Linux systems, such as real time functionality.
There's an ongoing debate over what consitutes the perfect kernel model, and right now for the most part the monolithic kernels are winning the hears-and-minds battle and the locked-down heavily-modular microkernel based approaches are still considered more advantageous in academia. That may change.
And it's a con. Those filters have dubious consequences for the reception of international calls, operator/calling card calls from certain payphones and/or calling cards, and calls from people who have, for legit reasons, put a permanent block on their number (victims of harassment, that kind of thing, who do not want a babysitter or guest unwittingly giving up the number.
The only sure-fire way I know of of preventing unwanted calls is to get an answerphone with a call screening capability. 99% of them have that feature. Record a short message telling people you'll pick up if they say who they are, and go from there. It works, it really is "Caller ID" (since when is a telephone number the id of a caller?), it is the least invasive to other people's privacy and the most effective in preventing the invasion of yours.
Oh, and you don't have to pay the phone company a penny for using one.
1. Unix.org was a legitimate site. There's no suggestion anywhere that they were trying to sell the site to Unix.com.
2. Trademarks are only relevent if there is a chance someone would confuse the two sites. It's a.org. UNIX.com obviously needs to go to the commercial trademark owner..org doesn't, nobody would expect it to, and this is an abuse of the system.
3. Thanks to people like you ("I use(d) to work for a cybersquatter") these kinds of idiotic mindless rules go unchallenged because you created a problem that people feel has to be dealt with. Rather than justify WIPO's inane and perverse (no, it didn't follow their standard rules) decision, the least you could do is apologise for your part in this.
I'm planning to cancel myself, I just have to wait for a few orders I'm waiting for to go through and then it's bye-bye Crapital One.
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89853 is the Bugzilla note on this. I recommend "vote"ing for it, as it will add numbers to the Mozilla's teams pleas to Capital One et al to stop this kind of practice.
FWIW, I did propose an Ask Slashdot immediately after Mozilla 1.0 was along the lines of "Which bank should I switch to given Capital One doesn't support Mozilla", which would have been a great thing to send a link of to their support people. I suspect the editors were a little worried about all the complaints of how Mozilla was coming up in every news article though. I may propose such a thing again.
The patents concerning Freon ran out in the late sixties. It wasn't until 5-10 years later that concerns about Freon became widespread, and 20 years later until the shit really hit the fan and countries all over the world banned it.
DuPont might have wanted to do what you're suggesting. But if it was a giant conspiracy by them, they certainly cocked it up. 20 years for a marketing strategy like that certainly sucks lemons.
Freon was banned after it was convincingly proven that it did perform the chemical reactions claimed by those concerned by it, and that the ozone layer was massively depleted.
No, it's because someone (whose name I forget, I'll have to look it up when I get home, but I don't recall any connection with DuPoint, and DuPont's patents would have already have run out by that point) developed the theory in the mid-seventies that as freon breaks up under UV light, and as there's lots of UV light in the ozone layer (by definition, that's the layer that blocks it) and ozone is very reactive, especially under UV, there was quite a good probability that the chlorine in it would come apart, react with the ozone, creating something else and resulting in a depletion of ozone.
This is a very logical explanation, and meant a lot of research was done into finding out if the ozone layer really was depleting. Lo and behold, checks on the areas above the poles revealed a massive reduction in the following decade.
I have a book of essays by one Isaac Asimov dating back to 1976, The Planet That Wasn't, which includes three chapters on ozone: it's discovery, it's importance in terms of how it made life on land possible, and, finally, a whole chapter on freon, what a fantastic substance it is (and it was), and ending on an explanation of how it might have one little flaw... with a comment to the effect of "It might be wise to reduce our usage of freon now rather than face a panic stop in ten years time."
It's excellent and explains in terms even a politician could understand what the chemical processes involved are and it's head-slappingly-and-saying-of-course! convincing without being alarmist. But Asimov never was an alarmist or luddite, and his chapter on freon is positively enthusiastic about the stuff, which under normal circumstances is as toxic as nitrogen (ie not), highly compressable without high forces, and a good heat conductor, until the ending when he points out its suseptability to breakdown under UV.
The book is still available, used, from Amazon's marketplace resellers. I recommend it.
Try the GPL quiz here. What you're writing is what I thought too, until I took it.
The provision of source code regardless of whether someone purchases the binaries or receives them for free is not optional - as long as you release copies publically, you must provide the source code for no more than a nominal copying/mail fee. This is covered in the GPL faq:
What does this "written offer valid for any third party" mean? Does that mean everyone in the world can get the source to any GPL'ed program no matter what?
"Valid for any third party" means that anyone who has the offer is entitled to take you up on it.
If you commercially distribute binaries not accompanied with source code, the GPL says you must provide a written offer to distribute the source code later. When users non-commercially redistribute the binaries they received from you, they must pass along a copy of this written offer. This means that people who did not get the binaries directly from you can still receive copies of the source code, along with the written offer.
The reason we require the offer to be valid for any third party is so that people who receive the binaries indirectly in that way can order the source code from you.
That's tortourous English, which is probably one of the reasons why the quiz asks the same questions.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, you are aware that they've rigged the games so that the odds are such that in the casino will win most of the time?
And presumably, given the technique you're condemning is using your brain - not looking over the dealer's shoulder, or slipping the dealer a bribe - but merely using knowledge and odds to make intelligent decisions about how much to bet and how far to go - all 21 players who do not blindly just ask for more cards and make the decision at random when to stop are "cheating"?
No, it isn't. Murdering someone isn't a game, and someone who's the victim of a murder is unlikely to have encouraged you to believe that it is.I'll get my coat.
Now, do the spoof as he suggests. Edit your hosts file so that www.amazon.com has www.thoughtcrime.org's IP address, ie put in the line: 66.93.78.63 www.amazon.com into your hosts file. Where that file is depends on your system; in Unix it's in /etc, in Windows 9x it's in C:\WINDOWS (or whatever %WINDIR% is), in Windows NT it's something like C:\WINNT\System32\Drivers\etc. It's a plain text file. To confirm you've set it up right, type "ping www.amazon.com" afterwards, if it's pinging 66.93.78.63 then you're all set.
Now open your browser, and go to https://www.amazon.com/. If you don't get an error, your browser is vulnerable.
No, no! They left to get away from Bill Thompson!
Awesome...
and the commutes/blender part would mean...?
Thank yew! You've been a great audience!
So I guess with that, and with a certain hardware company pushing WiFi services, the article really is, literally, comparing Orange to Apple.
This is all without adding GPRS to the network. It's fairly cool, especially as a GSM connection to an ISDN line is close to instant, so if you're lucky enough to have an ISDN access point for your ISP, you have a very fast to connect, if expensive, way of accessing the internet.
Of course, the network has to support the feature. Many don't.
And if someone connects to the network, and the network says "Please tell me what phone you're using, so I can double check it hasn't been stolen and hence protect myself from fraud", and the person says they're using a phone that they are not using, for the network to claim that they're the victim of fraud. It might not be high fraud - it might be the idiot who changed the IMEI (I'll explain the use of the I-word in a second) - really does own the phone they're using, but they've made it impossible to use an unintrusive theft detection method, by lying and misrepresenting the hardware they're using. And that's fraud. And anyone engaging in deliberate and entirely unnecessary fraud should be prepared to suffer the well known and well publicised consequences.
An idiot? Yes. There is no value, whatsoever, in changing the IMEI. The IMEI merely identifies a phone. It is not an ESN, where the number is tied to an account, because IMEI's are a GSM feature. It is used when registering a phone with a cell transmitter, and that's the only time it ever gets used. If I were to build a GSM base station for use in my well shielded basement, I could legitimately build something that just ignored the IMEI sent by the phone entirely - it wouldn't be necessary for me to use it. So there simply is never a case where I'd have to change the IMEI, and the IMEI exists for one reason and one reason alone - preventing theft. It doesn't invade privacy - the network identifies you by the information in your SIM card, not by the IMEI number; it doesn't, in Britain, where this law is proposed, give the network some control over you - if Orange, et al, forced subscribers to use only their phones, they would lose money and would be hauled up in front of OFTEL, the Competition Commission, and quite probably the EC as well.
The fact that the phone belongs to the subscriber does not mean that they're able to make any changes they want to it, not as long as they plan to connect it to a third party network. (And if they plan to connect it to internal networks only, effing difficult in the case of a mobile in the UK, and somehow can guarantee it will never even attempt to roam on another network, the fact is they wouldn't be in any danger of being caught even if they were stupid enough to change the number.)
There is no harm in this law. There is plenty of demonstrable harm in allowing users to change IMEI numbers. This is not about people having the right to modify their own equipment, because the moment they deal with third parties, they have some responsibilities to ensure their equipment behaves according to the law of the land.
I hate it when that happens *grin*
I've downloaded tools from the internet to remove the service provider locks on phones I've legally bought (these have nothing to do with the IMEI number, they're locks that prevent someone buying a phone with, say, BellSouth DCS, and then using it on a VoiceStream network), and the tools generally have the dodgy "change things like the IMEI and other things that shouldn't be changed" functionality as well as the useful bits. This is not, IMHO, a good thing...
I don't see any reason to oppose IMEI number protection laws, and see every reason to support what the British government are doing, unless service providors start preventing people from using their networks who haven't bought their "official" hardware, but given that no network makes a profit from the sales of hardware, I don't see such a foot-shooting exercise occuring any time soon. If ever.
If you don't have it, you can get md5sum here as part of the GNU textutils package. (It isn't shipped with many Unixes, including DEC Alpha Unix which I'm using right now, and thought this would be useful after finding that a Google search for "md5sum source code" was about as useful as a chocolate teapot...)
Currently eBay, Amazon, et al, pay for bandwidth to connect to anywhere in the US. This is why broadband is relatively cheap in the US, because everyone's paying their fair share. The buck stops, literally, at the US border. At that point, everyone outside of the US border has to pay all the costs of connecting to these content providers. You can imagine that the costs are astronomical when you're looking at an India-US link. They're expensive enough between, say, the UK and US.
Right now, Indian ISPs are subsidizing eBay's business model. They don't want to do that any more. I think it's pretty reasonable for them to ask companies that expect to make money from ecommerce with Indian users to pony up, or lose that business.
As an aside, I think the ISPs have a point. There's no reason why overseas ISPs, especially those in countries with lower incomes per capita, should shoulder the entire cost of connecting to US commercial entities. US ISPs don't have those levels of costs imposed on them, and Yahoo, eBay, etc, exist in order to make money from the people who connect to them. It's reasonable to suggest that they should help pay the costs. Any other outcome is essentially overseas ISPs subsidizing US businesses.
ICANN was initially a proposal of Postel as something he could hand the ropes to. He died, the governments got involved, and the current ICANN was the result.
I recommend the interview to anyone who thinks that ICANN has a shred of legitimacy; Dyson - presumably without realising it - pretty much confirms that it's little more than a cliquish power-hungry quango with little or no redeeming features.
But if it's anything like the War on Drugs we'll just end up with more asteroids on collision courses with the Earth than we'd have had otherwise...
The Linux kernel isn't something that'd be revered within a computer science institution. It's been built on the principle of "this works", rather than "This is how it should work." Linus took the existing 20 year old Unix monolithic kernel design and reproduced it. It's had to be substantially revised on places, most notably with the "modules" capability, to keep it scalable and there are some capabilities that are just plain difficult to get right under traditional Linux systems, such as real time functionality.
There's an ongoing debate over what consitutes the perfect kernel model, and right now for the most part the monolithic kernels are winning the hears-and-minds battle and the locked-down heavily-modular microkernel based approaches are still considered more advantageous in academia. That may change.
The only sure-fire way I know of of preventing unwanted calls is to get an answerphone with a call screening capability. 99% of them have that feature. Record a short message telling people you'll pick up if they say who they are, and go from there. It works, it really is "Caller ID" (since when is a telephone number the id of a caller?), it is the least invasive to other people's privacy and the most effective in preventing the invasion of yours.
Oh, and you don't have to pay the phone company a penny for using one.
2. Trademarks are only relevent if there is a chance someone would confuse the two sites. It's a .org. UNIX.com obviously needs to go to the commercial trademark owner. .org doesn't, nobody would expect it to, and this is an abuse of the system.
3. Thanks to people like you ("I use(d) to work for a cybersquatter") these kinds of idiotic mindless rules go unchallenged because you created a problem that people feel has to be dealt with. Rather than justify WIPO's inane and perverse (no, it didn't follow their standard rules) decision, the least you could do is apologise for your part in this.
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89853 is the Bugzilla note on this. I recommend "vote"ing for it, as it will add numbers to the Mozilla's teams pleas to Capital One et al to stop this kind of practice.
FWIW, I did propose an Ask Slashdot immediately after Mozilla 1.0 was along the lines of "Which bank should I switch to given Capital One doesn't support Mozilla", which would have been a great thing to send a link of to their support people. I suspect the editors were a little worried about all the complaints of how Mozilla was coming up in every news article though. I may propose such a thing again.
DuPont might have wanted to do what you're suggesting. But if it was a giant conspiracy by them, they certainly cocked it up. 20 years for a marketing strategy like that certainly sucks lemons.
Freon was banned after it was convincingly proven that it did perform the chemical reactions claimed by those concerned by it, and that the ozone layer was massively depleted.
This is a very logical explanation, and meant a lot of research was done into finding out if the ozone layer really was depleting. Lo and behold, checks on the areas above the poles revealed a massive reduction in the following decade.
I have a book of essays by one Isaac Asimov dating back to 1976, The Planet That Wasn't, which includes three chapters on ozone: it's discovery, it's importance in terms of how it made life on land possible, and, finally, a whole chapter on freon, what a fantastic substance it is (and it was), and ending on an explanation of how it might have one little flaw... with a comment to the effect of "It might be wise to reduce our usage of freon now rather than face a panic stop in ten years time."
It's excellent and explains in terms even a politician could understand what the chemical processes involved are and it's head-slappingly-and-saying-of-course! convincing without being alarmist. But Asimov never was an alarmist or luddite, and his chapter on freon is positively enthusiastic about the stuff, which under normal circumstances is as toxic as nitrogen (ie not), highly compressable without high forces, and a good heat conductor, until the ending when he points out its suseptability to breakdown under UV.
The book is still available, used, from Amazon's marketplace resellers. I recommend it.
The provision of source code regardless of whether someone purchases the binaries or receives them for free is not optional - as long as you release copies publically, you must provide the source code for no more than a nominal copying/mail fee. This is covered in the GPL faq:
That's tortourous English, which is probably one of the reasons why the quiz asks the same questions.