Taking Schneier and Ellison's essay as an indictment of SSL as a "scam" is a complete misinterpretation of the essay and (to my knowledge) as misrepresentation of Schneier's opinions on public key cryptography.
The essay asks Ten Important Questions and attempts to explore each one with some depth. These are not necessarily obvious issues; you might not think of them unless you spent some serious time pondering the ramifications of Trusted Third Parties (TTP) and Public Key Infrastructures (PKI). If you read the essay and consider it carefully, you will realize that using PKI to realize a TTP electronically has some pitfalls and while these may be addressed, it is labor-intensive (read: not cheap).
A lot of the posts on this story have been predictably dismissive of the issues laid out in Schneier and Ellison's essay. Part of the reason for this attitude is that some of these issues seem contrived or academic until you are in a situation where there are serious consequences for getting them wrong.
To borrow an example from the field of US law, consider the case of Colin Ferguson. Ferguson shot and killed several commuters before being wrestled to the ground when he ran out of ammo. When the police arrived, the witnesses probably said,"This guy shot some people," not,"This guy allegedly shot some people!" The next day, millions of break-room conversations no doubt mentioned "The guy who shot all those people on the train," not,"The guy who allegedly shot all those people on the train."
Why shouldn't they? After all, barring supernatural circumstances, there wasn't really any doubt that Mr. Ferguson has commited the crimes of which he was accused, yet any attorney or responsible news organization would have carefully referred to Mr. Ferguson as "the alleged attacker" until the point at which he was found guilty. In the US, people are legally considered innocent until found guilty in a court of law, and people who are responsible for maintaining this system (lawyers, legislators, judges, and to some extent, the media) will (or should) assiduously use the term "alleged" until a conviction is obtained; in the case of Colin Ferguson, this detail seemed absurd, but like many of the "overblown" details of PKI, and TTP, there are important issues at stake (just wait until you are accused of a crime you didn't commit!).
Now that you are thinking about that, how would you feel about a witness affadavid(sp?) that was validated only with a digital signature, rather than in-person testimony. Nervous? You should be. (Don't panic, this would probably be a violation of your VIth Amendment right to face your accuser.)
It should be little wonder that the boilerplate "Certification Practice Statement" (CPS), that any Certificate Authority (CA) should have, was drafted by the American Bar Association (the professional assocation of American lawyers).
What the referenced essay was trying to do was not to trivialize or malign PKI, but the highlight the issues that ultimately make it expensive to do PKIs and TTPs correctly. Before you run out, download OpenSSL and start cutting some free certificates, you should really understand why paying US$1000 for the same cryptography might be worth the money when this is something valuable at stake.
Artemis, although a pure Java application, has separate Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX versions. Great platform independence there.
Do you know why this is the case? It may be simply a different set of installs. If I make a Debian package and a RedHat RPM of the same code does that mean that Debian and RedHat aren't proper Linux platforms? Does that mean that the binary itself doesn't run, unmodified on both distros? Does that mean you can't download the source, build it, and install it yourself on your own favorite distro? Things can be so confusing if you are clueless, I guess.
Artemis is slow, and unstable. You might say, well that's the fault of the authors -- except -- when it dies, it dies with errors coming from Java's own interface classes, suggesting that Java, and not the application itself is at fault.
What do you mean "errors coming from Java's own interface classes"? You are correct, that statement doesn't mean anything. Obviously, you don't know how to read a Java stack trace. NullPointerExceptions are frequently the result of poorly-written Java code. For all you know, the Java interface classes are attempting to notify the application code that they have been called improperly. The same idiots who can't check their own parameters probably aren't catching their Exceptions.
What about C/C++? The worst application I can name is Netscape Navigator. When that POS crashes, it sometimes takes out my entire X server. I'll bet you couldn't do that with a Java program if you spent the rest of your life trying.
if shown an example of a speedy, stable, large Java application that actually exists and is not vapor, I could change my mind
Anyone get this to run on Linux? I get an Exception and then it seems to hang. The tree that is unzipped from the download suggests that the author wrote it assuming a case-independent file system!
Java *is* slow, unstable as all hell, and not nearly as platform independant as claimed.
Since when?
Corel Java Office
Oh, since 1996. Nice to see the the anti-Java crowd is staying current so they don't look like foaming at the mouth idiots.
When COJ was written, Enlightenment didn't exists. Why do I bring this up? Well, how would the Slashdot community respond to reviews of a Debian release of the same vintage as COJ? The reviewer would cite it as impossible to use, somewhat buggy, lacking in any useful applications (except Apache) and offering almost no support for popular hardware. Of course, this moronic reviewer would be roasted alive for failing to obtain and rate the latest and greatest distribution.
Still, someone who saw a slow Java application in 1996 feels empowered to trash Java's current state.
I'd like to combine this recommendation with the other high-rated recommendation about design.
Many "web languages" are page-centric. PHP, and ASP are like this. Other "web languages" take application languages and tie them to a page-centric mode. Mod-perl does with as does ASP+COM. For a lot applications, this isn't really a problem because the application flow maps nicely to the page flow. When the application does things which can be presented on a web page, but whose behavior is not easily modelled in a page-view manner, then you start to see kludgy implementations.
Java allows you to code in a manner appropriate to the part of the problem you are solving. If you have, for example, a game-play engine that runs in the background, you can easily spawn a Thread for it that will run just like any other Java Thread without any limitations due to being a "web program."
This allows a design where the game engine is nicely abstracted and isolated from the front end. This also makes it easier to have a team of people in charge of making the game cool for users and another team making the gameplay itself cool.
On a side note, EJB's can impose a lot of infrastructure and programming overhead that's unecessary if you don't need the services of a full-blown Component Transaction Monitor. You can frequently do what you want by using regular Java classes or Java RMI.
Voxeo has an "open source" VXML application community. You can get a dial-in number on their VXML for free and point it to your web server. Then they have a bunch of open source code you can start using to being developing IVR apps right away.
If you want to take your app commercial, you can purchase time on an 800 number. Number are available in the Bay Area, New Jersey and Chicago. These are cool guys -- I met them when they "left stealth mode" at the Pulver Voice Over Network developers conference in January.
A frequent gripe on Slashdot concerns the fact that "entry level" coders are often deprived of the respect they're deserved. There have always been young people with extra skill and ambition and in the age of Open Source, they now have access to "real" systems as well. The "hobby" project some kid worked on last summer may be running on your corporate server right now. Given this, 20-something hackers are asking to be granted some credit.
A frequent gripe on Slashdot concerns the fact that "entry level" coders are often deprived of the respect they're deserved. There have always been young people with extra skill and ambition
and in the age of Open Source, they now have access to "real" systems as well. The "hobby" project some kid worked on last summer may be running on your corporate server right now.
Given this, 20-something hackers are asking to be granted some credit.
A frequent gripe on Slashdot concerns the fact that "entry level" coders are often deprived of the respect they're deserved. There have always been young people with extra skill and ambition and in the age of Open Source, they now have access to "real" systems as well. The "hobby" project some kid worked on last summer may be running on your corporate server right now. Given this, 20-something hackers are asking to be granted some credit.
Well, fuck 'em. I'm not interviewing anyone under 25.
My company does not have a foosball table. We do not give everyone a state-of-the-art laptop and a top-of-the-line desktop machine. We don't have frequent scheduled "team building" junkets. And finally, we will not pay you what Viant paid you for six months before they laid you off. I'm not wasting my time interviewing another "bright kid" only to find them shocked and dismayed that we aren't throwing cash and prizes at them.
We do offer the opportunity to work in Perl and Java coding next-generation telecommunications products. We are open-source friendly, if not a bit zealous. We value ingenuity and innovation, not buzzwords and technopolitics. We are only one or two quarters away from being the first company to be profitable in our market space, so our stock options will actually be worth something when they vest. Unfortunately, anyone who wasn't in the job market before 1998 doesn't understand that not all jobs are cool and doesn't believe that stock options will ever make them money.
I'm all about living in castles in the sky; I just know you have to build them first. If you're still looking for VCs to buy one for you, then get the fuck out of my resume inbox.
Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. try to reach out to people and say: "Here, these are our religious documents. Use them and you'll be a better person." And if people disagree, they don't sue them for doing so, they just label them an non-believer of that religion.
Yes.
Then, as history teaches us, the next step is usually to kill the non-believer. I have no doubt that the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, for example, would have greatly preferred to be sued.
The fact is that you can sling mud at any organization of believers whether it's Scientologist, Baptists or even Atheists (I'm sure some atheiests have committed an atrocity in the name of atheism at some point in history.) Another fact is that Scientologies oddball practices of "auditting" and so forth does actually accomplish something. It can effectively train you not to respond emotionally to situations. It may not be the best method for achieving this kind of self-control, but some people really need this discipline (observably, many of them post to Slashdot), and Scientology might actually help those people.
Also, if an organization wants to copyright their material or mark it as a trade secret, that's their business. The Mormons and the Vatican, notably, have lots of secret doctrine and nobody freaks out about it on Slashdot. Nobody rants endlessly because the Urantia Foundation holds a copyright on the Urantia Book (another Third Testament of the Bible that came out in the early 1900's, in case you're not keeping up.)
No doubt this discussion is going to degenerate into a sectarian He sayeth/She sayeth/It sayeth flame war, but the point I'm trying to make is that making categorical statements about religion and trying to sort religions into "acceptable faiths" and "evil cults" is just a waste of bandwidth.
Believe what you want and shut up. I believe I'll have another beer.
Scalability. Open-source databases, in general, haven't endured the real-world conditions that Oracle, DB2 and MS-SQL have. If I compile Postgres for an RS-6000 it should kick ass; but will it? How much will it cost me to find out that it can't hack it? When we're talking about that kind of performance, we're talking about mission critical apps. As far as MS-SQL goes, the scalability issues are that it only runs on Intel hardware (where are you going to go today if that's not fast enough?) and it eats resources at a much higher rate than competing solutions.
Compatability.Hopefully, you are not in this situation, but a lot of application only "work" with one database or another. Even APIs such as JDBC that offer cross-platform portability can't port your stored proceedures. If you are starting from scratch, you can avoid or mitigate such portability issues, but if you need to integrate with some other COTS, you will probably end up with a narrow list of DB's it "works" with. Chances are, MySQL won't be on the list.
All tools have limitations. Ideally those limitations are encountered when one begins to step outside the realm the tool was designed for. One of the joys of hacking is stretching the boundaries of that realm. This could mean obscure hacks such as porting a video game to a digital camera or useful hacks, such as turning a hypertext delivery system into an application platform.
When all you have is a hammer, everything may look like a nail, but it isn't reasonable to expect that you can play a CD, cook a grilled cheese sandwich or mow the law by smashing it with a hammer just because it's the tool you thought to use.
If a developer want to make anything resonable (like a scroll list with 1000 items sorted by date), he should not be prevented because the toolkit implementors are using o(N^2) algorithms.
According to this "logic," if I want to use email as a transport for real-time streaming media, it's the fault of implementors of sendmail who are responsible for it not working?
If law enforcement wants technical knowledge that would help them do their job, they have to buy it from the same group of people that built the infrastructure that allows us to copy information.
So what your saying, if I understand correctly, is that hackers/coders/geeks should close ranks like a jealous preisthood and cut off access to the knowledge that would allow the law enforcement community to understand or control technology.
I hate to break it to you, but there's already something in place that will make witholding this kind of information impossible. It's called The Open Source Movement. Maybe you should look into it.
I guess modern dance isn't art, as many people don't "get it".
I never said anything that would imply this. Modern dance may not be widely appreciated, but many people who do appreciate it can't dance to save their lives (I happen to be one of these people).
Frequently programmers conflict with PHB's who don't understand the creative nature of programming. That said, this "is programming art" discussion looks like an attempt by people who have centered their entire life on a single pursuit to elevate that pursuit and give it wider implications, just to enrich their egos.
Oh puh-leez. This is really just a "Programmers: Are we cool or what?" dicusssion. Yeah, programming is cool, but real art appeals to people who aren't artists. If you want to be an artist be an artist. If your self-esteem needs proping up, get therapy.
Any guesses as to what this newsgroup contains? If you're baffled, you are supposed to be. soc.motss was the first USENET forum for homosexuals. "motss" stands for "Members Of The Same Sex." The people who created this forum in the 80's felt that soc.gays or soc.homosexual would make the newsgroup too visible to online gaybashers. It wasn't an attempt to hide in the USENET closet -- the forum was publically accessable to all -- just an attempt to avoid bigots looking for someone to harrass.
Anyway, after reading a zillion posts from people who've probably never even used NNTP claiming that "it's obvious what's in alt.picture.erotica.children," I had to comment. Sure, that newsgroup is easy to spot, but anyone can create an alt group if they want to. Would an ISP block alt.asdf.jk.hasd? I mean, would you even have time to find out what the hell was in it?
If the AG had asked, BuffNET would have cut off the newsgroup.
Uh... that doesn't work either. Let me 'splain.
When an NNTP gets a feed for all of the Newsgroups is subscribes to, it gets all of the messages that exist in any of those groups, including messages crossposted to other groups.
For example, a few years ago, I had a UUCP node and my upstream node would give me all of the "clean" heirarchys such as soc.*, rec.*, comp.* and so forth, but only hand-picked alt.* groups. The sysadmin refused to give me alt.drugs because he disapproved of it. He was doing me a huge favor giving me the UUCP feed, so I didn't make a fuss about it.
Anyway, I ended up subscribing to some groups that I could get, like soc.college that occaisionally had cross-postings from alt.drugs. When a discussion was cross-posted like this, it would end up getting into my feed. Of course, posts in this example should have had to do with recreational drugs and college social life, not just recreational drugs, so a lot of material was filtered out.
A year or so after I switched to a different feed, the newsgroup rec.drugs was finally approved amongst much controversy.
Anyway, if the ISP cuts off alt.porn.kids, then they still may end up with content from that group if (as many alt spammers do), there are cross-posts to similar groups such as alt.porn.very-young (these are not real groups AFAIK).
Slashdot Mirror
The essay asks Ten Important Questions and attempts to explore each one with some depth. These are not necessarily obvious issues; you might not think of them unless you spent some serious time pondering the ramifications of Trusted Third Parties (TTP) and Public Key Infrastructures (PKI). If you read the essay and consider it carefully, you will realize that using PKI to realize a TTP electronically has some pitfalls and while these may be addressed, it is labor-intensive (read: not cheap).
A lot of the posts on this story have been predictably dismissive of the issues laid out in Schneier and Ellison's essay. Part of the reason for this attitude is that some of these issues seem contrived or academic until you are in a situation where there are serious consequences for getting them wrong.
To borrow an example from the field of US law, consider the case of Colin Ferguson. Ferguson shot and killed several commuters before being wrestled to the ground when he ran out of ammo. When the police arrived, the witnesses probably said,"This guy shot some people," not,"This guy allegedly shot some people!" The next day, millions of break-room conversations no doubt mentioned "The guy who shot all those people on the train," not,"The guy who allegedly shot all those people on the train."
Why shouldn't they? After all, barring supernatural circumstances, there wasn't really any doubt that Mr. Ferguson has commited the crimes of which he was accused, yet any attorney or responsible news organization would have carefully referred to Mr. Ferguson as "the alleged attacker" until the point at which he was found guilty. In the US, people are legally considered innocent until found guilty in a court of law, and people who are responsible for maintaining this system (lawyers, legislators, judges, and to some extent, the media) will (or should) assiduously use the term "alleged" until a conviction is obtained; in the case of Colin Ferguson, this detail seemed absurd, but like many of the "overblown" details of PKI, and TTP, there are important issues at stake (just wait until you are accused of a crime you didn't commit!).
Now that you are thinking about that, how would you feel about a witness affadavid(sp?) that was validated only with a digital signature, rather than in-person testimony. Nervous? You should be. (Don't panic, this would probably be a violation of your VIth Amendment right to face your accuser.)
It should be little wonder that the boilerplate "Certification Practice Statement" (CPS), that any Certificate Authority (CA) should have, was drafted by the American Bar Association (the professional assocation of American lawyers).
What the referenced essay was trying to do was not to trivialize or malign PKI, but the highlight the issues that ultimately make it expensive to do PKIs and TTPs correctly. Before you run out, download OpenSSL and start cutting some free certificates, you should really understand why paying US$1000 for the same cryptography might be worth the money when this is something valuable at stake.
- Artemis, although a pure Java application, has separate Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX versions. Great platform independence there.
Do you know why this is the case? It may be simply a different set of installs. If I make a Debian package and a RedHat RPM of the same code does that mean that Debian and RedHat aren't proper Linux platforms? Does that mean that the binary itself doesn't run, unmodified on both distros? Does that mean you can't download the source, build it, and install it yourself on your own favorite distro? Things can be so confusing if you are clueless, I guess.- Artemis is slow, and unstable. You might say, well that's the fault of the authors -- except -- when it dies, it dies with errors coming from Java's own interface classes, suggesting that Java, and not the application itself is at fault.
What do you mean "errors coming from Java's own interface classes"? You are correct, that statement doesn't mean anything. Obviously, you don't know how to read a Java stack trace. NullPointerExceptions are frequently the result of poorly-written Java code. For all you know, the Java interface classes are attempting to notify the application code that they have been called improperly. The same idiots who can't check their own parameters probably aren't catching their Exceptions.What about C/C++? The worst application I can name is Netscape Navigator. When that POS crashes, it sometimes takes out my entire X server. I'll bet you couldn't do that with a Java program if you spent the rest of your life trying.
- if shown an example of a speedy, stable, large Java application that actually exists and is not vapor, I could change my mind
How about Apache Tomcat?Say it ain't so...
- Java *is* slow, unstable as all hell, and not nearly as platform independant as claimed.
Since when?- Corel Java Office
Oh, since 1996. Nice to see the the anti-Java crowd is staying current so they don't look like foaming at the mouth idiots.When COJ was written, Enlightenment didn't exists. Why do I bring this up? Well, how would the Slashdot community respond to reviews of a Debian release of the same vintage as COJ? The reviewer would cite it as impossible to use, somewhat buggy, lacking in any useful applications (except Apache) and offering almost no support for popular hardware. Of course, this moronic reviewer would be roasted alive for failing to obtain and rate the latest and greatest distribution.
Still, someone who saw a slow Java application in 1996 feels empowered to trash Java's current state.
Amazing.
- If the government had control over the internet, it would be quite a censored, wiretapped shithole, instead of the neutral ground that it is today.
Um, for most of the Internet's existence, it has been under government control. It was considerably cooler in many ways before it was privatized.- I *certianly* don't think it will be destroyed... not today, not tomorrow, not ever.
Yeah, we used to laugh at the people who predicted the death of USENET.And then it died.
Thx for the clarification.
Many "web languages" are page-centric. PHP, and ASP are like this. Other "web languages" take application languages and tie them to a page-centric mode. Mod-perl does with as does ASP+COM. For a lot applications, this isn't really a problem because the application flow maps nicely to the page flow. When the application does things which can be presented on a web page, but whose behavior is not easily modelled in a page-view manner, then you start to see kludgy implementations.
Java allows you to code in a manner appropriate to the part of the problem you are solving. If you have, for example, a game-play engine that runs in the background, you can easily spawn a Thread for it that will run just like any other Java Thread without any limitations due to being a "web program."
This allows a design where the game engine is nicely abstracted and isolated from the front end. This also makes it easier to have a team of people in charge of making the game cool for users and another team making the gameplay itself cool.
On a side note, EJB's can impose a lot of infrastructure and programming overhead that's unecessary if you don't need the services of a full-blown Component Transaction Monitor. You can frequently do what you want by using regular Java classes or Java RMI.
Zero
If you want to take your app commercial, you can purchase time on an 800 number. Number are available in the Bay Area, New Jersey and Chicago. These are cool guys -- I met them when they "left stealth mode" at the Pulver Voice Over Network developers conference in January.
The qualifications start with "college degree (or equivalent experience)" and "5 years industry experience."
If you have that by 24, you're hired.
But no foosball table!
A frequent gripe on Slashdot concerns the fact that "entry level" coders are often deprived of the respect they're deserved. There have always been young people with extra skill and ambition and in the age of Open Source, they now have access to "real" systems as well. The "hobby" project some kid worked on last summer may be running on your corporate server right now. Given this, 20-something hackers are asking to be granted some credit.
A frequent gripe on Slashdot concerns the fact that "entry level" coders are often deprived of the respect they're deserved. There have always been young people with extra skill and ambition and in the age of Open Source, they now have access to "real" systems as well. The "hobby" project some kid worked on last summer may be running on your corporate server right now. Given this, 20-something hackers are asking to be granted some credit.
Well, fuck 'em. I'm not interviewing anyone under 25.
My company does not have a foosball table. We do not give everyone a state-of-the-art laptop and a top-of-the-line desktop machine. We don't have frequent scheduled "team building" junkets. And finally, we will not pay you what Viant paid you for six months before they laid you off. I'm not wasting my time interviewing another "bright kid" only to find them shocked and dismayed that we aren't throwing cash and prizes at them.
We do offer the opportunity to work in Perl and Java coding next-generation telecommunications products. We are open-source friendly, if not a bit zealous. We value ingenuity and innovation, not buzzwords and technopolitics. We are only one or two quarters away from being the first company to be profitable in our market space, so our stock options will actually be worth something when they vest. Unfortunately, anyone who wasn't in the job market before 1998 doesn't understand that not all jobs are cool and doesn't believe that stock options will ever make them money.
I'm all about living in castles in the sky; I just know you have to build them first. If you're still looking for VCs to buy one for you, then get the fuck out of my resume inbox.
- Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. try to reach out to people and say: "Here, these are our religious documents. Use them and you'll be a better person." And if people disagree, they don't sue them for doing so, they just label them an non-believer of that religion.
Yes.Then, as history teaches us, the next step is usually to kill the non-believer. I have no doubt that the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, for example, would have greatly preferred to be sued.
The fact is that you can sling mud at any organization of believers whether it's Scientologist, Baptists or even Atheists (I'm sure some atheiests have committed an atrocity in the name of atheism at some point in history.) Another fact is that Scientologies oddball practices of "auditting" and so forth does actually accomplish something. It can effectively train you not to respond emotionally to situations. It may not be the best method for achieving this kind of self-control, but some people really need this discipline (observably, many of them post to Slashdot), and Scientology might actually help those people.
Also, if an organization wants to copyright their material or mark it as a trade secret, that's their business. The Mormons and the Vatican, notably, have lots of secret doctrine and nobody freaks out about it on Slashdot. Nobody rants endlessly because the Urantia Foundation holds a copyright on the Urantia Book (another Third Testament of the Bible that came out in the early 1900's, in case you're not keeping up.)
No doubt this discussion is going to degenerate into a sectarian He sayeth/She sayeth/It sayeth flame war, but the point I'm trying to make is that making categorical statements about religion and trying to sort religions into "acceptable faiths" and "evil cults" is just a waste of bandwidth.
Believe what you want and shut up. I believe I'll have another beer.
- Intel Only? Umm I have it on a Sparc Right now.
You have Windows 2000 with MS-SQL 2000 running on a sparc? Or do you have some back-reved version of NT and MS-SQL that will never be updated?Thought so...
When all you have is a hammer, everything may look like a nail, but it isn't reasonable to expect that you can play a CD, cook a grilled cheese sandwich or mow the law by smashing it with a hammer just because it's the tool you thought to use.
- If a developer want to make anything resonable (like a scroll list with 1000 items sorted by date), he should not be prevented because the toolkit implementors are using o(N^2) algorithms.
According to this "logic," if I want to use email as a transport for real-time streaming media, it's the fault of implementors of sendmail who are responsible for it not working?- Sure, the information is available, but they can't get their hands on anyone that knows what to do with it.
Right... because everyone in law enforcement all the way up to the FBI is a dumb, donut-eatin' mutherfucker who can't read "Linux for Dummies."The real flaw in this plan is that they're not that stupid.
- If law enforcement wants technical knowledge that would help them do their job, they have to buy it from the same group of people that built the infrastructure that allows us to copy information.
So what your saying, if I understand correctly, is that hackers/coders/geeks should close ranks like a jealous preisthood and cut off access to the knowledge that would allow the law enforcement community to understand or control technology.I hate to break it to you, but there's already something in place that will make witholding this kind of information impossible. It's called The Open Source Movement . Maybe you should look into it.
- artists working for game companies need to stop deluding themselves into thinking that they are equal talents to the developers.
Amen, brother. And on that note, a term that needs to be expunged from use is HTML Programmer.- I guess modern dance isn't art, as many people don't "get it".
I never said anything that would imply this. Modern dance may not be widely appreciated, but many people who do appreciate it can't dance to save their lives (I happen to be one of these people).Frequently programmers conflict with PHB's who don't understand the creative nature of programming. That said, this "is programming art" discussion looks like an attempt by people who have centered their entire life on a single pursuit to elevate that pursuit and give it wider implications, just to enrich their egos.
Oh puh-leez. This is really just a "Programmers: Are we cool or what?" dicusssion. Yeah, programming is cool, but real art appeals to people who aren't artists. If you want to be an artist be an artist. If your self-esteem needs proping up, get therapy.
Any guesses as to what this newsgroup contains? If you're baffled, you are supposed to be. soc.motss was the first USENET forum for homosexuals. "motss" stands for "Members Of The Same Sex." The people who created this forum in the 80's felt that soc.gays or soc.homosexual would make the newsgroup too visible to online gaybashers. It wasn't an attempt to hide in the USENET closet -- the forum was publically accessable to all -- just an attempt to avoid bigots looking for someone to harrass.
Anyway, after reading a zillion posts from people who've probably never even used NNTP claiming that "it's obvious what's in alt.picture.erotica.children," I had to comment. Sure, that newsgroup is easy to spot, but anyone can create an alt group if they want to. Would an ISP block alt.asdf.jk.hasd? I mean, would you even have time to find out what the hell was in it?
- If the AG had asked, BuffNET would have cut off the newsgroup.
Uh... that doesn't work either. Let me 'splain.When an NNTP gets a feed for all of the Newsgroups is subscribes to, it gets all of the messages that exist in any of those groups, including messages crossposted to other groups.
For example, a few years ago, I had a UUCP node and my upstream node would give me all of the "clean" heirarchys such as soc.*, rec.*, comp.* and so forth, but only hand-picked alt.* groups. The sysadmin refused to give me alt.drugs because he disapproved of it. He was doing me a huge favor giving me the UUCP feed, so I didn't make a fuss about it.
Anyway, I ended up subscribing to some groups that I could get, like soc.college that occaisionally had cross-postings from alt.drugs. When a discussion was cross-posted like this, it would end up getting into my feed. Of course, posts in this example should have had to do with recreational drugs and college social life, not just recreational drugs, so a lot of material was filtered out.
A year or so after I switched to a different feed, the newsgroup rec.drugs was finally approved amongst much controversy.
Anyway, if the ISP cuts off alt.porn.kids, then they still may end up with content from that group if (as many alt spammers do), there are cross-posts to similar groups such as alt.porn.very-young (these are not real groups AFAIK).
Followup-To: rec.birds
I miss the old days...
- Microsoft covers all the bases, you people are stuck in the outfield.
Seeing as how no one is playing baseball right now, this analogy is ironically apt.