if they had identified the server that it tried to contact, either by hostname or IP address, so that those with the capability to do so, could block connectivity to it from their network(s) and/or customers. ISP's could add a simple ACL to a router, home users might put a 127.0.0.1 entry in/etc/hosts, etc.
Of course one thing they completely left out was if this 'plugin' ran only on Windows Firefox or if other platforms were susceptible as well.
And quite frankly, if that host was providing some legitimate service that doing this ended up blocking, well, oh fucking well. Keep the thieves off your network and you can avoid that type of problem.
Another option of course, (for individuals and private/company networks, but probably not so for commercial ISP's) would be to just null-route the entirety of Russia (using blackholes.us), and then selective override individual address spaces as and if needed.
Who, exactly, is this 'BitTorrent' entity you are lecturing to? bittorrent is just a protocol. This isn't some company, or even loosely affiliated organization, that can be spoken to, or can 'find out' anything.
Its like saying FTP is doing something wrong, and its going to find out it isnt allowed to anymore.
And, like another post mentioned, you pay an ISP for a particular amount of bandwidth, and any sane ISP rate-limits you to exactly that bandwidth. What you are sending or receiving, or via what protocol, or to (or from) who (so long as that entity desires/agrees to send/receive/exchange whatever it is, with you), is none of their damn business.
As ISP's, monopolistic media cartels, and governments try more and more to control what information can be sent, I think theres going to be one good way forward for new protocols - fully encrypted tunnels between endpoints - rather than having various specific ports open, there will be one specific port (perhaps ssh) that will be opened, and then all further negotiation of protocols will occur over an already encrypted wrapper channel. To be effective, it must be something they can't block without causing major upheaval to the aveage end-user - so here's an idea that Mozilla and Apache could collaborate on - have a *new* http-type protocol that would operate this way, that both Firefox and Apache would support, and would try by default. In transition, administrators would/should configure Apache to listen for both legacy http, as well as the new transport. Firefox would try the new transport first, falling back to legacy http. When to cut off legacy http would be a judgement call for each server admin
Obviously you spent a lot more time thinking about this then I did, but you've got the right idea.
My laptop rarely leaves my desk, and if it does I'm pretty damn attentive to keeping possession of it (Oh, and it doesnt have any cellular wireless connectivity anyway, just plain wifi, which isn't set to activate automatically, because I'm normally on a wired link.), so my post was more about the concept, and also the fact that there are so many special paid-for 'services' that are absolutely irrelevant to someone not drinking the kool-aid that is the elixir of the ignorant masses.
write a script so anytime your laptop connects automatically reports its ip to a home machine
if your laptop is stolen, wait for it to connect, then ssh to it and do 'rm -rf/', or maybe `dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/[s|h]hda`. Or for that matter, anything else you want, like perhaps instead of disabling it, monitor what the thief does with it, assuming he can get around the login prompt.
(Oh, what? Oh, this is for laptops running that toy OS platform that only the ignorant masses and corporate sycophants use? Oh, nevermind then. they are stupid enough to actually *pay* for a service like this - go ahead and make money off them - but I wonder, why post news about something like this to a site intended for non-morons?)
I'm not sure about anyone else, but I do know *I* didn't say it wasn't ok for an ISP to cut off customers that were distributing copyrighted material. In fact, most smart ISP's include in their terms of service, a provision that they can cut off anyone they want for any reason they might choose, without even having to give a reason.
This isnt about vigilantes, or international law. No one went and did anything to these spammers, illegal (in any jurisdiction) or otherwise. Their OWN upstream ISP shut them off, presumably after it became aware of TOS violations. The day it becomes illegal to either report spam to an ISP, or for that ISP to shut off its customers that it determines are sending spam (or for any other cause [including the infamous 'for any reason we want' clause] listed in the TOS the customer agreed to), is the day the Internet dies.
Now, I'm sure the spammers are unhappy that volunteer citizens around the world track their spammy activities, and will do their best to whine and try to paint it as something illegal or wrong, but that doesnt change what happened.
No, not remotely vigilantism. Its not like someone went to these people and cut their fiber cable with a hacksaw - *THEIR ISP* turned them off, after it received reports of TOS violations and (presumably) investigated same. We should live in a world where all ISP's have and enforce anti-spam TOS, and actually investigate take action, as appropriate, when they receive reports of abuse, regardless of who the reporter is.
get online news websites to understand how the scrollbars work in a web browser, instead of breaking one 'page' into a dozen small ones that, instead of the whole article loading at once, and then being able to scroll smoothly, instead of having to click next, next, next, and have frustrating pauses while trying to read.
After I read the first 'bit' and realized Id have to click, wait, click, wait to read the rest, I just closed the tab instead of bothering.
Occasionally on sites like that there is a 'printable version' that gives the whole article as one, but lately it seems to just give a 'printable version' of that one bit of the story./. editors - lets not encourage these sites by linking to them and giving them the ad traffic.
But it is just another form of spam marketing. And as the article notes, the 'big national' dating sites are of little use if there are only one or two members within 200 miles of where you live.
If this data was remotely important, why didn't you hang on to a computer running this software?
Or load the data and either print it or save it as ascii text prior to disposing of whatever you created it on?
Beyond that, what you describe is an *excellent* reason for storing data not in a proprietary or application-specific format, but instead as plain ascii text in the first place. You can always load it into your current modern word-mangler of choice and plays with the fonts and margins.
If you store digital information (wether you are a library or not), make sure that as long as you have information stored in format "x", that you have the proper equipment for reading format "x". Ideally, if you get new equipment that uses a new format "y", be sure to *both* keep the old equipment that you knew worked properly (and not just one set - keep several, if you can, and make sure that new employees/members know how to use it), but also try to find such new equipment that is capable of both reading the old format "x", but also capable of copying/transferring information from the old format "x" to the new format "y". Try to convert all of your information before there is any likelyhood that the format "x" equipment reaches its end of usable/supported life.
Oh, and if at any point this means you have to bypass access keys or encryption, damn the torpedos(DMCA) and go straight agead.
Answer: "rate limiting queries-per-IP to something just slightly more than a legitimate user is likely to use, which is almost certainly far less than a scraper would have to make to be of use."
Why on earth would you send someone an electronic copy of your resume in a *any* editable word processor format? Especially when different wrd processors, or even different versions of the same word processor will render the same document in completely different ways.
PDF would be the way to go, regardless of the tool you originally use to enter it.
I assume you don't work in the systems administration field, or IT security. If you do I feel sorry for whatever company hired you (both due to the idiocy in accepting such a format, and because they've hired someone incompetent enough to send it that way in the first place)
There are obviously more and more MS-apologists moderating every day. Modded down or not, my comment (parents) is still true. The fact that some deluded fools have moderator points doesn't change that.
One point - a 'firewall' is a hardware device that stands between insecure systems (such as those running MS platforms) and an untrusted network (such as the Internet). Running some special software *on* a system running an insecure platform doesnt make up for its lack of security.
See, the thing is, among people who aren't cattle, "Windows Anti Virus" is an oxymoron.
Microsoft software *is* a virus - I'm sure people will think I'm "just kidding". but I'm not. Just ask all the businesses that have to upgrade their version of MSWord because their business partners did and continue to foolishly send email as attached word processor files instead of just typing the damn message into the email body, because they aren't satisified with all the stupid fonts and appearance controls that MS-psuedo-HTML has to offer, they want to fine tune exactly how their message appears, right down to the margins.
You are ignoring the case where you buddy reads and memorizes the entire contents of the book, then returns the physical book to you.
He now has complete access to the entire book anytime he wants, even (gasp) parallel access to it with you.
Or, say its a jokebook, and he reads and memorizes many of the jokes. Are you saying because the book author has copyright on those jokes he can't repeat them without paying for another 'instance'?
Copyright *should* have been called 'publish-for-sale right', wherein the author of a (book, song, software) would be the only party authorized to *SELL* it for money, because in the context it is originally conceived, that was how it was sold, and its primary effect.
The simple fact is, where the cost of duplication is essentially zero, the price point of that information tends to seek zero as well.
The unskilled Joe-Sixpacks are the ones that will be cold, hungry and unemployed.
I suspect that most of the people that work on projects like Wikipedia, or write Free Software, or that blog, probably aren't having any economic crisis, or at least not so much of one as the average masses.
I for one, am enjoying the huge drop in gas prices. I'm not worried about home values becuase I have no intention of selling mine for quite a long time. I'm also quite secure in my employment.
I agree - piracy is a horrible thing. I mean, all those shipments of chinese-made software discs being stolen from ships by machine-gun toting pirates is just tragic. Not to mention when they attack the cruise ships that the software company CEO's are on and disrupt their R&R time, making it harder for them to run the company. And don't forget the coffee bean shipments - why when those ships are pirated thats going for the jugular - they know programmers cant work without coffee.
No one in their right mind develops anything except entertainment and game sites in flash.
I am quite content that the iPhone has no flash, and hope that the desire to be accesible from an iPhone drives any site that currently requires flash just to access the site to ditch it, or at least make a non-flash alternative. (I'm looking at you, GrandCentral, although I suppose you're boycotting the iPhone and are holding out for Android).
The practice of a web site checking to see what software you have (or it having any reason to need to) is just insane.
Almost as absurd if the gas pump is going to start deciding wether my car is compatible with its fuel.
You want to put information on the web, put *the information* on the web, in a data form in a documented and standards-compliant format. Let the *web browser* decide what formats of data it is capable of displaying.
Slashdot Mirror
if they had identified the server that it tried to contact, either by hostname or IP address, so that those with the capability to do so, could block connectivity to it from their network(s) and/or customers. ISP's could add a simple ACL to a router, home users might put a 127.0.0.1 entry in /etc/hosts, etc.
Of course one thing they completely left out was if this 'plugin' ran only on Windows Firefox or if other platforms were susceptible as well.
And quite frankly, if that host was providing some legitimate service that doing this ended up blocking, well, oh fucking well. Keep the thieves off your network and you can avoid that type of problem.
Another option of course, (for individuals and private/company networks, but probably not so for commercial ISP's) would be to just null-route the entirety of Russia (using blackholes.us), and then selective override individual address spaces as and if needed.
Who, exactly, is this 'BitTorrent' entity you are lecturing to? bittorrent is just a protocol. This isn't some company, or even loosely affiliated organization, that can be spoken to, or can 'find out' anything.
Its like saying FTP is doing something wrong, and its going to find out it isnt allowed to anymore.
And, like another post mentioned, you pay an ISP for a particular amount of bandwidth, and any sane ISP rate-limits you to exactly that bandwidth. What you are sending or receiving, or via what protocol, or to (or from) who (so long as that entity desires/agrees to send/receive/exchange whatever it is, with you), is none of their damn business.
As ISP's, monopolistic media cartels, and governments try more and more to control what information can be sent, I think theres going to be one good way forward for new protocols - fully encrypted tunnels between endpoints - rather than having various specific ports open, there will be one specific port (perhaps ssh) that will be opened, and then all further negotiation of protocols will occur over an already encrypted wrapper channel. To be effective, it must be something they can't block without causing major upheaval to the aveage end-user - so here's an idea that Mozilla and Apache could collaborate on - have a *new* http-type protocol that would operate this way, that both Firefox and Apache would support, and would try by default. In transition, administrators would/should configure Apache to listen for both legacy http, as well as the new transport. Firefox would try the new transport first, falling back to legacy http. When to cut off legacy http would be a judgement call for each server admin
Obviously you spent a lot more time thinking about this then I did, but you've got the right idea.
My laptop rarely leaves my desk, and if it does I'm pretty damn attentive to keeping possession of it (Oh, and it doesnt have any cellular wireless connectivity anyway, just plain wifi, which isn't set to activate automatically, because I'm normally on a wired link.), so my post was more about the concept, and also the fact that there are so many special paid-for 'services' that are absolutely irrelevant to someone not drinking the kool-aid that is the elixir of the ignorant masses.
write a script so anytime your laptop connects automatically reports its ip to a home machine
if your laptop is stolen, wait for it to connect, then ssh to it and do 'rm -rf /', or maybe `dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/[s|h]hda`. Or for that matter, anything else you want, like perhaps instead of disabling it, monitor what the thief does with it, assuming he can get around the login prompt.
(Oh, what? Oh, this is for laptops running that toy OS platform that only the ignorant masses and corporate sycophants use? Oh, nevermind then. they are stupid enough to actually *pay* for a service like this - go ahead and make money off them - but I wonder, why post news about something like this to a site intended for non-morons?)
I'm not sure about anyone else, but I do know *I* didn't say it wasn't ok for an ISP to cut off customers that were distributing copyrighted material. In fact, most smart ISP's include in their terms of service, a provision that they can cut off anyone they want for any reason they might choose, without even having to give a reason.
This isnt about vigilantes, or international law. No one went and did anything to these spammers, illegal (in any jurisdiction) or otherwise. Their OWN upstream ISP shut them off, presumably after it became aware of TOS violations. The day it becomes illegal to either report spam to an ISP, or for that ISP to shut off its customers that it determines are sending spam (or for any other cause [including the infamous 'for any reason we want' clause] listed in the TOS the customer agreed to), is the day the Internet dies.
Now, I'm sure the spammers are unhappy that volunteer citizens around the world track their spammy activities, and will do their best to whine and try to paint it as something illegal or wrong, but that doesnt change what happened.
No, not remotely vigilantism. Its not like someone went to these people and cut their fiber cable with a hacksaw - *THEIR ISP* turned them off, after it received reports of TOS violations and (presumably) investigated same. We should live in a world where all ISP's have and enforce anti-spam TOS, and actually investigate take action, as appropriate, when they receive reports of abuse, regardless of who the reporter is.
get online news websites to understand how the scrollbars work in a web browser, instead of breaking one 'page' into a dozen small ones that, instead of the whole article loading at once, and then being able to scroll smoothly, instead of having to click next, next, next, and have frustrating pauses while trying to read.
After I read the first 'bit' and realized Id have to click, wait, click, wait to read the rest, I just closed the tab instead of bothering.
Occasionally on sites like that there is a 'printable version' that gives the whole article as one, but lately it seems to just give a 'printable version' of that one bit of the story. /. editors - lets not encourage these sites by linking to them and giving them the ad traffic.
But it is just another form of spam marketing. And as the article notes, the 'big national' dating sites are of little use if there are only one or two members within 200 miles of where you live.
That said, maybe /. should start a dating site. :P
'locate' is a much faster way to find files, unless they've only been recently created, and as long as the machine is on 24/7.
(man locate, man updatedb for more info)
You solved your own problem - the format that doesn't require any proprietary apps or ones licensed to a particular computer is "paper".
Ok, you get a pass then.
But you know better now, and if you manage to access that data will save it in the most widely and longest used 'format', ascii text?
And *then* load it into Word or Oo for formatting/printing, but still saving the ascii text for archival.
If this data was remotely important, why didn't you hang on to a computer running this software?
Or load the data and either print it or save it as ascii text prior to disposing of whatever you created it on?
Beyond that, what you describe is an *excellent* reason for storing data not in a proprietary or application-specific format, but instead as plain ascii text in the first place. You can always load it into your current modern word-mangler of choice and plays with the fonts and margins.
If you store digital information (wether you are a library or not), make sure that as long as you have information stored in format "x", that you have the proper equipment for reading format "x". Ideally, if you get new equipment that uses a new format "y", be sure to *both* keep the old equipment that you knew worked properly (and not just one set - keep several, if you can, and make sure that new employees/members know how to use it), but also try to find such new equipment that is capable of both reading the old format "x", but also capable of copying/transferring information from the old format "x" to the new format "y". Try to convert all of your information before there is any likelyhood that the format "x" equipment reaches its end of usable/supported life.
Oh, and if at any point this means you have to bypass access keys or encryption, damn the torpedos(DMCA) and go straight agead.
Simon? Is that you?
Answer: "rate limiting queries-per-IP to something just slightly more than a legitimate user is likely to use, which is almost certainly far less than a scraper would have to make to be of use."
Why on earth would you send someone an electronic copy of your resume in a *any* editable word processor format? Especially when different wrd processors, or even different versions of the same word processor will render the same document in completely different ways.
PDF would be the way to go, regardless of the tool you originally use to enter it.
I assume you don't work in the systems administration field, or IT security. If you do I feel sorry for whatever company hired you (both due to the idiocy in accepting such a format, and because they've hired someone incompetent enough to send it that way in the first place)
"You want the truth? You can't handle the truth"
There are obviously more and more MS-apologists moderating every day. Modded down or not, my comment (parents) is still true. The fact that some deluded fools have moderator points doesn't change that.
One point - a 'firewall' is a hardware device that stands between insecure systems (such as those running MS platforms) and an untrusted network (such as the Internet). Running some special software *on* a system running an insecure platform doesnt make up for its lack of security.
See, the thing is, among people who aren't cattle, "Windows Anti Virus" is an oxymoron.
Microsoft software *is* a virus - I'm sure people will think I'm "just kidding". but I'm not. Just ask all the businesses that have to upgrade their version of MSWord because their business partners did and continue to foolishly send email as attached word processor files instead of just typing the damn message into the email body, because they aren't satisified with all the stupid fonts and appearance controls that MS-psuedo-HTML has to offer, they want to fine tune exactly how their message appears, right down to the margins.
You are ignoring the case where you buddy reads and memorizes the entire contents of the book, then returns the physical book to you.
He now has complete access to the entire book anytime he wants, even (gasp) parallel access to it with you.
Or, say its a jokebook, and he reads and memorizes many of the jokes. Are you saying because the book author has copyright on those jokes he can't repeat them without paying for another 'instance'?
Copyright *should* have been called 'publish-for-sale right', wherein the author of a (book, song, software) would be the only party authorized to *SELL* it for money, because in the context it is originally conceived, that was how it was sold, and its primary effect.
The simple fact is, where the cost of duplication is essentially zero, the price point of that information tends to seek zero as well.
The unskilled Joe-Sixpacks are the ones that will be cold, hungry and unemployed.
I suspect that most of the people that work on projects like Wikipedia, or write Free Software, or that blog, probably aren't having any economic crisis, or at least not so much of one as the average masses.
I for one, am enjoying the huge drop in gas prices. I'm not worried about home values becuase I have no intention of selling mine for quite a long time. I'm also quite secure in my employment.
I agree - piracy is a horrible thing. I mean, all those shipments of chinese-made software discs being stolen from ships by machine-gun toting pirates is just tragic. Not to mention when they attack the cruise ships that the software company CEO's are on and disrupt their R&R time, making it harder for them to run the company. And don't forget the coffee bean shipments - why when those ships are pirated thats going for the jugular - they know programmers cant work without coffee.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy
No one in their right mind develops anything except entertainment and game sites in flash.
I am quite content that the iPhone has no flash, and hope that the desire to be accesible from an iPhone drives any site that currently requires flash just to access the site to ditch it, or at least make a non-flash alternative. (I'm looking at you, GrandCentral, although I suppose you're boycotting the iPhone and are holding out for Android).
The practice of a web site checking to see what software you have (or it having any reason to need to) is just insane.
Almost as absurd if the gas pump is going to start deciding wether my car is compatible with its fuel.
You want to put information on the web, put *the information* on the web, in a data form in a documented and standards-compliant format. Let the *web browser* decide what formats of data it is capable of displaying.