Indeed, and the story they have pinned to the top of their main page is one that should be bought to the attention of as many voters as possible. Anyone who hasn't read it should go read it now. It tells you a lot about how the next election will be run. The fix is in, and it's gone through a lot of beta testing. If your precinct uses Diebold voting equipment, your vote is irrelevant.
Funny thing is that I haven't heard this mentioned by any American media. Not even NPR. It should be all over the place. The fact that it isn't speaks very loudly about that media.
An interesting source of news links these days is news.google.com. But don't just look at the "top" links on the front page. Follow the "all 937 related" link and look down the list for sites you've never heard of. You can find all sorts of interesting things from all around the world hidden down there. Some of them you might want to bookmark.
Of course, YMMV, especially if you're behind a national firewall. And note that commercial ISPs have been known to block addresses, though most often it's their competitors' addresses. Still, there's a lot of interesting stuff out there if you do a bit of digging.
It's also interesting to see things like aljazeera.com showing up in googles' news ratings fairly often. Interesting stuff there sometimes that you rarely see in the American media, or only when a big international stink erupts.
You confuse my high member number to be that I haven't been around long enough,...
Something I've wondered for a while: It's fairly common for writers to periodically adopt new pen names, so that their new work will be judged on its own and not on the basis of their reputation. Both failures and successes do this, sometimes to good effect.
So, how many/. readers have changed their id and number for the same reason? How many readers do as many authors do, and keep a stable of pen names for use, depending on the topic and how they want to talk?
One famous historical case was Ben Franklin. When he was publishing his newspapers, he would sometimes write "letters to the editor", and then he'd write an opposing response, just to get a discussion started. I doubt that he's the only one who has ever thought of this.
Of course, these days someone has probably applied for a patent on the idea...
(And pay no attention to that number in my id...;-)
Yeah, Comedy Central is the best source of US political news now. And it's funny, yet. But there are two serious problems with it:
1. They only really deal with major national candidates, mostly the presidential candidates. It takes some major news for them to pay attention to state or local candidates. Understandable, because they mostly have only half an hour four evenings a week (though they upped it to an hour last week, due to the huge humor potential of the RNC).
2. Their web site sucks. Too bad; it has such potential. I've read a number of discussions of why their site works so poorly (if at all) iin most people's browsers. They only deliver in Real and WMA formats, both of which have rather flakey browser plugins. And CC's HTML is so confused that many browsers just can't decipher it sensibly, and lots of luck trying to extract the clip URLs yourself. On my Mac PB, their video clips work fine in the Real Player and Windows Media Player when I can find the URL for the clip. But they both fail almost every time when invoked from within a ComedyCentral.com web page. Even Real's fancy new browser fails on these web pages. This apparently isn't an attempt to shoot down Mac and linux viewers; Windows users also report garbled or blank videos.
OTOH, lots of political blogs are picking up on Comedy Central, and they often provide direct URLs to the videos. If you can find them, they usually work.
You might also look at theonion.com. They have some good political news. It's usually a lot more honest than the mass media, because their approach is to quote what the politicians were thinking, not what they actually said.
They recently had a headline about the New Jersey homosexual who had tearfully admitted to being the state's governor...
"Don't use that shitty commercial software, use this superior OSS alternative!" "OK. Wait, it's broken and buggy..." "Unlike that shitty commercial software, huh?" "Oh, yeah..."
OK; that works for GIF animations. I learned about it a few weeks ago, and set it to "once".
But, after a few days of watching Hurricane Frances on weather.com, I found that firefox was once again soaking up 90% of the cpu. And there were ads in the weather.com tabs that were busily showing me stupid pictures of fish swimming and butterflies flitting from flower to flower. They were flash animations.
The "about:config" page only has one instance of the string "flash", and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with this problem. Is there a way to disable stupid flash movies like this?
Also, I know how to use the menu item that suppresses images from a site. But with flash ads, the menu is short, and doesn't include the "Block images from..." item that GIF and JPEG ads have. So is there a way to do this with flash ads?
I find that I have to constantly kill firefox because it's going insane and eating the cpu. It seems a lot worse about this than mozilla (though mozilla does show a lot of the same problems). This is the main thing that's limiting my usage of firefox now. I know that if I open too many tabs or windows, the chances are great that one of them will do something that puts firefox into cpu-eating mode, and I'll have to kill it to get my machine back.
Maybe what's needed is a per-image "speed control" that would limit how much cpu time an image can use. And a way to set the default. This would let me say something like "The default for any active images is 0%, but for this one, let it use 40%."
It's especially annoying when there's one video that you'd like to watch, but it keeps stopping because it's competing with N animated ads that can't be stopped (or even found).
This is mostly a problem on my Mac (PB, 10.3). On my linux box, flash is still broken in both mozilla and firefox, so it's not a problem.;-) Actually, I can run standalone flash with several programs, so it's not the flash interpreter itself (wherever that is) that's broken; it's its interface with the browsers. I can hope that they don't fix this, I guess, and just use linux for sites like weather.com that use flash.
I think you'd have to demonstrate some damage for a cause of action
And I'd think that would be easy. Note that they didn't send these C&D letters to the supposed infringer; they sent the letters to the ISP. These letters accuse a third person of a crime. If that charge is incorrect, then there's a legal term that applies: libel.
Falsely sending a printed accusation of a crime to a third person would be considered "damage" by just about any court in any country.
So does the DMCA protect copyright owners from charges of libel when they make false accusations to third parties?
To conserve your bandwidth,...... have them all delivered by a cgi script that sends random bytes, one byte per second. Or maybe just send bytes 0-255 or a fixed sentence repeatedly, and after a few loops, drop the connection. (This is probably best if the header indicated a large file size.)
There are a lot of ways to slow them down. Of course, if they bother to examine the data, it's probably best if it's something that is obviously not their data. Then, if they continue to claim that you're violating their copyright, that's proof that they didn't examine your file at all.
If you want to sent many copies of a fixed sentence, I'd suggest something like "I will not press copyright claims until I've verified the contents of a file.\n". Really rub their noses in it.
Does Apache let you do that on a directory-by-directopy basis?
Yes, it does. If the "htaccess" mechanism is turned on, all you need to do is put a.htaccess file in the directory with the line:
ForceType image/jpeg
or whatever type you like. That causes everything in that directory to have that MIME type, regardless of suffix.
It's most often used to force everything in a directory of scripts to be allowed as CGI scripts:
ForceType application/x-httpd-cgi
But it can be used for any type. More generally, this mechanism also lets you declare types for specific suffixes or a single file. The.htaccess file applies to that directory and subdirectories, but not to the rest of the web site.
You should probably be a bit careful about this. You will have to make a claim that they are infringing on a copyright which you own, or that you are the legal representative of the actual owner.
However, it does seem that it should be fairly easy to follow their lead. Consider this thread, with the title "we hereby state...". Each message here is copyrighted by its author. So any of us could do a google search for that phrase. At this moment, there are 911 matches. Send a C&D letter to all of them, since by the RIAA's reasoning, they are suspected of infringing our copyright.
This should be fairly easy to automate. Take a few filenames on your web site, or titles of your office memos, descriptions of your online family pictures, titles and lyrics of your band's songs, whatever. Write a little program that asks google for matches, pick out the URLs of the matching web pages, do a "whois" search for the sites' owners, and generate C&D letters to all of them.
A few thousand of us doing this every day should get across the idea that we can play their nasty game as easily as they can, and with every bit as much legal justification.
What would be especially nice would be to make a list of the hosts that belong to RIAA member companies, and ask google about files on their web sites whos names or contents are close matches for your copyrighted files. Maybe we can use the DMCA to shut down all their web sites for copyright violations.
"Look, Ariel, baby, we'd love to sell you our tanks, but with all these terrorists running around it would be a security risk to give you our code. Which we'd have to do. Sorry...."
Actually, I'd think that lots of people in the DoD would be arguing for delivering the code to the Israelis. That way, the Israelis would not only be beta testers, but their hackers would probably send back all sorts of good patches.
If any of the bad guys are going to find exploits, it would be a lot better for the US if those exploits were demoed (and fixed) in Israel than in the US.
Cynical, maybe, but I'd bet that this argument is being made, and it's likely being listened to.
Dan O'Dowd's article didn't make much sense until I figured something out: He's assuming that the military is installing off-the-shelf linux. Once you realize that, his comments do make sense.
Somehow, I don't think that's quite true. The Army is probably not running FC2 or Debian or even Slackware.
While it is true, as others here have suggested, that most soldiers wouldn't be able to make any sense of the source code, I suspect that the Army has a significant crowd of geeks who are quite capable of doing a thorough analysis of the whole thing. And making a few judicious changes here and there.
Similar to the anecdotes that I like to tell. I've been on a number of projects where the official decree was to use web server Brand X (where X is any of the Usual Suspects). After some weeks of futzing around trying to get it working sanely, I'd decide that I'd had enough of it. So I'd set aside a half hour to grab the latest apache, compile it, config it, fire it up, and link all our stufff into its htdocs directory. This never took the full half hour, and invariably it worked like a charm, never crashed, never had breakins, etc.
Part of the fun was always telling them every few weeks "Say, y'know, we're supposed to be using server X rather than apache. Maybe we should get working on it." And invariably, everyone else would say "Yeah, but we have a working server now; we have a deadline; we have a lot of stuff to finish off; let's put it off a while longer."
Some of those were years ago and they're still using apache. The idea is starting to get through the thick management skulls that maybe there's something significant here.
Of course, if they have any active content at all (especially SSL), I also like to warn them that apache's apparent security is an illusion. Maybe apache itself is solid, but it has no control over those modules that came from someone else. Any script at all could have a gaping vulnerability, and apache has no defense against that. Every piece of code they add to the apache core is a potential security hole.
Sure wish I could get them appreciate that. And keep up with the apache patches.
(And I've long known the etymology of the name "apache". Bad, bad pun. Well, as they say, the only good pun is a bad pun.)
Heh. Well, it seems that around half the messages here are from people who indeed would put a bench next to a public sidewalk and then send a cop to arrest anyone who sat on it. We seriously need some classes in Civilised Behavior for Geeks, it seems.
Consider that, in the present case, the cop was threatening arrest for using an AP because the user was outside the building that supplied the access. The same person a few feet away on the other side of a wall would have been using it "legally".
My wife has a new Tungsten C, which has builtin WiFi that works quite automatically anywhere it can find a signal. Yeah, you can ask it to tell you about the WiFi, but she does that about as often as she asks her cell phone for info about its signal. (How many people even know how to do that?) She also visits the local public library every week or two. I can easily imagine her pulling out the PDA as she walks in or out the door. Would she be a criminal on one side of the door, but a "valued client" on the other side?
This is utterly demented. I wish the fellow had decided to challenge it. Though I understand why he didn't. When faced with a cop, the easy thing is to say "Yessir" and move on.
Re:One of the unfortunate things about Apache...
on
Hardening Apache
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Of course, you could reinterpret "start with a blank file" to mean "Add a '#' to the start of every line in the sample httpd.conf file". That would give you a "blank" file, but with all the documentation and examples very easily available.
If I want the public to sit on my bench, I put it in the park. If I don't want the public to sit on my bench, I put it in my back yard.
Well, maybe. But if I were to put a bench next to the sidewalk in front of my house, and tried to sue people who sat on it, I'd expect that any court would fine me, not the person who sat on it.
An open wifi AP is every bit as much of a public invitation. There might be obvious problems with abuse, as there would be if someone were to damage my bench. But just sitting on a bench next to a public way would be reasonable and expected use. I'd think that using an open AP would also be reasonable and expected.
The phenomenon of public wifi is slowly spreading. We don't want a situation where we all get used to using them just like we use the cell-phone system, and then find ourselves arrested because a single AP out of thousands was secretly labelled "private". That should be considered an obvious case of entrapment, and the perpetrator of such an open AP should be the criminal, not the innocent bypasser.
We really don't want to become criminals just by walking down the sidewalk doing things that everyone else is doing openly.
Hmmm... I've never thought there was anything disingenuous about the phrase "trusted computing". It clearly means that Microsoft trusts you to run the software (or play the tune, now). And if they stop trusting you for some reason, it stops working.
So what happens if... I don't agree to its EULA? Does it remove itself...?
Probably it's like Windows Media Player (WMP), where the people who installed the first releases reported that 1) All their other installed audio software was dead and had to be reinstalled; and 2) WMP wouldn't remove all of its components, and the pieces left behind would wake up periodically and again disable any "unauthorized" audio software. This hasn't changed much, of course. Unless you sell MS the rights to your audio software, chances are that WMP will periodically destroy it on customers' machines, teaching them a valuable lesson about attempting to run unauthorized software.
This does remind me of the recent stories about Apple's iTunes/iPod stuff being available for Windows. I wonder if this new MS music store will do a search-and-destroy on Apple's audio software? Or has Apple made a licensing deal that makes their software "authorized" on Windows?
I know a number of people building high-quality audio software that are getting rather depressed with the situation. They start off expecting to sell a Windows version, and eventually learn that it will die at random times unless it's in WMP's list of approved software. But some of them have figured out that the real market for such stuff is on OSX and linux. The future of Windows is a single-vendor "boom-box" approach to audio. And, as with traditional audio hardware, if you want quality you won't go with the "unified" systems; you buy a computer that permits mixing and matching quality components from different vendors.
TV certainly has had a huge impact on our society...
I'd disagree. TV is almost entirely an entertainment medium. It has increased the quantity of available entertainment, but not the quality, nor even the range, really. This hardly qualifies as a huge impact.
Some people might object that it provided news. But TV news has always been trivial compared to even a mediocre newspaper. Newspapers and other printed news sources have always been widely available.
The Internet beats both TV and print media all to hell. Entertainment? You can easily pick up entertainment from all parts of the world, of sorts that have never been available in your home country. News? TV news has always been controlled by a few corporations that have rarely presented anything more than highly-filtered headlines (plus pictures). The print media has usually been controlled in most of the world by local authorities, and it has been extremely difficult to get anything past the censors. Yes, even in the US, where subscribing to foreign periodicals has typically put you on government lists. (There have been repeated reports of mathematicians having their journals intercepted by government agents who couldn't understand the text and concluded it had to be subversive because of its origin.;-) Now it's trivial to find foreign news on the Internet, and while you'll still probably end up on the government lists, those lists contain so many millions of people that they are all but useless. And even the most oppressive governments are finding it fiendishly difficult to block it all without cutting off access entirely and killing their own economy in the process.
Even 10 years ago, it was next to impossible to get information like you can find on english.aljazeera.com; now it's easy, so we have no excuse for our ignorance (other than those 24 hours in a day, something that is really overdue for an upgrade). One of the problems the US's religious-right administration is that when they told us how evil all Muslims are, several million of us just hit the Internet, and quickly learned a lot of history (and religious doctrine) that a decade ago would have taken a lifetime to learn. So we know they were just lying to us. And our counterparts in the Muslim societies are rapidly learning to use the Internet, and are finding out that our society is just as much a mixed bag of good and evil as is theirs. (But we have a bigger middle class - so far.;-)
Of course, we still have the problem of the large part of the population that doesn't want to learn anything. But they don't have the excuses they once had. The data is there now, and much more accessible than it ever was in the past. They can't lie to us nearly as easily now.
On GMail-User newsgroup there have been reports of Google temporarily disabling accounts who use software to check GMail.
Awk! I was thinking of getting a gmail account, and I'd just assumed (like a dummy I guess) that everyone used software to check (and read) their mail. Silly me. So do you have to fly out to Silicon Valley to check your email in person? And do they have it printed out for you when you get there, so you don't have to use any software to read it?
Sounds like a hassle. I think I'll just keep using my old email accounts that rely on software to do everything. At least until google comes up with a way to deliver the printed mail to me. (Hey, that's a good idea. They could send it by truck or something. Maybe I should patent that idea before someone else thinks of it. Maybe google would license it from me.)
But maybe it's just as well that google has come up with a non-software method for reading mail. What with all this copyright stuff, pretty soon it'll be too big a legal risk to do mail with these computer things. I mean, every message in my email is copied several times before it even gets to me. Lots of messages contain copyrighted material, probably most of them what with this dumb "copyrighted when written" idea they passed into law recently. I doubt that the senders ever get written permission to copy email to my machine. We know that this has gotta end soon, or we'll all be in jail.
Anyway, thanks for passing on the info that google disables your account if you use software to check your mail. It's good to read that they're watching out for our future in the copyright-over-all world that's coming soon.
You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service"
To me, this sounds a lot like a Microsoft-type "agreement" that is designed to put them in a monopoly position relative to other search bots. Thus, if your data gets scanned by alltheweb or teoma and appears in their index, they can kick you off and remove your data. If they get away with it, they'll be able to tell people "We have the only search site that can get at some web data," and they'll be telling the truth.
One reason I notice this is that I've been involved in some projects to build special-purpose search bots that recognize and index certain kinds of (highly-technical) data. My bot can and does search a few mailing-list archives and can tell you which messages actually contain data of the specific types that are of interest.
In these cases, part of the reason for a specialized search is that google and other big search sites really deal with just natural language. They don't work for specialized data formats; you need software that understands those formats.
So the fear here is that google is making an attempt to 1) entice people to put their technical data online in a gmail account, perhaps in the form of a technical mailing list, and 2) prevent those same people or their associates from building a search site that handles their own technical data. Presumably they'll say "Well, we'll allow it if you just sell us the rights to your code."
If you don't sell, you'll be able to index the data on "open" sites, but you won't be able to index any technical discussions that happen to be archived at google.
This could be a really serious problem for a lot of researchers. Or maybe the words will get out, and researchers will learn that their technical resources should not be archived at google.
We should probably bring this to the attention of scientific societies. A lot of them are introducing rules requiring that research data for published papers be openly available. This should include "indexable", to prevent corporations like googgle from capturing their technical data or owning the only permitted indexing software.
There is a significant battle going on right now for the freedom of scientific information. The corporate world is trying hard to capture it and own it. A lot of technical societies are waking up and taking steps to block this capture. This clause in google's "agreement" is one more data point that will probably be yet another battle in the war (to use the military terminology so popular in American political circles these days;-). But if the societies declare that papers based on such captured data are unpublishable, people will learn not to put their data (including technical discussions) on google.
That's really bizarre! And when I clicked the OK button, a litte white box appeared over the "image.animation_mode" text, and a spinning "busy" thingy appeared for the pointer. The cpu was pegged, with firefox the top process. This lasted for 15 to 20 minutes, nothing ever appeared in that white box, and then suddenly it all cleared up. So maybe it worked. I'll do a bit of checking. I do notice that firefox is still using 20% - 25% of the cpu, but that's better than the roughly 50% before.
Sure is a strange way to do it. I don't think there's any chance I'll remember it if I ever need it again.
I wonder if any of this is documented. Or do you just play with it until you get an inkling of what it's doing? (Like the way you learn things on Windows.;-)
If IE doesn't support it, most authors won't use it on their web pages,
Well, that's good. Now if there were a reliable way to turn off "active" images of other types.
With mozilla, I've found that after I've gotten my usual flock of windows up after the latest mozilla crash, it tries to use at least 90% of the cpu. I then turn off everything "active", including changing images, and its cpu usage drops to around 10%. This is still too much cpu for a supposedly-idle process, but it does let other programs run.
OTOH, it seems that firefox has nothing like this. If it does, I can't find it. So all its active images stay active and soak up cpu time. So those ads on all the news/blog sites completely soak up your cpu, even if firefox is "idle", and there's nothing you can do about it except shut down firefox and start from scratch. (Just closing those windows has a small effect, but even when I get it to just a single empty window, firefox still grabs 20% to 30% of my cpu. Anyone know what it's so busy doing when it'd "idle"?)
It would help a lot if there were some way to globally stop all "active" images. I'd like my cpu back!
(One cool thing that mozilla has is a "once through" setting for images. I haven't found this on any other browser, and it really helps free up the cpu, while letting you see such things when you download them and are actually looking at the window. I wonder if firefox will ever pick this up?)
Slashdot Mirror
Blackboxvoting.org is the best source for any election-machine info ...
Indeed, and the story they have pinned to the top of their main page is one that should be bought to the attention of as many voters as possible. Anyone who hasn't read it should go read it now. It tells you a lot about how the next election will be run. The fix is in, and it's gone through a lot of beta testing. If your precinct uses Diebold voting equipment, your vote is irrelevant.
Funny thing is that I haven't heard this mentioned by any American media. Not even NPR. It should be all over the place. The fact that it isn't speaks very loudly about that media.
An interesting source of news links these days is news.google.com. But don't just look at the "top" links on the front page. Follow the "all 937 related" link and look down the list for sites you've never heard of. You can find all sorts of interesting things from all around the world hidden down there. Some of them you might want to bookmark.
Of course, YMMV, especially if you're behind a national firewall. And note that commercial ISPs have been known to block addresses, though most often it's their competitors' addresses. Still, there's a lot of interesting stuff out there if you do a bit of digging.
It's also interesting to see things like aljazeera.com showing up in googles' news ratings fairly often. Interesting stuff there sometimes that you rarely see in the American media, or only when a big international stink erupts.
You're a parrot.
Well, I'm not a parrot, but we do have a parrot (a blue-crowned conure) who likes to start political discussions by suddenly hollering out "IRAQ!"
If you say something in reply, her usual comment is "Oh!", or sometimes "Oh?"
(What was that old joke about the talking dog?)
You confuse my high member number to be that I haven't been around long enough, ...
/. readers have changed their id and number for the same reason? How many readers do as many authors do, and keep a stable of pen names for use, depending on the topic and how they want to talk?
...
... ;-)
Something I've wondered for a while: It's fairly common for writers to periodically adopt new pen names, so that their new work will be judged on its own and not on the basis of their reputation. Both failures and successes do this, sometimes to good effect.
So, how many
One famous historical case was Ben Franklin. When he was publishing his newspapers, he would sometimes write "letters to the editor", and then he'd write an opposing response, just to get a discussion started. I doubt that he's the only one who has ever thought of this.
Of course, these days someone has probably applied for a patent on the idea
(And pay no attention to that number in my id
Yeah, Comedy Central is the best source of US political news now. And it's funny, yet. But there are two serious problems with it:
...
1. They only really deal with major national candidates, mostly the presidential candidates. It takes some major news for them to pay attention to state or local candidates. Understandable, because they mostly have only half an hour four evenings a week (though they upped it to an hour last week, due to the huge humor potential of the RNC).
2. Their web site sucks. Too bad; it has such potential. I've read a number of discussions of why their site works so poorly (if at all) iin most people's browsers. They only deliver in Real and WMA formats, both of which have rather flakey browser plugins. And CC's HTML is so confused that many browsers just can't decipher it sensibly, and lots of luck trying to extract the clip URLs yourself. On my Mac PB, their video clips work fine in the Real Player and Windows Media Player when I can find the URL for the clip. But they both fail almost every time when invoked from within a ComedyCentral.com web page. Even Real's fancy new browser fails on these web pages. This apparently isn't an attempt to shoot down Mac and linux viewers; Windows users also report garbled or blank videos.
OTOH, lots of political blogs are picking up on Comedy Central, and they often provide direct URLs to the videos. If you can find them, they usually work.
You might also look at theonion.com. They have some good political news. It's usually a lot more honest than the mass media, because their approach is to quote what the politicians were thinking, not what they actually said.
They recently had a headline about the New Jersey homosexual who had tearfully admitted to being the state's governor
Well, the way I usually hear it is:
..."
"Don't use that shitty commercial software, use this superior OSS alternative!"
"OK. Wait, it's broken and buggy..."
"Unlike that shitty commercial software, huh?"
"Oh, yeah
about:config
..." item that GIF and JPEG ads have. So is there a way to do this with flash ads?
;-) Actually, I can run standalone flash with several programs, so it's not the flash interpreter itself (wherever that is) that's broken; it's its interface with the browsers. I can hope that they don't fix this, I guess, and just use linux for sites like weather.com that use flash.
...
OK; that works for GIF animations. I learned about it a few weeks ago, and set it to "once".
But, after a few days of watching Hurricane Frances on weather.com, I found that firefox was once again soaking up 90% of the cpu. And there were ads in the weather.com tabs that were busily showing me stupid pictures of fish swimming and butterflies flitting from flower to flower. They were flash animations.
The "about:config" page only has one instance of the string "flash", and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with this problem. Is there a way to disable stupid flash movies like this?
Also, I know how to use the menu item that suppresses images from a site. But with flash ads, the menu is short, and doesn't include the "Block images from
I find that I have to constantly kill firefox because it's going insane and eating the cpu. It seems a lot worse about this than mozilla (though mozilla does show a lot of the same problems). This is the main thing that's limiting my usage of firefox now. I know that if I open too many tabs or windows, the chances are great that one of them will do something that puts firefox into cpu-eating mode, and I'll have to kill it to get my machine back.
Maybe what's needed is a per-image "speed control" that would limit how much cpu time an image can use. And a way to set the default. This would let me say something like "The default for any active images is 0%, but for this one, let it use 40%."
It's especially annoying when there's one video that you'd like to watch, but it keeps stopping because it's competing with N animated ads that can't be stopped (or even found).
This is mostly a problem on my Mac (PB, 10.3). On my linux box, flash is still broken in both mozilla and firefox, so it's not a problem.
Maybe it's time to get a linux laptop
I think you'd have to demonstrate some damage for a cause of action
And I'd think that would be easy. Note that they didn't send these C&D letters to the supposed infringer; they sent the letters to the ISP. These letters accuse a third person of a crime. If that charge is incorrect, then there's a legal term that applies: libel.
Falsely sending a printed accusation of a crime to a third person would be considered "damage" by just about any court in any country.
So does the DMCA protect copyright owners from charges of libel when they make false accusations to third parties?
To conserve your bandwidth, ... ... have them all delivered by a cgi script that sends random bytes, one byte per second. Or maybe just send bytes 0-255 or a fixed sentence repeatedly, and after a few loops, drop the connection. (This is probably best if the header indicated a large file size.)
There are a lot of ways to slow them down. Of course, if they bother to examine the data, it's probably best if it's something that is obviously not their data. Then, if they continue to claim that you're violating their copyright, that's proof that they didn't examine your file at all.
If you want to sent many copies of a fixed sentence, I'd suggest something like "I will not press copyright claims until I've verified the contents of a file.\n". Really rub their noses in it.
Does Apache let you do that on a directory-by-directopy basis?
.htaccess file in the directory with the line:
.htaccess file applies to that directory and subdirectories, but not to the rest of the web site.
...
Yes, it does. If the "htaccess" mechanism is turned on, all you need to do is put a
ForceType image/jpeg
or whatever type you like. That causes everything in that directory to have that MIME type, regardless of suffix.
It's most often used to force everything in a directory of scripts to be allowed as CGI scripts:
ForceType application/x-httpd-cgi
But it can be used for any type. More generally, this mechanism also lets you declare types for specific suffixes or a single file. The
Sure wish I could see the kitten pictures
You should probably be a bit careful about this. You will have to make a claim that they are infringing on a copyright which you own, or that you are the legal representative of the actual owner.
However, it does seem that it should be fairly easy to follow their lead. Consider this thread, with the title "we hereby state...". Each message here is copyrighted by its author. So any of us could do a google search for that phrase. At this moment, there are 911 matches. Send a C&D letter to all of them, since by the RIAA's reasoning, they are suspected of infringing our copyright.
This should be fairly easy to automate. Take a few filenames on your web site, or titles of your office memos, descriptions of your online family pictures, titles and lyrics of your band's songs, whatever. Write a little program that asks google for matches, pick out the URLs of the matching web pages, do a "whois" search for the sites' owners, and generate C&D letters to all of them.
A few thousand of us doing this every day should get across the idea that we can play their nasty game as easily as they can, and with every bit as much legal justification.
What would be especially nice would be to make a list of the hosts that belong to RIAA member companies, and ask google about files on their web sites whos names or contents are close matches for your copyrighted files. Maybe we can use the DMCA to shut down all their web sites for copyright violations.
Anyone interested in testing this?
"Look, Ariel, baby, we'd love to sell you our tanks, but with all these terrorists running around it would be a security risk to give you our code. Which we'd have to do. Sorry...."
Actually, I'd think that lots of people in the DoD would be arguing for delivering the code to the Israelis. That way, the Israelis would not only be beta testers, but their hackers would probably send back all sorts of good patches.
If any of the bad guys are going to find exploits, it would be a lot better for the US if those exploits were demoed (and fixed) in Israel than in the US.
Cynical, maybe, but I'd bet that this argument is being made, and it's likely being listened to.
Dan O'Dowd's article didn't make much sense until I figured something out: He's assuming that the military is installing off-the-shelf linux. Once you realize that, his comments do make sense.
Somehow, I don't think that's quite true. The Army is probably not running FC2 or Debian or even Slackware.
While it is true, as others here have suggested, that most soldiers wouldn't be able to make any sense of the source code, I suspect that the Army has a significant crowd of geeks who are quite capable of doing a thorough analysis of the whole thing. And making a few judicious changes here and there.
Similar to the anecdotes that I like to tell. I've been on a number of projects where the official decree was to use web server Brand X (where X is any of the Usual Suspects). After some weeks of futzing around trying to get it working sanely, I'd decide that I'd had enough of it. So I'd set aside a half hour to grab the latest apache, compile it, config it, fire it up, and link all our stufff into its htdocs directory. This never took the full half hour, and invariably it worked like a charm, never crashed, never had breakins, etc.
Part of the fun was always telling them every few weeks "Say, y'know, we're supposed to be using server X rather than apache. Maybe we should get working on it." And invariably, everyone else would say "Yeah, but we have a working server now; we have a deadline; we have a lot of stuff to finish off; let's put it off a while longer."
Some of those were years ago and they're still using apache. The idea is starting to get through the thick management skulls that maybe there's something significant here.
Of course, if they have any active content at all (especially SSL), I also like to warn them that apache's apparent security is an illusion. Maybe apache itself is solid, but it has no control over those modules that came from someone else. Any script at all could have a gaping vulnerability, and apache has no defense against that. Every piece of code they add to the apache core is a potential security hole.
Sure wish I could get them appreciate that. And keep up with the apache patches.
(And I've long known the etymology of the name "apache". Bad, bad pun. Well, as they say, the only good pun is a bad pun.)
Heh. Well, it seems that around half the messages here are from people who indeed would put a bench next to a public sidewalk and then send a cop to arrest anyone who sat on it. We seriously need some classes in Civilised Behavior for Geeks, it seems.
Consider that, in the present case, the cop was threatening arrest for using an AP because the user was outside the building that supplied the access. The same person a few feet away on the other side of a wall would have been using it "legally".
My wife has a new Tungsten C, which has builtin WiFi that works quite automatically anywhere it can find a signal. Yeah, you can ask it to tell you about the WiFi, but she does that about as often as she asks her cell phone for info about its signal. (How many people even know how to do that?) She also visits the local public library every week or two. I can easily imagine her pulling out the PDA as she walks in or out the door. Would she be a criminal on one side of the door, but a "valued client" on the other side?
This is utterly demented. I wish the fellow had decided to challenge it. Though I understand why he didn't. When faced with a cop, the easy thing is to say "Yessir" and move on.
Of course, you could reinterpret "start with a blank file" to mean "Add a '#' to the start of every line in the sample httpd.conf file". That would give you a "blank" file, but with all the documentation and examples very easily available.
If I want the public to sit on my bench, I put it in the park. If I don't want the public to sit on my bench, I put it in my back yard.
Well, maybe. But if I were to put a bench next to the sidewalk in front of my house, and tried to sue people who sat on it, I'd expect that any court would fine me, not the person who sat on it.
An open wifi AP is every bit as much of a public invitation. There might be obvious problems with abuse, as there would be if someone were to damage my bench. But just sitting on a bench next to a public way would be reasonable and expected use. I'd think that using an open AP would also be reasonable and expected.
The phenomenon of public wifi is slowly spreading. We don't want a situation where we all get used to using them just like we use the cell-phone system, and then find ourselves arrested because a single AP out of thousands was secretly labelled "private". That should be considered an obvious case of entrapment, and the perpetrator of such an open AP should be the criminal, not the innocent bypasser.
We really don't want to become criminals just by walking down the sidewalk doing things that everyone else is doing openly.
Hmmm ... I've never thought there was anything disingenuous about the phrase "trusted computing". It clearly means that Microsoft trusts you to run the software (or play the tune, now). And if they stop trusting you for some reason, it stops working.
What's disingenuous about that?
So what happens if ... I don't agree to its EULA? Does it remove itself ...?
Probably it's like Windows Media Player (WMP), where the people who installed the first releases reported that 1) All their other installed audio software was dead and had to be reinstalled; and 2) WMP wouldn't remove all of its components, and the pieces left behind would wake up periodically and again disable any "unauthorized" audio software. This hasn't changed much, of course. Unless you sell MS the rights to your audio software, chances are that WMP will periodically destroy it on customers' machines, teaching them a valuable lesson about attempting to run unauthorized software.
This does remind me of the recent stories about Apple's iTunes/iPod stuff being available for Windows. I wonder if this new MS music store will do a search-and-destroy on Apple's audio software? Or has Apple made a licensing deal that makes their software "authorized" on Windows?
I know a number of people building high-quality audio software that are getting rather depressed with the situation. They start off expecting to sell a Windows version, and eventually learn that it will die at random times unless it's in WMP's list of approved software. But some of them have figured out that the real market for such stuff is on OSX and linux. The future of Windows is a single-vendor "boom-box" approach to audio. And, as with traditional audio hardware, if you want quality you won't go with the "unified" systems; you buy a computer that permits mixing and matching quality components from different vendors.
TV certainly has had a huge impact on our society ...
;-) Now it's trivial to find foreign news on the Internet, and while you'll still probably end up on the government lists, those lists contain so many millions of people that they are all but useless. And even the most oppressive governments are finding it fiendishly difficult to block it all without cutting off access entirely and killing their own economy in the process.
;-)
I'd disagree. TV is almost entirely an entertainment medium. It has increased the quantity of available entertainment, but not the quality, nor even the range, really. This hardly qualifies as a huge impact.
Some people might object that it provided news. But TV news has always been trivial compared to even a mediocre newspaper. Newspapers and other printed news sources have always been widely available.
The Internet beats both TV and print media all to hell. Entertainment? You can easily pick up entertainment from all parts of the world, of sorts that have never been available in your home country. News? TV news has always been controlled by a few corporations that have rarely presented anything more than highly-filtered headlines (plus pictures). The print media has usually been controlled in most of the world by local authorities, and it has been extremely difficult to get anything past the censors. Yes, even in the US, where subscribing to foreign periodicals has typically put you on government lists. (There have been repeated reports of mathematicians having their journals intercepted by government agents who couldn't understand the text and concluded it had to be subversive because of its origin.
Even 10 years ago, it was next to impossible to get information like you can find on english.aljazeera.com; now it's easy, so we have no excuse for our ignorance (other than those 24 hours in a day, something that is really overdue for an upgrade). One of the problems the US's religious-right administration is that when they told us how evil all Muslims are, several million of us just hit the Internet, and quickly learned a lot of history (and religious doctrine) that a decade ago would have taken a lifetime to learn. So we know they were just lying to us. And our counterparts in the Muslim societies are rapidly learning to use the Internet, and are finding out that our society is just as much a mixed bag of good and evil as is theirs. (But we have a bigger middle class - so far.
Of course, we still have the problem of the large part of the population that doesn't want to learn anything. But they don't have the excuses they once had. The data is there now, and much more accessible than it ever was in the past. They can't lie to us nearly as easily now.
Google hasn't done anything abysmally STUPID.
No, no; the word is "EVIL". Where have you been?
On GMail-User newsgroup there have been reports of Google temporarily disabling accounts who use software to check GMail.
Awk! I was thinking of getting a gmail account, and I'd just assumed (like a dummy I guess) that everyone used software to check (and read) their mail. Silly me. So do you have to fly out to Silicon Valley to check your email in person? And do they have it printed out for you when you get there, so you don't have to use any software to read it?
Sounds like a hassle. I think I'll just keep using my old email accounts that rely on software to do everything. At least until google comes up with a way to deliver the printed mail to me. (Hey, that's a good idea. They could send it by truck or something. Maybe I should patent that idea before someone else thinks of it. Maybe google would license it from me.)
But maybe it's just as well that google has come up with a non-software method for reading mail. What with all this copyright stuff, pretty soon it'll be too big a legal risk to do mail with these computer things. I mean, every message in my email is copied several times before it even gets to me. Lots of messages contain copyrighted material, probably most of them what with this dumb "copyrighted when written" idea they passed into law recently. I doubt that the senders ever get written permission to copy email to my machine. We know that this has gotta end soon, or we'll all be in jail.
Anyway, thanks for passing on the info that google disables your account if you use software to check your mail. It's good to read that they're watching out for our future in the copyright-over-all world that's coming soon.
You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service"
;-). But if the societies declare that papers based on such captured data are unpublishable, people will learn not to put their data (including technical discussions) on google.
To me, this sounds a lot like a Microsoft-type "agreement" that is designed to put them in a monopoly position relative to other search bots. Thus, if your data gets scanned by alltheweb or teoma and appears in their index, they can kick you off and remove your data. If they get away with it, they'll be able to tell people "We have the only search site that can get at some web data," and they'll be telling the truth.
One reason I notice this is that I've been involved in some projects to build special-purpose search bots that recognize and index certain kinds of (highly-technical) data. My bot can and does search a few mailing-list archives and can tell you which messages actually contain data of the specific types that are of interest.
In these cases, part of the reason for a specialized search is that google and other big search sites really deal with just natural language. They don't work for specialized data formats; you need software that understands those formats.
So the fear here is that google is making an attempt to 1) entice people to put their technical data online in a gmail account, perhaps in the form of a technical mailing list, and 2) prevent those same people or their associates from building a search site that handles their own technical data. Presumably they'll say "Well, we'll allow it if you just sell us the rights to your code."
If you don't sell, you'll be able to index the data on "open" sites, but you won't be able to index any technical discussions that happen to be archived at google.
This could be a really serious problem for a lot of researchers. Or maybe the words will get out, and researchers will learn that their technical resources should not be archived at google.
We should probably bring this to the attention of scientific societies. A lot of them are introducing rules requiring that research data for published papers be openly available. This should include "indexable", to prevent corporations like googgle from capturing their technical data or owning the only permitted indexing software.
There is a significant battle going on right now for the freedom of scientific information. The corporate world is trying hard to capture it and own it. A lot of technical societies are waking up and taking steps to block this capture. This clause in google's "agreement" is one more data point that will probably be yet another battle in the war (to use the military terminology so popular in American political circles these days
That's really bizarre! And when I clicked the OK button, a litte white box appeared over the "image.animation_mode" text, and a spinning "busy" thingy appeared for the pointer. The cpu was pegged, with firefox the top process. This lasted for 15 to 20 minutes, nothing ever appeared in that white box, and then suddenly it all cleared up. So maybe it worked. I'll do a bit of checking. I do notice that firefox is still using 20% - 25% of the cpu, but that's better than the roughly 50% before.
;-)
Sure is a strange way to do it. I don't think there's any chance I'll remember it if I ever need it again.
I wonder if any of this is documented. Or do you just play with it until you get an inkling of what it's doing? (Like the way you learn things on Windows.
If IE doesn't support it, most authors won't use it on their web pages,
Well, that's good. Now if there were a reliable way to turn off "active" images of other types.
With mozilla, I've found that after I've gotten my usual flock of windows up after the latest mozilla crash, it tries to use at least 90% of the cpu. I then turn off everything "active", including changing images, and its cpu usage drops to around 10%. This is still too much cpu for a supposedly-idle process, but it does let other programs run.
OTOH, it seems that firefox has nothing like this. If it does, I can't find it. So all its active images stay active and soak up cpu time. So those ads on all the news/blog sites completely soak up your cpu, even if firefox is "idle", and there's nothing you can do about it except shut down firefox and start from scratch. (Just closing those windows has a small effect, but even when I get it to just a single empty window, firefox still grabs 20% to 30% of my cpu. Anyone know what it's so busy doing when it'd "idle"?)
It would help a lot if there were some way to globally stop all "active" images. I'd like my cpu back!
(One cool thing that mozilla has is a "once through" setting for images. I haven't found this on any other browser, and it really helps free up the cpu, while letting you see such things when you download them and are actually looking at the window. I wonder if firefox will ever pick this up?)