Any "successful" use of RFID technology (even in the warehouse venue) will lead to an increasing likelyhood of their inclusion at the store level.
This will happen anyway, since manufacturers are going ahead with plans to include RFID at the factory. So we can soon expect the following scenario:
(Loud beeping as you exit the store).
Store detective: Sorry, sir/ma'am; we'll have to check your bag.
(Goes through contents of bags.)
S.D.: Hmmm.. It says you're carrying a pair of trousers that we sell, but I don't see them in the bag.
You: I'm wearing those. I bought them over at (competitor's name) just last week.
S.D.: So you say. The RFID tag hasn't been turned off, so we think you're stealing them from this store.
You: But I wore them coming in.
S.D.: Well, if you agree to let us add them to the bill, we'll forget about charging you with shoplifting.
If you think this is paranoia, you need to get a few more clues. Myself, as RFID goes in at the retail level, I'll just switch to buying most of my clothes online. It will no longer be safe to go into a store that sells clothes.
Y'know, that government project sounds just as bad as a lot of business and industrial projects that I've worked on over the years. Imagine that, a government organization that's run as poorly as a business. Who'd'a thunk it?
There is a fairly strong tradition in some sciences of subverting such emotion-laden terminology into technical terms. And there's an obvious example in this case.
Biologists have a lot of terms for particular kinds of adaptive changes. One of these is neoteny (adj: neotenous). This refers to a change that consists of extending a juvenile characteristic into adulthood. A common first textbook example is the axolotl, a Mexican salemander species. The norm in salamanders is a juvenile stage that is aquatic and has gills. Maturation involves developing internal lungs and losing the gills. The axolotl can keep its gills as an adult, if the pond is a good place to live, but if the pond gets overcrowded or dries up, an axolotl can metamorphose into the usual land-living form with lungs. This change is irreversible, but it allows the animal to go looking for a better home.
After several such examples, one that some biologists like to use is science itself. You see, in primates, curiosity is a juvenile characteristic. The young explore their world. But an adult knows all it ever needs to know about the world, and curiosity can be dangerous, so this mental attribute atrophies. New things are feared. You probably know people like this; they are normal primates.
But humans are neotenous primates. We extend the juvenile curiosity into adulthood. This has been a large part of our success. And in recent centuries, we have developed science, which is a further adaptation of what is really a juvenile characteristic.
Some biologists seem to enjoy explaining to their students that their scientific occupation is juvenile, and that the students are themselves entering on a lifetime of juvenile behavior.
I suspect that these biologists wouldn't feel too insulted by being called "sick" because of their search for more and more information. They'll just find a way to take such insults and convert them to technical terminology.
Why can't the USA get their act together like this?
The US government it currently holding people (ciizens and non-citizens) incommunicado in unstated locations. Access to lawyers, family members, etc. is denied. The government has stated that they intend to hold these people until they confess to what the government wants them to confess to.
One thing that is a techological possibility now that could go a long way to putting a stop to such atrocities: A general declaration that communication with the rest of the world is everyone's inalienable right.
Imagine the effect if the US government had to supply each of those captives with access to a blog, and access by the rest of the world were guaranteed.
Imagine the effect on lots of governments if "communication" were generally declared a universal human right under all circumstances.
Of course, in some cases, the rest of the world might well conclude that they deserved imprisonment, and would simply ignore them. But then, a right to communicate shouldn't mean that anyone else is required to listen.
(Maybe I should post this as an AC so there's less chance that I'll end up an "enemy combatant"?;-)
How ironic is it that third world nations could end up leading the way in voip adoption?
Not at all; that's exactly where you'd expect it to happen first. In more advanced countries, you'd expect the established phone companies to have the clout to block it.
But it's not even true that third-world nations were first. There have already been a lot of stories about how most of the new phone service in Japan is now VoIP. And Japan isn't exactly a third-world nation.
The real puzzle is why Nippon Tel didn't manage to block it.
Here in the US, we've been reading about how the phone system has gone to IP for essentially all long-distance traffic. But the phone companies have done a good job of blocking VoIP at the retail level, because this would destroy their main source of income.
They wouldn't have even counted me among the people using things like unencrypted POP to read email. Why? Well, because I read my email by sshing to a machine where I use a plain-text email reader. I do this for good reason. I got fed up with the thins that all the fancy GUI mail readers did to me. Even with mozilla's reader, when I told it to never send html and always send plain text, it embarrassed me by sendin g html. I don't trust any of them.
So I log in and use mh to read email. And to the folks in this article, I wasn't reading email at all, I was running an ssh session.
They probably similarly missed most of us old-time geeks in their statistics. So much for the meaningfulness of their data.
Let's rephrase this: Why should Bill Gates bother with other approaches, when his monopolistic approach has made him so rich?
Let's face it, "The Market" richly rewards such behavior. Millions of people constantly complain about how awful Microsoft software is, but they keep buying it. It doesn't take a lot of brains to figure out where the money is in this game.
Wow! That was an elegant summary of the attitude. Thanks.
Sorry I don't have moderator status, so I could give you a Funny point. Oh well, it's in response to my message, so I couldn't anyway. Maybe next time.
There's some irony here in the fact that I've spent much of the past week trying to get some javascript to work right on a variety of (mostly Windoze) systems. But today I think I finally persuaded them to give up, do it with a perl cgi script, and not try to do programming inside a web page.
So, in effect, I was arguing the same point, but from the approach that Web design shouldn't be programming.
Good idea. But to really pull it off, you should think of good file names. Consider the recent reports about the college prof by the name of Usher who recorded some of his material and put it on his department's web server in MP3 form with "Usher" in its name. The department promptly got vaguely-worded cease-and-desist letters from the company that owns the rights to the music of Usher the musician.
Think about this a bit. Is your name similar to some musician's name, or the name of some musical group? If so, you could use the same approach. Create files on your web site with names that look like they might be those musicians' recordings. The RIAA's people won't bother investigating further, they'll just start harrassing you.
With a bit of clever file naming, we can really bog down their search efforts.
(This idea has already appeared in a number of comic strips.)
Bullshit. If I make a recording, encode it in MP3 format, and put it up on my (or a friend's) web site, that is both legal and ethical, anywhere in the world.
What is unethical is for people to use others' copyright violations as an argument denying me the right to distribute my own recordings as I see fit.
The RIAA has no rights to my recordings unless I've signed a contract with them, which I haven't done. And I have the legal right to give away recordings for which I hold the copyright, for free or whatever price I think I can get.
What the RIAA is trying to do is block this new means of distribution, which is a challenge to their oligopolistic control over the traditional channels. Their goal is to put me back into the situation where, if I want my recordings distributed, I first have to sign over the rights to their corporations.
iTunes is hardly an answer to this. Apple doesn't (yet) accept recordings from musicians, only from recording companies. They then give part of the profits to the recording companies, who don't pass any of it on to the artists.
The real way to fight the RIAA is to check out the growing number of online musicians' web sites, listen to their music, and buy directly from them. Then they'll get the money that they deserve, and the RIAA will die a deserving death.
It should be noted that the RIAA is not trying to make sure that people get paid for their music. They represent the recording industry, and we've had very thorough documentation of the fact that in this industry, the musicians mostly don't get paid at all. And Apple doesn't seem to be fixing this. They are mostly supplying the same recordings that were made under contracts that give all the profits to the corporations, and nothing to the musicians.
If the EFF really wants to get musicians on their side, they should start pushing file sharing and other online music as a way of getting rid of the middlemen, and making a direct channel from musicians to their fans. They should be pointing out that the RIAA has no right to control recordings that I make in my own living room.
As one of millions of amateur musicians, I've put all my (few) recordings online for free. What bothers me about the RIAA's campaign iis that they seem to be saying that I shouldn't be allowed to do this with my own music. This is really what they're saying when they say, without reservations, that file sharing is theft. Sorry, but if I put my own music up on the net, downloading it is NOT theft. Any claim that it is, is merely trying to prevent me from communicating directly with others, so that the fat cats can claim my music and any profit that might come from it.
When the EFF and/or Apple start supporting my right to do with my own music as I wish, I'll be impressed.
(And if they can force ISPs to stop blocking port 80, I'll be even more impressed.)
A reload that doesn't reload graphics is a pain in the ass when you're trying to debug the graphics on your web page.
So far, the best way I've found is:
1. Right-click (with 3-button mouse) or click-and-hold (OSX) to get the menu, and select "View Image". This gets you a new page with just the old image in the upper left.
2. Click the Reload button in that window.
3. Click the Back button. Your page will now show the new image.
4...N Repeat the above for every friggin' image you're working on.
You'd think they'd have a little pity for web developers.
How hard would it be for Shift-Reload to reload everything?
... was how, in the demo movie, it seemed to know where the print head was going to be, and made the text appear there just before the printer passed over the spot.
Maybe what Tanya's author and publisher should do is get together with the Disney folk, and charge Rowling et al with infringement of a long list of their publications. They might start with the Sorcerer's Apprentice, though of course that was stolen whole from an earlier tale.
There have been any number of analyses written showing how the magic in Harry Potter is based firmly on European mythology and magical belief. This is part of its charm, of course. But saying that Harry Potter is a "derivative work" is really praise for the author's knowledge, not an accusation of criminal activity.
Publishing unauthorized works in the Harry Potter universe is one thing. Tanya Grotter and other such stories are not this at all. They are really new stories in a broad genre that existed long before Harry Potter. If they are ripoffs, then so are the Harry books, and Rowling should be stopped for the same reasons.
It'll be a sad day for literature and culture if such similar writings are blocked.
So let's hear from the Disney people. What do they think abut Rowling writing books in a magical world so similar to earlier Disney works?
You and everybody on the list signed up to be on it.
Ah, but this wasn't mentioned in the definition. Recall that it said only:
... sending email unsolicited to individuals you have no personal relationship with.
At least for the mailing lists that I'm on, there was never any human interaction when I signed up. I exchanged messages with some remote software. At no time did I form any sort of "relationship" with any person during this process. I may have formed loose pen-pal type relationships with a few people on the list, but most of the list members are strangers who are just names.
So by the definition given, anything I send to such a list is spam.
I'd say this definitely cheapens the term, since it makes memebers of most mailing lists (and anyone who posts to a newsgroup) into spammers.
There is a real possibility that, if such a definition is enacted into law, most mailing lists and all newsgroups will be among the casualties.
Email spam is... sending email unsolicited to individuals you have no personal relationship with.
Hmmm... That would cover sending a message to a mailing list or a newsgroup, since you rarely have a personal relation with anyone in those fora.
Guess I'll just have to consider myself a spammer. Just like a year and a half ago, George Dubya taught me that I'm a terrorist, since I don't agree with him.
It does sorta cheapen a term though, when nearly everyone qualifies.
My site was almost DOSed by bots originating from MS.
Similarly, my server has been hit with a DOS that originate at several blocks of IP addresses, only a few of them belonging to MSN. A year or so back, some of them learned how to invoke some of my cgi scripts. I have scripts that can read files from other sites and convert them to any of several output formats. These little monsters were systematically feeding my scripts URLs and converting them to all the output formats. One searcher did it from at least 100 addresses simultaneously.
I implemented a blacklist that stopped those in their tracks. And to handle latecomers, I implemented a minimum 10-sec delay (since lowered to 5 sec) between requests from an IP address. That slows them down.
But you've given me an idea. I also have a "Cookie" generator. I had a script that returned just one. Now I also have a "Cookies" generator that loops, with a new cookie every 10 sec. I think I'll put it in a few directories that robots.txt says not to search. Then I'll check occasionally to see if there are any search bots stuck in the tar pit.
Maybe I'll just let them run. They'll eventually get a rather large file, if they're archiving it.
Anyone have any other good ideas for bogging down bots that ignore robots.txt?
Yes, Google tried this, but they seem to have backed down pretty quickly, and their small ads are quite distinct from the real results.
With search.msn.com, they'd more likely go to great lengths to disguise the product placement.
This was a great part of what relegated altavista to the backwaters, remember. (Though if you check them out now, they seem to have gone back to a less blatantly commercial approach.)
In any case, we need to keep a close watch on all of them, including google. All it takes is a small shift in management focus to convert an information utility into a marketing utility.
So has SCO/Caldera/whatever actually won any court cases? As far as I can tell from reading all the coverage, it appears that they have always "reached an agreement", i.e., settled out of court. It might be interesting to read of any cases that actually got a court decision.
It's possible that IBM's approach is based on the "professional litigious bastards" perception, and a decision that this time they are not going to let them get away with an out-of-court settlement.
So has SCO ever actual won or lost a court case? And if so, what happened on appeal?
If millions of people breaking the law every day is not an option, why do we have laws that millions of people break every day?
I know that was a rhetorical question, not intended to elicit an answer. But I'll answer it anyway.
They are called "nuisance laws". The function of such laws is to provide a pretext for arresting anyone that the authorities consider a "nuisance". All countries have laws like this. They are mostly not enforced at all. But if someone with power wants to arrest you, such laws give them a legal excuse. Typically they won't let it get to court, because they don't want to risk the chance that the courts will declare the law invalid, or will listen when your lawyer shows proof of discriminatory enforcement. The intent is to take you out of circulation for some time, cause you to spend a lot of money defending yourself, and so on.
Here in the US, the canonical example is all the speed-limit laws, which are typically not enforced for white people until you are 15 or 20 mph over the limit. But non-whites are routinely pulled over at much lower speeds. This is so widespread and flagrant that the media has a term for it "Driving While Black".
Similarly, in the past year or so, we have had a lot of people of Middle-Eastern background arrested and held for reasons that are never applied to white, European-type people. The laws are on the books exactly for this purpose.
There are similar nuisance laws on the books wherever you may live.
Slashdot Mirror
Any "successful" use of RFID technology (even in the warehouse venue) will lead to an increasing likelyhood of their inclusion at the store level.
.. It says you're carrying a pair of trousers that we sell, but I don't see them in the bag.
This will happen anyway, since manufacturers are going ahead with plans to include RFID at the factory. So we can soon expect the following scenario:
(Loud beeping as you exit the store).
Store detective: Sorry, sir/ma'am; we'll have to check your bag.
(Goes through contents of bags.)
S.D.: Hmmm
You: I'm wearing those. I bought them over at (competitor's name) just last week.
S.D.: So you say. The RFID tag hasn't been turned off, so we think you're stealing them from this store.
You: But I wore them coming in.
S.D.: Well, if you agree to let us add them to the bill, we'll forget about charging you with shoplifting.
If you think this is paranoia, you need to get a few more clues. Myself, as RFID goes in at the retail level, I'll just switch to buying most of my clothes online. It will no longer be safe to go into a store that sells clothes.
Y'know, that government project sounds just as bad as a lot of business and industrial projects that I've worked on over the years. Imagine that, a government organization that's run as poorly as a business. Who'd'a thunk it?
No joke at all. Here's the scenario:
You (the defendant): I demand to know the charges against me and what law I've violated!
Prosecutor: Sorry; the law is copyrighted, and we don't have signed permission from the copyright owner to give you a copy of that information.
Maybe, just maybe, they're naturally curious.
There is a fairly strong tradition in some sciences of subverting such emotion-laden terminology into technical terms. And there's an obvious example in this case.
Biologists have a lot of terms for particular kinds of adaptive changes. One of these is neoteny (adj: neotenous). This refers to a change that consists of extending a juvenile characteristic into adulthood. A common first textbook example is the axolotl, a Mexican salemander species. The norm in salamanders is a juvenile stage that is aquatic and has gills. Maturation involves developing internal lungs and losing the gills. The axolotl can keep its gills as an adult, if the pond is a good place to live, but if the pond gets overcrowded or dries up, an axolotl can metamorphose into the usual land-living form with lungs. This change is irreversible, but it allows the animal to go looking for a better home.
After several such examples, one that some biologists like to use is science itself. You see, in primates, curiosity is a juvenile characteristic. The young explore their world. But an adult knows all it ever needs to know about the world, and curiosity can be dangerous, so this mental attribute atrophies. New things are feared. You probably know people like this; they are normal primates.
But humans are neotenous primates. We extend the juvenile curiosity into adulthood. This has been a large part of our success. And in recent centuries, we have developed science, which is a further adaptation of what is really a juvenile characteristic.
Some biologists seem to enjoy explaining to their students that their scientific occupation is juvenile, and that the students are themselves entering on a lifetime of juvenile behavior.
I suspect that these biologists wouldn't feel too insulted by being called "sick" because of their search for more and more information. They'll just find a way to take such insults and convert them to technical terminology.
Why can't the USA get their act together like this?
;-)
The US government it currently holding people (ciizens and non-citizens) incommunicado in unstated locations. Access to lawyers, family members, etc. is denied. The government has stated that they intend to hold these people until they confess to what the government wants them to confess to.
One thing that is a techological possibility now that could go a long way to putting a stop to such atrocities: A general declaration that communication with the rest of the world is everyone's inalienable right.
Imagine the effect if the US government had to supply each of those captives with access to a blog, and access by the rest of the world were guaranteed.
Imagine the effect on lots of governments if "communication" were generally declared a universal human right under all circumstances.
Of course, in some cases, the rest of the world might well conclude that they deserved imprisonment, and would simply ignore them. But then, a right to communicate shouldn't mean that anyone else is required to listen.
(Maybe I should post this as an AC so there's less chance that I'll end up an "enemy combatant"?
How ironic is it that third world nations could end up leading the way in voip adoption?
Not at all; that's exactly where you'd expect it to happen first. In more advanced countries, you'd expect the established phone companies to have the clout to block it.
But it's not even true that third-world nations were first. There have already been a lot of stories about how most of the new phone service in Japan is now VoIP. And Japan isn't exactly a third-world nation.
The real puzzle is why Nippon Tel didn't manage to block it.
Here in the US, we've been reading about how the phone system has gone to IP for essentially all long-distance traffic. But the phone companies have done a good job of blocking VoIP at the retail level, because this would destroy their main source of income.
They wouldn't have even counted me among the people using things like unencrypted POP to read email. Why? Well, because I read my email by sshing to a machine where I use a plain-text email reader. I do this for good reason. I got fed up with the thins that all the fancy GUI mail readers did to me. Even with mozilla's reader, when I told it to never send html and always send plain text, it embarrassed me by sendin g html. I don't trust any of them.
So I log in and use mh to read email. And to the folks in this article, I wasn't reading email at all, I was running an ssh session.
They probably similarly missed most of us old-time geeks in their statistics. So much for the meaningfulness of their data.
I say, make 'em 10 years renewable up to 50
Even better is the suggestion that anything out of print becomes public domain.
Copyright holders shouldn't be able to use their copyright to make something inaccessible to the rest of us.
logo that shows up in the browser location widget.
They've gotta have made that one, right? So why
can't I find it?
If not, maybe I oughta submit it. I'd buy one
(if I can't get it for free).
Let's rephrase this: Why should Bill Gates bother with other approaches, when his monopolistic approach has made him so rich?
Let's face it, "The Market" richly rewards such behavior. Millions of people constantly complain about how awful Microsoft software is, but
they keep buying it. It doesn't take a lot of brains to figure out where the money is in this game.
Wow! That was an elegant summary of the attitude. Thanks.
Sorry I don't have moderator status, so I could give you a Funny point. Oh well, it's in response to my message, so I couldn't anyway. Maybe next time.
There's some irony here in the fact that I've spent much of the past week trying to get some javascript to work right on a variety of (mostly Windoze) systems. But today I think I finally persuaded them to give up, do it with a perl cgi script, and not try to do programming inside a web page.
So, in effect, I was arguing the same point, but from the approach that Web design shouldn't be programming.
Good idea. But to really pull it off, you should think of good file names. Consider the recent reports about the college prof by the name of Usher who recorded some of his material and put it on his department's web server in MP3 form with "Usher" in its name. The department promptly got vaguely-worded cease-and-desist letters from the company that owns the rights to the music of Usher the musician.
Think about this a bit. Is your name similar to some musician's name, or the name of some musical group? If so, you could use the same approach. Create files on your web site with names that look like they might be those musicians' recordings. The RIAA's people won't bother investigating further, they'll just start harrassing you.
With a bit of clever file naming, we can really bog down their search efforts.
(This idea has already appeared in a number of comic strips.)
Swapping mp3's is illegal and unethical.
Bullshit. If I make a recording, encode it in MP3 format, and put it up on my (or a friend's) web site, that is both legal and ethical, anywhere in the world.
What is unethical is for people to use others' copyright violations as an argument denying me the right to distribute my own recordings as I see fit.
The RIAA has no rights to my recordings unless I've signed a contract with them, which I haven't done. And I have the legal right to give away recordings for which I hold the copyright, for free or whatever price I think I can get.
What the RIAA is trying to do is block this new means of distribution, which is a challenge to their oligopolistic control over the traditional channels. Their goal is to put me back into the situation where, if I want my recordings distributed, I first have to sign over the rights to their corporations.
iTunes is hardly an answer to this. Apple doesn't (yet) accept recordings from musicians, only from recording companies. They then give part of the profits to the recording companies, who don't pass any of it on to the artists.
The real way to fight the RIAA is to check out the growing number of online musicians' web sites, listen to their music, and buy directly from them. Then they'll get the money that they deserve, and the RIAA will die a deserving death.
It should be noted that the RIAA is not trying to make sure that people get paid for their music. They represent the recording industry, and we've had very thorough documentation of the fact that in this industry, the musicians mostly don't get paid at all. And Apple doesn't seem to be fixing this. They are mostly supplying the same recordings that were made under contracts that give all the profits to the corporations, and nothing to the musicians.
If the EFF really wants to get musicians on their side, they should start pushing file sharing and other online music as a way of getting rid of the middlemen, and making a direct channel from musicians to their fans. They should be pointing out that the RIAA has no right to control recordings that I make in my own living room.
As one of millions of amateur musicians, I've put all my (few) recordings online for free. What bothers me about the RIAA's campaign iis that they seem to be saying that I shouldn't be allowed to do this with my own music. This is really what they're saying when they say, without reservations, that file sharing is theft. Sorry, but if I put my own music up on the net, downloading it is NOT theft. Any claim that it is, is merely trying to prevent me from communicating directly with others, so that the fat cats can claim my music and any profit that might come from it.
When the EFF and/or Apple start supporting my right to do with my own music as I wish, I'll be impressed.
(And if they can force ISPs to stop blocking port 80, I'll be even more impressed.)
A reload that doesn't reload graphics is a pain in the ass when you're trying to debug the graphics on your web page.
So far, the best way I've found is:
1. Right-click (with 3-button mouse) or click-and-hold (OSX) to get the menu, and select "View Image". This gets you a new page with just the old image in the upper left.
2. Click the Reload button in that window.
3. Click the Back button. Your page will now show the new image.
4...N Repeat the above for every friggin' image you're working on.
You'd think they'd have a little pity for web developers.
How hard would it be for Shift-Reload to reload everything?
(Yeah; I just checked; it doesn't.)
... was how, in the demo movie, it seemed to know where the print head was going to be, and made the text appear there just before the printer passed over the spot.
That is truly impressive tracking technology.
Maybe what Tanya's author and publisher should do is get together with the Disney folk, and charge Rowling et al with infringement of a long list of their publications. They might start with the Sorcerer's Apprentice, though of course that was stolen whole from an earlier tale.
There have been any number of analyses written showing how the magic in Harry Potter is based firmly on European mythology and magical belief. This is part of its charm, of course. But saying that Harry Potter is a "derivative work" is really praise for the author's knowledge, not an accusation of criminal activity.
Publishing unauthorized works in the Harry Potter universe is one thing. Tanya Grotter and other such stories are not this at all. They are really new stories in a broad genre that existed long before Harry Potter. If they are ripoffs, then so are the Harry books, and Rowling should be stopped for the same reasons.
It'll be a sad day for literature and culture if such similar writings are blocked.
So let's hear from the Disney people. What do they think abut Rowling writing books in a magical world so similar to earlier Disney works?
Ah, but this wasn't mentioned in the definition. Recall that it said only:
At least for the mailing lists that I'm on, there was never any human interaction when I signed up. I exchanged messages with some remote software. At no time did I form any sort of "relationship" with any person during this process. I may have formed loose pen-pal type relationships with a few people on the list, but most of the list members are strangers who are just names.
So by the definition given, anything I send to such a list is spam.
I'd say this definitely cheapens the term, since it makes memebers of most mailing lists (and anyone who posts to a newsgroup) into spammers.
There is a real possibility that, if such a definition is enacted into law, most mailing lists and all newsgroups will be among the casualties.
Email spam is ... sending email unsolicited to individuals you have no personal relationship with.
... That would cover sending a message to a mailing list or a newsgroup, since you rarely have a personal relation with anyone in those fora.
Hmmm
Guess I'll just have to consider myself a spammer. Just like a year and a half ago, George Dubya taught me that I'm a terrorist, since I don't agree with him.
It does sorta cheapen a term though, when nearly everyone qualifies.
That's wonderful! I'm glad that someone had enough (infinite?) time on his/her hands to produce this "book".
My site was almost DOSed by bots originating from MS.
Similarly, my server has been hit with a DOS that originate at several blocks of IP addresses, only a few of them belonging to MSN. A year or so back, some of them learned how to invoke some of my cgi scripts. I have scripts that can read files from other sites and convert them to any of several output formats. These little monsters were systematically feeding my scripts URLs and converting them to all the output formats. One searcher did it from at least 100 addresses simultaneously.
I implemented a blacklist that stopped those in their tracks. And to handle latecomers, I implemented a minimum 10-sec delay (since lowered to 5 sec) between requests from an IP address. That slows them down.
But you've given me an idea. I also have a "Cookie" generator. I had a script that returned just one. Now I also have a "Cookies" generator that loops, with a new cookie every 10 sec. I think I'll put it in a few directories that robots.txt says not to search. Then I'll check occasionally to see if there are any search bots stuck in the tar pit.
Maybe I'll just let them run. They'll eventually get a rather large file, if they're archiving it.
Anyone have any other good ideas for bogging down bots that ignore robots.txt?
Also, would you trust MS to not sell placement?
Yes, Google tried this, but they seem to have backed down pretty quickly, and their small ads are quite distinct from the real results.
With search.msn.com, they'd more likely go to great lengths to disguise the product placement.
This was a great part of what relegated altavista to the backwaters, remember. (Though if you check them out now, they seem to have gone back to a less blatantly commercial approach.)
In any case, we need to keep a close watch on all of them, including google. All it takes is a small shift in management focus to convert an information utility into a marketing utility.
Is there a sonyesque powerstuggle going on inside IBM ...?
Well, of course there is. IBM is a large corporation run by humans.
So has SCO/Caldera/whatever actually won any court cases? As far as I can tell from reading all the coverage, it appears that they have always "reached an agreement", i.e., settled out of court. It might be interesting to read of any cases that actually got a court decision.
It's possible that IBM's approach is based on the "professional litigious bastards" perception, and a decision that this time they are not going to let them get away with an out-of-court settlement.
So has SCO ever actual won or lost a court case? And if so, what happened on appeal?
If millions of people breaking the law every day is not an option, why do we have laws that millions of people break every day?
;-)
I know that was a rhetorical question, not intended to elicit an answer. But I'll answer it anyway.
They are called "nuisance laws". The function of such laws is to provide a pretext for arresting anyone that the authorities consider a "nuisance". All countries have laws like this. They are mostly not enforced at all. But if someone with power wants to arrest you, such laws give them a legal excuse. Typically they won't let it get to court, because they don't want to risk the chance that the courts will declare the law invalid, or will listen when your lawyer shows proof of discriminatory enforcement. The intent is to take you out of circulation for some time, cause you to spend a lot of money defending yourself, and so on.
Here in the US, the canonical example is all the speed-limit laws, which are typically not enforced for white people until you are 15 or 20 mph over the limit. But non-whites are routinely pulled over at much lower speeds. This is so widespread and flagrant that the media has a term for it "Driving While Black".
Similarly, in the past year or so, we have had a lot of people of Middle-Eastern background arrested and held for reasons that are never applied to white, European-type people. The laws are on the books exactly for this purpose.
There are similar nuisance laws on the books wherever you may live.
(Am I cynical enough yet?