Note that most ISPs are already heavily involved in censorship. For example, most of them have a "no servers" rule. You can't (legally) put your own files up on your own web site, or run an IRC site, or whatever. This is total censorship. Of course, it's not anything unusual. In the commercial world, "free speech" means you have the money to run your own publishing firm.
> if your email gets routed through Chicago it'll get lost in a pothole the size of a car.:)
Whadday mean, "if"???
And remember the recent story from Phoenix, where the local ISP was taken over by MSN, and as a result, customers could no longer read their email from anything except a Microsoft mail reader.
This is the way that corporations do things. With enough stories like this, we'll see government control that just as strong as what happened back in the early 1900's with the telephone system.
Of course, that could end up giving a monopoly to one big computer company. Here in the US, it wasn't until the 70's that we could legally use phones other than those supplied by The Phone Company. It's still that way in a lot of the world. Microsoft bribed their way out of their lawsuit with the justice department. (They did this openly and legally, via millions of dollars in campaign contributions). They could very easily take over big chunks of the Internet in the US and other countries in the same way. And it could take most of a century before it becomes legal again to use a non-MS device on the Internet.
It is interesting to contemplate that the roads are for the most part "owned and operated" by the government, but actual construction is mostly done by private contractors. It's easy to see how this could end up being the way the Net works.
After all, if the roads were privately owned, you'd have to stop and pay a toll every few meters, and each short segment of road would use different technology and be a different width. This is pretty much the approach of the big corporations to the Net, too.
Also, if GM owned big sections of the roads, do you think they'd allow Ford or Honda or Volvo vehicles to have access?
So if it's to work at all, we'll probably have to end up with the basic infrastructure firmly under the control of the government, but with most of the actual construction and maintenance done by private contractors. That way, we can have a Net that is consistent and usable, while the business people get to do their deals behind the scenes to make a comfortable living off it all.
> For just getting information dial-up is adequate
Yeah, but that's not what the Internet was designed for. Like the phone system, it was designed as a two-way system, with every host able to contact every other host.
One of the real reasons for applauding this sort of move is the widespread TOS clauses that say "no servers allowed". That is, you and I aren't permitted to put our own information (e.g., pictures of our kids and pets) on the Internet. The commercial world views the Internet solely as a marketing tool, with one-way access from the "consumer" to the "provider" of information and entertainment. They deny us the right to communicate among ourselves.
A publicly-owned Internet would be as valuable as a public library. Publishers don't like public libraries (and behind the scenes this is one of the main issues of the attempts to restrict "intellectual property rights") But public access to information is important if you want a world that's worth living in. And this includes the right to communicate to others, not just to download commercial information.
Yeah, and before you know it, people in the government will be claiming that they invented the Internet. Just as they claim that the government built the highway system.
If I follow the reasoning right, people are trying to insult Microsoft users by claiming that they are too stupid to learn new stuff.
But by this reasoning, the opposite is obviously true. With Microsoft, every year or two you have to learn a completely new system. The UI changes radically, everything you knew no longer works, and you have to learn all over again where everything is. Most of your old files are no longer accepted, and you have to laboriously convert them to the latest format. All the menus and config windows have changed, so you spend a lot of time exploring until you find where things are on your New! Improved! system.
Microsoft's users seem to approve of this. They keep buying Microsoft systems and upgrading to the latest incompatible releases. They obviously enjoy learning about new computer software and keeping up with the "advances" in commercial computer technology.
Contrast this with the unix environment. 25 years ago, I learned how to use a shell and commands like cat, cc, ls, grep, etc. They all still work. Code that I wrote 20 years ago still compiles with the same cc command, and runs the same way. Quarter-century-old makefiles still work without problems. My shell, perl and tcl scripts from 10 years ago all just keep working. Yes, there are fancy things like KDE and Gnome, but a dummy like me can mostly ignore most of their cruft, fire up a lot of xterms, and not have to learn much at all about a new release.
So obviously it's us unix/linux geeks who are the conservative fuddy-duddies who are too stupid to learn gratuitous new systems. Meanwhile, Microsoft users happily dig in and learn all about every new "advance" from Microsoft, no matter how much time and effort this wastes.
> "Linux has held a very small portion of the market" for desktop PCs, said Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of systems software research at IDC.
Well, of course linux has a small portion of "the market". This is because people who want linux are forced to buy a Windows PC and install linux on it. So almost all of the linux "desktop" machines are listed in sales records as Windows machines.
This is just one of many dishonest ways that people determine what "the market" wants.
If something isn't for sale, "the market" always shows that people aren't buying it.
This guy definitely has a slender hold on reality. He describes 1994 as a time when the "Internet was new", and talk about using Compuserve, which was a "precursor to the Internet".
If this is what passes for factual history in his world, there's no apparent reason that we should listen to anything else he has to say.
What's disappointing is that the reporter apparently saw no need to comment on the accuracy of such "facts".
> I would love to know why you can't view PDF (Portable Document Format) files.
Just out of curiosity, I pulled my Kyocera smartphone (the one that runs PalmOS with IP and the Eudora web browser) out of my pocket. I thought I'd check out this news item and see how well it worked from this PDA (which is rather popular around here). I was underwhelmed.
First, I hadn't tried slashdot.org on it, so I had to do that. Jeez... It took forever to come up, and the first zillion lines were filled with all that junk at the top with a list of links and what they do. Where's the story? Lots and lots of scrolling until I finally found what should have been at the top.
Once I found it, it was easy enough to read, so I clicked on the link to the article. The site told me in no uncertain terms that my browser was not compatible with the site, and it wouldn't send me anything until I got an acceptable browser. The only acceptable ones, according to the site, are AOL, Netscape and IE.
I also visited adobe.com to see about getting a PDF reader. They have one for PalmOS, but to get it, you first have to buy a Windows machine, because they only supply it inside a Windows.exe installer. If you have a Mac or linux or Sun or VMS or any other system, you can't get PalmOS software from them. Yeah, they obviously have the program, but you can't get it until you first pay the Microsoft tax.
So what am I missing here? Could someone explain to me just how easy it is to make this article's link work on my PalmOS gadget?
For that matter, is there a good way to read/. on a web-enabled PalmOS device? I did look around a bit, and found no clues.
Well, I dunno about you, but on all the jobs I've had in the past few years, reading slashdot and other similar sites was highly relevant to my job. So was reading assorted tech newsgroups and exchanging email with people working on similar projects at other places.
Yeah, some of the management types didn't like it. But there are enough of them that understand where their profits come, so I haven't actually seen much real interference.
There was a funny case 6 or 7 years back, when a customer sent us the results of a benchmark of our product against several others. When asked why I hadn't run the benchmark myself, I pointed to a printed policy that prevented me from accessing the site that had the benchmark's source. I mentioned that I'd read about the test, but thought that if I downloaded it, I'd get into trouble for violating the policy. The policy changed real fast after that.
Management that restrict their techies from use of the Net are dummies who are just shooting their own company in the foot.
Yeah; I was wondering if someone would point that out.
(As for the claim that corporations never do anything illegal: What wasn't that moderated as "funny"? The only way I can think that someone would seriously make such a claim is that they just arrived on this planet. If that was truly posted by a human, it had to have been with tongue in cheek.)
The article makes a bit of a point about the email not having signatures. But "the writing is on the wall" for signatures. There are quite a number of retail outlets (Sears, Home Depot, etc.) that are now using the little electronic gadgets that collect your signature as a graphic and keep it in case they need it. This means that there are a growing number of computers that have collections of signatures in their databases. It is only a matter of time until some unscrupulous corporation starts using these to forge signatures. And it is a matter of an even shorter time after that until a victim proves in court that a signature is a forgery.
This will inevitably destroy the legal usefulness of signatures. An "electronic paper trail" such as was used in this court case will be a much more reliable proof of contract. This case is just one of the first in a series that will change the way that "proof of contract" works.
It is, of course, not terribly difficult to forge email. So we should have some fun cases to study in the next decade or so, as the courts try to come to terms with this brave new world.
> He said they are blocking port 25 & 80, incoming.
Actually, in rereading my message, I see that this wasn't actually stated. Of course, it's the only thing that makes sense in the context of the rest of the message. (It just didn't occur to me that a/. reader wouldn't understand.;-)
Also, I've been told by some friends in another part of the metro area that their port 25 is blocked in both directions. So outgoing mail has to be handed over to ATT's mailer. This is, of course, a huge waste of time for messages that could be delivered instantly.
Presumably ATT wants all email messages stored on their machines so they can run software that examines it for interesting things. I can't think of any other reason they'd force such a gratuitous waste of their own disk space on customers. Lest anyone think this is paranoid, Ill remind you again that MSN was caught doing this sort of thing a few months back, and using contents of customers' data for their own commercial purposes. Do you trust ATT more than MS?
Outgoing connections to port 25 work fine on my home machine. I sometimes like to demo email by doing "telnet 25" and typing the SMTP commands, including a "MAIL From: " line identifying the source as some celebrity. Then I challenge them to find evidence of where it really came from. This can be a real eye opener for people who are naive about the concept of email forgery. (Not that snail mail is much more difficult to forge.)
(Some of my friends are accustomed to getting personal messages from dubya@whitehouse.gov, and know to send the reply back to me. One of these days one of them will get a real message from Georgie, and I'll get the reply.;-)
So have they stopped blocking ports 25 and 80 in your neighborhood? Around here, those are blocked. You can't run your own SMTP or HTTP servers, at least not on the standard port.
Presumably this is because they're an "information service", by which they mean that if you start supplying information over their lines, you're a competitor and they'll shut you down.
Hereabouts, if you want to put your family pictures up on your own web site, you're in violation of the TOS. You're supposed to put them on the web space that they give you "for free".
Remember a few months back when people found that MSN was taking things like pictures from customers' web sites and using them in ads?
As a programmer, I have often given a simple explanation of why I can't write reliable software. On most vendors' computers (Microsoft obviously, but also Sun, HP, IBM and most of the rest), the inner workings are totally hidden from me. I can't even in principle know what a lot of my code will do in all cases, because I much make calls to the underlying system and its libraries, and the code for these things is a proprietary secret.
What I usually use as a parallel is: Imagine that the people who built buildings or bridges were required to use commercial steen and concrete, but the specs for these materials were trade secrets. Imagine that construction firms had to use whatever material was delivered, and were not permitted to see its specs. There would be no way that anyone could calculate the effect of loads and stresses, and things would fall down under load.
This is how software is built.
On Open Source systems, it's somewhat different, because the source is available. But even there, you can only understand the system "in principle". You usually don't have the time it would take to thoroughly investigate all the components that you use. Open Source software does generally work better, true, but it's not because every programmer has examined every piece of the source. It's because a lot of them have examined a few pieces, and they can tell each other about problems (and fix them).
This probably has significant legal impact. Consider the construction parallel again. If I design a structure and specify materials of a certain quality, those materials are used, and the structure collapses, I am probably liable. But if the material vendors substitute material with different properties (usually for cost reasons), all I need to do is show in court that the material didn't meet my specs. I'm not liable, and the vendors end up facing some serious fraud charges.
With software, this sort of fraud happens routinely, with all sorts of system components that are delivered knowing that they don't do what the manuals says they do. Or the vendors don't even bother checking that things work right, because they know they can't be held liable. Then people hire programmers like me to write software using such shoddy systems, and expect us to write reliable software on top of it. Then it turns out that some parts of the system have "undocumented features", and the code doesn't work right.
Until we find a way to force reliability on the Microsofts and Suns and IBMs of the world, the way we have with companies that sell steel and concrete, there's no way whatsoever that programmers can ever write reliable software.
It's time to point out again that there's a perfect solution to all this at:
http://www.snark.com/e-mail/
With this approach, Mr. Gilmore could keep his spam relay open and MAKE MONEY FAST! from it. His ISP would charge him more, but he'd probably be happy to pay a fraction of his profits to them.
;-)
(Be sure to check out the "simple explanation" page, too. It's all quite well done.)
> And by the way, why would you want to take a way the MS copyright? They do own it you know.
For the same reason I'd like to see their trademark on the word "windows" revoked. Consider the infringement case they've filed against Lindows.
What I'm afraid of is that if I, for example, send an email message to a local contractor talking about replacing some of the old, drafty windows in my house, the email will pass through some Microsoft server, where my use of the term "windows" is noted (and the fact that I'm considering paying someone other than Microsoft for them), and I'll be facing an infringement suit.
These days, worrying about such things isn't paranoid; it merely means you're following the news.
In any case, a basic principle of antitrust cases is that you don't have to win; you only have to delay a judgement. As long as the company can keep the case in the courts, it can continue its illegal practices. The court costs for Microsoft are much smaller than the profits they are making, so delaying the case is merely a marginal cost of doing business.
We might note that current Fortran implementations generally include a C compiler and you can link routines in the two languages without problems. This is easy because, except for superficial surface syntax, Fortran 90 and C (and C++ and Pascal and...) are the same language.
It's true that Fortran has always included a lot of numerical stuff that isn't in C. But I'd classify this as "superficial surface syntax", too. The Fortran compiler tends to produce subroutine calls for a lot of this; it's just that the Fortran code doesn't look like it's calling subroutines because there's special syntax for it all. C++ makes it possible to do all this with classes and overloaded operators, but C++ users are generally aware that this is really just syntactic sugar to make the C code (structs and macros) more readable. Fortran does the same thing, but users pretend that such features are unique to their language and lacking in C, because C forces you to use function/macro notation for it all.
A while back, someone abserved that we don't know what the major numerical language will be in 50 years, but we know it will be called "Fortran".
Another interesting observation a few years ago was that most of the running code in the world is in Fortran, because more than half the world's cpu cycles are used to run a single algorithm that is coded in Fortran. Trivia question: What does that algorithm do, and why do so many computers spend their entire lives running it?
A lot of this seems beside the point. Any minimally competent security person would simply say "If I don't have the source, I don't run it." If you don't have the source (and time to study it), you have no idea what's in it. It could contain any sort of backdoor, and you'd have no way of knowing.
Microsoft's security history should make one especially suspicious of any supposed "security" software for which they don't release the source to the entire security community. But this isn't really a Microsoft issue. Anyone who uses proprietary security software is asking for a security disaster.
Re:Should have specified Windows-only developers
on
The Problem Of Developing
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Heh, heh. I still keep running across studies that turn up the unexpected result that one of the most widely-used languages is still called "Fortran".
Haven't used that little monster in years, myself. But I have been somewhat bemused by the fact that over the past few years, I've used perl and tcl for pretty much all of the jobs I've been hired for. I never thought, when I started using these a decade ago, that people would ever actually be looking to hire people who knew them. I just learned them because it was obvious they were useful tools of the trade.
But the "top" languages are all pretty similar, and pretty much all descendents of the algol/pascal/C innovation more than a quarter of a century ago. People keep coming up with variations on the syntax, mostly so that they can claim to have a "new, improved" language. But they are all somorphic under the skin.
Now if we could only use some of the power of languages like prolog or snobol... or even lisp. But I guess it'll be more decades still before the commercial world advances to what we had back in the 60's.
Last summer, I did something similar with CGI scripts on one of my web sites. The site has a number of scripts that convert files in a compact notation to an assortment of output formats. What the data represents isn't too important; the problem arose from the fact that a single small file could be converted to things like PS or PDF or GIF or PNG or...
I'd been reading about research at the big search sites that was working on the problem of "hidden" web pages; i.e., pages that are generated on the fly by scripts that read from databases. The idea was to learn what was in a site's databases by calling the CGI scripts to extract it all. I found myself thinking "Uh, oh; I'd better watch for this."
One day it happened. A search site suddenly started invoking my scripts, methodically trying to extract all the data that I had in all of the output formats that I supported. And it did this in parallel from a large number of machines. This brought my server down and kept it down.
So I added a "blacklist" to my code. Any requests from any of those IP addresses got only a small page saying that they were on my blacklist. I included my email address in case anyone wanted to discuss the situation. Over a few months, my blacklist grew to include a few dozen blocks of addresses.
I've never received any email from any of the search sites. However, a few weeks back I got a message from a person in Singapore who wanted to use my site, but only got a blacklist message. I checked, and sure enough, his address was an ISP in Singapore. No way of telling him apart from the search bot at the same address (but presumably on a different machine).
The ISP didn't respond sensibly to my query, so I have no choice but to continue the blacklist. All I have for identification is the ISP's IP address, so I have to block everything behind that address.
I don't like blocking everyone behind an ISP, but I can't think of any other way to prevent this sort of attack on my server.
(Yes, I do have a robots.txt file. And I know how to use it.;-)
Heh, heh. Yah; I'd do something similar. But I wouldn't bother with a telnet and a GET; there are any number of command-line tools that let you just give the URL and you get back a blow-by-blow account of what the tool sees. I have several, including one that I wrote myself (so that I could make sure that it told me everything interesting).
But that all seemed a bit wordy for a basic answer to "How can you test for caching?"
"The details are left as an exercise for the reader.";-)
Slashdot Mirror
Note that most ISPs are already heavily involved in censorship. For example, most of them have a "no servers" rule. You can't (legally) put your own files up on your own web site, or run an IRC site, or whatever. This is total censorship. Of course, it's not anything unusual. In the commercial world, "free speech" means you have the money to run your own publishing firm.
Hmmm ... I didn't know that asbestos came from trees. The things you learn on slashdot ...
> if your email gets routed through Chicago it'll get lost in a pothole the size of a car.:)
Whadday mean, "if"???
And remember the recent story from Phoenix, where the local ISP was taken over by MSN, and as a result, customers could no longer read their email from anything except a Microsoft mail reader.
This is the way that corporations do things. With enough stories like this, we'll see government control that just as strong as what happened back in the early 1900's with the telephone system.
Of course, that could end up giving a monopoly to one big computer company. Here in the US, it wasn't until the 70's that we could legally use phones other than those supplied by The Phone Company. It's still that way in a lot of the world. Microsoft bribed their way out of their lawsuit with the justice department. (They did this openly and legally, via millions of dollars in campaign contributions). They could very easily take over big chunks of the Internet in the US and other countries in the same way. And it could take most of a century before it becomes legal again to use a non-MS device on the Internet.
It is interesting to contemplate that the roads are for the most part "owned and operated" by the government, but actual construction is mostly done by private contractors. It's easy to see how this could end up being the way the Net works.
After all, if the roads were privately owned, you'd have to stop and pay a toll every few meters, and each short segment of road would use different technology and be a different width. This is pretty much the approach of the big corporations to the Net, too.
Also, if GM owned big sections of the roads, do you think they'd allow Ford or Honda or Volvo vehicles to have access?
So if it's to work at all, we'll probably have to end up with the basic infrastructure firmly under the control of the government, but with most of the actual construction and maintenance done by private contractors. That way, we can have a Net that is consistent and usable, while the business people get to do their deals behind the scenes to make a comfortable living off it all.
> For just getting information dial-up is adequate
Yeah, but that's not what the Internet was designed for. Like the phone system, it was designed as a two-way system, with every host able to contact every other host.
One of the real reasons for applauding this sort of move is the widespread TOS clauses that say "no servers allowed". That is, you and I aren't permitted to put our own information (e.g., pictures of our kids and pets) on the Internet. The commercial world views the Internet solely as a marketing tool, with one-way access from the "consumer" to the "provider" of information and entertainment. They deny us the right to communicate among ourselves.
A publicly-owned Internet would be as valuable as a public library. Publishers don't like public libraries (and behind the scenes this is one of the main issues of the attempts to restrict "intellectual property rights") But public access to information is important if you want a world that's worth living in. And this includes the right to communicate to others, not just to download commercial information.
Yeah, and before you know it, people in the government will be claiming that they invented the Internet. Just as they claim that the government built the highway system.
If I follow the reasoning right, people are trying to insult Microsoft users by claiming that they are too stupid to learn new stuff.
;-) for the humor-impaired?
But by this reasoning, the opposite is obviously true. With Microsoft, every year or two you have to learn a completely new system. The UI changes radically, everything you knew no longer works, and you have to learn all over again where everything is. Most of your old files are no longer accepted, and you have to laboriously convert them to the latest format. All the menus and config windows have changed, so you spend a lot of time exploring until you find where things are on your New! Improved! system.
Microsoft's users seem to approve of this. They keep buying Microsoft systems and upgrading to the latest incompatible releases. They obviously enjoy learning about new computer software and keeping up with the "advances" in commercial computer technology.
Contrast this with the unix environment. 25 years ago, I learned how to use a shell and commands like cat, cc, ls, grep, etc. They all still work. Code that I wrote 20 years ago still compiles with the same cc command, and runs the same way. Quarter-century-old makefiles still work without problems. My shell, perl and tcl scripts from 10 years ago all just keep working. Yes, there are fancy things like KDE and Gnome, but a dummy like me can mostly ignore most of their cruft, fire up a lot of xterms, and not have to learn much at all about a new release.
So obviously it's us unix/linux geeks who are the conservative fuddy-duddies who are too stupid to learn gratuitous new systems. Meanwhile, Microsoft users happily dig in and learn all about every new "advance" from Microsoft, no matter how much time and effort this wastes.
Maybe I should add a
> "Linux has held a very small portion of the market" for desktop PCs, said Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of systems software research at IDC.
Well, of course linux has a small portion of "the market". This is because people who want linux are forced to buy a Windows PC and install linux on it. So almost all of the linux "desktop" machines are listed in sales records as Windows machines.
This is just one of many dishonest ways that people determine what "the market" wants.
If something isn't for sale, "the market" always shows that people aren't buying it.
Duh.
This guy definitely has a slender hold on reality. He describes 1994 as a time when the "Internet was new", and talk about using Compuserve, which was a "precursor to the Internet".
If this is what passes for factual history in his world, there's no apparent reason that we should listen to anything else he has to say.
What's disappointing is that the reporter apparently saw no need to comment on the accuracy of such "facts".
> I would love to know why you can't view PDF (Portable Document Format) files.
... It took forever to come up, and the first zillion lines were filled with all that junk at the top with a list of links and what they do. Where's the story? Lots and lots of scrolling until I finally found what should have been at the top.
.exe installer. If you have a Mac or linux or Sun or VMS or any other system, you can't get PalmOS software from them. Yeah, they obviously have the program, but you can't get it until you first pay the Microsoft tax.
/. on a web-enabled PalmOS device? I did look around a bit, and found no clues.
Just out of curiosity, I pulled my Kyocera smartphone (the one that runs PalmOS with IP and the Eudora web browser) out of my pocket. I thought I'd check out this news item and see how well it worked from this PDA (which is rather popular around here). I was underwhelmed.
First, I hadn't tried slashdot.org on it, so I had to do that. Jeez
Once I found it, it was easy enough to read, so I clicked on the link to the article. The site told me in no uncertain terms that my browser was not compatible with the site, and it wouldn't send me anything until I got an acceptable browser. The only acceptable ones, according to the site, are AOL, Netscape and IE.
I also visited adobe.com to see about getting a PDF reader. They have one for PalmOS, but to get it, you first have to buy a Windows machine, because they only supply it inside a Windows
So what am I missing here? Could someone explain to me just how easy it is to make this article's link work on my PalmOS gadget?
For that matter, is there a good way to read
Well, I dunno about you, but on all the jobs I've had in the past few years, reading slashdot and other similar sites was highly relevant to my job. So was reading assorted tech newsgroups and exchanging email with people working on similar projects at other places.
Yeah, some of the management types didn't like it. But there are enough of them that understand where their profits come, so I haven't actually seen much real interference.
There was a funny case 6 or 7 years back, when a customer sent us the results of a benchmark of our product against several others. When asked why I hadn't run the benchmark myself, I pointed to a printed policy that prevented me from accessing the site that had the benchmark's source. I mentioned that I'd read about the test, but thought that if I downloaded it, I'd get into trouble for violating the policy. The policy changed real fast after that.
Management that restrict their techies from use of the Net are dummies who are just shooting their own company in the foot.
Yeah; I was wondering if someone would point that out.
(As for the claim that corporations never do anything illegal: What wasn't that moderated as "funny"? The only way I can think that someone would seriously make such a claim is that they just arrived on this planet. If that was truly posted by a human, it had to have been with tongue in cheek.)
The article makes a bit of a point about the email not having signatures. But "the writing is on the wall" for signatures. There are quite a number of retail outlets (Sears, Home Depot, etc.) that are now using the little electronic gadgets that collect your signature as a graphic and keep it in case they need it. This means that there are a growing number of computers that have collections of signatures in their databases. It is only a matter of time until some unscrupulous corporation starts using these to forge signatures. And it is a matter of an even shorter time after that until a victim proves in court that a signature is a forgery.
This will inevitably destroy the legal usefulness of signatures. An "electronic paper trail" such as was used in this court case will be a much more reliable proof of contract. This case is just one of the first in a series that will change the way that "proof of contract" works.
It is, of course, not terribly difficult to forge email. So we should have some fun cases to study in the next decade or so, as the courts try to come to terms with this brave new world.
> He said they are blocking port 25 & 80, incoming.
/. reader wouldn't understand. ;-)
;-)
Actually, in rereading my message, I see that this wasn't actually stated. Of course, it's the only thing that makes sense in the context of the rest of the message. (It just didn't occur to me that a
Also, I've been told by some friends in another part of the metro area that their port 25 is blocked in both directions. So outgoing mail has to be handed over to ATT's mailer. This is, of course, a huge waste of time for messages that could be delivered instantly.
Presumably ATT wants all email messages stored on their machines so they can run software that examines it for interesting things. I can't think of any other reason they'd force such a gratuitous waste of their own disk space on customers. Lest anyone think this is paranoid, Ill remind you again that MSN was caught doing this sort of thing a few months back, and using contents of customers' data for their own commercial purposes. Do you trust ATT more than MS?
Outgoing connections to port 25 work fine on my home machine. I sometimes like to demo email by doing "telnet 25" and typing the SMTP commands, including a "MAIL From: " line identifying the source as some celebrity. Then I challenge them to find evidence of where it really came from. This can be a real eye opener for people who are naive about the concept of email forgery. (Not that snail mail is much more difficult to forge.)
(Some of my friends are accustomed to getting personal messages from dubya@whitehouse.gov, and know to send the reply back to me. One of these days one of them will get a real message from Georgie, and I'll get the reply.
> So far, ATTBI is doing most of that.
So have they stopped blocking ports 25 and 80 in your neighborhood? Around here, those are blocked. You can't run your own SMTP or HTTP servers, at least not on the standard port.
Presumably this is because they're an "information service", by which they mean that if you start supplying information over their lines, you're a competitor and they'll shut you down.
Hereabouts, if you want to put your family pictures up on your own web site, you're in violation of the TOS. You're supposed to put them on the web space that they give you "for free".
Remember a few months back when people found that MSN was taking things like pictures from customers' web sites and using them in ads?
"All your information are belong to us."
As a programmer, I have often given a simple explanation of why I can't write reliable software. On most vendors' computers (Microsoft obviously, but also Sun, HP, IBM and most of the rest), the inner workings are totally hidden from me. I can't even in principle know what a lot of my code will do in all cases, because I much make calls to the underlying system and its libraries, and the code for these things is a proprietary secret.
What I usually use as a parallel is: Imagine that the people who built buildings or bridges were required to use commercial steen and concrete, but the specs for these materials were trade secrets. Imagine that construction firms had to use whatever material was delivered, and were not permitted to see its specs. There would be no way that anyone could calculate the effect of loads and stresses, and things would fall down under load.
This is how software is built.
On Open Source systems, it's somewhat different, because the source is available. But even there, you can only understand the system "in principle". You usually don't have the time it would take to thoroughly investigate all the components that you use. Open Source software does generally work better, true, but it's not because every programmer has examined every piece of the source. It's because a lot of them have examined a few pieces, and they can tell each other about problems (and fix them).
This probably has significant legal impact. Consider the construction parallel again. If I design a structure and specify materials of a certain quality, those materials are used, and the structure collapses, I am probably liable. But if the material vendors substitute material with different properties (usually for cost reasons), all I need to do is show in court that the material didn't meet my specs. I'm not liable, and the vendors end up facing some serious fraud charges.
With software, this sort of fraud happens routinely, with all sorts of system components that are delivered knowing that they don't do what the manuals says they do. Or the vendors don't even bother checking that things work right, because they know they can't be held liable. Then people hire programmers like me to write software using such shoddy systems, and expect us to write reliable software on top of it. Then it turns out that some parts of the system have "undocumented features", and the code doesn't work right.
Until we find a way to force reliability on the Microsofts and Suns and IBMs of the world, the way we have with companies that sell steel and concrete, there's no way whatsoever that programmers can ever write reliable software.
It's time to point out again that there's a perfect solution to all this at:
http://www.snark.com/e-mail/
With this approach, Mr. Gilmore could keep his spam relay open and MAKE MONEY FAST! from it. His ISP would charge him more, but he'd probably be happy to pay a fraction of his profits to them.
;-)
(Be sure to check out the "simple explanation" page, too. It's all quite well done.)
> And by the way, why would you want to take a way the MS copyright? They do own it you know.
For the same reason I'd like to see their trademark on the word "windows" revoked. Consider the infringement case they've filed against Lindows.
What I'm afraid of is that if I, for example, send an email message to a local contractor talking about replacing some of the old, drafty windows in my house, the email will pass through some Microsoft server, where my use of the term "windows" is noted (and the fact that I'm considering paying someone other than Microsoft for them), and I'll be facing an infringement suit.
These days, worrying about such things isn't paranoid; it merely means you're following the news.
In any case, a basic principle of antitrust cases is that you don't have to win; you only have to delay a judgement. As long as the company can keep the case in the courts, it can continue its illegal practices. The court costs for Microsoft are much smaller than the profits they are making, so delaying the case is merely a marginal cost of doing business.
We might note that current Fortran implementations generally include a C compiler and you can link routines in the two languages without problems. This is easy because, except for superficial surface syntax, Fortran 90 and C (and C++ and Pascal and ...) are the same language.
It's true that Fortran has always included a lot of numerical stuff that isn't in C. But I'd classify this as "superficial surface syntax", too. The Fortran compiler tends to produce subroutine calls for a lot of this; it's just that the Fortran code doesn't look like it's calling subroutines because there's special syntax for it all. C++ makes it possible to do all this with classes and overloaded operators, but C++ users are generally aware that this is really just syntactic sugar to make the C code (structs and macros) more readable. Fortran does the same thing, but users pretend that such features are unique to their language and lacking in C, because C forces you to use function/macro notation for it all.
A while back, someone abserved that we don't know what the major numerical language will be in 50 years, but we know it will be called "Fortran".
Another interesting observation a few years ago was that most of the running code in the world is in Fortran, because more than half the world's cpu cycles are used to run a single algorithm that is coded in Fortran. Trivia question: What does that algorithm do, and why do so many computers spend their entire lives running it?
A lot of this seems beside the point. Any minimally competent security person would simply say "If I don't have the source, I don't run it." If you don't have the source (and time to study it), you have no idea what's in it. It could contain any sort of backdoor, and you'd have no way of knowing.
Microsoft's security history should make one especially suspicious of any supposed "security" software for which they don't release the source to the entire security community. But this isn't really a Microsoft issue. Anyone who uses proprietary security software is asking for a security disaster.
Heh, heh. I still keep running across studies that turn up the unexpected result that one of the most widely-used languages is still called "Fortran".
... or even lisp. But I guess it'll be more decades still before the commercial world advances to what we had back in the 60's.
Haven't used that little monster in years, myself. But I have been somewhat bemused by the fact that over the past few years, I've used perl and tcl for pretty much all of the jobs I've been hired for. I never thought, when I started using these a decade ago, that people would ever actually be looking to hire people who knew them. I just learned them because it was obvious they were useful tools of the trade.
But the "top" languages are all pretty similar, and pretty much all descendents of the algol/pascal/C innovation more than a quarter of a century ago. People keep coming up with variations on the syntax, mostly so that they can claim to have a "new, improved" language. But they are all somorphic under the skin.
Now if we could only use some of the power of languages like prolog or snobol
Last summer, I did something similar with CGI scripts on one of my web sites. The site has a number of scripts that convert files in a compact notation to an assortment of output formats. What the data represents isn't too important; the problem arose from the fact that a single small file could be converted to things like PS or PDF or GIF or PNG or ...
;-)
I'd been reading about research at the big search sites that was working on the problem of "hidden" web pages; i.e., pages that are generated on the fly by scripts that read from databases. The idea was to learn what was in a site's databases by calling the CGI scripts to extract it all. I found myself thinking "Uh, oh; I'd better watch for this."
One day it happened. A search site suddenly started invoking my scripts, methodically trying to extract all the data that I had in all of the output formats that I supported. And it did this in parallel from a large number of machines. This brought my server down and kept it down.
So I added a "blacklist" to my code. Any requests from any of those IP addresses got only a small page saying that they were on my blacklist. I included my email address in case anyone wanted to discuss the situation. Over a few months, my blacklist grew to include a few dozen blocks of addresses.
I've never received any email from any of the search sites. However, a few weeks back I got a message from a person in Singapore who wanted to use my site, but only got a blacklist message. I checked, and sure enough, his address was an ISP in Singapore. No way of telling him apart from the search bot at the same address (but presumably on a different machine).
The ISP didn't respond sensibly to my query, so I have no choice but to continue the blacklist. All I have for identification is the ISP's IP address, so I have to block everything behind that address.
I don't like blocking everyone behind an ISP, but I can't think of any other way to prevent this sort of attack on my server.
(Yes, I do have a robots.txt file. And I know how to use it.
AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said, "We do not track the personal Web activity of our members for privacy reasons."
Obviously, this was taken out of context. Mr. Graham then went on to mutter to himself, "We do it for business reasons, not privacy reasons."
Heh, heh. Yah; I'd do something similar. But I wouldn't bother with a telnet and a GET; there are any number of command-line tools that let you just give the URL and you get back a blow-by-blow account of what the tool sees. I have several, including one that I wrote myself (so that I could make sure that it told me everything interesting).
;-)
But that all seemed a bit wordy for a basic answer to "How can you test for caching?"
"The details are left as an exercise for the reader."