I hope you enjoy your well-earned lulz, good sir troll. Next time pick something less obvious.
Hmmm... I'd sorta assumed that the anonymous "troll" was a professional photographer making an unsubtle joke.
Apparently it was too subtle for some of the readers here.
I just got a new Canon t2i. It's one of the best cameras I've ever used, and is far easier to use than any point-and-shoot that I've ever seen. Well, except for the usual problem with digitals, that the complex UI sometimes does things very different than what I expected or wanted, and I have to figure out how to back it out of whatever mysterious state it's gotten itself into. But I've seen that with a number of the latest P&S cameras which also try to do more than what their users want. This is really a problem with the "D" in "DSLR", not with the "SLR" part. Anything digital always comes with a complex "nerdview" UI for the first decade or so. Its main problem is that it doesn't fit in my pocket. But it does do a good job of telling people that I'm a serious photographer.;-)
What an incredible racket to have a business that peddles lies every day, without consequences.
Yeah, the folks at The Onion seem to be doing a pretty good job. Maybe the other "news" organizations are simply watching their success, and following in their footsteps.
And note that The Onion has a long-standing policy of never admitting that they publish parody and satire. They do so despite (or maybe because of) the fact that their stories frequently get quoted as fact.
For that matter, during the last couple of US elections, surveys repeatedly reported that the best-informed voters were those who watched Jon Stewart (The Daily Show) and Stephen Colbert (The Colbert Report).
This will probably trigger a lot of correlation-vs-causation replies...
Fact checking is something journalists used to do, these days its regarded as a waste of money that might spoil a good story.
Actually, that's pretty much the way it's always been. Yes, you can point out a few publications from various times that did fact checking. But at any given time, most of them didn't bother. Fact checking was a waste of time that could be better spent producing more stories for the customers to read. Ya gotta have lots of that sorta stuff to pad out the ads, after all.
I would consider a newspaper to be the nearest offline cousin and would rather that web news was persistent as a historical record. The idea of articles changing silently seems a little Orwellian to me. It can be very useful to know what the news was, even if it later transpired to be wrong.
I think you've pinpointed the main point of the issue. Changing a "news" report as the info comes in may make sense if you're thinking only of the present. But it discards the historical value of the reporting. A record that shows who knew what when is much more useful, after the fact, than just a statement of what we (thought we) knew when it was all over.
In this particular story, all we're left with is "FedEx lost a package containing radioactive medical material, and then found it". If that's the only record left of the story, it's of little value. Delivery services lose track of packages all the time, and then find them. That used to be the norm, of course. Before it became possible to track packages and communicate in real time with the delivery people, it's what always happened. You'd put a package on a truck or train or airplane, it would leave, and until it arrived somewhere, you didn't actually know where it was.
But in this case, if there's an investigation, you can be sure that they'll want records that show the documented progress of the delivery. Without that, you can't figure out what went wrong, and you can't easily modify your procedures to decrease the likelihood of it happening again.
Even if you don't care about that, I'd think that a "news" organization should recognize that a lot of their audience is interested in the progress of the news. Otherwise, for an extreme example, we wouldn't need to report on a sports event (or a war). We'd just wait until it was over, and report who won. But that would hardly satisfy the large part of the audience who wants to know how it all happened.
The power structure of the world has and will always be a pyramid, and those on the bottom have always had the strength and numbers to overthrow those above it, yet a look at the past 20 years in Myanmar/Burma and Argentina are enough to show you that people still, after thousands of years, aren't always quick to do it.
Actually, history is full of stories of the people at the top being overthrown by their "inferiors". But those people are human, too, so what they normally do is just step into their predecessors' position. For a few years or decades they're the ones on top. Then some of their inferiors repeat the process. (See Myanmar/Burma and Argentina for some recent examples.;-)
The development of democracies has changed this a bit, but not as much as people like to think. It's usually difficult to run for office without the backing of the existing power structure, i.e., the major political parties. The rest of us can talk and complain all we like, but the power structure knows that it can safely ignore us.
How do we make sure that nobody "controls" the web?
Make it unprofitable.
So . . . you want the government to manage it?:D
Well, the US government did fund about 99% of its development, mainly through (D)ARPA, the (Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency. That seems to have worked pretty well. Furthermore, ARPA left most of the development to the academic community, which does a fairly good job of "unprofitable". They were interested in capability, not profits. The military took what they considered useful from what the academics developed, used it to build their own Internet with very few connections to the academic Internet, and left the academics to continue to play with their big, useful toy.
OTOH, since the Internet was commercialized, we see a lot of what we're talking about here: The primary interest of the for-profit world is maximizing their income from the Internet, while minimizing development and support costs. This is why, for example, it has taken so long to get wireless Internet. It has been built by the phone companies, whose interests lie in creating exclusive "walled gardens", in which they have control over what software you are allowed to run, because they want you to pay for every little thing (even when its authors are giving it out free). They also seriously limit independent developers, because they want you to pay the phone companies for the software, not the developers. (Sorta like how the music industry has so successfully claimed 99% of the income, given a small part to the top "artists", and given the rest nothing.)
If history is any guide, we should conclude that strict government control and management of the Internet is the right way to go, at least in countries where the government (or the military;-) has the good sense to continue to view it as an academic playground. And, as ARPA did during the early development, we should restrict the corporate world to the role of suppliers of the components, with no control of what we do with the network.
The growing talk of corporate monopolies running big chunks of the Internet should be a serious warning to all of us. To see why, look at the phone system back when in the US and many other countries, you could only attach hardware purchased or leased from the phone companies to your phone line. For a century, this produced glacially-slow development. Then, in the US and a few other countries, the government changed the rules, and gave customers permission to attach "foreign" gadgets (that met minimum interface requirements) to their phone lines. Within only a few years, there was an explosion of new capabilities. This is what you'd expect when you enable competition, of course. But you can't have competition and development if your connection is controlled by a monopoly that's allowed to control how you can use their system. In the US, this is pretty much the situation with wireless phones right now, and as a result, the wireless Internet is seriously crippled here.
Phrases like "net neutrality" and "control of the Web" should be warnings to all of us that the corporate world is trying to take control and limit our use of the Internet to only what we've explicitly paid them for. Look at the anti-competitive ways that Apple's App Store imposes. Ask yourself whether you want Apple or any of the other big players to impose rules like that on all the independent software developers out there. Ask yourself whether you want one big "winner" to control the Internet like AT&T did the phone system for a century, and block almost all further progress.
This is a case where the classical "incompetence" of the government has worked to our advantage. Maybe we should keep it that way. Without it, we'd never have had the Internet. We'd only have a flock of small, vendor-specific networks. You'd only be able to communicate with people and sites approved of by your
Yeah; it's taking a while for the field of journalism to establish standards for such things. Updating in place wasn't possible with earlier kinds of publication, but it's easy enough with computerized reporting.
With all the criticisms of the/. editors, this is something that they usually seem to get right. The usual practice here is to label updates as such, and include the time. Maybe eventually this will be standard practice with the mass media, too.
Or not. So far, the indications haven't been encouraging. It is normal for people who found they made a mistake to try to cover it up, and with online news, all it takes is a bit of editing (and hoping that not too many people have saved a copy of your earlier version;-).
It's not a crime to reverse engineer or otherwise mimic another software.
Maybe not, but that doesn't stop them from suing you. One of the legal principles in American law is that if you have enough financial clout, you can file suit against anyone for any reason, and the worst that will happen to you is that some judge will throw the case out. But that can be delayed for years, and by then the legal costs may bankrupt your victim.
I guess one could do a two-step process, dumping to a generic SQL text file, for "backup" purposes, to get around it, but man oh man, that's pretty scary.
Oh, I dunno; one of my recent big projects was essentially doing that sort of thing. The client wanted to migrate from a small flock of incompatible mainframe DBs (mostly because they'd recently bought a lot of small competitors and wanted to merge them), onto a big flock of networked systems. I liked to tell people that my job was as an official "database cracker". The previous systems weren't well understood by the company's people, and the vendor (guess who?) wasn't being cooperative with their migration plans. So a small gang of us "hackers" were hired to crack the old systems' data formats, extract the data, and produce it in standard, portable forms. I fondly remember the day that I got a message asking how quickly I could add an XML format to the list of supplied output formats. I told them it might take a week or so, then I delivered the working XML the next day. They were overjoyed.
Anyway, we worked with as many data dumps as we could get our hands on, plus all of the usual collection of printed reports that their management had been using. Together, we pretty much managed to get all the data out. But the parser wasn't pretty. It didn't have to be, because it was intended to be run for just a few months, until the new system was up and handling the job. And we kept stumbling across new examples where the parser reported something new that we'd never seen and nobody could explain to us, resulting in yet more special-case kludges.
That was a few years ago. I really hope they've thrown all our data-extraction code out by now. But knowing how the corporate world usually works, I wouldn't be surprised if they still have a few of the mainframe systems clunking along, with our code running to rip into the data and feed it to the new system.
They do have the advantage that now their own people have all the documentation on how their system works. Assuming that they've had the sense not to throw that out, too.;-)
If you'd glanced at the link in the summary, you might have noticed the.foxnews.com domain. And they did their usual trick of updating the story in place, even after the story had significantly changed by the discovery of the missing package, and not giving readers a clue that a major change had taken place.
(And, no, Fox isn't nearly the only online news source that this this sort of thing.;-)
Hmmm... I see that the "Jews" tag has been removed. But this could be a useful example in a discussion I've had recently. I've been building some web sites that include blog-like capabilities, including some simple moderation and tagging in addition to replies like this one. I've argued in favor of including techniques that allow users to edit their own messages, and admins (group leaders, etc) to edit all material under their area. Some have counterargued that most such things should be left as-is, with no user-level ability to modify things that have already been posted.
This is such a blatantly pointless and offensive tag that I'd think any reasonable person would support the right of at least a group's admins to simply erase it. I've seen similar things in the form of replies. Maybe I'll start making a collection of them, to present as evidence of the sort of vandalism that we shouldn't preserve.
Of course, this is a bit of a rathole, since it's obvious that a few group leaders will just erase anything that they don't agree with. But perhaps this could be handled by slyly keeping a few examples of each person's erasures or edits, to present as evidence to people asking how trustworthy a group's leaders are.
I dunno, but it's possibly worth thinking about a bit. You obviously want to keep as much as is feasible, but there are reasonable grounds for erasing a lot of stuff, especially the occasional gigabytes of spam that appear overnight when someone discovers a hole in a site's armor. An offensive tag like this one doesn't take gigabytes, of course, but it's also a useful example to bring up in discussions of the topic.
... from reading the patent's claims, I can see only one thing that was not in HeapCheck, but which DID exist in Electric Fence: the ability to enable heap checks at runtime, without recompilation. Electric Fence allowed one to do that via LD_PRELOAD, so I am sorry, but I stand by what I said - I can see nothing in there that didn't exist in either Efence or my HeapCheck.
It sounds like, if I were to implement the algorithm in a compiled language such as C or C++, I wouldn't have to worry about IBM's patent. But if I were to recode it in a very similar language such as java, perl or python that does run-time compilation, it would be a violation of IBM's patent.
So what IBM has actually patented is the run-time compilation of languages like java, perl or python. I'd wonder how this makes for any sort of "innovation" or improvement of the algorithm on IBM's part. Or is IBM just trying to lay claim to coding in languages that "don't need recompilation" because they compile code dynamically at runtime? If so, any work being in such languages may be at serious risk when they are used to implement public-domain and GPL'd algorithms.
I wonder what would happen if I (or IBM) were to apply for a patent on the concept of array bounds checking without recompilation (which java, perl and python do, and other languages did back in the 1970s)...
Picky correction: We have too many Canada geese. "Canadian geese" refers to any geese in Canada, not just that one species.
In any case, I don't think peregrines ever take on a Canada goose, which is far to large for them. A pigeon is about the biggest thing they normally eat.
To control the Canada geese, you need something the size of a coyote or wolf - or a human. Nothing else much ever brings them down (other than an occasional airplane).
But they are pretty good to eat. Messy to clean, though. You wouldn't believe how many (and how fluffy) down feathers one of those critters has. That's part of how they survive so well as far north as they like to live.
Their efficiency in converting suburban lawns and gardens into expanses of goose shit is also well known hereabouts (near Boston).
In New York City, we have a bad pigeon problem... A falconer convinced the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation to let him try a hawk.... It seemed to work for a while. Then the hawk attacked some lady's chihuahua, and they discontinued the experiment.
Well, jeez; he used a Harris hawk. He should have used a peregrine falcon. They pretty much restrict themselves to killing and eating smaller birds. They were almost extinct in North America 30 years ago, but people started introducing them to cities, and now they've recovered and are busy eating pigeons, grackles, starlings, and lots of sparrows as light snacks, in cities all over the continent.
Of course, they do have some limitations. They don't go after mice or rats; for that it's better to use an animal that lives on the ground and can poke around in out-of-the-way corners. Also, peregrines are highly territorial during nesting season (spring, summer), and won't tolerate a peregrine other than their mate within a mile or so of the nest. The pigeon population in a square mile of most cities is too high for a pair of peregrines to clean out. But this territoriality is common for most other kinds of hawks, too, so as photogenic as they are, hawks are only a partial solution to a pigeon (or starling or sparrow) surplus.
As others have suggested, our best rodent control is probably our domestic cats, with a little help from our dogs. We just have to stop treating them as pampered pets, and put them back to work doing the job that we domesticated them for. They're carnivores whose wild relatives live mostly by eating rodents, and they're well-adapted to living with humans.
It might be interesting to try introducing meerkats in a few areas. They're incredibly cute, and they also like to eat rodents. They also like to make burrows, and could probably invade a lot of the rodents' turfs. There are some other mongooses (mongeese?) that also have potential for urban rodent control.
There's also the area in southern India where people keep household cobras for rodent control...
But to claim "face" (and no doubt "book") goes beyond what should have ever been allowed.
I'd wonder whether the real target of the facebook gang is the word "book". But that's so ludicrous that they had the sense not to tackle it first. The idea is to sneak up on it, by first registering "face", and getting a number of courts to agree with that. Then they can tackle the problem of getting control of "book" in an online setting, using the "face" court decisions as a precedent.
In the long run, "book" is probably a much more valuable word to own than "face", which is much more limited in its online applicability. And there's a lot of precedent for getting rulings in obscure cases that most people don't care about, and then surprising the world when you use them as legal precedent for something that everyone is doing.
Hmmm... I think I'll try registering facetious.org... No, wait; that's already registered (72.52.199.114), as are facetious.net (also 72.52.199.114) and facetious.com (208.87.32.68). Similarly, faceoff.com, faceoff.net and faceoff.org are all registered, as are facet.com, facet.net and facet.org. I wonder if they'll all be sued by facebook?
There's also the growing problem that most 1- and 2-word (English) domain names are all registered, mostly by domain squatters.
OTOH, it seems that right now, facebook.net isn't registered. Hmmm...;-)
There are good companies out there. You sound like you don't work at one.
One of the problems is that you often only know this in retrospect.
I've worked for a few companies that seemed to be very open and reasonable. Then I found that it was only the low-level managers that I dealt with that fit this description. I learned this when higher-level managers suddenly ordered something that was disastrous for us all (and in a couple of cases, resulted in the low-level managers resigning and finding new jobs).
Unless you're top management yourself, you never really know what "the company" is really like.
It only becomes a problem if a company does something dumb like mandates you use personal phones to connect to their exchange environment and in my experience this pretty much never happens...
Actually, there is a bit of history of employers requiring workers to pay for and own their own tools. Thus, the "line men" you see out working on utility poles usually buy the tools you see hanging from their belts. Most of the companies either require this, or they magnanimously supply a default toolkit that's so crappy that workers "decide on their own" to buy good tools.
But I've never read of a case in which those companies reach out and destroy the tools when they lay off the employees. Maybe this is setting a new precedent. In the future, we might read of a phone or electric company laying off workers, and sending out a team to damage their tools so they can't be used if the workers get a job with a competitor. (We ignore here the fact that most phone and electric companies are legal monopolies, so the workers can't usually go to a competitor without also moving to a new town.;-)
OTOH, it could be interesting if we had a few court cases over this corporate practice of destroying non-job-related files on (ex-)employees computer systems. It's likely that courts would consider this beyond the pale, and a clear case of willful mayhem and destruction of private property.
... but if they said, "hey, if you install this software you can connect to our email servers" I don't really think it would occur to me to go check if the ordinary behavior of that software gives them root on my box. That wouldn't even occur to me.
Well, maybe now it will occur to you.;-)/. does have an educational function, after all.
Seriously; if you're running MS Windows, you are vulnerable to all sorts of tricks like this. You really need to be aware of them. Yes, they're possible on all OSs, but MS builds them into the very OS. They've openly admitted that since XP, there has been a "feature" of the OS that lets MS install software, even if you have the auto-upgrade stuff disabled. So if you're hooked up to the network, MS can and will "upgrade" some parts of the system, and such upgrades can include whatever new capabilities they decide to install. And anyone who has bribed the right person at MS also knows how to do it.
In this case, we've all learned that merely connecting to Outlook opens a backdoor that lets someone wipe out part or all of your file system by merely sending you an email message. You really should be aware of this builtin capability, if you're using Outlook. And you should be aware that any other email package just might have a similar capability. And not just on Windows; it's theoretically feasible on any computer system.
Of course, if you're running open-source software, it's a whole lot less likely, since the code is available to knowledgeable people ("hackers";-), who often enjoy studying the source to learn about undocumented capabilities. When they find such things, they usually publicize them, and they get fixed. So the probability of open-source software having such problems is lower. But we've had a few instances of problems there, such as the release of Firefox some time back that had a backdoor. Yes, it was quickly found and fixed, but for a short time it was active. And we know about it, so we're watching for further attempts to get such things into our machines.
In the case of Outlook, we know such backdoors are there, and they're considered "features" that won't be removed. But now you know this, and you can take action to prevent it from destroying your file system. Read and learn.
Silly me, I thought the Soviet Union hadn't existed for nearly two decades.
Heh. If you look into the linguistic details, you'll find lots of "soviets" still functioning in what used to be the USSR. And we've got lots of them functioning here in New England, too. One of the fun facts about the propaganda industry is that the Russian term "soviet" (or more properly "sovyet", since it's two syllables in Russian) merely means "council". If you live in a town run by a town council, you have a "soviet-style" local government. Of course, that approach is known not to scale, and doesn't work well for cities or anything larger, as was well demonstrated by the USSR.
But it's a good example of one of the standard propaganda tools: Take a common word in another language, and transliterate it rather than translating. It'll sound foreign to your listeners, and you can give it any meaning you want, to make the "enemy" look terrible. Thus, the Arabic term "jihad" is merely the common word for "struggle". But if we read about some foreigners in a "struggle" with us, we wouldn't be too impressed or worried. So the propagandists leave it untranslated, and tell us that it means something like "holy war", which sounds awful and revs up our fear response. The word "soviet" used to work this way, but the government that used that term died off, and its successor doesn't use a name that's as foreign-sounding.
The "sovyet" (i.e., council) form of local government may be alive and well in Russia and busy running lots of small towns, as it is in New England villages and in much of the rest of the world. But the propagandists haven't quite figured out yet how to turn this into a way of making us fear and hate the Russians again. OTOH, maybe they just aren't bothering, since they've found another bunch of foreign devils who use words that, if left untranslated, are working to get us to fear and hate the people who speak their funny languages. So who cares what sort of government system the Russians are using these days?
But we might want to take a second look at the Russians. They seem to have settled on a mixture of unregulated corporations and mobsters to run their economy. There are a lot of reasons we should worry about this. But what Russian words can we leave untranslated to make them look bad and scary? Westerners aren't very afraid of corporations or mobsters these days, after all, and many of our politicians seem to approve of them. We need to find some relevant Russian words that can focus our attention on them, if we're to turn them back into an enemy.
Any suggestions for the next good Russian word to re-instill fear in our population?
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you enjoy your well-earned lulz, good sir troll. Next time pick something less obvious.
Hmmm ... I'd sorta assumed that the anonymous "troll" was a professional photographer making an unsubtle joke.
Apparently it was too subtle for some of the readers here.
I just got a new Canon t2i. It's one of the best cameras I've ever used, and is far easier to use than any point-and-shoot that I've ever seen. Well, except for the usual problem with digitals, that the complex UI sometimes does things very different than what I expected or wanted, and I have to figure out how to back it out of whatever mysterious state it's gotten itself into. But I've seen that with a number of the latest P&S cameras which also try to do more than what their users want. This is really a problem with the "D" in "DSLR", not with the "SLR" part. Anything digital always comes with a complex "nerdview" UI for the first decade or so. Its main problem is that it doesn't fit in my pocket. But it does do a good job of telling people that I'm a serious photographer. ;-)
What an incredible racket to have a business that peddles lies every day, without consequences.
Yeah, the folks at The Onion seem to be doing a pretty good job. Maybe the other "news" organizations are simply watching their success, and following in their footsteps.
And note that The Onion has a long-standing policy of never admitting that they publish parody and satire. They do so despite (or maybe because of) the fact that their stories frequently get quoted as fact.
For that matter, during the last couple of US elections, surveys repeatedly reported that the best-informed voters were those who watched Jon Stewart (The Daily Show) and Stephen Colbert (The Colbert Report).
This will probably trigger a lot of correlation-vs-causation replies ...
Fact checking is something journalists used to do, these days its regarded as a waste of money that might spoil a good story.
Actually, that's pretty much the way it's always been. Yes, you can point out a few publications from various times that did fact checking. But at any given time, most of them didn't bother. Fact checking was a waste of time that could be better spent producing more stories for the customers to read. Ya gotta have lots of that sorta stuff to pad out the ads, after all.
I would consider a newspaper to be the nearest offline cousin and would rather that web news was persistent as a historical record. The idea of articles changing silently seems a little Orwellian to me. It can be very useful to know what the news was, even if it later transpired to be wrong.
I think you've pinpointed the main point of the issue. Changing a "news" report as the info comes in may make sense if you're thinking only of the present. But it discards the historical value of the reporting. A record that shows who knew what when is much more useful, after the fact, than just a statement of what we (thought we) knew when it was all over.
In this particular story, all we're left with is "FedEx lost a package containing radioactive medical material, and then found it". If that's the only record left of the story, it's of little value. Delivery services lose track of packages all the time, and then find them. That used to be the norm, of course. Before it became possible to track packages and communicate in real time with the delivery people, it's what always happened. You'd put a package on a truck or train or airplane, it would leave, and until it arrived somewhere, you didn't actually know where it was.
But in this case, if there's an investigation, you can be sure that they'll want records that show the documented progress of the delivery. Without that, you can't figure out what went wrong, and you can't easily modify your procedures to decrease the likelihood of it happening again.
Even if you don't care about that, I'd think that a "news" organization should recognize that a lot of their audience is interested in the progress of the news. Otherwise, for an extreme example, we wouldn't need to report on a sports event (or a war). We'd just wait until it was over, and report who won. But that would hardly satisfy the large part of the audience who wants to know how it all happened.
The power structure of the world has and will always be a pyramid, and those on the bottom have always had the strength and numbers to overthrow those above it, yet a look at the past 20 years in Myanmar/Burma and Argentina are enough to show you that people still, after thousands of years, aren't always quick to do it.
Actually, history is full of stories of the people at the top being overthrown by their "inferiors". But those people are human, too, so what they normally do is just step into their predecessors' position. For a few years or decades they're the ones on top. Then some of their inferiors repeat the process. (See Myanmar/Burma and Argentina for some recent examples. ;-)
The development of democracies has changed this a bit, but not as much as people like to think. It's usually difficult to run for office without the backing of the existing power structure, i.e., the major political parties. The rest of us can talk and complain all we like, but the power structure knows that it can safely ignore us.
That's not mine; mine is 192.168.1.103.
So I'm two better than you guys.
How do we make sure that nobody "controls" the web?
Make it unprofitable.
So . . . you want the government to manage it? :D
Well, the US government did fund about 99% of its development, mainly through (D)ARPA, the (Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency. That seems to have worked pretty well. Furthermore, ARPA left most of the development to the academic community, which does a fairly good job of "unprofitable". They were interested in capability, not profits. The military took what they considered useful from what the academics developed, used it to build their own Internet with very few connections to the academic Internet, and left the academics to continue to play with their big, useful toy.
OTOH, since the Internet was commercialized, we see a lot of what we're talking about here: The primary interest of the for-profit world is maximizing their income from the Internet, while minimizing development and support costs. This is why, for example, it has taken so long to get wireless Internet. It has been built by the phone companies, whose interests lie in creating exclusive "walled gardens", in which they have control over what software you are allowed to run, because they want you to pay for every little thing (even when its authors are giving it out free). They also seriously limit independent developers, because they want you to pay the phone companies for the software, not the developers. (Sorta like how the music industry has so successfully claimed 99% of the income, given a small part to the top "artists", and given the rest nothing.)
If history is any guide, we should conclude that strict government control and management of the Internet is the right way to go, at least in countries where the government (or the military ;-) has the good sense to continue to view it as an academic playground. And, as ARPA did during the early development, we should restrict the corporate world to the role of suppliers of the components, with no control of what we do with the network.
The growing talk of corporate monopolies running big chunks of the Internet should be a serious warning to all of us. To see why, look at the phone system back when in the US and many other countries, you could only attach hardware purchased or leased from the phone companies to your phone line. For a century, this produced glacially-slow development. Then, in the US and a few other countries, the government changed the rules, and gave customers permission to attach "foreign" gadgets (that met minimum interface requirements) to their phone lines. Within only a few years, there was an explosion of new capabilities. This is what you'd expect when you enable competition, of course. But you can't have competition and development if your connection is controlled by a monopoly that's allowed to control how you can use their system. In the US, this is pretty much the situation with wireless phones right now, and as a result, the wireless Internet is seriously crippled here.
Phrases like "net neutrality" and "control of the Web" should be warnings to all of us that the corporate world is trying to take control and limit our use of the Internet to only what we've explicitly paid them for. Look at the anti-competitive ways that Apple's App Store imposes. Ask yourself whether you want Apple or any of the other big players to impose rules like that on all the independent software developers out there. Ask yourself whether you want one big "winner" to control the Internet like AT&T did the phone system for a century, and block almost all further progress.
This is a case where the classical "incompetence" of the government has worked to our advantage. Maybe we should keep it that way. Without it, we'd never have had the Internet. We'd only have a flock of small, vendor-specific networks. You'd only be able to communicate with people and sites approved of by your
Yeah; it's taking a while for the field of journalism to establish standards for such things. Updating in place wasn't possible with earlier kinds of publication, but it's easy enough with computerized reporting.
With all the criticisms of the /. editors, this is something that they usually seem to get right. The usual practice here is to label updates as such, and include the time. Maybe eventually this will be standard practice with the mass media, too.
Or not. So far, the indications haven't been encouraging. It is normal for people who found they made a mistake to try to cover it up, and with online news, all it takes is a bit of editing (and hoping that not too many people have saved a copy of your earlier version ;-).
It's not a crime to reverse engineer or otherwise mimic another software.
Maybe not, but that doesn't stop them from suing you. One of the legal principles in American law is that if you have enough financial clout, you can file suit against anyone for any reason, and the worst that will happen to you is that some judge will throw the case out. But that can be delayed for years, and by then the legal costs may bankrupt your victim.
I guess one could do a two-step process, dumping to a generic SQL text file, for "backup" purposes, to get around it, but man oh man, that's pretty scary.
Oh, I dunno; one of my recent big projects was essentially doing that sort of thing. The client wanted to migrate from a small flock of incompatible mainframe DBs (mostly because they'd recently bought a lot of small competitors and wanted to merge them), onto a big flock of networked systems. I liked to tell people that my job was as an official "database cracker". The previous systems weren't well understood by the company's people, and the vendor (guess who?) wasn't being cooperative with their migration plans. So a small gang of us "hackers" were hired to crack the old systems' data formats, extract the data, and produce it in standard, portable forms. I fondly remember the day that I got a message asking how quickly I could add an XML format to the list of supplied output formats. I told them it might take a week or so, then I delivered the working XML the next day. They were overjoyed.
Anyway, we worked with as many data dumps as we could get our hands on, plus all of the usual collection of printed reports that their management had been using. Together, we pretty much managed to get all the data out. But the parser wasn't pretty. It didn't have to be, because it was intended to be run for just a few months, until the new system was up and handling the job. And we kept stumbling across new examples where the parser reported something new that we'd never seen and nobody could explain to us, resulting in yet more special-case kludges.
That was a few years ago. I really hope they've thrown all our data-extraction code out by now. But knowing how the corporate world usually works, I wouldn't be surprised if they still have a few of the mainframe systems clunking along, with our code running to rip into the data and feed it to the new system.
They do have the advantage that now their own people have all the documentation on how their system works. Assuming that they've had the sense not to throw that out, too. ;-)
More to the point: Fox News has editors? ;-)
If you'd glanced at the link in the summary, you might have noticed the .foxnews.com domain. And they did their usual trick of updating the story in place, even after the story had significantly changed by the discovery of the missing package, and not giving readers a clue that a major change had taken place.
(And, no, Fox isn't nearly the only online news source that this this sort of thing. ;-)
Hmmm ... I see that the "Jews" tag has been removed. But this could be a useful example in a discussion I've had recently. I've been building some web sites that include blog-like capabilities, including some simple moderation and tagging in addition to replies like this one. I've argued in favor of including techniques that allow users to edit their own messages, and admins (group leaders, etc) to edit all material under their area. Some have counterargued that most such things should be left as-is, with no user-level ability to modify things that have already been posted.
This is such a blatantly pointless and offensive tag that I'd think any reasonable person would support the right of at least a group's admins to simply erase it. I've seen similar things in the form of replies. Maybe I'll start making a collection of them, to present as evidence of the sort of vandalism that we shouldn't preserve.
Of course, this is a bit of a rathole, since it's obvious that a few group leaders will just erase anything that they don't agree with. But perhaps this could be handled by slyly keeping a few examples of each person's erasures or edits, to present as evidence to people asking how trustworthy a group's leaders are.
I dunno, but it's possibly worth thinking about a bit. You obviously want to keep as much as is feasible, but there are reasonable grounds for erasing a lot of stuff, especially the occasional gigabytes of spam that appear overnight when someone discovers a hole in a site's armor. An offensive tag like this one doesn't take gigabytes, of course, but it's also a useful example to bring up in discussions of the topic.
... from reading the patent's claims, I can see only one thing that was not in HeapCheck, but which DID exist in Electric Fence: the ability to enable heap checks at runtime, without recompilation. Electric Fence allowed one to do that via LD_PRELOAD, so I am sorry, but I stand by what I said - I can see nothing in there that didn't exist in either Efence or my HeapCheck.
It sounds like, if I were to implement the algorithm in a compiled language such as C or C++, I wouldn't have to worry about IBM's patent. But if I were to recode it in a very similar language such as java, perl or python that does run-time compilation, it would be a violation of IBM's patent.
So what IBM has actually patented is the run-time compilation of languages like java, perl or python. I'd wonder how this makes for any sort of "innovation" or improvement of the algorithm on IBM's part. Or is IBM just trying to lay claim to coding in languages that "don't need recompilation" because they compile code dynamically at runtime? If so, any work being in such languages may be at serious risk when they are used to implement public-domain and GPL'd algorithms.
I wonder what would happen if I (or IBM) were to apply for a patent on the concept of array bounds checking without recompilation (which java, perl and python do, and other languages did back in the 1970s) ...
Patents (like registered trademarks, and unlike copyright) are assumed enforcable unless proven otherwise.
Wouldn't prior art prove otherwise?
Only after you've paid for the court case to decide the case.
Good luck taking IBM to court.
Picky correction: We have too many Canada geese. "Canadian geese" refers to any geese in Canada, not just that one species.
In any case, I don't think peregrines ever take on a Canada goose, which is far to large for them. A pigeon is about the biggest thing they normally eat.
To control the Canada geese, you need something the size of a coyote or wolf - or a human. Nothing else much ever brings them down (other than an occasional airplane).
But they are pretty good to eat. Messy to clean, though. You wouldn't believe how many (and how fluffy) down feathers one of those critters has. That's part of how they survive so well as far north as they like to live.
Their efficiency in converting suburban lawns and gardens into expanses of goose shit is also well known hereabouts (near Boston).
In New York City, we have a bad pigeon problem ... A falconer convinced the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation to let him try a hawk. ... It seemed to work for a while. Then the hawk attacked some lady's chihuahua, and they discontinued the experiment.
Well, jeez; he used a Harris hawk. He should have used a peregrine falcon. They pretty much restrict themselves to killing and eating smaller birds. They were almost extinct in North America 30 years ago, but people started introducing them to cities, and now they've recovered and are busy eating pigeons, grackles, starlings, and lots of sparrows as light snacks, in cities all over the continent.
Of course, they do have some limitations. They don't go after mice or rats; for that it's better to use an animal that lives on the ground and can poke around in out-of-the-way corners. Also, peregrines are highly territorial during nesting season (spring, summer), and won't tolerate a peregrine other than their mate within a mile or so of the nest. The pigeon population in a square mile of most cities is too high for a pair of peregrines to clean out. But this territoriality is common for most other kinds of hawks, too, so as photogenic as they are, hawks are only a partial solution to a pigeon (or starling or sparrow) surplus.
As others have suggested, our best rodent control is probably our domestic cats, with a little help from our dogs. We just have to stop treating them as pampered pets, and put them back to work doing the job that we domesticated them for. They're carnivores whose wild relatives live mostly by eating rodents, and they're well-adapted to living with humans.
It might be interesting to try introducing meerkats in a few areas. They're incredibly cute, and they also like to eat rodents. They also like to make burrows, and could probably invade a lot of the rodents' turfs. There are some other mongooses (mongeese?) that also have potential for urban rodent control.
There's also the area in southern India where people keep household cobras for rodent control ...
But to claim "face" (and no doubt "book") goes beyond what should have ever been allowed.
I'd wonder whether the real target of the facebook gang is the word "book". But that's so ludicrous that they had the sense not to tackle it first. The idea is to sneak up on it, by first registering "face", and getting a number of courts to agree with that. Then they can tackle the problem of getting control of "book" in an online setting, using the "face" court decisions as a precedent.
In the long run, "book" is probably a much more valuable word to own than "face", which is much more limited in its online applicability. And there's a lot of precedent for getting rulings in obscure cases that most people don't care about, and then surprising the world when you use them as legal precedent for something that everyone is doing.
Careful. facepalm.com, facepalm.org and facepalm.net are all registered domain names.
Hmmm ... I think I'll try registering facetious.org ... No, wait; that's already registered (72.52.199.114), as are facetious.net (also 72.52.199.114) and facetious.com (208.87.32.68). Similarly, faceoff.com, faceoff.net and faceoff.org are all registered, as are facet.com, facet.net and facet.org. I wonder if they'll all be sued by facebook?
There's also the growing problem that most 1- and 2-word (English) domain names are all registered, mostly by domain squatters.
OTOH, it seems that right now, facebook.net isn't registered. Hmmm ... ;-)
There are good companies out there. You sound like you don't work at one.
One of the problems is that you often only know this in retrospect.
I've worked for a few companies that seemed to be very open and reasonable. Then I found that it was only the low-level managers that I dealt with that fit this description. I learned this when higher-level managers suddenly ordered something that was disastrous for us all (and in a couple of cases, resulted in the low-level managers resigning and finding new jobs).
Unless you're top management yourself, you never really know what "the company" is really like.
It only becomes a problem if a company does something dumb like mandates you use personal phones to connect to their exchange environment and in my experience this pretty much never happens ...
Actually, there is a bit of history of employers requiring workers to pay for and own their own tools. Thus, the "line men" you see out working on utility poles usually buy the tools you see hanging from their belts. Most of the companies either require this, or they magnanimously supply a default toolkit that's so crappy that workers "decide on their own" to buy good tools.
But I've never read of a case in which those companies reach out and destroy the tools when they lay off the employees. Maybe this is setting a new precedent. In the future, we might read of a phone or electric company laying off workers, and sending out a team to damage their tools so they can't be used if the workers get a job with a competitor. (We ignore here the fact that most phone and electric companies are legal monopolies, so the workers can't usually go to a competitor without also moving to a new town. ;-)
OTOH, it could be interesting if we had a few court cases over this corporate practice of destroying non-job-related files on (ex-)employees computer systems. It's likely that courts would consider this beyond the pale, and a clear case of willful mayhem and destruction of private property.
Stay tuned, and see how it all turns out ...
... but if they said, "hey, if you install this software you can connect to our email servers" I don't really think it would occur to me to go check if the ordinary behavior of that software gives them root on my box. That wouldn't even occur to me.
Well, maybe now it will occur to you. ;-) /. does have an educational function, after all.
Seriously; if you're running MS Windows, you are vulnerable to all sorts of tricks like this. You really need to be aware of them. Yes, they're possible on all OSs, but MS builds them into the very OS. They've openly admitted that since XP, there has been a "feature" of the OS that lets MS install software, even if you have the auto-upgrade stuff disabled. So if you're hooked up to the network, MS can and will "upgrade" some parts of the system, and such upgrades can include whatever new capabilities they decide to install. And anyone who has bribed the right person at MS also knows how to do it.
In this case, we've all learned that merely connecting to Outlook opens a backdoor that lets someone wipe out part or all of your file system by merely sending you an email message. You really should be aware of this builtin capability, if you're using Outlook. And you should be aware that any other email package just might have a similar capability. And not just on Windows; it's theoretically feasible on any computer system.
Of course, if you're running open-source software, it's a whole lot less likely, since the code is available to knowledgeable people ("hackers" ;-), who often enjoy studying the source to learn about undocumented capabilities. When they find such things, they usually publicize them, and they get fixed. So the probability of open-source software having such problems is lower. But we've had a few instances of problems there, such as the release of Firefox some time back that had a backdoor. Yes, it was quickly found and fixed, but for a short time it was active. And we know about it, so we're watching for further attempts to get such things into our machines.
In the case of Outlook, we know such backdoors are there, and they're considered "features" that won't be removed. But now you know this, and you can take action to prevent it from destroying your file system. Read and learn.
My personal iphone is connected to a gmail account that I forward a copy of all my work email.
That way I get work email, but it is still my account.
So you and your boss aren't worried that google's staff has full access to your company email?
I wonder if you boss actually knows this ...
Do you have to post at least 1 fear mongering story a day
Of course, they do. And they've done better than that today. One the same /. front page, there's a story about Microsoft buying the IP rights to unix.
I wonder which of these is the scariest to /. readers?
Silly me, I thought the Soviet Union hadn't existed for nearly two decades.
Heh. If you look into the linguistic details, you'll find lots of "soviets" still functioning in what used to be the USSR. And we've got lots of them functioning here in New England, too. One of the fun facts about the propaganda industry is that the Russian term "soviet" (or more properly "sovyet", since it's two syllables in Russian) merely means "council". If you live in a town run by a town council, you have a "soviet-style" local government. Of course, that approach is known not to scale, and doesn't work well for cities or anything larger, as was well demonstrated by the USSR.
But it's a good example of one of the standard propaganda tools: Take a common word in another language, and transliterate it rather than translating. It'll sound foreign to your listeners, and you can give it any meaning you want, to make the "enemy" look terrible. Thus, the Arabic term "jihad" is merely the common word for "struggle". But if we read about some foreigners in a "struggle" with us, we wouldn't be too impressed or worried. So the propagandists leave it untranslated, and tell us that it means something like "holy war", which sounds awful and revs up our fear response. The word "soviet" used to work this way, but the government that used that term died off, and its successor doesn't use a name that's as foreign-sounding.
The "sovyet" (i.e., council) form of local government may be alive and well in Russia and busy running lots of small towns, as it is in New England villages and in much of the rest of the world. But the propagandists haven't quite figured out yet how to turn this into a way of making us fear and hate the Russians again. OTOH, maybe they just aren't bothering, since they've found another bunch of foreign devils who use words that, if left untranslated, are working to get us to fear and hate the people who speak their funny languages. So who cares what sort of government system the Russians are using these days?
But we might want to take a second look at the Russians. They seem to have settled on a mixture of unregulated corporations and mobsters to run their economy. There are a lot of reasons we should worry about this. But what Russian words can we leave untranslated to make them look bad and scary? Westerners aren't very afraid of corporations or mobsters these days, after all, and many of our politicians seem to approve of them. We need to find some relevant Russian words that can focus our attention on them, if we're to turn them back into an enemy.
Any suggestions for the next good Russian word to re-instill fear in our population?