Don't want people linking to your site? Fine. Then don't let them. When the webserver gets an HTTP GET request, check the referrer address. If its not coming from a "proper" link, then simply refuse to serve the page. No need to fuss about improper links. They simply won't work. And you'll be MORE than capable of keeping all those potential customers OFF your website. Who really wants customers anyways? All they do is provide you with more work to do.:)
I mean.. why break into cars, hotwire them, and drive them off. The smart thief would save up and get himself a tow truck. The ONLY person who would pay any attention at all is the owner. The alarm could be going off and nobody would give it a second glance. Chances are good, nobody would ever even get a plate #. You could steal the car in plain sight, and never hear a peep about it.
No antitheft system in the world will help against a dedicated theif. The most effective system would probably be to just remove the distributor cap, or a kludge to disconnect the battery easily. No car thief is gonna spend time under the hood finding out why the car won't start. Of course, you get bit on convienence issues. But you'll never have to concern yourself with car theft.
Its important if these companies keep going assendup, we're gonna need to develop some alternative high speed internet connectivity options, and deploy them before its too late.
Neighborhood based internet is probably the best option. Let the neighborhoods wire themselves up to each other, then pool the monthly fees for one or two high speed RELIABLE uplinks, something like a fractional T3 for a moderately sized neighborhood. This is basiclly the design of cable internet anyways, only it will be under the control of those who are actually using it. And they can dictate their own policy. And if you have a warez kiddy in the neighbhood abusing the service for everyone, you KNOW WHERE HE LIVES, and the problem can be delt with properly.
And if the entire nighbhorhood is wired on the same network, people can each install a wireless ethernet hub and make the entire neighbhorhood wireless ready. If every subdivision would do this, you'll basically have citywide ethernet speed internet coverage.
How to handle the abusers and other problem people? That remains to be seen. And its a problem that someone will need to deal with. @home's solution was to cap the upstream and piss off everyone. Maybe we can do better.
Ok.. off the soapbox for now. Time to go pay the phone bill.:)
If Final Fantasy didn't do so well, it wasn't because of the fact that the actors were CG, it was because of the storyline and other issues.
Also, you still have voice actors behind the scenes... granted, you can get unknowns that are for all practical purposes as good as the hunk of the month for this job, but there are still people behind the scenes to pay.
While I agree that the providerless ip blocks make routing tables more complex, you can still multihome without them. This is the easy way...
Get yourself a domain name. Simple enough. Get yourself two internet connections, with two separate banks of IP addresses (however many you need). Now, you have two separate networks, but with linux boxen, you can alias both those networks over the same physical hardware on all your machines. Simply configure a primary outgoing gateway machine to forward half its packets to one router and half the packets to another, this will loadbalance your upstream.
For the two nameserver IP addresses you provider your registrar, give one IP on one network, and the other IP address on the other. This will ensure that half the incoming connections will come in on each of the two networks. If one of your providers goes down, all your incoming connections will default to the working network.
When I got really bored in class, this is what I used to do. Draw out an 8x8 grid and pencil in step numbers in each square starting anywhere, and moving around the board with valid chess knight moves. The objective is to hit every square exactly once.
Its not too tough, but it requires a bit of planning to get it right, and it keeps your mind occupied for a while.
What used to be a cool company? Geocities or X10? I don't recall geocities EVER being cool. And X10 is cool if only they'd get rid of that horribly crappy camera they feel the need to market to the ends of the earth and then some.
I agree wholeheartedly.. Avoid shipping anything remotely fragile with them if you can help it. However, if you MUST use them, here are some tips.
First off, the packing must be solid. If you can't stand on top of the sealed box and jump up and down on it without breaking it, you haven't packed it well enough. No, I'm NOT kidding. Your package may very well be subjected to just this type of abuse. Even if its handled correctly, there will likely be at minium several hundred pounds of packages stacked on top of it in a tight configuration. If the box gives at all, its going to collapse long before it reaches its destination.
If the box weighs over 70 pounds, its not going to be transported over internal conveyor belts but instead on special irregular carts. This has the potential to expose the package to a number of other abuses, but its less likely to suffer any extreme falls or belt jams and will also likely not have any packages stacked on top of it as the irregulars are typically loaded last.
If you use wooden crates to send something, the crates will probably fall apart in the shipment.
If you use bands to hold the packages together, if the package weighs more than 70 pounds, the bands will likely be used as handles. Don't expect the bands to hold the package together. If the package can't survive without the bands, its probably not going to survive.
And of course, make sure its really insured. UPS only covers $100 of insurance per package unless you purchase more. If you paid for insurance and the package wasn't covered, I'd have words with them. However, they DO investigate insurance claims and can be rather picky about improper packaging.
How about a spamtrap? Set up an email address, or addresses, and do whatever it takes to make sure they get on absolutely every spam based mailing list in existance. Then compare every message that goes to those addresses with messages that appear in your inbox. If any of them match, its spam.
that would probably catch 99% of them... if implemented correctly. Probably have to account for randomizing of headers and personalizing the messages, but otherwise it should get pretty close.
While on occassion I will speed 5 mph or so over the speed limit, I generally drive right at or slightly under the speed limit. I have taken to this activity because I got tired of getting tickets. I've gotten tickets for speeding. Ok, so does everybody. It happens. I live with it. But once I got pulled over because part of my truck was still in the intersection when the light turned red. Pulled once because I was missing a front license plate. Once because a headlight was out. I'm always uncomfortable when I get pulled over and I don't even know why. So I just obey the traffic laws to the letter now.
I now notice some interesting problems. When a light turns yellow, I have to make a quick decision. I either have to be able to make it completely through the light before it turns red, without exceeding the speed limit or I need to come to a complete, and more importantly SAFE stop without causing a wreak or destroying my brakes/tires in the process. If I drive exactly the speed limit, unless its in a school zone or some other pathetically slow street, there is a certain window by which it is very awkward to either clear the light legally or to stop without creating problems. If I was driving 5-10mph over the speed limit, there would be no problem at all.
If they have "reasonable" proof that there's an issue of piracy at hand, they should be able to have law enforcement obtain a search warrant and take care of the problem correctly.
There are also major remakes in progress for U5, U6, and U9.
U9 has several actually.. One is just a dialog patch, which keeps the same game but redoes all the dialog to change the plot of the game. There are also plans to completely recode the game from scratch with a plot and features that are typical to ultima games (a party for instance).
As for rights, I don't think any of these games have permission. Most of them have tried and have gotten no response. They are pursuing with the hope that the non-commercial intent will fall under the radar. If they DO respond negatively, the engine and new media can be utilized for other games unrelated to the Ultima series.
As for alienating ultima fans, the series is closed. There won't be any more Ultima games as far as the Avatar in Britannia is concerned. Details can be safely invented at this stage, as long as they don't interfere with stock storylines, as there won't be any more to interfere with it later. And the long term plot tends to contradict itself on several occasions anyways, so its not a major crisis anyways.
The point of remaking these older games is to provide a way to more modern gamers to experience the enchanting wonder of the Ultima games. This way the series will be kept alive even if no new titles are released under the name.
Although I'm not certain its necessary, it depends on if it can be used as evidence. If all it can do is signal a cop that there's a POSSIBILITY of a problem, they can watch the car. If the driver then starts swerving or showing other indications of intoxication, they can then be pulled over and inspected more closely.
And hey... if a cop wants to tail a car for 30 minutes because there MIGHT be someone intoxicated behind the wheel, at least that's 30 minutes they're not bothering anyone else.:)
Which is the entire purpose behind writing a NICE letter instead of a nasty flaming one. At least when you write a well supported polite, yet negative letter and your source of information turns out to not be completely accurate, you're able to say "oops, sorry my bad" and back off gracefully instead of REALLY looking like an idiot.
Its in Trident's best interests to have linux based drivers available, even if they don't want to support them in any way. They have a product to protect and I can understand why they don't want to post the specs publicly, but they realize that in time, given enough effort, someone will eventually reverse engineer their products. The point is, by the time that happens, those products will be obsolete and newer versions will be available. As long as the specs are available under an NDA, the drivers can still be released and the driver source, while maybe revealing more information than a binary driver would, still keeps hidden much of the internal workings of the device, until such time its no longer that important.
However, if Trident decided to completely turn their back on open source developers and suddenly a related OS were to gain a significant hold on the market, they'd be forced to play catch-up, but as long as they have drivers available, even unsupported by the company, they're on an even playing field, with no harm done.
"We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone"????
Granted... those businesses under regulation like utilities can't very well just refuse to provide services if the customer is paying, as the customer has no other options, but bandwidth is not exactly a monopolized industry.
Freenet is not really the only solution if the programmer chose to release the program and not reveal his identity. There are numerous other channels available which will let him preserve his anonymity. The only advantage to freenet is that is at least has a somewhat legitimate charter, where as other methods are typically underground and shady.
But still, if done properly, it could be released and spread without anyone finding out who the author is. The danger is if that person ever told ANYONE about it. If he did, then he's not truely anonymous, and given enough of an incentive, someone might be tempted to talk. At least, without releasing any code, then its technically all heresay and a lot less likely to be in violation of some strange law.
I fear however that this is how it will have to be done in the future if the silly laws don't get overturned. Either that, or some REALLY important sensitive document will have to be cracked and released publicly to the embarrasment of a large organization with a lot of people chanting "we told you so" before those in power might take a second glance and realize that perhaps peer review for security is a good idea after all.
Yes but the average person knows that killing someone without reasonable cause (self defense) is illegal. However, say a cop told me to walk over to him, and by doing so I crossed a grassy median and after I cross it, he arrests me for walking on the grass, since thats illegal. I may not have known that, especially if there were no obvious signs around.
Its not that law enforment told someone to break the law. They were posing as the legitimate users of the website/servers in question. Shooting someone is illegal in all cases (except those rare exceptions). I can't typically be ALLOWED to kill someone (yes, there are exceptions). However, the rightful owner of a house can give me permission to do any number of things to that house that would otherwise be illegal if permission wasn't granted, and when permission is granted it is no longer illegal.
If the sysadmin knew that what he was doing was potentially against the law, he probably should have gotten the request in writing. Obviously he didn't think much of someone asking him to break into his own site to demonstrate the flaw. But this was very much a setup. And more importantly, this is a victimless crime. Prosecuting this person accomplishes nothing, but it might make someone out there feel safer at night because some evil haxor they don't know and never hurt them won't be able to hurt them now or however someone wants to justify it.
I still say... what can you do? If we eventually reach the point where the very act of reporting a security hole is a crime, then we might as well go to the trouble to patch the holes and never say anything about it. I mean, after all, what difference will it make? We're just as liable, but one of those solutions is guaranteed to have the security problem taken care of.
Slashdot Mirror
if they have written agreements with Google, Altavista, and the other search engines. If not, perhaps their name should be removed from the engine.
:)
Actually, they don't have to. They DO have a robots.txt file. And in light of the current theme of this article, its rather amusing.
# everyone go away
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
-Restil
Don't want people linking to your site? Fine. Then don't let them. When the webserver gets an HTTP GET request, check the referrer address. If its not coming from a "proper" link, then simply refuse to serve the page. No need to fuss about improper links. They simply won't work. And you'll be MORE than capable of keeping all those potential customers OFF your website. Who really wants customers anyways? All they do is provide you with more work to do. :)
-Restil
I mean.. why break into cars, hotwire them, and drive them off. The smart thief would save up and get himself a tow truck. The ONLY person who would pay any attention at all is the owner. The alarm could be going off and nobody would give it a second glance. Chances are good, nobody would ever even get a plate #. You could steal the car in plain sight, and never hear a peep about it.
No antitheft system in the world will help against a dedicated theif. The most effective system would probably be to just remove the distributor cap, or a kludge to disconnect the battery easily. No car thief is gonna spend time under the hood finding out why the car won't start. Of course, you get bit on convienence issues. But you'll never have to concern yourself with car theft.
-Restil
But that was all I could take. Still, a rather good philisophical discussion on software evolution. Now time to think of other things... hehehe
-Restil
Guys.. you can use ANY dns server on the internet pretty much. Might be that tinsy bit extra resolving latency, but the crisis is minimal.
-Restil
Ya.. the S.1618 catches a lot. Or just filtering "this is not spam" or "you requested more information" would get a bunch too. :)
Sad.. I know.
-Restil
Its important if these companies keep going assendup, we're gonna need to develop some alternative high speed internet connectivity options, and deploy them before its too late.
:)
Neighborhood based internet is probably the best option. Let the neighborhoods wire themselves up to each other, then pool the monthly fees for one or two high speed RELIABLE uplinks, something like a fractional T3 for a moderately sized neighborhood. This is basiclly the design of cable internet anyways, only it will be under the control of those who are actually using it. And they can dictate their own policy. And if you have a warez kiddy in the neighbhood abusing the service for everyone, you KNOW WHERE HE LIVES, and the problem can be delt with properly.
And if the entire nighbhorhood is wired on the same network, people can each install a wireless ethernet hub and make the entire neighbhorhood wireless ready. If every subdivision would do this, you'll basically have citywide ethernet speed internet coverage.
How to handle the abusers and other problem people? That remains to be seen. And its a problem that someone will need to deal with. @home's solution was to cap the upstream and piss off everyone. Maybe we can do better.
Ok.. off the soapbox for now. Time to go pay the phone bill.
-Restil
If Final Fantasy didn't do so well, it wasn't because of the fact that the actors were CG, it was because of the storyline and other issues.
Also, you still have voice actors behind the scenes... granted, you can get unknowns that are for all practical purposes as good as the hunk of the month for this job, but there are still people behind the scenes to pay.
-Restil
While I agree that the providerless ip blocks make routing tables more complex, you can still multihome without them. This is the easy way...
Get yourself a domain name. Simple enough. Get yourself two internet connections, with two separate banks of IP addresses (however many you need). Now, you have two separate networks, but with linux boxen, you can alias both those networks over the same physical hardware on all your machines. Simply configure a primary outgoing gateway machine to forward half its packets to one router and half the packets to another, this will loadbalance your upstream.
For the two nameserver IP addresses you provider your registrar, give one IP on one network, and the other IP address on the other. This will ensure that half the incoming connections will come in on each of the two networks. If one of your providers goes down, all your incoming connections will default to the working network.
-Restil
Um.. ds9 ended over 2 years ago... Maybe you're still catching up??
-Restil
When I got really bored in class, this is what I used to do. Draw out an 8x8 grid and pencil in step numbers in each square starting anywhere, and moving around the board with valid chess knight moves. The objective is to hit every square exactly once.
Its not too tough, but it requires a bit of planning to get it right, and it keeps your mind occupied for a while.
-Restil
What used to be a cool company? Geocities or X10? I don't recall geocities EVER being cool. And X10 is cool if only they'd get rid of that horribly crappy camera they feel the need to market to the ends of the earth and then some.
-Restil
I agree wholeheartedly.. Avoid shipping anything remotely fragile with them if you can help it. However, if you MUST use them, here are some tips.
:)
First off, the packing must be solid. If you can't stand on top of the sealed box and jump up and down on it without breaking it, you haven't packed it well enough. No, I'm NOT kidding. Your package may very well be subjected to just this type of abuse. Even if its handled correctly, there will likely be at minium several hundred pounds of packages stacked on top of it in a tight configuration. If the box gives at all, its going to collapse long before it reaches its destination.
If the box weighs over 70 pounds, its not going to be transported over internal conveyor belts but instead on special irregular carts. This has the potential to expose the package to a number of other abuses, but its less likely to suffer any extreme falls or belt jams and will also likely not have any packages stacked on top of it as the irregulars are typically loaded last.
If you use wooden crates to send something, the crates will probably fall apart in the shipment.
If you use bands to hold the packages together, if the package weighs more than 70 pounds, the bands will likely be used as handles. Don't expect the bands to hold the package together. If the package can't survive without the bands, its probably not going to survive.
And of course, make sure its really insured. UPS only covers $100 of insurance per package unless you purchase more. If you paid for insurance and the package wasn't covered, I'd have words with them. However, they DO investigate insurance claims and can be rather picky about improper packaging.
Good luck.
-Restil
How about a spamtrap? Set up an email address, or addresses, and do whatever it takes to make sure they get on absolutely every spam based mailing list in existance. Then compare every message that goes to those addresses with messages that appear in your inbox. If any of them match, its spam.
that would probably catch 99% of them... if implemented correctly. Probably have to account for randomizing of headers and personalizing the messages, but otherwise it should get pretty close.
-Restil
While on occassion I will speed 5 mph or so over the speed limit, I generally drive right at or slightly under the speed limit. I have taken to this activity because I got tired of getting tickets. I've gotten tickets for speeding. Ok, so does everybody. It happens. I live with it. But once I got pulled over because part of my truck was still in the intersection when the light turned red. Pulled once because I was missing a front license plate. Once because a headlight was out. I'm always uncomfortable when I get pulled over and I don't even know why. So I just obey the traffic laws to the letter now.
I now notice some interesting problems. When a light turns yellow, I have to make a quick decision. I either have to be able to make it completely through the light before it turns red, without exceeding the speed limit or I need to come to a complete, and more importantly SAFE stop without causing a wreak or destroying my brakes/tires in the process. If I drive exactly the speed limit, unless its in a school zone or some other pathetically slow street, there is a certain window by which it is very awkward to either clear the light legally or to stop without creating problems. If I was driving 5-10mph over the speed limit, there would be no problem at all.
-Restil
If they have "reasonable" proof that there's an issue of piracy at hand, they should be able to have law enforcement obtain a search warrant and take care of the problem correctly.
Otherwise we have vigilante justice on our hands.
-Restil
Its "relieve."
Its "a need."
ahem....
-Restil
Wilderness adventure...
*sigh*
How long I spent trying to figure out that I didn't have to be under the oracle when it appeared, I only had to then proceed to that spot.
Ahh.. memories.
-Restil
The scary thing is... I actually remember that game, and played it quite a bit.
Damn I must be getting old.
But I simply can't believe that someone hasn't developed and released a "Wumpus 3D" game yet.
I'll just give it time.
-Restil
There are also major remakes in progress for U5, U6, and U9.
U9 has several actually.. One is just a dialog patch, which keeps the same game but redoes all the dialog to change the plot of the game. There are also plans to completely recode the game from scratch with a plot and features that are typical to ultima games (a party for instance).
As for rights, I don't think any of these games have permission. Most of them have tried and have gotten no response. They are pursuing with the hope that the non-commercial intent will fall under the radar. If they DO respond negatively, the engine and new media can be utilized for other games unrelated to the Ultima series.
As for alienating ultima fans, the series is closed. There won't be any more Ultima games as far as the Avatar in Britannia is concerned. Details can be safely invented at this stage, as long as they don't interfere with stock storylines, as there won't be any more to interfere with it later. And the long term plot tends to contradict itself on several occasions anyways, so its not a major crisis anyways.
The point of remaking these older games is to provide a way to more modern gamers to experience the enchanting wonder of the Ultima games. This way the series will be kept alive even if no new titles are released under the name.
-Restil
Although I'm not certain its necessary, it depends on if it can be used as evidence. If all it can do is signal a cop that there's a POSSIBILITY of a problem, they can watch the car. If the driver then starts swerving or showing other indications of intoxication, they can then be pulled over and inspected more closely.
:)
And hey... if a cop wants to tail a car for 30 minutes because there MIGHT be someone intoxicated behind the wheel, at least that's 30 minutes they're not bothering anyone else.
-Restil
Which is the entire purpose behind writing a NICE letter instead of a nasty flaming one. At least when you write a well supported polite, yet negative letter and your source of information turns out to not be completely accurate, you're able to say "oops, sorry my bad" and back off gracefully instead of REALLY looking like an idiot.
Its in Trident's best interests to have linux based drivers available, even if they don't want to support them in any way. They have a product to protect and I can understand why they don't want to post the specs publicly, but they realize that in time, given enough effort, someone will eventually reverse engineer their products. The point is, by the time that happens, those products will be obsolete and newer versions will be available. As long as the specs are available under an NDA, the drivers can still be released and the driver source, while maybe revealing more information than a binary driver would, still keeps hidden much of the internal workings of the device, until such time its no longer that important.
However, if Trident decided to completely turn their back on open source developers and suddenly a related OS were to gain a significant hold on the market, they'd be forced to play catch-up, but as long as they have drivers available, even unsupported by the company, they're on an even playing field, with no harm done.
-Restil
"We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone"????
Granted... those businesses under regulation like utilities can't very well just refuse to provide services if the customer is paying, as the customer has no other options, but bandwidth is not exactly a monopolized industry.
-Restil
Freenet is not really the only solution if the programmer chose to release the program and not reveal his identity. There are numerous other channels available which will let him preserve his anonymity. The only advantage to freenet is that is at least has a somewhat legitimate charter, where as other methods are typically underground and shady.
But still, if done properly, it could be released and spread without anyone finding out who the author is. The danger is if that person ever told ANYONE about it. If he did, then he's not truely anonymous, and given enough of an incentive, someone might be tempted to talk. At least, without releasing any code, then its technically all heresay and a lot less likely to be in violation of some strange law.
I fear however that this is how it will have to be done in the future if the silly laws don't get overturned. Either that, or some REALLY important sensitive document will have to be cracked and released publicly to the embarrasment of a large organization with a lot of people chanting "we told you so" before those in power might take a second glance and realize that perhaps peer review for security is a good idea after all.
-Restil
Yes but the average person knows that killing someone without reasonable cause (self defense) is illegal. However, say a cop told me to walk over to him, and by doing so I crossed a grassy median and after I cross it, he arrests me for walking on the grass, since thats illegal. I may not have known that, especially if there were no obvious signs around.
Its not that law enforment told someone to break the law. They were posing as the legitimate users of the website/servers in question. Shooting someone is illegal in all cases (except those rare exceptions). I can't typically be ALLOWED to kill someone (yes, there are exceptions). However, the rightful owner of a house can give me permission to do any number of things to that house that would otherwise be illegal if permission wasn't granted, and when permission is granted it is no longer illegal.
If the sysadmin knew that what he was doing was potentially against the law, he probably should have gotten the request in writing. Obviously he didn't think much of someone asking him to break into his own site to demonstrate the flaw. But this was very much a setup. And more importantly, this is a victimless crime. Prosecuting this person accomplishes nothing, but it might make someone out there feel safer at night because some evil haxor they don't know and never hurt them won't be able to hurt them now or however someone wants to justify it.
I still say... what can you do? If we eventually reach the point where the very act of reporting a security hole is a crime, then we might as well go to the trouble to patch the holes and never say anything about it. I mean, after all, what difference will it make? We're just as liable, but one of those solutions is guaranteed to have the security problem taken care of.
-Restil