If you have worries about political police or death squads, you definitely have more to worry about than free speech. As far as your employer not approving, well that's another issue altogether. I think it's not out of line for an employer to want his employees to believe in his company and the company's products and services. Beyond putting the finger to dangerous or faulty products, or stopping harrassment, I don't think it's beyond reason for a company to know what sorts of things it's employees are saying about it.
"False comments damaging someone's livelihood" involves a response to those comments by law enforcement, vigilantes, crusaders, paranoiacs, or the like.... Cite me an example of any speech causing harm, and I can probably explain it away as indicative of loss of liberty or breakdown in the rule of law.
There are many examples of anonymous speech harming one's livelihood that have nothing to do with the rule of law or loss of liberty. How about watching your company's stock totally deflate based upon anonymous comments in discussion groups. Or being investigated by an EEOC officer and watching your carreer go down the tubes. Harm to reputation can has as damaging an effect on your life as receiving grevious bodily injury.
Put a bag over your head. You're anonymous again. As far as the police, or whoever, knowing who you called, or what you talked about, it's irrelevant to this discussion. That's a privacy issue, not an anonymity issue.
I understand a many of the issues relating to anonymity online. But, I don't think the current state of affairs is acceptable in the long run. The net is a great tool for communication, but it's not the only tool. If you have a valid issue that does require protection, you always have the recourse of walking down the street to a payphone. Do we really need a situation where it is possible to say anything you want, even false comments that are damaging to others' way of life and livelyhood, without having any real possibility of having to be responsible for your actions?
Apple's tradition of quality in software is a myth. They had some good ideas in the beginning, but they sat on them complacently for ten years and lost the war to their competitors. Now they have crufty feeling UIs and unstable OSes. Hopefully they will be able to pull their heads out with OS X.
It does appear that it will add sites via that link. But I think it's unlikely that they have had people submit requests for more than 8 million different sites. Look at the changes this last month. All the top servers have had a numerical growth. Apache had approximately 490,000 more servers in November than in October. This equated to slightly more than 1 percent. It would take some real dedication to actively skew the results.
That's the message that MS has decided is appropriate in all situations where IE 5 can't display a proper page. It doesn't matter what the problem is, you get that message. Too bad their option to turn off "Friendly error messages" doesn't seem to do anything.:(
Not owning a laptop, and not being willing to leave my stash of computer related Christmas gifts until I get back home after the holidays, I always haul my computer to my parents place. And every year I wish that it wasn't such a pain to haul around all the extra pieces of equipment. If I could get a nice monitor/PC combo, I'd be pretty happy.
NT/IIS seems to be running a lot of commerce sites these days.
It happens that if you wanted to run a commerce site and wanted to use SSL and have a "plug" saying that you were a good guy, you need a certificate from one of the authorities like VeriSign or Thawte. But, until the last year or so, they wouldn't issue a certificate to any site running a "free" web server. You had to have a commercial server. And of the commercial servers, IIS is by far the best and most well known to web site developers.
Given what we do know about Mars, it's climate, and geological nature, scientists ("Back off man, I'm a scientist!") are able to make predictions about where we will find various substances. I think they have a theory and decent evidence that suggests that if there is water-ice there, it will be detectable at 2-3 feet.
As has already been mentioned, our non-local trash is pretty minimal. In your scenerio, if stuff even lasts that long, His Holy Roachness will probably realize that the items did not originate where they are found, since they would be pretty damned unique. Plus they would find a lot more interesting stuff right here on the earth.
There is a problem with space junk though. It's in orbit around the Earth. I think there are periods annually where various comm. companies shutdown their satellites and rotate them such that they are protected from collisions with stuff that has been left up there. I remember recently reading about how they track X number of pieces of junk larger than basketballs and such. It's projected that in the next few decades we'll have to do something or we're going to lose the ability to put satellites in space with any kind of expectation that they will not be destroyed by our own filth.
If any of these MP3 "jukebox" companies were smart, they'd put in systems to control listening. Make it so that only one person can listen to a particular MP3 at a time. Make it use shoutcast. That way they can at least argue that it follows the law.... Sheesh.
Just out of curiosity, do you know what/. is doing with all the information your browser sends to them? Look at the URL of this page. Can you honestly say that you know what all those numbers mean? Yes? No? Does the fact that you can see unintelligable information go by mean that whatever it means is ok, because it's in the open?
This was documented in the earlier tests. And I'd bet that more people downloaded the Linux version of the test than the Linux version of the DemoTest. Purely because of the cool factor. And then they realized they didn't like it, or it made them sick, or any number of reasons. It wouldn't suprise me if more than 50% of the people bitching on here right now have downloaded the prior versions and any bitching is more a case of not reading the supplied documentation. In fact I've not seen anybody mention that they noted the ommission of this in the new readme when they had read about it in the previous versions. So, how many people here are actually crying out of ignorance and bandwagoning? I bet a lot.
Microsoft does do that with their packages. Whenever someone launches IE 5 (and late versions of 4) it connects to their website first to check for more recent versions. It's on by default and you have to go under the advanced options property sheet to turn it off. Most users will not even look at the advanced options on that property sheet more than once, because the first time is enough to scare them away for good.
Actually, it connects to their master server everytime you ask to connect to a server. If you haven't realized that, then you must have been amazed that they could provide you with a quake player count to go along with their "Welcome quake player #1234567" message that appears everytime you are connecting.
What cookies are is sketchily documented. What they are used for is not documented at all, and are significantly more vile than any software sending back information about how it's configured.
If information is being sent to a third party site...
This brings up an interesting point. What information is being sent? OS? They already knew that because you downloaded the win32/linux/mac version of the game. Date? They have watches, so they probably know what time it is. What video card you have? No, not really. Just how you have configured the game. They don't perform any comprehensive hardware probes to identify your hardware. They just take whatever setting is under the renderer menu item and pass that back.
There is no reasonable way for an "average" person to find this out.
I guess it depends on what you define as average. There's no way for an average person to understand anything in the HTTP headers regardless of how documented you consider them to be. There's no way for an average person to even know what an RFC is, let alone where to find them.
If you followed the FPS world very much, you would already have known about this. It's not secret. I think that PQ even publicized it some in the early versions of the demo. If you can't be bothered to browse PQ for info, then why do you expect your average person to understand RFCs and such.
It's NOT that COVERT. You see, if IT WAS covert. THEN they would HAVE made the DATA less VISIBLE to people who ARE looking at THE data STREAM. In fact they COULD have USED a PUBLIC/private KEY encryption SYSTEM to make the DATA unreadable VIA network SNIFFERS. THEN you could BITCH about COVERTLY sending DATA to COVERT secret DOUBLE agent OPERATIVES in some SECRET AGENT type DREAMWORLD.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have worries about political police or death squads, you definitely have more to worry about than free speech. As far as your employer not approving, well that's another issue altogether. I think it's not out of line for an employer to want his employees to believe in his company and the company's products and services. Beyond putting the finger to dangerous or faulty products, or stopping harrassment, I don't think it's beyond reason for a company to know what sorts of things it's employees are saying about it.
-sw
"False comments damaging someone's livelihood" involves a response to those comments by law enforcement, vigilantes, crusaders, paranoiacs, or the like. ... Cite me an example of any speech causing harm, and I can probably explain it away as indicative of loss of liberty or breakdown in the rule of law.
There are many examples of anonymous speech harming one's livelihood that have nothing to do with the rule of law or loss of liberty. How about watching your company's stock totally deflate based upon anonymous comments in discussion groups. Or being investigated by an EEOC officer and watching your carreer go down the tubes. Harm to reputation can has as damaging an effect on your life as receiving grevious bodily injury.
-sw
Put a bag over your head. You're anonymous again. As far as the police, or whoever, knowing who you called, or what you talked about, it's irrelevant to this discussion. That's a privacy issue, not an anonymity issue.
I understand a many of the issues relating to anonymity online. But, I don't think the current state of affairs is acceptable in the long run. The net is a great tool for communication, but it's not the only tool. If you have a valid issue that does require protection, you always have the recourse of walking down the street to a payphone. Do we really need a situation where it is possible to say anything you want, even false comments that are damaging to others' way of life and livelyhood, without having any real possibility of having to be responsible for your actions?
-sw
You aren't looking at the whole picture. Go to the netcraft site and look at their data and see how all the numbers relate for the month of November.
Apple's tradition of quality in software is a myth. They had some good ideas in the beginning, but they sat on them complacently for ten years and lost the war to their competitors. Now they have crufty feeling UIs and unstable OSes. Hopefully they will be able to pull their heads out with OS X.
It does appear that it will add sites via that link. But I think it's unlikely that they have had people submit requests for more than 8 million different sites. Look at the changes this last month. All the top servers have had a numerical growth. Apache had approximately 490,000 more servers in November than in October. This equated to slightly more than 1 percent. It would take some real dedication to actively skew the results.
That's the message that MS has decided is appropriate in all situations where IE 5 can't display a proper page. It doesn't matter what the problem is, you get that message. Too bad their option to turn off "Friendly error messages" doesn't seem to do anything. :(
-sw
...but why does anyone want an iMac?
Not owning a laptop, and not being willing to leave my stash of computer related Christmas gifts until I get back home after the holidays, I always haul my computer to my parents place. And every year I wish that it wasn't such a pain to haul around all the extra pieces of equipment. If I could get a nice monitor/PC combo, I'd be pretty happy.
-sw
Netcraft uses more of a web robot system to periodically browse every site they know about. It's not an on demand probing of the site in question.
-sw
NT/IIS seems to be running a lot of commerce sites these days.
It happens that if you wanted to run a commerce site and wanted to use SSL and have a "plug" saying that you were a good guy, you need a certificate from one of the authorities like VeriSign or Thawte. But, until the last year or so, they wouldn't issue a certificate to any site running a "free" web server. You had to have a commercial server. And of the commercial servers, IIS is by far the best and most well known to web site developers.
-sw
Given what we do know about Mars, it's climate, and geological nature, scientists ("Back off man, I'm a scientist!") are able to make predictions about where we will find various substances. I think they have a theory and decent evidence that suggests that if there is water-ice there, it will be detectable at 2-3 feet.
-sw
As has already been mentioned, our non-local trash is pretty minimal. In your scenerio, if stuff even lasts that long, His Holy Roachness will probably realize that the items did not originate where they are found, since they would be pretty damned unique. Plus they would find a lot more interesting stuff right here on the earth.
There is a problem with space junk though. It's in orbit around the Earth. I think there are periods annually where various comm. companies shutdown their satellites and rotate them such that they are protected from collisions with stuff that has been left up there. I remember recently reading about how they track X number of pieces of junk larger than basketballs and such. It's projected that in the next few decades we'll have to do something or we're going to lose the ability to put satellites in space with any kind of expectation that they will not be destroyed by our own filth.
-sw
cookies are also safe because no code ever gets executed from them.
No, cookies are not "safe". Ever hear of doubleclick? They've made the connection with who you are and what sites you visit.
If any of these MP3 "jukebox" companies were smart, they'd put in systems to control listening. Make it so that only one person can listen to a particular MP3 at a time. Make it use shoutcast. That way they can at least argue that it follows the law.... Sheesh.
-sw
Just out of curiosity, do you know what /. is doing with all the information your browser sends to them? Look at the URL of this page. Can you honestly say that you know what all those numbers mean? Yes? No? Does the fact that you can see unintelligable information go by mean that whatever it means is ok, because it's in the open?
This was documented in the earlier tests. And I'd bet that more people downloaded the Linux version of the test than the Linux version of the DemoTest. Purely because of the cool factor. And then they realized they didn't like it, or it made them sick, or any number of reasons. It wouldn't suprise me if more than 50% of the people bitching on here right now have downloaded the prior versions and any bitching is more a case of not reading the supplied documentation. In fact I've not seen anybody mention that they noted the ommission of this in the new readme when they had read about it in the previous versions. So, how many people here are actually crying out of ignorance and bandwagoning? I bet a lot.
2 percent buddy.
Microsoft does do that with their packages. Whenever someone launches IE 5 (and late versions of 4) it connects to their website first to check for more recent versions. It's on by default and you have to go under the advanced options property sheet to turn it off. Most users will not even look at the advanced options on that property sheet more than once, because the first time is enough to scare them away for good.
Do you know the difference between what Real sent and what id is sending? It does matter.
The HTTP protocol does NOT require that your browser send back the User-Agent field of the HTTP spec. It's optional.
But... we do know where it's being sent. Many of us have known for some time. Since the release of q3test in fact.
Actually, it connects to their master server everytime you ask to connect to a server. If you haven't realized that, then you must have been amazed that they could provide you with a quake player count to go along with their "Welcome quake player #1234567" message that appears everytime you are connecting.
What cookies are is sketchily documented. What they are used for is not documented at all, and are significantly more vile than any software sending back information about how it's configured.
If information is being sent to a third party site...
This brings up an interesting point. What information is being sent? OS? They already knew that because you downloaded the win32/linux/mac version of the game. Date? They have watches, so they probably know what time it is. What video card you have? No, not really. Just how you have configured the game. They don't perform any comprehensive hardware probes to identify your hardware. They just take whatever setting is under the renderer menu item and pass that back.
I guess it depends on what you define as average. There's no way for an average person to understand anything in the HTTP headers regardless of how documented you consider them to be. There's no way for an average person to even know what an RFC is, let alone where to find them.
If you followed the FPS world very much, you would already have known about this. It's not secret. I think that PQ even publicized it some in the early versions of the demo. If you can't be bothered to browse PQ for info, then why do you expect your average person to understand RFCs and such.
Duh.
It's NOT that COVERT. You see, if IT WAS covert. THEN they would HAVE made the DATA less VISIBLE to people who ARE looking at THE data STREAM. In fact they COULD have USED a PUBLIC/private KEY encryption SYSTEM to make the DATA unreadable VIA network SNIFFERS. THEN you could BITCH about COVERTLY sending DATA to COVERT secret DOUBLE agent OPERATIVES in some SECRET AGENT type DREAMWORLD.