Remember the fella who stole internet access by running a CAT5 cable from a hub in a storage closet to his computer in his dorm room? (I was there to see that.) Now this.
OSU NEWSPAPER ARTICLE:
http://www.ocolly.com/issues/2000_Fall/000914/st ories/computer.html
THIS guy lives in Willham Hall, which just got wired for network access this past summer. Willham is one of the Freshman dorms, and Freshman are stereotyped to go absolutely nuts with the Internet. That's why the university was reluctant to have the building hooked up. (I used to live there three years ago. All we could use on the PBX phone system were defective external 9600 baud modems.)
ACTUALLY! Because the university built (and are still building) new on-campus apartments (http://www.reslife.okstate.edu/pictures/new/new.h tm), they were saying that entire Willham complex would be demolished in three years!..but that fizzled, and now they have internet access.
Here's a pic for refrence:
http://www.reslife.okstate.edu/suite/18.jpg
The new building down in front are one of the new apartment complexes, the two highrises in the back are the Willham complex -- the closest one is the men's dorm (where all this news is happening!) Maybe they decided not to demolish Willham because the new apartmenta are FIFTY FEET AWAY! Therefore, a construction/demolition problem led to the university giving into demand and installing internet access, which when combined with hyperactive Freshmen, led to the RIAA crawling up OSU's ass.
As for the ZDNet article, I like this quote:
"We're doing some forensic review of the hard drive and determining what is there," Eaton said. "After we finish that review, we will evaluate the amount of substance he was distributing."
All I can think of when they say "Oklahoma Forensics":
Jimbo: (browsing through 'My Documents/My Pictures') "Hey Bubba, check out the tits on this chick!"
Bubba: "DAMN! I ain't seen tits like that since we sold that one heifer, Suzy...WAIT! That IS Suzy! (*spank* *spank* *spank*..)"
MP3.com was keeping copies of the songs on their servers, but they supposedly put up a firewall of sorts to keep everybody from getting those songs -- The BeamIt Software. Once BeamIt saw that a user had a specific CD in their drive (with certain track lengths in a specific order), it would allow that user access to those songs (with those track lengths in that order).
THE PROBLEMS: The BeamIt software can't tell that a CDR is in the drive instead of the real CD. Therefore it will allow someone access to MP3 copies of songs they didn't own. The BeamIt software can't tell that the person beaming CDs into his account isn't the actual owner of the CD in his drive. The My.MP3.com site can't tell that the person logging into the account isn't the owner of the account.
I also wonder if MP3.com payed for the CDs they ripped from to make those MP3s? I'll probably never know, BUT they obviously didn't read the part about "unauthorized reproduction is prohibited by federal law".. ALSO! The fact that they are allowing more than one person to listen to the same MP3, could they be tried under the laws against rebroadcasting copyrighted material?
Sure, you could say that the people doing all this are breaking MP3.com's terms of use, but MP3.com is at fault for allowing people to break the law and not doing anything about it.
I hate to sound grouchy, but I'm just playing Devil's Advocate!:) I want to test the waters here on Slashdot..
The internet is similar to the universe and everything in-between -- especially the theories about their respective shapes! I remember when the big theory was that the universe is saddle-shaped. Then I got theories that conflicted that by saying that the universe has far too many dimensions to have a shape. Then the first guys said that only the three-dimensional part looks like a saddle.. Now there are people saying that the Internet looks like a bowtie. I say that if you redraw the graph with dots that represent site locations and put them in roughly the same areas (incoming, outgoing, central area, tendrils, etc.), you won't actually see individual tendrils. Instead, you'll see a big hazy mass. To the untrained eye, it will look like a blarb of shit. Here's the big question: Is the Big Blarb of Shit collapsing in on itself, or will it expand forever?
I mentioned that the Student Technology Fee covers internet access in the computer labs, and Residential Life covers access in the dorms, you might ask who covers access in classrooms or other buildings?
Well, there is another entity on campus -- Computing Information Services. These guys (plus Data Communications) pretty much run the entire campus network. They are in charge of all the labs and divide the funding into Student Tech Fee, and CIS Funding. Their own labs have slightly different policies: for example, they double as classrooms and whoever is is one of these labs when a class is about to start is asked to go to another lab or provide proof that they are enrolled in the scheduled class.
One thing that makes me wonder is that the ResLife servers go through CIS before they go to the rest of the world! So, do the CIS "Terms of Use" override those of ResLife? (Yeah, I've been a student here for FIVE years, and have worked for CIS for three, so I ought to know this.. but..;)
Ever since they remodeled the Classroom Building and added another wing to the Student Union, I have noticed at least one RJ45 port on every wall in those buildings! What will happen if the friend of mine who currently lives in Stout brings a laptop to the food court in the Union and hooks it up to the internet? Will he get arrested because he's not paying for that internet access with his room rent, or is he safe from ResLife because he's simply not in any dorm? Is it then covered by the Student Tech Fee or CIS Funding?
So, why weren't the guys who were arrested not charged with carrying their computers downstairs and connecting them in the lab? This is a private lab (as opposed to the public labs all over campus), so I'd assume it is run by Reslife. But the students weren't busted for using them, so who owns those jacks?
I see either some inconsistency or a just a simple lack of communication.
BTW, I don't even consider that room as a computer lab -- it's practically part of the laundry room. It only has eight computers, and has no lab monitor to watch them. (Then again, the other labs have at least 50 computers.) These are some of the old Pentium-90 systems (w/16MB RAM) that we had in the public labs from Fall '95 to Spring '98 before we upgraded. Half of them don't work well enough to use: at any given time, one cannot see the network, another has a bad keyboard, and another will be missing Windows entirely! The only things that really work are the network jacks! And these students just wanted to put them to good use -- just like they would have if the jacks were in another building.
WOW! A friend of mine lives literally *TWO* doors down from one of the guys mentioned! And the cable had been there (a blue RJ45 cable coming down from the ceiling into the fella's room) for a good month before anyone ever did anything about anything! My passive self never wanted to ask him what the cable was all about -- maybe his friends had a personal network going and most of his friends lived above him on the second floor. But now that I've read the article on the front page of the O'Colly and the front page of Slashdot (I'm still amazed it made it!), I realize that something was up!
As for the fact that they were paying for internet access in the first place, they were paying the "Student Technology Fee" which is an automatic fee that's charged for every hour that a student is enrolled in on campus. This fee covers the cost of the STF-funded computer labs only. (I used to work in one of these labs for three years, and my managers used to remind me that that was where my paycheck originated..) On the other hand, Residential Life (http://www.reslife.okstate.edu/main.htm) charges their own rates and runs their own servers to support dorm ethernet access. The dorm these guys live in is the "old/cheap" 50-year-old dorm "Stout Hall" -- the one with no air conditioning, no cable TV, no in-room carpeting, and no internet access (just a sink that spits out filthy water and lead pipes insulated in asbestos that rattle during the night).. Students can't even get modem access because the campus is using a propretary digital phone system! And these guys just let the little renegade inside them take over, protest and steal some internet access.
ResLife has been proposing to refurbish this building for years, but they didn't have a place to put 400+ students. Until..
..ResLife decided to put up new apartment-style housing, demolish the high-rises, and decommission Stout Hall. The students currently in Stout have first dibs to signup for the apartments. They will be quite nice -- two or four bedrooms, with an ethernet jack in each room and at least one extra jack in the living room!
..the guys just couldn't wait to move I guess..
Hell, we just got Southwestern Bell ADSL off-campus all over town here in Stillwater, and it is a hell of a lot cheaper and more reliable than living on campus with ethernet access!
I had one with my Commodore 64!..but I haven't seen one since. The reason why we don't have wiring schemnatics anymore is that they would give us incentive to climb inside the system and "mess with it". Well, the way most EULA's are made is that if we "mess with it", we will void the warranty.
I don't ever remember it "living"? In all of the computers I've used, in all of the computer stores I've been to (including the one I work at), and from all of the people I've talked to, I've never heard of (or seen) anything that uses Firewire. Maybe you could count the iMac, but that's a "foreign world" as far as I'm concerned.
"Everything I think I see, becomes a USB device to me!" -- distorted lyric from the old Tootsie Roll ads.
The problem I see with MS Windows' presence is that it's the only way to execute Win32 apps, and that falls back to Microsoft's presence: Without Microsoft Windows, you WILL NOT be able to run the most popular applications sold on the market. That is a monopoly.
Essentially, I'd like to see the judge force Microsoft to release the Win32 API (source code and all) for free to the general public. No, I don't want to see Microsoft have to release the source code for ALL of Windows, just the API. The developing public could port Win32 to other platforms. This would cause Windows to become a simple "front-end" for the API -- which would have to compete with all the other front-ends (window-managers / windowing systems?) that would pop up..
And then -- Hey look! Microsoft has to compete! Isn't that what we want MS to do, compete? (But knowing them, they might find a way around that as well..)
They should have given him what they REALLY used in the commercial -- a zip disk with the 3DStudio file of the Harrier.. For $700,000, I think it's well worth it! Maybe they didn't use 3DStudio, but you get the idea..
Yeah, and I'll go watch Telletubbies through a childs eyes.. That won't make me like it.
IMO, The big thing that bugs people about TPM is that they grew out of the target audience. It's a sad fact that most forms of entertainment don't grow up with us. Silly-ass saturday morning cartoons were a hard thing for me to let go of, but I eventually did. Some people are just going to have to get over Star Wars. According to its Creator, "it is a kids movie". We simply shoudn't be watching it..
That creativity article you mentioned brings up a darn good point..
Humans are at the mercy of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle! If you try to ask someone philosophically why they act the way they do, they'll slightly change the way they act to accomodate this new-found knowledge (they now know more about why they act the way they do). Their position stays the same (right where you stopped them to ask them the question), but their actions change.
It's a slight deviation from the conclusion that this article was taking, but it works once you think about it!
I remember about four years ago when I was hell-bent on downloading every Doom WAD I could get my grubby little hands on, ftp.cdrom.com seemed to be just a run-of-the-mill server. It was in its infancy -- maximum anonymous users was a measly 240!!
> And I thought that Linux could actually deal > with whatever format you threw at it, at least > more gracefully than Macs or Windows did..
Well, I first thought that myself until I tried burning a CD of Redhat 5.2 (which I downloaded), but the install disks wouldn't see my CD -- because of the long file names. It turns out that I needed to make an ISO9660 disc and generate a bunch of TRANS.TBL files, but there were no (inexpensive) Win9x CD burning packages that allowed me to do that.. I know mkisofs does it for linux, but I couldn't find a Win32 port.. (oh well..)
Of all the plain-sounding names out there, nither time.com nor earth.com talk about Time or the Earth. I think the NIST in Boulder, Colorado ought to get time.com. As for earth.com -- cdrom.com ought to get it.
- You've heard of "Internet in a BOX"? Try THIS! - "What are you doing?".. "I'm playing with my SCSI Ultra Wide!" - I got all the fsck I need, right here in my pants!
Slashdot Mirror
Remember the fella who stole internet access by running a CAT5 cable from a hub in a storage closet to his computer in his dorm room? (I was there to see that.) Now this.
t ories/computer.html
h tm), they were saying that entire Willham complex would be demolished in three years! ..but that fizzled, and now they have internet access.
..WAIT! That IS Suzy! (*spank* *spank* *spank*..)"
OSU NEWSPAPER ARTICLE:
http://www.ocolly.com/issues/2000_Fall/000914/s
THIS guy lives in Willham Hall, which just got wired for network access this past summer. Willham is one of the Freshman dorms, and Freshman are stereotyped to go absolutely nuts with the Internet. That's why the university was reluctant to have the building hooked up. (I used to live there three years ago. All we could use on the PBX phone system were defective external 9600 baud modems.)
ACTUALLY! Because the university built (and are still building) new on-campus apartments (http://www.reslife.okstate.edu/pictures/new/new.
Here's a pic for refrence:
http://www.reslife.okstate.edu/suite/18.jpg
The new building down in front are one of the new apartment complexes, the two highrises in the back are the Willham complex -- the closest one is the men's dorm (where all this news is happening!) Maybe they decided not to demolish Willham because the new apartmenta are FIFTY FEET AWAY! Therefore, a construction/demolition problem led to the university giving into demand and installing internet access, which when combined with hyperactive Freshmen, led to the RIAA crawling up OSU's ass.
As for the ZDNet article, I like this quote:
"We're doing some forensic review of the hard drive and determining what is there," Eaton said. "After we finish that review, we will evaluate the amount of substance he was distributing."
All I can think of when they say "Oklahoma Forensics":
Jimbo: (browsing through 'My Documents/My Pictures') "Hey Bubba, check out the tits on this chick!"
Bubba: "DAMN! I ain't seen tits like that since we sold that one heifer, Suzy.
MP3.com was keeping copies of the songs on their servers, but they supposedly put up a firewall of sorts to keep everybody from getting those songs -- The BeamIt Software. Once BeamIt saw that a user had a specific CD in their drive (with certain track lengths in a specific order), it would allow that user access to those songs (with those track lengths in that order).
:) I want to test the waters here on Slashdot..
THE PROBLEMS: The BeamIt software can't tell that a CDR is in the drive instead of the real CD. Therefore it will allow someone access to MP3 copies of songs they didn't own. The BeamIt software can't tell that the person beaming CDs into his account isn't the actual owner of the CD in his drive. The My.MP3.com site can't tell that the person logging into the account isn't the owner of the account.
I also wonder if MP3.com payed for the CDs they ripped from to make those MP3s? I'll probably never know, BUT they obviously didn't read the part about "unauthorized reproduction is prohibited by federal law".. ALSO! The fact that they are allowing more than one person to listen to the same MP3, could they be tried under the laws against rebroadcasting copyrighted material?
Sure, you could say that the people doing all this are breaking MP3.com's terms of use, but MP3.com is at fault for allowing people to break the law and not doing anything about it.
I hate to sound grouchy, but I'm just playing Devil's Advocate!
Why don't we just send the entire country the French Edition of NetNanny?
The internet is similar to the universe and everything in-between -- especially the theories about their respective shapes! I remember when the big theory was that the universe is saddle-shaped. Then I got theories that conflicted that by saying that the universe has far too many dimensions to have a shape. Then the first guys said that only the three-dimensional part looks like a saddle.. Now there are people saying that the Internet looks like a bowtie. I say that if you redraw the graph with dots that represent site locations and put them in roughly the same areas (incoming, outgoing, central area, tendrils, etc.), you won't actually see individual tendrils. Instead, you'll see a big hazy mass. To the untrained eye, it will look like a blarb of shit. Here's the big question: Is the Big Blarb of Shit collapsing in on itself, or will it expand forever?
I mentioned that the Student Technology Fee covers internet access in the computer labs, and Residential Life covers access in the dorms, you might ask who covers access in classrooms or other buildings?
;)
Well, there is another entity on campus -- Computing Information Services. These guys (plus Data Communications) pretty much run the entire campus network. They are in charge of all the labs and divide the funding into Student Tech Fee, and CIS Funding. Their own labs have slightly different policies: for example, they double as classrooms and whoever is is one of these labs when a class is about to start is asked to go to another lab or provide proof that they are enrolled in the scheduled class.
One thing that makes me wonder is that the ResLife servers go through CIS before they go to the rest of the world! So, do the CIS "Terms of Use" override those of ResLife? (Yeah, I've been a student here for FIVE years, and have worked for CIS for three, so I ought to know this.. but..
Ever since they remodeled the Classroom Building and added another wing to the Student Union, I have noticed at least one RJ45 port on every wall in those buildings! What will happen if the friend of mine who currently lives in Stout brings a laptop to the food court in the Union and hooks it up to the internet? Will he get arrested because he's not paying for that internet access with his room rent, or is he safe from ResLife because he's simply not in any dorm? Is it then covered by the Student Tech Fee or CIS Funding?
So, why weren't the guys who were arrested not charged with carrying their computers downstairs and connecting them in the lab? This is a private lab (as opposed to the public labs all over campus), so I'd assume it is run by Reslife. But the students weren't busted for using them, so who owns those jacks?
I see either some inconsistency or a just a simple lack of communication.
BTW, I don't even consider that room as a computer lab -- it's practically part of the laundry room. It only has eight computers, and has no lab monitor to watch them. (Then again, the other labs have at least 50 computers.) These are some of the old Pentium-90 systems (w/16MB RAM) that we had in the public labs from Fall '95 to Spring '98 before we upgraded. Half of them don't work well enough to use: at any given time, one cannot see the network, another has a bad keyboard, and another will be missing Windows entirely! The only things that really work are the network jacks! And these students just wanted to put them to good use -- just like they would have if the jacks were in another building.
-Quazi
WOW! A friend of mine lives literally *TWO* doors down from one of the guys mentioned! And the cable had been there (a blue RJ45 cable coming down from the ceiling into the fella's room) for a good month before anyone ever did anything about anything! My passive self never wanted to ask him what the cable was all about -- maybe his friends had a personal network going and most of his friends lived above him on the second floor. But now that I've read the article on the front page of the O'Colly and the front page of Slashdot (I'm still amazed it made it!), I realize that something was up!
. htm
As for the fact that they were paying for internet access in the first place, they were paying the "Student Technology Fee" which is an automatic fee that's charged for every hour that a student is enrolled in on campus. This fee covers the cost of the STF-funded computer labs only. (I used to work in one of these labs for three years, and my managers used to remind me that that was where my paycheck originated..) On the other hand, Residential Life (http://www.reslife.okstate.edu/main.htm) charges their own rates and runs their own servers to support dorm ethernet access. The dorm these guys live in is the "old/cheap" 50-year-old dorm "Stout Hall" -- the one with no air conditioning, no cable TV, no in-room carpeting, and no internet access (just a sink that spits out filthy water and lead pipes insulated in asbestos that rattle during the night).. Students can't even get modem access because the campus is using a propretary digital phone system! And these guys just let the little renegade inside them take over, protest and steal some internet access.
ResLife has been proposing to refurbish this building for years, but they didn't have a place to put 400+ students. Until..
http://www.reslife.okstate.edu/pictures/new/new
..ResLife decided to put up new apartment-style housing, demolish the high-rises, and decommission Stout Hall. The students currently in Stout have first dibs to signup for the apartments. They will be quite nice -- two or four bedrooms, with an ethernet jack in each room and at least one extra jack in the living room!
..the guys just couldn't wait to move I guess..
Hell, we just got Southwestern Bell ADSL off-campus all over town here in Stillwater, and it is a hell of a lot cheaper and more reliable than living on campus with ethernet access!
-Quazi
-- Anonymous_Troll@microsoft.com
PS: I'm just trying to up my 76.5% Slashdot Purity into the 90th percentile!
I had one with my Commodore 64! ..but I haven't seen one since. The reason why we don't have wiring schemnatics anymore is that they would give us incentive to climb inside the system and "mess with it". Well, the way most EULA's are made is that if we "mess with it", we will void the warranty.
I don't ever remember it "living"? In all of the computers I've used, in all of the computer stores I've been to (including the one I work at), and from all of the people I've talked to, I've never heard of (or seen) anything that uses Firewire. Maybe you could count the iMac, but that's a "foreign world" as far as I'm concerned.
"Everything I think I see, becomes a USB device to me!" -- distorted lyric from the old Tootsie Roll ads.
The problem I see with MS Windows' presence is that it's the only way to execute Win32 apps, and that falls back to Microsoft's presence: Without Microsoft Windows, you WILL NOT be able to run the most popular applications sold on the market. That is a monopoly.
Essentially, I'd like to see the judge force Microsoft to release the Win32 API (source code and all) for free to the general public. No, I don't want to see Microsoft have to release the source code for ALL of Windows, just the API. The developing public could port Win32 to other platforms. This would cause Windows to become a simple "front-end" for the API -- which would have to compete with all the other front-ends (window-managers / windowing systems?) that would pop up..
And then -- Hey look! Microsoft has to compete! Isn't that what we want MS to do, compete? (But knowing them, they might find a way around that as well..)
They should have given him what they REALLY used in the commercial -- a zip disk with the 3DStudio file of the Harrier.. For $700,000, I think it's well worth it! Maybe they didn't use 3DStudio, but you get the idea..
Yeah, and I'll go watch Telletubbies through a childs eyes.. That won't make me like it.
IMO, The big thing that bugs people about TPM is that they grew out of the target audience. It's a sad fact that most forms of entertainment don't grow up with us. Silly-ass saturday morning cartoons were a hard thing for me to let go of, but I eventually did. Some people are just going to have to get over Star Wars. According to its Creator, "it is a kids movie". We simply shoudn't be watching it..
But dammit George, you could have warned us.
I've got all the IP numbers I need right here in my pants!
:)
..sorry, I HAD to..
That creativity article you mentioned brings up a darn good point..
Humans are at the mercy of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle! If you try to ask someone philosophically why they act the way they do, they'll slightly change the way they act to accomodate this new-found knowledge (they now know more about why they act the way they do). Their position stays the same (right where you stopped them to ask them the question), but their actions change.
It's a slight deviation from the conclusion that this article was taking, but it works once you think about it!
I remember about four years ago when I was hell-bent on downloading every Doom WAD I could get my grubby little hands on, ftp.cdrom.com seemed to be just a run-of-the-mill server. It was in its infancy -- maximum anonymous users was a measly 240!!
I'm tellin' ya, this makes me feel OLD!
> And I thought that Linux could actually deal
> with whatever format you threw at it, at least
> more gracefully than Macs or Windows did..
Well, I first thought that myself until I tried burning a CD of Redhat 5.2 (which I downloaded), but the install disks wouldn't see my CD -- because of the long file names. It turns out that I needed to make an ISO9660 disc and generate a bunch of TRANS.TBL files, but there were no (inexpensive) Win9x CD burning packages that allowed me to do that.. I know mkisofs does it for linux, but I couldn't find a Win32 port.. (oh well..)
Of all the plain-sounding names out there, nither time.com nor earth.com talk about Time or the Earth. I think the NIST in Boulder, Colorado ought to get time.com. As for earth.com -- cdrom.com ought to get it.
Oh, the possibilities!
.. "I'm playing with my SCSI Ultra Wide!"
- You've heard of "Internet in a BOX"? Try THIS!
- "What are you doing?"
- I got all the fsck I need, right here in my pants!
..oh dear..
Last night, I put up a Shoutcast server (http://shoutcast.com) which is currently broadcasting over 4 hours worth of Kosmic music.
u tcast.html
m ic
All you need is the latest version of Winamp, press Ctrl-L, and type "http://139.78.87.109:8000".
The playlist:
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/9703/sho
more Kosmic songs:
ftp://wallajl.student.osktate.edu/pub/music/kos