Also, it would be nice to be able to hack your browser to support cookies only from authorized sites
Actually, you can do this with IE5. Which is not an implicit endorsement of the product, but it IS a nice feature. (Of course, Lynx also has this feature).
Is it just me, or is that site just asking to be hammered? Fortunately the pages are small, but come on.. Once you click, you just can't stop reloading the pages.. A virtually unlimited supply of Katz. Who could ask for more?
The main problem with Windoze based OSes is the fact that it is impossible to easily switch from ordinary users to priviledged ones, without logging out and relogging in
Uhm.. ever heard of su? Yes, there's a version of su for Windows NT. It's in the resource kit.
Am i the only one sick of seeing every other story say, "Just like in Cryptonomicon?" It's as bad as Neuromancer in the 80's...
Look, data havens! Just like in Cryptonomicon! Nope, there was never any such thing as offshore banking until it was invented in Crytponomicon, and now people have said, "gee what a keen idea. think I'll set one up." Ooh, encryption! Just like in Crytponomicon! Never mind the many times it's been mentioned before.
Which is not to say I don't like the author... But damn. Overhype is making me sick.
If, eventually, ever site on the net uses the same one or two huge ad banner companies, and they track you with cookies and then let's say they decide to share tracking info with each other.. They now have a complete log of every web page you visit that has ads. Targetted advertising is merely the best way that ad banner companies have come up with to "use" this information. There are other, far more useful/insidious ways to use this information. For what it's worth, although cookies make this much easier, it's not impossible to do it without them.
Anyway, advertising is not the issue -- it's the information behind the advertising. The issue is not that an ad company can give you targetted advertising -- the issue is that, because a single entity is present on a such a large percentage of web pages, you can be tracked and identified as you surf the web. If you don't care about maintaining privacy on the web, then likely you don't care about this either.
I know this has already been pointed out, but no one seems to be paying attention to it, so I'll point it out again.
Application servers like the article is talking about are NOT for end-users to remotely run software off. It's for companies to outsource their web-based applications. If you ever read all those free magazines you get at work, you'd see a lot of hype and speculation for Oracle's effort in this same vein.
cable boxes should come with disclaimers saying that everything on here is a half witted attempt to cater to the least intelligent people, cause they make up 99% of the worlds population
How can 99% of the population be the least intelligent people? Least intelligent = dumbest, bottom of the barrel, etc. And 99% falls into that? Damn, that's a steep pyramid.
Wow, I can't tell if that's a real comment, a troll, or just recycled generic slashdot spew.
Anyway, as someone who's been a user on a QNX system (albeit remotely)... I have nothing to say, except that it's too expensive to upgrade, so thank god that linux can now read QNX partitions.
Agents, filters, whatever -- objects that filter out what we don't want and reshape information for us ARE useful. Little things like Junkbuster or ad-filtering proxies or custom-written programs that automatically retrieve news from web sites / mail from webmail sites are an example of this. But Katz is proposing that we need such agents, not to be able to shape our view of information (instead of having it shaped by those who provide it to us -- shaped with ads on top), but to protect ourselves from our own lack of control.
If the only thing protecting you from rampant foolish consumerism is an 'agent,' what happens when the agent is subverted? You don't even have your own foolish mistakes of the past to learn from, because you never made them - you were sheltered from all of that. (And trust me, people will find ways to subvert agents just as surely as they subvert search engines to 'pornjack' you.)
So, basically, Katz's heroic Clotho.org is an agent that will give people without self-control self-control by never exposing them to 'temptation.' They don't have to worry about losing control and impulse buying because they'll never be exposed to anything like that.
Personally, I prefer the heroic legbreaker.org. By breaking my legs repeatedly, I never have to leave my house and thus am saved from having to experience the terrible evils of the modern world -- highways, big businesses, pollution, etc. Sure, I'm crippled, but it's a small price to pay for my mental safety!
What I am more concerned about is security. With dial-up connections at least you were a moving target - the IP changed and you weren't connected for a long period of time.
Now you have a static IP or a dynamic (DHCP) one that stays the same for long periods of time. All of a sudden you have thousands of computers sitting there wide open and vulnerable to attack
Actually, I've found that it makes people a lot more "polite." If you're on a dial-up link, you don't care if your IP gets banned for whatever you do, you can just redial and get a new one. Knowing you'll always have the same ip, while taking away some of your "privacy" also takes away some of the attitude of doing something you wouldn't normally do just cause you can do it anonymously. (For related examples, see "Slashdot, Posting on").
I hardly see how a static IP is a security risk -- unless you make someone mad at you and they specifically target your ip, and you can't hide from them by redialing. Otherwise, you're just as vulnerable in a block of dial-up IPs for people randomly scanning.
they've done such great things as getting R.A. Salvatorre to come back and write another Drizzt novel.
uh...
...
If you say so.
Drizzt was a cash cow that R A Salvatore milked for far too long, and you think it's a good thing that they got him to come back and write another one? [I stopped reading after about the 5th trilogy...]
Phone calls cannot be monitored because the phone line is considered a "common carrier" and thus not the property of the company.
Wrong!
At many places (say, call centers), monitoring phone calls is part of the normal process of evaluating employee performance. If you're foolish enough to make a personal call from the same phone that you take business calls on, and get monitored . . . oh well. Not only that, but all of your calls are recorded. The recorder runs 24x7 and will pick up noise from the room even when the phone isn't off-hook. Of course, I believe legally you have to announce this to callers (i.e. "To maintain service quality, this call may be recorded").
Get real. I highly doubt Slashdot would do an idealistic thing like this. This is about money. For Slashdot to be legal, all they have to do is use a licensed piece of software to create their gifs. For Slashdot to be "right," they would have to not use GIFs, not have any banner-ad animated GIFs, etc. And that's not going to happen -- too much work for nothing but a "moral" gain.
Don't get me wrong, it would be great -- but it's not going to happen. (And for people complaining about Unisys not 'defending' this patent: it covers GIF creation. You're thinking to yourself, "well, I didn't pay for this GIF creation software, and Unisys never said anything." That's probably because you pirated a commercial piece of software that DOES have a license. (I know there are plenty of free ones, but most people reading this are using pirated copies of licensed software.)
You can get this service in Austin. The company offering it is Nucentrix (www.nucentrix.net). I have the service and get upwards of 150k/sec from digex.net. (multiply that by 8 and get 1.2Mbit = perilously close to a T1, and you'll never get a full 1.544Mbps from a T1 anyway). The monthly price is good, the setup cost was fairly high but lowered afterwards. It's a static ip with no inbound ports blocked, and additional static ips are (for now) $10 bucks/month for 8 more. I'd point you to the site I run off of it but it's embarrasing, so I won't. The only problem so far is that it's not super-reliable -- intermittent cutouts, and *2* hours a day (5-7am) scheduled downtime. Oh yeah, and there's a 10Gb/month download limit, and the burstable to T1 speed is only from 6pm-6am (or so they said). The only reason we have it is because the location is too far out to get cable modem or DSL service. That being said, you'd probably only want it where you can't get DSL or cable because it's a bit more expensive than them -- but I know that I get downloads up to 4 or 5 times faster than friends with cable modems.
Re:There is no good reason to use Slackware
on
Slackware 5.0 Coming
·
· Score: 1
I'm not sure how this guy did it at work, but he sez he did a "typical or full" installation of RedHat, and there was no compiler selected! Woah....
Redhat 5.2. Full install. Gimme everything.
Hey, where's g++?
Not to mention the millions of layers of redirecting scripts and config files one has to go through just to find where something happens in a script. [Shudders].
Slashdot scoops others... er.. not.
on
Wired on Slashdot
·
· Score: 4
I like Slashdot and all that, but well over 50% of the content is just re-linking to stories on salon, news.com, or wired. I can go read news.com and wired.com in the morning, and in the afternoon there will be 3 or 4 stories posted (on Slashdot) that just point back to those. If anything, maybe Slashdot is a good way to, er, gather together the more interesting news and comment on it, but they're not 'scooping' anyone, except for when they post major software releases before they're supposed to be released, so the mirrors haven't gotten their copies yet, and the hordes kill the main site and the mirrors never get their copies.
Mix in the occasional JonKatz yellowish journalism (it's designed to create controversy and draw more hits/pageviews/ad loads), an article a day about "amazing high storage at amazingly low price sometime in the future" (I swear, there's at least one of these a day), and ever so often an empty essay from a slashdot reader or a book review.
And of course Slashdot "coexists" with the traditional news sites -- it's where they get half their stories.
It's my understanding that NT can't boot from a floppy, period. Which, I suppose, takes the hassle out of making a boot disk
Totally off-topic, of course, but yes, NT can boot from a boot disk. It does so when you install, and you'd have to boot from a disk to rescue it from a failed mirrored boot drive.
Of course, you'd have to boot from a boot disk to recover from a failed non-mirrored boot drive, but that'd be to reinstall... [snicker]
Funny, the exact same thing has happened before on Slashdot. (I think with kernel 2.2.0 or something similar).
But who cares about letting the mirrors get updated and not killing the main servers when you can be FIRST post|news story|downloader? Its a common theme here.
Slashdot Mirror
So many of these sites are afraid to say anything bad about big games that they just parrot out the company line
[Notes the moderation on above post: Score 0, Flamebait.]
See what happens when you say something people don't like, or don't want to hear?
Also, it would be nice to be able to hack your browser to support cookies only from authorized sites
Actually, you can do this with IE5. Which is not an implicit endorsement of the product, but it IS a nice feature. (Of course, Lynx also has this feature).
Is it just me, or is that site just asking to be hammered? Fortunately the pages are small, but come on.. Once you click, you just can't stop reloading the pages.. A virtually unlimited supply of Katz. Who could ask for more?
The main problem with Windoze based OSes is the fact that it is impossible to easily switch from ordinary users to priviledged ones, without logging out and relogging in
Uhm.. ever heard of su? Yes, there's a version of su for Windows NT. It's in the resource kit.
Am i the only one sick of seeing every other story say, "Just like in Cryptonomicon?" It's as bad as Neuromancer in the 80's...
Look, data havens! Just like in Cryptonomicon! Nope, there was never any such thing as offshore banking until it was invented in Crytponomicon, and now people have said, "gee what a keen idea. think I'll set one up." Ooh, encryption! Just like in Crytponomicon! Never mind the many times it's been mentioned before.
Which is not to say I don't like the author... But damn. Overhype is making me sick.
If, eventually, ever site on the net uses the same one or two huge ad banner companies, and they track you with cookies and then let's say they decide to share tracking info with each other.. They now have a complete log of every web page you visit that has ads. Targetted advertising is merely the best way that ad banner companies have come up with to "use" this information. There are other, far more useful/insidious ways to use this information. For what it's worth, although cookies make this much easier, it's not impossible to do it without them.
Anyway, advertising is not the issue -- it's the information behind the advertising. The issue is not that an ad company can give you targetted advertising -- the issue is that, because a single entity is present on a such a large percentage of web pages, you can be tracked and identified as you surf the web. If you don't care about maintaining privacy on the web, then likely you don't care about this either.
I know this has already been pointed out, but no one seems to be paying attention to it, so I'll point it out again.
Application servers like the article is talking about are NOT for end-users to remotely run software off. It's for companies to outsource their web-based applications. If you ever read all those free magazines you get at work, you'd see a lot of hype and speculation for Oracle's effort in this same vein.
cable boxes should come with disclaimers saying that everything on here is a half witted attempt to cater to the least intelligent people, cause they make up 99% of the worlds population
How can 99% of the population be the least intelligent people? Least intelligent = dumbest, bottom of the barrel, etc. And 99% falls into that? Damn, that's a steep pyramid.
You cannot get a virus simply by reading email
That used to be true. Now, thanks to HTML-enabled java-enabled mailreaders and trusted ActiveX documents, you can. (Those aren't just buzzwords)
I'm safe with pine, though.
Oh, wait, pine had a problem handling MIME headers at one point not TOO long ago... See the message on security focus.
MS Outlook had problems with a buffer overflow in MIME headers.
Everybody back to mailx!
Wow, I can't tell if that's a real comment, a troll, or just recycled generic slashdot spew.
Anyway, as someone who's been a user on a QNX system (albeit remotely)... I have nothing to say, except that it's too expensive to upgrade, so thank god that linux can now read QNX partitions.
Who saw, 'massive fiber cut' and thought that, er, someone was changing providers? And wondering why it was done in the middle of the day?
"But that cut wasn't scheduled for today!"
Agents, filters, whatever -- objects that filter out what we don't want and reshape information for us ARE useful. Little things like Junkbuster or ad-filtering proxies or custom-written programs that automatically retrieve news from web sites / mail from webmail sites are an example of this. But Katz is proposing that we need such agents, not to be able to shape our view of information (instead of having it shaped by those who provide it to us -- shaped with ads on top), but to protect ourselves from our own lack of control.
If the only thing protecting you from rampant foolish consumerism is an 'agent,' what happens when the agent is subverted? You don't even have your own foolish mistakes of the past to learn from, because you never made them - you were sheltered from all of that. (And trust me, people will find ways to subvert agents just as surely as they subvert search engines to 'pornjack' you.)
So, basically, Katz's heroic Clotho.org is an agent that will give people without self-control self-control by never exposing them to 'temptation.' They don't have to worry about losing control and impulse buying because they'll never be exposed to anything like that.
Personally, I prefer the heroic legbreaker.org. By breaking my legs repeatedly, I never have to leave my house and thus am saved from having to experience the terrible evils of the modern world -- highways, big businesses, pollution, etc. Sure, I'm crippled, but it's a small price to pay for my mental safety!
What I am more concerned about is security. With dial-up connections at least you were a moving target - the IP changed and you weren't connected for a long period of time.
Now you have a static IP or a dynamic (DHCP) one that stays the same for long periods of time. All of a sudden you have thousands of computers sitting there wide open and vulnerable to attack
Actually, I've found that it makes people a lot more "polite." If you're on a dial-up link, you don't care if your IP gets banned for whatever you do, you can just redial and get a new one. Knowing you'll always have the same ip, while taking away some of your "privacy" also takes away some of the attitude of doing something you wouldn't normally do just cause you can do it anonymously. (For related examples, see "Slashdot, Posting on").
I hardly see how a static IP is a security risk -- unless you make someone mad at you and they specifically target your ip, and you can't hide from them by redialing. Otherwise, you're just as vulnerable in a block of dial-up IPs for people randomly scanning.
they've done such great things as getting R.A. Salvatorre to come back and write another Drizzt novel.
uh...
...
If you say so.
Drizzt was a cash cow that R A Salvatore milked for far too long, and you think it's a good thing that they got him to come back and write another one? [I stopped reading after about the 5th trilogy...]
I just can't wait for my copy of Visual Emacs 2000 Enterprise Edition!
Phone calls cannot be monitored because the phone line is considered a "common carrier" and thus not the property of the company.
Wrong!
At many places (say, call centers), monitoring phone calls is part of the normal process of evaluating employee performance. If you're foolish enough to make a personal call from the same phone that you take business calls on, and get monitored . . . oh well. Not only that, but all of your calls are recorded. The recorder runs 24x7 and will pick up noise from the room even when the phone isn't off-hook. Of course, I believe legally you have to announce this to callers (i.e. "To maintain service quality, this call may be recorded").
I think slashdot should stop using GIFs,
Get real. I highly doubt Slashdot would do an idealistic thing like this. This is about money. For Slashdot to be legal, all they have to do is use a licensed piece of software to create their gifs. For Slashdot to be "right," they would have to not use GIFs, not have any banner-ad animated GIFs, etc. And that's not going to happen -- too much work for nothing but a "moral" gain.
Don't get me wrong, it would be great -- but it's not going to happen. (And for people complaining about Unisys not 'defending' this patent: it covers GIF creation. You're thinking to yourself, "well, I didn't pay for this GIF creation software, and Unisys never said anything." That's probably because you pirated a commercial piece of software that DOES have a license. (I know there are plenty of free ones, but most people reading this are using pirated copies of licensed software.)
You can get this service in Austin. The company offering it is Nucentrix (www.nucentrix.net). I have the service and get upwards of 150k/sec from digex.net. (multiply that by 8 and get 1.2Mbit = perilously close to a T1, and you'll never get a full 1.544Mbps from a T1 anyway). The monthly price is good, the setup cost was fairly high but lowered afterwards. It's a static ip with no inbound ports blocked, and additional static ips are (for now) $10 bucks/month for 8 more. I'd point you to the site I run off of it but it's embarrasing, so I won't. The only problem so far is that it's not super-reliable -- intermittent cutouts, and *2* hours a day (5-7am) scheduled downtime. Oh yeah, and there's a 10Gb/month download limit, and the burstable to T1 speed is only from 6pm-6am (or so they said). The only reason we have it is because the location is too far out to get cable modem or DSL service. That being said, you'd probably only want it where you can't get DSL or cable because it's a bit more expensive than them -- but I know that I get downloads up to 4 or 5 times faster than friends with cable modems.
I'm not sure how this guy did it at work, but he sez he did a "typical or full" installation of RedHat, and there was no compiler selected! Woah....
Redhat 5.2. Full install. Gimme everything.
Hey, where's g++?
Not to mention the millions of layers of redirecting scripts and config files one has to go through just to find where something happens in a script. [Shudders].
I like Slashdot and all that, but well over 50% of the content is just re-linking to stories on salon, news.com, or wired. I can go read news.com and wired.com in the morning, and in the afternoon there will be 3 or 4 stories posted (on Slashdot) that just point back to those. If anything, maybe Slashdot is a good way to, er, gather together the more interesting news and comment on it, but they're not 'scooping' anyone, except for when they post major software releases before they're supposed to be released, so the mirrors haven't gotten their copies yet, and the hordes kill the main site and the mirrors never get their copies.
Mix in the occasional JonKatz yellowish journalism (it's designed to create controversy and draw more hits/pageviews/ad loads), an article a day about "amazing high storage at amazingly low price sometime in the future" (I swear, there's at least one of these a day), and ever so often an empty essay from a slashdot reader or a book review.
And of course Slashdot "coexists" with the traditional news sites -- it's where they get half their stories.
[But, hey, I read it for the comments.]
So when will 2.2.x have ISAKMP masquerading support? Then I'll upgrade...
[Or maybe it does already and I'm just too foolish to notice it.]
you can't translate encrypted packets.
Yes you can.
[To put it generally, if the NAT is trusted and knowledgable.]
And you can, specifically, NAT IPSEC and PPTP. But I take it you weren't referring to them.
It's my understanding that NT can't boot from a floppy, period. Which, I suppose, takes the hassle out of making a boot disk
Totally off-topic, of course, but yes, NT can boot from a boot disk. It does so when you install, and you'd have to boot from a disk to rescue it from a failed mirrored boot drive.
Of course, you'd have to boot from a boot disk to recover from a failed non-mirrored boot drive, but that'd be to reinstall... [snicker]
Funny, the exact same thing has happened before on Slashdot. (I think with kernel 2.2.0 or something similar).
But who cares about letting the mirrors get updated and not killing the main servers when you can be FIRST post|news story|downloader? Its a common theme here.