The test I ran was from an NTL cable-modem serviced node.
If AOL wants to retaliate against specific ISPs for not managing spam, fine. Blocking indiscriminately based on dynamic and/or residential IP is a different matter altogether.
If you don't send or receive mail from your domain, the RFC doesn't apply. However, it is still a good idea to maintain a postmaster account -- spam spoofing (or viral spoofing a' la Klez, etc.) is sufficiently prevalent that your site may end up on blacklists...and if you ever do decide to run mail services, you may find few sites willing to peer with you.
The RFC-Ignorant site lists the relavent criteria for listing domains in violation of postmaster, abuse, whois, and other RFC requirements.
You seem to think there's an unlimited capacity and market to send to. Wrong.
Spammers are already effectively targeting as much of the email-accessible population as they can. I've run stats from multiple, widely seperated addresses and domains, and have seen loads of largely identical patterns, trends, and mails received.
As several more critical articles have revealed (the WSJ one referenced as history in this article), spam is marginally profitable. Where it is profitable, it can be lucrative -- at least sufficiently so to leverage the ill-gotten gains to some impressive electronics and real estate. But raising costs will impact the bottom line
And that means:
Going after the ISPs.
Reducing TTL for a given relay.
Utilizing SPEWS and other blacklists to put the muscle on pink-contract ISPs.
Utilizing SpamAssassin and other adaptive filtering methods to reduce the crud flowing into mailboxes.
Using heuristic throttles at major gateways to slow down major spews of email.
Consider per-mail charges. The rate need not be high to be effective -- on the order of $0.01 / 100 mails would add $100 to a million mail spam dump, but only $1 per message for a mailing list with 10,000 subscribers. At these rates, membership dues or donations could float legitimate organizations, and legitimate commercial marketers would swallow the cost without blinking (legitimate email marketing has response rates in the 1% - 25%+ range -- thousands of times higher than spam).
Spam is economic activity. Attack it on economics. You'll see success.
Junk snailmail costs on the order of $1-$5 per item, with items such as circulars and flyers being considerably less, though there's an implied geographical targeting occuring. Yes. I've worked for outfits which considered a large campaign to be 30k pieces, and a large part of the effort was selecting the target group (blanketing the US or any other country is not an option), and measuring the results.
The result is that you receive a limited amount of such mail. Note too that payment methods (the USPS, in the US, is taking payment) means that there are audit trails available. And there are legal means, operating through the USPS, for blocking junk postal mail (including the pornography exclusion method). Very useful for, say, keeping a PO Box useful w/o requiring daily checks.
I sincerely doubt that any significant (say 10000+ spam mailings) results in any less than a few dozen widely divergent spam complaints. I worked for a company which kept a pretty good handle on its mailing lists, and we'd still get a complaint or every few months after a mailing of ~50k addresses. Note that click-throughs on these mailings were in the 15-25% range -- rates postal marketers would die for. In the cases where I tracked these complaints down (or tried), it was rarely more than one person, promptly removed from the list.
Spammers hitting 300k+ addresses in a shot, even if spreading the load over boxen with a few hundred mailings each, are going to generate far more responses, readily validated.
From a source I can share, spam receipts (daily, flagged by SpamAssassin) are flat since May 1. At work, with a larger sample, I'm actually seeing about an 8% decline over the same interval -- ~55 intercepts daily to 40. Compare this to 2001, where receipts more than doubled over the course of the year. In both cases, I'm using well-known, or catch-all, addresses.
Related news indicates spammers are feeling the pinch of filtering, reporting, and retaliatory efforts. Spam's an economic activity, with low margins. If it can be made unprofitable, prevalence will drop markedly.
...and virus mail's quite another story -- daily intercepts have climbed from ~12/day (Jan - Apr, 2002) to 220+. Thank Klez, though SirCam's putting up a good showing.
As a Linux admin who's managing a bunch of 'Doze boxes as well, one of my first steps was to put Cygwin on all Windows desktops, along with TightVNC. This includes Win98, WinNT40WS, Win2K, Win2KS, and WinXP. This provides a local toolset I'm familiar with, OpenSSH (including sshd), and remote X capabilities. For admin needs, it's a godsend.
Installation of Cygwin itself is largely painless (though the download for the full install is time consuming, and space-consuming on smaller systems). I've had far better luck installing XF86 by hand according to the instructions in the INSTALL file. Using the scripted install tends to break in different ways on different platforms, YMMV.
The X11 server itself is pretty decent. Fullscreen is nice. My one gripe is that the <alt><tab> key combination remains stolen by MS Windows for application cycling. I prefer to use this to circulate windows under WindowMaker. Hummingbird and/or Reflection have a setting to bind this to the X server.
Agree that having a rootless mode would be useful. Among other things, it could help start migration toward a Linux desktop by exporting Linux apps to Cygwin.
I also like the suggestion someone made here to support exporting onto a Samba share, as this would be a good way to make Cygwin globally available.
Question: how does one update an existing Cygwin install? It would be nice (and in the case of ssh, damned necessary) to be able to grab the latest update packages on an occasional basis.
Patching a number of systems at the office (my desktop's Debian GNU/Linux, but others suffer...), I noticed that the EULA dialog (digression #2: HTF is someone supposed to be able to read the text in a dialog that shows ~8 lines x 20 columns?) didn't present the EULA by the time I'd clicked the "Accept" button. This several times. And though we're running some older systems, this included a set of newer 1 GHz+ boxen.
What's the legal status of a contract which disappears "on approval" before it's been read?
I filled this out last summer. Not only does it cut down the junk mail and telemarketing calls (I've had three calls since August, and can check my mailbox for bills once a week), but the reporting agency letters request that many casual inquiry requests not be honored.
If you request your credit report, you can deny access to specific companies (I banned Providian many years ago).
According to this Dow Jones article, IISX "incurred negative cash flow from operations for each of the three years ended Dec. 31, 2001, and had an accumulated deficit of $76.8 million through Dec. 31", and "might not continue as a going concern". Given the option between settling a $1m suit (which may be paid out at pennies on the dollar in a bankrupcy or liquidation settlement) vs. paying current cash for an extended legal defense, this may have been the easy way out. I suspect more to this story than meets the eye.
Whichever is the real story, the RIAA has just handed the fair-use activists the small businesses of America as allies.
Credits to David of Noisebox for pointing out the IISX finance picture.
The way I read it, the chart should show PD being about half of what it would be without copyright extensions, not a percent or two. The chart makes it appear as if the PD has been reset to zero with each copyright extension. Rather, works would have ceased entering PD following extensions, but the PD itself would not have decreased (excepting a legally significant, but still small, number of works which were withdrawn from PD following some recent revisions).
The title of the chart (but not the legend which refers only to the "Public Domain", not a rate of growth) states the chart is of "rate of growth". In which case I find it odd that this growth is strictly linear over time. I'm also curious about the lack of a vertical scale.
While I feel that the damage done to the public domain should be stressed strongly, it shouldn't be misrepresented. As a champion of the PD, I have to say that this chart does misrepresent the damage.
Just adding a point that seems to have been missed.
You do something in a GUI, chances are high that:
You can't repeat the action simply.
You can't back out if you make a mistake.
A good CLI provides the ability to do "here" documents and command-line scripts (vi mode in bash) which can be used to compose complex (or dire-consequence) commands, which can then be viewed, desk-checked, or "neutered" (echo command...) and then recalled and run for real. If it turns out you actually wanted to save the command, you can script it.
My own claim to fame was processing some 125,000 files which were part of a web archived I'd snarfed (with a wget script). Tasks were to correct nonstandard HTML, rewrite URLs to point to local references rather than a remote site no longer in existence, and to fix some badly broken HTML and files. A combination of tools and scripts got me through this in a matter of hours. I don't care to think what the GUI equivalent would have been.
CLI and GUI both have their place, but for work which can be expressed algorithmically and which contains repetitive elements, a scriptable CLI kicks Tog's ass.
Yes, I know this is a troll, I'm writing for the rest of ya.
MSIE runs under GNU/Linux. Ways, means, and degrees vary. Older versions are relatively easy to get up under WINE, with appropriate Windows libs installed, even newer versions are rumored to run relatively well. There's also Lin4Win and VMWare, but the first is somewhat a borderline case, and the latter I'd say really doesn't count, as the virtual system has nothing to do with GNU/Linux.
I don't know how your IRIX box translates to Intel Iron. But some comments on computing sufficiency.
I've been using a PPro 180MHz box as my principle desktop since 1997. It's largely sufficed. Within the past year, the inadequacies are starting to show, largely in more complex GUI apps, browsers and office suites in particular.
From a friend comes a remaindered 233 MHz system which I've set up over the past week. This system is fully adequate for Galeon (it's what I'm using now), and could possibly be clocked up another third to 333 MHz. So, for those saddled with older hardware, realize that some only slightly less old hardware may support your needs adequately.
And Galeon is so much more superior, in every possible way, to NS 4.x, it's not even funny.
The 800 (or more generally, toll-free) point will get your number regardless of your caller ID blocking status. This has to do with how the numbers are billed, and the billing data has to be available.
If you want to obscure your ID, call from a payphone, or use a third party's phone.
Mainframes have insane amounts of control over user processes (a Linux image essentially becomes same), as well as the ability to allocate more resources, fewer, provide fine-grained process accounting, shut down processes, migrate them elsewhere (part of the IBM dataceter Linux concept is the ability to migrate nodes around the country as needed).
What a mainframe doesn't have to offfer is insane amounts of processor power or memory. Disk, and disk I/O are quite another matter -- the amount of aggregate bandwidth a z390 has to offer is impressive.
PC-based virtualization clearly has some advantages, through not all of those offered by a mainframe. A rack of virtualized PCs probably does offer a higher processor density than the equivalent mainframe, however.
Your experience and actions mirror mine strongly. Tossing Java, Javascript, animated gifs, and Flash, and adding Junkbuster, make browsing pleasureable. I also actually notice ads such as Google's keyword ads and the text-only ads that have started appearing in The New York Times's online site.
Ditto commercial TV (and I was also an L&O fan), and radio. I mostly listen to two NPR stations (one news, the other jazz). It's a poorly-kept secret that NPR is at or near the top of many media markets nationwide -- but the commercial ratings services don't mix "mainstream" and "alternative" radio ratings. Kudos to Doc Searls for tipping me off on this.
Commercial stations -- music or news -- just grates. I've largely abandoned the local Safeway with its pervasive advertising (carts, floor tiles, flashing coupon things) and customer profiling for Trader Joes (better food to boot).
I've also registered with the DMA through Junkbuster's opt-out letters -- within two weeks, my junkmail load had dropped tremendously. There are a few additional items I'll get checked off under anti-obscenity rules. Frankly it's a health measure: my apartment mailbox is so small that any substantial quantity of mail means things get folded or torn. Keep those envelopes intact.
You're going to have to look at the situation and answer this question (honestly): why was it that the developer felt s/he had to do this on the sly?
My experience is that there are generally two cases, not mutually exclusive.
You've got a young Turk, and s/he is insist on using the tools s/he feels are suited to the task.
"The channels" are intimidating, long, or strongly discourage such innovation.
The other thing, of course, is to see if the unscheduled change makes the app better.
If your environment is as locked down as I suspect it may be, what you're describing here could just be a visible instance of what's widespread practice: people adding free software elements to their work environment because it makes it easier to get the job done. Complete freedom is clearly inappropriate, but a large tolerance for diversity is a strength.
And note before you disallow all such projects that UNIX itself began as an unauthorized project by Brian and Dennis on some old hardware.... Punishing inventiveness does lead to one predictable result. I'll let you do the math.
The language, read strictly, allows for a personal copy "for time-shifting purposes".
First, it's restricted to only non-premium content. This is becoming restricted to less and less programming of interest, and may even exclude a large number of event broadcasts: concerts, sports events, and the like.
Second, "time-shifting", read literally, could be construed to mean "record at time T, replay at time T+n". That is: you're allowed to delay playback. Once.
It's possible that restrictions might not be this severe. The content originator might deign to allow multiple playbacks, to some limit, or multiple pauses, to some limit. You might be allowed to skip over advertising, or you might not. However, the choice isn't yours, its with the content originator.
Third, the playback hardware and software would all contain "rights management" (read that as: they're managing to restrict your rights) systems, to the extent that any actions you might want to perform on the programming are going to be passed through a mediation process by the system. You ask for a playback, a pause, a replay. If the system feels that you're allowed to do this, you're granted it. If not, you're not.
And any attempt to bypass this system would be a violation of federal law.
Tell that to your beer-drinking buddies or social circle.
A friend of mine, Ben Tilly, has made the following annotated anlysis of the SSSCA, working on notes of mine. The original analyses were done before the recent announcement that Microsoft plans to "open" the.NET / Passport. It would seem that this drive for standards status plays straight into the company's long-term goals.
We believe that the SSSCA is Microsoft's game plan. This is how they intend to achieve World (or at least US) Domination. If others read and agree with our analysis, then I think our natural allies are companies like Sun, IBM, AOL, and Sony. They just need to have the true implications explained in clear terms to them to realize what is going on.
The analysis is long (it's an annotation of the full text of the draft bill). Some key points:
The SSSCA, as drafted:
Hits all software: Linux, StarOffice, vim, Perl, cat,... It outlaws Linux as we know it.
Hits all hardware with any digital component. Computers. Calculators. Watches. Digital thermometers.
It has to be incorporated in every component.
It kills interoperability.
It fits.NET and no other current system.
Antitrust protections are exempted: This law would specifically exempt the parties involved in a standard that covers all software on all hardware. With its most likely beneficiary being a convicted monopolist.
Strict schedule leaves little time for development and implementation: this is aimed at an existing standard, not one to be developed.
The SSSCA could not be better designed to take the Microsoft monopoly into the new millenium if it were written by Bill Gates. And we can't rule out that it was written by Bill Gates. The SSSCA is completely incompatible with Unix. It makes continued development on all software competing with the standard illegal.
I control my own network (hey, three whole boxen;-), and a local DNS service. x10.com has been added to my list of locally managed addresses, effectively blackholing the entire shootin' match.
That said, yes, Junkbuster is useful and effective as well. And I use it.
Slashdot Mirror
The test I ran was from an NTL cable-modem serviced node.
If AOL wants to retaliate against specific ISPs for not managing spam, fine. Blocking indiscriminately based on dynamic and/or residential IP is a different matter altogether.
If you don't send or receive mail from your domain, the RFC doesn't apply. However, it is still a good idea to maintain a postmaster account -- spam spoofing (or viral spoofing a' la Klez, etc.) is sufficiently prevalent that your site may end up on blacklists...and if you ever do decide to run mail services, you may find few sites willing to peer with you.
The RFC-Ignorant site lists the relavent criteria for listing domains in violation of postmaster, abuse, whois, and other RFC requirements.
You seem to think there's an unlimited capacity and market to send to. Wrong.
Spammers are already effectively targeting as much of the email-accessible population as they can. I've run stats from multiple, widely seperated addresses and domains, and have seen loads of largely identical patterns, trends, and mails received.
As several more critical articles have revealed (the WSJ one referenced as history in this article), spam is marginally profitable. Where it is profitable, it can be lucrative -- at least sufficiently so to leverage the ill-gotten gains to some impressive electronics and real estate. But raising costs will impact the bottom line
And that means:
Spam is economic activity. Attack it on economics. You'll see success.
Junk snailmail costs on the order of $1-$5 per item, with items such as circulars and flyers being considerably less, though there's an implied geographical targeting occuring. Yes. I've worked for outfits which considered a large campaign to be 30k pieces, and a large part of the effort was selecting the target group (blanketing the US or any other country is not an option), and measuring the results.
The result is that you receive a limited amount of such mail. Note too that payment methods (the USPS, in the US, is taking payment) means that there are audit trails available. And there are legal means, operating through the USPS, for blocking junk postal mail (including the pornography exclusion method). Very useful for, say, keeping a PO Box useful w/o requiring daily checks.
I sincerely doubt that any significant (say 10000+ spam mailings) results in any less than a few dozen widely divergent spam complaints. I worked for a company which kept a pretty good handle on its mailing lists, and we'd still get a complaint or every few months after a mailing of ~50k addresses. Note that click-throughs on these mailings were in the 15-25% range -- rates postal marketers would die for. In the cases where I tracked these complaints down (or tried), it was rarely more than one person, promptly removed from the list.
Spammers hitting 300k+ addresses in a shot, even if spreading the load over boxen with a few hundred mailings each, are going to generate far more responses, readily validated.
From a source I can share, spam receipts (daily, flagged by SpamAssassin) are flat since May 1. At work, with a larger sample, I'm actually seeing about an 8% decline over the same interval -- ~55 intercepts daily to 40. Compare this to 2001, where receipts more than doubled over the course of the year. In both cases, I'm using well-known, or catch-all, addresses.
Related news indicates spammers are feeling the pinch of filtering, reporting, and retaliatory efforts. Spam's an economic activity, with low margins. If it can be made unprofitable, prevalence will drop markedly.
...and virus mail's quite another story -- daily intercepts have climbed from ~12/day (Jan - Apr, 2002) to 220+. Thank Klez, though SirCam's putting up a good showing.
Sample here.
Second all of the above.
For configuring sshd, see http://tech.erdelynet.com/cygwin-sshd.html.
As a Linux admin who's managing a bunch of 'Doze boxes as well, one of my first steps was to put Cygwin on all Windows desktops, along with TightVNC. This includes Win98, WinNT40WS, Win2K, Win2KS, and WinXP. This provides a local toolset I'm familiar with, OpenSSH (including sshd), and remote X capabilities. For admin needs, it's a godsend.
Installation of Cygwin itself is largely painless (though the download for the full install is time consuming, and space-consuming on smaller systems). I've had far better luck installing XF86 by hand according to the instructions in the INSTALL file. Using the scripted install tends to break in different ways on different platforms, YMMV.
The X11 server itself is pretty decent. Fullscreen is nice. My one gripe is that the <alt><tab> key combination remains stolen by MS Windows for application cycling. I prefer to use this to circulate windows under WindowMaker. Hummingbird and/or Reflection have a setting to bind this to the X server.
Agree that having a rootless mode would be useful. Among other things, it could help start migration toward a Linux desktop by exporting Linux apps to Cygwin.
I also like the suggestion someone made here to support exporting onto a Samba share, as this would be a good way to make Cygwin globally available.
Question: how does one update an existing Cygwin install? It would be nice (and in the case of ssh, damned necessary) to be able to grab the latest update packages on an occasional basis.
Patching a number of systems at the office (my desktop's Debian GNU/Linux, but others suffer...), I noticed that the EULA dialog (digression #2: HTF is someone supposed to be able to read the text in a dialog that shows ~8 lines x 20 columns?) didn't present the EULA by the time I'd clicked the "Accept" button. This several times. And though we're running some older systems, this included a set of newer 1 GHz+ boxen.
What's the legal status of a contract which disappears "on approval" before it's been read?
I filled this out last summer. Not only does it cut down the junk mail and telemarketing calls (I've had three calls since August, and can check my mailbox for bills once a week), but the reporting agency letters request that many casual inquiry requests not be honored.
If you request your credit report, you can deny access to specific companies (I banned Providian many years ago).
Whichever is the real story, the RIAA has just handed the fair-use activists the small businesses of America as allies.
Credits to David of Noisebox for pointing out the IISX finance picture.
The way I read it, the chart should show PD being about half of what it would be without copyright extensions, not a percent or two. The chart makes it appear as if the PD has been reset to zero with each copyright extension. Rather, works would have ceased entering PD following extensions, but the PD itself would not have decreased (excepting a legally significant, but still small, number of works which were withdrawn from PD following some recent revisions). The title of the chart (but not the legend which refers only to the "Public Domain", not a rate of growth) states the chart is of "rate of growth". In which case I find it odd that this growth is strictly linear over time. I'm also curious about the lack of a vertical scale. While I feel that the damage done to the public domain should be stressed strongly, it shouldn't be misrepresented. As a champion of the PD, I have to say that this chart does misrepresent the damage.
Start off with a short, one sentence paragraph, stating your aim. Eg:
This is probably the only part of your letter which will be ready. Put it up front.
Just adding a point that seems to have been missed.
You do something in a GUI, chances are high that:
A good CLI provides the ability to do "here" documents and command-line scripts (vi mode in bash) which can be used to compose complex (or dire-consequence) commands, which can then be viewed, desk-checked, or "neutered" (echo command...) and then recalled and run for real. If it turns out you actually wanted to save the command, you can script it.
My own claim to fame was processing some 125,000 files which were part of a web archived I'd snarfed (with a wget script). Tasks were to correct nonstandard HTML, rewrite URLs to point to local references rather than a remote site no longer in existence, and to fix some badly broken HTML and files. A combination of tools and scripts got me through this in a matter of hours. I don't care to think what the GUI equivalent would have been.
CLI and GUI both have their place, but for work which can be expressed algorithmically and which contains repetitive elements, a scriptable CLI kicks Tog's ass.
Yes, I know this is a troll, I'm writing for the rest of ya.
MSIE runs under GNU/Linux. Ways, means, and degrees vary. Older versions are relatively easy to get up under WINE, with appropriate Windows libs installed, even newer versions are rumored to run relatively well. There's also Lin4Win and VMWare, but the first is somewhat a borderline case, and the latter I'd say really doesn't count, as the virtual system has nothing to do with GNU/Linux.
I don't know how your IRIX box translates to Intel Iron. But some comments on computing sufficiency.
I've been using a PPro 180MHz box as my principle desktop since 1997. It's largely sufficed. Within the past year, the inadequacies are starting to show, largely in more complex GUI apps, browsers and office suites in particular.
From a friend comes a remaindered 233 MHz system which I've set up over the past week. This system is fully adequate for Galeon (it's what I'm using now), and could possibly be clocked up another third to 333 MHz. So, for those saddled with older hardware, realize that some only slightly less old hardware may support your needs adequately.
And Galeon is so much more superior, in every possible way, to NS 4.x, it's not even funny.
The 800 (or more generally, toll-free) point will get your number regardless of your caller ID blocking status. This has to do with how the numbers are billed, and the billing data has to be available.
If you want to obscure your ID, call from a payphone, or use a third party's phone.
It's the control over it.
Mainframes have insane amounts of control over user processes (a Linux image essentially becomes same), as well as the ability to allocate more resources, fewer, provide fine-grained process accounting, shut down processes, migrate them elsewhere (part of the IBM dataceter Linux concept is the ability to migrate nodes around the country as needed).
What a mainframe doesn't have to offfer is insane amounts of processor power or memory. Disk, and disk I/O are quite another matter -- the amount of aggregate bandwidth a z390 has to offer is impressive.
PC-based virtualization clearly has some advantages, through not all of those offered by a mainframe. A rack of virtualized PCs probably does offer a higher processor density than the equivalent mainframe, however.
Your experience and actions mirror mine strongly. Tossing Java, Javascript, animated gifs, and Flash, and adding Junkbuster, make browsing pleasureable. I also actually notice ads such as Google's keyword ads and the text-only ads that have started appearing in The New York Times's online site.
Ditto commercial TV (and I was also an L&O fan), and radio. I mostly listen to two NPR stations (one news, the other jazz). It's a poorly-kept secret that NPR is at or near the top of many media markets nationwide -- but the commercial ratings services don't mix "mainstream" and "alternative" radio ratings. Kudos to Doc Searls for tipping me off on this.
Commercial stations -- music or news -- just grates. I've largely abandoned the local Safeway with its pervasive advertising (carts, floor tiles, flashing coupon things) and customer profiling for Trader Joes (better food to boot).
I've also registered with the DMA through Junkbuster's opt-out letters -- within two weeks, my junkmail load had dropped tremendously. There are a few additional items I'll get checked off under anti-obscenity rules. Frankly it's a health measure: my apartment mailbox is so small that any substantial quantity of mail means things get folded or torn. Keep those envelopes intact.
You're going to have to look at the situation and answer this question (honestly): why was it that the developer felt s/he had to do this on the sly?
My experience is that there are generally two cases, not mutually exclusive.
The other thing, of course, is to see if the unscheduled change makes the app better.
If your environment is as locked down as I suspect it may be, what you're describing here could just be a visible instance of what's widespread practice: people adding free software elements to their work environment because it makes it easier to get the job done. Complete freedom is clearly inappropriate, but a large tolerance for diversity is a strength.
And note before you disallow all such projects that UNIX itself began as an unauthorized project by Brian and Dennis on some old hardware.... Punishing inventiveness does lead to one predictable result. I'll let you do the math.
There's a big problem with 103(b).
The language, read strictly, allows for a personal copy "for time-shifting purposes".
First, it's restricted to only non-premium content. This is becoming restricted to less and less programming of interest, and may even exclude a large number of event broadcasts: concerts, sports events, and the like.
Second, "time-shifting", read literally, could be construed to mean "record at time T, replay at time T+n". That is: you're allowed to delay playback. Once.
It's possible that restrictions might not be this severe. The content originator might deign to allow multiple playbacks, to some limit, or multiple pauses, to some limit. You might be allowed to skip over advertising, or you might not. However, the choice isn't yours, its with the content originator.
Third, the playback hardware and software would all contain "rights management" (read that as: they're managing to restrict your rights) systems, to the extent that any actions you might want to perform on the programming are going to be passed through a mediation process by the system. You ask for a playback, a pause, a replay. If the system feels that you're allowed to do this, you're granted it. If not, you're not.
And any attempt to bypass this system would be a violation of federal law.
Tell that to your beer-drinking buddies or social circle.
I've asked. The response is now "I can't do that anymore".
Yet another reason to avoid the bastards. Thank $DIETY for Trader Joes!
Rick Moen has a standard message for those who would sue MAPS. You see, MAPS actually wins by losing.
Time to update those DNS records and MTA rulesets, people.
My own last message to Experian:
A friend of mine, Ben Tilly, has made the following annotated anlysis of the SSSCA, working on notes of mine. The original analyses were done before the recent announcement that Microsoft plans to "open" the .NET / Passport. It would seem that this drive for standards status plays straight into the company's long-term goals.
We believe that the SSSCA is Microsoft's game plan. This is how they intend to achieve World (or at least US) Domination. If others read and agree with our analysis, then I think our natural allies are companies like Sun, IBM, AOL, and Sony. They just need to have the true implications explained in clear terms to them to realize what is going on.
The analysis is long (it's an annotation of the full text of the draft bill). Some key points:
The SSSCA, as drafted:
The SSSCA could not be better designed to take the Microsoft monopoly into the new millenium if it were written by Bill Gates. And we can't rule out that it was written by Bill Gates. The SSSCA is completely incompatible with Unix. It makes continued development on all software competing with the standard illegal.
I control my own network (hey, three whole boxen ;-), and a local DNS service. x10.com has been added to my list of locally managed addresses, effectively blackholing the entire shootin' match.
That said, yes, Junkbuster is useful and effective as well. And I use it.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?