The problem is that you have to decide what it means to be "adult content". Even between the UK and France you can find the same film labelled "12" in France, while cut and labelled "18" in the UK
There's also the issue of why something might be considered "adult content".
I can see xxx.us working (kind of),
Or possibly xxx.city.state.us. Though celebrity-nipples.xxx.us might work.
Oddly, I think that forcing Microsoft into the open source, (open whatever) world might actually be a better business decision for the company.
In the sort term it certainly won't be. First off Microsoft will be placed between a rock and a hard place. If they take too long opening their code they will be further punished for being in "contempt of court". If they don't audit their code before making it available then they are likely to face multiple suits for copyright infringement. It's also not just as simple as "opening" a previously proprietary codebase. The code itself is unlikely to be in any way fit for OSS development. With it possibly taking months to years before it is.
In the medium to long term Microsoft would have to operate in a competitive market place, something they havn't done for a long time (if ever).
I agree with you - when I heard they were making Harry Potter movies my first reaction was "great, teaching another generation they can just go see the movie instead of reading a book."
Apparently a reviewer actually complained that the films follow the books "too closely":)
The title is probably wrong, with Hollywood having been at war with "classics" for quite a while now:)
The difference between Heinlein's Starship Troopers and the movie 'adaptation' will probably be the same in this instance.
IIRC an original idea for the books title was "The Starship Soldier". Which, given that the book is following the life of one man, might have been a better choice of titile.
Check out the Link Grammar Parser. I've found it pretty good at locating erroneous phrases, but it's not perfect and doesn't have the ability to make suggestions to correct grammar.
Especially if your starting point is "US English". Which not only has non standard spellings, but also differing syntax and grammer rules from other English dialects.
Getting really good grammar checking in English is difficult enough and it's a shame that other "lesser" languages like Estonian don't have tools anywhere near the caliber of those for the English language.
English is tricky because it has many dialects with complex rules of grammar and syntax. Estonian might actually be simpler to check mechanically. One thing which has yet to appear as a "writing aid" is an idiom checker.
Microsoft refuses to support Hebrew in Office, Outlook and IE for the Mac, even though the local Mac reps offered to put up a quarter million dollars and hire the programmers to do it.
The most amazing thing, IMHO, is that Microsoft appears happy to get into a pissing contest with Israel over the issue. This is the sort of thing plenty of governments, including the US, tend to avoid.
However, this argument about IP laws sounds just like what pharmaceutical companies keep saying: keep paying whatever we tell you or you might just not get another miracle drug.
Though the best drug from the POV of a pharmaceutical company is one which simply supresses symptoms. A "miracle drug" which cured anything would not make them that much money...
Ignoring that not all copyrighted works are "well crafted", unless people are changing the author's name on the book, the author is getting recognition. It's not money, admittedly. Maybe this same person wrote the best book in the world, but people still overlooked it.
Actually there are two groups of people, publishers and readers (sometimes with professional reviewers acting as a third group). Just because a publisher accepts a book does not mean that anyone wants to read it.
Creating creative works is a lot like a lottery: except for the direct results from writing it (feeling better, feeling you've expressed oneself, or whatever other direct justification for writing is), everything else is just luck. Would you want copyright owners to be able to sue publishers over money the expect even though no one's reading it (free or otherwise) because it's crap, but the author thinks it's the best thing since sliced bread?
If this could happen no doubt publishers would want to sue the public.
Without any kind of IP system (and I'm not saying the existing one works very well)
There are possible alternatives which may do a better job of rewarding/encouraging authorship. >BR> then creative endeavours are relegated to being hobbies, and the quantity and quality of the output will be significantly reduced.
There is nothing wrong with people enguaging in "creative endeavours" as "hobbies". A great many people do this. It's just as possible to argue that someone being a full time "creator" can negativly impact of their quality and even quantity. The human creative process does not always respond well to deadlines.
It's the author who's screwed having spent a year of his/her life writing a well crafted piece of fiction only to find there are copies available for free over [insert p2p of choice here] without any recognition going to the author for writing the piece in the first place.
This "recognition" may be at the level of having their name stay attached.
Is there a reason you substituted author for publisher? You do realize that it's the author who actually writes the books.
This issue goes right to the heart of copyright. The concept was originally a permission given by the state to a publisher. The idea of a copyright being about authors is more recent by something like a century.
Most authors want people to read their books first, profit hugely from them second.
If they can't published niether will happen:)
It's the publishers that are screwed when they make 10,000 books and no one buys them because of free copying online, not the author.
It's just as possible that few people will buy them because they don't want to read them. It's probably still possible for the author to get screwed, but that is a lot less liklely than the situation with musicans.
It's the publishers who front the investment, and it's the publishers who are bitching so much about IP laws being violated because it ruins their monopoly.
At least in the case of the indian stuff it wasn't an issue of getting copies of the information.
They "lost" essentially all of the indians' money - and the records were corrupted enough that it was no longer possible to trace who took it. The bureaucrats in charge (the likely suspects) then took advantage of the insecure network to finger-point away from themselves. Even though the problems have been going on for more than a century. The problem has little to do with computers. The most likely explanation is that the current people are just the latest in a long line of crooks.
My wife's 5/6 grade class couldn't believe that it was a hoax when they went to http://www.buydehydratedwater.com so they ended up ordering some:)
But you'd hope adults in charge of spending huge sums of money would be a bit more knowlagable than a 10 year old school kid. The issue is along the lines of "if they are that easy to fool...".
Fellowes is announcing that they are going to begin injecting a product called "Microban" into their keyboards and mice, to create an environment where bacteria cannot survive and grow.
Sounds like a good way to render another anti-bacterial agent useless. Spreading these things around is a good way to breed bacteria which are unaffected by such chemicals.
I'm all for forking when there are issues like this, but OEM packins will be the problem here. If HP is packing in crapware (like Dell and everyone else does), it'll become the de-facto standard and we'll be facing a new monoculture app-wise.
Note that this only applies to the home and SOHO market. Any corporate user who buys several machines at once is likely to first wipe off anything a supplier installs. Maybe large OEM's will eventually get a clue here:)
The FBI can because telecomm equipment vendors are required to keep that functionality in.
How can they ensure that only the FBI can use those facilities? How have they taught a computer to verify it a valid warrent exists? Do they pay their programmers a lot and provide them (and their families) with 24 armed guards?
GSM phones are very insecure. A lecturer I had in cryptography had implemented a code breaker for GSM phones. Given 4 minutes of recorded conversation you could break the encryption on that particular call. If you place a recorder by a specific GSM base station you can break all calls routed by that cell in just a few seconds.
Also the encryption only applies between handset and the basestation. Even if you have a call between two handsets on the same basestation the encryption is not end to end. In actual fact the call may well be "tromboning" several hundred miles. Since the base station probably dosn't have the ability to connect the call internally or generate the the billing data.
These last two would require a lot of resources naturally. But it's not impossible.
Resources can be stolen, people can be bribed/blackmailed for information. Depending on the purpose of intercepting the calls a criminal gang, commercial corporation, national government, etc could consider the expense "worth it".
You try getting a trunk that has SS7. Oh wait you can't.
Gets a lot easier if you are a PTO though.
Tell me how would you go about overhearing a circuit in this circuit based network? You can't. The fbi can,
Whilst it's not easy for a private individual to do this. It is possible for entities which have enough money get access. Through bribing the phone company, law enforcement or someone who has access to the relevent software. Remember that computers are stupid, if someone feeds one the right instructions it isn't going to say "hey I need to see a warrent before I can do that."
Circuit based networks by their very nature are actually highly secure networks.
They are secure against certain attacks, not others.
The only person you really have to worry about is the one in control of the line,
Which may include law enforcement, the telephone company, whoever wrote the software and whoever might have access to alter the software.
if you dont' trust them you go with someone else and use encryption..
In many parts of the world there is no "someone else", there being a local monopoly on the "local loop". Carrier Pre-Selection might change who issues the bill, but it dosn't change the hardware your phone is connected to in any way you can verify.
He also doesn't want to bother with all that nasty detective work to decide whose phones to tap, he wants to read all the mail and listen to all the phone calls and sort it out later.
Which is rather useless for any kind of law enforcement purpose. Given that the signal/noise ratio is so low. With any terrorist or gangster with 2 brain cells to rub together likely to use a simple code which will render their planning indistinguishable from the general chatter of millions of people. Law enforcement needs so called "human intelligence", which includes brave people to infiltrate and get out such information such as who's telephone to listen in on, etc.
Personally, I have no problem with this, as long as John Ashcroft's mail and phone calls are all made public so we can play, too.
Why stop with Mr Ashcroft? Maybe every member of government should have all their telephone calls (including those made with their home phone) placed in the public domain. That might improve the bahaviour of some politicans since it would make it harder for them to act hypocritically.
Maybe that's the deal. VOIP is too secure for the FBI to allow to become widespread.
It's kind of hard to tell what kind of data an encrypted VPN tunnel might be carrying...
Am I paranoid enough?
Given that historically such entities appear to have been more interested in commercial spying and chasing people with politically incorrect viewpoints, as opposed to catching organised crime and terrorists. There's a good case for asking if any degree of paranoid is sufficent. Though it can sometimes look as if those in the "security services" are the most paranoid.
Considering we've been using PSTN for about a hundred years, and we've had absolutely no security whatsoever,
Especially with SPC telephone systems where a "tap" exists only within the software of the system. Known only to the people in charge of the switching software. To the point where it is perfectly possible for lines to be tapped without the knowlage of even the telephone company and criminal gangs being able to place taps on police phones.
So it was you! I missed several important messages from a business associate in Nigera and others for expanding my.. opportunities. Important security update from Microsoft were lost! I'll sue!!!
Ironically there are actually people who insist on using Hotmail (and the like) for "business critial" information. No matter how many times they are told that it's outside of anyone's control, including what MS can do with the contents of anything sent through it.
i just wait for a law that grants US coporations the right to have their own nuclear weapons in order to protect their business
imagine SCO blackmailing IBM with nukes to stop using their IP
Except that IBM would probably have so many nukes that SCO would never have bothered them in the first place.
Interesting how we see strong-arm tactics against some aussie warez-puppy, but we don't see them waltzing into Moscow to shut down the mass-piracy of the Russian mafia groups, or the cd-r markets throughout Asia.
It fits with the idea of "bullies tend to be cowards"...
I guess this is to be expected from a government that will storm into a crippled-to-the-level-of-impotence Iraq to stop them from developing, err, "weapons of mass destruction", but will just cautiously sidestep any country of real WMD threat (China, NK, Israel).
Ditto, except for Israel where there is something far more complex (and apparently a lot darker) going on. To the extent that most of the US Government looks to be putting the interests of a foreign country before their own.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that you have to decide what it means to be "adult content". Even between the UK and France you can find the same film labelled "12" in France, while cut and labelled "18" in the UK
There's also the issue of why something might be considered "adult content".
I can see xxx.us working (kind of),
Or possibly xxx.city.state.us. Though celebrity-nipples.xxx.us might work.
Oddly, I think that forcing Microsoft into the open source, (open whatever) world might actually be a better business decision for the company.
In the sort term it certainly won't be. First off Microsoft will be placed between a rock and a hard place. If they take too long opening their code they will be further punished for being in "contempt of court". If they don't audit their code before making it available then they are likely to face multiple suits for copyright infringement.
It's also not just as simple as "opening" a previously proprietary codebase. The code itself is unlikely to be in any way fit for OSS development. With it possibly taking months to years before it is.
In the medium to long term Microsoft would have to operate in a competitive market place, something they havn't done for a long time (if ever).
It'll be about two more days now till someone alters the code and delivers a REAL malicious payload through the damn program.
It could happen a lot quicker. Or some other "black hats" will hack their program and change who it "phones home" to and what data it sends.
I agree with you - when I heard they were making Harry Potter movies my first reaction was "great, teaching another generation they can just go see the movie instead of reading a book."
:)
Apparently a reviewer actually complained that the films follow the books "too closely"
The title is probably wrong, with Hollywood having been at war with "classics" for quite a while now :)
The difference between Heinlein's Starship Troopers and the movie 'adaptation' will probably be the same in this instance.
IIRC an original idea for the books title was "The Starship Soldier". Which, given that the book is following the life of one man, might have been a better choice of titile.
Check out the Link Grammar Parser. I've found it pretty good at locating erroneous phrases, but it's not perfect and doesn't have the ability to make suggestions to correct grammar.
Especially if your starting point is "US English". Which not only has non standard spellings, but also differing syntax and grammer rules from other English dialects.
Getting really good grammar checking in English is difficult enough and it's a shame that other "lesser" languages like Estonian don't have tools anywhere near the caliber of those for the English language.
English is tricky because it has many dialects with complex rules of grammar and syntax. Estonian might actually be simpler to check mechanically.
One thing which has yet to appear as a "writing aid" is an idiom checker.
Microsoft refuses to support Hebrew in Office, Outlook and IE for the Mac, even though the local Mac reps offered to put up a quarter million dollars and hire the programmers to do it.
The most amazing thing, IMHO, is that Microsoft appears happy to get into a pissing contest with Israel over the issue. This is the sort of thing plenty of governments, including the US, tend to avoid.
However, this argument about IP laws sounds just like what pharmaceutical companies keep saying: keep paying whatever we tell you or you might just not get another miracle drug.
Though the best drug from the POV of a pharmaceutical company is one which simply supresses symptoms. A "miracle drug" which cured anything would not make them that much money...
Ignoring that not all copyrighted works are "well crafted", unless people are changing the author's name on the book, the author is getting recognition. It's not money, admittedly. Maybe this same person wrote the best book in the world, but people still overlooked it.
Actually there are two groups of people, publishers and readers (sometimes with professional reviewers acting as a third group). Just because a publisher accepts a book does not mean that anyone wants to read it.
Creating creative works is a lot like a lottery: except for the direct results from writing it (feeling better, feeling you've expressed oneself, or whatever other direct justification for writing is), everything else is just luck. Would you want copyright owners to be able to sue publishers over money the expect even though no one's reading it (free or otherwise) because it's crap, but the author thinks it's the best thing since sliced bread?
If this could happen no doubt publishers would want to sue the public.
Without any kind of IP system (and I'm not saying the existing one works very well)
There are possible alternatives which may do a better job of rewarding/encouraging authorship.
>BR> then creative endeavours are relegated to being hobbies, and the quantity and quality of the output will be significantly reduced.
There is nothing wrong with people enguaging in "creative endeavours" as "hobbies". A great many people do this. It's just as possible to argue that someone being a full time "creator" can negativly impact of their quality and even quantity. The human creative process does not always respond well to deadlines.
It's the author who's screwed having spent a year of his/her life writing a well crafted piece of fiction only to find there are copies available for free over [insert p2p of choice here] without any recognition going to the author for writing the piece in the first place.
This "recognition" may be at the level of having their name stay attached.
Is there a reason you substituted author for publisher? You do realize that it's the author who actually writes the books.
:)
This issue goes right to the heart of copyright. The concept was originally a permission given by the state to a publisher. The idea of a copyright being about authors is more recent by something like a century.
Most authors want people to read their books first, profit hugely from them second.
If they can't published niether will happen
It's the publishers that are screwed when they make 10,000 books and no one buys them because of free copying online, not the author.
It's just as possible that few people will buy them because they don't want to read them.
It's probably still possible for the author to get screwed, but that is a lot less liklely than the situation with musicans.
It's the publishers who front the investment, and it's the publishers who are bitching so much about IP laws being violated because it ruins their monopoly.
At the end of the day publishers are "middlemen".
Windows has had Access Control Lists (ACLs), filesystem permissions, protected memory space and parent-child processess since NT 4.0
It's a pity that people writing programs for Windows often don't understand these concepts. Sometimes even Microsoft badged software dosn't...
It's not our fault you log on as Administrator to check your e-mail.
It certainly isn't the user's fault if software is so badly designed that it will only work under "administrator".
At least in the case of the indian stuff it wasn't an issue of getting copies of the information.
They "lost" essentially all of the indians' money - and the records were corrupted enough that it was no longer possible to trace who took it.
The bureaucrats in charge (the likely suspects) then took advantage of the insecure network to finger-point away from themselves.
Even though the problems have been going on for more than a century. The problem has little to do with computers. The most likely explanation is that the current people are just the latest in a long line of crooks.
My wife's 5/6 grade class couldn't believe that it was a hoax when they went to http://www.buydehydratedwater.com so they ended up ordering some :)
But you'd hope adults in charge of spending huge sums of money would be a bit more knowlagable than a 10 year old school kid. The issue is along the lines of "if they are that easy to fool...".
Fellowes is announcing that they are going to begin injecting a product called "Microban" into their keyboards and mice, to create an environment where bacteria cannot survive and grow.
Sounds like a good way to render another anti-bacterial agent useless. Spreading these things around is a good way to breed bacteria which are unaffected by such chemicals.
I'm all for forking when there are issues like this, but OEM packins will be the problem here. If HP is packing in crapware (like Dell and everyone else does), it'll become the de-facto standard and we'll be facing a new monoculture app-wise.
:)
Note that this only applies to the home and SOHO market. Any corporate user who buys several machines at once is likely to first wipe off anything a supplier installs. Maybe large OEM's will eventually get a clue here
The FBI can because telecomm equipment vendors are required to keep that functionality in.
How can they ensure that only the FBI can use those facilities? How have they taught a computer to verify it a valid warrent exists? Do they pay their programmers a lot and provide them (and their families) with 24 armed guards?
GSM phones are very insecure. A lecturer I had in cryptography had implemented a code breaker for GSM phones. Given 4 minutes of recorded conversation you could break the encryption on that particular call. If you place a recorder by a specific GSM base station you can break all calls routed by that cell in just a few seconds.
Also the encryption only applies between handset and the basestation. Even if you have a call between two handsets on the same basestation the encryption is not end to end. In actual fact the call may well be "tromboning" several hundred miles. Since the base station probably dosn't have the ability to connect the call internally or generate the the billing data.
These last two would require a lot of resources naturally. But it's not impossible.
Resources can be stolen, people can be bribed/blackmailed for information. Depending on the purpose of intercepting the calls a criminal gang, commercial corporation, national government, etc could consider the expense "worth it".
You try getting a trunk that has SS7. Oh wait you can't.
Gets a lot easier if you are a PTO though.
Tell me how would you go about overhearing a circuit in this circuit based network? You can't. The fbi can,
Whilst it's not easy for a private individual to do this. It is possible for entities which have enough money get access. Through bribing the phone company, law enforcement or someone who has access to the relevent software. Remember that computers are stupid, if someone feeds one the right instructions it isn't going to say "hey I need to see a warrent before I can do that."
Circuit based networks by their very nature are actually highly secure networks.
They are secure against certain attacks, not others.
The only person you really have to worry about is the one in control of the line,
Which may include law enforcement, the telephone company, whoever wrote the software and whoever might have access to alter the software.
if you dont' trust them you go with someone else and use encryption..
In many parts of the world there is no "someone else", there being a local monopoly on the "local loop". Carrier Pre-Selection might change who issues the bill, but it dosn't change the hardware your phone is connected to in any way you can verify.
He also doesn't want to bother with all that nasty detective work to decide whose phones to tap, he wants to read all the mail and listen to all the phone calls and sort it out later.
Which is rather useless for any kind of law enforcement purpose. Given that the signal/noise ratio is so low. With any terrorist or gangster with 2 brain cells to rub together likely to use a simple code which will render their planning indistinguishable from the general chatter of millions of people.
Law enforcement needs so called "human intelligence", which includes brave people to infiltrate and get out such information such as who's telephone to listen in on, etc.
Personally, I have no problem with this, as long as John Ashcroft's mail and phone calls are all made public so we can play, too.
Why stop with Mr Ashcroft? Maybe every member of government should have all their telephone calls (including those made with their home phone) placed in the public domain. That might improve the bahaviour of some politicans since it would make it harder for them to act hypocritically.
Maybe that's the deal. VOIP is too secure for the FBI to allow to become widespread.
It's kind of hard to tell what kind of data an encrypted VPN tunnel might be carrying...
Am I paranoid enough?
Given that historically such entities appear to have been more interested in commercial spying and chasing people with politically incorrect viewpoints, as opposed to catching organised crime and terrorists. There's a good case for asking if any degree of paranoid is sufficent. Though it can sometimes look as if those in the "security services" are the most paranoid.
Considering we've been using PSTN for about a hundred years, and we've had absolutely no security whatsoever,
Especially with SPC telephone systems where a "tap" exists only within the software of the system. Known only to the people in charge of the switching software. To the point where it is perfectly possible for lines to be tapped without the knowlage of even the telephone company and criminal gangs being able to place taps on police phones.
My friend and I had jokingly sugguested starting a spam 'pharmacy' selling various things, that are, in reality, arsinic.
:)
That would take too long to cause any harm. Try offering them "LiCN", "NaCN", "KCN", "RbCN" & "CsCN". No need to misadvertise your products
So it was you! I missed several important messages from a business associate in Nigera and others for expanding my .. opportunities. Important security update from Microsoft were lost! I'll sue!!!
Ironically there are actually people who insist on using Hotmail (and the like) for "business critial" information. No matter how many times they are told that it's outside of anyone's control, including what MS can do with the contents of anything sent through it.
i just wait for a law that grants US coporations the right to have their own nuclear weapons in order to protect their business imagine SCO blackmailing IBM with nukes to stop using their IP
Except that IBM would probably have so many nukes that SCO would never have bothered them in the first place.
Interesting how we see strong-arm tactics against some aussie warez-puppy, but we don't see them waltzing into Moscow to shut down the mass-piracy of the Russian mafia groups, or the cd-r markets throughout Asia.
It fits with the idea of "bullies tend to be cowards"...
I guess this is to be expected from a government that will storm into a crippled-to-the-level-of-impotence Iraq to stop them from developing, err, "weapons of mass destruction", but will just cautiously sidestep any country of real WMD threat (China, NK, Israel).
Ditto, except for Israel where there is something far more complex (and apparently a lot darker) going on. To the extent that most of the US Government looks to be putting the interests of a foreign country before their own.