I do not advocate or support this theory about port chicago being a nuclear explosion at all but what about a Neutron Bomb? [nuclearfiles.org]. Granted they weren't even thought of till 1958 but...
This is still a nuclear weapon, thus will still spread fission products, nuclear fuel and irradiated bomb components around as fallout.
What, were these guys dual-booting into windows98? Or were they just idiots who didn't know Windows NT (and 2000/XP) has a multi-user system that will allow 'locking down' just as much as anything in Linux.
In practice it is considerably more difficult to "lock down" Windows if you actually want to run applications on it. Because the vast majority of Windows applications are written with a single user, who can do anything they like, approach.
Policy editor in NT4/9x and Policies in a Win2k environment lock down systems about as tight as you want. But no one at slashdot has ever read the Windows documentation,
Probably because getting decent documentation out of Redmond is difficult and expensive.
At my school the math section has linux-only PCs for the students. The CS section has Solaris (SUN) and Windows-only machines, and they justified the no-linux by saying that the companies use Windows so no point in teaching Linux to the students.
Even if "the companies" do have Windows machines they are unlikely to be the same version of Windows or set up in the same way educational networks are set up.
In windows you just have to close down all ways to do nasty things. End result : undestroyable but also completely useless pc. Nobody can do anything on it.
Assuming you don't miss some of the holes and end up with a trashed machine anyway. Maybe because of some piece of malware rather than user vandalism.
With a Unix system, students can't mess around anything BUT they can do whatever they want in their personal enviroment and a Unix box is still a usefull tool without root access.
It's even possible that they may mess up their user area so they can't log in, but that dosn't affect every other user. Quite often the attempts to make Windows multi-user don't quite work.
And with Unix, you can have reasonable security without doing silly things like disabling shell access. Unix was made for secure multi-user environments and remote administration.
One of these environments was UCB, another was MIT... Are Australian students somehow more destructive than American ones?
That's irrelevant. Ghost is not windows. Ghost is not unix either. Ghost is a separate program you can buy. You could set up linux, some unix, bsd, or whatever the heck you want and ghost it to a 100 boxes in the same amount of time.
Except that you could clone 100 identical unix hardware workstations using basic unix tools. No need for a third party product.
In windows you have to options: either you allow people to do everything or you allow them to do nothing. The policy editor just stops working once you allow someone to run an.exe from his desktop since he can break the system (with one of the numerous exploit that for example the GUI gives you.
Also in older to use the "only run allowed executables" policy option you need to know exactly which files you need to allow to be run. Which can translate into lots of trial and error everytime you install/update an app.
Now, imagine that user has to do some task, and they have messed up their configs. Now on Windows you either repair their profile (which can take quite a time if you can't login as them, if possible at all) or take backup of files, create new profile and copy the files over,
You may still have problems, since there might be some critical data in the USER branch of the registry, how do you examine and manipulate this other than trying to login with that.DAT file?
And once you get new systems with different hardware you have to do it again:) With linux you dump the same image and switch either kernel or module config.
You don't even need third party tools to copy a Linux workstation, since the regular utilities will do just fine.
Windows has it's strong points, but administration isn't one of them. At
least if you are trying to do it well. In a Uni even "we are not mission critical,
The students might disagree about the "mission critical" issue:)
.kids is different, in that it's a catch-all containing everything left over when you remove the unsuitable material. Further, it has to be suitable for children in the most repressive households, or else word gets out among some religious community that.kids allows unfettered access to material dealing with sexual health, evolution, atheism, blood transfusions, or other such horrors.
The problem is that you are not thinking globally here. The issues listed are rather specific to some parts of the US. How much common ground do you think could be found in the "suitable for children" between China, India, Sweden, Brazil, Libya and the US?
However, I think there is a global definition of a child, delimited by puberty. I can't think of a culture that doesn't recognize that division.
Plenty of cultures have the concept of "legal age", where only someone older than X years can do Y. In many cases there are lots of Y's with X' being close to being a random number. Such definitions appear most common amongst the industrialised nations, who are the people most likely to be using the Internet in the first place.
It's like.kids.us. Instead of registering a second level domain, you register a third level domain. So you might have something like www.travelocity.travel.us. In essence, you could think of "travel.us" as a top level domain, even though technically it's not.
That's how.com should have worked.
Actually it's how the DNS should be used. Nothing to do with webservers, since the DNS has been around long before the invention of the HTTP protocol.
.gov,.mil, and.edu should have been moved under.us a long time ago.
The courts. Law is full of 'man on the Clapham omnibus'-style subjective definitions. Why should porn be different?
In which case you don't want a.porn TLD in the first place. You need to have something which follows the jurisdiction of the courts. e.g..porn.clapham.london.uk.
Legislators would devise some 'reasonable wankability' test, which the courts would interpret and apply.
You'd need to get 200 odd legislatures to agree, being as they can't even manage this on the simpler problem of prosecuting war criminals it's a bit of a waste of time trying.
The trouble with '.kids' is that you end up with the intersection of everybody's ideas of what is suitable for kids.
It's exactly the same issue as with the.porn domain idea. The only way it might be workable would be as a secondary or tertiary domain within a geo-specific hierarchy.
How are.ca and.ie being abused? I dont see dodgy warez/porn sites using those country codes.
You can no longer be sure that something under.ca has any connection with Canada or that something under.ie has any connection with the Republic of Ireland (Eire).
" the International Air Transport Association (IATA) stated its case for ".travel,"
Why not ".iata.int"?
the World Health Organization (WHO) lobbied for ".health,"
Why not ".who.un" or "who.int"
Nokia Corp. for ".mobile"
Don't they already have ".nokia.com"?
and a group of Internet companies said it wants ".III" for individuals".
This is actually the daftest, since how do you sensibly organise 6 billion domains?
IMO most of those are pretty useless. ICANN should be working on revoking the country TLDS's that are being abused (.tk,.tv).
That list also includes.nu,.cx,.co,.la ane even.ca and.ie
Re:voluntary censorship by TLD
on
Plans For New TLDs
·
· Score: 4, Informative
What would really be useful for Internet culture would be a.kid TLD that would be free of content that requires a mature personality to process, such as graphic violence, graphic sex, advertising, etc.
This is sort of the opposite of.porn, with much the same problem of there being no global definition of "child". It would really only make much sense as a secondry or tertiary domain within a geographic TLD. e.g. kid.us, kid.uk, kid.fi, kid.ca.us, etc.
All very nice, but when the CEO demands IT get him a website with domain ".big-corp.com", you try telling him no and he now has to have "www.big-corp.screw-customers-for-profit"...of course you could always threaten, sorry, legally pressure some poor little geek for his personal domain, 'cos its got your company name in it.
Thing is that if.com were managed properly this "poor little geek" would have had to go to the trouble of registering "big-corp" as a business in at least two countries before they'd have had any chance of getting.big-corp.com The interesting thing is that many real transnational businesses want to chop their market up into regions (even single countries) anyway.
Re:Which solution would better?
on
Plans For New TLDs
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Would it be better to have many tightly regulated TLDs, such has only allowing non-profit organizations to use.org, or would it be better to have just a couple of very generic TLDs?
Or even you don't get a.com unless you are a commercial business operating in more than one country. A generic TLD would be something like.misc or.etc rather than treating.com,.net and.org as being.misc.
As it stands, most of the existing TLDs are not very regulated,
Indeed some of then have become less well regulated as time has gone on.
thereby defeating the orginal point of having different TLDs.
If domain names were used properly there wouldn't be an issue. The problem is treating a hierarchical system as though it is a flat namespace. No one is demmanding that there be more coutry names for postal mail or more country codes for telephones.
The other big problem is that existing.com owners get first pick of the new TLDs, meaning that it's just another domain companies have to buy/borrow/steal to prevent supposed trademark infringement.
Implying that the real idea is to make money out of the registrations. Anyway trademarks are ment to be specific to a specific place and type of business, though this appears to be increasingly ignored.
The difference is that United States copyright law considers RAM to be a tangible medium in which a work can be fixed; thus, reading a file into RAM is copying. The brain is not such a medium.
Thus showing that the legislators in question didn't understand the issue. Or maybe have brains which are more volatile than a piece of DRAM.
Copyright laws are made to prevent others from publishing copyrighted material and making $$ off that copyrighted material, i.e., it's to prevent the sale of a creative work in which none of that $$ goes to the creator of that work. This isn't about money they would have made but aren't making.
Except that people do commonly claim that such a copies equate to a loss of a sale. Even though it's by no means certain that there ever was a potential sale in the first place.
I think online publishing of material is great; it allows amateur authors, musicians, etc to get much more exposure than they would in traditional media.
Very few people "make it big" with traditional publishing. Especially in the music industry where a band with a record deal can be worst off financially than one who plays gigs evenings and weekends. Even those who are supposedly "sucessful" all too often appear to wind up bankrupt or even dead.
Additionally, it allows for many more alternative opinions and ideas to be expressed because publishing is not based on the demand for a book but rather the author's desire to publish it.
The criteria is more along the lines of if the publisher thinks they can make money from it.
Copyright law fails because they are trying to apply laws developed to control the production and distribution of physical objects to purely virtual ones that have none of the drawbacks that made the laws possible in the first place...
Copyright laws were originally developed in response to the invention of the printing press. Previously the only way to duplicate books was one copy at a time, by hand. Whereas a printing press enables many copies to be produced at a cheap price per copy, but making a single copy is expensive. This new technology created a new business model, that of the publisher. The earliest copyright laws were in effect state licences to publishing companies. Similar business models were applied with the invention of records and film. What has now happened is that the media has become more or less irrelevent. But it was only the media, not copyright law, which stood in the way of "piracy" in the first place. Things started to come unstuck around 20 years ago. But instead of reconsidering their business model the publishing industry lobbied for stronger and longer copyright laws.
Lessig brings up an excellent point that only 147 out of about 10000 books from the 20's are still in print. What happened to the rest of this knowledge? The rest of this creativity? It has been lost and forgotten.
Hopefully the rest of these books still exist in the various copyright libraries around the world. Which is less likely to be the case with the hundreds of thousands of out of print books published more recently. More disturbingly more modern media such as records, film, magnetic tape, etc do not have any kind of public archive. Thus are at even greater risk of rotting away before copyright expires on the content.
Slashdot Mirror
I do not advocate or support this theory about port chicago being a nuclear explosion at all but what about a Neutron Bomb? [nuclearfiles.org]. Granted they weren't even thought of till 1958 but...
This is still a nuclear weapon, thus will still spread fission products, nuclear fuel and irradiated bomb components around as fallout.
Undisturbed, wrecks can last a very long time. Look at the the Mary Rose
But only the part of the hull which was in the mud was preserved, the rest of the ship disappeared long ago.
This is just another facet of the kernel developers' jihad against binary modules.
Why shouldn't they complain about a struggle (look up what "jihad" actually means) pushed on them by third parties?
What, were these guys dual-booting into windows98? Or were they just idiots who didn't know Windows NT (and 2000/XP) has a multi-user system that will allow 'locking down' just as much as anything in Linux.
In practice it is considerably more difficult to "lock down" Windows if you actually want to run applications on it. Because the vast majority of Windows applications are written with a single user, who can do anything they like, approach.
Policy editor in NT4/9x and Policies in a Win2k environment lock down systems about as tight as you want. But no one at slashdot has ever read the Windows documentation,
Probably because getting decent documentation out of Redmond is difficult and expensive.
At my school the math section has linux-only PCs for the students. The CS section has Solaris (SUN) and Windows-only machines, and they justified the no-linux by saying that the companies use Windows so no point in teaching Linux to the students.
Even if "the companies" do have Windows machines they are unlikely to be the same version of Windows or set up in the same way educational networks are set up.
In windows you just have to close down all ways to do nasty things. End result : undestroyable but also completely useless pc. Nobody can do anything on it.
Assuming you don't miss some of the holes and end up with a trashed machine anyway. Maybe because of some piece of malware rather than user vandalism.
With a Unix system, students can't mess around anything BUT they can do whatever they want in their personal enviroment and a Unix box is still a usefull tool without root access.
It's even possible that they may mess up their user area so they can't log in, but that dosn't affect every other user. Quite often the attempts to make Windows multi-user don't quite work.
And with Unix, you can have reasonable security without doing silly things like disabling shell access. Unix was made for secure multi-user environments and remote administration.
One of these environments was UCB, another was MIT... Are Australian students somehow more destructive than American ones?
That's irrelevant. Ghost is not windows. Ghost is not unix either. Ghost is a separate program you can buy. You could set up linux, some unix, bsd, or whatever the heck you want and ghost it to a 100 boxes in the same amount of time.
Except that you could clone 100 identical unix hardware workstations using basic unix tools. No need for a third party product.
In windows you have to options: either you allow people to do everything or you allow them to do nothing. The policy editor just stops working once you allow someone to run an .exe from his desktop since he can break the system (with one of the numerous exploit that for example the GUI gives you.
.DAT file?
:) With linux you dump the same image and switch either kernel or module config.
:)
Also in older to use the "only run allowed executables" policy option you need to know exactly which files you need to allow to be run. Which can translate into lots of trial and error everytime you install/update an app.
Now, imagine that user has to do some task, and they have messed up their configs. Now on Windows you either repair their profile (which can take quite a time if you can't login as them, if possible at all) or take backup of files, create new profile and copy the files over,
You may still have problems, since there might be some critical data in the USER branch of the registry, how do you examine and manipulate this other than trying to login with that
And once you get new systems with different hardware you have to do it again
You don't even need third party tools to copy a Linux workstation, since the regular utilities will do just fine.
Windows has it's strong points, but administration isn't one of them. At least if you are trying to do it well. In a Uni even "we are not mission critical,
The students might disagree about the "mission critical" issue
.kids is different, in that it's a catch-all containing everything left over when you remove the unsuitable material. Further, it has to be suitable for children in the most repressive households, or else word gets out among some religious community that .kids allows unfettered access to material dealing with sexual health, evolution, atheism, blood transfusions, or other such horrors.
The problem is that you are not thinking globally here. The issues listed are rather specific to some parts of the US. How much common ground do you think could be found in the "suitable for children" between China, India, Sweden, Brazil, Libya and the US?
However, I think there is a global definition of a child, delimited by puberty. I can't think of a culture that doesn't recognize that division.
Plenty of cultures have the concept of "legal age", where only someone older than X years can do Y. In many cases there are lots of Y's with X' being close to being a random number. Such definitions appear most common amongst the industrialised nations, who are the people most likely to be using the Internet in the first place.
It's like .kids.us. Instead of registering a second level domain, you register a third level domain. So you might have something like www.travelocity.travel.us. In essence, you could think of "travel.us" as a top level domain, even though technically it's not.
.com should have worked.
.gov, .mil, and .edu should have been moved under .us a long time ago.
That's how
Actually it's how the DNS should be used. Nothing to do with webservers, since the DNS has been around long before the invention of the HTTP protocol.
Probably around 1990, if not a few years before.
The courts. Law is full of 'man on the Clapham omnibus'-style subjective definitions. Why should porn be different?
.porn TLD in the first place. You need to have something which follows the jurisdiction of the courts. e.g. .porn.clapham.london.uk.
In which case you don't want a
Legislators would devise some 'reasonable wankability' test, which the courts would interpret and apply.
You'd need to get 200 odd legislatures to agree, being as they can't even manage this on the simpler problem of prosecuting war criminals it's a bit of a waste of time trying.
The trouble with '.kids' is that you end up with the intersection of everybody's ideas of what is suitable for kids.
.porn domain idea. The only way it might be workable would be as a secondary or tertiary domain within a geo-specific hierarchy.
It's exactly the same issue as with the
How are .ca and .ie being abused? I dont see dodgy warez/porn sites using those country codes.
.ca has any connection with Canada or that something under .ie has any connection with the Republic of Ireland (Eire).
You can no longer be sure that something under
If you commit a crime via the Internet at 30,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean, whose jurisdiction does it fall in?
Aircraft are governed by the same laws as ships. The jurisdiction is the flag of the aircraft.
" the International Air Transport Association (IATA) stated its case for ".travel,"
.tv).
.nu, .cx, .co, .la ane even .ca and .ie
Why not ".iata.int"?
the World Health Organization (WHO) lobbied for ".health,"
Why not ".who.un" or "who.int"
Nokia Corp. for ".mobile"
Don't they already have ".nokia.com"?
and a group of Internet companies said it wants ".III" for individuals".
This is actually the daftest, since how do you sensibly organise 6 billion domains?
IMO most of those are pretty useless. ICANN should be working on revoking the country TLDS's that are being abused (.tk,
That list also includes
What would really be useful for Internet culture would be a .kid TLD that would be free of content that requires a mature personality to process, such as graphic violence, graphic sex, advertising, etc.
.porn, with much the same problem of there being no global definition of "child". It would really only make much sense as a secondry or tertiary domain within a geographic TLD. e.g. kid.us, kid.uk, kid.fi, kid.ca.us, etc.
This is sort of the opposite of
All very nice, but when the CEO demands IT get him a website with domain ".big-corp.com", you try telling him no and he now has to have "www.big-corp.screw-customers-for-profit"...of course you could always threaten, sorry, legally pressure some poor little geek for his personal domain, 'cos its got your company name in it.
.com were managed properly this "poor little geek" would have had to go to the trouble of registering "big-corp" as a business in at least two countries before they'd have had any chance of getting .big-corp.com
Thing is that if
The interesting thing is that many real transnational businesses want to chop their market up into regions (even single countries) anyway.
Would it be better to have many tightly regulated TLDs, such has only allowing non-profit organizations to use .org, or would it be better to have just a couple of very generic TLDs?
.com unless you are a commercial business operating in more than one country. A generic TLD would be something like .misc or .etc rather than treating .com, .net and .org as being .misc.
.com owners get first pick of the new TLDs, meaning that it's just another domain companies have to buy/borrow/steal to prevent supposed trademark infringement.
Or even you don't get a
As it stands, most of the existing TLDs are not very regulated,
Indeed some of then have become less well regulated as time has gone on.
thereby defeating the orginal point of having different TLDs.
If domain names were used properly there wouldn't be an issue. The problem is treating a hierarchical system as though it is a flat namespace. No one is demmanding that there be more coutry names for postal mail or more country codes for telephones.
The other big problem is that existing
Implying that the real idea is to make money out of the registrations. Anyway trademarks are ment to be specific to a specific place and type of business, though this appears to be increasingly ignored.
The difference is that United States copyright law considers RAM to be a tangible medium in which a work can be fixed; thus, reading a file into RAM is copying. The brain is not such a medium.
Thus showing that the legislators in question didn't understand the issue. Or maybe have brains which are more volatile than a piece of DRAM.
Copyright laws are made to prevent others from publishing copyrighted material and making $$ off that copyrighted material, i.e., it's to prevent the sale of a creative work in which none of that $$ goes to the creator of that work. This isn't about money they would have made but aren't making.
Except that people do commonly claim that such a copies equate to a loss of a sale. Even though it's by no means certain that there ever was a potential sale in the first place.
I think online publishing of material is great; it allows amateur authors, musicians, etc to get much more exposure than they would in traditional media.
Very few people "make it big" with traditional publishing. Especially in the music industry where a band with a record deal can be worst off financially than one who plays gigs evenings and weekends. Even those who are supposedly "sucessful" all too often appear to wind up bankrupt or even dead.
Additionally, it allows for many more alternative opinions and ideas to be expressed because publishing is not based on the demand for a book but rather the author's desire to publish it.
The criteria is more along the lines of if the publisher thinks they can make money from it.
Copyright law fails because they are trying to apply laws developed to control the production and distribution of physical objects to purely virtual ones that have none of the drawbacks that made the laws possible in the first place...
Copyright laws were originally developed in response to the invention of the printing press. Previously the only way to duplicate books was one copy at a time, by hand. Whereas a printing press enables many copies to be produced at a cheap price per copy, but making a single copy is expensive. This new technology created a new business model, that of the publisher. The earliest copyright laws were in effect state licences to publishing companies. Similar business models were applied with the invention of records and film.
What has now happened is that the media has become more or less irrelevent. But it was only the media, not copyright law, which stood in the way of "piracy" in the first place. Things started to come unstuck around 20 years ago. But instead of reconsidering their business model the publishing industry lobbied for stronger and longer copyright laws.
Lessig brings up an excellent point that only 147 out of about 10000 books from the 20's are still in print. What happened to the rest of this knowledge? The rest of this creativity? It has been lost and forgotten.
Hopefully the rest of these books still exist in the various copyright libraries around the world. Which is less likely to be the case with the hundreds of thousands of out of print books published more recently.
More disturbingly more modern media such as records, film, magnetic tape, etc do not have any kind of public archive. Thus are at even greater risk of rotting away before copyright expires on the content.