Naw, some people consent to being brutally sodomized by NSI, just as they'd line up to buy Microsoft Sodomy 5.0, the finest and most innovative form of sodomy developed through years of secret research. From the companies that brought you The RBL Potential Lawsuit Fiasco and "Bob."
Argh. I haven't found a registrar in this discussion yet that didn't have problematic TOS. And this one's from a tucows affiliate, so it's presumably working through OpenSRS. From domaindirect's agreement: By using the Services under this Agreement, you acknowledge that you have read and agree to be bound by all terms and conditions of this Agreement and any pertinent rules or policies that are or may be published by us... You agree that we may, in our sole discretion, delete or transfer your domain name at any time.
From dotster's terms: Dotster may modify the Dispute Policy at its sole discretion at any time. Your continued use of the domain name registered to you after any such Dispute Policy modification shall constitute your acceptance of this Agreement and the modified Dispute Policy... You further agree and acknowledge that Dotster may make publicly available, or directly available to third party vendors, some, or all, of the domain name registration information you provide, for purposes of inspection or for targeted marketing...You also agree that Dotster shall have the right in its sole discretion to suspend, cancel, transfer or otherwise modify a domain name registration upon seven (7) calendar days prior written notice and after such time as Dotster receives a properly authenticated order from a court of competent jurisdiction, or arbitration award, requiring the suspension, cancellation, transfer or modification of the domain name registration.
From processing innovations': By using the Services under this Agreement, you acknowledge that you have read and agree to be bound by all terms and conditions of this Agreement and any pertinent rules or policies that are or may be published by us...You agree, during the period of this Agreement, that we may: (1) revise the terms and conditions of this Agreement; and (2) change the services provided under this Agreement. Any such revision or change will be binding and effective immediately on posting of the revised Agreement or change to the service(s) on our web site, or on notification to you by e-mail or regular mail as per the Notices section of this agreement, Section 20. You agree to review our web site, including the Agreement, periodically to be aware of any such revisions....You agree that we may, in our sole discretion, delete or transfer your domain name at any time.
Domaingeeks looks better than NSI (the only way to look worse at this stage would involve sodomy and microsoft products), but here are some problems:
You agree, during the period of this Agreement, that we may: (1) revise the terms and conditions of this Agreement; and (2) change the services provided under this Agreement. Any such revision or change will be binding and effective immediately on posting of the revised Agreement or change to the service(s) on our web site, or on notification to you by e-mail or regular mail as per the Notices section of this agreement, Section 20. You agree to review our web site, including the Agreement, periodically to be aware of any such revisions.... You further agree that we, in our sole discretion, may modify our Dispute Policy at any time... You agree that we may, in our sole discretion, delete or transfer your domain name at any time.
What I'd want out of a registrar, based on our experiences sofar, would be:
Any changes to policy either come from ICANN or don't go into effect until the end of a reg term, when you will be notified of changes beforehand.
The domain is yours, and we won't turn it off so long as you've paid and the courts haven't ordered it shut off and our server's aren't on fire.
We protect your privacy -- including that we won't spam you, or let anyone else do so through information of ours.
While I like the idea of OpenSRS, and am inclined to give extra leniency to anyone competing with NSI, I'm leery of a registrar who feels it necessary or apropriate to run a site like this -- blatant spamdexing, Arial-only fonts, etc. Ugh. We've been through one registrar who abused the network for the sake of profit, how many more will there be? (yes, I know, lots. and I'm _really_ judging the proverbial book by its cover here)
This name is also startlingly close to the product name used by Avanti to market polyurethane condoms. I approve of that -- if processors have to have silly names, they ought at least to have manipulable ones.
We've talked about this before, but I think it's time to get serious about writing a canopener to extract files from InstallShield and similar SEA utilities without displaying, reading or parsing the license. It can't be that hard, and it would kill off the click-wrap license BS completely.
Hence, "by clicking OK you agree" would fall back to "by using this software you agree," and the latter's perfectly fine, since plenty of reverse engineering can be done without ever running a piece of software.
One thought -- poison the logs. Find an open proxy or two, and (gently, don't hurt the proxy) download the thing. Download the thing by segments if the webserver provides HTTP request ranges. If you control your own DNS, feed back deliberately misleading hostnames and HTTP referrers (referrers and/or hostnames from mattel.com, say, or from mattel's upstream, pilot.net). Tamper with the agent info (e.g. wget's -U), both to engender legal mistrust and to hinder automated parsing.
Other more fanciful/nefarious possibilities: write a windoze/activex macro virus that spreads the cp4break file around. Post it to usenet once so it gets put in Deja's archives (once overtly, and once covertly, e.g. with deniable-crypto hidden in some suitably naughty jpeg). Give copies to homeless people in libraries. Leave soiled-looking printouts in the men's room stalls of courthouses.
And remember the lessons of DeCSS. Do what worked, avoid what didn't.
IIRC, though, the court used Northwest having provided the computers as a justification for giving NWA the right to search their employees. Apallingly unconstitutional, IMO.
Employees could (probably) effectively oppose this sort of thing by extensive use of cryptography, e.g. CFS.
The likely market for NDS (on Linux or otherwise) coincides with the portion of the market least interested in the open source aspects of Linux. That portion also has a reasonably high personnel/software cost ratio anyway (where the software represents a fairly small fraction of the total cost), so standard commercial licensure wouldn't likely adversely affect the potential market much.
That said, I'd like to see NDS open sourced; however, recall that Novell is currently in a fairly bitter fight with MS over enterprise directory services, and realize that if there were source to NDS around, MS would almost certainly steal^h^h^h^h^hapropriate its better bits to benefit their own Active Directory, licensure prohibiting or not.
Also journalists using hot-paper smells, the inevitable reeking cacaphony of Usenet (a.s.r would smell of burnt silicon), the grotesque smell down{wind,stream} of AOL. Emacs would employ the olfactory port of the dissociation code. Editors would have to provide syntax highlighting and meta tags for smells. Ad filters (ijb et al) would be employed to make for a neutral experience.
Every corporate website would employ the olfactory equivalent of Muzak -- some superficial focus grouped scent of productivity and profit, mixed with some twinge of dynamism and excitement. Evil h4x0rs would break in and replace these smell files with the smell of pot (doubt that? Check the attrition hacked-sites archive and count the pot references).
We would receive spam offering us the usual "free pics delivered daily to your email box," augmented with "wee wiff of quim in the morning" offerings no discriminating connosieur (sp) could resist. [Rob Roy reference]
Mailbombs would become messier affairs.
Valentine's day (easy). cron jobs that produce the smell of toast and coffee (or other apropriate cues) at the right times of day.
Rather than spraying an aerosol about whilst cleaning a bathroom, you'd send mail to the e-toilet.
I pity those who got their moderator points on this one.:)
Speaking of which, yesterday (Tuesday), LinuxOne issued a press release to the effect that they'd opened an office in Taiwan, to:
-- promote sales of all LinuxOne products in Taiwan -- translate/localize LinuxOne products into Japanese -- circulate a web-based newsletter for the Taiwan open-source community -- actively promote the Linux software as a replacement for Window and MacIntosh -- develop special new software products for the Asian markets
Interpret that how you will. The release goes on to specify that the office holds a manager, a salesdroid, an accountant and three software engineers, with more salesdroids to follow "in the next 10 days."
It'd be useful to find someone with exposure to the Asian tech industry and Linux scene to illustrate what's occurred on that side of the lake.
Mr. Kurtz could do to read David James Duncan's essay on farce, as included in _The Brothers K_ (Rob, I wanna ), entitled "Two Kinds of Farce" -- it's a good defense of farce as a genre of humor whose purgative effect "necessitates hitting below the belt... and is free and indeed required to lampoon... cream-pie, as necessary." He goes on to discuss the importance of farce in the face of the Megafarce(s) put forth by various agencies such as the US government. A good read.
Anyone thinking about Y10k? -- Me Dan Bernstein. He was the one that lobbied the Usenet committees to make date formats survive y10k, and proposed the TAI64 time format, which helpfully lasts from the big bang to the big crunch. Add another 64 bits and you can individually address every attosecond in the whole span.
Read EFF's summary (as posted in EFFector) -- they make the case quite well that as source code is protected speech (see the Bernstein decision), and all the code written sofar (DeCSS, css-auth, et al) was written by the OSS community, the norwegian reverse-engineers, and so forth, it's their speech and it's protected under the first amendement. Accordingly, it's protected against BS injunctions like this one.
I would also infer that in a courtroom, freedom of expression likely takes a higher precedence than protection of trade secrets, which would tilt the case in our favor with minimal effort, and give the prosecution a much harder case.
This leads into the hairy issue of the legality of linking, which seems ridiculously clear-cut to everyone other than the lawyers and the courts, to the effect that in at least one case (which now escapes me, it was posted here) a court actually regarded linking to something illegal as a crime.
I noticed, yes. Especially amusing was the inclusion of Emmanuel Goldstein (2600), Open Projects, etc. Also the nice round number of 500 John Does, many of which aren't in the United States -- it's as if they hope to dump their hopeless enforcement situation on the US government to clear up at taxpayers' expense.
It being a court, there's not a whole lot of chance to influence the court itself -- the judiciary deliberately attempts to avoid influence by stuff happening on their front steps (recall the EFF's big demonstration in front of the supreme court when the CDA case was happening).
That said, it's much easier to put on a spectacle, and get media attention, which in turn attracts publicity and applies pressure to the plantiffs to back off (they have sofar seemed remarkably immune to pressure, but still).
If such an event were to be organized, it'd be useful to find someone with applicable organizational experience -- SVLUG comes to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla has a project to get SVG into the browser. Can't recall how far along they are, but there's a link from the Mozilla Projects page.
Naw, some people consent to being brutally sodomized by NSI, just as they'd line up to buy Microsoft Sodomy 5.0, the finest and most innovative form of sodomy developed through years of secret research. From the companies that brought you The RBL Potential Lawsuit Fiasco and "Bob."
Argh. I haven't found a registrar in this discussion yet that didn't have problematic TOS. And this one's from a tucows affiliate, so it's presumably working through OpenSRS. From domaindirect's agreement: By using the Services under this Agreement, you acknowledge that you have read and agree to be bound by all terms and conditions of this Agreement and any pertinent rules or policies that are or may be published by us... You agree that we may, in our sole discretion, delete or transfer your domain name at any time.
From dotster's terms: Dotster may modify the Dispute Policy at its sole discretion at any time. Your continued use of the domain name registered to you after any such Dispute Policy modification shall constitute your acceptance of this Agreement and the modified Dispute Policy... You further agree and acknowledge that Dotster may make publicly available, or directly available to third party vendors, some, or all, of the domain name registration information you provide, for purposes of inspection or for targeted marketing...You also agree that Dotster shall have the right in its sole discretion to suspend, cancel, transfer or otherwise modify a domain name registration upon seven (7) calendar days prior written notice and after such time as Dotster receives a properly authenticated order from a court of competent jurisdiction, or arbitration award, requiring the suspension, cancellation, transfer or modification of the domain name registration.
From processing innovations': By using the Services under this Agreement, you acknowledge that you have read and agree to be bound by all terms and conditions of this Agreement and any pertinent rules or policies that are or may be published by us...You agree, during the period of this Agreement, that we may: (1) revise the terms and conditions of this Agreement; and (2) change the services provided under this Agreement. Any such revision or change will be binding and effective immediately on posting of the revised Agreement or change to the service(s) on our web site, or on notification to you by e-mail or regular mail as per the Notices section of this agreement, Section 20. You agree to review our web site, including the Agreement, periodically to be aware of any such revisions....You agree that we may, in our sole discretion, delete or transfer your domain name at any time.
What I'd want out of a registrar, based on our experiences sofar, would be:
While I like the idea of OpenSRS, and am inclined to give extra leniency to anyone competing with NSI, I'm leery of a registrar who feels it necessary or apropriate to run a site like this -- blatant spamdexing, Arial-only fonts, etc. Ugh. We've been through one registrar who abused the network for the sake of profit, how many more will there be? (yes, I know, lots. and I'm _really_ judging the proverbial book by its cover here)
This name is also startlingly close to the product name used by Avanti to market polyurethane condoms. I approve of that -- if processors have to have silly names, they ought at least to have manipulable ones.
CyberPatrol provides two potentially useful pages:
A few thousand (polite) submissions along these lines might raise a few eyebrows.
Hence, "by clicking OK you agree" would fall back to "by using this software you agree," and the latter's perfectly fine, since plenty of reverse engineering can be done without ever running a piece of software.
One thought -- poison the logs. Find an open proxy or two, and (gently, don't hurt the proxy) download the thing. Download the thing by segments if the webserver provides HTTP request ranges. If you control your own DNS, feed back deliberately misleading hostnames and HTTP referrers (referrers and/or hostnames from mattel.com, say, or from mattel's upstream, pilot.net). Tamper with the agent info (e.g. wget's -U), both to engender legal mistrust and to hinder automated parsing.
Other more fanciful/nefarious possibilities: write a windoze/activex macro virus that spreads the cp4break file around. Post it to usenet once so it gets put in Deja's archives (once overtly, and once covertly, e.g. with deniable-crypto hidden in some suitably naughty jpeg). Give copies to homeless people in libraries. Leave soiled-looking printouts in the men's room stalls of courthouses.
And remember the lessons of DeCSS. Do what worked, avoid what didn't.
Employees could (probably) effectively oppose this sort of thing by extensive use of cryptography, e.g. CFS.
The likely market for NDS (on Linux or otherwise) coincides with the portion of the market least interested in the open source aspects of Linux. That portion also has a reasonably high personnel/software cost ratio anyway (where the software represents a fairly small fraction of the total cost), so standard commercial licensure wouldn't likely adversely affect the potential market much.
That said, I'd like to see NDS open sourced; however, recall that Novell is currently in a fairly bitter fight with MS over enterprise directory services, and realize that if there were source to NDS around, MS would almost certainly steal^h^h^h^h^hapropriate its better bits to benefit their own Active Directory, licensure prohibiting or not.
(I submitted the same article a week ago, dammit)
Every corporate website would employ the olfactory equivalent of Muzak -- some superficial focus grouped scent of productivity and profit, mixed with some twinge of dynamism and excitement. Evil h4x0rs would break in and replace these smell files with the smell of pot (doubt that? Check the attrition hacked-sites archive and count the pot references).
We would receive spam offering us the usual "free pics delivered daily to your email box," augmented with "wee wiff of quim in the morning" offerings no discriminating connosieur (sp) could resist. [Rob Roy reference]
Mailbombs would become messier affairs.
Valentine's day (easy). cron jobs that produce the smell of toast and coffee (or other apropriate cues) at the right times of day.
Rather than spraying an aerosol about whilst cleaning a bathroom, you'd send mail to the e-toilet.
I pity those who got their moderator points on this one. :)
[whois.arin.net]
@Home Network (NETBLK-ATHOME) ATHOME 24.0.0.0 - 24.19.255.255
@Home Network (NETBLK-CORP-RDC-SC-1) CORP-RDC-SC-1 24.0.0.0 - 24.0.0.255
That looks like 19 class B's and a class C. As I recall, @home applied for and was denied a class-A; they were moaning about it semi-publicly.
-- promote sales of all LinuxOne products in Taiwan
-- translate/localize LinuxOne products into Japanese
-- circulate a web-based newsletter for the Taiwan open-source community
-- actively promote the Linux software as a replacement for Window and MacIntosh
-- develop special new software products for the Asian markets
Interpret that how you will. The release goes on to specify that the office holds a manager, a salesdroid, an accountant and three software engineers, with more salesdroids to follow "in the next 10 days."
It'd be useful to find someone with exposure to the Asian tech industry and Linux scene to illustrate what's occurred on that side of the lake.
Mr. Kurtz could do to read David James Duncan's essay on farce, as included in _The Brothers K_ (Rob, I wanna ), entitled "Two Kinds of Farce" -- it's a good defense of farce as a genre of humor whose purgative effect "necessitates hitting below the belt... and is free and indeed required to lampoon... cream-pie, as necessary." He goes on to discuss the importance of farce in the face of the Megafarce(s) put forth by various agencies such as the US government. A good read.
Anyone thinking about Y10k? -- Me Dan Bernstein. He was the one that lobbied the Usenet committees to make date formats survive y10k, and proposed the TAI64 time format, which helpfully lasts from the big bang to the big crunch. Add another 64 bits and you can individually address every attosecond in the whole span.
There is nothing usefull to do with the darned program!
Playing DVDs under Linux/*BSD/et al isn't useful?
Here's the other, from somewhat earlier today. Pretty flattering. :)
Read EFF's summary (as posted in EFFector) -- they make the case quite well that as source code is protected speech (see the Bernstein decision), and all the code written sofar (DeCSS, css-auth, et al) was written by the OSS community, the norwegian reverse-engineers, and so forth, it's their speech and it's protected under the first amendement. Accordingly, it's protected against BS injunctions like this one.
I would also infer that in a courtroom, freedom of expression likely takes a higher precedence than protection of trade secrets, which would tilt the case in our favor with minimal effort, and give the prosecution a much harder case.
That seems to have happened, to a degree -- 2600 is one of the named defendants.
Our courts have a long way to go.
I noticed, yes. Especially amusing was the inclusion of Emmanuel Goldstein (2600), Open Projects, etc. Also the nice round number of 500 John Does, many of which aren't in the United States -- it's as if they hope to dump their hopeless enforcement situation on the US government to clear up at taxpayers' expense.
That said, it's much easier to put on a spectacle, and get media attention, which in turn attracts publicity and applies pressure to the plantiffs to back off (they have sofar seemed remarkably immune to pressure, but still).
If such an event were to be organized, it'd be useful to find someone with applicable organizational experience -- SVLUG comes to mind.