That would be like your dentist printing a list of all the candy you bought in the past 6 months and using it as ammunition against your dental health!
Close, but not quite on-target. Howsabout:
"That would be like your dental insurance company printing a list of all the candy you bought in the past six months and using it as an excuse to [jack your premiums | terminate your policy | force you to accept dentures | <...>]."
I think telnet has to be explicitly selected, but who in their right mind uses telnet in lieu of ssh?
I do, all the time:
[olc@hex olc]$/usr/bin/telnet supai.oit.zumass.edu 25
Trying 128.119.175.6...
Connected to supai.oit.zumass.edu.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 supai.oit.zumass.edu -- Server ESMTP (PMDF V5.2-32 #38130)
helo hex.zoomass.edu
250 supai.oit.zumass.edu OK, hex.cs.umass.edu [128.119.243.169].
mail from:
250 2.5.0 Address Ok.
rcpt to:
250 2.1.5 security@oit.zumass.edu OK.
rset
250 2.5.0 Ok.
quit
221 2.3.0 Bye received. Goodbye.
Connection closed by foreign host.
This is a cut'n'paste -- adulterated slightly from an xterm I used not 15 minutes before skimming this thread. I couldn't remember whether our upstream had a "security" address as well as the standard "abuse". VRFY is disabled, so...
I suppose I could use nc, but old habits die hard.
Installing and enabling the telnet server, now, *that* is in a category with behaviors such as dancing about on a hilltop during a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armor and shouting "All the gods are idiots!"
Ole, friendly neighborhood postmaster
(and rabid pterrine)
Probably because they've skipped platters -- it uses flash memory, with a putative max of 256M according to the article. What's the point of high-bitrate recording if you can't store (e.g.) an entire concert?
IMnsHO, they should've tossed in a drive a la the archos recorder, and made the thing capable of =192VBR.
Here's a simple solution for the contentious $$ aspect -- require that royalties assessed under a RAND license must be expressed as a percentage of the sale price of the item using the licensed tech.
While this doesn't prevent problems with license restrictions -- that would have to be dealt with separately -- it DOES mean that free software alternatives would be relatively unburdened.
Of course, RMS and co. wouldn't be happy, and I'd be inclined to agree with them -- this is a compromise, and compromising is the art of leaving everyone unhappy, but less unhappy than they would be if someone else at the table got everything their way.
Maybe we don't NEED an industry to feed us "content" anymore. Maybe we can make it up and share it amongst ourselves. Maybe we'll pay those of us who we really like. Maybe we won't be bamboozled by the bright lights of big money spectacles anymore. Without their ludicrously large promotion budgets, the Nsyncs and the Pearl Harbors of the world will fade away, replaced by new choices that mean something.
We might not need it, but Society (i.e. that 5% that has more than 50% of the money and power) does. They need some relatively homogenous source of enculturation to keep feeding the public, to keep said public from thinking too much. It doesn't have to be art, it just has to fill the unassuming role of mental chewing gum for enough of the have-not population that they don't question their place. That's why Congress, despite the pitiful fraction of the GDP that's attributable to the "content industry" in comparison to other industries, is so eager to fasten its collective lips to the asses of asses like Eisner -- Congress knows what would happen in a world without homogenized pasteurized one-size-fits-all lowest-common-denominator entertainment -- you'd see a hell of lot more people wake up and realize that the status quo sucks.
Damn right it's a caste system (as someone elsethread said) -- but it's not a new one, it's a very familiar tale.
Bread & Circuses. (Look it up -- it's a very old phrase..) What we have here are the circuses, trying to get the Senate to enforce their fee structure.
The Ipic is almost certainly a hoax. This guy should *not* be taken seriously until he either:
The iPIC was not a hoax. I work for the CS dept. in question; we helped him set up the mirror because the/. effect was hosing the gadget. (Hey, you want a homebrew fingernail-sized webserver, you don't get a lot of room for scaling up the load.)
" Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies.
"Certainly, there are other local, regional, national and international factors in many of these operations, but if the CIA were tried fairly in a U.S. court, under U.S. law, the principle of complicity, incitement, riot, and mayhem would clearly apply. In the United States, if you hire someone to commit a murder your sentence may be approximately the same as that of the murderer himself.
"Who are these six million people we have killed in the interest of American national security? Conservatives tell us, "It's a dangerous world. Our enemies have to die so we can be safe and secure." Some of them say, "I'm sorry, but that's the way the world is. We have to accept this reality and defend ourselves, to make our nation safe and insure our way of life."
"Since 1954, however, we have not parachuted teams into the Soviet Union - our number one enemy - to destabilize that country... Neither do we run these violent operations in England, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, or Switzerland. Since the mid-1950s they have all been conducted in Third World countries where governments do not have the power to force the United States to stop its brutal and destabilizing campaigns.
"One might call this the "Third World War." It is a war that has been fought by the United States against the Third World. Others call it the Cold War and focus on the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet rationales, but the dead are not Soviets; they are people of the Third World. It might also be called the Forty-Year War, like the Thirty-Year and Hundred-Year Wars in Europe, for this one began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. Altogether, perhaps twenty million people died in the Cold War. As wars go, it has been the second or third most destructive of human life in all of history, after World War I and World War II.
"The six million people the CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies, incapable of doing physical damage to the United States the 22,000 killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas. A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women and children.
"Communists? Hardly, since the dead Nicaraguans are predominantly Roman Catholics. Enemies of the United States? That description doesn't fit either, because the thousands of witnesses who have lived in Nicaraguan villages with the people since 1979 testify that the Nicaraguans are the warmest people on the face of the earth, that they love people from the United States, and they simply cannot understand why our leaders would want to spend $1 billion on a contra force designed to murder people and wreck the country."
-- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
For decades, our government -- with all its military and financial clout -- has deliberately shat upon other peoples in their efforts to attain the very freedoms we take for granted.
And you have the gall to suggest that this is their fault?
David Korpiewski, our Windoze martyr, is hard at work on this one (I Don't Do Windows:-), and had this to say:
Evidence from compromised boxes elsewhere on campus seems to indicate that this bug will create a ton of *.eml files on the computer and they are all about 78k. Wehaven't received an.eml file in hand yet, to view the contents. A variety of.eml files are created, including "desktop.eml",
"readme.eml", etc.
A compromised system will attach a readme.eml file to the bottom of all web pages served. This is because there is currently a bug out for IE5 that will auto execute any given.eml file.
[...] I would challenge the notion that platform makes much difference, especially for those who aren't in high school. And for kids who will go on to 4 years of college, I would say that it really doesn't make any difference at all. The OS they use today will most likely be nothing like the OS they use in the workplace.
There were two things I did in high school (which was '84-'88 if you care) that drastically influenced the course of my life. One was gymnastics, which isn't germane to this conversation.
The other was playing around with BSD 2.9 on an aging DEC 11/70. By my senior year the PDP had been replaced by a VAX 11/780 running Ultrix. Early experience with those operating systems (boy, I get nostalgic just seeing a vt100) is IMNSHO the major factor in my current employment (Unix BOF^H^H^Hsysadmin).
I was crushed when -- several years after I graduated -- I went back to LSRHS and saw that the entire computer room had been ripped out and replaced with a cutesy little networked Macintosh lab. Sure, Macs are nice for doing papers and assignments, but the kids using them weren't learning much about computers...
The native inhabitants play an enormous part, actually -- they're the demons (Taraka and his ilk) that Sam originally helped bind in Hellwell.
Zelazny is one of my absolute favorite authors; I was quite upset to hear the news of his death. (Ironic, in a way, since nearly all of his protagonists are immortal or at the very least extremely long-lived. I've occasionally wondered whether the screenwriters for Highlander (there was only one!) were influenced by his stuff.)
I'd have a hard time picking a favorite RZ book. They're all excellent. Something else to check out (next time you're in the used bookstore, they're damned hard to find new) are the collections of shorter works, such as The Last Defender of Camelot, Unicorn Variations, The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth, , etc..
I really like the pictures where there is a
painting that is converted to look like a river in a marsh. The computer makes it look real. So there is potential for artists. Scientists can use it to project data based on samples. I think there are some unique and useful uses to this program.
Scientists? Good grief. This is a military application -- you feed a computer lots of data on how to interpret infrared or other long-range recon data for a given type of climate, and then you can construct reasonable VR fly-throughs to train your pilots or image-recognition missiles or ground troops or whatever. The fact that it's apparently possible to do this with COTS components is probably going to make a lot of brass hats unhappy...
This has really started to piss me off. In the NYTimes Cyberlaw article, Kaplan (no relation, I assume) mostly does a decent job of covering the basic facts and issues, and is surprisingly evenhanded in most respects, eschewing the blatant MPAA/RIAA toadying we've seen in other mainstream coverage of this case. (As a defense witness, I was one of the bit-part players in the original trial; I testified in front of Kaplan regarding networking technology to refute some of Shameless^WShamos's bullshit. The coverage at the time almost uniformly painted the defense as Evil HaXor D00dz; it was really exasperating trying to explain to my family why I was helping them.)
The NYtimes article, quoting some pozzer of a professor at U. of Richmond, says in part: "You don't have a fair use right to view an HBO televised fight and make a copy of it[...]Similarly, a movie theater can restrict access by charging admission -- even charging a movie critic"
This is such an obvious bait-and-switch it makes my stomach churn that the reporter didn't call him on it! A movie showing in a theater is not "published". You haven't bought a copy of it, you've bought a ticket to go and see it. Copyright law doesn't apply! An HBO televised fight is technically the same thing -- you're paying HBO "admission" to see it, although in this case it's a little murky because they are transmitting a copy to your TV. But neither of these are analogous to something like a DVD, where you've purchased a copy of the work fixed in a tangible medium!
While it is nice to say that these guys owe us a living, they don't. They are businessmen, pure and simple, and will only stay in the business if it makes them a buck
Exactly. However, nothing says that they are entitled to obscene profit margins. In fact, nothing says that they are entitled to preservation of a business model.
To quote the article: "I think scientists all over would be shocked to realize what a phenomenally lucrative business scientific publishing can be," Nicholas Cozzarelli, editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), says. "There are huge sums of money to be had in
this field."
Moreover, if "they" feel they're not making enough bucks and don't stay in the business, someone else will find a way to do the same job and make enough profit to consider it worthwhile.
Much as I hate some of his writing, RAH penned something once that I find appropriate: "There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit." -- Robert A. Heinlein ("Life-Line")
Actually, I installed (albeit with various bits of hackery) RH6.2 onto an X20 with the builtin modem and NIC not too long ago. You can download drivers for the modem from www.tux.org/pub/dclug/marvin/ltmodem-5.78e.tar.gz; there're details at walbran.org/sean/linux/stodolsk/. Admittedly, they're basically linux kernel modules that act as wrappers for a binary, but they do work.
I gotta say, the X20 is a nice piece of hardware. I was very reluctant to hand it over to the professor who bought it (I do IT stuff for UMass's CS department.)
The only machines I've seen that compare weight- and power-wise are Vaios, and they absolutely suck as far as hardware reliability goes. (On the other pseudopod, this same professor took a ThinkPad 600 into the Israeli desert for six months; it must be practically unkillable.)
An example: my home firewall sees an HTTP request go out to pc.john.avesnet.net, for which (according to the explanation) a DNS lookup gets an IP address [1.2.3.4]. [1.2.3.4] is actually the IP of an "AVES waypoint" host. The waypoint processes my original HTTP request, and sends it along to the actual machine behind some NATbox (which has an IP of [5.6.7.8]) somewhere, which replies to my browser. But the reply doesn't originate from [1.2.3.4], which is where my firewall is looking for a reply to the original query -- instead, it arrives with a source IP of [5.6.7.8], which is the IP of the NATbox behind which pc.john.avesnet.net actually sits. To my firewall, this looks like an incoming connection attempt that is unrelated to any outgoing traffic, so it gets DROPped on the floor.
So, far from requiring no upgrades on the part of the end-browser, this scheme will require anyone with a firewall or a NATbox (such as my P90 running ipchains, or a linksys BEFSR41, or some other cablemodem/DSL access sharing device) to understand the protocol and deploy mechanisms for handling it.
Slashdot Mirror
Close, but not quite on-target. Howsabout:
"That would be like your dental insurance company printing a list of all the candy you bought in the past six months and using it as an excuse to [jack your premiums | terminate your policy | force you to accept dentures | <...>]."
Have a looksee at the Western Mass. Linux and Unix User's group.
I do, all the time:
[olc@hex olc]$Trying 128.119.175.6...
Connected to supai.oit.zumass.edu.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 supai.oit.zumass.edu -- Server ESMTP (PMDF V5.2-32 #38130)
helo hex.zoomass.edu
250 supai.oit.zumass.edu OK, hex.cs.umass.edu [128.119.243.169].
mail from:
250 2.5.0 Address Ok.
rcpt to:
250 2.1.5 security@oit.zumass.edu OK.
rset
250 2.5.0 Ok.
quit
221 2.3.0 Bye received. Goodbye.
Connection closed by foreign host.
This is a cut'n'paste -- adulterated slightly from an xterm I used not 15 minutes before skimming this thread. I couldn't remember whether our upstream had a "security" address as well as the standard "abuse". VRFY is disabled, so...
I suppose I could use nc, but old habits die hard.
Installing and enabling the telnet server, now, *that* is in a category with behaviors such as dancing about on a hilltop during a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armor and shouting "All the gods are idiots!"
IMnsHO, they should've tossed in a drive a la the archos recorder, and made the thing capable of =192VBR.
While this doesn't prevent problems with license restrictions -- that would have to be dealt with separately -- it DOES mean that free software alternatives would be relatively unburdened.
Of course, RMS and co. wouldn't be happy, and I'd be inclined to agree with them -- this is a compromise, and compromising is the art of leaving everyone unhappy, but less unhappy than they would be if someone else at the table got everything their way.
We might not need it, but Society (i.e. that 5% that has more than 50% of the money and power) does. They need some relatively homogenous source of enculturation to keep feeding the public, to keep said public from thinking too much. It doesn't have to be art, it just has to fill the unassuming role of mental chewing gum for enough of the have-not population that they don't question their place. That's why Congress, despite the pitiful fraction of the GDP that's attributable to the "content industry" in comparison to other industries, is so eager to fasten its collective lips to the asses of asses like Eisner -- Congress knows what would happen in a world without homogenized pasteurized one-size-fits-all lowest-common-denominator entertainment -- you'd see a hell of lot more people wake up and realize that the status quo sucks.
Damn right it's a caste system (as someone elsethread said) -- but it's not a new one, it's a very familiar tale.
Bread & Circuses. (Look it up -- it's a very old phrase..) What we have here are the circuses, trying to get the Senate to enforce their fee structure.
The iPIC was not a hoax. I work for the CS dept. in question; we helped him set up the mirror because the /. effect was hosing the gadget. (Hey, you want a homebrew fingernail-sized webserver, you don't get a lot of room for scaling up the load.)
Since the EULA is neither presented nor signed at the time of purchase, it doesn't have bearing on the transaction.
Just in time for the holidays...
"Yes, Virginia. There is a federal judge who's managed to avoid rectally contricting his cranial blood flow."
Why does their government suck?
Gee, could it be the fact that our government systematically and illegally destabilizes and undermines and blatantly overthrows any attempts at local democratic self-rule in third-world countries, preferring instead to prop up easily-controlled ,corrupt militaristic regimes?
For decades, our government -- with all its military and financial clout -- has deliberately shat upon other peoples in their efforts to attain the very freedoms we take for granted.
And you have the gall to suggest that this is their fault?
Evidence from compromised boxes elsewhere on campus seems to indicate that this bug will create a ton of *.eml files on the computer and they are all about 78k. Wehaven't received an .eml file in hand yet, to view the contents. A variety of .eml files are created, including "desktop.eml",
"readme.eml", etc.
A compromised system will attach a readme.eml file to the bottom of all web pages served. This is because there is currently a bug out for IE5 that will auto execute any given .eml file.
There were two things I did in high school (which was '84-'88 if you care) that drastically influenced the course of my life. One was gymnastics, which isn't germane to this conversation.
The other was playing around with BSD 2.9 on an aging DEC 11/70. By my senior year the PDP had been replaced by a VAX 11/780 running Ultrix. Early experience with those operating systems (boy, I get nostalgic just seeing a vt100) is IMNSHO the major factor in my current employment (Unix BOF^H^H^Hsysadmin).
I was crushed when -- several years after I graduated -- I went back to LSRHS and saw that the entire computer room had been ripped out and replaced with a cutesy little networked Macintosh lab. Sure, Macs are nice for doing papers and assignments, but the kids using them weren't learning much about computers...
Zelazny is one of my absolute favorite authors; I was quite upset to hear the news of his death. (Ironic, in a way, since nearly all of his protagonists are immortal or at the very least extremely long-lived. I've occasionally wondered whether the screenwriters for Highlander (there was only one!) were influenced by his stuff.)
I'd have a hard time picking a favorite RZ book. They're all excellent. Something else to check out (next time you're in the used bookstore, they're damned hard to find new) are the collections of shorter works, such as The Last Defender of Camelot, Unicorn Variations, The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth, , etc..
Scientists? Good grief. This is a military application -- you feed a computer lots of data on how to interpret infrared or other long-range recon data for a given type of climate, and then you can construct reasonable VR fly-throughs to train your pilots or image-recognition missiles or ground troops or whatever. The fact that it's apparently possible to do this with COTS components is probably going to make a lot of brass hats unhappy...
This has really started to piss me off. In the NYTimes Cyberlaw article, Kaplan (no relation, I assume) mostly does a decent job of covering the basic facts and issues, and is surprisingly evenhanded in most respects, eschewing the blatant MPAA/RIAA toadying we've seen in other mainstream coverage of this case. (As a defense witness, I was one of the bit-part players in the original trial; I testified in front of Kaplan regarding networking technology to refute some of Shameless^WShamos's bullshit. The coverage at the time almost uniformly painted the defense as Evil HaXor D00dz; it was really exasperating trying to explain to my family why I was helping them.)
The NYtimes article, quoting some pozzer of a professor at U. of Richmond, says in part:
"You don't have a fair use right to view an HBO televised fight and make a copy of it[...]Similarly, a movie theater can restrict access by charging admission -- even charging a movie critic"
This is such an obvious bait-and-switch it makes my stomach churn that the reporter didn't call him on it! A movie showing in a theater is not "published". You haven't bought a copy of it, you've bought a ticket to go and see it. Copyright law doesn't apply! An HBO televised fight is technically the same thing -- you're paying HBO "admission" to see it, although in this case it's a little murky because they are transmitting a copy to your TV. But neither of these are analogous to something like a DVD, where you've purchased a copy of the work fixed in a tangible medium!
Grrr...
While it is nice to say that these guys owe us a living, they don't. They are businessmen, pure and simple, and will only stay in the business if it makes them a buck
Exactly. However, nothing says that they are entitled to obscene profit margins. In fact, nothing says that they are entitled to preservation of a business model.
To quote the article: "I think scientists all over would be shocked to realize what a phenomenally lucrative business scientific publishing can be," Nicholas Cozzarelli, editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), says. "There are huge sums of money to be had in this field."
Moreover, if "they" feel they're not making enough bucks and don't stay in the business, someone else will find a way to do the same job and make enough profit to consider it worthwhile.
Much as I hate some of his writing, RAH penned something once that I find appropriate:
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit."
-- Robert A. Heinlein ("Life-Line")
Actually, I installed (albeit with various bits of hackery) RH6.2 onto an X20 with the builtin modem and NIC not too long ago. You can download drivers for the modem from www.tux.org/pub/dclug/marvin/ltmodem-5.78e.tar.gz; there're details at walbran.org/sean/linux/stodolsk/. Admittedly, they're basically linux kernel modules that act as wrappers for a binary, but they do work.
I gotta say, the X20 is a nice piece of hardware. I was very reluctant to hand it over to the professor who bought it (I do IT stuff for UMass's CS department.)
The only machines I've seen that compare weight- and power-wise are Vaios, and they absolutely suck as far as hardware reliability goes. (On the other pseudopod, this same professor took a ThinkPad 600 into the Israeli desert for six months; it must be practically unkillable.)which will bollix up many kinds of firewalls.
The fourth diagram on the "How Does Aves Work?" page shows this clearly.
An example: my home firewall sees an HTTP request go out to pc.john.avesnet.net, for which (according to the explanation) a DNS lookup gets an IP address [1.2.3.4]. [1.2.3.4] is actually the IP of an "AVES waypoint" host. The waypoint processes my original HTTP request, and sends it along to the actual machine behind some NATbox (which has an IP of [5.6.7.8]) somewhere, which replies to my browser. But the reply doesn't originate from [1.2.3.4], which is where my firewall is looking for a reply to the original query -- instead, it arrives with a source IP of [5.6.7.8], which is the IP of the NATbox behind which pc.john.avesnet.net actually sits. To my firewall, this looks like an incoming connection attempt that is unrelated to any outgoing traffic, so it gets DROPped on the floor.
So, far from requiring no upgrades on the part of the end-browser, this scheme will require anyone with a firewall or a NATbox (such as my P90 running ipchains, or a linksys BEFSR41, or some other cablemodem/DSL access sharing device) to understand the protocol and deploy mechanisms for handling it.