Microsoft knows what they're doing, and if this thing succeeds, you can forget about any non-Windows operating system being even remotely usable.
Microsoft holds a patent that describes a method by which hardware and software interoperate to guarantee "digital rights management" (aka fair use destruction and monopoly lock-in). The patent describes a mechanism in which there is a private/public key pair, with one half embedded in hardware (possibly the CPU). Only "authorized code" (aka Windows) can run in ring 0 (kernel space) on the CPU. Naturally, only Windows has the other half of the key.
This is probably how the Xbox prevents third-party operating systems from running, and it probably is why they originally applied for the patent. But it also has lots of uses in the monopoly business. This article describes how useful the patent could be in implementing the Hollings bill. Take it one step further and it's easy to envision a world in which this type of "protection" is not only mandated by law... but unimplementable by Linux hackers due to patent problems.
Hopefully, by the time this thing hits critical mass (if ever), Linux will be too firmly entrenched for the industry to allow it to be required. I think we're already there on the server side (1 out of 4 servers sold today ships with Linux, more if you include the ones they can't count). In another couple of years we'll be there on the desktop as well. But as they say, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Let's make sure we get heard.b
Yes, you read that correctly: Microsoft lost the browser war. Standards won. And that means everyone won, except Microsoft.
Think about it: why did Microsoft have such a low opinion about the Internet? They recognized the same thing that Marc Andreesen did: that it was a new platform for delivering applications. Microsoft didn't want that to happen; the incumbent platform was Windows. They were eventually forced to get into the browser business because the monopolist doesn't allow third-party applications with an installed base of more than a few thousand seats, of course, but it's all still standards-compliant.
Applications and information services are now delivered on the Web, not as little standalone Windows apps that you have to download and install. And that means the paradigm has shifted. The war is most definitely over, and Microsoft has lost.
The reason RPM is the most popular package manager out there right now is because it's the best. Sure, it's got some problems, but writing a whiny opinion piece isn't going to solve them. If something better gets written, something better will get used. It's that simple.
By the way, as someone mentioned earlier, dependency hell is created by poor packages. LSB should fix that; keep in mind that on an LSB-compliant system you will be able to look for a single dependency called lsb-1.0 (or whatever future version) and if it's found, you may safely assume that the system has all of the components which make up an LSB-compliant installation (libc, libz, etc.). That by itself should alleviate a lot of installation headaches.
In the future, though, I think we're going to see a lot more automated install programs. Ximian appears to do it seamlessly (unfortunately, I can't use it because I prefer KDE). I've also seen others, such as OpenNMS, do the same thing. And then of course there's the online version of CPAN that just goes out and grabs whatever it needs.
I realize that the ubergeeks among us will scream bloody murder at the thought of an installer program updating and installing libraries without asking permission. For those of us with that concern, we'll continue building stuff from source so we know exactly what's there. But for Linux's increasingly less techno-savvy user base (like it or not, folks, the Windows world is slowly starting to wake up and move to Linux) you have to make it easy.
Let's keep something in mind here, folks: Marc Andreessen is not a neutral party when observing the next-generation browser war. The current Netscape is based on Mozilla -- it's no longer "his" Netscape. This, I think, is the same line of thinking that got JWZ so upset about the Mozilla project. Netscape, while employing people like Andreessen and Zawinski, produced a first-generation browser that swept across the market because it was the only one there, but quickly got taken down by a company with monopoly power in the desktop market. This time around, Netscape has a better browser than Microsoft, but it's not the one they helped build. Sounds like a recipe for sour grapes to me -- or at least an apathetic attitude.
In the end, though, Microsoft didn't win the browser war -- open standards did.
Tired of Slashdot "BBS==past" attitude
on
Remembering the BBS
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Arrgh. I am sick and tired of the Slashdot editors pushing this idea that the BBS is a thing of the past. The BBS community is alive and well on the Internet. It's single-line dialup systems that are dead.
BBS's still provide the greatest sense of a cohesive online community out there. Better than "blog" type nonsense, and certainly better than what the likes of MSN and AOL have to offer.
I've run UNCENSORED! BBS for 14 years and I'm not about to stop now. And the 200+ users aren't going to stop logging in, either. Modern BBS's offer access via telnet/ssh or web, your choice. And the Internet-connectedness of it all has made it possible for BBS communities to attain geographic diversity, something which was not possible when you had to deal with long distance modem calls.
Please, people, let's get the perspective straight. The BBS is alive and well, so stop pushing this "bygone era" myth.
Check out the Citadel system. (Disclaimer: I am one of the developers, so my opinion on this is kind of strong.) We use Berkeley DB from Sleepycat Software for the data store. Yes, this is the same Berkeley DB that Sendmail uses to store its alias tables, access tables, etc. But it's capable of so much more than that. It's a robust, non-relational database that is hugely scalable and even has transactions/logging support!
We store all messages in the database.
Works like a charm. No pounding through ugly directory hierarchies or insanely long flat files. No need to escape out the word "From" when it appears at the start of a line. None of the cruft.
Ok, so it's a black box. But it's an open source server that uses an open source database backend, and since it supports SMTP/POP/IMAP plus webmail all by itself, you can still plug your favorite utilities into it (Pine, elm, fetchmail, etc.) and you don't have to graft together Sendmail+IMAP+whatever to make your mail system work.
The traditional Unix mail utilities are getting a little long in the tooth. I'm going to get flamed for saying this but look at what's happened to the email world: Lotus and Microsoft have run away with most of the market because Unix traditionalists won't give up their flat files. It's time for us to evolve, folks.
Please read this entire message before giving any consideration to modding it down. It is not intended as a flame.
Is it really appropriate that Mozilla be celebrated at the DNA Lounge?
For those of you not aware, the DNA Lounge is owned by Jamie Zawinski (aka JWZ), a former Netscape employee. When things weren't going his way, JWZ made a very high-profile exit from Netscape Communications and from the Mozilla project. He was very rude about it; he had very harsh words about Netscape's newer employees, he pushed all of the same FUD arguments that MS mouthpieces such as ZDnet tend to do, and he basically declared the project a failure.
JWZ's high-profile registration was a big setback for Mozilla, because it lowered morale inside the team and served as a huge negative PR piece.
Now that Mozilla has successfully reached its 1.0 release, they're going to celebrate by paying JWZ for booze and entertainment? Is this the way to reward the person who did more to hurt the Mozilla project than any other single person in the industry?
Perhaps I'm just being curmudgeonly about this, but I really don't think it's appropriate. Mozilla succeeded despite JWZ.
This is a dangerous idea. If what TransGaming achieves is true portability of Windows game source code to Linux and console platforms, and if game developers take to it, it makes Windows the reference platform for game development. Is this where we want to be? Specifically, is this where we want to be in another couple of years when Microsoft suddenly starts adding patented "features" to DirectX that can't be brought into the TransGaming WINE environment?
Write your games using truly open standards like OpenGL, and then port to Windows.
Just kidding! I'm sure you wrote it correctly so it doesn't do that--I hope.
Of course! If your account on the server is "myname@mydomain.dom" then that's what it stamps on the message. It's controlled by the server admin and doesn't try to figure out who you are based on where you're connecting from -- it figures out who you are based on who you logged in as. Authentication at its best:)
I don't see the problem here. The Organization: field gets set by the NNTP server that carried the message onto the 'net. This is great, it provides quite a bit more authenticity for messages.
I'm building a little groupware server that supports SMTP/POP/IMAP (among other things) and I do something even more heinous, to prevent open relaying: if you're not using authenticated SMTP, you can't deliver a message that claims to be from one of the server's own domains -- and if you are using authenticated SMTP, it rewrites the From: header line, forcing the message to appear authored by the user you logged in as.
Internet tradition and even some RFC's say that it's a sin to alter the message content, but in an era where people on the 'net just can't be trusted anymore, I think that's an obsolete concept.
Satellite Internet usually provides respectable speeds, but the latency is terrible. Speed is the raw bandwidth number (usually measured in megabits per second) while latency is your ping time, for example. There's plenty of bandwidth on those birds but regardless of how fast they run, you still have to send every packet into space and back down to earth. Since the satellite is over 20,000 miles away, that's a pretty long delay (many hundreds of milliseconds).
If you need the connection for file transfer (FTP, Gnutella, etc.) you'll be fine because you're doing big streaming transfers -- it doesn't really make a difference if your multi-megabyte download starts and ends half a second later than it would using a terrestrial connection. Email is no problem because it happens in the background. Web pages will be a little sluggish because you have to wait for all the HTTP transactions to complete. If you do any amount of interactive work, though -- such as telnet or SSH, where you're sending and receiving one character at a time while you type -- the lag will be absolutely unbearable.
As some other people here have said, there's no getting around the fact that bandwidth costs money. If you're going to colocate a box, though, you do have options.
What we usually do when a customer is using (or about to use) more bandwidth than they're contracted for, is to give them three options:
Update your contract for more bandwidth
Keep the contract where it is, and we bill you for the overage
We put a bandwidth cap on your connection to keep it at or below what you're paying for
As you can see, there are options. Which one you choose depends on whether your site is making money, and how much.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that the CCS encytion is there to keep pirates from copying the DVD. You can copy a protected DVD till the cows come home without even worrying about the encryption. The point of it is to sew up the *hardware* side of the business model.
The DVD Cartel (DVDCCA) has always maintained that the purpose of CSS encryption is to prevent "piracy" -- it's a very easy bogeyman to draw.
What we need is for some ballsy company with a few bucks to spare, to actually build a DVD player using the free DeCSS code. A single-disc player that acts exactly like a licensed player -- plays discs to the screen, no copying functions, it could even respect the region encoding.
What will the DVD Cartel say then? In that case they wouldn't be able to claim that anyone was trying to steal content, or destroy intellectual property -- the box would be very clearly designed to play legitimately obtained DVD's. Now that would be very interesting.
I've tested it with a Cisco switch (specifically, a Catalyst 4006). It does work. If you don't want a port to have access to "every" VLAN then you have to restrict it at the switch. Otherwise, anyone with root on the Linux box plugged into a trunk port can simply define additional eth0.xxx interfaces on whatever VLAN they want.
Gigabit Ethernet comes in really handy on Linux when you add 802.11q VLAN tagging.
For those of you who don't know how this works, here's a bit of a primer: basically, you set the port on your big data center grade switch to "trunk" and then you enable 802.1q on your Linux box. Then you don't just have one Ethernet interface with one address --- you have up to 4096 virtual ones, each on its own VLAN and each with an IP address that's valid on that VLAN. So you'd have eth0.1, eth0.2, eth0.3, etc... each talking to the machines on that VLAN.
Once you've got that running, you can do all sorts of neat stuff, including:
A router! You're on every VLAN anyway, so why not? It's not nearly as fast as a hardware-based Layer 3 switching module, but it's several orders of magnitude cheaper.
Really complex firewalls. You could put different parts of your organization (or whatever) on different VLAN's and then use your nifty Linux box to dictate what kind of policy is used to route between them.
If you're in a big building with multiple tenants, each with their own VLAN on a shared network, you can reduce the number of Internet access NAT/firewall boxes. Instead of one for each tenant, you've got a single one.
How about a VPN gateway that can place the caller directly on his or her department's own VLAN instead of having to route to it?
As you can see, it's limited only by your imagination. And with that much stuff potentially running through the box, you're going to need that 1 Gbps of speed. Happy hacking!
"As long as we can use the Mac version of MS Office as a cudgel to beat you with, you will continue to do everything we tell you to. There's no need to extend the contract."
Seriously... would Apple even dare to put Netscape back into Mac OS? All they have to do is merely think about it and Microsoft would start threatening them. Ditto for web services, media services, and whatever market Microsoft wants to park its steamroller in on any particular day.
Apple really ought to make an effort to get OpenOffice working really, really well as a native Mac OS X application. Then they should use the Mozilla technology to integrate a web browser into the Finder. If done well enough (and we know how good Apple is at desktop stuff), they could make Microsoft irrelevant on the Macintosh platform -- and then they wouldn't have to let Bill push them around anymore.
Storing this stuff could be incriminating.
on
XP, Phone Home
·
· Score: 2
Regardless of whether it's done in the OS or in their search engine or whatnot, the very idea of associating searches with particular individuals (or even particular computers) is a dangerous one. For example, what would happen if you decided to search for "metallica mp3" ? Don't you think it's entirely possible for Lars to demand access to those logs, and use entries like that as "probable cause" to raid your home or business for pirated music?
Every time a topic like this comes up, I am inclined to remind everyone that our online culture originated in the world of BBS's. That's where the real communities are. I've been running UNCENSORED! BBS (click to log in) for the last 14 years, and lemme tellya, I've seen it all. From the heyday of dialup to the commercialization of the Internet, from the utopian vision of a level playing field to the inevitable commercialization of the mainstream Web... guess what, folks? Through all that time, us old-school BBS geeks have been enjoying each other's company for years, in relative peace and quiet.
A friend of mine once put it this way: if places like Disneyopolis, MSN, and America Online compose the roar of the information highway, then your favorite friendly BBS could be likened to the corner pub where the locals gather.
Therefore I challenge each and every one of you to quit whining about what a commercial cesspool the mainstream Web has become, and go find your niche. Locate a BBS you like (I'd be thrilled if you chose mine, but there are lots of good ones out there) and log in daily. Become a part of the community. Meet people. Chat about whatever's on your mind: media, politics, sports, weather, relationships, technology, pets... it's all out there, and the sites operated by hobbyists are completely below the radar of corporate greed.
It's up to you. Don't like Disney's version of the 'net? Neither do I. Come join us in a place where they won't bother you.
The company is "cash flow positive" because people are making cash donations to it? This isn't sustainable. The "dot com" companies tried to live this way -- the only difference was that the money was coming from venture capitalists instead of consumers. Once the VC went away, they all went bankrupt very quickly.
Sorry folks, but the only way to stay in the black is to consistently keep your revenues higher than your expenses. A one-time cash infusion in tough times is nice, but you can't count on it to continue indefinitely.
Slashdot Mirror
If they searched the cartel's server disks... would it be a "RAID raid" ??
"Can you hear me now?"
(silence)
"Damn!"
Microsoft knows what they're doing, and if this thing succeeds, you can forget about any non-Windows operating system being even remotely usable.
Microsoft holds a patent that describes a method by which hardware and software interoperate to guarantee "digital rights management" (aka fair use destruction and monopoly lock-in). The patent describes a mechanism in which there is a private/public key pair, with one half embedded in hardware (possibly the CPU). Only "authorized code" (aka Windows) can run in ring 0 (kernel space) on the CPU. Naturally, only Windows has the other half of the key.
This is probably how the Xbox prevents third-party operating systems from running, and it probably is why they originally applied for the patent. But it also has lots of uses in the monopoly business. This article describes how useful the patent could be in implementing the Hollings bill. Take it one step further and it's easy to envision a world in which this type of "protection" is not only mandated by law... but unimplementable by Linux hackers due to patent problems.
Hopefully, by the time this thing hits critical mass (if ever), Linux will be too firmly entrenched for the industry to allow it to be required. I think we're already there on the server side (1 out of 4 servers sold today ships with Linux, more if you include the ones they can't count). In another couple of years we'll be there on the desktop as well. But as they say, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Let's make sure we get heard.b
Yes, you read that correctly: Microsoft lost the browser war. Standards won. And that means everyone won, except Microsoft.
Think about it: why did Microsoft have such a low opinion about the Internet? They recognized the same thing that Marc Andreesen did: that it was a new platform for delivering applications. Microsoft didn't want that to happen; the incumbent platform was Windows. They were eventually forced to get into the browser business because the monopolist doesn't allow third-party applications with an installed base of more than a few thousand seats, of course, but it's all still standards-compliant.
Applications and information services are now delivered on the Web, not as little standalone Windows apps that you have to download and install. And that means the paradigm has shifted. The war is most definitely over, and Microsoft has lost.
The reason RPM is the most popular package manager out there right now is because it's the best. Sure, it's got some problems, but writing a whiny opinion piece isn't going to solve them. If something better gets written, something better will get used. It's that simple.
By the way, as someone mentioned earlier, dependency hell is created by poor packages. LSB should fix that; keep in mind that on an LSB-compliant system you will be able to look for a single dependency called lsb-1.0 (or whatever future version) and if it's found, you may safely assume that the system has all of the components which make up an LSB-compliant installation (libc, libz, etc.). That by itself should alleviate a lot of installation headaches.
In the future, though, I think we're going to see a lot more automated install programs. Ximian appears to do it seamlessly (unfortunately, I can't use it because I prefer KDE). I've also seen others, such as OpenNMS, do the same thing. And then of course there's the online version of CPAN that just goes out and grabs whatever it needs.
I realize that the ubergeeks among us will scream bloody murder at the thought of an installer program updating and installing libraries without asking permission. For those of us with that concern, we'll continue building stuff from source so we know exactly what's there. But for Linux's increasingly less techno-savvy user base (like it or not, folks, the Windows world is slowly starting to wake up and move to Linux) you have to make it easy.
Let's keep something in mind here, folks: Marc Andreessen is not a neutral party when observing the next-generation browser war. The current Netscape is based on Mozilla -- it's no longer "his" Netscape. This, I think, is the same line of thinking that got JWZ so upset about the Mozilla project. Netscape, while employing people like Andreessen and Zawinski, produced a first-generation browser that swept across the market because it was the only one there, but quickly got taken down by a company with monopoly power in the desktop market. This time around, Netscape has a better browser than Microsoft, but it's not the one they helped build. Sounds like a recipe for sour grapes to me -- or at least an apathetic attitude.
In the end, though, Microsoft didn't win the browser war -- open standards did.
Arrgh. I am sick and tired of the Slashdot editors pushing this idea that the BBS is a thing of the past. The BBS community is alive and well on the Internet. It's single-line dialup systems that are dead.
BBS's still provide the greatest sense of a cohesive online community out there. Better than "blog" type nonsense, and certainly better than what the likes of MSN and AOL have to offer.
I've run UNCENSORED! BBS for 14 years and I'm not about to stop now. And the 200+ users aren't going to stop logging in, either. Modern BBS's offer access via telnet/ssh or web, your choice. And the Internet-connectedness of it all has made it possible for BBS communities to attain geographic diversity, something which was not possible when you had to deal with long distance modem calls.
Please, people, let's get the perspective straight. The BBS is alive and well, so stop pushing this "bygone era" myth.
Check out the Citadel system. (Disclaimer: I am one of the developers, so my opinion on this is kind of strong.) We use Berkeley DB from Sleepycat Software for the data store. Yes, this is the same Berkeley DB that Sendmail uses to store its alias tables, access tables, etc. But it's capable of so much more than that. It's a robust, non-relational database that is hugely scalable and even has transactions/logging support!
We store all messages in the database.
Works like a charm. No pounding through ugly directory hierarchies or insanely long flat files. No need to escape out the word "From" when it appears at the start of a line. None of the cruft.
Ok, so it's a black box. But it's an open source server that uses an open source database backend, and since it supports SMTP/POP/IMAP plus webmail all by itself, you can still plug your favorite utilities into it (Pine, elm, fetchmail, etc.) and you don't have to graft together Sendmail+IMAP+whatever to make your mail system work.
The traditional Unix mail utilities are getting a little long in the tooth. I'm going to get flamed for saying this but look at what's happened to the email world: Lotus and Microsoft have run away with most of the market because Unix traditionalists won't give up their flat files. It's time for us to evolve, folks.
Please read this entire message before giving any consideration to modding it down. It is not intended as a flame.
Is it really appropriate that Mozilla be celebrated at the DNA Lounge?
For those of you not aware, the DNA Lounge is owned by Jamie Zawinski (aka JWZ), a former Netscape employee. When things weren't going his way, JWZ made a very high-profile exit from Netscape Communications and from the Mozilla project. He was very rude about it; he had very harsh words about Netscape's newer employees, he pushed all of the same FUD arguments that MS mouthpieces such as ZDnet tend to do, and he basically declared the project a failure.
JWZ's high-profile registration was a big setback for Mozilla, because it lowered morale inside the team and served as a huge negative PR piece.
Now that Mozilla has successfully reached its 1.0 release, they're going to celebrate by paying JWZ for booze and entertainment? Is this the way to reward the person who did more to hurt the Mozilla project than any other single person in the industry?
Perhaps I'm just being curmudgeonly about this, but I really don't think it's appropriate. Mozilla succeeded despite JWZ.
This is a dangerous idea. If what TransGaming achieves is true portability of Windows game source code to Linux and console platforms, and if game developers take to it, it makes Windows the reference platform for game development. Is this where we want to be? Specifically, is this where we want to be in another couple of years when Microsoft suddenly starts adding patented "features" to DirectX that can't be brought into the TransGaming WINE environment?
Write your games using truly open standards like OpenGL, and then port to Windows.
I don't see the problem here. The Organization: field gets set by the NNTP server that carried the message onto the 'net. This is great, it provides quite a bit more authenticity for messages.
I'm building a little groupware server that supports SMTP/POP/IMAP (among other things) and I do something even more heinous, to prevent open relaying: if you're not using authenticated SMTP, you can't deliver a message that claims to be from one of the server's own domains -- and if you are using authenticated SMTP, it rewrites the From: header line, forcing the message to appear authored by the user you logged in as.
Internet tradition and even some RFC's say that it's a sin to alter the message content, but in an era where people on the 'net just can't be trusted anymore, I think that's an obsolete concept.
The new company will becalled "Hewlett Paqard"
Satellite Internet usually provides respectable speeds, but the latency is terrible. Speed is the raw bandwidth number (usually measured in megabits per second) while latency is your ping time, for example. There's plenty of bandwidth on those birds but regardless of how fast they run, you still have to send every packet into space and back down to earth. Since the satellite is over 20,000 miles away, that's a pretty long delay (many hundreds of milliseconds).
If you need the connection for file transfer (FTP, Gnutella, etc.) you'll be fine because you're doing big streaming transfers -- it doesn't really make a difference if your multi-megabyte download starts and ends half a second later than it would using a terrestrial connection. Email is no problem because it happens in the background. Web pages will be a little sluggish because you have to wait for all the HTTP transactions to complete. If you do any amount of interactive work, though -- such as telnet or SSH, where you're sending and receiving one character at a time while you type -- the lag will be absolutely unbearable.
What we usually do when a customer is using (or about to use) more bandwidth than they're contracted for, is to give them three options:
- Update your contract for more bandwidth
- Keep the contract where it is, and we bill you for the overage
- We put a bandwidth cap on your connection to keep it at or below what you're paying for
As you can see, there are options. Which one you choose depends on whether your site is making money, and how much.What we need is for some ballsy company with a few bucks to spare, to actually build a DVD player using the free DeCSS code. A single-disc player that acts exactly like a licensed player -- plays discs to the screen, no copying functions, it could even respect the region encoding.
What will the DVD Cartel say then? In that case they wouldn't be able to claim that anyone was trying to steal content, or destroy intellectual property -- the box would be very clearly designed to play legitimately obtained DVD's. Now that would be very interesting.
Didja ever notice that the MS-controlled press always has some nice things to say about open source whenever Microsoft has a court date coming up?
It's more than a little suspicious.
I've tested it with a Cisco switch (specifically, a Catalyst 4006). It does work. If you don't want a port to have access to "every" VLAN then you have to restrict it at the switch. Otherwise, anyone with root on the Linux box plugged into a trunk port can simply define additional eth0.xxx interfaces on whatever VLAN they want.
For those of you who don't know how this works, here's a bit of a primer: basically, you set the port on your big data center grade switch to "trunk" and then you enable 802.1q on your Linux box. Then you don't just have one Ethernet interface with one address --- you have up to 4096 virtual ones, each on its own VLAN and each with an IP address that's valid on that VLAN. So you'd have eth0.1, eth0.2, eth0.3, etc... each talking to the machines on that VLAN.
Once you've got that running, you can do all sorts of neat stuff, including:
As you can see, it's limited only by your imagination. And with that much stuff potentially running through the box, you're going to need that 1 Gbps of speed. Happy hacking!
Translation:
"As long as we can use the Mac version of MS Office as a cudgel to beat you with, you will continue to do everything we tell you to. There's no need to extend the contract."
Seriously... would Apple even dare to put Netscape back into Mac OS? All they have to do is merely think about it and Microsoft would start threatening them. Ditto for web services, media services, and whatever market Microsoft wants to park its steamroller in on any particular day.
Apple really ought to make an effort to get OpenOffice working really, really well as a native Mac OS X application. Then they should use the Mozilla technology to integrate a web browser into the Finder. If done well enough (and we know how good Apple is at desktop stuff), they could make Microsoft irrelevant on the Macintosh platform -- and then they wouldn't have to let Bill push them around anymore.
Regardless of whether it's done in the OS or in their search engine or whatnot, the very idea of associating searches with particular individuals (or even particular computers) is a dangerous one. For example, what would happen if you decided to search for "metallica mp3" ? Don't you think it's entirely possible for Lars to demand access to those logs, and use entries like that as "probable cause" to raid your home or business for pirated music?
Scary indeed.
Every time a topic like this comes up, I am inclined to remind everyone that our online culture originated in the world of BBS's. That's where the real communities are. I've been running UNCENSORED! BBS (click to log in) for the last 14 years, and lemme tellya, I've seen it all. From the heyday of dialup to the commercialization of the Internet, from the utopian vision of a level playing field to the inevitable commercialization of the mainstream Web... guess what, folks? Through all that time, us old-school BBS geeks have been enjoying each other's company for years, in relative peace and quiet.
A friend of mine once put it this way: if places like Disneyopolis, MSN, and America Online compose the roar of the information highway, then your favorite friendly BBS could be likened to the corner pub where the locals gather.
Therefore I challenge each and every one of you to quit whining about what a commercial cesspool the mainstream Web has become, and go find your niche. Locate a BBS you like (I'd be thrilled if you chose mine, but there are lots of good ones out there) and log in daily. Become a part of the community. Meet people. Chat about whatever's on your mind: media, politics, sports, weather, relationships, technology, pets... it's all out there, and the sites operated by hobbyists are completely below the radar of corporate greed.
It's up to you. Don't like Disney's version of the 'net? Neither do I. Come join us in a place where they won't bother you.
Doesn't anyone see what's wrong with this?
The company is "cash flow positive" because people are making cash donations to it? This isn't sustainable. The "dot com" companies tried to live this way -- the only difference was that the money was coming from venture capitalists instead of consumers. Once the VC went away, they all went bankrupt very quickly.
Sorry folks, but the only way to stay in the black is to consistently keep your revenues higher than your expenses. A one-time cash infusion in tough times is nice, but you can't count on it to continue indefinitely.
Look, now we can do compressed, lossless graphics without GIF's! That means there's no more need for the Unisys LZW patent ---
We have the way out!