1) "After Ivanov arrived in Seattle, accompanied by Gorshkov, agents posing as Invita officials asked the men to demonstrate their prowess on a computer outfitted with "sniffer" software to record every keystroke. After arresting the duo, they used account numbers and passwords obtained by the program to gain access to data stored in the computers in Russia, Schroeder said."
Ok, so they brought them to the U.S., told them to log into their computers in Russia, sniffed the passwords, and then used the sniffed passwords to log into the Russian machines. This is hacking? Social engineering, maybe...
2) "The agents downloaded the data, but did not view it until they obtained a search warrant from a U.S. federal court, he said."
Now this is interesting. They don't need a search warrant to break into your computer, only to read what's there. Which means that breaking into a computer isn't search and seizure.
Does this mean that if I break into FBI computers, but don't look at anything, that I haven't hacked them?
"These people will also set up bank trusts, etc. to preserve their interests as they lie dead and frozen."
No, no, NO. You're not thinking like an American. Lawyers will set up lawsuits to raid the assets and interests of the dead, because dead people don't fight back. What law firm are you going to hire to safeguard your millions of dollars and give them back to you when you're alive again? Instead of finding a way to pocket all of it and leave you dead? The one with character? Hah!
Throw dead meat in a sharkpool and watch the sharks. Now imagine they're lawyers.
That's $180 million up for embezzlement right there.
I know this is probably a really stupid question, but I'm curious:
Do you have to rebuild your applications to take advantage of this? Will binary distributions still take advantage of the SMP speed boost, or do you need to recompile them with SMP support?
I know with Linux it's a mixed story, just wondering if it's the same deal with BSD...
you forgot OSE by Enea Systems. Since you forgot a vendor too, either:
a) You're as ignorant as he is, or:
b) He's not ignorant.
My hope is B. That said, the failure of poorly performing embedded Linux companies is just selective market forces in action. Windows resellers are going out of business too, does that mean Windows is doomed? What about the solid embedded Linux vendors who are making money in this space?
Interesting link to Kevin Dankward's rant on the fragmentation of embedded linux. It is a response to the "Embedded Linux Consortium"'s proposed standard, which he claims:
"As stated, the ELC proposal will allow closed source alternatives to be certified. An OS with runtime royalties can be certified; an unreliable and unrobust alternative can be certified; an OS with poor networking can be certified; an OS with few drivers and tools can be certified; an OS with a small number of trained programmers can be certified."
That's the first time I've seen anyone in the mainstream mention a certified, closed source version of Linux. There is certainly a very strong push between a few vendors to become the "industry standard for embedded linux"... but closed source?
"For email, the recipient pays, so email is "no different" from junk faxes (which are already illegal)."
The "recipient pays" argument, and the comparison to fax spamming, are arguments we tend to see a lot here. I'm no expert, but allow me to try to poke some (admittedly tiny) holes in them:
Recipient Pays - I haven't paid one red cent to Hotmail for all the spam I've gotten there. Hotmail, in some vast, socialistic sense may have paid for it (mainly through the support costs of user complaints and possible though unproven additional equipment expenditures - but Hotmail is not the recipient. Hotmail is an ASP, and the cost is hardly passed on to the user. The case given by the "recipient pays" folks - the case of the dialup user who pays by message or connection time - is all but deceased. The number of Internet users who have to pay for mailbox space or by-minute connection time is small and getting smaller. ISPs push unlimited airtime plans, and that's what almost everyone is buying.
Direct Internet Marketing is just like Fax Spamming!
- Faxes are a synchronous resource. Email is asynchronous. You cannot interrupt one email with another. This is big.
- Faxes have a paper cost and an ink cost as well as a maintainence cost that puts the per page cost around.50c. This is what the MBAs like to call a linear cost. You pay every time someone sends a fax. Email only has an overhead cost. You pay for your email infrastructure. If you have to increase it to handle more spam, then in some vague sense you've paid for spam, but it's nowhere near the direct cost-link to you that fax spamming provides. And it's a lot harder to show in a courtroom.
That's the best I can do. Anyone else care to take a crack at it?
"I think that exception covers all cases you mention above, no?"
After an admittedly quick reading, yes, I believe it does. My comment was aimed more at/. and the opinion expressed in the paper (quoted), and the tendency by many to fail to draw the distinction between spam and direct Internet marketing.
That said, your link/statement is right on, gracias.
The thing I see missing from all the discussion of spam on/., as well as this paper, is the quantified difference between true spam and helpful courtesy emails & alerts.
Right in the abstract, the author lays down his bias: "Unsolicited Electronic Mail, also called 'spam'". Not all unsolicited electronic mail is spam! To make a simplistic example, If someone from way back in your past (like high school) sends you an email from out of the blue, it's unsolicited (you didn't ask for it) but it's hardly spam.
In the same vein, e-commerce companies emailing their loyal customers about limited time offers and promotions is far different from the crapflood-esque pyramid schemes from.nl addresses that put 10,000 emails in your box by raping a mail relay, or porn promotions that include web bugs to check when you've opened the email and start spamming you with a message a minute.
Spam is malicious, and has a penetration rate under 1 in a million. Direct mailing from web vendors to their customers has a much higher penetration rate because they are sending their customers information about stuff they are used to buying!!.
To those who argue that direct mailing should be easily opted out of, consider this: how easy is it to opt out of the existing direct mail offers you receieve via snail mail? It usually takes some real effort. Why can't this apply to the web? Is it truly so awful that Amazon tries to find other things you're interested in based on your interests, and lets you know?
My company participates in direct mailing, and a lot of customers respond. Far, far, far, far less write us up angrily for sending them direct offers (I can count the number of times it's happened on one hand).
From the paper:
"Some definitions of spam include only messages that are commercial in nature. "Commercial" is generally defined in terms of message content rather than the sender's actual or presumed motivation for sending the message; a typical definition includes any message that promotes the sale of goods or services."
Only commercial offers are spam? Come ON. Direct marketing is as American as apple pie. The Internet is no different.
If you're going to wage war on direct marketing, wage it on all fronts: telemarketing, direct mail, direct email. There's no need to single out email.
People posting bruce springsteen songs labelled as metallica will get filtered out.
The better news:
People coughing into the microphone as a prelude to pirated music will get filtered in.
You gotta love it. Let me digitally fingerprint your analog data.
Now, if they're doing true, really good pattern/voice recognition, then they may actually cause the Napster crowd some problems.
I wonder if they'll filter out Puff Daddy songs because they contain samples from Sting?
(REJECTED: Song Recognized: The Police, "Every Breath You Take")
Let's eliminate email, so that all those employees will instead spend that nearly an hour a day talking to the people they used to email!!
We've got MBA's and we're brilliant!!!
Why do those engineers think they have to communicate with each other to write code? Silly engineers. We should keystroke monitor them to see how much code they're writing per minute, and just pay them per line of code. God it's great to be a middle manager!
Hi, I don't know anything about IP, store and forward routing, TTL, dijkstra's algorithm, or the differences between switched and packet forwarded algorithms. I don't even know that a majority of packet-forwarded traffic flows over antiquated voice networks configured in fiber-optic rings with 1:1 50ms protection switching, but no packet forwarding protection.
Hell, I don't even pay attention to the unbridled explosion in consumed bandwidth on the Internet, or the protocols like BGP4 that ISPs use to delineate their peering relationships and shut down unwanted traffic, decreasing network redundancy by entire orders of magnitude.
"I wonder if it'll be cheap enough for home use.:-)"
Considering you can put 100Gbps through 400kilomters on one strand of existing optical fiber, you're gonna have a completely fucked up home if you need more bandwidth than that.
That said, the article claims that this will "revolutionize the telecommunications industry" because it allows for longer-haul fibers without inline optical amplifiers.
That might be true, if we were using the existing fiber we have. But look at the people selling low-power in-line optical amplifiers - namely Corvis. Nobody's buying their shit. We have millions of miles of "dark fiber" in America - fiber that no one is leasing. In addition, no one is using the "long haul" capability provided by the new generation of companies such as Corvis - mainly because policing these long fibers for a break is expensive, in addition to the fact that in a store-and-forward network topology (like IP) you have to route at each hop, so there's no reason to go that far.
The only successful applications of long-haul fiberoptic technologies so far have been underwater trans-oceanic lines. and this technology may help with that. But revolutionize the telecommunications industry? FUD.
What would revolutionize the telco industry would be if Corporate America actually had applications they wanted to buy bandwidth for, and started doing it. Look at all the solid equipment providers with tanked stocks: lucent, cisco - the bandwidth explosion hasn't happened.
If you can buy an off the shelf Linux DVD player, does this remove the justification for DecSS?
No, because the justification for DeCSS is that source code is free speech, and is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Ways to remove the justification for DeCSS would be:
1) Open Source the DVD format and release it into the public domain
2) Amend the Constitution to remove the first Amendment
3) Have the Supreme Court rule that computer source code is not speech.
My prediction: the scramjet will successfully accelerate to Mach 5, plowing into a Chinese observation plane and obliterating it. The flaming wreckage will fall from the sky and land on a Japanese pleasure cruiser, sinking it.
The number of sites that slashdot will link to for stories just went through the floor. T & H worried that media will figure out that Slashdot is sucking its bandwidth and must be eliminated or purchased.
MPAA: using dynamic IP xxx.yyy.zzz.aaa, user Bob was sharing the movie "Leonard Part VI" on 3/17/2000, at 6pm.
Bob: No I wasn't.
MPAA: We have ISP logs to prove that you were. They show your IP.
Bob: But IP's can be spoofed. Meet my expert witness...
They really can only enforce this if they raid your facility. I run gnotella at random times and IPs, and the HD that contains the stuff I share has a big electromagnet under it with a panic button, and is stored behind a door with a magnetic field generator.
That said, this is exactly what the MPAA should be doing. Not attacking the enablers, but attacking the actual movie fans themselves.
"Nonetheless, Celera's message is not likely to comfort investors. Gene therapy holds out less promise as a result of this new understanding."
That's right, the Rockville MD based company that is busy literally patenting our asses has just discovered that it doesn't know what it's patenting. The whole model of patenting a gene that codes for a protein has fallen apart, since with 10 times as many proteins as genes, we don't really know what genes do anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Two very interesting things in the article:
1) "After Ivanov arrived in Seattle, accompanied by Gorshkov, agents posing as Invita officials asked the men to demonstrate their prowess on a computer outfitted with "sniffer" software to record every keystroke. After arresting the duo, they used account numbers and passwords obtained by the program to gain access to data stored in the computers in Russia, Schroeder said."
Ok, so they brought them to the U.S., told them to log into their computers in Russia, sniffed the passwords, and then used the sniffed passwords to log into the Russian machines. This is hacking? Social engineering, maybe...
2) "The agents downloaded the data, but did not view it until they obtained a search warrant from a U.S. federal court, he said."
Now this is interesting. They don't need a search warrant to break into your computer, only to read what's there. Which means that breaking into a computer isn't search and seizure.
Does this mean that if I break into FBI computers, but don't look at anything, that I haven't hacked them?
Very, very interesting precedent...
"These people will also set up bank trusts, etc. to preserve their interests as they lie dead and frozen."
No, no, NO. You're not thinking like an American. Lawyers will set up lawsuits to raid the assets and interests of the dead, because dead people don't fight back. What law firm are you going to hire to safeguard your millions of dollars and give them back to you when you're alive again? Instead of finding a way to pocket all of it and leave you dead? The one with character? Hah!
Throw dead meat in a sharkpool and watch the sharks. Now imagine they're lawyers.
That's $180 million up for embezzlement right there.
I know this is probably a really stupid question, but I'm curious:
Do you have to rebuild your applications to take advantage of this? Will binary distributions still take advantage of the SMP speed boost, or do you need to recompile them with SMP support?
I know with Linux it's a mixed story, just wondering if it's the same deal with BSD...
beat me with clue stick, please.
"My experience with meteor showers in the past has been hit or miss"
Jesus. The "hits" would explain a lot, dude. My advice: bullet proof glass. LOTS of bullet proof glass.
Where do you live, the moon?
you forgot OSE by Enea Systems. Since you forgot a vendor too, either:
a) You're as ignorant as he is, or:
b) He's not ignorant.
My hope is B. That said, the failure of poorly performing embedded Linux companies is just selective market forces in action. Windows resellers are going out of business too, does that mean Windows is doomed? What about the solid embedded Linux vendors who are making money in this space?
COUtrollGH COUGH
Interesting link to Kevin Dankward's rant on the fragmentation of embedded linux. It is a response to the "Embedded Linux Consortium"'s proposed standard, which he claims:
"As stated, the ELC proposal will allow closed source alternatives to be certified. An OS with runtime royalties can be certified; an unreliable and unrobust alternative can be certified; an OS with poor networking can be certified; an OS with few drivers and tools can be certified; an OS with a small number of trained programmers can be certified."
That's the first time I've seen anyone in the mainstream mention a certified, closed source version of Linux. There is certainly a very strong push between a few vendors to become the "industry standard for embedded linux"... but closed source?
yuck. how could any linux company be that stupid?
Hopefully he's just being alarmist.
"For email, the recipient pays, so email is "no different" from junk faxes (which are already illegal)."
.50c. This is what the MBAs like to call a linear cost. You pay every time someone sends a fax. Email only has an overhead cost. You pay for your email infrastructure. If you have to increase it to handle more spam, then in some vague sense you've paid for spam, but it's nowhere near the direct cost-link to you that fax spamming provides. And it's a lot harder to show in a courtroom.
The "recipient pays" argument, and the comparison to fax spamming, are arguments we tend to see a lot here. I'm no expert, but allow me to try to poke some (admittedly tiny) holes in them:
Recipient Pays
- I haven't paid one red cent to Hotmail for all the spam I've gotten there. Hotmail, in some vast, socialistic sense may have paid for it (mainly through the support costs of user complaints and possible though unproven additional equipment expenditures - but Hotmail is not the recipient. Hotmail is an ASP, and the cost is hardly passed on to the user. The case given by the "recipient pays" folks - the case of the dialup user who pays by message or connection time - is all but deceased. The number of Internet users who have to pay for mailbox space or by-minute connection time is small and getting smaller. ISPs push unlimited airtime plans, and that's what almost everyone is buying.
Direct Internet Marketing is just like Fax Spamming!
- Faxes are a synchronous resource. Email is asynchronous. You cannot interrupt one email with another. This is big.
- Faxes have a paper cost and an ink cost as well as a maintainence cost that puts the per page cost around
That's the best I can do. Anyone else care to take a crack at it?
"I think that exception covers all cases you mention above, no?"
/. and the opinion expressed in the paper (quoted), and the tendency by many to fail to draw the distinction between spam and direct Internet marketing.
After an admittedly quick reading, yes, I believe it does. My comment was aimed more at
That said, your link/statement is right on, gracias.
The thing I see missing from all the discussion of spam on /., as well as this paper, is the quantified difference between true spam and helpful courtesy emails & alerts.
.nl addresses that put 10,000 emails in your box by raping a mail relay, or porn promotions that include web bugs to check when you've opened the email and start spamming you with a message a minute.
Right in the abstract, the author lays down his bias: "Unsolicited Electronic Mail, also called 'spam'". Not all unsolicited electronic mail is spam! To make a simplistic example, If someone from way back in your past (like high school) sends you an email from out of the blue, it's unsolicited (you didn't ask for it) but it's hardly spam.
In the same vein, e-commerce companies emailing their loyal customers about limited time offers and promotions is far different from the crapflood-esque pyramid schemes from
Spam is malicious, and has a penetration rate under 1 in a million. Direct mailing from web vendors to their customers has a much higher penetration rate because they are sending their customers information about stuff they are used to buying!!.
To those who argue that direct mailing should be easily opted out of, consider this: how easy is it to opt out of the existing direct mail offers you receieve via snail mail? It usually takes some real effort. Why can't this apply to the web? Is it truly so awful that Amazon tries to find other things you're interested in based on your interests, and lets you know?
My company participates in direct mailing, and a lot of customers respond. Far, far, far, far less write us up angrily for sending them direct offers (I can count the number of times it's happened on one hand).
From the paper:
"Some definitions of spam include only messages that are commercial in nature. "Commercial" is generally defined in terms of message content rather than the sender's actual or presumed motivation for sending the message; a typical definition includes any message that promotes the sale of goods or services."
Only commercial offers are spam? Come ON. Direct marketing is as American as apple pie. The Internet is no different.
If you're going to wage war on direct marketing, wage it on all fronts: telemarketing, direct mail, direct email. There's no need to single out email.
The good news:
People posting bruce springsteen songs labelled as metallica will get filtered out.
The better news:
People coughing into the microphone as a prelude to pirated music will get filtered in.
You gotta love it. Let me digitally fingerprint your analog data.
Now, if they're doing true, really good pattern/voice recognition, then they may actually cause the Napster crowd some problems.
I wonder if they'll filter out Puff Daddy songs because they contain samples from Sting?
(REJECTED: Song Recognized: The Police, "Every Breath You Take")
heh.
"``The First Amendment clearly applies to the Internet,'' Zilly said. ``The law says that a person has a right to speak anonymously.''"
Great. The First Amendment clearly applies to the Internet.
Does that mean that a person has a right to speak anonymously about DeCSS?
I keep getting such a mixed message from our legal system.
Let's eliminate email, so that all those employees will instead spend that nearly an hour a day talking to the people they used to email!!
We've got MBA's and we're brilliant!!!
Why do those engineers think they have to communicate with each other to write code? Silly engineers. We should keystroke monitor them to see how much code they're writing per minute, and just pay them per line of code. God it's great to be a middle manager!
word.
Spain imposed a fine on Microsoft for violating Spanish laws on data-transfer, for transfering employee information from servers in Spain to the U.S.
Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You stole my data. Prepare to die.
Hi, I don't know anything about IP, store and forward routing, TTL, dijkstra's algorithm, or the differences between switched and packet forwarded algorithms. I don't even know that a majority of packet-forwarded traffic flows over antiquated voice networks configured in fiber-optic rings with 1:1 50ms protection switching, but no packet forwarding protection.
Hell, I don't even pay attention to the unbridled explosion in consumed bandwidth on the Internet, or the protocols like BGP4 that ISPs use to delineate their peering relationships and shut down unwanted traffic, decreasing network redundancy by entire orders of magnitude.
But, um, slashdot, I was wondering...
why can't i get to my porn?
thanks.
you mean you can make clothes that act as a loudspeaker
riding the subway is hard enough already!!
that said, think of the applications for screwing with people if you could make your sweater talk... or a window... or a mirror.... oh my.
sorry, need to go make devilish plans...
"I wonder if it'll be cheap enough for home use. :-)"
Considering you can put 100Gbps through 400kilomters on one strand of existing optical fiber, you're gonna have a completely fucked up home if you need more bandwidth than that.
That said, the article claims that this will "revolutionize the telecommunications industry" because it allows for longer-haul fibers without inline optical amplifiers.
That might be true, if we were using the existing fiber we have. But look at the people selling low-power in-line optical amplifiers - namely Corvis. Nobody's buying their shit. We have millions of miles of "dark fiber" in America - fiber that no one is leasing. In addition, no one is using the "long haul" capability provided by the new generation of companies such as Corvis - mainly because policing these long fibers for a break is expensive, in addition to the fact that in a store-and-forward network topology (like IP) you have to route at each hop, so there's no reason to go that far.
The only successful applications of long-haul fiberoptic technologies so far have been underwater trans-oceanic lines. and this technology may help with that. But revolutionize the telecommunications industry? FUD.
What would revolutionize the telco industry would be if Corporate America actually had applications they wanted to buy bandwidth for, and started doing it. Look at all the solid equipment providers with tanked stocks: lucent, cisco - the bandwidth explosion hasn't happened.
sigh. fud.
If you can buy an off the shelf Linux DVD player, does this remove the justification for DecSS?
No, because the justification for DeCSS is that source code is free speech, and is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Ways to remove the justification for DeCSS would be:
1) Open Source the DVD format and release it into the public domain
2) Amend the Constitution to remove the first Amendment
3) Have the Supreme Court rule that computer source code is not speech.
Of those three options, 3) is the most likely.
No, Bud Light.
My prediction: the scramjet will successfully accelerate to Mach 5, plowing into a Chinese observation plane and obliterating it. The flaming wreckage will fall from the sky and land on a Japanese pleasure cruiser, sinking it.
George Bush will blame the Russians.
(let me translate for you)
The number of sites that slashdot will link to for stories just went through the floor. T & H worried that media will figure out that Slashdot is sucking its bandwidth and must be eliminated or purchased.
News at 11 (ON CHANNEL 1!! mwuahahaha!)
Do you have any idea how hard it's going to be to sell the public on the Y2.038K bug? Jesus.
I haven't seen a challenge like this since OS/2...
Please do this.
Please do what? Go out of business?
(*#&$%#$'in ambiguous reference.
MPAA: using dynamic IP xxx.yyy.zzz.aaa, user Bob was sharing the movie "Leonard Part VI" on 3/17/2000, at 6pm.
Bob: No I wasn't.
MPAA: We have ISP logs to prove that you were. They show your IP.
Bob: But IP's can be spoofed. Meet my expert witness...
They really can only enforce this if they raid your facility. I run gnotella at random times and IPs, and the HD that contains the stuff I share has a big electromagnet under it with a panic button, and is stored behind a door with a magnetic field generator.
That said, this is exactly what the MPAA should be doing. Not attacking the enablers, but attacking the actual movie fans themselves.
Looking for the good news? Here it is:
"Nonetheless, Celera's message is not likely to comfort investors. Gene therapy holds out less promise as a result of this new understanding."
That's right, the Rockville MD based company that is busy literally patenting our asses has just discovered that it doesn't know what it's patenting. The whole model of patenting a gene that codes for a protein has fallen apart, since with 10 times as many proteins as genes, we don't really know what genes do anymore.
Hallelujiah.