Branson is a master of PR, and I wouldn't be remotely surprised if this venture gets quietly binned, once its provided its much needed channels to allow Branson time to plug his newly launched credit card.
If so, he plans pretty far in advance:
Domain Name: VIRGINGALACTIC.COM
Created on..............: Wed, May 08, 2002 Record last updated on..: Sat, Dec 06, 2003
Frankly, I think it's a shame that it is so hard to be a musician without having to sign with a soulless record company who only wants the rights to your intellectual property. It would be nice if selling music were more like selling your house.
You mean how you can either sign with a soulless real estate agency and get a lot of people passing through and publicity, or how you can go it yourself and take twice as long to actually sell? (I agree with what you're saying, it's just selling house doesn't seem that much easier)
What would have been clever is if a bunch of independent musicians had gotten together in the dot-com boom, when you could still get millions of dollars from venture capitalists just by adding "e" to the beginning of your company name, and formed some sort of online recording label with low overhead which could actually get artists out there and on the radio or selling non-DRM mp3s for cheap. And it probably would have been profitable and not gone under, since people actually want music (As opposed to other sites whose business model was 'make a website that uses Flash and then buy as many Aeron chairs as possible')
Once you get one record label that doesn't have slavery contracts yet still gets the artists heard on the radio and the charts, it'll be the beginning of the end for current recording contracts and practices. But until then, it still sucks.
ISTR thinking that was pretty stupid at the time, but if the idea is being used by other companies, *someone* must be using these services. Though actually, mylastemail.com seems to be down right now, so maybe not. There's a Google cache of it, if you care.
I have every legal right to do anything I want with what I own.
Gee officer, I'm awful sorry I shot the guy, but heck, I own the gun, I got a right to do what I want with it and... hey... wait.. what are you doing with those handcuffs.
If I buy a CD, I can copy it as many times as I want, give out those copies to anyone. It is no different than when people used to make copies of tapes back in the 80's and early 90's. Explain to me how it was different back then from today?
Um, because people didn't give tapes out to anyone. They gave them to a few friends. Do that now, and the RIAA probably won't notice. That of course doesn't mean they don't care. The RIAA was in fact very displeased with the idea of taping records and trading them. But they didn't own enough Congressmen to do anything about it.
Or how is this different than a decade ago when people made copies with their VHS tape? And then they shared it. Heck, I knew people who taped movies off HBO or Cinemax and then saved it.
It's not. Jack Valenti, in his famous "VCR is the Boston strangler" testimony compared people time-shifting shows to people taping records and trading them.
But you're missing one key point. You talk about trading your music with friends. That's great. Except that's not what everyone is upset about. They're upset about trading it with *everyone*. If you have a password-protected FTP server with music for your friends (or even for you to listen to remotely), that's fine. If you transfer files to your friends via IM, I don't think the RIAA will notice or care.
But you can't seriously claim everyone on the Internet is your friend. Or even everyone on a certain P2P network. Now, if you want to make the argument that you should be able to give your music away to everyone for free, that's fine, but that's totally different from giving it away to only your friends.
Flat out and to the point: I have a right to privacy.
Yes, and no. If you want U.S. Mail service, your address is published by the USPS and sold to marketing agencies and city directories. If you want phone service, your phone number and name (or initials) are published in the phone book. Why should it not be the case that if you want your own domain, you provide correct information?
Contrary to popular belief, you can in fact live without having your own domain. It is not one of the fundamental rights guaranteed to people. If you needed it to live, that would be different. If the grocery store required you to publish contact info to buy food, that would be different.
my right to privacy is my own. If you don't like it, tough shit.
And their right to refuse to sell you a domain is their own. And if you don't like it, tough shit.
I fail to see why everyone gets so pissy about publishing whois info, and yet doesn't seem to care about having their phone number publish in the phone book. In both cases, you can pay to have it unlisted.
... I can watch my old Betamax tapes again? Good, I hate Congress interfering with my video formats. Next thing you know, they'll make DVD+R illegal, and only DVD-R formats will be allowed!
No, seriously, they could have chosen a better name. "Save Betamax" doesn't mean shit to Joe Consumer (How many people actually remember that decision?). If you phrase it as "They're going to make it illegal to set your VCR to tape a show while you're away on vacation", that'll mean a lot more, although it would be a crappy domain name. But I'll be calling anyway, and you all should too. Write letters to the editors of your local papers,while you're at it.
It's only propaganda if you let it be propaganda. In the age of the global internet, with hundreds of different news sources at your disposal (or accessible via your local public library), it's real hard to call something propaganda.
Flash back to World War II, for example. Consider the famous German propaganda broadcasters - they were on government-owned radio stations, broadcasting to the German people that England was about to surrender, and Hitler was marching through London. The average person had no way of knowing whether or not that was true. They couldn't go online to someone's blog showing the Allies storming the beaches at Normandy. They couldn't flip to FOX News showing German troops freezing in Russia. And they couldn't turn on AMC showing Steve McQueen jumping his motorcycle across the border. It was either accept what the government said, or die.
Nowadays, however, you can find hundreds of sites devoted to debunking Michael Moore. You can go look up the Congressional Record and see if all those people in F9/11 really did object to certifying the election results and if it was really true that no member of the Senate would sign their objections (it was). You can search newspapers and see old video clips and see if Moore really did edit Charlton Heston's speech in Bowling for Columbine (he did). You can see if the family Moore interviewed really did lose a son in Iraq (they did).
The days of newsreels in the movie theater are long gone. If you go to any movie and take what is says as fact (Be it Fahrenheit 9/11, I Robot, the Passion of the Christ, or the Pokemon movie), you're an idiot. Moore has said many times that he wants his movies to raise questions, not indoctrinate people. That's why I go to see them - to have my values and viewpoints challenged. But you can't suddenly base your entire life on them, any more than you should change your values based on someone coming up to you on the street and saying that your political party sucks.
I'm not a huge fan of Moore outside his movies - I think a lot of his speeches are grandstanding, and I thought he was kind of a jerk at the Oscars, but that doesn't mean he can't make movies that make you think. I mean, David Lynch makes good movies, but man I wouldn't want to spend 5 minutes along with him.
Either you live in some alternate universe in which vendors work on bugs for individual users
No, but I live in the universe where, for a large sum of money in the form of yearly support contract, a vendor will fix a bug that's screwing over a large company if you hound them enough.
Why will he fail? Assuming it's linux on intel hardware, there really isn't a huge amount of difference between distributions.
Um, no, Not even a little bit. It doesn't matter if you think Debian is the greatest thing in the world, or something you found at the bottom of your garbage can, there's one key difference.
Imagine some updated package broke all your applications. And your quarterly statements are due tomorrow. And the CEO is touring your server farm. And the planets are aligned infavorably. And it's Friday the 13th. Let me show two different scenarios:
Employee: Dear Redhat, your latest package broke our applications. Please fix it. Redhat: Um, ok, we're looking into it. Boss: What's going on? Employee: I've reported the issue and taken the action item to follow up with Red Hat. They're working on it. Boss: Carry on. Employee: Um, look harder please, remember we're paying you all this money for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Redhat: Ah, ok, I think we've found the problem. We'll try out a bug fix and get back to you. Boss: Well, is it fixed yet? Employee: Not yet, but Redhat says they believe they've solved the problem. CEO: What's going on here?! Boss: Well sir, we ran into an issue with our latest upgrade, but the vendor is on it, and we'll make sure they get us the fix. CEO: Good work. Carry on. Redhat: Here's an updated RPM, try this. Employee: Hey, that worked, great.
And the alternative:
Employee: Dear debian-users@lists.debian.org, the latest package broke our application. Can you fix it? Random Dude 1: Uh, no, but you can. That's the beauty of Open Source. Employee: But I don't really know much about kernel hacking so I... Random Dude 2: Look, if you don't like it, maybe you should go back to Windows. Employee: Hey, I like Linux, I'm just not in a position to track down this kernel panic that happens whenever I... Random Dude 3: You get what you pay for, people are doing this for free. RMS: The HURD kernel doesn't have this problem. Employee: What's the HURD? Ken Brown: The HURD is a stolen copy of SCO UNIX. Duh. Boss: So, is it fixed yet? Employee: No, but I'm learning about ideology and wanking. Boss: Did you just say wanking? And why aren't you following up with the vendor? Employee: Well, there's not really a vendor so much as a bunch of guys talking about whether or not it should be called GNU/Linux. CEO: What's this about there not being a vendor? Boss: I don't know sir, I certainly didn't approve this. CEO: Well, who installed software without a support contact. Employee: I did, sir. CEO; Tell me, employee, can you say 'Would you like fries with that?' Employee: I can. CEO: Good. You'll need it.
my favorite is the Target Alert extension which displays a small graphic next to links that are not web pages.
I came across this a while ago and thought it would be useful for helping out some novice users who don't understand helper applications and the like. Alas, it's mostly useless. It uses the 3 digit extension, not the MIME type. So it's useless for content served dynamically via CGI scripts. It would also be trivial for a malicious user to create a website, post some.doc files, which would show up as Word Documents, and instead change the MIME type and serve up JavaScript or VBScript to do something evil.
The right way to do this is to get the HTTP Headers and see what MIME type is being returned by the server.
I'm a FireFox user - have been since it was Phoenix - but so many of the skins and plugins have too much of a "Oooh, shiny!" factor to them. How about more flexible X.509 configuration or a harcore Kiosk mode (that's the reason most kiosks run IE) or something like that. It has the same problem as WinAMP - there are far too many skins (40% of which have UI design issues; 40% of which are identical to each other, and 20% might be useful) and not enough technical plugins.
To pre-emptively fend off trolls, yes I know it's free, you get what you pay for, if you don't like it go code it yourself, etc, etc.
First, see if your college has a laptop registration program. Many larger colleges offer this. Talk to your IT department or possibly the campus police. My school partnered with "STOP" (Security Tracking of Office Property) - for a $10 one-time fee, your laptop was registered with STOP, and you got a barcoded tag applied to your laptop. The tag claims to require 500lbs of force to remove (easily enough to crack the screen and thus eliminate the resale value) and if removed leaves "Stolen property" permanently etched into the plastic. They even have mini tags for PDAs - I had a stolen PDA recovered - the battery pack and stylus were missing, but the PDA was recovered, although they had tried to remove the tag. There are other programs too, but be warned some of these tags don't attach cases made of weird material.
You should at least purchase a cable lock for your laptop - they're about $15, and worth it. Sure you can cut it, but laptop thieves are looking to grab something and walk away without anyone noticing - they'll move on if yours is locked up. And obviously don't leave your laptop bag lying around.
Ask your parents to call their insurance company and see what is covered. Many homeowners policies specifically include dorm room coverage, or you can add it for a nominal yearly fee (like $30-$50). You can also get a renter's policy (about $50-$100/year depending on how much coverage you want), but some of those specifically don't apply to dorms, so check on that.
Write down your MAC address (aka hardware address, ethernet address: 00:12:34:56:78:9a) for all your cards. Many laptops are stolen by other students. Your IT department, if they're halfway competent, should be able to track MAC addresses on the network (certainly they can if they use DHCP) - it's good to report this when your laptop is stolen. I work in IT and every year we recover 2-3 laptops this way. Some thieves are pretty stupid.
In fact, write down all identifying information of your laptop and keep it somewhere. You'd be surprised how many stolen laptops show up on eBay. I can think of several times where laptops were recovered by the campus police posing as buyers on eBay, and they could match the serial numbers because the student wrote them down.
Sooo... by the same rationale, do you also support the lawsuits brought against... Grokster
Um, no. Completely different. There are legitimate uses for Grokster. There exist pieces of music not copyrighted by the RIAA. There exist independent artists who publish their own music on P2P networks. And there exists free software which can be distributed this way. Thus it takes a lot of convincing to prove that Grokster is encouraging folks to break the law.
However, there does not exist (in the US at least, and it appears this site only works in the US) a debt collector can legimiately impersonate someone else when attempting to collect a debt. (Sure, he can do that when calling his wife or ordering pizza, but who cares). Thus, this site, by explicitly targeting debt collectors, is slimy, and they should be prohibited from doing so. If they want to target ex-spouses or ex-boy/girlfriends, fine, as long as they stay within stalking laws, but that's different.
The basic difference is that Caller ID spoofing (as opposed to simple blocking) has no evident legitimate use, unlike video recorders, file routing systems, or firearms.
Indeed. You have the right to privacy (ie: caller-ID blocking - already offered by the phone companies). You do not, however, have the right to impersonate someone else.
Jepson and his partners believe that collection agencies in particular will find the service invaluable for getting recalcitrant debtors to answer the phone.
They should do their research. There are very strict laws about debt collectors calling. They cannot contact you outside 8AM-9PM, for example. If they call you, they are legally required to provide a mailing address if you ask, and if you send them a letter requesting no further contact, it is illegal for them to continue to contact you (except one call saying they received the letter). They can still sue your ass in court, and you can get served with papers, etc, but the debt collector themselves cannot contact you. Additionally, if you have an attorney, they must call the attorney, not you.
Most importantly, they are also prohibited from misrepresenting themselves. I'd say falsified caller id falls pretty clearly under misrepresenting. (They can block caller-id, that's fine, but they can't say they're Joe's Pizza, for example). I sincerely hope these guys get sued into oblivion for encouraging slimy debt collection processes. It's not clear the service itself is illegal, but debt collectors using it to identify themselves as someone else very clearly is. I predict some attorney general is going to have a field day with this. I plan to write to mine about it.
new laws need to cover this kind of disruption, it's a thief pure and simple.
No, no, no. Anytime something happens in technology, people start clamoring for new laws. Then the special interest groups get involved, and then we end up with a law that is worse than the crime it is intended to prevent. Like, say, I dunno, the DMCA. There were plenty of laws about copyright infringement already. It was already illegal to take a camcorder into movie theaters and make tapes to sell on the street corner. All they had to do was extend that to the Internet. But isntead we have the DMCA.
I'm sure there are laws about interfering with commerce already. Just ammend them to include DDOS attacks. If we start writing new laws, they'll get more and more restrictive and before you know it, hitting Reload on a page more than twice in 5 minutes will land you in jail for cyber terrorism.
Are they just trying to be smooth, or do you think their license agreements for the songs actually requires them to talk over some portion of the song, to try and discourage exactly the kind of activity you described (i.e., taping the songs off the radio)?
No, they just like the sound of their voices. Or maybe it helps them squeeze more advertising revenue into an hour - like how the local FOX affiliate cuts off the last 3 seconds of the Simpsons in syndication before every commercial break to have moer commercials.
In fact, it's gotten so bad, I know several radio stations who make a big deal of plugging the fact that they never talk over a song. And it's true, they don't.
It may not be inflammatory exactly, but it's certainly dishonest. The title implies that they were sued because they were music lovers, or perhaps despite being music lovers. It seeks to evoke feelings of pity and empathy - "Hey, I love music too!".
And yet, for some reason, Slashdot was all upset about the INDUCE act, which was originally plugged as a way to save kids from Internet molestation and porn. Slashdot editors (Pot) meet Sen. Hatch (Kettle).
So if you start losing VoIP service and your modem starts cycling... be quick to report it so they can change out your device.
Hrm, my digital phone went out. Internet too. Weird. Oh well, I'll just pick up the phone and call the cable company so..... oh, crap.
Enh, no big deal, I'll just dial in to the modem pool at work. AT&F1 ATDT6175551234 NO DIALTONE
Oh, right. Crap.
Honestly, that's the single biggest reason for me to keep my landline. Redundancy. I want the ability to dial out if cable fails. Heck, with my laptop, I can even have connectivity in a power outage (yes, I've done this before). That and one of my friends got screwed by this when his digital phone service crapped out. He was complaining about it to me over IM and the fact that he couldn't even call to report it. Yes, yes, cell phones, but cell phone reception can be pretty crappy in large apartment buildings, and that doesn't help for connectivity, since cell modems are expensive.
The WiFi data-link layer may not be encrypted in 80% of cases but that doesn't mean that encryption isn't used or enforced at a higher level. You can run VPN, SSL, ssh etc. quite happily over what might appear to be an 'insecure' WiFi link.
Finally. I was starting think that no one on Slashdot understood that. I don't use WEP on my network. So yes, it's not secure, but neither is my cable modem. Everyone else on my head end can see what I'm doing. For traffic I care about, I use SSH, or SSL, or Kerberos. I really don't give a crap that people can see that I'm posting to/. right now. However, I give a crap if they can read my mail, so I PGP encrypt the stuff I care about. And I care if they can see my password, so I use SSH to login remotely. So "secure" in this case is ambiguous and therefore a meaningless statistic.
Tell me how many wireless networks you can associate with and actually use.
Amen to that. A friend of mine made such a big deal about the fact that I didn't use WEP and I was just waiting for some spammer to come along and use my network. So I said, "Fine, bring your laptop over, I'm going to go watch TV, call me when you have connectivity." After about 20 minutes he gives up and admits that maybe WEP isn't needed if you take other measures to prevent access to the network.
Most of these "studies" are just some guy running around with Netstumbler saying "Oooh, look, an SSID, and it's not using WEP. Oh, well, there's another insecure network." I'll take them seriously when, for each non-WEP network, he shows what IP address he was able to get, and shows both a ping and traceroute to, say, Google, or somewhere so he can prove that a spammer or kiddie porn guy or some other horrible person could use these wireless networks for terrorism. And maybe nmap on both ends too. After all, just because they're allowing ICMP packets through doesn't mean you can actually do anything useful - they could be blocking all ports outbound). Until that happens, these are just meaningless statistics.
For exactly which economic bracket is $20 considered "disposable"? I consider myself middle-class, and I'm not going to throw anything away unless it cost under $8, if I can help it.
Well, you said you're trolling, but I suppose there might be people who have never used disposable cameras. They're not throw-away. You're basically renting them. You're paying for the convenience of not owning a camera or not having one with you. The camera doesn't get thrown away when you're done. You just don't get to keep it. More like leasing than renting, I guess. You take it to the processor, and they give you pictures and then refurbish the camera and sell it again.
Who the hell at SCO _ever_ thought this would be anything but a disaster?
Oh, I don't think anyone was *that* stupid (No, not even Darl). But as history has demonstrated many times, if you're in the right place at the right time, disasters can be very profitable. This isn't about SCO owning Linux or UNIX -- it never was. This is about a calculated attempt to manipulate investors and the stock market.
To me this is just a bunch of script kiddies trying to get attention,
And Slashdot is giving them attention, which is a huge mistake. These people do not deserve any media attention at all. They are not martyrs, they are not fighting for freedom, and they are serving nobody's interest. If the websites get DDOSed or defaced, all it's going to do is provide support for Ashcroft and the fight against "cyber-terrorism". They could also spin it as an attack on the democratic process from al-Qaeda. "They're trying to prevent us from having an election, quick pass this new legislation to designate things like wget and shell scripts as weapons of mass terrorism. And it probably would pass. And we'd all be screwed.
I'd have a lot more respect for these people if they set up a website about why the GOP sucks. And it would probably take less time, too.
Did you ever learn anything about computer security?
Did you ever learn anything about end users?
It's all well and good to say don't connect it to the network before patching, but end users don't know that. Nor should they have to know that. It is totally unreasonable to think that the first thought through Joe User's head should be "Right, I bought this brand new machine, but I shouldn't connect it to the network since it might be compromised."
End users are only very recently learning about service packs and patching, etc. Remember, prior to Windows XP, service packs were for business operating systems. How many end users did you see running NT 4? Even those folks running 2K at home were clueful folks - home PCs sold at CompUSA and the like shipped with 98SE or ME. You can't expect them to gain all this knowledge overnight.
have all relevant patches available on removeable media - that has been verified authentic - and install sans network.
And you obtain them how? In an IT environment, sure, it's trivial, beacuse you have N different computers, and probably N different platforms to use to create this media. Most folks still only have one PC. Sure, some people can burn CDs at work (but many workplaces severely limit what users can do on their machines, and lots of places prevent CD burning on work machines for corporate espionage reasons), and others might have friends with CD burners, but that's still a lot of effort, and it doesn't cover everyone.
It's totally unreasonable to expect a consumer to jump through all these hoops. (I'm not saying they shouldn't take these steps, just that they shouldn't *have* to take these steps in order to make a consumer electronics device work) Several changes need to be made.
MS should produce a crapload of service pack CDs and give them to OEMs and every new computer should come with a current one. (They did this with NT4 SP3 and haven't done it since to my knowledge). They should also ship them to large stores (BestBuy, CompUSA, etc) and sell them for a low price (ie: $0.99) enough to prevent people from taking more than they need, but not terribly expensive. MS is notoriously tight-fisted when it comes to stuff like this, despite the fact it's their fault the product is insecure. Carmakers wouldn't get away with charging for recalled parts. For example, MS refuses to ship CDs to colleges. They'll ship one for every 50 or 100 students, but that's it, and that's ONLY if you have a Select license. Given that in that quantity the CDs cost fractions of a cent each, there's no reason for this. I can understand them being reluctant to make a CD with hotfixes, since those come out so frequently, but once a service pack is out, it's out, there's no reason not to make a CD except to penny-pinch.
I applaude Real for taking the first step to end device lock-in. Device lock-in is bad for consumers. I do think they're going to lose against Apple, but by taking the first step, one can only hope some day iPods will no longer be exclusive to iTunes and vice versa.
iPods aren't really exclusive to iTunes. Apple hasn't gotten upset about the 3rd party apps for Linux, for example, to load your own audio files onto the iPod. They did get upset about the ones that pulled metadata from the iTunes Music Store, but you can't fault them - they're paying for the bandwith - why should they have to make it available to non-customers?
And really, the iTunes Music Store has the least lock-in. You purchase the file, burn it to CD, and then rip it to MP3. Bingo, you have an MP3 that can be played on any MP3 player. It takes a few extra steps, sure, but it's better than WMA where you don't get to burn a real audio CD, and much better than protected CDs themselves.
And there are plenty of other vendors working with Apple. Real just decided to go the "fuck you" route, and Apple is upset.
And if the situation were reversed, and Apple went and found a workaround to put their.m4p files on Real's music player (assuming they had one), I'd say that Real has a right to be upset.
Slashdot Mirror
If so, he plans pretty far in advance:
You mean how you can either sign with a soulless real estate agency and get a lot of people passing through and publicity, or how you can go it yourself and take twice as long to actually sell? (I agree with what you're saying, it's just selling house doesn't seem that much easier)
What would have been clever is if a bunch of independent musicians had gotten together in the dot-com boom, when you could still get millions of dollars from venture capitalists just by adding "e" to the beginning of your company name, and formed some sort of online recording label with low overhead which could actually get artists out there and on the radio or selling non-DRM mp3s for cheap. And it probably would have been profitable and not gone under, since people actually want music (As opposed to other sites whose business model was 'make a website that uses Flash and then buy as many Aeron chairs as possible')
Once you get one record label that doesn't have slavery contracts yet still gets the artists heard on the radio and the charts, it'll be the beginning of the end for current recording contracts and practices. But until then, it still sucks.
ISTR thinking that was pretty stupid at the time, but if the idea is being used by other companies, *someone* must be using these services. Though actually, mylastemail.com seems to be down right now, so maybe not. There's a Google cache of it, if you care.
Gee officer, I'm awful sorry I shot the guy, but heck, I own the gun, I got a right to do what I want with it and ... hey ... wait .. what are you doing with those handcuffs.
If I buy a CD, I can copy it as many times as I want, give out those copies to anyone. It is no different than when people used to make copies of tapes back in the 80's and early 90's. Explain to me how it was different back then from today?
Um, because people didn't give tapes out to anyone. They gave them to a few friends. Do that now, and the RIAA probably won't notice. That of course doesn't mean they don't care. The RIAA was in fact very displeased with the idea of taping records and trading them. But they didn't own enough Congressmen to do anything about it.
Or how is this different than a decade ago when people made copies with their VHS tape? And then they shared it. Heck, I knew people who taped movies off HBO or Cinemax and then saved it.
It's not. Jack Valenti, in his famous "VCR is the Boston strangler" testimony compared people time-shifting shows to people taping records and trading them.
But you're missing one key point. You talk about trading your music with friends. That's great. Except that's not what everyone is upset about. They're upset about trading it with *everyone*. If you have a password-protected FTP server with music for your friends (or even for you to listen to remotely), that's fine. If you transfer files to your friends via IM, I don't think the RIAA will notice or care.
But you can't seriously claim everyone on the Internet is your friend. Or even everyone on a certain P2P network. Now, if you want to make the argument that you should be able to give your music away to everyone for free, that's fine, but that's totally different from giving it away to only your friends.
Yes, and no. If you want U.S. Mail service, your address is published by the USPS and sold to marketing agencies and city directories. If you want phone service, your phone number and name (or initials) are published in the phone book. Why should it not be the case that if you want your own domain, you provide correct information?
Contrary to popular belief, you can in fact live without having your own domain. It is not one of the fundamental rights guaranteed to people. If you needed it to live, that would be different. If the grocery store required you to publish contact info to buy food, that would be different.
my right to privacy is my own. If you don't like it, tough shit.
And their right to refuse to sell you a domain is their own. And if you don't like it, tough shit.
I fail to see why everyone gets so pissy about publishing whois info, and yet doesn't seem to care about having their phone number publish in the phone book. In both cases, you can pay to have it unlisted.
No, seriously, they could have chosen a better name. "Save Betamax" doesn't mean shit to Joe Consumer (How many people actually remember that decision?). If you phrase it as "They're going to make it illegal to set your VCR to tape a show while you're away on vacation", that'll mean a lot more, although it would be a crappy domain name. But I'll be calling anyway, and you all should too. Write letters to the editors of your local papers,while you're at it.
Kang: "It's a two-party system. You have to vote for one of us."
Person in crowd: "I believe I'll vote for a third party candidate!"
Kodos: "Go ahead - throw your vote away!"
(Pan to Ross Perot in crowd punching though his hat)
***************
Kodos: "All hail President Kang!"
Marge: "I can't believe we have to build a ray gun to aim at a planet I never even heard of."
Homer: "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos."
Flash back to World War II, for example. Consider the famous German propaganda broadcasters - they were on government-owned radio stations, broadcasting to the German people that England was about to surrender, and Hitler was marching through London. The average person had no way of knowing whether or not that was true. They couldn't go online to someone's blog showing the Allies storming the beaches at Normandy. They couldn't flip to FOX News showing German troops freezing in Russia. And they couldn't turn on AMC showing Steve McQueen jumping his motorcycle across the border. It was either accept what the government said, or die.
Nowadays, however, you can find hundreds of sites devoted to debunking Michael Moore. You can go look up the Congressional Record and see if all those people in F9/11 really did object to certifying the election results and if it was really true that no member of the Senate would sign their objections (it was). You can search newspapers and see old video clips and see if Moore really did edit Charlton Heston's speech in Bowling for Columbine (he did). You can see if the family Moore interviewed really did lose a son in Iraq (they did).
The days of newsreels in the movie theater are long gone. If you go to any movie and take what is says as fact (Be it Fahrenheit 9/11, I Robot, the Passion of the Christ, or the Pokemon movie), you're an idiot. Moore has said many times that he wants his movies to raise questions, not indoctrinate people. That's why I go to see them - to have my values and viewpoints challenged. But you can't suddenly base your entire life on them, any more than you should change your values based on someone coming up to you on the street and saying that your political party sucks.
I'm not a huge fan of Moore outside his movies - I think a lot of his speeches are grandstanding, and I thought he was kind of a jerk at the Oscars, but that doesn't mean he can't make movies that make you think. I mean, David Lynch makes good movies, but man I wouldn't want to spend 5 minutes along with him.
No, but I live in the universe where, for a large sum of money in the form of yearly support contract, a vendor will fix a bug that's screwing over a large company if you hound them enough.
Um, no, Not even a little bit. It doesn't matter if you think Debian is the greatest thing in the world, or something you found at the bottom of your garbage can, there's one key difference.
Imagine some updated package broke all your applications. And your quarterly statements are due tomorrow. And the CEO is touring your server farm. And the planets are aligned infavorably. And it's Friday the 13th. Let me show two different scenarios:
And the alternative:
I came across this a while ago and thought it would be useful for helping out some novice users who don't understand helper applications and the like. Alas, it's mostly useless. It uses the 3 digit extension, not the MIME type. So it's useless for content served dynamically via CGI scripts. It would also be trivial for a malicious user to create a website, post some .doc files, which would show up as Word Documents, and instead change the MIME type and serve up JavaScript or VBScript to do something evil.
The right way to do this is to get the HTTP Headers and see what MIME type is being returned by the server.
I'm a FireFox user - have been since it was Phoenix - but so many of the skins and plugins have too much of a "Oooh, shiny!" factor to them. How about more flexible X.509 configuration or a harcore Kiosk mode (that's the reason most kiosks run IE) or something like that. It has the same problem as WinAMP - there are far too many skins (40% of which have UI design issues; 40% of which are identical to each other, and 20% might be useful) and not enough technical plugins.
To pre-emptively fend off trolls, yes I know it's free, you get what you pay for, if you don't like it go code it yourself, etc, etc.
You should at least purchase a cable lock for your laptop - they're about $15, and worth it. Sure you can cut it, but laptop thieves are looking to grab something and walk away without anyone noticing - they'll move on if yours is locked up. And obviously don't leave your laptop bag lying around.
Ask your parents to call their insurance company and see what is covered. Many homeowners policies specifically include dorm room coverage, or you can add it for a nominal yearly fee (like $30-$50). You can also get a renter's policy (about $50-$100/year depending on how much coverage you want), but some of those specifically don't apply to dorms, so check on that.
Write down your MAC address (aka hardware address, ethernet address: 00:12:34:56:78:9a) for all your cards. Many laptops are stolen by other students. Your IT department, if they're halfway competent, should be able to track MAC addresses on the network (certainly they can if they use DHCP) - it's good to report this when your laptop is stolen. I work in IT and every year we recover 2-3 laptops this way. Some thieves are pretty stupid.
In fact, write down all identifying information of your laptop and keep it somewhere. You'd be surprised how many stolen laptops show up on eBay. I can think of several times where laptops were recovered by the campus police posing as buyers on eBay, and they could match the serial numbers because the student wrote them down.
Um, no. Completely different. There are legitimate uses for Grokster. There exist pieces of music not copyrighted by the RIAA. There exist independent artists who publish their own music on P2P networks. And there exists free software which can be distributed this way. Thus it takes a lot of convincing to prove that Grokster is encouraging folks to break the law.
However, there does not exist (in the US at least, and it appears this site only works in the US) a debt collector can legimiately impersonate someone else when attempting to collect a debt. (Sure, he can do that when calling his wife or ordering pizza, but who cares). Thus, this site, by explicitly targeting debt collectors, is slimy, and they should be prohibited from doing so. If they want to target ex-spouses or ex-boy/girlfriends, fine, as long as they stay within stalking laws, but that's different.
Indeed. You have the right to privacy (ie: caller-ID blocking - already offered by the phone companies). You do not, however, have the right to impersonate someone else.
They should do their research. There are very strict laws about debt collectors calling. They cannot contact you outside 8AM-9PM, for example. If they call you, they are legally required to provide a mailing address if you ask, and if you send them a letter requesting no further contact, it is illegal for them to continue to contact you (except one call saying they received the letter). They can still sue your ass in court, and you can get served with papers, etc, but the debt collector themselves cannot contact you. Additionally, if you have an attorney, they must call the attorney, not you.
Most importantly, they are also prohibited from misrepresenting themselves. I'd say falsified caller id falls pretty clearly under misrepresenting. (They can block caller-id, that's fine, but they can't say they're Joe's Pizza, for example). I sincerely hope these guys get sued into oblivion for encouraging slimy debt collection processes. It's not clear the service itself is illegal, but debt collectors using it to identify themselves as someone else very clearly is. I predict some attorney general is going to have a field day with this. I plan to write to mine about it.
More info: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/credit/fdc.htm
No, no, no. Anytime something happens in technology, people start clamoring for new laws. Then the special interest groups get involved, and then we end up with a law that is worse than the crime it is intended to prevent. Like, say, I dunno, the DMCA. There were plenty of laws about copyright infringement already. It was already illegal to take a camcorder into movie theaters and make tapes to sell on the street corner. All they had to do was extend that to the Internet. But isntead we have the DMCA.
I'm sure there are laws about interfering with commerce already. Just ammend them to include DDOS attacks. If we start writing new laws, they'll get more and more restrictive and before you know it, hitting Reload on a page more than twice in 5 minutes will land you in jail for cyber terrorism.
No, they just like the sound of their voices. Or maybe it helps them squeeze more advertising revenue into an hour - like how the local FOX affiliate cuts off the last 3 seconds of the Simpsons in syndication before every commercial break to have moer commercials.
In fact, it's gotten so bad, I know several radio stations who make a big deal of plugging the fact that they never talk over a song. And it's true, they don't.
And yet, for some reason, Slashdot was all upset about the INDUCE act, which was originally plugged as a way to save kids from Internet molestation and porn. Slashdot editors (Pot) meet Sen. Hatch (Kettle).
Hrm, my digital phone went out. Internet too. Weird. Oh well, I'll just pick up the phone and call the cable company so ..... oh, crap.
Enh, no big deal, I'll just dial in to the modem pool at work.
AT&F1
ATDT6175551234
NO DIALTONE
Oh, right. Crap.
Honestly, that's the single biggest reason for me to keep my landline. Redundancy. I want the ability to dial out if cable fails. Heck, with my laptop, I can even have connectivity in a power outage (yes, I've done this before). That and one of my friends got screwed by this when his digital phone service crapped out. He was complaining about it to me over IM and the fact that he couldn't even call to report it. Yes, yes, cell phones, but cell phone reception can be pretty crappy in large apartment buildings, and that doesn't help for connectivity, since cell modems are expensive.
Finally. I was starting think that no one on Slashdot understood that. I don't use WEP on my network. So yes, it's not secure, but neither is my cable modem. Everyone else on my head end can see what I'm doing. For traffic I care about, I use SSH, or SSL, or Kerberos. I really don't give a crap that people can see that I'm posting to /. right now. However, I give a crap if they can read my mail, so I PGP encrypt the stuff I care about. And I care if they can see my password, so I use SSH to login remotely. So "secure" in this case is ambiguous and therefore a meaningless statistic.
Tell me how many wireless networks you can associate with and actually use.
Amen to that. A friend of mine made such a big deal about the fact that I didn't use WEP and I was just waiting for some spammer to come along and use my network. So I said, "Fine, bring your laptop over, I'm going to go watch TV, call me when you have connectivity." After about 20 minutes he gives up and admits that maybe WEP isn't needed if you take other measures to prevent access to the network.
Most of these "studies" are just some guy running around with Netstumbler saying "Oooh, look, an SSID, and it's not using WEP. Oh, well, there's another insecure network." I'll take them seriously when, for each non-WEP network, he shows what IP address he was able to get, and shows both a ping and traceroute to, say, Google, or somewhere so he can prove that a spammer or kiddie porn guy or some other horrible person could use these wireless networks for terrorism. And maybe nmap on both ends too. After all, just because they're allowing ICMP packets through doesn't mean you can actually do anything useful - they could be blocking all ports outbound). Until that happens, these are just meaningless statistics.
Well, you said you're trolling, but I suppose there might be people who have never used disposable cameras. They're not throw-away. You're basically renting them. You're paying for the convenience of not owning a camera or not having one with you. The camera doesn't get thrown away when you're done. You just don't get to keep it. More like leasing than renting, I guess. You take it to the processor, and they give you pictures and then refurbish the camera and sell it again.
Oh, I don't think anyone was *that* stupid (No, not even Darl). But as history has demonstrated many times, if you're in the right place at the right time, disasters can be very profitable. This isn't about SCO owning Linux or UNIX -- it never was. This is about a calculated attempt to manipulate investors and the stock market.
And Slashdot is giving them attention, which is a huge mistake. These people do not deserve any media attention at all. They are not martyrs, they are not fighting for freedom, and they are serving nobody's interest. If the websites get DDOSed or defaced, all it's going to do is provide support for Ashcroft and the fight against "cyber-terrorism". They could also spin it as an attack on the democratic process from al-Qaeda. "They're trying to prevent us from having an election, quick pass this new legislation to designate things like wget and shell scripts as weapons of mass terrorism. And it probably would pass. And we'd all be screwed.
I'd have a lot more respect for these people if they set up a website about why the GOP sucks. And it would probably take less time, too.
Did you ever learn anything about end users?
It's all well and good to say don't connect it to the network before patching, but end users don't know that. Nor should they have to know that. It is totally unreasonable to think that the first thought through Joe User's head should be "Right, I bought this brand new machine, but I shouldn't connect it to the network since it might be compromised."
End users are only very recently learning about service packs and patching, etc. Remember, prior to Windows XP, service packs were for business operating systems. How many end users did you see running NT 4? Even those folks running 2K at home were clueful folks - home PCs sold at CompUSA and the like shipped with 98SE or ME. You can't expect them to gain all this knowledge overnight.
have all relevant patches available on removeable media - that has been verified authentic - and install sans network.
And you obtain them how? In an IT environment, sure, it's trivial, beacuse you have N different computers, and probably N different platforms to use to create this media. Most folks still only have one PC. Sure, some people can burn CDs at work (but many workplaces severely limit what users can do on their machines, and lots of places prevent CD burning on work machines for corporate espionage reasons), and others might have friends with CD burners, but that's still a lot of effort, and it doesn't cover everyone.
It's totally unreasonable to expect a consumer to jump through all these hoops. (I'm not saying they shouldn't take these steps, just that they shouldn't *have* to take these steps in order to make a consumer electronics device work) Several changes need to be made. MS should produce a crapload of service pack CDs and give them to OEMs and every new computer should come with a current one. (They did this with NT4 SP3 and haven't done it since to my knowledge). They should also ship them to large stores (BestBuy, CompUSA, etc) and sell them for a low price (ie: $0.99) enough to prevent people from taking more than they need, but not terribly expensive. MS is notoriously tight-fisted when it comes to stuff like this, despite the fact it's their fault the product is insecure. Carmakers wouldn't get away with charging for recalled parts. For example, MS refuses to ship CDs to colleges. They'll ship one for every 50 or 100 students, but that's it, and that's ONLY if you have a Select license. Given that in that quantity the CDs cost fractions of a cent each, there's no reason for this. I can understand them being reluctant to make a CD with hotfixes, since those come out so frequently, but once a service pack is out, it's out, there's no reason not to make a CD except to penny-pinch.
iPods aren't really exclusive to iTunes. Apple hasn't gotten upset about the 3rd party apps for Linux, for example, to load your own audio files onto the iPod. They did get upset about the ones that pulled metadata from the iTunes Music Store, but you can't fault them - they're paying for the bandwith - why should they have to make it available to non-customers?
And really, the iTunes Music Store has the least lock-in. You purchase the file, burn it to CD, and then rip it to MP3. Bingo, you have an MP3 that can be played on any MP3 player. It takes a few extra steps, sure, but it's better than WMA where you don't get to burn a real audio CD, and much better than protected CDs themselves.
And there are plenty of other vendors working with Apple. Real just decided to go the "fuck you" route, and Apple is upset.
And if the situation were reversed, and Apple went and found a workaround to put their .m4p files on Real's music player (assuming they had one), I'd say that Real has a right to be upset.