I have sent snail mail a grand total of three times in the past two years. Two of those were to a state government agency. Snail mail is junk mail until proven legit. All the anthrax stuff (which is statistically insignificant) means is that I wash my hands after I have taken my mail out of the mailbox and thrown it into the trash can.
They do PGP for in and out email, and SSL between the webserver and the client. You can also have them do a domain for you at USD 30 per year.
Having used them for awhile, the only complaint I have is that they do not have a nice integrated email directory, so I have to manually key in addresses. They do have a directory so that I can put the addresses in the account, and I can cut and paste if I want to go that route.
I believe the issue most companies/people have with Abiword is not on opening documents, rather it is on saving documents.
I use it to view documents quickly on a regular basis. But if I am going to edit a document, and especially if I am going to be saving and sending it back to a M$ user, then I use StarOffice.
In the article, the author mentioned that they asked everyone to voluntarily cut down their usage and everyone did.
Has anyone else at any company of any size (>100 employees) seen anything along these lines? Simply asking employees to cut down Internet use and the employees did? Or any studies about this?
It sounds kinda odd to me. My reason for asking: I had never had any hesitations installing censorware for my employer to cut down on wasting bandwidth. But if asking actually works for >100 people, (ideally several documented cases) then I'll rethink my stance..
Does anybody know if the program phones home at each web page load to find out what to link the keywords to?
If so, then would not that suggest that protecting my company's network from this be possible by polluting the company's internal DNS with a bad entry for this entire domain? I am thinking in the same vein as putting in DNS records so that anything in the doubleclick domain resolved to 127.0.0.1 or similar.
This is something I would obviously test myself before putting onto my company's network, but I'm asking if anyone else has already tried this.
However, it looks like it's not quite working for this site. It still works for Yahoo though. Also, the/. preview is showing a space between the 'o' and the 'm'. Make sure that you don't type one there if you need to enter it manually.
There was another technology that I remember reading about here, although I do not remember when, nor do I remember the name.
The idea was to start with a CD but instead of the regular films that are used that last a long while, the new things had a film that would breakdown after some time of being exposed to the laser's of a CDROM (a few days after first exposure if I remember right).
On the part about Linux in Mexico, I have to wonder what part would not run on their systems. I have a feeling it was more along the lines of would have taken a bit of looking around to find the correct drivers and/or picking another distribution. I am sure that Microsoft did something to sweeten the deal for the Mexican government, and I'll bet that their deal with the devil will come back to bite them when the BSA comes down in a few months to perform a software audit. They'll get what they deserve.
On the KaZaa thread, the first email which I get saying that my site had links which I did not put up myself will send me to an attorney to discuss what I can do to them along the lines of changing my content, including copyright infringment (I know that I'll have to put notices on the pages) and to see if defacing a website charges can be arranged along the lines of prosecuting them like the Code Red Worm writers could be prosecuted. The fact that things were done on the client side instead of the server side should not be relevant (IANAL).
I saw the outline for this on a site last year and developed it myself a bit...
Why not force Microsoft to open source their software? They could license the source to a series of distributors who could compile and sell the binaries. Prohibit Microsoft from selling the binaries directly for any platform.
Microsoft could retain control of the software and therefore still have the 'freedom to innovate' but at the same time, the distributors would be able to edit out any kind of problems such as forcing IE onto 98.
This would need to be applied to all Microsoft products so that they do not just change the product name and go about business as usual. The NSA might not appreciate having the world know how they were ferreting away encryption keys, but oh well.
Does anyone know how to suggest remedies to these federal judges and/or the prosecutors involved in these cases?
I'm a network engineer (Cisco dude) not a programmer, but maybe this idea will be able to help.
I found a really good way to do an interview was to point the vict^H^H^H^H candidate at a dry erase board, hand them a marker, and tell them to draw up the network they most enjoyed working on.
It allows them to take control and talk about what they know, giving them a comfort zone. I can ask whatever questions I think might be useful. I can add or remove a component and find out how they would work around it. I can also make sure that they are comfortable thinking in the same mindset that I have. I can make sure they are talking the same language that I am talking.
How to do this in a programming arena? Instead of a network diagram, maybe a flowchart for the logic, maybe a screen drawing for layouts, maybe pseudocode or code, although I would expect that last one would get hairy on a dry erase board.
Anyone who can build on this, please do so. I got a CS degree doing programming, but that was way too many years (and beers) ago. I do not remember enough to really be useful on this.
Read the fsck'ing article. It did not say that he was released, only that Adobe had withdrawn its complaint. The Feds would not have picked him up if Adobe had not already given them enough info to convict him under the DMCA.
And the odds of this ending up being a test case for the DMCA would be pretty slim, since a defense would probably (IANAL) defend him based on 'he did the deed in Russia, not the USA' rather than going after the constitutionality of the DMCA.
No matter how you slice it, Adobe gave the shaft to a foreign citizen traveling in the US to give information to us, the American people, and now Adobe is trying to pretend that they did nothing wrong. It is time for them to grow up and realize that this is an action that they cannot take back.
This man is going to spend a while cooling his heels behind bars, time that he will never get back. It is Adobe's fault. Make them suffer. Spread the word as far and wide as you can outside the geek/hacker community about Adobe's actions and the replacements for Adobe software already out there. Get them where it counts, in the pocketbook.
I registered my domain with NameSpace and they worked like a champ. The mail record works with their web based interface that has PGP built in.
I would like to note that it took a few emails to convince a salesperson with my web hosting company (separate) to put in the necessary virtual host entry without registering with NetSol. I think she ended up asking a technician who beat her over the head with an axe handle and made her go ahead and do what I was asking for.
At any rate, I'm glad to see any company with a near monopoly status taking a few hits of competition.
Has anyone compiled the source and diff'ed it to make sure the executable was really compiled from the source, minus the key?
If there is a rat in this, one way it could work would be for the software to phone home to Redmond and let them know who is running the program.
All in all, I would only run this on a machine that was not able to get to the internet, and after running and verfiying, delete and reinstall a fresh copy of my OS before putting that machine back on the net.
I do pay for content if that content is worth something to me. I read http://www.worldnetdaily.com every day. Once a month, the editor asks people for donations in his daily column. You are not required to pay anything at all, it is simply a request. However, I value the content that the site provides and links to highly enough that I give $100 (USD) each month.
How do I justify this to myself? I balance it with the savings of not getting a dead tree newspaper subscription and the savings of not paying cable since I threw away my television set around two years ago (one of the best things I ever did).
Would I pay that much for Slashdot? Nope. If Slashdot starts charging I'll be going somewhere else. Here, the value is coming from people posting comments of their own accord. They are not relying on their posting to put food in their mouths, and in fact, are happy to have their ideas in as many heads as possible.
Can the answer change over time? Yes. I used to pay for a mailbox at NetAddress so that I would not have to deal with advertising and with taglines at the end of my emails. Now, they are going to be charging starting at the end of July, and I will not be using them. Their service at one point distiquished itself from the other services. Now, it is of little or no comparitive value, therefore I will not pay.
What would I recommend to a website provider? Make your entire site free, put in a link to allow people to pay if they choose, and remind them that paying keeps the site free. Issue a reminder somewhere in the once-a-month time frame. If you want to use banner ads, go ahead, but assume that some (or maybe most, depending on your audience) will be filtering them. If that sounds risky, then you, as a website provider, must not believe in your content enough to risk showing it to me, hoping that I will pay for it out of goodwill.
I agree with Chris (albanac). I'm also a network guy, although I work more on the enterprise side of the house.
A parallel to this is the way my father looked at driver's ed when I was growing up. He saw it as a chance to get a small amount of experience on test equipment (the driving school's car) before working on valuable production equipment (the family car). No, driver's ed was not enough to make you a qualified driver. My dad kept me from driving by myself for over a year to get the experience with himself at my side. Lab training is the exact same relationship to production work. And I agree that paper certifications are worthless without time behind the wheel.
Regarding the comment that it is my skills (as an employee) therefore I should pay for the training, and take it on my own time. I overall agree except for one detail. The labor market is tight. The number of people who are qualified is lower than the number of positions needed to be filled. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with an employee attempting to leverage whatever they want out of the tight labor market, be it higher salary, better benefits, or training. Training is just one of the better (for the employer) ways to give money to an employee. They get a return on the investment in a more productive and happier employee. I see it as a tax free raise for the year, with the only stipulation being that I have to spend it in a certain way.
I look at it as no better than Windows Update for the Borged machines I use at work. I don't know what information is being transmitted up or what is coming back down. Commercial software is supposed to work out of the box, without needing an update to be functional. That is why I pay money for it. Remember, free speech, not free beer.
Notice that when you install Redhat, the installer never explains what RHN is, nor does it give you a chance to say 'no, don't use this'. I see that and think that Redhat is trying to hide something in the package.
I also do not like how, short of either a recompile or polluting my DNS I can't make the RHN update from my server. If nothing else, from a bandwidth point of view, if I have 10,000 machines, I want to download the package from Redhat, test that package in a lab, then put it on my server internal to my network and have all 10,000 of my user's machines update from a local server as opposed to tying up my already skimpy bandwidth out to the Internet.
In a way, this package disappoints me because I like the Redhat distro. I like the way it handles, and when I'm putting a stealth box into the network, the Redhat name gives me credibility with PHBs, who are willing to trust my judgement and look the other way. If I had used just about any other distro, those PHBs would have been unplugging cables to keep the box off the network.
In summary, the package should have setup options during a normal installation that allow me to either use it with Redhat servers, use it with my own servers, or disable it. And there should be an easy to follow set of directions so that I can setup my own server on my network and run the update process from there.
Use this link http://a1.g.akamaitech.net/6/6/6/6/www.goto.com/d/ search/?Keywords=bulk+email in one window, use the original link in another window. Then you can combine the two links with something such as notepad (I'm at work, it's not my choice on the OS) to make it appear that the link to the site came from Akamai.
Also, on Bill's Borg Boxes, you can run Netscape and write protect cookies.txt (after accepting the/. one for posting). Then you don't need to clean out your cookies, just close and reopen your browser.
Whatever you do, when you hit the GoTo page, make sure you see a dollar amount after each link. The value is the amount the spammer will be charged. If you have cookies turned off, the spammers do NOT get charged.
... any random block of code in any random print-out. What does it express? Why should that code be protected expression?
Source code is the language that programmers use to commmunicate with other programmers.
French is the language the French people use to communicate with other French people.
Do we outlaw French?
Then the arguement falls to outlawing the source for this particular piece of code because we (as a society) do not like the content of the language. That is exactly where the First Amendment kicks in to protect the content. Just as the First Amendment protects the instructions for how to make a bomb, but does not protect the making of a bomb, the First Amendment protects the source for DeCSS, but does not protect the copying of a DVD that DeCSS allows. MPAA can go after the people who are using DeCSS to copy movies, but they can not go after people for putting out the source which shows how to copy the movies.
I am posting in hopes this arguement can be of use to the lawyers for 2600.
Slashdot Mirror
I have sent snail mail a grand total of three times in the past two years. Two of those were to a state government agency. Snail mail is junk mail until proven legit. All the anthrax stuff (which is statistically insignificant) means is that I wash my hands after I have taken my mail out of the mailbox and thrown it into the trash can.
Another option for encrypted email is https://mail.lokmail.net.
They do PGP for in and out email, and SSL between the webserver and the client. You can also have them do a domain for you at USD 30 per year.
Having used them for awhile, the only complaint I have is that they do not have a nice integrated email directory, so I have to manually key in addresses. They do have a directory so that I can put the addresses in the account, and I can cut and paste if I want to go that route.
Hope this helps someone in keeping their privacy.
I use it to view documents quickly on a regular basis. But if I am going to edit a document, and especially if I am going to be saving and sending it back to a M$ user, then I use StarOffice.
Has anyone else at any company of any size (>100 employees) seen anything along these lines? Simply asking employees to cut down Internet use and the employees did? Or any studies about this?
It sounds kinda odd to me. My reason for asking: I had never had any hesitations installing censorware for my employer to cut down on wasting bandwidth. But if asking actually works for >100 people, (ideally several documented cases) then I'll rethink my stance..
If so, then would not that suggest that protecting my company's network from this be possible by polluting the company's internal DNS with a bad entry for this entire domain? I am thinking in the same vein as putting in DNS records so that anything in the doubleclick domain resolved to 127.0.0.1 or similar.
This is something I would obviously test myself before putting onto my company's network, but I'm asking if anyone else has already tried this.
Bill's reply: I did not have sexual relations with that pixel, Miss Lewinsky.
Gary's reply: I have no idea where I put, oops, I mean where that pixel disappeared to.
However, it looks like it's not quite working for this site. It still works for Yahoo though. Also, the /. preview is showing a space between the 'o' and the 'm'. Make sure that you don't type one there if you need to enter it manually.
The idea was to start with a CD but instead of the regular films that are used that last a long while, the new things had a film that would breakdown after some time of being exposed to the laser's of a CDROM (a few days after first exposure if I remember right).
I'll check out articles a little better next time.
Thanks for the reminder.
On the KaZaa thread, the first email which I get saying that my site had links which I did not put up myself will send me to an attorney to discuss what I can do to them along the lines of changing my content, including copyright infringment (I know that I'll have to put notices on the pages) and to see if defacing a website charges can be arranged along the lines of prosecuting them like the Code Red Worm writers could be prosecuted. The fact that things were done on the client side instead of the server side should not be relevant (IANAL).
Why not force Microsoft to open source their software? They could license the source to a series of distributors who could compile and sell the binaries. Prohibit Microsoft from selling the binaries directly for any platform.
Microsoft could retain control of the software and therefore still have the 'freedom to innovate' but at the same time, the distributors would be able to edit out any kind of problems such as forcing IE onto 98.
This would need to be applied to all Microsoft products so that they do not just change the product name and go about business as usual. The NSA might not appreciate having the world know how they were ferreting away encryption keys, but oh well.
Does anyone know how to suggest remedies to these federal judges and/or the prosecutors involved in these cases?
I found a really good way to do an interview was to point the vict^H^H^H^H candidate at a dry erase board, hand them a marker, and tell them to draw up the network they most enjoyed working on.
It allows them to take control and talk about what they know, giving them a comfort zone. I can ask whatever questions I think might be useful. I can add or remove a component and find out how they would work around it. I can also make sure that they are comfortable thinking in the same mindset that I have. I can make sure they are talking the same language that I am talking.
How to do this in a programming arena? Instead of a network diagram, maybe a flowchart for the logic, maybe a screen drawing for layouts, maybe pseudocode or code, although I would expect that last one would get hairy on a dry erase board.
Anyone who can build on this, please do so. I got a CS degree doing programming, but that was way too many years (and beers) ago. I do not remember enough to really be useful on this.
I wonder how many busy signals Amazon will put up with before they go get a real ISP?
And the odds of this ending up being a test case for the DMCA would be pretty slim, since a defense would probably (IANAL) defend him based on 'he did the deed in Russia, not the USA' rather than going after the constitutionality of the DMCA.
No matter how you slice it, Adobe gave the shaft to a foreign citizen traveling in the US to give information to us, the American people, and now Adobe is trying to pretend that they did nothing wrong. It is time for them to grow up and realize that this is an action that they cannot take back.
This man is going to spend a while cooling his heels behind bars, time that he will never get back. It is Adobe's fault. Make them suffer. Spread the word as far and wide as you can outside the geek/hacker community about Adobe's actions and the replacements for Adobe software already out there. Get them where it counts, in the pocketbook.
I would like to note that it took a few emails to convince a salesperson with my web hosting company (separate) to put in the necessary virtual host entry without registering with NetSol. I think she ended up asking a technician who beat her over the head with an axe handle and made her go ahead and do what I was asking for.
At any rate, I'm glad to see any company with a near monopoly status taking a few hits of competition.
If there is a rat in this, one way it could work would be for the software to phone home to Redmond and let them know who is running the program.
All in all, I would only run this on a machine that was not able to get to the internet, and after running and verfiying, delete and reinstall a fresh copy of my OS before putting that machine back on the net.
How do I justify this to myself? I balance it with the savings of not getting a dead tree newspaper subscription and the savings of not paying cable since I threw away my television set around two years ago (one of the best things I ever did).
Would I pay that much for Slashdot? Nope. If Slashdot starts charging I'll be going somewhere else. Here, the value is coming from people posting comments of their own accord. They are not relying on their posting to put food in their mouths, and in fact, are happy to have their ideas in as many heads as possible.
Can the answer change over time? Yes. I used to pay for a mailbox at NetAddress so that I would not have to deal with advertising and with taglines at the end of my emails. Now, they are going to be charging starting at the end of July, and I will not be using them. Their service at one point distiquished itself from the other services. Now, it is of little or no comparitive value, therefore I will not pay.
What would I recommend to a website provider? Make your entire site free, put in a link to allow people to pay if they choose, and remind them that paying keeps the site free. Issue a reminder somewhere in the once-a-month time frame. If you want to use banner ads, go ahead, but assume that some (or maybe most, depending on your audience) will be filtering them. If that sounds risky, then you, as a website provider, must not believe in your content enough to risk showing it to me, hoping that I will pay for it out of goodwill.
A parallel to this is the way my father looked at driver's ed when I was growing up. He saw it as a chance to get a small amount of experience on test equipment (the driving school's car) before working on valuable production equipment (the family car). No, driver's ed was not enough to make you a qualified driver. My dad kept me from driving by myself for over a year to get the experience with himself at my side. Lab training is the exact same relationship to production work. And I agree that paper certifications are worthless without time behind the wheel.
Regarding the comment that it is my skills (as an employee) therefore I should pay for the training, and take it on my own time. I overall agree except for one detail. The labor market is tight. The number of people who are qualified is lower than the number of positions needed to be filled. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with an employee attempting to leverage whatever they want out of the tight labor market, be it higher salary, better benefits, or training. Training is just one of the better (for the employer) ways to give money to an employee. They get a return on the investment in a more productive and happier employee. I see it as a tax free raise for the year, with the only stipulation being that I have to spend it in a certain way.
Notice that when you install Redhat, the installer never explains what RHN is, nor does it give you a chance to say 'no, don't use this'. I see that and think that Redhat is trying to hide something in the package.
I also do not like how, short of either a recompile or polluting my DNS I can't make the RHN update from my server. If nothing else, from a bandwidth point of view, if I have 10,000 machines, I want to download the package from Redhat, test that package in a lab, then put it on my server internal to my network and have all 10,000 of my user's machines update from a local server as opposed to tying up my already skimpy bandwidth out to the Internet.
In a way, this package disappoints me because I like the Redhat distro. I like the way it handles, and when I'm putting a stealth box into the network, the Redhat name gives me credibility with PHBs, who are willing to trust my judgement and look the other way. If I had used just about any other distro, those PHBs would have been unplugging cables to keep the box off the network.
In summary, the package should have setup options during a normal installation that allow me to either use it with Redhat servers, use it with my own servers, or disable it. And there should be an easy to follow set of directions so that I can setup my own server on my network and run the update process from there.
Also, on Bill's Borg Boxes, you can run Netscape and write protect cookies.txt (after accepting the /. one for posting). Then you don't need to clean out your cookies, just close and reopen your browser.
Whatever you do, when you hit the GoTo page, make sure you see a dollar amount after each link. The value is the amount the spammer will be charged. If you have cookies turned off, the spammers do NOT get charged.
Source code is the language that programmers use to commmunicate with other programmers.
French is the language the French people use to communicate with other French people.
Do we outlaw French?
Then the arguement falls to outlawing the source for this particular piece of code because we (as a society) do not like the content of the language. That is exactly where the First Amendment kicks in to protect the content. Just as the First Amendment protects the instructions for how to make a bomb, but does not protect the making of a bomb, the First Amendment protects the source for DeCSS, but does not protect the copying of a DVD that DeCSS allows. MPAA can go after the people who are using DeCSS to copy movies, but they can not go after people for putting out the source which shows how to copy the movies.
I am posting in hopes this arguement can be of use to the lawyers for 2600.