The idea is so simple that charging $16.95 for it does seem a bit overpriced.
The easiest way to switch drives is probably to build a switch that setzs the drives' master/slave jumpers accordingly. This is very easy to build, and once you know your drives' jumper settings it's also completely drive-independent, as long as you've set your BIOS to auto-detect. Costs you about $2 for the switch and a fifteen minutes' work. Chargin $16.95 is ridiculous.
Thanks for the link to kuro5hin.org (which, by the way, is perfectly well reachable at the moment). It has again pointed out to me how preferable kuro5hin is over Slashdot: a far lower troll quota, no incompetent story submission/rejection crew, no bland US bias, and, most of all, the general impression that what you write is actually being read by someone.
I know it's slightly offtopic, but there was a rather frustrated post once on a BeOS mailing list from a guy who had to write a graphic driver for BeOS and made an Infocom-style text adventure out of his rather frustrating experiences with it...
Here's a small excerpt (Formatting is a bit cruddy):
You are in a cube. In front of you is a 16"
(visible) Sony monitor. In front of that is a
Mitsumi keyboard and an unbranded mouse. Just to
the right is a 266 MHz PC clone. The system is
running a development version of BeOS R4. There is a graphics card here.
There is a floppy disk here.
There is a note from your boss here.
There is a Hoberman sphere here. > INVENTORY You have a well-used satchel. Inside it are
A set of screwdrivers
A small telescope
A 16M laptop RAM module
A book on decorative knots
A PCMCIA Ethernet card
Last year's tax return
A 166 MHz Pentium laptop computer
A bottle of echinacea capsules
Hair sticks
Your wallet contains $3200. > REPLACE KEYBOARD You put aside the amazingly cruddy Mitsumi keyboard
and substitute your favorite AT&T keyboard. > PUT LAPTOP ON DESK The laptop is now on the desk. > READ NOTE "Write a driver for this card. We'd like it in time
for R4 release." > EXAMINE GRAPHICS CARD You are evidently the proud owner of a Yoyodyne
Monstra VelocElite-LX 128-3D-AGP graphics card. > INSERT CARD IN MACHINE The machine emits a curious and worrying noise. > TURN OFF MACHINE AND INSERT CARD The graphics card is now installed in the machine. > TURN ON MACHINE BeOS R4(devel) boots. You are looking at a
gray scale desktop. > EXAMINE FLOPPY DISK The handwritten label reads, "Programming docs." >INSERT DISK AND PRINT DOCS Nothing happens. > INSERT DISK, MOUNT DISK, AND PRINT DOCS The drive spins for a moment, and the command prompt
returns. > READ DOCS I see no docs here. > GO TO PRINTER AND GET DOCS The printer is out of paper. > PUT PAPER IN PRINTER There is no paper here. > STEAL PAPER FROM COPIER UPSTAIRS After installing the liberated paper in the printer,
you print your docs.
Oh, Windows is being blamed too, doesn't mean it isn't mainstream...:-|
</sarcasm>
Maybe the fact that somebody is being offensively blamed for not supporting Linux is actually a sign of Linux actually going mainstream, instead of a cause for not going mainstream? People start to expect Linux drivers the same way they expect Windows drivers.
This is a real chance to get us an ISP-less network that is relatively immune to attacks to the service provider. It is quite public-though, and easy to monitor; together with applications such as FreeNet which automatically encrypt communications and decentralize data storage from individual nodes, this could provide a nice extension of the Internet into ubiquitous, free (as in speech & beer) network coverage. At least when there are enough participating nodes.
Could someone please explain to me what process is described by the term media consolidation? I mean, it sounds like a nice flippy 21st century information society term, but nevertheless I'd like to know what it means and what it's definition implies about where it's leading.
No existing micropayment system is feasible in terms of ease of use and market penetration yet.
Nobody's forced to pay for content: you can bet that content which is for sale on site A can be obtained for free from some site B. There is virtually no content exclusively available for sale as opposed to free download, except, possibly, pr0n.
It's a bit complicated to keep track of dozens and hundreds of transactions that all cost $0.0315 - of course, the computer can do that for me, but myself I wouldn't mind onlable to keep track of it in my head.
I dunno about you guys, but that makes my technology buying habit look like my chewing gum budget.
The difference is probably that: (a) audiophiles run around in far less numbers than computer addicts and (b) when you buy an amplifier for $50k, you can be fairly assured that in five years you're not going to see it on eBay for $50.
I have been using Java for CS teaching for some time. It is not the funniest language for people to learn, mainly because you have to get yourself a thorough knowledge of Sun's standard libraries and their class hierarchy.
The main advantage of Java over C and C++ (and the reason why C and derivations are discontinued as teaching tools in my university) is it's relative platform-independence. When you want to test the programs that people have written at home, it's a real pain in the ass to get their Borland C++ programs running under Linux, you know. This disappears with Java.
On the other hand, Java is not the most highly structured language, especially in recent versions. That greatly lessens its didactic qualities; I have had several students here who started to experiment with all sorts of arcane features like inner classes and operator overloading without learning how to write good programs first. It's a bit like comparing Niklaus Wirth's original Pascal to Borland Delphi. Deplhi is more powerful, but you need a thorough knowledge of the class hierarchy and in order to deliver good OO programs, you have to be a good OO programmer beforehand.
Therefore, I now prefer either more systematic languages like Eiffel, or script-like languages like Python - the first for their higher level of abstraction and cleaner design, the latter for their greater ease of use and wider field of applications. Both are, in my opinion, better suited as didactic tools for learning OO programming.
And BTW, over here in Germany the high dependence on symbols such as {} or [] or/**/ is a didactic problem in itself because these aren't so easily reached on a German keyboard. This may sound harmless, but we get endless complaints from people who hate to perform strange Alt+Key acrobatics to get a simple thing like a curly brace.
The "opt-out" strategy that Microsoft suggests web designers to take is completely worthless. I may remind you of the opt-out policies that are in effect against spam: I receive a spam mail from company A, then I opt out, and the next spam mail I receive is from company B, so in the end it all had no effect at all.
If Microsoft has a strategy to alter the content of web pages, they will probably use it regardless of users opting out. While Microsoft is not an the Evil Empire, they're not a charity organization either, and they are not known for always respecting the law, let alone general morals. Probably we'll just have another <meta> tag that is in the header of every security-aware, anti-Microsoft web site and that causes the Internet explorer to behave all strangely with those pages (links generating mysterious 404s, security sites being unreachable, continuous reporting back to Microsoft, all sorts of evil behaviour.
The evidence is pretty anecdotal, but each person's internal map of pecking orders and trust networks seems to grow not much beyond that size. You and I can track coolness factors for about 150 of our closest friends, no more.
This is not entirely true. I know that this has been the result of some experiment in social psychology, but there is enough evidence that the sizes of individual ego networks may vary greatly, often beyond those 150 heads. These results have been problematic mainly due to the environmental settings their test persons were subject to, i.e. their role within Western culture. However, if you look at the ego network of someone really prominent within one's society (a famous scholar, a politician etc., someone who knows and has to communicate with lots of people independently and intensively), you'll find that they are often larger. I know of no historical examples where there are scientific surveys, but one is currently in preparation about an Arabic scholar in 18th century Egypt who had intensive scholarly contacts all over Northern Africa, Arabia and most of Asia, and his ego network comprised of well over one thousand individuals.
Of course, this does not invalidate your idea.
Personally, I find the idea to have something like a permanent trend database collected from what individual users considered "cool" at a given time rather fascinating. It allows for some really interesting social analyses, for example whether coolness trends originate from individuals who are in the position of "hubs" in a social network or rather from individuals more to the edge and so on.
However, the proposal definitely has the problem of anonymity. When individual user's trends are trackable, individual anonymity can no longer be guaranteed; effectively, DoubleClick already does quite a lot of what you want the trend database to do! I doubt whether just anonymizing the data will solve this fairly basic problem; social networks are very often harder or even impossible to reconstruct when the data is fully anonymized (because it is much harder to reconstruct who interacts with whom), and partial anonymization is practically equivalent to no anonymization at all, because when you speak of "User A" instead of "Joe User", but keep track of his taste, his age, gender and so on, as well as his social interaction within the observed framework, you may just as well keep the name because it would be rather easy to correlate the data with external material and thus recover the individual's identity.
And just to give the crowd some material regarding social networks, here are some social network-related links:
The Oracle of Bacon - play and delve into the network of Hollywood actors (i.e. who acted with whom)
Visualizing Social Networks - paper by Linton S. Freeman, social network scientist, that explains some of the theory, with applications
Honestly, you don't really KNOW about Unicode and how it works, do you?
The idea behind Unicode is to have a uniform encoding for all the world's scripts, not for all the world's languages. The necessity of this is evident for anyone who has experience with the insufficiencies of the individual codepage systems (Windows CPxxx, ISO 8859-x, ISCII etc.) currently in use. Have you ever tried to send an Arabic e-mail through a non-Arabic mailserver or run a program with German character support on a codepage 450 windows? Unicode is designed to programs and data interoperable regardless of either's language encoding.
Just because you don't know Japanese it doesn't make the rendering of Japanese pointless. Just because you don't have a clue how a Chinese or Japanese Kanji input system works doesn't render the idea of being able to chat in IRC using Japanese characters entirely pointless.
Just because English is the most popular language on the Internet at the moment, that doesn't mean that either other languages were not used or that other languages might not take over that role in the future. If, for example, the growth of Internet accessibility in China keeps up at that rate, Chinese will be language #1 in the Internet by 2007, especially since Chinese will be read and understood by Koreans and Japanese as well.
No, the FBI is not above the law however in order to protect us, law enforcement agencies do need to be able to bend the law a little bit to get the evidence they need. Sorta like the FBI going into a business and requesting their Tax files from the last 10 years in investigating a tax fraud case.
Define "bend the law a little bit".
According to law, a law enforcement agency must operate within the law. Everything else is unlawful by definition. If we allow law enforcement agencies to behave unlawfully, then we can go back to torturing prisoners and concentration camps: in the substance, there's no difference. And the FBI is allowed by law to request tax files.
Secondly, the judge was correct. The Russians could not be guarenteed privacy when using a computer that is not theirs
Admittedly, your point is better than your last one. But imagine borrowing a friend's car, then getting crashed into by a drunk truck driver. Should you not be guaranteed personal safety in spite of the car you're driving not being yours? Shouldn't I be guaranteed privacy when walking on a public road that isn't mine? Is the government allowed to confiscate my friend's laptop and see through his files when I walk into a public building that isn't mine? What would the FBI have done if the Russians had used their own computers? Shrugged and said "Well, we can't act here?"
Finally, if you have nothing to hide then don't worry about law enforcement. If you do have something to hide then put your tail between your legs. Every person on here who complains about the FBI and the gov't is just afraid that their warez'd version of Photoshop will be found.
This time, you are really dangerously mistaken. Even if I have nothing to hide, the law enforcement ageny might think I had something to hide and do all sorts of nasty things to me, for example. And just because someone acts in a fashion that you (or the law enforcement agency) consider strange doesn't mean they've got something to hide, and this completely subjective notion should definitely not suffice for them to start hacking into my computer, even if I haven't got a warezed version of Photoshop. What if they hack into it, find my legal copies of Jack B. Nymble and PGP and decide that I'm a potential criminal, hence I'm probably a criminal, hence I am a criminal, hence they can take action against me because they've bent the law a little bit?
In a free, civil society, every individual must be allowed to worry about privacy, about individual security and about law enforcement agencies. Just because I question the police's behaviour doesn't mean I'm a criminal.
I think you have this backwards. Russia is a lawless place in many ways right now. If there was law in Russia, those crooks would have been investigated locally, the evidence revealed without need for any subterfuge, and either have been handed over to US authorities or have been prosecuted and jailed on Russian soil. The FBI is just making it tougher for crooks to get away with "internet protection rackets" by hiding on foreign soil. By raising the stakes, they make it less likely that people will try to do this.
Whether Russia is considered a lawless place as compared to the US by US citizens or not is of very little concern for international law. If it's on their soil, it's their responsibility. If they don't live up to what you think their responsibility is, the only thing you're allowed to do is to complain. No nuking, no computer intrusions, no covert police actions.
The notion of whether somewhere is a lawless place is a highly subjective notion, don't you think? Compared to Somalia, Russia is a pretty lawful place. The sheer number of laws in effect in Russia is probably comparable to the US. What you describe as it being a lawless place is more precisely a certain chaos in how they are enacted and executed. However, the FBI will have to be asked for aid by the Russians prior to intruding in order for the whole thing to be compliant to international law.
Also, there is the issue of "intrusion". The fact that the FBI obtained the passwords in a fashion that was legal against US law dows not lessen the intrusion. If it was legal in Iran to torture people, could the Iranians torture some Americans, get their passwords to some American servers and happily go downloading away just because they don't have to hack into the machine, after all, because they've got the passwords? The danger of hypocrisy is rather evident.
So that's the present state of affairs: an US judge effectively allows US an interior police agency to steal passwords, then use these passwords to gain access to foreign computers.
The only legitimacy I see in this is the fact that the sniffing of passwords took place in US space. (And even this is highly questionable given the virtual nature of the net)
So when will we see the next step, a judgment that OKs the FBI to hack into the Russian computers right away? Will the USA now cease considering Chinse hackers that hack into US government computers an international infringement?
I completely agree that this probably takes out a few Russian script kiddies. However, it takes them out with a method that starts to be questionable against the background of international law. Technically, had they nuked Chelyabinsk, they'd have taken out the script kiddies out as well. Face facts: when a hacker is outside your own territory, your law doesn't apply to them. While this may be a problem in the elimination of hackers, this is only just and fair for international relationships. Hackers are just citizens, you know. Even Russians.
.md domain exists already
on
IETF vs. ICANN
·
· Score: 1
There is the.md country-code top-level domain as well, which is, of course, originally intended for Moldova, but which is seeing increased use for doctors in English-speaking countries...
I am sitting on a Deutsche Telekom DSL line with Portsentry installed, and a large number of reported attacks come from Telekom dialup numbers admittedly.
On the other hand, it's not entirely a bad thing if an ISP allows its customers 100% free access to the Internet (excluding SMTP, but the Telekom has a special SMTP relay for which you have to register). And, well, if someone attacks you on 119 and 1080 (111 is popular as well, maybe you should increase your firewall sensitivity), just block their IP for 24 hours and that's it. I do that automatically and it doesn't hurt.
On the other hand, I fail to see both how sensible a connection between the Telekom's ISP services and their micropayment idea is and what your security has to do with micropayment at all.
Slashdot Mirror
- sets the jumpers.
- and fifteen minutes work
- Chargingg
Did I miss anything?The easiest way to switch drives is probably to build a switch that setzs the drives' master/slave jumpers accordingly. This is very easy to build, and once you know your drives' jumper settings it's also completely drive-independent, as long as you've set your BIOS to auto-detect. Costs you about $2 for the switch and a fifteen minutes' work. Chargin $16.95 is ridiculous.
Boy, this is going to cost me Karma.
Here's a small excerpt (Formatting is a bit cruddy):
You are in a cube. In front of you is a 16" (visible) Sony monitor. In front of that is a Mitsumi keyboard and an unbranded mouse. Just to the right is a 266 MHz PC clone. The system is running a development version of BeOS R4.
There is a graphics card here.
There is a floppy disk here.
There is a note from your boss here.
There is a Hoberman sphere here.
> INVENTORY
You have a well-used satchel. Inside it are
- A set of screwdrivers
- A small telescope
- A 16M laptop RAM module
- A book on decorative knots
- A PCMCIA Ethernet card
- Last year's tax return
- A 166 MHz Pentium laptop computer
- A bottle of echinacea capsules
- Hair sticks
Your wallet contains $3200.> REPLACE KEYBOARD
You put aside the amazingly cruddy Mitsumi keyboard and substitute your favorite AT&T keyboard.
> PUT LAPTOP ON DESK
The laptop is now on the desk.
> READ NOTE
"Write a driver for this card. We'd like it in time for R4 release."
> EXAMINE GRAPHICS CARD
You are evidently the proud owner of a Yoyodyne Monstra VelocElite-LX 128-3D-AGP graphics card.
> INSERT CARD IN MACHINE
The machine emits a curious and worrying noise.
> TURN OFF MACHINE AND INSERT CARD
The graphics card is now installed in the machine.
> TURN ON MACHINE
BeOS R4(devel) boots. You are looking at a gray scale desktop.
> EXAMINE FLOPPY DISK
The handwritten label reads, "Programming docs."
>INSERT DISK AND PRINT DOCS
Nothing happens.
> INSERT DISK, MOUNT DISK, AND PRINT DOCS
The drive spins for a moment, and the command prompt returns.
> READ DOCS
I see no docs here.
> GO TO PRINTER AND GET DOCS
The printer is out of paper.
> PUT PAPER IN PRINTER
There is no paper here.
> STEAL PAPER FROM COPIER UPSTAIRS
After installing the liberated paper in the printer, you print your docs.
Give .us all your money!!
(Sorry, I just had to say it.)
Right. That's just what it is for.
Oh, Windows is being blamed too, doesn't mean it isn't mainstream... :-|
</sarcasm>
Maybe the fact that somebody is being offensively blamed for not supporting Linux is actually a sign of Linux actually going mainstream, instead of a cause for not going mainstream? People start to expect Linux drivers the same way they expect Windows drivers.
(Whether or not that's desirable or not is another matter.)
And BTW I don't normally reply to myself, it only occurred to me after submitting. Never mind.
This is a real chance to get us an ISP-less network that is relatively immune to attacks to the service provider. It is quite public-though, and easy to monitor; together with applications such as FreeNet which automatically encrypt communications and decentralize data storage from individual nodes, this could provide a nice extension of the Internet into ubiquitous, free (as in speech & beer) network coverage. At least when there are enough participating nodes.
Could someone please explain to me what process is described by the term media consolidation? I mean, it sounds like a nice flippy 21st century information society term, but nevertheless I'd like to know what it means and what it's definition implies about where it's leading.
You know, with money spent on military technology, I'm not sure I even want it to work back ino my life.
The difference is probably that: (a) audiophiles run around in far less numbers than computer addicts and (b) when you buy an amplifier for $50k, you can be fairly assured that in five years you're not going to see it on eBay for $50.
The main advantage of Java over C and C++ (and the reason why C and derivations are discontinued as teaching tools in my university) is it's relative platform-independence. When you want to test the programs that people have written at home, it's a real pain in the ass to get their Borland C++ programs running under Linux, you know. This disappears with Java.
On the other hand, Java is not the most highly structured language, especially in recent versions. That greatly lessens its didactic qualities; I have had several students here who started to experiment with all sorts of arcane features like inner classes and operator overloading without learning how to write good programs first. It's a bit like comparing Niklaus Wirth's original Pascal to Borland Delphi. Deplhi is more powerful, but you need a thorough knowledge of the class hierarchy and in order to deliver good OO programs, you have to be a good OO programmer beforehand.
Therefore, I now prefer either more systematic languages like Eiffel, or script-like languages like Python - the first for their higher level of abstraction and cleaner design, the latter for their greater ease of use and wider field of applications. Both are, in my opinion, better suited as didactic tools for learning OO programming.
And BTW, over here in Germany the high dependence on symbols such as {} or [] or /**/ is a didactic problem in itself because these aren't so easily reached on a German keyboard. This may sound harmless, but we get endless complaints from people who hate to perform strange Alt+Key acrobatics to get a simple thing like a curly brace.
If Microsoft has a strategy to alter the content of web pages, they will probably use it regardless of users opting out. While Microsoft is not an the Evil Empire, they're not a charity organization either, and they are not known for always respecting the law, let alone general morals. Probably we'll just have another <meta> tag that is in the header of every security-aware, anti-Microsoft web site and that causes the Internet explorer to behave all strangely with those pages (links generating mysterious 404s, security sites being unreachable, continuous reporting back to Microsoft, all sorts of evil behaviour.
This post is Microsoft Smart Post-enhanced.
Given the previous sentence, I don't really want to know what a Cummunist is.
This is not entirely true. I know that this has been the result of some experiment in social psychology, but there is enough evidence that the sizes of individual ego networks may vary greatly, often beyond those 150 heads. These results have been problematic mainly due to the environmental settings their test persons were subject to, i.e. their role within Western culture. However, if you look at the ego network of someone really prominent within one's society (a famous scholar, a politician etc., someone who knows and has to communicate with lots of people independently and intensively), you'll find that they are often larger. I know of no historical examples where there are scientific surveys, but one is currently in preparation about an Arabic scholar in 18th century Egypt who had intensive scholarly contacts all over Northern Africa, Arabia and most of Asia, and his ego network comprised of well over one thousand individuals.
Of course, this does not invalidate your idea.
Personally, I find the idea to have something like a permanent trend database collected from what individual users considered "cool" at a given time rather fascinating. It allows for some really interesting social analyses, for example whether coolness trends originate from individuals who are in the position of "hubs" in a social network or rather from individuals more to the edge and so on.
However, the proposal definitely has the problem of anonymity. When individual user's trends are trackable, individual anonymity can no longer be guaranteed; effectively, DoubleClick already does quite a lot of what you want the trend database to do! I doubt whether just anonymizing the data will solve this fairly basic problem; social networks are very often harder or even impossible to reconstruct when the data is fully anonymized (because it is much harder to reconstruct who interacts with whom), and partial anonymization is practically equivalent to no anonymization at all, because when you speak of "User A" instead of "Joe User", but keep track of his taste, his age, gender and so on, as well as his social interaction within the observed framework, you may just as well keep the name because it would be rather easy to correlate the data with external material and thus recover the individual's identity.
And just to give the crowd some material regarding social networks, here are some social network-related links:
- The Oracle of Bacon - play and delve into the network of Hollywood actors (i.e. who acted with whom)
- Visualizing Social Networks - paper by Linton S. Freeman, social network scientist, that explains some of the theory, with applications
- Freeman's personal homepage, with links and papers - no, I'm not associated with him in any way
:-)
- The International Network for Social Network Analysis - scientific association with fairly self-referential name, with links
For those interested, that should point you to a lot of interesting material.The idea behind Unicode is to have a uniform encoding for all the world's scripts, not for all the world's languages. The necessity of this is evident for anyone who has experience with the insufficiencies of the individual codepage systems (Windows CPxxx, ISO 8859-x, ISCII etc.) currently in use. Have you ever tried to send an Arabic e-mail through a non-Arabic mailserver or run a program with German character support on a codepage 450 windows? Unicode is designed to programs and data interoperable regardless of either's language encoding.
Just because you don't know Japanese it doesn't make the rendering of Japanese pointless. Just because you don't have a clue how a Chinese or Japanese Kanji input system works doesn't render the idea of being able to chat in IRC using Japanese characters entirely pointless.
Just because English is the most popular language on the Internet at the moment, that doesn't mean that either other languages were not used or that other languages might not take over that role in the future. If, for example, the growth of Internet accessibility in China keeps up at that rate, Chinese will be language #1 in the Internet by 2007, especially since Chinese will be read and understood by Koreans and Japanese as well.
Define "bend the law a little bit".
According to law, a law enforcement agency must operate within the law. Everything else is unlawful by definition. If we allow law enforcement agencies to behave unlawfully, then we can go back to torturing prisoners and concentration camps: in the substance, there's no difference. And the FBI is allowed by law to request tax files.
Admittedly, your point is better than your last one. But imagine borrowing a friend's car, then getting crashed into by a drunk truck driver. Should you not be guaranteed personal safety in spite of the car you're driving not being yours? Shouldn't I be guaranteed privacy when walking on a public road that isn't mine? Is the government allowed to confiscate my friend's laptop and see through his files when I walk into a public building that isn't mine? What would the FBI have done if the Russians had used their own computers? Shrugged and said "Well, we can't act here?"
This time, you are really dangerously mistaken. Even if I have nothing to hide, the law enforcement ageny might think I had something to hide and do all sorts of nasty things to me, for example. And just because someone acts in a fashion that you (or the law enforcement agency) consider strange doesn't mean they've got something to hide, and this completely subjective notion should definitely not suffice for them to start hacking into my computer, even if I haven't got a warezed version of Photoshop. What if they hack into it, find my legal copies of Jack B. Nymble and PGP and decide that I'm a potential criminal, hence I'm probably a criminal, hence I am a criminal, hence they can take action against me because they've bent the law a little bit?
In a free, civil society, every individual must be allowed to worry about privacy, about individual security and about law enforcement agencies. Just because I question the police's behaviour doesn't mean I'm a criminal.
Whether Russia is considered a lawless place as compared to the US by US citizens or not is of very little concern for international law. If it's on their soil, it's their responsibility. If they don't live up to what you think their responsibility is, the only thing you're allowed to do is to complain. No nuking, no computer intrusions, no covert police actions.
The notion of whether somewhere is a lawless place is a highly subjective notion, don't you think? Compared to Somalia, Russia is a pretty lawful place. The sheer number of laws in effect in Russia is probably comparable to the US. What you describe as it being a lawless place is more precisely a certain chaos in how they are enacted and executed. However, the FBI will have to be asked for aid by the Russians prior to intruding in order for the whole thing to be compliant to international law.
Also, there is the issue of "intrusion". The fact that the FBI obtained the passwords in a fashion that was legal against US law dows not lessen the intrusion. If it was legal in Iran to torture people, could the Iranians torture some Americans, get their passwords to some American servers and happily go downloading away just because they don't have to hack into the machine, after all, because they've got the passwords? The danger of hypocrisy is rather evident.
The only legitimacy I see in this is the fact that the sniffing of passwords took place in US space. (And even this is highly questionable given the virtual nature of the net)
So when will we see the next step, a judgment that OKs the FBI to hack into the Russian computers right away? Will the USA now cease considering Chinse hackers that hack into US government computers an international infringement?
I completely agree that this probably takes out a few Russian script kiddies. However, it takes them out with a method that starts to be questionable against the background of international law. Technically, had they nuked Chelyabinsk, they'd have taken out the script kiddies out as well. Face facts: when a hacker is outside your own territory, your law doesn't apply to them. While this may be a problem in the elimination of hackers, this is only just and fair for international relationships. Hackers are just citizens, you know. Even Russians.
There is the .md country-code top-level domain as well, which is, of course, originally intended for Moldova, but which is seeing increased use for doctors in English-speaking countries...
On the other hand, it's not entirely a bad thing if an ISP allows its customers 100% free access to the Internet (excluding SMTP, but the Telekom has a special SMTP relay for which you have to register). And, well, if someone attacks you on 119 and 1080 (111 is popular as well, maybe you should increase your firewall sensitivity), just block their IP for 24 hours and that's it. I do that automatically and it doesn't hurt.
On the other hand, I fail to see both how sensible a connection between the Telekom's ISP services and their micropayment idea is and what your security has to do with micropayment at all.