Creating a torrent for each patch would ensure the fastest possible distribution, while the rss feed would ensure the timely announcement of it.
"broadpatching" ?
I was thinking along similar lines for distributing virus signature updates. What with "warhol worms" now routinely spreading faster than traditionally-downloaded (and slashdotted signature files, antivirus vendors need a more efficient distribution channel, as well.
A company that single handedly dominates a market is a monopoly. Two or more companies that dominate a market is a cartel.
What would likely happen is that companies that used to merge would instead collude to split the market, circumventing the tax. When market peers (*cough* record companies) settle into their markets, a wink is as good as a nod - they're smart enough to guess without any communication whatsoever that not making waves raises all boats.
What happens when Trusted Computing architectures meet these p2p services, and a "bug" is found that allows anonymous access to all shared content? What if the network operators refuse to expire the certs on the "buggy" software? Are they liable for the infringement of the users, who refuse to stop using the software because they use it for other things?
The users can't stop the copies from being made because they're locked into the software, and shouldn't be expected to stop using the service (which they use for other reasons).
The authors can't be expected to be liable for the (mis)use of software bey their userbase, so long as it has a "substantial non-infringing use".
This an important conflict. By a common interpretation of Canadian copyright law, Downloading is legal. It's uploading that's the infringement. It was my impression that this interpretation was due to what party is viewed as causing the copy to be made.
People who install Kazaa on their machine are in control of their machine, and are knowingly installing software that creates copies of files for anonymous transmission across the net. The uploader, then, is the one making the copy.
But this takes that view and turns it upside down. So they're saying that, because Kazaa shares downloaded files by default, an ignorant user can be legitimately unaware that copyright infringement is happening on their box, and that makes them innocent?
This is bizaare...
After some consideration, this sounds more like a case of not being liable for what others do with your stuff. If you leave a case of CDs in an unlocked car, you're not responsible for the infringement if some thief breaks in and copies them all.
Beacause The license agreement you must accept, and the Palladium DRM that you can't circumvent (easily, or legally), prohibits you from running anything other than Microsoft-signed software.
Think XBox, only with teeth.
And don't think that because you "own" the hardware, that this will save you. You'll be leasing it.
When one starts characterizing the media cartels as state propaganda machines, the propaganda efforts of small dictatorships look like the drops in the bucket they are.
...who explained to me that in a dictatorship, it doesn't matter what people think, because you have a gun to their head. If you can control what they do, then what they think doesn't matter.
Only in a democratic system, where direct extortion is prohibited, does thought control become necessary. When people are relatively free to do as they please does it become necessary to control what they think - and that's what the media cartels have learned how to do.
The Internet allows for the relatively free flow of subversive thought and criticism, which certianly sparks change in societies where force is not king. But in a dictatorship, That's not enough. Until the Internet traffics in guns, dictatorship won't care about it.
I've been experimenting with alternative roots over the past couple of months.
The OpenNICroot zone file seems pretty stable, and resolves ICANN domains along with opennic's own.geek,.oss,.parody,.indy,.null, and.opennic . AlterNIC and Pacific Root alternate roots seem to be long gone - I haven't been able to find any current information on these alternate roots, and I have yet to come across a root zone file that allows resolution of any of their names (anybody know?).
I tried the ORSCroot zone file, which is FAR more extensive, but it seems to be out of date - I couldn't even resolve some ICANN domains with it!
It seems that the YouCANN and ORSC web sites are possibly horribly out of date - can anyone verify that these projects are even active?
Now for a little editorial criticism: I don't see any indication in the article that ICANN is considering "incorporating" alternative TLDs as much as it's considering bulldozing over them, like it has for.biz . The submitter's take that ICANN roots may soon start resolving these independent root operators is either woefully mistaken or badly misleading.
Had the EU (such as it was) approached Microsoft ten or fiteen years ago, and said: "We'll let you engage in anti-competitve practices in operating sytems, office applications, web browsers, and media players all you like for a crisp half-billion dollars, payable on delivery", do you think they would have taken the deal?
They have $50 Billion dollars in cash. 1% of one's cash reserves (never mind revenues) is simply not a punishment.
Imagine being taxed one percent of your life savings for a license to break all the laws you like. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.
The problem with fines is that business already thinks in terms of money. Punishments for breaking the law are intended to deter behaviour. Fines are instead framed by the company as just the cost of doing business.
I've experienced Rackspace's chat app before, and I find it overall, fairly positive.
1) You don't have to go trudging through as much public marketroid copy to get your questions answered. every website has a different FAQ section, and they don't always answer your FAQ.
With a human, it's easier to get a straight, fast answer, even if what you want to know is obscure - or if, for whatever reason, the business isn't amicable to advertising it's answers to the public.
2) If you don't want to chat, close the window. I'm sure the cookie marks you as having been approached to avoid disgruntling "users". I'm sure a webchat salesperson isn't going to give a damn if "guest243 has closed the chat window" scrolls by. Then again, I also have no qualms about immediately hanging up after identifying a telemarketer.
Then again, there's a fine line between auto-popping a window and placing a chat button on the site. I would imagine regular popup blockers would take care of the folks who wold be most annoyed by this.
If only meatspace salespeople came with little close buttons...
My guess is that since 'X/Freee/86' is a plausible keyword combo for a porn site, *and* a popular search term for that other reason, those running porn sites would be tempted to submit a lot of sites optimized for that keyword. If the web crawlers that feed MSN's index pick up a lot more porn sites for "xfree86" because the keyword is being targeted more by porn sites, then it shouldn't be surprising that searches for xfree85 or xfree87 don't set off the message.
Then again, I typed "xfree85" into nightsurf.com, and got the EXACT SAME 162 RESULTS, in the same order, with only the keyword changed...
I love Paranoia, but I thought the weakest point of the game (and perhaps a bigger detterent to gameplay than I thought) was the art. I really, really don't like Jim Holloway, for some reason.
So who's going to be slapping the chrome on this edition?
I was favorably impressed when the Unreal Tournament 2k3 demo CD came out on a bootable Gentoo Linux installer cd. It made sense that game demos could be released in a clean-room software environment, making support easier.
Of course, there's just one thing holding back many people I know form switching to Linux: GAMES. If the right sound and graphics support could be developed for bartspe, windows game demos could be run right off a bootable cd, without needing to have windows actually installed at all.
It was an exciting idea, until I thought about the licensing issues...
The Flash click to play extension is great, but it doesn't block all flash. From the actual file:/* Doesn't work for tags, which are less common than tags - bug 190970 */
So, it doesn't block flash like the the ones often seen here.
Ah, the inexorable corruption of the profit motive...
Anytime you have a power-distributive technology fall into the hands of a group whose first priority is profit, the tendency for the technology to distribute power always loses.
Napster was sued out of existence (Brand name notwithstanding), and rightfully so, not so much because it contributed to copyright infringement, but because it sought to profit from that infringment.
Red Hat has decided that it's priorities require that it profit before it supports the small Linux user, so using Red Hat Linux has become that much less of an option for most people.
Sharman Networks has it's network, and has shown for some time its disregard for its users in preference to its profit motive. If the business can profit from cutting user's throats, it will do it.
Now, I'm not going to engage the issue of whether profit motives are justified, or whether these individual examples were motivated by survival or profit motive.
It seems only non-profit groups, whose priorites lie with their actual stated goal (making and maintaining quality software - SPI/Debian, Mandrake, etc.) can actually be trusted.
The profit motive, by definition, is to concentrate power in the form of money (and the process of doing that benefits from other kinds of power). This has consequences for any technology which has the potential to distribute power of any kind. The two tendencies inevitably conflict.
I'm more than happy to wait for a private or anonymous page to load. It's the fact that every time I install freenet, connect, and let the links saturate for a few days, half my requests still timeout instead of producing the requested content.
WASTE builds networks by authenticating users, so that YOU can make judgements about who to trust. MUTE builds networks by anonymizing users, so that THEY can't.
Of course. I'm moving to Canada, personally. (marginally) Better IP laws, no DMCA, no Patriot Act, no warmongering. And I still work for a US firm (mostly because I haven't convinced my partner to move yet).
Of course the preceeding statement is contradicted by the fact that seemingly every conglomerate seems to have rights....
Which is why incoporation is precisely the avenue autonomous human-par machines will likely use to obtain legal personhood. Corporations are already "artificial persons", and have been for quite some time.
However, I think this whole debate can be short-circuited by considering that AI can "attain personhood" by augmenting existing human intelligence, rather than pushing the pop concept of an autonomous robot. By extending the abilities of existing rightsholders, like any tool does, the debate doesn't become nearly as sticky.
This is one of those debates that tickles my gut as a non sequitur. Tech history is riddled with fierce controversies that turn out to be trivially solved by unanticipated developments. I reserve the right to be full of crap, but time will tell...
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like an application for broadcatching .
Creating a torrent for each patch would ensure the fastest possible distribution, while the rss feed would ensure the timely announcement of it.
"broadpatching" ?
I was thinking along similar lines for distributing virus signature updates. What with "warhol worms" now routinely spreading faster than traditionally-downloaded (and slashdotted signature files, antivirus vendors need a more efficient distribution channel, as well.
patches are distributed not as patches to individual files (e.g. diffs) but as whole file replacements.
You're right. Everyone knows crackers are too lazy to make their own diff.
A company that single handedly dominates a market is a monopoly. Two or more companies that dominate a market is a cartel.
What would likely happen is that companies that used to merge would instead collude to split the market, circumventing the tax. When market peers (*cough* record companies) settle into their markets, a wink is as good as a nod - they're smart enough to guess without any communication whatsoever that not making waves raises all boats.
What happens when Trusted Computing architectures meet these p2p services, and a "bug" is found that allows anonymous access to all shared content? What if the network operators refuse to expire the certs on the "buggy" software? Are they liable for the infringement of the users, who refuse to stop using the software because they use it for other things?
The users can't stop the copies from being made because they're locked into the software, and shouldn't be expected to stop using the service (which they use for other reasons).
The authors can't be expected to be liable for the (mis)use of software bey their userbase, so long as it has a "substantial non-infringing use".
Vendor lock-in meets free speech.
OK, I know I'm way out west, here...
This an important conflict. By a common interpretation of Canadian copyright law, Downloading is legal. It's uploading that's the infringement. It was my impression that this interpretation was due to what party is viewed as causing the copy to be made.
People who install Kazaa on their machine are in control of their machine, and are knowingly installing software that creates copies of files for anonymous transmission across the net. The uploader, then, is the one making the copy.
But this takes that view and turns it upside down. So they're saying that, because Kazaa shares downloaded files by default, an ignorant user can be legitimately unaware that copyright infringement is happening on their box, and that makes them innocent?
This is bizaare...
After some consideration, this sounds more like a case of not being liable for what others do with your stuff. If you leave a case of CDs in an unlocked car, you're not responsible for the infringement if some thief breaks in and copies them all.
Beacause The license agreement you must accept, and the Palladium DRM that you can't circumvent (easily, or legally), prohibits you from running anything other than Microsoft-signed software.
Think XBox, only with teeth.
And don't think that because you "own" the hardware, that this will save you. You'll be leasing it.
When one starts characterizing the media cartels as state propaganda machines, the propaganda efforts of small dictatorships look like the drops in the bucket they are.
...who explained to me that in a dictatorship, it doesn't matter what people think, because you have a gun to their head. If you can control what they do, then what they think doesn't matter.
Only in a democratic system, where direct extortion is prohibited, does thought control become necessary. When people are relatively free to do as they please does it become necessary to control what they think - and that's what the media cartels have learned how to do.
The Internet allows for the relatively free flow of subversive thought and criticism, which certianly sparks change in societies where force is not king. But in a dictatorship, That's not enough. Until the Internet traffics in guns, dictatorship won't care about it.
Microsoft may be the prime example, but when I think Vendor Lock-in, I think Apple.
Mostly obscure .org domains, although even slashdot.org occasionally fails. spaatz.org, riaa.org (I'm just pulling domains out of the air).
I'm attemtping to resolve from my home box, and two different dedicated servers with different results.
I've been experimenting with alternative roots over the past couple of months.
.geek, .oss, .parody, .indy, .null, and .opennic . AlterNIC and Pacific Root alternate roots seem to be long gone - I haven't been able to find any current information on these alternate roots, and I have yet to come across a root zone file that allows resolution of any of their names (anybody know?).
.biz . The submitter's take that ICANN roots may soon start resolving these independent root operators is either woefully mistaken or badly misleading.
The OpenNIC root zone file seems pretty stable, and resolves ICANN domains along with opennic's own
I tried the ORSC root zone file, which is FAR more extensive, but it seems to be out of date - I couldn't even resolve some ICANN domains with it!
It seems that the YouCANN and ORSC web sites are possibly horribly out of date - can anyone verify that these projects are even active?
Now for a little editorial criticism: I don't see any indication in the article that ICANN is considering "incorporating" alternative TLDs as much as it's considering bulldozing over them, like it has for
Had the EU (such as it was) approached Microsoft ten or fiteen years ago, and said: "We'll let you engage in anti-competitve practices in operating sytems, office applications, web browsers, and media players all you like for a crisp half-billion dollars, payable on delivery", do you think they would have taken the deal?
They have $50 Billion dollars in cash. 1% of one's cash reserves (never mind revenues) is simply not a punishment.
Imagine being taxed one percent of your life savings for a license to break all the laws you like. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.
The problem with fines is that business already thinks in terms of money. Punishments for breaking the law are intended to deter behaviour. Fines are instead framed by the company as just the cost of doing business.
I've experienced Rackspace's chat app before, and I find it overall, fairly positive.
1) You don't have to go trudging through as much public marketroid copy to get your questions answered. every website has a different FAQ section, and they don't always answer your FAQ.
With a human, it's easier to get a straight, fast answer, even if what you want to know is obscure - or if, for whatever reason, the business isn't amicable to advertising it's answers to the public.
2) If you don't want to chat, close the window. I'm sure the cookie marks you as having been approached to avoid disgruntling "users". I'm sure a webchat salesperson isn't going to give a damn if "guest243 has closed the chat window" scrolls by. Then again, I also have no qualms about immediately hanging up after identifying a telemarketer.
Then again, there's a fine line between auto-popping a window and placing a chat button on the site. I would imagine regular popup blockers would take care of the folks who wold be most annoyed by this.
If only meatspace salespeople came with little close buttons...
My guess is that since 'X/Freee/86' is a plausible keyword combo for a porn site, *and* a popular search term for that other reason, those running porn sites would be tempted to submit a lot of sites optimized for that keyword. If the web crawlers that feed MSN's index pick up a lot more porn sites for "xfree86" because the keyword is being targeted more by porn sites, then it shouldn't be surprising that searches for xfree85 or xfree87 don't set off the message.
Then again, I typed "xfree85" into nightsurf.com, and got the EXACT SAME 162 RESULTS, in the same order, with only the keyword changed...
Was I the only guy who expanded CDC to "Cult of the Dead Cow"?
Now THAT would be what I call cross-disciplinary!
I love Paranoia, but I thought the weakest point of the game (and perhaps a bigger detterent to gameplay than I thought) was the art. I really, really don't like Jim Holloway, for some reason.
So who's going to be slapping the chrome on this edition?
not to mention the security boost a read-only boot source adds...
I was favorably impressed when the Unreal Tournament 2k3 demo CD came out on a bootable Gentoo Linux installer cd. It made sense that game demos could be released in a clean-room software environment, making support easier.
Of course, there's just one thing holding back many people I know form switching to Linux: GAMES. If the right sound and graphics support could be developed for bartspe, windows game demos could be run right off a bootable cd, without needing to have windows actually installed at all.
It was an exciting idea, until I thought about the licensing issues...
weird. ou'd think he'd refer people to ebay's own dictionary section
The Flash click to play extension is great, but it doesn't block all flash. From the actual file: /* Doesn't work for tags, which are less common than tags - bug 190970 */
So, it doesn't block flash like the the ones often seen here.
Ah, the inexorable corruption of the profit motive...
Anytime you have a power-distributive technology fall into the hands of a group whose first priority is profit, the tendency for the technology to distribute power always loses.
Napster was sued out of existence (Brand name notwithstanding), and rightfully so, not so much because it contributed to copyright infringement, but because it sought to profit from that infringment.
Red Hat has decided that it's priorities require that it profit before it supports the small Linux user, so using Red Hat Linux has become that much less of an option for most people.
Sharman Networks has it's network, and has shown for some time its disregard for its users in preference to its profit motive. If the business can profit from cutting user's throats, it will do it.
Now, I'm not going to engage the issue of whether profit motives are justified, or whether these individual examples were motivated by survival or profit motive.
It seems only non-profit groups, whose priorites lie with their actual stated goal (making and maintaining quality software - SPI/Debian, Mandrake, etc.) can actually be trusted.
The profit motive, by definition, is to concentrate power in the form of money (and the process of doing that benefits from other kinds of power). This has consequences for any technology which has the potential to distribute power of any kind. The two tendencies inevitably conflict.
Freenet's problem isn't speed - it's reliability.
I'm more than happy to wait for a private or anonymous page to load. It's the fact that every time I install freenet, connect, and let the links saturate for a few days, half my requests still timeout instead of producing the requested content.
Alternatives are welcome.
Very much an opposite principle:
WASTE builds networks by authenticating users,
so that YOU can make judgements about who to trust.
MUTE builds networks by anonymizing users,
so that THEY can't.
Of course. I'm moving to Canada, personally. (marginally) Better IP laws, no DMCA, no Patriot Act, no warmongering. And I still work for a US firm (mostly because I haven't convinced my partner to move yet).
Of course the preceeding statement is contradicted by the fact that seemingly every conglomerate seems to have rights....
Which is why incoporation is precisely the avenue autonomous human-par machines will likely use to obtain legal personhood. Corporations are already "artificial persons", and have been for quite some time.
However, I think this whole debate can be short-circuited by considering that AI can "attain personhood" by augmenting existing human intelligence, rather than pushing the pop concept of an autonomous robot. By extending the abilities of existing rightsholders, like any tool does, the debate doesn't become nearly as sticky.
This is one of those debates that tickles my gut as a non sequitur. Tech history is riddled with fierce controversies that turn out to be trivially solved by unanticipated developments. I reserve the right to be full of crap, but time will tell...