i think, like web sites, they'd figure out the unobtrusive ads wouldn't work well enough (partly because most unix users don't reboot daily) and they'd switch to the "ads that make me want to burn my computer and throw it in the ocean" ads.
every five minutes the whole screen shakes and animated ads pop up on top of anything i'm doing.
yay.
at least, as almost every post has pointed out, you could chop it out of an open source desktop. just imagine when (not if) microsoft figures this out and all those poor bastards using Windows QX 2003 Amateur have to put up with ads for mouse pointers.
even given the oddities of some car manufacturers (i once saw an ignition down by the stick shift rather than the steering column), i'd still contend that car layouts are more stable and standard than most electronic devices. did you have to consult a manual to find how to turn the headlights on in a car ever? i haven't. i HAVE had to consult a manual to program my answering machine.
i have to say modern vcrs are really easy to program, being menu-driven, but there are plenty of electronics that don't have nice displays telling you what to do. those are the ones that annoy people most, i'd say. part of the problem is that most people don't want most of the features they have to wade through. they want to plug in the tv and watch "friends." most people don't care about setting channel favorites, screen inlays letting you watch two things at once, or an internal communication device for talking to aliens should they land tomorrow.
if you give someone all that at once, and it's all new or different than it was before, you're going to annoy someone.
the thing with a car is that, having learned to drive a car, i remain able to drive the next generation car and the car after that. ok, maybe i have to read the manual to figure out how the gps works, but it's no great struggle to turn it on and drive it somewhere. this is true for my fridge as well.
with electronics, different manufacturers often have completely different interfaces for the same device, and it changes with each generation. setting the clock on the vcr my parents had in 1985 is completely different than setting the clock on the one i have. after a while people get sick of learning a new way of doing something every time they have to trade in their newly obsolete product for the next product that will be obsolete in two years. i guess this means any unstable or inconsistent interface is what's truely non user-friendly.
i've stopped setting the clock on my vcr. frankly, if i want to know the time i check my computer. it can sync with an ntp server.
anyone remember the interview with lars ulrich from metallica (http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/ 05/26/1251220&mode=nested&tid=141 if not)? he offered some good insight into how the recording industry works, but basically what you're paying for is the record company bankrolling new artists (as well as the overhead jobe_br mentions). part of the "sure thing" cristina agulera cover risks on new artists.
as far as a small startup being able to survive on a small profit margin, well DUH. one guy with a recording studio and burner just has to pay himself, but a&m or sony has to pay people not directly related to revenue: human resources, payroll, lawyers. don't pretend they're not necessary just because the small company doesn't need the. that's like saying "hey, my 4-port hub has more capacity than i need at home, why do people spend so much money on switches and routers when they could string the internet together with 4-port hubs?" the bigger you get the more infrastructure demands you have.
it doesn't help that everyone (artists and executives alike) wants to be rich, but i doubt cutting prices on cds will change that attitude --it's in every industry.
all that said, i'd buy more cds if they were cheaper. right now i have a hard time justifying buying a whole cd just so i can have one song i like.
how can you say it doesn't matter whether or not it will work? even if some of the politicians behind this truly are in it for votes, some people --possibly the progenitors-- honestly do want to help children out, and if they do how detrimental is that?
i guess i'm a bit biased, here. for some time i worked for a free homepage provider and spent some time with the abuse team, keeping out piracy and pr0n to keep bandwidth down. along with foot porn, fruit porn, and furniture porn (i'm completely serious about those), i saw things that broke my heart. i had --and have-- no qualms turning those users over to the FBI and i hope they spend the rest of their lives in jail enduring daily beatings for what they did to those kids.
the basic idea behind the internet is that free exchange of information helps everyone, because it allows people to make informed political and social decisions. the problem is that kids don't have the experience or cognative skills to judge the information and people they they find, so people want to make a place for kids to find out about dinosaurs without parents having to worry about child molesters lurking in chat rooms. is that not worth --at least-- a try?
you're part right. the law isn't about limiting freedom. the domain is optional and, if you don't like not being able to speak your mind freely, you can continue speaking it as you're doing right now --outside the.kids.us domain. just as we consider it inappropriate to wander naked through a school playground at recess, we should consider it inappropriate to do so in some corner of the internet. i doubt that's too much to ask.
actually, consider global corporations that use email and IM for communication. i'm sure easier encryption (even over icq!) would ease a lot of minds in their legal departments as people discuss sensitive information over the internet. i know where i work it's pretty rare to pick up a phone; we tend to use email and IM almost exclusively.
i think the point of the post, too, is the "go to the bother" part of your reply. if encryption weren't a bother (consider just selecting a checkbox for "use encryption") people wouldn't need as much of a reason to use it.
to answer your question, the article says who's to decide what's what: the state attorney's office.
i just can't believe how stupid the whole thing is. if the law enforcement officials KNOW a site is child porn then wouldn't they be much better off going after the site itself rather than alerting the site owners by putting them on a hunted list?
moreover, wouldn't it be more useful to LET people access a known child porn site? a swift enough equipment seisure could offer further leads in email, log files, and so on.
i got all huffy when the french decided to sue some american companies for not blocking access to nazi paraphanalia sales when the sites, themselves, didn't control the sales. i see this as the same thing, though the subject matter is an order of magnitude more detestible. still, i say pennsylvania's going after the wrong people.
i don't think the suit is about money. sure, sun'd probably love money, but it sounds like the suit is sun trying to save java. the injunction they filed as part of the suit is asking the court to require microsoft to include java in windows and ie. it's not just about payback or damages or limiting microsoft's monopoly, it's about saving their major foot in the door of internet technology.
as far as why they waited, i imagine they prefered to let the doj and the states fight on their behalf until now. it's comparatively recently that it's been clear sun would see no rememdy from the doj/state action against microsoft.
here's what i see that's interesting:
1) california has anti-spam laws (i think they're actually anti-hacking laws worded vaguely enough to encompass spam: "use or cause to be used" computers without the owners' permission). even if the end spam doesn't fit under this category, that elementary school in korea probably would (though since it's not in california it's may not, technically, be illegal). anyway, that doesn't make it better --it's like a cop driving to mexico to buy something illegal here, smells of hypocrisy. http://law.spamcon.org/us-laws/states/ca/index.sht ml for details about the california spam laws.
2) people don't like spam. some people really hate spam. his innovative tactic is to irritate people.
3) how "internet-savvy" can he really be if he doesn't know a BASIC rule of email manners like "don't send spam."
i think this says a lot about the candidate. i'm glad to hear about it because now i know NOT to vote for him (yes i live in california).
i spent a good part of my childhood in lake tahoe, california. there used to be great fishing there.
someone (fish and game dept if i remember correctly) thought it would be a GREAT idea to start up a shrimping industry there, too, and introduced shrimp into the lake.
the fish now eat the shrimp. there's no shrimping because the shrimp are fish food. there's no fishing because the fish don't care about bait --they have helpless shrimp. while hardly a massive disaster (except for the fishing industry there), the idea's the same: when you screw with an ecosystem you may not get what you want.
sometimes great ideas aren't as great as they sound on paper because it's too hard to see the consequences of what you're doing. even if the flies do exactly what scientists want and decimate the population of existing flies, are we sure that won't cause ANOTHER problem?
The neat thing is that you don't have to be a citizen to have a driver's license, and --as far as i know-- it's not even legal for them to ask for that information when you apply for one.
so as far as the government will be concerned, there's no difference between citizens and non-citizens in our new national id card system; the only difference will be drivers and non-drivers ("state id card" holders). that will surely fight off the foreign terrorists they're trying to protect us from.
if those people didn't ask for email from you it's unsolicited use of a company resource (currently illegal in california where i'm guessing this whole thing happened because that's where inte'ls HQ is). they asked him to stop and he didn't.
if he'd been sending to those employees' PERSONAL email addresses it sounds like intel wouldn't have had a problem with it (whether that's true or not we'll never know). i know i've gotten email from former employees in the form of job offers (which they signed papers promising not to do) and just plain "you suck and now i'm having fun" messages to large lists. i thought it tasteless and dealt with it just like i deal with the university diplomas mail --the 'D' key and considering tweaking my procmail filters.
exactly. most of the "joe shmoe" venues vanished because they couldn't pay their bills. when you can't make payroll or pay for your bandwidth you also go away (not just when a behemoth buys you).
it's not the fact that big corporations have taken over the net so much as they're the ones who have survived the recession. the lawsuits aren't so much a result of their new power as the increased attention they're paying to the net. six years ago if you told fox that someone has a web page with screenshots from one of their shows they probably wouldn't have known what you were talking about, and now they do (and care).
frankly i think the net is as democratic now as ever, just in a new way. i no longer have to rely on tripod or xoom or the globe or whoever else has gone out of business: i can set up my own webserver under my own domain on my home dsl to voice my opinions (try doing THAT six years ago).
this speaks mostly for the US and its concept of "free speech," but the general idea applies in countries that protect speech thus:
- you can't defend yourself from a slander or libel charge claiming "free speech"
- you can't defend yourself from inciting a riot claiming "free speech" (http://www.spectacle.org/freespch/bomb.html).
the idea is that if your speech is doing or advocating damage it's not protected.
the next question is whether a game is speech, art, or a product (like a pen or a sponge). i don't think most governments have figured that out yet.
i prefer olwm. i think it was a mistake for sun to stop supporting it. it does everything i want a window manager to do, and is lightweight and simple.
thanks to their wisdom in releasing the source code, though, i can still use it (and on linux, and on freebsd).
begin
toWorryAboutThem:= 1;
with hopeThatHalfTheSuitHasNoMerit do
begin
CrossFingers();
hopeThatHalfTheSuitHasNoMerit:= hopeThatHalfTheSuitHasNoMerit - 1;
end;
end;
(sorry, been a few years. if only i could remember COBOL, not that COBOL could do anything useful).
i could carry your argument a step further and say that an unethical entity (company/person) might release security patches that INTRODUCE holes. when they do i'll name that method "trojan horse" (you know, after condoms). i currently protect myself from these kinds of attacks by confirming the hole with a trusted source. since ethical, reputable security groups like l0pht or SANS usually contact the product's author(s) first, the author(s) are usually my first choice.
my point isn't that they're useless; just that exploits are probably doing more harm than good.
but is an exploit REALLY necessary? it's useful, but why make life easier for script kiddies? what i, as a sysadmin, would find more useful than an exploit is a tool that says "yes, you're vulnerable to this exploit" when that's possible (and finding out is more difficult than, say, checking a version number).
i think i agree with microsoft, here: search for problem, yes; warn people, yes; offer solutions/patches/workarounds, yes; make toys for script kiddies, no.
it may be illegal, but not under the dmca because it doesn't involve bypassing encryption to get to data; it's just reverse engineering. if the software has a reverse engineering clause there might be problems.
i liked timothy's comment that people who use aol may shy away from bsd or linux because they wouldn't want to switch isps. having seen the aol interface and met aol users, i doubt any aol user would honestly USE linux. at best a couple might try the install, but go back to using windows.
it's a cool idea (hey, i'd join), but i wonder about how fully baked it is.
yes, communications are important during disasters and we should have a crew to deal with outages of ESSENTIAL systems, but if it's just so average people can check on family members, i'd think that can wait. i'd rather see all resources possible going to the victims rather than "that explosion caused a major fiber cut! mypr0n.com is down!"
now, a team to go in and do emergency rebuilds after the victims are cleared out (and presumably the site is reasonably safe, otherwise the effort would be pointless) would probably be useful. maybe i'm just getting tired, but i missed whether they were proposing one, the other, or both.
i imagine windows has an implementation of alarm(). you can handle timeouts that way and stay with simpler blocking i/o (granted you need to set up a SIGALRM handler, but that's only a few lines of code).
still, i think labrea is a good idea. at worst it's better than whining in forums about "why can't those windows lusers patch their systems," and at best it's the beginning of a more active way to hurt viruses. i'd probably run it if i had a pool of unused addresses.
you know it's all for the chicks, man. no, wait. what was this post about again?
it's all part of building a reputation. much like a photographer has a portfolio, a programmer can prove himself in open source. yes, there's ego in that, but it's also practical.
on top of that, i think sharing is a traditional part of hobbies. "hey, look what i just found out" and "look at this thing i just did" are part of the "geek personality" that goes with a strong love for technology, just like any other hobby. mustang collectors go to mustang shows to show off their cars and the work they put in (try posting on a car forum for suggestions on how to get more horsepower out of your car). geeks are doing the same thing.
right. this doesn't sound like censorship, either, --just an asset search. they were probably (and maybe still are) planning to seize machines they think were used for something illegal (like maybe used in a hacking attempt).
i think someone's overreacting. at least the article didn't mention that they were linux servers, or else the posts would be hysterical with indignation.
Slashdot Mirror
i think, like web sites, they'd figure out the unobtrusive ads wouldn't work well enough (partly because most unix users don't reboot daily) and they'd switch to the "ads that make me want to burn my computer and throw it in the ocean" ads.
every five minutes the whole screen shakes and animated ads pop up on top of anything i'm doing.
yay.
at least, as almost every post has pointed out, you could chop it out of an open source desktop. just imagine when (not if) microsoft figures this out and all those poor bastards using Windows QX 2003 Amateur have to put up with ads for mouse pointers.
even given the oddities of some car manufacturers (i once saw an ignition down by the stick shift rather than the steering column), i'd still contend that car layouts are more stable and standard than most electronic devices. did you have to consult a manual to find how to turn the headlights on in a car ever? i haven't. i HAVE had to consult a manual to program my answering machine.
i have to say modern vcrs are really easy to program, being menu-driven, but there are plenty of electronics that don't have nice displays telling you what to do. those are the ones that annoy people most, i'd say. part of the problem is that most people don't want most of the features they have to wade through. they want to plug in the tv and watch "friends." most people don't care about setting channel favorites, screen inlays letting you watch two things at once, or an internal communication device for talking to aliens should they land tomorrow.
if you give someone all that at once, and it's all new or different than it was before, you're going to annoy someone.
the thing with a car is that, having learned to drive a car, i remain able to drive the next generation car and the car after that. ok, maybe i have to read the manual to figure out how the gps works, but it's no great struggle to turn it on and drive it somewhere. this is true for my fridge as well.
with electronics, different manufacturers often have completely different interfaces for the same device, and it changes with each generation. setting the clock on the vcr my parents had in 1985 is completely different than setting the clock on the one i have. after a while people get sick of learning a new way of doing something every time they have to trade in their newly obsolete product for the next product that will be obsolete in two years. i guess this means any unstable or inconsistent interface is what's truely non user-friendly.
i've stopped setting the clock on my vcr. frankly, if i want to know the time i check my computer. it can sync with an ntp server.
anyone remember the interview with lars ulrich from metallica (http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/ 05/26/1251220&mode=nested&tid=141 if not)? he offered some good insight into how the recording industry works, but basically what you're paying for is the record company bankrolling new artists (as well as the overhead jobe_br mentions). part of the "sure thing" cristina agulera cover risks on new artists.
as far as a small startup being able to survive on a small profit margin, well DUH. one guy with a recording studio and burner just has to pay himself, but a&m or sony has to pay people not directly related to revenue: human resources, payroll, lawyers. don't pretend they're not necessary just because the small company doesn't need the. that's like saying "hey, my 4-port hub has more capacity than i need at home, why do people spend so much money on switches and routers when they could string the internet together with 4-port hubs?" the bigger you get the more infrastructure demands you have.
it doesn't help that everyone (artists and executives alike) wants to be rich, but i doubt cutting prices on cds will change that attitude --it's in every industry.
all that said, i'd buy more cds if they were cheaper. right now i have a hard time justifying buying a whole cd just so i can have one song i like.
how can you say it doesn't matter whether or not it will work? even if some of the politicians behind this truly are in it for votes, some people --possibly the progenitors-- honestly do want to help children out, and if they do how detrimental is that?
.kids.us domain. just as we consider it inappropriate to wander naked through a school playground at recess, we should consider it inappropriate to do so in some corner of the internet. i doubt that's too much to ask.
i guess i'm a bit biased, here. for some time i worked for a free homepage provider and spent some time with the abuse team, keeping out piracy and pr0n to keep bandwidth down. along with foot porn, fruit porn, and furniture porn (i'm completely serious about those), i saw things that broke my heart. i had --and have-- no qualms turning those users over to the FBI and i hope they spend the rest of their lives in jail enduring daily beatings for what they did to those kids.
the basic idea behind the internet is that free exchange of information helps everyone, because it allows people to make informed political and social decisions. the problem is that kids don't have the experience or cognative skills to judge the information and people they they find, so people want to make a place for kids to find out about dinosaurs without parents having to worry about child molesters lurking in chat rooms. is that not worth --at least-- a try?
you're part right. the law isn't about limiting freedom. the domain is optional and, if you don't like not being able to speak your mind freely, you can continue speaking it as you're doing right now --outside the
actually, consider global corporations that use email and IM for communication. i'm sure easier encryption (even over icq!) would ease a lot of minds in their legal departments as people discuss sensitive information over the internet. i know where i work it's pretty rare to pick up a phone; we tend to use email and IM almost exclusively.
i think the point of the post, too, is the "go to the bother" part of your reply. if encryption weren't a bother (consider just selecting a checkbox for "use encryption") people wouldn't need as much of a reason to use it.
to answer your question, the article says who's to decide what's what: the state attorney's office.
i just can't believe how stupid the whole thing is. if the law enforcement officials KNOW a site is child porn then wouldn't they be much better off going after the site itself rather than alerting the site owners by putting them on a hunted list?
moreover, wouldn't it be more useful to LET people access a known child porn site? a swift enough equipment seisure could offer further leads in email, log files, and so on.
i got all huffy when the french decided to sue some american companies for not blocking access to nazi paraphanalia sales when the sites, themselves, didn't control the sales. i see this as the same thing, though the subject matter is an order of magnitude more detestible. still, i say pennsylvania's going after the wrong people.
i don't think the suit is about money. sure, sun'd probably love money, but it sounds like the suit is sun trying to save java. the injunction they filed as part of the suit is asking the court to require microsoft to include java in windows and ie. it's not just about payback or damages or limiting microsoft's monopoly, it's about saving their major foot in the door of internet technology.
as far as why they waited, i imagine they prefered to let the doj and the states fight on their behalf until now. it's comparatively recently that it's been clear sun would see no rememdy from the doj/state action against microsoft.
here's what i see that's interesting:t ml for details about the california spam laws.
1) california has anti-spam laws (i think they're actually anti-hacking laws worded vaguely enough to encompass spam: "use or cause to be used" computers without the owners' permission). even if the end spam doesn't fit under this category, that elementary school in korea probably would (though since it's not in california it's may not, technically, be illegal). anyway, that doesn't make it better --it's like a cop driving to mexico to buy something illegal here, smells of hypocrisy. http://law.spamcon.org/us-laws/states/ca/index.sh
2) people don't like spam. some people really hate spam. his innovative tactic is to irritate people.
3) how "internet-savvy" can he really be if he doesn't know a BASIC rule of email manners like "don't send spam."
i think this says a lot about the candidate. i'm glad to hear about it because now i know NOT to vote for him (yes i live in california).
i spent a good part of my childhood in lake tahoe, california. there used to be great fishing there.
someone (fish and game dept if i remember correctly) thought it would be a GREAT idea to start up a shrimping industry there, too, and introduced shrimp into the lake.
the fish now eat the shrimp. there's no shrimping because the shrimp are fish food. there's no fishing because the fish don't care about bait --they have helpless shrimp. while hardly a massive disaster (except for the fishing industry there), the idea's the same: when you screw with an ecosystem you may not get what you want.
sometimes great ideas aren't as great as they sound on paper because it's too hard to see the consequences of what you're doing. even if the flies do exactly what scientists want and decimate the population of existing flies, are we sure that won't cause ANOTHER problem?
The neat thing is that you don't have to be a citizen to have a driver's license, and --as far as i know-- it's not even legal for them to ask for that information when you apply for one.
so as far as the government will be concerned, there's no difference between citizens and non-citizens in our new national id card system; the only difference will be drivers and non-drivers ("state id card" holders). that will surely fight off the foreign terrorists they're trying to protect us from.
if those people didn't ask for email from you it's unsolicited use of a company resource (currently illegal in california where i'm guessing this whole thing happened because that's where inte'ls HQ is). they asked him to stop and he didn't.
if he'd been sending to those employees' PERSONAL email addresses it sounds like intel wouldn't have had a problem with it (whether that's true or not we'll never know). i know i've gotten email from former employees in the form of job offers (which they signed papers promising not to do) and just plain "you suck and now i'm having fun" messages to large lists. i thought it tasteless and dealt with it just like i deal with the university diplomas mail --the 'D' key and considering tweaking my procmail filters.
exactly. most of the "joe shmoe" venues vanished because they couldn't pay their bills. when you can't make payroll or pay for your bandwidth you also go away (not just when a behemoth buys you).
it's not the fact that big corporations have taken over the net so much as they're the ones who have survived the recession. the lawsuits aren't so much a result of their new power as the increased attention they're paying to the net. six years ago if you told fox that someone has a web page with screenshots from one of their shows they probably wouldn't have known what you were talking about, and now they do (and care).
frankly i think the net is as democratic now as ever, just in a new way. i no longer have to rely on tripod or xoom or the globe or whoever else has gone out of business: i can set up my own webserver under my own domain on my home dsl to voice my opinions (try doing THAT six years ago).
this speaks mostly for the US and its concept of "free speech," but the general idea applies in countries that protect speech thus:
- you can't defend yourself from a slander or libel charge claiming "free speech"
- you can't defend yourself from inciting a riot claiming "free speech" (http://www.spectacle.org/freespch/bomb.html).
the idea is that if your speech is doing or advocating damage it's not protected.
the next question is whether a game is speech, art, or a product (like a pen or a sponge). i don't think most governments have figured that out yet.
worth changing my signature over.
still, it's only california. there are, what, like twenty more states?
i prefer olwm. i think it was a mistake for sun to stop supporting it. it does everything i want a window manager to do, and is lightweight and simple.
thanks to their wisdom in releasing the source code, though, i can still use it (and on linux, and on freebsd).
begin := 1;
:= hopeThatHalfTheSuitHasNoMerit - 1;
toWorryAboutThem
with hopeThatHalfTheSuitHasNoMerit do
begin
CrossFingers();
hopeThatHalfTheSuitHasNoMerit
end;
end;
(sorry, been a few years. if only i could remember COBOL, not that COBOL could do anything useful).
i could carry your argument a step further and say that an unethical entity (company/person) might release security patches that INTRODUCE holes. when they do i'll name that method "trojan horse" (you know, after condoms). i currently protect myself from these kinds of attacks by confirming the hole with a trusted source. since ethical, reputable security groups like l0pht or SANS usually contact the product's author(s) first, the author(s) are usually my first choice.
my point isn't that they're useless; just that exploits are probably doing more harm than good.
but is an exploit REALLY necessary? it's useful, but why make life easier for script kiddies? what i, as a sysadmin, would find more useful than an exploit is a tool that says "yes, you're vulnerable to this exploit" when that's possible (and finding out is more difficult than, say, checking a version number).
i think i agree with microsoft, here: search for problem, yes; warn people, yes; offer solutions/patches/workarounds, yes; make toys for script kiddies, no.
it may be illegal, but not under the dmca because it doesn't involve bypassing encryption to get to data; it's just reverse engineering. if the software has a reverse engineering clause there might be problems.
i liked timothy's comment that people who use aol may shy away from bsd or linux because they wouldn't want to switch isps. having seen the aol interface and met aol users, i doubt any aol user would honestly USE linux. at best a couple might try the install, but go back to using windows.
it's a cool idea (hey, i'd join), but i wonder about how fully baked it is.
yes, communications are important during disasters and we should have a crew to deal with outages of ESSENTIAL systems, but if it's just so average people can check on family members, i'd think that can wait. i'd rather see all resources possible going to the victims rather than "that explosion caused a major fiber cut! mypr0n.com is down!"
now, a team to go in and do emergency rebuilds after the victims are cleared out (and presumably the site is reasonably safe, otherwise the effort would be pointless) would probably be useful. maybe i'm just getting tired, but i missed whether they were proposing one, the other, or both.
i'm betting the corporations have good lawyers as well, and can make a fair argument for prior art.
i imagine windows has an implementation of alarm(). you can handle timeouts that way and stay with simpler blocking i/o (granted you need to set up a SIGALRM handler, but that's only a few lines of code).
still, i think labrea is a good idea. at worst it's better than whining in forums about "why can't those windows lusers patch their systems," and at best it's the beginning of a more active way to hurt viruses. i'd probably run it if i had a pool of unused addresses.
you know it's all for the chicks, man. no, wait. what was this post about again?
it's all part of building a reputation. much like a photographer has a portfolio, a programmer can prove himself in open source. yes, there's ego in that, but it's also practical.
on top of that, i think sharing is a traditional part of hobbies. "hey, look what i just found out" and "look at this thing i just did" are part of the "geek personality" that goes with a strong love for technology, just like any other hobby. mustang collectors go to mustang shows to show off their cars and the work they put in (try posting on a car forum for suggestions on how to get more horsepower out of your car). geeks are doing the same thing.
right. this doesn't sound like censorship, either, --just an asset search. they were probably (and maybe still are) planning to seize machines they think were used for something illegal (like maybe used in a hacking attempt).
i think someone's overreacting. at least the article didn't mention that they were linux servers, or else the posts would be hysterical with indignation.