"somebody will make a program that rips cd's into a weird new extensions like.FMS (fuck microsoft) instead of.mp3
stupid winxp will not realize what's going on..."
WinXP will be leased, not bought. It will contact a server at Microsoft headquarters every n days to confirm whether it needs "system updates" or not. And if your net connection is down for more than k days, your system will refuse to run, so don't think you can just pull the ethernet jack and use a (crippled) system.
If a program to use your.FMS extension ever gets more than 1,000 users, Microsoft will patch the operating system to exclude it, and within a few days your workaround will stop working.
This will happen back and forth a few times until 99% of the userbase gets thoroughly sick of it and uses whatever format Microsoft makes it easy to use. Ease-of-use, slow and steady, wins the race.
Don't think Microsoft will zap out your program from Redmond? Think
DirecTV.
They own the operating system from boot to shutdown. No matter how clever you are, they will take your program down remotely.
That's the short-term fix. In the long-term, 5 to 10 years, you will find that Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers will team up to create an audio standard which requires you to know a secret key to put data to your computer's speakers. If you don't apply to Microsoft for a special license, your program will be unable to make noise -- without going through Microsoft's API, of course, which will make only noises guaranteed not to infringe copyright, like boops, beeps, or files stored in whatever format Microsoft makes it easy to use.
Enterprising hackers will of course find and steal secret keys, so that they can release freeware MP3 players that run on Windows. But again, as soon as these programs get popular enough to show up on Microsoft's radar, the operating system will download the new patches which specifically forbid these programs from working.
Try to understand. Microsoft's eventual plan is that you will not own your computer anymore. They will own your computer, and lease its use to you on very specific licensing terms. Their long-term goal is that people who try to use their computers like Turing machines, thinking they can make them do anything they want, will go to jail.
"Arial photos of numerous camps (including Auschwitz) so detailed that you could see people smoking cigarettes. But you sure as hell couldn't see people being smoked - especially en masse, as they supposedly were."
Holocaust-deniers ignore the aerial photographs which do show the smoke from burning pits. Some of these photos, taken moments apart by the planes flying overhead, actually allow stereoscopic views which show, in effect, a 3-D view of the smoke rising over the Auschwitz death camp.
Prof. John Zimmerman talks about these in his essay
Body Disposal at Auschwitz.
He writes (I'm omitting his footnotes):
...when the June26 [1944] photo was first analyzed in a Central Intelligence Agency study in 1979 it was noted that ground scarring near CrematoriaIV and V, consistent with the eyewitness testimony about burning pits, was visible.
The other photo was taken on May31, a time when deportations were occurring. This photo was not analyzed in the original CIA study. The full extent of the extermination process is not recorded on this photo. However, it needs to be kept in mind that this is a still photo taken at a particular point in time, not round the clock surveillance.
Nevertheless, the May31 photo does reveal important information not addressed by deniers. In 1994 Mattogno assured his readers that the May31 photo did not show a "trace of smoke" or "pits, crematory or otherwise."The problem is that at the same time his monograph appeared, a book published on Auschwitz showed smoke rising from a pit near KremaV, the same place all of the eyewitnesses said bodies were being burned.This was the same May31 photo. It had actually first been reproduced showing the smoke in 1983.
The May31 photo also showed something that was spotted by Dr. Nevin Bryant, supervisor of cartographic applications and image processing at Caltech/NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He identified prisoners being marched into KremaV.
Mattogno claimed in 1995, the year following the publication of the May31 photo, that the smoke was not from burning bodies but most probably from trash. However, it is known that this is not the case because KremasII and III each had a trash incinerator. Therefore, there would not have been a reason to burn trash in the open. Moreover, as will be seen, there are three pits near KremaV in the photo. Mattogno simply had no explanation for the presence of this smoke.
Afghanistan doesn't allow any voting. It shares that distinction with the U.A.E., which another poster mentioned, and with Saudi Arabia and presumably others.
I'm updating the country to Kuwait. The
CIA World Factbook's entry on Kuwait
says "Suffrage: adult males who have been naturalized for 30 years," etc. Interesting that after five minutes of looking through dozens of countries to try to find one that denies the vote specifically to women, the only one I could find was one whose government my country went to war to defend.
"Iranian women, in fact, do have the right to vote"
I was trying to be mildly funny (pictures of people voting, ha ha), but skipped Rule 1 which is to make sure jokes have their facts straight. I apologize to Iran. Someone name me a country where women can't vote and I'll update the joke.
"In the story's submission the submitter posted a link to Neo-Nazi content but not to pornographic content."
Obviously you didn't click the link (which was my addition, not a submitter's). It points to a collection of papers and speeches by my late friend Stig Hornshøj-Møller, who had researched the Nazi propaganda film
Der ewige Jude.
Stig had argued, and persuasively demonstrated, that the 1941 Nazi propaganda film is no longer a threat to democracy, and that screening it for young people in particular can help them understand Nazi use of propaganda. And yet the film is still strictly regulated by Germany, to the point where instructors have to apply to the government for permission before using it even in the classroom.
Go
check out his work.
It's fascinating (IMHO) to see how the film has changed in sixty years from a tool of persuasion, to an object to be feared, and, finally, hopefully, to a historical document to be learned from.
...is there any way Slashdot could add an optional filter to remove "funny" content for those of us who don't think [stupid things] are "funny?"
A feature to allow this -- and other, similar customization -- is in the works for a future release of the slashcode. I can't say exactly when, but we hear ya and it's on our list.
"I like the way the editors no longer ever pretend that the vast majority of readers on this site aren't running Windows.... Believe it or not, at one time, that wasn't the case."
The majority of readers have been running Windows ever since I've been reading Slashdot. At least, the readers I've met. The best games have always run on Windows and no self-respecting Slashdotter would be caught dead being unable to dual-boot into deathmatch heaven.
But then, the majority of readers have always been saying "Slashdot was much better back in the day," so, you're upholding a proud tradition. Carry on!
"If you focus enough distributed processing power on any security problem, like, say, through posting it to slashdot, you will overwhelm and outpace the sincere efforts to patch the problem that are being undertaken by the hapless victims."
The company has now known about the problem for 5.5 days. I had debated how long to give the company to fix stuff before posting this, but since it was already picked up by MSNBC and other media two days ago, I don't really feel it's an issue anymore.
The page was there for two hours after I emailed them about it, but was removed and redirected shortly before this story went up, so I added the link to
where it used to be.
You can see the "bak" in the URL, which is why I assume it was backup data never intended to stay on the corporate web server.
As far as anyone can tell, this code does not propagate itself over the internet at all. It spreads to other applications on the same machine. That means only computer labs are vulnerable - Linux computer labs in which everyone gets root access, and I don't expect there are very many of those.
When was the last time you copied a binary executable from one Linux machine to another, and then ran it on the second machine as root?
Code that has to be spread manually is not a "virus." Code that exists only on one machine (!) is not a virus. This code is as much a "virus" on Linux as that text: "hi, I'm an email virus, copy me into your sig!" Reporting it as a "virus" is very irresponsible of Reuters.
"The coolest experience ever was when we discovered you could kill the mutant shrubs by getting it to stand in a doorway and watch the door smash it to bits! We laughed for hours after."
Sounds like you were loading up on more than M&M's...
:)
This game sounds a lot like the original Wizardry for the Apple][, which hooked me for about six months when I was in high school (early '80s I guess). A dungeon crawl with 90-degree corners and sprites overlaid on the "3-D" view. I still think pretty graphics are secondary to balanced gameplay and a deep world.
Come to think of it, Wizardry at six straight months still has the longest replay value of any single-player game I've ever played.
"All they would see were rotating one liners, one of which stated 'I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded.'
Under these circumstances, contacting the police was reasonable."
Not to cast blame or make excuses, but here's what a tech-savvy and thinking staff member might have done:
The page that comes up makes it crystal clear that it's a quote (try it!). When you need context, feed a phrase to Google.
By the way, I think the first line on the actual site went up to the word "tennis" -- not sure. What you saw in the story as I wrote it depends on the width of your browser.
"Jamie would rather lather up the troops... I don't trust Jamie's reporting. His involvement in censorware issues is as a participant, not as a journalist. His reporting on other issues is misleading and inflamatory (moreso than other/. authors). I've learned to double-check anything Jamie says before I get my panties in a twist."
Assuming you're not trolling...
In classic Slashdot style, I make no attempt to hide my biases. I am strongly biased in favor of free speech generally, and my stories will reflect that fact. If you expect a writer for "Your Rights Online" to be neutral on
censorware,
you're deluded.
I don't think any of my stories have been "misleading." Accuracy concerns me; when I've screwed up, I correct myself ASAP, and the difference between facts and my opinion has never been unclear. As for "inflammatory," get a grip. This story was a report on something I found interesting from several angles, not least its humor value. There's a cautionary element to it, but you didn't exactly see me calling for anyone's head on a platter. If this was an attempt to inflame the "troops," it was a pretty lame one, don't you think?
"Ive submitted info to CDDB before, so they can make money off of my time now? I say no."
"As did I. I must have submitted information for close to 100 CD. I did not get paid. I thought I was donating my time to a free effort."
You gotta read the fucking licenses. The license is everything, that's how you know what you're donating your effort to. You think just because they give you shit without paying for it it's a "free effort"? I think you know that's not what "free" is all about...
I'm looking around for a place on their site where they tell me what rights I have to the information that I donated to them. I don't find anything. I find obscure licensing terms which they force their applications to adhere to, like (just one example):
"End users must register with CDDB2 the first time they access the service with your application."
Here's a rule of thumb: if something is free like in speech, you will learn this within 60 seconds of visiting their website for the first time. Free projects are proud of being free. If you find yourself clicking around page after page, hoping to find some magic words about distribution rights and can't find any, that's how you know it's proprietary.
Actually all those years added up properly for me. Better check your Processor for the Pentium Floating point bug...;)
It's a Mac, actually:)
You're right about 1992 and 1995, those were my typos (these didn't affect any numbers I used in the story). That'll teach me to transpose digits. Argh. I've edited the story to reflect this.
But I'm right about 1998. Their note says "DVD Audio Product is included in the Music Video totals." They added the $12.2 million in twice to get $13723.5M instead of $13711.2M (the other $900,000 being a roundoff error).
Well, no. I'm looking at the numbers in context. The RIAA is focusing solely on 1% of their market which saw reduced sales, and making out of it a much bigger deal than it is.
from a cursory scan of the original post (and, if I'm in any way wrong, feel free to shoot me down) he at one point designates the CD singles base as "1%", then later recognizes it as "8%". Which is it?
CD singles are 1% of the total revenue (my spreadsheet says 0.9963%).
Cassettes, cassingles, vinyl LPs, vinyl singles, and music videos together are another 6.748%.
So the total non-full-length-CD market is 7.744%, which I called 8%.
(Four significant figures is as close as I can get, because there's roundoff error; the total revenue on my spreadsheet for 2000 is $14,323.7 million but the RIAA claims only $14,323.0 million.)
single sales have to be viewed in light of the artist.... their older brothers came around and downloaded Napster for the family machine.
Look at it this way. If CD single sales had dropped entirely to zero, it would only have decreased their total revenues by 1%. Meanwhile, full-length CD sales from 1999 increased the RIAA's income by 2.3% of total revenue from last year.
As I mentioned, the digital audio sales are up from 1999; it's the analog and video sales that are down.
The report clearly states 'according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).'
For some reason jamie didn't feel that part was important enough to include in his intro (he does gloss over it in the body text).
Yes, and the BBC would quickly have seen that this "fact" was a blatant lie if they'd bothered to look at the numbers.
As I wrote:
The BBC story's second paragraph says "Sales of music compact discs fell by 39% last year," which they would have quickly seen was a blatant lie if they'd bothered to look at the numbers.
If you write a story whose primary basis is one "fact," you really owe it to your readers to check that fact. If I wrote a story about how great the DEA was, and its second paragraph was "the DEA stops 99% of all drugs coming into this country, according to the head of the DEA," I would expect y'all to come down on me just as hard. Especially if the real numbers were available from their website, two clicks off their homepage.
Since when did "bevy" specifically involve females? Even the linked definition doesn't suggest that. Somebody has been hit with the idiot paddle a few too many times
I'm not denying the part about the idiot paddle, but the definition was from my college dictionary, Webster's New World Dictionary of American English, Third College Edition, 1988.
Scroll down on the linked definition and you'll see similar definitions:
1. A company; an assembly or collection of persons, especially of ladies.
Windows file sharing is so fucking stupid -- why on earth would they set it up so the default share is "all users: full access"?
I have no idea what the default setting is, because I don't use Windows. But according to the folks at ShareSniffer,
this is not true:
"Microsoft Windows by default will not expose files to the Internet. It has to be consciously configured to expose files to the Internet."
First, the whole point of censorware is that you can't get around it. If you have a choice of whether to run it or not, it might be searching, filtering, categorizing, whatever, but it's not censorware.
The idea of an "open" solution which is forced upon people is a little silly. Apart from the philosophical absurdity, censorware can never work on an open-source operating system without stringent physical controls as well.
(Recall the first rule of security: anyone who has physical access to your machine has the potential to compromise it. This may be as simple as booting from floppy!)
Second, making up a blacklist of porn sites is trivial if you just want to list the ones who want to be listed. Use RSACi. It's already built into your browser. Almost all porn sites rate with RSACi, and they want to be blacklisted, because it helps immunize them from prosecution for providing porn to kids (or at least that's the perception).
If you want to make up a blacklist of sites which don't want to be blacklisted, you have a fight on your hands. It's a phenomenal amount of work to scan the web. Consider the massive server farms and pipes of unholy size that Google or Alta Vista have to use to spider the web. Who's going to volunteer to set up a similar installation to spider porn sites?
If you think you're just going to provide a way for volunteers to send in "hey, I found another porn site" URLs, don't be silly. Most of those submissions are going to be RASCi-rated; almost all the rest will be overlap. The web is huge. Porn is about 1% of it. One percent of huge is still huge.
And then, the big question: who's going to make decisions about these allegedly porn (but not self-rated) sites? Some human being has to categorize them, or you'll be no more accurate than the existing closed-source blacklists (which is to say, laughably inaccurate).
That takes time, and with millions of new or changed pages on the web every hour, do the math and figure out how much time you can expect to get out of your volunteers. How many dollars of free labor does this hypothetical project depend on? Do porn-hating geeks really hate porn that much, that they'll sit in front of a monitor all day for free and surf porn sites?
Short version: if it were easy to do, someone already would have done it. In fact there already exist several places that keep an "open" list of porn sites which can be dropped into any Squid proxy. Most of them are years old and will never be maintained again:
Linux Center's squidblock.tgz Click
the "Latest" link, which is there "just to show that someone is using it!" Note
that the "latest" additions to the blacklist include such obscure sites as
playboy.com, and such recent new sites as dailydirt.com (domain registered on Jan 12, 1998).
Slashdot Mirror
WinXP will be leased, not bought. It will contact a server at Microsoft headquarters every n days to confirm whether it needs "system updates" or not. And if your net connection is down for more than k days, your system will refuse to run, so don't think you can just pull the ethernet jack and use a (crippled) system.
If a program to use your .FMS extension ever gets more than 1,000 users, Microsoft will patch the operating system to exclude it, and within a few days your workaround will stop working.
This will happen back and forth a few times until 99% of the userbase gets thoroughly sick of it and uses whatever format Microsoft makes it easy to use. Ease-of-use, slow and steady, wins the race.
Don't think Microsoft will zap out your program from Redmond? Think DirecTV. They own the operating system from boot to shutdown. No matter how clever you are, they will take your program down remotely.
That's the short-term fix. In the long-term, 5 to 10 years, you will find that Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers will team up to create an audio standard which requires you to know a secret key to put data to your computer's speakers. If you don't apply to Microsoft for a special license, your program will be unable to make noise -- without going through Microsoft's API, of course, which will make only noises guaranteed not to infringe copyright, like boops, beeps, or files stored in whatever format Microsoft makes it easy to use.
Enterprising hackers will of course find and steal secret keys, so that they can release freeware MP3 players that run on Windows. But again, as soon as these programs get popular enough to show up on Microsoft's radar, the operating system will download the new patches which specifically forbid these programs from working.
Try to understand. Microsoft's eventual plan is that you will not own your computer anymore. They will own your computer, and lease its use to you on very specific licensing terms. Their long-term goal is that people who try to use their computers like Turing machines, thinking they can make them do anything they want, will go to jail.
Jamie McCarthy
Holocaust-deniers ignore the aerial photographs which do show the smoke from burning pits. Some of these photos, taken moments apart by the planes flying overhead, actually allow stereoscopic views which show, in effect, a 3-D view of the smoke rising over the Auschwitz death camp.
Prof. John Zimmerman talks about these in his essay Body Disposal at Auschwitz. He writes (I'm omitting his footnotes):
Jamie McCarthy
I'm updating the country to Kuwait. The CIA World Factbook's entry on Kuwait says "Suffrage: adult males who have been naturalized for 30 years," etc. Interesting that after five minutes of looking through dozens of countries to try to find one that denies the vote specifically to women, the only one I could find was one whose government my country went to war to defend.
Jamie McCarthy
I was trying to be mildly funny (pictures of people voting, ha ha), but skipped Rule 1 which is to make sure jokes have their facts straight. I apologize to Iran. Someone name me a country where women can't vote and I'll update the joke.
Jamie McCarthy
Obviously you didn't click the link (which was my addition, not a submitter's). It points to a collection of papers and speeches by my late friend Stig Hornshøj-Møller, who had researched the Nazi propaganda film Der ewige Jude.
Stig had argued, and persuasively demonstrated, that the 1941 Nazi propaganda film is no longer a threat to democracy, and that screening it for young people in particular can help them understand Nazi use of propaganda. And yet the film is still strictly regulated by Germany, to the point where instructors have to apply to the government for permission before using it even in the classroom.
Go check out his work. It's fascinating (IMHO) to see how the film has changed in sixty years from a tool of persuasion, to an object to be feared, and, finally, hopefully, to a historical document to be learned from.
Jamie McCarthy
A feature to allow this -- and other, similar customization -- is in the works for a future release of the slashcode. I can't say exactly when, but we hear ya and it's on our list.
Jamie McCarthy
No, YOU are a troll!
TROLL!
Jamie McCarthy
The majority of readers have been running Windows ever since I've been reading Slashdot. At least, the readers I've met. The best games have always run on Windows and no self-respecting Slashdotter would be caught dead being unable to dual-boot into deathmatch heaven.
But then, the majority of readers have always been saying "Slashdot was much better back in the day," so, you're upholding a proud tradition. Carry on!
Jamie McCarthy
The company has now known about the problem for 5.5 days. I had debated how long to give the company to fix stuff before posting this, but since it was already picked up by MSNBC and other media two days ago, I don't really feel it's an issue anymore.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
When was the last time you copied a binary executable from one Linux machine to another, and then ran it on the second machine as root?
Code that has to be spread manually is not a "virus." Code that exists only on one machine (!) is not a virus. This code is as much a "virus" on Linux as that text: "hi, I'm an email virus, copy me into your sig!" Reporting it as a "virus" is very irresponsible of Reuters.
Jamie McCarthy
Sounds like you were loading up on more than M&M's...
:)
This game sounds a lot like the original Wizardry for the Apple][, which hooked me for about six months when I was in high school (early '80s I guess). A dungeon crawl with 90-degree corners and sprites overlaid on the "3-D" view. I still think pretty graphics are secondary to balanced gameplay and a deep world.
Come to think of it, Wizardry at six straight months still has the longest replay value of any single-player game I've ever played.
Jamie McCarthy
Not to cast blame or make excuses, but here's what a tech-savvy and thinking staff member might have done:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22put+the+shotgun+ in+an+Adidas+bag%22
The page that comes up makes it crystal clear that it's a quote (try it!). When you need context, feed a phrase to Google.
By the way, I think the first line on the actual site went up to the word "tennis" -- not sure. What you saw in the story as I wrote it depends on the width of your browser.
Jamie McCarthy
Assuming you're not trolling...
In classic Slashdot style, I make no attempt to hide my biases. I am strongly biased in favor of free speech generally, and my stories will reflect that fact. If you expect a writer for "Your Rights Online" to be neutral on censorware, you're deluded.
I don't think any of my stories have been "misleading." Accuracy concerns me; when I've screwed up, I correct myself ASAP, and the difference between facts and my opinion has never been unclear. As for "inflammatory," get a grip. This story was a report on something I found interesting from several angles, not least its humor value. There's a cautionary element to it, but you didn't exactly see me calling for anyone's head on a platter. If this was an attempt to inflame the "troops," it was a pretty lame one, don't you think?
Your thoughts are welcome: jamie@mccarthy.vg.
Jamie McCarthy
The school claimed it was an anonymous tip from one of the other students.
Jamie McCarthy
You gotta read the fucking licenses. The license is everything, that's how you know what you're donating your effort to. You think just because they give you shit without paying for it it's a "free effort"? I think you know that's not what "free" is all about...
Go read at http://www.gracenote.com/terms.html:
"Proprietary Rights Information
"The contents of this Site are protected by the copyright laws of the United States and around the world, including international treaties. No use of the CDDB Content, database or other content on this Site is allowed except as expressly stated herein. All rights not expressly granted are reserved. Copyright © 1996-1999 CDDB Inc"
That's not exactly the goddamn GPL.
I'm looking around for a place on their site where they tell me what rights I have to the information that I donated to them. I don't find anything. I find obscure licensing terms which they force their applications to adhere to, like (just one example):
"End users must register with CDDB2 the first time they access the service with your application."
Here's a rule of thumb: if something is free like in speech, you will learn this within 60 seconds of visiting their website for the first time. Free projects are proud of being free. If you find yourself clicking around page after page, hoping to find some magic words about distribution rights and can't find any, that's how you know it's proprietary.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
The last paragraph of the story, which says "update"? :)
Jamie McCarthy
It's a Mac, actually :)
You're right about 1992 and 1995, those were my typos (these didn't affect any numbers I used in the story). That'll teach me to transpose digits. Argh. I've edited the story to reflect this.
But I'm right about 1998. Their note says "DVD Audio Product is included in the Music Video totals." They added the $12.2 million in twice to get $13723.5M instead of $13711.2M (the other $900,000 being a roundoff error).
Thanks.
Jamie McCarthy
Well, no. I'm looking at the numbers in context. The RIAA is focusing solely on 1% of their market which saw reduced sales, and making out of it a much bigger deal than it is.
CD singles are 1% of the total revenue (my spreadsheet says 0.9963%).
Cassettes, cassingles, vinyl LPs, vinyl singles, and music videos together are another 6.748%.
So the total non-full-length-CD market is 7.744%, which I called 8%.
(Four significant figures is as close as I can get, because there's roundoff error; the total revenue on my spreadsheet for 2000 is $14,323.7 million but the RIAA claims only $14,323.0 million.)
Look at it this way. If CD single sales had dropped entirely to zero, it would only have decreased their total revenues by 1%. Meanwhile, full-length CD sales from 1999 increased the RIAA's income by 2.3% of total revenue from last year.
As I mentioned, the digital audio sales are up from 1999; it's the analog and video sales that are down.
Jamie McCarthy
Yes, and the BBC would quickly have seen that this "fact" was a blatant lie if they'd bothered to look at the numbers.
As I wrote:
If you write a story whose primary basis is one "fact," you really owe it to your readers to check that fact. If I wrote a story about how great the DEA was, and its second paragraph was "the DEA stops 99% of all drugs coming into this country, according to the head of the DEA," I would expect y'all to come down on me just as hard. Especially if the real numbers were available from their website, two clicks off their homepage.
Jamie McCarthy
I'm not denying the part about the idiot paddle, but the definition was from my college dictionary, Webster's New World Dictionary of American English, Third College Edition, 1988.
Scroll down on the linked definition and you'll see similar definitions:
1. A company; an assembly or collection of persons, especially of ladies.
bevy n 1: a group of girls or young women
Jamie McCarthy
I have no idea what the default setting is, because I don't use Windows. But according to the folks at ShareSniffer, this is not true: "Microsoft Windows by default will not expose files to the Internet. It has to be consciously configured to expose files to the Internet."
Jamie McCarthy
I'm glad we can finally know for sure that Aristotle's earth-centered model was wrong.
Jamie McCarthy
First, the whole point of censorware is that you can't get around it. If you have a choice of whether to run it or not, it might be searching, filtering, categorizing, whatever, but it's not censorware.
The idea of an "open" solution which is forced upon people is a little silly. Apart from the philosophical absurdity, censorware can never work on an open-source operating system without stringent physical controls as well.
(Recall the first rule of security: anyone who has physical access to your machine has the potential to compromise it. This may be as simple as booting from floppy!)
Second, making up a blacklist of porn sites is trivial if you just want to list the ones who want to be listed. Use RSACi. It's already built into your browser. Almost all porn sites rate with RSACi, and they want to be blacklisted, because it helps immunize them from prosecution for providing porn to kids (or at least that's the perception).
If you want to make up a blacklist of sites which don't want to be blacklisted, you have a fight on your hands. It's a phenomenal amount of work to scan the web. Consider the massive server farms and pipes of unholy size that Google or Alta Vista have to use to spider the web. Who's going to volunteer to set up a similar installation to spider porn sites?
If you think you're just going to provide a way for volunteers to send in "hey, I found another porn site" URLs, don't be silly. Most of those submissions are going to be RASCi-rated; almost all the rest will be overlap. The web is huge. Porn is about 1% of it. One percent of huge is still huge.
And then, the big question: who's going to make decisions about these allegedly porn (but not self-rated) sites? Some human being has to categorize them, or you'll be no more accurate than the existing closed-source blacklists (which is to say, laughably inaccurate).
That takes time, and with millions of new or changed pages on the web every hour, do the math and figure out how much time you can expect to get out of your volunteers. How many dollars of free labor does this hypothetical project depend on? Do porn-hating geeks really hate porn that much, that they'll sit in front of a monitor all day for free and surf porn sites?
Short version: if it were easy to do, someone already would have done it. In fact there already exist several places that keep an "open" list of porn sites which can be dropped into any Squid proxy. Most of them are years old and will never be maintained again:
Click the "Latest" link, which is there "just to show that someone is using it!" Note that the "latest" additions to the blacklist include such obscure sites as playboy.com, and such recent new sites as dailydirt.com (domain registered on Jan 12, 1998).
Jamie McCarthy