Every time we get a story about another bust.com doing the big sleep and selling it's customer info, the wails and gnashing of teeth are thunderous. Slashdotters love anonymity, and hate being profiled.
Now imagine if identity theft becomes commonplace - this will result in all that "personal info" becoming worthless, and will make demographic profiling useless. Massive identity theft will wind up increasing real anonymity - because anyone could be using "your" ID numbers and passwords.
No longer will you have to worry about someone connecting your nick to your "real name", and fearing repercussions over your "free" (as in speech) speech. "I didn't post that, some stinking pinko identity stealer did!" I'd think the cypherpunks should be breathing hard by this point. Heck, they may try to encourage identity theft!
Doesn't this make you happy? Those big companies won't be able to treat you like a number anymore, because that number could be a bunch of people. We'll finally be able to cast off the oppressive yoke of corporate pigeonholing and catagorization of people!
...and get back to actually going to the store with cash in hand for your CDs, DVDs and blank CD-Rs. Ah well, that's the price you pay for progress, right?
If I were an insurance adjuster trying to insure peoples' information technology assets, I would have my own experts supervising everyone who was on the insurance plan to ensure that they patched their fucking software.
If you were an insurance product manager you'd make sure there was an exclusion on the policy that denied claims on servers that were 30 or more days behind in the latest patches. (Yeah, I work for an insurance company)
Of course this would make everyone apply patches as soon as they came out, which could very well create more problems than it solves. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I don't know, somebody could release a nice, polite worm instead. They don't all have to be surly, you know.
That's not a bad idea - you could create the Exploit Detecting Panda worm for the express purpose of finding exploitable servers and notifying them of their vulnerability...
"...and when the sysop doesn't apply the latest patches, that makes me a Sad Panda."
But you know the helpful author of such a worm would get nailed right to the barn door.
If they catch the author, I think this should be grounds for leniency. He had the sense to put in a cutoff so that the worm wouldn't grow out of control.
"Your Honor, I would like to point out that my client could have chosen to shoot all the children in the schoolyard, but he purposely held himself to an even dozen. Please keep this act of self restrain into account during sentencing. Thank you."
Can you compete with the cost undercutting of an african code sweatshop?
No, and I can't compete with a 12 year old in a Nike sweatshop putting together shoes. Because I don't fscking make shoes, nor do I write the kind of crap-code that a kid working for a bowl of rice is going to churn out.
The day I'm no more valuable than some barely-English speaking third-worlder who knows nothing about the business (pick a business - any business) is the day I go apply at the Taco Bell. You want hot or mild sauce?
Let me know when Africa, Indonesia et al start cranking out those killer apps.
Tough call.
Not for me. I'm an American. I welcome the competition.
Sorry for the Ed Anger rant there, but jeez louize...
Re:Turn a PC into an excellent Line Doubler
on
The Joys of HDTV
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· Score: 1
Replace All is a powerful ally... but beware the Dark Side!
They won't even allow you to connect anymore unless you have the latest version with the latest filtering shiznit.
That's terrible! You should demand a refund!
Re:Napster is why any xfer protocol MUST be public
on
Napster Reprieve
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· Score: 1
What could *any* lawyer do against ftp? http?
Send the offender's ISP a letter demanding they TOS the user, or see you in court.
Or warez servers WHERE THEY ARE LEGAL like in Taiwan?
Tell the US backbone providers to block these IPs or see you in court.
Simply the threat of a lengthy court battle with it's expenses is enough to get a company's cooperation. Who wants to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars defending pirates? There's no profit in it.
It really depends on your neighborhood and the time of day.
I can't speak to neighborhood, but in my experience (Time Warner cable modem, Akron OH area) time of day is a definite factor. There seems to be a "rush hour" around 4-6pm (kids getting home from school, people getting home from work), and Sunday afternoons can be brutal.
In the wee small hours of the morning I can get 400kB(yte)/second web downloads on a fast site. At the worst of rush hour I usually don't fall below 60kB/s... and that still makes a dialup connection look pretty sick.
Yeah, I expect it to get worse, but I figure I've got a while before the ol' US Robotics starts looking good again.
What technologies exist to facilitate the ablitly to provide guest access to everyone within range of my xmitter, and to coordinate other free resources like mine in my area, i.e., to provide roaming, etc., like current cell providers can?
Are you sure you want to open your wireless 'net to all and sundry? Anything that they do is going to be tied back to you - sending death threats to politicians, posting kiddie pr0n, or (God forbid!) posting DECSS.
I've got 802.11b at home, hooked to my cable modem. All my computers (ok, both of my computers and my PDA) can share the broadband anywhere in the house, on the porch, in the garage... but I've got the encryption enabled not because I'm stingey with the bandwidth, but because I don't want some script kiddie three doors down getting me tossed off my ISP/cable company for DOSing Amazon or somesuch.
But it's really only relevant to people and companies who are selling downloads. So if you require payment before someone can download some information, this patent might (or might not) be relevant.
If I'm reading this correctly, pay-per-view cable television (which would be taped by the viewer) would violate this patent and/or be prior art (does anyone remember taping PPV movies before 1985?).
I press the button on my cable box remote, the box and the cable co. validate my purchase (and bill me accordingly), and they deliver the information over their network to my VCR, where I make a "material object" out of the data. Even if the PPV is ordered via the phone I think it's pretty much the same mechanism described in the patent.
I agree with Martin Colloms. I cannot believe the gall of the record labels to (apparently surreptitiously) deliberately introduce errors and data corruption into music CDs that customers are expected (and "legally required") to purchase with their hard-earned cash.
Agreed. What we need is a new version of the PMRC to strong-arm the record companies into putting a "WARNING: This recording included explicit purposely introduced errors, your listening experience could be degraded" label on all such protected disks.
I'm no fan of pot being illegal, but don't be pissed because the cops use technology to observe what's going on.
The cops were using technology to circumvent the 4th Amendment's protection from unlawful search - so yes, you should be pissed when this happens. And you should be delighted that the SCOTUS shot it down as unconstitutional.
Until one of the two breaks, and you realize it'd be cheaper to by a new one (TV or VCR) than to fix the evil siamese-twin appliance you've got. Then you're stuck with dead tech taking up room.
A TV-Stereo combo is a very bad idea.
Back in the day, when stuff was (a) made to last and (b) made to be repairable instead of replaceable, TV/Stero combos were quite popular... in the 50s and 60s IIRC. Great big tree-killing wood consoles with giant speakers, a TV screen (remember when you had a tuner and it went "clunk-clunk-clunk" to change channels?) and a radio reciever and record player. It was furniture, baby!
You know it would be bitchin-shit to be able to sit down at your terminal and type:
$ telnet jvc_vcr
$ set channel 64
$ set record 11:00pm
$ exit
I can do something like this now with the Replay PVR... go to myreplaytv.com, log in, tell it what to record and the next time my Replay phones home it'll update accordingly. Sweet!
"There are people who believe that commercial software should not exist at all--that there should be no jobs or taxes around commercial software at all," Gates said. While that's a small group, "the GPL was created with that goal in mind. And so people should understand the GPL. When people say open source, they often mean the GPL."
I bet he was just itching to say "communism" instead of GPL.
Are you now, or have you ever been an Open Source developer?
Bias alert: I work for Progressive. Adjust your filters accordingly.
The insurance company will put this in my car and monitor it and know my every move. How fast I go. Where I go, when and how often.
The program (called "Autograph", and only rolled out in Texas IIRC) was based on the idea that your premium would be pay-as-you-go. Park the car for a month, premium drops. Drive lots of miles at high speeds at night and garage in high-risk areas, pay accordingly.
Not only is this an invasion of privacy, I would suspect I would get worse insurance rates than I am getting now instead of better.
How can something that's voluntary be an invasion of privacy? As for your rates going up, that depends on your driving habits. Which was the whole idea, you pay according to the risk of your driving habits.
I'm not involved in the project, I don't know how well it did or if it's going to be ongoing. But I think it's an innovative idea.
Here is a short article about it from the IEEE. Punching "progressive insurance autograph gps" into google will return lots more.
Slashdot Mirror
Every time we get a story about another bust.com doing the big sleep and selling it's customer info, the wails and gnashing of teeth are thunderous. Slashdotters love anonymity, and hate being profiled.
Now imagine if identity theft becomes commonplace - this will result in all that "personal info" becoming worthless, and will make demographic profiling useless. Massive identity theft will wind up increasing real anonymity - because anyone could be using "your" ID numbers and passwords.
No longer will you have to worry about someone connecting your nick to your "real name", and fearing repercussions over your "free" (as in speech) speech. "I didn't post that, some stinking pinko identity stealer did!" I'd think the cypherpunks should be breathing hard by this point. Heck, they may try to encourage identity theft!
Doesn't this make you happy? Those big companies won't be able to treat you like a number anymore, because that number could be a bunch of people. We'll finally be able to cast off the oppressive yoke of corporate pigeonholing and catagorization of people!
...and get back to actually going to the store with cash in hand for your CDs, DVDs and blank CD-Rs. Ah well, that's the price you pay for progress, right?
If I were an insurance adjuster trying to insure peoples' information technology assets, I would have my own experts supervising everyone who was on the insurance plan to ensure that they patched their fucking software.
If you were an insurance product manager you'd make sure there was an exclusion on the policy that denied claims on servers that were 30 or more days behind in the latest patches. (Yeah, I work for an insurance company)
Of course this would make everyone apply patches as soon as they came out, which could very well create more problems than it solves. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I don't know, somebody could release a nice, polite worm instead. They don't all have to be surly, you know.
That's not a bad idea - you could create the Exploit Detecting Panda worm for the express purpose of finding exploitable servers and notifying them of their vulnerability...
"...and when the sysop doesn't apply the latest patches, that makes me a Sad Panda."
But you know the helpful author of such a worm would get nailed right to the barn door.
If they catch the author, I think this should be grounds for leniency. He had the sense to put in a cutoff so that the worm wouldn't grow out of control.
"Your Honor, I would like to point out that my client could have chosen to shoot all the children in the schoolyard, but he purposely held himself to an even dozen. Please keep this act of self restrain into account during sentencing. Thank you."
Uh, no.
Is it just me, or is it a bit odd to be reporting on the disappearance of items that never existed in the first place?
"If you can see it, but it's not there, it's virtual.
If you can't see it, but it is there, it's hidden.
It you can't see it and it isn't there, it's gone."
-- Some old hacker I knew, RIP
Can you compete with the cost undercutting of an african code sweatshop?
No, and I can't compete with a 12 year old in a Nike sweatshop putting together shoes. Because I don't fscking make shoes, nor do I write the kind of crap-code that a kid working for a bowl of rice is going to churn out.
The day I'm no more valuable than some barely-English speaking third-worlder who knows nothing about the business (pick a business - any business) is the day I go apply at the Taco Bell. You want hot or mild sauce?
Let me know when Africa, Indonesia et al start cranking out those killer apps.
Tough call.
Not for me. I'm an American. I welcome the competition.
Sorry for the Ed Anger rant there, but jeez louize...
Replace All is a powerful ally... but beware the Dark Side!
They won't even allow you to connect anymore unless you have the latest version with the latest filtering shiznit.
That's terrible! You should demand a refund!
What could *any* lawyer do against ftp? http?
Send the offender's ISP a letter demanding they TOS the user, or see you in court.
Or warez servers WHERE THEY ARE LEGAL like in Taiwan?
Tell the US backbone providers to block these IPs or see you in court.
Simply the threat of a lengthy court battle with it's expenses is enough to get a company's cooperation. Who wants to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars defending pirates? There's no profit in it.
I can definitely see how it would be useful while beating my monkey in Black & White,
Dude, upgrade to a color monitor already, it's way more realis...
Oh. Wait. You meant the game...
Err, nevermind.
Funny... I never heard anybody on Star Trek: the Next Generation complain about this.
"Dammit, why did they put the 'Console Self-Destruct' button so frickin' close to the 'Raise Shields' button?"
It really depends on your neighborhood and the time of day.
I can't speak to neighborhood, but in my experience (Time Warner cable modem, Akron OH area) time of day is a definite factor. There seems to be a "rush hour" around 4-6pm (kids getting home from school, people getting home from work), and Sunday afternoons can be brutal.
In the wee small hours of the morning I can get 400kB(yte)/second web downloads on a fast site. At the worst of rush hour I usually don't fall below 60kB/s... and that still makes a dialup connection look pretty sick.
Yeah, I expect it to get worse, but I figure I've got a while before the ol' US Robotics starts looking good again.
What technologies exist to facilitate the ablitly to provide guest access to everyone within range of my xmitter, and to coordinate other free resources like mine in my area, i.e., to provide roaming, etc., like current cell providers can?
Are you sure you want to open your wireless 'net to all and sundry? Anything that they do is going to be tied back to you - sending death threats to politicians, posting kiddie pr0n, or (God forbid!) posting DECSS.
I've got 802.11b at home, hooked to my cable modem. All my computers (ok, both of my computers and my PDA) can share the broadband anywhere in the house, on the porch, in the garage... but I've got the encryption enabled not because I'm stingey with the bandwidth, but because I don't want some script kiddie three doors down getting me tossed off my ISP/cable company for DOSing Amazon or somesuch.
But it's really only relevant to people and companies who are selling downloads. So if you require payment before someone can download some information, this patent might (or might not) be relevant.
If I'm reading this correctly, pay-per-view cable television (which would be taped by the viewer) would violate this patent and/or be prior art (does anyone remember taping PPV movies before 1985?).
I press the button on my cable box remote, the box and the cable co. validate my purchase (and bill me accordingly), and they deliver the information over their network to my VCR, where I make a "material object" out of the data. Even if the PPV is ordered via the phone I think it's pretty much the same mechanism described in the patent.
There are converters, but as it stands, the iPaq with PCMCIA sleeve is one of the few PDAs that can use this card.
Count the HP Jornada 720 as one of those. The PC card slot was the main reason I bought it, since that allows it to be on my 802.11b network at home.
I agree with Martin Colloms. I cannot believe the gall of the record labels to (apparently surreptitiously) deliberately introduce errors and data corruption into music CDs that customers are expected (and "legally required") to purchase with their hard-earned cash.
Agreed. What we need is a new version of the PMRC to strong-arm the record companies into putting a "WARNING: This recording included explicit purposely introduced errors, your listening experience could be degraded" label on all such protected disks.
Say, Tipper probably isn't too busy these days...
Headline: "Napster Users Plummet"
Good God! The RIAA is pushing them out of helicopters now! Oh, the humanity...
I'm no fan of pot being illegal, but don't be pissed because the cops use technology to observe what's going on.
The cops were using technology to circumvent the 4th Amendment's protection from unlawful search - so yes, you should be pissed when this happens. And you should be delighted that the SCOTUS shot it down as unconstitutional.
A TV-VCR combo is a good idea.
Until one of the two breaks, and you realize it'd be cheaper to by a new one (TV or VCR) than to fix the evil siamese-twin appliance you've got. Then you're stuck with dead tech taking up room.
A TV-Stereo combo is a very bad idea.
Back in the day, when stuff was (a) made to last and (b) made to be repairable instead of replaceable, TV/Stero combos were quite popular... in the 50s and 60s IIRC. Great big tree-killing wood consoles with giant speakers, a TV screen (remember when you had a tuner and it went "clunk-clunk-clunk" to change channels?) and a radio reciever and record player. It was furniture, baby!
You know it would be bitchin-shit to be able to sit down at your terminal and type:
$ telnet jvc_vcr
$ set channel 64
$ set record 11:00pm
$ exit
I can do something like this now with the Replay PVR... go to myreplaytv.com, log in, tell it what to record and the next time my Replay phones home it'll update accordingly. Sweet!
600 Million American is equal to 600 Canadian
...mistakes.
"There are people who believe that commercial software should not exist at all--that there should be no jobs or taxes around commercial software at all," Gates said. While that's a small group, "the GPL was created with that goal in mind. And so people should understand the GPL. When people say open source, they often mean the GPL."
I bet he was just itching to say "communism" instead of GPL.
Are you now, or have you ever been an Open Source developer?
There's more to unsafe driving than speeding.
And there's more to the Autograph system than measuring speed. Did you bother to read up on it or did you just jerk the knee?
I've gotten one before on the Ohio Turnpike. Took a picture of the license plate and mailed me the ticket.
Are you sure you remembered to pay the toll? They're kinda picky about that...
Bias alert: I work for Progressive. Adjust your filters accordingly.
The insurance company will put this in my car and monitor it and know my every move. How fast I go. Where I go, when and how often.
The program (called "Autograph", and only rolled out in Texas IIRC) was based on the idea that your premium would be pay-as-you-go. Park the car for a month, premium drops. Drive lots of miles at high speeds at night and garage in high-risk areas, pay accordingly.
Not only is this an invasion of privacy, I would suspect I would get worse insurance rates than I am getting now instead of better.
How can something that's voluntary be an invasion of privacy? As for your rates going up, that depends on your driving habits. Which was the whole idea, you pay according to the risk of your driving habits.
I'm not involved in the project, I don't know how well it did or if it's going to be ongoing. But I think it's an innovative idea.
Here is a short article about it from the IEEE. Punching "progressive insurance autograph gps" into google will return lots more.