If you don't want someone storing your words, use x-no-archive.
If that isn't enough, then should you be posting in the first place?
The worrying thing about Deja is that many people have no clue it's there (despite positing to news) and vice versa, that Deja seems to be shielding newbies from the fact that they aren't usenet, they're merely a storage facility, sucking it up from publicly available sources.
Deja will need to tread a very careful line here to make damned sure that the inference cannot be drawn that links are personally recomended by the poster. It might be PD, but there's still the issues surrounding copyrighted works and reasonable use of them. They're still my words, even if they are resident on someone else's machine. If that someone else changes their meaning (and adding links is a subtle form of semantic editing) then I might well have a problem. A legally attackable problem? Yes, almost certainly.
This "progress" is understandable from Deja's point of view, but worrying from a usenet poster's perspective.
I'd be *really* surprised if the UK did act against them. Why are Havenco's activities more dangerous to the UK than say, the Channel Islands or the Faroe islands?"
That's the point, they're not - indeed, like the Channel Islands, that the business could be very lucrative could be actively working in their future favour.
The diplomatic PoV is moot - I doubt HMG are giving them much real consideration at the moment, tolerating them because it's a kids game. The moment it becomes important, just watch the rules change.
Cutting the lines would be the last resort, but the UK could make life very "interesting" for them. Whole countries can survive boycotts and sanctions, tiny islands with little or no means of self-support might find the going a little tougher - no matter what their support from the world's liberal intelligensia!
Call me a sceptic, but doesn't this whole thing smack just a little (just a real little) of FUD?
The next time they go to raid a script kiddie or a packet monkey, they can turn around and say "hey, remember our brave astronauts?"
NASA employ some of the best programmers working on some of the most amazingly designed systems, systems that we can all be looking to in awe, I'm just guessing that this is not the whole story...
All this principality, sovereign nations talk sounds fun, but don't you think that all this is merely being tolerated because it's not actually threatening?
The moment HavenCo does something to actively antagonise the UK or mainland Europe, the connection gets cut. Simple.
Lackey claims they're not worried about this, but frankly it's pie in the sky. HavenCo will be tolerated for as long as they're not actively annoying any governments - their days are numbered unless they're just being a colo with a cool twist. For as long as they're just that, they'll be left alone.
That the UK hasn't stomped on them is all down to whimsy - the comms, the utilities, their provisions, their healthcare, their very existence is all hanging by a thread. They'll not last long in a siege!
MP3 is a portable media and 128 bitrate (oh, go on then, spoil me, use 196) is perfectly adequate for people who are then going to listen through tinny little earphones or in their not-completely-sound-proofed cars.
MP3 (and MiniDisc for that matter) is not a refined listening format, CDs will always be better.
That's not to say that there aren't still holy wars raging about CDs and Vinyls!
History is littered with people whose first works (in whatever medium) are greated with acclaim and are elevated to classics and the creators deified.
DNA is just such a person. He's managed what others have only glimpsed, like the Beatles changing styles from album to album, but not like Python who've been abusing the same sixth form gags for 30 years, he has been trying to outgrow his roots.
The radio series was wonderful (if you don't own the CDs, go buy. Now) the books translated them to a new form.
His subsequent ventures have seen a few flops, but they have been different.
I saw him lecture a few years ago on some element of futurism and I really got the feeling he was looking at the world through slightly different eyes and it was a privilege to glimpse his perceptions.
One thing that has always surprised me - and he touched on it in some of his answers - that such a basically English (not British) sense of humour is such a hit in the US. Why is that?
Perhaps, now she's on the inside, suggesting that they replace the security company - and telling the security company why they're doing it, too - would be a good thing, over and above any legal action.
Hit the lax company where it hurts - in the wallet and the client base.
I think the thing people have to remember is that, given a 10mhz 386 with enough disk space for a reasonable amount of virtual RAM, you could render a seen with twice as many pingpong balls. It might take a while, but it could happen."
I remember a Dilbert cartoon:
Dilbert: Oh, wow, a 386-33 with 16Mb RAM.
PHB: Well, how often do you need to raytrace a sphere? Dilbert: Once, if I'm lucky...
As I Understand It, previous trials and convictions are inadmissable *unless brought up by the defence* - so if a criminal ran his own information site, that's ok, it would be admissable (it would also be a confesssion:) - it's the independence of the site that would be the crux under English law.
No good comes from pandering to folks who can't cope with "defammatory postings" at all. You should be allowed to flame away to your heart's content, IMNSHO - if you don't like being flamed, don't go out of your way to deserve it!
The case was raised because of a posting to soc.culture.thai - given SE Asia's reputation for certain classes of tourists, I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out the possible contents of the posting.
It wasn't a flame, it was a lie. There's a million miles between the two.
Just because it's Usenet, that doesn't mean you should be able to forge a posting, making out that someone else is admitting to something that is not true.
Freedom of speech is not freedom to malign and impugn.
Sure the new RIP is heinous and the work done by the peeps at Stand is worthwhile, but don't condone the slanderer.
The net should be about making information available to all. It should also be about, where possible, making sure that that information is timely, relevant and accurate.
I don't think that ISPs should have the onus placed on them to check what's on their web-servers, news-spools or disk-space assigned to their users. They should, though, be able to take reasonable steps once potential problems have been pointed out. Demon didn't even try, that's where they went wrong. They didn't even look into the problem and say "we don't have an issue with this", they just ignored it.
\begin{quote} At home I used to have a very intelligent VCR with near-perfect voice recognition and knowledge of me. I could ask it to record programs by name and, in some cases, even assume it would do so automatically, without my asking. Then, all of a sudden, my son went to college. \cite{Negroponte:95} \end{quote}
@Book{Negroponte:95, author = "N. Negroponte", title = "Being Digital", publisher = "Hodder \& Stoughton", year = "1995", }
It's not Big Brother that should worry you
on
Database Nation
·
· Score: 2
As Garfinkel says in the book, it's the hundreds of cooperating Little Brothers (and Sisters).
The book's sub-title, "The death of privacy in the 21st century" sums is up pretty well. Being able to tell if a woman's pregnant from a retinal scan, the local council using a satellite photo to check your planning regulations.
He asks us to consider what might happen if you were to be able to link computer-held information about yourself. Scared?
Everything from your electoral information, your tax records, your credit card bill, your mobile telephone calls, your university's course records, your web browser's history file, your supermarket loyalty card, your car's satnav.
Now factor in face recognition from CCTV, cookies left behind from web sites, the boxes you tick when you sign an application form...
Now draw it together. Now automate it so that a computer, not a person, makes decision on your life based on these related clues.
Scared now? I was.
Boy does he cover some ground - from medical records, web logs, satelite imagery, encryption products, mail redirection - we get the full gamut. His central tenet is clear - just what does personal information mean? What rights to you have over information about yourself? Your name, your date of birth, your income, your shoe size, your magazine subscriptions, your web life. All disparate facts, but when combined, a powerful profile and useful to many people. From an insurer worrying about you as a policy, to a prospective employer who's interested in seeing what you've said on the net, to the local council who noticed you've built a new outhouse on your land... the truth is out there, but can you connect it up?
The body is yours, but what's right do you have to your identity? You can fight back - pay in cash, wear dark glasses, don't get ill, don't travel outside your country's borders, browser through an anonymiser, opt out of DoubleClick - but the tide needs to be stemmed and only, apparently, the governments can do it... but do they have the inclination?
A truly scary read and a wake-up call that information is, now more than ever, power. And if you've either it got it or you ain't, just how to you decide who gets information about you?
Do you need such large amounts of storage in a portable machine? I'd be more than happy to file away the Gb of MP3s on CD-Rs or HDDs or whatever and only squirt in (or transfer direct from audio CDs) what I needed temporarily, enough for the 2-3-4 hours I was actually going to be mobile.
How stable is the HDD going to be for mobile users? The solid state's greatest marketing point over CDs and MiniDisc walkmen is no moving parts. Nothing to jog.
256Mb of RAM (oh, go on then, 512Mb) will suffice - that's more than enough for a journey, you can refresh from your laptop when you get there!
Christie's and Sotheby's are in a demonstrably non-internet market. While eBay et al are perfect vehicles for people selling second hand items that they'd previously have used the small ads for, who is going to sell - or buy - a multi-million pound item through a website?
Objets d'art need personal validation so while online auctions (or the faux "auctions" of many of the sites which merely sell under the pretence of an auction) are ideal for some, the traditional auction room scene of a few dozen high rollers bidding away isn't going to disappear any time soon.
EBay know this. So they're trying to buy the opposition. Standard tactics. The question is though, will Sotheby's - and their imminent lawsuits over the anti-trust cases - going to be worth buying? Or is eBay's struggle for real-world respectability going to cost them dear?
Blocking a competitor's logo is, probably, fine - so long as the block is obvious. The pixellated area of a screen masking a face or some other censored partial image, the visual equivalent of the beep or the "expletive deleted".
It's censorship though, but if you watch/read/listen to any news media you're being given someone else's view of the facts anyway, is editing censorship? Yes, no, maybe.
You cannot believe what you see - that's not new. What is new is that modifications are much harder to detect than previously, say, the classic example of the shot of Lenin preaching with the then out of favour Trotsky replaced by a lump of wood.
Can you trust what you see? That's the real issue. Can you trust your news provider to give you as many facts as are pertinent. After all, you can read two newspapers, but you can't watch two live actions feeds with as high a level of discrimination.
If you can't trust the image - and unless a strict code of conduct is used to indicate when manipulation is used you can't trust the image - then you must be able to decide whether you can trust the provider.
Why in person? Because in order to understand the man, the brain in the man and the thoughts in the brain, you have to consider the body with the thoughts, brain and man inhabits.
Sure, an email would have answered the questions, but the awe of the way he's fought his condition and lived 30 years longer than his doctors thought he would, that awe doesn't come across in an email. A 4-hour interview will have had an effect on the interviewer - that effect is as crucial is the content.
His views are interesting, but frankly, not unusual - nothing new in the realms of futurology. If you want his opinions, you'll not get them in an interview, you'll get them through his books....
Re:This standard message seems to work well...
on
Suing the Spammers
·
· Score: 2
When I have time I send the following message to: The person spamming,
Nice idea, but isn't responding directly to the spammer just confirming to them that your address works and thus making it more likely that you'll receive something in the future?
Slashdot Mirror
Go to another online store and see if they require the same information. Repeat until you find one that doesn't. Use it.
Then tell the others why you're not using them. If enough people do this then changes will occur.
If you don't want someone storing your words, use x-no-archive.
If that isn't enough, then should you be posting in the first place?
The worrying thing about Deja is that many people have no clue it's there (despite positing to news) and vice versa, that Deja seems to be shielding newbies from the fact that they aren't usenet, they're merely a storage facility, sucking it up from publicly available sources.
Deja will need to tread a very careful line here to make damned sure that the inference cannot be drawn that links are personally recomended by the poster. It might be PD, but there's still the issues surrounding copyrighted works and reasonable use of them. They're still my words, even if they are resident on someone else's machine. If that someone else changes their meaning (and adding links is a subtle form of semantic editing) then I might well have a problem. A legally attackable problem? Yes, almost certainly.
This "progress" is understandable from Deja's point of view, but worrying from a usenet poster's perspective.
"Censorship is always bad" he says. "Regulations destroy trust" he says. "Redistribution is theft" he says.
Noble concepts, they might (or might not be), but it's not exactly well reasoned, defended or explained. It certainly isn't well demonstrated.
Good ideas? Good intentions? We could all come up with better sitting in the bar with a few cold ones.
What is it that they say about the road to hell?
Cold fusion, anyone?
That's the point, they're not - indeed, like the Channel Islands, that the business could be very lucrative could be actively working in their future favour.
The diplomatic PoV is moot - I doubt HMG are giving them much real consideration at the moment, tolerating them because it's a kids game. The moment it becomes important, just watch the rules change.
Cutting the lines would be the last resort, but the UK could make life very "interesting" for them. Whole countries can survive boycotts and sanctions, tiny islands with little or no means of self-support might find the going a little tougher - no matter what their support from the world's liberal intelligensia!
Call me a sceptic, but doesn't this whole thing smack just a little (just a real little) of FUD?
...
The next time they go to raid a script kiddie or a packet monkey, they can turn around and say "hey, remember our brave astronauts?"
NASA employ some of the best programmers working on some of the most amazingly designed systems, systems that we can all be looking to in awe, I'm just guessing that this is not the whole story
All this principality, sovereign nations talk sounds fun, but don't you think that all this is merely being tolerated because it's not actually threatening?
The moment HavenCo does something to actively antagonise the UK or mainland Europe, the connection gets cut. Simple.
Lackey claims they're not worried about this, but frankly it's pie in the sky. HavenCo will be tolerated for as long as they're not actively annoying any governments - their days are numbered unless they're just being a colo with a cool twist. For as long as they're just that, they'll be left alone.
That the UK hasn't stomped on them is all down to whimsy - the comms, the utilities, their provisions, their healthcare, their very existence is all hanging by a thread. They'll not last long in a siege!
AV is bloated but their technology is first rate.
While I've been a Google fan since way back, I have to say that AV's frills-free raging is my engine of choice these days.
MP3 is a portable media and 128 bitrate (oh, go on then, spoil me, use 196) is perfectly adequate for people who are then going to listen through tinny little earphones or in their not-completely-sound-proofed cars.
:)
MP3 (and MiniDisc for that matter) is not a refined listening format, CDs will always be better.
That's not to say that there aren't still holy wars raging about CDs and Vinyls!
Ok, who'll bid me SACD?
I gather we did, yes. Couldn't care less though. I have more important things on my mind ....
History is littered with people whose first works (in whatever medium) are greated with acclaim and are elevated to classics and the creators deified.
DNA is just such a person. He's managed what others have only glimpsed, like the Beatles changing styles from album to album, but not like Python who've been abusing the same sixth form gags for 30 years, he has been trying to outgrow his roots.
The radio series was wonderful (if you don't own the CDs, go buy. Now) the books translated them to a new form.
His subsequent ventures have seen a few flops, but they have been different.
I saw him lecture a few years ago on some element of futurism and I really got the feeling he was looking at the world through slightly different eyes and it was a privilege to glimpse his perceptions.
One thing that has always surprised me - and he touched on it in some of his answers - that such a basically English (not British) sense of humour is such a hit in the US. Why is that?
Perhaps, now she's on the inside, suggesting that they replace the security company - and telling the security company why they're doing it, too - would be a good thing, over and above any legal action.
Hit the lax company where it hurts - in the wallet and the client base.
I remember a Dilbert cartoon:
PHB: Well, how often do you need to raytrace a sphere?
Dilbert: Once, if I'm lucky
As I Understand It, previous trials and convictions are inadmissable *unless brought up by the defence* - so if a criminal ran his own information site, that's ok, it would be admissable (it would also be a confesssion :) - it's the independence of the site that would be the crux under English law.
As one of the lucky "few" (only 400 exchanges at the present, rising to 70% of the country within 18 months), do I take the punt?
Let's face it, 40 quid isn't cheap, but it's the same as my mobile bill!
The case was raised because of a posting to soc.culture.thai - given SE Asia's reputation for certain classes of tourists, I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out the possible contents of the posting.
It wasn't a flame, it was a lie. There's a million miles between the two.
Just because it's Usenet, that doesn't mean you should be able to forge a posting, making out that someone else is admitting to something that is not true.
Freedom of speech is not freedom to malign and impugn.
Sure the new RIP is heinous and the work done by the peeps at Stand is worthwhile, but don't condone the slanderer.
The net should be about making information available to all. It should also be about, where possible, making sure that that information is timely, relevant and accurate.
I don't think that ISPs should have the onus placed on them to check what's on their web-servers, news-spools or disk-space assigned to their users. They should, though, be able to take reasonable steps once potential problems have been pointed out. Demon didn't even try, that's where they went wrong. They didn't even look into the problem and say "we don't have an issue with this", they just ignored it.
If you ignore things, they don't always go away.
Shouldn't they rename best supporting actor/actress "lifetime achievement"?
\begin{quote}
At home I used to have a very intelligent VCR with near-perfect voice recognition and
knowledge of me. I could ask it to record programs by name and, in some cases, even
assume it would do so automatically, without my asking. Then, all of a sudden, my
son went to college. \cite{Negroponte:95}
\end{quote}
@Book{Negroponte:95,
author = "N. Negroponte",
title = "Being Digital",
publisher = "Hodder \& Stoughton",
year = "1995",
}
As Garfinkel says in the book, it's the hundreds of cooperating Little Brothers (and Sisters).
...
... the truth is out there, but can you connect it up?
... but do they have the inclination?
The book's sub-title, "The death of privacy in the 21st century" sums is up pretty well. Being able to tell if a woman's pregnant from a retinal scan, the local council using a satellite photo to check your planning regulations.
He asks us to consider what might happen if you were to be able to link computer-held information about yourself. Scared?
Everything from your electoral information, your tax records, your credit card bill, your mobile telephone calls, your university's course records, your web browser's history file, your supermarket loyalty card, your car's satnav.
Now factor in face recognition from CCTV, cookies left behind from web sites, the boxes you tick when you sign an application form
Now draw it together. Now automate it so that a computer, not a person, makes decision on your life based on these related clues.
Scared now? I was.
Boy does he cover some ground - from medical records, web logs, satelite imagery, encryption products, mail redirection - we get the full gamut. His central tenet is clear - just what does personal information mean? What rights to you have over information about yourself? Your name, your date of birth, your income, your shoe size, your magazine subscriptions, your web life. All disparate facts, but when combined, a powerful profile and useful to many people. From an insurer worrying about you as a policy, to a prospective employer who's interested in seeing what you've said on the net, to the local council who noticed you've built a new outhouse on your land
The body is yours, but what's right do you have to your identity? You can fight back - pay in cash, wear dark glasses, don't get ill, don't travel outside your country's borders, browser through an anonymiser, opt out of DoubleClick - but the tide needs to be stemmed and only, apparently, the governments can do it
A truly scary read and a wake-up call that information is, now more than ever, power. And if you've either it got it or you ain't, just how to you decide who gets information about you?
Do you need such large amounts of storage in a portable machine? I'd be more than happy to file away the Gb of MP3s on CD-Rs or HDDs or whatever and only squirt in (or transfer direct from audio CDs) what I needed temporarily, enough for the 2-3-4 hours I was actually going to be mobile.
How stable is the HDD going to be for mobile users? The solid state's greatest marketing point over CDs and MiniDisc walkmen is no moving parts. Nothing to jog.
256Mb of RAM (oh, go on then, 512Mb) will suffice - that's more than enough for a journey, you can refresh from your laptop when you get there!
Christie's and Sotheby's are in a demonstrably non-internet market. While eBay et al are perfect vehicles for people selling second hand items that they'd previously have used the small ads for, who is going to sell - or buy - a multi-million pound item through a website?
Objets d'art need personal validation so while online auctions (or the faux "auctions" of many of the sites which merely sell under the pretence of an auction) are ideal for some, the traditional auction room scene of a few dozen high rollers bidding away isn't going to disappear any time soon.
EBay know this. So they're trying to buy the opposition. Standard tactics. The question is though, will Sotheby's - and their imminent lawsuits over the anti-trust cases - going to be worth buying? Or is eBay's struggle for real-world respectability going to cost them dear?
zero isn't even, it's just not odd, so the next day with all evens will have to wait until 2/2/2222 I'm afraid.
...
Although, given the general %02d nature of displaying months, there could be a suggestion that an all-even month number is impossible
Blocking a competitor's logo is, probably, fine - so long as the block is obvious. The pixellated area of a screen masking a face or some other censored partial image, the visual equivalent of the beep or the "expletive deleted".
It's censorship though, but if you watch/read/listen to any news media you're being given someone else's view of the facts anyway, is editing censorship? Yes, no, maybe.
You cannot believe what you see - that's not new. What is new is that modifications are much harder to detect than previously, say, the classic example of the shot of Lenin preaching with the then out of favour Trotsky replaced by a lump of wood.
Can you trust what you see? That's the real issue. Can you trust your news provider to give you as many facts as are pertinent. After all, you can read two newspapers, but you can't watch two live actions feeds with as high a level of discrimination.
If you can't trust the image - and unless a strict code of conduct is used to indicate when manipulation is used you can't trust the image - then you must be able to decide whether you can trust the provider.
Why in person? Because in order to understand the man, the brain in the man and the thoughts in the brain, you have to consider the body with the thoughts, brain and man inhabits.
Sure, an email would have answered the questions, but the awe of the way he's fought his condition and lived 30 years longer than his doctors thought he would, that awe doesn't come across in an email. A 4-hour interview will have had an effect on the interviewer - that effect is as crucial is the content.
His views are interesting, but frankly, not unusual - nothing new in the realms of futurology. If you want his opinions, you'll not get them in an interview, you'll get them through his books ....
The person spamming,
Nice idea, but isn't responding directly to the spammer just confirming to them that your address works and thus making it more likely that you'll receive something in the future?