In most other countries, people with typical (ie 9-5 job, accounts with major institutions, mortgage on one property etc) finances don't need to file taxes, it's all done for them automatically and appropriate taxes are deducted directly from income sources. It's only people with especially complex finances who fill out tax returns.
Well, since the government defines the taxes, in the interest of its citizens the government should also provide a no frills open source (BSD or such) implementation of the tax code... Third parties could then build better interfaces (facilities to import from other sources etc) on that, while knowing that the base code complies with all the applicable rules and submits the requires end data to the IRS.
For the government to set arbitrarily complex tax rules, and then force you to pay third party suppliers to clean up the mess it forces on you is wrong.
Everyone should have a free, government supplied and transparent way of completing their taxes.
Personally i wouldn't trust a closed source package at all, since i cannot verify what its doing.
The question is.. Did the attacker throw 3gbps at it because that's all they had, or because that's all that was needed to do the job?
It's not uncommon for multiple colo customers to be on a shared switch with 1gb uplink especially when each individual customer only has a 100mbit port, a 3gbps attack will take all of those offline even if it doesn't harm the colo provider a a whole.
Also the isp has to pay for the bandwidth usage that hits them, even if most of it never actually reaches the end customer... A sustained 3gbps attack could become quite expensive if it lasts long enough to push their 95th percentile billing up. If their average customer only uses 1mbps, chances are they don't have an especially high commit rate.
This assumes they are just trying to flood the httpd with requests, because doing so requires less resources on their part, and generally only harms the target box and not the isp hosting it. If you block an attack like this, you run the risk that the attacker will switch tactics and start simply flooding your line. If there were 31,000 attacking drones, and assuming a rather conservative 512kbit/sec upstream per box thats over 10gbit/sec of traffic hitting you...
Also when sending raw packets the source addresses can be spoofed because you dont care about receiving a reply (and conversely, a spoofed reply wastes the victims bandwidth without impacting the attackers, and may cause the victim machine to send unsolicited traffic to someone else), making it harder to trace the source of the attacks.
And ofcourse if you perform the filtering on the server itself, it has already traversed your line and is likely costing you... You really need to filter further upstream in order to be of much use.
Get multiple transit links... Advertise your range over the links to the locations where the vast majority of your customers come from, and then advertise everything else over a very slow backup link. Most sites cater to local customers, so have 10gb local peering and maybe 10mb international transit... Chances are most of the ddos drones won't be local, and so the attack will quickly destroy the 10mb link while your customers are happily using the 10gb peering. If there are ddos nodes local to you, the isps hosting them are more likely to be responsive and shut them down than trying to contact a hosting company in a different timezone speaking a different language etc.
Don't pay any heed to what the likes of gartner say, none of these things are "mandatory", they are all a factor of risk vs benefit vs cost...
If your running a webserver, it only has tcp/80 open and nothing else... Then you add a firewall which sits infront and only allows 80/tcp, what have you gained? You may have an extra point of monitoring, and mitigation against outbound traffic *if* the box gets compromised... But if someone exploits a vulnerability on port 80 it's not going to help you (and there was never anything else to exploit). On the other hand, your costs have now increased (Cost of firewall, + cost of management, + power/hosting costs), you now have an extra point of failure, an extra target for hackers and potentially reduced performance (increase risk of ddos) because the firewall device does far more processing per packet than your host does, and has a slower cpu.
Same with an IDS/IPS, cost of the device, cost of monitoring it (after all its largely pointless if not monitored), risk of false positives causing disruption with an IPS etc.
Similarly when it comes to risk of ddos, are you hosting anything thats likely to be a target? If someone does take your site down, what will it cost you for it to be down? Also consider extra capacity to handle unusual loads (eg a link from slashdot), is the extra cost worth it to handle the 0.01% of the time you get that much traffic?
And most importantly, when you read advice from the likes of gartner take it all with a pinch of salt... Ask yourself this, who pays their wages? You will find that a lot of their funding comes from the very vendors that sell these products they are now claiming to be "mandatory"... Do you really think they are in any way impartial?
Having the ability to do this is a good thing, and its aimed at people who fully understand the risks...
These options are not intended for the average user, which is why they are not enabled by default... Although the ability to install packages from untrusted sources could be a bit more difficult for users to just stumble across, it is at least a relatively advanced process to get root.
Sure, just as soon as you arrange consistent taxation rules across the entire world so it costs me the same to sell each copy wherever my customer is.
Don't forget you also need to provide a guaranteed, cost-free, universal sales channel throughout the world so that I can sell my work to anyone on the planet from day one and keep it available for the full five years to avoid inadvertently giving up my copyright.
You simply make the work available online, either for download or charge transparently for shipping to wherever it may be going. All you need is a website and a payment processor.
You operate from a central location so you only need to worry about your local taxation rules, taxation rules in other locations are down to the buyer.
Oh, and you have to enforce copyright reliably so that I can pitch my work at a price that maximizes my profits within your permitted five-year period based on wealthy markets who can afford to pay, without everyone else just ripping me off.
Pure greed.. Why should supposedly wealthy markets be forced to pay more for the exact same product? And talk about sense of entitlement "maximizes my profits" ? what right do you have to that? If people don't feel your product is worth paying for, they won't buy it. And don't forget that most of those "wealthy" markets have plenty of people who are poor too, and those less wealthy markets typically have their own super-elite upper classes.
without everyone else just ripping me off
So you want to rip people off, but don't like the idea that they might do the same to you?
And all this about charging less in less wealthy markets for the benefit of he people is bullshit, the prices are lower in these markets because otherwise you wouldn't make any sales whatsoever, and because the media costs virtually nothing to copy you still make high margins.
Also, every student in the world who might have enjoyed the work at a discount because I was a student once myself now hates you. BTW, you didn't want to ever buy anything interesting at a somewhat reduced price during an economic downturn, did you?
Why do students deserve a special deal? They generally only get cheap deals as a form of indoctrination, so that when they finish being a student they will be used to you and pay full price...
And by "somewhat reduced price during an economic downturn" you actually mean you were selling it at an inflated price before, and found that during the downturn people were no longer able to pay this price, so you reduce it to a more reasonable price that still turns you a profit.
Wether the majority would support their goals or not is irrelevant, they don't have sufficient access to the media in order to inform the majority of what their goals are... The majority only reads what the large media companies want them to read, and those companies have an interest in maintaining the status quo.
So have a fixed copyright term from release assigned to the current owner of the original work, irrespective of the status of the author...
If something has not been released then it doesn't need copyright, there are other laws to protect someone's confidential information.
Even with no copyright, there is every incentive to release it... An unreleased work doesn't make any money whatsoever, a released one without an artificial monopoly may make less but consider you already have the work, you just need to produce copies so in the worst case you're no worse off than anyone else who might compete against you to publish it, but in the best case you have a head start because they will not even see the work until your copy hits the shelves.
While being written, the book isn't published and therefore doesn't need copyright... Once published, the term should be short... Also there is no reason you can't continue selling a book after copyright has expired, and people will still happily buy it, you just have to start actually competing with other (cheaper) publishers. Some people would still pay a small premium for the "original", and others would choose the original over a third party if the price was the same... You can also sweeten the deal by offering autographed copies, extra content (the new content would gain its own copyright term from the date it was published) etc.
And people have written books for hundreds of years, many predate any concept of copyright and yet people still wrote them.
People have produced music, literary works, and put on all manner of live entertainment performances for hundreds if not thousands of years before copyright was ever dreamt up.
That's not to say the scene wouldn't be different, but it may even be better because only people who were truly passionate about their work would do it, people would be in the business because its something they are truly passionate about and not because they see it as a way to get rich.
Who's to say they can't continue to sell the work after copyright has expired? If it's a small band, then the volume won't be high enough to make it worthwhile for a third party distributor to release their own version.
Sure there may well be distribution online, but again for a small band this will mean wider distribution and promotion, something they might not get otherwise, and so their next album may see higher returns as a result. Similarly, greater distribution will increase interest in live performances and other merchandise.
Copyright terms should be limited to no more than 5 years...
And as a copyright holder, you should have to make your media available to anyone on equal terms and in (applicable to the type of media) standard forms at a price that can stay the same (adjusted for inflation) or go down, but not go up.
If you stop making your work available, copyright should automatically expire.
There are far too many works out there which will be completely forgotten by the time the copyright on them expires, there may not even be any readable copies left by that time resulting in the loss of that work.
They have a more natural culture of sharing... They don't have mass thefts of property that deprives the original owner, they only copy ideas and information... This is how people have learned for thousands of years.
Parental control software is utterly useless, the vast majority of kids know a lot more about computers than their parents and have no trouble bypassing a parental control system that is purely software based... It's a classic case of client side security.
If you want something like that to be even remotely effective, it has to run at a layer further up the network that the kids have no access to.
That said, porn and sex are a fact of life. Your kids will encounter them at some point wether you like it or not... When they're really young they wont be interested in it, and when they get older they will actively seek it out.
To a kid, if a subject is forbidden then its automatically more interesting... The more you try to prevent them seeing porn, they more they will look for it, and this is nothing new. When i was a kid, internet access was very rare and porn on computers was pixelated and dithered.. So we acquired porn from magazines and on vhs tapes.
And something else important to consider, if you try to prevent your kids from learning about such things as porn, then they will just get introduced to it by other kids at school instead... Surely better for you to educate them in a controlled environment, so they are prepared for what they will encounter when they venture out into an environment that you don't control. If you wrap them in cotton wool and shield them from any thoughts or violence, sex, bad language etc, then they will be completely unprepared when they encounter such things form other kids at school, and will have far more interest in them because its new to them and forbidden at home.
Citrix itself isn't too bad, their software is relatively robust and fairly secure, at least against external attacks...
The problem isn't citrix, so much as the underlying windows system and the applications people use... I've seen many supposedly secure citrix environments where its trivial to break out of the published application and get to the standard windows tools, which then gives you a foothold inside the network and a platform from which to attack other systems.
Another reason for poor citrix performance, is people who quote ancient performance requirements... I've seen people who quote performance specs from the 90s, when citrix was new and ran on nt4 when deciding how much ram and bandwidth is required... Not considering that modern systems are more bloated, screen resolutions are higher and with greater color depth etc..
Not necessarily, those people now buying digitally may have previously acquired music from p2p, but they might also have previously bought it on cd...
A lot of people who used p2p did so because they could not afford to buy music... They still can't afford to buy it, but also cannot run the risk of losing their internet access so they just do without. I know several people who fall into this category.
Many people cannot afford to buy much music, but will buy some... The lack of p2p takes away an avenue by which they could try new bands. I certainly wouldn't spend money on something i wasn't sure was going to be any good.
Well, the horse shoe market also shrank massively. The idea of the market shrinking is not compatible with the greed and sense of self importance the recording industry has.
Slashdot Mirror
In most other countries, people with typical (ie 9-5 job, accounts with major institutions, mortgage on one property etc) finances don't need to file taxes, it's all done for them automatically and appropriate taxes are deducted directly from income sources.
It's only people with especially complex finances who fill out tax returns.
Well, since the government defines the taxes, in the interest of its citizens the government should also provide a no frills open source (BSD or such) implementation of the tax code... Third parties could then build better interfaces (facilities to import from other sources etc) on that, while knowing that the base code complies with all the applicable rules and submits the requires end data to the IRS.
For the government to set arbitrarily complex tax rules, and then force you to pay third party suppliers to clean up the mess it forces on you is wrong.
Everyone should have a free, government supplied and transparent way of completing their taxes.
Personally i wouldn't trust a closed source package at all, since i cannot verify what its doing.
You want to pay money, so you can use services that the providers of which deem you unworthy to have, just because you currently reside in europe...
Why would you want to continue supporting companies that discriminate against you like that?
The question is..
Did the attacker throw 3gbps at it because that's all they had, or because that's all that was needed to do the job?
It's not uncommon for multiple colo customers to be on a shared switch with 1gb uplink especially when each individual customer only has a 100mbit port, a 3gbps attack will take all of those offline even if it doesn't harm the colo provider a a whole.
Also the isp has to pay for the bandwidth usage that hits them, even if most of it never actually reaches the end customer... A sustained 3gbps attack could become quite expensive if it lasts long enough to push their 95th percentile billing up. If their average customer only uses 1mbps, chances are they don't have an especially high commit rate.
Not very competent asshats if they didnt notice the proxy setup, and simply continue hitting the original ip ranges...
This assumes they are just trying to flood the httpd with requests, because doing so requires less resources on their part, and generally only harms the target box and not the isp hosting it.
If you block an attack like this, you run the risk that the attacker will switch tactics and start simply flooding your line. If there were 31,000 attacking drones, and assuming a rather conservative 512kbit/sec upstream per box thats over 10gbit/sec of traffic hitting you...
Also when sending raw packets the source addresses can be spoofed because you dont care about receiving a reply (and conversely, a spoofed reply wastes the victims bandwidth without impacting the attackers, and may cause the victim machine to send unsolicited traffic to someone else), making it harder to trace the source of the attacks.
And ofcourse if you perform the filtering on the server itself, it has already traversed your line and is likely costing you... You really need to filter further upstream in order to be of much use.
Get multiple transit links...
Advertise your range over the links to the locations where the vast majority of your customers come from, and then advertise everything else over a very slow backup link.
Most sites cater to local customers, so have 10gb local peering and maybe 10mb international transit... Chances are most of the ddos drones won't be local, and so the attack will quickly destroy the 10mb link while your customers are happily using the 10gb peering.
If there are ddos nodes local to you, the isps hosting them are more likely to be responsive and shut them down than trying to contact a hosting company in a different timezone speaking a different language etc.
Don't pay any heed to what the likes of gartner say, none of these things are "mandatory", they are all a factor of risk vs benefit vs cost...
If your running a webserver, it only has tcp/80 open and nothing else... Then you add a firewall which sits infront and only allows 80/tcp, what have you gained? You may have an extra point of monitoring, and mitigation against outbound traffic *if* the box gets compromised... But if someone exploits a vulnerability on port 80 it's not going to help you (and there was never anything else to exploit). On the other hand, your costs have now increased (Cost of firewall, + cost of management, + power/hosting costs), you now have an extra point of failure, an extra target for hackers and potentially reduced performance (increase risk of ddos) because the firewall device does far more processing per packet than your host does, and has a slower cpu.
Same with an IDS/IPS, cost of the device, cost of monitoring it (after all its largely pointless if not monitored), risk of false positives causing disruption with an IPS etc.
Similarly when it comes to risk of ddos, are you hosting anything thats likely to be a target? If someone does take your site down, what will it cost you for it to be down?
Also consider extra capacity to handle unusual loads (eg a link from slashdot), is the extra cost worth it to handle the 0.01% of the time you get that much traffic?
And most importantly, when you read advice from the likes of gartner take it all with a pinch of salt... Ask yourself this, who pays their wages? You will find that a lot of their funding comes from the very vendors that sell these products they are now claiming to be "mandatory"... Do you really think they are in any way impartial?
Having the ability to do this is a good thing, and its aimed at people who fully understand the risks...
These options are not intended for the average user, which is why they are not enabled by default... Although the ability to install packages from untrusted sources could be a bit more difficult for users to just stumble across, it is at least a relatively advanced process to get root.
Sure, just as soon as you arrange consistent taxation rules across the entire world so it costs me the same to sell each copy wherever my customer is.
Don't forget you also need to provide a guaranteed, cost-free, universal sales channel throughout the world so that I can sell my work to anyone on the planet from day one and keep it available for the full five years to avoid inadvertently giving up my copyright.
You simply make the work available online, either for download or charge transparently for shipping to wherever it may be going. All you need is a website and a payment processor.
You operate from a central location so you only need to worry about your local taxation rules, taxation rules in other locations are down to the buyer.
Oh, and you have to enforce copyright reliably so that I can pitch my work at a price that maximizes my profits within your permitted five-year period based on wealthy markets who can afford to pay, without everyone else just ripping me off.
Pure greed.. Why should supposedly wealthy markets be forced to pay more for the exact same product? And talk about sense of entitlement "maximizes my profits" ? what right do you have to that? If people don't feel your product is worth paying for, they won't buy it.
And don't forget that most of those "wealthy" markets have plenty of people who are poor too, and those less wealthy markets typically have their own super-elite upper classes.
without everyone else just ripping me off
So you want to rip people off, but don't like the idea that they might do the same to you?
And all this about charging less in less wealthy markets for the benefit of he people is bullshit, the prices are lower in these markets because otherwise you wouldn't make any sales whatsoever, and because the media costs virtually nothing to copy you still make high margins.
Also, every student in the world who might have enjoyed the work at a discount because I was a student once myself now hates you. BTW, you didn't want to ever buy anything interesting at a somewhat reduced price during an economic downturn, did you?
Why do students deserve a special deal? They generally only get cheap deals as a form of indoctrination, so that when they finish being a student they will be used to you and pay full price...
And by "somewhat reduced price during an economic downturn" you actually mean you were selling it at an inflated price before, and found that during the downturn people were no longer able to pay this price, so you reduce it to a more reasonable price that still turns you a profit.
Wether the majority would support their goals or not is irrelevant, they don't have sufficient access to the media in order to inform the majority of what their goals are... The majority only reads what the large media companies want them to read, and those companies have an interest in maintaining the status quo.
So have a fixed copyright term from release assigned to the current owner of the original work, irrespective of the status of the author...
If something has not been released then it doesn't need copyright, there are other laws to protect someone's confidential information.
Even with no copyright, there is every incentive to release it... An unreleased work doesn't make any money whatsoever, a released one without an artificial monopoly may make less but consider you already have the work, you just need to produce copies so in the worst case you're no worse off than anyone else who might compete against you to publish it, but in the best case you have a head start because they will not even see the work until your copy hits the shelves.
While being written, the book isn't published and therefore doesn't need copyright...
Once published, the term should be short...
Also there is no reason you can't continue selling a book after copyright has expired, and people will still happily buy it, you just have to start actually competing with other (cheaper) publishers. Some people would still pay a small premium for the "original", and others would choose the original over a third party if the price was the same... You can also sweeten the deal by offering autographed copies, extra content (the new content would gain its own copyright term from the date it was published) etc.
And people have written books for hundreds of years, many predate any concept of copyright and yet people still wrote them.
People have produced music, literary works, and put on all manner of live entertainment performances for hundreds if not thousands of years before copyright was ever dreamt up.
That's not to say the scene wouldn't be different, but it may even be better because only people who were truly passionate about their work would do it, people would be in the business because its something they are truly passionate about and not because they see it as a way to get rich.
Who's to say they can't continue to sell the work after copyright has expired? If it's a small band, then the volume won't be high enough to make it worthwhile for a third party distributor to release their own version.
Sure there may well be distribution online, but again for a small band this will mean wider distribution and promotion, something they might not get otherwise, and so their next album may see higher returns as a result.
Similarly, greater distribution will increase interest in live performances and other merchandise.
Copyright terms should be limited to no more than 5 years...
And as a copyright holder, you should have to make your media available to anyone on equal terms and in (applicable to the type of media) standard forms at a price that can stay the same (adjusted for inflation) or go down, but not go up.
If you stop making your work available, copyright should automatically expire.
There are far too many works out there which will be completely forgotten by the time the copyright on them expires, there may not even be any readable copies left by that time resulting in the loss of that work.
MS could easily afford to sell windows 7 for less than $25, and still turn a tidy profit.
The reason things like ribbons and metro, that you clearly don't like, are forced on people is because MS can, thanks to there being no competition.
They have a more natural culture of sharing... They don't have mass thefts of property that deprives the original owner, they only copy ideas and information... This is how people have learned for thousands of years.
Oh i don't know, wanking over porn on the internet is one way to avoid the risk of unintentionally having children.
Parental control software is utterly useless, the vast majority of kids know a lot more about computers than their parents and have no trouble bypassing a parental control system that is purely software based... It's a classic case of client side security.
If you want something like that to be even remotely effective, it has to run at a layer further up the network that the kids have no access to.
That said, porn and sex are a fact of life.
Your kids will encounter them at some point wether you like it or not... When they're really young they wont be interested in it, and when they get older they will actively seek it out.
To a kid, if a subject is forbidden then its automatically more interesting... The more you try to prevent them seeing porn, they more they will look for it, and this is nothing new.
When i was a kid, internet access was very rare and porn on computers was pixelated and dithered.. So we acquired porn from magazines and on vhs tapes.
And something else important to consider, if you try to prevent your kids from learning about such things as porn, then they will just get introduced to it by other kids at school instead... Surely better for you to educate them in a controlled environment, so they are prepared for what they will encounter when they venture out into an environment that you don't control.
If you wrap them in cotton wool and shield them from any thoughts or violence, sex, bad language etc, then they will be completely unprepared when they encounter such things form other kids at school, and will have far more interest in them because its new to them and forbidden at home.
Citrix itself isn't too bad, their software is relatively robust and fairly secure, at least against external attacks...
The problem isn't citrix, so much as the underlying windows system and the applications people use... I've seen many supposedly secure citrix environments where its trivial to break out of the published application and get to the standard windows tools, which then gives you a foothold inside the network and a platform from which to attack other systems.
Another reason for poor citrix performance, is people who quote ancient performance requirements... I've seen people who quote performance specs from the 90s, when citrix was new and ran on nt4 when deciding how much ram and bandwidth is required... Not considering that modern systems are more bloated, screen resolutions are higher and with greater color depth etc..
A decision they make based primarily on information provided to them by the police...
Not necessarily, those people now buying digitally may have previously acquired music from p2p, but they might also have previously bought it on cd...
A lot of people who used p2p did so because they could not afford to buy music... They still can't afford to buy it, but also cannot run the risk of losing their internet access so they just do without. I know several people who fall into this category.
Many people cannot afford to buy much music, but will buy some... The lack of p2p takes away an avenue by which they could try new bands. I certainly wouldn't spend money on something i wasn't sure was going to be any good.
Well, the horse shoe market also shrank massively. The idea of the market shrinking is not compatible with the greed and sense of self importance the recording industry has.
Whenever i think of french music, i can't help but think of Cacofonix...