First of all, James Randi doesn't actually say that acupuncture doesn't work in the article you linked to.
I was mistaken thinking that the location of the link, "An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural", would be a very good tipoff as to what Mr. Randi thinks about it.
And he'd be a fool to, because even the National Institute of Health agrees that it does. --They don't know how, but that's hardly the issue.
It's hardly the issue that something 'works' but nobody knows how? Most folks don't know how a car, or a gun, work internally, but the people making them (presumably) certainly must, for them to actually be able to... well, work.
From the Wikipedia article on acupuncture. .. From the same Wiki:
Whether acupuncture is efficacious or a placebo is subject to scientific research. There is no scientific consensus over whether or not evidence supports efficacy
And...
In 1997, the following statement was adopted as policy of the American Medical Association (AMA) after a report on a number of alternative therapies including acupuncture:[37]
"There is little evidence to confirm the safety or efficacy of most alternative therapies. Much of the information currently known about these therapies makes it clear that many have not been shown to be efficacious. Well-designed, stringently controlled research should be done to evaluate the efficacy of alternative therapies."
Which goes back to my original post that there certainly are people who contest whether acupuncture works. Here's another link, found with the google search terms 'acupuncture' and 'fake': http://atheism.about.com/b/a/169142.htm.
Penn & Teller may have done an episode on using magnets for healing, but this is hardly relevant since I made no mention of using magnets for healing. Further, I find it curious that you quote performers as definitive sources on the state of reality. Penn & Teller, and James Randi, as clever as they are, are not scientists. They are stage magicians with tunnel vision and egos to protect. Granted, you didn't mention magnets, but, since usually acupuncture and magnets go together, I thought I'd head it off at the cuff. As far as definitive sources on the state of reality, stage performers make their living with trickery. The ones I referenced happen to ADMIT that it's trickery, rather than trying to pass it off as some mystical bullshit. Please do some basic research on them before dismissing them merely as people looking to protect their egos. Whatever flaws they have as messengers doesn't negate the honesty of their respective messages.
I think there's a bit of a difference in using directed electricty, which you can immediately observe in a laboratory environment, versus sticking pieces of metal into various places on your body and saying there's some sort of benevolent effect.
And, again, 'working but not knowing how' could be said of prayer, as well. While you're free to believe what you will, that doesn't change those beliefs into anything resembling the actual reality that exists, despite whatever faith based approach you may have developed in perceiving it. Nor do your beliefs translate into a blanket consensus of agreement amongst everyone. This is just common sense: Even for things that ARE agreed upon by the vast majority, there still are those who'll contest them, despite the evidence. For example, the moon landing. That's why it's important to have reproducable results, and understand WHY and HOW something works, not just that 'it seems to'.
The problem is that the answers are very upsetting to the power structure of the West. No, not really. Fruits making money selling acupuncture, reflexology, and sugar pills certainly do take away from the profit of large drug c
Acupuncture works. Nobody contests this. --The theory is that by inserting a metal needle and setting it to lightly rotate, the needle cuts through the Earth's magnetic field creating a micro-current which then affects the body in a variety of different ways.
Nobody that believes in woo-woo contests it, you mean? Those pesky scientists with their logic and methods and critical thinking, on the other hand, actually do tend to be slightly skeptical about acupuncture. http://www.randi.org/encyclopedia/acupuncture.html
Penn & Teller did an episode on using magnets for healing. I bet you can get free shipping on the DVD...
Well, I missed asking yesterday, but I'll settle for asking today: What's your replacement?:)
Btw, your post was excellent. I'm not trying to evangelize Freenet, I'm simply saying that at the moment, it seems to be the 'best' option for some things. DeCSS, for example, would have been well served to have been released on Freenet. Also, I believe the authors of 'Clit' (.lit converter) originally released on Freenet.
You are correct as far as the mainstream attention, but that's not my focus. I'm more interested in a medium where what's being put into it is far more important than other factors: Ie, trust and recognition. If you have something you want to 'get' out there and NOT have it be linked to you, Freenet seems to be the best solution, whether it be a program that would result in high civil penalties, or an expose that could potentially result in a bullet in the head.
I didn't know that Bugtraq still published details, as I stopped reading a goodly time ago. Most 'security bulletins' I seem to run across are scant except to say that 'such and such a hole exists'. Freenet could serve as a nice place to post one's full 'experience' with such a thing, especially in the United States, where the DMCA makes even the posting now questionable, for some endeavours.
I guess I'm more focused on source code type stuff, and the sort of information that can easily be verified by those interested, than in the worry of authenticity that you cover: You're right, an anonymous post about a random company doesn't hold much weight. Publishing an undoctored picture of the CEO taking a goat from behind, on the other hand, speaks for itself.:)
Today, more than ever, there's a need to be able to put out information that CANNOT be traced back to oneself, for myriad reasons, many of them ethically, if not legally, legit. Freenet is the only avenue I'm aware of that strives to allow that, despite its many notable failings. (Just for chatting, IIRC (www.invisiblenet.net) see to be nifty...)
Anyway, interested in your alternative, and I thank you for your comments...:)
If you've got a safe and anonymous channel, why not use it to transmit the subversive content and save yourself the trouble?
Is Sorenson still closed? If someone happened to have the source about, or, perhaps, the source for M$'s DRM for something like.lit... what's the hassle of trying to find a site that won't go down versus posting to Freenet? I think you're missing the whole point of Freenet: Having a way of keeping things 'out there' without worrying about it being suppressed. For Scientology docs, there ARE some sites able to stay up because of location, but, then, that's a tiny cult compared to any major government. Check out DeCSS.. that's pretty global, and ONLY is out there because of the swell of people that spread it. Well, Freenet has the same concept: If something's really desired, it's going to get passed around the network, and there's no one to write to say, "Remove this". The guys developing Freenet don't control it --- make them stop developing, but people can still run nodes, and play with (improve) the source.
For keys --- okay, for the use of kiddie pr0n... what's more secure... trying to anonymously post it online, where someone has control at some point of the access point and can get rid of it, or, putting it on freenet, and scrawling the key on the side of a toilet stall? I didn't say use of the internet explicitly. Kiddie porn is the fighting issue the governments will use to try to ban anonymous p2p, but is hardly their major worry. After all, some sickos looking at kids doesn't hurt THEIR wallets. On the other hand, whistle blowers, with hard copy, THOSE are the dangerous types, and THAT is the kind of stuff you can't easily post to a url: An "invisible blog" is still hosted somewhere, and that means either seizure of that machine, or a sniping of the upstream provider. However, if one were to put their stuff on Freenet, and then post the key to places where people would be interested (email to CNN? Certain newsgroups?) from a library, or a college computer room, etc... is that not better? And there's no where to 'pull the plug', so to speak. And, you mention bugtraq... do they now actually discuss the gritty details of exploits, or are they still doing, "There could be a buffer overflow in App X"? If you know a page is vulnerable to sql injection --- does that go into bugtraq? Photographs of war atrocities: If you've got an American soldier standing over some kid with its brains blown out, wearing a silly grin (the soldier, not the kid), do you think that'd stay online anywhere for any length of time, especially if it was linked to by well traveled sites? (Assuming places like MSNBC would even link that) Again, the 'joy' of Freenet is being able to easily post something that could land you in hot water where-ever you might be geographically located, and not have to worry quite as much about being shot in the back of the head for it. Perhaps it's true that it's impossible to do truly anonymous p2p and have it work at all, but, right now, Freenet is the best bet for it, and, believe me, the paeds aren't the only ones using it. I can think of (but shan't name) four rather interesting projects that were only released into Freenet and keys posted; stuff that rather stirred up a hornets nest, but left them no where to sting.
As for bottlenecks: When the application crashes, and you lose all your node refs and peers, that's quite bad --- and is because of the java implementation. Sure, C crashes, if you don't do it right, but, at least, it's fast while it's going. The network itself will speed up when people will actually RUN it. Can't get users without it being stable and fast, can't be fast without users. (Stable is another story, bleh).
Is there anything that you can recommend that functions better than Freenet for what I've mentioned? A way to, once posted, keep content as long as people want to retrieve it, but not have any 'real' place it's located?
Freenet has potential; I don't think it's been reached yet, but it is there. Java is retarded. In theory, it's a great old thing, but when you deal with various implementations that all have little flaws, the result is a program that is slow and buggy. That's the first of Freenet's problems. The second is the lack of awareness and use. You're incorrect in thinking only conspiracy theorists and paedophiles use the network.
Kiddie porn may be the most heinous and illegal thing to you, and southern baptists everywhere, but, what about a step by step guide to hijacking an airplane and crashing it into a building? Or, an updated version of being a professional hitman, with detailed instructions on how to use new technologies to cover your tracks? Or making profit off selling rat's milk to children for their school lunch? You've got a limited imagination: Freenet can cater to many more than the sexually decadent and Mel Gibson/Julia Roberts shippers.
Taking my tongue out of my cheek (or foot out of mouth, as case may be) Freenet alternately lets you: Post the inner documents of Any Given Cult Formed By A Hack Of A SciFi Author, post the source code for exploits that are especially meaty, and a detailed dissection for the non-script kiddies interested in knowing the nitties, photographs of war atrocities, done in the interest of protecting the unwashed masses of soccer moms from terrorists, etc, all with a high level of anonymity. Not perfection, of course, but remember, Freenet is *international*. This makes it harder for the Usian government to squash those little irritating things it doesn't like.
Is Freenet perfect? Hell no. As I started this post with, it's SLOW and BUGGY, mostly because of being imped in java. Traffic analysis would probably bear fruit against a target, given sufficient resources being brought to bear against them. But (the big one) the more people running it, the less likely it is of you being tracked down. Of course, we're talking apples and oranges --- the people who use blogs, at least to me, seem terribly narcisstic. They WANT people to know who they are... sort of a fame thing. Freenet is for when you DON'T want the recognition, but you want to get whatever info out there. Dispersion? You post the key to the public forums anonymously... and let people go get the data themselves. Indexing is only a problem when someone is randomly searching for certain data, ie, governments.
Now, if only Elcomsoft would start funding development for Ian.
Hrm. My comment got modded as 'troll'. While I am trollish, in the physical appearance sense, my comment was not intended as such. I was not soaping linux, or bsd, or even BeOS, for that matter. I was simply responding to the article, and seeing if anyone else felt the same: That the lack of options during an install is a *bad* thing. The only reason I can see for it, is OEM installs, or unattended installs over a network. However, that's what (currently) winnt.sif is for. It works rather well: With a winxp, you can set the initial state to 'classic' mode and never see the, in my opinion, rather gaudy default desktop. My OSen of choice tend to be the standard wannabe hacker faire, but, I'm 'forced' to use Windows a good bit. Okay, I whore myself so as to be able to eat. It's life. Am I the only one that wonders why yet another 'version' of windows is needed, and why it now installs itself with next to no user input, much like a good virus, just without the whole tiny memory footprint? WinXP is a nice melding of the 'normal' windows with some stability. As far as M$ produced... 'software', it does rather well. It crashes only about once a week on me, compared to the earlier versions of Windows that crashed with every compile of any program I might be working on. My linux 'router's' currently got an uptime of about 164 days, but we had a power out. Anyway, I only run a web server, smtp daemon, dns, ip masqing, seti, squid, and other trivial programs on there, so there's no reason for it to crash; I use the XP box for major code production (yes, ugly... but, whores need not be pretty, nor what they produce...) so once a week is acceptable. Why would I be interested in Longhorn? The article doesn't say what's new and super duper about it. Just that it's got a different interface, and, I infer, will install even more bloat, without so much as a click from you. I had an interesting time the other day with Norton System Works 2003. My personal opinion is that it's a piece of shit. On the other hand, I'm too lazy to go get all the separate pieces that it's got (jv16 Powertools only goes so far). Installing is a bear; I had to remove it, and reinstall, but it doesn't properly remove itself, hence one must do so by hand. That leads to exploring the.dlls in \windows\system32, which in turn makes me boggle in wonder. For example, there's 7 or so AOL.dlls for displaying 'Art' graphics. Very close in version and size. Why do I have these? That's one of many examples; I'm guessing 75% of the.dlls there, about 200 meg worth of space, is useless and wasted, and never used. 200 meg might not seem like a lot, but, it's a decent Sliders or Buffy episode in divx. So, again, why do I want yet another version of Windows with more useless stuff? As I said in my original post, I'm quite anal. Having empty directories like 'xerox' and 'msn gaming zone' under my programs directory just makes me lose sleep. What scares me is that there are actually some people here who use Windows by pure choice. Not because they have to in order to make a living, but because they WANT to. Call that trolling, if you will, but until Slashdot's run off... erm, "Longhorn", I think there should still be a place for those of us without "I'm a Bill Gates Acolyte (Wanna play monopoly?)" t-shirts to gently poke fun at it and whatever other 'innovations' to come out of Redmond.
And, seriously, does no one else find installs with no options, and ever changing user interfaces annoying?
I'd MUCH rather have some control of the install. I've noticed that with every bloze release, there's fewer and fewer options when you're initially putting on the beast. Is this what the lemmings want? Looking through the review, it seems that all the 'next gen' of M$ products will do is appeal more to soccer moms. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but, hrm, the world could really use some decent BeOS drivers instead. As for the name 'longhorn', I think His Lordship William is being rather over-optimistic..
Anyone know what happened to bbs.ufies.org? Was down when I tried earlier, after being prompted by this article to see if it was still around... was a nice nostalgia trip, when I discovered it a couple of years ago. Perhaps Pitr hasn't been able to dedicate the time to running it, what with his clone studies.:0
The problem with synth playing back stuff 'perfectly' has been tackled by Cakewalk.
The repetition that you typically hear in synthed
music is due to all the notes having the same velocity and exact timing. With Cakewalk, you can use "Groove Quantinize" and manual adjustments to provide more realism (ie, make a note just slightly off, so it's still on the beat, but yet perceptible to the human ear that it's not perfect.) Also, at least with Cakewalk, when you record yourself through the midi port, you'll have it exactly how you played it.
That all said, I don't think Dream Theater's going to be using software to make their music anytime soon.:-)
There was a controversy recently about a Sony handheld cam being able to do just that, with very little additions. (Think there was a $20 lense you had to buy). It basically worked by 'seeing' light bounced through lighter clothing. Personally, it'd be far more useful to see what sort of chip someone's running than their wetware, but that's just me.
I typically despise any animations or plugins, and
I prefer Lynx to any other browser. However, Opera's nice for looking at userfriendly every day. What's annoying, though, is that I have to enable javascript just to view some sites. This is useless. Offhand, Mail.com... there's absolutely no need to make links with javascript. As other people have said, keeping things simple is best. If you have no content, then you're just wasting bandwidth anyway, and no amount of cutsey pictures will disguise the fact. There is only ONE site that I've ever seen that makes *perfect* use of flash/gif animations, and that's How Stuff Works. Check out their article on lock picking, or Programming In C. Compare useful stuff like that to frivolous garbage, shown here: FX Networks.
The world will be a far better place when we can simply euthanize Frontpage users.
Worrying about wiping isn't as big of a deal if you make the data indecipherable in the first place.:-) Check out rubberhose for more information: Basically an encrypted file system that's free and gives deniability. Who cares about file echoes when they're all chaos?
I had a rather fun experience with Creative a couple months ago. I wanted to wean a neighbour off a winmodem, which was typically connecting at around 23-26000bps, so looked about online for what would be a decent, but cheap, modem. (Hard convincing non computer folks to spend more when there's one for $5...). So, settled on a Creative one. It came, I installed it. The best it did was 33.6. I spent hours looking at init strings, scouring the net, etc, to no avail, so, finally, broke down and looked for a number for Creative's support. Then came the fun: As near as I could tell (and I doubt it's changed) there's absolutely no way to get a live person at Creative. Period. The support numbers just give voice recorded hell, telling you to go to a web page. I've still not got a reply to the email I sent them...
I think eventually, all the companies that can't even support their hardware are just going to become extinct. It's one thing to have to handhold a naive customer through using one's product, but if it doesn't work as advertised (btw, a nice little usr modem connects at 49333
everytime on that neighbour's system... ) and
they can't be bothered to answer their phones? To anecdotal nostalgia with them!
As far as the Xboxes... did we really need another console, especially from M$? I still get off playing the N64, if I need some chewing gum for the mind. Between Sony and Nintendo, I think there's a nice, balanced market... and most the 'serious' gamers either own both or religiously stand behind one or the other. No room for the Redmond beast. Plus, who's going to be loyal when they start selling XBox'02 upgrades for half the price of the system, next year?:-)
2 am, it's time for a rambly ranting.
on
Kazaa to be shut down?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
IRC is very problematic, though. First off, there are many different IRC networks, which adds to hassle for the casual user in knowing which to connect to (though, it is nice to spice things up a bit for those trying to destroy it...) and a requirement to create the same kind of Napster (--) OpenNapster proxies that came about shortly before its demise. Next, we again have very large centralized servers. I was going to toss up a DAL server on a T1 about a year ago, and, after reading the peering process, canned the idea. Further, IRC is a horribly inefficient protocol, and we've not even gotten into exploit issues, netsplits, and all the other joys we know and love.:) File *transfer* works just fine in DCC, but for the functionality of stuff like Morpheus, it wouldn't make sense just to tack it on.
What a couple of us (anonymous geeky types trying to read what's left of the First Admendment through the brown stains (ref: Brian Dalton, Ohio)) have been tossing around is a p2p system
that would be totally encrypted, and provide
a one stop place for all your networking needs.::smirks widely:: Right, AOL.::shudders::
But, seriously. A good majority of people online
are soccer moms who don't know why they should use encryption, don't think they're doing anything wrong (and thus have nothing to hide),
and can barely navigate. (IE is "the web").
A nice gui (multi-platform, of course, and done
in qt or wxwindows) that does the encryption
behind the scenes for their chatting and instant messaging would be a *huge* hit. I just removed
Earthlink from a neighbours system. Their software is HIDEOUS! She put it on there because
she wanted things "all in one place". (As an aside, I called Earthlink's tech support while I was there, and asked why the smtp server address they gave her wasn't working. After I was told that smtp stood for "send mail to people", I rather quickly hung up. Turned out that they'd
bought out the ISP she was using, but that
she needed to use the old isps hostnames, as
earthlink hadn't gotten around to providing customers from her area with access. She lives
5 miles away but it's long distance for me
to call her. Rah!)
Where was I? Oh, right. Soccer moms. Anyway,
the key to any p2p system surviving is *normal*
users. Despite the numbers, all existing
file share systems seem to be people with
lots of time on their hands, or very technically
inclined. The people who log in for a couple
hours to chat with grandma, or little neice
Susie, or check the latest news bulletins
AREN'T using them. And if they're not using
them, when the systems are shut down, you
aren't getting the mainstream mass media
outcry. This again goes to legitimacy.
It can't be tacked on to IRC, because IRC
already has enough kludges added and needs
to be respectfully laid to rest.
You *cannot* have a "content publishing system"
that's true p2p and have it *be useable* without
the industry clowns attacking it. (Look at Freenet, and tell me how long it takes you
to find a key of something interesting,
much less to download it. The fact that
I'm actually going to have to buy the
O'Reilly book on p2p should say something.
Wait, I buy all the O'Reilly books. But
if I didn't...:-) )
I think the best solution is to build (sigh, yet ANOTHER) protocol (open) based on the best aspects of the open protocols that exist, and
make a single client/server multiplatform application that everyone can use, and the government can tear its hair out over because
it's not as easy as harrassing an ISP to read what everyone's saying.
This isn't as grandiose as you might think, and people far smarter than me have even done some parts of it. No one, though, has put it all together. I won't keep rambling on details, but, check out Mojonation: For the file sharing end, it addresses a lot of issues that haven't been before (mojo/leech consequences, ratings, etc).
However, it's an utter piece of shit --- requires
a web browser (expects IE? Yech!), is abysmally
slow to publish, and, in my experience, impossible to download on. And, again, just file sharing.
This is probably longer than it needed to be, but, as you might have guessed, something I'm really interested in. I have no idea how it would be possible to have a p2p without central servers (elitist hubs in IRC talk) and yet
provide reliable delivery. Even a quasi-p2p
network with NO commercial entities involved,
and as much anonymity thrown in as possible
would be better than what's going on now.
Again, reiterating my first post, if a million
people are all chatting encrypted, and there's
no way to see who's doing what, there's just
no way to shut it down. Maybe I'm still naive, but I don't think we're past the point where we can grasp unto what freedoms we have left and hold on tight...
I don't think any of the MusicCity protocol
clients are decentralized. Or are our peers
serving up those ADs?
There was file sharing prior to Napster and
friends --- anyone remember the days of searching
Audiogalaxy for ftp sites, or, IRC?
The problem with all the current crop of 'solutions' out there are that they're huge targets (Morpheus/Kazaa), don't work very well (gnutella), are good ideas but fail to work even a quarter of the time (Freenet) or are absolute utter crap (Mojonation). Any system designed specifically for file sharing will *have* to be a target to the idiots who don't comprehend that the genie's out of the bag. Notice that they're not tackling file trading on IRC, or, heck, even usenet as hard? I wonder what's going to happen when there's a nice convenient client that does
chat (100% legit use), IMs (100% legit use) AND allows one to search for files of any type, without advertising and central servers? Certainly something I'd love to code if I could figure out, and something that would be near impossible to 'take down'. (Yes, the devil is in the details, but it is feasible, if you think about it.)
Surely at some point there will be a p2p client not operated by any company (read: target), and
even the RIAA and friends would eventually
have to admit the futility of shutting down
millions of nodes... especially when you can't
identify easily which people are just chatting
and which are actually trading files.
Ruff Ruff, sayeth the Wizard?
on
Ultima Revived
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· Score: 1
From the article: "EA owns the rights to Ultima and all of its characters, and in this case, no permission was requested or granted," said Jeff Brown, an Electronic Arts spokesman. "As for Richard Garriott's approval, that's like getting permission from Toto to remake The Wizard of Oz."
I'm not sure I understand this remark. Didn't Garriott sort of, you know, CREATE Ultima?::searches core for memories of his old NES so many years ago:: I'm pretty sure that's what the credits said. Perhaps I was mistaken.
Or was Mr. Brown implying that Toto did indeed write the script to the Wizard Of Oz, and should be blamed for all the plot wholes and shoddy songs therein?::scratches his head and sings Existential Blues to anyone near enough to be tortured by it::
Interesting article. I've been a fan of AMD
chips for years, because they tend to be
cheaper than Intel's offerings, as well
as outperform them. However, I'm curious
as to what exactly AMD is paying for the right
to use. Surely not 'mov', 'jmp', 'cmp', etc.
I wonder where our new crop of emulators would
fall if one can charge for use of their chipset
instructions...
Slashdot Mirror
I was mistaken thinking that the location of the link, "An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural", would be a very good tipoff as to what Mr. Randi thinks about it.
And he'd be a fool to, because even the National Institute of Health agrees that it does. --They don't know how, but that's hardly the issue.
It's hardly the issue that something 'works' but nobody knows how? Most folks don't know how a car, or a gun, work internally, but the people making them (presumably) certainly must, for them to actually be able to
From the Wikipedia article on acupuncture. .
From the same Wiki:
And...
Which goes back to my original post that there certainly are people who contest whether acupuncture works. Here's another link, found with the google search terms 'acupuncture' and 'fake': http://atheism.about.com/b/a/169142.htm.
Penn & Teller may have done an episode on using magnets for healing, but this is hardly relevant since I made no mention of using magnets for healing. Further, I find it curious that you quote performers as definitive sources on the state of reality. Penn & Teller, and James Randi, as clever as they are, are not scientists. They are stage magicians with tunnel vision and egos to protect.
Granted, you didn't mention magnets, but, since usually acupuncture and magnets go together, I thought I'd head it off at the cuff. As far as definitive sources on the state of reality, stage performers make their living with trickery. The ones I referenced happen to ADMIT that it's trickery, rather than trying to pass it off as some mystical bullshit. Please do some basic research on them before dismissing them merely as people looking to protect their egos. Whatever flaws they have as messengers doesn't negate the honesty of their respective messages.
I think there's a bit of a difference in using directed electricty, which you can immediately observe in a laboratory environment, versus sticking pieces of metal into various places on your body and saying there's some sort of benevolent effect.
And, again, 'working but not knowing how' could be said of prayer, as well. While you're free to believe what you will, that doesn't change those beliefs into anything resembling the actual reality that exists, despite whatever faith based approach you may have developed in perceiving it. Nor do your beliefs translate into a blanket consensus of agreement amongst everyone. This is just common sense: Even for things that ARE agreed upon by the vast majority, there still are those who'll contest them, despite the evidence. For example, the moon landing. That's why it's important to have reproducable results, and understand WHY and HOW something works, not just that 'it seems to'.
The problem is that the answers are very upsetting to the power structure of the West.
No, not really. Fruits making money selling acupuncture, reflexology, and sugar pills certainly do take away from the profit of large drug c
Nobody that believes in woo-woo contests it, you mean? Those pesky scientists with their logic and methods and critical thinking, on the other
hand, actually do tend to be slightly skeptical about acupuncture.
http://www.randi.org/encyclopedia/acupuncture.htm
Penn & Teller did an episode on using magnets for healing. I bet you can get free shipping on the DVD...
Well, I missed asking yesterday, but I'll settle for asking today: What's your replacement? :)
:)
:)
Btw, your post was excellent. I'm not trying to evangelize Freenet, I'm simply saying that at the moment, it seems to be the 'best' option for some things. DeCSS, for example, would have been well served to have been released on Freenet. Also, I believe the authors of 'Clit' (.lit converter) originally released on Freenet.
You are correct as far as the mainstream attention, but that's not my focus. I'm more interested in a medium where what's being put into it is far more important than other factors: Ie, trust and recognition. If you have something you want to 'get' out there and NOT have it be linked to you, Freenet seems to be the best solution, whether it be a program that would result in high civil penalties, or an expose that could potentially result in a bullet in the head.
I didn't know that Bugtraq still published details, as I stopped reading a goodly time ago. Most 'security bulletins' I seem to run across are scant except to say that 'such and such a hole exists'. Freenet could serve as a nice place to post one's full 'experience' with such a thing, especially in the United States, where the DMCA makes even the posting now questionable, for some endeavours.
I guess I'm more focused on source code type stuff, and the sort of information that can easily be verified by those interested, than in the worry of authenticity that you cover: You're right, an anonymous post about a random company doesn't hold much weight. Publishing an undoctored picture of the CEO taking a goat from behind, on the other hand, speaks for itself.
Today, more than ever, there's a need to be able to put out information that CANNOT be traced back to oneself, for myriad reasons, many of them ethically, if not legally, legit. Freenet is the only avenue I'm aware of that strives to allow that, despite its many notable failings. (Just for chatting, IIRC (www.invisiblenet.net) see to be nifty...)
Anyway, interested in your alternative, and I thank you for your comments...
Is Sorenson still closed? If someone happened to have the source about, or, perhaps, the source for M$'s DRM for something like .lit... what's the hassle of trying to find a site that won't go down versus posting to Freenet? I think you're missing the whole point of Freenet: Having a way of keeping things 'out there' without worrying about it being suppressed. For Scientology docs, there ARE some sites able to stay up because of location, but, then, that's a tiny cult compared to any major government. Check out DeCSS.. that's pretty global, and ONLY is out there because of the swell of people that spread it. Well, Freenet has the same concept: If something's really desired, it's going to get passed around the network, and there's no one to write to say, "Remove this". The guys developing Freenet don't control it --- make them stop developing, but people can still run nodes, and play with (improve) the source.
For keys --- okay, for the use of kiddie pr0n... what's more secure... trying to anonymously post it online, where someone has control at some point of the access point and can get rid of it, or, putting it on freenet, and scrawling the key on the side of a toilet stall? I didn't say use of the internet explicitly. Kiddie porn is the fighting issue the governments will use to try to ban anonymous p2p, but is hardly their major worry. After all, some sickos looking at kids doesn't hurt THEIR wallets. On the other hand, whistle blowers, with hard copy, THOSE are the dangerous types, and THAT is the kind of stuff you can't easily post to a url: An "invisible blog" is still hosted somewhere, and that means either seizure of that machine, or a sniping of the upstream provider. However, if one were to put their stuff on Freenet, and then post the key to places where people would be interested (email to CNN? Certain newsgroups?) from a library, or a college computer room, etc... is that not better? And there's no where to 'pull the plug', so to speak. And, you mention bugtraq... do they now actually discuss the gritty details of exploits, or are they still doing, "There could be a buffer overflow in App X"? If you know a page is vulnerable to sql injection --- does that go into bugtraq? Photographs of war atrocities: If you've got an American soldier standing over some kid with its brains blown out, wearing a silly grin (the soldier, not the kid), do you think that'd stay online anywhere for any length of time, especially if it was linked to by well traveled sites? (Assuming places like MSNBC would even link that) Again, the 'joy' of Freenet is being able to easily post something that could land you in hot water where-ever you might be geographically located, and not have to worry quite as much about being shot in the back of the head for it. Perhaps it's true that it's impossible to do truly anonymous p2p and have it work at all, but, right now, Freenet is the best bet for it, and, believe me, the paeds aren't the only ones using it. I can think of (but shan't name) four rather interesting projects that were only released into Freenet and keys posted; stuff that rather stirred up a hornets nest, but left them no where to sting.
As for bottlenecks: When the application crashes, and you lose all your node refs and peers, that's quite bad --- and is because of the java implementation. Sure, C crashes, if you don't do it right, but, at least, it's fast while it's going. The network itself will speed up when people will actually RUN it. Can't get users without it being stable and fast, can't be fast without users. (Stable is another story, bleh).
Is there anything that you can recommend that functions better than Freenet for what I've mentioned? A way to, once posted, keep content as long as people want to retrieve it, but not have any 'real' place it's located?
Not quite.
Freenet has potential; I don't think it's been reached yet, but it is there. Java is retarded. In theory, it's a great old thing, but when you deal with various implementations that all have little flaws, the result is a program that is slow and buggy. That's the first of Freenet's problems. The second is the lack of awareness and use. You're incorrect in thinking only conspiracy theorists and paedophiles use the network.
Kiddie porn may be the most heinous and illegal thing to you, and southern baptists everywhere, but, what about a step by step guide to hijacking an airplane and crashing it into a building? Or, an updated version of being a professional hitman, with detailed instructions on how to use new technologies to cover your tracks? Or making profit off selling rat's milk to children for their school lunch? You've got a limited imagination: Freenet can cater to many more than the sexually decadent and Mel Gibson/Julia Roberts shippers.
Taking my tongue out of my cheek (or foot out of mouth, as case may be) Freenet alternately lets you: Post the inner documents of Any Given Cult Formed By A Hack Of A SciFi Author, post the source code for exploits that are especially meaty, and a detailed dissection for the non-script kiddies interested in knowing the nitties, photographs of war atrocities, done in the interest of protecting the unwashed masses of soccer moms from terrorists, etc, all with a high level of anonymity. Not perfection, of course, but remember, Freenet is *international*. This makes it harder for the Usian government to squash those little irritating things it doesn't like.
Is Freenet perfect? Hell no. As I started this post with, it's SLOW and BUGGY, mostly because of being imped in java. Traffic analysis would probably bear fruit against a target, given sufficient resources being brought to bear against them. But (the big one) the more people running it, the less likely it is of you being tracked down. Of course, we're talking apples and oranges --- the people who use blogs, at least to me, seem terribly narcisstic. They WANT people to know who they are... sort of a fame thing. Freenet is for when you DON'T want the recognition, but you want to get whatever info out there. Dispersion? You post the key to the public forums anonymously... and let people go get the data themselves. Indexing is only a problem when someone is randomly searching for certain data, ie, governments.
Now, if only Elcomsoft would start funding development for Ian.
Hrm. My comment got modded as 'troll'. While I am trollish, in the physical appearance sense, my comment was not intended as such. .dlls in \windows\system32, which in turn makes me boggle in wonder. For example, there's 7 or so AOL .dlls for displaying 'Art' graphics. Very close in version and size. Why do I have these? That's one of many examples; I'm guessing 75% of the .dlls there, about 200 meg worth of space, is useless and wasted, and never used. 200 meg might not seem like a lot, but, it's a decent Sliders or Buffy episode in divx. So, again, why do I want yet another version of Windows with more useless stuff? As I said in my original post, I'm quite anal. Having empty directories like 'xerox' and 'msn gaming zone' under my programs directory just makes me lose sleep.
I was not soaping linux, or bsd, or even BeOS, for that matter. I was simply responding to the article, and seeing if anyone else felt the same: That the lack of options during an install is a *bad* thing. The only reason I can see for it, is OEM installs, or unattended installs over a network. However, that's what (currently) winnt.sif is for. It works rather well: With a winxp, you can set the initial state to 'classic' mode and never see the, in my opinion, rather gaudy default desktop.
My OSen of choice tend to be the standard wannabe hacker faire, but, I'm 'forced' to use Windows a good bit. Okay, I whore myself so as to be able to eat. It's life. Am I the only one that wonders why yet another 'version' of windows is needed, and why it now installs itself with next to no user input, much like a good virus, just without the whole tiny memory footprint?
WinXP is a nice melding of the 'normal' windows with some stability. As far as M$ produced... 'software', it does rather well. It crashes only about once a week on me, compared to the earlier versions of Windows that crashed with every compile of any program I might be working on. My linux 'router's' currently got an uptime of about 164 days, but we had a power out. Anyway, I only run a web server, smtp daemon, dns, ip masqing, seti, squid, and other trivial programs on there, so there's no reason for it to crash; I use the XP box for major code production (yes, ugly... but, whores need not be pretty, nor what they produce...) so once a week is acceptable.
Why would I be interested in Longhorn? The article doesn't say what's new and super duper about it. Just that it's got a different interface, and, I infer, will install even more bloat, without so much as a click from you.
I had an interesting time the other day with Norton System Works 2003. My personal opinion is that it's a piece of shit. On the other hand, I'm too lazy to go get all the separate pieces that it's got (jv16 Powertools only goes so far). Installing is a bear; I had to remove it, and reinstall, but it doesn't properly remove itself, hence one must do so by hand. That leads to exploring the
What scares me is that there are actually some people here who use Windows by pure choice. Not because they have to in order to make a living, but because they WANT to. Call that trolling, if you will, but until Slashdot's run off... erm, "Longhorn", I think there should still be a place for those of us without "I'm a Bill Gates Acolyte (Wanna play monopoly?)" t-shirts to gently poke fun at it and whatever other 'innovations' to come out of Redmond.
And, seriously, does no one else find installs with no options, and ever changing user interfaces annoying?
ENDP RANT
I'd MUCH rather have some control of the install. I've noticed that with every bloze release, there's fewer and fewer options when you're initially putting on the beast. Is this what the lemmings want?
Looking through the review, it seems that all the 'next gen' of M$ products will do is appeal more to soccer moms. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but, hrm, the world could really use some decent BeOS drivers instead.
As for the name 'longhorn', I think His Lordship William is being rather over-optimistic..
Anyone know what happened to bbs.ufies.org? Was down when I tried earlier, after being prompted by this article to see if it was still around... was a nice nostalgia trip, when I discovered it a couple of years ago. Perhaps Pitr hasn't been able to dedicate the time to running it, what with his clone studies. :0
That all said, I don't think Dream Theater's going to be using software to make their music anytime soon. :-)
There was a controversy recently about a Sony handheld cam being able to do just that, with very little additions. (Think there was a $20 lense you had to buy). It basically worked by 'seeing' light bounced through lighter clothing. Personally, it'd be far more useful to see what sort of chip someone's running than their wetware, but that's just me.
I typically despise any animations or plugins, and I prefer Lynx to any other browser. However, Opera's nice for looking at userfriendly every day. What's annoying, though, is that I have to enable javascript just to view some sites. This is useless. Offhand, Mail.com... there's absolutely no need to make links with javascript. As other people have said, keeping things simple is best. If you have no content, then you're just wasting bandwidth anyway, and no amount of cutsey pictures will disguise the fact. There is only ONE site that I've ever seen that makes *perfect* use of flash/gif animations, and that's How Stuff Works. Check out their article on lock picking, or Programming In C. Compare useful stuff like that to frivolous garbage, shown here: FX Networks. The world will be a far better place when we can simply euthanize Frontpage users.
Worrying about wiping isn't as big of a deal if you make the data indecipherable in the first place. :-) Check out rubberhose for more information: Basically an encrypted file system that's free and gives deniability. Who cares about file echoes when they're all chaos?
I think eventually, all the companies that can't even support their hardware are just going to become extinct. It's one thing to have to handhold a naive customer through using one's product, but if it doesn't work as advertised (btw, a nice little usr modem connects at 49333 everytime on that neighbour's system... ) and they can't be bothered to answer their phones? To anecdotal nostalgia with them!
As far as the Xboxes... did we really need another console, especially from M$? I still get off playing the N64, if I need some chewing gum for the mind. Between Sony and Nintendo, I think there's a nice, balanced market... and most the 'serious' gamers either own both or religiously stand behind one or the other. No room for the Redmond beast. Plus, who's going to be loyal when they start selling XBox'02 upgrades for half the price of the system, next year? :-)
What a couple of us (anonymous geeky types trying to read what's left of the First Admendment through the brown stains (ref: Brian Dalton, Ohio)) have been tossing around is a p2p system that would be totally encrypted, and provide a one stop place for all your networking needs. ::smirks widely:: Right, AOL. ::shudders::
But, seriously. A good majority of people online
are soccer moms who don't know why they should use encryption, don't think they're doing anything wrong (and thus have nothing to hide),
and can barely navigate. (IE is "the web").
A nice gui (multi-platform, of course, and done
in qt or wxwindows) that does the encryption
behind the scenes for their chatting and instant messaging would be a *huge* hit. I just removed
Earthlink from a neighbours system. Their software is HIDEOUS! She put it on there because
she wanted things "all in one place". (As an aside, I called Earthlink's tech support while I was there, and asked why the smtp server address they gave her wasn't working. After I was told that smtp stood for "send mail to people", I rather quickly hung up. Turned out that they'd
bought out the ISP she was using, but that
she needed to use the old isps hostnames, as
earthlink hadn't gotten around to providing customers from her area with access. She lives
5 miles away but it's long distance for me
to call her. Rah!)
Where was I? Oh, right. Soccer moms. Anyway, the key to any p2p system surviving is *normal* users. Despite the numbers, all existing file share systems seem to be people with lots of time on their hands, or very technically inclined. The people who log in for a couple hours to chat with grandma, or little neice Susie, or check the latest news bulletins AREN'T using them. And if they're not using them, when the systems are shut down, you aren't getting the mainstream mass media outcry. This again goes to legitimacy. It can't be tacked on to IRC, because IRC already has enough kludges added and needs to be respectfully laid to rest. You *cannot* have a "content publishing system" that's true p2p and have it *be useable* without the industry clowns attacking it. (Look at Freenet, and tell me how long it takes you to find a key of something interesting, much less to download it. The fact that I'm actually going to have to buy the O'Reilly book on p2p should say something. Wait, I buy all the O'Reilly books. But if I didn't... :-) )
I think the best solution is to build (sigh, yet ANOTHER) protocol (open) based on the best aspects of the open protocols that exist, and
make a single client/server multiplatform application that everyone can use, and the government can tear its hair out over because
it's not as easy as harrassing an ISP to read what everyone's saying.
This isn't as grandiose as you might think, and people far smarter than me have even done some parts of it. No one, though, has put it all together. I won't keep rambling on details, but, check out Mojonation: For the file sharing end, it addresses a lot of issues that haven't been before (mojo/leech consequences, ratings, etc). However, it's an utter piece of shit --- requires a web browser (expects IE? Yech!), is abysmally slow to publish, and, in my experience, impossible to download on. And, again, just file sharing.
This is probably longer than it needed to be, but, as you might have guessed, something I'm really interested in. I have no idea how it would be possible to have a p2p without central servers (elitist hubs in IRC talk) and yet provide reliable delivery. Even a quasi-p2p network with NO commercial entities involved, and as much anonymity thrown in as possible would be better than what's going on now.
Again, reiterating my first post, if a million people are all chatting encrypted, and there's no way to see who's doing what, there's just no way to shut it down. Maybe I'm still naive, but I don't think we're past the point where we can grasp unto what freedoms we have left and hold on tight...
I don't think any of the MusicCity protocol clients are decentralized. Or are our peers serving up those ADs? There was file sharing prior to Napster and friends --- anyone remember the days of searching Audiogalaxy for ftp sites, or, IRC? The problem with all the current crop of 'solutions' out there are that they're huge targets (Morpheus/Kazaa), don't work very well (gnutella), are good ideas but fail to work even a quarter of the time (Freenet) or are absolute utter crap (Mojonation). Any system designed specifically for file sharing will *have* to be a target to the idiots who don't comprehend that the genie's out of the bag. Notice that they're not tackling file trading on IRC, or, heck, even usenet as hard? I wonder what's going to happen when there's a nice convenient client that does chat (100% legit use), IMs (100% legit use) AND allows one to search for files of any type, without advertising and central servers? Certainly something I'd love to code if I could figure out, and something that would be near impossible to 'take down'. (Yes, the devil is in the details, but it is feasible, if you think about it.) Surely at some point there will be a p2p client not operated by any company (read: target), and even the RIAA and friends would eventually have to admit the futility of shutting down millions of nodes... especially when you can't identify easily which people are just chatting and which are actually trading files.
The original quote was from Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Definately one of, if not the first literary hacker. He does with words what only the frenzied few can do with code.a 3cfa64493982c9965db8ddb0b7e8
Links:
http://www.quoteland.com/qldb/author/6?qlSess=03b
http://www.twainquotes.com/Death.html
The previous page rather seems to exert that the quote in question is urban legendish.
From the article: "EA owns the rights to Ultima and all of its characters, and in this case, no permission was requested or granted," said Jeff Brown, an Electronic Arts spokesman. "As for Richard Garriott's approval, that's like getting permission from Toto to remake The Wizard of Oz." I'm not sure I understand this remark. Didn't Garriott sort of, you know, CREATE Ultima? ::searches core for memories of his old NES so many years ago:: I'm pretty sure that's what the credits said. Perhaps I was mistaken.
Or was Mr. Brown implying that Toto did indeed write the script to the Wizard Of Oz, and should be blamed for all the plot wholes and shoddy songs therein? ::scratches his head and sings Existential Blues to anyone near enough to be tortured by it::
Interesting article. I've been a fan of AMD
chips for years, because they tend to be
cheaper than Intel's offerings, as well
as outperform them. However, I'm curious
as to what exactly AMD is paying for the right
to use. Surely not 'mov', 'jmp', 'cmp', etc.
I wonder where our new crop of emulators would
fall if one can charge for use of their chipset
instructions...