Do these people who are being identified know who they are?
Let's me do some extensive research for you...
(reads article)
Yes, they do:
"Ms. Deutsch said Verizon had already informed the two people whose information is the subject of its lawsuits against the recording industry group. The group has filed two additional subpoenas, and those subscribers have also been informed that their names are to be divulged."
We've all tuned in time to hear "Tangoville" announced and had to sit and wait for them to work all they way around the alphabet to get back to "Sierraville" for you.
Re:Not a whole lot left...
on
C&W Bails Out
·
· Score: 4, Informative
BBN getting sucked up by GTE...
Keep up, will you?
BBN got sucked up by GTE (after briefly instantiating as BBNPlanet); GTEI then got acquired by Bell Atlantic, which then devolved into Verizon and Genuity. Genuity has now been acquired by Level 3.
Next week, Ramirez, long thought dead, will turn up and lay his claim to L3's heart!
SCO (which is to say, McBride) should learn to shut up before they ingest their entire leg.
Asked why SCO has suddenly started looking at these issues now, after years of declining revenues at his company and the increasing popularity of Linux, McBride said SCO had few options in the late 1990s as Linux began surfacing in the business computing world. "Even if you potentially had a problem [with concerns about Unix code in Linux back then], what are you going to do?" McBride asked. "Sue Linus Torvalds? And get what?"
You would get the infringing code, which SCO has previously claimed is what enabled Linux to succeed in the market, out of Linux. SCO, of course, according to its previous statements, would then succeed because it contained all the *cough* enterprise characteristics that were required to succeed.
So which is it, McBride? If Linux would have been unable to succeed without the alleged SCO IP, then action in 1999 would have allowed SCO to succeed on its *cough* merits. If Linux was able to succeed without the alleged SCO IP, then you have just contradicted the statements in your court filing (not that that was a very accurate document, now was it?)
If I was a shareholder, I'd be mightily concerned about the total inability of SCO management to stick to a single, credible story.
I'm sorry, but who needs a calorie counter in their phone?
Most people in the U.S. We are the fattest nation on earth (Australia, don't laugh, you're #2).
I mean, c'mon, look at the bellies around you at work. And how often have you sat on the bus or an airplane and realized your seatmate is 1.5x the width of his allocated space?
I feel kind of obliged to point out that you need to be ready to read those books.
They are, essentially, a forceful argument to convince people to subscribe to the philosophy that Man should not be forced to subscribe to anyone else's philosophy. The books were recommended to me when I was in high school but I didn't read them until 10 years later; I'm both flattered that the guidance counselor thought I would get something out of them and glad I didn't take her up on her advice until I was a little more capable of handling that ambiguity. Otherwise I'd probably have spent 10 years with "Who is John Galt?" as my.sig.
In addition, The Fountainhead has one of the ugliest scenes I have ever come across in any piece of literature. I'm referring to the scene involving Roarke and Dominique, which in my mind, seems more or less equivalent to rape, yet is not treated as such in the book.
Dude, DON'T take the previous poster's suggestion and read the Gap series, then.
Re:For the love of God, don't start the Wheel of T
on
A Good Summer Read?
·
· Score: 1
On the other hand, if you want a good fantasy series, take a look at George R. R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" (starts with _A Game of Thrones_). Another multivolume, incomplete series, but he promises only 6 books, so maybe it'll work out.
I think he's up to promising 7 now. It was in an IRC chat that got linked to alt.fan.grrm a few months ago. Something like he found out he couldn't just skip past the years that were supposed to be between books 3 and 4.
Semi-true. There is a technical $5,000 threshold in order for the FBI to have federal jurisdiction over cybercrimes.
True; however, there is no requirement that the $5,000 threshold relate to a single incident. If, for example, Fluffi Bunni knocks over 6 sites doing damage of $1,000 each, and those 6 sites all report it to the Fed with enough evidence to connect them all to Fluffi Bunni, then the $5,000 threshold is satisfied. In other words, the Feds can aggregate cases involving the same perpetrator.
This is why they encourage businesses to report incidents, even if they can't / won't prosecute them all. If several businesses all report related incidents, that's something they can work on.
Re:Dang it, there goes my stomach lining...
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
hmmm..wouldn't I want a long chain of both anonomyzers and open relays?
The open relays add nothing.
Firstly, you need to get your data out of the country in an encrypted format, period. Get it past the local version of Echelon.
"But," you'll say, "won't the oppressive regime just shoot anyone using encryption?"
Yes. Yes, they will. However, they'll catch you faster if you're unencrypted.
Once you get it out via the encrypted anonymizer... further anonymizers might help. Open relays add only the illusion of secrecy, and given the negative attention they get these days, they probably negatively impact the security of your subversive communications.
What would you do? Remember you're a novice.
I don't know. I can't imagine being a novice and I can't imagine living under somebody like Pol Pot. Stephenson's solution in Cryptonomicon was interesting but seemed quite idealistic.
_Cryptonomicon_ is the appropriate reference. As Doug Shaftoe states after reading the HEAP, "One of these days I'm going to have to sit down and tell you everything that's wrong with that idea." The short answer is, novices either get help - from outside groups like special forces or Amnesty International - or they learn themselves, or they die. It isn't a game for novices.
(Or, of course, they become another survivor living under a repressive regime. They're repressed. That's the point of repressive regimes, is to make it hard to be subversive.)
You're next question should be, "What about freenet?" That's the appropriate solution to a problem like this, although the issue of getting shot for having encrypted traffic traverse your node still applies. The other is steganography. Neither of these is for novices. Is PGP for novices yet? That was the goal, yes, to make encryption available to the masses?
But how do we protect ourselves when people with skills start writing malware? Methinks the main advantage would be a quarantined lab environment where the dynamics of propagation could be studied.
Readers who find this idea interesting may want to read This Alien Shore by C.S. Friedman. While it's nothing relevant to current technology, it describes an interesting scenario of a well-written virus, and describes it from the point of view of both an untrained "cracker" and a schooled, skilled, & specialized "security specialist."
First of all, Richard Salgado has got to tell people to be very careful. He's a prosecutor for the government. He's got to say things that err on the side of safety, and of never condoning possible violations of the law. (He's a nice guy, and a good speaker. He's just very obviously in one corner, and has the party line to hew to).
Secondly, read 18 U.S.C. Section 2511. That lays out the _exceptions_ to the Wiretap Act, which includes the Provider exception, which boils down to: if you own the machine, and have appropriate banners, and the wiretap is done "while engaged in any
activity which is a necessary incident to the rendition of [the rightful adminstrator's] service or to the protection of the rights or property of the provider of that service...". The reason the gov't is goosey about honeypots is, if it is a property laid out to be broken into, then is the wiretapping justfied? If you're doing it as part of the defense of your network, consensus tends to be yes. If you're doing it for shits and giggles, there tends to be less consensus. The gov't needs to be able to prosecute anyone, so without court cases telling them otherwise they're leaning to the stricter interpretation.
Re:Dang it, there goes my stomach lining...
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
What if I'm a novice user and a long time victim of..whatever.. some nutty regime.
If open relay is the best way you can think of to communicate in that situation, then you should be praying for people to close their open relays before you end up in a shallow grave. An open relay means a) 99% likely you're not encrypting and b) if they're nutty, they're watching the wire. Note that c) if the nutty regime misses the transmission and decides to try and track it back, an open relay will cave and give them your IP information far faster than an anonymizer.
Re:Dang it, there goes my stomach lining...
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
The worst thing spammers will do is cause even more... loss of open mail relays
No, no, no. No one needs open relays.
In a world with STARTTLS and SMTP AUTH, there is no need for open relays. We've evolved. Let go of that pesky little appendix and live without the stabbing pain in your side making you worry.
Re:Wil's on fark too
on
Dancing Barefoot
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have a saved email from Richard Stallman. The topic it was on is irrelevant to me now, but the fact that I corresponded with an uber geek and got a response other than the typical restraining order I usually receive is something that I wanted to record for posterity,...
I remember the first time I met Stallman, too. While a restraining order might have been appropriate, I wouldn't be the one needing to be restrained.
I spent a few minutes before his talk wondering why Harvard let random homeless people walk around their lecture halls pretending they had a gun in their pocket and leering at people. Then he went up to the podium and started talking. Then he went insane when I threw out a hypothetical and included the phrase "god forbid", at which point he expounded loudly on his views that there is no god.
I now have a theory that most people who worship the man haven't met him.
Good book having SR-71 & U2 history
on
Secret Empire
·
· Score: 3, Informative
While mostly about the stealth F-117, the book Skunk Works by Ben Rich/Leo Janos contains a lot of anecdotal and interesting information about the U2 and SR-71 projects. Rich worked at the Lockheed Skunk Works through all three planes' lifecycles, and provides some insight into the quirks, challenges and personalities that surround the three aircraft.
But the US does benefit from the cheap oil prices caused by an addition of a new supplier to the energy market.
But, since this could have been just as (in fact, more) easily achieved by loosening sanctions, this would be a damned silly reason for war.
why one should be suspicious that US is doing this for oil company contracts, but why that same logic would not apply to French and Russian rationales for opposing the war
I'm not sure I understand the question.
I think that translates into "Funny how everyone screams that the US is after oil, and ignores how the two Security Council opponents (France and Russia) acted in their own financial interests":
Had Saddam's Iraq as a reasonably large trade partner (they built stuff, he owed them)
Had more Iraqi business lined up to go as soon as sanctions lifted (Contracts in place to build more stuff as soon as sanctions allowed, especially oil-producing infrastructure)
Sold, or allowed the sale of, proscribed munitions and technology in violation of sanctions (GPS gammers, Roland-2 and -3 missiles)
I'm coming to view the French as the real-world analogs of the Ferengi. Frankly, it explains a lot.
I encourage people to write corresponding documents for other MTAs
HOWTO: Configuring Postfix to use your ISP's relay for AOL
This uses the Postfix 'transport_maps' feature. The transport_maps
feature allows you to specify the mailer and relay parameters for
individual domains. That's exactly what we need here.
First, configure Postfix to reference the transport map by searching for 'transport_maps' in/etc/postfix/main.cf and setting it like such:
transport_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/transport
Edit/etc/postfix/transport (or whatever file you specified above) and add a line like this:
aol.com smtp:relay.my-isp.net
Now that you've created the transport text file, you need to build it into a higher-performance database file. That's easily done with the following command:
postmap/etc/postfix/transport
Restart postfix with your particular distribution's favored method, or just try:
She went from AOL dialup to RoadRunner cable modem. After a few months, she paid the extra $10/month to get AOL/RoadRunner. It has stuff she got used to getting that she can't get elsewhere.
AOL has its advantages, especially for the non-techie set. She doesn't read/. either.
But having your own SMTP server doesn't provide any functionality that you can't get from Comcast at base price anyway.
Actually, it provides three bits of functionality:
Performance (less stupid delays)
Reliability (less insanely stupid delays)
Intelligent anti-spam, based on more complex thinking than "Hell, let's just block a/8."
This move by AOL is a good thing.
No, actually, it's a fucking bad thing. But you won't realize it until the day that you want to send your friend on MSN email but can't, and neither of you can talk to your parents who are on AOLMail, both of which are playing games to close their protocols to make sure that GnuMail can't play.
Providing an open replacement for SMTP that has the authentication and accountability that SMTP is sorely lacking would be a good thing. Segregating the Internet address space into ghettoes is not.
I've got ATTBI / Comcast, and they're blocking that too. Not only that, but they're blocking it with a soft "I might accept this later, so keep trying" error, which makes mail back up in my queue and keep hitting their machine up for a few days. Fucking stupid.
I now route AOL mail through ATTBI's mail servers (which are not on the blacklist). My mom has AOL, so what am I gonna do?
Many Cable Modem/DSL providers exclude VPN use from their "Residential" service. That usage is covered by their "Commercial" service, which generally costs 3 times as much.
If you are not "making a payment to the provider in the amount normally chargd by the provider for the" Commercial "service," then you are harming and defauding the ISP.
Some cable companies have a similar rule about multiple machines - they have standard access (one machine) and "home network" access (often 3 machines). There have been limited attempts to use this to restrain use of NAT for home networks. I would hate to see such attempts with a law like this behind them.
Another more legitimate target of this would be people freely sharing their connection via Wireless.
this fancy schmancy stuff isn't terribly helpful when you are burried in a sand storm
Tell that to the gunners with thermal imaging sights who just fought their way through a sandstorm. See this account. A quote:
The desert winds had kicked up a sandstorm, but the result was the same as the night before. "We could see through thermal sites," he said. "You could see what was shooting at you. With our gun tube orientation, everybody kept their sector and we kept rolling and we engaged all the way through."
Slashdot Mirror
Level 3 has sold Genuity to CSC (Computer Sciences Corporation).
Only the hosting business, which doesn't really count in this context.
Do these people who are being identified know who they are?
Let's me do some extensive research for you...
(reads article)
Yes, they do:
"Ms. Deutsch said Verizon had already informed the two people whose information is the subject of its lawsuits against the recording industry group. The group has filed two additional subpoenas, and those subscribers have also been informed that their names are to be divulged."
Yeah, or you can just look at the county's website. You'd think a slashdot reader would be able to think of that on his own.
You're from one of those queer warm states, aren't you?
Radio has the advantage that it works during power outages, which shockingly enough often coincide with snow storms.
School closings during snowstorms.
We've all tuned in time to hear "Tangoville" announced and had to sit and wait for them to work all they way around the alphabet to get back to "Sierraville" for you.
BBN getting sucked up by GTE...
Keep up, will you?
BBN got sucked up by GTE (after briefly instantiating as BBNPlanet); GTEI then got acquired by Bell Atlantic, which then devolved into Verizon and Genuity. Genuity has now been acquired by Level 3.
Next week, Ramirez, long thought dead, will turn up and lay his claim to L3's heart!
SCO (which is to say, McBride) should learn to shut up before they ingest their entire leg.
Asked why SCO has suddenly started looking at these issues now, after years of declining revenues at his company and the increasing popularity of Linux, McBride said SCO had few options in the late 1990s as Linux began surfacing in the business computing world. "Even if you potentially had a problem [with concerns about Unix code in Linux back then], what are you going to do?" McBride asked. "Sue Linus Torvalds? And get what?"
You would get the infringing code, which SCO has previously claimed is what enabled Linux to succeed in the market, out of Linux. SCO, of course, according to its previous statements, would then succeed because it contained all the *cough* enterprise characteristics that were required to succeed.
So which is it, McBride? If Linux would have been unable to succeed without the alleged SCO IP, then action in 1999 would have allowed SCO to succeed on its *cough* merits. If Linux was able to succeed without the alleged SCO IP, then you have just contradicted the statements in your court filing (not that that was a very accurate document, now was it?)
If I was a shareholder, I'd be mightily concerned about the total inability of SCO management to stick to a single, credible story.
I'm sorry, but who needs a calorie counter in their phone?
Most people in the U.S. We are the fattest nation on earth (Australia, don't laugh, you're #2).
I mean, c'mon, look at the bellies around you at work. And how often have you sat on the bus or an airplane and realized your seatmate is 1.5x the width of his allocated space?
I feel kind of obliged to point out that you need to be ready to read those books.
They are, essentially, a forceful argument to convince people to subscribe to the philosophy that Man should not be forced to subscribe to anyone else's philosophy. The books were recommended to me when I was in high school but I didn't read them until 10 years later; I'm both flattered that the guidance counselor thought I would get something out of them and glad I didn't take her up on her advice until I was a little more capable of handling that ambiguity. Otherwise I'd probably have spent 10 years with "Who is John Galt?" as my .sig.
In addition, The Fountainhead has one of the ugliest scenes I have ever come across in any piece of literature. I'm referring to the scene involving Roarke and Dominique, which in my mind, seems more or less equivalent to rape, yet is not treated as such in the book.
Dude, DON'T take the previous poster's suggestion and read the Gap series, then.
On the other hand, if you want a good fantasy series, take a look at George R. R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" (starts with _A Game of Thrones_). Another multivolume, incomplete series, but he promises only 6 books, so maybe it'll work out.
I think he's up to promising 7 now. It was in an IRC chat that got linked to alt.fan.grrm a few months ago. Something like he found out he couldn't just skip past the years that were supposed to be between books 3 and 4.
Semi-true. There is a technical $5,000 threshold in order for the FBI to have federal jurisdiction over cybercrimes.
True; however, there is no requirement that the $5,000 threshold relate to a single incident. If, for example, Fluffi Bunni knocks over 6 sites doing damage of $1,000 each, and those 6 sites all report it to the Fed with enough evidence to connect them all to Fluffi Bunni, then the $5,000 threshold is satisfied. In other words, the Feds can aggregate cases involving the same perpetrator.
This is why they encourage businesses to report incidents, even if they can't / won't prosecute them all. If several businesses all report related incidents, that's something they can work on.
hmmm..wouldn't I want a long chain of both anonomyzers and open relays?
The open relays add nothing.
Firstly, you need to get your data out of the country in an encrypted format, period. Get it past the local version of Echelon.
"But," you'll say, "won't the oppressive regime just shoot anyone using encryption?"
Yes. Yes, they will. However, they'll catch you faster if you're unencrypted.
Once you get it out via the encrypted anonymizer... further anonymizers might help. Open relays add only the illusion of secrecy, and given the negative attention they get these days, they probably negatively impact the security of your subversive communications.
What would you do? Remember you're a novice.
I don't know. I can't imagine being a novice and I can't imagine living under somebody like Pol Pot. Stephenson's solution in Cryptonomicon was interesting but seemed quite idealistic.
_Cryptonomicon_ is the appropriate reference. As Doug Shaftoe states after reading the HEAP, "One of these days I'm going to have to sit down and tell you everything that's wrong with that idea." The short answer is, novices either get help - from outside groups like special forces or Amnesty International - or they learn themselves, or they die. It isn't a game for novices.
(Or, of course, they become another survivor living under a repressive regime. They're repressed. That's the point of repressive regimes, is to make it hard to be subversive.)
You're next question should be, "What about freenet?" That's the appropriate solution to a problem like this, although the issue of getting shot for having encrypted traffic traverse your node still applies. The other is steganography. Neither of these is for novices. Is PGP for novices yet? That was the goal, yes, to make encryption available to the masses?
But how do we protect ourselves when people with skills start writing malware? Methinks the main advantage would be a quarantined lab environment where the dynamics of propagation could be studied.
Readers who find this idea interesting may want to read This Alien Shore by C.S. Friedman. While it's nothing relevant to current technology, it describes an interesting scenario of a well-written virus, and describes it from the point of view of both an untrained "cracker" and a schooled, skilled, & specialized "security specialist."
First of all, Richard Salgado has got to tell people to be very careful. He's a prosecutor for the government. He's got to say things that err on the side of safety, and of never condoning possible violations of the law. (He's a nice guy, and a good speaker. He's just very obviously in one corner, and has the party line to hew to).
Secondly, read 18 U.S.C. Section 2511. That lays out the _exceptions_ to the Wiretap Act, which includes the Provider exception, which boils down to: if you own the machine, and have appropriate banners, and the wiretap is done "while engaged in any activity which is a necessary incident to the rendition of [the rightful adminstrator's] service or to the protection of the rights or property of the provider of that service...". The reason the gov't is goosey about honeypots is, if it is a property laid out to be broken into, then is the wiretapping justfied? If you're doing it as part of the defense of your network, consensus tends to be yes. If you're doing it for shits and giggles, there tends to be less consensus. The gov't needs to be able to prosecute anyone, so without court cases telling them otherwise they're leaning to the stricter interpretation.
Thirdly, if you're interested, read the posted practical assignments for the SANS GCFA (Forensics) course/certification. The original assignment (the only one posted currently) has three parts, the third of which is Describe in detail your authority as a system administrator with regards to this statute. Keep in mind that none of those people are lawyers, but most of them sat through a course including Richard Salgado talking on this issue, and all of them worked their butt off to write the paper and pass the course. More work than goes into, say, a /. post 8).
What if I'm a novice user and a long time victim of ..whatever.. some nutty regime.
If open relay is the best way you can think of to communicate in that situation, then you should be praying for people to close their open relays before you end up in a shallow grave. An open relay means a) 99% likely you're not encrypting and b) if they're nutty, they're watching the wire. Note that c) if the nutty regime misses the transmission and decides to try and track it back, an open relay will cave and give them your IP information far faster than an anonymizer.
The worst thing spammers will do is cause even more ... loss of open mail relays
No, no, no. No one needs open relays.
In a world with STARTTLS and SMTP AUTH, there is no need for open relays. We've evolved. Let go of that pesky little appendix and live without the stabbing pain in your side making you worry.
I have a saved email from Richard Stallman. The topic it was on is irrelevant to me now, but the fact that I corresponded with an uber geek and got a response other than the typical restraining order I usually receive is something that I wanted to record for posterity,...
I remember the first time I met Stallman, too. While a restraining order might have been appropriate, I wouldn't be the one needing to be restrained.
I spent a few minutes before his talk wondering why Harvard let random homeless people walk around their lecture halls pretending they had a gun in their pocket and leering at people. Then he went up to the podium and started talking. Then he went insane when I threw out a hypothetical and included the phrase "god forbid", at which point he expounded loudly on his views that there is no god.
I now have a theory that most people who worship the man haven't met him.
While mostly about the stealth F-117, the book Skunk Works by Ben Rich/Leo Janos contains a lot of anecdotal and interesting information about the U2 and SR-71 projects. Rich worked at the Lockheed Skunk Works through all three planes' lifecycles, and provides some insight into the quirks, challenges and personalities that surround the three aircraft.
But the US does benefit from the cheap oil prices caused by an addition of a new supplier to the energy market.
But, since this could have been just as (in fact, more) easily achieved by loosening sanctions, this would be a damned silly reason for war.
I'm not sure I understand the question.
I think that translates into "Funny how everyone screams that the US is after oil, and ignores how the two Security Council opponents (France and Russia) acted in their own financial interests":
I'm coming to view the French as the real-world analogs of the Ferengi. Frankly, it explains a lot.
I want one that also tracks hungry, angry bears
We're here! We're queer! We don't want anymore bears!
I encourage people to write corresponding documents for other MTAs
HOWTO: Configuring Postfix to use your ISP's relay for AOL
This uses the Postfix 'transport_maps' feature. The transport_maps feature allows you to specify the mailer and relay parameters for individual domains. That's exactly what we need here.
Move her to another (probably cheaper) ISP.
She went from AOL dialup to RoadRunner cable modem. After a few months, she paid the extra $10/month to get AOL/RoadRunner. It has stuff she got used to getting that she can't get elsewhere.
AOL has its advantages, especially for the non-techie set. She doesn't read /. either.
But having your own SMTP server doesn't provide any functionality that you can't get from Comcast at base price anyway.
Actually, it provides three bits of functionality:
This move by AOL is a good thing.
No, actually, it's a fucking bad thing. But you won't realize it until the day that you want to send your friend on MSN email but can't, and neither of you can talk to your parents who are on AOLMail, both of which are playing games to close their protocols to make sure that GnuMail can't play.
Providing an open replacement for SMTP that has the authentication and accountability that SMTP is sorely lacking would be a good thing. Segregating the Internet address space into ghettoes is not.
I've got ATTBI / Comcast, and they're blocking that too. Not only that, but they're blocking it with a soft "I might accept this later, so keep trying" error, which makes mail back up in my queue and keep hitting their machine up for a few days. Fucking stupid.
I now route AOL mail through ATTBI's mail servers (which are not on the blacklist). My mom has AOL, so what am I gonna do?
Does a VPN "harm or defraud" an ISP? NO
Many Cable Modem/DSL providers exclude VPN use from their "Residential" service. That usage is covered by their "Commercial" service, which generally costs 3 times as much.
If you are not "making a payment to the provider in the amount normally chargd by the provider for the" Commercial "service," then you are harming and defauding the ISP.
Some cable companies have a similar rule about multiple machines - they have standard access (one machine) and "home network" access (often 3 machines). There have been limited attempts to use this to restrain use of NAT for home networks. I would hate to see such attempts with a law like this behind them.
Another more legitimate target of this would be people freely sharing their connection via Wireless.
this fancy schmancy stuff isn't terribly helpful when you are burried in a sand storm
Tell that to the gunners with thermal imaging sights who just fought their way through a sandstorm. See this account. A quote:
The desert winds had kicked up a sandstorm, but the result was the same as the night before. "We could see through thermal sites," he said. "You could see what was shooting at you. With our gun tube orientation, everybody kept their sector and we kept rolling and we engaged all the way through."