> Maybe they catch you because you're incorporated in Seattle and report income on your sale of Widget(R) and deposit money into your account there?
Then I'd relocate the company the fuck out of Seattle.
When the company produces bits, it doesn't matter where it's incorporated.
There's a reason why lots of companies are based in Delaware and the Bahamas, regardless of where their employees work. A damn good one.
And in the case of MSFT, depending on how much Washington State wanted to loot from Gates, Gates could physically relocate the development work to an offshore haven. "Work for Microsoft! No tax to pay, 'cuz we own the island country of Billgatus! Nature provided the sand, sun, and surf, and Gates.gov provides the schools and computers! Best of all, Billgatus' largest employer, Microsoft, now offers its shareholders a better return-on-assets because even with the added expenses of providing services to its employee/citizens, it no longer has to pay tribute to the feudal lords in the States who thought they could tax the production of bits!"
(That said, the sight of Steve Ballmer in a thong on a hot sunny beach isn't one I'd care to contemplate. But hey, if it's good for the shareholders, I could put up with it.)
> Some of these levies (flash memory, microdrives, &c) are only significant when they ship with the device in question. If the manufacturers consider unbundling the flash cards and the like, selling them separately, the tariff goes down to CA$.008/MB which works out to a whopping CA$8.19/GB.
WD 60G hard drive - $100US ~= $150CDN.
At C$8.19/G, that's C$400, or twice the price of the fuckin' drive!
I hardly call that "down". (I do, however, call it a great excuse to smuggle in hard drives;-)
> A flight in a Mig25 sounds a lot more fun though! Does anyone know of any rich owners of IT
comapnies who give lifts?
No, but for the next-best thing - prop-driven (and cheap) head-to-head dogfighting, there's Air Combat Canada in Southern Ontario and Fighter Combat in Arizona. For about $1000 US, customers get a full day of training and fly an unlimited-class aerobatic aircraft with a former F-18 pilot as a backseater.
It ain't supersonic (I guess it's kinda hard to do that in US airspace, and our military pilots have enough funding to maintain and fuel their aircraft without tourist dollars;-), but it sounds like a hellacious amount of fun.
> Delta has had similar premium offers - tyopically high end vacations or a chance to fly a 757 simulator.
"Why yes, Abdul, you earned so many frequent flyer points from all those last-minute first-class one-way tickets you bought last year, of course you can fly the 757 sim! Where to, sir, lower Manhattan or DC?"
Not only would space tourism cut launch costs, I'd say putting Abdul on a Russian RLVs that has yet to be designed, let alone flight-tested, would be safer for all of us:-)
> > "bone loss" > >
"Excuse me, stewardess? I beleive I had 206 bones when I boarded, now I only have 198 and this
packet of crisps, I will never fly Delta again!"
"Where do you think the crisps for the passengers on the next flight come from?"
> First a law - DMCA - to render fair use impotent. > >Then a hardware standard - DMDA - to make fair use impossible. > >Then an agency - DMEA - because fair use will no longer be illegal.
Erm, because fair use will no longer be legal. Serves me right for not previewing before I post.
Not that it matters - by the time the DMDA comes out, I'll have enough noncompliant hardware grandfathered to last me a lifetime. And if the hardware isn't grandfathered, I'll move to a saner jurisdiction.
> I'm pretty sure Time Warner has the CAPABILITY to log what channels you watch and for how long, and knowing TW I'm willing to bet they do some sort of demographic tracking BS.
> >
I have to wonder how many nights they've been able to figure out "Ok, he's home drunk and alone and flipping through the Skinemax
late-night features..." > >Er, about my neighbors, I mean.
Well, sure, but you didn't need anything as high-tech as two-way cable or the tech described in this article to tell what was on if the light on your walls was mostly pink instead of blue, and its intensity varied in a sine wave with a frequency of about 1-2 Hz...;-)
From the article: > How much ass does Google kick? All of it.
ALL YOUR ASS ARE KICK BY GOOGLE!
(Oh hell, somebody had to say it.)
Re:So what if it's not a surprise....
on
Netscape 6 is Spyware?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> > > Then again, I trust the spooks to keep whatever they know about me private; that is, I trust them a hell of a lot more than I trust AOL/TW's marketing department. >> >>You shouldn't. > >Sure you should, but not because they're "nice guys". They'll keep what they know about you private because to not do so is to admit what they know about you.
Good point. (And the spooks, unlike the marketroids, have not just a vested interest in keeping things secret, but they also have experience in doing so.)
The other point worth making is that I choose to trust the spooks with my info when I send mail without using PGP (whups, another/. thread), or post/read Slashdot, etc. Informed consent.
(No, Joe Sixpack isn't giving informed consent, because he might be surprised at the level of surveillance -- but anyone who's thought about it even pre-9/11 should realize that if it's loggable, it's reasonable to assume it's being logged.)
Back to the Netscape topic - I don't think people are as pissed about the redirect through the netscape.com search-logger, as they are about the fact that they were never told this was happening in the first place.
(Again, Joe Sixpack isn't giving informed consent -- but if I, having read this article, continued to use Netscape and used the search toolbar without disabling the redirect -- I'd then be giving informed consent to AOL to log my queries.)
> Google could do exactly the same thing as AOL on the server side. What's the difference? We "like" google but "hate" AOL/Netscape. This week. But it doesn't really matter right? Google could get bought by AOL next week and then where are you?
I'm then free to stop using it.
I agree that Google can (and probably does, and should) log search query requests. I decided that Google's history of not caving in to the interests of intrusive advertisers, plus their action in resurrecting the Deja archives, etc. etc. have made them worthy of my trust.
I've also decided that AOL/TW's actions do not meet my standards for trustworthiness. If I'm going to use a Mozilla derivative, it'll be Mozilla instead of Netscape.
(The reasoning is even similar -- I trust the Mozilla developers' code more than I trust the Netscape developers' code. Netscape is Mozilla with stuff I neither want nor need. And before someone mentions IE, I don't trust their developers at all;-)
> Here's the link for that: > >
Google Search: Crossdressing Monkey Porno [google.com]
> >
Just doing my part. (I think its funny how google suggests that I meant porn. Anyway, shouldn't that be pr0n?)
Hi. Steve Ballmer's lawyer is here and he has a gun pointed to my head.
So c'mon guys, just cut it out with the links to crossdressing monkey pr0n.
> So what exactly is my information worth to these people? What is the going rate for the fact that I made a search for 'Mount Washington' on google this morning?
> > Can I sell it for $.35? 5.35? I'm just curious. Perhaps I could put that in Ebay.
Depends on what happens to Mount Washington, doesn't it?
What would you pay for a list of all "WTC evacuation shortest route" queries dated September 10th?
> People shouldn't be informed they are being spied on and say, "Eh, I figured as much anyway." Would you say that if you found that the CIA had been wiretapping your phone line and/or DSL/Cable line for the past 6 months?
Hell yes, I'd be surprised! The 6-month anniversary of 9/11 is still three days away! (You'll have to ask me again Monday morning;-)
Then again, I trust the spooks to keep whatever they know about me private; that is, I trust them a hell of a lot more than I trust AOL/TW's marketing department.
> And you're bitching about AOL collecting some lousy anonymized demographics???
With the unique identifier, and having every search query you ever enter pass through a netscape.com redirector, yeah, he's got a right to bitch.
What's anonymous about this? It's one cookie (from a bank, or a broker, or some other site to which he's given real data) and one SQL join away from having his entire search history linked to him.
A redirector is transparently intercepting and logging the user's search queries.
Whether it's www.netscape.com, www.fbi.gov, or www.doubleclick.net doing the intercept and redirect isn't the point. My search queries are transactions between me and Google. I can log 'em. Google can log 'em. They're nobody else's fsckin' business.
> The companies will surely argue in friend of the court briefs that giving
them additional copyright time will cause them to keep old works in distribution, which is a public benefit. We'll have to see
how this plays out.
The same companies that are now issuing press releases about how they need stronger copy control protections so that their works aren't distributed (over Gnutella, etc.) are gonna argue that more copyright protection is gonna increase distribution.
I'd love to see the copyright cartel pigfuckers try this. And see the look on the Justices' faces when the cartel-busters lay out in front of the Justices the ratio of the number of works in the Library of Congress with a publishing date after 1928 to the number of books still in print.
Infinity minus a day hasn't kept works in distribution, it's kept works away from the public, and the 10000:1 ratio of works locked away from public redistribution due to copyright vs. works being distributed by copyright holders (and I'm being conservative - I wouldn't be surprised if it was 100,000 to one) should be grounds for perjury charges against anyone who testifies under oath that extended copyright protection "keeps old works in distribution".
Up yours, Valenti. Up yours, Rosen. Up yours, Eisner.
> They also found that the Paradyne Infolock 2811-11 DES encryptor has an LED on the plaintext data.
I spewed coffee all over myself when I read that. Some dumbshit should, and probably will, be fired for that.
> And they have a great appendix on using keyboard LEDs as a high-bandwidth covert channel, with the obligatory reference to Cryptonomicon.
I've actually seen this - not for communications, but there was a Winamp plugin that flashed the three LEDs on a conventional keyboard as a 3-element graphic equalizer. It looked way cool.
> If you want the "Scheduled Tasks" folder in My Computer, you have to install Internet Explorer...Since when has the equivalent of cron needed a web browser to work?
Since someone got caught perjuring themselves in court with a rigged demo videotape. I'll bet Gates himself stormed down to the development pens and said "Build me a crond that fails without a web browser, so next time I have to do this in front of a course, I don't have to perjure myself!"
> Wonder why Allchin didn't use the ubiquitous "IANAL" acronym? Surprisingly, it's because his own last name is a very similar acronym! > >ALLCHIN -
A Lying Lawyer? Clearly, He Is Not!
Now I know why I have trouble telling Ballmer and Allchin apart.
Whenever I see Ballmer up on stage, sweating like a pig after doing the monkey dance, or talking about developers (developers... developers...), I realize "Hey, this man has no neck. He's all chin."
Re:Reading webboards for fun and investigation
on
Open Source Intelligence
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> I've wondered who gets the task of monitoring this stuff. Can you imagine what it must be like to have your job being to read Slashot? (officially, I mean, not counting all the people who make it their job de facto...)
I was about to say "pretty fucking cool" when I realized that anyone using/. to communicate covertly would likely troll, get automodded to -1, and then communicate at low bandwidth using various ASCII penis birds as steganography.
The poor bastard probably has to read at -2 all the time.
On the other hand, it's probably a great incentive to develop steganography-detection tools and pattern-recognition software. There'd be no other way to read/. at -2 and remain sane.
/me waves to spooks, and if you're hiring and there's Jolt cola in the fridge, I'm up for it.
> as much as you might joke that spammers should be lined up and shot, that gets a lot less funny when you're dealing with the Chinese government.
I was gonna suggest that if they can't recoup the costs of the bullets through selling live streaming video, they could harvest the organs and sell 'em for transplant.
But spammers have no brains, heart, or balls, so those organs are off the list.
Going down the list of organs that I've seen working on spammer bodies, we're down to one possible use. Colostomy patients who need asshole transplants. And it'd still be an insult to the transplant recipient's own shit.
Oh well, it was a good idea while it lasted. Back to the streaming video idea.
> Why wouldn't you buy software (or download it for free) from a non-software company that was guarunteed to be more secure than your browser (especially MS Internet Explorer) and easier to use. God knows an application like that could interact with the rest of your system a little better and wouldn't be the size of Internet Explorer or Netscape (both of them FAR too huge for web browsers).
Sounds good in theory, but probably fails in practice.
The biggest issue is that I already have NS and/or IE to use. There's no additional "bloat", as the software already exists.
The second-biggest issue is that for online banking, all I really need is the ability to fill out a form and punch in some data.
If I were building a cool 3D game, I wouldn't use a web browser, because I'd need to do things a web browser can't. But online banking transactions need only the ability to fill out forms and validate data on the client or server side. Web browsers do that.
As for trust, it's not so much a security issue as a stability issue. Due to their large installed bases, Netscape and IE bugs that fux0r up Windoze systems at install time get weeded out. Joe's Custom Bankware may have been "tested" by installing it on the PCs of 5 bank employees on NT3.51.
Finally, I don't want Joe's Custom Bankware to interact with the rest of my system "a bit better". In fact, I don't see why Joe's Custom Bankware should interact with the rest of my system at all. I just wanted to punch in a dollar amount, a payee, and have the instructions sent to the bank's back office, where the bank's systems take over it from there.
> If it stinks, don't use it -- it'll give them incentive to make it better.
If you don't use it, you can't file bug reports. If nobody hears about the bug reports, the bugs don't get fixed. The managers think everything's perfect.
And if nobody uses it, the managers hire more marketroids to flog it harder. Only after a few years (and I suspect many early-adopters saying "Your service uses a model of which I want no part, so I'll take my business elsewhere" was a big part in this) did they actually move to a web-based system.
> Maybe you don't want Citibank developing software for your PC. Fine. Would you be adverse to Sun developing it? Would you be adverse to Microsoft developing it? How about the open source community?
Actually, I would. Citibank (as mentioned). Sun and MSFT due to privacy worries (today). And the open source community would never be invited to write such software, because a lot of the banking industry still runs on IBM minis and mainframes.
And none of those options would get around the fact that this isn't "software" I want to work with every day - it's "something to perform a task once or twice a month". I don't bank online because I want to install more software on my PC. I bank online because it doesn't require me to install more software;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Then I'd relocate the company the fuck out of Seattle. When the company produces bits, it doesn't matter where it's incorporated.
There's a reason why lots of companies are based in Delaware and the Bahamas, regardless of where their employees work. A damn good one.
And in the case of MSFT, depending on how much Washington State wanted to loot from Gates, Gates could physically relocate the development work to an offshore haven. "Work for Microsoft! No tax to pay, 'cuz we own the island country of Billgatus! Nature provided the sand, sun, and surf, and Gates.gov provides the schools and computers! Best of all, Billgatus' largest employer, Microsoft, now offers its shareholders a better return-on-assets because even with the added expenses of providing services to its employee/citizens, it no longer has to pay tribute to the feudal lords in the States who thought they could tax the production of bits!"
(That said, the sight of Steve Ballmer in a thong on a hot sunny beach isn't one I'd care to contemplate. But hey, if it's good for the shareholders, I could put up with it.)
WD 60G hard drive - $100US ~= $150CDN.
At C$8.19/G, that's C$400, or twice the price of the fuckin' drive!
I hardly call that "down". (I do, however, call it a great excuse to smuggle in hard drives ;-)
No, but for the next-best thing - prop-driven (and cheap) head-to-head dogfighting, there's Air Combat Canada in Southern Ontario and Fighter Combat in Arizona. For about $1000 US, customers get a full day of training and fly an unlimited-class aerobatic aircraft with a former F-18 pilot as a backseater.
It ain't supersonic (I guess it's kinda hard to do that in US airspace, and our military pilots have enough funding to maintain and fuel their aircraft without tourist dollars ;-), but it sounds like a hellacious amount of fun.
"Why yes, Abdul, you earned so many frequent flyer points from all those last-minute first-class one-way tickets you bought last year, of course you can fly the 757 sim! Where to, sir, lower Manhattan or DC?"
Not only would space tourism cut launch costs, I'd say putting Abdul on a Russian RLVs that has yet to be designed, let alone flight-tested, would be safer for all of us :-)
>
> "Excuse me, stewardess? I beleive I had 206 bones when I boarded, now I only have 198 and this packet of crisps, I will never fly Delta again!"
"Where do you think the crisps for the passengers on the next flight come from?"
>
>Then a hardware standard - DMDA - to make fair use impossible.
>
>Then an agency - DMEA - because fair use will no longer be illegal.
Erm, because fair use will no longer be legal. Serves me right for not previewing before I post.
Not that it matters - by the time the DMDA comes out, I'll have enough noncompliant hardware grandfathered to last me a lifetime. And if the hardware isn't grandfathered, I'll move to a saner jurisdiction.
First a law - DMCA - to render fair use impotent.
Then a hardware standard - DMDA - to make fair use impossible.
Then an agency - DMEA - because fair use will no longer be illegal.
>
> I have to wonder how many nights they've been able to figure out "Ok, he's home drunk and alone and flipping through the Skinemax late-night features..."
>
>Er, about my neighbors, I mean.
Well, sure, but you didn't need anything as high-tech as two-way cable or the tech described in this article to tell what was on if the light on your walls was mostly pink instead of blue, and its intensity varied in a sine wave with a frequency of about 1-2 Hz... ;-)
> How much ass does Google kick? All of it.
ALL YOUR ASS ARE KICK BY GOOGLE!
(Oh hell, somebody had to say it.)
>>
>>You shouldn't.
>
>Sure you should, but not because they're "nice guys". They'll keep what they know about you private because to not do so is to admit what they know about you.
Good point. (And the spooks, unlike the marketroids, have not just a vested interest in keeping things secret, but they also have experience in doing so.)
The other point worth making is that I choose to trust the spooks with my info when I send mail without using PGP (whups, another /. thread), or post/read Slashdot, etc. Informed consent.
(No, Joe Sixpack isn't giving informed consent, because he might be surprised at the level of surveillance -- but anyone who's thought about it even pre-9/11 should realize that if it's loggable, it's reasonable to assume it's being logged.)
Back to the Netscape topic - I don't think people are as pissed about the redirect through the netscape.com search-logger, as they are about the fact that they were never told this was happening in the first place.
(Again, Joe Sixpack isn't giving informed consent -- but if I, having read this article, continued to use Netscape and used the search toolbar without disabling the redirect -- I'd then be giving informed consent to AOL to log my queries.)
I'm then free to stop using it.
I agree that Google can (and probably does, and should) log search query requests. I decided that Google's history of not caving in to the interests of intrusive advertisers, plus their action in resurrecting the Deja archives, etc. etc. have made them worthy of my trust.
I've also decided that AOL/TW's actions do not meet my standards for trustworthiness. If I'm going to use a Mozilla derivative, it'll be Mozilla instead of Netscape.
(The reasoning is even similar -- I trust the Mozilla developers' code more than I trust the Netscape developers' code. Netscape is Mozilla with stuff I neither want nor need. And before someone mentions IE, I don't trust their developers at all ;-)
>
> Google Search: Crossdressing Monkey Porno [google.com]
>
> Just doing my part. (I think its funny how google suggests that I meant porn. Anyway, shouldn't that be pr0n?)
Hi. Steve Ballmer's lawyer is here and he has a gun pointed to my head.
So c'mon guys, just cut it out with the links to crossdressing monkey pr0n.
>
> Can I sell it for $.35? 5.35? I'm just curious. Perhaps I could put that in Ebay.
Depends on what happens to Mount Washington, doesn't it?
What would you pay for a list of all "WTC evacuation shortest route" queries dated September 10th?
Hell yes, I'd be surprised! The 6-month anniversary of 9/11 is still three days away! (You'll have to ask me again Monday morning ;-)
Then again, I trust the spooks to keep whatever they know about me private; that is, I trust them a hell of a lot more than I trust AOL/TW's marketing department.
With the unique identifier, and having every search query you ever enter pass through a netscape.com redirector, yeah, he's got a right to bitch.
What's anonymous about this? It's one cookie (from a bank, or a broker, or some other site to which he's given real data) and one SQL join away from having his entire search history linked to him.
A redirector is transparently intercepting and logging the user's search queries.
Whether it's www.netscape.com, www.fbi.gov, or www.doubleclick.net doing the intercept and redirect isn't the point. My search queries are transactions between me and Google. I can log 'em. Google can log 'em. They're nobody else's fsckin' business.
I drew a "WTF" on those comments until I figured it out.
What he means is that he doesn't use IE or any other user-obsequious dumbing-down of the interface that overuses the word "start".
Netscape 4.71 -> Edit -> Preferences -> Navigator -> "Home Page: Clicking on the Home button will take you to this page".
The same companies that are now issuing press releases about how they need stronger copy control protections so that their works aren't distributed (over Gnutella, etc.) are gonna argue that more copyright protection is gonna increase distribution.
I'd love to see the copyright cartel pigfuckers try this. And see the look on the Justices' faces when the cartel-busters lay out in front of the Justices the ratio of the number of works in the Library of Congress with a publishing date after 1928 to the number of books still in print.
Infinity minus a day hasn't kept works in distribution, it's kept works away from the public, and the 10000:1 ratio of works locked away from public redistribution due to copyright vs. works being distributed by copyright holders (and I'm being conservative - I wouldn't be surprised if it was 100,000 to one) should be grounds for perjury charges against anyone who testifies under oath that extended copyright protection "keeps old works in distribution".
Up yours, Valenti. Up yours, Rosen. Up yours, Eisner.
Unethical, yeah, but where do you think some of the drawings in your Anatomy texts came from?
The difference here is that I have no ethical objection to human cloning, nor to embryo research.
I spewed coffee all over myself when I read that. Some dumbshit should, and probably will, be fired for that. > And they have a great appendix on using keyboard LEDs as a high-bandwidth covert channel, with the obligatory reference to Cryptonomicon.
I've actually seen this - not for communications, but there was a Winamp plugin that flashed the three LEDs on a conventional keyboard as a 3-element graphic equalizer. It looked way cool.
Since someone got caught perjuring themselves in court with a rigged demo videotape. I'll bet Gates himself stormed down to the development pens and said "Build me a crond that fails without a web browser, so next time I have to do this in front of a course, I don't have to perjure myself!"
>
>ALLCHIN - A Lying Lawyer? Clearly, He Is Not!
Now I know why I have trouble telling Ballmer and Allchin apart.
Whenever I see Ballmer up on stage, sweating like a pig after doing the monkey dance, or talking about developers (developers... developers...), I realize "Hey, this man has no neck. He's all chin."
I was about to say "pretty fucking cool" when I realized that anyone using /. to communicate covertly would likely troll, get automodded to -1, and then communicate at low bandwidth using various ASCII penis birds as steganography.
The poor bastard probably has to read at -2 all the time.
On the other hand, it's probably a great incentive to develop steganography-detection tools and pattern-recognition software. There'd be no other way to read /. at -2 and remain sane.
I was gonna suggest that if they can't recoup the costs of the bullets through selling live streaming video, they could harvest the organs and sell 'em for transplant.
But spammers have no brains, heart, or balls, so those organs are off the list.
Going down the list of organs that I've seen working on spammer bodies, we're down to one possible use. Colostomy patients who need asshole transplants. And it'd still be an insult to the transplant recipient's own shit.
Oh well, it was a good idea while it lasted. Back to the streaming video idea.
Sounds good in theory, but probably fails in practice.
The biggest issue is that I already have NS and/or IE to use. There's no additional "bloat", as the software already exists.
The second-biggest issue is that for online banking, all I really need is the ability to fill out a form and punch in some data.
If I were building a cool 3D game, I wouldn't use a web browser, because I'd need to do things a web browser can't. But online banking transactions need only the ability to fill out forms and validate data on the client or server side. Web browsers do that.
As for trust, it's not so much a security issue as a stability issue. Due to their large installed bases, Netscape and IE bugs that fux0r up Windoze systems at install time get weeded out. Joe's Custom Bankware may have been "tested" by installing it on the PCs of 5 bank employees on NT3.51.
Finally, I don't want Joe's Custom Bankware to interact with the rest of my system "a bit better". In fact, I don't see why Joe's Custom Bankware should interact with the rest of my system at all. I just wanted to punch in a dollar amount, a payee, and have the instructions sent to the bank's back office, where the bank's systems take over it from there.
> If it stinks, don't use it -- it'll give them incentive to make it better.
If you don't use it, you can't file bug reports. If nobody hears about the bug reports, the bugs don't get fixed. The managers think everything's perfect.
And if nobody uses it, the managers hire more marketroids to flog it harder. Only after a few years (and I suspect many early-adopters saying "Your service uses a model of which I want no part, so I'll take my business elsewhere" was a big part in this) did they actually move to a web-based system.
> Maybe you don't want Citibank developing software for your PC. Fine. Would you be adverse to Sun developing it? Would you be adverse to Microsoft developing it? How about the open source community?
Actually, I would. Citibank (as mentioned). Sun and MSFT due to privacy worries (today). And the open source community would never be invited to write such software, because a lot of the banking industry still runs on IBM minis and mainframes.
And none of those options would get around the fact that this isn't "software" I want to work with every day - it's "something to perform a task once or twice a month". I don't bank online because I want to install more software on my PC. I bank online because it doesn't require me to install more software ;-)
Thank you, Mr. Levy, for giving me, in Hackers, the words to express what I already knew to be true.
"Bite my [shiny metal] ass, Eisner."
OK, so my computer's version's not as eloquent. I think it gets the point across, though.