> If they maintain the lists, they should *maintain* them, not just treat them like a brick wall and simply pile up the addresses and leave it at that.
*nodding* - I'd never recommend anyone other than "me" use my blacklist. (And that's why I don't publish it:)
I'm too lazy to take entries out on a day-by-day basis. I believe public blacklists (in general) are a Good Thing, on the grounds that they're easier (for the admin) to use than private blacklists, easier (for the admin) to maintain, and easier (for legitimate customers if and when the ISP cleans up its act) to get out of.
(Someday, I envision a huge "I'm Spartacus!" cascade...)
> My customer goes to the newsgroup to ask to be let out of SPEWS. Group members flame my customer to a crisp because he is supporting spammers when he pays his bill every month.
As for nanae posters flaming your customer to a crisp, well, that's USENET;-)
Seriously, I do have a problem with that, even though I understand why it happens. The problem is that if you've read nanae long enough, you've seen every spammer lie in the book, and you're very skeptical.
I don't know a solution for that one. It's disturbing - like the cop who busts everyone for minor traffic offenses, because he believes everyone's lying to him. He's heard "I left my wallet at home!" and "Gee, my speedometer must be off!" and "I just noticed the headlight burned out when I left work!" thousands of times over his career, and the thought no longer crosses his mind that once in a while, it'll be the truth.
The nanae problem, in this sense, is that your customer (unlike the poor schmuck who did leave his wallet at home, but who probably realizes he's still toast:-) has no idea how burned-out most nanae denizens have become, and is (IMHO justly) surprised and pissed-off at the rough reception he gets when he tries to make good.
As my initial/. post shows, I'm also part of that problem (too cynical for my own good), which is why I maintain my blocklist on my own box, and only lurk on nanae. But having seen the arguments in nanae so many times, and realizing many/.ers aren't regular nanae readers and haven't read them, I figured I'd throw my two bits in here.
> I check to see if the customer is a spammer and if they are running a open relay. If they are a spammer, I tell them to fuck off. If they have an open relay, I fix it. If they are none of the above, I send them thru a colo.
Cool! (Frankly, I can't see how you'd get listed in the first place. I'm speaking primarily to the SPEWS issue, as that seems to be the "blacklist du jour", as opposed to the various open relay blocking services.)
(Yeah, I was exaggerating by implying I block the IP on the first spam. I usually don't block a/24 unless it looks like a dedicated spamming operation being hosted by a known non-responsive ISP. For dialup-through-relay spam, procmail is your friend. For my own mail, I still auto-forward-to-abuse and the FTC everything from certain ISP dialup ranges in Michigan and the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. I watch those recipes pretty quickly, and take the victim/accomplice ISPs as soon as the cockroach-in-question migrates to his next ISP.)
> What if it used to be a crack house, but the neighborhood cleaned up and was safe?
A good point. That's why I'd buy SPEWS a beer.
The system appears to be automated -- if the blocked host stops sending spam for a long enough period of time, SPEWS appears to unblock it.
If, on the other hand, the spam continues to issue from the blocked host, SPEWS appears not to unblock it.
From what I've read in news.admin.net-abuse.email, the length of time for which a provider remains in SPEWS appears to be proportional to the length of time the provider ignored abuse complaints.
Contrast this with a privately-run blocklist (e.g. my "fsck it, block the/24".) I can't be bothered to check if the/24 has cleaned up. There are IP address ranges all the way back to the days of Cyberpromo that I haven't been bothered to unblock.
The advantage of SPEWS and its ilk is that 1000 systems can be unblocked. The problem with the blocklist on my own system is that I can rarely be bothered to unblock it.
(In crackhouse terms, SPEWS reads police blotters, and if it stops seeing crime in a certain area, allows pizza delivery. I'm the crusty old Italian guy who says "No, you can't deliver to 48th street, it's a war zone, at least, it was the last time I tried to deliver a pie there sometime in 1996!")
> We have had customers find themselves on SPEWS. We just set up a smart host on a colo and have thier mail server direct all outgoing mail thru the colo. This way, the non-spammer does not have to re-locate and SPEWS has to do their own dirty work.
Disclaimer: I am not SPEWS. I don't know who SPEWS is. If I did, I'd buy them a beer.
Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with that. Assuming you're the ISP, it still requires some effort on your part, thereby raising your costs of doing business with the spammers. But if I understand you correctly -- as you describe it, you're not moving the spammer around to evade the block. So SPEWS can continue to block the spam, and your non-spamming customers' concerns are also answered. (That is, the legitimate customers' email now comes from an unaffected range at the other host, so it's not subject to a block.)
I assume this is what you're talking about, otherwise (i.e. sending the spammer's mail through the smarthost/colo) SPEWS would just block the host at the colo. (Of course, that might not be your problem, it'd be the problem of whoever provided bandwidth to the colo - but if the spam's coming from there, it's the colo provider's problem too;-)
You wanna live in a crack house? Don't go whining to the cops when you can't get a pizza delivered at midnight.
You wanna get bandwidth with a company that provides services to spammers and relocates spammers to IP addresses to avoid blocking of single IP addresses, don't come whining to/. when the rest of the world wants nothing to do with your ISP.
If someone spams me, I block the IP address. If the ISP relocates the spammer to another IP address in the same netspace, I say "fuck it", and block the/24. Or the/16, if need be.
> THE COURT: Were there completed Molotov cocktails found? > >12 MR. HOU: There were two Molotov cocktails that were in various states of finality. There was one which actually had the
wick in it, I understand, from the FBI agent, and it was tested. The materials were tested to determine what was inside, and
it was later determined -- the FBI determined that it did contain petroleum products.
Note that they don't specify which petroleum products were used.
With a name like "raisethefist", it could have been "petroleum jelly". Exactly what that petroleum product would be doing on a bottle is left as an exercise for the goatse.cx guy.
So he (ahem:) got off. He's still a skr1pt k1dd13. A lucky skr1pt k1dd13, probably the luckiest skr1pt k1dd13 on the planet, and a hell of a lot luckier than he has any right to be. But a skr1pt k1dd13 nonetheless.
> There would be some hefty perks to owning the network citezens would be using to vote, such that hackers and false voters could be elimiated.
You have a gift for understatement comparable to calling the Grand Canyon a "ditch".
"It isn't who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes."
- Various versions of which have been attributed to Lenin, Stalin, and historical references going back to American political cartoonist "Boss" Tweed in 1871.
> How about we give everyone (-1 extremist) mod points? Then the two sides can blow each other away, leaving the stuff in the middle for people to discuss further.
/me mods this cool and practical idea as (-1, Extremist);-)
> Unless it's made of silver, shouldn't that be called flatware [dictionary.com]?
Well, yes, but in defence of the Slashdot editors, they entitled it "why your silverware rusts".
For Slashdotters, any utensil that (a) isn't a spork, and (b) isn't made of plastic, counts as "silverware";-)
It'd make a neat Slashdot poll, though. Do you own:
...silverware (utensils made of Ag, often passed down through the maternal half of your family for generations, that sits in a velvet-lined case and slowly tarnishes until Mom decides it's time to clean it again)
...flatware (the same utensils, but made out of stainless steel, that you actually eat with;-)
...CowboyNealware? (Hey, CowboyNeal! Buy me a pizza!)
>
Y'know, this guy is a preeminent capitalist. He made his billions (mostly without any moral ambiguities) and has gone on to change the world in positive ways. His generosity and nobility are prime examples of why the "society benefits from selfishness" is such a load of crapola. Soros did it for himself, now he's doing it for others. *That* is a capitalist, my friends. > > Obviously I am not the Ayn Rand fan I once was.
Not necessarily. I, too, respect Soros, both for his trading skills and for what he's decided to do with his money now that he's earned it.
But I'd think that even the hardest-core Randroid could appreciate what Soros is doing.
1) He made his money. It's his. It pleases him to do this with his money, and who is anyone else to say he ought to do otherwise?
2) The other simple argument: Soros values the recipients (scientists) of his generosity. It is appropriate for him (in the Randroid sense) to help them.
3) If it's productive virtue that buys self-respect and happiness, and Soros wants to see science done, then this is a way of producing more with his money than he could otherwise produce. He's got enough to satisfy his material needs (and the needs of those for whom he cares) for the rest of his life. Sure, he could probably make a few billion more, but those would be just bits in a database somewhere. Instead, he chooses to use it - to produce something of value (more scientists, by reducing the cost of "becoming a scientist"), and in return, has the satisfaction of knowing that the things (ideas, discoveries, theories, technologies) the scientists go on to build were things he (as a nonscientist) would never have been able to build himself.
If that isn't fair, mutually-beneficial trade, I don't know what is.
(Or to put it another way, producing demand is easy, but boring -- he could spend billions on toys like tourist trips to the Space Station, an OC-192 and 50" plasma display to every room in each of his houses, and he'd probably be bored after the orgy of spending was complete. But producing supply - new scientists to develop space hotels, OC-192s for $50 and 3D holographic displays - is hard. He's chosen to do the hard, but rewarding, thing.)
> First off, this is not a virus. It's an Internet Explorer exploit allowing access to your Messenger contact list and other Messenger functions.
And while we're at it, this isn't a Warhol worm either.
I don't see the optimized scanning routine for initial propagation. I don't see a precompiled target list or any innovative ways to scan the network. And if you wanted to do maximum damage, you'd release it on a Friday night before this weekend.
Unless the spam from the formmail.pl script contains a very clever exploit to set the stage for a second round of infection, I'm calling this one a false alarm. It's an annoyance, but not a Warhol worm by any stretch of the imagination.
> These firms may watch where I surf, but the only real thing they want/need to know is where I'll spend my next purchase. I may surf porn all day and then buy music, I don't generally surf/purchase in any
sort of direct proportion, and I suspect most people don't.
Someone oughta do some cross-correlation of Subject: lines of USENET headers and keyword searches on music databases.
I know I've often typed in things like "$BAND_NAME discography" within a day or so of downloading MP3s of a band I've previously never heard of.
I don't know how useful it would be useful for marketing purposes, as I've already got everything I need to know to make up my mind whether I wanna buy the album or not.
But if I owned an online music store, I'd think I'd like to have a google-zeitgeist kind of "most popular searches over time" and watch for spikes in rarely-searched terms, and match those spikes with postings of MP3s in the MP3 hierarchies.
> [Rep. Ed] Markey, D-Mass., in a letter to Comcast President Brian Roberts, wrote that he was concerned about "the nature and extent of any transgressions of the law that may have resulted in consumer privacy being compromised."
> Welcome to the 21st century! I'm leaving the planet when the government starts burning books....
That's the beauty of the system being proposed. If you burn the books, people might get upset.
Plus, by banning or burning the book, you get people interested in the book who might not otherwise have read it. (Remember DeCSS?)
Instead, just track the purchase of the books, and keep tabs on the suspicious ones. Gives you better intelligence data, and the rest of the population is none the wiser.
Think of a police informant doing a drug buy with marked money - the presence of the marked money in the suspect's wallet indicates guilt at the time of arrest, and the suspect never knows which of his "customers" turned him in.
> Why should direct marketing companies buy customer info from the booksellers when the government gets it for free?
More to the point, why should the government have to go through the trouble of a subpoena and the associated legal crap that goes with it, when they can just buy the damn records like any other marketroid?
If your friendly neighborhood DMA goon can buy your purchasing records from your credit card company ("Hi, my client is a chemical supply company that wants to send a targeted mailing to amateur chemists. Here's $0.10 per name, we need the list of all snail-mail addresses of people who've bought books X, Y, and Z"), why can't Officer Friendly?
> Will you nutsos get over yourselves on the drug thing? I'm tired of people acting like the supreme goal in life is to make drugs legal.
I've never done drugs other than alcohol and caffeine.
I think drug use should be decriminalized. Marijuana is the largest cash crop in North America. I think Philip Morris (Oops, "Altria!") could make a fscking fortune growing and selling pot, and I think the IRS and state governments could make just as big a fscking fortune taxing the sale thereof.
I also think that both the federal and state governments could save a fscking fortune by not having to house potheads and crackheads in jail. Bust the ones who drive while impaired and who get aggressive. DWI's still a crime, so's assault.
Note that I'm talking about saving taxpayer dollars by lightening the load on prisons, not downsizing law enforcement.
I'd feel safer walking the streets at night if I knew that (a) I was unlikely to be mugged for $10 in my pocket, because drugs were affordable (due to increased supply), and (b) it was more likely there'd be a cop on the street to kick the guy's ass anyways (due to cops having more free time).
More importantly, I'd also feel a hell of a lot safer getting on a plane if I knew that (c) the law enforcement effort currently targeted against drug use were channeled into securing our borders and our transportation networks against terrorists.
Legalize drugs and you generate billions in tax revenues, save billions on prison expenses, eliminate the motivation for most gang violence, and simultaneously free up the resources of a million cops to secure their communities against other criminals such as sexual predators and terrorists. Everybody wins, even the cops.
The War on Drugs is obsolete; it's a WOMBAT: a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time. Our tax dollars can be better spent elsewhere.
Great, just one day after I'm pleasantly reminded of a favorite quotation on politics from Fahrenheit 451 and I'm dumb enough to publicly post
my favorite passages from Atlas Shrugged and 1984.
Well, I'm boned.
I confess to also having read Kafka's The Trial, and as I have no particular desire to go through that, I'm submitting the following "Ask Slashdot" question:
"I read literature. Should I shoot myself or hang myself before they come for me?"
(Yeah, I know I could just order a copy of Final Exit, but I probably wouldn't be able to afford the resulting increase in my health insurance premiums;-)
> I think companies should be allowed to control how to make *new* material using the characters they've created. At
the moment Mickey Mouse expires from those 17 years of protection, I don't think you should be able to make a porn
cartoon (or whatever) starring him.
"I didn't say Minnie was cheating on you, Mickey, I just said she was fucking goofy!"
*ahem*
That out of the way, you're right -- that's the third IP thing, namely trademarks. IIRC, they last as long as you're selling the product. So in my imaginary world of "copyrights only last 17 years", if I make a new Mickey Mouse cartoon, and purport to sell it as my own creation, Walt could still sue my ass.
> When I go into a drugstore, I can buy a drug. I am not allowed to copy the drug, or manufacture it (even for private use.)
Right. That's called "patenting".
The deal is that in order to promote useful progress in the arts and sciences, the manufacturer has to tell the world how to make the drug. (That's why anyone can read the patent on it.) The government, in return for this service, grants the manufacturer a legal monopoly over making the drug for the next 17 years.
After the 17 years are up, however, anyone can make the drug. If you can't make your investment into Prozac or Viagra back in 17 years, then tough titty.
That's the deal - if you tell the world how to make your miracle drug or cool invention, you get to price-gouge the world for the next 17 years. After that, everyone else gets to join in the fun and you have to compete.
> BUT if I go into target, I can buy a crippled "The Fast and Furious Soundtrack" CD. Why do I own the data, and not just a peice of plastic? They didn't sell the data, and that's obvious b/c it's crippled...
Right again. That's called "copyright".
By publishing 1000000 copies of the CD or DVD with a big pile of bits on it, RIAA or MPAA tell the world how to reproduce a song, or a movie.
Sonny "I read OT-7 and can communicate with that tree!" Bono was more than just an idiot, a $cientologist and a Congressman (but I repeat myself). You see, Sonny was also working for Disney, and because of that, RIAA and MPAA get to control who gets to reproduce the bits for 75 years after the original creator dies. (And to buy another law that says "100 years after death of creator" as soon as the current "75 after death of creator" starts to threaten Mickey Mouse again.)
See the difference?
Funny, neither can I.
The smart thing to do would be to realize that digital media (software, music, movies) are no different from the sorts of things that patent protection.
Both involve an initial innovation. Both involve telling the world how to reproduce your innovation.
Yet one has 17 years of protection, and the other, 75 years after the death of the creator.
Intellectual property laws need to be reformed in such a way that both copyrights and patents expire more quickly, require renewal, and if not renewed, the works in question (if copyrighted) fall into the public domain, or (if patented) lose patent protection.
We can quibble over the numbers - and I think "17 years" is too long - but even reducing the time limit on copyright to 17 years would be a damn fine start.
"If you can't make a respectable profit on a movie or a song in 17 years, give up and find another line of work".
Say it. Feel it. Think about it. If that's good enough for Pfizer and Merck and the tens of billions of dollars in biotech research, it's gotta be good enough for a fuckin' cartoon mouse, or a chick with big tits who can lip-sync.
> It's not about optical output, silly. When they find out that you made a copy, Roger-- The RIAA Enforcer, comes to
your house and rubs a key across your copied disk. Therefore, you will lose quality.
> > As if the pain of losing a CDR isn't enough, the noise made during this scratching is supposed to be untollerable.
Hey, I listen to industrial music. I might like that;-)
At the very least, it'd sound a hell of a lot better than whatever Titney Spears has put out.
> I can honestly state I have not, in over a year, listened to music being played _directly from a CD_. And, while I recognize that I'm in the minority here (I don't drive, so I don't worry about car CD players), I can say with some assurance that for every 100,000 iPods or other MP3 players get sold, the chance of copy protection being acceptable gets diminishingly less. > > That's It, it's all over - If nobody buys copy protected CDs (and nobody with an iPod will or MP3 player will), it's game over. DIVX went down not because it was broken, but because nobody was interested in buying the Discs.
Good point. I never thought of it that way, but when I buy a CD, I, too, listen to it once or twice at the most - either to find out what my downloaded MP3s were missing, and then to gauge the quality of the MP3s I just encoded off it. (Side note: LAME rocks. Rocks hard enough that I've pretty much not had to bother doing CD-MP3 comparisons, as I've stopped being able to tell the difference, even on headphones at 192. I encode at 256, just to be on the safe side. Maybe someday I'll have a stereo system where I could tell the difference, hard drive space is cheap, and I'm not uploading 'em to anyone else, so the space is mine to waste.)
But after the rip/encode day, it's computer and MP3 player from that point on. Last time I listened to a CDDA was a set of compilations/mixes that I burned for a car stereo and a long trip. Even then, I didn't even bother to dig out the original CDs to create the.WAVs, I just decoded the MP3s.)
Put it on unprotected CD-DA, and I'll buy it. Hilary still gets her 90% of the artist's money.
Put it on copy-protected discs, and I might think it's worthwhile to work around the protection to get the format I want. Hilary might still get her cut of that money.
Make it so I can't work around it, and I'll download it from a P2P source. Ms. Rosen can take a long hard suck on my arse.
> > > How many times do we have to explain that no anti-piracy technology will ever work flawlessly nor will it not be broken
over time.
> > > Until moderators stop moderating up the same, old, boring arguments. > > Or untill they stop posting the same, old, boring
articles.
Or until RIAA realizes that Midbar and all the other copy-control companies are selling nothing more than snake oil.
Or until RIAA realizes that no matter how much money they have, we're still right - making bits uncopyable is like making water not wet - and they're wrong.
Or (my personal hope) - until the combined weight of the bullshit coming out of Midbar's technical marketing staff's and Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti's shared hallucination is sufficient to gravitational collapse and becomes a black hole, thereby putting an end to RIAA, MPAA and the rest of the content control industry once and for all.
Slashdot Mirror
*nodding* - I'd never recommend anyone other than "me" use my blacklist. (And that's why I don't publish it :)
I'm too lazy to take entries out on a day-by-day basis. I believe public blacklists (in general) are a Good Thing, on the grounds that they're easier (for the admin) to use than private blacklists, easier (for the admin) to maintain, and easier (for legitimate customers if and when the ISP cleans up its act) to get out of.
(Someday, I envision a huge "I'm Spartacus!" cascade...)
> My customer goes to the newsgroup to ask to be let out of SPEWS. Group members flame my customer to a crisp because he is supporting spammers when he pays his bill every month.
As for nanae posters flaming your customer to a crisp, well, that's USENET ;-)
Seriously, I do have a problem with that, even though I understand why it happens. The problem is that if you've read nanae long enough, you've seen every spammer lie in the book, and you're very skeptical.
I don't know a solution for that one. It's disturbing - like the cop who busts everyone for minor traffic offenses, because he believes everyone's lying to him. He's heard "I left my wallet at home!" and "Gee, my speedometer must be off!" and "I just noticed the headlight burned out when I left work!" thousands of times over his career, and the thought no longer crosses his mind that once in a while, it'll be the truth.
The nanae problem, in this sense, is that your customer (unlike the poor schmuck who did leave his wallet at home, but who probably realizes he's still toast :-) has no idea how burned-out most nanae denizens have become, and is (IMHO justly) surprised and pissed-off at the rough reception he gets when he tries to make good.
As my initial /. post shows, I'm also part of that problem (too cynical for my own good), which is why I maintain my blocklist on my own box, and only lurk on nanae. But having seen the arguments in nanae so many times, and realizing many /.ers aren't regular nanae readers and haven't read them, I figured I'd throw my two bits in here.
Cool! (Frankly, I can't see how you'd get listed in the first place. I'm speaking primarily to the SPEWS issue, as that seems to be the "blacklist du jour", as opposed to the various open relay blocking services.)
(Yeah, I was exaggerating by implying I block the IP on the first spam. I usually don't block a /24 unless it looks like a dedicated spamming operation being hosted by a known non-responsive ISP. For dialup-through-relay spam, procmail is your friend. For my own mail, I still auto-forward-to-abuse and the FTC everything from certain ISP dialup ranges in Michigan and the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. I watch those recipes pretty quickly, and take the victim/accomplice ISPs as soon as the cockroach-in-question migrates to his next ISP.)
A good point. That's why I'd buy SPEWS a beer.
The system appears to be automated -- if the blocked host stops sending spam for a long enough period of time, SPEWS appears to unblock it.
If, on the other hand, the spam continues to issue from the blocked host, SPEWS appears not to unblock it.
From what I've read in news.admin.net-abuse.email, the length of time for which a provider remains in SPEWS appears to be proportional to the length of time the provider ignored abuse complaints.
Contrast this with a privately-run blocklist (e.g. my "fsck it, block the /24".) I can't be bothered to check if the /24 has cleaned up. There are IP address ranges all the way back to the days of Cyberpromo that I haven't been bothered to unblock.
The advantage of SPEWS and its ilk is that 1000 systems can be unblocked. The problem with the blocklist on my own system is that I can rarely be bothered to unblock it.
(In crackhouse terms, SPEWS reads police blotters, and if it stops seeing crime in a certain area, allows pizza delivery. I'm the crusty old Italian guy who says "No, you can't deliver to 48th street, it's a war zone, at least, it was the last time I tried to deliver a pie there sometime in 1996!")
Disclaimer: I am not SPEWS. I don't know who SPEWS is. If I did, I'd buy them a beer.
Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with that. Assuming you're the ISP, it still requires some effort on your part, thereby raising your costs of doing business with the spammers. But if I understand you correctly -- as you describe it, you're not moving the spammer around to evade the block. So SPEWS can continue to block the spam, and your non-spamming customers' concerns are also answered. (That is, the legitimate customers' email now comes from an unaffected range at the other host, so it's not subject to a block.)
I assume this is what you're talking about, otherwise (i.e. sending the spammer's mail through the smarthost/colo) SPEWS would just block the host at the colo. (Of course, that might not be your problem, it'd be the problem of whoever provided bandwidth to the colo - but if the spam's coming from there, it's the colo provider's problem too ;-)
You wanna live in a crack house? Don't go whining to the cops when you can't get a pizza delivered at midnight.
You wanna get bandwidth with a company that provides services to spammers and relocates spammers to IP addresses to avoid blocking of single IP addresses, don't come whining to /. when the rest of the world wants nothing to do with your ISP.
If someone spams me, I block the IP address. If the ISP relocates the spammer to another IP address in the same netspace, I say "fuck it", and block the /24. Or the /16, if need be.
Don't like living in a crack house? Move.
>
>12 MR. HOU: There were two Molotov cocktails that were in various states of finality. There was one which actually had the wick in it, I understand, from the FBI agent, and it was tested. The materials were tested to determine what was inside, and it was later determined -- the FBI determined that it did contain petroleum products.
Note that they don't specify which petroleum products were used.
With a name like "raisethefist", it could have been "petroleum jelly". Exactly what that petroleum product would be doing on a bottle is left as an exercise for the goatse.cx guy.
So he (ahem :) got off. He's still a skr1pt k1dd13. A lucky skr1pt k1dd13, probably the luckiest skr1pt k1dd13 on the planet, and a hell of a lot luckier than he has any right to be. But a skr1pt k1dd13 nonetheless.
You have a gift for understatement comparable to calling the Grand Canyon a "ditch".
"It isn't who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes."
- Various versions of which have been attributed to Lenin, Stalin, and historical references going back to American political cartoonist "Boss" Tweed in 1871.
Well, yes, but in defence of the Slashdot editors, they entitled it "why your silverware rusts".
For Slashdotters, any utensil that (a) isn't a spork, and (b) isn't made of plastic, counts as "silverware" ;-)
It'd make a neat Slashdot poll, though. Do you own:
The Register's editors have obviously misspelled "Now that it's made Slashdot's front page, for about 10 more minutes..."
Given that his fiancee's site just got Slashdotted, as long he pays for Kathleen's bandwidth bill this month, all should be forgiven.
Congratz, Taco.
>
> Obviously I am not the Ayn Rand fan I once was.
Not necessarily. I, too, respect Soros, both for his trading skills and for what he's decided to do with his money now that he's earned it.
But I'd think that even the hardest-core Randroid could appreciate what Soros is doing.
1) He made his money. It's his. It pleases him to do this with his money, and who is anyone else to say he ought to do otherwise?
2) The other simple argument: Soros values the recipients (scientists) of his generosity. It is appropriate for him (in the Randroid sense) to help them.
3) If it's productive virtue that buys self-respect and happiness, and Soros wants to see science done, then this is a way of producing more with his money than he could otherwise produce. He's got enough to satisfy his material needs (and the needs of those for whom he cares) for the rest of his life. Sure, he could probably make a few billion more, but those would be just bits in a database somewhere. Instead, he chooses to use it - to produce something of value (more scientists, by reducing the cost of "becoming a scientist"), and in return, has the satisfaction of knowing that the things (ideas, discoveries, theories, technologies) the scientists go on to build were things he (as a nonscientist) would never have been able to build himself.
If that isn't fair, mutually-beneficial trade, I don't know what is.
(Or to put it another way, producing demand is easy, but boring -- he could spend billions on toys like tourist trips to the Space Station, an OC-192 and 50" plasma display to every room in each of his houses, and he'd probably be bored after the orgy of spending was complete. But producing supply - new scientists to develop space hotels, OC-192s for $50 and 3D holographic displays - is hard. He's chosen to do the hard, but rewarding, thing.)
And while we're at it, this isn't a Warhol worm either.
I don't see the optimized scanning routine for initial propagation. I don't see a precompiled target list or any innovative ways to scan the network. And if you wanted to do maximum damage, you'd release it on a Friday night before this weekend.
Unless the spam from the formmail.pl script contains a very clever exploit to set the stage for a second round of infection, I'm calling this one a false alarm. It's an annoyance, but not a Warhol worm by any stretch of the imagination.
Someone oughta do some cross-correlation of Subject: lines of USENET headers and keyword searches on music databases.
I know I've often typed in things like "$BAND_NAME discography" within a day or so of downloading MP3s of a band I've previously never heard of.
I don't know how useful it would be useful for marketing purposes, as I've already got everything I need to know to make up my mind whether I wanna buy the album or not.
But if I owned an online music store, I'd think I'd like to have a google-zeitgeist kind of "most popular searches over time" and watch for spikes in rarely-searched terms, and match those spikes with postings of MP3s in the MP3 hierarchies.
What are you hiding, Rep. Markey? ;-)
(Seriously - give 'em hell, Rep. Well done.)
That's the beauty of the system being proposed. If you burn the books, people might get upset.
Plus, by banning or burning the book, you get people interested in the book who might not otherwise have read it. (Remember DeCSS?)
Instead, just track the purchase of the books, and keep tabs on the suspicious ones. Gives you better intelligence data, and the rest of the population is none the wiser.
Think of a police informant doing a drug buy with marked money - the presence of the marked money in the suspect's wallet indicates guilt at the time of arrest, and the suspect never knows which of his "customers" turned him in.
More to the point, why should the government have to go through the trouble of a subpoena and the associated legal crap that goes with it, when they can just buy the damn records like any other marketroid?
If your friendly neighborhood DMA goon can buy your purchasing records from your credit card company ("Hi, my client is a chemical supply company that wants to send a targeted mailing to amateur chemists. Here's $0.10 per name, we need the list of all snail-mail addresses of people who've bought books X, Y, and Z"), why can't Officer Friendly?
I've never done drugs other than alcohol and caffeine.
I think drug use should be decriminalized. Marijuana is the largest cash crop in North America. I think Philip Morris (Oops, "Altria!") could make a fscking fortune growing and selling pot, and I think the IRS and state governments could make just as big a fscking fortune taxing the sale thereof.
I also think that both the federal and state governments could save a fscking fortune by not having to house potheads and crackheads in jail. Bust the ones who drive while impaired and who get aggressive. DWI's still a crime, so's assault.
Note that I'm talking about saving taxpayer dollars by lightening the load on prisons, not downsizing law enforcement.
I'd feel safer walking the streets at night if I knew that (a) I was unlikely to be mugged for $10 in my pocket, because drugs were affordable (due to increased supply), and (b) it was more likely there'd be a cop on the street to kick the guy's ass anyways (due to cops having more free time).
More importantly, I'd also feel a hell of a lot safer getting on a plane if I knew that (c) the law enforcement effort currently targeted against drug use were channeled into securing our borders and our transportation networks against terrorists.
Legalize drugs and you generate billions in tax revenues, save billions on prison expenses, eliminate the motivation for most gang violence, and simultaneously free up the resources of a million cops to secure their communities against other criminals such as sexual predators and terrorists. Everybody wins, even the cops.
The War on Drugs is obsolete; it's a WOMBAT: a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time. Our tax dollars can be better spent elsewhere.
Well, I'm boned.
I confess to also having read Kafka's The Trial , and as I have no particular desire to go through that, I'm submitting the following "Ask Slashdot" question:
"I read literature. Should I shoot myself or hang myself before they come for me?"
(Yeah, I know I could just order a copy of Final Exit , but I probably wouldn't be able to afford the resulting increase in my health insurance premiums ;-)
"I didn't say Minnie was cheating on you, Mickey, I just said she was fucking goofy!"
*ahem*
That out of the way, you're right -- that's the third IP thing, namely trademarks. IIRC, they last as long as you're selling the product. So in my imaginary world of "copyrights only last 17 years", if I make a new Mickey Mouse cartoon, and purport to sell it as my own creation, Walt could still sue my ass.
Right. That's called "patenting".
The deal is that in order to promote useful progress in the arts and sciences, the manufacturer has to tell the world how to make the drug. (That's why anyone can read the patent on it.) The government, in return for this service, grants the manufacturer a legal monopoly over making the drug for the next 17 years. After the 17 years are up, however, anyone can make the drug. If you can't make your investment into Prozac or Viagra back in 17 years, then tough titty.
That's the deal - if you tell the world how to make your miracle drug or cool invention, you get to price-gouge the world for the next 17 years. After that, everyone else gets to join in the fun and you have to compete.
> BUT if I go into target, I can buy a crippled "The Fast and Furious Soundtrack" CD. Why do I own the data, and not just a peice of plastic? They didn't sell the data, and that's obvious b/c it's crippled...
Right again. That's called "copyright".
By publishing 1000000 copies of the CD or DVD with a big pile of bits on it, RIAA or MPAA tell the world how to reproduce a song, or a movie.
Sonny "I read OT-7 and can communicate with that tree!" Bono was more than just an idiot, a $cientologist and a Congressman (but I repeat myself). You see, Sonny was also working for Disney, and because of that, RIAA and MPAA get to control who gets to reproduce the bits for 75 years after the original creator dies. (And to buy another law that says "100 years after death of creator" as soon as the current "75 after death of creator" starts to threaten Mickey Mouse again.)
See the difference?
Funny, neither can I.
The smart thing to do would be to realize that digital media (software, music, movies) are no different from the sorts of things that patent protection.
Both involve an initial innovation. Both involve telling the world how to reproduce your innovation.
Yet one has 17 years of protection, and the other, 75 years after the death of the creator.
Intellectual property laws need to be reformed in such a way that both copyrights and patents expire more quickly, require renewal, and if not renewed, the works in question (if copyrighted) fall into the public domain, or (if patented) lose patent protection.
We can quibble over the numbers - and I think "17 years" is too long - but even reducing the time limit on copyright to 17 years would be a damn fine start.
"If you can't make a respectable profit on a movie or a song in 17 years, give up and find another line of work".
Say it. Feel it. Think about it. If that's good enough for Pfizer and Merck and the tens of billions of dollars in biotech research, it's gotta be good enough for a fuckin' cartoon mouse, or a chick with big tits who can lip-sync.
>
> As if the pain of losing a CDR isn't enough, the noise made during this scratching is supposed to be untollerable.
Hey, I listen to industrial music. I might like that ;-)
At the very least, it'd sound a hell of a lot better than whatever Titney Spears has put out.
>
> That's It, it's all over - If nobody buys copy protected CDs (and nobody with an iPod will or MP3 player will), it's game over. DIVX went down not because it was broken, but because nobody was interested in buying the Discs.
Good point. I never thought of it that way, but when I buy a CD, I, too, listen to it once or twice at the most - either to find out what my downloaded MP3s were missing, and then to gauge the quality of the MP3s I just encoded off it. (Side note: LAME rocks. Rocks hard enough that I've pretty much not had to bother doing CD-MP3 comparisons, as I've stopped being able to tell the difference, even on headphones at 192. I encode at 256, just to be on the safe side. Maybe someday I'll have a stereo system where I could tell the difference, hard drive space is cheap, and I'm not uploading 'em to anyone else, so the space is mine to waste.)
But after the rip/encode day, it's computer and MP3 player from that point on. Last time I listened to a CDDA was a set of compilations/mixes that I burned for a car stereo and a long trip. Even then, I didn't even bother to dig out the original CDs to create the .WAVs, I just decoded the MP3s.)
Put it on unprotected CD-DA, and I'll buy it. Hilary still gets her 90% of the artist's money.
Put it on copy-protected discs, and I might think it's worthwhile to work around the protection to get the format I want. Hilary might still get her cut of that money.
Make it so I can't work around it, and I'll download it from a P2P source. Ms. Rosen can take a long hard suck on my arse.
>
> > Until moderators stop moderating up the same, old, boring arguments.
>
> Or untill they stop posting the same, old, boring articles.
Or until RIAA realizes that Midbar and all the other copy-control companies are selling nothing more than snake oil.
Or until RIAA realizes that no matter how much money they have, we're still right - making bits uncopyable is like making water not wet - and they're wrong.
Or (my personal hope) - until the combined weight of the bullshit coming out of Midbar's technical marketing staff's and Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti's shared hallucination is sufficient to gravitational collapse and becomes a black hole, thereby putting an end to RIAA, MPAA and the rest of the content control industry once and for all.