> It would probably not be possible to enter and land through mars atmosphere 'perpendicularly'. For 'entry'
purposes, assume mars atmosphere to be 125Km high. The spacecraft is travelling at interplanetery velocity,
say 7.5Km per sec. If we decide not to slow down, we will hit the surface in 17 seconds with a *big* bang.
...besides, we already tried it a few years ago. It didn't work. (Except to provide a light show for the Martians.:-)
> "It looks like Microsoft may be trying to do the right thing from a security standpoint"
In other news today, Satan said to be interested in joining US Figure Skating Team.
"Yes, this is a serious bid; we've already started training now!", said the Dark One, executing a perfect double axel over what was once the Ninth Plane of Hell.
> 99.99% of the population is
probably doing something illegal fairly regularly.
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said
Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that
it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know
that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power
and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick,
and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares
so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live
without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens'
What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that
can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and
you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.
Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you
understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
> I'm unaware of how any of these things destroy his credibility - note that the national list is opt-in,
and participation in it is totally voluntary on the part of the consumer.
Against telemarketing, it might work.
Against spam, do a keyword search for "Global Remove List".
It's been tried before - run by the spammers, who used it to find valid email addresses and subject them to more spam.
SafeEPS, by Al Joffee, a DMA guy, but otherwise reputable anti-spammer, who figured out how to do it in a way that was privacy-friendly. But nobody else in the DMA wanted that, because it allowed domain-level opt-out.
The DMA was offered SafeEPS for $1.00, but the DMA decided no, better to do it the DMA's way. Which begat the current One True Remove List for spam, namely e-MPS.
A "global remove list" won't work against spammers for the same reason that government backdoors in crypto won't work against terrorists - because the terrorists won't use backdoored crypto, and the spammers don't give a rat's ass about a government-required opt-out list. (When was the last time you got spammed for anything that wasn't a fraud, con game, quack medicine, or pyramid scheme? That didn't involve "relay rape", or the unauthorized use of third-party open relays? These people are already breaking laws, one more won't stop them.)
Global Remove Lists have been tried since 1997. Every one has been a spec-fucking-tacular failure.
Anyone who believes that a "national opt out" list for spam" is a viable solution in 2001 - has about as much credibility on the issue as Osama Bin Laden would if applying for the Nobel Peace Prize.
> [...] because of a lack of new legislation requiring companies
to post policies that outline their privacy practices, the easiest
way for a company to avoid trouble with its privacy policy is not to
have one in the first place. "Those who are
silent about their privacy practices won't be subject to
enforcement," he said.
There's at least one silver lining here - at least the truth
is out.
After all, since when did any company (especially
those with TRUSTe logos slapped on 'em - a surefire indicator
of a privacy-violator;) ever abide by its published policy
in the first place?
And since when did any company in violation of its
own privacy policy ever get anything more than a "Yeah, they
reworded the policy to make it OK" in response.
Since 1995, it's never made a wet slap of difference whether or not a company had a privacy policy, let alone whether it adhered to it.
> How do they (the government, security agencies, etc) expect to spy on everyone to find terrorists,
etc. While forcing businesses to not even share customer info between their own departments?
Crazy... Just plain crazy!
1) The government hates competition?;-)
2) Actually, this makes sense. The government can now outsource the invasive datacollection to the private sector. And send regular "requests" to data aggregators like Doublefuck to provide them with profiles.
("Hello, this Mr. Smith, from Fowl and Bees, Incorporated. We're in, uh, an industry, and we'd very much like to target a series of, uh, advertisements, to persons whom you believe likely to be daily readers of any of the following middle-eastern news web sites, and who have entered search keywords on certain forms of agricultural equipment. Could you please give us some information, that, when aggregated with information in another marketing company's database, could provide us with their real identities and geographic locations? We'd really appreciate it.")
3)...and in that sense - since private-sector data miners (i.e. privacy invaders) aren't subject to the rules that govern the sorts of information the Government is allowed to collect on its own citizens, odds are that the Government will be able to buy far more data on us than it would ever have been able to collect on its own.
Whether this is a Bug or a Feature depends on how much you trust J. Edgar Hoover, I suppose.
I'm skeptical of the veracity of this mail, but according to fuckedcompany.com, Hilary is alleged to have written:
It is time to get coordinated and aggressive with the new round of peer to peer
services. The amount of music being downloaded is, as you know, reaching
unprecedented levels. Since college started last week Morpheus traffic was up
to 19 million downloads per day. AND THAT'S JUST MORPHEUS. With the imminent
launch of legitimate subscription services we have to get our customers back.
> So now we have a proposed bill on mandatory copy control in hardware, with an intimation that OS's that bypass it will be
illegal. OK, it's unpopular, it will probably be defeated, but we said that about the DMCA as well. And if it fails, there will
be another one next year, and the year after that, until one much like it passes. Then we have to fight it on every point up to
the supremes, and then they can just buy another bill.
As another group of terrorists once said to a civilian government: "You have to be lucky every time. We only have to be lucky once."
> The CIA wants more James Bond, not More Larry Ellison. actually that is too glib.
Actually, I don't think it's too glib at all. It's possibly the most concice statement of the problem I've seen yet.
Repackaged as a soundbite for your consideration:
"The world needs more James Bonds, not more Larry Ellisons."
(Regrettably, nobody outside of Slashdot will understand what that means. But for those of us on slashdot, it's a perfect summation of why we were unable to defend ourselves against the attack of 9/11.)
> From what it seems, there's a bit more to it than this. I would immagine that each version of the cd has a different
watermark on it. They know that it is still gonna be ripped & coppied, they just want to find out which protection scheme is
gonna be broken by the most people. The version with the least number of copies out there will be the format the industry
settles on.
So, when no geek could be bothered to buy and rip the unprotected version in the presence of the (slightly) more challenging alternative of breaking the protection, the music industry concludes that people are more likely to rip/encode copy-protected CDs than unprotected CDs.
The industry, in a blinding flash of sanity, then throws copy control technology into the dustbin of history (where it belongs), and the world goes back to normal.
> > why can't they just create another OPEN standard for digital music for use on PC's and portables? > Because the problem of making un-hackable music formats is so far unsolvable.
And last, but not least, because when it's all in a proprietary format, reverse-engineering of which is illegal under DMCA, and SSSCA becomes law and makes the construction of devices that don't use DMCA-protected propretary technology, they won't care whether it's crackable or not.
If you crack it, you go to jail under DMCA.
If you don't have to crack it because you don't use it, you go to jail under SSSCA.
> The RIAA managed to accept and OPEN standard known as Red Book for production of CD's...why can't they just create another OPEN standard for digital music for use on PC's and portables?
Because they figured that with 650M of data on a CD, that CDs would never by "copyable".
Because when CD-ROM drives came out, hard drives that could hold 650M cost thousands of dollars.
Because when CD-R came out, it cost thousands of dollars, and they figured we'd continue to listen (or dub) music on shiny black boxes with twirly knobs on 'em called "audio equipment", not PCs.
Because when MP3 came out, it took all night to encode a CD-ROM at 128. And most hard drives were only a couple of gigs. And CD-R discs still cost a few bucks apiece, so it was still usually cheaper to buy the album at the store.
Because they never imagined that we'd do anything with MP3s other than burn them to CD-DA. The notion of an MP3 "player" (whether based on CD-R, flash ROM, or hard drive) was just preposterous.
Because when people started trading MP3s, it was over 56K modem links, and it took all night to download an album.
Because SDMI always was, currently is, and will forever be, a WOMBAT - Waste Of Money Brains And Time.
Because they view us as nothing more than sheep for the shearing.
Because open formats like Red Book allowed the sheep to escape the fold.
Because they're damned if they'll ever make that mistake again.
> How many albums you know use the full 78 (wasn't it 74?) minutes?
And hey, isn't the fun of MP3 the fact that you can get the 5-10 minutes worth of music in the 78, 74, or 55 minutes on the CD that's actually worth listening to?;-)
> Anything put out, funded, etc by the NSA or any other agency should be considered suspect until PROVEN otherwise...and before anyone here says "but it's open source"...keep in mind there have been numerous instances of serious bugs, weaknesses, etc found many years after various open source programs were released.
And this is better than binary-only distros (whether from Micros~1 or the FreeBSD and Linux communities) how?
If you're interested in securing a system, anything put out by anyone (yourself included) should be considered suspect until proven otherwise.
NSA's involvement in SELinux is IMHO a red herring.
And I think their track record is pretty good. I remember thinking for years that they weakened DES by h4x0ring the S-boxes and not telling anyone why, when it turns out there were strengthening it against an attack known at the time only to them.
Remember - they have two missions. One, gathering intelligence from the assets other countries. Two, securing of American assets from the intelligence-gathering operations of other countries.
I believe that SELinux is part of the second mission, not the first.
> On a more serious note, if they really are just like us geeks on slashdot, why do they work at the NSA? Are geeks who work at the NSA happy with their jobs?
Disclaimer: I don't work for NSA. I am, however, a geek.
Let's see here. Largest concentration of computing power on the face of the earth. Home of some of the top mathematicians on earth. The chance to work on solving problems that nobody else even knows about (e.g. strengthening DES against differential cryptanalysis many years ago).
The pay probably sucks compared to private sector, and no doubt there's more than even the large amount of red tape that comes with a "normal" dot-gov career, but the fringe benefits - all the computing power you can play with, the chance to work with - or to develop - revolutionary technologies, probably more than makes up for the bad parts.
And all you really have to be able to do (well, apart from play with all the cool toys) is keep your mouth shut when you're not at the office. (And as geeks, most of us are introverted enough that keeping our mouths shut isn't a problem for us:)
For a potential applicant, most of this is known in advance. It's not like you wake up one morning, figure "Hey, I need to make next month's rent, I wonder if NSA is hiring".
So all in all, while it's not a career for everyone, I'd imagine that those who work there manage to find both personal and professional fulfillment there, and as a result, do enjoy their jobs.
> Technology is getting to the point where something generated via CGI cannot be distinguished from real. > While they may have dismissed making Virtual child porn illegal in the past, I shudder to think what could happen if they dismiss it again.
You're probably the first person to see the problem for what it really is.
If the virtual is indistinguishable from the real, then all the lawyer for the defence needs to say "There is no way to distinguish the virtual from the real. There is therefore reasonable doubt about whether my client's.JPGs depict real or virtual events. The defence rests."
It's not about "censoring" the virtual - it's about ensuring that those charged with posession of the real thing cannot use "But I thought it was virtual" as a defence.
> Just get a coalition of other "soccer moms" together, go down to the porn company's headquarters, and start splattering yourselves against the building, like they did in that South Park episode.
Hey, a new type of pr0n! When Soccer Mom Protestors go Wild! (Wonder if the goatse guy would host it;)
> At any rate, [if the Supremes declare DMCA unconstitutional] Congress will think twice before passing such draconian laws again (at least for digital rights issues [...]
Thanks, dude. That was the best laugh I've had all day.
> In 6-8 months when someone patents a meta tag that disables the "View Source" button and disables Copy/Paste, if the PTO doesn't think it's an obvious invention send them a link to this comment.
Fsck that. Patent it yourself.
Then charge Jack Valenti, Hilary Rosen, and the other pigs that run mass media $1,000,000 per use of the tag as a royalty.
If their fucking content is so fucking precious, they oughta beg to pay you for the right to protect it like a masochist begs for the whip. You'll make billions.
And if you get the patent and they don't cough up the dough, sue 'em into the stone age. Obliterate the fscking RIAA and MPAA in a trillion-dollar lawsuit, and the world'll still be a better place.
> "This is the best way to protect America's valuable creative works, which in turn will expand broadband access and Internet use," said Jack Valenti
Lemme get this straight - locking down all consumer hardware, banning the PC, and doing it all to prevent people from getting any use out of P2P networks for file-sharing.
So - in order to "expand broadband access", we not only kill Napster (which was arguably the "killer app" that drove people to demand broadband access at home) - we also now want to kill the PCs on which any application can run.
Well, I suppose if nobody uses broadband for themselves, that leaves more dark fiber available to Hollyweird.
But it smacks a little too much of "we had to destroy the village to save it" for my tastes.
(Of course, we all know this is exactly what Jack wants. To which I say "Fuck you, Jack. Fuck you with a wire brush. You and your partner in oligopoly, Ms. Rosen, are cordially invited to tongue my hot sweaty bag.")
I was half-joking when I suggested scouring the surplus shops for spare PCs to last us through the coming Dark Ages. I'm no longer joking. If your "new PC" budget is $2000, don't buy a $2000 PC. Buy four $500 PCs - with non-CPRM hard drives, flashable-firmware DVD-ROMs, and CD/RWs. Because the hardware you buy over the next 2 years may very well have to last you the rest of your life.
> going to my good
old standby, lyrics.ch (and summarily suffering through the redirection to
songfile),
Then you were never looking at the International Lyrics Server. You were looking at the thing that killed the International Lyrics Server.
Did anybody ever mirror the original ILS before the enemy destroyed it? Does anybody have backup tapes/CD-Rs?
Since the shutdown (and make no mistake, songfile.com was never useful as anything other than a way to find out that yes, Harry Fox owned the words, and wanted you to know they owned the words, and didn't want you to read them - or that they didn't own the words and therefore you couldn't read them) seems that bandwidth has gotten accessible enough that such a thing, if it exists, could be discreetly distributed via one of the many P2P applications, or posted to USENET via an open SOCKS proxy. Diskspace has also gotten cheap enough that individuals could host their own local copies of the pre-Foxsized ILS on their own hard drives.
Not that I'd encourage anyone to do such a thing. But it'd be kinda nice to see if someone were to independently come up with the idea of doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news today, Satan said to be interested in joining US Figure Skating Team. "Yes, this is a serious bid; we've already started training now!", said the Dark One, executing a perfect double axel over what was once the Ninth Plane of Hell.
Against telemarketing, it might work.
Against spam, do a keyword search for "Global Remove List".
It's been tried before - run by the spammers, who used it to find valid email addresses and subject them to more spam.
SafeEPS, by Al Joffee, a DMA guy, but otherwise reputable anti-spammer, who figured out how to do it in a way that was privacy-friendly. But nobody else in the DMA wanted that, because it allowed domain-level opt-out.
The DMA was offered SafeEPS for $1.00, but the DMA decided no, better to do it the DMA's way. Which begat the current One True Remove List for spam, namely e-MPS.
(The full SafeEPS/e-MPS story here)
A "global remove list" won't work against spammers for the same reason that government backdoors in crypto won't work against terrorists - because the terrorists won't use backdoored crypto, and the spammers don't give a rat's ass about a government-required opt-out list. (When was the last time you got spammed for anything that wasn't a fraud, con game, quack medicine, or pyramid scheme? That didn't involve "relay rape", or the unauthorized use of third-party open relays? These people are already breaking laws, one more won't stop them.)
Global Remove Lists have been tried since 1997. Every one has been a spec-fucking-tacular failure.
Anyone who believes that a "national opt out" list for spam" is a viable solution in 2001 - has about as much credibility on the issue as Osama Bin Laden would if applying for the Nobel Peace Prize.
There's at least one silver lining here - at least the truth is out.
After all, since when did any company (especially those with TRUSTe logos slapped on 'em - a surefire indicator of a privacy-violator ;) ever abide by its published policy
in the first place?
And since when did any company in violation of its own privacy policy ever get anything more than a "Yeah, they reworded the policy to make it OK" in response.
Since 1995, it's never made a wet slap of difference whether or not a company had a privacy policy, let alone whether it adhered to it.
So at least now the truth is out.
1) The government hates competition? ;-)
2) Actually, this makes sense. The government can now outsource the invasive datacollection to the private sector. And send regular "requests" to data aggregators like Doublefuck to provide them with profiles.
("Hello, this Mr. Smith, from Fowl and Bees, Incorporated. We're in, uh, an industry, and we'd very much like to target a series of, uh, advertisements, to persons whom you believe likely to be daily readers of any of the following middle-eastern news web sites, and who have entered search keywords on certain forms of agricultural equipment. Could you please give us some information, that, when aggregated with information in another marketing company's database, could provide us with their real identities and geographic locations? We'd really appreciate it.")
3) ...and in that sense - since private-sector data miners (i.e. privacy invaders) aren't subject to the rules that govern the sorts of information the Government is allowed to collect on its own citizens, odds are that the Government will be able to buy far more data on us than it would ever have been able to collect on its own.
Whether this is a Bug or a Feature depends on how much you trust J. Edgar Hoover, I suppose.
No, that's John Ashcroft's job. ;)
>
> Not gonna happen.
Hell, it doesn't even work for the Taliban ;)
I'm skeptical of the veracity of this mail, but according to fuckedcompany.com, Hilary is alleged to have written:
To which I can only respond "what customers?"
As another group of terrorists once said to a civilian government: "You have to be lucky every time. We only have to be lucky once."
Actually, I don't think it's too glib at all. It's possibly the most concice statement of the problem I've seen yet.
Repackaged as a soundbite for your consideration:
"The world needs more James Bonds, not more Larry Ellisons."
(Regrettably, nobody outside of Slashdot will understand what that means. But for those of us on slashdot, it's a perfect summation of why we were unable to defend ourselves against the attack of 9/11.)
So, when no geek could be bothered to buy and rip the unprotected version in the presence of the (slightly) more challenging alternative of breaking the protection, the music industry concludes that people are more likely to rip/encode copy-protected CDs than unprotected CDs.
The industry, in a blinding flash of sanity, then throws copy control technology into the dustbin of history (where it belongs), and the world goes back to normal.
(Hey, I can dream, can't I?)
I'm not sure whether this deserves a (+1, Funny), or (-1, Troll). Probably both.
> Because the problem of making un-hackable music formats is so far unsolvable.
And last, but not least, because when it's all in a proprietary format, reverse-engineering of which is illegal under DMCA, and SSSCA becomes law and makes the construction of devices that don't use DMCA-protected propretary technology, they won't care whether it's crackable or not.
If you crack it, you go to jail under DMCA.
If you don't have to crack it because you don't use it, you go to jail under SSSCA.
"How do you want to be arrested today?"
Because they figured that with 650M of data on a CD, that CDs would never by "copyable".
Because when CD-ROM drives came out, hard drives that could hold 650M cost thousands of dollars.
Because when CD-R came out, it cost thousands of dollars, and they figured we'd continue to listen (or dub) music on shiny black boxes with twirly knobs on 'em called "audio equipment", not PCs.
Because when MP3 came out, it took all night to encode a CD-ROM at 128. And most hard drives were only a couple of gigs. And CD-R discs still cost a few bucks apiece, so it was still usually cheaper to buy the album at the store.
Because they never imagined that we'd do anything with MP3s other than burn them to CD-DA. The notion of an MP3 "player" (whether based on CD-R, flash ROM, or hard drive) was just preposterous.
Because when people started trading MP3s, it was over 56K modem links, and it took all night to download an album.
Because SDMI always was, currently is, and will forever be, a WOMBAT - Waste Of Money Brains And Time.
Because they view us as nothing more than sheep for the shearing.
Because open formats like Red Book allowed the sheep to escape the fold.
Because they're damned if they'll ever make that mistake again.
And hey, isn't the fun of MP3 the fact that you can get the 5-10 minutes worth of music in the 78, 74, or 55 minutes on the CD that's actually worth listening to? ;-)
And this is better than binary-only distros (whether from Micros~1 or the FreeBSD and Linux communities) how?
If you're interested in securing a system, anything put out by anyone (yourself included) should be considered suspect until proven otherwise.
NSA's involvement in SELinux is IMHO a red herring.
And I think their track record is pretty good. I remember thinking for years that they weakened DES by h4x0ring the S-boxes and not telling anyone why, when it turns out there were strengthening it against an attack known at the time only to them.
Remember - they have two missions. One, gathering intelligence from the assets other countries. Two, securing of American assets from the intelligence-gathering operations of other countries.
I believe that SELinux is part of the second mission, not the first.
Disclaimer: I don't work for NSA. I am, however, a geek.
Let's see here. Largest concentration of computing power on the face of the earth. Home of some of the top mathematicians on earth. The chance to work on solving problems that nobody else even knows about (e.g. strengthening DES against differential cryptanalysis many years ago).
The pay probably sucks compared to private sector, and no doubt there's more than even the large amount of red tape that comes with a "normal" dot-gov career, but the fringe benefits - all the computing power you can play with, the chance to work with - or to develop - revolutionary technologies, probably more than makes up for the bad parts.
And all you really have to be able to do (well, apart from play with all the cool toys) is keep your mouth shut when you're not at the office. (And as geeks, most of us are introverted enough that keeping our mouths shut isn't a problem for us :)
For a potential applicant, most of this is known in advance. It's not like you wake up one morning, figure "Hey, I need to make next month's rent, I wonder if NSA is hiring".
So all in all, while it's not a career for everyone, I'd imagine that those who work there manage to find both personal and professional fulfillment there, and as a result, do enjoy their jobs.
> While they may have dismissed making Virtual child porn illegal in the past, I shudder to think what could happen if they dismiss it again.
You're probably the first person to see the problem for what it really is.
If the virtual is indistinguishable from the real, then all the lawyer for the defence needs to say "There is no way to distinguish the virtual from the real. There is therefore reasonable doubt about whether my client's .JPGs depict real or virtual events. The defence rests."
It's not about "censoring" the virtual - it's about ensuring that those charged with posession of the real thing cannot use "But I thought it was virtual" as a defence.
Hey, a new type of pr0n! When Soccer Mom Protestors go Wild! (Wonder if the goatse guy would host it ;)
No, it's because the soccer moms got boned in the first place that we have this problem.
If nobody had kids, there'd be (a) no child abuse, and (b) no soccer moms. Win/win.
Thanks, dude. That was the best laugh I've had all day.
Fsck that. Patent it yourself.
Then charge Jack Valenti, Hilary Rosen, and the other pigs that run mass media $1,000,000 per use of the tag as a royalty.
If their fucking content is so fucking precious, they oughta beg to pay you for the right to protect it like a masochist begs for the whip. You'll make billions.
And if you get the patent and they don't cough up the dough, sue 'em into the stone age. Obliterate the fscking RIAA and MPAA in a trillion-dollar lawsuit, and the world'll still be a better place.
Lemme get this straight - locking down all consumer hardware, banning the PC, and doing it all to prevent people from getting any use out of P2P networks for file-sharing.
So - in order to "expand broadband access", we not only kill Napster (which was arguably the "killer app" that drove people to demand broadband access at home) - we also now want to kill the PCs on which any application can run.
Well, I suppose if nobody uses broadband for themselves, that leaves more dark fiber available to Hollyweird.
But it smacks a little too much of "we had to destroy the village to save it" for my tastes.
(Of course, we all know this is exactly what Jack wants. To which I say "Fuck you, Jack. Fuck you with a wire brush. You and your partner in oligopoly, Ms. Rosen, are cordially invited to tongue my hot sweaty bag.")
I was half-joking when I suggested scouring the surplus shops for spare PCs to last us through the coming Dark Ages. I'm no longer joking. If your "new PC" budget is $2000, don't buy a $2000 PC. Buy four $500 PCs - with non-CPRM hard drives, flashable-firmware DVD-ROMs, and CD/RWs. Because the hardware you buy over the next 2 years may very well have to last you the rest of your life.
Fuck you, Jack.
Then you were never looking at the International Lyrics Server. You were looking at the thing that killed the International Lyrics Server.
Did anybody ever mirror the original ILS before the enemy destroyed it? Does anybody have backup tapes/CD-Rs?
Since the shutdown (and make no mistake, songfile.com was never useful as anything other than a way to find out that yes, Harry Fox owned the words, and wanted you to know they owned the words, and didn't want you to read them - or that they didn't own the words and therefore you couldn't read them) seems that bandwidth has gotten accessible enough that such a thing, if it exists, could be discreetly distributed via one of the many P2P applications, or posted to USENET via an open SOCKS proxy. Diskspace has also gotten cheap enough that individuals could host their own local copies of the pre-Foxsized ILS on their own hard drives.
Not that I'd encourage anyone to do such a thing. But it'd be kinda nice to see if someone were to independently come up with the idea of doing it.