You want a real free election? It was held in Nicarauga. They had 6 parties, all on the ballots, they all got equal TV/radio/paper time to present their case...and even with US bombing of the country they elected the Sandinistas by an 87% majority.:)...Of course, 6 more years of US bombing and they changed their minds about who to vote for.
What they realized: If they opened up the elections to money, huge outside influences would fund campaigns...(Foreign powers) So they eliminated money from the process. They passed a law saying the people owned the airwaves - everyone got TV & Radio time. *(sound familiar)? They passed a law saying newspapers had to give a certain amount of advertising to political candidates.. In many respects, the elections in Nicarauga were the freest in history anywhere, and certaintly the freest in Latin America.
The truth is: Republicans, Democrats, and corporations (the 4th unelected branch of the government) are afraid of real democracy.
Re:any surprise? Remember "Smart Download"
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Netscape 6 is Spyware?
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· Score: 2, Informative
That sent them a list of any files you were downloading?... It shouldn't surprise anyone that Alexa is involved in this. Alexa was the same company that put out a combo web browser buddy + stock market valuator. (At the risk of a lawsuit) This gave them the ability to not only track where users surfed to, but also monitor those who used the features stock portfolios to see which way the sheep were herding. (If you can't see how information like this can be used for fun and profit you just aren't dark enough yet). They even got the nice people at CNET to plug it for them.
On another note: You can block some of this activity out by going to the host(s) file and making your own entry.
127.0.0.1 alexa.com or 0.0.0.0 flashpoint.com ...Just insert your target there and it will bounce back to local host. If you run a webserver you may want to put something else in that box. I'm not sure how to do it for products that field their query by IP and not names. Maybe you have to run your own DNS/NAT to get prevent those from getting access?
This also isn't the only way companies spy on you. Akamai/Lycos have a clever way of doing it with both referrer headers http://lycos.com/url?=realurl. Plus they own such a large portion of the network that they can get their cookies to work on any part of it. Go to say: http://www.wired.com and watch how many connections it makes to your computer, and watch the url handling in the right hand corner... All this reminds me of the @ and %40 tricks that were used by porno spammers in IRC in the olden days.:)
Cept if you use Microsoft Internet Access your total usenet experience is pretty much limited to Microsoft support groups with little else available... At least on their server anyway.
Better to find the last ISP that doesn't suck and get it that way, or end up spending $10-20 a month for it in addition to what you pay for the ISP.
St Louis city practically gives away land, tax breaks, and everything else to tech companies. Of course, everyone here wants to locate their business in the county where most of the people live and that negates a lot of the savings if you do. Of course, St Louis county doesn't give you "free" land. heh.
The first rule of thumb with Opera for Windows is have it identify itself as MSIE XX.XX. That solves a ton of problems right there, most of them on the other end of the equasion. I'll grant you that it has some problems with Java and Javascript, the best solution is disable them - it's more secure, no popups and other garbage... Turn 'em on if you need 'em as you need them. (6.0 has a quick bar for doing this, very convienant) I find problems very rarely...but I do have to load IE to deal with a page on occasion (and usually completely change my security settings to boot).
Opera for Linux has been my #1 choice if I have to surf on the Linux box. Konquerer is my second. I've always found Mozilla and Netscape and Galeon to be flaky. (Galeon tends to run up the system resources as well, until you manually kill off the process.) I'm not saying Opera is an end all, it's still got a lot of problems in the Linux version. Can't get XXX plug in to view this or that because it's windows only... No way around that. Sometimes it will massacre a page for whatever reason. I've found it to occasionally crash as well, just not as often as the other browsers. I honestly prefer to surf in Windows 2000, as I run into less hassles. Not a flame, just the truth. The situation has improved slightly, but it's still got a long way to go.
Telco's screwing over smaller ISP's who provide decent DSL service. Lack of decent DSL service in small communities....and of course, PPPoE... That and regulators in the pockets of large telcos with most of their telco's employees defacto and real running the shop.
Cable companies: blocking ports, restricting what you can do with your cable model line...Can't host content? Why bother? Can't put up a web site without losing my account? Why both.
SSSCA is on the table. If you don't want it, write your legislators now. Better yet, fax them as a letter wont reach them in time. It wont stop the ones deep deep in the payroll from voting on it, but the ones that aren't as deep, it will make them think twice about how they vote as election time is coming around.
...and sue the most guilty party of all! The programmer who came up with the assembly code to copy files in the first place. Yep, the ol' COPY command. I guess the hard drive makers could be sued for contributory infringement since it was forseeable that hard drives and magnet media would lead to the illegal copying of works. I mean, come on, they are selling a Maxtor 100GB drive...:)
Want to bet that problems like modem drivers get solved really quickly when AOL starts marketing it's service on the Linux platform?...Does no good to have a dialup service if users can't dial in, eh?
I forsee AOL coming to the Linux desktop. They already released a version of AIM for Linux. I don't see it as a bad thing -- IF -- we can keep the spam, the tracking, the excessive marketing, and commercialization out of the end product.
Given AOL's track record in this arena, and that they are a "content creator" with a keen interest in DRM...I'm not inclined to believe they will suddenly change. If they understand the Linux community at all, they will know these are some of the reasons so many of us disdain the M$ experience. I think AOL is smart enough to know this, if not, the level of outrage over "SIGN UP WITH AOL" Icons suddenly appearing on desktop will just drive users to other distros.
So I feel mixed. Perhaps they will just buy it to have an edge in making embedded appliances...which get AOL mail..etc?
I wouldn't worry too much about that happening. One only needs use a trial of their internet service to see how ingrained in their philosophy security isn't. This is the same service which forces you to download scripts marked "not safe for scripting", cookies, for parts of their service information across domains,....and on and on...
This is the same company that took 5 years to fix a backdoor in their browser where the contents of your hard drive could be viewed (with..or...without...file sharing being enabled), only to break it again with the next patch they released.
The examples go on and on.
I'll tell you what I believe: Some of these errors are unintentional. A great many others are intentional, and put it at the request of the people in charge, and their marketing partners.
"Considering the absolutley abysimal record of the polygraph in controlled testing (references are extensive) this is just something else we don't need. Relying on an "automatic" system is just asking for more "false faith" in a security system that doesn't work."
According to several polygraph administrators, the value of the test once someone is in captivity (IE: detained, under arrest, already incarcerated) is next to nil. The reason being the stress level of the individual is too high to make the measurements meaningful.
If you know the IP of someone running Kazaa, or Morpheus for that matter, you can connect to them without using the service by http://ipaddress:1214 and it will give you a list of what they are sharing all nicely presented for you.
Lets see..They send out thousands of press releases, and all of their "research" seems to revolve around an MPAA/RIAA position. Umm, can you say "Industry Front Group"?
See, it's like this: Legit groups generally don't have the resources to hire huge public relations companies to do massive campaigns for them to get their stories in publications (hits). Those with large amounts of corporate backing (IE: cash) do.
"Sending 35,000 messages of a potentially libellous nature is not the same as putting up a personal opinion on a website. " ----
Yes, but people get sued for that too. The first tactic is to sue for trademark infringement..Oh I'm sorry, your reference to how bad your Compaq sucks didn't say Compaq(TM) sucks. The second is the resulting harassment letter to your ISP threatening to sue them for allowing this trademark infringement to continue. Then, if you registered a domain name, the next is action to remove your totally non confusing domain name...because it infringes on their trademark. Failing that, they then come back and threaten lawsuits based on libel, slander...etc They may even make the joke of threatening your ISP with it (of course, legally no ISP is in any way responsible for your speech..however, someone might be stupid enough to fall for it).
The fact that this person used email in the manner she did is unique to this case. Corporations threatening and/or suing critics to silence them online(and offline) is simply standard operating proceedure for many of them.
"'d find it more surprising that hackers weren't already at work trying to hack.NET. Imagine the free pickings some criminally-inclined hacker could have... all the credit card numbers, personal info, etc they ever desired about people who are on average probably pretty clueless (otherwise, they wouldn't be using.NET most likely)"
You can already do all of that, and don't even hack to hack.. It's called Lexis Nexis, and it has 2.5 billion people in it so far.. (Along with such wonderful information as the last time you ordered a pizza...and who you ordered it from...and maybe even what you had on it!) Hacking.net is pointless in comparison to compromising a fully active Nexus account as far as what data can be obtained.
"The chief reason the Taliban fell so fast was because they didn't have an airforce or any sophisticated weapons. Let's see how this analysis holds up with North Korea, eh?"
The North Koreans were resoundingly defeated over and over again up until two things happened: The Russians got involved (with Chinese markings painted on the jets) in the air campaign, and the Chinese started sending massive numbers of troops over the border.
While the air campaign on our part was still in large part successful even with this intervention, the restrictions it placed...as well as the introduction of several hundred thousand fresh Chinese soldgiers proved too much for us to handle.
Just the facts.
What most people miss in the war is good for ....
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The Drone War
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· Score: 1
What most people miss in the war is good for business anology is:
The majority of profit from wars is not in the building, selling, and distributing of arms to blow stuff up. It's in the rebuilding of what you blow up with them.
When you can drop a $213,000 bomb on a $313,000,000 dam, which do you think there is more profit in? Making bombs or making dams?
Another misconception people have: That in order for this connection to work a US company must go in and do the actual rebuilding. Nada. US companies and persons can profit from this both in being material suppliers (concrete, steel, building materials, engineers, transporters, and most importantly - wall street financers of (increasingly) foreign companies that do this kind of work. In addition to this, war also tends to open up tremendous public funds for rebuilding projects.
IMHO, these operations in many parts of the world are as simple as extracting cash/investment out of a country by covert means. Examples of this abound in our involvement in South America. Don't believe me. Follow the money. Look into it yourself. Watch in Columbia as years of invested drug money will be quietly extracted by US supplied arms, and enhanced by CIA operatives on the ground. (See "School For The Americas", and other searches on CIA operations). It's actually preferred to keep US soldgiers off of the ground. If they can get Columbians to kill other Columbians, it's easier to deal with at the polls and in the media.
One last comment: It's not always necessary to use bombs to extract/consolidate wealth in a country. You can also use the IMF as a tool for this. Call in all the IMF loans at once, destroy the economy, big & institutional investors buy up the assets of a country for pennies on the dollar. (See Agentina & the IMF).
The only variant I see on this story is, it gives the government a couple new tools to accomplish it's aims. (Mind you, these are not "new" ideas.) For as long as we have had guided missiles (there are some real interesting reads on the history of guilded missiles, including using pidgeons trained to direct them to their target..No kidding! Yep..back before computers!) Guilded missiles, and other devices of a remote nature have existed for some time. The only thing which has changed is the level of control we have over them.
Cable Companies are also in many cases "content creators"...(Well, distributors is more accurate). When you have a situation like AOL/Time Warner who in addition to owning online services also owns several hundred record and video companies - you see an obvious conflict of interest.
There is another conflict of interest that is not so obvious. That is that major media, and many major corporations also want to keep control over the total content that is available online. IE: Censorship of views contrary to their position. There is a great deal of port blocking, companies (DSL/Cable providers) from having static IP's - all in the hopes of preventing them from being able to host content. ISP's look at it as reducing utilization. Corporates look at it as keeping out public participation.
To the degree with which the news media is censored and self censored (fear of lawsuits, food disparagement laws ) is in the view of corporates a positive thing. Keeps information out of the public debate, out of public participation. They don't want to have to track down 1000 web site owners with their servers all over the world, and potentially in jurisdictions not covered by disparagement laws. Media companies also have an interest in keeping out competition, and the maintainance of the status quo is good for keeping advertising revenues(their real source of income) at a constant. They don't want societal upheaval, nor do they want anybody potentially tapping in to their revenue streams by siphoning away viewers (or even potentially advertising revenues).
The US is, afterall, the corporate megacenter of the world. If you seriously don't believe big business interest don't get higher billing than John Q Public... The last president to attempt to reign in corporate power in the US was Wilson.
What I expect to see: Further consolidation in the broadband market, restrictive controls placed on it where content providers are in charge of it, and an economic domino effect of pushing out smaller providers who don't follow the restrictions, provided by active disruption of their services where ISP's compete directly with major telco's but are still dependant on the major telco for any part of the process. This has been the trend. Don't expect government regulators to do anything but turn a blind eye to it either.
Re:Long-term versus Short-term incentives
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Making It Personal
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· Score: 1
I have to disagree with the idea of "information for a one time buck". To truly grasp the amount of information collected, and for those companies that do that sort of thing...One need only take a trip over to LexisNexis. Already other groups are using covert and semicovert tactics to compile list of information based on everything from when you order pizza to your political & lobbying preferences. A good deal of this information finds it's way into the LexisNexis data base. Not All, mind you. Some of this information is sold directly to companies who would gleam a benefet out of it. (Such as one company that provides those "Write your legislator from out site" systems). They grep datamine the information passing through it, and can give companies who pay the fee a list of all their enemies/friends who have used the system, along with their full email address, real name, real address, phone number... In at least one case I know about, the company is selling the actually email contents themselfs *(that pass through their system) to any corporation willing to pay the entry fee.
Your best bet is still to NEVER give out your real name, real contact information on the net unless you absolutely have to (ordering something online). Be extremely wary of any service(s) on the net where their business model is not completely out in the open, and always remember, what they might not be willing to do today, they might tomorrow. Also remember, the companies doing the sleaziest bits will be very guarded with what information they do reveal. You wont find out their business practices without covert action on your part.
The solution is to make corporations Charter
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Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 1
The solution is to make corporations charter of a limited nature, specifically defined, and revokable by the people wherein the corporation resides.
This is not a new idea, though it was only partially implimented. Parts of this were the law of the land before corporations won 14th ammendment protection. What's needed now is a constitutional ammendment specifically denying that corporations are to be treated as people, specifically denying them 14th ammendment protections by virtue of their being entitled to certain financial protections invidials are not....And the sad thing is...With the corruption in governemnt, our judicial system, and with corporations funding the campaigns, this ain't going happen by any means short of outright revolution on the part of the American people...and those affected by transnationals in other parts of the world. (Regardless of what you think of Ralph Nader, many of the reforms he proposes are sorely needed.)
Of note, I live in the same city as the evil corporation in question. While working for an IV Pharmacy (which does homecare) I had more than occasion to visit families living next to their Sauget Illinois plant. Sauget is a town with a population of less than 400 people. I had *9* patients on one block. Most of them cancer & lukemia. In addition to which, about half of the patients and, more importantly, their families also living there, suffered from respitory problems. We serviced towns 100 times that size that didn't have 9 patients in the entire zip code! While this is annedotal evidence, it's hard for it not to affect you when you are dealing with sick children dying from a disease that was most likely the cause of their very bad neighbor. It makes me very angry. Very angry.
>>>>>
Many bands have entered into "distribution" agreements. You can forget anything else. This isn't about if you have a free mp3 or not, it's about control over distribution. I don't like it, and it's contrary to the interest of artist not currently in the top 70 (it may even be contrary to the interest of those within the top 70 bands if you understand their creative accounting practices).
The major labels do not want anything which challenges their near monopoly on distribution. This monopoly includes- playola (paying for songs to be paid on radio stations, videos to be played on MTV/VH1), control over concert venues, distribution control at major outlets.
Peer to peer brought with it a distribution method which was beyond their control. The reason CD sales went up during this period was people were exposed to a variety of music they could not get before. This helped bands on smaller labels achieve wider success, more CD sales, and higher concert gross [Where most bands really make their money]. (Clear Channel as a case in point owns over 700 radio stations, and controls through it's partners over 70% of the concert venues over 500 seats in the USA)Think of Napster as more of a publicly controlled radio station with distribution capabilities.
This is also why they went after Net radio stations so heavily.
Too many enemies with tons of money.
In radio there are two main things which determine who will win in a contest of signals, they are: Line of sight, and wattage. If the person attempting to stomp on your signal has equal line of site, and superior wattage, yes, he will stomp all over your signal. You might be protected from regions of the world which don't have line of sight to your sattelite, but anyone else...
The only good news I have for you is, it's not terribly difficult to triangulate and track down a radio signal if the event were to happen for a sustained period. The problem would be, he could be anywhere that has line of sight. If it ever happens, definitely call the FCC and get manpower, you'll need it.
have been known to be risky for a long time. It is my hope that some of these ideas will be incorporated within the next kernel, or show up as modules. For your front line servers running apache, ftp, sendmail, and maybe generating content on the fly via a database - this would make sense to isolate those issues there.
It would also seem quite reasonable to run those services known to have high risk on a virtual machine, reducing the compromise to just that layer (hopefully). Anyone had a great deal of experience with that route?
I didn't start using Linux because my other OS was too secure....
Which debutes in around 82-83, running on a system called the Rolla Link (in Exile) on a TRS-80 Model III. There is still an MTABBS up and running on a TRS-80 Model IV (started in 1983) called The Junk Drawer (314)434-4034. Probably the oldest continually running BBS in the 314 (St Louis) are.
Amazingly enough, cept for replacing the power supply, the unit is entirely origonal. Back then they built 'em to last.:)
My experience with the major telco.
I'm in Missouri, and decided two years ago I wanted DSL. So I called around and found a company that was small, local, friendly, and didn't answer the question "Do you support Linux?" with a no. I paid my $150 for them to do what they had to to get it turned on. Around 3 weeks later they finished the site survey, got the line laid, and had a tech drop off the DSL modem and *nic. I had everything wired to go. I then spent the next 4 months waiting for SWB to throw a switch. During the entire period I recieved around 6 (paper, sometimes including CD) DSL advertisements from SWB and two phone calls asking me to use their DSL service.
I would concur. Suse tends to have better out of the box no fuss no muss hardware support than other distros I have tried. When I installed Suse 7.1 everything got configured properly at the point of install. No printer problem, no nonsupported sound card problem... Suse makes it easier. Doing the same thing in Mandrake (the first Linux I installed) took me several hours of searching to find a driver that only sort of worked properly for my HP. I would of loved to of had a product to cut down that time for me so I could get right to work.
Slashdot Mirror
You want a real free election? It was held in Nicarauga. They had 6 parties, all on the ballots, they all got equal TV/radio/paper time to present their case...and even with US bombing of the country they elected the Sandinistas by an 87% majority. :) ...Of course, 6 more years of US bombing and they changed their minds about who to vote for.
What they realized: If they opened up the elections to money, huge outside influences would fund campaigns...(Foreign powers) So they eliminated money from the process. They passed a law saying the people owned the airwaves - everyone got TV & Radio time. *(sound familiar)? They passed a law saying newspapers had to give a certain amount of advertising to political candidates.. In many respects, the elections in Nicarauga were the freest in history anywhere, and certaintly the freest in Latin America.
The truth is: Republicans, Democrats, and corporations (the 4th unelected branch of the government) are afraid of real democracy.
That sent them a list of any files you were downloading? ... It shouldn't surprise anyone that Alexa is involved in this. Alexa was the same company that put out a combo web browser buddy + stock market valuator. (At the risk of a lawsuit) This gave them the ability to not only track where users surfed to, but also monitor those who used the features stock portfolios to see which way the sheep were herding. (If you can't see how information like this can be used for fun and profit you just aren't dark enough yet). They even got the nice people at CNET to plug it for them.
:)
On another note: You can block some of this activity out by going to the host(s) file and making your own entry.
127.0.0.1 alexa.com
or
0.0.0.0 flashpoint.com
...Just insert your target there and it will bounce back to local host. If you run a webserver you may want to put something else in that box. I'm not sure how to do it for products that field their query by IP and not names. Maybe you have to run your own DNS/NAT to get prevent those from getting access?
This also isn't the only way companies spy on you. Akamai/Lycos have a clever way of doing it with both referrer headers http://lycos.com/url?=realurl. Plus they own such a large portion of the network that they can get their cookies to work on any part of it. Go to say: http://www.wired.com and watch how many connections it makes to your computer, and watch the url handling in the right hand corner...
All this reminds me of the @ and %40 tricks that were used by porno spammers in IRC in the olden days.
Cept if you use Microsoft Internet Access your total usenet experience is pretty much limited to Microsoft support groups with little else available... At least on their server anyway.
Better to find the last ISP that doesn't suck and get it that way, or end up spending $10-20 a month for it in addition to what you pay for the ISP.
St Louis city practically gives away land, tax breaks, and everything else to tech companies. Of course, everyone here wants to locate their business in the county where most of the people live and that negates a lot of the savings if you do. Of course, St Louis county doesn't give you "free" land. heh.
The first rule of thumb with Opera for Windows is have it identify itself as MSIE XX.XX. That solves a ton of problems right there, most of them on the other end of the equasion. I'll grant you that it has some problems with Java and Javascript, the best solution is disable them - it's more secure, no popups and other garbage... Turn 'em on if you need 'em as you need them. (6.0 has a quick bar for doing this, very convienant) I find problems very rarely ...but I do have to load IE to deal with a page on occasion (and usually completely change my security settings to boot).
Opera for Linux has been my #1 choice if I have to surf on the Linux box. Konquerer is my second. I've always found Mozilla and Netscape and Galeon to be flaky. (Galeon tends to run up the system resources as well, until you manually kill off the process.) I'm not saying Opera is an end all, it's still got a lot of problems in the Linux version. Can't get XXX plug in to view this or that because it's windows only... No way around that. Sometimes it will massacre a page for whatever reason. I've found it to occasionally crash as well, just not as often as the other browsers. I honestly prefer to surf in Windows 2000, as I run into less hassles. Not a flame, just the truth. The situation has improved slightly, but it's still got a long way to go.
The main things holding broadband back:
...and of course, PPPoE ... That and regulators in the pockets of large telcos with most of their telco's employees defacto and real running the shop.
...Can't host content? Why bother? Can't put up a web site without losing my account? Why both.
Telco's screwing over smaller ISP's who provide decent DSL service. Lack of decent DSL service in small communities.
Cable companies: blocking ports, restricting what you can do with your cable model line
SSSCA is on the table. If you don't want it, write your legislators now. Better yet, fax them as a letter wont reach them in time. It wont stop the ones deep deep in the payroll from voting on it, but the ones that aren't as deep, it will make them think twice about how they vote as election time is coming around.
...and sue the most guilty party of all! The programmer who came up with the assembly code to copy files in the first place. Yep, the ol' COPY command. I guess the hard drive makers could be sued for contributory infringement since it was forseeable that hard drives and magnet media would lead to the illegal copying of works. I mean, come on, they are selling a Maxtor 100GB drive... :)
Good, even if it is AOL.
...Does no good to have a dialup service if users can't dial in, eh?
...I'm not inclined to believe they will suddenly change. If they understand the Linux community at all, they will know these are some of the reasons so many of us disdain the M$ experience. I think AOL is smart enough to know this, if not, the level of outrage over "SIGN UP WITH AOL" Icons suddenly appearing on desktop will just drive users to other distros.
...which get AOL mail..etc?
Want to bet that problems like modem drivers get solved really quickly when AOL starts marketing it's service on the Linux platform?
I forsee AOL coming to the Linux desktop. They already released a version of AIM for Linux. I don't see it as a bad thing -- IF -- we can keep the spam, the tracking, the excessive marketing, and commercialization out of the end product.
Given AOL's track record in this arena, and that they are a "content creator" with a keen interest in DRM
So I feel mixed. Perhaps they will just buy it to have an edge in making embedded appliances
I wouldn't worry too much about that happening. One only needs use a trial of their internet service to see how ingrained in their philosophy security isn't. This is the same service which forces you to download scripts marked "not safe for scripting", cookies, for parts of their service information across domains, ....and on and on...
..or...without...file sharing being enabled), only to break it again with the next patch they released.
This is the same company that took 5 years to fix a backdoor in their browser where the contents of your hard drive could be viewed (with
The examples go on and on.
I'll tell you what I believe: Some of these errors are unintentional. A great many others are intentional, and put it at the request of the people in charge, and their marketing partners.
"Considering the absolutley abysimal record of the polygraph in controlled testing (references are extensive) this is just something else we don't need. Relying on an "automatic" system is just asking for more "false faith" in a security system that doesn't work."
According to several polygraph administrators, the value of the test once someone is in captivity (IE: detained, under arrest, already incarcerated) is next to nil. The reason being the stress level of the individual is too high to make the measurements meaningful.
If you know the IP of someone running Kazaa, or Morpheus for that matter, you can connect to them without using the service by http://ipaddress:1214 and it will give you a list of what they are sharing all nicely presented for you.
Lets see..They send out thousands of press releases, and all of their "research" seems to revolve around an MPAA/RIAA position. Umm, can you say "Industry Front Group"?
See, it's like this: Legit groups generally don't have the resources to hire huge public relations companies to do massive campaigns for them to get their stories in publications (hits). Those with large amounts of corporate backing (IE: cash) do.
Have a nice day,
Salt
"Sending 35,000 messages of a potentially libellous nature is not the same as putting up a personal opinion on a website. " ----
..Oh I'm sorry, your reference to how bad your Compaq sucks didn't say Compaq(TM) sucks. The second is the resulting harassment letter to your ISP threatening to sue them for allowing this trademark infringement to continue. Then, if you registered a domain name, the next is action to remove your totally non confusing domain name ...because it infringes on their trademark. Failing that, they then come back and threaten lawsuits based on libel, slander...etc They may even make the joke of threatening your ISP with it (of course, legally no ISP is in any way responsible for your speech..however, someone might be stupid enough to fall for it).
Yes, but people get sued for that too. The first tactic is to sue for trademark infringement
The fact that this person used email in the manner she did is unique to this case. Corporations threatening and/or suing critics to silence them online(and offline) is simply standard operating proceedure for many of them.
"'d find it more surprising that hackers weren't already at work trying to hack .NET. Imagine the free pickings some criminally-inclined hacker could have... all the credit card numbers, personal info, etc they ever desired about people who are on average probably pretty clueless (otherwise, they wouldn't be using .NET most likely)"
...and who you ordered it from...and maybe even what you had on it!) Hacking .net is pointless in comparison to compromising a fully active Nexus account as far as what data can be obtained.
You can already do all of that, and don't even hack to hack.. It's called Lexis Nexis, and it has 2.5 billion people in it so far.. (Along with such wonderful information as the last time you ordered a pizza
"The chief reason the Taliban fell so fast was because they didn't have an airforce or any sophisticated weapons. Let's see how this analysis holds up with North Korea, eh?"
The North Koreans were resoundingly defeated over and over again up until two things happened: The Russians got involved (with Chinese markings painted on the jets) in the air campaign, and the Chinese started sending massive numbers of troops over the border.
While the air campaign on our part was still in large part successful even with this intervention, the restrictions it placed...as well as the introduction of several hundred thousand fresh Chinese soldgiers proved too much for us to handle.
Just the facts.
What most people miss in the war is good for business anology is:
The majority of profit from wars is not in the building, selling, and distributing of arms to blow stuff up. It's in the rebuilding of what you blow up with them.
When you can drop a $213,000 bomb on a $313,000,000 dam, which do you think there is more profit in? Making bombs or making dams?
Another misconception people have: That in order for this connection to work a US company must go in and do the actual rebuilding. Nada. US companies and persons can profit from this both in being material suppliers (concrete, steel, building materials, engineers, transporters, and most importantly - wall street financers of (increasingly) foreign companies that do this kind of work. In addition to this, war also tends to open up tremendous public funds for rebuilding projects.
IMHO, these operations in many parts of the world are as simple as extracting cash/investment out of a country by covert means. Examples of this abound in our involvement in South America. Don't believe me. Follow the money. Look into it yourself. Watch in Columbia as years of invested drug money will be quietly extracted by US supplied arms, and enhanced by CIA operatives on the ground. (See "School For The Americas", and other searches on CIA operations). It's actually preferred to keep US soldgiers off of the ground. If they can get Columbians to kill other Columbians, it's easier to deal with at the polls and in the media.
One last comment: It's not always necessary to use bombs to extract/consolidate wealth in a country. You can also use the IMF as a tool for this. Call in all the IMF loans at once, destroy the economy, big & institutional investors buy up the assets of a country for pennies on the dollar. (See Agentina & the IMF).
The only variant I see on this story is, it gives the government a couple new tools to accomplish it's aims. (Mind you, these are not "new" ideas.) For as long as we have had guided missiles (there are some real interesting reads on the history of guilded missiles, including using pidgeons trained to direct them to their target..No kidding! Yep..back before computers!) Guilded missiles, and other devices of a remote nature have existed for some time. The only thing which has changed is the level of control we have over them.
Cable Companies are also in many cases "content creators"...(Well, distributors is more accurate). When you have a situation like AOL/Time Warner who in addition to owning online services also owns several hundred record and video companies - you see an obvious conflict of interest.
There is another conflict of interest that is not so obvious. That is that major media, and many major corporations also want to keep control over the total content that is available online. IE: Censorship of views contrary to their position. There is a great deal of port blocking, companies (DSL/Cable providers) from having static IP's - all in the hopes of preventing them from being able to host content. ISP's look at it as reducing utilization. Corporates look at it as keeping out public participation.
To the degree with which the news media is censored and self censored (fear of lawsuits, food disparagement laws ) is in the view of corporates a positive thing. Keeps information out of the public debate, out of public participation. They don't want to have to track down 1000 web site owners with their servers all over the world, and potentially in jurisdictions not covered by disparagement laws. Media companies also have an interest in keeping out competition, and the maintainance of the status quo is good for keeping advertising revenues(their real source of income) at a constant. They don't want societal upheaval, nor do they want anybody potentially tapping in to their revenue streams by siphoning away viewers (or even potentially advertising revenues).
The US is, afterall, the corporate megacenter of the world. If you seriously don't believe big business interest don't get higher billing than John Q Public... The last president to attempt to reign in corporate power in the US was Wilson.
What I expect to see: Further consolidation in the broadband market, restrictive controls placed on it where content providers are in charge of it, and an economic domino effect of pushing out smaller providers who don't follow the restrictions, provided by active disruption of their services where ISP's compete directly with major telco's but are still dependant on the major telco for any part of the process. This has been the trend. Don't expect government regulators to do anything but turn a blind eye to it either.
I have to disagree with the idea of "information for a one time buck". To truly grasp the amount of information collected, and for those companies that do that sort of thing...One need only take a trip over to LexisNexis. Already other groups are using covert and semicovert tactics to compile list of information based on everything from when you order pizza to your political & lobbying preferences. A good deal of this information finds it's way into the LexisNexis data base. Not All, mind you. Some of this information is sold directly to companies who would gleam a benefet out of it. (Such as one company that provides those "Write your legislator from out site" systems). They grep datamine the information passing through it, and can give companies who pay the fee a list of all their enemies/friends who have used the system, along with their full email address, real name, real address, phone number... In at least one case I know about, the company is selling the actually email contents themselfs *(that pass through their system) to any corporation willing to pay the entry fee.
Your best bet is still to NEVER give out your real name, real contact information on the net unless you absolutely have to (ordering something online). Be extremely wary of any service(s) on the net where their business model is not completely out in the open, and always remember, what they might not be willing to do today, they might tomorrow. Also remember, the companies doing the sleaziest bits will be very guarded with what information they do reveal. You wont find out their business practices without covert action on your part.
The solution is to make corporations charter of a limited nature, specifically defined, and revokable by the people wherein the corporation resides. This is not a new idea, though it was only partially implimented. Parts of this were the law of the land before corporations won 14th ammendment protection. What's needed now is a constitutional ammendment specifically denying that corporations are to be treated as people, specifically denying them 14th ammendment protections by virtue of their being entitled to certain financial protections invidials are not. ...And the sad thing is...With the corruption in governemnt, our judicial system, and with corporations funding the campaigns, this ain't going happen by any means short of outright revolution on the part of the American people...and those affected by transnationals in other parts of the world. (Regardless of what you think of Ralph Nader, many of the reforms he proposes are sorely needed.)
Of note, I live in the same city as the evil corporation in question. While working for an IV Pharmacy (which does homecare) I had more than occasion to visit families living next to their Sauget Illinois plant. Sauget is a town with a population of less than 400 people. I had *9* patients on one block. Most of them cancer & lukemia. In addition to which, about half of the patients and, more importantly, their families also living there, suffered from respitory problems. We serviced towns 100 times that size that didn't have 9 patients in the entire zip code! While this is annedotal evidence, it's hard for it not to affect you when you are dealing with sick children dying from a disease that was most likely the cause of their very bad neighbor. It makes me very angry. Very angry.
>>>>> Many bands have entered into "distribution" agreements. You can forget anything else. This isn't about if you have a free mp3 or not, it's about control over distribution. I don't like it, and it's contrary to the interest of artist not currently in the top 70 (it may even be contrary to the interest of those within the top 70 bands if you understand their creative accounting practices). The major labels do not want anything which challenges their near monopoly on distribution. This monopoly includes- playola (paying for songs to be paid on radio stations, videos to be played on MTV/VH1), control over concert venues, distribution control at major outlets. Peer to peer brought with it a distribution method which was beyond their control. The reason CD sales went up during this period was people were exposed to a variety of music they could not get before. This helped bands on smaller labels achieve wider success, more CD sales, and higher concert gross [Where most bands really make their money]. (Clear Channel as a case in point owns over 700 radio stations, and controls through it's partners over 70% of the concert venues over 500 seats in the USA)Think of Napster as more of a publicly controlled radio station with distribution capabilities. This is also why they went after Net radio stations so heavily. Too many enemies with tons of money.
In radio there are two main things which determine who will win in a contest of signals, they are: Line of sight, and wattage. If the person attempting to stomp on your signal has equal line of site, and superior wattage, yes, he will stomp all over your signal. You might be protected from regions of the world which don't have line of sight to your sattelite, but anyone else... The only good news I have for you is, it's not terribly difficult to triangulate and track down a radio signal if the event were to happen for a sustained period. The problem would be, he could be anywhere that has line of sight. If it ever happens, definitely call the FCC and get manpower, you'll need it.
have been known to be risky for a long time. It is my hope that some of these ideas will be incorporated within the next kernel, or show up as modules. For your front line servers running apache, ftp, sendmail, and maybe generating content on the fly via a database - this would make sense to isolate those issues there. It would also seem quite reasonable to run those services known to have high risk on a virtual machine, reducing the compromise to just that layer (hopefully). Anyone had a great deal of experience with that route? I didn't start using Linux because my other OS was too secure....
Which debutes in around 82-83, running on a system called the Rolla Link (in Exile) on a TRS-80 Model III. There is still an MTABBS up and running on a TRS-80 Model IV (started in 1983) called The Junk Drawer (314)434-4034. Probably the oldest continually running BBS in the 314 (St Louis) are. Amazingly enough, cept for replacing the power supply, the unit is entirely origonal. Back then they built 'em to last. :)
My experience with the major telco. I'm in Missouri, and decided two years ago I wanted DSL. So I called around and found a company that was small, local, friendly, and didn't answer the question "Do you support Linux?" with a no. I paid my $150 for them to do what they had to to get it turned on. Around 3 weeks later they finished the site survey, got the line laid, and had a tech drop off the DSL modem and *nic. I had everything wired to go. I then spent the next 4 months waiting for SWB to throw a switch. During the entire period I recieved around 6 (paper, sometimes including CD) DSL advertisements from SWB and two phone calls asking me to use their DSL service.
I would concur. Suse tends to have better out of the box no fuss no muss hardware support than other distros I have tried. When I installed Suse 7.1 everything got configured properly at the point of install. No printer problem, no nonsupported sound card problem... Suse makes it easier. Doing the same thing in Mandrake (the first Linux I installed) took me several hours of searching to find a driver that only sort of worked properly for my HP. I would of loved to of had a product to cut down that time for me so I could get right to work.