No kidding, greedy industry. And can you imagine the nonsense of collecting royalties through ISPs? I write mostly free/open source software, and I demand that it be distributed freely. In fact, for a lot of my freeware I specifically say that no third party may collect fees for the distribution of my intellectual property without express written permission from me.
So if the industry starts collecting royalties from ISP customers, then they will be violating my license agreements and will either owe me some of the money, or be stealing my intellectual property.
This ruling is good news (and in line with the Supreme Court's earlier rulings protecting individual privacy). But the fight is not over, trust me. The Heritage Committee, in their report just last month, outlined their plans for ratifying WIPO and wants to change the laws governing ISP responsibility.
Now parliament is out, an election was just held, and the same Liberal party is back in power (minority) with a loose coalition with the NDP party -- who quite strongly supports ratifying WIPO. So I fear that we're going to see Canadian government ratify WIPO, bringing in DMCA-like legislation into Canada. Check out the Digital Copyright Canada forums and get involved if these privacy rights concern you. There is also a national petition for user's rights that you can sign if you are concerned about all these 'special laws' for digital media. Remember that we live in a digital world, but the general public does not realize this. Placing strange restrictions on digital information is just hurting ourselves, and our own industries.
As I understand it, we're observing one of two things:
Government incompetence like we've never seen before (funny but mostly harmless), or
The US Government shall break its commitment to its citizens, at the Executive's sole discretion (not so funny)
Actually, I think the whole 'enemy combatants' thing (Guantanamo prisoners outside both US, and International law) is another great example of how ready the Executive is to side-step the established systems of the country, whenever they feel like it. Remember that we put these guys in power to work for us! Actually...
Go to a computer that has had a lot of browsing activity last week, and dig through their cache: grep -i -R javascript *.jpg grep -i -R javascript *.gif
When the server is infected it puts javascript content in any document retrieved, even images. I have done this on our work and home computers and have found no matches, but if someone can do this on a high-volume public browsing computer then I'm sure we can dig up the infected sites.
Here's the beta version of my freeware program popURL (for Windows, sorry!). You can copy a URL to the clipboard (Copy Link Location) then click the tray icon, and popURL will pop up an info box on the URL telling you the software running on the remote server (IIS, Apache, whatever); the MIME type of the document, and its size if available. Potentially useful for safe, IIS-free browsing:) On UNIX you can get the same info using wget -S though somewhat less convenient.
Re:The silver lining in the falling sky...
on
P2P Bits
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The simple fact of the matter is that the existance of the Internet has made unlimited digital sharing a reality. The genie's out, people love getting free stuff, and nothing short of a police state is going to stop it.
Exactly. I would take it further toward basics. One of the fundamental design purposes of a digital computer is to copy information perfectly. This is what data storage and retrieval is all about! Right now you're sitting at a desktop machine, the result of billions of dollars of research, all to ensure reliable and efficient data duplication/processing. Trying to restrict actions (like media copying, format conversions, data uploads) is just plain silly when you've got math and physics against you.
What we're seeing is a conflict between the desires of a corporation and the realities of modern digital computing infrastructure. Digital computing is going to win, because we need it.
Here's an analogy. In India, multinationals have tried to enforce patent rights on seeds to prevent locals from sharing crop seeds as they have always done traditionally. But a seed grows when it is placed in the ground, and plants reproduce -- this is nature's design. The people decreed that they will plant and swap seeds despite what law tells them to do.
And soon that's what we will do too (in the digital context) because things are approaching sillyness.
Whoa there with the brainwashing
on
P2P Bits
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
... address music sharing. In one Kembrew McLeod says that the lawsuits aren't working
Does anyone else notice a pretty serious effort to associate, psychologically, music sharing with illegal activities? The two don't always go together. I share legitimate music on the Internet with strangers. And I legitimately share music I own with close friends. They're trying to brainwash us (and it's working BTW)
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Content-Length: 0
By the way, here's a neat program that sends only HEAD requests to web servers and shows you the response headers. ViewHEAD runs on Windows; on UNIX you can use wget -S. Useful for seeing what's at a web page, without having to download it. Also tells you what server is running, MIME type of the file, etc.
Looking at the stats on my web site, which receives over 1000 unique visitors/day on average (and almost all of them are Windows users because I distribute Windows software)... here are this year's proportions:
Jan: IE 73%, Mozilla 12% Feb: IE 76%, Mozilla 15% Mar: IE 75%, Mozilla 16% Apr: IE 75%, Mozilla 16% May: IE 71%, Mozilla 19% Jun: IE 71%, Mozilla 20%
And for some historical reference, in July of 2003 I saw: IE 78%, Mozilla 11%.
Nope, the disaster hasn't happened yet. When it happens, the economy will collapse and what's left of Microsoft will be hauled before court. The FBI or some other government body will use its existing evidence to show that Microsoft knew about the risks posed by its monoculture OS/desktop yet failed to take the necessary measures to protect consumers and businesses. It will be a grey area but it won't matter, since mainstream IT will be shattered. The nerds will rebuild, and will be filthy rich. Women will throw themselves at us.
A friend of mine is doing some geological work in Hawaii and he sent me these photos. Damn, there's an amazing place.
Re:Why not?
on
Linux in Iraq
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This was to combat Islamist extremism, which he always found to be a threat.
Interesting, you're saying that Saddam was against the Islamic extremists? The same morons who cry 'jihad' and drive planes into buildings, explode car bombs, etc.?
So Saddam is against Islamist extremists, and we bomb him -- but we do business with Saudi Arabia, the country that is home to the wealthy funders of Islamic extremism, and home to all the Sept. 11 hijackers? Let's not kid ourselves, there are bad things happening in both countries but only one of those two countries was the champion of Islamic fundamentalists / extremists.
I don't get it, it's too weird!
Of course...
on
Linux in Iraq
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
They might have been better off before we started dropping bombs on their country. I used to receive emails from some engineering students in Iraq who enjoyed using my software. I stopped hearing from them around war time, and have no idea whether they were killed, fled the country, or what. They were around my age, early 20s.
Anyway, my point being that it seems kind of silly to 'celebrate' rebuilding Iraq when they had all kinds of existing infrastructure before the US invaded. We just, uh, BOMBED it all.
Yep, that's right, the distrobution that was out before kernel 1.0 is now considered Yet Another Distro.
Another interesting angle about Slackware is that it has been profitable for some time. Pat does a lot of the work himself, and his small team helps him with CD orders etc. Much of the testing is community volunteer work, of course. RedHat might have 1,000 employees doing what Pat+friends can accomplish. Hey, here's an article on ten years of Slackware
After trying many different distributions I have settled on Slackware. The BSD-style configuration is, I find, straightforward and powerful (even though I wasn't a BSD user before Linux). Slackware does not impose specific configuration styles, layouts, interfaces or layers on you and I enjoy the resulting flexibility and freedom. I like the "EZ".tgz packages. You either use the slackware packages, or compile from source (I use a hybrid approach). I have NOT found RPM or FreeBSD ports to be particularly more convenient. Sorry, but it's true.
Security notices are rapid, accurate, and to the point thanks to Pat himself. Things in the Slackware installation work properly, without embarassing-looking glitches. It is intelligently put together, and tested to perfection.
Overall the distro is the lean and the easiest to tweak in the least amount of time. I personally found it the easiest to install of all Linux distros. Slackware is a winner.
It gets better. Vernon Schryver, networking genius, is responsible for the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse which does something similar, but as I understand it, is much more efficient for large servers. When our university turned on DCC filtering combined with greylisting, the daily spam to inboxes dropped from hundreds daily to ZERO (I kid you not). I am not aware of any false positives, at least on my account. DCC blew my mind.
Content-based spam filtering is a waste of time. . . RBLs WORK
But content-based filters can very accurately determine what is spam and what's not, and so they can feed RBLs/DNSBLs. Let real spam to real user accounts form the blocklist! One such project is WPBL.
I have been using spamprobe for some time, with the webfilt front-end, and I'm very pleased with the speedy spamprobe program (written in C++).
I receive approximately 10 legit emails/day and about 300 spam/day. I have only had 2 false positives overall (that's 2 out of about 100,000 total emails received) and on average only 2 spams/day split past the filter. Now I'm testing Spambayes on one of my most spammed accounts, but it's definitely much slower than spamprobe and not more accurate as far as I can tell.
This is the technology used. It uses a third party to set up the 'connection', but the third party is only required for connection establishment. After that, data flows directly between the two NAT'ed hosts and not through the third party.
Skype claims P2P but the voice has to go through at least one hop, so the latency is pretty poor and you need other (hijacked) nodes. Check out this VoIP system, which has low latency, direct peer to peer communications even through NAT on both sides. Oh, and blowfish for encryption so good... it may be illegal in your country!
I thought the lesson was, software monoculture in the global computing industry is opening the door for disaster -- what we need is diversity in platforms and applications.
Quite simply, avoid talking to the media whenever possible. You can definitely expect them to put some kind of spin on whatever you say -- whether it's meant to add excitement, satisfy their existing bias, or for whatever other reason (lack of skill / stupidity). A close friend of mine was severely embarassed in our community due an idiot reporter who entirely misrepresented/misquoted what my friend said. The lesson for me was, reporters are not smart people and even if they mean well they can screw up big time, hurting you in the process, and nobody cares to read retractions. When the media comes knocking, keep your mouth shut.
IGNORE SCO. They're full of shit. Just ignore them... they thrive off publicity. Slashdot attention makes them look legitimate, and concerns technical people. When they see 500+ comments in these articles, people think there's an issue... there is no issue.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding, greedy industry. And can you imagine the nonsense of collecting royalties through ISPs? I write mostly free/open source software, and I demand that it be distributed freely. In fact, for a lot of my freeware I specifically say that no third party may collect fees for the distribution of my intellectual property without express written permission from me.
So if the industry starts collecting royalties from ISP customers, then they will be violating my license agreements and will either owe me some of the money, or be stealing my intellectual property.
This ruling is good news (and in line with the Supreme Court's earlier rulings protecting individual privacy). But the fight is not over, trust me. The Heritage Committee, in their report just last month, outlined their plans for ratifying WIPO and wants to change the laws governing ISP responsibility.
Now parliament is out, an election was just held, and the same Liberal party is back in power (minority) with a loose coalition with the NDP party -- who quite strongly supports ratifying WIPO. So I fear that we're going to see Canadian government ratify WIPO, bringing in DMCA-like legislation into Canada. Check out the Digital Copyright Canada forums and get involved if these privacy rights concern you. There is also a national petition for user's rights that you can sign if you are concerned about all these 'special laws' for digital media. Remember that we live in a digital world, but the general public does not realize this. Placing strange restrictions on digital information is just hurting ourselves, and our own industries.
Actually, I think the whole 'enemy combatants' thing (Guantanamo prisoners outside both US, and International law) is another great example of how ready the Executive is to side-step the established systems of the country, whenever they feel like it. Remember that we put these guys in power to work for us! Actually...
Go to a computer that has had a lot of browsing activity last week, and dig through their cache:
grep -i -R javascript *.jpg
grep -i -R javascript *.gif
When the server is infected it puts javascript content in any document retrieved, even images. I have done this on our work and home computers and have found no matches, but if someone can do this on a high-volume public browsing computer then I'm sure we can dig up the infected sites.
Here's the beta version of my freeware program popURL (for Windows, sorry!). You can copy a URL to the clipboard (Copy Link Location) then click the tray icon, and popURL will pop up an info box on the URL telling you the software running on the remote server (IIS, Apache, whatever); the MIME type of the document, and its size if available. Potentially useful for safe, IIS-free browsing :) On UNIX you can get the same info using wget -S though somewhat less convenient.
What we're seeing is a conflict between the desires of a corporation and the realities of modern digital computing infrastructure. Digital computing is going to win, because we need it.
Here's an analogy. In India, multinationals have tried to enforce patent rights on seeds to prevent locals from sharing crop seeds as they have always done traditionally. But a seed grows when it is placed in the ground, and plants reproduce -- this is nature's design. The people decreed that they will plant and swap seeds despite what law tells them to do.
And soon that's what we will do too (in the digital context) because things are approaching sillyness.
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Content-Length: 0
By the way, here's a neat program that sends only HEAD requests to web servers and shows you the response headers. ViewHEAD runs on Windows; on UNIX you can use wget -S. Useful for seeing what's at a web page, without having to download it. Also tells you what server is running, MIME type of the file, etc.
Looking at the stats on my web site, which receives over 1000 unique visitors/day on average (and almost all of them are Windows users because I distribute Windows software)... here are this year's proportions:
Jan: IE 73%, Mozilla 12%
Feb: IE 76%, Mozilla 15%
Mar: IE 75%, Mozilla 16%
Apr: IE 75%, Mozilla 16%
May: IE 71%, Mozilla 19%
Jun: IE 71%, Mozilla 20%
And for some historical reference, in July of 2003 I saw: IE 78%, Mozilla 11%.
A friend of mine is doing some geological work in Hawaii and he sent me these photos. Damn, there's an amazing place.
So Saddam is against Islamist extremists, and we bomb him -- but we do business with Saudi Arabia, the country that is home to the wealthy funders of Islamic extremism, and home to all the Sept. 11 hijackers? Let's not kid ourselves, there are bad things happening in both countries but only one of those two countries was the champion of Islamic fundamentalists / extremists.
I don't get it, it's too weird!
They might have been better off before we started dropping bombs on their country. I used to receive emails from some engineering students in Iraq who enjoyed using my software. I stopped hearing from them around war time, and have no idea whether they were killed, fled the country, or what. They were around my age, early 20s.
Anyway, my point being that it seems kind of silly to 'celebrate' rebuilding Iraq when they had all kinds of existing infrastructure before the US invaded. We just, uh, BOMBED it all.
Torrent ratio? You can configure that? Anyway the torrents are working, I'm getting up to 60 KBytes/sec and will leave mine running all night.
After trying many different distributions I have settled on Slackware. The BSD-style configuration is, I find, straightforward and powerful (even though I wasn't a BSD user before Linux). Slackware does not impose specific configuration styles, layouts, interfaces or layers on you and I enjoy the resulting flexibility and freedom. I like the "EZ"
Security notices are rapid, accurate, and to the point thanks to Pat himself. Things in the Slackware installation work properly, without embarassing-looking glitches. It is intelligently put together, and tested to perfection.
Overall the distro is the lean and the easiest to tweak in the least amount of time. I personally found it the easiest to install of all Linux distros. Slackware is a winner.
It gets better. Vernon Schryver, networking genius, is responsible for the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse which does something similar, but as I understand it, is much more efficient for large servers. When our university turned on DCC filtering combined with greylisting, the daily spam to inboxes dropped from hundreds daily to ZERO (I kid you not). I am not aware of any false positives, at least on my account. DCC blew my mind.
I have been using spamprobe for some time, with the webfilt front-end, and I'm very pleased with the speedy spamprobe program (written in C++).
I receive approximately 10 legit emails/day and about 300 spam/day. I have only had 2 false positives overall (that's 2 out of about 100,000 total emails received) and on average only 2 spams/day split past the filter. Now I'm testing Spambayes on one of my most spammed accounts, but it's definitely much slower than spamprobe and not more accurate as far as I can tell.
This is the technology used. It uses a third party to set up the 'connection', but the third party is only required for connection establishment. After that, data flows directly between the two NAT'ed hosts and not through the third party.
Skype claims P2P but the voice has to go through at least one hop, so the latency is pretty poor and you need other (hijacked) nodes. Check out this VoIP system, which has low latency, direct peer to peer communications even through NAT on both sides. Oh, and blowfish for encryption so good... it may be illegal in your country!
I thought the lesson was, software monoculture in the global computing industry is opening the door for disaster -- what we need is diversity in platforms and applications.
Here is a mirror. Wishing Michael a safe flight!
Quite simply, avoid talking to the media whenever possible. You can definitely expect them to put some kind of spin on whatever you say -- whether it's meant to add excitement, satisfy their existing bias, or for whatever other reason (lack of skill / stupidity). A close friend of mine was severely embarassed in our community due an idiot reporter who entirely misrepresented/misquoted what my friend said. The lesson for me was, reporters are not smart people and even if they mean well they can screw up big time, hurting you in the process, and nobody cares to read retractions. When the media comes knocking, keep your mouth shut.
What are Nigerian 419 scam artists going to do with that much storage?
IGNORE SCO. They're full of shit. Just ignore them... they thrive off publicity. Slashdot attention makes them look legitimate, and concerns technical people. When they see 500+ comments in these articles, people think there's an issue... there is no issue.