I'm really confused about this, because I don't quite understand how phone numbers are bought and sold by companies.
Say I get broadband at home from Bob's Broadband. I get a static IP address of 1.2.3.4. Later on I decide I can get a better price from Joe's Broadband. I switch, and they give me the IP address 5.6.7.8. This is unfair! Why can't I keep my 1.2.3.4 IP address?!
Anyone who can tell a router from a hole in the ground knows the answer to this one - Bob's Broadband owns the subset of IP addresses in which 1.2.3.4 is located. If I were to keep my IP address and sign up with Joe's Broadband, there would be a lot of awkward router configuration going on at both ISP's.
Likewise, if a cellular provider buys a block of phone numbers, can they have them taken away without any compensation? I know my cellular contract doesn't say I own the number, it just says I get to use it. Can somebody fill me in?
You put a line in your robots.txt saying that bots are not allowed to access a certain directory or file. Then you put an invisible link to said directory or file on your home page. Any host that makes a request for the forbidden file is an evil bot, and gets blacklisted and/or reported to some other authority.
And the sad part is that the reason the industry started this was to protect the small record stores from the megamarts. The companies believed that small record stores offered better music-buying advice to customers than the megamarts, and would therefore expose customers to more music they'd like. This ruling is great news for Wal-Mart and bad news for almost every other seller.
Edition based freesites achieve exactly what you describe.
True. Although much less conveniently - I have to wait forever for the link images to load, and when they come up broken, I have to wonder if the site really hasn't been updated, or if my node just couldn't retrieve the image. Sometimes I have to click through dozens of editions, each taking several minutes to load, just to get to the latest. With Konspire, I can work, play games, or sleep while my node does the busy work.
1. Konspire does offer anonymity. If you get the receiver key for a channel off a web site, you have no idea who publishes it.
2. Freenet has no way for content to "progress". When I read Bob's Freesite, I have no idea whether Bob has changed his mind in the meantime and posted another site. Yes, Freenet has MSK's or MBR's or DBR's (can't remember which right now) but those require constant attention, or a 24/7 connection and a cron job.
Email over freenet requires guessing the right key to insert based on what keys you think have already been inserted, and then guessing which keys to retrieve, based on (essentially) brute force. Email over konspire only requires the right signature keys.
First they started flexing their muscles to censor the video game industry and made it plain that any video game they didn't like wouldn't be sold by Wal-Mart, thus making game companies cave and self-edit their games.
Are we talking about the same Wal-Mart that sold me Grand Theft Auto: Vice City?
k2b is a great solution to the free-rider weakness of bittorrent, but it replaces it with another free-rider weakness -- what incentive is there to broadcast a channel? ("I'd rather be downloading")... traditional p2p clients prevent this for the most part by making the upload/download service run at the same time; if you want to DL then you have to be available for UL.
Whatever incentives provoke people to encode TV episodes immediately after the network sends them out on satellite, run BitTorrent trackers, and distribute.torrent files should be enough to make them distribute content via the much-simpler Konspire2B GUI. And it's my understanding that with Konspire2B, you DO upload as you download, so there's no loss compared to BitTorrent.
Furthermore, during the TV season, I was waking up early in the morning to use BitTorrent to download TV episodes as soon as they started being distributed, so that I could have them before I left for work. With k2b, I could have "subscribed" to my favorite shows, and obtained them immediately and automatically while I slept.
But a better idea may be to use this k2b to push torrent files thus relieving those popular, and always down (DoSed, money/bandwidth-starved, or simply lamely administered) torrent distribution sites..
The bigger problem with BitTorrent isn't that the torrent site gets DOSed, it's that the tracker gets DOSed. Without the tracker, the.torrent file is useless.
I'm not a black hat, but if I were, Konspire2B seems like an optimal method for zombie communication. It has the untraceability of Freenet with more predictability of where to find the data.
Why doesn't anyone understand that "free speech" only applies to the government not being able to censor speech. If you write an article critical of the government and the newspaper decides to publish it, the government can not come in and tell the paper to remove it. That is free speech. If you write an artle critical of the govennment, newspaper, your dog... whatever and the newspaper refuses to publish it--thats business--you can always try to buy ad space but it is not a "free speech" issue.
I agree with you that people apply the First Amendment in places where it doesn't belong, i.e. private transactions. But it's the government that's come in and told this guy he has to shut his search engine down, and made him cough up $12,000 to the RIAA. This isn't a private transaction.
But if the company doing the consolidating weren't providing content that met the listener demand more than anyone else, that consolidation wouldn't work, would it? They'd make more profit selling the stations to companies that WOULD meet the demands.
If there's a demand for certain content, I don't see why ClearChannel shouldn't be allowed to supply it - even if it's not exactly to my tastes. (Frankly, ClearChannel owns certain stations elsewhere in the country that I WISH they'd clone where I live.)
I suggest that most slashdot types are libertarian in their political thought. Not Libertarian(tm), but libertarian in thought.
It seemed that way a few years ago, but I'm not sure anymore. Glancing at this thread, opinion seems almost unanimous in favor of government's controlling who can and cannot broadcast over the air. Maybe I'll suggest to ChrisD that we have some more political polls.
Thanks - you're the first person to comment in the months I've had it. When I made it, I was afraid I'd be called a troll. My wc gives a line count as well as a word count by default, but I think I will take your suggestion anyway.
More than a few workplaces hold fire drills to gauge readiness for a fire. It wouldn't cost much for a company to hire a local starving actor to call random employees, spout some technical BS, and ask for their passwords. Then you could determine the percentage of gullible employees, and send out an email reminding everyone never to give out their passwords to someone they don't know, ever ever ever.
Doing this once or twice a year would be dirt cheap, amusing, and very useful.
Ever play the original Grand Theft Auto in multiplayer mode? It's the best kept secret in PC gaming!
It had serious technical issues - it could barely handle lag at all, and the interplayer messaging was utterly broken. And of course the whole engine was inferior to that of GTA3. But god damn it, it was fun! You just drove around following the arrow to your friend. Once you found her, you had three options: ram her car with yours until one of them exploded, get out of your car and try to shoot her with the rocket launcher (giving her the opportunity to run your ass over), or wait for her to get out of HER car and try to run her over - giving her the opportunity to fry YOUR ass with a rocket launcher!
My favorite trick - there was a broken bridge in Liberty City that most cars could jump easily. I liked to take a fire engine or bus and leave along at the edge of the gap, so that as my friend was flying over the gap, he'd hit the fire engine and fall into the river.
.... is the profile of the average spammer. Most of my spam is poorly spelled and frequently points to sites that don't have anything to sell. My suspicion, and I have no way of verifying it, is that most of these messages are sent by people who get suckered into a "Make Money From Home!" offer, send a few messages to a giant list of addresses, and then give up when they're not living in MC Hammer's mansion by the end of the week.
Does anyone know who the average spammer is?
Another cool piece of spam research I've never seen mentioned on Slashdot is the Bot Trap, which I learned about from this Little Green Footballs entry. If you're the admin for any web server, I strongly recommend setting this up. You probably don't make a huge dent in spam, but you get the satisfaction of seeing the list of IP's you thwarted.
Privately held companies are driven by one thing: Generating Profit. Publicly traded companies are driven by something else: Stock Price.
Yeah, that's become a bug in our system, and you only have to glance at a newspaper to see that people are getting hurt by it. Someone compared it to paying a doctor based on the beeping of a patient's heart monitor - it's not a bad way of judging the patient's health, until the doctor starts dreaming up ways to make the monitor beep that don't make the patient any healthier.
I'm hoping that when we eliminate the tax on dividends, stockholders will start focusing more on profits and less on stock price.
I still don't get it. The site makes no mention of storage space.... what does it serve? Once it's on my network, do I SSH/telnet/ftp/whatever into it and upload files that way?
They also exclude most college students. Let's see - a large demographic living far away from their home team, with lots of bandwidth, and some disposable income. Does this sound like a group we want to do business with? Nah - their credit cards are in the wrong zip code.
Could I please have the IP addresses of these servers that have been running while multiple security patches that require reboots have been released, just to, um, verify that they exist?;)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm really confused about this, because I don't quite understand how phone numbers are bought and sold by companies.
Say I get broadband at home from Bob's Broadband. I get a static IP address of 1.2.3.4. Later on I decide I can get a better price from Joe's Broadband. I switch, and they give me the IP address 5.6.7.8. This is unfair! Why can't I keep my 1.2.3.4 IP address?!
Anyone who can tell a router from a hole in the ground knows the answer to this one - Bob's Broadband owns the subset of IP addresses in which 1.2.3.4 is located. If I were to keep my IP address and sign up with Joe's Broadband, there would be a lot of awkward router configuration going on at both ISP's.
Likewise, if a cellular provider buys a block of phone numbers, can they have them taken away without any compensation? I know my cellular contract doesn't say I own the number, it just says I get to use it. Can somebody fill me in?
Catch Bad Bots in a Bot Trap
You put a line in your robots.txt saying that bots are not allowed to access a certain directory or file. Then you put an invisible link to said directory or file on your home page. Any host that makes a request for the forbidden file is an evil bot, and gets blacklisted and/or reported to some other authority.
You're also wrong. Try this.
EGON
There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
PETER
What?
EGON
Don't cross the streams.
PETER
Why?
EGON
It would be bad.
PETER
I'm fuzzy on the whole good-bad thing. What do you mean, bad?
EGON
Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
RAY
Total protonic reversal.
PETER
All right, that's bad, okay. Important safety tip, don't cross the streams. Thanks, Egon.
And the sad part is that the reason the industry started this was to protect the small record stores from the megamarts. The companies believed that small record stores offered better music-buying advice to customers than the megamarts, and would therefore expose customers to more music they'd like. This ruling is great news for Wal-Mart and bad news for almost every other seller.
Edition based freesites achieve exactly what you describe.
True. Although much less conveniently - I have to wait forever for the link images to load, and when they come up broken, I have to wonder if the site really hasn't been updated, or if my node just couldn't retrieve the image. Sometimes I have to click through dozens of editions, each taking several minutes to load, just to get to the latest. With Konspire, I can work, play games, or sleep while my node does the busy work.
1. Konspire does offer anonymity. If you get the receiver key for a channel off a web site, you have no idea who publishes it.
2. Freenet has no way for content to "progress". When I read Bob's Freesite, I have no idea whether Bob has changed his mind in the meantime and posted another site. Yes, Freenet has MSK's or MBR's or DBR's (can't remember which right now) but those require constant attention, or a 24/7 connection and a cron job.
Email over freenet requires guessing the right key to insert based on what keys you think have already been inserted, and then guessing which keys to retrieve, based on (essentially) brute force. Email over konspire only requires the right signature keys.
Are we talking about the same Wal-Mart that sold me Grand Theft Auto: Vice City?
k2b is a great solution to the free-rider weakness of bittorrent, but it replaces it with another free-rider weakness -- what incentive is there to broadcast a channel? ("I'd rather be downloading")... traditional p2p clients prevent this for the most part by making the upload/download service run at the same time; if you want to DL then you have to be available for UL.
.torrent files should be enough to make them distribute content via the much-simpler Konspire2B GUI. And it's my understanding that with Konspire2B, you DO upload as you download, so there's no loss compared to BitTorrent.
Whatever incentives provoke people to encode TV episodes immediately after the network sends them out on satellite, run BitTorrent trackers, and distribute
Furthermore, during the TV season, I was waking up early in the morning to use BitTorrent to download TV episodes as soon as they started being distributed, so that I could have them before I left for work. With k2b, I could have "subscribed" to my favorite shows, and obtained them immediately and automatically while I slept.
But a better idea may be to use this k2b to push torrent files thus relieving those popular, and always down (DoSed, money/bandwidth-starved, or simply lamely administered) torrent distribution sites..
.torrent file is useless.
The bigger problem with BitTorrent isn't that the torrent site gets DOSed, it's that the tracker gets DOSed. Without the tracker, the
I'm not a black hat, but if I were, Konspire2B seems like an optimal method for zombie communication. It has the untraceability of Freenet with more predictability of where to find the data.
Actually it was an out of court settlement so there was no government intervention involved. RTFA
But isn't an out-of-court settlement an attempt to avoid getting the government involved?
Why doesn't anyone understand that "free speech" only applies to the government not being able to censor speech. If you write an article critical of the government and the newspaper decides to publish it, the government can not come in and tell the paper to remove it. That is free speech. If you write an artle critical of the govennment, newspaper, your dog... whatever and the newspaper refuses to publish it--thats business--you can always try to buy ad space but it is not a "free speech" issue.
I agree with you that people apply the First Amendment in places where it doesn't belong, i.e. private transactions. But it's the government that's come in and told this guy he has to shut his search engine down, and made him cough up $12,000 to the RIAA. This isn't a private transaction.
At $100,000/license minimum the barrier to entry into radio is WAY too high.
And yet people in government insist that the problem is NOT ENOUGH government control over the airwaves.
But if the company doing the consolidating weren't providing content that met the listener demand more than anyone else, that consolidation wouldn't work, would it? They'd make more profit selling the stations to companies that WOULD meet the demands.
If there's a demand for certain content, I don't see why ClearChannel shouldn't be allowed to supply it - even if it's not exactly to my tastes. (Frankly, ClearChannel owns certain stations elsewhere in the country that I WISH they'd clone where I live.)
I suggest that most slashdot types are libertarian in their political thought. Not Libertarian(tm), but libertarian in thought.
It seemed that way a few years ago, but I'm not sure anymore. Glancing at this thread, opinion seems almost unanimous in favor of government's controlling who can and cannot broadcast over the air. Maybe I'll suggest to ChrisD that we have some more political polls.
Thanks - you're the first person to comment in the months I've had it. When I made it, I was afraid I'd be called a troll. My wc gives a line count as well as a word count by default, but I think I will take your suggestion anyway.
More than a few workplaces hold fire drills to gauge readiness for a fire. It wouldn't cost much for a company to hire a local starving actor to call random employees, spout some technical BS, and ask for their passwords. Then you could determine the percentage of gullible employees, and send out an email reminding everyone never to give out their passwords to someone they don't know, ever ever ever.
Doing this once or twice a year would be dirt cheap, amusing, and very useful.
Ever play the original Grand Theft Auto in multiplayer mode? It's the best kept secret in PC gaming!
It had serious technical issues - it could barely handle lag at all, and the interplayer messaging was utterly broken. And of course the whole engine was inferior to that of GTA3. But god damn it, it was fun! You just drove around following the arrow to your friend. Once you found her, you had three options: ram her car with yours until one of them exploded, get out of your car and try to shoot her with the rocket launcher (giving her the opportunity to run your ass over), or wait for her to get out of HER car and try to run her over - giving her the opportunity to fry YOUR ass with a rocket launcher!
My favorite trick - there was a broken bridge in Liberty City that most cars could jump easily. I liked to take a fire engine or bus and leave along at the edge of the gap, so that as my friend was flying over the gap, he'd hit the fire engine and fall into the river.
.... is the profile of the average spammer. Most of my spam is poorly spelled and frequently points to sites that don't have anything to sell. My suspicion, and I have no way of verifying it, is that most of these messages are sent by people who get suckered into a "Make Money From Home!" offer, send a few messages to a giant list of addresses, and then give up when they're not living in MC Hammer's mansion by the end of the week.
Does anyone know who the average spammer is?
Another cool piece of spam research I've never seen mentioned on Slashdot is the Bot Trap, which I learned about from this Little Green Footballs entry. If you're the admin for any web server, I strongly recommend setting this up. You probably don't make a huge dent in spam, but you get the satisfaction of seeing the list of IP's you thwarted.
The first two months are the worst. Expect improvements shortly thereafter.
Then about 13 years later, expect five years that will make you nostalgic for the first two months.
Privately held companies are driven by one thing: Generating Profit. Publicly traded companies are driven by something else: Stock Price.
Yeah, that's become a bug in our system, and you only have to glance at a newspaper to see that people are getting hurt by it. Someone compared it to paying a doctor based on the beeping of a patient's heart monitor - it's not a bad way of judging the patient's health, until the doctor starts dreaming up ways to make the monitor beep that don't make the patient any healthier.
I'm hoping that when we eliminate the tax on dividends, stockholders will start focusing more on profits and less on stock price.
The more porn people can get for free the less porn they will pay for,
If you'd said this on a thread debating the morality of mp3 trading, you would have been modded down.
I still don't get it. The site makes no mention of storage space.... what does it serve? Once it's on my network, do I SSH/telnet/ftp/whatever into it and upload files that way?
They also exclude most college students. Let's see - a large demographic living far away from their home team, with lots of bandwidth, and some disposable income. Does this sound like a group we want to do business with? Nah - their credit cards are in the wrong zip code.
Grandparent: That sounds very similar to what happened with the Republicans last election :P
Parent: All the liberals got cute and split the vote between gore and nader... BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
For what office were Gore and Nader running in the last election?
Could I please have the IP addresses of these servers that have been running while multiple security patches that require reboots have been released, just to, um, verify that they exist? ;)