Why not have *real* caller-ID for email authentication? Before you can get on my white-list, you have to call a phone number for some sort of challenge-response
So every person that wants to email you, now has the added burden of phoning some system and following the voice menu options? I think that most people will simply not bother and won't send the email at all.
Email is a great tool and easy to use. Even existing challenge-response systems have been found to have many problems. Let's not ruin email, by taking away the best parts of it. Any authentication needs to be seamless and the details should be hidden from end-users.
Whats to stop a spammer from signing up for a free email account with a false name, blast out a few thousand messages, drop the account (it'll be closed anyway by abuse), wipe hands and repeat?
I don't know about all free email services, but Hotmail does not allow this anymore. Accounts are limited in how many messages per day they can send out. This is why most spammers are still relying on open relays and zombie machines.
If you don't already know, then you should probably be looking at hosting your website with an actual web hosting provider. I don't know about the situation in the US, but in Canada most of the ISPs have provisions in their contracts forbidding you from running websites on a residential/consumer connection. Of course lots of people still do, but those with websites that get any significant amount of traffic are usually targetted.
We should not be concentrating on which operating is more secure than another. This just promotes the myth that people can 'choose' the most secure operating system and then they are secure. No operating is secure, if you do not keep it up to date and patched.
Everytime I see an article like this, I wonder how many users and administrators will get the false impression that if they just switch to another platform they will have done their job.
Security is a process. It is not all about the technology, and it requires educating users and managers to be effective.
The person who made the copies is violating the copyright (originally two words, godamnit!) not the person who picked them up.
Exactly! But when you download something like that off the internet you are making an unauthorized copy, because you have to make a local copy in order to view it. That is illegal.
When you download something from off the Internet (and that includes viewing webpages ), you are making a local copy. Now in some places that may be okay, but in the US you are not allowed to make an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work without the permission of the work's author/owner.
Whether it should be a crime or not, is an issue for a separate discussion.
No, I have a good understanding of copyright law. I realize that there are other jurisdictions that permit limited private copying (such as Canada, where I actually live) but I was refering to the situation in the United States, since Slashdot tends to be U.S. centric.
In the US, it is illegal to download it (that includes browsing source code files on the web), but not illegal to view it.
You have no idea how copyright law works do you? The source code is not subject to the same laws as stolen physical goods are. It is copyrighted material. There is no theft of goods here, but you are infringing on Microsoft's copyrights by downloading (and thereby making an unauthorized copy of) the source code. Which by the way is still a serious crime, but it is not theft in the traditional sense.
By the way, viewing it on a webpage still counts as downloading it because you have to make a copy of the webpage onto your local computer in order to view it.
Copyright infringement is not the same as theft. And if you believe otherwise you have been drinking too much of the RIAA Kool-aid.
There are existing solutions that work like this. Brightmail comes to mind. These types of solution still do not stop all spam, because spammers insert random characters into their emails so that each email will 'hash' to a different value.
In actuality, a lot of spammers are located within the US. They only use remote facilities to mask their identities and cover up what they are doing. No, 'international enforcement' would not likely even have much of an effect either.
In that case the administration would do nothing. Look at North Korea. They have nuclear weapons, they have the capability to strike. And they have been at war with a US ally for the past 50 years. The Bush administration will not touch them however, because they are too scared of what would happen if they tried to take over North Korea.
Technically.. but the vast majority of them are now in violation of the new anti-spam legislation. They have no regard for the legality of what they are doing.
Well aside from the fact that the point of my post went completely over your head, I do have a few comments:
[I do care about some of the characteristics of the physical layer -- like speed and reliablity]]
That is the whole point of having a publicly owned utility, to manage the physical network (including upgrading!), sell the access to it, and to ensure reliability. There are utilities at the municipal level already doing this now, and they are proving effective.
POTS and satellite are irrelevant, neither can provide the speed ( including latency ) that cable or DSL can.
It won't be a problem in a year, cause they will probably start blocking outgoing SMTP traffic, unless it goes through their mail servers. A lot of ISPs are doing this now, and it will probably become standard practice shortly.
Almost, but not quite what they are describing. Qwest and others built nation-wide networks of fiber, but they did not go the last step of extending that connectivity to the last mile. That is where the current problem is right now. No one seems willing to risk going ahead and connecting all of the various homes to the existing fiber.
Personally, I think we should wait another 3-4 years until fiber-optics is cheap enough to warrant rolling it out en masse. Gigabit networking has to become more popular too, most routers and switches being sold for the home market are still 10/100. They need 1/10 gigabit at the very least if they want to be able to provide the services envisioned like multiple HDTV streams and VOIP all running at once.
3. Government mandates that your consumer electronics contain "monitoring equipment" to ensure that you are not harboring terrorists
By 2024, if everyone is connected via big-broadband Ethernet based access, you will pretty much have to encrypt all of your communications. So there won't be that much monitoring going on anyways.
You are confusing the notion of access service providers with utility providers. Stop thinking about Internet access as something you get from a specific telephone or cable company. Think of it like electricity. You can have competing billing providers all offering their own distinct plans. But just one 'utility' that builds and sells the physical access wholesale to the access service providers, who then resell it to the end-users.
He said the sources for the graphics, not the actual file used by the operating system. i.e. The graphic artists who do the icons in MacOS and XP use vector-based graphics when they are creating their icons, whereas the Amiga ones seem to have been drawn pixel-by-pixel instead.
Not always. Sometimes when a weaker competitor leaves the market, it makes the existing competitor's stronger, and sometimes you get aggressive price wards. But most of the time it does mean higher prices. We'll just have to wait and see how this one pans out.
I'm glad this crap isn't taking place in the Netherlands. For now downloading is legal here, uploading isn't.
Some dutch artists are trying to influence the government into changing the law here to go after the downloaders as well.
According to some interpretations, the law is the same here in Canada too. Downloading is apparently legal, while uploading is not. That's why if you read the article you will see they are seeking uploaders only.
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Why not have *real* caller-ID for email authentication? Before you can get on my white-list, you have to call a phone number for some sort of challenge-response
So every person that wants to email you, now has the added burden of phoning some system and following the voice menu options? I think that most people will simply not bother and won't send the email at all.
Email is a great tool and easy to use. Even existing challenge-response systems have been found to have many problems. Let's not ruin email, by taking away the best parts of it. Any authentication needs to be seamless and the details should be hidden from end-users.
Whats to stop a spammer from signing up for a free email account with a false name, blast out a few thousand messages, drop the account (it'll be closed anyway by abuse), wipe hands and repeat?
I don't know about all free email services, but Hotmail does not allow this anymore. Accounts are limited in how many messages per day they can send out. This is why most spammers are still relying on open relays and zombie machines.
If you don't already know, then you should probably be looking at hosting your website with an actual web hosting provider. I don't know about the situation in the US, but in Canada most of the ISPs have provisions in their contracts forbidding you from running websites on a residential/consumer connection. Of course lots of people still do, but those with websites that get any significant amount of traffic are usually targetted.
Well if they think that, then they really shouldn't be admins, should they?
Yes, unfortunately it is not always the case.
We should not be concentrating on which operating is more secure than another. This just promotes the myth that people can 'choose' the most secure operating system and then they are secure. No operating is secure, if you do not keep it up to date and patched.
Everytime I see an article like this, I wonder how many users and administrators will get the false impression that if they just switch to another platform they will have done their job.
Security is a process. It is not all about the technology, and it requires educating users and managers to be effective.
The person who made the copies is violating the copyright (originally two words, godamnit!) not the person who picked them up.
Exactly! But when you download something like that off the internet you are making an unauthorized copy, because you have to make a local copy in order to view it. That is illegal.
When you download something from off the Internet (and that includes viewing webpages ), you are making a local copy. Now in some places that may be okay, but in the US you are not allowed to make an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work without the permission of the work's author/owner.
Whether it should be a crime or not, is an issue for a separate discussion.
No, I have a good understanding of copyright law. I realize that there are other jurisdictions that permit limited private copying (such as Canada, where I actually live) but I was refering to the situation in the United States, since Slashdot tends to be U.S. centric.
In the US, it is illegal to download it (that includes browsing source code files on the web), but not illegal to view it.
You have no idea how copyright law works do you? The source code is not subject to the same laws as stolen physical goods are. It is copyrighted material. There is no theft of goods here, but you are infringing on Microsoft's copyrights by downloading (and thereby making an unauthorized copy of) the source code. Which by the way is still a serious crime, but it is not theft in the traditional sense.
By the way, viewing it on a webpage still counts as downloading it because you have to make a copy of the webpage onto your local computer in order to view it.
Copyright infringement is not the same as theft. And if you believe otherwise you have been drinking too much of the RIAA Kool-aid.
No, that's still downloading it. Because you are still copying the file to your local hard drive, therefore infringing on the copyright.
There are existing solutions that work like this. Brightmail comes to mind. These types of solution still do not stop all spam, because spammers insert random characters into their emails so that each email will 'hash' to a different value.
In actuality, a lot of spammers are located within the US. They only use remote facilities to mask their identities and cover up what they are doing. No, 'international enforcement' would not likely even have much of an effect either.
It is not illegal to view it. It is illegal to download it.
In that case the administration would do nothing. Look at North Korea. They have nuclear weapons, they have the capability to strike. And they have been at war with a US ally for the past 50 years. The Bush administration will not touch them however, because they are too scared of what would happen if they tried to take over North Korea.
Technically.. but the vast majority of them are now in violation of the new anti-spam legislation. They have no regard for the legality of what they are doing.
Well aside from the fact that the point of my post went completely over your head, I do have a few comments:
[I do care about some of the characteristics of the physical layer -- like speed and reliablity]]
That is the whole point of having a publicly owned utility, to manage the physical network (including upgrading!), sell the access to it, and to ensure reliability. There are utilities at the municipal level already doing this now, and they are proving effective.
POTS and satellite are irrelevant, neither can provide the speed ( including latency ) that cable or DSL can.
It won't be a problem in a year, cause they will probably start blocking outgoing SMTP traffic, unless it goes through their mail servers. A lot of ISPs are doing this now, and it will probably become standard practice shortly.
Almost, but not quite what they are describing. Qwest and others built nation-wide networks of fiber, but they did not go the last step of extending that connectivity to the last mile. That is where the current problem is right now. No one seems willing to risk going ahead and connecting all of the various homes to the existing fiber.
Personally, I think we should wait another 3-4 years until fiber-optics is cheap enough to warrant rolling it out en masse. Gigabit networking has to become more popular too, most routers and switches being sold for the home market are still 10/100. They need 1/10 gigabit at the very least if they want to be able to provide the services envisioned like multiple HDTV streams and VOIP all running at once.
3. Government mandates that your consumer electronics contain "monitoring equipment" to ensure that you are not harboring terrorists
By 2024, if everyone is connected via big-broadband Ethernet based access, you will pretty much have to encrypt all of your communications. So there won't be that much monitoring going on anyways.
You are confusing the notion of access service providers with utility providers. Stop thinking about Internet access as something you get from a specific telephone or cable company. Think of it like electricity. You can have competing billing providers all offering their own distinct plans. But just one 'utility' that builds and sells the physical access wholesale to the access service providers, who then resell it to the end-users.
How was this modded off-topic? UTOPIA is exactly the type of big-broadband network the former FCC chief was describing.
He said the sources for the graphics, not the actual file used by the operating system. i.e. The graphic artists who do the icons in MacOS and XP use vector-based graphics when they are creating their icons, whereas the Amiga ones seem to have been drawn pixel-by-pixel instead.
Not always. Sometimes when a weaker competitor leaves the market, it makes the existing competitor's stronger, and sometimes you get aggressive price wards. But most of the time it does mean higher prices. We'll just have to wait and see how this one pans out.
I'm glad this crap isn't taking place in the Netherlands. For now downloading is legal here, uploading isn't. Some dutch artists are trying to influence the government into changing the law here to go after the downloaders as well.
According to some interpretations, the law is the same here in Canada too. Downloading is apparently legal, while uploading is not. That's why if you read the article you will see they are seeking uploaders only.