Indeed if your average pimpy-faced computer nerd is 16, he doesn't get to vote very often. In fact he doesn't get to vote at all. Or I'm mistaken about the minimun American voting age.
... but I think this guy has a point. OK, there's a lot of PR crap in this essay, such as calling the way newly found vulnerabilities are handled by the "security community" (whatever that is)information anarchy.
Still, I think that it is true that "exploit howtos" released by security sites DOES help malicious hackers to create their evil stuff. When the vulnerability is a default config problem that admins can fix themselves, then fine, it is their responability to keep up to date with this information. But sometimes the vulnerability can only be fixed by a patch, and because of the proprietary nature of MS software, the patch can only come from MS itself.
In that case I think it would be better to inform MS and wait for the patch... but that's just what should happen in an ideal world. The problem is that MS is notorious for NOT fixing vulnerabilities of which they are aware. This is bad ; MS software will keep on being exploited until this changes. However I do not thing that the "let's release this information so that it will get exploited and them bastards wille be forced to fix it" attitude is a very responsible way to handle it. Innocent bystanders will be hurt because of Redmond's lazyness, and I do not think that this is fair. Just because people run MS servers does not mean that they deserve to get cracked.
OTOH publishing that information does also have its good sides. For example it is the only way admins can check whether they are vulnerable to a specific attack. My point is that determining the proper way to handle information about newly found security holes is a complex issue ; just yelling "arrgh MS ! arrgh evil!" won't make it any simpler.
And please quit pretending this essay is anti-free-speech. Culp is arguing that the way security sites release information about exploit is bad, not that the sites ought to be censored, banned or whatever. Criticizing some form of speech is not equivalent to demanding that it be censored. Even if the critic works for Microsoft:)
Maybe, ti just might be that the hackers and crackers are just not "evil" as they are made out.
I think the theory outlined in this 1985 paper about "hackers" (ok, crackers) ethics is still valid : these are mostly young teenagers whose idea of what's wrong and what's right isn't better or worse than that of most kids this age. The author argues that kids breaking into a computer system are at the same level of moral developement as other kids hot-wiring a car for a joyride. Both are just immature vandals, but the thing is that damage caused by computer vandalism is usually much worse.
Hey, me I'm not like these 2600 7am3rz, I know what Babbage is : it's a programming language.
Kidz these days don't even know about the pioneering concept of "artificial stupidity". How sad.
That's the point, man. They want the new anti-terrorism laws
amended so they can do it WITHOUT being charged for
terrorism. (reading the article is good for you)
Riiight, this guy calling your joke unfunny means
that he is trying to deprive you of your constitutional rights ?
Give me a break ! You better watch out for the big bad censors then,
'cause it didn't make me laugh either.
Many "New-Agers" might classify as none. They have beliefs, but the beliefs are not codified by authority or community.
Not in this census, since "New Age" has its own entry in the list. Along with "rationalist", "realist", "internationalist", "monk" and other stuff that hardly qualifies as religion.
But the rebel troups would never have killed
thousands of totally innocent people for their cause
Alas ! I could've done with a little more collateral
damage to, say, ewoks for example.
Yes this post may seem rude in the light of current
events, but I didn't start that stupid SW paralel. I
actually cheer when the one ewok dies in Ep. VI, I
never cheer when I see a real person die (even if it's
on tv).
...KDE & Gnome aren't window managers but desktop environnements.
And the finder is yet something else (I'll leave to
Mac users to explain exactly what that thing is). I
know this rebuttal is annoying but hey, can't compare
apple to orange as they say !
Oh yes it sure is ! As I understand it, the directive next needs to be approved by the European Parliament which has a history of favoring "opt-out" over "opt-in" ("before the end of this year" probably means "not before next year"). If it is approved, the directive would then become "European law", i.e. UE countries will be required to pass it onto their national legislations ; however there usually is a rather long transitional period during which they cannot be prosecuted for not complying with the directive (1+ years transitional periods are common). If a country doesn't comply with the directive at the end of the transitional period, it may then be prosecuted by the European Court of Justice. This again takes time, and if a country really doesn't want to pass that law, it can usually still get away with it by paying a fine ; e.g. France has been in violation of the European hunt opening dates directives for years and there is no sign of it changing anytime soon.
This is just an overview of this awfully long and complicated bureaucratic process, I'm sure I forgot about several steps. This is one of the reasons I think that the current EU "constitution" sucks big time, another one being that even though those European Commission have very extended powers, no EU citizen ever appointed them for the job. We only get to vote for members of the weak "consultative" European Parliament. Calling that system a democray/republic is a joke !
Back on topic : as other posters already pointed out, one major flaw of this directive is that it only applies to "financial services" spam. A more general directive about unsollicited e-mail is expected to be discussed next year ; if it decides for "opt-out", the "financial services" directive will be rendered irrelevant. Given the track of "brilliant" technological laws of the EU, this is NOT impossible.
My point : if you're a EU citizen who wants spam to be outlawed, you're probably better off petitioning your own government rather than waiting for the European commissioners to get that one right. Even if the EC finally requires your national legislation to be changed, by the time it finally happens you will have enjoyed several years of outlawed spamming. Whether anti-spam legislation is an effective solution to this problem is another matter.
Actually the systems of differential equations do not have
to be large for chaos theory to apply. The point is
that a chaotic system has no linear solution.
Not only that, but they were also "forced" (or "strongly
advised") by the British authoririties (IIRC) to realease
their album "Blue Lines" under the name "Massive". I wonder
how they handled metal bands whose names are for example "Annihilator"
"Massacra" "Slayer" or "Agressive Agrikultor":D
Well I saw an interview on French tv that might be relevant :
the interviewee has responsibilities in French counter-terrorism
organizations and as such has frequent contacts with his American equivalents.
What he said basically amounts to this:
All western intelligence services and especially Americans were expecting "something" to happen, however:
They were NOT thinking about attacks within the American territory e.g., they were expecting something along the lines of the former bombings
of US embassies.
They were worried about some kind
of "high-tech" attack - trying to prevent biological/chemical or even nuclear attacks, and not thinking that something rather "low-tech" like what happened was possible.
Of course this information comes from an indirect source
so it should be taken with a grain of salt.
Look how bad, unreadable and unusable the big portals $
have got. Yet, guess who gets the most hits ? The user-nightmares portals.
This is obviously so because clueless new Internet
users don't know how to look for information without, or because their
browser's startpage defaults to BiGPoRtaL.com, whatever. My point is, if the biggies start
to use the "annoying" (to say the least...) advertisement technology described in the article, we're
in for some interesting fun. My opinion is that the average luser of these would
actually be annoyed by this crap, but is too sheepy/clueless
to start looking for an alternative solution.
Exactly what I thought when I first read that article. Here in France it's exactly the same, maybe even worse since
France Telecom still has monopoly over local phonelines (e.g.) all good ole modem users.
Friends in Germany and Spain tell me they suffer the
same...
I thought the EU had called for the end of state telco monopolies
years ago ? They really need to be told again that it's time
for them to go home and adapt to competition, instead
of trying to find new creative ways to screw their competitors
and their captive customers.
I don't really like the EU - having some new unelected
governement over my already oppressive French governement scares me-
but I think they might be the only one that could make things change ;
obviously our local governements benefit a lot from
this dumb situation.
All right, but did anybody ever get forced to use
the window paradigm in their GUI, just because it
was not patented by Xerox ? Nowadays it's more or
less compulsary to have windows (not Windows:) )
in your GUI, because people are used to it ; but
back in the days when GUIs weren't commonplace,
everybody could develop radically different GUIs
and still hope that it would get widely used. Of course
it was much easier to just borrow some ideas to
the Xerox PARC design, since it was not patented,
but still...
My guess is that there aren't that many different,
more efficient alternatives to windowed GUIs. If
you disagree, please provide references to those
"dream UIs" I don't know about, I'd like to give it
a try...
This is basically what the evil French censorship law says : you're allowed to sell "My Kampf", but you can't sell it without a proper disclaimer.
The two organizations who sue Yahoo have never considered such a solution. They're not honestly trying to fight the Nazi ideology, they're seeking publicity.
Simple answer : because the two organizations that started this decided so. This is no French gov't conspiracy to censor the Internet as everybody here in/. seems to think.
It's obvious that these NFP orgs (Int. League against Racism and Antisemitism, Union of French Students - UEJF) are seeking publicity, and nothing else. They can't be stupid enough as to think that they might succeed in censoring the entire Internet with rulings made in France. Or can they ?
OTOH, expect more of this from UEJF ; as a friend who used to be a member told me, their leaders are mostly law school students who will sue everything on sight to "practice" what they learn...
What's their Intellectual Property there ? Thinking about Linux of course...
although it's quite clear that developping the Linux kernel was NOT a "work for hire", I'm quite sure that Linus must have used the ressources
of the university of Helsinki at some point. Under
the policy of many universities as I understand them (like mine for starters)
, this should make the Linux kernel intellectual property of the school... let's all hope they're
fine with having their code GPL'd!!
Of course I'm joking there, but it raises interesting questions, like is there a threshold in the use of the school's ressources above which you have to give them the copyright of your code/work, or do you have to refrain from using any of their ressources to be sure to keep the control of your work ?
I don't know, Linus must have thought this out at some point ;
where's/. "Ask Linus" section ?:-)
Are the Electoral College votes kept secret ? If they're not, I highly doubt that one of them may switch their vote. Assuming these electors are party members, vote switching equals political death for any elector who'd commit it. Hard to imagine the man being supported by the party he helped losing the presidence in any future election ! The only thing left for him would then be to join the other side, but who likes to have a traitor on his side ?
Just my 0.02 euro (not a lot of money these days:-) )
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed if your average pimpy-faced computer nerd is 16, he doesn't get to vote very often. In fact he doesn't get to vote at all. Or I'm mistaken about the minimun American voting age.
... but I think this guy has a point. OK, there's a lot of PR crap in this essay, such as calling the way newly found vulnerabilities are handled by the "security community" (whatever that is)information anarchy.
:)
Still, I think that it is true that "exploit howtos" released by security sites DOES help malicious hackers to create their evil stuff. When the vulnerability is a default config problem that admins can fix themselves, then fine, it is their responability to keep up to date with this information. But sometimes the vulnerability can only be fixed by a patch, and because of the proprietary nature of MS software, the patch can only come from MS itself.
In that case I think it would be better to inform MS and wait for the patch... but that's just what should happen in an ideal world. The problem is that MS is notorious for NOT fixing vulnerabilities of which they are aware. This is bad ; MS software will keep on being exploited until this changes. However I do not thing that the "let's release this information so that it will get exploited and them bastards wille be forced to fix it" attitude is a very responsible way to handle it. Innocent bystanders will be hurt because of Redmond's lazyness, and I do not think that this is fair. Just because people run MS servers does not mean that they deserve to get cracked.
OTOH publishing that information does also have its good sides. For example it is the only way admins can check whether they are vulnerable to a specific attack. My point is that determining the proper way to handle information about newly found security holes is a complex issue ; just yelling "arrgh MS ! arrgh evil!" won't make it any simpler.
And please quit pretending this essay is anti-free-speech. Culp is arguing that the way security sites release information about exploit is bad, not that the sites ought to be censored, banned or whatever. Criticizing some form of speech is not equivalent to demanding that it be censored. Even if the critic works for Microsoft
Maybe, ti just might be that the hackers and crackers are just not "evil" as they are made out.
I think the theory outlined in this 1985 paper about "hackers" (ok, crackers) ethics is still valid : these are mostly young teenagers whose idea of what's wrong and what's right isn't better or worse than that of most kids this age. The author argues that kids breaking into a computer system are at the same level of moral developement as other kids hot-wiring a car for a joyride. Both are just immature vandals, but the thing is that damage caused by computer vandalism is usually much worse.
Hey, me I'm not like these 2600 7am3rz, I know what Babbage is : it's a programming language. Kidz these days don't even know about the pioneering concept of "artificial stupidity". How sad.
That's the point, man. They want the new anti-terrorism laws
amended so they can do it WITHOUT being charged for
terrorism. (reading the article is good for you)
Riiight, this guy calling your joke unfunny means
that he is trying to deprive you of your constitutional rights ?
Give me a break ! You better watch out for the big bad censors then,
'cause it didn't make me laugh either.
yen-dollar updated exchange rate can be found here. :)
The true hacker does the math himself
Many "New-Agers" might classify as none. They have beliefs, but the beliefs are not codified by authority or community.
Not in this census, since "New Age" has its own entry in the list. Along with "rationalist", "realist", "internationalist", "monk" and other stuff that hardly qualifies as religion.
My answers to the various questions seen as relevant in this thread:
- 1) Do you believe that there is a god ?
- 2) Do you believe that there is no god ?
- 3) Do you believe that these questions can be answered
to using logics ?
- 4) Do you care about those question ?
So what is my affiliation ? Agnostic, atheist or jedi knight ?No
No
No
Not really.
But the rebel troups would never have killed
thousands of totally innocent people for their cause
Alas ! I could've done with a little more collateral
damage to, say, ewoks for example.
Yes this post may seem rude in the light of current
events, but I didn't start that stupid SW paralel. I
actually cheer when the one ewok dies in Ep. VI, I
never cheer when I see a real person die (even if it's
on tv).
reality != fiction
...KDE & Gnome aren't window managers but desktop environnements.
And the finder is yet something else (I'll leave to
Mac users to explain exactly what that thing is). I
know this rebuttal is annoying but hey, can't compare
apple to orange as they say !
Who's talking about another window-manager project besides you ?
Oh yes it sure is ! As I understand it, the directive next needs to be approved by the European Parliament which has a history of favoring "opt-out" over "opt-in" ("before the end of this year" probably means "not before next year"). If it is approved, the directive would then become "European law", i.e. UE countries will be required to pass it onto their national legislations ; however there usually is a rather long transitional period during which they cannot be prosecuted for not complying with the directive (1+ years transitional periods are common). If a country doesn't comply with the directive at the end of the transitional period, it may then be prosecuted by the European Court of Justice. This again takes time, and if a country really doesn't want to pass that law, it can usually still get away with it by paying a fine ; e.g. France has been in violation of the European hunt opening dates directives for years and there is no sign of it changing anytime soon.
This is just an overview of this awfully long and complicated bureaucratic process, I'm sure I forgot about several steps. This is one of the reasons I think that the current EU "constitution" sucks big time, another one being that even though those European Commission have very extended powers, no EU citizen ever appointed them for the job. We only get to vote for members of the weak "consultative" European Parliament. Calling that system a democray/republic is a joke !
Back on topic : as other posters already pointed out, one major flaw of this directive is that it only applies to "financial services" spam. A more general directive about unsollicited e-mail is expected to be discussed next year ; if it decides for "opt-out", the "financial services" directive will be rendered irrelevant. Given the track of "brilliant" technological laws of the EU, this is NOT impossible.
My point : if you're a EU citizen who wants spam to be outlawed, you're probably better off petitioning your own government rather than waiting for the European commissioners to get that one right. Even if the EC finally requires your national legislation to be changed, by the time it finally happens you will have enjoyed several years of outlawed spamming. Whether anti-spam legislation is an effective solution to this problem is another matter.
Actually the systems of differential equations do not have
to be large for chaos theory to apply. The point is
that a chaotic system has no linear solution.
sophisticated new digital marketing research ?
Hmmm... does anyone else read this as a new euphemism for spam ?
Not only that, but they were also "forced" (or "strongly :D
advised") by the British authoririties (IIRC) to realease
their album "Blue Lines" under the name "Massive". I wonder
how they handled metal bands whose names are for example "Annihilator"
"Massacra" "Slayer" or "Agressive Agrikultor"
-
All western intelligence services and especially Americans were expecting "something" to happen, however
: - They were NOT thinking about attacks within the American territory e.g., they were expecting something along the lines of the former bombings
of US embassies.
- They were worried about some kind
of "high-tech" attack - trying to prevent biological/chemical or even nuclear attacks, and not thinking that something rather "low-tech" like what happened was possible.
Of course this information comes from an indirect source so it should be taken with a grain of salt.Look how bad, unreadable and unusable the big portals $ have got. Yet, guess who gets the most hits ? The user-nightmares portals.
This is obviously so because clueless new Internet users don't know how to look for information without, or because their browser's startpage defaults to BiGPoRtaL.com, whatever. My point is, if the biggies start to use the "annoying" (to say the least...) advertisement technology described in the article, we're in for some interesting fun. My opinion is that the average luser of these would actually be annoyed by this crap, but is too sheepy/clueless to start looking for an alternative solution.
I guess this is happening all over Europe.
Exactly what I thought when I first read that article. Here in France it's exactly the same, maybe even worse since France Telecom still has monopoly over local phonelines (e.g.) all good ole modem users. Friends in Germany and Spain tell me they suffer the same...
I thought the EU had called for the end of state telco monopolies years ago ? They really need to be told again that it's time for them to go home and adapt to competition, instead of trying to find new creative ways to screw their competitors and their captive customers.
I don't really like the EU - having some new unelected governement over my already oppressive French governement scares me- but I think they might be the only one that could make things change ; obviously our local governements benefit a lot from this dumb situation.
All right, but did anybody ever get forced to use the window paradigm in their GUI, just because it was not patented by Xerox ? Nowadays it's more or less compulsary to have windows (not Windows :) )
in your GUI, because people are used to it ; but
back in the days when GUIs weren't commonplace,
everybody could develop radically different GUIs
and still hope that it would get widely used. Of course
it was much easier to just borrow some ideas to
the Xerox PARC design, since it was not patented,
but still...
My guess is that there aren't that many different, more efficient alternatives to windowed GUIs. If you disagree, please provide references to those "dream UIs" I don't know about, I'd like to give it a try...
That's interesting. Your theory is that this judge wants to ban Nazi items from Yahoo auctions because it might annoy the Germans ?
Newsflash : Hitler lost the war, Germany is NOT a Nazi country ; I really don't see why this might make the German gov't unhappy.
This is basically what the evil French censorship law says : you're allowed to sell "My Kampf", but you can't sell it without a proper disclaimer.
The two organizations who sue Yahoo have never considered such a solution. They're not honestly trying to fight the Nazi ideology, they're seeking publicity.
Why are they stopping with Yahoo?
/. seems to think.
Simple answer : because the two organizations that started this decided so. This is no French gov't conspiracy to censor the Internet as everybody here in
It's obvious that these NFP orgs (Int. League against Racism and Antisemitism, Union of French Students - UEJF) are seeking publicity, and nothing else. They can't be stupid enough as to think that they might succeed in censoring the entire Internet with rulings made in France. Or can they ?
OTOH, expect more of this from UEJF ; as a friend who used to be a member told me, their leaders are mostly law school students who will sue everything on sight to "practice" what they learn...
What's their Intellectual Property there ? Thinking about Linux of course... although it's quite clear that developping the Linux kernel was NOT a "work for hire", I'm quite sure that Linus must have used the ressources of the university of Helsinki at some point. Under the policy of many universities as I understand them (like mine for starters) , this should make the Linux kernel intellectual property of the school... let's all hope they're fine with having their code GPL'd!!
/. "Ask Linus" section ? :-)
Of course I'm joking there, but it raises interesting questions, like is there a threshold in the use of the school's ressources above which you have to give them the copyright of your code/work, or do you have to refrain from using any of their ressources to be sure to keep the control of your work ?
I don't know, Linus must have thought this out at some point ; where's
Are the Electoral College votes kept secret ? If they're not, I highly doubt that one of them may switch their vote. Assuming these electors are party members, vote switching equals political death for any elector who'd commit it. Hard to imagine the man being supported by the party he helped losing the presidence in any future election ! The only thing left for him would then be to join the other side, but who likes to have a traitor on his side ? Just my 0.02 euro (not a lot of money these days :-) )