I have a notebook. It goes with me everywhere. So do my games.
Dragon Age: Origins is annoying enough, having to have the CD, and being denied access to "bonus features" if I can't be online, but I can live with that - if I'm careful, and don't end up relying on "bonus features" on any key game save. But always-online simply means I won't buy the game, because it's useless to me. I'll be damned if I have to buy a 3G card or pay for airport / airline wifi just to play games while travelling. And internationally - no effing way.
Yeah, obviously I'm not part of the target demographic. It's a long time since I was 20, and I don't spend the evenings holed up in my room in my mom's house. But I'd have thought notebook-toting professionals weren't an insignificant group.
Never mind, this is explicitly a part of DMCA, it seems. So I believe the conclusions are valid, that there's a huge free speech impact of DMCA on search engines, but what the heck, we know that DMCA is designed to counter free speech.
This seems like a very bad move on Google's part. It makes them, Google, responsible for the contents of the pages they link to. A DMCA action is brought against the content provider; in accepting it, Google is accepting the Scientologists' premise that the links they are generating are copyrighted.
It seems to me this opens the door for any organization to challenge competitor's links on Google, especially given that filing fraudulent DMCA actions has no penalty. Or for any corporation to stifle criticism by denying the little guy access to links.
The way I read DMCA, Heldal shouldn't be responding to Google, as they're not his ISP or ICP, they're not hosting his content at all. Google should be filing their own counter-notification, saying "these are only links, and they are not copyrighted". It's possible that the summaries of each page could be actionable, but I would have expected them to be "fair use".
Under Google's reading, any controversial website will now not only have to file counter-notifications to fraudulent DMCA claims against it, but counter-notifications to claims against any site which may link to it. Quite an effective chilling mechanism.
IANAL, of course. I have, however, been the target of a fraudulent Scientology DMCA action.
Especially if the computer is in a place you can see, which is a good suggestion of Jamie's. Those times that she gets to a porno site, whether deliberately or accidentally, it is horribly embarassing to a kid not to be able to get back out of it. So instead of leaving her locked into those insane sites that won't let you leave, disable JavaScript and give her the option of exiting gracefully.
I am also a father, of a kid who happens to be in the same school as Sean. My son knows Sean, says he's "cool", and that Katz was right on about the merciless torment.
My son is now 6' 1" and no easy target for bullies. But in the past, he's had problems, and I did try to solve them with his teachers. No dice. Kids must work out their problems between themselves. And that resolution must not involve teachers, that's "tattling", and is apparently worse than bullying in the current educational philosophy. So the only solution is STFU and take it.
I have a friend whose daughter is a year younger than my son, and was in a nearby school district. She was stabbed by a kid who had been tormenting her for months. She had tried involving the teachers, but the "no tattling" rule applied. After the stabbing the kid was suspended - for somewhere around a month, IIRC - and when he returned, the verbal abuse began again, and again, the teachers weren't interested. She's now in a private school.
Now, think for a moment. When did you last hear of a school shooting where no-one knew that there was something up? Kids hear things, they may take them quite seriously, but after a decade of being told to sit down and shut up, who the hell are they going to tell?
And if a kid is bullied into serious depression, is he really going to look for help before he offs himself, when he's been told for a decade that help isn't going to happen?
There's good reason to try to guide kids away from "tattling" for trivial offences and from becoming dependent on teachers to solve their problems. But wilfully ignoring real problems not only leads to the craziness of school violence and suicide, it also leads to keeping the possibility of school violence and suicide hidden until the death toll mounts.
I don't know Patrick. But I can not fault him for not having been able to acheive results that I also sought.
I hate to see this misinformation modded up. Equifax does not require DOS, Windows, or M-LINK, whatever that is.
I had no trouble setting up an Equifax certificate with Apache 1.3.11 (now 1.1.14 with no issues) and mod_ssl. Their instructions were clear, and everything worked with no problem.
Their customer support followed up to be sure I made everything work.
Indeed... this is an about face from the AOL of the days of the cozy chats with Feebees. Or maybe it isn't, maybe it's just the fact that they're getting swamped with subpoenas. Certainly DMCA gives pretty much anyone the right to (or at least, the uncontestable ability) to violate anonymity with little or no cause.
This isn't a DMCA action, apparently, so it may be a better case for AOL to start trying to turn back the tide.
It says 1/3 of all applications. That may be true, because most of them are hacked-together pieces of junk that may be in use at one site or another. All you need is "JavaScript for Dummies" and a couple of hours and you can -- at least you can believe that you can -- put together a "shopping cart" application.
In the real world, there are a small number of applications in large scale use, and the custom applications of the major retailers are... well, if 30 percent of them allow user-entered data, I've gotten unlucky...
So, non-US divisions selling to non-US customers somehow harms US customers? That's an... ummm, interesting philosophy.
Since the premise, observations ("purchase of Avery Brooks"? he's an actor, for God's sake) and conclusions are bogus, I can only assume that what you're really objecting to is IBM permitting a customer to use... eeek!!! Linux.
Read Ira Levin's "Corporate Espionage : What It Is, Why It Is Happening in Your Company, What You Must Do About It" (ISBN 0761508406). It's an excellent and very readable book about how corporate spies operate and how to guard against them. Protecting what's on your hard disk is only a small part of information security. It will be a rare executive who'll submit to using an encrypted filesystem, and even if he does, you probably have unencrypted backups, paper printouts and all kinds of other stuff that a corporate spy will love.
And it isn't only computer information, a good spy can use social engineering better than most hackers, knows when to go garbage diving, and what records that you'd normally consider insensitive actually reveal critical inside information.
Read the book if you care about security, and if you don't... read the book and you will:-)
Seems to me the most accurate count could be had from the advertising services a major site uses. DoubleClick could get an actual count, without requiring sampling, by counting referrals to their ads. Their obnoxious cookies would make an estimate of unique visitors quite good, too. So they could give the same statistics as the audited site, with some measure of third-party independence.
'Course, DoubleClick can be fooled by having cookies disabled, a JunkBuster proxy, or whatever, but I'd imagine at this point only a tiny percentage of users are sufficiently clued to use JunkBuster or Cookie Pal. Certainly too few to make the count less accurate than sampling.
Lessee... what's the best way to get free software accepted? Flame the vendors! That's the ticket! Flame 'em. Post your gripes to Slashdot so everyone else will flame 'em too. Tell 'em they suck. Threaten to sue 'em. NO GPL VIOLATORS ALLOWED!
Ummm, what, they may have made a mistake? That the software is actually under GPL, and the license is erroneous? It *doesn't matter*. Free software is way too important to tolerate mistakes. Flame 'em.
Uh... perhaps they want to make a profit on it? Perhaps it isn't a derived work, perhaps it only *runs on* Linux? No matter. Flame 'em. Commercial software sucks. Only free software is good enough to run on free OSs.
Flame the vendors, flame the reviewers, flame the journalists who have this idiotic idea that free software devotees are a gaggle of flaming geeks. That'll convince them that free software is mature (like its promoters) and worth supporting.
DMCA gives pretty much anyone with sufficiently deep pockets the ability (note, I didn't say "right") to shut down access to any site for any reason at any point of connectivity.
There is supposed to be an escalating mechanism to prevent this happening, but there's no enforcement, and if you pay your lawyers enough, they can threaten every connectivity provider. Now, as an ICP, do you cut a feed - especially to a site that's in legal trouble, and unlikely to take action against you - or face Sony in court?
This has happened to me.
A certain nameless California law firm, likely representing a certain nameless cult based mainly in California and Clearwater, FL, has had my ICP cut routing to my site using a DMCA threat. Because they totally skipped the part about requesting that I take down a particular page (which would have given the site's owner the right to file a counter-notification) and skipped the part about informing my ISP, they gave me no chance to resolve the problem. Instead, they threatened my ICP, who immediately buckled and turned my IP off in their router. Which, of course, killed not only the site in question, but all other sites hosted at the same IP (likely part of their reason, since another site was more topical, more embarrassing, and less easy to attack with DMCA)*.
Obviously the DMCA mechanism was violated. But as long as the nameless law firm claimed to have filed in good faith**, the ICP has little choice. In my case, when they realized the law firm was not acting in good faith, they developed some backbone. But if the law firm had chosen to divert a tiny percentage of the group's resources at them, they'd have been in trouble, and even though I would have had legal redress, it would have been damned expensive for me and for the ICP.
Who, in a similar situation, is likely to go up against Sony?
* - No-one notified me, neither the law firm nor the ICP. I only discovered when routing to one particular IP was erratic. I moved the sites, and within a day, the problem moved with the IP. After the same thing happened again, we finally got through the ranks of the clueless at the ICP to someone who knew why they were deliberately breaking my connectivity.
** - Since when did "Under Penalty Of Perjury" have any significance either to the cult of S<cough, cough>y or the major record labels?
Second, s11.org is in Oz. (I checked the IP block of www.s11.org, and it's served by Telestra, so it doesn't appear to be an Oz site based on Smith's UK server.)
These together make it hard to see why Smith has any involvement.
Third, to get to s11.org took more than an Internic entry. It took a name server that resolved nike.com to s11.org which was pointed to by the bogus NSI record.
Fourth, s11.org's site is on a named virtual host. If someone provided DNS without s11's knowledge, nike.com would have resolved to "GreenNet Australia", which is the default.
It seems that the only solution to satisfy all of these conditions is that s11.org (and / or GreenNet) were involved up to their eyeballs, since the VirtualHost record could only have been created on their site. Obviously they wouldn't have done that had the DNS not pointed to them, and to point a name server to themselves, they'd have had to control the Internic record.
Unless a) someone else hacked Internic and pointed the name server to s11, and, seeing the requests, they added the VirtualHost opportunistically. Or b) GreenNet was also hacked.
In any case, I don't see Smith's involvement here, unless he was the one to set up the name service for a) above.
I've transferred all my regs from NSI to Tucows mainly because of the ease of domain hijacking, and NSI's security is certainly the source of this problem. But I'm totally unconvinced that it happened as the Wired reported presented.
Not really ironic, Brock Meeks has been seen to be quite uncomplimentary on occasion, and is one of the few journalists of any covering the MS trial to challenge the MS FUD.
On the surface, Morgenthal raises good points. These seem to be:
It may not be possible for Corporation X to have its changes integrated into Linux
Linux has fewer provided services and lower interoperability than NT
SMP Linux lags SMP NT
With it's Unix base, Linux is harder to administer than NT
At the risk of reiterating what most Slashdotters already know, I'd like to comment on this. BTW, none of the below is meant as a slight against FreeBSD or any other open source OS. Linux is the open source environment with which I'm most familiar - and of course, the focus of Morgenthal's article.
I'm not aware of any process whereby a corporation can have its changes integrated into NT. Nor any other commercial OS, for that matter.
On the other hand, with Linux,
such changes are possible, and if they make sense to the project at large, will be included
modules allow the OS to be extended without kernel modification
Linux services are certainly more loosely coupled than those from Microsoft. I can't off-hand think of anything which is missing from a Linux distribution, including a choice of database servers, but it's true that for a particular application, it might be necessary to work with a number of third-party components to meet the same level of integration.
On the other hand, once this integration is achieved, it will not be dependent on proprietary protocols (such as Exchange), will be upgradeable at the component level, will not be as susceptible to email attacks, will be more secure and more stable. Etcetera. In a lot of integrations, these would be seen as advantages.
Also, of course, the level of interoperability and integration is increasing exponentially, particularly with Gnome, KDE2, CORBA-compliant applications - and this integration is happening with multiple vendor support.
Linux SMP, except in some narrow benchmarks, has held its own against NT for some while. Until recently, multiprocessor NT systems have been barely more effective than a single processor version. At the same time, Linux SMP has been becoming more efficient; it may be that NT is currently outperforming Linux SMP, though I suspect this theory is largely based on the Mindcraft test results. However, as the 2.2 kernel is being improved, that situation isn't likely to last.
At the same time, of course, NT scales beautifully -- to a bigger, faster, Intel processor, while Linux scales to faster machines and upcoming processors. SMP addresses performance, not integration, and in this area, Pentium-specific NT isn't likely to maintain a lead.
I would submit that someone who claims NT is easier to administer than Unix has not spent sufficient time learning one or the other environment. NT isn't easier, it's prettier.
Going beyond basic configuration becomes very hard very quickly with NT, as the menu/dialog-driven utilities allow limited selections, and have limited debugging options. In fact, one of the most useful tools for administering an NT network is a Linux box with Samba and tcpdump.
A medium sized company's networking needs may be able to be met by NT, but configuration management requires every bit as much of a networking guru as the equivalent *n*x network, and troubleshooting can be far harder.
I'm puzzled by the comments of Linux's inferiority to the Big Boys' Unixes - Linux ease of configuration and use seems to compare very favorably to AIX, HP-UX, etc.
Finally, Morgenthal makes an off-hand comment which I believe speaks to his motivation. Linux certainly began as s student's project. To speak of it "going astray" is to make a perjorative comment about its rate of increase. "Becoming too big to be manageable" might have been a fair comment, though I'd disagree with it. But to speak of an OS which is already extremely reliable, well-supported and widely used as "going astray" reveals a personal bias against Linux which at least would give an impression that the article is designed as FUD rather than an impartial analysis.
Slashdot Mirror
Threatening criminal action for a frivolous cause also seems like marvelous fodder for a RICO case.
I have a notebook. It goes with me everywhere. So do my games.
Dragon Age: Origins is annoying enough, having to have the CD, and being denied access to "bonus features" if I can't be online, but I can live with that - if I'm careful, and don't end up relying on "bonus features" on any key game save. But always-online simply means I won't buy the game, because it's useless to me. I'll be damned if I have to buy a 3G card or pay for airport / airline wifi just to play games while travelling. And internationally - no effing way.
Yeah, obviously I'm not part of the target demographic. It's a long time since I was 20, and I don't spend the evenings holed up in my room in my mom's house. But I'd have thought notebook-toting professionals weren't an insignificant group.
Most of the languages are referenced allegorically, while Perl's usage is literal.
Never mind, this is explicitly a part of DMCA, it seems. So I believe the conclusions are valid, that there's a huge free speech impact of DMCA on search engines, but what the heck, we know that DMCA is designed to counter free speech.
This seems like a very bad move on Google's part. It makes them, Google, responsible for the contents of the pages they link to. A DMCA action is brought against the content provider; in accepting it, Google is accepting the Scientologists' premise that the links they are generating are copyrighted.
It seems to me this opens the door for any organization to challenge competitor's links on Google, especially given that filing fraudulent DMCA actions has no penalty. Or for any corporation to stifle criticism by denying the little guy access to links.
The way I read DMCA, Heldal shouldn't be responding to Google, as they're not his ISP or ICP, they're not hosting his content at all. Google should be filing their own counter-notification, saying "these are only links, and they are not copyrighted". It's possible that the summaries of each page could be actionable, but I would have expected them to be "fair use".
Under Google's reading, any controversial website will now not only have to file counter-notifications to fraudulent DMCA claims against it, but counter-notifications to claims against any site which may link to it. Quite an effective chilling mechanism.
IANAL, of course. I have, however, been the target of a fraudulent Scientology DMCA action.
Especially if the computer is in a place you can see, which is a good suggestion of Jamie's. Those times that she gets to a porno site, whether deliberately or accidentally, it is horribly embarassing to a kid not to be able to get back out of it. So instead of leaving her locked into those insane sites that won't let you leave, disable JavaScript and give her the option of exiting gracefully.
My son is now 6' 1" and no easy target for bullies. But in the past, he's had problems, and I did try to solve them with his teachers. No dice. Kids must work out their problems between themselves. And that resolution must not involve teachers, that's "tattling", and is apparently worse than bullying in the current educational philosophy. So the only solution is STFU and take it.
I have a friend whose daughter is a year younger than my son, and was in a nearby school district. She was stabbed by a kid who had been tormenting her for months. She had tried involving the teachers, but the "no tattling" rule applied. After the stabbing the kid was suspended - for somewhere around a month, IIRC - and when he returned, the verbal abuse began again, and again, the teachers weren't interested. She's now in a private school.
Now, think for a moment. When did you last hear of a school shooting where no-one knew that there was something up? Kids hear things, they may take them quite seriously, but after a decade of being told to sit down and shut up, who the hell are they going to tell?
And if a kid is bullied into serious depression, is he really going to look for help before he offs himself, when he's been told for a decade that help isn't going to happen?
There's good reason to try to guide kids away from "tattling" for trivial offences and from becoming dependent on teachers to solve their problems. But wilfully ignoring real problems not only leads to the craziness of school violence and suicide, it also leads to keeping the possibility of school violence and suicide hidden until the death toll mounts.
I don't know Patrick. But I can not fault him for not having been able to acheive results that I also sought.
I had no trouble setting up an Equifax certificate with Apache 1.3.11 (now 1.1.14 with no issues) and mod_ssl. Their instructions were clear, and everything worked with no problem.
Their customer support followed up to be sure I made everything work.
This isn't a DMCA action, apparently, so it may be a better case for AOL to start trying to turn back the tide.
In the real world, there are a small number of applications in large scale use, and the custom applications of the major retailers are... well, if 30 percent of them allow user-entered data, I've gotten unlucky...
This is a self-serving scare story.
Since the premise, observations ("purchase of Avery Brooks"? he's an actor, for God's sake) and conclusions are bogus, I can only assume that what you're really objecting to is IBM permitting a customer to use... eeek!!! Linux.
And it isn't only computer information, a good spy can use social engineering better than most hackers, knows when to go garbage diving, and what records that you'd normally consider insensitive actually reveal critical inside information.
Read the book if you care about security, and if you don't... read the book and you will :-)
'Course, DoubleClick can be fooled by having cookies disabled, a JunkBuster proxy, or whatever, but I'd imagine at this point only a tiny percentage of users are sufficiently clued to use JunkBuster or Cookie Pal. Certainly too few to make the count less accurate than sampling.
Ummm, what, they may have made a mistake? That the software is actually under GPL, and the license is erroneous? It *doesn't matter*. Free software is way too important to tolerate mistakes. Flame 'em.
Uh... perhaps they want to make a profit on it? Perhaps it isn't a derived work, perhaps it only *runs on* Linux? No matter. Flame 'em. Commercial software sucks. Only free software is good enough to run on free OSs.
Flame the vendors, flame the reviewers, flame the journalists who have this idiotic idea that free software devotees are a gaggle of flaming geeks. That'll convince them that free software is mature (like its promoters) and worth supporting.
<sigh>
There is supposed to be an escalating mechanism to prevent this happening, but there's no enforcement, and if you pay your lawyers enough, they can threaten every connectivity provider. Now, as an ICP, do you cut a feed - especially to a site that's in legal trouble, and unlikely to take action against you - or face Sony in court?
This has happened to me.
A certain nameless California law firm, likely representing a certain nameless cult based mainly in California and Clearwater, FL, has had my ICP cut routing to my site using a DMCA threat. Because they totally skipped the part about requesting that I take down a particular page (which would have given the site's owner the right to file a counter-notification) and skipped the part about informing my ISP, they gave me no chance to resolve the problem. Instead, they threatened my ICP, who immediately buckled and turned my IP off in their router. Which, of course, killed not only the site in question, but all other sites hosted at the same IP (likely part of their reason, since another site was more topical, more embarrassing, and less easy to attack with DMCA)*.
Obviously the DMCA mechanism was violated. But as long as the nameless law firm claimed to have filed in good faith**, the ICP has little choice. In my case, when they realized the law firm was not acting in good faith, they developed some backbone. But if the law firm had chosen to divert a tiny percentage of the group's resources at them, they'd have been in trouble, and even though I would have had legal redress, it would have been damned expensive for me and for the ICP.
Who, in a similar situation, is likely to go up against Sony?
First, Smith is in the UK (apparently).
Second, s11.org is in Oz. (I checked the IP block of www.s11.org, and it's served by Telestra, so it doesn't appear to be an Oz site based on Smith's UK server.)
These together make it hard to see why Smith has any involvement.
Third, to get to s11.org took more than an Internic entry. It took a name server that resolved nike.com to s11.org which was pointed to by the bogus NSI record.
Fourth, s11.org's site is on a named virtual host. If someone provided DNS without s11's knowledge, nike.com would have resolved to "GreenNet Australia", which is the default.
It seems that the only solution to satisfy all of these conditions is that s11.org (and / or GreenNet) were involved up to their eyeballs, since the VirtualHost record could only have been created on their site. Obviously they wouldn't have done that had the DNS not pointed to them, and to point a name server to themselves, they'd have had to control the Internic record.
Unless a) someone else hacked Internic and pointed the name server to s11, and, seeing the requests, they added the VirtualHost opportunistically. Or b) GreenNet was also hacked.
In any case, I don't see Smith's involvement here, unless he was the one to set up the name service for a) above.
I've transferred all my regs from NSI to Tucows mainly because of the ease of domain hijacking, and NSI's security is certainly the source of this problem. But I'm totally unconvinced that it happened as the Wired reported presented.
Not really ironic, Brock Meeks has been seen to be quite uncomplimentary on occasion, and is one of the few journalists of any covering the MS trial to challenge the MS FUD.
At the risk of reiterating what most Slashdotters already know, I'd like to comment on this. BTW, none of the below is meant as a slight against FreeBSD or any other open source OS. Linux is the open source environment with which I'm most familiar - and of course, the focus of Morgenthal's article.
On the other hand, with Linux,
On the other hand, once this integration is achieved, it will not be dependent on proprietary protocols (such as Exchange), will be upgradeable at the component level, will not be as susceptible to email attacks, will be more secure and more stable. Etcetera. In a lot of integrations, these would be seen as advantages.
Also, of course, the level of interoperability and integration is increasing exponentially, particularly with Gnome, KDE2, CORBA-compliant applications - and this integration is happening with multiple vendor support.
At the same time, of course, NT scales beautifully -- to a bigger, faster, Intel processor, while Linux scales to faster machines and upcoming processors. SMP addresses performance, not integration, and in this area, Pentium-specific NT isn't likely to maintain a lead.
Going beyond basic configuration becomes very hard very quickly with NT, as the menu/dialog-driven utilities allow limited selections, and have limited debugging options. In fact, one of the most useful tools for administering an NT network is a Linux box with Samba and tcpdump.
A medium sized company's networking needs may be able to be met by NT, but configuration management requires every bit as much of a networking guru as the equivalent *n*x network, and troubleshooting can be far harder.
I'm puzzled by the comments of Linux's inferiority to the Big Boys' Unixes - Linux ease of configuration and use seems to compare very favorably to AIX, HP-UX, etc.