I know it's legal for me to tape a TV show from the air onto VHS, DVD, or TiVo myself. I suspect it's probably legal for me to, say, loan the VHS tape to a friend so he/she can watch it as well. And now, obviously TiVo owners can send each other episodes they recorded.
How is this all different than downloading a TV episode of a p2p network? I think I remember hearing of people getting DMCA notices for doing exactly that.
Anyone know where the line is in this case?
Re:where are the IPv6 native ISPs?
on
IPv6 is Here
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's the classic chicken-and-egg problem. ISPs know that it will take quite a bit of up-front cash to convert their routers to IPv6. I don't even know to what extent v6 backbone routers exist, but I'd bet their pricey.
Right now.. really the only people that can use v6 are the BSD/Linux folks, as well as (I think) OSX. That's like 5% of the entire Internet desktop users, according to Google's Zeitgeist.
It's a scary thought.. but really, I think critical-mass v6 adoption rests solely on the shoulders of Microsoft at this point. We had better pray that Longhorn comes with it enabled (and that's like 2-3 years from now, at the earliest). If that happens though, it's a sure bet that Linksys et al. as well as lots of ISPs will be on board. I think we'll be waiting a while yet myself, though.
I was looking at Secunia's Virus Info Page.. right under the graph it says "Based on Information delivered by BullGuard".
That set off a few bells... Know what BullGuard is? It's spyware that happens to come bundled with Kazaa. Amusingly, you can see BullGuard on Kazaa's *cough*
No Spyware Policy Page, where they try to pretend that their bundled software isn't spyware.
With all this talk about it being important to hit the big boys instead of just small fry spammers... I was just googling when I saw the AdSense link to this company that sells, essentially, spamming lists.
They've got a snappy site design, and obviously shelled out enough to be a top google hit, so they're obviously doing well for themselves. Call them at 1-800-395-7707 (number from the page) to let them know how you feel (*wink* *wink*).
When Bush was trying to rally support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- You remember.. back when everyone believed the bloated claims of Saddam's WMDs and ties to al Qaeda.. none of which has the slightest shred of evidence, to this date.
Anyway.. Bush & Co. realized that no other countries (other than our good old laptog, the UK) gave a flying crap about our grandiose plans, we started bribing small nations to join the "Coalition of the Willing". Australia was dangled promises of a free trade agreement, so they joined. Hey, what did they have to lose. Bush made similar enticements to other nations, which is why so many small nations, many of which have no standing armies at all, were in bed with us, at least nominally.
How many of you can name any other countries in our "Coalition", other than the UK (and the Aussies)? Hey.. I'll start you off! Afghanistan. No comment here. Seriously. Azerbaijain (bet they were a huge help.. next, Albania. Again, no comment. Alright, I'm stopping with the listing.
Rant Over. Vote in November, one way or the other. Sub-50% voter turnout in a democratic, educated nation with a history of close elections is pathetic.
I was at a LAN recently.. brought along an old Linux box to fiddle with, like I normally do. Got a chance to play a lot of fun games on other boxes though, like BF1942, Diablo, etc.
Anyway.. I started musing about going back to Windows after seeing everyone else's tricked out Windows-basesd gaming rigs. I realized just how -nice- a good desktop OS like win2k can feel. (I despise the eye candy in XP, and most people don't know how/why to turn it off.
First off, I think Firefox looks nice in Windows than Linux. I could never get anti-aliasing to work right, and for some reasons my fonts usually look crappy, even when I install the Windows TTF fonts.
Windows is, I still think, a good OS for a few things -- word processing (I use OpenOffice, and it's good... but I wouldn't want to have to do more than a few papers here and there with it), games -- no question there. As well as using p2p software.. just download eMule, your favorite BT client, Kazaa Lite. (Yea, there are equivalents in Linux. ) Put everything you want in the quickstart bar, maybe add some skins.. etc. And it will all look quite nice, and behave responsibly. You won't ever have to worry about hacking around text files to get a program to compile, messing with dependencies. gpoing through a 20 step process to get binary-only drivers fron Nvidia/ATI to work so that you can play a few games like UT natively, or a handful under Wine. Don't even get me started on Wine.
Having said all that.. I'm still on Linux. Here's why. First of all, I don't mind messing around a bit in Linux to get stuff to work. It's educational. I feel like I'm really learning stuff when I set up Apache the way I want it. On that note, I think Windows is a terrible choice if you're thinking of running an FTP server, web server, etc. I honestly have no clue how I would go about setting up IIS, although I imagine it's probably easy. I honestly don't know much about the guts of windows, because you're not encouraged to. On the other hand.. Linux encourages you to be able to mess with stuff like init.d config, all the config files in/etc, and so forth.
And here's another point. I can only begin to imagine how many Windows users have spyware and other crap installed. Any sane Linux user would consider this a serious problem.. it's essentialy a root-exploit from installing malicious software as root (i.e. Admin).
The free software paradigm in Linux works wonders. I trust every open source program I download, even though I'm not going to personally check the source. Yea, I'm sure it could be possible for some knucklehead to hide some malicious code in a program, but I can't remember the last time (ever?) an OSS project had that happen.
In Windows.. it's easy to do things the wrong way. Click on those popup ads telling you your computer is broadcasting an IP address, accidentally clicking "Yes" when some popup ad asks you if you want to trust software from Foo Company. Having a hole in IE exploited, and your browswer homepage changed. Being constantly forced to revert to Administrator, if you're smart enough to be running as an unpriveleged user. In Mandrake, when I made the mistake of logging into KDE as root, I was reminded many times, both by KDE and the programs (i.e. xchat) that I was doing the wrong thing.
A final note. I think every "power" Windows user needs to pirate many hundreds of dollars of software in order to have a working system -- FlashFXP, WinRAR, Newsbin, maybe AdAware/ZoneAlarm Pro,BPFtp server, CloneCD, Nero, the latest games, etc. In Linux.. you actually feel good about just using the software that some kind soul has made for you.
Just to keep things in perspective.. According to the Google Zeitgeist Linux is still at only around 1% of the desktop market share. That's roughly the same as the number of Windows 95 users. Yes, Linux users might arguably be more into high end graphics cards and games.. But if I were ATI, I'd be more focused on beating Nvidia in price and performance on Windows, with little regard to the 1% of users on Linux.
So.. keep converting desktop users to linux, and let ATI know how you feel I guess. Peace.
I'd be careful of this. My last year of high school, we had a really terrible CS teacher we all hated. We set up L0phtcrack on one of the lab computers to sniff for his windows login password. So we got his hash that day, and had some trouble cracking it at first.. we were afraid we'd have to resort to brute force. Fortunately, as a last resort, someone got a really huge dictionary file from somewhere, and one of the terms matched the password. Know what it was?
mnbvcx (look at keyboard)
I'm not sure why the dictionary had it in there, but it did. Turned out, he also used it for his email as well. We had some fun. I checked recently, and apparently he still hasn't changed his password.
Moral of the story? Maybe enforcing a 90+ day password switch isn't all that bad, and if you're admin'ing a server with many users that you need to keep secure, run regular audits on your/etc/shadow or whatever password hashes.
I've got a Gmail account (no, I won't give an invite:p) and I recently came up with the idea of forwarding all my mail from another account with a simple.procmailrc file straight to my Gmail account. I actually find Google's web interface easier and quicker to use than, say, Thunderbird, and I don't have to worry about the account ever filling up. I won't even go into the hapless users stuck on Outlook.
Anyway, especially since I've dipped my toes into the 419 world recently, a Gmail account with a TB of storage would be the perfect account to run scam-baiting, or general spam collecting, which can have a variety of purposes -- not the least of which is to refine Bayesian filtering. I know there's a place somewhere that encourages you to submit spam, I'm too lazy to look now though. I rememebr ute@ftc.gov as being one place you can forward spam too.
Thanks for all the responses folks, I really appreciate it.
I was surprised, and happy, to see the link to that big Gateway monitor (too bad for WA only).. I've never seen monitors over 21-22" before, and even those are usually mondo-expensive and aimed towards graphic designers and so forth.
I'm not sure yet whether I'm gonna have to set him up with a real big monitor/TV or depend on software for magnification/text to speech because we're not sure how bad his vision is going to get. . he went from being a regular glasses-wearer to near blind in like a week, was kind of scary. Makes me really value my health at this point.
Anyway thanks for all the suggestions, got to run to class so haven't been able to follow around all the links but I'll get around to it. Thanks!
P.S. Also, I appreciate the idea of the big keyboards.. I've seen them in my googling, but hadn't really thought much of them. But I don't think me dad ever learned to touch-type as well as he should have by this point, so he could probably use one of them.
If this case is successful, the changes it brings about could be simply monumental. Look at the state of file-sharing right now. So many kids out there growing up on p2p but also instilled with a fear of sharing that puts a damper on the growth of p2p.
If this case is won, and the RIAA lawsuits are stopped in their tracks, I predict an overnight explosion in filesharing. Seriously, people in the U.S. right now are downright scared of sharing on p2p. I know I am, especially after getting a DMCA notice. I'm not saying that essentially unlimited p2p would necessarily spell the death of the RIAA and insane prices for music CDs but I think it would be a pretty clear mandate to the RIAA that they need to change their business plan fast.
I'm going to get modded down into oblivion for saying this, but whatever.
For some reason I see a bunch of/.'ers coming out of the woodwork in support of the local libraries and expounding on how incredibly useful dead tree literature is. Another attitude that seems to crop up both here and in University classroms a lot is that "stuff on the Internet is all unverifiable crap and should never be used in real papers"
In the words of the parent:
The books you find will have references, and you can follow those to immense amounts of material more specifically related to the angle you've chosen. And none of it is on Google.
Know what? I'm calling bollocks on this attitude. Wake up folks. It's the 21st century, not the 17th. I'm a college student. I've been there, done that. I know it's f-in tough to be forced to crank out a bunch of bullshit papers. That's life. But the Internet has made it all easier. If I need to look up information on, say, Hamlet, volumes of information are a few clicks away. Yeah, I've heard the usual jabber about how the barrier to entry on the Internet is practically nonexistant and anyone can publich any useless crap, yadda yadda yadda.
Again, wake up people. That's what google and Pagerank is for. I'm not a total idiot. I know bullshit online when I see it. Moreover, if I look an opinion online over, and I think it's enlightening, there's a pretty good chance that my Professor will too. Yeah, if I wanted to invest hours and hours in a three page paper I could go out through the cold and snow to the library, hunt through the antiquated card catalogue for what I'm looking for, and actually read a real resource for factual, honest-to-god information.
Forget it. Know where I turn to when I can't figure out what the hell is wrong with my network card? Where I go when I want to know trivia, like whether the original Goldfish were "cheddar" or "plain"? Right. It ain't the public library. And it's the same place I go when I want to find some useful information about Hamlet or any other serious research, for that matter. Instead of manually flipping through pages of some damn research books I've got the clusters of Google grep'ing through god only knows how many pages. Yeah, there are crazy ideas out there, but again, I'm not an idiot. And neither is Google for that matter. Pagerank is your friend, library-lovers.
And another thing. The parent whined about how there's not enough material available online due to copyright crap.
US and world copyright laws are keeping almost all the content from being eligible for online publication, even if their profit windows are long closed.
He's absolutely right. Libraries will be dead the minute copyright law gets toned down to a 10 year span and every legal book on the planet has been OCR'ed. In the meantime, put your stuff out there for free. It makes a difference. Write a big research paper? An English paper? Science paper? Put it under GPL/Creative Commons/BSD/whatever, and let people have it. You don't need it anymore. Don't be so damn possessive. You won't be able to take the stupid papers with you when you die.
I'm not just blowing smoke. I do this on my own site. Yeah, the papers I've put out are just stuff that I or others have written, but it helps. Information is a good thing. Let Google decide if your paper is good enough to show up in a search.
As one or two others have pointed out, WMV9 encryption is actually relatively secure, at least as far as we know right now. It uses pretty strong public key encryption. Someone suggested just using another media player that doesn't respect the "protection". That's like suggesting just using another email client to open a PGP encrypted email if you don't have the private key.
There are tools out there to strip the protection from WMV9 audio files, unf**k.exe and one other I can't remember right now. However, none have been released to my knowledge for video files. When the full-length Hilton video came out last week, it was released as a WMV9 file with DRM. The distributors wanted $50 for the privelege of viewing it five times. Needless to say, someone actually bought a license and released a pretty good quality analog rip of it within a few days. There is NO way to get around the "analog hole" provided a would-be pirate has a valid key for it.
What I'd be more worried about with theaters using Mpeg-4 compression in general is quality... Yeah, they brag about filesize compression in comparison with mpeg-2, but I was always under the impression that mpeg-4 is best for lower bitrates and can't provide high quality at high bitrates like mpeg-2 can. Mpeg-2 is used currently in HDTV streams and on DVDs.
I would suspect that you would get compression artifacts even in a 5 GB mpeg-4 file in a 2 hour+ movie. Actually I would suspect you'd get noticeable artifacting at any filesize with WMV/Mpeg-4. I don't think I've ever seen a WMV encode that looked even near DVD-quality.
Know what. Screw the whole legality issue. Those who have a foot in both the software design (even OSS?) and warez scene need to nab this. Much positive work could be done with windows/linux compatibility once we figure out the obscure protocols that windows uses. Yeah, it'll be legally grey, but who cares.
This will probably elicit a lot of replies about how Linux needs, especially now, legitimacy, especially under scrutiny of corps hoping to use it on desktops/servers. Individuals wouldn't care as much, obviously. They're right, in part at least. However, I've always admired the range of software choice Linux has, and just like Debian doesn't ship with all the necessary mplayer codecs.. they're out there, if you want 'em.
On another note.. what if someone took the code, released Linux software designed to help, say, samba, or something. Then another developer, without looking at the actual code for that program, made their own derivative by decompiling/whatever?
iTunes can be a good deal for independent labels and musicians (see side bar) and there's no reason for them to boycott
Downhillbattle is really only "opposed" to iTunes because it encourages the spread and payment of RIAA music. Hence their encouragement of the whole Pepsi cap recycling scheme.
Some people have mentioned the possibility of MSN search overpowering google mainly due to Microsoft's sheer muscle in the desktop market.
Ain't gonna happen. You know why? Despite what a lot of you have said about Microsoft having a lot of money and time to throw at the problem of being better than google, they show no interest at all in improving their search results. Worse, they appear to deliberately skew their search results. Try searching for "Apache" on both google and search.msn.com. One gives an "Oil and natural gas development Company" as the first result, another gives the software foundation. Guess which engine does which? And guess which site more people search for.
Yeah. If Microsoft really wanted to, they could probably challenge Google. Looks like they'd rather control what hits get back to the clueless lusers though. "MSN Search -- More Useful Everyday" , my ass.
I can understand why Comcast and other cable providers won't tell you what their caps are, though I don't necessarily agree with them.
By not telling you, they're hoping the bandwidth hogs will voluntarily drastically curtail their usage. I kind of sympathize with the cable co's because they're essentially giving you the downstream of a T1+ for $30-$50 a month. Their whole business plan started to fall apart with the explosion of p2p. Before then, they had always just assumed that people would use their connections like good little 56k customers. Oh well.
That's why I really like DSL. If you've got a draconian cable provider, and are looking to switch, take a look at DSL. I have almost no downtime, and no flak for using as much bandwidth as I like. Even better, since unlike cable, you have your own link to the ISP, so they give you a pretty decent usenet account and don't care if you leech 10 GB/s a day from it. Check it out, cable crowd.
I was just thinking about this after getting copies of this crap in an inbox of an email address I've only given out to a few people. The return addresses were indeed spoofed from places like foo@travelocity.com , but I'm still able to narrow the possible culprits down to the few people who know my address.
So.. how about this. Get together with the admin of a reasonably popular forum that's scoured by spammers. Whip up a script that will create a unique email address for each IP address that visits, such as HASHOFADDRESS@foo.com , and is displayed on the pages. When you start getting these viruses in the mail, just check which IP the email address corresponds to. With luck, you'll find the virus writers scouring for more addresses. At the very least, you'll catch a spammer or two.
You guys remember when the DOJ lawyers were being interviewed on Slashdot? The first question asked basically boils down to:
We all have no doubt that if Jack Valenti finds a website selling pirated versions of his movies that law enforcement will descend upon the infringer with a fury comparable to that wielded against drug smugglers and violent criminals... I wonder whether an individual author's rights as a copyright owner would be similary protected?
Their answer was fairly predictable:
The prosecutions we undertake do in fact benefit real people. If you look at the people and organizations who have been victimized by the defendants we prosecute, you will see that we enforce the law without regard to who the victims may be and we have protected the rights of victim companies of all sizes.
So, these lawyers for the DOJ are trying to assert that they go after ALL cases of copyright infringement that warrant serious investigation, regardless of who the copyright holder is. This is certainly the case for underground warez sites, they get busted all the time.
Isn't a page on the SCO website, linked to by a reputable news source, hosted by a publicly traded company, that is illegally distributing copyrighted material that they do not have claim to, just as serious as some dude on a random site spreading movies on the www? Why don't these supposedly good-hearted lawyers take some initiative?
Come on, people. So maybe this guy committed a mild form of "corporate espionage". He probably violated some part of a hideously restrictive contract, whatever. None of this matters.
Folks, when you're on the internet, use a little common sense. The internet is the perfect tool for disseminating information for those who understand how it works and how to use it. Instead of buying the domain name "michaelhanscom.com" ( Gee... I wonder which one of our employees' blogs THIS could be?), there are countless numbers of ways that his blog could have been nearly anonymous. Why didn't pay for offsite hosting? If he was a cheapo like me, how about hypermart/geocities ? Or even.. How about hosting it himself, with a domain name that doesn't directly point to him?
Microsoft didn't even seem competent enough to do a traceroute on "michaelhanscom.com" , they probably wouldn't even know how to do a domain lookup. Not that those necessarily have to contain real information...
All I'm saying, is, the Internet has really afforded the average citizen MORE privacy as it has grown more robust. In ten years, we will probably have true encrypted P2P anonymous information networks (ala Freenet, only working). In the meantime, just take common sense measures to ensure that if anyone (your employer, present/future employers) don't need to know more about you than you want them to. After all, that's exactly the way they treat you.
Looks like SBC is probably set to lose this one, if the Verizon case is any precedent. However, maybe the big ISPs could learn a valuable lesson from all the RIAA lawsuits -- since I'm sure they don't like having to dole out information to RIAA subpoenas or DMCA notices, why not just destroy logs after a short period, say one day? Better yet, compress just the basic pertinent information and hire a corporation in, say, Madagascar to store the logs. Make the claim that you don't have the storage space or whatever. Then, if the RIAA wants the logs, they'll have to deal with an out of country entity... GOOD LUCK! Plus, the logs would still be available in case it was a serious case, such as child pornography or something. Just a thought.
In a CS class I took in High School, the teacher was running a little program on the projector with a prompt for a first and last name. One of my classmates raised his hand and suggested "Last name 'Hunt' , First name 'Mike'".
Attempting to conceal our laughter, we watched as the clueless teacher repeated the name aloud, then entered it into the program. He wondered why the whole class seemed to be laughing, and whether it had anything to do with this "Mike" -- one intrepid classmate told him that it was a friend of ours who had been kicked out of our school some years ago. The teacher then proceeded to use the same name in the next few iterations of the program.
Guess it just goes to show that teachers think on a different level than their students.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been chewing on this for a while..
I know it's legal for me to tape a TV show from the air onto VHS, DVD, or TiVo myself. I suspect it's probably legal for me to, say, loan the VHS tape to a friend so he/she can watch it as well. And now, obviously TiVo owners can send each other episodes they recorded.
How is this all different than downloading a TV episode of a p2p network? I think I remember hearing of people getting DMCA notices for doing exactly that.
Anyone know where the line is in this case?
It's the classic chicken-and-egg problem. ISPs know that it will take quite a bit of up-front cash to convert their routers to IPv6. I don't even know to what extent v6 backbone routers exist, but I'd bet their pricey.
Right now.. really the only people that can use v6 are the BSD/Linux folks, as well as (I think) OSX. That's like 5% of the entire Internet desktop users, according to Google's Zeitgeist.
It's a scary thought.. but really, I think critical-mass v6 adoption rests solely on the shoulders of Microsoft at this point. We had better pray that Longhorn comes with it enabled (and that's like 2-3 years from now, at the earliest). If that happens though, it's a sure bet that Linksys et al. as well as lots of ISPs will be on board. I think we'll be waiting a while yet myself, though.
You forgot a really big one
mugu@mugu.com -- 11,400
See the wiki about it for more info.
I was looking at Secunia's Virus Info Page .. right under the graph it says "Based on Information delivered by BullGuard".
That set off a few bells... Know what BullGuard is? It's spyware that happens to come bundled with Kazaa. Amusingly, you can see BullGuard on Kazaa's *cough* No Spyware Policy Page, where they try to pretend that their bundled software isn't spyware.
With all this talk about it being important to hit the big boys instead of just small fry spammers... I was just googling when I saw the AdSense link to this company that sells, essentially, spamming lists.
They've got a snappy site design, and obviously shelled out enough to be a top google hit, so they're obviously doing well for themselves. Call them at 1-800-395-7707 (number from the page) to let them know how you feel (*wink* *wink*).
Schmiddy
When Bush was trying to rally support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- You remember.. back when everyone believed the bloated claims of Saddam's WMDs and ties to al Qaeda.. none of which has the slightest shred of evidence, to this date.
Anyway.. Bush & Co. realized that no other countries (other than our good old laptog, the UK) gave a flying crap about our grandiose plans, we started bribing small nations to join the "Coalition of the Willing". Australia was dangled promises of a free trade agreement, so they joined. Hey, what did they have to lose. Bush made similar enticements to other nations, which is why so many small nations, many of which have no standing armies at all, were in bed with us, at least nominally.
How many of you can name any other countries in our "Coalition", other than the UK (and the Aussies)? Hey.. I'll start you off! Afghanistan. No comment here. Seriously. Azerbaijain (bet they were a huge help.. next, Albania. Again, no comment. Alright, I'm stopping with the listing.
Rant Over. Vote in November, one way or the other. Sub-50% voter turnout in a democratic, educated nation with a history of close elections is pathetic.
I was at a LAN recently.. brought along an old Linux box to fiddle with, like I normally do. Got a chance to play a lot of fun games on other boxes though, like BF1942, Diablo, etc.
/etc, and so forth.
Anyway.. I started musing about going back to Windows after seeing everyone else's tricked out Windows-basesd gaming rigs. I realized just how -nice- a good desktop OS like win2k can feel. (I despise the eye candy in XP, and most people don't know how/why to turn it off.
First off, I think Firefox looks nice in Windows than Linux. I could never get anti-aliasing to work right, and for some reasons my fonts usually look crappy, even when I install the Windows TTF fonts.
Windows is, I still think, a good OS for a few things -- word processing (I use OpenOffice, and it's good... but I wouldn't want to have to do more than a few papers here and there with it), games -- no question there. As well as using p2p software.. just download eMule, your favorite BT client, Kazaa Lite. (Yea, there are equivalents in Linux. ) Put everything you want in the quickstart bar, maybe add some skins.. etc. And it will all look quite nice, and behave responsibly. You won't ever have to worry about hacking around text files to get a program to compile, messing with dependencies. gpoing through a 20 step process to get binary-only drivers fron Nvidia/ATI to work so that you can play a few games like UT natively, or a handful under Wine. Don't even get me started on Wine.
Having said all that.. I'm still on Linux. Here's why. First of all, I don't mind messing around a bit in Linux to get stuff to work. It's educational. I feel like I'm really learning stuff when I set up Apache the way I want it. On that note, I think Windows is a terrible choice if you're thinking of running an FTP server, web server, etc. I honestly have no clue how I would go about setting up IIS, although I imagine it's probably easy. I honestly don't know much about the guts of windows, because you're not encouraged to. On the other hand.. Linux encourages you to be able to mess with stuff like init.d config, all the config files in
And here's another point. I can only begin to imagine how many Windows users have spyware and other crap installed. Any sane Linux user would consider this a serious problem.. it's essentialy a root-exploit from installing malicious software as root (i.e. Admin).
The free software paradigm in Linux works wonders. I trust every open source program I download, even though I'm not going to personally check the source. Yea, I'm sure it could be possible for some knucklehead to hide some malicious code in a program, but I can't remember the last time (ever?) an OSS project had that happen.
In Windows.. it's easy to do things the wrong way. Click on those popup ads telling you your computer is broadcasting an IP address, accidentally clicking "Yes" when some popup ad asks you if you want to trust software from Foo Company. Having a hole in IE exploited, and your browswer homepage changed. Being constantly forced to revert to Administrator, if you're smart enough to be running as an unpriveleged user. In Mandrake, when I made the mistake of logging into KDE as root, I was reminded many times, both by KDE and the programs (i.e. xchat) that I was doing the wrong thing.
A final note. I think every "power" Windows user needs to pirate many hundreds of dollars of software in order to have a working system -- FlashFXP, WinRAR, Newsbin, maybe AdAware/ZoneAlarm Pro,BPFtp server, CloneCD, Nero, the latest games, etc. In Linux.. you actually feel good about just using the software that some kind soul has made for you.
Just to keep things in perspective.. According to the Google Zeitgeist Linux is still at only around 1% of the desktop market share. That's roughly the same as the number of Windows 95 users. Yes, Linux users might arguably be more into high end graphics cards and games.. But if I were ATI, I'd be more focused on beating Nvidia in price and performance on Windows, with little regard to the 1% of users on Linux.
So.. keep converting desktop users to linux, and let ATI know how you feel I guess.
Peace.
I'd be careful of this. My last year of high school, we had a really terrible CS teacher we all hated. We set up L0phtcrack on one of the lab computers to sniff for his windows login password. So we got his hash that day, and had some trouble cracking it at first.. we were afraid we'd have to resort to brute force. Fortunately, as a last resort, someone got a really huge dictionary file from somewhere, and one of the terms matched the password. Know what it was?
/etc/shadow or whatever password hashes.
mnbvcx (look at keyboard)
I'm not sure why the dictionary had it in there, but it did. Turned out, he also used it for his email as well. We had some fun. I checked recently, and apparently he still hasn't changed his password.
Moral of the story? Maybe enforcing a 90+ day password switch isn't all that bad, and if you're admin'ing a server with many users that you need to keep secure, run regular audits on your
I've got a Gmail account (no, I won't give an invite :p) and I recently came up with the idea of forwarding all my mail from another account with a simple .procmailrc file straight to my Gmail account. I actually find Google's web interface easier and quicker to use than, say, Thunderbird, and I don't have to worry about the account ever filling up. I won't even go into the hapless users stuck on Outlook.
Anyway, especially since I've dipped my toes into the 419 world recently, a Gmail account with a TB of storage would be the perfect account to run scam-baiting, or general spam collecting, which can have a variety of purposes -- not the least of which is to refine Bayesian filtering. I know there's a place somewhere that encourages you to submit spam, I'm too lazy to look now though. I rememebr ute@ftc.gov as being one place you can forward spam too.
Here.
Thanks for all the responses folks, I really appreciate it.
I was surprised, and happy, to see the link to that big Gateway monitor (too bad for WA only).. I've never seen monitors over 21-22" before, and even those are usually mondo-expensive and aimed towards graphic designers and so forth.
I'm not sure yet whether I'm gonna have to set him up with a real big monitor/TV or depend on software for magnification/text to speech because we're not sure how bad his vision is going to get. . he went from being a regular glasses-wearer to near blind in like a week, was kind of scary. Makes me really value my health at this point.
Anyway thanks for all the suggestions, got to run to class so haven't been able to follow around all the links but I'll get around to it. Thanks!
P.S. Also, I appreciate the idea of the big keyboards.. I've seen them in my googling, but hadn't really thought much of them. But I don't think me dad ever learned to touch-type as well as he should have by this point, so he could probably use one of them.
If this case is successful, the changes it brings about could be simply monumental. Look at the state of file-sharing right now. So many kids out there growing up on p2p but also instilled with a fear of sharing that puts a damper on the growth of p2p.
If this case is won, and the RIAA lawsuits are stopped in their tracks, I predict an overnight explosion in filesharing. Seriously, people in the U.S. right now are downright scared of sharing on p2p. I know I am, especially after getting a DMCA notice. I'm not saying that essentially unlimited p2p would necessarily spell the death of the RIAA and insane prices for music CDs but I think it would be a pretty clear mandate to the RIAA that they need to change their business plan fast.
I'm going to get modded down into oblivion for saying this, but whatever.
/.'ers coming out of the woodwork in support of the local libraries and expounding on how incredibly useful dead tree literature is. Another attitude that seems to crop up both here and in University classroms a lot is that "stuff on the Internet is all unverifiable crap and should never be used in real papers"
For some reason I see a bunch of
In the words of the parent:
The books you find will have references, and you can follow those to immense amounts of material more specifically related to the angle you've chosen. And none of it is on Google.
Know what? I'm calling bollocks on this attitude. Wake up folks. It's the 21st century, not the 17th. I'm a college student. I've been there, done that. I know it's f-in tough to be forced to crank out a bunch of bullshit papers. That's life. But the Internet has made it all easier. If I need to look up information on, say, Hamlet, volumes of information are a few clicks away. Yeah, I've heard the usual jabber about how the barrier to entry on the Internet is practically nonexistant and anyone can publich any useless crap, yadda yadda yadda.
Again, wake up people. That's what google and Pagerank is for. I'm not a total idiot. I know bullshit online when I see it. Moreover, if I look an opinion online over, and I think it's enlightening, there's a pretty good chance that my Professor will too. Yeah, if I wanted to invest hours and hours in a three page paper I could go out through the cold and snow to the library, hunt through the antiquated card catalogue for what I'm looking for, and actually read a real resource for factual, honest-to-god information.
Forget it. Know where I turn to when I can't figure out what the hell is wrong with my network card? Where I go when I want to know trivia, like whether the original Goldfish were "cheddar" or "plain"? Right. It ain't the public library. And it's the same place I go when I want to find some useful information about Hamlet or any other serious research, for that matter. Instead of manually flipping through pages of some damn research books I've got the clusters of Google grep'ing through god only knows how many pages. Yeah, there are crazy ideas out there, but again, I'm not an idiot. And neither is Google for that matter. Pagerank is your friend, library-lovers.
And another thing. The parent whined about how there's not enough material available online due to copyright crap.
US and world copyright laws are keeping almost all the content from being eligible for online publication, even if their profit windows are long closed.
He's absolutely right. Libraries will be dead the minute copyright law gets toned down to a 10 year span and every legal book on the planet has been OCR'ed. In the meantime, put your stuff out there for free. It makes a difference. Write a big research paper? An English paper? Science paper? Put it under GPL/Creative Commons/BSD/whatever, and let people have it. You don't need it anymore. Don't be so damn possessive. You won't be able to take the stupid papers with you when you die.
I'm not just blowing smoke. I do this on my own site. Yeah, the papers I've put out are just stuff that I or others have written, but it helps. Information is a good thing. Let Google decide if your paper is good enough to show up in a search.
As one or two others have pointed out, WMV9 encryption is actually relatively secure, at least as far as we know right now. It uses pretty strong public key encryption. Someone suggested just using another media player that doesn't respect the "protection". That's like suggesting just using another email client to open a PGP encrypted email if you don't have the private key.
There are tools out there to strip the protection from WMV9 audio files, unf**k.exe and one other I can't remember right now. However, none have been released to my knowledge for video files. When the full-length Hilton video came out last week, it was released as a WMV9 file with DRM. The distributors wanted $50 for the privelege of viewing it five times. Needless to say, someone actually bought a license and released a pretty good quality analog rip of it within a few days. There is NO way to get around the "analog hole" provided a would-be pirate has a valid key for it.
What I'd be more worried about with theaters using Mpeg-4 compression in general is quality... Yeah, they brag about filesize compression in comparison with mpeg-2, but I was always under the impression that mpeg-4 is best for lower bitrates and can't provide high quality at high bitrates like mpeg-2 can. Mpeg-2 is used currently in HDTV streams and on DVDs.
I would suspect that you would get compression artifacts even in a 5 GB mpeg-4 file in a 2 hour+ movie. Actually I would suspect you'd get noticeable artifacting at any filesize with WMV/Mpeg-4. I don't think I've ever seen a WMV encode that looked even near DVD-quality.
Know what. Screw the whole legality issue. Those who have a foot in both the software design (even OSS?) and warez scene need to nab this. Much positive work could be done with windows/linux compatibility once we figure out the obscure protocols that windows uses. Yeah, it'll be legally grey, but who cares.
This will probably elicit a lot of replies about how Linux needs, especially now, legitimacy, especially under scrutiny of corps hoping to use it on desktops/servers. Individuals wouldn't care as much, obviously. They're right, in part at least. However, I've always admired the range of software choice Linux has, and just like Debian doesn't ship with all the necessary mplayer codecs.. they're out there, if you want 'em.
On another note.. what if someone took the code, released Linux software designed to help, say, samba, or something. Then another developer, without looking at the actual code for that program, made their own derivative by decompiling/whatever?
iTunes can be a good deal for independent labels and musicians (see side bar) and there's no reason for them to boycott
Downhillbattle is really only "opposed" to iTunes because it encourages the spread and payment of RIAA music. Hence their encouragement of the whole Pepsi cap recycling scheme.
Some people have mentioned the possibility of MSN search overpowering google mainly due to Microsoft's sheer muscle in the desktop market.
Ain't gonna happen. You know why? Despite what a lot of you have said about Microsoft having a lot of money and time to throw at the problem of being better than google, they show no interest at all in improving their search results. Worse, they appear to deliberately skew their search results. Try searching for "Apache" on both google and search.msn.com. One gives an "Oil and natural gas development Company" as the first result, another gives the software foundation. Guess which engine does which? And guess which site more people search for.
Yeah. If Microsoft really wanted to, they could probably challenge Google. Looks like they'd rather control what hits get back to the clueless lusers though. "MSN Search -- More Useful Everyday" , my ass.
I can understand why Comcast and other cable providers won't tell you what their caps are, though I don't necessarily agree with them. By not telling you, they're hoping the bandwidth hogs will voluntarily drastically curtail their usage. I kind of sympathize with the cable co's because they're essentially giving you the downstream of a T1+ for $30-$50 a month. Their whole business plan started to fall apart with the explosion of p2p. Before then, they had always just assumed that people would use their connections like good little 56k customers. Oh well.
That's why I really like DSL. If you've got a draconian cable provider, and are looking to switch, take a look at DSL. I have almost no downtime, and no flak for using as much bandwidth as I like. Even better, since unlike cable, you have your own link to the ISP, so they give you a pretty decent usenet account and don't care if you leech 10 GB/s a day from it. Check it out, cable crowd.
I was just thinking about this after getting copies of this crap in an inbox of an email address I've only given out to a few people. The return addresses were indeed spoofed from places like foo@travelocity.com , but I'm still able to narrow the possible culprits down to the few people who know my address. So.. how about this. Get together with the admin of a reasonably popular forum that's scoured by spammers. Whip up a script that will create a unique email address for each IP address that visits, such as HASHOFADDRESS@foo.com , and is displayed on the pages. When you start getting these viruses in the mail, just check which IP the email address corresponds to. With luck, you'll find the virus writers scouring for more addresses. At the very least, you'll catch a spammer or two.
I just saved $150 on my car insurance by switching to Geico!
You guys remember when the DOJ lawyers were being interviewed on Slashdot? The first question asked basically boils down to:
We all have no doubt that if Jack Valenti finds a website selling pirated versions of his movies that law enforcement will descend upon the infringer with a fury comparable to that wielded against drug smugglers and violent criminals... I wonder whether an individual author's rights as a copyright owner would be similary protected?
Their answer was fairly predictable:
The prosecutions we undertake do in fact benefit real people. If you look at the people and organizations who have been victimized by the defendants we prosecute, you will see that we enforce the law without regard to who the victims may be and we have protected the rights of victim companies of all sizes.
So, these lawyers for the DOJ are trying to assert that they go after ALL cases of copyright infringement that warrant serious investigation, regardless of who the copyright holder is. This is certainly the case for underground warez sites, they get busted all the time.
Isn't a page on the SCO website, linked to by a reputable news source, hosted by a publicly traded company, that is illegally distributing copyrighted material that they do not have claim to, just as serious as some dude on a random site spreading movies on the www? Why don't these supposedly good-hearted lawyers take some initiative?
Come on, people. So maybe this guy committed a mild form of "corporate espionage". He probably violated some part of a hideously restrictive contract, whatever. None of this matters.
Folks, when you're on the internet, use a little common sense. The internet is the perfect tool for disseminating information for those who understand how it works and how to use it. Instead of buying the domain name "michaelhanscom.com" ( Gee... I wonder which one of our employees' blogs THIS could be?), there are countless numbers of ways that his blog could have been nearly anonymous. Why didn't pay for offsite hosting? If he was a cheapo like me, how about hypermart/geocities ? Or even.. How about hosting it himself, with a domain name that doesn't directly point to him?
Microsoft didn't even seem competent enough to do a traceroute on "michaelhanscom.com" , they probably wouldn't even know how to do a domain lookup. Not that those necessarily have to contain real information...
All I'm saying, is, the Internet has really afforded the average citizen MORE privacy as it has grown more robust. In ten years, we will probably have true encrypted P2P anonymous information networks (ala Freenet, only working). In the meantime, just take common sense measures to ensure that if anyone (your employer, present/future employers) don't need to know more about you than you want them to. After all, that's exactly the way they treat you.
Looks like SBC is probably set to lose this one, if the Verizon case is any precedent. However, maybe the big ISPs could learn a valuable lesson from all the RIAA lawsuits -- since I'm sure they don't like having to dole out information to RIAA subpoenas or DMCA notices, why not just destroy logs after a short period, say one day? Better yet, compress just the basic pertinent information and hire a corporation in, say, Madagascar to store the logs. Make the claim that you don't have the storage space or whatever. Then, if the RIAA wants the logs, they'll have to deal with an out of country entity... GOOD LUCK! Plus, the logs would still be available in case it was a serious case, such as child pornography or something. Just a thought.
In a CS class I took in High School, the teacher was running a little program on the projector with a prompt for a first and last name. One of my classmates raised his hand and suggested "Last name 'Hunt' , First name 'Mike'".
Attempting to conceal our laughter, we watched as the clueless teacher repeated the name aloud, then entered it into the program. He wondered why the whole class seemed to be laughing, and whether it had anything to do with this "Mike" -- one intrepid classmate told him that it was a friend of ours who had been kicked out of our school some years ago. The teacher then proceeded to use the same name in the next few iterations of the program.
Guess it just goes to show that teachers think on a different level than their students.