The FBI is an agency that desperately needs to have a president come in and clean house
I don't know why this guy got modded Troll... what he's saying is largely correct (I know some FBI types who would agree with him), although realistically you can apply that principle to virtually any major Federal agency.
Given such a small community of users, I'd say a little vigilante-style "attitude adjustment" could be directly applied to anyone who abuses the system.
Interesting. I'm not quite at geezer status yet but it's been a long time since I had any involvement with amateur radio. Thanks for the info.
Now, I understand the reasoning behind disallowing encryption of the connection itself... but does that extend to tunneling a connection through a VPN, or using SSL to access a secure Web site?
Not really oversubscription if he's delivering what he promised, but I take your point. Besides, if he bought a full T-1 I'd bet latency is substantially better than dial-up, especially if he has some decent head-end equipment. Also, a full T-1 is 1.5 mbits/sec symmetric, which means each user's back-channel would be as good as most other broadband users on cable or ADSL. Probably better, since the majority of the users probably won't even be using much of that. Heck, I'll bet his customers could run VoIP without much trouble.
So they're sharing a 1.5 mb/sec T1 among themselves and twenty-five other people? Let's see, figuring a total of 27 users (your uncle, his partner, and the 25 subscribers) if divided equally that means each gets.. 55 kbits/sec. I guess it qualifies as broadband but not by much. Good as a single-channel DSL line anyway. Of course, with a decent router they can allocate bandwidth more intelligently than that, and if it came down to a choice between that and dial-up, I'd go for it in a heartbeat.
Maybe once he gets that T1 installation paid off he can put in another one.
True, although neither other HAM operators nor the ARRL have any enforcement capacity... about all they can do is ring in the Feds. But you're right, the FCC does take a very dim view of such activities. It sounds like he's out in the sticks, which is probably why nobody has noticed anything.
Once he gets reported he may find himself out in the cold, with a few fines and no broadband to keep him company.
You do know what the Internet is, don't you? It's a communications medium, pure and simple. It moves chunks of binary data from here to there, and everywhere, and really doesn't much care what country you're in, unless your country has made it that way (see: Great Firewall.) The Internet, as such, is not only not broken, but is still working remarkably well, and there's really no further "globalization" possible other than extending its reach and improving performance. The Internet is controlled, in any given country, by the laws and corporations who maintain the segments that operate within that region. International control of the Internet is already a reality, and it was so from Day One. To claim otherwise is disingenuous, and speaks more of a dislike for the United States than any acknowledgment or understanding of what is.
Now, your complaint seems to be that some search engine (Google, I would venture to guess, which is a large American company that provides free services to everyone, everywhere a government doesn't block it) is too U.S.-centric for your tastes. So, fine... use another search service. There are many, and I'm sure your country is home to more than a few. What... they don't give you the same overall quality of results as the one you're complaining about? Well, that's not the Internet's fault, and is not any corporation's responsibility to fix if they don't want to. If there's a demand for an engine that will give you the kind of results for which you are looking, then it will probably eventually appear if it hasn't already.
How does The Pirate Bay police anything? So far as I can tell, if you submit a torrent they just put it into their index. I see no "policing" going on there at all. I really don't grok your comment: do you understand the nature of an index, as compared to a host system?
And it does matter. U.S. courts can look at relevant decisions made in other countries. Still... regardless of any legal consequences, what I find most interesting about this leak is that it really document what a lot of people have been saying for years: the media outfits are, truly, run by the people of the worst stripe. The ends do justify the means, and they really don't care who they hurt. An increase in awareness of that fact among the general population (of any country) is a Very Cool Thing.
I'm glad I stopped buying shiny plastic discs a long, long time ago.
Well, I couldn't care less about The Pirate Bay, and I absolutely do not sympathize with big media. Possibly you wouldn't either if you researched what those companies and their front organizations done over the decades to retard technological progress they perceived as threatening in any way, and so far as their effect on the legal systems in many countries... well. "Self serving" is just too kind a phrase and when you get right down to it, these corporations aren't deserving of sympathy on anyone's part. Bad people, all the way around, and if they get any semblance of a comeuppance from this, one can only know they got their just desserts.
Besides, "going out of business", in this context, just means that some other large corporation will buy their assets and kick out the current management team. Heck, maybe Google could take out an option to pick up Verizon for ten cents on the dollar. In any event, it doesn't mean that the phone system will stop working all across the country (which is what these assholes are implying.) That's what this is all about: the people presently running the show don't want to find themselves out of a job. Now, that's just too bad... they've earned jail sentences and are hardly entitled to their positions anymore.
I guess I've never download a PDF big enough to notice. I'll have to try that though. My biggest complaint about Adobe's reader is the time it takes to load the thing: Foxit comes up instantly, whereas Adobe has to load all kinds of extra modules. I know, I could turn most of that off but then you lose those extra features anyway.
Hell, even Tom Clancy got his information right often enough that it resulted in multiple visits from the Feds. But he put it all together using publicly-available information.
There's a lot more to this than sabotaging torrents, which is the least of the concerns (most of that activity has been obsolesced by technological measures taken by modern Torrent clients and trackers anyway... encryption, distributed hash tables, rating systems, etc.) This is about the media companies using illegal means to gain access to confidential information (paying crackers to break into private systems for one) among other juicy bits. The Pirate Bay folks have been saying this for a long time, but didn't have a lot of evidence. Now it seems they've been pretty thoroughly vindicated by the Media Defender leak.
It doesn't matter, in the long run, whether the United States with it's piddling 280 million or so consumers chooses the environmentally sound route. Besides, if anything our ongoing deindustrialization is going to reduce our contribution to the global pollution scene. On the other hand, if China, Mexico and other rapidly-industrializing third-world outfits don't start cleaning up their respective acts we're all going to wake up one morning wondering where we are heading, and why we're inside this giant handbasket.
Ultimately, the problem is billions of easily-exploitable poor who look at severe pollution as just another price they have to pay to be allowed to live for another day, see their manufacturing plant jobs as being an improvement over life in a small village somewhere. That, and brutal leaders who see those poor as an endless supply of organic industrial robots. No different in those respects as it was in the U.S. decades ago, but it's happening worldwide at a rapidly accelerating pace and on a scale that the West never encountered.
He took a picture that he thought was so worthless that he posted it to Flickr, of all places, using a CC license. Then it is discovered that a huge corporation is using it in a massive advertising campaign. He must have been thinking, "Oh my GOD, I screwed up... she's worth a ton of money!" So now he and the family are going to try and get a piece of that action. I don't see anything unreasonable about that, in and of itself. All depends upon what the legalities of the situation, and ultimately who has the more competent counsel (I wouldn't assume that's Virgin, either.)
Now, I didn't RTFA, but did they even try to get compensation from the Virgin people first, or did they just go right to a lawsuit?
and don't use Adobe's reader. Don't use Adobe's Acrobat either, if you don't have to. At least in the Windows world, there are plenty of alternatives out there, that often work better and more efficiently than Adobe's products, and are sometimes (get this) FREE! Are they as secure as Adobe's products? Who knows. For that matter, who knows how secure Adobe software is: big companies don't necessarily turn out more secure software than smaller ones. They can apply more programmers to a project and crank out more lines of code... but that generally makes the product less secure because there's more room for error.
I mean if you just want a PDF viewer that works standalone and in Firefox, try Foxit Reader. Fast (very fast), lightweight and free for the download. You can upgrade to the Pro version if you need the extra capability, but for simple viewing the free version is great. I use PDF Creator to convert printer output to PDF files. Also free, and works very well.
I've long considered Adobe's PDF Reader to be inefficient bloatware and haven't used it in years. The fact that it's got security problems is one less reason to use it.
This situation will never, ever happen in the U.S., even if politicians try to wave magic Government-Issued wands.
Yes and no.
The Feds, over the past decade, did wave such a magic card at the Telcos and the billions of dollars that were inside that card that were supposed to be used for such a buildout just vanished. Gone. Never to be seen again. "Information superhighway" my ass.
So the situation could obtain in the U.S. but only if we remove a major stumbling block: the major ISP themselves. Believe me, the investment capital would be available if the people willing to put up the money knew that they would receive a return on that investment. Interestingly, Google is investing heavily in infrastructure, but they're not giving it to the incumbents. They know better than anyone that it would be a waste of money.
And of course this is off-topic -- but how could the parent be rated "Insightful"
This is Slashdot, where a +5 Insightful is just a few ignorant moderators away. Of course, that's balanced out by all the +5 Flamebaits spewn forth by the same drain-bamaged individuals.
Slashdot Mirror
The FBI is an agency that desperately needs to have a president come in and clean house
... what he's saying is largely correct (I know some FBI types who would agree with him), although realistically you can apply that principle to virtually any major Federal agency.
I don't know why this guy got modded Troll
Given such a small community of users, I'd say a little vigilante-style "attitude adjustment" could be directly applied to anyone who abuses the system.
Interesting. I'm not quite at geezer status yet but it's been a long time since I had any involvement with amateur radio. Thanks for the info.
... but does that extend to tunneling a connection through a VPN, or using SSL to access a secure Web site?
Now, I understand the reasoning behind disallowing encryption of the connection itself
That's the problem with doing intelligence stuff --- not much glory.
Kinda like the average network administrator.
Not really oversubscription if he's delivering what he promised, but I take your point. Besides, if he bought a full T-1 I'd bet latency is substantially better than dial-up, especially if he has some decent head-end equipment. Also, a full T-1 is 1.5 mbits/sec symmetric, which means each user's back-channel would be as good as most other broadband users on cable or ADSL. Probably better, since the majority of the users probably won't even be using much of that. Heck, I'll bet his customers could run VoIP without much trouble.
So they're sharing a 1.5 mb/sec T1 among themselves and twenty-five other people? Let's see, figuring a total of 27 users (your uncle, his partner, and the 25 subscribers) if divided equally that means each gets .. 55 kbits/sec. I guess it qualifies as broadband but not by much. Good as a single-channel DSL line anyway. Of course, with a decent router they can allocate bandwidth more intelligently than that, and if it came down to a choice between that and dial-up, I'd go for it in a heartbeat.
Maybe once he gets that T1 installation paid off he can put in another one.
True, although neither other HAM operators nor the ARRL have any enforcement capacity ... about all they can do is ring in the Feds. But you're right, the FCC does take a very dim view of such activities. It sounds like he's out in the sticks, which is probably why nobody has noticed anything.
Once he gets reported he may find himself out in the cold, with a few fines and no broadband to keep him company.
Billy-bob sold the Chinese plenty of our hard won missile technology.
That's a lie! He didn't sell it to them, he gave it to them.
You do know what the Internet is, don't you? It's a communications medium, pure and simple. It moves chunks of binary data from here to there, and everywhere, and really doesn't much care what country you're in, unless your country has made it that way (see: Great Firewall.) The Internet, as such, is not only not broken, but is still working remarkably well, and there's really no further "globalization" possible other than extending its reach and improving performance. The Internet is controlled, in any given country, by the laws and corporations who maintain the segments that operate within that region. International control of the Internet is already a reality, and it was so from Day One. To claim otherwise is disingenuous, and speaks more of a dislike for the United States than any acknowledgment or understanding of what is.
... use another search service. There are many, and I'm sure your country is home to more than a few. What ... they don't give you the same overall quality of results as the one you're complaining about? Well, that's not the Internet's fault, and is not any corporation's responsibility to fix if they don't want to. If there's a demand for an engine that will give you the kind of results for which you are looking, then it will probably eventually appear if it hasn't already.
Now, your complaint seems to be that some search engine (Google, I would venture to guess, which is a large American company that provides free services to everyone, everywhere a government doesn't block it) is too U.S.-centric for your tastes. So, fine
... and as someone of American descent, I'm just offended.
Hah.
How does The Pirate Bay police anything? So far as I can tell, if you submit a torrent they just put it into their index. I see no "policing" going on there at all. I really don't grok your comment: do you understand the nature of an index, as compared to a host system?
... regardless of any legal consequences, what I find most interesting about this leak is that it really document what a lot of people have been saying for years: the media outfits are, truly, run by the people of the worst stripe. The ends do justify the means, and they really don't care who they hurt. An increase in awareness of that fact among the general population (of any country) is a Very Cool Thing.
And it does matter. U.S. courts can look at relevant decisions made in other countries. Still
I'm glad I stopped buying shiny plastic discs a long, long time ago.
Well, I couldn't care less about The Pirate Bay, and I absolutely do not sympathize with big media. Possibly you wouldn't either if you researched what those companies and their front organizations done over the decades to retard technological progress they perceived as threatening in any way, and so far as their effect on the legal systems in many countries ... well. "Self serving" is just too kind a phrase and when you get right down to it, these corporations aren't deserving of sympathy on anyone's part. Bad people, all the way around, and if they get any semblance of a comeuppance from this, one can only know they got their just desserts.
Besides, "going out of business", in this context, just means that some other large corporation will buy their assets and kick out the current management team. Heck, maybe Google could take out an option to pick up Verizon for ten cents on the dollar. In any event, it doesn't mean that the phone system will stop working all across the country (which is what these assholes are implying.) That's what this is all about: the people presently running the show don't want to find themselves out of a job. Now, that's just too bad ... they've earned jail sentences and are hardly entitled to their positions anymore.
In other words, you can't change the legal status of actions in the past.
So? They'll just redefine the meaning of the word "past".
Or as Ensign Chekov would no doubt have said, "Linux? Of course, Keptin. It was a Russian inwention."
True enough. And I appreciate your use of the word cracker, not hacker. Nice to see someone that knows the difference.
I guess I've never download a PDF big enough to notice. I'll have to try that though. My biggest complaint about Adobe's reader is the time it takes to load the thing: Foxit comes up instantly, whereas Adobe has to load all kinds of extra modules. I know, I could turn most of that off but then you lose those extra features anyway.
Hell, even Tom Clancy got his information right often enough that it resulted in multiple visits from the Feds. But he put it all together using publicly-available information.
Doesn't mean they weren't a wee bit distressed.
There's a lot more to this than sabotaging torrents, which is the least of the concerns (most of that activity has been obsolesced by technological measures taken by modern Torrent clients and trackers anyway ... encryption, distributed hash tables, rating systems, etc.) This is about the media companies using illegal means to gain access to confidential information (paying crackers to break into private systems for one) among other juicy bits. The Pirate Bay folks have been saying this for a long time, but didn't have a lot of evidence. Now it seems they've been pretty thoroughly vindicated by the Media Defender leak.
This is officially Very Cool Stuff.
That's really the issue.
It doesn't matter, in the long run, whether the United States with it's piddling 280 million or so consumers chooses the environmentally sound route. Besides, if anything our ongoing deindustrialization is going to reduce our contribution to the global pollution scene. On the other hand, if China, Mexico and other rapidly-industrializing third-world outfits don't start cleaning up their respective acts we're all going to wake up one morning wondering where we are heading, and why we're inside this giant handbasket.
Ultimately, the problem is billions of easily-exploitable poor who look at severe pollution as just another price they have to pay to be allowed to live for another day, see their manufacturing plant jobs as being an improvement over life in a small village somewhere. That, and brutal leaders who see those poor as an endless supply of organic industrial robots. No different in those respects as it was in the U.S. decades ago, but it's happening worldwide at a rapidly accelerating pace and on a scale that the West never encountered.
He took a picture that he thought was so worthless that he posted it to Flickr, of all places, using a CC license. Then it is discovered that a huge corporation is using it in a massive advertising campaign. He must have been thinking, "Oh my GOD, I screwed up ... she's worth a ton of money!" So now he and the family are going to try and get a piece of that action. I don't see anything unreasonable about that, in and of itself. All depends upon what the legalities of the situation, and ultimately who has the more competent counsel (I wouldn't assume that's Virgin, either.)
Now, I didn't RTFA, but did they even try to get compensation from the Virgin people first, or did they just go right to a lawsuit?
and don't use Adobe's reader. Don't use Adobe's Acrobat either, if you don't have to. At least in the Windows world, there are plenty of alternatives out there, that often work better and more efficiently than Adobe's products, and are sometimes (get this) FREE! Are they as secure as Adobe's products? Who knows. For that matter, who knows how secure Adobe software is: big companies don't necessarily turn out more secure software than smaller ones. They can apply more programmers to a project and crank out more lines of code ... but that generally makes the product less secure because there's more room for error.
I mean if you just want a PDF viewer that works standalone and in Firefox, try Foxit Reader. Fast (very fast), lightweight and free for the download. You can upgrade to the Pro version if you need the extra capability, but for simple viewing the free version is great. I use PDF Creator to convert printer output to PDF files. Also free, and works very well.
I've long considered Adobe's PDF Reader to be inefficient bloatware and haven't used it in years. The fact that it's got security problems is one less reason to use it.
This situation will never, ever happen in the U.S., even if politicians try to wave magic Government-Issued wands.
Yes and no.
The Feds, over the past decade, did wave such a magic card at the Telcos and the billions of dollars that were inside that card that were supposed to be used for such a buildout just vanished. Gone. Never to be seen again. "Information superhighway" my ass.
So the situation could obtain in the U.S. but only if we remove a major stumbling block: the major ISP themselves. Believe me, the investment capital would be available if the people willing to put up the money knew that they would receive a return on that investment. Interestingly, Google is investing heavily in infrastructure, but they're not giving it to the incumbents. They know better than anyone that it would be a waste of money.
No, his name is Lester Watts ... Les Watts for short.
And of course this is off-topic -- but how could the parent be rated "Insightful"
This is Slashdot, where a +5 Insightful is just a few ignorant moderators away. Of course, that's balanced out by all the +5 Flamebaits spewn forth by the same drain-bamaged individuals.