From the space.com article, here's what Uwingu's CEO had to say...
"They basically said we're conducting a scam, and nothing could be further from the truth," [...] "They basically put us out of business, and they've ruined our reputation."
"To claim what they claimed — that we're somehow misrepresenting that these were IAU names — has just about put us out of business," Stern told SPACE.com. "It's unbelievable."
"They've spent 18 years with no forward movement — ask planet hunter extraordinaire [and Uwingu adviser] Geoff Marcy," Stern said. "Then somebody else comes along and does something harmless, fun and engaging, and now they're slandering us."
The key is split (look up PKI key splitting) into 5 parts. My girlfriend, father, buddy at work, and two of my friends each have a part. [...] Four of those parts together are required to unlock.
Better make sure you're not travelling in a car (or airplane, etc) with two or more of your keybearers...
Why not give all of them the complete key and trust them? Thats what I do (minus the gf).
I know nothing about your friends or family, so YMMV.
Plutonium is a strange metal. [...] an experienced machinist or blacksmith would have trouble making a simple screwdriver or chisel out of and have to make a perfect, hollow, evacuated sphere out of it [...]
Please don't mention plutonium, half spheres and screwdrivers in the same sentence.
I've had nightmares about this.
This is one of my pet annoyances in most "web 2.0" products. All those forums giving the time of a message as "a year ago" are driving me mad. Some of them at least have the actual date and time in the title attribute, but that doesn't help much on a mobile device. Let the software be exact, and leave the fuzziness to me, please.
FWIW, this is exactly what we do to cue a blind choir member.
It's not a geeky solution, and it involves people touching each other, but it's very reliable.
I can't imagine any sighted choir member refusing to do this.
The linked page on businessweek.com contains no less than 13 trackers:
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Dynamic Logic
Facebook Connect
ForeSee
Google Adsense
Google Analytics
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wouldn't it be cheaper to arm them with pointed sticks?
Pointed sticks? Ho, ho, ho. We want to learn how to defend ourselves against pointed sticks, do we? Getting all high and mighty, eh? Fresh fruit not good enough for you, eh? Well I'll tell you something my lad. When you're walking home tonight and some great homicidal maniac comes after you with a bunch of Apple products, don't come crying to me!
Now, the passion fruit.
[...] something "better" than crappy gnu info (there's nothing I hate more than a man page that directs me to use gnu info, how I hate that thing)
I feel your pain. I can't stand info either. Maybe if I had to use it more frequently, I would finally memorize the keybindings, but even then I find it awkward to use. I'm not ashamed to admit that I tend to fall back to an easier, more masses-compatible way of reading info pages: KDE's KIO slaves. I just hit Alt-F2 and type "info:gettext", which displays the info contents for GNU gettext in a browser as a set of nicely formatted HTML pages. All manpages and info pages are also browsable and listed alphabetically in the KDE help center. (Of course, that wouldn't work if the info pages are only available on a remote server, but I can't remember that ever coming up.) Not sure about Gnome and other desktop environments, but they probably have something similar.
In short, if there's a hard way and an easy way to do it, and they both give the same result... I'm a geek, not a masochist.
I registered seven new domains and sent each domain to one seventh of the list; the list contains about 420,000 addresses, so each one went to about 60,000 people. (Each new site is only sent to a random subset of the list, so that a blocking company can't just subscribe one address to the list and block all new sites as soon as they're mailed out.)
So somebody who wants to block all the proxies would have to subscribe several times in order to get the full list (it's not like multiple subscriptions would be noticed on a list with 420k recipients). I was wondering how effective this method was. Here are my results, in case anybody else was wondering:
With 20 subscribed addresses, the chance of getting the full list is 70%.
With 30 subscribed addresses, the chance of getting the full list is 93%.
With 40 subscribed addresses, the chance of getting the full list is 98.5%.
With 50 subscribed addresses, the chance of getting the full list is 99.7%.
With 100 subscribed addresses, the chance of getting the full list is 99.9999%.
Seems like this method of evading the censors is only effective if they're not smart enough to write a couple of simple scripts.
The quotes were just because it's not a big deal to move from Ubuntu to Kubuntu.
You can change an existing Ubuntu installation to Kubuntu by installing a few packages.
When Ubuntu decided to poop on their users with Unity, there was an exodus of biblical proportions to Linux Mint. That's why Mint is now the #1 distro.
IMHO, if they don't like Unity, it should have been an "exodus" to Kubuntu...
If you haven't tried it, please do. It's beautiful.
Didn't Mint do something vaguely similar by patching a package to redirecting searches to earn income for the distro rather than the original package authors?
I understand that, and I agree with you in principle. But as I said, this is a special case. This isn't about being offended, it's about fearing for your life. The typical arrests for violations of this law are Neo-Nazis running around with their right hands raised and shouting "Heil Hitler". This isn't a big deal in most of the world, but it's taken very seriously here. The Third Reich and the war were the single most important and terrifying episode in our country's recent history. You can't take two steps in Vienna without seeing a monument or a plaque commemorating the victims of that time. And there are still survivors around. As a consequence, people can be arrested for standing outside a synagogue and shouting Heil Hitler. You could see it as a voluntary surrender of part of our right to Free Speech, as a special courtesy and insurance for the former victims.
Like you, I disagree about the "denying the Holocaust" part; this should be legal. But at the present time, it's not possible to have a rational political discussion about it. No serious politician wants to be perceived as agreeing with the extreme right parties. Politicians without backbones are a global phenomenon...
As an Austrian; thank you for bringing this up. People from other countries are often confused or concerned about this law, so I'd like to clear a few things up. The situation is very similar in Germany, but since I'm an Austrian, and you specifically mentioned the Irving trial, I'll concentrate on that.
The Verbotsgesetz is indeed an intentional limitation on free speech. As far as I know, this is the only major difference to what is considered free speech in the US, although we may be a bit stricter concerning incitement of popular hatred against ethnic groups. Both the Verbotsgesetz and the right to free speech are part of the Austrian constitution. To understand why we have this law, and why such an obvious limitation on what we can say or publish is tolerated by the people, you need to take a look at when and why the law was instated.
The first version became law on May 8, 1945 - the very day that WWII ended in Europe with the capitulation of the Wehrmacht. Its main and largest part deals with the process of "denazification," which was an acute necessity in order to resume normal life after the war. It was also mandated by the allied forces, who continued to occupy Austria for the next ten years. This part is now dead law, because the denazification is as complete as it's ever going to be, and also because there was an amnesty for former members of the NSDAP in 1957.
The second part of the law forbids the reformation of the NSDAP and certain organizations associated with it (like the SS, SA, etc). It also - and here's where the interesting part comes in - made national-socialist activities illegal. This includes any action which "denies, belittles, condones or tries to justify the Nazi genocide or other Nazi crimes against humanity".
I'm sure you will understand why such a law was considered necessary immediately after the war. So why didn't we repeal it later? The main reason for that was to send a strong public signal that this era is once and for all over. During the time of the Third Reich, there was a significant brain drain in Germany and Austria. Many of the most important scientific minds, as well as writers, artists, lawyers, doctors, etc, were Jewish and were forced to emigrate. It was of great importance to prove to those people that it was safe to return.
Which leaves the question: how long should this law, as a special case due to historic necessity, remain in force? This point is actually debated regularly, but unfortunately the only people who are publicly advocating to repeal it are from the extreme right. They're not at all concerned about freedom of speech in general, they just want to avoid fines and prison terms after their typical antisemitic tirades. As a result, they are consistently voted down. As for me.. as long as there are Holocaust survivors living in this country, I wouldn't want the law repealed. At some point in the future, it would probably be best to put it behind us and let the normal laws handle these cases.
By the way, this Innocence of Muslims video (idiotic as it is) would not have violated any Austrian law. There's no need to be afraid about speaking your mind in Austria, as long as you don't publicly deny or condone the Nazi war crimes. Irving knew that perfectly well. He knowingly violated the Verbotsgesetz multiple times, and as a result he had to spend 13 months in prison. It was a stupid thing to do, and it appears he has learned his lesson.
On these logs, as is the norm, every web request was recorded (more than 376 million HTTP requests in total). It is certainly unfortunate this information was leaked out, and who knows who got it before it got fixed.
You could, you know... look in the logs to find out?
If you store passwords as a hash, as you are supposed to, then there is no way to shorten them since without the end of the password you won't be able to make the hash match. This means that at least somewhere Hotmail is storing passwords in plaintext.
Or that they've always silently thrown away anything past the 16th character.
This used to be the case with old Unix passwords too, except that the limit was 8 characters: if your password was hunter123, you could log in with hunter12, hunter124, etc.
Live and learn... The online edition of the Duden doesn't have a history, but my friend just looked it up in her 2006 dead-tree edition of the Duden, and "parsen" was not in there. Seem like parsen officially became a German word at some point in the last five years.
Exactly. The German translation is horrible. It looks like one person just went over the keywords and translated them without considering the context they'd be used in. I'm pretty sure that nobody else checked on that translation before they decided to go with it.
The main problem seems to be that the translator decided to use the infinitive verb form for command/method names, when the imperative form would have been more appropriate.
E.g., arr.zerteilen(x) literally means arr.to_slice(x), not arr.slice(x).
They're not even consistent in that usage: decodeURI --> dekodiereURI(imperative) break --> abbrechen(infinitive, "to break") try --> versuche(imperative) throw --> wirf(imperative) catch --> fangen(infinitive, "to catch")
Some translations are incorrect or just plain weird: length --> länger("longer") parseFloat --> parseGleitkommazahl("parse" is not a German word) parseInt --> praseGanzzahl(neither is "prase", obviously;-) return --> rücksprung("the jump back", awkward when used with values) escape --> umsetzen(??)
This clearly needs more work. Which is a shame, because I'm teaching programming to an 11-year old who only has a rudimentary grasp of English. This could have been used as a stepping stone to the real thing, but not in this state. It's probably a good thing, anyway. It won't hurt the kid to learn some more English.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod this man up.
From the space.com article, here's what Uwingu's CEO had to say...
Oh cry me a river...
CJ
Good intentions being the pavement to the road to hell, ever heard that one? Guess it would be adapted as the US foreign policy motto.
Come on, that's harsh.
Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing
...after they have exhausted all other possibilities.
-- Winston Churchill
CJ
The key is split (look up PKI key splitting) into 5 parts. My girlfriend, father, buddy at work, and two of my friends each have a part. [...] Four of those parts together are required to unlock.
Better make sure you're not travelling in a car (or airplane, etc) with two or more of your keybearers...
Why not give all of them the complete key and trust them? Thats what I do (minus the gf).
I know nothing about your friends or family, so YMMV.
CJ
Plutonium is a strange metal. [...] an experienced machinist or blacksmith would have trouble making a simple screwdriver or chisel out of and have to make a perfect, hollow, evacuated sphere out of it [...]
Please don't mention plutonium, half spheres and screwdrivers in the same sentence.
I've had nightmares about this.
You know what?
Fuck fuzzy time.
This is one of my pet annoyances in most "web 2.0" products. All those forums giving the time of a message as "a year ago" are driving me mad. Some of them at least have the actual date and time in the title attribute, but that doesn't help much on a mobile device. Let the software be exact, and leave the fuzziness to me, please.
CJ
FWIW, this is exactly what we do to cue a blind choir member.
It's not a geeky solution, and it involves people touching each other, but it's very reliable.
I can't imagine any sighted choir member refusing to do this.
The linked page on businessweek.com contains no less than 13 trackers:
ChartBeat
Disqus
DoubleClick
Dynamic Logic
Facebook Connect
ForeSee
Google Adsense
Google Analytics
Krux Digital
New Relic
ScoreCard Research Beacon
Taboola
Twitter Button
Oh dear, please disregard.
I didn't see the link in your post.
Oh and a son named Max as well.
And MaxDB is a former MySQL AB product (together with SAP AG).
The domain maxdb.org is now owned by Oracle. maxsql.org is still up for grabs :)
A monster of the highest order.
Maybe, ...but he loves you!
wouldn't it be cheaper to arm them with pointed sticks?
Pointed sticks? Ho, ho, ho. We want to learn how to defend ourselves against pointed sticks, do we? Getting all high and mighty, eh? Fresh fruit not good enough for you, eh? Well I'll tell you something my lad. When you're walking home tonight and some great homicidal maniac comes after you with a bunch of Apple products, don't come crying to me!
Now, the passion fruit.
[...] something "better" than crappy gnu info (there's nothing I hate more than a man page that directs me to use gnu info, how I hate that thing)
I feel your pain. I can't stand info either. Maybe if I had to use it more frequently, I would finally memorize the keybindings, but even then I find it awkward to use. I'm not ashamed to admit that I tend to fall back to an easier, more masses-compatible way of reading info pages: KDE's KIO slaves. I just hit Alt-F2 and type "info:gettext", which displays the info contents for GNU gettext in a browser as a set of nicely formatted HTML pages. All manpages and info pages are also browsable and listed alphabetically in the KDE help center. (Of course, that wouldn't work if the info pages are only available on a remote server, but I can't remember that ever coming up.) Not sure about Gnome and other desktop environments, but they probably have something similar.
In short, if there's a hard way and an easy way to do it, and they both give the same result... I'm a geek, not a masochist.
CJ
So somebody who wants to block all the proxies would have to subscribe several times in order to get the full list (it's not like multiple subscriptions would be noticed on a list with 420k recipients). I was wondering how effective this method was. Here are my results, in case anybody else was wondering:
With 20 subscribed addresses, the chance of getting the full list is 70%.
With 30 subscribed addresses, the chance of getting the full list is 93%.
With 40 subscribed addresses, the chance of getting the full list is 98.5%.
With 50 subscribed addresses, the chance of getting the full list is 99.7%.
With 100 subscribed addresses, the chance of getting the full list is 99.9999%.
Seems like this method of evading the censors is only effective if they're not smart enough to write a couple of simple scripts.
CJ
You can change an existing Ubuntu installation to Kubuntu by installing a few packages.
CJ
When Ubuntu decided to poop on their users with Unity, there was an exodus of biblical proportions to Linux Mint. That's why Mint is now the #1 distro.
IMHO, if they don't like Unity, it should have been an "exodus" to Kubuntu...
If you haven't tried it, please do. It's beautiful.
CJ
Didn't Mint do something vaguely similar by patching a package to redirecting searches to earn income for the distro rather than the original package authors?
No, that was Ubuntu, too. Ubuntu vs Banshee
I'm only providing the link. Please don't interpret this as me siding with RMS against Ubuntu, or the other way around.
CJ
First-world is NATO, second-world is [former] Soviet, and third-world is everybody else.
That's a horribly outdated definition. Or would you call Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, and other highly developed nations third world countries?
No boom today.
Boom tomorrow.
There's always a boom tomorrow.
I understand that, and I agree with you in principle. But as I said, this is a special case. This isn't about being offended, it's about fearing for your life. The typical arrests for violations of this law are Neo-Nazis running around with their right hands raised and shouting "Heil Hitler". This isn't a big deal in most of the world, but it's taken very seriously here. The Third Reich and the war were the single most important and terrifying episode in our country's recent history. You can't take two steps in Vienna without seeing a monument or a plaque commemorating the victims of that time. And there are still survivors around. As a consequence, people can be arrested for standing outside a synagogue and shouting Heil Hitler. You could see it as a voluntary surrender of part of our right to Free Speech, as a special courtesy and insurance for the former victims.
Like you, I disagree about the "denying the Holocaust" part; this should be legal. But at the present time, it's not possible to have a rational political discussion about it. No serious politician wants to be perceived as agreeing with the extreme right parties. Politicians without backbones are a global phenomenon...
CJ
As an Austrian; thank you for bringing this up. People from other countries are often confused or concerned about this law, so I'd like to clear a few things up. The situation is very similar in Germany, but since I'm an Austrian, and you specifically mentioned the Irving trial, I'll concentrate on that.
The Verbotsgesetz is indeed an intentional limitation on free speech. As far as I know, this is the only major difference to what is considered free speech in the US, although we may be a bit stricter concerning incitement of popular hatred against ethnic groups. Both the Verbotsgesetz and the right to free speech are part of the Austrian constitution. To understand why we have this law, and why such an obvious limitation on what we can say or publish is tolerated by the people, you need to take a look at when and why the law was instated.
The first version became law on May 8, 1945 - the very day that WWII ended in Europe with the capitulation of the Wehrmacht. Its main and largest part deals with the process of "denazification," which was an acute necessity in order to resume normal life after the war. It was also mandated by the allied forces, who continued to occupy Austria for the next ten years. This part is now dead law, because the denazification is as complete as it's ever going to be, and also because there was an amnesty for former members of the NSDAP in 1957.
The second part of the law forbids the reformation of the NSDAP and certain organizations associated with it (like the SS, SA, etc). It also - and here's where the interesting part comes in - made national-socialist activities illegal. This includes any action which "denies, belittles, condones or tries to justify the Nazi genocide or other Nazi crimes against humanity".
I'm sure you will understand why such a law was considered necessary immediately after the war. So why didn't we repeal it later? The main reason for that was to send a strong public signal that this era is once and for all over. During the time of the Third Reich, there was a significant brain drain in Germany and Austria. Many of the most important scientific minds, as well as writers, artists, lawyers, doctors, etc, were Jewish and were forced to emigrate. It was of great importance to prove to those people that it was safe to return.
Which leaves the question: how long should this law, as a special case due to historic necessity, remain in force? This point is actually debated regularly, but unfortunately the only people who are publicly advocating to repeal it are from the extreme right. They're not at all concerned about freedom of speech in general, they just want to avoid fines and prison terms after their typical antisemitic tirades. As a result, they are consistently voted down. As for me.. as long as there are Holocaust survivors living in this country, I wouldn't want the law repealed. At some point in the future, it would probably be best to put it behind us and let the normal laws handle these cases.
By the way, this Innocence of Muslims video (idiotic as it is) would not have violated any Austrian law. There's no need to be afraid about speaking your mind in Austria, as long as you don't publicly deny or condone the Nazi war crimes. Irving knew that perfectly well. He knowingly violated the Verbotsgesetz multiple times, and as a result he had to spend 13 months in prison. It was a stupid thing to do, and it appears he has learned his lesson.
CJ
-- it's not like the poles have huge buildings and whatnot that would obstruct the view.
The Elder Things and the Shoggoths would disagree.
You could, you know... look in the logs to find out?
If you store passwords as a hash, as you are supposed to, then there is no way to shorten them since without the end of the password you won't be able to make the hash match. This means that at least somewhere Hotmail is storing passwords in plaintext.
Or that they've always silently thrown away anything past the 16th character.
This used to be the case with old Unix passwords too, except that the limit was 8 characters: if your password was hunter123, you could log in with hunter12, hunter124, etc.
CJ
Live and learn... The online edition of the Duden doesn't have a history, but my friend just looked it up in her 2006 dead-tree edition of the Duden, and "parsen" was not in there. Seem like parsen officially became a German word at some point in the last five years.
Exactly. The German translation is horrible. It looks like one person just went over the keywords and translated them without considering the context they'd be used in. I'm pretty sure that nobody else checked on that translation before they decided to go with it.
The main problem seems to be that the translator decided to use the infinitive verb form for command/method names, when the imperative form would have been more appropriate.
E.g., arr.zerteilen(x) literally means arr.to_slice(x), not arr.slice(x).
They're not even consistent in that usage:
decodeURI --> dekodiereURI (imperative)
break --> abbrechen (infinitive, "to break")
try --> versuche (imperative)
throw --> wirf (imperative)
catch --> fangen (infinitive, "to catch")
Some translations are incorrect or just plain weird: ;-)
length --> länger ("longer")
parseFloat --> parseGleitkommazahl ("parse" is not a German word)
parseInt --> praseGanzzahl (neither is "prase", obviously
return --> rücksprung ("the jump back", awkward when used with values)
escape --> umsetzen (??)
This clearly needs more work. Which is a shame, because I'm teaching programming to an 11-year old who only has a rudimentary grasp of English. This could have been used as a stepping stone to the real thing, but not in this state. It's probably a good thing, anyway. It won't hurt the kid to learn some more English.
CJ