...arguments that apply equally to handhelds and to full-sized computers. Why should it be any more important that you have the extra control/privacy that OSS provides on your portable than on any other computer?
In the final (or possibly penultimate) episode, you see KMail on Michelle's desktop. I noticed this while watching the DVD the other day. And no, I didn't need to go and freeze-frame it or anything.
More likely just the one. The really bad offenders have no excuse to use a gas-guzzler at all, whereas 3-kid families do actually get my sympathy when it comes to using a full-size vehicle.
Slightly offtopic, but: Are there any papers in the UK that aren't tabloids?
The Grauniad is the most respected newspaper among the politically aware round here (and also suits my political stance of ``well over to the left''). Then, heading more towards the right, you get the Indy, the Times, and the Torygraph.
Those posters did seem rather odd, chastising people in public for not owning a television.
Not only that, but the cost of putting up the full-size advert mentioning how many (all the ones I've seen have been <5) houses have no TV licence almost certainly costs more than the amount they'll get if that number of people pay a licence.
there have been cases where owners have successfully argued they watch no TV broadcasts even though they have the equipment.
Not quite. Yes, they successfully proved they did not watch TV broadcasts. However, they still got fined, because the letter of the (bloody stupid) law was being followed, rather than the spirit.
(I can't find a source for this, so it's your word vs mine, but I do recall hearing the outcome on these cases.)
Besides, using the term "clone" is so vague as to be meaningless.
Not to mention the fact that ``Intellectual Property'' is just a made-up term to blanket cover a number of legal areas including copyrights, patents and trademarks. People claiming an IP infringment are deliberately avoiding being specific about it, usually because they don't actually have a leg to stand on.
Obviously, they'd have to adapt the kernel to suit their needs, since most of the hardware on the shuttle is custom designed and built for it. Under the GPL they would have to release any changes they make to the kernel back into the public domain.
No, they wouldn't. This is just FUD. See the GPL FAQ:
The GPL does not require you to release your modified version. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. [...] If you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the users, under the GPL
They'd only have to make the source public if they were also distributing the customised kernel. Chances are, they're only going to use their executable in this custom hardware of theirs.
[which folders should be protected]... Which is why you'd have a flag attributable to folders, that would tell rm to prompt the user "are you sure?". Which folders got this flag would be up to the people who put together the particular distro (of, if they don't do it, the end-user or administrator who wants to harden it).
That sounds like a reasonable idea at first, but if it means adding a new flag to the filesystem (and therefore creating a new filesystem format), then before long, someone will decide to add another new feature - an rm option that says `override protection flag -- use with extreme caution'. And then you're back to where we are now, with the -f option overriding the readonly flag.
Presumably if you were to create an rm that reads a list of protected files (eg/etc/dontrm) then someone would add a flag to circumvent that, too.
There's already one level of safeguards in place by aliasing rm to `rm -i' Wrong. Always being prompted "are you sure (y/n)" is *not* a safeguard at all. It simply builds into you the habit to press 'y' after typing 'rm'.
It still saves directories - the first y is to say `Descend into directory...?', and doesn't actually delete anything. Then when you get a second question after pressing `y' you might realise that it's not about to do what you expected.
Also, there should be a trashcan.
Personally, I delete stuff because it's taking valuable disk space, so I don't want it to go and take up the same amount of space under the name `recycle bin'. However, I take your point that others might have more space for backups. There is a kernel undelete system under development, but it's not much good at the moment. (If you need it that much, you might consider helping with the development (or testing).)
Your hypothetical "rm" program and similar hypothetical and real programs that don't consider social realities and human imperfection suck compared to those that do.
Unfortunately, a computer simply cannot consider social realities and human imperfections on the fly - not till neural networks and highspeed processors get considerably ahead of where we are today. Therefore, all these safeguards need to be decided by the programmer at the time of writing. Sure, it's easy to say "query before rm -rf/", but where do you draw the line? Should you automatically query before deleting "/etc"? Or maybe "/opt"? "/usr/local/"? It will differ from machine to machine, and if you don't like the behaviour which seems to suit the masses, then you can hack the rm sources to ignore the -f flag under very specific conditions, and see how many people prefer using that.
There's already one level of safeguards in place by aliasing rm to `rm -i'. By specifying the -f flag, you are being equivalent to (returning to the analogy used earlier in this thread) a pilot who places a bag over his head before starting - it is still possible to continue safely, but you know you must be extremely careful.
(All this said, it is a complete PITA that having a file named `-rf' can cause untold destruction when used with `rm *'. That's an oversight in the combined functionality of glob(3) and any cmdline tool that reads "-foo" as options. Unfortunately this seems to be in the POSIX spec, and can only be overcome by writing programs that say `to hell with POSIX compliance, I want something that *works*'. Scuse me while I hack a fix into the bash shell...)
Everything that fades in or out does so in just the right amount of time to look "classy" instead of "cheezy"
Oh, really? Try logging out on a multi-user installation of XP. When you bring up the dialog to log out (with its Log off, Shutdown, Restart etc options), the screen gently fades to black-and-white. Yes, very nice. Now, having selected `log off user $USERNAME', you click OK. The screen _instantly_ comes back into colour. No gentle fading at all. That's just sloppy.
we need a way to identify people,
and if you think that driver's licenses and social security numbers aren't already doing this...
Please think about what you've just said - You're right, driver's licenses and social security numbers (or, here in the UK, national insurance numbers) are already doing this, and they're doing it satisfactorily. So: what's the need for another form of ID? It won't increase security, or prevent forgery, at all - it'll just make more of a mess to be cleaned up when something does go wrong, because if people trust it absolutely, criminals will make more of an effort to forge it.
These are all fairly primitive methods. Anyone with a slight bit of clue can find the URLs and set them up for leeching as before.
The interesting bit is the Spam protection. This bit didn't have any examples, but asked you to do it yourself `with a few lines of JavaScript'. Just like normal address-munging, then. And that's just what this site is about. You can obfuscate things so that a human can still work them out but a machine can't, and if everyone is intelligent enough to obfuscate in their own individual way, no script can be written to do it. This works against spam-spiders, which want to get as many addresses in as short a time as possible. But if someone wants to deep-link a reference to the latest TV-capped Buffy episode, then someone else will work out a way to leech it if they're really determined.
The posters who are saying ``circumvent it if you want, it's you who'll lose out when the site goes down due to lack of funding'' are right. If a site wants to keep getting its revenue, it's going to have to guilt-trip its customers into funding them, not just try using increasingly sneaky and unreliable methods (compare with copy-prevented audio discs).
Just for the record, here's how to circumvent all the examples they give (line breaks permitting...). They don't even check the referrer URL, so I don't see how they're in any way reliable.
Protect download links (These all return the same test.zip file.)
http://www.anti-leech.com/al_download2.php?filennn =test&id=demo_pop
http://www.anti-leech.com/al_download2.php?filennn =test&id=demo_gat
http://www.anti-leech.com/al_download2.php?filennn =test&id=demo_gat&package=1
http://www.anti-leech.com/al_download2.php?filennn =test&id=demo_pop&package=1
Image links (both return same.gif, as do all the thumbnail pages)
http://www.anti-leech.com/ai_load.php?id=demo_pop& name=test
http://www.anti-leech.com/ai_load.php?id=demo_gat& name=test
HTML links (some versions of wget do annoying escaping here, so just point your browser and hit View Source)
http://www.anti-leech.com/html/load_crypted.php?id =demo_gat&l=http://www.anti-leech.com/antihtml.php &html=test
http://www.anti-leech.com/html/load_crypted.php?id =demo_pop&l=http://www.anti-leech.com/antihtml.php &html=test
And the main example? - just use lynx:-)... alternatively, wait till you get an actual Access Denied type of page, then look at the URL - it'll have a bit saying &adblocker=yes. Just change that to &adblocker=no. ``No ad blockers here, honest guv!''. D'oh.
over the decade of Microsoft's hegemony, computing power has grown cheaper and cheaper.
I've heard this before, and I will agree. See In the beginning was the command line. The point is, MS made it possible for computers to become cheap and commonplace. But now that they've done that, there is no further benefit from them maintaining a monopoly. The idiot who wrote this article doesn't seem to understand that much, and is still narrow-mindedly believing that they can do no wrong.
It boils down to ``OS doesn't matter - you need windows'' - in other words, a blatant bit of technically inaccurate flamebait. (And very good flamebait too - I've bitten...) Unfortunately, there's still idiots out there who believe what he's saying, and will think ``if even the experts say the OS is irrelevant and we should all buy Windows, then I will''.
We need Microsoft itself to be the universal stepladder that lets us climb out of our hole and smell the roses.... euch. Troll just isn't a good enough word for it. Pass the 2x4x24.
Perhaps you should concentrate on tcpdump logs instead of trying to reverse engineer the code itself. I've considered tackling this project myself.
I have tackled this project myself for a while. I didn't get anywhere with the handshake thing, but I found out about a bit about some of the proprietary protocols involved, such as RDT. The packet header structure looks like it's been deliberately obfuscated to prevent reverse-engineering. But as it's not actually encrypted, it's still hackable.
but it was the previously missing key to saving streamed media.
No, the way to save streamed media is to run tcpdump to capture the packets, while you play the stream using the offical RealPlayer, then investigate the logs. As the stuff still isn't encrypted, you can then reassemble it. I've done this a couple of times, but the code I wrote to do it is such a hack that I won't be releasing it any time soon. (Information about some of the media protocols involved can be found online if you look hard enough.)
Of course, if someone did manage to rediscover this key, or even if one of the original hackers who wrote Streambox could reconstruct it, and then it was released open source, Real wouldn't be able to shut it down so easily. Which would lead to one of two things: Either Real is no longer used as a streaming protocol, as everyone knows how to hack it (until they take time to build a new handshake protocol that isn't vulnerable), Or the few kilobytes of code required will reach the same state as DeCSS - you will be prosecuted for distributing it, reading it, using it, explaining it, and if it's found that you actually wrote it, then you're well and truly shafted.
Because the Hungarian alphaware cygwin hack can actually re-encode the movie to a different (open) format. And it can read some files for which there is no standalone player, like those embedded movies from Quake. And loads of other fun stuff that WinMediaPlayer won't let you do.
What he doesn't realise, is that the spammers may soon wise up to this, in the same way that they have learned to forge headers etc. It shouldn't be too difficult to make a script that calls wget in a way that looks like a genuine browser, by generating GET requests for the images too (and possibly other tricks), in order to keep themselves generating links. But the lynx users [waves] will keep ignoring the images, so only the lynx users will be affected in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
Pity the alternatives aren't further along.
Looks like a perfect opportunity to switch to Y, then. These things won't get any further along without a little pushing.
200 GOSUB 38000 ; * Profit
...arguments that apply equally to handhelds and to full-sized computers. Why should it be any more important that you have the extra control/privacy that OSS provides on your portable than on any other computer?
then the rest of it looks like clock stuff
rclock.c has nothing to do with clocks. It implements Read-Copy-update LOCKs, of which there doesn't appear to be any mention in eg. 2.4.23
In the final (or possibly penultimate) episode, you see KMail on Michelle's desktop. I noticed this while watching the DVD the other day. And no, I didn't need to go and freeze-frame it or anything.
3 kids in the back
More likely just the one. The really bad offenders have no excuse to use a gas-guzzler at all, whereas 3-kid families do actually get my sympathy when it comes to using a full-size vehicle.
document that can't be freely redistributed.
No different from the POSIX standard, then...
Slightly offtopic, but: Are there any papers in the UK that aren't tabloids?
The Grauniad is the most respected newspaper among the politically aware round here (and also suits my political stance of ``well over to the left''). Then, heading more towards the right, you get the Indy, the Times, and the Torygraph.
Those posters did seem rather odd, chastising people in public for not owning a television.
Not only that, but the cost of putting up the full-size advert mentioning how many (all the ones I've seen have been <5) houses have no TV licence almost certainly costs more than the amount they'll get if that number of people pay a licence.
there have been cases where owners have successfully argued they watch no TV broadcasts even though they have the equipment.
Not quite. Yes, they successfully proved they did not watch TV broadcasts. However, they still got fined, because the letter of the (bloody stupid) law was being followed, rather than the spirit.
(I can't find a source for this, so it's your word vs mine, but I do recall hearing the outcome on these cases.)
Besides, using the term "clone" is so vague as to be meaningless.
Not to mention the fact that ``Intellectual Property'' is just a made-up term to blanket cover a number of legal areas including copyrights, patents and trademarks. People claiming an IP infringment are deliberately avoiding being specific about it, usually because they don't actually have a leg to stand on.
Its funny how every mac user claims that having the taskbar at the top is a good idea and yet they all claim its a good idea for a different reason.
Do you suppose that may be because there are lots of good reasons for having it at the top?
Obviously, they'd have to adapt the kernel to suit their needs, since most of the hardware on the shuttle is custom designed and built for it. Under the GPL they would have to release any changes they make to the kernel back into the public domain.
No, they wouldn't. This is just FUD. See the GPL FAQ:
The GPL does not require you to release your modified version. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. [...] If you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the users, under the GPL
They'd only have to make the source public if they were also distributing the customised kernel. Chances are, they're only going to use their executable in this custom hardware of theirs.
[which folders should be protected]... Which is why you'd have a flag attributable to folders, that would tell rm to prompt the user "are you sure?". Which folders got this flag would be up to the people who put together the particular distro (of, if they don't do it, the end-user or administrator who wants to harden it).
That sounds like a reasonable idea at first, but if it means adding a new flag to the filesystem (and therefore creating a new filesystem format), then before long, someone will decide to add another new feature - an rm option that says `override protection flag -- use with extreme caution'. And then you're back to where we are now, with the -f option overriding the readonly flag.
Presumably if you were to create an rm that reads a list of protected files (eg /etc/dontrm) then someone would add a flag to circumvent that, too.
There's already one level of safeguards in place by aliasing rm to `rm -i'
Wrong. Always being prompted "are you sure (y/n)" is *not* a safeguard at all. It simply builds into you the habit to press 'y' after typing 'rm'.
It still saves directories - the first y is to say `Descend into directory...?', and doesn't actually delete anything. Then when you get a second question after pressing `y' you might realise that it's not about to do what you expected.
Also, there should be a trashcan.
Personally, I delete stuff because it's taking valuable disk space, so I don't want it to go and take up the same amount of space under the name `recycle bin'. However, I take your point that others might have more space for backups. There is a kernel undelete system under development, but it's not much good at the moment. (If you need it that much, you might consider helping with the development (or testing) .)
Your hypothetical "rm" program and similar hypothetical and real programs that don't consider social realities and human imperfection suck compared to those that do.
Unfortunately, a computer simply cannot consider social realities and human imperfections on the fly - not till neural networks and highspeed processors get considerably ahead of where we are today. Therefore, all these safeguards need to be decided by the programmer at the time of writing. Sure, it's easy to say "query before rm -rf /", but where do you draw the line? Should you automatically query before deleting "/etc"? Or maybe "/opt"? "/usr/local/"? It will differ from machine to machine, and if you don't like the behaviour which seems to suit the masses, then you can hack the rm sources to ignore the -f flag under very specific conditions, and see how many people prefer using that.
There's already one level of safeguards in place by aliasing rm to `rm -i'. By specifying the -f flag, you are being equivalent to (returning to the analogy used earlier in this thread) a pilot who places a bag over his head before starting - it is still possible to continue safely, but you know you must be extremely careful.
(All this said, it is a complete PITA that having a file named `-rf' can cause untold destruction when used with `rm *'. That's an oversight in the combined functionality of glob(3) and any cmdline tool that reads "-foo" as options. Unfortunately this seems to be in the POSIX spec, and can only be overcome by writing programs that say `to hell with POSIX compliance, I want something that *works*'. Scuse me while I hack a fix into the bash shell...)
Everything that fades in or out does so in just the right amount of time
to look "classy" instead of "cheezy"
Oh, really? Try logging out on a multi-user installation of XP. When you
bring up the dialog to log out (with its Log off, Shutdown, Restart etc
options), the screen gently fades to black-and-white. Yes, very nice.
Now, having selected `log off user $USERNAME', you click OK. The screen
_instantly_ comes back into colour. No gentle fading at all. That's just
sloppy.
we need a way to identify people,
and if you think that driver's licenses and social security numbers aren't already doing this...
Please think about what you've just said - You're right, driver's licenses and social security numbers (or, here in the UK, national insurance numbers) are already doing this, and they're doing it satisfactorily. So: what's the need for another form of ID?
It won't increase security, or prevent forgery, at all - it'll just make more of a mess to be cleaned up when something does go wrong, because if people trust it absolutely, criminals will make more of an effort to forge it.
These are all fairly primitive methods. Anyone with a slight bit of clue can find the URLs and set them up for leeching as before.
The interesting bit is the Spam protection. This bit didn't have any examples, but asked you to do it yourself `with a few lines of JavaScript'. Just like normal address-munging, then. And that's just what this site is about. You can obfuscate things so that a human can still work them out but a machine can't, and if everyone is intelligent enough to obfuscate in their own individual way, no script can be written to do it. This works against spam-spiders, which want to get as many addresses in as short a time as possible. But if someone wants to deep-link a reference to the latest TV-capped Buffy episode, then someone else will work out a way to leech it if they're really determined.
The posters who are saying ``circumvent it if you want, it's you who'll lose out when the site goes down due to lack of funding'' are right. If a site wants to keep getting its revenue, it's going to have to guilt-trip its customers into funding them, not just try using increasingly sneaky and unreliable methods (compare with copy-prevented audio discs).
Just for the record, here's how to circumvent all the examples they give (line breaks permitting...). They don't even check the referrer URL, so I don't see how they're in any way reliable.
And the main example? - just use lynx :-) ... alternatively, wait till you get an actual Access Denied type of page, then look at the URL - it'll have a bit saying &adblocker=yes. Just change that to &adblocker=no. ``No ad blockers here, honest guv!''. D'oh.
Are there any browser plugins for using mplayer to play movies online yet
In the style of the MPlayer support team:
;-)
RTFM - man mailcap
(It works with lynx and probably others)
you can record 30 seconds of music you hear
Oh my god! With that kind of technology, and 6 of these things, you can copy a whole SONG without paying! It'll have to be outlawed immediately!
over the decade of Microsoft's hegemony, computing power has grown cheaper and cheaper.
I've heard this before, and I will agree. See In the beginning was the command line. The point is, MS made it possible for computers to become cheap and commonplace. But now that they've done that, there is no further benefit from them maintaining a monopoly. The idiot who wrote this article doesn't seem to understand that much, and is still narrow-mindedly believing that they can do no wrong.
It boils down to ``OS doesn't matter - you need windows'' - in other words, a blatant bit of technically inaccurate flamebait. (And very good flamebait too - I've bitten...) Unfortunately, there's still idiots out there who believe what he's saying, and will think ``if even the experts say the OS is irrelevant and we should all buy Windows, then I will''.
We need Microsoft itself to be the universal stepladder that lets us climb out of our hole and smell the roses. ... euch. Troll just isn't a good enough word for it. Pass the 2x4x24.
Perhaps you should concentrate on tcpdump logs instead of trying to reverse engineer the code itself. I've considered tackling this project myself.
I have tackled this project myself for a while. I didn't get anywhere with the handshake thing, but I found out about a bit about some of the proprietary protocols involved, such as RDT. The packet header structure looks like it's been deliberately obfuscated to prevent reverse-engineering. But as it's not actually encrypted, it's still hackable.
but it was the previously missing key to saving streamed media.
No, the way to save streamed media is to run tcpdump to capture the packets, while you play the stream using the offical RealPlayer, then investigate the logs. As the stuff still isn't encrypted, you can then reassemble it. I've done this a couple of times, but the code I wrote to do it is such a hack that I won't be releasing it any time soon. (Information about some of the media protocols involved can be found online if you look hard enough.)
Of course, if someone did manage to rediscover this key, or even if one of the original hackers who wrote Streambox could reconstruct it, and then it was released open source, Real wouldn't be able to shut it down so easily. Which would lead to one of two things: Either Real is no longer used as a streaming protocol, as everyone knows how to hack it (until they take time to build a new handshake protocol that isn't vulnerable), Or the few kilobytes of code required will reach the same state as DeCSS - you will be prosecuted for distributing it, reading it, using it, explaining it, and if it's found that you actually wrote it, then you're well and truly shafted.
Because the Hungarian alphaware cygwin hack can actually re-encode the movie to a different (open) format. And it can read some files for which there is no standalone player, like those embedded movies from Quake. And loads of other fun stuff that WinMediaPlayer won't let you do.
What he doesn't realise, is that the spammers may soon wise up to this, in the same way that they have learned to forge headers etc. It shouldn't be too difficult to make a script that calls wget in a way that looks like a genuine browser, by generating GET requests for the images too (and possibly other tricks), in order to keep themselves generating links. But the lynx users [waves] will keep ignoring the images, so only the lynx users will be affected in the long run.