Looking at the anti-piracy campaign ad poster (PDF file), I just wonder if the P2P program nicknames depicted are fake or a real sample of fileswappers the MPAA has observed on the net...:)
You are writing as if the award would have been given by the French. Well, the festival might have been French but this year's jury comprised in fact of many US citizens with Quentin Tarantino as the jury president. The was only one French citizen on the jury. I quote the article in The New York Times:
He also said that Mr. Tarantino had assured him that the political message of "Fahrenheit 9/11" did not influence the jury's decision. "On this jury we have different politics," he quoted Mr. Tarantino as saying. It is also a film financed by Miramax, which distributes Mr. Tarantino's movies.
Mr. Moore noted that four of the nine jurors were American: Mr. Tarantino, Kathleen Turner, the director Jerry Schatzberg, and the Haitian-born novelist Edwidge Danticat. "I fully expect the Fox News Channel and other right-wing media to portray this as an award from the French," Mr. Moore said. Only one juror, the actress Emanuelle Béart, is a French citizen.
Without having looked at the project pages, I'd guess that the features of the language (syntax, etc.) make it industrial-strength, but this particular first implementation of the language (compiler, libraries, etc.) is only at the pre-alpha stage.
Well, yeah. But there is this "update" on the story with a quote from Ballmer:
I can assure you that we know there has been no compromise of the integrity of the source code; that it has not been modified or tampered with in any way.
The problem is that the quote is soon four years old. So that statement is not relevant to this story at all.
Go into kazaa and gnutella and search for any.doc files. Or some likely sounding names like "resume" or "job application".
Other examples are ".dbx", the file name extension for mail folders in Outlook Express. Or ".pwl", the Windows 9x system password file (supposedly easily crackable with the correct tool).
There are unfortunately clueless users who share their whole hard drive. File sharing programs have however started getting better in discouraging or preventing the users from doing this.
Well, I have always thought that the vibrating alarms in the Nokias have been a bit weak... maybe Sybian could assist in developing a more... uhh... satisfying mobile exprerience....:)
Can you give some info and pointers about the CS/IT/telecom education in India, especially at unversity level? I'm interested in how qualified the tech sector workers are in India.
How many people graduate from a (technical) university on an average? (As a fraction of all people born a certain year, for example.)
Does the government subsidize university-level education in any way, or is a degree only possible to attain only if you are rich enough? What does a M.Sc. or B.Sc. degree cost you?
What are the most prominent higher-level education universities in the technology sector? Homepage URLs? Do they specialize in any particular fields of technology?
What's the teaching like, compared to curriculums in Eurpoe or the US? Are certain subjects and fields emphasized more or less?
Are there any major differences in teaching methods? (lectures, homework, group projects, tuition by teaching assistants, etc.)
Are those Indians that have graduated abroad (say in the US) more respected than people who have graduated from an Indian university? That is, how well are foreign degrees appreciated within India?
What is the employment outlook and status in tech-sector jobs in India? Are many graduated engineers unemployed? Has the unemployment rate risen or fallen? What impact has the outsourcing of jobs to India had on the employment rates?
We are giving them the chance to make 2 legal copies for private use with "official blanks".
I don't get this. According to copyright law (well, at least the copyright law in Finland and as I have understood also other Western countries) I am allowed to copy any published work for private use. And I can make as many copies as I want. I don't even have to own the work I make private copies of, I'm allowed for example to copy works I have borrowed from the library or my friends.
Then this band comes along and says: "Hey, look here. We are nice to you. You may copy our record. But you may only make two copies and only on these particular branded discs."
This is nothing to celebrate. The band is acutally not giving me more liberties, they are trying to say that they have the right to restrict my liberties from status quo. Bah! Don't support them!
Your idea of running fake open proxies for spammers to discover and 'abuse' is not new. There is already software for this purpose. Search for 'proxy honeypot' or 'proxypot' in Google.
In fact, Ronald F. Guilmette who ran the monkeys.com anti-spam website and open proxy blocklist and who was forced to shut down due to DDoS-attacks also ran an extensive network of proxypots to unconver those criminal spammer gangs who regularly abuse open proxies and also to uncover the rouge ISPs who host these criminals and who let the proxy hijackers to be connected.
Mr. Guilmette posted several times to the news.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup (charter) compiled lists of the top proxy-abuse allowing ISPs and extensive analyses of the proxy-hijackers' operations (examples here, here, here, here and here). This anti-spam work was partly very fruitful, resulting in several ISPs to be outed as spammer-friendly and also being forced to clean up their act.
What irritates me more is when people refer to junk email as "SPAM" instead of "spam"
actually, isn't that part of hormel's deal? we can continue to call UBE (insert full stops as required) SPAM as long as we capitalise it and they won't complain or try to sue anyone over dilution of trademark etc. (ie as spam is actually a product they sell).
It's the other way around. Hormel has a trademark on 'SPAM' and would prefer UBE to be called 'spam'. See the SPAM website for more info.
For a freshman, that's rather smart. He'll probably be successful in his studies.
I mean, not everybody can build a fusion rector in his freshman year. I'm finishing my master's thesis and even I cannot get the reaction running properly yet.
It's sadly true that mp3 has gained such a momentum and support in the market that the chances for another file format to gain a similar status are rather slim and far away.
Support for other formats such as Ogg Vorbis is fortunately slowly growing. For example Winamp which is probably the most popular media player for Windows (apart from Windows' own built-in player) has supported Ogg Vorbis in the standard install since version 2.80. And that version is old, at least over a year IIRC.
So the player support is beginning to be there. It's a question of, as you mentioned, getting people to actually use the other formats when encoding.
Spews was an excellent solution. It wasn't perfect and a few mistakes were made. The fact that the real operators had to remain secret due to all the lawsuit threats did make it difficult to provide feedback to make corrections. I predict SPEWS will be back, but in a different form, possibly as a distributed file of sites to block... which will make it even harder to get removed since it will then not be operating as a live database.
Please note that Osirusoft is not SPEWS. You are speaking as if SPEWS has shut down. This is not the case. (AFAIK.) Osirusoft hosted many mirrors of popular blocklists. One of them was SPEWS. Many people used Osirusoft to access the SPEWS list. Even if Osirusoft shut down, SPEWS is still accessible for example at http://bl.reynolds.net.au/spews/.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking at the anti-piracy campaign ad poster (PDF file), I just wonder if the P2P program nicknames depicted are fake or a real sample of fileswappers the MPAA has observed on the net... :)
The cracks.am domain sure is registered in Armenia. But the www.cracks.am website has an IP address assigned to an ISP in Sealand, not Armenia.
Look it up: http://www.openrbl.org/ip/217/64/35/211.whois.htm.
Gilmore has a website, http://www.freetotravel.org/ with more info and court documents regarding his case against the US government.
You are writing as if the award would have been given by the French. Well, the festival might have been French but this year's jury comprised in fact of many US citizens with Quentin Tarantino as the jury president. The was only one French citizen on the jury. I quote the article in The New York Times:
I think we found them already....
Without having looked at the project pages, I'd guess that the features of the language (syntax, etc.) make it industrial-strength, but this particular first implementation of the language (compiler, libraries, etc.) is only at the pre-alpha stage.
As long as there are people putting "I know CHMOD and Upload/Download" on their resumes, I guess anything is possible....
It probably is related to WALLA.
Sorry, that quote is almost four years old.
Sorry, that quote is soon four years old.
Well, yeah. But there is this "update" on the story with a quote from Ballmer:
The problem is that the quote is soon four years old. So that statement is not relevant to this story at all.
Seems like a hoax.
Other examples are ".dbx", the file name extension for mail folders in Outlook Express. Or ".pwl", the Windows 9x system password file (supposedly easily crackable with the correct tool).
There are unfortunately clueless users who share their whole hard drive. File sharing programs have however started getting better in discouraging or preventing the users from doing this.
Well, I have always thought that the vibrating alarms in the Nokias have been a bit weak... maybe Sybian could assist in developing a more... uhh... satisfying mobile exprerience.... :)
Can you give some info and pointers about the CS/IT/telecom education in India, especially at unversity level? I'm interested in how qualified the tech sector workers are in India.
I don't get this. According to copyright law (well, at least the copyright law in Finland and as I have understood also other Western countries) I am allowed to copy any published work for private use. And I can make as many copies as I want. I don't even have to own the work I make private copies of, I'm allowed for example to copy works I have borrowed from the library or my friends.
Then this band comes along and says: "Hey, look here. We are nice to you. You may copy our record. But you may only make two copies and only on these particular branded discs."
This is nothing to celebrate. The band is acutally not giving me more liberties, they are trying to say that they have the right to restrict my liberties from status quo. Bah! Don't support them!
To get a grasp on how widely blocked you are, look up your IP address on the various DNS-based blocklists.
Enter your mail server IP address into OpenRBL and the spam database lookup form at DNS Stuff.
The "Google" and "Senderbase" links at OpenRBL are also useful.
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen addressed the issue of linkrot in a column already in 1998: Fighting Linkrot.
*ROTFLMAO*
Man, I wish I had mod points today.... =)
Your idea of running fake open proxies for spammers to discover and 'abuse' is not new. There is already software for this purpose. Search for 'proxy honeypot' or 'proxypot' in Google.
In fact, Ronald F. Guilmette who ran the monkeys.com anti-spam website and open proxy blocklist and who was forced to shut down due to DDoS-attacks also ran an extensive network of proxypots to unconver those criminal spammer gangs who regularly abuse open proxies and also to uncover the rouge ISPs who host these criminals and who let the proxy hijackers to be connected.
Mr. Guilmette posted several times to the news.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup (charter) compiled lists of the top proxy-abuse allowing ISPs and extensive analyses of the proxy-hijackers' operations (examples here, here, here, here and here). This anti-spam work was partly very fruitful, resulting in several ISPs to be outed as spammer-friendly and also being forced to clean up their act.
It's the other way around. Hormel has a trademark on 'SPAM' and would prefer UBE to be called 'spam'. See the SPAM website for more info.
College Freshman Builds Fusion Reactor
For a freshman, that's rather smart. He'll probably be successful in his studies.
I mean, not everybody can build a fusion rector in his freshman year. I'm finishing my master's thesis and even I cannot get the reaction running properly yet.
It's sadly true that mp3 has gained such a momentum and support in the market that the chances for another file format to gain a similar status are rather slim and far away.
Support for other formats such as Ogg Vorbis is fortunately slowly growing. For example Winamp which is probably the most popular media player for Windows (apart from Windows' own built-in player) has supported Ogg Vorbis in the standard install since version 2.80. And that version is old, at least over a year IIRC.
So the player support is beginning to be there. It's a question of, as you mentioned, getting people to actually use the other formats when encoding.
...but not all have the qualities you probably are looking for.
Please note that Osirusoft is not SPEWS. You are speaking as if SPEWS has shut down. This is not the case. (AFAIK.) Osirusoft hosted many mirrors of popular blocklists. One of them was SPEWS. Many people used Osirusoft to access the SPEWS list. Even if Osirusoft shut down, SPEWS is still accessible for example at http://bl.reynolds.net.au/spews/.