In case you haven't noticed, everything that "The Importance of" submits to Slashdot turns to gold. He's on a pedestal shared only by Roland Piquepaille.
Amidst all the indecency crackdowns, and the FCC's announcements yesterday, nobody seems to be pointing out the fact that the ruling against Infinity was for a Howard Stern show that aired in 2001. It's not for anything Howard has said or done recently, and as I understand it, it's more due to what a caller said.
Howard's been playing this game for a long time. He knows the rules, and he knows them well; perhaps even better than most people who work for the FCC. Howard has always voiced his contempt for the rules, but he's (generally) always played within the rules, as well. So why is Howard getting attacked all of a sudden?
For the majority of Bush's presidency, Howard has been a staunch supporter. On September 11 2001, he was on the air telling everyone that it was bin Laden, and that we ought to do something about it. Howard supported the Afghanistan strikes 100%. As time wore on and people grew critical of Bush, Howard stood his ground, even supporting the war in Iraq.
After the Janet Jackson fiasco, when it was obvious that the FCC was gearing up to make some heads roll, Howard suddenly shifted gears. For the past few weeks, his (on-air) political leanings have done an abrupt 180. He's been decrying the FCC and its crackdown, and more importantly, he's been urging listeners to vote Bush out of office.
ClearChannel dropped Stern from 6 stations. It wasn't for anything "indecent." It was because of Howard's recent political about-face.
ClearChannel is owned by a guy named Lowry Mays. Mays is a Texan, and he's got ties to the oil industry. OK, so these days it seems like everyone is from Texas and is an oil baron. How about the fact that GWB sold his share of the Texas Rangers baseball team to a guy named Tom Hicks. Tom Hicks was, at the time, CEO of a company called AMFM. Guess what business a company named "AMFM" was in? That's right, the radio business. AMFM was bought out by ClearChannel, and Tom Hicks is now Vice Chairman of ClearChannel.
Howard Stern had a surprisingly good ride, in terms of FCC scrutiny, under the Bush administration until the past couple of weeks. I think it's because - and only because - Howard had, until that time, been an unapologetic supporter of Bush and the war in Iraq, even to the point where it conflicted with his own liberal interests in terms of broadcasting.
A timeline:
1) AMFM CEO buys GWB's share in Texas Rangers 2) AMFM acquired by ClearChannel 3) Janet Jackson bares areola 4) FCC launches witch-hunt 4a) FCC Chairman Powell is Secretary of State Colin's son, for those who aren't paying attention 5) ClearChannel dumps Stern like a bag of bricks 6) FCC fines Infinity (but not ClearChannel, even though they aired it) for a Stern episode from 2001
Mod me troll if you want, but this is the politics of things. Howard Stern isn't being sought out because he was "indecent." He's being sought out because he jumped the fence, he's being sought out because he's telling 8+ million people a day to vote Bush out of office.
Don't forget GIMP-Savvy. They have over 4GB of free as in [beer|speech] pics; plus, even if you don't have any images to donate, you can contribute to the site by categorizing existing photos.
I don't need anything too fancy, just an added layer of protection from the multitude of various people who come in and out of my place of business everyday.
I've had a good deal of success with one of these.
People who take control of four airliners might be stupider, you never know
I have yet to see a photo that comes anywhere close to convincing me that whatever hit the Pentagon was an airliner. If you believe that there were four planes involved, you may want to revisit the photographs. Pay special attention to the ones that were taken before the outer wall of the Pentagon "collapsed."
Better start practicing singing a song in your head to block out the thought police.
Good idea, but Mary Had a Little Lamb probably won't cut it. Here are thelyrics you're looking for:
Let the eagle soar, Like she's never soared before. From rocky coast to golden shore, Let the mighty eagle soar. Soar with healing in her wings, As the land beneath her sings: 'Only god, no other kings.' This country's far too young to die. We've still got a lot of climbing to do, And we can make it if we try. Built by toils and struggles God has led us through
Since someone else has already pointed out what the "crypt" is in technicality (part of a UUEncoded file), I'll tell you what it really is. It's proof that no amount of expanded or enhanced power on the government's part will ever make any of us safer from whatever Bogeyman we're worrying about today.
<hypothetical>Suppose you're a terrorist, and you've just finished the final draft of the Secret Terrorism Plans. Now you need to distribute it to your cohorts. The problem is, "the man" is spying on all internet traffic, and you suspect they might even be able to crack PGP. How, then, can you possibly send a copy of the Secret Terrorism Plans to 18 of your closest friends without being caught?
Easy, you bury it in shit.
You take your Secret Terrorism Plans file and PGP-encrypt it, just for good measure. You then UUEncode the encrypted file, and split it into 10 chunks. Each chunk gets posted as a comment to a different Slashdot story. Somewhere out-of-band - or even in-band, say, as part of the previous message - you tell the recipients to start looking for parts of the file in the first Slashdot story with "Linux" in the story text on March 15th.
Slashdot generates more than a million pageviews a day, with tens of stories and thousands of comments posted. Helpfully, your 10 UUEncoded chunks of the Secret Terrorism Plans are moderated -1, Troll, so that most people never even see them. Of those who do see them, most will ignore them, a few will wonder (as you did) what they are, fewer still will recognize that they're pieces of a UUEncoded file, and probably nobody will bother trying to track down all the parts and assemble them. Except for your intended recipients, that is.</hypothetical>
Am I saying that Slashdot is a medium for terrorist communications? Of course not, though it's certainly possible. What I'm getting at - finally, straying on-topic - is that no amount of Groove, or P2P, or database crosschecking, or FBI wiretapping cable modems and DSL connections, is going to find the Secret Terrorism Plans. People coordinated enough to simultaneously take control of three airliners are not going to be sending around "Secret Terrorism Plans.doc" via email.
IMO, Groove won't do any more to fight $BOGEYMAN than CAPPS or CAPPS II. It's just going to make it easier for "the man" to inconvenience the people who aren't doing anything wrong.
I thought patents were only granted for new technology? Handheld emulation has been around for years. How can Nintendo suddenly own it?
Because it hadn't been patented before, at least not in the manner in which this patent application describes. Welcome to the wacky world of the USPTO...
Post the URL here, and then Slashdot the buggers into oblivion! Make their bandwidth bill so high that they'll beg you to take it back!
There are other ways to fight back, too. For example, I write PHP scripts and sell them online at phplabs.com. Some months ago, we started getting install requests from people we'd never heard of and who obviously weren't our customers. We eventually tracked it back to a ripoff site called phpselect.com. They're selling all of our scripts without permission, along with a bunch of others they presumably stole from other developers. Since they're based in the Netherlands, there appears to be little to no legal remedy.
So, we fought back using everyone's favorite tool, Google. Needless to say, phpselect.com's ripoff site is no longer the first result if you Google for phpselect.
The FCC has no purview over the content of cable, or satellite
This may be true, I'm not really knowledgeable in this field. However, the "Filing a Complaint" page at the FCC's website indicates that the general complaints form is for "wireless and wireline telecommunications issues, cable, broadcasting and telecommunications accessibility issues."
I think this story was added to the front page as an afterthought. The SCO/S2 story was directly below the Kodak/Sony story for some time, I could swear on it.
Same here, on Time Warner Cable. You might try filling out the FCC's general complaint form. It's geared towards telephone complaints but you can choose "The subject of my complaint is not listed," and fill everything out manually. I couldn't locate a form specifically meant for cable or broadcast, so I guess this one should work.
Before discrediting the value of a complaint, consider that the whole "indecency crackdown" insanity came about because the FCC received a whole bunch of complaints about Janet's melon. If enough people register their displeasure at Viacom's irritating crawls showing up on unaffected cable networks, maybe the FCC will do something about it.
Re:Chatting can indeed be dangerous!!!
on
ICQ Universe
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· Score: 1
Very interesting! I was a remote for approximately 5 years, spanning Mac Help, YouthTech, Digital City, AOL Promotions, CLC, KARES, and various other interests. I never got a "DOJ Letter," as I wasn't much for public chat or hanging with Guides, but I did get one of these.
I was also blocking mail from specific users long before Mail Controls were available, my experiments with screen name refresh tokens led to the eventual "Update Screen Name List" link at keyword: NAMES (a poor TechLive friend got in trouble for distributing my form); keyword: NOTIFYAOL exists at my suggestion, as opposed to just being a button in chat rooms (thanks Chris!); and - as you say - God knows what else. Those were the days, no?
If you don't mind my asking, what was your Guide uniform, or perhaps your civvies? I might've known ye...
First Microsoft, now AOL?
on
ICQ Universe
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· Score: 3, Informative
I thought this was a dupe until I went back and looked; the previous story was about Microsoft getting into this game. I wonder which one of them will be first to partner with Acxiom?
SCO is filled with evil bastards, and now that they got him in a contract, they're likely going to sue him.
No. Even discounting the hallucinogens which seem to permeate SCO's headquarters these days, I don't think they'd be anywhere near that stupid. To come out on Monday saying "one of our biggest licensees is EV1" and then come out on Tuesday saying "We're suing EV1" would be so ridiculous, no one would buy into it, not even the people who have sided with SCO thus far.
To my knowledge, SCO has already said that whoever they're going to sue already has a license for other products from SCO. My bet is on a colo farm with some (possibly ancient, and harmless at the time) Unixware or OpenServer licenses.
Apparently
I accidentally let the registration expire by a little bit, because all of a sudden someone else (UltimateSearch) snatched it up. One day, typing in my old domain name (www.chrysalisguitars.com) brings a page with 'common search results' which are all paid sponsor links. Bastards running hijacking scripts is my guess! What can I do??
Nothing. Your domain name wasn't "hijacked," it expired, and someone else re-registered it. That's how the system works.
It's happened to me too (and by the same group; WHOIS ipid.net). These days it's a little more difficult to lose a domain this way. Nearly all registrars will hold onto an expired domain for one month in the RedemptionPeriod status. This means the domain won't work - and you'll notice that you can't get to your site - but it gives you 30 days to figure this out and post a renewal before the domain becomes available on the open market.
If this didn't happen in your case, I'd suggest using a different registrar next time. DomainMonger has been good to me, and they do support the RedemptionPeriod. Of course, you have to visit your own site enough to realize that it's down, which in the case of ipid.net I didn't do, so I wound up losing that one anyway.
I am sure that the internet generation would be more than happy to do the same thing because the.xxx domain would tend to drive traffic to their sites.
No, the.xxx domain would be so easily filtered (I'm not just talking about Net Nanny and the like) that the adult industry would suffer bigtime. Trust me, if all adult sites were herded into their own TLD, the temptation to block or restrict that TLD would be overwhelming. We'd have Congress passing bills requiring you to get some sort of government-issued "proof of age" license before you'd be allowed into.xxx, then the government would have a big list of porn consumers to target the next time Ashcroft got hungry for publicity.
It's a freedom of speech issue, as well. Take the bricks-and-mortar comparison of adult bookstores and adult toy shops. As long as you can afford the rent and upkeep on a building which is zoned commercial, you can open an adult bookstore pretty much wherever you want. Generally you can't put one nextdoor to a school, but that's it. The local government can't force adult-oriented shops all to one street, or to the "seedy part of town," etc. any more than they can force all the coffee shops, or cybercafes, or newsstands who sell controversial magazines into one place.
As far as.xxx, careful what you ask for, you just might get it.
Slashdot Mirror
In case you haven't noticed, everything that "The Importance of" submits to Slashdot turns to gold. He's on a pedestal shared only by Roland Piquepaille.
Michael didn't edit the submission.
Long-time listener, first-time caller.. ;)
Amidst all the indecency crackdowns, and the FCC's announcements yesterday, nobody seems to be pointing out the fact that the ruling against Infinity was for a Howard Stern show that aired in 2001. It's not for anything Howard has said or done recently, and as I understand it, it's more due to what a caller said.
Howard's been playing this game for a long time. He knows the rules, and he knows them well; perhaps even better than most people who work for the FCC. Howard has always voiced his contempt for the rules, but he's (generally) always played within the rules, as well. So why is Howard getting attacked all of a sudden?
For the majority of Bush's presidency, Howard has been a staunch supporter. On September 11 2001, he was on the air telling everyone that it was bin Laden, and that we ought to do something about it. Howard supported the Afghanistan strikes 100%. As time wore on and people grew critical of Bush, Howard stood his ground, even supporting the war in Iraq.
After the Janet Jackson fiasco, when it was obvious that the FCC was gearing up to make some heads roll, Howard suddenly shifted gears. For the past few weeks, his (on-air) political leanings have done an abrupt 180. He's been decrying the FCC and its crackdown, and more importantly, he's been urging listeners to vote Bush out of office.
ClearChannel dropped Stern from 6 stations. It wasn't for anything "indecent." It was because of Howard's recent political about-face.
ClearChannel is owned by a guy named Lowry Mays. Mays is a Texan, and he's got ties to the oil industry. OK, so these days it seems like everyone is from Texas and is an oil baron. How about the fact that GWB sold his share of the Texas Rangers baseball team to a guy named Tom Hicks. Tom Hicks was, at the time, CEO of a company called AMFM. Guess what business a company named "AMFM" was in? That's right, the radio business. AMFM was bought out by ClearChannel, and Tom Hicks is now Vice Chairman of ClearChannel.
Howard Stern had a surprisingly good ride, in terms of FCC scrutiny, under the Bush administration until the past couple of weeks. I think it's because - and only because - Howard had, until that time, been an unapologetic supporter of Bush and the war in Iraq, even to the point where it conflicted with his own liberal interests in terms of broadcasting.
A timeline:
1) AMFM CEO buys GWB's share in Texas Rangers
2) AMFM acquired by ClearChannel
3) Janet Jackson bares areola
4) FCC launches witch-hunt
4a) FCC Chairman Powell is Secretary of State Colin's son, for those who aren't paying attention
5) ClearChannel dumps Stern like a bag of bricks
6) FCC fines Infinity (but not ClearChannel, even though they aired it) for a Stern episode from 2001
Mod me troll if you want, but this is the politics of things. Howard Stern isn't being sought out because he was "indecent." He's being sought out because he jumped the fence, he's being sought out because he's telling 8+ million people a day to vote Bush out of office.
Don't forget GIMP-Savvy. They have over 4GB of free as in [beer|speech] pics; plus, even if you don't have any images to donate, you can contribute to the site by categorizing existing photos.
a) You aren't too keen on telling anyone what movie you were associated with.
b) After paying you, they had no money left over in the budget for decent actors.
Gigli , right?
Nobody's compromised any of my machines yet!
Since someone else has already pointed out what the "crypt" is in technicality (part of a UUEncoded file), I'll tell you what it really is. It's proof that no amount of expanded or enhanced power on the government's part will ever make any of us safer from whatever Bogeyman we're worrying about today.
<hypothetical>Suppose you're a terrorist, and you've just finished the final draft of the Secret Terrorism Plans. Now you need to distribute it to your cohorts. The problem is, "the man" is spying on all internet traffic, and you suspect they might even be able to crack PGP. How, then, can you possibly send a copy of the Secret Terrorism Plans to 18 of your closest friends without being caught?
Easy, you bury it in shit.
You take your Secret Terrorism Plans file and PGP-encrypt it, just for good measure. You then UUEncode the encrypted file, and split it into 10 chunks. Each chunk gets posted as a comment to a different Slashdot story. Somewhere out-of-band - or even in-band, say, as part of the previous message - you tell the recipients to start looking for parts of the file in the first Slashdot story with "Linux" in the story text on March 15th.
Slashdot generates more than a million pageviews a day, with tens of stories and thousands of comments posted. Helpfully, your 10 UUEncoded chunks of the Secret Terrorism Plans are moderated -1, Troll, so that most people never even see them. Of those who do see them, most will ignore them, a few will wonder (as you did) what they are, fewer still will recognize that they're pieces of a UUEncoded file, and probably nobody will bother trying to track down all the parts and assemble them. Except for your intended recipients, that is.</hypothetical>
Am I saying that Slashdot is a medium for terrorist communications? Of course not, though it's certainly possible. What I'm getting at - finally, straying on-topic - is that no amount of Groove, or P2P, or database crosschecking, or FBI wiretapping cable modems and DSL connections, is going to find the Secret Terrorism Plans. People coordinated enough to simultaneously take control of three airliners are not going to be sending around "Secret Terrorism Plans.doc" via email.
IMO, Groove won't do any more to fight $BOGEYMAN than CAPPS or CAPPS II. It's just going to make it easier for "the man" to inconvenience the people who aren't doing anything wrong.
So, we fought back using everyone's favorite tool, Google. Needless to say, phpselect.com's ripoff site is no longer the first result if you Google for phpselect.
Can't hurt to fill it out.
I think this story was added to the front page as an afterthought. The SCO/S2 story was directly below the Kodak/Sony story for some time, I could swear on it.
Before discrediting the value of a complaint, consider that the whole "indecency crackdown" insanity came about because the FCC received a whole bunch of complaints about Janet's melon. If enough people register their displeasure at Viacom's irritating crawls showing up on unaffected cable networks, maybe the FCC will do something about it.
Very interesting! I was a remote for approximately 5 years, spanning Mac Help, YouthTech, Digital City, AOL Promotions, CLC, KARES, and various other interests. I never got a "DOJ Letter," as I wasn't much for public chat or hanging with Guides, but I did get one of these.
I was also blocking mail from specific users long before Mail Controls were available, my experiments with screen name refresh tokens led to the eventual "Update Screen Name List" link at keyword: NAMES (a poor TechLive friend got in trouble for distributing my form); keyword: NOTIFYAOL exists at my suggestion, as opposed to just being a button in chat rooms (thanks Chris!); and - as you say - God knows what else. Those were the days, no?
If you don't mind my asking, what was your Guide uniform, or perhaps your civvies? I might've known ye...
I thought this was a dupe until I went back and looked; the previous story was about Microsoft getting into this game. I wonder which one of them will be first to partner with Acxiom?
To my knowledge, SCO has already said that whoever they're going to sue already has a license for other products from SCO. My bet is on a colo farm with some (possibly ancient, and harmless at the time) Unixware or OpenServer licenses.
Because sometime later today, SCO is going to sue one of his competitors...
It's happened to me too (and by the same group; WHOIS ipid.net). These days it's a little more difficult to lose a domain this way. Nearly all registrars will hold onto an expired domain for one month in the RedemptionPeriod status. This means the domain won't work - and you'll notice that you can't get to your site - but it gives you 30 days to figure this out and post a renewal before the domain becomes available on the open market.
If this didn't happen in your case, I'd suggest using a different registrar next time. DomainMonger has been good to me, and they do support the RedemptionPeriod. Of course, you have to visit your own site enough to realize that it's down, which in the case of ipid.net I didn't do, so I wound up losing that one anyway.
It's a freedom of speech issue, as well. Take the bricks-and-mortar comparison of adult bookstores and adult toy shops. As long as you can afford the rent and upkeep on a building which is zoned commercial, you can open an adult bookstore pretty much wherever you want. Generally you can't put one nextdoor to a school, but that's it. The local government can't force adult-oriented shops all to one street, or to the "seedy part of town," etc. any more than they can force all the coffee shops, or cybercafes, or newsstands who sell controversial magazines into one place.
As far as