This would be great if everyone was on AOL (I shudder at the thought...), but in my case, I get my Internet service completely unfiltered from the State Board of Education. Any filtering would have to be implemented by them, and it's just not financially feasible right now...they're already up to their bald spot in financial troubles. You know, maybe that congressional suggestion that people be allowed to nuke infringing computers has a bit of merit. Set up a voting system, and if you get so many votes, the system is remotely detonated. Should take any spammy data centers with it.
If you read his notice, you'll observe that his biggest beef is that he got no support from any of the big ISP's that probably used his services anyway. The/. blurb is right...until there is some sort of distributed, un-DDOS-able method of tracking spammers and their ever-rotating servers, we will continue to be blanketed with spam. By the way, has anyone noticed a particular surge in spam just today? I've gotten dozens of very similar messages in just the past three hours.
Re:While I remain unemployed.....since January.
on
Tech Rich Get Richer
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· Score: 1
I'm sure that fact consoles the thousands of people looking for jobs because of the decision. I'm sure that the trickling-down of business jet purchases will heat their houses and clothe their children just fine. When your job is sacrificed on the altar of buying another gilded shower curtain or executive X-mas bash at Caesar's Palace, your view may change.
Re:While I remain unemployed.....since January.
on
Tech Rich Get Richer
·
· Score: 1
A very good example of how the wealth of the world is going to, eventually, contract into one person...all others will be his underlings. Look at HP. They lay off thousands of workers, send countless thousands of jobs to India, and then what do they do with their vaunted "covergence" and "symbiosis" savings? They buy a bunch of multi-million dollar business jets. Get used to this...now that unions have been trampled under, there's nothing to stop the rampant contraction of businesses and money.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11542
I like this part in the article you referenced...
"Do not cut any portion of the orange high-voltage wiring harness. Do not touch any bare or exposed wires of this high-voltage system."
That's really nice when the car is wrapped around a tree and on fire. In those situations, I still maintain that there is a severe risk of getting the living hell shocked out of you...since it operates on 273.6 volts or 144 volts, depending on the car.
I want to reiterate that I don't think that hybrids are deathtraps by any means...but it's just another consideration when buying one. They are not the lilac-scent-spewing faerie-mobiles that some people make them out to be. They are machines, and as such are by their nature dangerous and polluting.
Electrics or hybrids are nice...but just wreck one...or have one break for that matter. Nobody but the dealer will touch them because nobody but the dealer has the training and equipment to do it. Insurance companies are extremely wary of them too...I toured an insurance company and they were busy smashing them into things and seeing the effects if the batteries got shorted or spewed acid all over everyone...certainly not worse than having flaming gasoline sprayed on you, but there was a real danger of electrocution.
I can take things out of context too!
"The most controversial issue" with having sex with cows "in the information technology industry today is the ongoing battle over software copyrights and intellectual property."
ALSO
"This battle is being fought largely between" various warring factions in my rectum, and "vendors who create and sell proprietary software, and the Open Source community."
AND
"My company, the SCO Group, became a focus of this controversy when we filed a lawsuit against IBM alleging that" we would really like to have repeated sex with cows, and "SCO's proprietary Unix code has been illegally copied into the free Linux operating system."
Where I used to work, the network was as often as not knocked out by the "Technical Director", who couldn't direct his way out of a linen closet. His response to most everything was to call $150 per hour consultants, when usually it was just NT4 that needed rebooting.
I'm talking OS-wise, not application-wise. Obviously they don't have much in the way of educational software...but will there be any copies of OpenOffice running? Or will there be any Linux servers?
Being in education, I think it's wonderful that Microsoft is handing out some technology...but it is the "catches" that worry me. You can be guaranteed that no computer in the district will be allowed to run ANYTHING but Microsoft software...anything else will be a breach of the Terms&Conditions that everyone will be forced into signing. This is just a ploy to draw mindless Technical Directors and Coordinators into the false sense of security that Microsoft offers...since these people, with the backing of hundreds of Microsoft Engineers, made it work, then certainly it would work for our district too! I've seen that mentality in action, and this will only further it.
To my fellow Administrators, a system log is a record of the student's activities during the day...which is very much considered an "education record" just as much as his or her attendance or performance on a test. It would take much more than a simple subpoena from a faceless record company organization to pry such records from my district's hands. The intent of the law is similar to medical records laws...if we have it on record, you can't have it without lots of papers and badges. It fascinates me how so many schools willingly turn over such records in the face of such regulatory prohibitions.
I am saying that there is little or no way to tell the difference between legal and illegal. And depending on the RIAA to do so is a very poor policy I think.
Jesus CHRIST! I said another district is where everybody does it, not mine. Stop jumping to conclusions about everything I say. The district I'm in has very little downloading going on.
I'm glad you think it would be nice to have somebody other than me work in your kids' school district. Perhaps they could hire the consultants that used to work here. They routinely overbilled by 100 and even 200 percent, all the while keeping us on closed-source and license-ridden software. I came in, converted everything to Linux, and now we pay NO license fees, and have 99 percent fewer problems. Thank you very much, I probably wouldn't want to be in your kids school district anyway.
http://www.ed.gov/offices/OII/fpco/ferpa/
I can't seem to get it to accept HTML links. In any case, it is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Here is the relevant quotation..."Generally, schools must have written permission from the parent or eligible student in order to release any information from a student's education record."
The exception is "To comply with a judicial order or lawfully issued subpoena;"...and I consider the RIAA-generated subpoenas to be unlawfully issued. The point is that you can't release any information about a student without written permission from the parents...which ain't gonna happen if I know most of the parents.
Well I've got 600 users on 220 client machines in my network...none of the machines are student-owned, of course, which would definately complicate things too. I don't believe that free and unrestricted downloading in a school environment is correct or good, either...but I just chafe at the thought of the RIAA beating down my door and asking for my "logs" (your papers PLEASE!) without the least bit of proof beforehand other than their "word." It is for that reason I will continue getting rid of any logs that might or might not contain anything like P2P connections. I also bristle at people banning a technology just because some organization thinks it should be banned, for some obscure and unprovable reason.
The log proves nothing. Certainly not any amount of legality or the lack therof. Allowing the RIAA to look at those logs would be a violation of educational regulations.
I watch my network like a hawk, and nothing like a 2-week download session will be allowed to occur. I like to play safe as much as the next person...but I don't think that killing an entire emerging technology is worth that.
I didn't say they were, as far as the story was concerned. But many of them do at the district I work for, and I know that this problem is much, much worse at other districts. At one in particular, everyone from the Superintendent to the Janitor downloads music...
A. Kazaa might be loaded...if they can figure it out, which most of them can't
B. High speed on the supply end maybe...but things are limited so it doesn't take up too much bandwidth
C. CD Burner? None of the machines need or have that
D. Open P2P ports. Well, ya. Most of them don't have anything to share, so there isn't much uploading
E. Spare time during the day? Haven't you figured out that computers are mostly babysitters for students anyway? It's called "computer lab" and it's all about spare time
= No undue misuse of resources beyond what they do already, like browsing Pokemon, Slipknot, and MTV all day. If nothing else they're getting familiar with computers and P2P, which is the future of music distribution irrespective of what the RIAA thinks
Well I'm glad you can talk to me in a calm matter instead of flaming me like many other people would.
I agree that if you are part of a large government organization that requires that kind of stuff, then by all means keep them. I had gotten the impression that you were keeping logs for the sole purpose of having something pretty to look at. I understand your point of view better now.
I certainly don't work FOR the students, but I don't work AGAINST them either. I feel that allowing kids access to things like Kazaa, when not used for government subversion or something OVERTLY illegal (the illegality of downloading songs, many of which are public domain, has not been demonstrated to my satisfaction) is okay. When the kids start forming terror cells in the local playground, I will reconsider...(it's on the way!)
You're missing the point of my argument anyway. My first inclination in saying that an intelligent administrator would erase logs is this: in order to prove a certain student did a certain thing you would have to read the logs. If there are no logs then there are no problems. My secondary consideration is that I see no point in keeping megabytes of logs that are useless. My daily Squid cache logs exceed 100 megabytes. I keep the syslog to way back when, and back it up. But why keep around gigabytes of logs that have no purpose? And my server likes jelly-filled ones.
Logs are kept that serve a purpose...I see no purpose to keeping a SOCKS log, so therefore it is flushed. Do you "maintain" a log of your donut consumption?
If an administrator jumped at every "BAN IT" whim in the world, we'd be looking at nothing but Barney's page on PBS.com (or maybe the Teletubbies.) An administrator's job is not to be the content gestapo.
You are begging the question by assuming that everything that goes on with these "activities" is illegal. Not everything that users do is violating copyrights.
Most High Schools use proxies...if the kids are running Kazaa at school and using a proxy, then it would be unethical and highly illegal to divulge their names to a non-law-enforcement-entity such as the RIAA. Anyway, an intelligent administrator would flush their logs every day.
This would apply greatly to their most recent patent-infringement case where they "lost" 35 weeks of e-mail. Now, upon word from upper management, those 35 weeks of e-mail could be instantly, irrevocably, and easily evaporated. In fact, they could evaporate everything but sections that make them look good (i.e. the initial discussions with the company, not the later "Screw these guys, lets steal their stuff.") This is NOT a good thing, in my view.
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This would be great if everyone was on AOL (I shudder at the thought...), but in my case, I get my Internet service completely unfiltered from the State Board of Education. Any filtering would have to be implemented by them, and it's just not financially feasible right now...they're already up to their bald spot in financial troubles. You know, maybe that congressional suggestion that people be allowed to nuke infringing computers has a bit of merit. Set up a voting system, and if you get so many votes, the system is remotely detonated. Should take any spammy data centers with it.
If you read his notice, you'll observe that his biggest beef is that he got no support from any of the big ISP's that probably used his services anyway. The /. blurb is right...until there is some sort of distributed, un-DDOS-able method of tracking spammers and their ever-rotating servers, we will continue to be blanketed with spam. By the way, has anyone noticed a particular surge in spam just today? I've gotten dozens of very similar messages in just the past three hours.
I'm sure that fact consoles the thousands of people looking for jobs because of the decision. I'm sure that the trickling-down of business jet purchases will heat their houses and clothe their children just fine. When your job is sacrificed on the altar of buying another gilded shower curtain or executive X-mas bash at Caesar's Palace, your view may change.
A very good example of how the wealth of the world is going to, eventually, contract into one person...all others will be his underlings. Look at HP. They lay off thousands of workers, send countless thousands of jobs to India, and then what do they do with their vaunted "covergence" and "symbiosis" savings? They buy a bunch of multi-million dollar business jets. Get used to this...now that unions have been trampled under, there's nothing to stop the rampant contraction of businesses and money. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11542
I like this part in the article you referenced... "Do not cut any portion of the orange high-voltage wiring harness. Do not touch any bare or exposed wires of this high-voltage system." That's really nice when the car is wrapped around a tree and on fire. In those situations, I still maintain that there is a severe risk of getting the living hell shocked out of you...since it operates on 273.6 volts or 144 volts, depending on the car. I want to reiterate that I don't think that hybrids are deathtraps by any means...but it's just another consideration when buying one. They are not the lilac-scent-spewing faerie-mobiles that some people make them out to be. They are machines, and as such are by their nature dangerous and polluting.
Electrics or hybrids are nice...but just wreck one...or have one break for that matter. Nobody but the dealer will touch them because nobody but the dealer has the training and equipment to do it. Insurance companies are extremely wary of them too...I toured an insurance company and they were busy smashing them into things and seeing the effects if the batteries got shorted or spewed acid all over everyone...certainly not worse than having flaming gasoline sprayed on you, but there was a real danger of electrocution.
I can take things out of context too! "The most controversial issue" with having sex with cows "in the information technology industry today is the ongoing battle over software copyrights and intellectual property." ALSO "This battle is being fought largely between" various warring factions in my rectum, and "vendors who create and sell proprietary software, and the Open Source community." AND "My company, the SCO Group, became a focus of this controversy when we filed a lawsuit against IBM alleging that" we would really like to have repeated sex with cows, and "SCO's proprietary Unix code has been illegally copied into the free Linux operating system."
Where I used to work, the network was as often as not knocked out by the "Technical Director", who couldn't direct his way out of a linen closet. His response to most everything was to call $150 per hour consultants, when usually it was just NT4 that needed rebooting.
I'm talking OS-wise, not application-wise. Obviously they don't have much in the way of educational software...but will there be any copies of OpenOffice running? Or will there be any Linux servers?
Being in education, I think it's wonderful that Microsoft is handing out some technology...but it is the "catches" that worry me. You can be guaranteed that no computer in the district will be allowed to run ANYTHING but Microsoft software...anything else will be a breach of the Terms&Conditions that everyone will be forced into signing. This is just a ploy to draw mindless Technical Directors and Coordinators into the false sense of security that Microsoft offers...since these people, with the backing of hundreds of Microsoft Engineers, made it work, then certainly it would work for our district too! I've seen that mentality in action, and this will only further it.
To my fellow Administrators, a system log is a record of the student's activities during the day...which is very much considered an "education record" just as much as his or her attendance or performance on a test. It would take much more than a simple subpoena from a faceless record company organization to pry such records from my district's hands. The intent of the law is similar to medical records laws...if we have it on record, you can't have it without lots of papers and badges. It fascinates me how so many schools willingly turn over such records in the face of such regulatory prohibitions.
I am saying that there is little or no way to tell the difference between legal and illegal. And depending on the RIAA to do so is a very poor policy I think. Jesus CHRIST! I said another district is where everybody does it, not mine. Stop jumping to conclusions about everything I say. The district I'm in has very little downloading going on. I'm glad you think it would be nice to have somebody other than me work in your kids' school district. Perhaps they could hire the consultants that used to work here. They routinely overbilled by 100 and even 200 percent, all the while keeping us on closed-source and license-ridden software. I came in, converted everything to Linux, and now we pay NO license fees, and have 99 percent fewer problems. Thank you very much, I probably wouldn't want to be in your kids school district anyway.
http://www.ed.gov/offices/OII/fpco/ferpa/ I can't seem to get it to accept HTML links. In any case, it is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Here is the relevant quotation..."Generally, schools must have written permission from the parent or eligible student in order to release any information from a student's education record." The exception is "To comply with a judicial order or lawfully issued subpoena;"...and I consider the RIAA-generated subpoenas to be unlawfully issued. The point is that you can't release any information about a student without written permission from the parents...which ain't gonna happen if I know most of the parents.
Well I've got 600 users on 220 client machines in my network...none of the machines are student-owned, of course, which would definately complicate things too. I don't believe that free and unrestricted downloading in a school environment is correct or good, either...but I just chafe at the thought of the RIAA beating down my door and asking for my "logs" (your papers PLEASE!) without the least bit of proof beforehand other than their "word." It is for that reason I will continue getting rid of any logs that might or might not contain anything like P2P connections. I also bristle at people banning a technology just because some organization thinks it should be banned, for some obscure and unprovable reason.
The log proves nothing. Certainly not any amount of legality or the lack therof. Allowing the RIAA to look at those logs would be a violation of educational regulations.
I watch my network like a hawk, and nothing like a 2-week download session will be allowed to occur. I like to play safe as much as the next person...but I don't think that killing an entire emerging technology is worth that.
I didn't say they were, as far as the story was concerned. But many of them do at the district I work for, and I know that this problem is much, much worse at other districts. At one in particular, everyone from the Superintendent to the Janitor downloads music...
A. Kazaa might be loaded...if they can figure it out, which most of them can't B. High speed on the supply end maybe...but things are limited so it doesn't take up too much bandwidth C. CD Burner? None of the machines need or have that D. Open P2P ports. Well, ya. Most of them don't have anything to share, so there isn't much uploading E. Spare time during the day? Haven't you figured out that computers are mostly babysitters for students anyway? It's called "computer lab" and it's all about spare time = No undue misuse of resources beyond what they do already, like browsing Pokemon, Slipknot, and MTV all day. If nothing else they're getting familiar with computers and P2P, which is the future of music distribution irrespective of what the RIAA thinks
Well I'm glad you can talk to me in a calm matter instead of flaming me like many other people would. I agree that if you are part of a large government organization that requires that kind of stuff, then by all means keep them. I had gotten the impression that you were keeping logs for the sole purpose of having something pretty to look at. I understand your point of view better now. I certainly don't work FOR the students, but I don't work AGAINST them either. I feel that allowing kids access to things like Kazaa, when not used for government subversion or something OVERTLY illegal (the illegality of downloading songs, many of which are public domain, has not been demonstrated to my satisfaction) is okay. When the kids start forming terror cells in the local playground, I will reconsider...(it's on the way!)
You're missing the point of my argument anyway. My first inclination in saying that an intelligent administrator would erase logs is this: in order to prove a certain student did a certain thing you would have to read the logs. If there are no logs then there are no problems. My secondary consideration is that I see no point in keeping megabytes of logs that are useless. My daily Squid cache logs exceed 100 megabytes. I keep the syslog to way back when, and back it up. But why keep around gigabytes of logs that have no purpose? And my server likes jelly-filled ones.
Logs are kept that serve a purpose...I see no purpose to keeping a SOCKS log, so therefore it is flushed. Do you "maintain" a log of your donut consumption?
If an administrator jumped at every "BAN IT" whim in the world, we'd be looking at nothing but Barney's page on PBS.com (or maybe the Teletubbies.) An administrator's job is not to be the content gestapo.
You are begging the question by assuming that everything that goes on with these "activities" is illegal. Not everything that users do is violating copyrights.
Most High Schools use proxies...if the kids are running Kazaa at school and using a proxy, then it would be unethical and highly illegal to divulge their names to a non-law-enforcement-entity such as the RIAA. Anyway, an intelligent administrator would flush their logs every day.
This would apply greatly to their most recent patent-infringement case where they "lost" 35 weeks of e-mail. Now, upon word from upper management, those 35 weeks of e-mail could be instantly, irrevocably, and easily evaporated. In fact, they could evaporate everything but sections that make them look good (i.e. the initial discussions with the company, not the later "Screw these guys, lets steal their stuff.") This is NOT a good thing, in my view.