Oh come on...the patient business is proving to be quit popular these days. How many companies are we reading about that can't make a dime and then they start to sue people and win because they filed some absure patient first? The "buy-it-now" patient and the double-click patient are great examples of this. Its the new business model. Can't make money by marketing and implementation. So now you can make money by thinking up something and then patienting.
In traditional./ equiquation 1.) Think of idea 2.) Patient idea 3.) Wait for people to use for a good long time 4.) Sue 4a.) Stiffle innovation 5.) Profit
Software patients are bad, especially when the implementation of such is not know. Trade secrets should be used instead of clobbering competition. And with Micrsoft doing something like this, I would bet that a suit would emerge alledging anti-competitve behaviors. Besides with the EU and there MS is an evil monopoly attitude I would be that the EU might have some teeth where the US might not. Stang how playing internationally can lead to some serious problems for a company that won't play nice.
1.) Have a period of time where current domain owners can lay claim to the the SLD in the.XXX TLD. Those with valid and registered trademarks are given first shot. Then the site that has the oldest name, for example ABCD.com would have first crack at getting.XXX as long as its principle business is in pornography. If that site refuses to accept the.XXX domain, then other SLD's in in another TLD can get the.XXX name. After all the porn vendors have had their crack, then the other companies, who are not pornography businesses get the chance to register their domain names in the.XXX TLD. 2.) After the period of time to work out existing domain name owners and trademark owners, then other people will be opened up to the.XXX domain name. 3.) Require all new domain owners agree that sexual content that fits the definition of pornography to register a.XXX domain name. Registering a new domain in any non-XXX TLD and then putting up pornographic content would be a violation and your site could be pulled down. 4.) Existing non-XXX TLD's that host pornographic content before the changes can continue to operate, however if they have the.XXX equivalent then they will be required to redirect people to the.XXX domain. 5.) Existing non-XXX TLD's that host pornographic content will be required, as a term of renewal to purchase a.XXX SLD and have the content served from that domain name. Their 'brand' can stay the same, such as SEX.COM as a front page without pornographic content on the front page. The current TLD is to be used as a 'doormat'. All media content, including pictures must be linked from the.XXX TLD.
The main advantage to this is that filters could universally block the.XXX TLD. Then, since site will be allowed to have a.com/.org/.whatever TLD welcome mat it can be blocked. In the event that some filter doesn't capture the doormat, the pictures, movies, images, etc, will be blocked because they are hosted on the.XXX domain name. The system provides a clearing house to make sure that cybersquating won't happen (you won't have the arguments over sex.com or some punk trying to get playboy.xxx).
The people that seem to be fighting the.XXX are those who don't understand the internet and those that are against any form of censorship even if it to protect children. Having a 'redlight district' on the internet would make it very easy for companies, homes and schools to block a good majority of pornography. Sure you would have some sex search engine that would index the entirety of.XXX, but the people that are going to look for it are going to find it. Browsers could have a simple filter built in to not attempt to resolve any host in.XXX. Company's could put in their own zone file for.XXX that redirects all sites to their AUP.
People are approaching this problem from the idea this is a free speech issue, when it's not always. There are economic considerations. Companies can people routelinely for looking at pornography. It cost companies lost productivity and bandwidth. Not to mention the crap that gets bundled with porn because someone is so engroused in the porn that he installs whatever program wants to install itself. Universities and schools deal with the loss of bandwidth. Economically, there are reasons to move it to a seperate section of the internet. Just because the moral-right seems to be the ones yelling for it, doesn't mean that there isn't an economic insentive. If you can keep a good employee that does good work from looking at porn and thereby he doesn't get fired, then it is worth it to a company. But if that same employee is looking at porn and wasting company resources and he has to get canned, then it cost compa
Acording to http://www.spr.org/ 1 in 5 men and 1 in 4 women are raped while in prision.
I went and looked up the Federal Sentencing Guidelines http://www.ussc.gov/2004guid/tabcon04_1.htm Turns out, for a raping another prisioner or even a correctional officer raping prision you get 32 points. (FYI: each crime is weighted on a point scale. Each crime has a base point and then you can get "extra credit" to increase the points based on the actual details of the crime.) If you are first time offendor serving a time for a pervious crime, then you're looking at between 11 and 13 years for a prision rape. If you are serious offendor, then plan somewhere in the neighborhood of about 22 years for raping someone. Federal law, btw, makes prision rape a federal crime.
While everyone is being brutal about the GP for saying that you get 20 years for doing prision rape, according to the sentencing guidelines, which Federal Judges are bound to, then 20 years would sound right. That would be enough for anyone with the hope of getting out not to do it. Also, since it is a sex crime, then the prisioner upon release for committing prision rape would have to register as a sex offendor. Now the idiot that got his jollies on his cell mate won't be able to get a job because he'll be labeled a felon and a pervert.
What about virtualization? I thought that the whole idea of virtualization is to increase the CPU useage from 15-20% to 80-85%.
Just because there is a bunch of processes running doesn't mean that the second core will be used. Instead you end up having a dual core processor that can do things using less of the individual cores. Now you have a cpu that is only being utilized 7.5-10% per core.
We did a case study in one of my classes. Aparently the guy wanted to see if a site was legimate for the Tsunami funds at the Red Cross. Some system administrator freaked when he saw that there was a non-standard browser appearing in the event logs. So the sys-admin traced the IP and the cops broke down his door. Aparently using a text based browser to be safe can get you in trouble. They ceased his computer equipment and if memory serves me right he went to jail.
Where you believe the Lynx user or the Red Cross for hacking, there aren't much details. But one of the things that was pretty obvious is that Lynx is what tipped the sys-admin to calling the cops on him.
While the servers may not be running Windows XP or even Windows, there are other compontants to making an infrustructure crictical. For example, just having a server is pretty useless unless you have clients to use it. But if a DRM kit disables the clients, then what good is the server going to be? Sure you have the information and it is protected, but no practical way to get to it. A credit card company probably has many servers and they are probably all secure. But if you have unsecured clients as a result of DRM gone bad, and no way to uninstall it, then the infrustructure of that company may have been violated.
I think what *IA and the BSA are saying is that they don't want exception to DRM on critical infrustructure because too many companies might fall under that title. Credit card companies, banks, credit unions, government agencies, etc., all have some role which is essential. Allowing security exceptions would mute their protections and then they wouldn't have the ability to keep people from pirating music at work. I also wonder whether they feel that it is the companies responsabiltiy to protect machines against a malicious DRM -- the argument being if it is so critical and essential then why on earth is the machine being used as a music player.
The real problem that is being highlighted is the attitude that a copyright holder has the ability under the DMCA to hold a computer hostage. Whether it is critical infrustructure, non-criticial, school or home computers, they are having a power trip and are abusing their customers. The problem has to be solved, and with the attitude of preventing piracy through mob-like methods (proverbially breaking people's legs), the only way to do it is to have congress deal with it. I think the only way we'll see the *IA stripped of their precious DMCA is for a some crictial infrustructure to fail as the result of a miscreant DRM. Hopefully it'll be someone like VISA where it will be hard felt. Then you can bet that some Congresscritter will listen and we might see something happen.
I think what should happen is those that use DRM and do not provide a method of removing the protection from computers should be held to strict product liability standards. Any reputable software package has a method of removal. If they won't provide the means to remove it, and something happens, then the copyright holders should be held responsable. A DRM causes someone to die, then the DRM producer and distributor should be held liable for wrongful death. A DRM causes a company to lose millions because the network is down, then they should be pay the millions back. If *IAA won't play nice and won't allow reasonable exceptions and even fight them, then there should be consequences for problems that DRM causes.
With Microsoft in the group, why on earth should anybody trust the standard? They have been trying to torpedo ODF for a such a long time now they make an open group? Forgive me for asking, but if memory serves me correctly, Microsoft broke XML document standards with Office 2003 so that it wasn't compatiable with other readers. And Microsoft has a really bad habit of taking a standard, after all the works been done and building on it so that it Microsoft products can interoperate with others, but others can't with them. I would be really skeptical of anything Microsoft does, because history has proven time and time again that they like to create the standard and have everyone else follow, only to break the following. Does Internet Explorer and HTML sound farmiliar? That is an open standard, and Microsoft has yet to abide by it. It has resulted in millions of web pages that won't render correctly because Microsoft can't play nice and use the standards that that are published.
That is the problem with modern politics. The poltical parties have blurred the lines between what a conservative and liberal is, requiring them to align with a political party. When in fact, the politcal parties fluctuate so much, move left and right, that depending on where your politcal ideology actually lies, you might be more in line with the democrats on presidental term and the republicans the next. With each election the politcal parties attempt to capture the magical middle of the political spectrum, while at the same time pushing forward their left or right wing agendas. However, since it is all politics, the pure ideology of being a conservative or a liberal is usually lost. In the case of the current administration, Pres. Bush has pushed the country more towards the right, while pursuing a course that a lot of conservatives disagree with (for example, conservatitves are for less government, less regulation, and less government in their lives). Pres. Bush has done more to put the government in people's lifes than what a true conservative would have done. So when all is said and done, a politiian may claim to be a conservative to capture that voting base, but then abuse them and actually pursue a course that runs counter that ideology. The same holds true for a liberals and the democrats. And what we think of being oxymoronic, you can actually be a conservative democrat. The conservative and liberal are all just titles of the ideology. While the political parties are the method and the means to implementing that ideology. American politics are somewhat of an enigma in the world. With a two party system, somehow we loose the fact that the vast majority of Americans do not fit neatly in two parties. However, since third parties have proven to be ineffective and are ignored by the two other parties, then most American's simply say Democrat, Republican or Independant.
My personal feeling is that the politcal landscaping is going to start changing soon so that the Democrats and Republicans are going to have to acknowledge the independants. They are going to have to change their platform to be flexiable. The difference between a Republican and Democrat is so minimial that the rest of the world largely laughs at America. In other countries you have poltical parties that run from Communist to straight out facsist. But in the US you have two groups that are so close to the middle that they actually fight over capturing the middle ground.
Another interesting thing is that many self-labeled conservates and liberals may not actually be such. For example a conservative may actually be an economic or neoliberal and be a social conservative. Or libertarians for the most part are economic and social liberals. Or what many democratic politicans tend to be, which is economic conservatives and social liberals. The problem with the parties is that they mix and blur what the issues really are and they don't have clear policy statements about their parties positions.
I am wondering if Microsoft is equating security with product activation security. Volume licenses for businesses and the corporate editions have special activation features. Based on the Window's Genuine Advantage or whatever the heck they call it, and the evolution that it has been under for the last year or so and with this, I really wonder if it has something to do with thwarting pirates. After, most pirates are going to want to pirate the Ultimate edition, not the Starter or the basic home. But if they build something into the operating system that makes the whole OS harder to pirate. This is my speculation, but maybe there will be something different for the home users and the business user in terms of activation.
But I also wonder if it might be also related to hardware vendors asking for more time. If some of the hardware makers are having a little trouble get Aero Glass to work that would make a little sense. Vista has been delayed for so long, people are a little numb. It could even be a major vendor that is having problems. So Microsoft says that it is a security issue, the vendor gets more time and people don't really care.
If I were a system administrator I would do it as a security measure. If ad companies are going to start using more metrics than a simple click, I would consider that a potential breach of security. Who knows what information they might be gathering. But if they are gathering any information which might be personally identifiable. The last thing that a company would need is to have an advertisment database that included the company's domain name with what the people at the company look at on the internet. Call me paranoid.
In the more practical area, it will save a little bandwidth by blocking those sites. It might not be much, but if you have a large organization it can add up.
The children that have the knowledge of other operating systems probably have the knowledge of how to route such software out if they want to. That is one of the basic problems in dealing with host-based censorship (this, of course, is excluding your who view point of the topic). In order for a system administrator to block porn and other undesirable topics, they have to block the content on the network level instead of on the host level, otherwise there is a mirad of ways around it. For example, you could neutur the software, boot into a bootable Linux distro, etc., and it will moot the software. Also, a child could use a different browser since this software only supports Mozilla, Firefox and Internet Explorer.
It seems to me that the most effective method would be to have a cable modem/DSL modem that has the content blocking software built onto the modem. It would raise the cost of the modem significantly, but at the same time it moves the blocking from the host to the network layer and makes circumvention a whole lot harder. Then the child has to start playing with the ideas of VPN's, etc, to get around the issue. So either way you look at it, if a child wants to get around filters, they will do it, but it doesn't mean that a parent shouldn't try.
And reading some of the other posts there are comments that people have made stating that any porn blocking is inherently bad. However, people fail to remember that, except in the case of a home use scenerio, the internet at work or school is not theirs and they are bound by agreements. The acceptable use policies are there for a reason. I have heard story after story of employers with an employee that just surfs for porn all day long, or one story where the boss was using all the bandwidth of a fractional T-1 downloading porn all day long. Removing your moral standpoint on the topic, if pornography starts to costs a business or school money disportionately per user because some users are spend too much time or too much bandwidth surfing for porn then the decision to block it becomes a business decision not a moral decision. Slashdotters fail to make the distinction that sometimes businesses make the decision to block things, like porn, or p2p, instant messaging, etc., based off a business decision and not a moral decision all the time. Also, schools for example, might have legal issues in being required to block pornography.
Also, another interesting topic is the issue that while Slashdot is left-leaning, those who are left-leaning feminist don't nessisarily agree with pornography. Some organizations of feminists have created an odd aliance with right-leaning organizations because the two camps are united in one believe -- pornography is degrading to woman and that it lies about sexual relationships. Some have even made the distinction between good and bad pornography, stating that the good lacks violence, while the bad contains eliments of violence. There are those who argue that it is their right to view, buy and produce pornography under free speech protections. The reason why I point this out is that the issue of pornography is not so much a left/right issue. There are those who are in the right that feel that people have the right to produce it under the freedom of speech, while there are those who are in the left who feel that no one should be able to produce it because it is degrading to woman. The political issues of pornography are not so much cut and dry, left and right as many Slashdotters would have people think. After all the Child Pornography Prevention Act was passed in 1996 under President Bill Clinton and signed by him.
To throw another log on the fire, what is legal to access in California may not be legal in Oregon. This is called community standards. The law states that free speech has have value -- political, artistic, scientific, or literary. "Sex speech" does not enjoy the same protections under the law. This has come down from various Supreme Court rulings. That is why the Supreme Court actually watches porn -- to see if
Medical Records? Ever heard of HIPAA? If you had even the shred of evidence that you were turned down for a job because they had medical information about you contained in medical records, then you would own that company. It would mean that somehow they obtained the information illegally and someone disclosed the information illegally. The criminal liability for disclosure of a medical record is in the neighborhood of about $250,000 for each offense. Plus punitive damages. You could probably sue the company that has the record, the company that obtained it to the company the doctor that disclosed it (assuming they used an P.I.). And I wouldn't sign an agreement stating that an employer could have medical records unless there was a valid reason. Anybody in the business of medical records is paranoid of disclosing a medical record. Oh, by the way, under HIPAA, you own your medical records. Depending on what is in your medical record and why they turned you down you could sue for a HIPAA violation, ADA and all sorts of discrimination statutues. Frankly, I don't know if I would want work at a place that was using medical records as to exclude people.
However, under some circustainces I can understand the use of a credit record. For example if you are going to be handling sensative information or you are going to be doing finanaces, then it makes sense check the credit record. However, if there is no criminal record or even the hint of fraud exclusion because someone has a bad credit record would not be fair -- just because someone fell on hard times (there is no way telling why their credit record may be bad) means they won't be a good employee.
Frankly, I don't care if a potential employer knows information about me -- I don't have anything to hide. If they don't like my political views, my credit history, medical history, etc., then oh well. It probably isn't exactly the job for me in the first place. If they want the information, then they can ask me, and I'll provide it, freely.
(To any future employer, feel free to ask me the information you want and I'll give it to you straight up.)
However, I seriously doubt that RIAA will even consider your last argument. Why would they? They seem to think that entertainment costs are flexiable and that other considerations will not reduce the demand for entertainment. Just because some teenager can get to the mall does not mean that they have the money to spend it on a CD. Then when you consider that the next generation of DVD is going to run between $35-50, there is going to be some fierce competition for teen's money. There is competition for what teens are spending their money on and blaiming priacy for competition is a straw man argument.
I once entered myself into a hot pepper festival in Texas. It was a painful experience. All the contestants started out with a red pepper and then worked their way up the famed Habanero. By the time you reached the Habanero your mouth is on fire, your stomach is upset and you want to shoot yourself. I thought that the pain was over once my mouth was done burning. No. About four hours latter I had what I can only describe as the "Bunghole of Fire." My room mate knocked on the door to ask if I was okay. Apparently the screams pain hinted that something was not quite right in the bathroom. So your comment brought back memories. Thanks. I didn't need that....
But I would bet that companies will push for laws banning the use of RFID scanners in businesses to prevent exactly that -- not for consumers but for competition. Imagine what a competitor would be able to pull off -- a quick walk around the store and they have the complete inventory of what the competior has and even quantities. Or, even more interesting would be a competor using an RFID scanner as people leave their competitors store. Then competitors will be able to tell what people are buying and then alter prices accordingly. Of course this would only work if the suppliers use the same RFID identification number for each retailer.
Any form of obsufication would only work for a short period of time. As the products start to leave the store, people will start to make a database for the purpouses that you described above -- and then it would only be a matter of time before competitors would buy the databases or obtain them.
Like I said, I would bet that RFID readers will be illegal to use except by the people that employ them on site.
I tend to agree that with CPU's increasing in speed and power, that the cost of encyrpting goes down. But also the cost of breaking the same codes goes down. Right now it takes 2^120 rounds to break AES encrpytion while trying to brute force. So in order for the higher speeds of the CPU argument to hold to encrypt everything, encryption technology will have to go up. Right now 128 bit is acceptable, but as speeds increase, then the encrpytion will have to be changed as well. And that will require faster processors.
Well it is a "different test" the results could be remoteley generated. But you would have to have a web browser on their end running to get it to work. You simply write a Java program that runs locally on the client machine. When the client machine connects, they download your Java program. This java program then launches SSH (which, BTW, Java can do), compromises the root account, and then downloads a native Mac OS X malware/spyware program. Sure this is a different test, but it does demonstrate that the root account could, theoretically be compromised remotely. The program could even act as a trojan and phone home.
The other thought that passed my mind is that since it is a University what is the likely hood that this Mac is really a Honeypot of some sort? Sure it may be hardened, but they may be trying to figure out how secure Mac OS X is and just trying to get at the ego of hackers.
Come on. The idea behind declaring a company a monopoly is that consumer choice is limited because of collusion and anti-competitve behavior. In this case, there is some potential to support the idea that Intel and Sykpe may have colluded to create an artificial barrier that is anti-competitive. As a result, it limits consumer choice. When that barrier is arbitrary and is not based on the merrits of the product, for example that AMD chips really don't have some sort of defect that limit the number of telephone calls down to five while an Intel dual core allows up to ten phone calls at the same time, that is anti-competitive. Worse, is when it limits consumer choice and in a business sense, forces a business to adopt a chip that they might not otherwise buy, that is where the issues start to come into play. Merely stating that you don't buy the chip is a straw man arguement. The protections against monopolies where put in to protect the consumer. When companies and monopolies collude, the consumer looses. AMD is outselling their chips -- they can't make them fast enough. Intel might feel threatened, but that is by no means a reason for them to engage in anti-competetive behavior. Also, it is interesting to note that Intel and AMD have agreements for them to coperate together in the development of the x86 instruction set. But Intel doesn't play nice. Intel stopped cooperating with AMD when AMD started to outshine them. It took a judge to order Intel to play nice. Now that AMD is winning the x86-64 game, and has a better server chip, has integrated memory controllers (although Intel does have DDR2 memory, and their mobile chips are about par) people are paying attention to AMD. And an AMD chip is cheaper than an Intel chip. So forcing a company that wants to use the features of Syke or any software to use a particular chip for an arbitarary reason (and Intel verse AMD is arbitarary for the most part) is anti-competitive IF there was any undue influence on the part of the chip maker. If Intel paid any amount of money or applied any pressure that makes the whole arbitarary restriction very illegal and would probably result in an FTC investigation.
The department that I am in at my University has mandated Laptops as a cost-saving measure and also to increase the experience of the students. It was discovered that the students that have laptops do better in classes, get their home work done, and have a better experience in classes. Also, they aren't alway trying to change the settings that the dork before them changed -- so the enviroment is generally more stable. However, the department that I am in is the Information Systems, and not your english department.
The University was turning over the IS computers on a yearly basis in some of the labs. So they merely just started to use open source tools, and those tools that aren't open source they bought site licenses to. For example, Norton Anti-Virus Corp is available, the MSDN Academic Suite, and all the other developer tools are free. Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop, etc., are going to be resold to us at nominal fees for semester use (time-bombed versions I suspect at around $50, which puts them at the cost of a book). So now instead of them having to replace computers, they are having us buy laptops and use them, and they are buying some heavy duty Cisco routers, Pix boxes, software suites, etc. It allows the IS department a lot more flexiability on a short budget to give us a more versital experience.
The down side -- I have pretty hooped up laptop. It has run me nearly $2,800. And I guess that it will only last me maybe two and a years max on the laptop.
We're sorry to inform you, however, your posts on the popular internet forum "Slashdot" indicate that you hold opinions that are in opposition to our company. We found these posts by using Google and searching for "Robert Erickson."
One particular comment, maligning Windows, "If I want to make use of old hardware in my house, I'll install linux, hands down -- without a window manager" demonstrates your opinons. Google has helped to ferret out your true nature that you failed to disclose in the interview processes.
Additionally the cell will be used by IBM for things like blade servers and medical devices. So while the initial launch may be rather painful for Sony and cost Sony a lot of money, economies of scale do apply, and the cost will fall. With the use in medical devices for example, I would suspect that Sony and IBM will use that as a major source of revienue to help pay back development costs.
At that length won't is start to pick up some sort of charge? (I am not a physicist, so this is a genuine question) From what I understand (and be gentle on me to all you physicist and would-be's) is that if you put something that is really long, and start spinning it, the particles in the air, and even in space will start to charge the object. If I recall correctly, there was some sort of experiment a while back along these lines that NASA did to see if they could generate electricity by having a super-long tether. Anyhow, wouldn't such a device extending from space to earth carry such a massive potential energy? What about using it to generate electricity?
Except now spyware/virus writers/etc can produce their malicous wares with out having to buy a Mac. They can now run it in a virtual environment on the hardware they already own. It would be worth there effort to make sure that they don't want it out just for security reasons.
Real easy: The principles are the consiprators. They are the ones that planned the attack, launced it, and used the tools. Personal responsability is not mitigated by availiability, oportunity or circumstance. Just because they saw how to use a tool in such a way does not make them any less the guilty. The gun analogy here does not quite work. Why? Because the adware network had to be changed in order to get it work. So there was more planning, work, testing, etc., which proves more culpability and the maliciious nature of the act. In the case of gun, you just load, point and click. In this case, an entire bot net was pointed at a target, programmed and then used to attack. It is a whole lot different than pointing one gun, it is the equivalent of pointing thousands of guns, and then firing them. Worst yet, it is the equivalent of pointing thousands of guns and then blackmailing someone by saying you won't do it unless they pay you not to do it. So sure they saw that they could do it. They did it. But that does not in any way mitiagate there culpability.
As much as I hate the adware people, they are just as much as a victem too. Assume that the software was legitimately on the computers they hijacked, then this stunt was in violation of the computer tresspass laws. Further, there software was reversed engineered, hacked and then used on a hospital in an attempt to get the money.
So painting the hospital and the adware company as secondaries is foolish. When some decides that they are going to exploit someone or something and use illegal methods to gain, everybody in the chain becomes a victem, regardless of their degree of contributing participation. If the adware company had the forsight to know that its software could have been used to do such a thing, then it would reasonable to blame them, but I seriously doubt they did.
Otherwise, rest the blame squarely on the shoulders of the princple attackers. Personal responsability is what matters. The attackers used what they knew to exploit the tools.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come on...the patient business is proving to be quit popular these days. How many companies are we reading about that can't make a dime and then they start to sue people and win because they filed some absure patient first? The "buy-it-now" patient and the double-click patient are great examples of this. Its the new business model. Can't make money by marketing and implementation. So now you can make money by thinking up something and then patienting.
./ equiquation
In traditional
1.) Think of idea
2.) Patient idea
3.) Wait for people to use for a good long time
4.) Sue
4a.) Stiffle innovation
5.) Profit
Software patients are bad, especially when the implementation of such is not know. Trade secrets should be used instead of clobbering competition. And with Micrsoft doing something like this, I would bet that a suit would emerge alledging anti-competitve behaviors. Besides with the EU and there MS is an evil monopoly attitude I would be that the EU might have some teeth where the US might not. Stang how playing internationally can lead to some serious problems for a company that won't play nice.
Here's how you could do it:
.XXX TLD. Those with valid and registered trademarks are given first shot. Then the site that has the oldest name, for example ABCD.com would have first crack at getting .XXX as long as its principle business is in pornography. If that site refuses to accept the .XXX domain, then other SLD's in in another TLD can get the .XXX name. After all the porn vendors have had their crack, then the other companies, who are not pornography businesses get the chance to register their domain names in the .XXX TLD. .XXX domain name. .XXX domain name. Registering a new domain in any non-XXX TLD and then putting up pornographic content would be a violation and your site could be pulled down. .XXX equivalent then they will be required to redirect people to the .XXX domain. .XXX SLD and have the content served from that domain name. Their 'brand' can stay the same, such as SEX.COM as a front page without pornographic content on the front page. The current TLD is to be used as a 'doormat'. All media content, including pictures must be linked from the .XXX TLD.
.XXX TLD. Then, since site will be allowed to have a .com/.org/.whatever TLD welcome mat it can be blocked. In the event that some filter doesn't capture the doormat, the pictures, movies, images, etc, will be blocked because they are hosted on the .XXX domain name. The system provides a clearing house to make sure that cybersquating won't happen (you won't have the arguments over sex.com or some punk trying to get playboy.xxx).
.XXX are those who don't understand the internet and those that are against any form of censorship even if it to protect children. Having a 'redlight district' on the internet would make it very easy for companies, homes and schools to block a good majority of pornography. Sure you would have some sex search engine that would index the entirety of .XXX, but the people that are going to look for it are going to find it. Browsers could have a simple filter built in to not attempt to resolve any host in .XXX. Company's could put in their own zone file for .XXX that redirects all sites to their AUP.
1.) Have a period of time where current domain owners can lay claim to the the SLD in the
2.) After the period of time to work out existing domain name owners and trademark owners, then other people will be opened up to the
3.) Require all new domain owners agree that sexual content that fits the definition of pornography to register a
4.) Existing non-XXX TLD's that host pornographic content before the changes can continue to operate, however if they have the
5.) Existing non-XXX TLD's that host pornographic content will be required, as a term of renewal to purchase a
The main advantage to this is that filters could universally block the
The people that seem to be fighting the
People are approaching this problem from the idea this is a free speech issue, when it's not always. There are economic considerations. Companies can people routelinely for looking at pornography. It cost companies lost productivity and bandwidth. Not to mention the crap that gets bundled with porn because someone is so engroused in the porn that he installs whatever program wants to install itself. Universities and schools deal with the loss of bandwidth. Economically, there are reasons to move it to a seperate section of the internet. Just because the moral-right seems to be the ones yelling for it, doesn't mean that there isn't an economic insentive. If you can keep a good employee that does good work from looking at porn and thereby he doesn't get fired, then it is worth it to a company. But if that same employee is looking at porn and wasting company resources and he has to get canned, then it cost compa
Acording to http://www.spr.org/ 1 in 5 men and 1 in 4 women are raped while in prision.
I went and looked up the Federal Sentencing Guidelines http://www.ussc.gov/2004guid/tabcon04_1.htm Turns out, for a raping another prisioner or even a correctional officer raping prision you get 32 points. (FYI: each crime is weighted on a point scale. Each crime has a base point and then you can get "extra credit" to increase the points based on the actual details of the crime.) If you are first time offendor serving a time for a pervious crime, then you're looking at between 11 and 13 years for a prision rape. If you are serious offendor, then plan somewhere in the neighborhood of about 22 years for raping someone. Federal law, btw, makes prision rape a federal crime.
While everyone is being brutal about the GP for saying that you get 20 years for doing prision rape, according to the sentencing guidelines, which Federal Judges are bound to, then 20 years would sound right. That would be enough for anyone with the hope of getting out not to do it. Also, since it is a sex crime, then the prisioner upon release for committing prision rape would have to register as a sex offendor. Now the idiot that got his jollies on his cell mate won't be able to get a job because he'll be labeled a felon and a pervert.
And that is just on the federal level.
What about virtualization? I thought that the whole idea of virtualization is to increase the CPU useage from 15-20% to 80-85%.
Just because there is a bunch of processes running doesn't mean that the second core will be used. Instead you end up having a dual core processor that can do things using less of the individual cores. Now you have a cpu that is only being utilized 7.5-10% per core.
Yeah, but a British guy went down for hacking for using Lynx. Here's the article. http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/27/jailed_for_us ing_a_n.html. stm
And the BBC article is here. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4195339
We did a case study in one of my classes. Aparently the guy wanted to see if a site was legimate for the Tsunami funds at the Red Cross. Some system administrator freaked when he saw that there was a non-standard browser appearing in the event logs. So the sys-admin traced the IP and the cops broke down his door. Aparently using a text based browser to be safe can get you in trouble. They ceased his computer equipment and if memory serves me right he went to jail.
Where you believe the Lynx user or the Red Cross for hacking, there aren't much details. But one of the things that was pretty obvious is that Lynx is what tipped the sys-admin to calling the cops on him.
While the servers may not be running Windows XP or even Windows, there are other compontants to making an infrustructure crictical. For example, just having a server is pretty useless unless you have clients to use it. But if a DRM kit disables the clients, then what good is the server going to be? Sure you have the information and it is protected, but no practical way to get to it. A credit card company probably has many servers and they are probably all secure. But if you have unsecured clients as a result of DRM gone bad, and no way to uninstall it, then the infrustructure of that company may have been violated.
I think what *IA and the BSA are saying is that they don't want exception to DRM on critical infrustructure because too many companies might fall under that title. Credit card companies, banks, credit unions, government agencies, etc., all have some role which is essential. Allowing security exceptions would mute their protections and then they wouldn't have the ability to keep people from pirating music at work. I also wonder whether they feel that it is the companies responsabiltiy to protect machines against a malicious DRM -- the argument being if it is so critical and essential then why on earth is the machine being used as a music player.
The real problem that is being highlighted is the attitude that a copyright holder has the ability under the DMCA to hold a computer hostage. Whether it is critical infrustructure, non-criticial, school or home computers, they are having a power trip and are abusing their customers. The problem has to be solved, and with the attitude of preventing piracy through mob-like methods (proverbially breaking people's legs), the only way to do it is to have congress deal with it. I think the only way we'll see the *IA stripped of their precious DMCA is for a some crictial infrustructure to fail as the result of a miscreant DRM. Hopefully it'll be someone like VISA where it will be hard felt. Then you can bet that some Congresscritter will listen and we might see something happen.
I think what should happen is those that use DRM and do not provide a method of removing the protection from computers should be held to strict product liability standards. Any reputable software package has a method of removal. If they won't provide the means to remove it, and something happens, then the copyright holders should be held responsable. A DRM causes someone to die, then the DRM producer and distributor should be held liable for wrongful death. A DRM causes a company to lose millions because the network is down, then they should be pay the millions back. If *IAA won't play nice and won't allow reasonable exceptions and even fight them, then there should be consequences for problems that DRM causes.
With Microsoft in the group, why on earth should anybody trust the standard? They have been trying to torpedo ODF for a such a long time now they make an open group? Forgive me for asking, but if memory serves me correctly, Microsoft broke XML document standards with Office 2003 so that it wasn't compatiable with other readers. And Microsoft has a really bad habit of taking a standard, after all the works been done and building on it so that it Microsoft products can interoperate with others, but others can't with them. I would be really skeptical of anything Microsoft does, because history has proven time and time again that they like to create the standard and have everyone else follow, only to break the following. Does Internet Explorer and HTML sound farmiliar? That is an open standard, and Microsoft has yet to abide by it. It has resulted in millions of web pages that won't render correctly because Microsoft can't play nice and use the standards that that are published.
Yes, but dual core Intel CPU's will be able to have 20 open at the same time.
That is the problem with modern politics. The poltical parties have blurred the lines between what a conservative and liberal is, requiring them to align with a political party. When in fact, the politcal parties fluctuate so much, move left and right, that depending on where your politcal ideology actually lies, you might be more in line with the democrats on presidental term and the republicans the next. With each election the politcal parties attempt to capture the magical middle of the political spectrum, while at the same time pushing forward their left or right wing agendas. However, since it is all politics, the pure ideology of being a conservative or a liberal is usually lost. In the case of the current administration, Pres. Bush has pushed the country more towards the right, while pursuing a course that a lot of conservatives disagree with (for example, conservatitves are for less government, less regulation, and less government in their lives). Pres. Bush has done more to put the government in people's lifes than what a true conservative would have done. So when all is said and done, a politiian may claim to be a conservative to capture that voting base, but then abuse them and actually pursue a course that runs counter that ideology. The same holds true for a liberals and the democrats. And what we think of being oxymoronic, you can actually be a conservative democrat. The conservative and liberal are all just titles of the ideology. While the political parties are the method and the means to implementing that ideology. American politics are somewhat of an enigma in the world. With a two party system, somehow we loose the fact that the vast majority of Americans do not fit neatly in two parties. However, since third parties have proven to be ineffective and are ignored by the two other parties, then most American's simply say Democrat, Republican or Independant.
My personal feeling is that the politcal landscaping is going to start changing soon so that the Democrats and Republicans are going to have to acknowledge the independants. They are going to have to change their platform to be flexiable. The difference between a Republican and Democrat is so minimial that the rest of the world largely laughs at America. In other countries you have poltical parties that run from Communist to straight out facsist. But in the US you have two groups that are so close to the middle that they actually fight over capturing the middle ground.
Another interesting thing is that many self-labeled conservates and liberals may not actually be such. For example a conservative may actually be an economic or neoliberal and be a social conservative. Or libertarians for the most part are economic and social liberals. Or what many democratic politicans tend to be, which is economic conservatives and social liberals. The problem with the parties is that they mix and blur what the issues really are and they don't have clear policy statements about their parties positions.
I am wondering if Microsoft is equating security with product activation security. Volume licenses for businesses and the corporate editions have special activation features. Based on the Window's Genuine Advantage or whatever the heck they call it, and the evolution that it has been under for the last year or so and with this, I really wonder if it has something to do with thwarting pirates. After, most pirates are going to want to pirate the Ultimate edition, not the Starter or the basic home. But if they build something into the operating system that makes the whole OS harder to pirate. This is my speculation, but maybe there will be something different for the home users and the business user in terms of activation.
But I also wonder if it might be also related to hardware vendors asking for more time. If some of the hardware makers are having a little trouble get Aero Glass to work that would make a little sense. Vista has been delayed for so long, people are a little numb. It could even be a major vendor that is having problems. So Microsoft says that it is a security issue, the vendor gets more time and people don't really care.
If I were a system administrator I would do it as a security measure. If ad companies are going to start using more metrics than a simple click, I would consider that a potential breach of security. Who knows what information they might be gathering. But if they are gathering any information which might be personally identifiable. The last thing that a company would need is to have an advertisment database that included the company's domain name with what the people at the company look at on the internet. Call me paranoid.
In the more practical area, it will save a little bandwidth by blocking those sites. It might not be much, but if you have a large organization it can add up.
The children that have the knowledge of other operating systems probably have the knowledge of how to route such software out if they want to. That is one of the basic problems in dealing with host-based censorship (this, of course, is excluding your who view point of the topic). In order for a system administrator to block porn and other undesirable topics, they have to block the content on the network level instead of on the host level, otherwise there is a mirad of ways around it. For example, you could neutur the software, boot into a bootable Linux distro, etc., and it will moot the software. Also, a child could use a different browser since this software only supports Mozilla, Firefox and Internet Explorer.
It seems to me that the most effective method would be to have a cable modem/DSL modem that has the content blocking software built onto the modem. It would raise the cost of the modem significantly, but at the same time it moves the blocking from the host to the network layer and makes circumvention a whole lot harder. Then the child has to start playing with the ideas of VPN's, etc, to get around the issue. So either way you look at it, if a child wants to get around filters, they will do it, but it doesn't mean that a parent shouldn't try.
And reading some of the other posts there are comments that people have made stating that any porn blocking is inherently bad. However, people fail to remember that, except in the case of a home use scenerio, the internet at work or school is not theirs and they are bound by agreements. The acceptable use policies are there for a reason. I have heard story after story of employers with an employee that just surfs for porn all day long, or one story where the boss was using all the bandwidth of a fractional T-1 downloading porn all day long. Removing your moral standpoint on the topic, if pornography starts to costs a business or school money disportionately per user because some users are spend too much time or too much bandwidth surfing for porn then the decision to block it becomes a business decision not a moral decision. Slashdotters fail to make the distinction that sometimes businesses make the decision to block things, like porn, or p2p, instant messaging, etc., based off a business decision and not a moral decision all the time. Also, schools for example, might have legal issues in being required to block pornography.
Also, another interesting topic is the issue that while Slashdot is left-leaning, those who are left-leaning feminist don't nessisarily agree with pornography. Some organizations of feminists have created an odd aliance with right-leaning organizations because the two camps are united in one believe -- pornography is degrading to woman and that it lies about sexual relationships. Some have even made the distinction between good and bad pornography, stating that the good lacks violence, while the bad contains eliments of violence. There are those who argue that it is their right to view, buy and produce pornography under free speech protections. The reason why I point this out is that the issue of pornography is not so much a left/right issue. There are those who are in the right that feel that people have the right to produce it under the freedom of speech, while there are those who are in the left who feel that no one should be able to produce it because it is degrading to woman. The political issues of pornography are not so much cut and dry, left and right as many Slashdotters would have people think. After all the Child Pornography Prevention Act was passed in 1996 under President Bill Clinton and signed by him.
To throw another log on the fire, what is legal to access in California may not be legal in Oregon. This is called community standards. The law states that free speech has have value -- political, artistic, scientific, or literary. "Sex speech" does not enjoy the same protections under the law. This has come down from various Supreme Court rulings. That is why the Supreme Court actually watches porn -- to see if
Medical Records? Ever heard of HIPAA? If you had even the shred of evidence that you were turned down for a job because they had medical information about you contained in medical records, then you would own that company. It would mean that somehow they obtained the information illegally and someone disclosed the information illegally. The criminal liability for disclosure of a medical record is in the neighborhood of about $250,000 for each offense. Plus punitive damages. You could probably sue the company that has the record, the company that obtained it to the company the doctor that disclosed it (assuming they used an P.I.). And I wouldn't sign an agreement stating that an employer could have medical records unless there was a valid reason. Anybody in the business of medical records is paranoid of disclosing a medical record. Oh, by the way, under HIPAA, you own your medical records. Depending on what is in your medical record and why they turned you down you could sue for a HIPAA violation, ADA and all sorts of discrimination statutues. Frankly, I don't know if I would want work at a place that was using medical records as to exclude people.
However, under some circustainces I can understand the use of a credit record. For example if you are going to be handling sensative information or you are going to be doing finanaces, then it makes sense check the credit record. However, if there is no criminal record or even the hint of fraud exclusion because someone has a bad credit record would not be fair -- just because someone fell on hard times (there is no way telling why their credit record may be bad) means they won't be a good employee.
Frankly, I don't care if a potential employer knows information about me -- I don't have anything to hide. If they don't like my political views, my credit history, medical history, etc., then oh well. It probably isn't exactly the job for me in the first place. If they want the information, then they can ask me, and I'll provide it, freely.
(To any future employer, feel free to ask me the information you want and I'll give it to you straight up.)
However, I seriously doubt that RIAA will even consider your last argument. Why would they? They seem to think that entertainment costs are flexiable and that other considerations will not reduce the demand for entertainment. Just because some teenager can get to the mall does not mean that they have the money to spend it on a CD. Then when you consider that the next generation of DVD is going to run between $35-50, there is going to be some fierce competition for teen's money. There is competition for what teens are spending their money on and blaiming priacy for competition is a straw man argument.
I once entered myself into a hot pepper festival in Texas. It was a painful experience. All the contestants started out with a red pepper and then worked their way up the famed Habanero. By the time you reached the Habanero your mouth is on fire, your stomach is upset and you want to shoot yourself. I thought that the pain was over once my mouth was done burning. No. About four hours latter I had what I can only describe as the "Bunghole of Fire." My room mate knocked on the door to ask if I was okay. Apparently the screams pain hinted that something was not quite right in the bathroom. So your comment brought back memories. Thanks. I didn't need that....
But I would bet that companies will push for laws banning the use of RFID scanners in businesses to prevent exactly that -- not for consumers but for competition. Imagine what a competitor would be able to pull off -- a quick walk around the store and they have the complete inventory of what the competior has and even quantities. Or, even more interesting would be a competor using an RFID scanner as people leave their competitors store. Then competitors will be able to tell what people are buying and then alter prices accordingly. Of course this would only work if the suppliers use the same RFID identification number for each retailer.
Any form of obsufication would only work for a short period of time. As the products start to leave the store, people will start to make a database for the purpouses that you described above -- and then it would only be a matter of time before competitors would buy the databases or obtain them.
Like I said, I would bet that RFID readers will be illegal to use except by the people that employ them on site.
I tend to agree that with CPU's increasing in speed and power, that the cost of encyrpting goes down. But also the cost of breaking the same codes goes down. Right now it takes 2^120 rounds to break AES encrpytion while trying to brute force. So in order for the higher speeds of the CPU argument to hold to encrypt everything, encryption technology will have to go up. Right now 128 bit is acceptable, but as speeds increase, then the encrpytion will have to be changed as well. And that will require faster processors.
Well it is a "different test" the results could be remoteley generated. But you would have to have a web browser on their end running to get it to work. You simply write a Java program that runs locally on the client machine. When the client machine connects, they download your Java program. This java program then launches SSH (which, BTW, Java can do), compromises the root account, and then downloads a native Mac OS X malware/spyware program. Sure this is a different test, but it does demonstrate that the root account could, theoretically be compromised remotely. The program could even act as a trojan and phone home.
The other thought that passed my mind is that since it is a University what is the likely hood that this Mac is really a Honeypot of some sort? Sure it may be hardened, but they may be trying to figure out how secure Mac OS X is and just trying to get at the ego of hackers.
Come on. The idea behind declaring a company a monopoly is that consumer choice is limited because of collusion and anti-competitve behavior. In this case, there is some potential to support the idea that Intel and Sykpe may have colluded to create an artificial barrier that is anti-competitive. As a result, it limits consumer choice. When that barrier is arbitrary and is not based on the merrits of the product, for example that AMD chips really don't have some sort of defect that limit the number of telephone calls down to five while an Intel dual core allows up to ten phone calls at the same time, that is anti-competitive. Worse, is when it limits consumer choice and in a business sense, forces a business to adopt a chip that they might not otherwise buy, that is where the issues start to come into play. Merely stating that you don't buy the chip is a straw man arguement. The protections against monopolies where put in to protect the consumer. When companies and monopolies collude, the consumer looses. AMD is outselling their chips -- they can't make them fast enough. Intel might feel threatened, but that is by no means a reason for them to engage in anti-competetive behavior. Also, it is interesting to note that Intel and AMD have agreements for them to coperate together in the development of the x86 instruction set. But Intel doesn't play nice. Intel stopped cooperating with AMD when AMD started to outshine them. It took a judge to order Intel to play nice. Now that AMD is winning the x86-64 game, and has a better server chip, has integrated memory controllers (although Intel does have DDR2 memory, and their mobile chips are about par) people are paying attention to AMD. And an AMD chip is cheaper than an Intel chip. So forcing a company that wants to use the features of Syke or any software to use a particular chip for an arbitarary reason (and Intel verse AMD is arbitarary for the most part) is anti-competitive IF there was any undue influence on the part of the chip maker. If Intel paid any amount of money or applied any pressure that makes the whole arbitarary restriction very illegal and would probably result in an FTC investigation.
The department that I am in at my University has mandated Laptops as a cost-saving measure and also to increase the experience of the students. It was discovered that the students that have laptops do better in classes, get their home work done, and have a better experience in classes. Also, they aren't alway trying to change the settings that the dork before them changed -- so the enviroment is generally more stable. However, the department that I am in is the Information Systems, and not your english department.
The University was turning over the IS computers on a yearly basis in some of the labs. So they merely just started to use open source tools, and those tools that aren't open source they bought site licenses to. For example, Norton Anti-Virus Corp is available, the MSDN Academic Suite, and all the other developer tools are free. Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop, etc., are going to be resold to us at nominal fees for semester use (time-bombed versions I suspect at around $50, which puts them at the cost of a book). So now instead of them having to replace computers, they are having us buy laptops and use them, and they are buying some heavy duty Cisco routers, Pix boxes, software suites, etc. It allows the IS department a lot more flexiability on a short budget to give us a more versital experience.
The down side -- I have pretty hooped up laptop. It has run me nearly $2,800. And I guess that it will only last me maybe two and a years max on the laptop.
Dear Robert,
We're sorry to inform you, however, your posts on the popular internet forum "Slashdot" indicate that you hold opinions that are in opposition to our company. We found these posts by using Google and searching for "Robert Erickson."
One particular comment, maligning Windows, "If I want to make use of old hardware in my house, I'll install linux, hands down -- without a window manager" demonstrates your opinons. Google has helped to ferret out your true nature that you failed to disclose in the interview processes.
We wish you the best of luck in your job search.
Sincerely,
RIAA
Additionally the cell will be used by IBM for things like blade servers and medical devices. So while the initial launch may be rather painful for Sony and cost Sony a lot of money, economies of scale do apply, and the cost will fall. With the use in medical devices for example, I would suspect that Sony and IBM will use that as a major source of revienue to help pay back development costs.
At that length won't is start to pick up some sort of charge? (I am not a physicist, so this is a genuine question) From what I understand (and be gentle on me to all you physicist and would-be's) is that if you put something that is really long, and start spinning it, the particles in the air, and even in space will start to charge the object. If I recall correctly, there was some sort of experiment a while back along these lines that NASA did to see if they could generate electricity by having a super-long tether. Anyhow, wouldn't such a device extending from space to earth carry such a massive potential energy? What about using it to generate electricity?
Except now spyware/virus writers/etc can produce their malicous wares with out having to buy a Mac. They can now run it in a virtual environment on the hardware they already own. It would be worth there effort to make sure that they don't want it out just for security reasons.
Shades of gray? Who to blame?
Real easy: The principles are the consiprators. They are the ones that planned the attack, launced it, and used the tools. Personal responsability is not mitigated by availiability, oportunity or circumstance. Just because they saw how to use a tool in such a way does not make them any less the guilty. The gun analogy here does not quite work. Why? Because the adware network had to be changed in order to get it work. So there was more planning, work, testing, etc., which proves more culpability and the maliciious nature of the act. In the case of gun, you just load, point and click. In this case, an entire bot net was pointed at a target, programmed and then used to attack. It is a whole lot different than pointing one gun, it is the equivalent of pointing thousands of guns, and then firing them. Worst yet, it is the equivalent of pointing thousands of guns and then blackmailing someone by saying you won't do it unless they pay you not to do it. So sure they saw that they could do it. They did it. But that does not in any way mitiagate there culpability.
As much as I hate the adware people, they are just as much as a victem too. Assume that the software was legitimately on the computers they hijacked, then this stunt was in violation of the computer tresspass laws. Further, there software was reversed engineered, hacked and then used on a hospital in an attempt to get the money.
So painting the hospital and the adware company as secondaries is foolish. When some decides that they are going to exploit someone or something and use illegal methods to gain, everybody in the chain becomes a victem, regardless of their degree of contributing participation. If the adware company had the forsight to know that its software could have been used to do such a thing, then it would reasonable to blame them, but I seriously doubt they did.
Otherwise, rest the blame squarely on the shoulders of the princple attackers. Personal responsability is what matters. The attackers used what they knew to exploit the tools.