DEC had all this sorted out back in the days of the PDP-11! Filenames would get a version number appended (such as LOGIN.COM;12) and you could specify how many versions to keep hanging around. Writing a file without specifying a version number would create a new version, reading a file without specifying a version number would use the latest version.
Easiest way? Just create a RAID1 array between the laptop's internal HDD and an identical-sized file mounted as an NFS share. (You'll need the relevant modules compiled hard into the kernel, or in your initrd.) If the share isn't found at bootup, the array will run degraded (i.e. with just the HDD). If the share is detected at bootup, the array will be re-syncronised in the background. Metadata on the internal HDD will indicate that it was correctly updated, so you needn't worry about causing an unintentional rollback!
Defendant: But, your honour, if you look at exhibit a: printout of/var/log/xferlog, you will see that nobody actually downloaded any of the files in question.
Judge: That does not matter. The fact is that you made the files available, so someone could have downloaded them. Your ADSL gives a maximum upload speed of 768kb/sec, is contended at 50:1 and the creation date on the files is four weeks ago, so that's 28 * 86400 = 2419200". In every second you can upload 786432 bits or 98304 bytes, and if you were sharing with 49 others then that would be 1966.08 bytes per second. Which over 4 weeks makes 4 756 340 736 bytes. Or over three days of music in the form of 128kbit, ferric-oxide cassette quality MP3 files!
Defendant: Are you going to do me for rape as well, your honour?
Judge: Are you admitting to a count of rape?
Defendant: No, but I have got the equipment.....
blockquote>The legal system won't take purity into account but the market will. A dealer who sells a higher quality product will have more repeat custom from satisfied drug users. A dealer who rips off their customers won't get repeat custom if there is any decent competition. The free market is a good thing!
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they aren't. You can't expect to apply the laws of ideal free markets to real, non-free markets.
Heroin addicts don't have much in the way of choice, their decisions aren't always rational, and thus they can be said to inhabit a non-free market. Fact is, as long as whatever you're selling is even vaguely preferable to the symptoms of withdrawal and isn't definitely going to kill them, they will crawl naked through broken glass to score an underweight wrap, late, and thank you for it.
There's a certain class of (invariably non-using) dealer who get a kick out of the power they can wield over addicts..... sort of like those kids who enjoyed pulling the wings off flies. In their way, they're as bad as cops.
You have forgotten, or chosen to ignore, that the overwhelming majority of the damage suffered by any addict is because of the illegality of their favourite drug rather than due to any effect of the drug itself. Since an unscrupulous dealer who doesn't care if the shit he's pushing is full of brick dust or scouring powder will receive no worse a penalty than a dealer who is fastidious about purity, there is no incentive to supply a quality product (in fact, for non-using dealers, there is an outright disincentive). Without quality control, a user runs the twin risks of being harmed by impurities, or overdosing due to receiving a more potent product than they expected. Furthermore, the prospect of having to incriminate oneself and one's friends in order to get help is the single greatest factor working to dissuade people from seeking treatment at an early stage when it would have the best chance of being effective. "No," they think, "I can't risk losing my job -- which is how I'm affording to pay for my habit -- or dropping my mates in the shit. I'm just going to have to sort this one out myself." /> "Oh, fuck. Now I really need a hit."
I also recall reading about how mass-spec has gotten reliable enough that feeding your victim to the chickens will no longer save you from a murder rap, because human DNA can be distinguished from the rest of the chicken shit.
If you had a person you really wanted to send down for a crime, but you couldn't find enough evidence (perhaps even because they didn't do it), wouldn't it be easy to pretend that a brand new spiffy scientific technique, way beyond the comprehension of a school leaver with passing grades in all required subjects, has just been invented which then proved to be the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle?
You can verify to yourself, using only commonly available and household materials, that features such as fingerprints and dental impressions are unique to a person and immutable. But all this advanced science stuff..... well, you can't get a kit to do that at home; and I rather suspect that anyone even trying to market such a thing might well find themselves on the wrong side of an investigation.
The test for methamphetamines probably picks up legitimate prescribed medications for hyperactivity and weight loss, since these drugs belong to the methamphetamine group. If it's broad enough to pick up phenylethylamine, then it will even get false positives from anyone who has been eating chocolate or got a bad case of the horn.
You can't actually kill someone with LSD. It's not toxic enough.
LSD makes it easier to drive a person insane, for sure, but there are other ways.
Going on from your example, what if you killed a person known to enjoy barbecues with food poisoning bacteria such as you might find in (and could easily culture from) undercooked sausages? What if you injected someone intravenously with a large dose of histamine (which will send them into anaphylactic shock) and stuck a half-eaten Snickers bar (Gee, allergic to peanuts, whoever woulda thunk it?) in their hand? What if..... well, there are already all manner of ways of poisoning a person that could be made to look like a bit of harmless fun gone horribly wrong, and legalising recreational drugs (which are readily-enough available anyway, if you've got the mind) really won't add enough "new" ones to the mix to be worth worrying about.
Your post is a perfect example of what happens when drug policy is made by people who have little or no experience of drugs.
Even so, any aspiring attic hydroponicist should insulate the inside of their roof thoroughly and rig an extractor fan to blow into a convenient, unused chimbley (be sure properly to block off the fireplace below). Hot air coming out of a flue doesn't look half as suspicious as heat dissipating through a roof. In winter, you could even place an air conditioner in the loft space and route the vent pipe down into the house (it'll save a bit on your central heating). Extra points if you can arrange a separate duct to bring in non-dope-smelling air to the condenser intake. Or, use a two-part air conditioner with the "indoor" end in the loft and the "outdoor" end in the house. Remember also that air-con / dehumidifier runoff is, to all intents and purposes, demineralised water.
Surely if you have to pay extra for it then it's by definition not "net neutrality" after all? Seems to me that if people have to pay extra for it, you're creating the same kind of two-tier internet that net neutrality proponents despise!
Still, a different kind of two-tier structure is exactly what I'm planning to offer sometime in the near future. For a fee, customers will receive access to a proxy server which blocks all known advertising servers (and quite likely, known malware servers as well). If people are prepared -- as evidenced by the popularity of Sky Plus -- to pay good money to be free of advertisements, I don't see why I shouldn't be getting a piece of the action.
Is the DMCA ever used for anything but propping up broken business models with riduculous lawsuits?
Relying on files stored on a user's computer to indicate that an action has already been carried out is just christian, and deserves to be laughed out of court. It's like sticking a sticker on somebody's clothes to prove that they have already had a free sample of ice cream, then complaining when they show up an hour later sans sticker.
No; the derivative work created by removal of advertisements of a web page is specifically authorised by the Law of the Land as Fair Dealing / Fair Use. It would only become potentially-infringing if you shew it to anyone else.
Please be so kind as to let us know the hostnames of all your ad-servers. Details of what software (and which specific versions) they are running would be an added bonus, as would the physical location of the building in which they are kept and the times when it is staffed.
No need to muck about with vi. (If you do want to advise people to use vi, it's good form then to tell them the exact keystrokes they will need. Some people aren't as smart or brave as the secretaries who used to work for AT&T, and do actually get put off by a screenful of tildes, a beep every time they press a key and no obvious way out. So: shift+G to Go to the end of the file; a to enter append mode; type the extra line; ESC to get out of {or escape from} append mode; shift+Z, shift+Z to save and exit {go to sleep ZZ}.)
Can't the server operator just put some directive in their httpd.conf to limit the maximum number of concurrent connections per client, if they really think more than two is taking the piss?
I'm actually seriously thinking of offering an advert-busting proxy as a paid-for Internet service. I've already worked out how to collect the money on it and accept submissions of new sites. I know that people would rather pay money than see adverts (or else, how do you explain the popularity of Sky Plus?)
Yes, but the point is, Joe Average doesn't need to crack DRM. He just needs to wait until some hacker or other has done that and created a DRM-free, sharable version.
Piracy puts legitimate companies like mine out of business
Yes it does, but not the way you think it does.
Faced with the choice of: pay for Adobe Photoshop, pirate Photoshop, pay for a simple graphics editor which will do what they need or pirate simple graphics editor, people will pirate Photoshop every time. If you sell a simple graphics editor that can be used to retouch photographs (red-eye removal, brightness / contrast adjustment, cropping / resizing, obliterating ex-boyfriends with copied bits of background) you will get absolutely nowhere -- and that's all because of piracy. And the crazy thing is, nobody ever has to make a single pirate copy of your program! Everyone's using pirate copies of Adobe Photoshop that they got from "a friend". They don't get the Adobe manuals, but they can get a book for about £20 that will explain how to use Adobe Photoshop to do all the stuff they could have done in that cheap graphics editor.
The publishers of all these "$EXPENSIVE_PACKAGE for n00bs"-type books have to bear some responsibility for this. They are next-to encouraging wholesale piracy of $EXPENSIVE_PACKAGE. Unfortunately, I can't see any solution that doesn't make things worse. If you insist for someone to prove that they have a valid licence for $EXPENSIVE_PACKAGE before they can buy the n00b's guide, you make it harder to give software and books as gifts (e.g. the software from your mum and the book from your little sister). And you can't read the book before you get the software. If you give the publishers of $EXPENSIVE_PACKAGE some right of control over third-party manuals, you're damaging the free market (to the extent that such a free market exists, what with the damage already done by widespread tolerance of rampant piracy).
The only thing that might come remotely close to cutting piracy is to introduce the concept of laches in copyright -- make it so that if copyright holders don't do something to protect their IP, they lose it. Then this would encourage them to go after home users and casual pirates. But I suspect many copyright holders wouldn't really want this either. They want to eat their cake and have it; they'd rather you were using a pirated version of their software than a legitimate version of anyone else's software.
The BSD licence, if you read it one way, gives you the freedom to withhold the Source Code if you make an improvement. (If you read it differently, it gives other people the freedom to distribute Source Code they didn't actually get. We'll gloss over this for now.) The GPL obliges you, if you make an improvement, to choose between distributing Source Code or keeping your trap shut. Some (specifically, those who would take another person's hard work which they intended to be given away for free; then alter it just a little, cage it up and earn a living from selling it) have complained that this equates to less freedom.
In a society where slavery is legal, you have the freedom to own slaves -- which theoretically makes you more free than you would be in a society where slavery were illegal. In practice, however, the average level of freedom in a society where slavery is permitted will be rather less than the corresponding level of freedom in a society where slavery is not permitted.
In other words, taking away some "freedom" actually makes people more free!
Or just use the old dd command (it's short for "donvert and dopy" -- the obvious "convert and copy" abbreviation was already taken), which is found on pretty much every live / system rescue CD. I mostly use DSL or Slax, because they're small, but Knoppix works. I can't really recommend tomsrtbt anymore (shame; Lua is such an interesting language) due to the demise of floppy drives. Boot from CD, plug in and mount a USB HDD (not included; this must be bigger than the partition you want to back up), # dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/sda1/windows_image & (if = input file = the drive partition you wish to backup, of = output file = a (new) file on the HDD. You'll get a response like [1] 1234 - note down the number after the square brackets. Typing # kill -USR1 1234 -- substitute the number you wrote down before in place of 1234 -- will give you a progress report.
Later, if you're into that sort of thing, you can compress the image using bzip2 (it'll shrink well, since most of it will just be freshly-formatted disk space) and save it onto a bootable DVD. Change the DVD's/etc/motd to show the instructions to unzip the file into its rightful place (it'll be something like # bunzip2/windows_image.bz2 >/dev/hda1 but depends on where you got it from and where you put it; do not be tempted to skip this step, because you will forget in the meantime how it was done) and put away in a safe place.
Re:I have no problem with this kind of thing
on
Manhattan 1984
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· Score: 1
You don't even have to be cautioned; you don't even have to be charged with an offence. They can store DNA from anyone arrested. And they don't need reasonable suspicion of a crime to arrest you anymore -- a high-ranking officer's word is enough.
Pretty soon they're going to be taking DNA samples routinely, on some pretext or other. For one thing, just having a large amount of DNA on file is going to allow interesting analysis..... they might conceivably spot patterns indicating hair or skin colour, height, build or something. (This may be possible already; they can already figure out from DNA whether two people are likely to be related to one another.) And then the nightmare really begins.
There's a small, but finite, probability of false positives. Identical twins have the same DNA, and it's not certain that the techniques currently in use do actually have a perfect 1:1 mapping (so two different DNAs might conceivably show up as the same). If you knew somehow that someone shared your DNA, you could frame them for a crime you committed. Then of course, if you're really unlucky it's also possible to have two different DNAs in the same body, which could give a false negative. DNA, like most other forms of evidence, can be covertly acquired and planted. And those working within the system are, as ever, in the best position to be able to subvert it without detection.
It wasn't so bad in the early days, when DNA was the final piece of evidence that brought a murderer or rapist to justice. Most of the suspects, and hence the potential false positives, had already been eliminated; the DNA evidence was just enough to remove reasonable doubt. This has afforded it undeserved special powers in the public perception. If DNA ever becomes a litmus test, it'll likely be an extraordinarily bad one -- but it will never be challenged.
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DEC had all this sorted out back in the days of the PDP-11! Filenames would get a version number appended (such as LOGIN.COM;12) and you could specify how many versions to keep hanging around. Writing a file without specifying a version number would create a new version, reading a file without specifying a version number would use the latest version.
Easiest way? Just create a RAID1 array between the laptop's internal HDD and an identical-sized file mounted as an NFS share. (You'll need the relevant modules compiled hard into the kernel, or in your initrd.) If the share isn't found at bootup, the array will run degraded (i.e. with just the HDD). If the share is detected at bootup, the array will be re-syncronised in the background. Metadata on the internal HDD will indicate that it was correctly updated, so you needn't worry about causing an unintentional rollback!
Defendant: But, your honour, if you look at exhibit a: printout of /var/log/xferlog, you will see that nobody actually downloaded any of the files in question.
.....
Judge: That does not matter. The fact is that you made the files available, so someone could have downloaded them. Your ADSL gives a maximum upload speed of 768kb/sec, is contended at 50:1 and the creation date on the files is four weeks ago, so that's 28 * 86400 = 2419200". In every second you can upload 786432 bits or 98304 bytes, and if you were sharing with 49 others then that would be 1966.08 bytes per second. Which over 4 weeks makes 4 756 340 736 bytes. Or over three days of music in the form of 128kbit, ferric-oxide cassette quality MP3 files!
Defendant: Are you going to do me for rape as well, your honour?
Judge: Are you admitting to a count of rape?
Defendant: No, but I have got the equipment
blockquote>The legal system won't take purity into account but the market will. A dealer who sells a higher quality product will have more repeat custom from satisfied drug users. A dealer who rips off their customers won't get repeat custom if there is any decent competition. The free market is a good thing! In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they aren't. You can't expect to apply the laws of ideal free markets to real, non-free markets.
..... sort of like those kids who enjoyed pulling the wings off flies. In their way, they're as bad as cops.
Heroin addicts don't have much in the way of choice, their decisions aren't always rational, and thus they can be said to inhabit a non-free market. Fact is, as long as whatever you're selling is even vaguely preferable to the symptoms of withdrawal and isn't definitely going to kill them, they will crawl naked through broken glass to score an underweight wrap, late, and thank you for it.
There's a certain class of (invariably non-using) dealer who get a kick out of the power they can wield over addicts
There's no such thing as "01:22pm". It's either "13:22" or "1:22pm". Leading zeros always mean VCR time.
You have forgotten, or chosen to ignore, that the overwhelming majority of the damage suffered by any addict is because of the illegality of their favourite drug rather than due to any effect of the drug itself. Since an unscrupulous dealer who doesn't care if the shit he's pushing is full of brick dust or scouring powder will receive no worse a penalty than a dealer who is fastidious about purity, there is no incentive to supply a quality product (in fact, for non-using dealers, there is an outright disincentive). Without quality control, a user runs the twin risks of being harmed by impurities, or overdosing due to receiving a more potent product than they expected. Furthermore, the prospect of having to incriminate oneself and one's friends in order to get help is the single greatest factor working to dissuade people from seeking treatment at an early stage when it would have the best chance of being effective. "No," they think, "I can't risk losing my job -- which is how I'm affording to pay for my habit -- or dropping my mates in the shit. I'm just going to have to sort this one out myself."/> "Oh, fuck. Now I really need a hit."
You can verify to yourself, using only commonly available and household materials, that features such as fingerprints and dental impressions are unique to a person and immutable. But all this advanced science stuff
The test for methamphetamines probably picks up legitimate prescribed medications for hyperactivity and weight loss, since these drugs belong to the methamphetamine group. If it's broad enough to pick up phenylethylamine, then it will even get false positives from anyone who has been eating chocolate or got a bad case of the horn.
You can't actually kill someone with LSD. It's not toxic enough.
..... well, there are already all manner of ways of poisoning a person that could be made to look like a bit of harmless fun gone horribly wrong, and legalising recreational drugs (which are readily-enough available anyway, if you've got the mind) really won't add enough "new" ones to the mix to be worth worrying about.
LSD makes it easier to drive a person insane, for sure, but there are other ways.
Going on from your example, what if you killed a person known to enjoy barbecues with food poisoning bacteria such as you might find in (and could easily culture from) undercooked sausages? What if you injected someone intravenously with a large dose of histamine (which will send them into anaphylactic shock) and stuck a half-eaten Snickers bar (Gee, allergic to peanuts, whoever woulda thunk it?) in their hand? What if
Your post is a perfect example of what happens when drug policy is made by people who have little or no experience of drugs.
Even so, any aspiring attic hydroponicist should insulate the inside of their roof thoroughly and rig an extractor fan to blow into a convenient, unused chimbley (be sure properly to block off the fireplace below). Hot air coming out of a flue doesn't look half as suspicious as heat dissipating through a roof. In winter, you could even place an air conditioner in the loft space and route the vent pipe down into the house (it'll save a bit on your central heating). Extra points if you can arrange a separate duct to bring in non-dope-smelling air to the condenser intake. Or, use a two-part air conditioner with the "indoor" end in the loft and the "outdoor" end in the house. Remember also that air-con / dehumidifier runoff is, to all intents and purposes, demineralised water.
Surely if you have to pay extra for it then it's by definition not "net neutrality" after all? Seems to me that if people have to pay extra for it, you're creating the same kind of two-tier internet that net neutrality proponents despise!
Still, a different kind of two-tier structure is exactly what I'm planning to offer sometime in the near future. For a fee, customers will receive access to a proxy server which blocks all known advertising servers (and quite likely, known malware servers as well). If people are prepared -- as evidenced by the popularity of Sky Plus -- to pay good money to be free of advertisements, I don't see why I shouldn't be getting a piece of the action.
Is the DMCA ever used for anything but propping up broken business models with riduculous lawsuits?
Relying on files stored on a user's computer to indicate that an action has already been carried out is just christian, and deserves to be laughed out of court. It's like sticking a sticker on somebody's clothes to prove that they have already had a free sample of ice cream, then complaining when they show up an hour later sans sticker.
No; the derivative work created by removal of advertisements of a web page is specifically authorised by the Law of the Land as Fair Dealing / Fair Use. It would only become potentially-infringing if you shew it to anyone else.
When the Source Code for Opera becomes available, maybe I'll think about installing it.
Can't the server operator just put some directive in their httpd.conf to limit the maximum number of concurrent connections per client, if they really think more than two is taking the piss?
Yes, but the point is, Joe Average doesn't need to crack DRM. He just needs to wait until some hacker or other has done that and created a DRM-free, sharable version.
Are you sure? My parent' first Beta machine (acquired 1981, to record The Wedding) could fit 3h15' on an L-750 cassette.
Faced with the choice of: pay for Adobe Photoshop, pirate Photoshop, pay for a simple graphics editor which will do what they need or pirate simple graphics editor, people will pirate Photoshop every time. If you sell a simple graphics editor that can be used to retouch photographs (red-eye removal, brightness / contrast adjustment, cropping / resizing, obliterating ex-boyfriends with copied bits of background) you will get absolutely nowhere -- and that's all because of piracy. And the crazy thing is, nobody ever has to make a single pirate copy of your program! Everyone's using pirate copies of Adobe Photoshop that they got from "a friend". They don't get the Adobe manuals, but they can get a book for about £20 that will explain how to use Adobe Photoshop to do all the stuff they could have done in that cheap graphics editor.
The publishers of all these "$EXPENSIVE_PACKAGE for n00bs"-type books have to bear some responsibility for this. They are next-to encouraging wholesale piracy of $EXPENSIVE_PACKAGE. Unfortunately, I can't see any solution that doesn't make things worse. If you insist for someone to prove that they have a valid licence for $EXPENSIVE_PACKAGE before they can buy the n00b's guide, you make it harder to give software and books as gifts (e.g. the software from your mum and the book from your little sister). And you can't read the book before you get the software. If you give the publishers of $EXPENSIVE_PACKAGE some right of control over third-party manuals, you're damaging the free market (to the extent that such a free market exists, what with the damage already done by widespread tolerance of rampant piracy).
The only thing that might come remotely close to cutting piracy is to introduce the concept of laches in copyright -- make it so that if copyright holders don't do something to protect their IP, they lose it. Then this would encourage them to go after home users and casual pirates. But I suspect many copyright holders wouldn't really want this either. They want to eat their cake and have it; they'd rather you were using a pirated version of their software than a legitimate version of anyone else's software.
The BSD licence, if you read it one way, gives you the freedom to withhold the Source Code if you make an improvement. (If you read it differently, it gives other people the freedom to distribute Source Code they didn't actually get. We'll gloss over this for now.) The GPL obliges you, if you make an improvement, to choose between distributing Source Code or keeping your trap shut. Some (specifically, those who would take another person's hard work which they intended to be given away for free; then alter it just a little, cage it up and earn a living from selling it) have complained that this equates to less freedom.
In a society where slavery is legal, you have the freedom to own slaves -- which theoretically makes you more free than you would be in a society where slavery were illegal. In practice, however, the average level of freedom in a society where slavery is permitted will be rather less than the corresponding level of freedom in a society where slavery is not permitted.
In other words, taking away some "freedom" actually makes people more free!
See also Freedom or Power?.
Or just use the old dd command (it's short for "donvert and dopy" -- the obvious "convert and copy" abbreviation was already taken), which is found on pretty much every live / system rescue CD. I mostly use DSL or Slax, because they're small, but Knoppix works. I can't really recommend tomsrtbt anymore (shame; Lua is such an interesting language) due to the demise of floppy drives. Boot from CD, plug in and mount a USB HDD (not included; this must be bigger than the partition you want to back up), # dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/sda1/windows_image & (if = input file = the drive partition you wish to backup, of = output file = a (new) file on the HDD. You'll get a response like [1] 1234 - note down the number after the square brackets. Typing # kill -USR1 1234 -- substitute the number you wrote down before in place of 1234 -- will give you a progress report.
/etc/motd to show the instructions to unzip the file into its rightful place (it'll be something like # bunzip2 /windows_image.bz2 > /dev/hda1 but depends on where you got it from and where you put it; do not be tempted to skip this step, because you will forget in the meantime how it was done) and put away in a safe place.
Later, if you're into that sort of thing, you can compress the image using bzip2 (it'll shrink well, since most of it will just be freshly-formatted disk space) and save it onto a bootable DVD. Change the DVD's
You don't even have to be cautioned; you don't even have to be charged with an offence. They can store DNA from anyone arrested. And they don't need reasonable suspicion of a crime to arrest you anymore -- a high-ranking officer's word is enough.
..... they might conceivably spot patterns indicating hair or skin colour, height, build or something. (This may be possible already; they can already figure out from DNA whether two people are likely to be related to one another.) And then the nightmare really begins.
Pretty soon they're going to be taking DNA samples routinely, on some pretext or other. For one thing, just having a large amount of DNA on file is going to allow interesting analysis
There's a small, but finite, probability of false positives. Identical twins have the same DNA, and it's not certain that the techniques currently in use do actually have a perfect 1:1 mapping (so two different DNAs might conceivably show up as the same). If you knew somehow that someone shared your DNA, you could frame them for a crime you committed. Then of course, if you're really unlucky it's also possible to have two different DNAs in the same body, which could give a false negative. DNA, like most other forms of evidence, can be covertly acquired and planted. And those working within the system are, as ever, in the best position to be able to subvert it without detection.
It wasn't so bad in the early days, when DNA was the final piece of evidence that brought a murderer or rapist to justice. Most of the suspects, and hence the potential false positives, had already been eliminated; the DNA evidence was just enough to remove reasonable doubt. This has afforded it undeserved special powers in the public perception. If DNA ever becomes a litmus test, it'll likely be an extraordinarily bad one -- but it will never be challenged.