Actually, it looks like you can. From the article:
Your mail items are stored in secure storage facilities...You can contact us as often or as little as you like. We will forward the originals to your address.
They'll probably charge you postage though. However, as somebody else mentioned, you can always just print the mail from your computer.
AOL has already changed their protocol on several occasions specifically to break the clients. This is nothing new.
Actually, AOL runs two different protocols, OSCAR, and TOC. OSCAR is a more featured, closed protocol that is only supposed to be used with licensed AOL clients, like AOL's software or iChat. This is the protocol that they change every now and then. However, while a little less featured, the TOC protocol is open, and can be used by any client. AOL even uses it for their Java/Linux clients, and it has never been changed.
Basically, while AOL keeps the better protocol restricted to licensed clients, they still offer TOC to anybody who wants to use it. MSN, on the other hand, is just blocking everybody without a license, period.
There's one big difference between this and Napster. When you walk over to somebody's house and borrow a book, there is still only one copy of that book. No new books have been created. However, with Napster, every time you connected to another user's computer to download a song, you would essentially create a brand new copy of that song on your computer, plus allow other users to make copies of that song, and then share those copes with even more people, ad infitum.
What would be neat is if somebody designed a "music library", where files could only get loaned out once and would then get locked, requiring the file to be returned before being loaned out again. I believe Crigely mentioned something along these lines on his site before.
also, our grade/attendance program, SASI, which btw, is a POS, runs nicely under wine. they were baffled. i can mount all my novell shares using ncpmount and run the stuff fine. you made some progress. keep it up.
Hey, don't dis SASI. Our district used it for a good 12 years, and never had any problems with it. It may be dos based, and the company might not support it anymore, but it did it's job, and did it well.
Last year, our district just decided to ditch SASI and go with a partially web-based solution called SchoolMax. The thing breaks weakly, nobody can run reports, and it's counter-intuitive. To add insult to injury, the whole web based interface is built on top of ASP/IIS, which just screams "security-hole". Right now, the school has to manually transcribe everybody's grades out of SchoolMax back into SASI every semester, since students need to send their transcripts to colleges, but they can't get the new system to handle the old transcripts properly.
Of course, SASI is still chugging away just fine. Just goes to show you that when it comes to reliability, sometimes the old technology works better than the alternatives. Speaking of which, my district decided to transition from NetWare to Windows 2k some time ago. It's been a year since they took the old system offline, and student's still don't have a working fileserver!
I also expect that to be the last such migration in my life time. It might be famous last words, however I do have trouble believing 64-bit processing and addressing will get outgrown by any software we'll be running on the desktop.
Just like nobody will ever want more than 64k of RAM, right?;-)
Things change, sometimes very dramatically, and the computational needs of the future will have to change along with them.
This practice is called marketing. While it may not be the greatest thing it the world, it's the way most businesses try to sell products, especially to home users.
Now, when they start replacing mhz with either "Super-Fast" or "Mind-Numbingly Fast" for processor speeds, then I'll be concerned.
Companies will never switch over to IPv6 until they're either forced to, or it becomes more cost effective to upgrade than continuing to use their existing systems. Either way, the only way these goals can be achieved is if ISP's start offering IPv6 to their customers.
What I want to know is, what's stopping them from doing this? All they'd have to do is have a router set up so that users can still access IPv4 addresses, and they'd be set. Not only that, but it would save the ISP money, since they wouldn't have to buy as many IPv4 addresses, and they wouldn't have to reinvest in hardware in the future when they'd have to switch to IPv6 anyway. They could even use it as a marketing tool, guaranteeing every customer a static IP for every system they own. Heck, I know that they'd get a good portion of/. readers to sign up for that alone!
Actually, they already do. By default, Safari has a toolbar button that sends a bug report, along with an optional screenshot/code snapshot, to Apple. In fact, this is one of the reasons why they choose to release the beta, so they could iron out all the bugs without having to the test all of the pages out there.
However, there is no need to get bug reports for a product that they know is unstable or incomplete (the post-v60 builds). If they posted one of those publicly, not only would they get a backlash for releasing an extreemly unstable build of their product, such as the first beta, which had a nice "feature" that would automatically delete ~/ for you, but all of their bug reports would be for a build which is still incomplete. Instead, they could just post their more complete, milestone builds, and get feedback which is much more beneficial to the developers.
True, Safari itself is closed source. However, the heart of the browser, WebCore, is released under the APSL, which is open source. So what if they want to make their browser closed source, it's just a wrapper. If you don't like it, you could always write your own interface and have it tie into WebCore.
As for Internet Explorer, once Apple ships a 1.0 release of Safari, you can bet that they will start to use it on new systems instead of IE. The "far less knowledgable" don't flock to IE because they want to use IE, they just use it because it's already there and don't see a need to get anything else.
They're not using WiFi to let people tune in, but rather to broadcast it. Since it looks like they're doing five different streams at a time, and I'm willing to bet that those places don't have the most accessible internet connections, they're using WiFi Texas to get a connection to each club. There, they've got G3 computers running Gentoo and some streaming software going. After it's encoded, they use the wireless to send it to their XServe (also running Gentoo), which streams it to the internet at large.
Personally, I think this qualifies as being "cool."
No. According to the article, "Timing attacks enable an attacker to extract secrets maintained in a security system by observing the time it takes the system to respond to various queries." Once you choose to encrypt and send a message with GPG/PGP, it is done, and that is that. Aide from the conversation your computer makes with the SMTP server, there is no further communication between hosts, so there is no way somebody could try to measure the time it takes to generate an encrypted reply to something.
Therefore, as long as your computer isn't comprimised, you're fine. However, if your computer is comprimised, well, you've got bigger things to worry about than somebody trying to time how long it takes to encrypt a message.;-)
I may be wrong, but doesn't GSM have a built in encryption machanism to make sure that your calls are kept private? I know my Motorola C331 manual says that the phone will alert me if it detects a device monitoring a call.
So if this is true, even though you could still get a wiretap to monitor the call once it gets to the telco, this would be nearly impossible if somebody is using a prepaid phone like the article said, since you'd have to tap all prepaid phones. So what I want to know is since Europe is pretty much all GSM, how are they able to monitor the call?
Slashdot Mirror
AOL has already changed their protocol on several occasions specifically to break the clients. This is nothing new.
Actually, AOL runs two different protocols, OSCAR, and TOC. OSCAR is a more featured, closed protocol that is only supposed to be used with licensed AOL clients, like AOL's software or iChat. This is the protocol that they change every now and then. However, while a little less featured, the TOC protocol is open, and can be used by any client. AOL even uses it for their Java/Linux clients, and it has never been changed.
Basically, while AOL keeps the better protocol restricted to licensed clients, they still offer TOC to anybody who wants to use it. MSN, on the other hand, is just blocking everybody without a license, period.
There's one big difference between this and Napster. When you walk over to somebody's house and borrow a book, there is still only one copy of that book. No new books have been created. However, with Napster, every time you connected to another user's computer to download a song, you would essentially create a brand new copy of that song on your computer, plus allow other users to make copies of that song, and then share those copes with even more people, ad infitum.
What would be neat is if somebody designed a "music library", where files could only get loaned out once and would then get locked, requiring the file to be returned before being loaned out again. I believe Crigely mentioned something along these lines on his site before.
Hey, don't dis SASI. Our district used it for a good 12 years, and never had any problems with it. It may be dos based, and the company might not support it anymore, but it did it's job, and did it well.
Last year, our district just decided to ditch SASI and go with a partially web-based solution called SchoolMax. The thing breaks weakly, nobody can run reports, and it's counter-intuitive. To add insult to injury, the whole web based interface is built on top of ASP/IIS, which just screams "security-hole". Right now, the school has to manually transcribe everybody's grades out of SchoolMax back into SASI every semester, since students need to send their transcripts to colleges, but they can't get the new system to handle the old transcripts properly.
Of course, SASI is still chugging away just fine. Just goes to show you that when it comes to reliability, sometimes the old technology works better than the alternatives. Speaking of which, my district decided to transition from NetWare to Windows 2k some time ago. It's been a year since they took the old system offline, and student's still don't have a working fileserver!
Things change, sometimes very dramatically, and the computational needs of the future will have to change along with them.
This practice is called marketing. While it may not be the greatest thing it the world, it's the way most businesses try to sell products, especially to home users.
Now, when they start replacing mhz with either "Super-Fast" or "Mind-Numbingly Fast" for processor speeds, then I'll be concerned.
Companies will never switch over to IPv6 until they're either forced to, or it becomes more cost effective to upgrade than continuing to use their existing systems. Either way, the only way these goals can be achieved is if ISP's start offering IPv6 to their customers.
/. readers to sign up for that alone!
What I want to know is, what's stopping them from doing this? All they'd have to do is have a router set up so that users can still access IPv4 addresses, and they'd be set. Not only that, but it would save the ISP money, since they wouldn't have to buy as many IPv4 addresses, and they wouldn't have to reinvest in hardware in the future when they'd have to switch to IPv6 anyway. They could even use it as a marketing tool, guaranteeing every customer a static IP for every system they own. Heck, I know that they'd get a good portion of
Ahem...ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please...
I now present, for your listening enjoyment, The Free Software Song!!!
Actually, they already do. By default, Safari has a toolbar button that sends a bug report, along with an optional screenshot/code snapshot, to Apple. In fact, this is one of the reasons why they choose to release the beta, so they could iron out all the bugs without having to the test all of the pages out there.
However, there is no need to get bug reports for a product that they know is unstable or incomplete (the post-v60 builds). If they posted one of those publicly, not only would they get a backlash for releasing an extreemly unstable build of their product, such as the first beta, which had a nice "feature" that would automatically delete ~/ for you, but all of their bug reports would be for a build which is still incomplete. Instead, they could just post their more complete, milestone builds, and get feedback which is much more beneficial to the developers.
True, Safari itself is closed source. However, the heart of the browser, WebCore, is released under the APSL, which is open source. So what if they want to make their browser closed source, it's just a wrapper. If you don't like it, you could always write your own interface and have it tie into WebCore.
As for Internet Explorer, once Apple ships a 1.0 release of Safari, you can bet that they will start to use it on new systems instead of IE. The "far less knowledgable" don't flock to IE because they want to use IE, they just use it because it's already there and don't see a need to get anything else.
I think you misunderstood...
They're not using WiFi to let people tune in, but rather to broadcast it. Since it looks like they're doing five different streams at a time, and I'm willing to bet that those places don't have the most accessible internet connections, they're using WiFi Texas to get a connection to each club. There, they've got G3 computers running Gentoo and some streaming software going. After it's encoded, they use the wireless to send it to their XServe (also running Gentoo), which streams it to the internet at large.
Personally, I think this qualifies as being "cool."
No. According to the article, "Timing attacks enable an attacker to extract secrets maintained in a security system by observing the time it takes the system to respond to various queries." Once you choose to encrypt and send a message with GPG/PGP, it is done, and that is that. Aide from the conversation your computer makes with the SMTP server, there is no further communication between hosts, so there is no way somebody could try to measure the time it takes to generate an encrypted reply to something.
;-)
Therefore, as long as your computer isn't comprimised, you're fine. However, if your computer is comprimised, well, you've got bigger things to worry about than somebody trying to time how long it takes to encrypt a message.
I may be wrong, but doesn't GSM have a built in encryption machanism to make sure that your calls are kept private? I know my Motorola C331 manual says that the phone will alert me if it detects a device monitoring a call. So if this is true, even though you could still get a wiretap to monitor the call once it gets to the telco, this would be nearly impossible if somebody is using a prepaid phone like the article said, since you'd have to tap all prepaid phones. So what I want to know is since Europe is pretty much all GSM, how are they able to monitor the call?