"Try to open your mind a little! Until you can PROVE that spiritualism doesn't exist, you don't have a case."
This statement completely disregards the scientific method. You are taking something for an absolute then asking someone else to prove it is false. This is obviously not a logical decision.
Science is based on evidence. Scientists are also rightly skeptical about new ideas. However they are also open to new ideas. Your statement that we must prove spiritualism does not exist is dogma with little proof.
I can understand that you want to explain everything around you. I think you are probably skeptical about spirituality. I just think that you are not looking at the fact that the original poster does not take ideas with absolutely no proof whatsoever without a grain of salt.
Having an open mind to formulate new ideas and extend thought is healthy. Making statements that we must prove often unskeptical information taken by many people as an absolute is not.
There are many ISP's who do this already. The problem, however, is that there is too many who do not. I would assume one of the major problems to be portable IP ranges. If we want Tier 1 ISP's to do this, that is a large problem. Then, when we realize some smaller ISP's should be doing it as well, we realize that it's a big pain to get everyone doing this.
I'm all for such an initiative, but it would be tons of work and cost a lot of money.
"A distractive factor so the people do not read and think"
That's funny. We're sitting here right now on the internet typing into a discussion forum. People can participate in discussion all around the world coming from different financial and social circles. They can also choose from millions of sites. They are not a captive audience with the limited content of television. I think it is not a valid comparison.
There are many people being denied access to information. There are, of course, many who do not want information. However, when anyone can type into a search engine an interest or query for information, they will be able to do it with relatively little effort compared to going to the library (which has lots of out-dated and uninteresting information, relating to many interests of many people). When people can congregate online and discuss opinion and exchange information there is a change.
This is certainly interesting. Does anyone out there know of any mentioned strings attached in this case?
The statement in Katz article says:
"Ford says it will offer Internet home pages in 14 languages, and provide home page links to Ford Web sites, with UUNet as the ISP."
This, to me, seems like they will be receiving dialup from UUNet. I know of no draconian protocol sniffing that UUNet does. However, the question still does stand for their company web sites. Since they are company sites, they would likely take into consideration company policy, bureaucracy, polictics, and employee rights. The last, of course, often compromised to fit the company's whims or bottom line.
I could make a statement that we should look at it situationally within a corporation - but often fair judgement is impaired by politics and crappy policies -- so I think the government has to look at some of these issues in more detail to create balance since the corporate machine is often cold to social issues and individual freedoms.
"Computers not put to actual productive use do not educate"
I'm guessing an implication to an assumption that ford employees will not actively seek out information. I think this is a stupid generalization.
Also, if you read further detail into his article, you would see that Ford is working to setup collaboration systems that would further allow for dissemination of information. As well, speaking of the world wide internet - there are plenty of users *not* putting it to good use. There are, however, plenty of users who *are* putting it to good use.
Would you state your assumption regarding internet users world wide as well? Or is this just a prejudice regarding Ford employee's or lower/middle class workers?
Blizzard is a word. Just because someone is using it in their company name does not give them a right to the domain.
If they have a legitimate case, please state facts to back this up.
"If a new software company (we'll call them companyX in this example) started up, and made a web site to sell their software http://www.companyX.com. Now lets say Bill Gates came along and built http://www.companyX.net and all that web site did was sell email address'. YOU WOULD BE OUTRAGED"
And out of luck because you did not register the domain sooner. He may have a company under the same name operating an e-mail forwarding site. Are you trying to say that e-mail forwarding service is not a legitimate use of a domain, especially when it is a straight english word?
You're wrong. To smurf, you must send a spoofed source address of the person you want to attack. If your ISP blocks spoofed packets out of a certain range, you won't be able to smurf outside a certain IP range that the router allows packets to come from.
Each of the hosting boxes slashdot uses to host probably have 100mbps interfaces. Since they are just doing round robin, you could just take down one box and a 1/3 of the people visiting the site would receive errors. Their provider, dn.net, probably has somewhere between 500 and 800mbps aggregate bandwidth capacity (at least out -- I don't know how oversold they are in). This does not translate to actual bandwidth on the internet because of bgp routing tables as well as a number of weak peering arrangements between ISP's.
In other words, someone could probably easily temporarily take down slashdot if they really wanted to. Of course, the same goes for any other site without very large amounts of bandwidth capacity as well as filters.
Many cable providers (as well as many other end user non business ISP's) block spoofed packets at a router downstream (out of a certain allowable range). In other words, I can probably only smurf someone or syn flood directly within a certain range of IP addresses. I know shaw, rogers and at least parts of TCI/ATT does this on their cable networks.
I remember hearing about 2 years ago that smurf attacks would be completely phased out due to tier 1 (and to a lesser degree smaller) ISP's filtering at their borders -- but apparently this has not happened yet, as there are plenty of broken networks around and plenty of unfiltered networks that are able to exploit these vulnerabilities.
"Look, 30-50 shells can certainly generate big traffice but they also can be pin point in a few hours"
False. There are many attacks that are not easily traceable back to the attacker without help from the tier 1 ISP's networks that the packets traverse. Tracing would only be possible for the duration of the attack as well.
"It was mentioned that there existed attacks from a thousand computers"
This may be true in this case. However, I was responding to this person's claim that it wasn't possible to do such an attack.
"This means it's due to an OS hole of some sort, because no scrip kiddies have patience to crack hundreds of machines before an attack"
A generalization, and a stupid one at that. One, who says the attack came from thousands of machines? It could just as easily be from thousands of IP's. Two, there is little difference between the effort involved in scanning for vulnerabilities then initiating an attack then either distributing a trojan and then scanning for it, or finding certain OS vulnerabilities that leads to an attack as such. Three, there is no evidence to back up your claim that it "means it's due to an OS hole of some sort". Four, your generalization regarding all script kiddies is demonstratable false. Log on to EFNet sometime and watch any number of complete idiots DoS attacking frontier/globalcenter, @home, exodus, best, whatever IRC servers with hundreds of megabytes a second of traffic. There is not much difference in scaling an attack such as those to 1gbps.
Get the upstream ISP to identify the attack and install filters at their borders. If that tier 1 isp has enough capacity, the DoS attacker will probably get bored knowing they aren't affecting service and eventually go away.
The problem is that there are many types of attacks that are capable of interrupting service. Many times installed filters require the provider or the customer to compromise their use of the service to allow for better security and protection.
Wrong. 30 to 50 shells with 10 - 100mbps nic's connected to t3's (such as at univerities, large corporations and co-located hosting boxes) are quite capable of taking services such as yahoo out. This, as well as misconfigured networks, are easily taken advantage of.
I would know too. I've had hosting boxes with 100mbps interfaces on an network with oc3 and multiple t3's to tier1 providers completely annihilated due to users using IRC without permission (EFNet is evil). One one occasion, all it took was a DoS attack from a box at a corporation with a t3 to sprint, the university of colorado and a misconfigured US naval academy network. Estimated traffic? 134mbps. Scaling an attack such as that to 1gbps (as reported) is fairly easy if you use distributed sources.
It is also true that there are many script kiddies with this much bandwidth available due to compromised shells and broken networks. Visit EFNet IRC sometime. There are many idiots without a clue with the ability to carry out attacks such as this. You don't have to know what you're doing to scan the entire internet for known vulnerabilities then sniff traffic and tty's at a number of locations and gain access to many other networks.
While this and syn rate limiting are a good thing, they will do nothing if your link is completely overwhelmed. ICMP_BANDLIM and SYN rate limiting will only protect your computer resources as well as uplink bandwidth (your attempts to respond to SYN on open ports or TCP Resets on closed ports, or ICMP error messages).
There is no solution to prevent large distributed DoS attacks. What you can do is put certain filters in place to detect these attacks and act accordingly. When the largest problem is the amount of bandwidth, your only recourse is to get your upstream ISP to filter it at their site because they likely have much more bandwidth than you do. However, the problem with this is that they get very annoyed very fast and will tell you to go jump in a lake if their major routers are going down (this is of course unless you are a major customer). Believe me, I have dealt with sprint, uunet, and exodus regarding this and their solution regarding an idiot repeatedly DoS attacking your site is to charge you more money for all their trouble or to tell you to go away.
"They're running for President on the Libertarian and Socialist ballots respectively"
Yes, I am certainly concerned that we, the government, and the media regularly practice exclusion on these parties -- even if my vision of america does not closely match theirs. Even if some are extremists, they could bring some balance to broken processes.
I've closeley watched the current campaign finance committee in action on c-span, and all I've seen is blatantly partisan stupidity on the part of democrats and republicans.
Admittedly, I am skeptical as to how much McCain can do, even if he is very serious about his platform. However, he is many times better than the empty headed "princeling" bush in my opinion. Wishful thinking, maybe. It is at least calculated.
Anyway, as McCain put it (paraphrased), everyone involved in this political system are tainted and he is just working within it to (hopefully) noble goals. I don't think there is sufficient information on the voting of this particular bill to guess how McCain voted. However, his voting record regarding certain special interests in publicly subsidization and pro big business certainly looks good against his platform. I've recently become much more interested in this race than previous races, because I've finally found a candidate who's more than degrees of hopelessness.
To get back on topic, campaign finance reforms as well as limits on personal gifts by anyone who could be classified as a special interest are very important to restoring unclouded judgment to american politics. Of course, there are other problems such as in party pressure to conform...
Duh, another follow up. Something occured to me after writing this: Question: How easy is it to change back and forth between accounts on my.mp3.com? If it is fairly easy, what the previous poster said would be easily achievable. I could just beam up 20 cd's change accounts, then beam them up to my friend somewhere halfway across the world. This would, in effect, "duplicate" the cd's (as long as you are at your computer). I have sent another message to them regarding this loophole. This one does seem a serious problem as there is no e-mail or other authentication after "beaming" a cd up.
I just signed up and checked it out. It seems that you can not download the files. You must stream the mp3's. This could be circumvented through the use of recording software at the client end. However, this is irrelevant as it would be easier to just create mp3's from your own cd and send them over to a friend.
Also, it is 128k, which is not CD quality, and I can easily tell the difference between it and my original CD (although, those of you with crappy stereo's or computer speakers probably wouldn't).
I have sent e-mail to mp3.com regarding the possibility of thievery by multiple simultaneous logins shared by multiple people. I await a reply. Hopefully it will be soon, so that I can reply on this story.
I have done my own personal checking of this, and so far it seems you can not use from multiple locations at once. Here is what I got when I tried to access from multiple IP's.
"We're sorry, we've noticed you are trying to stream from a URL that is no longer active. Please generate a new playlist and try again"
So it does indeed seem that they do have protection from this. As soon as I tried accessing from somewhere else, my original stream cut, and the new one didn't work as well. So, basically, the direction of your comment is invalid.
My question is, is it possible to be logged in from multiple locations at once under the same account? I would assume mp3.com has restrictions as such to prevent someone sharing their account with many people.
"with only small percentage actually buying the CDs"
Can you actually download the songs? If not, its use is limited to the computer. I think it's very useful in the process of buying CD's over the net because it brings instant gratification - at least, while you are at your computer.
"couldn't one just sniff one's local cablemodem neighborhood for connections going to the beam-it IP range and capture those packets"
I'll give you a cookie if you can find an MSO Cable provider who is this clueless. This is a major rumor that as far as I know, has never been true. The only major security hazard as such has been the allowance of broadcasts on the local network which allowed people to view network neighbourhood and other local network broadcasts. The vast majority of MSO's have fixed this problem within the last few years. Many modems also have encrypted communication from modem to cmts.
I just wanted to clear that up. I am ignorant of my.mp3.com so I can not comment any further.
This posting is devoid of fact. The FreeBSD (and *BSD) community has multiplied many times in the past year. I hate to tell you, but there are thousands of BSD users that read this site.
I can back my statement up with statistics such as:
-) peak 250 people in the efnet #FreeBSD channel which is comparable to the number in linux related channels;
-) exponential increase in unique users on the freebsd mailing lists;
-) increased commercial use of FreeBSD. This includes Intel, Pair.com, UUnet (Canada, U.S., South America), Savvis, Whistle Communications, US West, and older adopters such as Hotmail and Yahoo! inc, as well as many other companies with name recognition.
Now provide proof in your argument or numbers to nullify mine. Otherwise it is useless supposition.
Since you need to be connected to the napster server to initiate the file transfer (as far as I know), blocking the napster servers effectively blocks its use. There will, of course, be workarounds (if the napster server doesn't tell the client on the other side that your ip is the proxy -- which would be very hard to proxy dynamically allocated ports), but it keeps the majority from using it. The harder they make it, the more bandwidth they save.
Of course, we have to take into consideration that many schools probably pay by percentage of line used. With this situation, sucking down thousands of mp3's or setting up an illegal software distribution ftp server may cost the university thousands of dollars a month.
I do not see anything wrong with downloading operating system ISO's, but I support the attempt to limit students stealing music and software. Just because some people rationalize, it doesn't make it legal or right.
Your argument is nullified by your apparent ignorance to both operating systems. Anyway, I will present my perspective.
First, Linux does not do "much more than BSD's do". This statement sounds like a corporate propaganda campaign that doesn't actually have any real arguments. Next time, please properly articulate features that you value in both operating systems.
Second, the world does not rotate around Linux. You may think that all the applications that you use in Linux were in fact specifically made for it, but this is in fact false. Many, many applications were not only developed to be specifically cross platform, but also were primarily developed on other UNIX-like operating systems.
"users want to feel 'superior' by using a 'real' UNIX"
These people are either ignorant or feel they can make weak statements such as that just because it's slashdot.
"having nostalgic fixation on an ancient code base"
Which of course brings about the fact that all the BSD's are in fact not full of ancient code but are being constantly modified just like Linux.
Under the direction of your argument, we could also say that we should stop using gtk or kde and use the other, stop using sendmail and use qmail etc. Different people use and develop for what they like. Your argument is just a weak minded attempt to bring uniformity where it has no place.
"Whatever technical advantages BSD may have over Linux, Linux will simply incorporate"
That's a stupid argument. Replace BSD with microsoft or SCO or solaris and you'll see how stupid it is. If you meant straight code lifting, who cares. It doesn't take away from the BSD projects. Those interested will contribute.
To elaborate upon my choices of OS:
- 2 co-located freebsd i386 shell and web servers. According to my benchmarks, Freebsd was faster serving static web pages. This, however, is irrelevant, given that I never come close to maximizing the 100mbps interfaces on each, and each is within that performance threshold. I like the ease in which I can secure freebsd, as well as the standardized setup where I can easily determine where everything is. The ports collection (along with packages collection) were also a very good plus (ports, because I often do makefile and minor source mods before make install). Another factor was also the fact that I had used FreeBSD in the past (at a time when Linux 2.0 was a joke compared to FreeBSD), so I found no compelling reason to switch to linux
- 1 2xp3 (debian)linux db2 server. Couldn't get db2 working properly on freebsd to even benchmark (linux base 6.1 wasn't available at that time). Linux SMP is also reportedly better, so I just thought I would use it. I wish I had a sparc with solaris with oracle, but budget was a consideration.
- 1 p200 FreeBSD firewall and nat gateway. I do not like ipchains. Netfilter seems to be getting there, but not yet. I don't particularly like ipfw for freeBSD, so I use ipfilter for filtering. I also use dummynet for traffic shaping (which is find superior to the solutions offered for Linux). It also doubles as a samba server.
- 1 FreeBSD 4.0 workstation. I enjoy playing with new features, so I'm running -CURRENT here. I use X, with the Window Maker window manager. I also have some kde applications installed. I do some java, c, and quick and dirty perl development here. I also run some multimedia applications. I also have cvs, samba and postgresql running here. The new jail chroot environment is also really interesting, especially for large shell login environments. Anyway, I do not see any compelling reason to go to Linux here. My ata 66 hard drive works fine, window maker works fine, kde applications work fine, performance is also comparable to linux in this configuration.
- 1 windows 98 workstation. I use editplus for most coding (as well as developer studio). I use ie5 heavily. I play counterstrike, a half-life mod when I have free time. I sometimes use word to format specifications documents and letters. I also create PDF's. Another reason to keep it around is proprietary media formats such as windows media, real and the sorenson codec in quicktime.
As you can see, I have plenty of reasons to use multiple operating systems.
Slashdot Mirror
"Try to open your mind a little! Until you can PROVE that spiritualism doesn't exist, you don't have a case."
This statement completely disregards the scientific method. You are taking something for an absolute then asking someone else to prove it is false. This is obviously not a logical decision.
Science is based on evidence. Scientists are also rightly skeptical about new ideas. However they are also open to new ideas. Your statement that we must prove spiritualism does not exist is dogma with little proof.
I can understand that you want to explain everything around you. I think you are probably skeptical about spirituality. I just think that you are not looking at the fact that the original poster does not take ideas with absolutely no proof whatsoever without a grain of salt.
Having an open mind to formulate new ideas and extend thought is healthy. Making statements that we must prove often unskeptical information taken by many people as an absolute is not.
There are many ISP's who do this already. The problem, however, is that there is too many who do not. I would assume one of the major problems to be portable IP ranges. If we want Tier 1 ISP's to do this, that is a large problem. Then, when we realize some smaller ISP's should be doing it as well, we realize that it's a big pain to get everyone doing this.
I'm all for such an initiative, but it would be tons of work and cost a lot of money.
"A distractive factor so the people do not read and think"
That's funny. We're sitting here right now on the internet typing into a discussion forum. People can participate in discussion all around the world coming from different financial and social circles. They can also choose from millions of sites. They are not a captive audience with the limited content of television. I think it is not a valid comparison.
There are many people being denied access to information. There are, of course, many who do not want information. However, when anyone can type into a search engine an interest or query for information, they will be able to do it with relatively little effort compared to going to the library (which has lots of out-dated and uninteresting information, relating to many interests of many people). When people can congregate online and discuss opinion and exchange information there is a change.
This is certainly interesting. Does anyone out there know of any mentioned strings attached in this case?
The statement in Katz article says:
"Ford says it will offer Internet home pages in 14 languages, and provide home page links to Ford Web sites, with UUNet as the ISP."
This, to me, seems like they will be receiving dialup from UUNet. I know of no draconian protocol sniffing that UUNet does. However, the question still does stand for their company web sites. Since they are company sites, they would likely take into consideration company policy, bureaucracy, polictics, and employee rights. The last, of course, often compromised to fit the company's whims or bottom line.
I could make a statement that we should look at it situationally within a corporation - but often fair judgement is impaired by politics and crappy policies -- so I think the government has to look at some of these issues in more detail to create balance since the corporate machine is often cold to social issues and individual freedoms.
"Computers not put to actual productive use do not educate"
I'm guessing an implication to an assumption that ford employees will not actively seek out information. I think this is a stupid generalization.
Also, if you read further detail into his article, you would see that Ford is working to setup collaboration systems that would further allow for dissemination of information. As well, speaking of the world wide internet - there are plenty of users *not* putting it to good use. There are, however, plenty of users who *are* putting it to good use.
Would you state your assumption regarding internet users world wide as well? Or is this just a prejudice regarding Ford employee's or lower/middle class workers?
Blizzard is a word. Just because someone is using it in their company name does not give them a right to the domain.
If they have a legitimate case, please state facts to back this up.
"If a new software company (we'll call them companyX in this example) started up, and made a web site to sell their software http://www.companyX.com. Now lets say Bill Gates came along and built http://www.companyX.net and all that web site did was sell email address'. YOU WOULD BE OUTRAGED"
And out of luck because you did not register the domain sooner. He may have a company under the same name operating an e-mail forwarding site. Are you trying to say that e-mail forwarding service is not a legitimate use of a domain, especially when it is a straight english word?
You're wrong. To smurf, you must send a spoofed source address of the person you want to attack. If your ISP blocks spoofed packets out of a certain range, you won't be able to smurf outside a certain IP range that the router allows packets to come from.
Each of the hosting boxes slashdot uses to host probably have 100mbps interfaces. Since they are just doing round robin, you could just take down one box and a 1/3 of the people visiting the site would receive errors. Their provider, dn.net, probably has somewhere between 500 and 800mbps aggregate bandwidth capacity (at least out -- I don't know how oversold they are in). This does not translate to actual bandwidth on the internet because of bgp routing tables as well as a number of weak peering arrangements between ISP's.
In other words, someone could probably easily temporarily take down slashdot if they really wanted to. Of course, the same goes for any other site without very large amounts of bandwidth capacity as well as filters.
"Yahoo, et. al., ought to be working to figure out where the spoofed packets are coming from"
Good luck. It would require a lot of coordination with a number of tier 1 ISP's *during* the attack to determine the sources.
Many cable providers (as well as many other end user non business ISP's) block spoofed packets at a router downstream (out of a certain allowable range). In other words, I can probably only smurf someone or syn flood directly within a certain range of IP addresses. I know shaw, rogers and at least parts of TCI/ATT does this on their cable networks.
I remember hearing about 2 years ago that smurf attacks would be completely phased out due to tier 1 (and to a lesser degree smaller) ISP's filtering at their borders -- but apparently this has not happened yet, as there are plenty of broken networks around and plenty of unfiltered networks that are able to exploit these vulnerabilities.
"Look, 30-50 shells can certainly generate big traffice but they also can be pin point in a few hours"
False. There are many attacks that are not easily traceable back to the attacker without help from the tier 1 ISP's networks that the packets traverse. Tracing would only be possible for the duration of the attack as well.
"It was mentioned that there existed attacks from a thousand computers"
This may be true in this case. However, I was responding to this person's claim that it wasn't possible to do such an attack.
"This means it's due to an OS hole of some sort, because no scrip kiddies have patience to crack hundreds of machines before an attack"
A generalization, and a stupid one at that. One, who says the attack came from thousands of machines? It could just as easily be from thousands of IP's. Two, there is little difference between the effort involved in scanning for vulnerabilities then initiating an attack then either distributing a trojan and then scanning for it, or finding certain OS vulnerabilities that leads to an attack as such. Three, there is no evidence to back up your claim that it "means it's due to an OS hole of some sort". Four, your generalization regarding all script kiddies is demonstratable false. Log on to EFNet sometime and watch any number of complete idiots DoS attacking frontier/globalcenter, @home, exodus, best, whatever IRC servers with hundreds of megabytes a second of traffic. There is not much difference in scaling an attack such as those to 1gbps.
Get the upstream ISP to identify the attack and install filters at their borders. If that tier 1 isp has enough capacity, the DoS attacker will probably get bored knowing they aren't affecting service and eventually go away.
The problem is that there are many types of attacks that are capable of interrupting service. Many times installed filters require the provider or the customer to compromise their use of the service to allow for better security and protection.
Wrong. 30 to 50 shells with 10 - 100mbps nic's connected to t3's (such as at univerities, large corporations and co-located hosting boxes) are quite capable of taking services such as yahoo out. This, as well as misconfigured networks, are easily taken advantage of.
I would know too. I've had hosting boxes with 100mbps interfaces on an network with oc3 and multiple t3's to tier1 providers completely annihilated due to users using IRC without permission (EFNet is evil). One one occasion, all it took was a DoS attack from a box at a corporation with a t3 to sprint, the university of colorado and a misconfigured US naval academy network. Estimated traffic? 134mbps. Scaling an attack such as that to 1gbps (as reported) is fairly easy if you use distributed sources.
It is also true that there are many script kiddies with this much bandwidth available due to compromised shells and broken networks. Visit EFNet IRC sometime. There are many idiots without a clue with the ability to carry out attacks such as this. You don't have to know what you're doing to scan the entire internet for known vulnerabilities then sniff traffic and tty's at a number of locations and gain access to many other networks.
While this and syn rate limiting are a good thing, they will do nothing if your link is completely overwhelmed. ICMP_BANDLIM and SYN rate limiting will only protect your computer resources as well as uplink bandwidth (your attempts to respond to SYN on open ports or TCP Resets on closed ports, or ICMP error messages).
There is no solution to prevent large distributed DoS attacks. What you can do is put certain filters in place to detect these attacks and act accordingly. When the largest problem is the amount of bandwidth, your only recourse is to get your upstream ISP to filter it at their site because they likely have much more bandwidth than you do. However, the problem with this is that they get very annoyed very fast and will tell you to go jump in a lake if their major routers are going down (this is of course unless you are a major customer). Believe me, I have dealt with sprint, uunet, and exodus regarding this and their solution regarding an idiot repeatedly DoS attacking your site is to charge you more money for all their trouble or to tell you to go away.
"They're running for President on the Libertarian and Socialist ballots respectively"
Yes, I am certainly concerned that we, the government, and the media regularly practice exclusion on these parties -- even if my vision of america does not closely match theirs. Even if some are extremists, they could bring some balance to broken processes.
I've closeley watched the current campaign finance committee in action on c-span, and all I've seen is blatantly partisan stupidity on the part of democrats and republicans.
Admittedly, I am skeptical as to how much McCain can do, even if he is very serious about his platform. However, he is many times better than the empty headed "princeling" bush in my opinion. Wishful thinking, maybe. It is at least calculated.
Anyway, as McCain put it (paraphrased), everyone involved in this political system are tainted and he is just working within it to (hopefully) noble goals. I don't think there is sufficient information on the voting of this particular bill to guess how McCain voted. However, his voting record regarding certain special interests in publicly subsidization and pro big business certainly looks good against his platform. I've recently become much more interested in this race than previous races, because I've finally found a candidate who's more than degrees of hopelessness.
To get back on topic, campaign finance reforms as well as limits on personal gifts by anyone who could be classified as a special interest are very important to restoring unclouded judgment to american politics. Of course, there are other problems such as in party pressure to conform...
This does not seem to be in the faq. Can you please give a URL to the Real video?
Duh, another follow up. Something occured to me after writing this: Question: How easy is it to change back and forth between accounts on my.mp3.com? If it is fairly easy, what the previous poster said would be easily achievable. I could just beam up 20 cd's change accounts, then beam them up to my friend somewhere halfway across the world. This would, in effect, "duplicate" the cd's (as long as you are at your computer). I have sent another message to them regarding this loophole. This one does seem a serious problem as there is no e-mail or other authentication after "beaming" a cd up.
Follow up:
I just signed up and checked it out. It seems that you can not download the files. You must stream the mp3's. This could be circumvented through the use of recording software at the client end. However, this is irrelevant as it would be easier to just create mp3's from your own cd and send them over to a friend.
Also, it is 128k, which is not CD quality, and I can easily tell the difference between it and my original CD (although, those of you with crappy stereo's or computer speakers probably wouldn't).
I have sent e-mail to mp3.com regarding the possibility of thievery by multiple simultaneous logins shared by multiple people. I await a reply. Hopefully it will be soon, so that I can reply on this story.
I have done my own personal checking of this, and so far it seems you can not use from multiple locations at once. Here is what I got when I tried to access from multiple IP's.
"We're sorry, we've noticed you are trying to stream from a URL that is no longer active. Please generate a new playlist and try again"
So it does indeed seem that they do have protection from this. As soon as I tried accessing from somewhere else, my original stream cut, and the new one didn't work as well. So, basically, the direction of your comment is invalid.
Bravo mp3.com.
My question is, is it possible to be logged in from multiple locations at once under the same account? I would assume mp3.com has restrictions as such to prevent someone sharing their account with many people.
"with only small percentage actually buying the CDs"
Can you actually download the songs? If not, its use is limited to the computer. I think it's very useful in the process of buying CD's over the net because it brings instant gratification - at least, while you are at your computer.
"couldn't one just sniff one's local cablemodem neighborhood for connections going to the beam-it IP range and capture those packets"
I'll give you a cookie if you can find an MSO Cable provider who is this clueless. This is a major rumor that as far as I know, has never been true. The only major security hazard as such has been the allowance of broadcasts on the local network which allowed people to view network neighbourhood and other local network broadcasts. The vast majority of MSO's have fixed this problem within the last few years. Many modems also have encrypted communication from modem to cmts.
I just wanted to clear that up. I am ignorant of my.mp3.com so I can not comment any further.
This posting is devoid of fact. The FreeBSD (and *BSD) community has multiplied many times in the past year. I hate to tell you, but there are thousands of BSD users that read this site.
I can back my statement up with statistics such as:
-) peak 250 people in the efnet #FreeBSD channel which is comparable to the number in linux related channels;
-) exponential increase in unique users on the freebsd mailing lists;
-) increased commercial use of FreeBSD. This includes Intel, Pair.com, UUnet (Canada, U.S., South America), Savvis, Whistle Communications, US West, and older adopters such as Hotmail and Yahoo! inc, as well as many other companies with name recognition.
Now provide proof in your argument or numbers to nullify mine. Otherwise it is useless supposition.
Since you need to be connected to the napster server to initiate the file transfer (as far as I know), blocking the napster servers effectively blocks its use. There will, of course, be workarounds (if the napster server doesn't tell the client on the other side that your ip is the proxy -- which would be very hard to proxy dynamically allocated ports), but it keeps the majority from using it. The harder they make it, the more bandwidth they save.
Of course, we have to take into consideration that many schools probably pay by percentage of line used. With this situation, sucking down thousands of mp3's or setting up an illegal software distribution ftp server may cost the university thousands of dollars a month.
I do not see anything wrong with downloading operating system ISO's, but I support the attempt to limit students stealing music and software. Just because some people rationalize, it doesn't make it legal or right.
Your argument is nullified by your apparent ignorance to both operating systems. Anyway, I will present my perspective.
First, Linux does not do "much more than BSD's do". This statement sounds like a corporate propaganda campaign that doesn't actually have any real arguments. Next time, please properly articulate features that you value in both operating systems.
Second, the world does not rotate around Linux. You may think that all the applications that you use in Linux were in fact specifically made for it, but this is in fact false. Many, many applications were not only developed to be specifically cross platform, but also were primarily developed on other UNIX-like operating systems.
"users want to feel 'superior' by using a 'real' UNIX"
These people are either ignorant or feel they can make weak statements such as that just because it's slashdot.
"having nostalgic fixation on an ancient code base"
Which of course brings about the fact that all the BSD's are in fact not full of ancient code but are being constantly modified just like Linux.
Under the direction of your argument, we could also say that we should stop using gtk or kde and use the other, stop using sendmail and use qmail etc. Different people use and develop for what they like. Your argument is just a weak minded attempt to bring uniformity where it has no place.
"Whatever technical advantages BSD may have over Linux, Linux will simply incorporate"
That's a stupid argument. Replace BSD with microsoft or SCO or solaris and you'll see how stupid it is. If you meant straight code lifting, who cares. It doesn't take away from the BSD projects. Those interested will contribute.
To elaborate upon my choices of OS:
- 2 co-located freebsd i386 shell and web servers. According to my benchmarks, Freebsd was faster serving static web pages. This, however, is irrelevant, given that I never come close to maximizing the 100mbps interfaces on each, and each is within that performance threshold. I like the ease in which I can secure freebsd, as well as the standardized setup where I can easily determine where everything is. The ports collection (along with packages collection) were also a very good plus (ports, because I often do makefile and minor source mods before make install). Another factor was also the fact that I had used FreeBSD in the past (at a time when Linux 2.0 was a joke compared to FreeBSD), so I found no compelling reason to switch to linux
- 1 2xp3 (debian)linux db2 server. Couldn't get db2 working properly on freebsd to even benchmark (linux base 6.1 wasn't available at that time). Linux SMP is also reportedly better, so I just thought I would use it. I wish I had a sparc with solaris with oracle, but budget was a consideration.
- 1 p200 FreeBSD firewall and nat gateway. I do not like ipchains. Netfilter seems to be getting there, but not yet. I don't particularly like ipfw for freeBSD, so I use ipfilter for filtering. I also use dummynet for traffic shaping (which is find superior to the solutions offered for Linux). It also doubles as a samba server.
- 1 FreeBSD 4.0 workstation. I enjoy playing with new features, so I'm running -CURRENT here. I use X, with the Window Maker window manager. I also have some kde applications installed. I do some java, c, and quick and dirty perl development here. I also run some multimedia applications. I also have cvs, samba and postgresql running here. The new jail chroot environment is also really interesting, especially for large shell login environments. Anyway, I do not see any compelling reason to go to Linux here. My ata 66 hard drive works fine, window maker works fine, kde applications work fine, performance is also comparable to linux in this configuration.
- 1 windows 98 workstation. I use editplus for most coding (as well as developer studio). I use ie5 heavily. I play counterstrike, a half-life mod when I have free time. I sometimes use word to format specifications documents and letters. I also create PDF's. Another reason to keep it around is proprietary media formats such as windows media, real and the sorenson codec in quicktime.
As you can see, I have plenty of reasons to use multiple operating systems.