While I applaud Standford (sic) for their efforts at increasing the bandwidth on a technical side, one has to ask if they have the sociologist-equivalent of bearded terminal hackers working on the impact of such discoveries. We have seen that as the Internet has grown since 1996 from modems and isbn lines on up to cable modems and DSL, netizens aren't exactly using their bandwidth for the most altruistic purposes. This has created social problems such as the rampant piracy on the internet. Also companies that invested large sums of money in compression schemes and other workarounds for low bandwidth situations have and will continue to suffer in the face of increasing bandwidth (ask anyone at Citrix). Hopefully businesses and individuals can learn to adapt and use new technology responsibly.
Here's to more colloboration between technologists and sociologists.
Any bearded terminal hacker will tell you, when asked about the book they learned from, that while they went from one book to another in their early days, the most productive thing they ever did was learn how to read the documentation already available to them. This includes man pages, changelogs, posts to dailydave, and source code. A lot of people completely neglect these wonderful sources, and even go so far as to reinvent the wheel writing their own guides (see early Mandrake and Redhat releases).
Someone should write documentation on how to read documentation (especially source!)!
Will the future be one in which the pride of a technologically advanced information society overrides the welfare of its participants? The more we make our documents dynamic, transparent, and interlinking, the more we open ourselves up to the possibility that those we link and those who link to us might wish to do us harm. The bearded terminal hackers of the early days of the web discovered this, "pranking" each other by waiting for a number of links to a particular site to appear, before switching it out to some other, more humorous content. In more serious cases (see Citrix), we can see how this can cause serious public image problems for businesses. As always in networked technology, and predicted by the late Sir Tim Berners Lee, actually, the pornography industry has made an art of this sort of deception. How then, would opportunists exploit these new ideas and techniques?
Certainly we can't stop innovation over a fear of how it can be misused, but it should give some of you a pause for thought.
I think that this could bring about a new golden age of the internet, for the people who really believe in it, and the security of it. Certainly if we were to block access to it from those who are not secure, there would be a new and revived interest in becoming secure and knowledgable about security. Back in the late 80s when the Internet started, people like Sir Tim Berners Lee and Bruce Perens and other pioneers were instrumental in crusading against the sort of exploits we see today. This search for knowledge rather than money is what really got the internet started by the bearded terminal hackers of yore.
I know I'll probably be modded down as flamebait for promoting alternative window managers in a KDE message thread, but I think it might be a good time for the every day user to take a look at how bearded terminal hackers are making things more efficient. Many "LINUX power users" are making their every day work more efficient by using and developing great window managers such as EvilWM, which I am currently typing this post up in.
Maybe a grassroots movement towards simpler window managers is in order. This would be a movement similar to what Bruce Perens trailblazed for GNU/Linux back in the early nineties to fight the onslaught of OS2 and Win 3.1. Now that we have a stable system to build upon after all of these years, we should concentrate on a good user interface. Not necessarily a Desktop User Interface, but a thin, lightweight interface that allows the user to more efficiently do their work without any messy cognitive analogies.
They are in danger of breaking the law in many places: they are providing copies of copyrighted work without the permission of the copyright holder, pure and simple. The only relevant question is whether they have a defence under something like fair use or public interest or whatever similar allowances are called in your jurisdiction. And I'm not obligated to do anything for them either, including giving them permission to copy my Usenet posts for profit.
Every bearded terminal hacker with a past to hide knows that google provides an easy method to remove posts from their indexing, and if you do not wish future posts to be indexed, there are lines you can put into your header. They're actually very friendly about it.
Do your homework before throwing around accusations. Maybe you should protest by not using google anymore LOLOL.
Google's bearded terminal hackers provide this service out of the goodness of their open source hearts, and you're going to claim that they're breaking the law? They're not obligated to do anything for you.
We're the users. That's our right as users. If nobody questions the decision to remove features, then how does Google know what features we liked?
Is this really necessary? Think of bearded terminal hacker #1: Linus Trolvads. Did he (or even now) care about the features everybody else wanted? No. He simply wanted a version of BSD UNIX that he could run on the PC that he built. Sometimes the screw-you-guys approach produces good software.
Let everyone else build it into the SVR4 GNU/Linux Distro Whatever they want to. If you want features so bad, bolt them on yourself.
For all the years of good service we've had from google, who are we to question the removal of features? What the bearded terminal hackers at Google giveth, the bearded terminal hackers at Google may taketh away. Certainly, if we can embrace their advertising as the GNU/Linux community has done en-masse, we can understand that they have their reasons for these changes.
Perhaps you'd like to start your own archive of the USENET message boards?
Whatever happened to Asimov's rules of robots that they can do no harm to humans? For years, bearded terminal hackers have done their thing, hacking on software, hardware, and such, with little regard to the ethics of the situation. But now, with our creations affecting mankind in a more profound way, we give little more thought to ethics than we did with a simple BASIC shell script.
Think about this the next time you are coding a servo controller on your Redhat compiler. Could your code be misused in a way you would not approve?
Personally, I believe that more waste should be used in the creation of energy. Imagine if the excrement of so many bearded terminal hackers were to be harnessed for the creation of energy. Then imagine if all the people in your extended family, dare I say, the world, had their excrement harvested!
I agree that the peer to peer revolution is beneficial to the scientific community. When the concept of peer to peer was invented the bearded terminal hacker Sir Tim Berners Lee in 1987, this is exactly what he had in mind.
I think that it is finally coming to fruition is a wonderful statement in his memory.
I think it is commendable that so much effort is being put into a field of research that there has been little result in in the past 20 years. The results simply are not important, as we have seen in the race to defeat The NP Problem, it is the struggle to further the scientific knowledge. Even bearded terminal hackers should bow to the (surely bearded) physics hackers who thanklessly work on this day and night
Could it be that in the future, rather than having the typical bearded terminal hackers, we could all be hacking out physical solutions to real problems with nanotechnology? Wouldn't that be a great day:)?
This sort of thing ushers in a new era of exploitation in which the warnings of security professionals in the past have been proven dreadfully wrong. Only the bearded terminal hackers are invulnerable to this one, typing away at their command lines being all, "What JPGS?". No longer can we simply give advice on security based on our assumptions as to what is possible and what is not. We must pay the piper and actually consider attack vectors that have formerly not been feasible.
That was uncalled for. I happen to administer several Solaris machines here and know bash scripting quite well. At least I don't post as anonymous coward.
Flash mobs of course can be a nuisance, or even a threat to the safety of
the public as a whole. All it takes is one bearded terminal hacker gone bad
to start one up under the auspices of a good prank or a fun time, but with
the ulterior motivation of making some business pay for their alleged crimes.
Can we allow bearded terminal hackers to become judge, jury, and
executioner? Perhaps one day we'll look back on the incident at the offices
of Symantec last year and realize that it wasn't just a crowd, it was a
crowd put together by a person, possibly a terrorist depending on your
definition of such. Flash mobs have the potential to ensnare young participants in things they would normally not even dream of.
Slashdot Mirror
While I applaud Standford (sic) for their efforts at increasing the bandwidth on a technical side, one has to ask if they have the sociologist-equivalent of bearded terminal hackers working on the impact of such discoveries. We have seen that as the Internet has grown since 1996 from modems and isbn lines on up to cable modems and DSL, netizens aren't exactly using their bandwidth for the most altruistic purposes. This has created social problems such as the rampant piracy on the internet. Also companies that invested large sums of money in compression schemes and other workarounds for low bandwidth situations have and will continue to suffer in the face of increasing bandwidth (ask anyone at Citrix). Hopefully businesses and individuals can learn to adapt and use new technology responsibly.
Here's to more colloboration between technologists and sociologists.
Any bearded terminal hacker will tell you, when asked about the book they learned from, that while they went from one book to another in their early days, the most productive thing they ever did was learn how to read the documentation already available to them. This includes man pages, changelogs, posts to dailydave, and source code. A lot of people completely neglect these wonderful sources, and even go so far as to reinvent the wheel writing their own guides (see early Mandrake and Redhat releases).
Someone should write documentation on how to read documentation (especially source!)!
Will the future be one in which the pride of a technologically advanced information society overrides the welfare of its participants? The more we make our documents dynamic, transparent, and interlinking, the more we open ourselves up to the possibility that those we link and those who link to us might wish to do us harm. The bearded terminal hackers of the early days of the web discovered this, "pranking" each other by waiting for a number of links to a particular site to appear, before switching it out to some other, more humorous content. In more serious cases (see Citrix), we can see how this can cause serious public image problems for businesses. As always in networked technology, and predicted by the late Sir Tim Berners Lee, actually, the pornography industry has made an art of this sort of deception. How then, would opportunists exploit these new ideas and techniques? Certainly we can't stop innovation over a fear of how it can be misused, but it should give some of you a pause for thought.
I think that this could bring about a new golden age of the internet, for the people who really believe in it, and the security of it. Certainly if we were to block access to it from those who are not secure, there would be a new and revived interest in becoming secure and knowledgable about security. Back in the late 80s when the Internet started, people like Sir Tim Berners Lee and Bruce Perens and other pioneers were instrumental in crusading against the sort of exploits we see today. This search for knowledge rather than money is what really got the internet started by the bearded terminal hackers of yore.
I fully support this.
Help, this man is annoying me! Moderators! Anybody! Help!
Wah wah.
I know I'll probably be modded down as flamebait for promoting alternative window managers in a KDE message thread, but I think it might be a good time for the every day user to take a look at how bearded terminal hackers are making things more efficient. Many "LINUX power users" are making their every day work more efficient by using and developing great window managers such as EvilWM, which I am currently typing this post up in.
Maybe a grassroots movement towards simpler window managers is in order. This would be a movement similar to what Bruce Perens trailblazed for GNU/Linux back in the early nineties to fight the onslaught of OS2 and Win 3.1. Now that we have a stable system to build upon after all of these years, we should concentrate on a good user interface. Not necessarily a Desktop User Interface, but a thin, lightweight interface that allows the user to more efficiently do their work without any messy cognitive analogies.
Can't have it both ways, scalawag.
It's bound to be something genetic though. He's got the aura of a beard.
They are in danger of breaking the law in many places: they are providing copies of copyrighted work without the permission of the copyright holder, pure and simple. The only relevant question is whether they have a defence under something like fair use or public interest or whatever similar allowances are called in your jurisdiction. And I'm not obligated to do anything for them either, including giving them permission to copy my Usenet posts for profit.
Every bearded terminal hacker with a past to hide knows that google provides an easy method to remove posts from their indexing, and if you do not wish future posts to be indexed, there are lines you can put into your header. They're actually very friendly about it.
Do your homework before throwing around accusations. Maybe you should protest by not using google anymore LOLOL.
There are these mysterious things that only bearded terminal hackers know of, called "API"s.
Go read "Google Hacks".
Google's bearded terminal hackers provide this service out of the goodness of their open source hearts, and you're going to claim that they're breaking the law? They're not obligated to do anything for you.
We're the users. That's our right as users. If nobody questions the decision to remove features, then how does Google know what features we liked?
Is this really necessary? Think of bearded terminal hacker #1: Linus Trolvads. Did he (or even now) care about the features everybody else wanted? No. He simply wanted a version of BSD UNIX that he could run on the PC that he built. Sometimes the screw-you-guys approach produces good software.
Let everyone else build it into the SVR4 GNU/Linux Distro Whatever they want to. If you want features so bad, bolt them on yourself.
For all the years of good service we've had from google, who are we to question the removal of features? What the bearded terminal hackers at Google giveth, the bearded terminal hackers at Google may taketh away. Certainly, if we can embrace their advertising as the GNU/Linux community has done en-masse, we can understand that they have their reasons for these changes.
Perhaps you'd like to start your own archive of the USENET message boards?
balderdash Oh fuck, I loved that game (runs to find a c64 disk image).
You sir, are an insult to the bearded terminal hacker spirit.
Whatever happened to Asimov's rules of robots that they can do no harm to humans? For years, bearded terminal hackers have done their thing, hacking on software, hardware, and such, with little regard to the ethics of the situation. But now, with our creations affecting mankind in a more profound way, we give little more thought to ethics than we did with a simple BASIC shell script.
Think about this the next time you are coding a servo controller on your Redhat compiler. Could your code be misused in a way you would not approve?
Personally, I believe that more waste should be used in the creation of energy. Imagine if the excrement of so many bearded terminal hackers were to be harnessed for the creation of energy. Then imagine if all the people in your extended family, dare I say, the world, had their excrement harvested!
The mind boggles
I agree that the peer to peer revolution is beneficial to the scientific community. When the concept of peer to peer was invented the bearded terminal hacker Sir Tim Berners Lee in 1987, this is exactly what he had in mind.
I think that it is finally coming to fruition is a wonderful statement in his memory.
I think it is commendable that so much effort is being put into a field of research that there has been little result in in the past 20 years. The results simply are not important, as we have seen in the race to defeat The NP Problem, it is the struggle to further the scientific knowledge. Even bearded terminal hackers should bow to the (surely bearded) physics hackers who thanklessly work on this day and night
We salute you!
Could it be that in the future, rather than having the typical bearded terminal hackers, we could all be hacking out physical solutions to real problems with nanotechnology? Wouldn't that be a great day :)?
In what ways do you support the interests of Bearded Terminal Hackers?
This sort of thing ushers in a new era of exploitation in which the warnings of security professionals in the past have been proven dreadfully wrong. Only the bearded terminal hackers are invulnerable to this one, typing away at their command lines being all, "What JPGS?". No longer can we simply give advice on security based on our assumptions as to what is possible and what is not. We must pay the piper and actually consider attack vectors that have formerly not been feasible.
And what is your contribution to Slashdot? Oh, I see, there's plenty of posts from you on here. Anonymous Coward is everywhere!
Coward.
That was uncalled for. I happen to administer several Solaris machines here and know bash scripting quite well. At least I don't post as anonymous coward.
Coward.
Flash mobs of course can be a nuisance, or even a threat to the safety of the public as a whole. All it takes is one bearded terminal hacker gone bad to start one up under the auspices of a good prank or a fun time, but with the ulterior motivation of making some business pay for their alleged crimes.
Can we allow bearded terminal hackers to become judge, jury, and executioner? Perhaps one day we'll look back on the incident at the offices of Symantec last year and realize that it wasn't just a crowd, it was a crowd put together by a person, possibly a terrorist depending on your definition of such. Flash mobs have the potential to ensnare young participants in things they would normally not even dream of.
Is it worth the good pranks to let this go on?