Isn't there an inherent sample bias in asking only EverQuest players?
Playing time increases with age? - EverQuest is an old game, and it's players tend to drift towards the hardcore. Anyone still playing it must be really into it. Younger players will probably be turned off - either by the older graphics or the fact they could be playing WoW instead.
As for the differences between genders, we have to remember that we're not polling the general population. Women gamers who are still playing EverQuest are slightly more hardcore than male players. This might tell us nothing at all about women in general. In fact, I'd bet these stats aren't exactly representative of normal people, or even necessarily "normal" hardcore gamers.
I'm sure I could go on, but there must be some stats nerds who can go to town on this sort of headline...
These domain names are usually used because they're easier to *say* than shorthand versions.
I used to think exactly the same way as you, but then I worked at a radio station for a year. Some of those short names can be quite easily misunderstood - letters are notoriously confusable. That's why there's a radio phonetic alphabet.
Don't feed the trolls, I know... but I feel I should clarify.
I was referring to the "800% of GDP" comment made by the grandparent, which is true of Iceland which has debt of "eight times GDP", and not Ireland, which doesn't have great debt but not to anything near the levels the poster argued.
And since I'm British, I'm not really sure what your comment about Americans is supposed to mean...
I don't disagree with what you're saying in principle, but I think perhaps you mean Iceland not Ireland.
See Wikipedia: "By 2008 the nation's currency (the krÃna) was defunct and the national debt had soared to over eight times GDP."
Although Ireland is not doing great ("Ireland was stripped of it`s AAA credit ranking and downgraded to AA+ by Standard & Poor's ratings agency, due to Ireland`s bleak financial outlook and heavy government debt burden." - Wikipedia), it's still AA+, compared to Iceland which has pretty much collapsed.
Exactly. I work on security for a major retailer, and people try to screw the system with gift cards all the time. It doesn't work.
Those cards get activated (i.e. added to a database of purchased cards) by software on the POS system, they're totally useless.
Try it - walk into a shop and these gift cards will be unprotected on the shelf. Copy the number from the back of a card and punch it into iTunes. Their value will add up to thousands of dollars in one shop alone - what sort of a company would sell cards with what would effectively be cash value without that sort of protection?
People steal these cards from retail stores all the time. The joke is that they just risked prosecution to steal a worthless piece of plastic.
Also, I think that's why big stores abandoned gift vouchers. They were stealable and copyable, but a gift card is database checked when you use it, so much much harder to fool a checkout operator with.
I'm working as a part-time Security Guard/CCTV operator while I'm at University. Most of my colleagues work a 44 hour week (4x9, 1x8), not including overtime.
And they're the lucky ones - outside contractors (usually migrant workers) work 12 hour shifts with only 2 half-hour breaks (the legal maximum number of hours work combined with the legal minimum break time).
I've installed AIR and the iPlayer downloader, and so far neither have really worked.
Granted this is probably because I'm using 64-bit Linux, and they don't seem to support it yet (not that I was told this at any stage of the installation process, or the website where I downloaded the installer.
To get the thing installed on 64-bit I followed these instructions, and then proceeded to the BBC website to download something. Nothing seemed to work, no download links appeared. I then followed the links to an episode of Never Mind The Buzzcocks that other people reported was working. This time a download link appeared, but clicking it took me to install the program again.
To figure out why it wasn't working, I ran the downloader from the command line. It was printing the following: "Unkown desktop manager((null)), only Gnome and KDE are supported". Aha... I'm using XFCE, yet it must use the inter-process communication of either one of those desktops...
Booted into Gnome, and tried again. This time it tells me that it wants libgnome-keyring.so - I realise that no preferences are savable - it must be saving prefs with the keyring. I think that's a bit odd - what's wrong with ~/.Adobe/AIR?
After installing 32-bit libraries for gnome-keyring, the thing still doesn't work, and still won't download anything.
The problem with this application, or rather with Adobe AIR, is the series of arbitrary choices the designers seem to have made. Linux is not a platform where you can assume many things - and it would have probably made more sense to pick some generic ways of getting things done (there's a reason that text-files have always been used for config!) rather than relying upon fairly specific libraries for basic tasks and then not even falling back to a sane alternative. Perhaps a 64-bit version will fix all of this, I certainly hope so!
Exactly! It seems like so many of the problems in political and media debate about science are caused by a total lack of understanding about what a good method is, and what isn't a good method.
I've just finished reading the excellent Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, a book which really hammers down where all the misconceptions about science and medicine come from in a few specific British examples.
Basically, politicians and journalists want there to be two sides to every story, a "for" and an "against". Therefore the people promoting creationism, or the belief that homeopathy works, or whatever other example are printed in the same standing as people who are just talking basic sense.
Science is complicated to understand, and ordinary people (and doctors!) have to rely upon other people to collate and conclude on all available data. Our newspapers and governments should be providing a sensible properly worked-out conclusion on science stories, not taking the lazy option of equally weighted "he said, she said" stories that treat people who believe Vitamin C can cure HIV, or that special water cures cancer as legitimate.
All this just makes science seem confusing and casts doubt upon scientific method. While individual theories can be argued, doubted, tested, or whatever (that's the point) - the basic idea of "evidence based" science is undoubtedly the best way to do things. Seems sad we're still arguing about this after more than a hundred years of Darwinism, doesn't it?
Create multiple user accounts in connection with any violation of the Agreement or create user accounts by automated means or under false or fraudulent pretenses
So it's illegal to create more than one account if you're breaking the rules in some other way - not specifically illegal on it's own. The terms don't mention using it for anything other than email, though...
I work as a part-time CCTV operator (while I'm at University), and the footage just doesn't look remotely real to me. Specifically the frame-rate is FAR too high, most CCTV systems have the frame-rate turned down quite low (say 3-5 FPS) to save space.
Second, not every CCTV camera is necessarily recording at the same time. While every camera probably CAN record, usually only key cameras will be set to record, maybe half or less, to save space on the system. The idea is that if anything happens the CCTV operator will record that camera, not that everything records all the time.
If a band asked me to look up their footage because of something like this, the footage they'd get back wouldn't look that good. This is a publicity stunt.
(and, as has already been pointed out, the Data Protection Act, not the Freedom of Information Act)
Since when did "it's" not mean "it is?!" As recently as the US constitution:
No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.
(Emphasis mine)
It's was an invention in the 16th century in England and that spelling lasted until the 19th century
The common misspelling "coworker" is actually a contraction of "cow orker", "ork" being an old Scottish slang term the meaning of which is not hard to guess.
No, it isn't. I'm not familiar with the particular quote, but co-worker > coworker is a common grammatical contraction, such as "it's" (it belongs to) becoming its, or 'phone > phone, or a million other things.
The Dictionary of the Scots Language and Oxford English Dictionary, probably the two best resources on the etymology of the language of England and Scotland have no record of that construction or word. I've definitely never heard it here.
I know it's a joke, but these types of 'word histories' are usually bollocks that actually dilute our understanding of where words really come from.
(Yes, I am an English major, and I live in Aberdeen, Scotland)
I agree with your point of course, but this got me thinking: what if all EULA licenses had to provide a creative commons style summary of the overall terms. The standard would have to be worked out carefully, and it wouldn't be quite as simple as the CC stuff, but think of it as the friendly summaries of mortgages or bank terms that some places require.
So, clicking through a big block of text, or seeing:
You can: 1) Use this software for you own personal use.
You can't: 1) Copy it. 2) Reverse engineer it. 3) Install it on more than one computer.
We can: 1) Contact your computer via the internet to check if you purchased this software. 2) Deactivate the software or key features of your computer if we believe you have unlawfully obtained this software. 3) etc...
It would be a pain to sort out, but would anyone really be able to just ignore that sort of summary?
I'm not a network expert, but this is what I would do:
Just deploy your Firefox on a central server and make sure your user profiles are stored within their respective home directories. For machines that can't rely on LAN connectivity, either stick your firefox image on a LAN/VPN or internet server and write something to check to see if the server is available, and, if so, overwrite the local firefox copy. It would be a good idea to have a fail-safe backup on the local system as well. In all the networks I've used (school, university, and one mid-sized company) his sort of thing is fairly standard, and I'm sure any large company already has an in-house tool that does this with a lot of applications.
That said... a nice GUI and set of simple tools made by Mozilla would be helpful, unless they already exist and I haven't noticed them. Pre-made tools would reduce the burden for small businesses who don't already have, or can't afford to change internal tools built for IE, and since I'd say they would be the best targets to convince about open source.
Corruption is an overly harsh term, it's a development, technically. In most English speaking countries the letters Z/S and their sounds/s/ and/z/ are now pretty much interchangable (ie they are Allophones), so using z vs s really doesn't matter, except to remove what some people thought of as a 'useless' letter.
There are a few other British spelling developments, like "dreamt" instead of "dreamed" (this possibly even just a different direction with another interchangable sound), and a few American spelling simplifications, like "color" vs "colour".
As a linguistics student, I know that the spelling makes absolutely no difference, since it's all completely wrong for modern pronunciation anyway (English spelling has "fosilised"), but as a Briton I seeing "color" or "realize" just makes me shudder. It's scary.
First, I'd like to say that, whatever it's faults, this site has always been regular reading for me ever since I discovered it. The stories are (usually) interesting and informative, and at least give me an idea about "the world" that you don't see elsewhere.
However... I'm an English student and I notice the typos. Constantly. It's annoying, but I'm not unused to it. (And besides, all language is merely a collection of fundamentally useless floating signifiers anyway;) )
So... Taco doesn't want to be flooded with comments bitching about his inability to check stories, and a lot of people don't want to see typing errors on this website, for whatever reason (grammar-nazism, scanning problems, 2nd language problems). Why don't we just shift this to the person who submits the story?
If the story is largely written by the users anyway, then why not add a simple spellcheck to the "preview" option when posting. A simple hook to a or ispell would do. Show the user what they might have spelt wrong, and give them the chance to correct it if they wish. If they want to make the decision to keep the typos, for whatever reason, they can. If they want to correct the spelling, they can.
If this is a place that is concerned with telling multiple stories then I see no problem in letting the user choose how to spell words. After all, I wouldn't want someone to correct my colour, dreamt and realise to color, dreamed and realize, but I might want to know that I spelt "necccessity" wrong.
Surely, in this situation, everybody wins? Or at least doesn't lose too much...
Yes, but interestingly most of the scanning is being done by US based companies.
I've read reports sent by BayTSP in the name of various far-eastern copyright owners, and they also work for BPI (UK RIAA) and others. BayTSP are a US company.
Perhaps it's the centre of the industry, or maybe it's something about the availability of cheap fibre. Who knows...
Yep including me, that doesn't change a huge amount.
The majority of copyright law in the US is nearly identical to the majority of copyright law around the world.
The specifics of the patriot act are ones i don't even think apply in this situation, but i could be wrong!
I think that if RIAA (IFPI, BPI, etc etc) were capable of getting a patriot act FBI search then they wouldn't be paying MediaSentry and BayTSP thousands (millions?) of dollars to catch people.
And lets not kid ourselves, as much as I love homegrown media in Europe, India etc, the majority of movie and music production (at least in the west) is coming from America, that's where the industry is.
This means that the US acts as kind of centre for the most insane copyright laws that appear.
That would be true if that was the *point* of PeerGuardian - the idea is not to hide your IP - that is *nearly impossible*.
The point is to stop you sending data to them. An IP address is not enough evidence, you must send data to the person so that they can prove you are really active on the torrent, otherwise the tracker could be sending false data, or virtually anything.
This is nothing more than a troll, the organisations that do the tracking acknowledged that IP blocking would work (look up a Wired article from a few years back) - they criticised our ability to pick up any ip addresses at all!
We've managed to overcome that hurdle (see blocklist.org), so the effectiveness of this system is something that's a moot point.
Of course come IPv6 it'll be totally useless, the next stage is *decent* secure p2p. (I'm waiting for WASTE2, Rodi and a few more in this respect.)
Yep, as the coder of the original PGLinux (a bash/perl script that imported the rules into iptables I can offically say that it sucked, and although it ran ok on my machine it still sucked. it just sucked slightly less than the previous "Linux PeerGuardians which just ran a long list of bash commands, while this version used iptables-restore to import a list of rules, which is IN THEORY (if iptables wasn't somewhat poorly planned for this purpose) much faster.
However that was *over a year* ago - we picked up 2 new major contributors and the copy you see on that page is a TOTALLY DIFFERENT VERSION, written in C/C++ that uses ip_queue to filter the traffic.
The script was a thing I posted on our Forums, was never posted on the front page (to my memory).
Still incomplete, but I'm sure some more work will bring it up to the standard of the Windows version.
That said, the safety of Bittorrent over eDonkey is questionable, I'd say that neither is safer than the other. A big dose of common sense is helpful in both situations - stay away from suspicious torrents and servers.
We're not totally sure what they're being used for, but I imagine setting up their own servers allows them to keep logs far more easily, although they'll still have to get some data from you for it to stand up in court.
I was referring specifically to the IM conversations. Note that with AIM your conversations ARE recorded, and the licence famously says that they can do anything they want with your data.
The encryption in Jabber should make this perfectly acceptable - the contact details that they store are standard things - MSN, AIM and even the public Jabber servers also store this data.
If you're not happy about the "quality control" reporting in the talk client then you can switch to GAIM or something which is Open Source. The server software they are using is Jabber standard software (more or less, they've added this VoIP - something I'd like to see released for use in other clients).
Frankly, I think the way that they are handling this is fantastic. Not perfect, but better than the other commercial entities in this arena.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no idea why, but it seems to me that every time I read one of these surveys about MMO players, they always choose Everquest players.
Maybe because it's been around so long?
Isn't there an inherent sample bias in asking only EverQuest players?
Playing time increases with age? - EverQuest is an old game, and it's players tend to drift towards the hardcore. Anyone still playing it must be really into it. Younger players will probably be turned off - either by the older graphics or the fact they could be playing WoW instead.
As for the differences between genders, we have to remember that we're not polling the general population. Women gamers who are still playing EverQuest are slightly more hardcore than male players. This might tell us nothing at all about women in general. In fact, I'd bet these stats aren't exactly representative of normal people, or even necessarily "normal" hardcore gamers.
I'm sure I could go on, but there must be some stats nerds who can go to town on this sort of headline...
These domain names are usually used because they're easier to *say* than shorthand versions.
I used to think exactly the same way as you, but then I worked at a radio station for a year. Some of those short names can be quite easily misunderstood - letters are notoriously confusable. That's why there's a radio phonetic alphabet.
Don't feed the trolls, I know... but I feel I should clarify.
I was referring to the "800% of GDP" comment made by the grandparent, which is true of Iceland which has debt of "eight times GDP", and not Ireland, which doesn't have great debt but not to anything near the levels the poster argued.
And since I'm British, I'm not really sure what your comment about Americans is supposed to mean...
I don't disagree with what you're saying in principle, but I think perhaps you mean Iceland not Ireland.
See Wikipedia: "By 2008 the nation's currency (the krÃna) was defunct and the national debt had soared to over eight times GDP."
Although Ireland is not doing great ("Ireland was stripped of it`s AAA credit ranking and downgraded to AA+ by Standard & Poor's ratings agency, due to Ireland`s bleak financial outlook and heavy government debt burden." - Wikipedia), it's still AA+, compared to Iceland which has pretty much collapsed.
Exactly. I work on security for a major retailer, and people try to screw the system with gift cards all the time. It doesn't work.
Those cards get activated (i.e. added to a database of purchased cards) by software on the POS system, they're totally useless.
Try it - walk into a shop and these gift cards will be unprotected on the shelf. Copy the number from the back of a card and punch it into iTunes. Their value will add up to thousands of dollars in one shop alone - what sort of a company would sell cards with what would effectively be cash value without that sort of protection?
People steal these cards from retail stores all the time. The joke is that they just risked prosecution to steal a worthless piece of plastic.
Also, I think that's why big stores abandoned gift vouchers. They were stealable and copyable, but a gift card is database checked when you use it, so much much harder to fool a checkout operator with.
I'm working as a part-time Security Guard/CCTV operator while I'm at University. Most of my colleagues work a 44 hour week (4x9, 1x8), not including overtime.
And they're the lucky ones - outside contractors (usually migrant workers) work 12 hour shifts with only 2 half-hour breaks (the legal maximum number of hours work combined with the legal minimum break time).
I guess it depends upon what you're used to.
I've installed AIR and the iPlayer downloader, and so far neither have really worked.
Granted this is probably because I'm using 64-bit Linux, and they don't seem to support it yet (not that I was told this at any stage of the installation process, or the website where I downloaded the installer.
To get the thing installed on 64-bit I followed these instructions, and then proceeded to the BBC website to download something. Nothing seemed to work, no download links appeared. I then followed the links to an episode of Never Mind The Buzzcocks that other people reported was working. This time a download link appeared, but clicking it took me to install the program again.
To figure out why it wasn't working, I ran the downloader from the command line. It was printing the following: "Unkown desktop manager((null)), only Gnome and KDE are supported". Aha... I'm using XFCE, yet it must use the inter-process communication of either one of those desktops...
Booted into Gnome, and tried again. This time it tells me that it wants libgnome-keyring.so - I realise that no preferences are savable - it must be saving prefs with the keyring. I think that's a bit odd - what's wrong with ~/.Adobe/AIR?
After installing 32-bit libraries for gnome-keyring, the thing still doesn't work, and still won't download anything.
The problem with this application, or rather with Adobe AIR, is the series of arbitrary choices the designers seem to have made. Linux is not a platform where you can assume many things - and it would have probably made more sense to pick some generic ways of getting things done (there's a reason that text-files have always been used for config!) rather than relying upon fairly specific libraries for basic tasks and then not even falling back to a sane alternative. Perhaps a 64-bit version will fix all of this, I certainly hope so!
Exactly! It seems like so many of the problems in political and media debate about science are caused by a total lack of understanding about what a good method is, and what isn't a good method.
I've just finished reading the excellent Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, a book which really hammers down where all the misconceptions about science and medicine come from in a few specific British examples.
Basically, politicians and journalists want there to be two sides to every story, a "for" and an "against". Therefore the people promoting creationism, or the belief that homeopathy works, or whatever other example are printed in the same standing as people who are just talking basic sense.
Science is complicated to understand, and ordinary people (and doctors!) have to rely upon other people to collate and conclude on all available data. Our newspapers and governments should be providing a sensible properly worked-out conclusion on science stories, not taking the lazy option of equally weighted "he said, she said" stories that treat people who believe Vitamin C can cure HIV, or that special water cures cancer as legitimate.
All this just makes science seem confusing and casts doubt upon scientific method. While individual theories can be argued, doubted, tested, or whatever (that's the point) - the basic idea of "evidence based" science is undoubtedly the best way to do things. Seems sad we're still arguing about this after more than a hundred years of Darwinism, doesn't it?
Create multiple user accounts in connection with any violation of the Agreement or create user accounts by automated means or under false or fraudulent pretenses
So it's illegal to create more than one account if you're breaking the rules in some other way - not specifically illegal on it's own. The terms don't mention using it for anything other than email, though...
See the program policies and terms of use.
Exactly, I was about to suggest that it was fake.
I work as a part-time CCTV operator (while I'm at University), and the footage just doesn't look remotely real to me. Specifically the frame-rate is FAR too high, most CCTV systems have the frame-rate turned down quite low (say 3-5 FPS) to save space.
Second, not every CCTV camera is necessarily recording at the same time. While every camera probably CAN record, usually only key cameras will be set to record, maybe half or less, to save space on the system. The idea is that if anything happens the CCTV operator will record that camera, not that everything records all the time.
If a band asked me to look up their footage because of something like this, the footage they'd get back wouldn't look that good. This is a publicity stunt.
(and, as has already been pointed out, the Data Protection Act, not the Freedom of Information Act)
(Emphasis mine)
It's was an invention in the 16th century in England and that spelling lasted until the 19th century
(Source: OED, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50122404)
No, it isn't. I'm not familiar with the particular quote, but co-worker > coworker is a common grammatical contraction, such as "it's" (it belongs to) becoming its, or 'phone > phone, or a million other things.
The Dictionary of the Scots Language and Oxford English Dictionary, probably the two best resources on the etymology of the language of England and Scotland have no record of that construction or word. I've definitely never heard it here.
I know it's a joke, but these types of 'word histories' are usually bollocks that actually dilute our understanding of where words really come from.
(Yes, I am an English major, and I live in Aberdeen, Scotland)
I agree with your point of course, but this got me thinking: what if all EULA licenses had to provide a creative commons style summary of the overall terms. The standard would have to be worked out carefully, and it wouldn't be quite as simple as the CC stuff, but think of it as the friendly summaries of mortgages or bank terms that some places require.
So, clicking through a big block of text, or seeing:
You can: 1) Use this software for you own personal use.
You can't: 1) Copy it. 2) Reverse engineer it. 3) Install it on more than one computer. We can: 1) Contact your computer via the internet to check if you purchased this software. 2) Deactivate the software or key features of your computer if we believe you have unlawfully obtained this software. 3) etc...
It would be a pain to sort out, but would anyone really be able to just ignore that sort of summary?
I'm not a network expert, but this is what I would do:
Just deploy your Firefox on a central server and make sure your user profiles are stored within their respective home directories. For machines that can't rely on LAN connectivity, either stick your firefox image on a LAN/VPN or internet server and write something to check to see if the server is available, and, if so, overwrite the local firefox copy. It would be a good idea to have a fail-safe backup on the local system as well. In all the networks I've used (school, university, and one mid-sized company) his sort of thing is fairly standard, and I'm sure any large company already has an in-house tool that does this with a lot of applications.
That said... a nice GUI and set of simple tools made by Mozilla would be helpful, unless they already exist and I haven't noticed them. Pre-made tools would reduce the burden for small businesses who don't already have, or can't afford to change internal tools built for IE, and since I'd say they would be the best targets to convince about open source.
Corruption is an overly harsh term, it's a development, technically. In most English speaking countries the letters Z/S and their sounds /s/ and /z/ are now pretty much interchangable (ie they are Allophones), so using z vs s really doesn't matter, except to remove what some people thought of as a 'useless' letter.
There are a few other British spelling developments, like "dreamt" instead of "dreamed" (this possibly even just a different direction with another interchangable sound), and a few American spelling simplifications, like "color" vs "colour".
As a linguistics student, I know that the spelling makes absolutely no difference, since it's all completely wrong for modern pronunciation anyway (English spelling has "fosilised"), but as a Briton I seeing "color" or "realize" just makes me shudder. It's scary.
First, I'd like to say that, whatever it's faults, this site has always been regular reading for me ever since I discovered it. The stories are (usually) interesting and informative, and at least give me an idea about "the world" that you don't see elsewhere.
;) )
However... I'm an English student and I notice the typos. Constantly. It's annoying, but I'm not unused to it. (And besides, all language is merely a collection of fundamentally useless floating signifiers anyway
So... Taco doesn't want to be flooded with comments bitching about his inability to check stories, and a lot of people don't want to see typing errors on this website, for whatever reason (grammar-nazism, scanning problems, 2nd language problems). Why don't we just shift this to the person who submits the story?
If the story is largely written by the users anyway, then why not add a simple spellcheck to the "preview" option when posting. A simple hook to a or ispell would do. Show the user what they might have spelt wrong, and give them the chance to correct it if they wish. If they want to make the decision to keep the typos, for whatever reason, they can. If they want to correct the spelling, they can.
If this is a place that is concerned with telling multiple stories then I see no problem in letting the user choose how to spell words. After all, I wouldn't want someone to correct my colour, dreamt and realise to color, dreamed and realize, but I might want to know that I spelt "necccessity" wrong.
Surely, in this situation, everybody wins? Or at least doesn't lose too much...
Media made in those countries that is locally financed in those places. Example might be Dr Who, perhaps Shaun of the Dead (thinking of UK here...).
India has the huge "bollywood" industry, but how many of those films make it internationally?
My point is that the US seems to be the centre of most of our media, at least the big record companies are predominantly American.
Not saying I'm happy about it or anything... just seems to be the way it is.
Yes, but interestingly most of the scanning is being done by US based companies.
I've read reports sent by BayTSP in the name of various far-eastern copyright owners, and they also work for BPI (UK RIAA) and others. BayTSP are a US company.
Perhaps it's the centre of the industry, or maybe it's something about the availability of cheap fibre. Who knows...
Yep including me, that doesn't change a huge amount.
The majority of copyright law in the US is nearly identical to the majority of copyright law around the world.
The specifics of the patriot act are ones i don't even think apply in this situation, but i could be wrong!
I think that if RIAA (IFPI, BPI, etc etc) were capable of getting a patriot act FBI search then they wouldn't be paying MediaSentry and BayTSP thousands (millions?) of dollars to catch people.
And lets not kid ourselves, as much as I love homegrown media in Europe, India etc, the majority of movie and music production (at least in the west) is coming from America, that's where the industry is.
This means that the US acts as kind of centre for the most insane copyright laws that appear.
perhaps, if they can legally classify copyright infrigement as terrorism.... :S
remember copyright is still a CIVIL action, not even enforcable by the police yet!
That would be true if that was the *point* of PeerGuardian - the idea is not to hide your IP - that is *nearly impossible*.
The point is to stop you sending data to them. An IP address is not enough evidence, you must send data to the person so that they can prove you are really active on the torrent, otherwise the tracker could be sending false data, or virtually anything.
This is nothing more than a troll, the organisations that do the tracking acknowledged that IP blocking would work (look up a Wired article from a few years back) - they criticised our ability to pick up any ip addresses at all!
We've managed to overcome that hurdle (see blocklist.org), so the effectiveness of this system is something that's a moot point.
Of course come IPv6 it'll be totally useless, the next stage is *decent* secure p2p. (I'm waiting for WASTE2, Rodi and a few more in this respect.)
PGLinux is basically an alpha, it's incomplete and will probably change a few hundred times before it's finally released.
The final version will have a GUI and all the prettiness you would expect, but until then we have to deal with one problem at a time.
Any help the OSS community feels like giving us, the codes on our CVS...
peerguardian.sourceforge.net
Yep, as the coder of the original PGLinux (a bash/perl script that imported the rules into iptables I can offically say that it sucked, and although it ran ok on my machine it still sucked. it just sucked slightly less than the previous "Linux PeerGuardians which just ran a long list of bash commands, while this version used iptables-restore to import a list of rules, which is IN THEORY (if iptables wasn't somewhat poorly planned for this purpose) much faster.
However that was *over a year* ago - we picked up 2 new major contributors and the copy you see on that page is a TOTALLY DIFFERENT VERSION, written in C/C++ that uses ip_queue to filter the traffic.
The script was a thing I posted on our Forums, was never posted on the front page (to my memory).
Try it, you'll see it's a lot better.
This should give you an idea of the CPU usage:
root 5729 0.0 0.4 13312 2196 ? Sl 12:00 0:00 peerguardnf -d -c
Still incomplete, but I'm sure some more work will bring it up to the standard of the Windows version.
That said, the safety of Bittorrent over eDonkey is questionable, I'd say that neither is safer than the other. A big dose of common sense is helpful in both situations - stay away from suspicious torrents and servers.
Just look at some friendly *MediaSentry* owned eDonkey servers - http://blocklist.org/ip/1143410646
We're not totally sure what they're being used for, but I imagine setting up their own servers allows them to keep logs far more easily, although they'll still have to get some data from you for it to stand up in court.
I was referring specifically to the IM conversations. Note that with AIM your conversations ARE recorded, and the licence famously says that they can do anything they want with your data.
The encryption in Jabber should make this perfectly acceptable - the contact details that they store are standard things - MSN, AIM and even the public Jabber servers also store this data.
If you're not happy about the "quality control" reporting in the talk client then you can switch to GAIM or something which is Open Source. The server software they are using is Jabber standard software (more or less, they've added this VoIP - something I'd like to see released for use in other clients).
Frankly, I think the way that they are handling this is fantastic. Not perfect, but better than the other commercial entities in this arena.