Not until we resolve the issue of rights for other species.
We tend to measure the value of other lifeforms in terms of their genetic closeness to ourselves. All humans share something like 99.9% of their genes... and we already have a hard time fighting for the rights of distant strangers who are in fact members of our large but interbred human family.
Then how about our genetic relations, our sibling and cousin species, from chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utangs out to other primates, then to other mammals, then birds, reptiles, fish, then insects and even down to single-celled organisms, with whom we still share an impressive number of genes. All still much closer to us in any meaningful sense than even the most human-looking cyborb.
This story has a nasty, nasty feel about it. NCR is the company where Thomas J. Watson Sr. learned the dirty tricks he needed to found and run IBM. By 1920, NCR had already perfected the techniques of capturing customers and smashing competitors (often literally, with sticks and stones). IBM did the same in a slightly genteeler way, Microsoft did the same a generation later.
So NCR is back and has cornered one of the few Internet success stories. Next, Google and Amazon? The patents appear to be so basic that they apply to every commercial web site, nay, every commercial software application.
Evil, dangerous, and cynically positioned to take advantage of other people's hard work and sacrifice.
Why does this kind of parasitical behaviour go unpunished? Because the ones doing it are part of the system, not outside it. Not only does the system allow this kind of abuse, it has pretty much evolved to support and protect it.
Conclusion: the modern political body is corrupt and survives by manipulating public opinion. Nothing new... two millenia after the fall of the Roman Empire, we are treated in the same way as the emperors treated their subjects. Give them bread, and they won't complain. Give them circuses, and they won't notice. Give them security, and they won't fight. Human nature lets such things happen, for a while. But eventually it revolts and the further it has been pushed one way, the more aggressive and reactionary the revolt.
If you want my website, you're going to have to prise it from my cold, dead hands.
From 650ma for the original shitty nicads to something like 1850ma for the latest generation of Nickle-metal-hydride.
The 1850ma batteries last long on a charge than the best alkaline batteries do new, and you can recharge them a thousand times or so, with no memory effect. The original 1650ma batteries I got with my Fuji camera still gave a full charge two years later when the camera was stolen.
I never buy disposable AAs for anything anymore, instead I have a bunch of AA NmH.
As a youth in the Scottish Highlands I proudly wore (you have to rrrole the rrr's to get the right effect here) a kilt (Hunting McGregor, the clan colors) every Sunday morning. I can tell you that the girls all ask the same thing ("whatcha got in that sporran") and the danger factor is defnitely higher than the suit-and-tie. The little skian-dhu knife makes a great toy. You can't ssh into your server with it, but you can throw it at a tree from ten yards, and it is great for skinning rabbits. Kilts are Good. If geeks wore kilts, Slashdot would dwindle and die. UP WITH KILTS!!
And that is for the RIAA to use the P2P network to sue itself. Perhaps we will see an RIAA-sponsored feature in upcoming releases of W2K3: 'autosuit', in which your computer automatically formats you an appropriate lawsuit and sends a log of incriminating evidence to the RIAA. Maybe the most effective resistance against the RIAA would be for 10,000,000 people to voluntarily go to the authorities and confess to having downloaded exactly 1 song. "I did it, and I can't sleep cause of the guilt, please punish me." Kind of like burning ID passes in Apartheid South Africa. If everyone does it, punishments become unenforcable.
This has been known for a long time. Consider the peacock's tail... a large decoration that attracts the female of the species not because of its brilliant colours, but simply by its size. The larger the tail, the stronger the peacock. The same goes for the tails of the birds of paradise, the longer the tail the more danger the bird is in, and more attractive to fenales. This is "dangerwear", and in its extreme human form, comes in the form of military uniforms. Women like to look at men in suits because if you can survive a day of strangulation, you are by definition tough, and that's good, somehow. (I'm not sure why the ability to bear suffering is attractive to women, but nature has its reasons, I guess.) However, scientifically this can be measured. Half the geeks wear a tie and suit for a month, the other half wear comfortable shorts and sandals. At the end of the month, who got more sex? Far-fetched, I know, but just maybe...
I'm an authority on this subject, because a friend of mine once dated a girl. Actually, we never met her, but he showed us emails and pictures, so it must have been real.
My dictionary defines "fiancee" as "a mother-in-law waiting to happen", which sounds pretty drastic.
People have denied the automatability of human skills for the last ten thousand years. "They could not hit a barn at that dista...". Famous last words.
The human brain does not emply magic. It uses strategems, hard-coded guesses, models, and logics, filled with and tuned by accumulated information and knowledge.
All this is automatable. It just takes a _lot_ of investment.
My prediction is that within ten years we will have machine translation that speaks significantly better than average people, although not nearly as well as professional translators.
And it will be as banal as playing chess against a piece of software.
This was simply the coolest show: not the decor or effects, which were brutally minimalistic, but the characterisation and writing, which was so good that it felt real, every time. The day that the series was killed was so traumatic that I almost kicked off TV: the show's producers simply, and without warning, arranged for the entire cast to be killed in one gruesome and bloody ambush. After years of arranging narrow escapes for our favourite characters, this was just incredibly insensitive. Glad to see the show will be back.
Yeah, nothing new under the sun. Olde Englishe beer mugs sometimes used to have little metal bells backed into the handle... when a thirsty punter wanted a refill, they would lift their mug and thumb the bell. Hence the expression.
And this happened as soon as Linux started to be stable and compatible enough for people to switch. A large client of ours ran their back office system on SCO, and still does, but all development and training servers run RedHat. They don't switch only because they have had the servers for 5 years and will keep them for another five. SCO Unix as a product has almost zero relevance to today's world, and to SCO's actions. Remember that this is a company that bought the SCO baggage and then used it to launch lawsuits. Would you buy an operating system from a firm of lawyers? Nope, me neither.
Ah, now that Micosoft came forwards and licensed their Windows source code, we can no longer claim that as 'closed source' it is impossible that it found its way into Linux. However, since the Windows source code *has* been licensed, it should be possible to run a hashing comparison that will identify whether and what Windows code has slipped into Linux. There could be a few surprises in there. Imagine discovering that MS had themselves contributed some code to one or other OSS project in order to frame the entire OSS community! Time to start a "Guaranteed 100% Microsoft-free" certification process?
SCO's attack has always been aimed at Linux, not Unix, and they were sponsored from the start by Microsoft. Now that SCO appears to be settling in, and the anti-Linux FUD appears to be sticking, of course Microsoft has jumped on the bandwagon. "Cloning" is now stealing, reverse-engineering is piracy, and all imitations are theft. Welcome to the Golden Age. For those who believe that truth and honesty will win, understand that this is war: Microsoft is fighting for its very existence and it knows that it must destroy Linux and the very concept of OSS if it is to survive. There is really only one answer, and that is to start a movement to boycott Microsoft in all its markets. The alternative is to watch as the freedoms we take totally for granted (write program, distribute program) get eroded and finally criminalized.
Re:The EU has very strong data protection laws...
on
The Beast of Brussels
·
· Score: 1
Yes, exactly. In the UK, too, the data protection act is taken seriously. But in France, or Belgium, or Italy, or Spain? When a company wants to abuse its customers' data it can simply switch its location to a country where enforcement is weak. I know of at least one case where a company is avoiding Belgian laws on (ab)use of private data by operating from France.
The EU has very strong data protection laws...
on
The Beast of Brussels
·
· Score: 1
Very strong on paper, perhaps, but in practice they are not widely followed, and I have never heard of a case of an institution or business being in trouble for breaking the laws on data privacy. Add to this the fact that any implementation of these laws is done at the national level... and you do not get much of a feeling in Europe that private data is safe.
"Strong laws that are widely ignored" is somewhat of an oxymoron. I chose the example of New Zealand specifically because this is a place where the laws are both strongly worded, and taken seriously.
Spam is not just about sending unwanted email from rogue servers. Even if the Internet email system consisted of a 100% controlled network that excluded spammers' systems, there would be a serious spam problem. Why? More and more spam is sent from systems infected by viruses and trojans, and as other avenues get closed, this most promising one will be used to the maximum. Let me race down the technology curve and predict some of the wonderful things that will happen in the war on spam:
- the majority of spam will originate from 'infected PCs'. - some smart person will cause email to be charged, and millions of innocent users will get incredible invoices for email they 'never sent' - as the number of infected PCs being remotely controlled by spammers increases, the volume sent from each PC will go random and low enough to be effectively undetectable. - spammers will start modifying real email to attach their own messages. - spammers will start modifying URLs in real email to point to their own websites. - spammers will find ways to infect MSIE to do the same thing. - anti-spam software will start to resemble anti-virus software, as spammers and virus writers hook-up into an organized (criminal) network. - anti-spam software will be the main thing targetted by new viruses.
and all this time, 80% of PC users will remain blisfully unaware that their PCs are sending shiploads of spam around the world.
The basic problem is that the (Windows) PC is simply too complex, too connected, and too vulnerable to use as a secure communications device.
There is an answer somewhere... but I don't believe it lies in technological solutions, nor does it lie in making email paid, nor does it lie in attacking the servers and networks used to send spam. It is rather to understand that simplicity and transparency is the key to security. In the case of PCs, this means arriving at a OS/application combination that is immune to trojans and viruses, not thanks to the latest anti-virus scanners, but thanks to an inherently uncrackable design.
Re:Impossible for all the wrong reasons...
on
The Beast of Brussels
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Yes, that is a good point. Saying '11/9/03', or better, using the ISO standard '2003/11/09' for all references to this date would make the discussion much clearer. Excellent comment!
(I am not a telecoms specialist, this is second-hand knowledge...)
Most billing systems in telecoms infrastructure work on trust to some extent. That is, billing is based on information such as the originator address, but many telecoms systems do not verify this kind of data except in a limited way.
In a general sense, once you are on a telecoms network, your partners trust you to play fair, but there is not a general paranoia. Historically this was because nationalized telcos had no reason to cheat.
This is a particular headache for SMS operators, since it is relatively easy for fraudulent operators to send SMS traffic with spoofed originating addresses. The traffic is either billed to the wrong parties, or at the wrong rate.
Obviously whenever this kind of fraud gets uncovered, people tighten up their security. But often the cost of doing this is so high that it's a last step, not a first one.
Think of unsecured email and you get a fair analogy.
Perhaps a telco insider has a better view?
Impossible for all the wrong reasons...
on
The Beast of Brussels
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Some countries, like New Zealand, have very strict rules about what information government departments can share. As far as I know, the EU does not have such rules. Nonetheless, I know many people who work in the EU, including in the IT departments, and the idea of a "supercomputer" of some kind is so laughable...
Firstly, the different sections of the EU are so jealous about gaining and holding power that they barely collaborate, and would never allow such a centralization of information (and thus power).
Secondly, the state of the art of IT in the EU is amazingly poor. Actually, it's quite normal, given the huge amounts of money thrown at it. One of the laws of IT systems is that lots of money means shitty systems.
Thirdly, no-one in the EU administration really cares about such things. Seriously: the idea of acting as a Big Brother is a joke... all the Eurocrats want is their perk, their rules, their little niche in the United States of Europe.
Not so different from any large civilian government...
If there is a risk of a 'supernational database' one should look at law enforcement. Until 11/9, there was a definite 'not my problem' attritude to cross-border crime inside Europe. Since 11/9, police have started sharing information, and since most European countries hold full records of all their citizens (the UK is one of the few exceptions), it is a short step from sharing databases on criminals to sharing databases on everyone possible. Finally, to answer the poster who mentioned the East German Stasi, one has to really understand the motives of any government. The DDR was obsessed with controlling its people. The EU is obsessed with straight bananas and olive oil quotas. There is a real difference, and it's not accidental. Vive l'Europe... never have so many useless mid-level managers been happily occupied with useless works.
Slashdot Mirror
Not until we resolve the issue of rights for other species.
We tend to measure the value of other lifeforms in terms of their genetic closeness to ourselves. All humans share something like 99.9% of their genes... and we already have a hard time fighting for the rights of distant strangers who are in fact members of our large but interbred human family.
Then how about our genetic relations, our sibling and cousin species, from chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utangs out to other primates, then to other mammals, then birds, reptiles, fish, then insects and even down to single-celled organisms, with whom we still share an impressive number of genes. All still much closer to us in any meaningful sense than even the most human-looking cyborb.
This story has a nasty, nasty feel about it.
NCR is the company where Thomas J. Watson Sr. learned the dirty tricks he needed to found and run IBM. By 1920, NCR had already perfected the techniques of capturing customers and smashing competitors (often literally, with sticks and stones). IBM did the same in a slightly genteeler way, Microsoft did the same a generation later.
So NCR is back and has cornered one of the few Internet success stories. Next, Google and Amazon? The patents appear to be so basic that they apply to every commercial web site, nay, every commercial software application.
Evil, dangerous, and cynically positioned to take advantage of other people's hard work and sacrifice.
Why does this kind of parasitical behaviour go unpunished? Because the ones doing it are part of the system, not outside it. Not only does the system allow this kind of abuse, it has pretty much evolved to support and protect it.
Conclusion: the modern political body is corrupt and survives by manipulating public opinion. Nothing new... two millenia after the fall of the Roman Empire, we are treated in the same way as the emperors treated their subjects.
Give them bread, and they won't complain.
Give them circuses, and they won't notice.
Give them security, and they won't fight.
Human nature lets such things happen, for a while. But eventually it revolts and the further it has been pushed one way, the more aggressive and reactionary the revolt.
If you want my website, you're going to have to prise it from my cold, dead hands.
From 650ma for the original shitty nicads to something like 1850ma for the latest generation of Nickle-metal-hydride.
The 1850ma batteries last long on a charge than the best alkaline batteries do new, and you can recharge them a thousand times or so, with no memory effect. The original 1650ma batteries I got with my Fuji camera still gave a full charge two years later when the camera was stolen.
I never buy disposable AAs for anything anymore, instead I have a bunch of AA NmH.
As a youth in the Scottish Highlands I proudly wore (you have to rrrole the rrr's to get the right effect here) a kilt (Hunting McGregor, the clan colors) every Sunday morning.
I can tell you that the girls all ask the same thing ("whatcha got in that sporran") and the danger factor is defnitely higher than the suit-and-tie. The little skian-dhu knife makes a great toy. You can't ssh into your server with it, but you can throw it at a tree from ten yards, and it is great for skinning rabbits.
Kilts are Good. If geeks wore kilts, Slashdot would dwindle and die.
UP WITH KILTS!!
And that is for the RIAA to use the P2P network to sue itself. Perhaps we will see an RIAA-sponsored feature in upcoming releases of W2K3: 'autosuit', in which your computer automatically formats you an appropriate lawsuit and sends a log of incriminating evidence to the RIAA.
Maybe the most effective resistance against the RIAA would be for 10,000,000 people to voluntarily go to the authorities and confess to having downloaded exactly 1 song. "I did it, and I can't sleep cause of the guilt, please punish me."
Kind of like burning ID passes in Apartheid South Africa. If everyone does it, punishments become unenforcable.
This has been known for a long time. Consider the peacock's tail... a large decoration that attracts the female of the species not because of its brilliant colours, but simply by its size. The larger the tail, the stronger the peacock.
The same goes for the tails of the birds of paradise, the longer the tail the more danger the bird is in, and more attractive to fenales.
This is "dangerwear", and in its extreme human form, comes in the form of military uniforms.
Women like to look at men in suits because if you can survive a day of strangulation, you are by definition tough, and that's good, somehow.
(I'm not sure why the ability to bear suffering is attractive to women, but nature has its reasons, I guess.)
However, scientifically this can be measured. Half the geeks wear a tie and suit for a month, the other half wear comfortable shorts and sandals. At the end of the month, who got more sex?
Far-fetched, I know, but just maybe...
I'm an authority on this subject, because a friend of mine once dated a girl. Actually, we never met her, but he showed us emails and pictures, so it must have been real.
My dictionary defines "fiancee" as "a mother-in-law waiting to happen", which sounds pretty drastic.
I think I'll stick with my geektoys for now.
People have denied the automatability of human skills for the last ten thousand years. "They could not hit a barn at that dista...". Famous last words.
The human brain does not emply magic. It uses strategems, hard-coded guesses, models, and logics, filled with and tuned by accumulated information and knowledge.
All this is automatable. It just takes a _lot_ of investment.
My prediction is that within ten years we will have machine translation that speaks significantly better than average people, although not nearly as well as professional translators.
And it will be as banal as playing chess against a piece of software.
This was simply the coolest show: not the decor or effects, which were brutally minimalistic, but the characterisation and writing, which was so good that it felt real, every time.
The day that the series was killed was so traumatic that I almost kicked off TV: the show's producers simply, and without warning, arranged for the entire cast to be killed in one gruesome and bloody ambush.
After years of arranging narrow escapes for our favourite characters, this was just incredibly insensitive.
Glad to see the show will be back.
The phrase "My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster" just didn't seem right for 2003...
Google is God.
Knows everything you've ever said.
If you're gonna troll, try to be original about it.
Are you taking the PIS? Uhm... "my PIS is full. I can't find my PIS."
I think we need another term. Unfortunately my PIS seems to have crashed so I can't search for one.
Yeah, nothing new under the sun. Olde Englishe beer mugs sometimes used to have little metal bells backed into the handle... when a thirsty punter wanted a refill, they would lift their mug and thumb the bell. Hence the expression.
And this happened as soon as Linux started to be stable and compatible enough for people to switch. A large client of ours ran their back office system on SCO, and still does, but all development and training servers run RedHat. They don't switch only because they have had the servers for 5 years and will keep them for another five.
SCO Unix as a product has almost zero relevance to today's world, and to SCO's actions. Remember that this is a company that bought the SCO baggage and then used it to launch lawsuits.
Would you buy an operating system from a firm of lawyers? Nope, me neither.
True, but remember the origin of the word: the last defense of helpless consumers faced with a relentless force.
That's all.
Unplug your network cable, move to a place with no IP connectivity, put on some music, and get concentrating.
Ah, now that Micosoft came forwards and licensed their Windows source code, we can no longer claim that as 'closed source' it is impossible that it found its way into Linux.
However, since the Windows source code *has* been licensed, it should be possible to run a hashing comparison that will identify whether and what Windows code has slipped into Linux.
There could be a few surprises in there. Imagine discovering that MS had themselves contributed some code to one or other OSS project in order to frame the entire OSS community!
Time to start a "Guaranteed 100% Microsoft-free" certification process?
SCO's attack has always been aimed at Linux, not Unix, and they were sponsored from the start by Microsoft. Now that SCO appears to be settling in, and the anti-Linux FUD appears to be sticking, of course Microsoft has jumped on the bandwagon. "Cloning" is now stealing, reverse-engineering is piracy, and all imitations are theft. Welcome to the Golden Age.
For those who believe that truth and honesty will win, understand that this is war: Microsoft is fighting for its very existence and it knows that it must destroy Linux and the very concept of OSS if it is to survive.
There is really only one answer, and that is to start a movement to boycott Microsoft in all its markets. The alternative is to watch as the freedoms we take totally for granted (write program, distribute program) get eroded and finally criminalized.
Yes, exactly. In the UK, too, the data protection act is taken seriously. But in France, or Belgium, or Italy, or Spain? When a company wants to abuse its customers' data it can simply switch its location to a country where enforcement is weak. I know of at least one case where a company is avoiding Belgian laws on (ab)use of private data by operating from France.
Very strong on paper, perhaps, but in practice they are not widely followed, and I have never heard of a case of an institution or business being in trouble for breaking the laws on data privacy. Add to this the fact that any implementation of these laws is done at the national level... and you do not get much of a feeling in Europe that private data is safe.
"Strong laws that are widely ignored" is somewhat of an oxymoron. I chose the example of New Zealand specifically because this is a place where the laws are both strongly worded, and taken seriously.
Spam is not just about sending unwanted email from rogue servers. Even if the Internet email system consisted of a 100% controlled network that excluded spammers' systems, there would be a serious spam problem. Why? More and more spam is sent from systems infected by viruses and trojans, and as other avenues get closed, this most promising one will be used to the maximum.
Let me race down the technology curve and predict some of the wonderful things that will happen in the war on spam:
- the majority of spam will originate from 'infected PCs'.
- some smart person will cause email to be charged, and millions of innocent users will get incredible invoices for email they 'never sent'
- as the number of infected PCs being remotely controlled by spammers increases, the volume sent from each PC will go random and low enough to be effectively undetectable.
- spammers will start modifying real email to attach their own messages.
- spammers will start modifying URLs in real email to point to their own websites.
- spammers will find ways to infect MSIE to do the same thing.
- anti-spam software will start to resemble anti-virus software, as spammers and virus writers hook-up into an organized (criminal) network.
- anti-spam software will be the main thing targetted by new viruses.
and all this time, 80% of PC users will remain blisfully unaware that their PCs are sending shiploads of spam around the world.
The basic problem is that the (Windows) PC is simply too complex, too connected, and too vulnerable to use as a secure communications device.
There is an answer somewhere... but I don't believe it lies in technological solutions, nor does it lie in making email paid, nor does it lie in attacking the servers and networks used to send spam. It is rather to understand that simplicity and transparency is the key to security. In the case of PCs, this means arriving at a OS/application combination that is immune to trojans and viruses, not thanks to the latest anti-virus scanners, but thanks to an inherently uncrackable design.
Yes, that is a good point. Saying '11/9/03', or better, using the ISO standard '2003/11/09' for all references to this date would make the discussion much clearer. Excellent comment!
(I am not a telecoms specialist, this is second-hand knowledge...)
Most billing systems in telecoms infrastructure work on trust to some extent. That is, billing is based on information such as the originator address, but many telecoms systems do not verify this kind of data except in a limited way.
In a general sense, once you are on a telecoms network, your partners trust you to play fair, but there is not a general paranoia. Historically this was because nationalized telcos had no reason to cheat.
This is a particular headache for SMS operators, since it is relatively easy for fraudulent operators to send SMS traffic with spoofed originating addresses. The traffic is either billed to the wrong parties, or at the wrong rate.
Obviously whenever this kind of fraud gets uncovered, people tighten up their security. But often the cost of doing this is so high that it's a last step, not a first one.
Think of unsecured email and you get a fair analogy.
Perhaps a telco insider has a better view?
Some countries, like New Zealand, have very strict rules about what information government departments can share. As far as I know, the EU does not have such rules. Nonetheless, I know many people who work in the EU, including in the IT departments, and the idea of a "supercomputer" of some kind is so laughable...
Firstly, the different sections of the EU are so jealous about gaining and holding power that they barely collaborate, and would never allow such a centralization of information (and thus power).
Secondly, the state of the art of IT in the EU is amazingly poor. Actually, it's quite normal, given the huge amounts of money thrown at it. One of the laws of IT systems is that lots of money means shitty systems.
Thirdly, no-one in the EU administration really cares about such things. Seriously: the idea of acting as a Big Brother is a joke... all the Eurocrats want is their perk, their rules, their little niche in the United States of Europe.
Not so different from any large civilian government...
If there is a risk of a 'supernational database' one should look at law enforcement. Until 11/9, there was a definite 'not my problem' attritude to cross-border crime inside Europe. Since 11/9, police have started sharing information, and since most European countries hold full records of all their citizens (the UK is one of the few exceptions), it is a short step from sharing databases on criminals to sharing databases on everyone possible.
Finally, to answer the poster who mentioned the East German Stasi, one has to really understand the motives of any government. The DDR was obsessed with controlling its people. The EU is obsessed with straight bananas and olive oil quotas. There is a real difference, and it's not accidental.
Vive l'Europe... never have so many useless mid-level managers been happily occupied with useless works.
Yeah, which is great compared to imported Toyotas, but pretty sad compared to everything else Mercedes makes, not to mention other brands...