Most of the ISP filtering nowadays isn't based on protocol specific filtering... it's based on the idea that if you have multiple incoming connections all at once, you're probably using BitTorrent, so they filter you.
If you can get around that, you're a smarter man than I.
Easy enough. Proxy everything over a VPN tunnel - then an eavesdropper can't tell if you're using a lot of bandwidth with one connection or many.
UK copyright law is criminal liability - and we don't really tend to award punitive damages in the civil system so the $millions in fines you see awarded in the US wouldn't happen over here.
But even then there is plenty of opportunity to deal with criminal offences outside the court system.
Fixed penalties for speeding, customs agents have the right to impound your car if you import too much booze or tobacco - they don't need a court order to do so. Councils routinely hand out fines for parking which is decriminalised and the only appeal route is to go via the people who issued the ticket in the first place.
On my Amiga I can still convert a CD to MP3s and upload them with little worry of anyboady cathing me( at least if I'm connected to my neighbors wireless!) Oops, probably a bad thread for this I might get arrested! Uh, just kidding, I don't even on a CD-ROM drive!
Given that the fastest processor ever fitted to a generally-available amiga was a 50MHz 68000 chip, I suspect the use of the singular to refer to the CD you convert to MP3 may be quite appropriate.
It probably doesn't help that so many cameras generate such shitty images that you wind up with a news report saying "Police are looking for an amorphous grey blob that stabbed another amorphous grey blob".
He isn't saying that punishment has no effect, he says that harsher punishment has no effect. People might reason about getting captured by police, but they don't reason about getting 5 instead of 3 years in jail when commiting their act.
Have you seen the average police force's clearup figures?
The chances of anyone in the UK being caught, arrested, prosecuted and punished for most crimes short of murder are absolutely disgraceful.
I think even bankruptcy protection is enough to get that result.
Anything is enough to give that result, because gift vouchers/cards are more or less entirely unregulated. They essentially amount to an agreement that you pay the store now and someone - anyone - can come in and pick up items to the value of whatever you paid them. Subject to terms and conditions like "if we decide tomorrow to abandon this scheme and nullify anything issued under it, that's your problem".
why give somebody the equivalent of cash that can only be used at one store and which becomes worthless if that store declares bankruptcy
I think a lot of people are asking the same question over here in the UK right now. Over the Christmas/new year period, a number of companies which operated gift vouchers went out of business.
Insurance companies also include force majeure as a get-out clause in their policies.
You don't think it's remotely possible that "complete collapse of all privately-held financial institutions" would be classed as Force Majeure by the insurance company, hmm?
You don't respond to a terrorist attack by filing a lawsuit -- you respond by killing and/or imprisoning those responsible.
We in the UK tried that with the Irish problem on and off for about 400 years.
The thing that finally worked was when a lot of the funding for the main terrorist organisation disappeared - the main catalyst for which was, ironically, 9/11. It taught the US what a terrible thing terrorism is and in so doing destroyed one of the IRAs greatest sources of funding.
A lot depends on where you live - different parts of Britain have different policies regarding what drugs and procedures you can have.
The ones that hit the headlines is where the difference lies in drugs for really nasty conditions - like cancer, Alzheimers, that sort of stuff.
The other thing you may not have experienced is Accident and Emergency. If you're well enough to come in and report to reception yourself (rather than be rushed in in an ambulance), waits of 4 hours or so are not uncommon.
Having said all that, I'd much rather have the UK system - imperfect though it may be - than the US system where nobody seems to think it's so bad for a family to have to take their child home to die simply because they can't afford the procedure necessary to save the child's life.
I just hope we get this smart-chip cards soon so at least they cannot be copied. Bloody hell, here's something that could use some stimulus and regulation. Mandate the upgrade to these cards and give us the names.
Aw, bless.
A few of the things that have been known to happen with the chip cards in the UK, where they were introduced a couple of years ago:
1. The magnetic stripe's still there. Stripe gets cloned, information is sent to some far-off country and used over there where chip cards don't exist. Chip & PIN won't solve this until it's rolled out worldwide and the magnetic stripe is discontinued altogether.
2. There are plenty of attacks which have been used with some success against Chip & PIN, including fake readers in petrol stations (either the petrol station owner is dishonest or - more likely because it seems to affect huge numbers at a time - some random bloke is coming in off the street and saying "I'm here to replace your card reader" and the person behind the counter just says "OK then").
I wouldn't bet on it. The UK government has been making noises both for and against open source every couple of years.
SOP with these things is that Microsoft send out a few of their top salesmen who then concoct a bunch of figures about how much more expensive open source software is and before you know it the ink will be drying on a contract with Microsoft for many millions of £.
Anyone who's been in IT any length of time has read these "cost-savings" figures salesmen like to produce - they almost invariably include at least one absolutely ridiculous overblown item which only applies to the competition and suddenly - as if by magic! - their product looks fantastically cheap.
I've looked into Microsoft licensing for a number of things in the past and a few of the clauses make for interesting reading.
Let me preface this by saying I'm in the UK, I've been speaking to MS UK and it's them this information comes from. I have no idea how well these terms would stand up in a court of law or how flexible they are if you've got government-sized budgets but.... if you want an educational license - or, for that matter, one of the more flexible enterprise license schemes, one of the terms of the license is you MUST buy a license for every computer that's physically capable of running the software.
Every PC, every laptop, even every x86-based Mac.
Of course you can go down the "Open" licensing route which (AFAIK) has no such rule but while I haven't priced it up, I bet it quickly becomes drastically cheaper not to.
Suddenly, OpenOffice doesn't look like such a cost saver unless you roll it out to everyone. Nor does Ubuntu.
This is politics. They'll happily accept the Latest! New! version of office with zero retraining but give them anything that's not Office and they'll demand £hundreds worth of training per user.
Most people don't really think "But what if these powers were to be abused?" - and until such time as there's enough evidence to prove that this is happening regularly, the stock answer to "Everyone has done something wrong; example...." is generally "Well of course they won't enforce it like that..."
Then you wind up with the argument "why word it like that?" and "how do you know the next government won't? - laws don't just disappear because a different government's taken power"
Or, to spin it another way - the BNP (UK political party full of racist bigots, often described as Nazis) is gaining ground in some parts of the country. The way the current government is doing now, the BNP could get in and they'd already have all the tools they could possibly want to forward a manifesto of full-blown ethnic cleansing without having to pass many laws at all.
Yeah, but look at the remediation if they fail to meet the uptime - you get some free days of service. That's it. Rather crap of a guarantee.
I know of no hosted service which will indemnify you for $1,000,000 if they go down for an hour and, by sheer bad luck, that downtime causes you to demonstrably lose a US$1,000,000 order.
Funnily enough, that may be easier than you think.
I'm quite sure I've noticed a shift from the media in the last couple of months away from "ID everyone!!11" and towards "Is this a Big Brother state?". Wonderful, it only took them about 5 years.
I find it incredible that people find the idea of this organisation covertly removing content acceptable.
Firstly, until the recent Wikipedia issue blew up, the IWF was practically unheard of in the UK.
Secondly, while we'd all love to believe that something like "oh, by the way - there's a 95% chance that everything you do online is being monitored and censored" would have people taking to the streets with pitchforks and torches, the fact of the matter is it doesn't. I hate to say it, but a large percentage of the population fully subscribe to the idea that if you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear.
Thirdly, this is one of those hot potatoes that it's very difficult to argue against - anyone who does is likely to find themselves tarred as someone who's "sympathetic to paedophiles". This doesn't just apply to politicians - our mass media is just as capable of demonising people as anyone else's and I don't know many people who would have the stomach for being plastered all over the front page of the papers with headlines like "Sick pervert wants to allow photos of child abuse!!11oneone"
If the defacto standard was opensource, with provably well implemented encryption, then I wouldn't be safe from the criminal hordes.
It could have been. If an opensource project created a product which worked as well as skype I'm sure it could easily have been as popular.
The problem with a plain SIP client is you suddenly find you need a SIP account with a provider - there aren't many truly international SIP providers and they don't all have agreements to allow SIP calls to be carried for free, which adds a lot of complication. And every layer of complication you add to a product will put a lot of people off.
You have no idea how many people - on both sides of the Linux/MS divide - simply never stop to think to themselves "Hang on a minute, this is a boring repetitive task which takes a long time - exactly the kind of thing computers excel at - and I'm not making the computer do it?!"
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Most of the ISP filtering nowadays isn't based on protocol specific filtering... it's based on the idea that if you have multiple incoming connections all at once, you're probably using BitTorrent, so they filter you.
If you can get around that, you're a smarter man than I.
Easy enough. Proxy everything over a VPN tunnel - then an eavesdropper can't tell if you're using a lot of bandwidth with one connection or many.
UK copyright law is criminal liability - and we don't really tend to award punitive damages in the civil system so the $millions in fines you see awarded in the US wouldn't happen over here.
But even then there is plenty of opportunity to deal with criminal offences outside the court system.
Fixed penalties for speeding, customs agents have the right to impound your car if you import too much booze or tobacco - they don't need a court order to do so. Councils routinely hand out fines for parking which is decriminalised and the only appeal route is to go via the people who issued the ticket in the first place.
On my Amiga I can still convert a CD to MP3s and upload them with little worry of anyboady cathing me( at least if I'm connected to my neighbors wireless!) Oops, probably a bad thread for this I might get arrested! Uh, just kidding, I don't even on a CD-ROM drive!
Given that the fastest processor ever fitted to a generally-available amiga was a 50MHz 68000 chip, I suspect the use of the singular to refer to the CD you convert to MP3 may be quite appropriate.
You can be denied entry onto a flight for any reason whatsoever - even "the security inspector x-raying your hand luggage didn't get laid last night".
It probably doesn't help that so many cameras generate such shitty images that you wind up with a news report saying "Police are looking for an amorphous grey blob that stabbed another amorphous grey blob".
He isn't saying that punishment has no effect, he says that harsher punishment has no effect. People might reason about getting captured by police, but they don't reason about getting 5 instead of 3 years in jail when commiting their act.
Have you seen the average police force's clearup figures?
The chances of anyone in the UK being caught, arrested, prosecuted and punished for most crimes short of murder are absolutely disgraceful.
I think even bankruptcy protection is enough to get that result.
Anything is enough to give that result, because gift vouchers/cards are more or less entirely unregulated. They essentially amount to an agreement that you pay the store now and someone - anyone - can come in and pick up items to the value of whatever you paid them. Subject to terms and conditions like "if we decide tomorrow to abandon this scheme and nullify anything issued under it, that's your problem".
why give somebody the equivalent of cash that can only be used at one store and which becomes worthless if that store declares bankruptcy
I think a lot of people are asking the same question over here in the UK right now. Over the Christmas/new year period, a number of companies which operated gift vouchers went out of business.
Insurance companies also include force majeure as a get-out clause in their policies.
You don't think it's remotely possible that "complete collapse of all privately-held financial institutions" would be classed as Force Majeure by the insurance company, hmm?
You don't respond to a terrorist attack by filing a lawsuit -- you respond by killing and/or imprisoning those responsible.
We in the UK tried that with the Irish problem on and off for about 400 years.
The thing that finally worked was when a lot of the funding for the main terrorist organisation disappeared - the main catalyst for which was, ironically, 9/11. It taught the US what a terrible thing terrorism is and in so doing destroyed one of the IRAs greatest sources of funding.
A lot depends on where you live - different parts of Britain have different policies regarding what drugs and procedures you can have.
The ones that hit the headlines is where the difference lies in drugs for really nasty conditions - like cancer, Alzheimers, that sort of stuff.
The other thing you may not have experienced is Accident and Emergency. If you're well enough to come in and report to reception yourself (rather than be rushed in in an ambulance), waits of 4 hours or so are not uncommon.
Having said all that, I'd much rather have the UK system - imperfect though it may be - than the US system where nobody seems to think it's so bad for a family to have to take their child home to die simply because they can't afford the procedure necessary to save the child's life.
I just hope we get this smart-chip cards soon so at least they cannot be copied. Bloody hell, here's something that could use some stimulus and regulation. Mandate the upgrade to these cards and give us the names.
Aw, bless.
A few of the things that have been known to happen with the chip cards in the UK, where they were introduced a couple of years ago:
1. The magnetic stripe's still there. Stripe gets cloned, information is sent to some far-off country and used over there where chip cards don't exist. Chip & PIN won't solve this until it's rolled out worldwide and the magnetic stripe is discontinued altogether.
2. There are plenty of attacks which have been used with some success against Chip & PIN, including fake readers in petrol stations (either the petrol station owner is dishonest or - more likely because it seems to affect huge numbers at a time - some random bloke is coming in off the street and saying "I'm here to replace your card reader" and the person behind the counter just says "OK then").
3. A cash machine is rigged to allow the thief to steal your card: http://www.travelfinances.com/blog/index.php/2006/12/27/card-fishing-atm-scam/
I once had a user request training after their old keyboard was replaced with a new one. I wish I were joking.
Sounds like someone just looking for an excuse to avoid doing any work. There's someone like that in a lot companies of any size.
I wouldn't bet on it. The UK government has been making noises both for and against open source every couple of years.
SOP with these things is that Microsoft send out a few of their top salesmen who then concoct a bunch of figures about how much more expensive open source software is and before you know it the ink will be drying on a contract with Microsoft for many millions of £.
Anyone who's been in IT any length of time has read these "cost-savings" figures salesmen like to produce - they almost invariably include at least one absolutely ridiculous overblown item which only applies to the competition and suddenly - as if by magic! - their product looks fantastically cheap.
I've looked into Microsoft licensing for a number of things in the past and a few of the clauses make for interesting reading.
Let me preface this by saying I'm in the UK, I've been speaking to MS UK and it's them this information comes from. I have no idea how well these terms would stand up in a court of law or how flexible they are if you've got government-sized budgets but.... if you want an educational license - or, for that matter, one of the more flexible enterprise license schemes, one of the terms of the license is you MUST buy a license for every computer that's physically capable of running the software.
Every PC, every laptop, even every x86-based Mac.
Of course you can go down the "Open" licensing route which (AFAIK) has no such rule but while I haven't priced it up, I bet it quickly becomes drastically cheaper not to.
Suddenly, OpenOffice doesn't look like such a cost saver unless you roll it out to everyone. Nor does Ubuntu.
This is politics. They'll happily accept the Latest! New! version of office with zero retraining but give them anything that's not Office and they'll demand £hundreds worth of training per user.
Most people don't really think "But what if these powers were to be abused?" - and until such time as there's enough evidence to prove that this is happening regularly, the stock answer to "Everyone has done something wrong; example ...." is generally "Well of course they won't enforce it like that..."
Then you wind up with the argument "why word it like that?" and "how do you know the next government won't? - laws don't just disappear because a different government's taken power"
Or, to spin it another way - the BNP (UK political party full of racist bigots, often described as Nazis) is gaining ground in some parts of the country. The way the current government is doing now, the BNP could get in and they'd already have all the tools they could possibly want to forward a manifesto of full-blown ethnic cleansing without having to pass many laws at all.
pfft. I've had this running as an apache module for years. mod_bigbrother ftw.
OK, I admit it, I googled mod_bigbrother to see if it really existed.
It doesn't yet, but given the number of modules that exist for Apache
Yeah, but look at the remediation if they fail to meet the uptime - you get some free days of service. That's it. Rather crap of a guarantee.
I know of no hosted service which will indemnify you for $1,000,000 if they go down for an hour and, by sheer bad luck, that downtime causes you to demonstrably lose a US$1,000,000 order.
Funnily enough, that may be easier than you think.
I'm quite sure I've noticed a shift from the media in the last couple of months away from "ID everyone!!11" and towards "Is this a Big Brother state?". Wonderful, it only took them about 5 years.
I find it incredible that people find the idea of this organisation covertly removing content acceptable.
Firstly, until the recent Wikipedia issue blew up, the IWF was practically unheard of in the UK.
Secondly, while we'd all love to believe that something like "oh, by the way - there's a 95% chance that everything you do online is being monitored and censored" would have people taking to the streets with pitchforks and torches, the fact of the matter is it doesn't. I hate to say it, but a large percentage of the population fully subscribe to the idea that if you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear.
Thirdly, this is one of those hot potatoes that it's very difficult to argue against - anyone who does is likely to find themselves tarred as someone who's "sympathetic to paedophiles". This doesn't just apply to politicians - our mass media is just as capable of demonising people as anyone else's and I don't know many people who would have the stomach for being plastered all over the front page of the papers with headlines like "Sick pervert wants to allow photos of child abuse!!11oneone"
If the defacto standard was opensource, with provably well implemented encryption, then I wouldn't be safe from the criminal hordes.
It could have been. If an opensource project created a product which worked as well as skype I'm sure it could easily have been as popular.
The problem with a plain SIP client is you suddenly find you need a SIP account with a provider - there aren't many truly international SIP providers and they don't all have agreements to allow SIP calls to be carried for free, which adds a lot of complication. And every layer of complication you add to a product will put a lot of people off.
Neither did he. The one who abused his position is the theif who got caught on camera, i.e. you. I mean, ummm, your friend.
Didn't say anything about him being a thief either, did I?
You just hurt your own case. He abused his position and lost his job thereby proving that there isn't a problem.
Didn't say the person who was likely to lose their job was the manager who handed over the CCTV tapes, did I?
You have no idea how many people - on both sides of the Linux/MS divide - simply never stop to think to themselves "Hang on a minute, this is a boring repetitive task which takes a long time - exactly the kind of thing computers excel at - and I'm not making the computer do it?!"