Yeah, except Mastercard and Visa between them have a duopoly in many countries. And if you think the RIAA doesn't also have a team negotiating with Visa, I may have a bridge you might be interested in.
Not necessarily so. I'm given to understand - though I'm not a mathematician myself by any means - that the problem is not so much maths is difficult as teaching is difficult.
While it's relatively easy to teach a subject to someone who's been blessed with a pretty innate grasp of it, it's damn difficult to teach that exact same subject to someone who doesn't have such a grasp.
Whether intentional or not, that was definitely worded in a somewhat trollish way.
In any case, I'll bite.
The simple truth is... sssh, come closer.
Closer.
The "F/OSS community" is by and large abysmal at coming up with great new solutions. It's far better at taking an existing idea and running with it - probably because nobody has ever got a group of people together to say "With our experience and problems that we and so many others face, what fantastic solution can we put together?" without paying them first. OTOH, lots of successful projects have come about as a result of someone - or a small group of people - saying "We've got this product which has the potential to be a fantastic solution to problems X and Y, and maybe Z as well. Right now it's OK with X and Y, if a little rough around the edges. We haven't even started on Z, but we're opening it to the community".
What's really embarrassing is when the F/OSS community not only doesn't solve a problem, but pronounces it unsolveable even in the face of evidence to the contrary in the form of commercial software which is generally considered to solve it quite nicely, TYVM. I can think of quite a few OSS projects where the leaders have announced that they don't plan to even try to solve a particular problem because they have mathematically proven that it is impossible, only to proudly announce about 12-18 months later that their latest release does actually solve it.
That, actually, is entirely possible (and IIRC has happened a couple of times).
I can well imagine a scenario where business A is perfectly honest but through sheer bad luck happens to be sharing hardware with the rather less honest business B at a well-known cloud provider. (Why that absurd word? You still have to run your servers as if they were onsite, the only difference is they're virtual servers in some other buggers infrastructure).
Law enforcement storms in with a warrant to take everything which has ever held B's data - and if that happens to include hardware vital to A, C, D, E and indeed the rest of the alphabet - sucks to be them. And the law won't be changed to make it harder for that to happen, because the huge companies doing the lobbying are big enough that if they do use an outsourced provider, chances are their hardware will be totally separate to everyone else's.
I don't know it's quite as bad as you make out. This isn't the first time the industry's gone full circle, and it probably won't be the last - right now it's a PITA if you're in IT because the current fashion for "cloud-everything" has a tendency to push jobs towards the companies running cloud services - many of whom are running the show from a country with very low labour costs. The PHBs of this world assume the outsourced provider has a whacking great infrastructure with fancy SANs, enormous numbers of RAIDed disks, redundancy coming out the ass etc etc - and while the majority of providers don't tell you much about their infrastructure, I note that none are particularly quick to contradict this view.
Five years from now I'm sure a few companies will decide that the cost of running everything in-house is worth every penny and bring things back inhouse. My guess is it'll start to happen when the first outsourced-cloud-infrastructure company announces some huge terrible thing to go wrong which seriously affects a significant number of their customers.
Not really. It'll help if the weak point is dynamic content being generated by your own app, but if the weak point is anywhere else (eg. your link to the Internet), it'll achieve precisely nothing.
Absolutely right, and something I've been thinking a bit about lately.
Even if you succeed in telling people not to click on every silly little advert and run random software that you don't really need, most web browsers these days save them the trouble. It's not stupid, it's downright insanity. You've got an application which - by design - downloads and executes code from random locations with more-or-less zero oversight.
Which is why you don't do it that way. I can think of a few ways you can do it, with relatively little hassle (albeit some expense):
- Contract with someone like OpenDNS to use their filtered DNS service for your customers and transparently redirect all DNS queries to that service. It won't do anything about using raw IP addresses or services which aren't as heavily dependent on DNS as web browsing, but that's practically nobody these days. I'd think it's certainly enough to shut up your average MP.
- Transparently proxy anything you don't like. Most ISPs are already operating a transparent proxy, and in the UK they're already blocking child porn. Again, only really effective against plain HTTP.
The problem with this system, at least in the United States, is that there is a huge grey area where a students parents make too much for him to get financial aid, but not enough for them to realistically put him through the school in question.
That's going to be the case in more-or-less any country with means-tested education. It seems almost inevitable when such means testing is based purely on gross income rather than expenditure - I swear the people who work out the numbers don't have to pay a mortgage, rent or buy food.
(I'm not in the US, but don't tell me the US doesn't have means-tested education. Charging a small fortune to go to a top university, less to go to a local college with bursary and scholarship schemes available to outstanding students from poorer backgrounds is precisely means-tested education, just under another name.)
That was my reading as well. The bank explicitly told the account holder that the cheques had cleared, but then changed their mind. I thought the whole point of the clearing process and delays were to verify the validity and liquidity of a cheque.
You'd think so, wouldn't you? Similar thing happened to my wife on ebay - accepted a cheque, banked it, waited the three business days it was supposed to take to clear, verified with the bank it had definitely cleared before shipping - and then it bounced two weeks later. It turns out that when a bank tells you a cheque has cleared, what they don't tell you is they mean "subject to a whole lot of other things which can still happen".
She was totally unaware of this, as was I. And this was in the UK...
They won't because most ISPs are already blocking child porn (and this was done some years ago with very little fuss, largely because nobody has yet invented a way to fuss about these things without coming across as a kiddie-fiddling pervert).
God I wish someone would. It's pretty ridiculous when anything can get passed if its proponents just manage to connect it to "preventing" kiddie-porn.
I should make clear this wasn't legislation. The UK government discovered a few years ago that they could achieve almost the exact same effect as legislation (without all the onerous debate, voting and subsequent legal challenges) by simply calling a meeting with the parties involved and giving them an ultimatum: do this thing we're asking you do or we'll pass legislation which forces you to.
If you were scared before, I bet you're terrified now.
Don't really see the point in periodical scans, either. Most modern malware is perfectly capable of hiding itself from such a scan, you need to have the AV product actively running in realtime against everything and block at the perimeter of the PC.
I stopped doing that decades ago after I grew up and couldn't be forced to eat them. Now I look at my friends who are vegetarians, and am shocked at how old they look compared to my mostly meat-eating self.
Easiest way to fuck up a vegetarian diet is to take a normal meat-eaters diet and simply cut out the meat. You can't do that and expect to be healthy, you have to actually learn to cook properly - which means more than just cooking good food, it means cooking nutritious food. It is possible to get every nutrient you need, but it'd be quite difficult unless you know exactly what things you need to eat.
Disclaimer: Way back in the mists of time, I went to a vegetarian school. You weren't obliged to be veggie, but meat and meat products weren't allowed on the premises.
In what is no doubt a complete coincidence, since a modern "healthy" diet with plenty of vegetables was introduced to the Inuit after World War II, obesity, diabetes, and cancer have gone from nothing to epidemic proportions and lifespan is plummeting.
Sounds like a variant on something in a play I was once in. (Forgive the paraphrasing, it was fifteen years ago):
A: Curries are all very well, but eat too many and they rot your kidneys. B: Eurgh. I won't eat any more A: Once in a while is all right. Everything in moderation! But in your grandfathers day, nobody ate curry. Kidney transplants were unheard of.
i have on my uni provided laptop forefront client security. it seems to be identical to MSE. the only problem is that these idiots have made it impossible to change the auto scan schedule.
"These idiots" usually do that kind of thing because it's the only way to ensure that "those other idiots" (ie. you) don't either disable it altogether or otherwise turn down the settings so much that you may as well disable it altogether.
You tried calling any major ISP's technical support lately? I can predict exactly how that conversation would turn out:
Me: Hi, I'm calling because I want to confirm whether a page is genuinely unavailable or if you are blocking it? CSR: (thick Indian accent) Can I confirm your account number, thank you please sir? Me: Sure, it's 1234567890. My name is Peter South [it isn't but let's imagine it is for this, OK?] CSR: Well, thank you for calling us Mr. Smith. So what is the problem that it is you are having today? Me: I'm trying to visit this page (read URL) and it's coming back with a 404. Is that your system or is it genuinely unavailable? CSR: Ah, so you are having trouble getting on the Internet Mr. Scott. Have you tried rebooting your PC? Me: No, that's not what I meant. I'm getting an HTTP error which I think may have been injected by your system.... CSR: I appreciate that, Mr. North, but I need you to reboot your PC before I can help you any further. Me: The problem isn't with my PC! CSR: I realise that, Mr. West, but I am not allowed to be continuing this call until you have rebooted your PC. Me: ach. (pause 1 minute, lies) Okay, it's rebooted. Still getting a 404. CSR: Could you do please be holding the line Mr. Southerby? Me: OK. (wait 5 minutes) CSR: I have spoken to my supervisor, he says your computer has a virus. Me: That's nothing to do with it, it doesn't have a virus and.... look, can I speak to your supervisor please? CSR: Certainly sir (wait 5 minutes) CSRSupervisor: Good evening, Mr. Green, I understand your PC is having a virus? Me: No, that's not the problem at all. I need to know if a page is genuinely unavailable or if you're inserting fake 404s. CSRSupervisor: Well, Mr. South, I will have to be checking to be seeing what it is you are having a problem with. What is the page you cannot load? Me: (repeat URL) CSRSupervisor: That page doesn't exist. Me: Yes I know that's what comes back. Now is that because of something you're doing or is it genuinely not there? CSRS: Well, Mr. Scott, it is that page it doesn't exist. You should contact the owner of the website. Me: You're quite sure it's not a 404 your systems are injecting? CSRS: I am not sure I am understanding you, Mr. St. John. Me: (click).
I live with a teacher, and have worked in local schools myself.
I know for a fact that at least two of the schools in my area have discovered that their kids are busy making their own porn, which they cheerfully send each other via their phones.
Doesn't surprise me. I'm waiting for the first case where Daddy is arrested for child porn because his loving daughter was playing doctors and nurses with a friend, decided to use her Christmas present to film it and he was caught with the doll in his possession.
I don't know how effective it's been (I'm really not too keen on prison food), but they did manage to get every major ISP to put blocks in place through that age-old government technique of "get everyone together and tell them that if they don't do something, legislation will be passed to make them".
Google for "internet watch foundation" if you want to know more.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, except Mastercard and Visa between them have a duopoly in many countries. And if you think the RIAA doesn't also have a team negotiating with Visa, I may have a bridge you might be interested in.
Possibly, but I'll bet the printing and distribution is a relatively small part of the total cost.
Maybe not a USB key, but a credit-card sized smartcard along with a passphrase or word to unlock it would be a lot easier.
For one thing, people would tend to keep it in their wallet rather than on a keychain (which immediately means it'll be looked after much better).
The person you're replying to and the person whose wife left high school in 2003 are two different people.
People don't do that when they're only mildly annoyed - which right now, no matter how much you complain, is the case for most.
People do that when they are absolutely, desperately hacked off and there really is precisely nothing more they can do short of revolution.
Not necessarily so. I'm given to understand - though I'm not a mathematician myself by any means - that the problem is not so much maths is difficult as teaching is difficult.
While it's relatively easy to teach a subject to someone who's been blessed with a pretty innate grasp of it, it's damn difficult to teach that exact same subject to someone who doesn't have such a grasp.
Whether intentional or not, that was definitely worded in a somewhat trollish way.
In any case, I'll bite.
The simple truth is... sssh, come closer.
Closer.
The "F/OSS community" is by and large abysmal at coming up with great new solutions. It's far better at taking an existing idea and running with it - probably because nobody has ever got a group of people together to say "With our experience and problems that we and so many others face, what fantastic solution can we put together?" without paying them first. OTOH, lots of successful projects have come about as a result of someone - or a small group of people - saying "We've got this product which has the potential to be a fantastic solution to problems X and Y, and maybe Z as well. Right now it's OK with X and Y, if a little rough around the edges. We haven't even started on Z, but we're opening it to the community".
What's really embarrassing is when the F/OSS community not only doesn't solve a problem, but pronounces it unsolveable even in the face of evidence to the contrary in the form of commercial software which is generally considered to solve it quite nicely, TYVM. I can think of quite a few OSS projects where the leaders have announced that they don't plan to even try to solve a particular problem because they have mathematically proven that it is impossible, only to proudly announce about 12-18 months later that their latest release does actually solve it.
There is one crucial difference - it's a hell of a lot faster than X over SSH.
That, actually, is entirely possible (and IIRC has happened a couple of times).
I can well imagine a scenario where business A is perfectly honest but through sheer bad luck happens to be sharing hardware with the rather less honest business B at a well-known cloud provider. (Why that absurd word? You still have to run your servers as if they were onsite, the only difference is they're virtual servers in some other buggers infrastructure).
Law enforcement storms in with a warrant to take everything which has ever held B's data - and if that happens to include hardware vital to A, C, D, E and indeed the rest of the alphabet - sucks to be them. And the law won't be changed to make it harder for that to happen, because the huge companies doing the lobbying are big enough that if they do use an outsourced provider, chances are their hardware will be totally separate to everyone else's.
The Register ran an article which said much the same thing (albeit worded rather differently) last month:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/19/mobile_phone_platforms/page2.html
I don't know it's quite as bad as you make out. This isn't the first time the industry's gone full circle, and it probably won't be the last - right now it's a PITA if you're in IT because the current fashion for "cloud-everything" has a tendency to push jobs towards the companies running cloud services - many of whom are running the show from a country with very low labour costs. The PHBs of this world assume the outsourced provider has a whacking great infrastructure with fancy SANs, enormous numbers of RAIDed disks, redundancy coming out the ass etc etc - and while the majority of providers don't tell you much about their infrastructure, I note that none are particularly quick to contradict this view.
Five years from now I'm sure a few companies will decide that the cost of running everything in-house is worth every penny and bring things back inhouse. My guess is it'll start to happen when the first outsourced-cloud-infrastructure company announces some huge terrible thing to go wrong which seriously affects a significant number of their customers.
Not really. It'll help if the weak point is dynamic content being generated by your own app, but if the weak point is anywhere else (eg. your link to the Internet), it'll achieve precisely nothing.
Absolutely right, and something I've been thinking a bit about lately.
Even if you succeed in telling people not to click on every silly little advert and run random software that you don't really need, most web browsers these days save them the trouble. It's not stupid, it's downright insanity. You've got an application which - by design - downloads and executes code from random locations with more-or-less zero oversight.
Which is why you don't do it that way. I can think of a few ways you can do it, with relatively little hassle (albeit some expense):
- Contract with someone like OpenDNS to use their filtered DNS service for your customers and transparently redirect all DNS queries to that service. It won't do anything about using raw IP addresses or services which aren't as heavily dependent on DNS as web browsing, but that's practically nobody these days. I'd think it's certainly enough to shut up your average MP.
- Transparently proxy anything you don't like. Most ISPs are already operating a transparent proxy, and in the UK they're already blocking child porn. Again, only really effective against plain HTTP.
The problem with this system, at least in the United States, is that there is a huge grey area where a students parents make too much for him to get financial aid, but not enough for them to realistically put him through the school in question.
That's going to be the case in more-or-less any country with means-tested education. It seems almost inevitable when such means testing is based purely on gross income rather than expenditure - I swear the people who work out the numbers don't have to pay a mortgage, rent or buy food.
(I'm not in the US, but don't tell me the US doesn't have means-tested education. Charging a small fortune to go to a top university, less to go to a local college with bursary and scholarship schemes available to outstanding students from poorer backgrounds is precisely means-tested education, just under another name.)
That was my reading as well. The bank explicitly told the account holder that the cheques had cleared, but then changed their mind. I thought the whole point of the clearing process and delays were to verify the validity and liquidity of a cheque.
You'd think so, wouldn't you? Similar thing happened to my wife on ebay - accepted a cheque, banked it, waited the three business days it was supposed to take to clear, verified with the bank it had definitely cleared before shipping - and then it bounced two weeks later. It turns out that when a bank tells you a cheque has cleared, what they don't tell you is they mean "subject to a whole lot of other things which can still happen".
She was totally unaware of this, as was I. And this was in the UK...
They won't because most ISPs are already blocking child porn (and this was done some years ago with very little fuss, largely because nobody has yet invented a way to fuss about these things without coming across as a kiddie-fiddling pervert).
God I wish someone would. It's pretty ridiculous when anything can get passed if its proponents just manage to connect it to "preventing" kiddie-porn.
I should make clear this wasn't legislation. The UK government discovered a few years ago that they could achieve almost the exact same effect as legislation (without all the onerous debate, voting and subsequent legal challenges) by simply calling a meeting with the parties involved and giving them an ultimatum: do this thing we're asking you do or we'll pass legislation which forces you to.
If you were scared before, I bet you're terrified now.
Afraid not, I don't use MSE.
Don't really see the point in periodical scans, either. Most modern malware is perfectly capable of hiding itself from such a scan, you need to have the AV product actively running in realtime against everything and block at the perimeter of the PC.
I stopped doing that decades ago after I grew up and couldn't be forced to eat them. Now I look at my friends who are vegetarians, and am shocked at how old they look compared to my mostly meat-eating self.
Easiest way to fuck up a vegetarian diet is to take a normal meat-eaters diet and simply cut out the meat. You can't do that and expect to be healthy, you have to actually learn to cook properly - which means more than just cooking good food, it means cooking nutritious food. It is possible to get every nutrient you need, but it'd be quite difficult unless you know exactly what things you need to eat.
Disclaimer: Way back in the mists of time, I went to a vegetarian school. You weren't obliged to be veggie, but meat and meat products weren't allowed on the premises.
In what is no doubt a complete coincidence, since a modern "healthy" diet with plenty of vegetables was introduced to the Inuit after World War II, obesity, diabetes, and cancer have gone from nothing to epidemic proportions and lifespan is plummeting.
Sounds like a variant on something in a play I was once in. (Forgive the paraphrasing, it was fifteen years ago):
A: Curries are all very well, but eat too many and they rot your kidneys.
B: Eurgh. I won't eat any more
A: Once in a while is all right. Everything in moderation! But in your grandfathers day, nobody ate curry. Kidney transplants were unheard of.
i have on my uni provided laptop forefront client security. it seems to be identical to MSE. the only problem is that these idiots have made it impossible to change the auto scan schedule.
"These idiots" usually do that kind of thing because it's the only way to ensure that "those other idiots" (ie. you) don't either disable it altogether or otherwise turn down the settings so much that you may as well disable it altogether.
You tried calling any major ISP's technical support lately? I can predict exactly how that conversation would turn out:
Me: Hi, I'm calling because I want to confirm whether a page is genuinely unavailable or if you are blocking it?
CSR: (thick Indian accent) Can I confirm your account number, thank you please sir?
Me: Sure, it's 1234567890. My name is Peter South [it isn't but let's imagine it is for this, OK?]
CSR: Well, thank you for calling us Mr. Smith. So what is the problem that it is you are having today?
Me: I'm trying to visit this page (read URL) and it's coming back with a 404. Is that your system or is it genuinely unavailable?
CSR: Ah, so you are having trouble getting on the Internet Mr. Scott. Have you tried rebooting your PC?
Me: No, that's not what I meant. I'm getting an HTTP error which I think may have been injected by your system....
CSR: I appreciate that, Mr. North, but I need you to reboot your PC before I can help you any further.
Me: The problem isn't with my PC!
CSR: I realise that, Mr. West, but I am not allowed to be continuing this call until you have rebooted your PC.
Me: ach. (pause 1 minute, lies) Okay, it's rebooted. Still getting a 404.
CSR: Could you do please be holding the line Mr. Southerby?
Me: OK. (wait 5 minutes)
CSR: I have spoken to my supervisor, he says your computer has a virus.
Me: That's nothing to do with it, it doesn't have a virus and.... look, can I speak to your supervisor please?
CSR: Certainly sir (wait 5 minutes)
CSRSupervisor: Good evening, Mr. Green, I understand your PC is having a virus?
Me: No, that's not the problem at all. I need to know if a page is genuinely unavailable or if you're inserting fake 404s.
CSRSupervisor: Well, Mr. South, I will have to be checking to be seeing what it is you are having a problem with. What is the page you cannot load?
Me: (repeat URL)
CSRSupervisor: That page doesn't exist.
Me: Yes I know that's what comes back. Now is that because of something you're doing or is it genuinely not there?
CSRS: Well, Mr. Scott, it is that page it doesn't exist. You should contact the owner of the website.
Me: You're quite sure it's not a 404 your systems are injecting?
CSRS: I am not sure I am understanding you, Mr. St. John.
Me: (click).
I live with a teacher, and have worked in local schools myself.
I know for a fact that at least two of the schools in my area have discovered that their kids are busy making their own porn, which they cheerfully send each other via their phones.
Doesn't surprise me. I'm waiting for the first case where Daddy is arrested for child porn because his loving daughter was playing doctors and nurses with a friend, decided to use her Christmas present to film it and he was caught with the doll in his possession.
I guarantee it'll happen in the next 2 years.
I don't know how effective it's been (I'm really not too keen on prison food), but they did manage to get every major ISP to put blocks in place through that age-old government technique of "get everyone together and tell them that if they don't do something, legislation will be passed to make them".
Google for "internet watch foundation" if you want to know more.
Except, they haven't...not even close.
Be that as it may, I would strongly recommend you do not write to your MP - or for that matter your ISP - informing them of this.