Or could the existence of things called "printed books" lead to the spread of knowledge among others who could use it, rather than having to build up their theoretical knowledge from personal experience and a few precious manuscripts? And make it more broadly available so that people with less than mutant brilliance can contribute andn publish their contributions for others?
I don't think you need to read in any great cultural change to a cross-disciplinary approach here: the problem is one well-suited to this man's exact skills, an algorithmic computation of likely human behavior. Encouraging cross-disciplinary work because people focused too tightly on one field will miss available tools from other fields is helpful, and certainly helps keep me paid for work that ranges throughout computing and engineering fields.
Given the amount of flat-out lying being revealed in other RIAA cases, and that the data security's evidence seems to be made up out of whole cloth based on what they've revealed so far, it looks like the RIAA and their paid witnesses are themselves making up plot devices. So let's be cautious before we blame someone else for invoking a metaphor, instead of giving mistaken if not fraudulent testimony in court.
That makes no sense. It's another set of lawyers, working for RIAA, who are doing the "fucking with their system". So please don't try to claim that it's lawyers being offended who will right this matter. It's lawyers being paid lots of money to contort copyright and free speech, and often lawyers become legislators accepting lobbying support, who've created this legal morass out of what was once a much simpler set of copyright guidelines.
You want this on paper as well, to keep a legally verifiable copy, and say that you sent it via email and paper. Even if it is not from a lawyer, a copy on paper shows you took it a lot more seriously than just a random email.
I think you've misread the tragedy of the commons. It's when a few or even many user begins to take slightly more than their share that you get "the tragedy of the commons". It's what the GPL is designed to avoid, and is precisely why the GPL is often more effective in protecting the commons than the BSD or Apache licenses. There is no "giving back" requirement in the original story of the commons, although "giving back" can extend the lifetime of the cocmmons by quite a lot, even making it permanent and avoiding the tragedy if done properly.
That said, he hasn't sued, so get off the high horse. Documenting *everything*, and a simple cease and desist letter from a competent intellectual property lawyer may be all that's needed if they're really in violation. If they are in violation, that competent lawyer needs to help drag their butt into court. If it were my code, I wouldn't ask on Slashdot, I'd ask the EFF and the FSF for recommendationsn for lawyers, and I'd ask over on Groklaw, not Slashdot.
4 year old laptops tend to have miniscule resources, worn out components, and lack the resouces to run recent software. I know, I'm using one right now that was mid-range four years ago and now only use because it's paid for, and I have external USB hard drives and DVD drives for other reasons. I wouldn't invest any money in repairing, much less replacing it, because components are starting to fail.
Investing $300 for such a device, rather than a new machine with a warranty, is begging to waste a lot of money and time.
You find first class seated well because their seats are bigger, their overhead bins are bigger and easier to fit oddly shaped luggage in, the aisles between their seats are bigger, they're given more time to get boarded per person, and there are often empty seats around them which eases congestion for them. There is no personal "better behavior" among them that I've noticed, but rather the rest of the plane suffers from the lack of any or all of the factors I just mentioned.
I agree that many of the rare travelers around the holidays are clueless, or poorly manage their boarding, but you don't see it among the first class travelers because their relatively generous accomodations of space and time soak up the stress better.
Sir, have you ever tried to organize a mob including 4 children on a trip? I've done it with in-laws, and it's very awkward. The priority is keeping everyone safe, including the kids and innocent bystanders. The paperwork often gets disorganized in the resulting chaos.
That ESI link looks like what I read about 5 years ago when discussing Akamai with someone who thought having a Squid server in their local network would do the same thing and we decided that no, there are big differences.
I agree that a lot of this was far from obvious when the patent was made. And I agree that this is not a patent troll issue: they actually use the patent, and the patents they've filed seem surprisingly legible. It's not like Microsoft's "57 patent violations by Linux" that they refuse to actually list or reveal.
I don't think so. Akamai's servers don't store the client's content statically, there's much, much, much too much content for that, especially for streaming media. It would be hideously expensive in disk space for their servers. Instead, they use a web proxy to rewrite the URL's, grab the content from their customer's designated servers, and keep it cached locally on that Akamai server or set of servers as it's needed. So the first hit on an image takes a while to grab from the customer, but the rest go against Akamai's servers at much higher speed and with a much better fan-out to support lots of customers.
It's basically a fanned out form of web proxy, with some fascinating DNS architecture to get you the nearest Akamai proxy. As such, it's well worth some patents: I remember when the company was created, and thinking "wow, I wish I'd thought of that!" It does leave me curious, as well, about what their core tools are? Squid and djbdns, maybe? Does anyone know?
It's been tried, repeatedly, for tools like the Boston Arm and other workarounds for severed nerves. There's a huge phase delay in any controls because of the amount of filtering needed to read the actual neurological impulse, apart from electrical noise on the skin. We're talking about 200 msec delay, minimum. That's fine for simple tasks like "lower the landing gear" or "turn on the afterburner". But for something timing sensitive, like controlling your aim-point or having your character time a jump as they run in a first-person-shooter, it's unacceptable.
It's worse: they send their kid to soccer practice with your kids, and use it to write playbooks on how to cheat for their kid's team. Look at what they did with SPF, stapling "SenderID" on top of it, breaking SPF, and taking credit for the installed SPF userbase to lend credence to their claims of anyone using SenderID.
And take a look at Active Directory. It's builot on the open standards of Kerberos, dynamic DNS, DHCP, LDAP, and the like, all woven together and proprietized in ways that not break compatibility. This includes oddnesses done to Kerberos, which MIT sued over and for which the Kerberos patches were very quickly published by MIT to fix the compatibility breakage. It's also taken years for the Samba team to reverse engineer and make a stable Active Directory replacement service, because they're refused to publish what they "extended" onto the open standard applications.
This behavior is one of the best reasons I can see for using GPL rather than the so-called "more free" licenses, because GPL style licenses actually protect us better from this sort of embrace and extend behavior.
Yes, they've learned how to steal from the very best and then make it "theirs".
Spam is traceable. For zombie-bot sent spam, it's traceable to the sending host. The spam being illegal, without the insanity of the current US "CAN-SPAM" act which has no punishment for ordinary spamming, would allow complainers or even plaintiffs to prosecute with ordinary civil lawsuits, and to force the ISP's to act against the rootkitted machines. It would also end the practice of selling "pink contracts", those ISP contracts that protect professional spammers from losing their primary network feedsd.
Even spam eventually involves money (with a very few exceptions involving plain old denial-of-service attacks). If the spam itself is untraceable, the money is not. A very modest budget for buying a few bottles of Viagra, with the existing warrant-free infrastructure so many agreed we needed in order to fight funding for terrorists or with actual, proper warrants, should trace the money quite effectively. And if a web company in Nigeria is hosting the fraudsters, then that web company can lose its upstream connectivity for permitting the abuse under the laws that already exist in Nigeria.
You see, I'm not saying "throw up your hands". I'm saying "it's not new", and "look at what has already worked". The junk fax law basically works.
Well, the lack the tools in open source is partly because Apple fills that niche reasonably well with some decent hardware and well integrated software. MacOS *is* now a UNIX variant, so they're getting those benefits as well. They also pay a lot of attention to making their tools well integrated, which is not a strongpoint of open source tools.
Also note: Linus wrote the kernel, not the OS. So don't get too confused about whose got whose head up whose ass when you make statements like that.
I'm sorry, but there is *nothing* new to these kinds of crimes. Pyramid schemes, junk fax solicitations, billboard wars obliterating public spaces with excess advertisiing, chain letters, bank frauds stealing people's account information, the Nigerian check cashing fraud, and all these other activities have plenty of precedent. Some of the precedents go back to the dawn of time.
I'll pick a single instance as an example: spam is very similar to junk fax, where advertising imposes a ridiculous burden on the recipient because of its sheer volume, but it's very cheap for the sender to do. Junk fax was stopped by enforcement of a new law, USCC section 18, paragraph 2701, which defined and outlawed junk fax in the USA. Simply extending its wording very slightly would allow it to cover spam as well, and it's easily withstood constitutional challenges from junk fax companies who felt their "free speech" was being infringed. They can talk: they just can't insist that everyone listen.
There are problems of scale, but the biggest problem is the refusal of law enforcement to act sensibly. One badly aimed trial to convict an MIT idiot for hosting a Warez website and try to set a nutty legal precedent is time that could have been used to prosecute half a dozen spammers, with far more result.
No, it's because they're fundamentally incompetent. They are a black hole for reported network abuse. They neither act, nor are they willing to delegate the task to others willing and able to take the load. And frankly, it's not that hard to change the federal policy to eliminate a lot of spam. Encourage ISP's to have responsible AUP's and enforce them, write clear guidelines on how to protect "common carrier" status, and actually prosecute people when spam hunters present the logs, the names, dates, times, and places of the spammers and script kiddies, all nicely assembled and ready to strip their Internet access with a restraining order even if you can't justify putting them in jail.
I've dropped exactly such packages of evidence off with the FBI, on at least 3 different occasions. There was a call to say thank you, and no sign of anything actually being done with the information, and on 2 of them the agents were technologically incompetent.
Well, yes, but I'm willing to grant the idea of automatic page turning for small text and small images with noticeably slower reloads. It's an ad based website, after all: automatic reloading of content seems almost mandatory for those.
Perhaps if the local cops would show anything like competence, we could take them more seriously. The FBI does not, and will not, investigate US-hosted spam and fraud operations, with only a very, very few headline-grabbing exceptions. Neither does the Secret Service, whose job the phishing schemes are because they handle wire fraud.
Making all the neighbors put up a chain link fence, when the problem is dogs that dig holes under chain link fences and your own house is the one with all the tempting garbage lying around in plastic bags that tempts the dogs in, is insane.
Hey, Mr. Walled Garden, why don't you try encouraging the use of SSL for POP and IMAP, the use of SSH instead of open telnet and rsy, and turning off services you don't need by default instead of having hte operating system leave them on automatically? (IIS and SQL and Windows file and printer sharing come to mind.)
Oh, please. The VPN access will be stolen within minutes of its publication, through rootkitted laptops traveling in and out of the networks and through pernicious downloads.
Wal-mart is an interesting case for check-handling, and I approve of their behavior, but it provides absolutely *no* protection against the average Internet fraud or phishing where passwords and account information are stolen and used remotely.
You noticed that part! We need to keep a real eye on "Un-"Trusted Computing. The software keys for it won't even be in federal hands with a structure of warrants required to get them, they live mostly in Microsoft hands with no published legal standard of how to obtain people's private keys. It's potentially quite useful for this kind of walled community: a small set of central keys provides access to the registered communications, but those keys reside in commercial hands and don't need warrants to get. I wonder who would find that helpful?
This is great for Big Brother, or his cousin the NSA, and for warrant-free unauthorized searches of electronic content. It's exceptionally bad for individual privacy. I just keep hoping that someone will find some vulnerability similar to the one that shot down the SkipJack, federally created encryption system. (It turned out you could forge your own keys, and there were at least 3 significant patent violations.)
Yes, many corporate and eduucational sites do have their own email servers. It's also a hideously bad idea to use those email services for political, dating, Usenet, or even Slashdot email handling because such activity can be a direct violation of the often very restrictive policies, and leave the email even more vulnerable to sniffing by admins you shouldn't trust than it is at Gmail.
That said, "whitelisting certain IP's" is probably far too complex a problem of managing the address list.
You've missed something. The porn site in question can also be a cracked machine, redirecting the porn traffic s well from dozens or hundereds of poorly secured porn sites. Once you've got proxying set up on the cracked machine, you can avoid the cash trail and use any of thousands of poorly secured bot machines as your front IP address.
It's much safer to use a cracked machine or set of them, than to actually pay people for services, even in a sweatshop in India.
Not workable. Corporate or academic sites that use NAT or web proxies report the same client ID for hundreds or even thousands of potential Gmail clients. Given the limitations of IPv4, we're going to see more and more of this to protect the very expensive external address spaces.
Slashdot Mirror
Or could the existence of things called "printed books" lead to the spread of knowledge among others who could use it, rather than having to build up their theoretical knowledge from personal experience and a few precious manuscripts? And make it more broadly available so that people with less than mutant brilliance can contribute andn publish their contributions for others?
I don't think you need to read in any great cultural change to a cross-disciplinary approach here: the problem is one well-suited to this man's exact skills, an algorithmic computation of likely human behavior. Encouraging cross-disciplinary work because people focused too tightly on one field will miss available tools from other fields is helpful, and certainly helps keep me paid for work that ranges throughout computing and engineering fields.
And this is different from real people..... how?
Given the amount of flat-out lying being revealed in other RIAA cases, and that the data security's evidence seems to be made up out of whole cloth based on what they've revealed so far, it looks like the RIAA and their paid witnesses are themselves making up plot devices. So let's be cautious before we blame someone else for invoking a metaphor, instead of giving mistaken if not fraudulent testimony in court.
That makes no sense. It's another set of lawyers, working for RIAA, who are doing the "fucking with their system". So please don't try to claim that it's lawyers being offended who will right this matter. It's lawyers being paid lots of money to contort copyright and free speech, and often lawyers become legislators accepting lobbying support, who've created this legal morass out of what was once a much simpler set of copyright guidelines.
You want this on paper as well, to keep a legally verifiable copy, and say that you sent it via email and paper. Even if it is not from a lawyer, a copy on paper shows you took it a lot more seriously than just a random email.
I'll say. It's a big source of revenue for RedHat, SuSE, Xen, and lots of other open source software vendors.
I think you've misread the tragedy of the commons. It's when a few or even many user begins to take slightly more than their share that you get "the tragedy of the commons". It's what the GPL is designed to avoid, and is precisely why the GPL is often more effective in protecting the commons than the BSD or Apache licenses. There is no "giving back" requirement in the original story of the commons, although "giving back" can extend the lifetime of the cocmmons by quite a lot, even making it permanent and avoiding the tragedy if done properly.
That said, he hasn't sued, so get off the high horse. Documenting *everything*, and a simple cease and desist letter from a competent intellectual property lawyer may be all that's needed if they're really in violation. If they are in violation, that competent lawyer needs to help drag their butt into court. If it were my code, I wouldn't ask on Slashdot, I'd ask the EFF and the FSF for recommendationsn for lawyers, and I'd ask over on Groklaw, not Slashdot.
4 year old laptops tend to have miniscule resources, worn out components, and lack the resouces to run recent software. I know, I'm using one right now that was mid-range four years ago and now only use because it's paid for, and I have external USB hard drives and DVD drives for other reasons. I wouldn't invest any money in repairing, much less replacing it, because components are starting to fail.
Investing $300 for such a device, rather than a new machine with a warranty, is begging to waste a lot of money and time.
You find first class seated well because their seats are bigger, their overhead bins are bigger and easier to fit oddly shaped luggage in, the aisles between their seats are bigger, they're given more time to get boarded per person, and there are often empty seats around them which eases congestion for them. There is no personal "better behavior" among them that I've noticed, but rather the rest of the plane suffers from the lack of any or all of the factors I just mentioned.
I agree that many of the rare travelers around the holidays are clueless, or poorly manage their boarding, but you don't see it among the first class travelers because their relatively generous accomodations of space and time soak up the stress better.
Sir, have you ever tried to organize a mob including 4 children on a trip? I've done it with in-laws, and it's very awkward. The priority is keeping everyone safe, including the kids and innocent bystanders. The paperwork often gets disorganized in the resulting chaos.
That ESI link looks like what I read about 5 years ago when discussing Akamai with someone who thought having a Squid server in their local network would do the same thing and we decided that no, there are big differences.
I agree that a lot of this was far from obvious when the patent was made. And I agree that this is not a patent troll issue: they actually use the patent, and the patents they've filed seem surprisingly legible. It's not like Microsoft's "57 patent violations by Linux" that they refuse to actually list or reveal.
Is Akamai actually using Squid? Or another proxy program? Under the hood, it really is a proxying technology.
I don't think so. Akamai's servers don't store the client's content statically, there's much, much, much too much content for that, especially for streaming media. It would be hideously expensive in disk space for their servers. Instead, they use a web proxy to rewrite the URL's, grab the content from their customer's designated servers, and keep it cached locally on that Akamai server or set of servers as it's needed. So the first hit on an image takes a while to grab from the customer, but the rest go against Akamai's servers at much higher speed and with a much better fan-out to support lots of customers.
It's basically a fanned out form of web proxy, with some fascinating DNS architecture to get you the nearest Akamai proxy. As such, it's well worth some patents: I remember when the company was created, and thinking "wow, I wish I'd thought of that!" It does leave me curious, as well, about what their core tools are? Squid and djbdns, maybe? Does anyone know?
It's been tried, repeatedly, for tools like the Boston Arm and other workarounds for severed nerves. There's a huge phase delay in any controls because of the amount of filtering needed to read the actual neurological impulse, apart from electrical noise on the skin. We're talking about 200 msec delay, minimum. That's fine for simple tasks like "lower the landing gear" or "turn on the afterburner". But for something timing sensitive, like controlling your aim-point or having your character time a jump as they run in a first-person-shooter, it's unacceptable.
It's worse: they send their kid to soccer practice with your kids, and use it to write playbooks on how to cheat for their kid's team. Look at what they did with SPF, stapling "SenderID" on top of it, breaking SPF, and taking credit for the installed SPF userbase to lend credence to their claims of anyone using SenderID.
And take a look at Active Directory. It's builot on the open standards of Kerberos, dynamic DNS, DHCP, LDAP, and the like, all woven together and proprietized in ways that not break compatibility. This includes oddnesses done to Kerberos, which MIT sued over and for which the Kerberos patches were very quickly published by MIT to fix the compatibility breakage. It's also taken years for the Samba team to reverse engineer and make a stable Active Directory replacement service, because they're refused to publish what they "extended" onto the open standard applications.
This behavior is one of the best reasons I can see for using GPL rather than the so-called "more free" licenses, because GPL style licenses actually protect us better from this sort of embrace and extend behavior.
Yes, they've learned how to steal from the very best and then make it "theirs".
Spam is traceable. For zombie-bot sent spam, it's traceable to the sending host. The spam being illegal, without the insanity of the current US "CAN-SPAM" act which has no punishment for ordinary spamming, would allow complainers or even plaintiffs to prosecute with ordinary civil lawsuits, and to force the ISP's to act against the rootkitted machines. It would also end the practice of selling "pink contracts", those ISP contracts that protect professional spammers from losing their primary network feedsd.
Even spam eventually involves money (with a very few exceptions involving plain old denial-of-service attacks). If the spam itself is untraceable, the money is not. A very modest budget for buying a few bottles of Viagra, with the existing warrant-free infrastructure so many agreed we needed in order to fight funding for terrorists or with actual, proper warrants, should trace the money quite effectively. And if a web company in Nigeria is hosting the fraudsters, then that web company can lose its upstream connectivity for permitting the abuse under the laws that already exist in Nigeria.
You see, I'm not saying "throw up your hands". I'm saying "it's not new", and "look at what has already worked". The junk fax law basically works.
Well, the lack the tools in open source is partly because Apple fills that niche reasonably well with some decent hardware and well integrated software. MacOS *is* now a UNIX variant, so they're getting those benefits as well. They also pay a lot of attention to making their tools well integrated, which is not a strongpoint of open source tools.
Also note: Linus wrote the kernel, not the OS. So don't get too confused about whose got whose head up whose ass when you make statements like that.
I'm sorry, but there is *nothing* new to these kinds of crimes. Pyramid schemes, junk fax solicitations, billboard wars obliterating public spaces with excess advertisiing, chain letters, bank frauds stealing people's account information, the Nigerian check cashing fraud, and all these other activities have plenty of precedent. Some of the precedents go back to the dawn of time.
I'll pick a single instance as an example: spam is very similar to junk fax, where advertising imposes a ridiculous burden on the recipient because of its sheer volume, but it's very cheap for the sender to do. Junk fax was stopped by enforcement of a new law, USCC section 18, paragraph 2701, which defined and outlawed junk fax in the USA. Simply extending its wording very slightly would allow it to cover spam as well, and it's easily withstood constitutional challenges from junk fax companies who felt their "free speech" was being infringed. They can talk: they just can't insist that everyone listen.
There are problems of scale, but the biggest problem is the refusal of law enforcement to act sensibly. One badly aimed trial to convict an MIT idiot for hosting a Warez website and try to set a nutty legal precedent is time that could have been used to prosecute half a dozen spammers, with far more result.
No, it's because they're fundamentally incompetent. They are a black hole for reported network abuse. They neither act, nor are they willing to delegate the task to others willing and able to take the load. And frankly, it's not that hard to change the federal policy to eliminate a lot of spam. Encourage ISP's to have responsible AUP's and enforce them, write clear guidelines on how to protect "common carrier" status, and actually prosecute people when spam hunters present the logs, the names, dates, times, and places of the spammers and script kiddies, all nicely assembled and ready to strip their Internet access with a restraining order even if you can't justify putting them in jail.
I've dropped exactly such packages of evidence off with the FBI, on at least 3 different occasions. There was a call to say thank you, and no sign of anything actually being done with the information, and on 2 of them the agents were technologically incompetent.
Well, yes, but I'm willing to grant the idea of automatic page turning for small text and small images with noticeably slower reloads. It's an ad based website, after all: automatic reloading of content seems almost mandatory for those.
Perhaps if the local cops would show anything like competence, we could take them more seriously. The FBI does not, and will not, investigate US-hosted spam and fraud operations, with only a very, very few headline-grabbing exceptions. Neither does the Secret Service, whose job the phishing schemes are because they handle wire fraud.
Making all the neighbors put up a chain link fence, when the problem is dogs that dig holes under chain link fences and your own house is the one with all the tempting garbage lying around in plastic bags that tempts the dogs in, is insane.
Hey, Mr. Walled Garden, why don't you try encouraging the use of SSL for POP and IMAP, the use of SSH instead of open telnet and rsy, and turning off services you don't need by default instead of having hte operating system leave them on automatically? (IIS and SQL and Windows file and printer sharing come to mind.)
Oh, please. The VPN access will be stolen within minutes of its publication, through rootkitted laptops traveling in and out of the networks and through pernicious downloads.
Wal-mart is an interesting case for check-handling, and I approve of their behavior, but it provides absolutely *no* protection against the average Internet fraud or phishing where passwords and account information are stolen and used remotely.
You noticed that part! We need to keep a real eye on "Un-"Trusted Computing. The software keys for it won't even be in federal hands with a structure of warrants required to get them, they live mostly in Microsoft hands with no published legal standard of how to obtain people's private keys. It's potentially quite useful for this kind of walled community: a small set of central keys provides access to the registered communications, but those keys reside in commercial hands and don't need warrants to get. I wonder who would find that helpful?
This is great for Big Brother, or his cousin the NSA, and for warrant-free unauthorized searches of electronic content. It's exceptionally bad for individual privacy. I just keep hoping that someone will find some vulnerability similar to the one that shot down the SkipJack, federally created encryption system. (It turned out you could forge your own keys, and there were at least 3 significant patent violations.)
Yes, many corporate and eduucational sites do have their own email servers. It's also a hideously bad idea to use those email services for political, dating, Usenet, or even Slashdot email handling because such activity can be a direct violation of the often very restrictive policies, and leave the email even more vulnerable to sniffing by admins you shouldn't trust than it is at Gmail.
That said, "whitelisting certain IP's" is probably far too complex a problem of managing the address list.
You've missed something. The porn site in question can also be a cracked machine, redirecting the porn traffic s well from dozens or hundereds of poorly secured porn sites. Once you've got proxying set up on the cracked machine, you can avoid the cash trail and use any of thousands of poorly secured bot machines as your front IP address. It's much safer to use a cracked machine or set of them, than to actually pay people for services, even in a sweatshop in India.
Not workable. Corporate or academic sites that use NAT or web proxies report the same client ID for hundreds or even thousands of potential Gmail clients. Given the limitations of IPv4, we're going to see more and more of this to protect the very expensive external address spaces.