What *are* you talking about? I'm not suggesting you shouldn't battle the forces of evil: I'm suggesting that you shouldn't be surprised or shocked that they exist or pretend that they're unique. You can learn quite a lot about how to combat them from seeing what's been effective in the past, and what's merely ineffective grandstanding or idle claims.
For example, an ISP owner in this situation might try to find a way to leak the information safely. Or take a good look at the customer's account and find some reason to drop them as a customer, graciously, and fail to tell the FBI. Or better yet, look at the customer's *public* records such as their public web pages and blogs, and try to figure out why the FBI is investigating them. Or, as this owner did, find a way to go public with as much information as possible so that these things are not occurring completely in the dark and people are more aware of the abuse.
But let's not pretend that unconstitutional and illegal searches for evidence are anything new.
And even then, they can lie about your having received it or opened it. Take a look into the old Amateur Action pornography case: an aggressive postal inspector sent a porn site some unsolicted bestiality and other materials and got them convicted for trafficking in it, from another state, even though they never opened the package. They only realized it was the postal inspector himself who sent it when they noticed the signature on the labels matched the signature on the warrant. (http://www.eff.org/Censorship/?f=obscen_virtcom_s tds_godwin.article)
Oh, reporting Internet fraud of various sorts rapidly gets you on the Secret Service's watch list, since they're nominally responsible for handling wire fraud. They're bad at it, but it is their task as the enforcement arm of the Treasury.
You can also wind up on the NSA's watch lists for asking hard questions about what this unnoticed room is in the plans of your local major telecom when planning co-location facilities there, and reviewing the blue prints, and actually trying to trace the cables back. This can cause really *amazing* concerns on the part of the security team when you ask hard questions about it when debugging signal losses on you upstream links.
I love youngsters. I suggest that you examine what happens to people who provide medical marijuana, people who blow the whistle on illegal chemical and bacteriological warfare attempts by the US, people who exposed the CIA use of LSD in experiments as an interrogation drug in the 60's, the McCarthy era's hunt for "Communists" at the massive cost of civil liberties, the illegal imprisoning of foreign nationals without charges filed or the Geneva convention or the US code of military justice allwed to apply to them,
Brave people do stand up to such abuse: but the risk for a small business owner of refusing to cooperate is quite high, even if they win in court. Take a look at Steve Jackson Games and the old Secret Service raid on them for an example of how badly aimed such an investigation can be, and of how innocent people can suffer as they try to stand up for themselves in the IT world.
Google took on the responsibility of censoring content for the Chinese government (http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8FBCF686 &show_article=1, and numerous other articles on it). The question is thus not whether Google can censor: the question is *how much* they'll do it.
Google gave up the righteous stance of being unwilling to censor when they went along with political content censorship: the decision will haunt them in this and similar situations, where the content doesn't have the protection of international treaties against such censorship but often falls under international copyright laws.
No, I'm afraid not. It's easy to tell on even a casual glance whether a video has nudity or pornography. It's quite awkward to search for copyright: verifying the copyrights alone is a job for a seriously large legal department, especially with "fair use" laws or policies.
I'm not young. And Iraq is becoming the new "Godwin's Law" in electronic discussions.
But the young'un has good points on every single issue he or she raised. Look again at those issues if you can find time: even the Canada soft timber one was a solid gripe. Complaining about government subsidies in a trade partner is great, but the US lost the court cases on this 3 times and imposed an illegal tariff in direct violation of NAFTA as punishment. Then when the US lost its case in the WTO about tax breaks for corporations being subsidies, then it was "oh, no, those aren't subsidies! Honest!"
Well educated young'un, I think. Despite their rough posting style, I'm glad to see them out here.
Really? Tell that to New Orleans, where they're fairly successfully stopping the Mississippi, and tell it to the Dutch, who've successfully stopped the Atlantic Ocean.
It's amazing how long you can succeed in holding back something "unstoppable". It's not always successful, but people can and do live their entire lives in the areas at risk.
There are limits to the "many files in the same filesystem". It's still possible to overwhelm any filesystem with too many files in it
ReiserFS has other problems: see. (See http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2 007/03/09/BAG1OOI9ID46.DTL and numerous other articles.) It's always bad news for a filesystem when its author manages to lose something that way: it tends to hinder development, and make one wonder what else is buried where.
Has it improved a lot in the last 2 years? I was unimpressed a few years ago, but it may have gotten better. I've gone through serious pain with many other such systems, being asked to test and evaluate them and often seeing them come up quite short.
It's not the email. Email is easy: it's the integration with calendar services, and *that* has been painful. There are just too many badly written, never completed open source calendar servers and none of them are well integrated with the clients.
And Adobe pre-loader. And the MS Office pre-loader. And all the "download assistants". And all the adware and spyware. And the boot-time tools that try to pre-index your file system, which will definitely slow things as your system gets more files on it.
The list goes on, and some of it is very hard to get rid of. I love SpyBot for blocking it: they don't have the legal fears of calling spyware and adware by their right names, even if it's "selected" by ignorant users who don't know it's incorporated into other downloads. Some commercial anti-virus packages have taken on this business of blocking adware, but it's a legally nasty business for them.
But those are *exactly* the sorts of things Windows users have put up with for years. Manual driver installations for hardware not supported by the basic Windows OS is quite normal for laptops, especially for fancy display chipsets, newer wireless or serial port chipsets, or even newer hard drive controllers. This is why OEM manufacturers send those update CD's, and encourage you to visit their websites for newer drivers.
Don't mark Ubunto down for that: give them credit for keeping it easy to update and fix. Since the bug was reported, expect Ubuntu to address this in the next generation's X configuration tool. (Or expect Debian to fix it, if they can properly push the problem upstream.)
Oh, you *can*. I recommend www.tomshardware.com for looking up the best components if you do this. But it's very labor intensive, and unless you're willing to ruin some parts and maybe not have things work right the first 3 times I don't recommend it for building something new or with high end parts.
Do it with old parts or scrapped systems first. You'll learn quite a lot about component layout and making sure your cables don't block your airflow, and be much more likely to have stable drivers for older equipment. And a PC built from parts less than 3 years old should be plenty to run a reasonable Linux.
You will probably wind up buying more RAM, though.
Trust me, you wouldn't. Getting the varous low-power modes, display, wireless, and touchpad drivers working on a bare laptop is often a couple of weeks research and talking to kernel authors to get the latest patches and build them in. You might relish such a task, but I've usually got better things to do with my time.
But they'd lose sales: most consumers still want Windows. And by buying those licenses in bulk, and *especially* buying licenses for every single machine they sell to satisfy Microsoft's demonstrated and illegal behind the scenes leveraging of their monopoly position, they can save a chunk of money on every other machine's license costs. You can't simply factor these prices on a machine by machine basis: the "bottom line" of their business has to be looked at across the whole variety of machines they sell.
Moreover, Linux users are often tough to support and cost more in tech support. We're quite clueful, and expect our systems to do everything they're supposed to do, and we sometimes demand that things work together that have never been tested together. (Such as putting in an entirely new version of OpenOffice or X or Perl and expecting it to "just work", or expecting our X configuration tools to work on this new cheap LCD monitor that has only been on the market for 3 weeks.) Such support calls are expensive to handle.
That's for Windows 2003 Server. That's comparable to the price of RedHat "Advanced Server", which has extra licensed capabalities and support, and they take your bug reports a lot more serously than for consumer versions of operating systems.
You've got a good point. I've actually had it happen, and negotiated the argument between the QA people who hadn't gotten around to testing recent enough kernels to support the new chipset for understandable reasons, the computer manufacturer who hadn't taken the hint that "do not change things" means "do not change things", and the motherboard makers who said "you're running a kernel *how old*!!????"
It's worse for laptops: the chipsets there are often being "enhanced" in various ways that make maintaining drivers for them quite difficult. So a pre-installed laptop is a godsend: you can expect the touchpad, the wireless, and the X settings for the display to all work.
Oh, they've got more "versions" than that. They've got "Basic Edition" for a number of those "strands" as well, and it's very difficult to find the full chart of all the client and server and basic and other variants on their website: the data seemsm deliberately separated into different chunks so that industrial users don't realize that the "Basic" edition is available and fits most of their actual needs.
And that's exactly why RedHat can't run that repository. Xine, Mplayer, etc. rely on software patented tools like MPEG players, tools for which RedHat hasn't paid the fees and for which CentOS users don't bother because there is no way to *pay* those license fees for Linux applications. (I've tried in industrial setups to get DVD players and MPEG players: it's still no little to no US patent license obeying software available.)
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What *are* you talking about? I'm not suggesting you shouldn't battle the forces of evil: I'm suggesting that you shouldn't be surprised or shocked that they exist or pretend that they're unique. You can learn quite a lot about how to combat them from seeing what's been effective in the past, and what's merely ineffective grandstanding or idle claims.
For example, an ISP owner in this situation might try to find a way to leak the information safely. Or take a good look at the customer's account and find some reason to drop them as a customer, graciously, and fail to tell the FBI. Or better yet, look at the customer's *public* records such as their public web pages and blogs, and try to figure out why the FBI is investigating them. Or, as this owner did, find a way to go public with as much information as possible so that these things are not occurring completely in the dark and people are more aware of the abuse.
But let's not pretend that unconstitutional and illegal searches for evidence are anything new.
You've been practicing with the SCO legal documents over at groklaw.net, haven't you?
And even then, they can lie about your having received it or opened it. Take a look into the old Amateur Action pornography case: an aggressive postal inspector sent a porn site some unsolicted bestiality and other materials and got them convicted for trafficking in it, from another state, even though they never opened the package. They only realized it was the postal inspector himself who sent it when they noticed the signature on the labels matched the signature on the warrant. (http://www.eff.org/Censorship/?f=obscen_virtcom_s tds_godwin.article)
This is, in fact, correct. You have to lie. Take it from anyone who's done work involving non-disclosure agreements who actually takes them seriously.
Oh, reporting Internet fraud of various sorts rapidly gets you on the Secret Service's watch list, since they're nominally responsible for handling wire fraud. They're bad at it, but it is their task as the enforcement arm of the Treasury.
You can also wind up on the NSA's watch lists for asking hard questions about what this unnoticed room is in the plans of your local major telecom when planning co-location facilities there, and reviewing the blue prints, and actually trying to trace the cables back. This can cause really *amazing* concerns on the part of the security team when you ask hard questions about it when debugging signal losses on you upstream links.
Not *this* president. And it's clear that the increasingly popular electronic votings are open to massive fraud.
I love youngsters. I suggest that you examine what happens to people who provide medical marijuana, people who blow the whistle on illegal chemical and bacteriological warfare attempts by the US, people who exposed the CIA use of LSD in experiments as an interrogation drug in the 60's, the McCarthy era's hunt for "Communists" at the massive cost of civil liberties, the illegal imprisoning of foreign nationals without charges filed or the Geneva convention or the US code of military justice allwed to apply to them,
Brave people do stand up to such abuse: but the risk for a small business owner of refusing to cooperate is quite high, even if they win in court. Take a look at Steve Jackson Games and the old Secret Service raid on them for an example of how badly aimed such an investigation can be, and of how innocent people can suffer as they try to stand up for themselves in the IT world.
Google took on the responsibility of censoring content for the Chinese government (http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8FBCF686 &show_article=1, and numerous other articles on it). The question is thus not whether Google can censor: the question is *how much* they'll do it.
Google gave up the righteous stance of being unwilling to censor when they went along with political content censorship: the decision will haunt them in this and similar situations, where the content doesn't have the protection of international treaties against such censorship but often falls under international copyright laws.
No, I'm afraid not. It's easy to tell on even a casual glance whether a video has nudity or pornography. It's quite awkward to search for copyright: verifying the copyrights alone is a job for a seriously large legal department, especially with "fair use" laws or policies.
I'm not young. And Iraq is becoming the new "Godwin's Law" in electronic discussions.
But the young'un has good points on every single issue he or she raised. Look again at those issues if you can find time: even the Canada soft timber one was a solid gripe. Complaining about government subsidies in a trade partner is great, but the US lost the court cases on this 3 times and imposed an illegal tariff in direct violation of NAFTA as punishment. Then when the US lost its case in the WTO about tax breaks for corporations being subsidies, then it was "oh, no, those aren't subsidies! Honest!"
Well educated young'un, I think. Despite their rough posting style, I'm glad to see them out here.
Really? Tell that to New Orleans, where they're fairly successfully stopping the Mississippi, and tell it to the Dutch, who've successfully stopped the Atlantic Ocean.
It's amazing how long you can succeed in holding back something "unstoppable". It's not always successful, but people can and do live their entire lives in the areas at risk.
There are limits to the "many files in the same filesystem". It's still possible to overwhelm any filesystem with too many files in it
2 007/03/09/BAG1OOI9ID46.DTL and numerous other articles.) It's always bad news for a filesystem when its author manages to lose something that way: it tends to hinder development, and make one wonder what else is buried where.
ReiserFS has other problems: see. (See http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/
Has it improved a lot in the last 2 years? I was unimpressed a few years ago, but it may have gotten better. I've gone through serious pain with many other such systems, being asked to test and evaluate them and often seeing them come up quite short.
Apple hardware is unusual: it's well-tested and well-defined. That makes a huge difference for installing *anything*.
It's not the email. Email is easy: it's the integration with calendar services, and *that* has been painful. There are just too many badly written, never completed open source calendar servers and none of them are well integrated with the clients.
And Adobe pre-loader. And the MS Office pre-loader. And all the "download assistants". And all the adware and spyware. And the boot-time tools that try to pre-index your file system, which will definitely slow things as your system gets more files on it.
The list goes on, and some of it is very hard to get rid of. I love SpyBot for blocking it: they don't have the legal fears of calling spyware and adware by their right names, even if it's "selected" by ignorant users who don't know it's incorporated into other downloads. Some commercial anti-virus packages have taken on this business of blocking adware, but it's a legally nasty business for them.
But those are *exactly* the sorts of things Windows users have put up with for years. Manual driver installations for hardware not supported by the basic Windows OS is quite normal for laptops, especially for fancy display chipsets, newer wireless or serial port chipsets, or even newer hard drive controllers. This is why OEM manufacturers send those update CD's, and encourage you to visit their websites for newer drivers.
Don't mark Ubunto down for that: give them credit for keeping it easy to update and fix. Since the bug was reported, expect Ubuntu to address this in the next generation's X configuration tool. (Or expect Debian to fix it, if they can properly push the problem upstream.)
Oh, you *can*. I recommend www.tomshardware.com for looking up the best components if you do this. But it's very labor intensive, and unless you're willing to ruin some parts and maybe not have things work right the first 3 times I don't recommend it for building something new or with high end parts.
Do it with old parts or scrapped systems first. You'll learn quite a lot about component layout and making sure your cables don't block your airflow, and be much more likely to have stable drivers for older equipment. And a PC built from parts less than 3 years old should be plenty to run a reasonable Linux.
You will probably wind up buying more RAM, though.
Trust me, you wouldn't. Getting the varous low-power modes, display, wireless, and touchpad drivers working on a bare laptop is often a couple of weeks research and talking to kernel authors to get the latest patches and build them in. You might relish such a task, but I've usually got better things to do with my time.
But they'd lose sales: most consumers still want Windows. And by buying those licenses in bulk, and *especially* buying licenses for every single machine they sell to satisfy Microsoft's demonstrated and illegal behind the scenes leveraging of their monopoly position, they can save a chunk of money on every other machine's license costs. You can't simply factor these prices on a machine by machine basis: the "bottom line" of their business has to be looked at across the whole variety of machines they sell.
Moreover, Linux users are often tough to support and cost more in tech support. We're quite clueful, and expect our systems to do everything they're supposed to do, and we sometimes demand that things work together that have never been tested together. (Such as putting in an entirely new version of OpenOffice or X or Perl and expecting it to "just work", or expecting our X configuration tools to work on this new cheap LCD monitor that has only been on the market for 3 weeks.) Such support calls are expensive to handle.
That's for Windows 2003 Server. That's comparable to the price of RedHat "Advanced Server", which has extra licensed capabalities and support, and they take your bug reports a lot more serously than for consumer versions of operating systems.
Let's just be sure to compare apples to apples.
You've got a good point. I've actually had it happen, and negotiated the argument between the QA people who hadn't gotten around to testing recent enough kernels to support the new chipset for understandable reasons, the computer manufacturer who hadn't taken the hint that "do not change things" means "do not change things", and the motherboard makers who said "you're running a kernel *how old*!!????"
It's worse for laptops: the chipsets there are often being "enhanced" in various ways that make maintaining drivers for them quite difficult. So a pre-installed laptop is a godsend: you can expect the touchpad, the wireless, and the X settings for the display to all work.
19: Profit!
Oh, they've got more "versions" than that. They've got "Basic Edition" for a number of those "strands" as well, and it's very difficult to find the full chart of all the client and server and basic and other variants on their website: the data seemsm deliberately separated into different chunks so that industrial users don't realize that the "Basic" edition is available and fits most of their actual needs.
And that's exactly why RedHat can't run that repository. Xine, Mplayer, etc. rely on software patented tools like MPEG players, tools for which RedHat hasn't paid the fees and for which CentOS users don't bother because there is no way to *pay* those license fees for Linux applications. (I've tried in industrial setups to get DVD players and MPEG players: it's still no little to no US patent license obeying software available.)