No, a big chunk of the CPU and network time of mailservers is eaten up by spam, even if you don't try to block. With over half of all email being spam these days, and much of that email bouncing and thus not being directly spam but still resulting from it, it's even worse.
For many sys-admins, dealing with the spam when a particular burst of it exceeds any sane threshold they might have predicted for spam takes many hours, if not days, of expensive adminn time to clear up. And it keeps happening to small sites that can hardly afford the resources.
According to folks at trade shows, Brian Wanger was still there 4 years ago, still in good management graces. So he's learned to shut up on Usenet since the old threats he made against Dennis Erlich of exposing confidential material from Dennis's confidential "auditing" or confessional meteerial, but that's not startling, especially because his higher ups in the Office of Special Affairs probably had a little talk with him about doing it so publicly, and the cult pulled every publicly identifiable member off the Usenet group since then.
I was aware Netcom had been bought out: it's not too shocking they wound up with Earthlink, but it's a loss. The ISP's have been going through real feeding frenzies to drive each other out of business andn leave only a few sharks active.
But notice the bait and switch here: nowhere do you say "they don't have password access", you say "you didn't have to blurt out your password". That's not what the password entries are for, the cleartext passwords are so that they read the password to *you* when you lose it. Given that kind of behavior, how touch can it be to psych out the call center people and get them to give you someone else's password? Or for a disgruntled employee to give your password to a friend of theirs, or to sell the list to a cracker, or even to poke around in the accounts of co-workers who also have Earthlink accounts.
All of this stuff is possible: much of it is even extremely likely given the overall size of their call center staff. The possibility of misuse is exacerbated by the historical behavior of the cult of which several of their top staff are very active members.
Now, blocking SMB and outgoing port 25: this is fairly trivial at the core routers. It's very difficult to block at the scattered Points of Presence (POP) of other providers around the world, but by doing it as a general policy on their own directly controlled networks, they could vastly encourage the policy worldwide. Plenty of ISP's worldwide do precisely this, but not enough to set it as a default.
Ahh. Notice that you didn't address the real point, that what Earthlink is doing is entirely re-active, not pro-active.
Pro-active technological seteps would be monitoring their user's SMTP traffic for excess outgoing traffic, blocking outgoing port 25, running viral scans for viruses over the past six months, blocking incoming SMB and other ports to home machines to reduce script kiddie installation of viruses, and more recently using SPF in their DNS. (OK, they're publishing SPF records: good! But they're not filtering on it yet.)
Netcom has a much better history of actually catching spammers: Earthlink's recent involvement of prosecution of a child pornographer was *in spite of* their policies, not due to their policies, since the FBI was simply subpoena-ing records which Earthlink only very reluctantly provided. (Understandable reluctance, but it's not like they reported or caught the misbhavior.)
Other pro-active steps would include refusing to sell "pink" contracts which some professional spammers use to buy up commercial spamming space. Even if the spammers get kicked off for abusing such a pink contract, such contracts are pretty cheap and can easily be used by a professional spammer to send many millions of messages before this spamfighter in the original article can get around to unplugging them. And by buying a set of them at a time, under slightly different names, they can continue to abuse quite a lot of the Earthlink connectivity and fall over to the next set of accounts whenever needed.
Now, passwords. I suggest you talk to your relatives and less technologically oriented friends and assess how many of them use the same passwords for their email, for their banking, for their web services like Slashdot and Expedia, for their FTP sites, and for a dozen other services. Even if it's only 10% of such users (and I'm sure it's higher, from harsh experience!), that means that the Earthlink accounts people have access to many thousands of bank accounts, not just to email.
That's a real temptation. Add in the limited security in place in a facility stupid enough to keep such data online for convenience, and you're asking to be hacked by script kiddies. Add in the long history of Scientology's "Guardian Office", now called the "Office of Special Affairs" in breaking into buildings, planting bomb threats to discredit authors, and generally being nasty crooks, and I trust their upper level staff heavily involved in Scientology such as Sky Dayton (president) and Brian Wanger (one of their leading sys-admins) to keep these data safe about as much as I trust a chipmunk not to steal bird seed from the bird feeder in my back yard.
And friend, my data is not from working from them. It's from talking to their active staff at the sys-admin level, although admittedly my last long talk with any of them was at MacWorld two years ago. Maybe it's changed, but there's frankly no reason to think so: they're still doing those L. Ron Hubbard mandated weekly reports every Thursday, at least last I heard.
No, they're afraid the US governmentn will run Eric Raymond's "shredder" programm and find more lovely bits of source code they've stolen, and verify that OpenOffice in fact does not use Microsoft's source code despite the lawsuits.
You didn't see it because they papered over the L. Ron Hubbard quotes on their WISE management brochures when they started successfully buying other ISP's. Remember those weekly reports on all employees every Thursday, and how resources only went to people pushing salable products rather than people warning in advance about a disaster in the offing? Straight L. Ron Hubbard management policy, as taught by WISE.
Storing passwords in plaintext is *always* insecure. It means that every one in the company who can access passwords, by hook or by crook, can access all of them in plain text and use them or sell them. It's not necessary in any modern software system, and it's an incredibly bad idea unless you want your employees (especially managers) to be able to access anyone else's resources at whim.
You want to trust Eartthlink's co-founder Reed Slatkin, who got busted for running a pyramid scheme, with your mother's and cousin's email passwords that they probably foolishly use for their checking accounts and credit cards, and which can be stolen and sold off by any disgruntled employee or anyone who can pierce Earthlink's only modest database security? I don't think so.
Friend, I've done tech support in various ways for several decades. Yes, it makes your tech support job easier to reset the password to whatever somebody had in their scattered email clients but can't be bothered to remember or reset. But it's still stupid.
What you describe is merely re-active, not pro-active. Pro-active would be joining the ISP's using SPF, refusing to sell "pink" contracts to spammers which contractually permit them to send unsolicited bulk advertising, etc.
What you describe is over-"re"acting, where doubtful is dirty and any question of proprietary behavior is dealt with harshly. It's understandable: spammers lie so much and pretend so much that their behavior is all "opt-in" that it colors our responses to companies and mailing lists like yours that are, in fact, opt-in and doing everything right.
Reed Slatkin, for those who don't know, never was their president. Sky Dayton, an active and fairly sizable Scientology contributor, is and has been the president since their start.
Reed was one of their founders and got arrested for running a pyramid scheme. Given the financing misbehaviors of many start-up ISP's, it's not real surprising that one of their early managers also ran pyramid schemes, but that seems to be extremely common for the upper level Scientology members. They had a bunch of their upper staff in Europe also busted for running pyramid schemes involving those miracle "laundry balls", the ones that supposedly wash your laundry without soap but where you're actually just using the soap stuck to the walls of the washing machine from previous washes, and the "laundry ball" has nothing to do with it.
At Earthlink, absolutely. Earthlink's commitment to user security is absolutely non-existent. It's easier for them to manage with un-encrypted passwords: it's much faster and cheaper in tech time to tell someone their old password on the phone, or give it to the nice FBI man who asks for it, than to have to deal with encrypted passwords and reset passwords for people and send them the *new* password safely.
Earthlink will take ease of management over genuine security any day: that kind of behavior is built into the WISE management guidelines they follow, although after all the complaints about the Scientology management techniques they don't call them WISE anymore.
If you think I'm kidding, look into the background of Sky Dayton and their original CTO, who jumped out of a building on L. Ron Hubbard's birthday when he went back to college.
There's a big difference between "average" and "typical". A few professional spammers make a real business out of it, but they make a real business by selling the spam services, but by selling the spammed products.
Spammers are mostly like pyramid scheme or Ponzi scheme victims: the promise of money gets them to invest their time and effort, and only the few people at the top of the business actually make any real money.
Many are in.kr, true. But both the sender and the target audience for most of those spams is in fact the US, because the senders have the bandwidth to do the sending and because the suckers in the US have more money to pay for the primarily fraudulent or porn spam that makes up so much of it
Banning MAC addresses is not that useful. First, it costs a lot of extra effort in building up a monitoring tool suite and switch configurations to ban them, unless they happen to be already using forced DHCP. Second, a lot of Earthlink clients use actual Points of Presence (POPs) that are on other companies' networks. Third, almost any modern network card will let you code in a different MAC address to deal with exactly that kind of situation where you switch machines and there's some MAC-based permission. Fourth, a new network card these days only costs about $20 if you can't find a dozen of them in your parts bin from old repaired or replaced computers. Fifth, a lot of folks use "internet firewall" boxes that provide an arbitrary front end DHCP/MAC address configuration so you can swap it for your desktop in talking to your ISP.
Overall, it's not usually worth the effort to filter on a MAC address basis.
Read it again. He "takes orders from the FBI", etc., regarding child pornography, he doesn't contact them.
What the article describes is entirely re-active. In no way is it pro-active: pro-active costs money, and keeps the spammers from signing up in the first place to send the spam. This is typical Earthlink, whose focus is on making the weekly progress reports their departments favor as taught by the "WISE" management techniques so favored by their Scientology educated president and his top staff.
It's not evil, but given their history of blowing off complaints for months or even years until faced with real consequences such as a Usenet Death Penalty where all posts from Earthlink would be actively cancelled, it's not topnotch.
I'm not the idiot who misnamed the "locale" setting as "LANG" in gettext. And no, LANG=en will definitely screw up a lot of old man pages that worked for years and which the authors have never bothered to re-write dozens of different language pages for and left their old nroff documentation the heck alone, not realizing that these silly gettext and internationalization users would waste their time breaking perfectly good ASCII and curses output formerly used for underlining or creating bold print.
Nope. Most of them are still in the US, especially the commercial spamming service people who constitute the largest volume of spam. This is partly because the US has the most bandwidth, and partly because the US has the most money.
That may change, but prosecuting the US business people involved would help encourage ISP's to expose the spammers as clearly criminal.
I turn in a dozen clearly fraudulent spams a month, which are blithely ignored by law enforcement. The problem is not "catching". The law enforcement agencies can easily, if they wish, get subpoenas to track the records or follow a canceled check or credit card to get the worst of the spammers.
The problem is that they can't be bothered unless it involves hundreds of thousands of dollars of blatant wire fraud, and even then they're quite incompetent at following the evidence or even prosecuting for the right crime.
And they're not trying very hard. A new patentable algorithm is worth money. A performance improvement is also worth money and makes your software better.
Most security measures, such as checking return values and carefully allocating memory or evaluating possible sizes of inputs, cost CPU time, slow your systems, and cost time to do. And they're often best understood by the most expensive programmers on a team, not the new guys and interns handed these new development problems, so they get tacked on only as an afterthought.
Even though this kind of vulnerability is *extremely* bad, it's not as permanently dangerous as the ubiquitous "web-bugs" in web pages and email advertising, which use an off-site 1x1 pixel transparent gif in order to provide user tracking information to the other site. These help provide user tracking without cookies and can in fact be used to transmit passwords from phishing web sites by writing fascinatingly encoded URL's to grab the web bag, and can be used to pierce the anonymity of users who receive email.
Nasty, nasty, nasty little widgets for which there are very few plans to block them. While blocking them by blocking "off-site" images is useful, it's easily defeated by writing Akamai's web-caching URL's instead of straight URL's. Since Akamai's web caching can't be blocked without messing up huge numbers of high-content websites, guess what "web content delivery" company also sells web-bug tracking services?
Text-only browsers, man. If the web page doesn't work right with a text-only browser, it's done wrong and isn't worth visiting.
It's a funnier joke than you knew. Check out the "Installing Linux on a Dead Badger" article at http://www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20040405/badge r.shtml.
Years ago, someone worked out how to print holograms in sugar coatings on chocolate. How about printing a hologram on top of the chocolate to make it look like a 3D object? Or chocolate that still seems to be there, just fuzzier, when you bite off half the chocolate.
But I have to admit, this was a really, really cool design.
Learn to write shorter posts, please.
You wrote: "The librarian's authority stops at the door to the library; it does not extend to people sitting or standing outside."
This is legally mistaken. The library's authority also extends to its grounds, its parking lot, its books that are loaned out, and certainly to its own network. The level of authority and responsibility may differ depending on whether you're inside the building, for example in the ability to insist that you be quiet for the other patrons.
The story is not about "face value". The story is about suspicion and appearances. While the cop was probably wildly mistaken in bothering someone using a public access point, you can't simply take the word of someone who, when asked to stop using one network, starts probing for other networks to use nearby instead and finds a secretive, out-of-view location to post the story without the cop's awareness. You need at least some character witness to be completely sure of his overall honesty.
You wrote: "Unsecured goods or services available for free on open grounds are meant to be used."
This is not necessarily true. There are unattended news-stands that leave the papers out and have a can next to them for change, jugglers who perform in public who put out a hat, and other services that are meant to be *shared* in various socially agreed ways. We don't know from the article that the network was meant to be used outside the library. It's reasonable, but it's not a given.
Please don't make up claims like that out of whole cloth or your perceptions of the social mores of someone of someone who then went and hid out to post the article out of the view of the cop.
No, I was serious. There was no indication from the article of what kind of priest he was: could be Discordian or a member of the Church of Bob Dobbs for all that was in the article. As it turns out from other postings by this guy, he's an Episcopal priest. But those don't normally wear the "Roman collar" unless they're acting in an official capacity, so the cop probably had no way of knowing the guy was a priest.
And frankly, a lot of bloggers and people who like to crack into wi-fi networks lie like bandits about who they are and what they were up to, so I'd like to verify this guy's statmenets. There's no compelling reason to think he's fibbing, but the whole thing sounds a bit fishy, so I'd want to check it out before treating it as more than a "friend of a friend" story.
Slashdot Mirror
No, a big chunk of the CPU and network time of mailservers is eaten up by spam, even if you don't try to block. With over half of all email being spam these days, and much of that email bouncing and thus not being directly spam but still resulting from it, it's even worse. For many sys-admins, dealing with the spam when a particular burst of it exceeds any sane threshold they might have predicted for spam takes many hours, if not days, of expensive adminn time to clear up. And it keeps happening to small sites that can hardly afford the resources.
According to folks at trade shows, Brian Wanger was still there 4 years ago, still in good management graces. So he's learned to shut up on Usenet since the old threats he made against Dennis Erlich of exposing confidential material from Dennis's confidential "auditing" or confessional meteerial, but that's not startling, especially because his higher ups in the Office of Special Affairs probably had a little talk with him about doing it so publicly, and the cult pulled every publicly identifiable member off the Usenet group since then.
I was aware Netcom had been bought out: it's not too shocking they wound up with Earthlink, but it's a loss. The ISP's have been going through real feeding frenzies to drive each other out of business andn leave only a few sharks active.
But notice the bait and switch here: nowhere do you say "they don't have password access", you say "you didn't have to blurt out your password". That's not what the password entries are for, the cleartext passwords are so that they read the password to *you* when you lose it. Given that kind of behavior, how touch can it be to psych out the call center people and get them to give you someone else's password? Or for a disgruntled employee to give your password to a friend of theirs, or to sell the list to a cracker, or even to poke around in the accounts of co-workers who also have Earthlink accounts.
All of this stuff is possible: much of it is even extremely likely given the overall size of their call center staff. The possibility of misuse is exacerbated by the historical behavior of the cult of which several of their top staff are very active members.
Now, blocking SMB and outgoing port 25: this is fairly trivial at the core routers. It's very difficult to block at the scattered Points of Presence (POP) of other providers around the world, but by doing it as a general policy on their own directly controlled networks, they could vastly encourage the policy worldwide. Plenty of ISP's worldwide do precisely this, but not enough to set it as a default.
But they're learning.
Ahh. Notice that you didn't address the real point, that what Earthlink is doing is entirely re-active, not pro-active.
Pro-active technological seteps would be monitoring their user's SMTP traffic for excess outgoing traffic, blocking outgoing port 25, running viral scans for viruses over the past six months, blocking incoming SMB and other ports to home machines to reduce script kiddie installation of viruses, and more recently using SPF in their DNS. (OK, they're publishing SPF records: good! But they're not filtering on it yet.)
Netcom has a much better history of actually catching spammers: Earthlink's recent involvement of prosecution of a child pornographer was *in spite of* their policies, not due to their policies, since the FBI was simply subpoena-ing records which Earthlink only very reluctantly provided. (Understandable reluctance, but it's not like they reported or caught the misbhavior.)
Other pro-active steps would include refusing to sell "pink" contracts which some professional spammers use to buy up commercial spamming space. Even if the spammers get kicked off for abusing such a pink contract, such contracts are pretty cheap and can easily be used by a professional spammer to send many millions of messages before this spamfighter in the original article can get around to unplugging them. And by buying a set of them at a time, under slightly different names, they can continue to abuse quite a lot of the Earthlink connectivity and fall over to the next set of accounts whenever needed.
Now, passwords. I suggest you talk to your relatives and less technologically oriented friends and assess how many of them use the same passwords for their email, for their banking, for their web services like Slashdot and Expedia, for their FTP sites, and for a dozen other services. Even if it's only 10% of such users (and I'm sure it's higher, from harsh experience!), that means that the Earthlink accounts people have access to many thousands of bank accounts, not just to email.
That's a real temptation. Add in the limited security in place in a facility stupid enough to keep such data online for convenience, and you're asking to be hacked by script kiddies. Add in the long history of Scientology's "Guardian Office", now called the "Office of Special Affairs" in breaking into buildings, planting bomb threats to discredit authors, and generally being nasty crooks, and I trust their upper level staff heavily involved in Scientology such as Sky Dayton (president) and Brian Wanger (one of their leading sys-admins) to keep these data safe about as much as I trust a chipmunk not to steal bird seed from the bird feeder in my back yard.
And friend, my data is not from working from them. It's from talking to their active staff at the sys-admin level, although admittedly my last long talk with any of them was at MacWorld two years ago. Maybe it's changed, but there's frankly no reason to think so: they're still doing those L. Ron Hubbard mandated weekly reports every Thursday, at least last I heard.
No, they're afraid the US governmentn will run Eric Raymond's "shredder" programm and find more lovely bits of source code they've stolen, and verify that OpenOffice in fact does not use Microsoft's source code despite the lawsuits.
You didn't see it because they papered over the L. Ron Hubbard quotes on their WISE management brochures when they started successfully buying other ISP's. Remember those weekly reports on all employees every Thursday, and how resources only went to people pushing salable products rather than people warning in advance about a disaster in the offing? Straight L. Ron Hubbard management policy, as taught by WISE. Storing passwords in plaintext is *always* insecure. It means that every one in the company who can access passwords, by hook or by crook, can access all of them in plain text and use them or sell them. It's not necessary in any modern software system, and it's an incredibly bad idea unless you want your employees (especially managers) to be able to access anyone else's resources at whim. You want to trust Eartthlink's co-founder Reed Slatkin, who got busted for running a pyramid scheme, with your mother's and cousin's email passwords that they probably foolishly use for their checking accounts and credit cards, and which can be stolen and sold off by any disgruntled employee or anyone who can pierce Earthlink's only modest database security? I don't think so. Friend, I've done tech support in various ways for several decades. Yes, it makes your tech support job easier to reset the password to whatever somebody had in their scattered email clients but can't be bothered to remember or reset. But it's still stupid.
What you describe is merely re-active, not pro-active. Pro-active would be joining the ISP's using SPF, refusing to sell "pink" contracts to spammers which contractually permit them to send unsolicited bulk advertising, etc. What you describe is over-"re"acting, where doubtful is dirty and any question of proprietary behavior is dealt with harshly. It's understandable: spammers lie so much and pretend so much that their behavior is all "opt-in" that it colors our responses to companies and mailing lists like yours that are, in fact, opt-in and doing everything right.
Reed Slatkin, for those who don't know, never was their president. Sky Dayton, an active and fairly sizable Scientology contributor, is and has been the president since their start.
Reed was one of their founders and got arrested for running a pyramid scheme. Given the financing misbehaviors of many start-up ISP's, it's not real surprising that one of their early managers also ran pyramid schemes, but that seems to be extremely common for the upper level Scientology members. They had a bunch of their upper staff in Europe also busted for running pyramid schemes involving those miracle "laundry balls", the ones that supposedly wash your laundry without soap but where you're actually just using the soap stuck to the walls of the washing machine from previous washes, and the "laundry ball" has nothing to do with it.
At Earthlink, absolutely. Earthlink's commitment to user security is absolutely non-existent. It's easier for them to manage with un-encrypted passwords: it's much faster and cheaper in tech time to tell someone their old password on the phone, or give it to the nice FBI man who asks for it, than to have to deal with encrypted passwords and reset passwords for people and send them the *new* password safely. Earthlink will take ease of management over genuine security any day: that kind of behavior is built into the WISE management guidelines they follow, although after all the complaints about the Scientology management techniques they don't call them WISE anymore. If you think I'm kidding, look into the background of Sky Dayton and their original CTO, who jumped out of a building on L. Ron Hubbard's birthday when he went back to college.
There's a big difference between "average" and "typical". A few professional spammers make a real business out of it, but they make a real business by selling the spam services, but by selling the spammed products. Spammers are mostly like pyramid scheme or Ponzi scheme victims: the promise of money gets them to invest their time and effort, and only the few people at the top of the business actually make any real money.
Many are in .kr, true. But both the sender and the target audience for most of those spams is in fact the US, because the senders have the bandwidth to do the sending and because the suckers in the US have more money to pay for the primarily fraudulent or porn spam that makes up so much of it
Banning MAC addresses is not that useful. First, it costs a lot of extra effort in building up a monitoring tool suite and switch configurations to ban them, unless they happen to be already using forced DHCP. Second, a lot of Earthlink clients use actual Points of Presence (POPs) that are on other companies' networks. Third, almost any modern network card will let you code in a different MAC address to deal with exactly that kind of situation where you switch machines and there's some MAC-based permission. Fourth, a new network card these days only costs about $20 if you can't find a dozen of them in your parts bin from old repaired or replaced computers. Fifth, a lot of folks use "internet firewall" boxes that provide an arbitrary front end DHCP/MAC address configuration so you can swap it for your desktop in talking to your ISP. Overall, it's not usually worth the effort to filter on a MAC address basis.
Read it again. He "takes orders from the FBI", etc., regarding child pornography, he doesn't contact them.
What the article describes is entirely re-active. In no way is it pro-active: pro-active costs money, and keeps the spammers from signing up in the first place to send the spam. This is typical Earthlink, whose focus is on making the weekly progress reports their departments favor as taught by the "WISE" management techniques so favored by their Scientology educated president and his top staff.
It's not evil, but given their history of blowing off complaints for months or even years until faced with real consequences such as a Usenet Death Penalty where all posts from Earthlink would be actively cancelled, it's not topnotch.
And hey, you get a built-in UPS. A couple of words of advice if you go this route, though.
1: Route the video to the external display most of the time with the Fn-F8 key on most laptops, so you're not burning watts on the power display.
2: If you're not using wireless, remove or physically turn off the device. They draw roughly 200 mA when active that you don't need to waste.
I'm not the idiot who misnamed the "locale" setting as "LANG" in gettext. And no, LANG=en will definitely screw up a lot of old man pages that worked for years and which the authors have never bothered to re-write dozens of different language pages for and left their old nroff documentation the heck alone, not realizing that these silly gettext and internationalization users would waste their time breaking perfectly good ASCII and curses output formerly used for underlining or creating bold print.
Nope. Most of them are still in the US, especially the commercial spamming service people who constitute the largest volume of spam. This is partly because the US has the most bandwidth, and partly because the US has the most money. That may change, but prosecuting the US business people involved would help encourage ISP's to expose the spammers as clearly criminal.
I turn in a dozen clearly fraudulent spams a month, which are blithely ignored by law enforcement. The problem is not "catching". The law enforcement agencies can easily, if they wish, get subpoenas to track the records or follow a canceled check or credit card to get the worst of the spammers.
The problem is that they can't be bothered unless it involves hundreds of thousands of dollars of blatant wire fraud, and even then they're quite incompetent at following the evidence or even prosecuting for the right crime.
And they're not trying very hard. A new patentable algorithm is worth money. A performance improvement is also worth money and makes your software better. Most security measures, such as checking return values and carefully allocating memory or evaluating possible sizes of inputs, cost CPU time, slow your systems, and cost time to do. And they're often best understood by the most expensive programmers on a team, not the new guys and interns handed these new development problems, so they get tacked on only as an afterthought.
Even though this kind of vulnerability is *extremely* bad, it's not as permanently dangerous as the ubiquitous "web-bugs" in web pages and email advertising, which use an off-site 1x1 pixel transparent gif in order to provide user tracking information to the other site. These help provide user tracking without cookies and can in fact be used to transmit passwords from phishing web sites by writing fascinatingly encoded URL's to grab the web bag, and can be used to pierce the anonymity of users who receive email.
Nasty, nasty, nasty little widgets for which there are very few plans to block them. While blocking them by blocking "off-site" images is useful, it's easily defeated by writing Akamai's web-caching URL's instead of straight URL's. Since Akamai's web caching can't be blocked without messing up huge numbers of high-content websites, guess what "web content delivery" company also sells web-bug tracking services?
Text-only browsers, man. If the web page doesn't work right with a text-only browser, it's done wrong and isn't worth visiting.
It's a funnier joke than you knew. Check out the "Installing Linux on a Dead Badger" article at http://www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20040405/badge r.shtml.
Years ago, someone worked out how to print holograms in sugar coatings on chocolate. How about printing a hologram on top of the chocolate to make it look like a 3D object? Or chocolate that still seems to be there, just fuzzier, when you bite off half the chocolate.
But I have to admit, this was a really, really cool design.
And the cop was right. The article author was in the midst of probing for other networks to use and had already found two other local signals.
Learn to write shorter posts, please. You wrote: "The librarian's authority stops at the door to the library; it does not extend to people sitting or standing outside." This is legally mistaken. The library's authority also extends to its grounds, its parking lot, its books that are loaned out, and certainly to its own network. The level of authority and responsibility may differ depending on whether you're inside the building, for example in the ability to insist that you be quiet for the other patrons.
The story is not about "face value". The story is about suspicion and appearances. While the cop was probably wildly mistaken in bothering someone using a public access point, you can't simply take the word of someone who, when asked to stop using one network, starts probing for other networks to use nearby instead and finds a secretive, out-of-view location to post the story without the cop's awareness. You need at least some character witness to be completely sure of his overall honesty.
You wrote: "Unsecured goods or services available for free on open grounds are meant to be used." This is not necessarily true. There are unattended news-stands that leave the papers out and have a can next to them for change, jugglers who perform in public who put out a hat, and other services that are meant to be *shared* in various socially agreed ways. We don't know from the article that the network was meant to be used outside the library. It's reasonable, but it's not a given. Please don't make up claims like that out of whole cloth or your perceptions of the social mores of someone of someone who then went and hid out to post the article out of the view of the cop.
No, I was serious. There was no indication from the article of what kind of priest he was: could be Discordian or a member of the Church of Bob Dobbs for all that was in the article. As it turns out from other postings by this guy, he's an Episcopal priest. But those don't normally wear the "Roman collar" unless they're acting in an official capacity, so the cop probably had no way of knowing the guy was a priest.
And frankly, a lot of bloggers and people who like to crack into wi-fi networks lie like bandits about who they are and what they were up to, so I'd like to verify this guy's statmenets. There's no compelling reason to think he's fibbing, but the whole thing sounds a bit fishy, so I'd want to check it out before treating it as more than a "friend of a friend" story.