More or less. That's what I was referring to when I said "root nameserver override" - once every n days we would release a new zone file which would allow people with disputed domains to give an option to view that page directly or see the recently disenfranchised one.
As to legality... I love people who think the law is The Law. simple solution here - base it outside the US, and have participants sign an NDA ala the RBL.
I mentioned this elsewhere on/., but I'll bring it up again - we need another registry. First we could blame it on network solutions - they have a monopoly. But then when the government botched the "multiple registry" idea (doomed to failure anyway, IMO) it should have sounded an alarm. The government is too stupid to be entrusted with DNS services, and Network Solutions is obviously an un-ideal choice. Soooooo.... my solution?
Form another registry. We can create a new TLD and nest things underneath there, but with one important difference over other projects like AlterNIC - the option to override the root nameservers. How come? Well, I for one am sick of hearing about Multi-Mega Conglomarate of Super Corporation Enterprises Inc, Ltd. using trademark law to snap up domains even remotely similar to their own, and often unfairly. My solution: first come, first serve, end of story. There will be no trademarks in the DNS system. There will be no money to be had in the system. There's a few other ideas I want to throw in, but that's the big one - root namespace overriding.
I also think registration should be very easy - if the domain isn't used, click [register] and you're live after filling in the fields. The technologies there.
e-mail me off slashdot, I'd like to hear what you think..
Yes. It's unfortunate the majority of the slashdot readership (judging by the response to my post) don't want to admit this. Then again, is anyone suprised? We have everything society can give us - well paying jobs, financial security, envy of the country. Silicon Valley is more important than hollywood and the social elite know this - the hot place to put your kid is not law school but CSci.
So, you might have a bunch of free-software philantrophists working for the ideals we share, with money to support that work. Can that be bad?
I don't know. To be honest with you, I'm skeptical about things in general, more so when money is involved. I initially distrust people I meet - I trust them by their actions not their words (I've had too many people claim they were acting in my best interests... without ever asking me what I thought). It is for this reason why I don't have as much faith in people as, perhaps, you do.
We'll see. I hope that people don't lose sight of why open source is successful, and how little it actually has to do with software development. It's about distributed collaboration, peer review, and the incredible accomplishments a group can make when they drop the barriers imposed on our daily lives. Lessons that anyone, geek or not, should take to heart.
That wasn't what I was driving at - money changes things. It changes people, it changes countries, it changes many things. Like Midas' touch.
I'm worried that as geeks move up the social/economic ladder they're leaving behind some well-earned lessons about the price of being different. We're the stars now of our society - financially well off, we can satisfy our material wants, we work what most people consider to be ideal jobs, and we're the envy of most of the country if not the world. Can you believe, even for a moment, that this isn't having an impact?
I'm wondering what's going to happen to this group of social outcasts whom I happen to belong to - will they embrace society, or use their power to change it (thus taking the risk of losing the aforementioned economic gains)? This question is far more important than the monentary concerns voiced so far, IMO. Geeks now have both the economic power and intellectual prowness to encourage dramatic social changes. Will they take advantage of this, or trade that for financial security?
Is it just me, or has linux started absorbing (at an absolutely incredible rate) all the qualities it's supporters initially dismissed as both irrelevant and/or evil?
Linux is supposed to be "free speech, not free beer"... yet here we are making money hand over fist. If you contributed an open source project *BLAMO!* you get The Letter and an opportunity to make alot of money.
ESR made it big (as he should.. he's on the board of directors), Bruce Perens is off now with his vulture capital friends, and Rob of slashdot fame joined up with Andover.net, now going for IPO (or maybe they have already, I wasn't paying attention).
We've been fighting all these spectres of Big Business Squashing the Little Guy, actively refuting the FUD companies throw against our cherished OS' (while replacing it with some of our own, admittedly), and essentially emulating all the behavior of the big businesses we're fighting against!
Anyone else feel like Alice after falling down the rabbit hole here?
Well, I can't rate anything but lpwa - I used it and it was great. I wish I had mod points to put that one up - if anonymizer is that bad I'd feel kinda guilty throwing the link on/.
these guys and those guys both offer free proxying. The lucent boys also had a free service, but it's since exitted beta. Of course, running nmap and searching for port 8000 for awhile will also yield some "free" services... although *cough* you'd get more than you pay for if you hit the wrong one.:\
Anonymity *can* work. Check out Freedom for one example. Proxying is the way to go - non-logging proxies, that is. Does this impede law enforcement? Yes, but only if they're very stupid and don't know what a packet sniffer is.
Another thing about anonymity - I can run off 100 copies of a position I hold against our Governor, which in this case is Ventura (I live in MN) and post it up across the twin cities - anonymously. To do this on the internet, I can use a service like Freedom. There are plenty of alternatives with equal functionality (so don't think I'm plugging/just/ this product), however.
Anonymity isn't dead... the problem is that modern media has the collective intelligence of a lobotomized flatworm... *sigh* it's very easy to cover your tracks... if it wasn't so-called "hacking" (it's cracking, ppl!) would be impossible.
If it can pick up microwave red baron pizzas that have been ingrained into the floor, determine which of my multitude of mtn. dew cans are full, empty, or "flat", and figure out which printouts I want to save and which ones I want to discard... I won't just buy it, I'll *marry* it.
It would be outlawed by ISPs faster than you can say "slashdot" three times fast. That bandwidth is over a shared medium. If you go and increase the load by even 10-15% at most places the T1 saturates and the QoS drops like a lead balloon.
Making this a distributed effort would only be useful for a clustering environment ala beowulf where tight syncronization would be needed to prevent machines from revisiting the same websites. Other than that, distributed processing for web crawlers is... dubious.
It has been brought to my attention that your 3rd grade teacher didn't give you basic training on the proper use of money. I am sorry, but we are unable to process a refund for you at this time. Please contact your 3rd grade teacher for assistance in dealing with this problem.
There's a very simple legal recourse to this - we simply do something called a "counter-suit" for bringing a "frivolous action". ie: You pay legal costs for bringing this into court. This guy's gonna be out alot more than $25k because of his stupidity.
What's really sad is that people have the expectation that this government should protect people from their own stupidity. It's not entirely bad, either.. but in a pure capitalist society the government won't be holding your hand at all. The US hasn't made up it's mind here, so the question is "it depends". So I guess there's plenty of blame to pass around for stupid lawsuits like this - the legislators for not taking a firm stand, the stupid idiot that blew $25k on his "habit" and tried to pass the blame on, and the company for not having policies to prevent this. Ultimately the blame rests on this guy - he has a problem, he knew it, he didn't seek help. You can't sue the hospital for not telling you you're bleeding to death.
We need a legal defense fund - no doubt Napster cannot support a drawn out legal battle - their revenue comes from banner ads built into the client which as is likely only covers the bandwidth and meager upkeep costs for their servers / employees.
We know the RIAA is counting (nay, depending!) on Napster backing down. The RIAA is the Microsoft of the computer industry - sue people just because you'd win the war of attrition. If there is ANY way for me to help, PLEASE contact me, I'd be willing to contribute a few bucks to a defense fund - Napster is a great product. As a sidenote, you might be able to raise the necessary funds by pledging to open source Napster if you got n dollars. I know it isn't the ideal situation, but the alternative is even worse. The key is to distribute the load and amass enough resources to stay afloat long enough to bring the media down to bear on the problem - they love stories about the underdog. The best we can hope for is bad enough publicity and lost sales as part of a possible boycott that they would back off.
Yes, is is kinda off topic. But this OS was never meant to be mainstreamed... it was a project. I thought nothing notable would be contributed to this thread, so I threw this comment in there to give bored late night/. readers something to muse over. Besides, I plug the Hacker Dictionary every chance I get - it's right next to HGTG on my bookshelf.
For those of you who would like some history, check out this story. It's one of hackerdom's great stories about the last Real Programmers who hacked in assembly using vi and a toothpick....
Okay, I guess on that you're right. I've been reading too many philosophy books that are filled with little abstract saying like that. They make sense and sound intelligent when you think it.. but a few seconds of additional thought renders them impotent.
Anyway, about the domain name - I'm planning on creating a slashdot-like site eventually that would be hosted there and sport a variety of improvements over the current slashdot engine (like user-defined forums / root thread postings and usenet/e-mail integration)... but until then...
No, I don't take it personally. I have already admitted that many of my postings until recently (not anymore, however) were to a large degree testing the moderation system. The results so far: People moderate things that they agree with up and things they disagree with down. This isn't how the system is supposed to work.. but that *is* how it's working right now. My new slash engine will have a different system which will hopefully defeat this. I will also learn from cmdrtaco's mistakes and not post karma publically but instead keep that internal to the system or only rate them in general terms "excellent, good, average, none, poor, terrible, troll" instead of exact numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay. Just... ummm... don't land there. Last thing we need is another disease. :\
As to legality... I love people who think the law is The Law. simple solution here - base it outside the US, and have participants sign an NDA ala the RBL.
You sure about that... uh... Ned?
... and the number one difference between Australia and the US - "we tell our citizens we're censoring them!"
Form another registry. We can create a new TLD and nest things underneath there, but with one important difference over other projects like AlterNIC - the option to override the root nameservers. How come? Well, I for one am sick of hearing about Multi-Mega Conglomarate of Super Corporation Enterprises Inc, Ltd. using trademark law to snap up domains even remotely similar to their own, and often unfairly. My solution: first come, first serve, end of story. There will be no trademarks in the DNS system. There will be no money to be had in the system. There's a few other ideas I want to throw in, but that's the big one - root namespace overriding.
I also think registration should be very easy - if the domain isn't used, click [register] and you're live after filling in the fields. The technologies there.
e-mail me off slashdot, I'd like to hear what you think..
My my, how the tables have turned....
I don't know. To be honest with you, I'm skeptical about things in general, more so when money is involved. I initially distrust people I meet - I trust them by their actions not their words (I've had too many people claim they were acting in my best interests... without ever asking me what I thought). It is for this reason why I don't have as much faith in people as, perhaps, you do.
We'll see. I hope that people don't lose sight of why open source is successful, and how little it actually has to do with software development. It's about distributed collaboration, peer review, and the incredible accomplishments a group can make when they drop the barriers imposed on our daily lives. Lessons that anyone, geek or not, should take to heart.
Kill files. Tell rob you want kill files.
I'm worried that as geeks move up the social/economic ladder they're leaving behind some well-earned lessons about the price of being different. We're the stars now of our society - financially well off, we can satisfy our material wants, we work what most people consider to be ideal jobs, and we're the envy of most of the country if not the world. Can you believe, even for a moment, that this isn't having an impact?
I'm wondering what's going to happen to this group of social outcasts whom I happen to belong to - will they embrace society, or use their power to change it (thus taking the risk of losing the aforementioned economic gains)? This question is far more important than the monentary concerns voiced so far, IMO. Geeks now have both the economic power and intellectual prowness to encourage dramatic social changes. Will they take advantage of this, or trade that for financial security?
.egassem siht ni segassem lanimilbus on era erehT
Linux is supposed to be "free speech, not free beer"... yet here we are making money hand over fist. If you contributed an open source project *BLAMO!* you get The Letter and an opportunity to make alot of money.
ESR made it big (as he should.. he's on the board of directors), Bruce Perens is off now with his vulture capital friends, and Rob of slashdot fame joined up with Andover.net, now going for IPO (or maybe they have already, I wasn't paying attention).
We've been fighting all these spectres of Big Business Squashing the Little Guy, actively refuting the FUD companies throw against our cherished OS' (while replacing it with some of our own, admittedly), and essentially emulating all the behavior of the big businesses we're fighting against!
Anyone else feel like Alice after falling down the rabbit hole here?
I beat you by about 1 minute. See also: CID 19.
Anyone else think of frankenstein the moment they saw this article? =)
Well, I can't rate anything but lpwa - I used it and it was great. I wish I had mod points to put that one up - if anonymizer is that bad I'd feel kinda guilty throwing the link on /.
these guys and those guys both offer free proxying. The lucent boys also had a free service, but it's since exitted beta. Of course, running nmap and searching for port 8000 for awhile will also yield some "free" services... although *cough* you'd get more than you pay for if you hit the wrong one. :\
Anonymity *can* work. Check out Freedom for one example. Proxying is the way to go - non-logging proxies, that is. Does this impede law enforcement? Yes, but only if they're very stupid and don't know what a packet sniffer is.
Another thing about anonymity - I can run off 100 copies of a position I hold against our Governor, which in this case is Ventura (I live in MN) and post it up across the twin cities - anonymously. To do this on the internet, I can use a service like Freedom. There are plenty of alternatives with equal functionality (so don't think I'm plugging /just/ this product), however.
Anonymity isn't dead... the problem is that modern media has the collective intelligence of a lobotomized flatworm... *sigh* it's very easy to cover your tracks... if it wasn't so-called "hacking" (it's cracking, ppl!) would be impossible.
If it can pick up microwave red baron pizzas that have been ingrained into the floor, determine which of my multitude of mtn. dew cans are full, empty, or "flat", and figure out which printouts I want to save and which ones I want to discard... I won't just buy it, I'll *marry* it.
Making this a distributed effort would only be useful for a clustering environment ala beowulf where tight syncronization would be needed to prevent machines from revisiting the same websites. Other than that, distributed processing for web crawlers is... dubious.
The trade would be that they open source their server and client.
It has been brought to my attention that your 3rd grade teacher didn't give you basic training on the proper use of money. I am sorry, but we are unable to process a refund for you at this time. Please contact your 3rd grade teacher for assistance in dealing with this problem.
Sincerely,
The US Treasury
What's really sad is that people have the expectation that this government should protect people from their own stupidity. It's not entirely bad, either.. but in a pure capitalist society the government won't be holding your hand at all. The US hasn't made up it's mind here, so the question is "it depends". So I guess there's plenty of blame to pass around for stupid lawsuits like this - the legislators for not taking a firm stand, the stupid idiot that blew $25k on his "habit" and tried to pass the blame on, and the company for not having policies to prevent this. Ultimately the blame rests on this guy - he has a problem, he knew it, he didn't seek help. You can't sue the hospital for not telling you you're bleeding to death.
We know the RIAA is counting (nay, depending!) on Napster backing down. The RIAA is the Microsoft of the computer industry - sue people just because you'd win the war of attrition. If there is ANY way for me to help, PLEASE contact me, I'd be willing to contribute a few bucks to a defense fund - Napster is a great product. As a sidenote, you might be able to raise the necessary funds by pledging to open source Napster if you got n dollars. I know it isn't the ideal situation, but the alternative is even worse. The key is to distribute the load and amass enough resources to stay afloat long enough to bring the media down to bear on the problem - they love stories about the underdog. The best we can hope for is bad enough publicity and lost sales as part of a possible boycott that they would back off.
Yes, is is kinda off topic. But this OS was never meant to be mainstreamed... it was a project. I thought nothing notable would be contributed to this thread, so I threw this comment in there to give bored late night /. readers something to muse over. Besides, I plug the Hacker Dictionary every chance I get - it's right next to HGTG on my bookshelf.
For those of you who would like some history, check out this story. It's one of hackerdom's great stories about the last Real Programmers who hacked in assembly using vi and a toothpick....
Anyway, about the domain name - I'm planning on creating a slashdot-like site eventually that would be hosted there and sport a variety of improvements over the current slashdot engine (like user-defined forums / root thread postings and usenet/e-mail integration)... but until then...
No, I don't take it personally. I have already admitted that many of my postings until recently (not anymore, however) were to a large degree testing the moderation system. The results so far: People moderate things that they agree with up and things they disagree with down. This isn't how the system is supposed to work.. but that *is* how it's working right now. My new slash engine will have a different system which will hopefully defeat this. I will also learn from cmdrtaco's mistakes and not post karma publically but instead keep that internal to the system or only rate them in general terms "excellent, good, average, none, poor, terrible, troll" instead of exact numbers.