I do the same, with twist. I actively tell them I stop doing business with them. It tends to surprise the fuck out of them that somebody actually is not only not interested in their "great business opportunity" but enough so to avoid them. If one person does that, they usually think "lunatic" and just go on. If several people tell them, they either get a clue, or are out of business a few years later... -John
I know this is not the answer you're looking for, but I've been very succesful with option 3: build your own. You may have to find somebody with the technical know-how to help you, but building your own from scratch does mean you will end up with a computer without an operating system.
Simple, you'll buy your stuff elsewhere. It's something that's already happening with, for example, DVD players. If you want one that's region-free, its far, far simpler to buy a chinese brand. Perhaps non-americans should applaud this law, as it removes a big competitor from the market..
Why insist on the plausible? If I had given you the Dmitri story before the DMCA was law, would you have considered *that* to be a plausible outcome of that law?
I was in the audience at that time. Note that most of the audience walked in were actually Mac developers. It was held in the same week, and across the street from, the World Wide Developer Conference held by Apple in San Jose.
Indeed - and I even agree with him. However, he did not say the entire book is wrong, actually, the algorithms and protocols are very, very correct and useful. He said his statements about encryption being capable of solving all problems and being a sort of Holy Grail are wrong. Encryption by itself is not the answer, it's not even the beginning of the answer.. As I said, Secrets and Lies is far more interesting...
Folks, in this discussion, please keep "algorithm" and "protocol" seperated. An algorith is a mathematical method, such as the public key algorithms, or, as described rather roughly above, bits being indistinguishable from the statistical properties of the pixels. Protocol, on the other hand, is roughly speaking the way you use the algorithms - everything required to get the message from Alice to Bob, including key exchange, agreements on which pictures to use and how to identify them, etc,e tc. I strongly urge you all to read Bruce Schneier excellent works on this subject, both his Applied Cryptography books and his less theoretical and for most of us far more interesting book Secrets and Lies.
Also, whenever I hear "state of the art cryptography" I feel I hear somebody who doesn't understand that creating cryptography takes years and years. Peer review, taking apart actual implementations, etc, etc, and if after x years there's still no good attack known, then perhaps the cryptography is acceptable.. "state of the art" usually implies "the newest and the latest", and that's not what you're looking for when you select cryptography.
I'm the author of the free NetBSD/i386 based firewall at dubbele.com If my web logs are any indication, it has been installed by over 7000 cable and ADSL owners so far, and the amount of tech support I have to do is very minimal. If you have an old PC and two ethernet cards, you're half-way there.
3: If you are bothered by any of this, you can do any of the myriad options the providers offer for getting you site either de-tagged, or not linking to that one site.
Then you first have to know about them. We now know about microsoft attempting this, and the little idiot company that spawned this/. thread. How many more are there in the wild?
A good sysadmin always carries around a few feet of fiber. If he ever finds himself lost, and doesn't know the way out of whatever place he is, he simply drops the fiber on the ground and waits ten minutes, and then talks the backhoe operator for directions..
Throwing out a bad patent is fine, it's just a question of why. I haven't read the actual law text (thank god I'm not a lawyer:-) but I assume they lists some reasons a patent could be invalidated. I'm pretty sure "moronic" is not one of the reasons listed, so they'll have to find something else, and that's where things get interesting..
I did read - and you actually prove my point. The 'system' has refused to let it go anywhere for a long, long time, simply because the outcome is either "go stick your patent where the sun doesn't shine", which is bad for patent law, or "go collect mucho bucks from everybody". Actually, just letting it die slowly in courts may be the best solution...
As one lawyer said in the article: "If the patent owner prevails in its view, they stand to be wealthier than Microsoft"
Really? Really really? If it's really about that large amounts of money, companies are going to fold or relocate outside the USA, rather than pay up. Does anybody here really think that's going to happen? In the unlikely event that a judge allows this company to win, the USA will have to reconsider its patent system or risk hurting the economy real bad.
My prediction is that this case will sizzle and die, never to be heard of again. The stakes are simply to high.
Perhaps I'm just a lousy reader, but I have yet to see somebody who actually tells me what meta tag I have to use to disable this - I want to put this on my web site, but I'm unable to find out how. Getting the SDK for this from microsoft.com failed miserably as well on both my Mac and NetBSD machines, so if there's a kind soul on/. that can help...
The postfix/cyrus combination already offers most of what you want. Although I haven't looked into the web based part yet, the management is probably best done with webmin. For reading mail from the web, there's so many perl scripts floating around I'm not even going to bother picking one for you...
I've got several users of my firewall at www.dubbele.com who have done just that. NetBSD, which I'm using, but linux as well, of course, can get by with limited resources - small disks, not too many Mb of memory, etc...
You could spend either a lot of time to make CPU cycles available to servicing the NIC, or a certain amount of your money by getting rid of the IDE disks and putting in a better disk subsystem, for example SCSI, but I'm sure slashdot readers will give you lot of other options as well. I don't know how valuable your time is, you'll have to do the math yourself.
At a certain shopping mall in thailand you can now get perfect copies (with encryption still intact) of your favourite DVD for 350 - 400 baht, and prices can be expected to drop further so this whole thing about certain burners not being capable, or CCS being a copy-protection circumvention device, is totally irrelevant..
Slashdot Mirror
To the firewall at www.dubbele.com
And there's plenty of others based on BSD freely available... see www.dubbele.com
-John
Based on NetBSD, and it has been around for a while..
I do the same, with twist. I actively tell them I stop doing business with them. It tends to surprise the fuck out of them that somebody actually is not only not interested in their "great business opportunity" but enough so to avoid them. If one person does that, they usually think "lunatic" and just go on. If several people tell them, they either get a clue, or are out of business a few years later...
-John
I know this is not the answer you're looking for, but I've been very succesful with option 3: build your own. You may have to find somebody with the technical know-how to help you, but building your own from scratch does mean you will end up with a computer without an operating system.
Simple, you'll buy your stuff elsewhere. It's something that's already happening with, for example, DVD players. If you want one that's region-free, its far, far simpler to buy a chinese brand. Perhaps non-americans should applaud this law, as it removes a big competitor from the market..
Why insist on the plausible?
If I had given you the Dmitri story before the DMCA was law, would you have considered *that* to be a plausible outcome of that law?
I was in the audience at that time. Note that most of the audience walked in were actually Mac developers. It was held in the same week, and across the street from, the World Wide Developer Conference held by Apple in San Jose.
Indeed - and I even agree with him. However, he did not say the entire book is wrong, actually, the algorithms and protocols are very, very correct and useful. He said his statements about encryption being capable of solving all problems and being a sort of Holy Grail are wrong. Encryption by itself is not the answer, it's not even the beginning of the answer.. As I said, Secrets and Lies is far more interesting...
Folks, in this discussion, please keep "algorithm" and "protocol" seperated. An algorith is a mathematical method, such as the public key algorithms, or, as described rather roughly above, bits being indistinguishable from the statistical properties of the pixels.
Protocol, on the other hand, is roughly speaking the way you use the algorithms - everything required to get the message from Alice to Bob, including key exchange, agreements on which pictures to use and how to identify them, etc,e tc. I strongly urge you all to read Bruce Schneier excellent works on this subject, both his Applied Cryptography books and his less theoretical and for most of us far more interesting book Secrets and Lies.
Also, whenever I hear "state of the art cryptography" I feel I hear somebody who doesn't understand that creating cryptography takes years and years. Peer review, taking apart actual implementations, etc, etc, and if after x years there's still no good attack known, then perhaps the cryptography is acceptable.. "state of the art" usually implies "the newest and the latest", and that's not what you're looking for when you select cryptography.
urgh. Slashcode 2.0 does ugly things to urls after post... Simply try this: http://www.dubbele.com
If my web logs are any indication, it has been installed by over 7000 cable and ADSL owners so far, and the amount of tech support I have to do is very minimal. If you have an old PC and two ethernet cards, you're half-way there.
Check it out and let me know what you think..
-John
Then you first have to know about them. We now know about microsoft attempting this, and the little idiot company that spawned this /. thread. How many more are there in the wild?
Throwing out a bad patent is fine, it's just a question of why. I haven't read the actual law text (thank god I'm not a lawyer :-) but I assume they lists some reasons a patent could be invalidated. I'm pretty sure "moronic" is not one of the reasons listed, so they'll have to find something else, and that's where things get interesting..
I did read - and you actually prove my point. The 'system' has refused to let it go anywhere for a long, long time, simply because the outcome is either "go stick your patent where the sun doesn't shine", which is bad for patent law, or "go collect mucho bucks from everybody". Actually, just letting it die slowly in courts may be the best solution...
Really? Really really? If it's really about that large amounts of money, companies are going to fold or relocate outside the USA, rather than pay up. Does anybody here really think that's going to happen? In the unlikely event that a judge allows this company to win, the USA will have to reconsider its patent system or risk hurting the economy real bad.
My prediction is that this case will sizzle and die, never to be heard of again. The stakes are simply to high.
Every now and then there's posters on /. who wonder how one makes money with Open Source.
Well, read this press release, this is how you do it...
-John
Perhaps I'm just a lousy reader, but I have yet to see somebody who actually tells me what meta tag I have to use to disable this - I want to put this on my web site, but I'm unable to find out how. Getting the SDK for this from microsoft.com failed miserably as well on both my Mac and NetBSD machines, so if there's a kind soul on /. that can help...
The postfix/cyrus combination already offers most of what you want. Although I haven't looked into the web based part yet, the management is probably best done with webmin. For reading mail from the web, there's so many perl scripts floating around I'm not even going to bother picking one for you...
Disclaimer: that's my site. Contact me through email if you need assistance, I'd be happy to help you with details..
-John
I've got several users of my firewall at www.dubbele.com who have done just that. NetBSD, which I'm using, but linux as well, of course, can get by with limited resources - small disks, not too many Mb of memory, etc...
And if you don't want to do the work yourself, look at www.dubbele.com
You could spend either a lot of time to make CPU cycles available to servicing the NIC, or a certain amount of your money by getting rid of the IDE disks and putting in a better disk subsystem, for example SCSI, but I'm sure slashdot readers will give you lot of other options as well. I don't know how valuable your time is, you'll have to do the math yourself.
At a certain shopping mall in thailand you can now get perfect copies (with encryption still intact) of your favourite DVD for 350 - 400 baht, and prices can be expected to drop further so this whole thing about certain burners not being capable, or CCS being a copy-protection circumvention device, is totally irrelevant..