A few weeks ago, Adam Penenberg's Media Hack column addressed the matter of Internet-based delivery cutting into the newspaper business ("Newspapers Should Really Worry"). My favorite bit:
"Imagine what higher-ups at the
Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn't accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I'm not making this up): They didn't like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses."
Anyhow, it's an interesting read, and not just because I'm quoted in it.;)
I'm a bit confused. When CAN-SPAN passed, I remember vividly that one of the major problems with it was that it negated state anti-spam laws. Yet here in Virginia, AG Jerry Kilgore just, amidst much celebration, sent a spammer to prison for years. Now Ohio intends to pass this law. Another commenter has pointed out that this Ohio law seems to be based on a permissive clause of CAN-SPAM that permits such laws to be passed.
Can state anti-spam laws only be passed if states have been expressly granted the power to do so under CAN-SPAM? Or am I missing something?
"I'll wager that, if not for the FUD that came of this lawsuit, BSD would be the OS of choice for geeks today."
implying the lawsuit made a difference in adaptation. On the other hand you say:
"More people were using BSD because Linux barely existed. and we figured that BSD might go away (whatever that would constitute), so why bet on a losing horse?"
as if the lawsuit made no difference. Which is it?
I'm sorry, but I just don't understand the source of your confusion. The point of the whole post -- really, all that I'm trying to say -- is that the fact that there was a lawsuit made adoption of BSD seem iffy, with the adoption of Linux seeming like an easy choice. Since I seem to have confused you, my apologies, but that's really all that I'm saying here.
Now I'll clarify what I mean by abusers. The people at USL tried to gain exclusive use of code that had been written by others in honest and open manner. They not only tried to lock the authors out of their work, they tried to block alternate and original implementations of the same work by the same people, which sort of proves who was responsible for that code in the first place. In effect, they wanted to own the functionality of the code. It was wrong and they were defeated in court, after wasting lots of other people's time and money. That's what I consider abusive.
And you want to know what I thought about this a decade ago, when I was 15? I didn't think a thing about it. Never crossed my mind. I could somehow have cared less, I suppose, but I'm not sure how I would have gone about it.
According to you, more people were using BSD despite the lawsuit.
More people were using BSD because Linux barely existed. The Linux kernel hadn't even gone 1.0. It was under 1MB. It wasn't a matter of the lawsuit -- it was that Linux was unknown.
Moreover, you do not consider the very real philosophical difference between the BSD and GNU people.
What you mean is that I did not (past tense) consider the philosophical differences. And you're right -- I was totally uninterested. We didn't have "open source" -- the phrase didn't exist. We had free software. Both BSD and Linux were free. Both had source to edit. What teenager cared about some contract?
I'll wager that many of your peers made the choice based on the philisophical grounds.
My older friends surely chose based on philosophical grounds -- those old enough to be in any way interested in IP and related freedoms. I was writing for 2600 and decompiling and modifying MS-DOS for fun -- wasn't no contract going to stop me from doing whatever I wanted with an OS, or so I figured.
But you were the man on the spot, you tell me, was it impending abuse and the desire to not aid the abusers as obvious then as it is now?
I'm afraid that I'm not sure that I understand your question. But perhaps it would answer your question to restate my premise: we had no idea what the deal was with the lawsuit. Abuse schmabuse -- we figured that BSD might go away (whatever that would constitute), so why bet on a losing horse?
The difference is that the USL/BSD "FUD" was a lot more substantial than SCO's fantasyland FUD.
I'm sure that's true, but I use the term "FUD" not in the pejorative sense, but instead in the literal one: there was fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the wisdom of using BSD, at least in the mind of this then-15-year-old.
For those of us accustomed to Unix and looking to run it on our desktops in the early 1990s, we found that there were very few options at the time. The popular choice was BSD, but those of us who read Boardwatch and kept up with the choice few Usenet groups knew only that there was some kind of a BSD lawsuit that made it bad to use. The details were fuzzy, but we thought that BSD would be a dead end.
Instead, we used Linux. It was much less popular, and way underpowered (compared to BSD), but it was unencumbered by lawsuits and would let us run all of those/<-rad commands like gopher wiretap.spies.com and zmodem phrack_15.tgz, which is what I and my fellow teenaged geeks were really looking to do. Some of my friends with whom I chose to use Linux, rather than BSD, have gone onto greatness, notably Nat Friedman of Ximian/Novell. (I, however, am an utter fucking nobody, which is fine.:)
I'll wager that, if not for the FUD that came of this lawsuit, BSD would be the OS of choice for geeks today. Instead, Linux is far more popular -- I continue to use it a decade later, with the vague guilt that I would be cooler if I were running BSD. I wonder to what degree the SCO FUD is similarly affecting the choice of Linux today?
Folks its time to move on. George Bush did not win because of some evil Diebold exec or magical vote changing election booths. He won because over 61 million Americans pulled the lever for him.
Erm. How do you know that? I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with you, I'd just like to know what special information that you have access to that, say, the New York Times doesn't? If you've got some sort of audit logs from all of the voting machines, please, by all means, share with the GAO.
This election was a mess not because of evil Republican voting machines but because people were paid (some in crack) to register voters which brought in fraudulent voter registrations.
I call bullshit. There two -- two -- known incidents of people being registered fraudulently, according to the Republican National Committee Vote Fraud group. (Listen to This American Life's November 1 episode, "Swing Set," Act 2, which is 21:10 into the episode.) Not only were both of these committed by petty criminals paid by the registrant to sign up voters (that is, it was not systemic, just a pair of dopes), but it doesn't matter, since there is, in fact, no way for Mary Poppins to show up and vote. The other case was a Colorado man who registered 35 times. He can only vote once, as you can imagine, so, again, it doesn't matter.
Your implication that there is any parity between two isolated incidents of greedy workers signing up people wrongly and the massive, jail-time-yielding Republican work to suppress the vote or, worse still, systemic Diebold/ES&S fraud is well beyond ludicrous; it is, simply, stupid, and I am embarrassed on your behalf, because it seems that you don't have the good sense to be embarrassed for yourself.
This has "HOAX" written all over it. It's classic culture jamming.
It's just like the stories about hunting nude women with paintball markers, Arm the Homeless, and Stu Magazine. I'd say odds are excellent that this is somebody pulling one over, quite cleverly and effectively, on the media.
See Sniggle.Net's News Trolls page for more information about the long, hilarious history of news trolling in the United States.
I've been blogging since '96. A website developer since '93. Developed LAMP websites since '99. A Linux user since '94. I'm no dope. My Slashdot UID is so low, people have offered to pay me for it.
My geekdom established, I just don't get Wikis. Anybody can edit documents, the Wiki tracks changes, but somebody's in charge and can approve or roll back changes. Some sites use them for FAQs, and they suck. What else is there? What am I missing? What makes these things so damned special?
I'm not agitating here -- I really don't get it, and I'm certain that I must just not be in possession of all the facts. Can somebody enlighten me?
I work in politics. The program that we use for this is Caliper's Mapitude. It's a bad-ass little package. Perhaps the most amusing function is the ability to pinpoint an address (the incumbent's) and construct a district that includes every house in the neighborhood but that one, pitting two incumbents of the same party against each other and leaving an open seat for the redistricting party. I'd love to own a copy, just to play with, but for $500, I'd rather have a new iPod.:)
I don't know why I couch this is "this party" and "other party" language -- it's the Republicans, because they had dominance in many states after the 2000 census, just as technology had advanced sufficiently to turn redistricting into more of a science. If we Democrats had the majority then, we probably would have dome the same thing (though I'd like to hope I'd have argued against it in favor of redistricting by disinterested parties, not that what I say matters to anybody in any way).
Can anybody explain what, if any, physical concerns exist with the use of an inflatable bladder in space? I can't quite envision how an inflatable object would behave in zero-G (perhaps just like any other object?), but in a vacuum, presumably explosion would be quite a difficult problem. Obviously, they've thought this through, but if somebody could explain the challenge of the proposition, I'd love to hear it.
I only know enough about this to know that I don't know enough about it.
One of the communities that I run has 25,000 registered users who are active on the discussion boards. As a matter of practice, if somebody posts one of these bullshit links, the post is immediately removed, and both the user account and the IP are banned.
There is no bigger geek rockstar in the House than my representative, Rep. Rick Boucher (VA-09). The guy advocates the protection of Fair Use, a Digital Milennium Consumers' Rights Act, opposes the DOJ's anti-P2P work, proposed a great anti-spam act in 2003 (it didn't pass; that crappy CAN-SPAM did, instead), he sponsored the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, and he testifies before various House committees all the time, representing, effectively, Slashdot.:) See the Internet section of his House site for more information. Alternately, you could see any of the Slashdot stories about him from over the years, including Slashdot | Rep. Boucher Outlines 'Fair Use' Fight, Boucher's Anti-DMCA Bill Gets High Profile Allies, Anti Spamming Act 2001 Proposed, and Webcasting and the DMCA.
Hell, Boucher guest blogged for Larry Lessig a few weeks ago, and the stuff that he wrote about is like a Slashdotter's wet dream.:)
He doesn't talk about these things in his campaign literature -- much of the very-rural, poor population of southwest Virginia just wouldn't care. Read over his campaign website and you'll find more about the tobacco buyout, healthcare and tourism than technology.:)
Ooh, or, instead of starting a company to register the domain, you could buy an identity from the Nigerian and establish residency there, including buying a house (which you could keep empty) to function as a drop-box for mail and the like.
That's just foolish -- we're not alone in the world. Globalization means that we're intricately interconnected with much of the rest of the world, and highly dependent on other nations. If American went isolationist tomorrow, we'd starve to death within weeks.
There's good reason why only Americans can vote in American elections. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't consider all of the facts, including the fact that the rest of the world is getting increasingly wary about the United States.
Are you going to provide the funds for the manpower required to manually search help fields? You can't exactly fly airplanes/helicopters over the area and expect to make easy identification without some on the ground work.
Shall we ban bleached flour, because it resembles cocaine? Aspirin because it resembles Xanax?
C'mon, Bill -- you know this is a logical dead-end.
I worked with my friendly state delegate, here in Charlottesville, VA, to introduce an OSS bill in the General Assembly in Richmond last February. It did nothing but remind -- not enforce, not require, remind -- the state IT department that there's nothing preventing them from using OSS, should they see fit.
It...uh...ended badly. Microsoft sent out six lobbyists (only one officially from Microsoft, with the rest from Microsoft shell agencies with Bushian names like "Organization for Software Freedom") and shut it down.
I run a 28,000 person discussion board, so I can relate fully. Were I you, I'd do the following:
Set your.htaccess to redirect all traffic with a referrer of this white-power site to goatse.cx or something. If they can't post links to ongoing discussions on your site, it will make it very inconvenient for them.
Require approval of all new users. This will weed out the obvious bullshit accounts - "h8gays" and "queerbait@hotmail.com" and the like.
Prevent new users from starting threads for the first 24 hours.
Don't ban trolls. Instead, set all page requests coming from their class of account to have a random sleep time of 30-60 seconds before the page will be delivered, and perhaps 25% of the time yield, simply, a "Server Too Busy" error. This way, they will not create new accounts (as they do if you simply ban them, forcing you to squash a new account), but find the whole affair too much trouble.
All of these are pretty easy to do, and are liable to save you a lot of trouble.
For those who are or would assail John Viega's credibility, I should remind you who he is.
Most notable for the purpose of this discussion, Viega is the creator of Mailman, the fantastically-popular GPLd mailing list management software. All was good and well with his view of the many-eyeballs theory until, one day, he found a huge, glaring, holy-shit hole in Mailman a few years ago. He was so alarmed that nobody had ever spotted this that, after fixing it, he reflected on what he'd learned and turned it into a thoughtful article, The Myth of Open Source Security. As he wrote:
"For three years, until March 2000, Mailman had a handful of glaring security problems in code that I wrote before I knew much about security. An attacker could use these security holes to gain access to the operating system on Linux computers running the program.
"These were not obscure bugs: anyone armed with the Unix command grep and an iota of security knowledge could have found them in seconds. Even though Mailman was downloaded and installed thousands of times during that time period, no one reported a thing. I finally realized there were problems as I started to learn more about security. Everyone using Mailman, apparently, assumed that someone else had done the proper security auditing, when, in fact, no one had."
Again, Mailman was and is an extremely popular program -- this was not a problem of obscurity.
So, the OnLamp.com article under discussion here is a follow-up to his original article, as he points out in the opening to the new article (but people apparently aren't reading.) As you can imagine, Viega is no rabid anti-OSS guy -- he's, in fact, the very model of what we want our developers to be. He writes good software, admits it when he writes bad software, and tells it like it is, even when we don't want to hear it.
(Disclaimers, such as they are: Viega is an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech, where I attend school, and I was the earliest alpha-tester of Mailman, in the late 90s.)
You're talking about Senator Kerry, right? The guy who hasn't answered a reporter's question for one month and eight days now?
Yes, he has -- he does interviews with local media outlets regularly, often several times daily. I believe what you mean is that he has not personally held a press conference for one month and eight days, which is quite true.
Why would this be a good thing? Imagine the nightmares web page designers would have to go through if they had to support two completely different non-standards-compliant browsers. We'd need to use several different browsers on a day-to-day basis just to view all the pages correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
-Waldo Jaquith
I'm a bit confused. When CAN-SPAN passed, I remember vividly that one of the major problems with it was that it negated state anti-spam laws. Yet here in Virginia, AG Jerry Kilgore just, amidst much celebration, sent a spammer to prison for years. Now Ohio intends to pass this law. Another commenter has pointed out that this Ohio law seems to be based on a permissive clause of CAN-SPAM that permits such laws to be passed.
Can state anti-spam laws only be passed if states have been expressly granted the power to do so under CAN-SPAM? Or am I missing something?
-Waldo Jaquith
On one hand you say:
"I'll wager that, if not for the FUD that came of this lawsuit, BSD would be the OS of choice for geeks today."
implying the lawsuit made a difference in adaptation. On the other hand you say:
"More people were using BSD because Linux barely existed. and we figured that BSD might go away (whatever that would constitute), so why bet on a losing horse?"
as if the lawsuit made no difference. Which is it?
I'm sorry, but I just don't understand the source of your confusion. The point of the whole post -- really, all that I'm trying to say -- is that the fact that there was a lawsuit made adoption of BSD seem iffy, with the adoption of Linux seeming like an easy choice. Since I seem to have confused you, my apologies, but that's really all that I'm saying here.
Now I'll clarify what I mean by abusers. The people at USL tried to gain exclusive use of code that had been written by others in honest and open manner. They not only tried to lock the authors out of their work, they tried to block alternate and original implementations of the same work by the same people, which sort of proves who was responsible for that code in the first place. In effect, they wanted to own the functionality of the code. It was wrong and they were defeated in court, after wasting lots of other people's time and money. That's what I consider abusive.
And you want to know what I thought about this a decade ago, when I was 15? I didn't think a thing about it. Never crossed my mind. I could somehow have cared less, I suppose, but I'm not sure how I would have gone about it.
-Waldo Jaquith
I see you read my blog.
Dang.
-Waldo Jaquith
According to you, more people were using BSD despite the lawsuit.
More people were using BSD because Linux barely existed. The Linux kernel hadn't even gone 1.0. It was under 1MB. It wasn't a matter of the lawsuit -- it was that Linux was unknown.
Moreover, you do not consider the very real philosophical difference between the BSD and GNU people.
What you mean is that I did not (past tense) consider the philosophical differences. And you're right -- I was totally uninterested. We didn't have "open source" -- the phrase didn't exist. We had free software. Both BSD and Linux were free. Both had source to edit. What teenager cared about some contract?
I'll wager that many of your peers made the choice based on the philisophical grounds.
My older friends surely chose based on philosophical grounds -- those old enough to be in any way interested in IP and related freedoms. I was writing for 2600 and decompiling and modifying MS-DOS for fun -- wasn't no contract going to stop me from doing whatever I wanted with an OS, or so I figured.
But you were the man on the spot, you tell me, was it impending abuse and the desire to not aid the abusers as obvious then as it is now?
I'm afraid that I'm not sure that I understand your question. But perhaps it would answer your question to restate my premise: we had no idea what the deal was with the lawsuit. Abuse schmabuse -- we figured that BSD might go away (whatever that would constitute), so why bet on a losing horse?
-Waldo Jaquith
The difference is that the USL/BSD "FUD" was a lot more substantial than SCO's fantasyland FUD.
I'm sure that's true, but I use the term "FUD" not in the pejorative sense, but instead in the literal one: there was fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the wisdom of using BSD, at least in the mind of this then-15-year-old.
-Waldo Jaquith
A little history lesson.
/<-rad commands like gopher wiretap.spies.com and zmodem phrack_15.tgz, which is what I and my fellow teenaged geeks were really looking to do. Some of my friends with whom I chose to use Linux, rather than BSD, have gone onto greatness, notably Nat Friedman of Ximian/Novell. (I, however, am an utter fucking nobody, which is fine. :)
For those of us accustomed to Unix and looking to run it on our desktops in the early 1990s, we found that there were very few options at the time. The popular choice was BSD, but those of us who read Boardwatch and kept up with the choice few Usenet groups knew only that there was some kind of a BSD lawsuit that made it bad to use. The details were fuzzy, but we thought that BSD would be a dead end.
Instead, we used Linux. It was much less popular, and way underpowered (compared to BSD), but it was unencumbered by lawsuits and would let us run all of those
I'll wager that, if not for the FUD that came of this lawsuit, BSD would be the OS of choice for geeks today. Instead, Linux is far more popular -- I continue to use it a decade later, with the vague guilt that I would be cooler if I were running BSD. I wonder to what degree the SCO FUD is similarly affecting the choice of Linux today?
-Waldo Jaquith
Folks its time to move on. George Bush did not win because of some evil Diebold exec or magical vote changing election booths. He won because over 61 million Americans pulled the lever for him.
Erm. How do you know that? I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with you, I'd just like to know what special information that you have access to that, say, the New York Times doesn't? If you've got some sort of audit logs from all of the voting machines, please, by all means, share with the GAO.
This election was a mess not because of evil Republican voting machines but because people were paid (some in crack) to register voters which brought in fraudulent voter registrations.
I call bullshit. There two -- two -- known incidents of people being registered fraudulently, according to the Republican National Committee Vote Fraud group. (Listen to This American Life's November 1 episode, "Swing Set," Act 2, which is 21:10 into the episode.) Not only were both of these committed by petty criminals paid by the registrant to sign up voters (that is, it was not systemic, just a pair of dopes), but it doesn't matter, since there is, in fact, no way for Mary Poppins to show up and vote. The other case was a Colorado man who registered 35 times. He can only vote once, as you can imagine, so, again, it doesn't matter.
Your implication that there is any parity between two isolated incidents of greedy workers signing up people wrongly and the massive, jail-time-yielding Republican work to suppress the vote or, worse still, systemic Diebold/ES&S fraud is well beyond ludicrous; it is, simply, stupid, and I am embarrassed on your behalf, because it seems that you don't have the good sense to be embarrassed for yourself.
-Waldo Jaquith
The bastards, they're going after two of the internets! Let's hope that President Bush doesn't tell them about any of the others...
-Waldo Jaquith
This has "HOAX" written all over it. It's classic culture jamming.
It's just like the stories about hunting nude women with paintball markers, Arm the Homeless, and Stu Magazine. I'd say odds are excellent that this is somebody pulling one over, quite cleverly and effectively, on the media.
See Sniggle.Net's News Trolls page for more information about the long, hilarious history of news trolling in the United States.
-Waldo Jaquith
I've been blogging since '96. A website developer since '93. Developed LAMP websites since '99. A Linux user since '94. I'm no dope. My Slashdot UID is so low, people have offered to pay me for it.
My geekdom established, I just don't get Wikis. Anybody can edit documents, the Wiki tracks changes, but somebody's in charge and can approve or roll back changes. Some sites use them for FAQs, and they suck. What else is there? What am I missing? What makes these things so damned special?
I'm not agitating here -- I really don't get it, and I'm certain that I must just not be in possession of all the facts. Can somebody enlighten me?
-Waldo Jaquith
What kind a of a sick sonofabitch roots for the Yankees?
-Waldo Jaquith
I work in politics. The program that we use for this is Caliper's Mapitude. It's a bad-ass little package. Perhaps the most amusing function is the ability to pinpoint an address (the incumbent's) and construct a district that includes every house in the neighborhood but that one, pitting two incumbents of the same party against each other and leaving an open seat for the redistricting party. I'd love to own a copy, just to play with, but for $500, I'd rather have a new iPod. :)
I don't know why I couch this is "this party" and "other party" language -- it's the Republicans, because they had dominance in many states after the 2000 census, just as technology had advanced sufficiently to turn redistricting into more of a science. If we Democrats had the majority then, we probably would have dome the same thing (though I'd like to hope I'd have argued against it in favor of redistricting by disinterested parties, not that what I say matters to anybody in any way).
-Waldo Jaquith
Can anybody explain what, if any, physical concerns exist with the use of an inflatable bladder in space? I can't quite envision how an inflatable object would behave in zero-G (perhaps just like any other object?), but in a vacuum, presumably explosion would be quite a difficult problem. Obviously, they've thought this through, but if somebody could explain the challenge of the proposition, I'd love to hear it.
I only know enough about this to know that I don't know enough about it.
-Waldo Jaquith
One of the communities that I run has 25,000 registered users who are active on the discussion boards. As a matter of practice, if somebody posts one of these bullshit links, the post is immediately removed, and both the user account and the IP are banned.
I just don't have any patience for that shit.
-Waldo Jaquith
There is no bigger geek rockstar in the House than my representative, Rep. Rick Boucher (VA-09). The guy advocates the protection of Fair Use, a Digital Milennium Consumers' Rights Act, opposes the DOJ's anti-P2P work, proposed a great anti-spam act in 2003 (it didn't pass; that crappy CAN-SPAM did, instead), he sponsored the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, and he testifies before various House committees all the time, representing, effectively, Slashdot. :) See the Internet section of his House site for more information. Alternately, you could see any of the Slashdot stories about him from over the years, including Slashdot | Rep. Boucher Outlines 'Fair Use' Fight, Boucher's Anti-DMCA Bill Gets High Profile Allies, Anti Spamming Act 2001 Proposed, and Webcasting and the DMCA.
:)
:)
;)
Hell, Boucher guest blogged for Larry Lessig a few weeks ago, and the stuff that he wrote about is like a Slashdotter's wet dream.
He doesn't talk about these things in his campaign literature -- much of the very-rural, poor population of southwest Virginia just wouldn't care. Read over his campaign website and you'll find more about the tobacco buyout, healthcare and tourism than technology.
And everybody else in the House sucks.
-Waldo Jaquith
Ooh, or, instead of starting a company to register the domain, you could buy an identity from the Nigerian and establish residency there, including buying a house (which you could keep empty) to function as a drop-box for mail and the like.
That'd be easier than getting, like, a PO box.
-Waldo Jaquith
That's just foolish -- we're not alone in the world. Globalization means that we're intricately interconnected with much of the rest of the world, and highly dependent on other nations. If American went isolationist tomorrow, we'd starve to death within weeks.
There's good reason why only Americans can vote in American elections. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't consider all of the facts, including the fact that the rest of the world is getting increasingly wary about the United States.
-Waldo Jaquith
Are you going to provide the funds for the manpower required to manually search help fields? You can't exactly fly airplanes/helicopters over the area and expect to make easy identification without some on the ground work.
Shall we ban bleached flour, because it resembles cocaine? Aspirin because it resembles Xanax?
C'mon, Bill -- you know this is a logical dead-end.
-Waldo Jaquith
I worked with my friendly state delegate, here in Charlottesville, VA, to introduce an OSS bill in the General Assembly in Richmond last February. It did nothing but remind -- not enforce, not require, remind -- the state IT department that there's nothing preventing them from using OSS, should they see fit.
It...uh...ended badly. Microsoft sent out six lobbyists (only one officially from Microsoft, with the rest from Microsoft shell agencies with Bushian names like "Organization for Software Freedom") and shut it down.
We'll try again this year.
-Waldo Jaquith
- Set your
.htaccess to redirect all traffic with a referrer of this white-power site to goatse.cx or something. If they can't post links to ongoing discussions on your site, it will make it very inconvenient for them.
- Require approval of all new users. This will weed out the obvious bullshit accounts - "h8gays" and "queerbait@hotmail.com" and the like.
- Prevent new users from starting threads for the first 24 hours.
- Don't ban trolls. Instead, set all page requests coming from their class of account to have a random sleep time of 30-60 seconds before the page will be delivered, and perhaps 25% of the time yield, simply, a "Server Too Busy" error. This way, they will not create new accounts (as they do if you simply ban them, forcing you to squash a new account), but find the whole affair too much trouble.
All of these are pretty easy to do, and are liable to save you a lot of trouble.-Waldo Jaquith
Most notable for the purpose of this discussion, Viega is the creator of Mailman, the fantastically-popular GPLd mailing list management software. All was good and well with his view of the many-eyeballs theory until, one day, he found a huge, glaring, holy-shit hole in Mailman a few years ago. He was so alarmed that nobody had ever spotted this that, after fixing it, he reflected on what he'd learned and turned it into a thoughtful article, The Myth of Open Source Security. As he wrote: Again, Mailman was and is an extremely popular program -- this was not a problem of obscurity.
So, the OnLamp.com article under discussion here is a follow-up to his original article, as he points out in the opening to the new article (but people apparently aren't reading.) As you can imagine, Viega is no rabid anti-OSS guy -- he's, in fact, the very model of what we want our developers to be. He writes good software, admits it when he writes bad software, and tells it like it is, even when we don't want to hear it.
(Disclaimers, such as they are: Viega is an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech, where I attend school, and I was the earliest alpha-tester of Mailman, in the late 90s.)
-Waldo Jaquith
You're talking about Senator Kerry, right? The guy who hasn't answered a reporter's question for one month and eight days now?
Yes, he has -- he does interviews with local media outlets regularly, often several times daily. I believe what you mean is that he has not personally held a press conference for one month and eight days, which is quite true.
-Waldo Jaquith
Dang, I hope you didn't Slashdot Filebox. I need to get to that tonight. :)
-Waldo Jaquith
Why would this be a good thing? Imagine the nightmares web page designers would have to go through if they had to support two completely different non-standards-compliant browsers. We'd need to use several different browsers on a day-to-day basis just to view all the pages correctly.
Welcome to 1998. I'll be your host.
-Waldo Jaquith