I'd be interested in seeing how many of these hits are for complete feeds rather than If-Modified-Since the last time it was downloaded. I suspect that if the RSS readers were behaving like nice User-Agents, we wouldn't see such reports.
Perhaps particularly offending User-Agents should be denied access to feeds. If I saw particular User-Agents consistently sending requests without If-Modified-Since, I'd ban them.
Are you listening, Sharp?
on
OQO Examined
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Of course. Sharp's entire Zaurus business model is based on the rantings of Slashdot posters. That's probably why IBM also jumped on board and distributed the Zaurus under their own brand. They're building street cred.
- the earth is spherical in shape - the earth revolves around the sun - we evolved from lower species - energy equals mass times the speed of light squared
<!-- STOP THIEF! WARNING: IT IS A FEDERAL CRIME UNDER THE DIGITAL MILLENIUM COPYRIGHT ACT --> <!-- TO CIRCUMVENT THIS COPY PROTECTION MECHANISM TO DOWNLOAD COPYRIGHTED IMAGES. --> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://CPRR.org/no-download.js"></script&g t;
A successful troll, as you quickly achieved a score of 5. Congratulations. However, you fail to:
a) backup any of your assertions with facts;
b) acknowledge RH's committment to OSS, which is evident in its strict conformance with all OSS licenses it engages in, by distributing said software;
c) acknowledge RH's contribution to OSS with its numerous contributions to the Linux kernel, GNOME, and other OSS projects -- yes, they benefit RH, but they benefit us too;
d) acknowlege RH's contribution to making Linux a credible production environment. RH's commercial success, in combination with actions from IBM and other vendors, has made Linux a viable production platform.
I wonder why you're pissed that RH is making decisions about how it spends its own money. It's a commercial enterprise. It's RH's mission in life to make money. Always has been.
Businesses have accepted Linux, and their reasons are not of your business. That's one of the major principles of OSS -- freedom to choose.
So, there's still some hope. The code to GAIM is freely availeable for Microsoft to audit, so theres at least a small chance they will certify it as not being a "security risk".
I wish. I think the probability that Microsoft would certify a GPL software package for use with their network is only slightly higher than the chance Microsoft would releasing Microsoft Office 2003 under the GPL.
In the capitalist scenario, two parties engage in a consentual transaction. The first party provides a product or service to the second party in exchange for agreed upon remuneration.
Along comes a third party, someone who acquired a patent (essentially government-granted monopoly to some law of nature) to prevent the other two parties from engaging in their transaction. Armed with a patent, the patent holder can exert control over someone else's physical property, all because he has been granted a monopoly on some aspect of reality.
Regarding your allusion to communism, as far as I know, the author of that quote was an anarchist. To my knowledge, this is the extreme opposite of communism, calling for no government intervention.
Government granted monopolies (such as patents) allow people to charge in excess to the value of product or service. This severely inhibits capitalism, where what one pays for a product or service is proportional to its value. Often, in an effort to prevent "price gouging" by those with monopoly positions, governments attempt to establish controls on pricing. This practice is a hallmark of communism.
I won't argue that one man's idea is everyone's property. In fact quite the opposite. I would argue that it cannot be anyone's property.
"... the patent monopoly... consists in protecting inventors... against competition for a period long enough to extort from the people a reward enormously in excess of the labor measure of their services, -- in other words, in giving certain people a right of property for a term of years in laws and facts of Nature, and the power to extract tribute from others for the use of this natural wealth, which should be open to all."
- Benjamin Tucker, Instead of a Book, By a Man Too Busy to Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism (New York: Tucker, 1893), p. 13.)
And how should Sun solve this? By allowing anyone to use a Java conformant logo who conform to the Java standard. Now all Sun has to do is stop being dicks the way they were with JBoss J2EE conformance and call a conformant Java implementation what it is.
HTML and XML are examples of where this works. HTML has open source implementations, and despite Microsoft's attempts to deviate from the standard, W3C keeps churning out specs, and people keep implementing them. Yes, some people optimize to IE, but divergence in devices is making that impractical.
Weren't you supposed to burn your Dixie Chicks albums with the rest of us?:P Even with so-called theme albums, some songs are good and others are mediocre. I think this holds true with Home.
But doesn't it all come down to consent between the artist and consumer (indirectly through the RIAA)? If an artist consents to selling singles and you consent to buying one, no problem.
If the artist doesn't consent to release of singles, isn't that their prerogative? Of course, if people don't buy their albums, and the cupboards start to get bare, maybe the'll change their tune.
Consumers hold power collectively by choosing who to engage in consentual transactions with. Citizens hold power collectively by voting on who represents them in government.
Certainly VOD will be a convenient way to watch movies, and many will choose this over renting DVDs at the local video store. However:
1. Quality. The quality of VOD is likely to be less than that of DVD for some time. I'm watching analog cable broadcasts of television, and I'm seeing more compression artifacts as satellite providers try to cram as much content in their pipes as possible. VOD is likely going to strain the bandwidth of providers, requiring more compression, reducing quality.
2. Ownership. There are movies I also want to "own". You know, a piece of physical matter I can put into a player to watch it again and again and again until I've memorized every line in the movie and dream of one day starring in the... err... You know, "own".
3. Investment. People have made investment in home entertainment systems. They're not going to throw those away anytime soon. They're still a captive market to sell DVDs to, and I expect they will be for quite some time. It's why VHS is still selling. It's the reason things use to come on cassette and8-track.
I think these are compelling reasons why DVDs won't disappear in the timeline that's being proposed.
Linux does have viruses, and Lindows in particular runs the desktop as root by default. Lindows is much more likely to become infected by a virus than a Linux system configured with limited user accounts.
Unless AOL is in violation of some term or condition of its contract with its customers, there is nothing wrong with AOL blocking addresses for its subscribers without informing them. If AOL customers don't like this, they can find an ISP that provides a better level of service than AOL. My point is this is hardly a YRO issue -- AOL is well within its rights.
Amen to that. People often claim they refuse to accept email from AOL because a lot of spam comes from them. The inverse completely legitimate. No rights are being violated. AOL is deciding with whom it is willing to associate with. If its customers dislike the change, they are free to find a more agreeable service provider.
My previous employer was unfortunate enough to be attacked by a series of distributed ICMP ping flood attacks. Our bill jumped from under $1K per month (Canadian) to over $10K in less than a day.
We adjusted our monitoring process to detect these spikes early and contact our ISP to deny traffic from the offending subnets. Luckily, our ISP was willing to do this, even though they still incurred traffic from inbound packets. Luckily, these attacks originated from a few subnets that could be isolated.
As a further kludge, we eventually disabled ICMP altogether on our routers, and lived without ping and traceroute.
Having a host on the net is a risky proposition. You pay for inbound and outbound traffic, regardless of the source, packet type, or quantity. DDoS attacks can not only prevent your server from being accessable, they could literally bankrupt you if you become a target and don't take preventative measures.
Hmm... One click bankruptcy. I wonder if anyone has tried to patent this yet...
Our ISP was technically capable of detecting and thwarting various attacks. Ultimately, the policy of monitoring and contacting an ISP when traffic exceeds a certain threshold seems like a workable solution for average co-locaters.
Given the architecture of the Internet, it's difficult to see how we could shift the burden to pay away from the server to the client. It seems like a problem remarkably similar to the problem of spam.
I just want to add, to cover all PoV, that a self-correcting system does not mean that no justice is needed. If someone breaks the law, I expect them to be found guilty and punished no matter who they are. This is whether they stole my car, robbed a bank, murdered, or broke antitrust law.
Are you comparing so-called "antitrust" behavior with patently criminal acts such as robbery and murder? Are all laws just?
This article briefly mentions my challenge of the constititutionality of section 329 of the Canada Elections Act. S.329 prohibits the "premature transmission" of election results.
The constitutional hearing is scheduled in Vancouver provincial court at 9:30 AM, January 28 2003 at 222 Main Street, Vancouver.
If he wants autorun on, then so be it. That does'nt make it right for a third party to send or receive any information from that PC.
If leaves autorun enabled, then inserts a CD with unknown content, he probably shouldn't be surprised if his computer stops obeying his commands and decides to obey someone else.
This is one of the most compelling cases for open source software. A license, however implcit, should not include the right of the manufacturer to decide what the user's system can, cannot, will, will not do.
I *dare* you to read the Microsoft Windows XP End User License Agreement. I *double* dare you to actually agree to its terms. I think people would be seriously surprised if they actually read the agreements they are engaging in by opening cellophane wrappers and inserting CDs into drives.
Would it sit well with you as a kernel developer if, for instance, microsoft was using linux as their development platform for their next OS?
If I were a Linux kernel developer, how people would use my kernel is none of my business.
What if you knew that they were using it in production with in house changes and additions with out releasing source code?
If I knew they were distributing binaries to Linux without accompanying source code, I would insist that they rectify their apparent violations of the GPL.
This is where BitMover is sitting. Developers are using their software to assist in developing their competition and doing it in violation of their licensing agreement.
Actually, BM is restricting the license to BK, not based on how it's used, but on who uses it. If you're a competitor to BM, you do not qualify to use the Gratis version.
It's not open source software. It's commercial software. This may be ultimately incompatible with its use by open source developers. This is no surprise, right? Linus seems to make choices based on the merits of technology and practicality, not politics. If too many barriers to the use of BK emerge, I have a feeling he could make a different decision.
BitMover is just doing what we would do if the shoe was on the other foot. This issue will be solved in the same way the open source community always deals with challenges.
Placing restrictions on how a piece of software is used violates the "free speech" elements of any open source software license. It would stop being open source software. How people use the Linux kernel is none of the developers' business. How they redistribute it, however, differs with certain licenses.
The open source community will produce a better alternative under the GPL without using their software. Just like Windows is not the developer enviroment for the kernel, BitKeeper will not be the revision control software used for Subversion.
I don't think the SV folks ever considered using BK as their revision control system. I think the issue is, a SV developer could not accept the Gratis license to BK to work on the Kernel, because he was excluded because he works on a competitive project.
Many projects/products are now basing themselves on other core projects (e.g., Netscape/Mozilla, Covalent/Apache, CrossOver/WINE, RedHat/KDE/GNOME...). So far, I haven't seen flaws in derivatives give their bases a bad name.
Perhaps someone could name a few concrete examples?
This is a bug and it does allow someone to track where you're going. The proof of concept page clearly states that the "referer of the http request for this image will be the page you are visiting next, not this page" (emphasis is theirs). I expect that when JavaScript is executing for the page I am leaving, that it have no idea where I am going. Anything otherwise is a breach of privacy, and should be considered a bug.
Make no mistake, Red Hat is a commerical organization, whose sole purpose is to make money and increase its value for its shareholders.
However, what could keep RH from devolving into another-business-that-has-achieved-market-dominanc e is the GNU General Public License. RH was founded on the GPL, which places significant constraints on distributors.
I'm sure if RH finds a dangerous loophole, it'll be quickly shored up by RMS, and unless RH decides to fork all of its packages and take on development itself, will be obliged to adhere to the terms of the software it distributes.
Finally, there is a bellweather I would watch to determine whether RH has become too powerful: Alan Cox. Cox seems a man of principle, and wouldn't stand for too much BS from his employer.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be interested in seeing how many of these hits are for complete feeds rather than If-Modified-Since the last time it was downloaded. I suspect that if the RSS readers were behaving like nice User-Agents, we wouldn't see such reports.
Perhaps particularly offending User-Agents should be denied access to feeds. If I saw particular User-Agents consistently sending requests without If-Modified-Since, I'd ban them.
Stuff that's nearly two years old.
Of course. Sharp's entire Zaurus business model is based on the rantings of Slashdot posters. That's probably why IBM also jumped on board and distributed the Zaurus under their own brand. They're building street cred.
Of course, a whole lot of this is just theory.
Of course, in theory:
- the earth is spherical in shape
- the earth revolves around the sun
- we evolved from lower species
- energy equals mass times the speed of light squared
Interesting tidbit when you view source...
<!-- STOP THIEF! WARNING: IT IS A FEDERAL CRIME UNDER THE DIGITAL MILLENIUM COPYRIGHT ACT -->
<!-- TO CIRCUMVENT THIS COPY PROTECTION MECHANISM TO DOWNLOAD COPYRIGHTED IMAGES. -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://CPRR.org/no-download.js"></script&g t;
A successful troll, as you quickly achieved a score of 5. Congratulations. However, you fail to:
a) backup any of your assertions with facts;
b) acknowledge RH's committment to OSS, which is evident in its strict conformance with all OSS licenses it engages in, by distributing said software;
c) acknowledge RH's contribution to OSS with its numerous contributions to the Linux kernel, GNOME, and other OSS projects -- yes, they benefit RH, but they benefit us too;
d) acknowlege RH's contribution to making Linux a credible production environment. RH's commercial success, in combination with actions from IBM and other vendors, has made Linux a viable production platform.
I wonder why you're pissed that RH is making decisions about how it spends its own money. It's a commercial enterprise. It's RH's mission in life to make money. Always has been.
Businesses have accepted Linux, and their reasons are not of your business. That's one of the major principles of OSS -- freedom to choose.
Nobody's raping anyone.
So, there's still some hope. The code to GAIM is freely availeable for Microsoft to audit, so theres at least a small chance they will certify it as not being a "security risk".
I wish. I think the probability that Microsoft would certify a GPL software package for use with their network is only slightly higher than the chance Microsoft would releasing Microsoft Office 2003 under the GPL.
I would buy the first portable player to have Ogg Vorbis support. Just 5 minutes ago, I ordered by Neuros.
You probably should have bought the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500, which has had support for Ogg Vorbis now for some time.
In the capitalist scenario, two parties engage in a consentual transaction. The first party provides a product or service to the second party in exchange for agreed upon remuneration.
Along comes a third party, someone who acquired a patent (essentially government-granted monopoly to some law of nature) to prevent the other two parties from engaging in their transaction. Armed with a patent, the patent holder can exert control over someone else's physical property, all because he has been granted a monopoly on some aspect of reality.
Regarding your allusion to communism, as far as I know, the author of that quote was an anarchist. To my knowledge, this is the extreme opposite of communism, calling for no government intervention.
Government granted monopolies (such as patents) allow people to charge in excess to the value of product or service. This severely inhibits capitalism, where what one pays for a product or service is proportional to its value. Often, in an effort to prevent "price gouging" by those with monopoly positions, governments attempt to establish controls on pricing. This practice is a hallmark of communism.
I won't argue that one man's idea is everyone's property. In fact quite the opposite. I would argue that it cannot be anyone's property.
"... the patent monopoly ... consists in protecting inventors ... against competition for a period long enough to extort from the people a reward enormously in excess of the labor measure of their services, -- in other words, in giving certain people a right of property for a term of years in laws and facts of Nature, and the power to extract tribute from others for the use of this natural wealth, which should be open to all."
- Benjamin Tucker, Instead of a Book, By a Man Too Busy to Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism (New York: Tucker, 1893), p. 13.)
And how should Sun solve this? By allowing anyone to use a Java conformant logo who conform to the Java standard. Now all Sun has to do is stop being dicks the way they were with JBoss J2EE conformance and call a conformant Java implementation what it is.
HTML and XML are examples of where this works. HTML has open source implementations, and despite Microsoft's attempts to deviate from the standard, W3C keeps churning out specs, and people keep implementing them. Yes, some people optimize to IE, but divergence in devices is making that impractical.
Weren't you supposed to burn your Dixie Chicks albums with the rest of us? :P Even with so-called theme albums, some songs are good and others are mediocre. I think this holds true with Home.
But doesn't it all come down to consent between the artist and consumer (indirectly through the RIAA)? If an artist consents to selling singles and you consent to buying one, no problem.
If the artist doesn't consent to release of singles, isn't that their prerogative? Of course, if people don't buy their albums, and the cupboards start to get bare, maybe the'll change their tune.
What's insightful about this?
Consumers hold power collectively by choosing who to engage in consentual transactions with. Citizens hold power collectively by voting on who represents them in government.
Neither has much power individually.
Certainly VOD will be a convenient way to watch movies, and many will choose this over renting DVDs at the local video store. However:
1. Quality. The quality of VOD is likely to be less than that of DVD for some time. I'm watching analog cable broadcasts of television, and I'm seeing more compression artifacts as satellite providers try to cram as much content in their pipes as possible. VOD is likely going to strain the bandwidth of providers, requiring more compression, reducing quality.
2. Ownership. There are movies I also want to "own". You know, a piece of physical matter I can put into a player to watch it again and again and again until I've memorized every line in the movie and dream of one day starring in the... err... You know, "own".
3. Investment. People have made investment in home entertainment systems. They're not going to throw those away anytime soon. They're still a captive market to sell DVDs to, and I expect they will be for quite some time. It's why VHS is still selling. It's the reason things use to come on cassette and8-track.
I think these are compelling reasons why DVDs won't disappear in the timeline that's being proposed.
Linux does have viruses, and Lindows in particular runs the desktop as root by default. Lindows is much more likely to become infected by a virus than a Linux system configured with limited user accounts.
Unless AOL is in violation of some term or condition of its contract with its customers, there is nothing wrong with AOL blocking addresses for its subscribers without informing them. If AOL customers don't like this, they can find an ISP that provides a better level of service than AOL. My point is this is hardly a YRO issue -- AOL is well within its rights.
Amen to that. People often claim they refuse to accept email from AOL because a lot of spam comes from them. The inverse completely legitimate. No rights are being violated. AOL is deciding with whom it is willing to associate with. If its customers dislike the change, they are free to find a more agreeable service provider.
My previous employer was unfortunate enough to be attacked by a series of distributed ICMP ping flood attacks. Our bill jumped from under $1K per month (Canadian) to over $10K in less than a day.
We adjusted our monitoring process to detect these spikes early and contact our ISP to deny traffic from the offending subnets. Luckily, our ISP was willing to do this, even though they still incurred traffic from inbound packets. Luckily, these attacks originated from a few subnets that could be isolated.
As a further kludge, we eventually disabled ICMP altogether on our routers, and lived without ping and traceroute.
Having a host on the net is a risky proposition. You pay for inbound and outbound traffic, regardless of the source, packet type, or quantity. DDoS attacks can not only prevent your server from being accessable, they could literally bankrupt you if you become a target and don't take preventative measures.
Hmm... One click bankruptcy. I wonder if anyone has tried to patent this yet...
Our ISP was technically capable of detecting and thwarting various attacks. Ultimately, the policy of monitoring and contacting an ISP when traffic exceeds a certain threshold seems like a workable solution for average co-locaters.
Given the architecture of the Internet, it's difficult to see how we could shift the burden to pay away from the server to the client. It seems like a problem remarkably similar to the problem of spam.
I just want to add, to cover all PoV, that a self-correcting system does not mean that no justice is needed. If someone breaks the law, I expect them to be found guilty and punished no matter who they are. This is whether they stole my car, robbed a bank, murdered, or broke antitrust law.
Are you comparing so-called "antitrust" behavior with patently criminal acts such as robbery and murder? Are all laws just?
This article briefly mentions my challenge of the constititutionality of section 329 of the Canada Elections Act. S.329 prohibits the "premature transmission" of election results.
The constitutional hearing is scheduled in Vancouver provincial court at 9:30 AM, January 28 2003 at 222 Main Street, Vancouver.
For more information, visit ElectionResultsCanada.com.
If he wants autorun on, then so be it. That does'nt make it right for a third party to send or receive any information from that PC.
If leaves autorun enabled, then inserts a CD with unknown content, he probably shouldn't be surprised if his computer stops obeying his commands and decides to obey someone else.
This is one of the most compelling cases for open source software. A license, however implcit, should not include the right of the manufacturer to decide what the user's system can, cannot, will, will not do.
I *dare* you to read the Microsoft Windows XP End User License Agreement. I *double* dare you to actually agree to its terms. I think people would be seriously surprised if they actually read the agreements they are engaging in by opening cellophane wrappers and inserting CDs into drives.
Would it sit well with you as a kernel developer if, for instance, microsoft was using linux as their development platform for their next OS?
If I were a Linux kernel developer, how people would use my kernel is none of my business.
What if you knew that they were using it in production with in house changes and additions with out releasing source code?
If I knew they were distributing binaries to Linux without accompanying source code, I would insist that they rectify their apparent violations of the GPL.
This is where BitMover is sitting. Developers are using their software to assist in developing their competition and doing it in violation of their licensing agreement.
Actually, BM is restricting the license to BK, not based on how it's used, but on who uses it. If you're a competitor to BM, you do not qualify to use the Gratis version.
It's not open source software. It's commercial software. This may be ultimately incompatible with its use by open source developers. This is no surprise, right? Linus seems to make choices based on the merits of technology and practicality, not politics. If too many barriers to the use of BK emerge, I have a feeling he could make a different decision.
BitMover is just doing what we would do if the shoe was on the other foot. This issue will be solved in the same way the open source community always deals with challenges.
Placing restrictions on how a piece of software is used violates the "free speech" elements of any open source software license. It would stop being open source software. How people use the Linux kernel is none of the developers' business. How they redistribute it, however, differs with certain licenses.
The open source community will produce a better alternative under the GPL without using their software. Just like Windows is not the developer enviroment for the kernel, BitKeeper will not be the revision control software used for Subversion.
I don't think the SV folks ever considered using BK as their revision control system. I think the issue is, a SV developer could not accept the Gratis license to BK to work on the Kernel, because he was excluded because he works on a competitive project.
This will give Linux a bad name.
I think it should only give Lindows a bad name.
Many projects/products are now basing themselves on other core projects (e.g., Netscape/Mozilla, Covalent/Apache, CrossOver/WINE, RedHat/KDE/GNOME...). So far, I haven't seen flaws in derivatives give their bases a bad name.
Perhaps someone could name a few concrete examples?
This is a bug and it does allow someone to track where you're going. The proof of concept page clearly states that the "referer of the http request for this image will be the page you are visiting next , not this page " (emphasis is theirs). I expect that when JavaScript is executing for the page I am leaving, that it have no idea where I am going. Anything otherwise is a breach of privacy, and should be considered a bug.
Make no mistake, Red Hat is a commerical organization, whose sole purpose is to make money and increase its value for its shareholders.
c e is the GNU General Public License. RH was founded on the GPL, which places significant constraints on distributors.
However, what could keep RH from devolving into another-business-that-has-achieved-market-dominan
I'm sure if RH finds a dangerous loophole, it'll be quickly shored up by RMS, and unless RH decides to fork all of its packages and take on development itself, will be obliged to adhere to the terms of the software it distributes.
Finally, there is a bellweather I would watch to determine whether RH has become too powerful: Alan Cox. Cox seems a man of principle, and wouldn't stand for too much BS from his employer.