I was referrering more to the content of the letter then just the handwriting. There is a big difference between a form letter saying "Thanks for writing, my position on issue X is..." and a letter that actually singles out concerns and replies with thought out responses to them, which is what I have recieved in response to some of my emails.
Re:Not willing to go to jail to prove a point?
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 2
Downloading mp3s is not illegal, and the RIAA will not do anything about it. If you want to piss them off, record 400,000 mp3s by independent artists and share them all, promoting independent music in a non-cd format. I guarantee you that would piss them off.
Re:Not willing to go to jail to prove a point?
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 2
EPIC, while obviously far more competent than the EFF, is not for defending freedom of speech, but for defending privacy. Groups like this have to specialize, because in a court system full of corrupt judges and politicians like the US courts, the need the specialization to survive.
If you plan to get a law degree in IP, you might want to reconsider. Aside from working full time for a group like the EFF (Unlikely at best.), an IP lawyer who did anything OTHER than promote a corporate point of view would be quickly blacklisted. Just something to think about if you plan to make a living with a degree in IP law.
Re:Well, so much for freedom.
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 5, Informative
"Get out from behind the monitor and write your congressman. No, don't e-mail him/her, they won't read it."
YES, THEY WILL. Some Senators have actually pointed out that right now electronic mail is a better way to go (For an example, CLICK HERE.) because of the Anthrax threats on Capitol Hill. I can personally vouch that politicians read email, because I have recieved multiple personal, specific replies to emails I have sent to my representatives. These were well written letters, not just a generic form letter about a topic with a fake signature stamp.
On the topic, Americans need to stop buying into the myth that politicians do not read email. This story is spread by:
1- American media corporations, who want to keep people from contacting representatives. Actually writing a letter and mailing it intimidates some people (Those who do not know how to prepare elegant business letters or have poor handwriting and lack spelling skills.), and is too time-consuming for others. By making sure that the people's thoughts are not heard, companies like AOL and Microsoft make sure that theirs ARE.
2- Old Guard politicians afraid of progress, the guys like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond who are afraid of change, especially one that gives a lot of voters a voice in a manner that they do not understand.
Use email to contact politicians. It works. If a politician will not care about your email, chances are that he is enough of an asshole that he would not care about a letter anyway,.And if a politician expresses disdain for email, note it, and make sure he gets voted out!
Not willing to go to jail to prove a point?
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Why didn't the scientists involved just present their research pulicly, and make it a media event? Let the corporate goon squads of the DOJ/FBI prosecute the scientists, in front of the American media, obviously violating their consitutional rights? Or are these scientists willing to go to jail to make a point? Apparently not.
So here I will make an offer: Someone get me a good presentation that violates the DMCA, along with printed handouts, and time at a conference to present it. Inform the media and the DOJ/RIAA/MPAA ahead of time of what I will be dicussing. Have a lawyer ready to represent me. At that time I will pass out printed photocopies of the presentation and give the presentation. I am willing to go to jail over this if someone else is willing to do the preparatory work. If you can get provide the backing, just drop me an email at supabeast AT supabeast DAWT oh-are-gee.
I honestly feel that having some serious corporate representation on board is a good thing. There are many people in the Open Source/Free Software communities that want to see Gnome become the standard desktop out there, but until Gnome gets to a point where it can be popular with regular old users, and stable enough for use in serious business applications, it will never have a good chance at winning business from Windows. Perhaps with some serious attempts to make money involved (At least from RedHat and Compaq- the chances of Ximian ever becoming profitable seem pretty slim.), Gnome can become the free software desktop of choice and deserve it.
Now I can watch companies sue everyone in sight over ownership of.us domains, too! Whee!
On the upside for NeuStar, they are sure to make a fortune from all the companies sick of getting into lawsuits over this sort of thing and buy thier.us domains right away. May I pet your Ferraris?
"It is one thing for a university to claim ownership of work produced by their employees; it is quite another for a university to claim ownership of work produced by people who are paying to be there."
And it has not stopped you from paying to be there, has it? The biggest problem with academia is that so many people just accept all of the horrible flaws in the system, and keep pumping in money to support it.
Remember Cringley's columnabout Microsoft wanting to replace TCP/IP with their own protocols? Imagine a requirement that American's only use software that the FBI can get at- and if that software ran on proprietary Microsoft protocols, the government could force American ISPs to block the older protocols that only criminals need anyway. Given that George Bush will likely be elected if he can drag on his "war on terrorism" until 2004 (Americans always re-elect wartime preisdents.), that leaves us with seven more years of a federal government supports Microsoft, supports John Ashscroft's assault on the freedoms provided by our constitution, and is not afraid of the political ramifications of extreme actions.
Easy way to abuse the FBI's new Magic Lantern "virus."
Do illegal stuff online, and be conspicuous about it. If you are already involved in organized crime, this will be easy. Do all your stuff using PGP on a Windows 2000 base install. Regularly talk on the phone to your buddies about those idiot FBI agents who can't read your encrypted email. Make sure to do everything with LCD montitors so that the FBI has to crack the email instead of just tapping your CRT. Get a geek to learn a lot about virus operation so that he can regularly check the system and snag the virus.
As soon as the virus pops up, keep playing along. Send out encrypted crap messages that make no sense, and appear to be written in code words so that the FBI spends more time trying to crack THAT code after cracking the message. At the same time, decompile the virus and figure out how it works. Alter the virus to be self-propigating and extremely malicious, destroying all filesystems on infected machines and shutting them down while residing only in memory to prevent people from finding the virus on disk.
After a few days, set up an online store selling anti-virus software at $19.95 a seat licensing. Encrypt everything the program contains with the exception of an executable, so that no other virus company can figure out how it works without violating the DMCA.
Laugh at the FBI agents who are too busy trying to figure out what all your code words are to notice you raking in millions with a foreign company selling anti-virus software, move to Zug, and retire.
I admit, that scenario is a bit of a stretch. A more likely scheme (And what will likely happen very soon.) is a few good crackers decompile antivirus software from McAffee and Norton, both American companies that will allow the FBI virus through, and compare it with antivirus software from foreign firms, which will likely block the FBI virus to prevent the USA from spying on their companies as the USA does with echelon. Bingo, killer virus in no time flat, watch it take the world by storm. And before any of you bother to post about how the FBI will manage to keep all the details secret so that this doesn't happen, think about this; if the FBI could manage to keep a secret, we would not know about things like Magic Lantern and Carnivore to begin with.
I want to thank the FBI for fucking over America with their inability to realize the dire consequences of their poorly-planned actions. By doing this the FBI is screwing over:
1- All of the companies around the world, especially in the US, that will spend a ton of money dealing with the downtime caused by the first virus to exploit the Magic Lantern backdoors.
2- All of the American antivirus software companies who will lose market share to foreign software companies who do not leave FBI backdoors in their products.
3- Microsoft, who will likely be accused of leaving FBI backdoors in Windows, and who will lose market share when a virus sweeps the Windows world on a level that shames Code Red I and II.
4- All the Windows admins out there who will now have to rebuild all of their compromised machines, and switch to antivirus software by companies that do not leave backdoors for the FBI.
"So sure, maybe you could write Amazing Lightbulb, that McAfee can't distinguish from Magic Lantern. But it probably couldn't do anything interesting, because if it tried, McAfee would know it isn't Magic Lantern."
Unless, of course, the first thing that Amazing Lightbulb does is shut off all run anti-virus software and delete the executables to prevent them from running later.
People in the USA complaining about loss of liberties ARE happy we live in the US. Right now I would not want to be a citizen of ANY other country. When we scream and bitch and protest it is because we love America, we love our freedoms, and under no circumstances will we go quitely into the night as sleazy politicians try turn the USA into a police state to forward their wretched careers.
Is it just me, or does the thought of debugging an app controlled with C code the executes code in PERL, shell, java, and whatever else sound really, really horrible?
Right now this thread is filling with posts about why or why not this network will be secure, and why or why not all of the OTHER protected/secret government networks are/are not secure. What people are missing out on is that the government does not actually WANT a secure network.
Bush and co. want a new network because two states, California and Viriginia, are full of out-of-work techies, left jobless by the dotcom collapse. Virginia and California are also the top two states in regards to defense agencies, contracts, locations, dollars, etc.. Building a new government network would create a huge number of stable, high-paying jobs in Virginia and California as the agencies and contractors in those states were wired up; and even more jobs all across the country as the network spread out to all of the other states in between.
Not only does this have the effect of greatly boosting the economy without pissing too many people off (Which Congress has proven they cannot manage to do.), it also earns a lot of loyalty to the Republican party from all of the people who get those jobs, as well as the other people who benefit from those jobs as the money trickles outward.
Is this network needed, or even likely to work? I do not really know, and anyone who had nothing better to do than post to Slashdot about it really does either. But that does not matter, because right now America's economy needs to get going, the world needs our economy to get going, and the people making decisions in the White House realize that this is a good way to give a long term boost to the economy and their careers, without really earning much scorn, and they would be fools not to.
Want to know what killed Bleem!? It as Bleem!. Those guys were trying to be a viable software company by selling a Playstation emulator. Earth to morons, console gamers that can afford enough games to make Bleem! worth buying already had a Playstation by the time Bleem! hit the market.
Bleem! was bitten by their own product being, well, lame.
99% of what I find on the web is crap that I stumble across when looking for relevant information. Given that I constantly use the web as a reference for everything I can because I am usually at a computer anyway (Often 12+ hours a day.), my web bills would easily be several hundred dollars a month, most of which would be me paying for what is essentially waste. Unless search engines start forcing users to rate websites for content quality, people would quickly get sick of paying for waste, and the system would die out fast.
Abuse of such a system would only exacerbate the problem. People would load pages with stuff designed to ring up search engine hits for guaranteed clickthroughs. Everyone out there would break up articles into two-paragraph pages to get more clicks. Sites like Slashdot would be flooded with even more worthless submissions by people who actually wanted to get slammed with hits.
And what about those annoying popups? I better not end up paying for those. Sleazy webmasters will go out of their way to trick people into firing off tons of penny a hit windows.
Am I saying that penny-per-page micropayments have no future? No. But it will take some very, very careful planning to make it work.
-A 50 user wireless node.
-Built-in modem that even supports AOL access.
-Connects to Cable/DSL "modems" to act as a router.
-Built-in firewall for simple security setup.
-Works with loads of different operating systems.
-Looks really, really cool. Definately beats those ugly blue boxes with flashing LEDs and antennae.
Is it just me, or should Apple marketing be pushing these to non-Apple users? This thing is incredible, especially for the cost. Steve Jobs should tell them to send review samples to the editors of all the PC magazines and web sites.
Just a bit of advice about big companies like Worldcom: they love to treat employees like dirt. If you go to a company like that, expect to be nothing but a number, overworked at the excuse of a salary until the day they lay you off so that the CEO can save the company $2 millon and gives himself a $3 million dollar raise to celebrate.
Unless you are young and looking to learn, look for small companies. If you have a high tolerance for BS, get into goverment contracting or work for the government directly. The pay is not as good, but in the long run you will be much happier.
Video games are the greatest form of art to come along in human history. Both visual and aural stimulation combine to envelop the player in an experience forged by the game's creator. Expression is taken to levels never seen before in video games. As video games progress, we will see video games that become more and more expressive of a single person's concepts and ideas, because the tools to make the games will eventually become simple and fast enough for a single person to use to create a game. Neverwinter Nights, an upcoming role-playing game with the capability for users to design their own games with it, is a great example of just how this will all work out.
Slashdot Mirror
I was referrering more to the content of the letter then just the handwriting. There is a big difference between a form letter saying "Thanks for writing, my position on issue X is ..." and a letter that actually singles out concerns and replies with thought out responses to them, which is what I have recieved in response to some of my emails.
Downloading mp3s is not illegal, and the RIAA will not do anything about it. If you want to piss them off, record 400,000 mp3s by independent artists and share them all, promoting independent music in a non-cd format. I guarantee you that would piss them off.
Touche...
EPIC, while obviously far more competent than the EFF, is not for defending freedom of speech, but for defending privacy. Groups like this have to specialize, because in a court system full of corrupt judges and politicians like the US courts, the need the specialization to survive.
If you plan to get a law degree in IP, you might want to reconsider. Aside from working full time for a group like the EFF (Unlikely at best.), an IP lawyer who did anything OTHER than promote a corporate point of view would be quickly blacklisted. Just something to think about if you plan to make a living with a degree in IP law.
"Get out from behind the monitor and write your congressman. No, don't e-mail him/her, they won't read it."
YES, THEY WILL. Some Senators have actually pointed out that right now electronic mail is a better way to go (For an example, CLICK HERE.) because of the Anthrax threats on Capitol Hill. I can personally vouch that politicians read email, because I have recieved multiple personal, specific replies to emails I have sent to my representatives. These were well written letters, not just a generic form letter about a topic with a fake signature stamp.
On the topic, Americans need to stop buying into the myth that politicians do not read email. This story is spread by:
1- American media corporations, who want to keep people from contacting representatives. Actually writing a letter and mailing it intimidates some people (Those who do not know how to prepare elegant business letters or have poor handwriting and lack spelling skills.), and is too time-consuming for others. By making sure that the people's thoughts are not heard, companies like AOL and Microsoft make sure that theirs ARE.
2- Old Guard politicians afraid of progress, the guys like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond who are afraid of change, especially one that gives a lot of voters a voice in a manner that they do not understand.
Use email to contact politicians. It works. If a politician will not care about your email, chances are that he is enough of an asshole that he would not care about a letter anyway,.And if a politician expresses disdain for email, note it, and make sure he gets voted out!
Why didn't the scientists involved just present their research pulicly, and make it a media event? Let the corporate goon squads of the DOJ/FBI prosecute the scientists, in front of the American media, obviously violating their consitutional rights? Or are these scientists willing to go to jail to make a point? Apparently not.
So here I will make an offer: Someone get me a good presentation that violates the DMCA, along with printed handouts, and time at a conference to present it. Inform the media and the DOJ/RIAA/MPAA ahead of time of what I will be dicussing. Have a lawyer ready to represent me. At that time I will pass out printed photocopies of the presentation and give the presentation. I am willing to go to jail over this if someone else is willing to do the preparatory work. If you can get provide the backing, just drop me an email at supabeast AT supabeast DAWT oh-are-gee.
I honestly feel that having some serious corporate representation on board is a good thing. There are many people in the Open Source/Free Software communities that want to see Gnome become the standard desktop out there, but until Gnome gets to a point where it can be popular with regular old users, and stable enough for use in serious business applications, it will never have a good chance at winning business from Windows. Perhaps with some serious attempts to make money involved (At least from RedHat and Compaq- the chances of Ximian ever becoming profitable seem pretty slim.), Gnome can become the free software desktop of choice and deserve it.
Now I can watch companies sue everyone in sight over ownership of .us domains, too! Whee!
.us domains right away. May I pet your Ferraris?
On the upside for NeuStar, they are sure to make a fortune from all the companies sick of getting into lawsuits over this sort of thing and buy thier
"It is one thing for a university to claim ownership of work produced by their employees; it is quite another for a university to claim ownership of work produced by people who are paying to be there."
And it has not stopped you from paying to be there, has it? The biggest problem with academia is that so many people just accept all of the horrible flaws in the system, and keep pumping in money to support it.
Remember Cringley's columnabout Microsoft wanting to replace TCP/IP with their own protocols? Imagine a requirement that American's only use software that the FBI can get at- and if that software ran on proprietary Microsoft protocols, the government could force American ISPs to block the older protocols that only criminals need anyway. Given that George Bush will likely be elected if he can drag on his "war on terrorism" until 2004 (Americans always re-elect wartime preisdents.), that leaves us with seven more years of a federal government supports Microsoft, supports John Ashscroft's assault on the freedoms provided by our constitution, and is not afraid of the political ramifications of extreme actions.
I think we all have a reason to be paranoid...
Well, at least 2.5 was fucked up! Now nobody can really say that 2.5 was ever stable!
Easy way to abuse the FBI's new Magic Lantern "virus."
Do illegal stuff online, and be conspicuous about it. If you are already involved in organized crime, this will be easy. Do all your stuff using PGP on a Windows 2000 base install. Regularly talk on the phone to your buddies about those idiot FBI agents who can't read your encrypted email. Make sure to do everything with LCD montitors so that the FBI has to crack the email instead of just tapping your CRT. Get a geek to learn a lot about virus operation so that he can regularly check the system and snag the virus.
As soon as the virus pops up, keep playing along. Send out encrypted crap messages that make no sense, and appear to be written in code words so that the FBI spends more time trying to crack THAT code after cracking the message. At the same time, decompile the virus and figure out how it works. Alter the virus to be self-propigating and extremely malicious, destroying all filesystems on infected machines and shutting them down while residing only in memory to prevent people from finding the virus on disk.
After a few days, set up an online store selling anti-virus software at $19.95 a seat licensing. Encrypt everything the program contains with the exception of an executable, so that no other virus company can figure out how it works without violating the DMCA.
Laugh at the FBI agents who are too busy trying to figure out what all your code words are to notice you raking in millions with a foreign company selling anti-virus software, move to Zug, and retire.
I admit, that scenario is a bit of a stretch. A more likely scheme (And what will likely happen very soon.) is a few good crackers decompile antivirus software from McAffee and Norton, both American companies that will allow the FBI virus through, and compare it with antivirus software from foreign firms, which will likely block the FBI virus to prevent the USA from spying on their companies as the USA does with echelon. Bingo, killer virus in no time flat, watch it take the world by storm. And before any of you bother to post about how the FBI will manage to keep all the details secret so that this doesn't happen, think about this; if the FBI could manage to keep a secret, we would not know about things like Magic Lantern and Carnivore to begin with.
I want to thank the FBI for fucking over America with their inability to realize the dire consequences of their poorly-planned actions. By doing this the FBI is screwing over:
1- All of the companies around the world, especially in the US, that will spend a ton of money dealing with the downtime caused by the first virus to exploit the Magic Lantern backdoors.
2- All of the American antivirus software companies who will lose market share to foreign software companies who do not leave FBI backdoors in their products.
3- Microsoft, who will likely be accused of leaving FBI backdoors in Windows, and who will lose market share when a virus sweeps the Windows world on a level that shames Code Red I and II.
4- All the Windows admins out there who will now have to rebuild all of their compromised machines, and switch to antivirus software by companies that do not leave backdoors for the FBI.
"So sure, maybe you could write Amazing Lightbulb, that McAfee can't distinguish from Magic Lantern. But it probably couldn't do anything interesting, because if it tried, McAfee would know it isn't Magic Lantern."
Unless, of course, the first thing that Amazing Lightbulb does is shut off all run anti-virus software and delete the executables to prevent them from running later.
People in the USA complaining about loss of liberties ARE happy we live in the US. Right now I would not want to be a citizen of ANY other country. When we scream and bitch and protest it is because we love America, we love our freedoms, and under no circumstances will we go quitely into the night as sleazy politicians try turn the USA into a police state to forward their wretched careers.
Is it just me, or does the thought of debugging an app controlled with C code the executes code in PERL, shell, java, and whatever else sound really, really horrible?
I just want an entire keg of Guiness, and a keg-er-ator that can hold it!
Right now this thread is filling with posts about why or why not this network will be secure, and why or why not all of the OTHER protected/secret government networks are/are not secure. What people are missing out on is that the government does not actually WANT a secure network.
Bush and co. want a new network because two states, California and Viriginia, are full of out-of-work techies, left jobless by the dotcom collapse. Virginia and California are also the top two states in regards to defense agencies, contracts, locations, dollars, etc.. Building a new government network would create a huge number of stable, high-paying jobs in Virginia and California as the agencies and contractors in those states were wired up; and even more jobs all across the country as the network spread out to all of the other states in between.
Not only does this have the effect of greatly boosting the economy without pissing too many people off (Which Congress has proven they cannot manage to do.), it also earns a lot of loyalty to the Republican party from all of the people who get those jobs, as well as the other people who benefit from those jobs as the money trickles outward.
Is this network needed, or even likely to work? I do not really know, and anyone who had nothing better to do than post to Slashdot about it really does either. But that does not matter, because right now America's economy needs to get going, the world needs our economy to get going, and the people making decisions in the White House realize that this is a good way to give a long term boost to the economy and their careers, without really earning much scorn, and they would be fools not to.
Want to know what killed Bleem!? It as Bleem!. Those guys were trying to be a viable software company by selling a Playstation emulator. Earth to morons, console gamers that can afford enough games to make Bleem! worth buying already had a Playstation by the time Bleem! hit the market.
Bleem! was bitten by their own product being, well, lame.
Pretty much. I bet Apple would have done a lot better if they hadn't kept trying to sell those Macs with black and white screens for years....
99% of what I find on the web is crap that I stumble across when looking for relevant information. Given that I constantly use the web as a reference for everything I can because I am usually at a computer anyway (Often 12+ hours a day.), my web bills would easily be several hundred dollars a month, most of which would be me paying for what is essentially waste. Unless search engines start forcing users to rate websites for content quality, people would quickly get sick of paying for waste, and the system would die out fast.
Abuse of such a system would only exacerbate the problem. People would load pages with stuff designed to ring up search engine hits for guaranteed clickthroughs. Everyone out there would break up articles into two-paragraph pages to get more clicks. Sites like Slashdot would be flooded with even more worthless submissions by people who actually wanted to get slammed with hits.
And what about those annoying popups? I better not end up paying for those. Sleazy webmasters will go out of their way to trick people into firing off tons of penny a hit windows.
Am I saying that penny-per-page micropayments have no future? No. But it will take some very, very careful planning to make it work.
For $300 the new airport base gets you:
-A 50 user wireless node.
-Built-in modem that even supports AOL access.
-Connects to Cable/DSL "modems" to act as a router.
-Built-in firewall for simple security setup.
-Works with loads of different operating systems.
-Looks really, really cool. Definately beats those ugly blue boxes with flashing LEDs and antennae.
Is it just me, or should Apple marketing be pushing these to non-Apple users? This thing is incredible, especially for the cost. Steve Jobs should tell them to send review samples to the editors of all the PC magazines and web sites.
Just buy an ibook and run one of the PPC Linux distros on it.
Just a bit of advice about big companies like Worldcom: they love to treat employees like dirt. If you go to a company like that, expect to be nothing but a number, overworked at the excuse of a salary until the day they lay you off so that the CEO can save the company $2 millon and gives himself a $3 million dollar raise to celebrate.
Unless you are young and looking to learn, look for small companies. If you have a high tolerance for BS, get into goverment contracting or work for the government directly. The pay is not as good, but in the long run you will be much happier.
Video games are the greatest form of art to come along in human history. Both visual and aural stimulation combine to envelop the player in an experience forged by the game's creator. Expression is taken to levels never seen before in video games. As video games progress, we will see video games that become more and more expressive of a single person's concepts and ideas, because the tools to make the games will eventually become simple and fast enough for a single person to use to create a game. Neverwinter Nights, an upcoming role-playing game with the capability for users to design their own games with it, is a great example of just how this will all work out.