Privacy isn't bad, and lots of people got something to hide. But to me, there is a difference between local provider XS4All that says "we comply with the law, but safeguard your privacy to the best of our ability. We don't allow spam, botnets or phishing however." and CyberBunker who rolls out the welcome mat for specifically that type of business.
FYI, XS4ALL was the provider that hosted the Fishman affidavit and defended the people who put that up (myself included) in court until the High Court where they won, which took years. They support Bits of Freedom and the EFF. They were born out of the hacker scene and still have some ties with that.
To contrast: Cyberbunker looks like it was founded by scriptkiddies that can hardly use LOIC and will probably fold at the first real challenge. They're owned by ZYZTM (www.zyztm.com) that ties back to someone living in Goes near the bunker. Probably a very small outfit.
Seems to me they're poseurs who make sure that spammers and phishing pondscum know they will find safe harbour there but if the law really drops by, I doubt they'll stand up to the challenge. In the meantime they will fulfill the function of "useful idiot" for any politician looking to strengthen the laws against computer crime and laws that violate our privacy. They basically help noone and do us all a big disservice - privacy advocates most of all.
I agree that according to that definition they are probably not going to be convicted. It has a different definition in The Netherlands however, the Wikipedia definition is closer to that of the Dutch laws on extortion.
So yeah they probably won't get convicted. Still, they could try something with the computer crime laws, they're much less evolved and have much more leeway for formulating complaints than the blackmail and extortion claims.
CyberBunker will keep your servers online "no matter what". Cyberbunker will protect your servers from hurricanes, earthquakes, crashing airplanes, (nuclear) bombs, floods and anything else that could interrupt the hosting of your servers. However the biggest threat usually is the hosting provider that takes your servers offline if they receive complaints from others. As long as your hosting fee is paid CyberBunker will do anything in its power to keep your servers up. In addition CyberBunker protects your servers also from others who might want to take your servers down like the DMCA, your competitors,authorities, burglars, governments and terrorists.
Impenetrable Hosting Facility The CyberBunker data center is located in a nuclear bunker that was designed to survive a nuclear war. Even without war the bunker remains impenetrable. In 2007 City Hall accompanied by the local police and fire brigade made an attempt to enter the building without authorization. Their attempts were futile. City hall paid the for the damages caused by the hydraulic tools used by the fire brigade in an attempt to open the first set of blast doors. The doors were damaged but still closed. Even with the right access codes the doors still could not be opened anymore. In 2008 City Hall paid € 24500.- in damages to CyberBunker in order to get the doors operational again. There are 3 sets of blast doors, one set next after the other, on all entrances.
Concealed Location The physical limitations to enter the building are not the only reason why customers choose to host their servers at CyberBunker. CyberBunker offers a unique routing system in order to confuse parties that are eager to discover the physical location of the servers. Many known and unknown customers use our services to have their servers online without revealing the actual location. Sometimes it happens that one of our customers is exposed by the media. e.g. see: TorrentFreak. And even then we are able find a suitable solution in order to conceal the location of the servers again.
Anonymous Hosting Most of our customers desire to stay anonymous. In some cases we do not even know who our customers actually are. We have no idea and we simply do not care. Who ever you are, it is our business to keep you online.
Mind Your Own Business CyberBunker does not poke around on your servers. Customers are allowed to host any content they like, except child porn and anything related to terrorism. Everything else is fine. CyberBunker has adopted a policy not to mind our clients business. Our famous "Mind Your Own Business" policy.
Bold = my emphasis.
This is an open invitation to spammers, neo-nazis, phishing scammers, botnet operators, usenet providers (teh binareez) and torrent servers (torrentfreak, notably) to come and play ball. It's their business model to protect the customer. Given their attitude, they're likely to be in quite hot water once one of their customers actually does run a childporn network or an assassination ring and it turns out in court that their business model is "we never ask questions".
Anyway, I'm starting to understand the Spamhaus attitude: it's probably frustration.
Forcing someone to cooperate "or else" can be construed as blackmail and can then be cause for a criminal suit - the fact that you can mitigate the attack does not remove the threat (just as buying a fire extinguisher doesn't mean being threatened by someone with arson is no longer a case for the police).
Go and see a family with a handicapped son or daughter. To you, the kid looks like a mess. To them, it's the most beautiful kid in the world. "Every parent thinks his owl a falcon". And from my own experience, that's almost literally true.
No company who wants to stay in business long term makes any profitable product open source. Open source software is NOT THE PRODUCT of ANY COMPANY ANYWHERE.
It is so easy to list dozens of counter-examples that I'm not even going to bother. Personally I know several companies that are open-sourcing their main product right now because the consultancy fees will outweigh the licensing fees. Or they sell add-ons to the main product for big companies that make a lot of sense for those companies, while their developers can use the same stuff (minus big unwieldy add-ons) at home for free. Win-win. I'm not even discussing the open source vendors here, who live off the support and consultancy. Or a local company, that makes money off the fees paid by customers who want to prioritize or speed up the extensions they need to the basic product. There are loads of different models to make money off open source software.
I do agree that the GP is trolling though. But your comment is a bit strange.
VSS was a pain but it provided basic versioning for single programmers. If you want to run your business on it, prepare to embrace the pain. Although now they no longer support it, what happens is that more people actually drop versioning altogether and aren't even aware of the benefits. Team Foundation is very nice, but way to expensive for single developers. And integration with Mercurial et. al. is a bit clunky.
It all depends on how you do it. I've never had trouble but my niece is semi-sociopath and she got fired 9 times in a row. At least I have sense enough to be subtle about it. Anyway, just make a presentation on "things you've learnt at other places" and why it's a good idea. If they don't get it, you can always build your own environment or leave (which I did in one case - they just weren't into development). But test the waters first. Are you the sole programmer under 60? Maybe try and find one guy who loves new stuff and has a lot of influence. Get him on board.
Spot on. I'd use as many buzzwords as possible when convincing management. Don't go for subtle: stuff as many buzzwords in as you possibly can and still have a correct English sentence. They love it.
Same thing happened to me and a few highschool friends as well. By sheer tenacity I just went on until I completed the study. Final year was pretty hard with working and graduating all in one big mess. But just curious: were you from a family where you were the first to study? Because nowadays they have programs for kids from backgrounds where the parents haven't studied themselves. I know it would have helped me immensely if someone had been there to explain how everything works to me. Would still have goofed off in the first semester, but not longer than necessary.
There is also the fact if they are marked as stupid then they will work to meet that expectation. I have seen a lot of actually smart and talented kids just barely pass school, just because they were labeled as such. Usually a kid at an early age will find what his place in life is and stick with it.
Social scientists studied this and one (rather unethical) experiment went like this: at the beginning of the year they gave a teacher a completely random list of the new students with notes about their intellectual capabilities, a fake IQ-test result, if you will. Then they compared the students results at the end of the year with the random list. They matched rather closely.
Once a child is pegged as being a penny, it is pretty hard to become a quarter. Not because the child is unable or unwilling, but because continuous lack of expectation from the teacher is killing all forms of motivation.
You want kids to do great at school? Have a great and motivating teacher. Or at least a passable one who doesn't kill the intrinsic motivation.
This scheme was an attempt to get rid of a few symptoms. As long as you focus on that, the disease itself will never be cured.
True - but most people with McJobs need to work very hard to get a decent wage, and I can not find that a sign of moral strength, as the GP did - which I was arguing against. It wasn't intended to disparage the people who work very hard to bring home wages to feed their families, merely the person who glorified that as morally superior. I would argue that a society that forces that on people, is morally bankrupt rather than superior.
Some people are so alienated from their own work, they would become inactive (at least for a while). This is more an indictment of society being unable to provide fullfilling jobs than a comment on someones personal ethics as far as I'm concerned.
Apparently you think Life is a game and money is the score. Good for you. For me, 50 hours a week is something the people who clean the offices or work at the McDonalds do.
On my level, I don't see anyone working like that. What I see is people who sell a great idea to companies for 200000 euro, that takes them about 3 months to design. The rest of the year they spend doing stuff that boosts their creativity, like holidays, visiting exhibitions, and playing golf. Sometimes they sell more in a year. I see others creating iPad/iPhone games who earn 5x the median income because they build one great game a year, from home, and not in a 40 hour workweek either. Another acquaintance builds scale models for architects and companies. He works a few weeks VERY hard (basically day and night) but then he gets a few weeks off. I bet he works less than 20 hr/week in total.
Personally, I prefer to work smarter, not harder. But if you think that is a sign of moral weakness, that's great - you're not competing with me that way.
It could, but it won't, because there is always something else to do with that money, as far as the people who actually have it, are concerned. Supporting the middle or lower classes is NOT on the agenda. Fox News' "Class War" theme demonstrates quite clearly how a large fraction of the ruling class view anyone who would dare to beg for even a token fraction of their wealth. Although the smarter ones understand where that will end up: people who once looked upon the Russian Czar as a saint, were angered considerably when he had the army open fire on unarmed people, led by a priest, that were trying to present a petition. That didn't end well for the Czar.
Slashdot Mirror
Privacy isn't bad, and lots of people got something to hide. But to me, there is a difference between local provider XS4All that says "we comply with the law, but safeguard your privacy to the best of our ability. We don't allow spam, botnets or phishing however." and CyberBunker who rolls out the welcome mat for specifically that type of business.
FYI, XS4ALL was the provider that hosted the Fishman affidavit and defended the people who put that up (myself included) in court until the High Court where they won, which took years. They support Bits of Freedom and the EFF. They were born out of the hacker scene and still have some ties with that.
To contrast: Cyberbunker looks like it was founded by scriptkiddies that can hardly use LOIC and will probably fold at the first real challenge. They're owned by ZYZTM (www.zyztm.com) that ties back to someone living in Goes near the bunker. Probably a very small outfit.
Seems to me they're poseurs who make sure that spammers and phishing pondscum know they will find safe harbour there but if the law really drops by, I doubt they'll stand up to the challenge. In the meantime they will fulfill the function of "useful idiot" for any politician looking to strengthen the laws against computer crime and laws that violate our privacy. They basically help noone and do us all a big disservice - privacy advocates most of all.
I agree that according to that definition they are probably not going to be convicted. It has a different definition in The Netherlands however, the Wikipedia definition is closer to that of the Dutch laws on extortion.
So yeah they probably won't get convicted. Still, they could try something with the computer crime laws, they're much less evolved and have much more leeway for formulating complaints than the blackmail and extortion claims.
Not only that. I'll quote their entire policy:
Disaster Free Hosting
CyberBunker will keep your servers online "no matter what". Cyberbunker will protect your servers from hurricanes, earthquakes, crashing airplanes, (nuclear) bombs, floods and anything else that could interrupt the hosting of your servers. However the biggest threat usually is the hosting provider that takes your servers offline if they receive complaints from others. As long as your hosting fee is paid CyberBunker will do anything in its power to keep your servers up. In addition CyberBunker protects your servers also from others who might want to take your servers down like the DMCA, your competitors,authorities, burglars, governments and terrorists.
Impenetrable Hosting Facility
The CyberBunker data center is located in a nuclear bunker that was designed to survive a nuclear war. Even without war the bunker remains impenetrable. In 2007 City Hall accompanied by the local police and fire brigade made an attempt to enter the building without authorization. Their attempts were futile. City hall paid the for the damages caused by the hydraulic tools used by the fire brigade in an attempt to open the first set of blast doors. The doors were damaged but still closed. Even with the right access codes the doors still could not be opened anymore. In 2008 City Hall paid € 24500.- in damages to CyberBunker in order to get the doors operational again. There are 3 sets of blast doors, one set next after the other, on all entrances.
Concealed Location
The physical limitations to enter the building are not the only reason why customers choose to host their servers at CyberBunker. CyberBunker offers a unique routing system in order to confuse parties that are eager to discover the physical location of the servers. Many known and unknown customers use our services to have their servers online without revealing the actual location. Sometimes it happens that one of our customers is exposed by the media. e.g. see: TorrentFreak. And even then we are able find a suitable solution in order to conceal the location of the servers again.
Anonymous Hosting
Most of our customers desire to stay anonymous. In some cases we do not even know who our customers actually are. We have no idea and we simply do not care. Who ever you are, it is our business to keep you online.
Mind Your Own Business
CyberBunker does not poke around on your servers. Customers are allowed to host any content they like, except child porn and anything related to terrorism. Everything else is fine. CyberBunker has adopted a policy not to mind our clients business. Our famous "Mind Your Own Business" policy.
Bold = my emphasis.
This is an open invitation to spammers, neo-nazis, phishing scammers, botnet operators, usenet providers (teh binareez) and torrent servers (torrentfreak, notably) to come and play ball. It's their business model to protect the customer. Given their attitude, they're likely to be in quite hot water once one of their customers actually does run a childporn network or an assassination ring and it turns out in court that their business model is "we never ask questions".
Anyway, I'm starting to understand the Spamhaus attitude: it's probably frustration.
Forcing someone to cooperate "or else" can be construed as blackmail and can then be cause for a criminal suit - the fact that you can mitigate the attack does not remove the threat (just as buying a fire extinguisher doesn't mean being threatened by someone with arson is no longer a case for the police).
Go and see a family with a handicapped son or daughter. To you, the kid looks like a mess. To them, it's the most beautiful kid in the world. "Every parent thinks his owl a falcon". And from my own experience, that's almost literally true.
No company who wants to stay in business long term makes any profitable product open source. Open source software is NOT THE PRODUCT of ANY COMPANY ANYWHERE.
It is so easy to list dozens of counter-examples that I'm not even going to bother. Personally I know several companies that are open-sourcing their main product right now because the consultancy fees will outweigh the licensing fees. Or they sell add-ons to the main product for big companies that make a lot of sense for those companies, while their developers can use the same stuff (minus big unwieldy add-ons) at home for free. Win-win. I'm not even discussing the open source vendors here, who live off the support and consultancy. Or a local company, that makes money off the fees paid by customers who want to prioritize or speed up the extensions they need to the basic product. There are loads of different models to make money off open source software.
I do agree that the GP is trolling though. But your comment is a bit strange.
He obviously used telnet, you insensitive clod!
VSS was a pain but it provided basic versioning for single programmers. If you want to run your business on it, prepare to embrace the pain. Although now they no longer support it, what happens is that more people actually drop versioning altogether and aren't even aware of the benefits. Team Foundation is very nice, but way to expensive for single developers. And integration with Mercurial et. al. is a bit clunky.
It all depends on how you do it. I've never had trouble but my niece is semi-sociopath and she got fired 9 times in a row. At least I have sense enough to be subtle about it. Anyway, just make a presentation on "things you've learnt at other places" and why it's a good idea. If they don't get it, you can always build your own environment or leave (which I did in one case - they just weren't into development). But test the waters first. Are you the sole programmer under 60? Maybe try and find one guy who loves new stuff and has a lot of influence. Get him on board.
Spot on. I'd use as many buzzwords as possible when convincing management. Don't go for subtle: stuff as many buzzwords in as you possibly can and still have a correct English sentence. They love it.
Or interested in the same sex. I'd agree that being gay would change my perspective on the opposite sex a lot :)
Same thing happened to me and a few highschool friends as well. By sheer tenacity I just went on until I completed the study. Final year was pretty hard with working and graduating all in one big mess. But just curious: were you from a family where you were the first to study? Because nowadays they have programs for kids from backgrounds where the parents haven't studied themselves. I know it would have helped me immensely if someone had been there to explain how everything works to me. Would still have goofed off in the first semester, but not longer than necessary.
Dancing lessons may help. Especially street dance or something cool like that.
And they're all generated by monkeys! :)
There is also the fact if they are marked as stupid then they will work to meet that expectation.
I have seen a lot of actually smart and talented kids just barely pass school, just because they were labeled as such. Usually a kid at an early age will find what his place in life is and stick with it.
Social scientists studied this and one (rather unethical) experiment went like this: at the beginning of the year they gave a teacher a completely random list of the new students with notes about their intellectual capabilities, a fake IQ-test result, if you will. Then they compared the students results at the end of the year with the random list. They matched rather closely.
Once a child is pegged as being a penny, it is pretty hard to become a quarter. Not because the child is unable or unwilling, but because continuous lack of expectation from the teacher is killing all forms of motivation.
You want kids to do great at school? Have a great and motivating teacher. Or at least a passable one who doesn't kill the intrinsic motivation.
This scheme was an attempt to get rid of a few symptoms. As long as you focus on that, the disease itself will never be cured.
Bonus points for ironic use of anonymous cowards anonimity to post this.
I agree 100%.
True - but most people with McJobs need to work very hard to get a decent wage, and I can not find that a sign of moral strength, as the GP did - which I was arguing against. It wasn't intended to disparage the people who work very hard to bring home wages to feed their families, merely the person who glorified that as morally superior. I would argue that a society that forces that on people, is morally bankrupt rather than superior.
Some people are so alienated from their own work, they would become inactive (at least for a while). This is more an indictment of society being unable to provide fullfilling jobs than a comment on someones personal ethics as far as I'm concerned.
Apparently you think Life is a game and money is the score. Good for you. For me, 50 hours a week is something the people who clean the offices or work at the McDonalds do.
On my level, I don't see anyone working like that. What I see is people who sell a great idea to companies for 200000 euro, that takes them about 3 months to design. The rest of the year they spend doing stuff that boosts their creativity, like holidays, visiting exhibitions, and playing golf. Sometimes they sell more in a year. I see others creating iPad/iPhone games who earn 5x the median income because they build one great game a year, from home, and not in a 40 hour workweek either. Another acquaintance builds scale models for architects and companies. He works a few weeks VERY hard (basically day and night) but then he gets a few weeks off. I bet he works less than 20 hr/week in total.
Personally, I prefer to work smarter, not harder. But if you think that is a sign of moral weakness, that's great - you're not competing with me that way.
It could, but it won't, because there is always something else to do with that money, as far as the people who actually have it, are concerned. Supporting the middle or lower classes is NOT on the agenda. Fox News' "Class War" theme demonstrates quite clearly how a large fraction of the ruling class view anyone who would dare to beg for even a token fraction of their wealth. Although the smarter ones understand where that will end up: people who once looked upon the Russian Czar as a saint, were angered considerably when he had the army open fire on unarmed people, led by a priest, that were trying to present a petition. That didn't end well for the Czar.
... and foreign competition.
Yeah, and Dick versus Barack is no contest. It's obviously Cheney.
While God created the iPhone, Jobs tried to take the credit :P
(yeah, insane - but it would fit their mindset to believe this)
Don't worry about it. In 20 years we'll all standardize on Chinese, because we'd like to be able to chat with our managers.