The whole purpose of copyright was originally to protect those people who invested in the typesetting of printed works against unscrupulous printers who would then set up their printers only for the proven best-sellers of the other printers who took risks.
Nowadays, the cost of typesetting and printing (or composition, arrangement, recording etc.) is borne by the artists, and the publishers do nothing of value that a kid in a garage can't do. So there is no further need of copyright to protect the printing investment. Anyone can record, print and distribute for essentially nothing.
The question is now whether monopolies should be retained when the cost of publishing is essentially zero. The answer is clearly no. If all copyright on music is removed, the result will be a flowering of music and literature from artists who otherwise would have been strangled and suffocated by the dominance of the monopolists.
In short, technology has made the protected markets of music and literature publishers obsolete. Considering the trashy sounds that pass for published music these days, I don't know why anyone keeps buying that rubbish. At least 10% of people nowadays can produce much better music in their garage. So why not just stop buying the commercial garbage and just get unencumbered music off the net for free?
This is one of the funniest stories I've heard for a long time. Are microsoft sending themselves up?
This reminds me of the old joke about the advantages of standards, that there are so many to choose from.
That old joke was supposed to be in the Tanenbaum book, but I couldn't find it in the 3rd edition. Was it removed? Or can someone give me a reference for this?
"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. And if you really don't like all the standards you just have to wait another year until the one arises you are looking for."
As a past developer of Palm IIIx software (who gave up because of the clumsy 32k limit with gcc binaries and the weird PalmOS API), I am looking for these things to make me buy another PDA for development. (My past 3 PDAs, including the Palm IIIx and an Agenda, are all gathering dust because they were not developer-friendly.)
1. Must have good sync to linux desktop. 2. Must have libraries for gcc cross-compilation/linking on the desktop. 3. Must have a well-documented rational API to the OS which is not too weird. If the underlying kernel is linux but the API is PalmOS, then what's the point in changing?
In fact, the PalmOS API is not too awful, and the documentation was not at all bad. But the VMS-style record-oriented files (laughingly called "databases") were too weird for me. Real unix-style unstructured byte-sequence files are best. For database, some sort of SQL would be best.
The main purpose of having linux on the PDA would be to give the developer the ability to write one set of code to run on both the PDA and desktop. I was not able to do this for the PalmOS API.
Around about 12 months ago, plus or minus several months, I noticed a very sudden reduction in the number of pro-Arab articles in the English-language Google news for USA readers. There used to be heaps of articles from English-language newspapers in the Arab world (mostly translations), expressing the Arab points of view on the various modalities of massacring Arabs in the last couple of years. Does this indicate that Google "changed their algorithm" again? That's what they say whenever the general search changes drastically. I suspect that Google got a lot of comments from the vast right-wing conspiracy about the "anti-American" views in news articles about the wars. It's a pity, because now the Google news only contains pro-USA or very mild articles. Blood-curdling reports on US and Israeli military actions don't get linked any more.
To get over the instinctive, subliminal, unconscious fears of getting something free (as in the much-maligned free lunch), mention as soon as possible that science has been open source for the last 2500 years, and science has progressed very nicely. Open source software just applies the same principles of openness and peer review that have made scientific progress so rapid, especially in the last few centuries since printing started. The ancient Egyptian priests kept all their science closed source - trade secrets. Then the ancient Greeks got hold of some of it and really went to town with it, publishing everything on papyri and making very rapid progress. The rest is history!
This is yet another splendid opportunity for education in metric units lost. I imagine there will be information boards in front of each planet giving the weight in ounces and the volume in gallons. When will the USA catch up with international standards?
But seriously though, a much better place to do this is in the Australian outback. We have enough room for it, and we even have enough room to mount the planets on vehicles and drive them around at the right speed without running into anything. In fact, this would make a nice tourist attraction for Alice Springs. Let me see now, Earth radius = 6371 km, distance to Sun = 150 million km, Radius of Earth model = 42 mm. Hmmm... it will need a dingo fence.
billg cannot be an enemy combatant because he does not wear a military uniform. So he must be an _illegal_ combatant. Therefore, if guilty, he will have to go to Guantanamo Bay for a few years to "help with investigations". Of course, proof cannot be given for his guilt because that might jeopardize national security. Therefore no trial until terrorism is defeated. Can't afford to take chances with them terrorists!
Here's the scary message I get in the system log on my linux machine.
Jun 25 12:40:54 emu sshd[4872]: Accepted hostbased for userblah from 123.12.123.12 port 2654
Hostbased?
But I've got all the hostbased stuff turned off. A bit of testing shows that _probably_ it is really using RSA or DSA publickey. But it is very scary indeed to see this (probably wrong) message in the system log.
Does anyone know if this is _definitely_ an erroneous message.
I've got all of my.rhosts etc. stuff off. Here's my sshd_config file:
Protocol 2 IgnoreRhosts yes PermitRootLogin no RhostsAuthentication no RhostsRSAAuthentication no
AllowUsers blah1 blah2 PasswordAuthentication no PermitEmptyPasswords no
On looking more closely at my logs for my 203.* servers, it's clear that the start was at 09:18 EDT, US time. The 203.* space consists of about 25% Australian hosts, and the rest are in Korea, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong etc. etc.
I still think that the timing cannot be coincidental.
By the way, what gives with the "offtopic" comment. Someone must be using a different dictionary to me, I guess.
All things considered, maybe those who argued against sending out an anti-worm to automatically patch or otherwise neutralise the remaining 40,000 Code Red II infected machines were wrong.
The fine points of Internet ethics seem a little insignificant now compared to the harm that this new infection is doing. What next?
My estimate of intensity of this one is that it is costing me about 10 times the bytes per second of CR2. (We pay for our bytes in Australia!)
Recently I was thinking of converting over all my Artistic License software to GPL because I thought that only the GPL really scared Microsoft enough to make sure that they wouldn't "embrace and extend" my software. But the recently reported MS license that described AL as one of the "potentially viral licenses" made me think that the AL is sufficient protection.
What we really need is an answer to the question:
"Which licenses scare MS?" If they don't stop at least MS from appropriating the software, then what use is such an OS license?
Here in 203-land (Australia, CHina, Korea, Taiwan etc. - see this index), we've been clobbered since about UTC 19:00 August 4.
As a consequence, we get clobbered by all those unpatched machines in east Asia. Since the price of windows office in vietnam in 1998 was US$13 (according to my observations at the time), it's not surprising that everyone in east Asia has windows.
Hopefully, when MS gets serious about those nasty pirates who duplicate their second-rate software for them and make it a de-facto standard in Asia, we'll see these inadequately managed MS machines disappear from Asia and get replace with linux.
Virtually all of the new CR2 probes on my 48 IP addresses are getting clobbered by 203.0.0.0/8 addresses. Note: not/24.
First, see here for how to telnet into the back door left by all CR2 infections. Second, write a script to telnet to all infected hosts which probe you on port 80 and shut down the offending machine. Third, run this script on your web server so that all hosts probing your site get shut down.
If everyone did this, then CR2 would disappear off the net within 24 hours, and we could all rest easy!
I've had 12 hits on 22 virtual host IPs in the last 20 minutes. That's
(12 * 60) / (20 * 22) = 1.63 hits per hour per IP address.
For 4e9 IP addresses, that's about 1.6 million hits per second. Each hit uses about 1 kByte. So that makes a total bandwidth of about 12 Gbits/sec. It's less than that because hits into empty IP space use only about 300 bytes for the SYN packets. But still, this is quite a large bandwidth. I wonder how much of this is heading across the border between the US and other countries right now.
If there are 40,000 infected machines, that's about 40 hits emanating out of each infected host per second. At 500 Bytes each on average, that's about 160 kbits/sec per host, which is not too far away from a credible value.
I'm seeing a very rapid increase in the dreaded/default.ida probing on my network in the couple of hours to UTC 16:30.
This is almost certainly world wide. So I think that anyone who thought it was over might be very wrong.
And it's very important indeed to emphasize that it is MS's fault. This is a propaganda coup. Someone should do a press release!!
All my port 80 are belong to Code Red!!!
For great justice!
Another bad thing about the Telstra passwords is
that they don't use any SSL to cover any of the
access to subscribers' info. Therefore it just might be that the passwords were obtained from the net in transit - not necessarily from an in-situ source. At least, they don't use any SSL when I'm using my accounts, for which I've just changed my passwords, of course.
I was just thinking today about what would happen
to the latest monopolistic moves by MS and whether
a breakup would help, and in fact, it simply
couldn't, because the applications half of the
split-up company would be where the new monopoly
power would lie.
In the case of the Standard Oil break-up, and AT&T, it was possible to do a geographicly based break-up, e.g. by regions of the US. But in the MS case, it would be pointless and meaningless to do a geographic break-up.
It may be time now to start thinking again about
the open source solution. Wouldn't it be a good thing if just the OS side was made open source, since that is where the monopoly lies. Opening up the OS and making it GPL would get rid of the monopoly power. And then MS would have to compete on an equal footing with other applications writers - just as happened with most other operating systems.
PS. I forgot to mention that there was once a Robert Crumb comic around about 1970 where some guy went over to the Soviet Union and set off the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal in the direction of the US. A little while later, about 10,000 US ICBMs came over the horizon and this guy thought that this was the end of civilisation on Earth. But instead, each of the US missiles ejected boxes of stuff which landed to Earth with parachutes. It turned out they contained big US luxury cars, TV sets and so forth, with a note explaining "We figured if you fired off your missiles, we wouldn't need all this stuff. So you're welcome to it because we must all be dead by now anyway."
Well, the same principle applies to sending stuff to Mars, although it would be so much cheaper to send it all to the Moon. Whatever happened to the story about ice at the Moon's south pole? Couldn't there be life there? And why haven't we got a base there yet? That would be a great place to store data for safe-keeping - for use by whatever life-form takes over on Earth after humans are wiped out by the next big asteroid.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole purpose of copyright was originally to protect those people who invested in the typesetting of printed works against unscrupulous printers who would then set up their printers only for the proven best-sellers of the other printers who took risks.
Nowadays, the cost of typesetting and printing (or composition, arrangement, recording etc.) is borne by the artists, and the publishers do nothing of value that a kid in a garage can't do. So there is no further need of copyright to protect the printing investment. Anyone can record, print and distribute for essentially nothing.
The question is now whether monopolies should be retained when the cost of publishing is essentially zero. The answer is clearly no. If all copyright on music is removed, the result will be a flowering of music and literature from artists who otherwise would have been strangled and suffocated by the dominance of the monopolists.
In short, technology has made the protected markets of music and literature publishers obsolete. Considering the trashy sounds that pass for published music these days, I don't know why anyone keeps buying that rubbish. At least 10% of people nowadays can produce much better music in their garage. So why not just stop buying the commercial garbage and just get unencumbered music off the net for free?
This is one of the funniest stories I've heard for a long time.
Are microsoft sending themselves up?
This reminds me of the old joke about the advantages of standards, that there are so many to choose from.
That old joke was supposed to be in the Tanenbaum book, but I couldn't find it in the 3rd edition. Was it removed? Or can someone give me a reference for this?
"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. And if you really don't like all the standards you just have to wait another year until the one arises you are looking for."
If you know linux, it's straightforward to set up linux, and MS-Wormholes is a right royal pain.
If you know MS-Wormware, it's straightforward to set up MS-Wormware, and linux is a right royal pain.
As Gomer Pyle used to say in the olden days: "Surprise, surprise!"
As a past developer of Palm IIIx software (who gave up because of the clumsy 32k limit with gcc binaries and the weird PalmOS API), I am looking for these things to make me buy another PDA for development. (My past 3 PDAs, including the Palm IIIx and an Agenda, are all gathering dust because they were not developer-friendly.)
1. Must have good sync to linux desktop.
2. Must have libraries for gcc cross-compilation/linking on the desktop.
3. Must have a well-documented rational API to the OS which is not too weird. If the underlying kernel is linux but the API is PalmOS, then what's the point in changing?
In fact, the PalmOS API is not too awful, and the documentation was not at all bad. But the VMS-style record-oriented files (laughingly called "databases") were too weird for me. Real unix-style unstructured byte-sequence files are best. For database, some sort of SQL would be best.
The main purpose of having linux on the PDA would be to give the developer the ability to write one set of code to run on both the PDA and desktop. I was not able to do this for the PalmOS API.
Around about 12 months ago, plus or minus several months, I noticed a very sudden reduction in the number of pro-Arab articles in the English-language Google news for USA readers. There used to be heaps of articles from English-language newspapers in the Arab world (mostly translations), expressing the Arab points of view on the various modalities of massacring Arabs in the last couple of years. Does this indicate that Google "changed their algorithm" again? That's what they say whenever the general search changes drastically. I suspect that Google got a lot of comments from the vast right-wing conspiracy about the "anti-American" views in news articles about the wars. It's a pity, because now the Google news only contains pro-USA or very mild articles. Blood-curdling reports on US and Israeli military actions don't get linked any more.
To get over the instinctive, subliminal, unconscious fears of getting something free (as in the much-maligned free lunch), mention as soon as possible that science has been open source for the last 2500 years, and science has progressed very nicely. Open source software just applies the same principles of openness and peer review that have made scientific progress so rapid, especially in the last few centuries since printing started. The ancient Egyptian priests kept all their science closed source - trade secrets. Then the ancient Greeks got hold of some of it and really went to town with it, publishing everything on papyri and making very rapid progress. The rest is history!
You've got it right. Nuclear is very clean, and it will not run out of fuel until well after every oil well is as dry as the Sahara.
Some people think that there's an issue with waste and nuclear weapons and terrorists and things. But remember:
Nukes don't kill people. People kill people.
Cheerio....
This is yet another splendid opportunity for education in metric units lost. I imagine there will be information boards in front of each planet giving the weight in ounces and the volume in gallons. When will the USA catch up with international standards?
But seriously though, a much better place to do this is in the Australian outback. We have enough room for it, and we even have enough room to mount the planets on vehicles and drive them around at the right speed without running into anything. In fact, this would make a nice tourist attraction for Alice Springs. Let me see now, Earth radius = 6371 km, distance to Sun = 150 million km, Radius of Earth model = 42 mm. Hmmm... it will need a dingo fence.
billg cannot be an enemy combatant because he
does not wear a military uniform.
So he must be an _illegal_ combatant.
Therefore, if guilty, he will have to go to
Guantanamo Bay for a few years to "help with
investigations".
Of course, proof cannot be given for his guilt
because that might jeopardize national security.
Therefore no trial until terrorism is defeated.
Can't afford to take chances with them terrorists!
Has anyone mentioned that Mozilla is a Spanish word?
It's in the dictionary from moza = young woman,
unmarried girl, maidservant etc.
So it's pronounced: mo-seel-ya,
or mo-theel-ya in Castilian.
Here's the scary message I get in the system log
.rhosts etc. stuff off.
/usr/local/libexec/sftp-server
on my linux machine.
Jun 25 12:40:54 emu sshd[4872]: Accepted hostbased for userblah from 123.12.123.12 port 2654
Hostbased?
But I've got all the hostbased stuff turned off.
A bit of testing shows that _probably_ it is really using RSA or DSA publickey.
But it is very scary indeed to see this (probably wrong) message in the system log.
Does anyone know if this is _definitely_ an erroneous message.
I've got all of my
Here's my sshd_config file:
Protocol 2
IgnoreRhosts yes
PermitRootLogin no
RhostsAuthentication no
RhostsRSAAuthentication no
AllowUsers blah1 blah2
PasswordAuthentication no
PermitEmptyPasswords no
X11Forwarding yes
Subsystem sftp
I still think that the timing cannot be coincidental.
By the way, what gives with the "offtopic" comment. Someone must be using a different dictionary to me, I guess.
The fine points of Internet ethics seem a little insignificant now compared to the harm that this new infection is doing. What next?
My estimate of intensity of this one is that it is costing me about 10 times the bytes per second of CR2. (We pay for our bytes in Australia!)
It has a very high probability of /16 hits as well as /8 hits.
It's using about 50% of my modem bandwidth with about 20 IP addresses with port 80 active. It's so bad, I closed down most of my ports 80.
Either the cookies go. Or slashdot goes!
Not happy!
What we really need is an answer to the question: "Which licenses scare MS?" If they don't stop at least MS from appropriating the software, then what use is such an OS license?
Way back in around 1985-87 or so, Amiga went into Chapter 11, and eventually they came out of it!
c178.h203149139.is.net.tw - - [06/Aug/2001:00:22:44 +0930] "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090% u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u9 090%u8190%u00c3%u0003%u8b00%u531b%u53ff%u0078%u000 0%u00=a HTTP/1.1" 400 - "-"
No more "GET", notice.
Now what does this one do?
As a consequence, we get clobbered by all those unpatched machines in east Asia. Since the price of windows office in vietnam in 1998 was US$13 (according to my observations at the time), it's not surprising that everyone in east Asia has windows.
Hopefully, when MS gets serious about those nasty pirates who duplicate their second-rate software for them and make it a de-facto standard in Asia, we'll see these inadequately managed MS machines disappear from Asia and get replace with linux.
Virtually all of the new CR2 probes on my 48 IP addresses are getting clobbered by 203.0.0.0/8 addresses. Note: not /24.
First, see here for how to telnet into the back door left by all CR2 infections. Second, write a script to telnet to all infected hosts which probe you on port 80 and shut down the offending machine. Third, run this script on your web server so that all hosts probing your site get shut down.
If everyone did this, then CR2 would disappear off the net within 24 hours, and we could all rest easy!
(12 * 60) / (20 * 22) = 1.63 hits per hour per IP address.
For 4e9 IP addresses, that's about 1.6 million hits per second. Each hit uses about 1 kByte. So that makes a total bandwidth of about 12 Gbits/sec. It's less than that because hits into empty IP space use only about 300 bytes for the SYN packets. But still, this is quite a large bandwidth. I wonder how much of this is heading across the border between the US and other countries right now.
If there are 40,000 infected machines, that's about 40 hits emanating out of each infected host per second. At 500 Bytes each on average, that's about 160 kbits/sec per host, which is not too far away from a credible value.
And it's very important indeed to emphasize that it is MS's fault. This is a propaganda coup. Someone should do a press release!!
All my port 80 are belong to Code Red!!!
For great justice!
Another bad thing about the Telstra passwords is that they don't use any SSL to cover any of the access to subscribers' info. Therefore it just might be that the passwords were obtained from the net in transit - not necessarily from an in-situ source. At least, they don't use any SSL when I'm using my accounts, for which I've just changed my passwords, of course.
city: Adelaide, South Australia
I was just thinking today about what would happen to the latest monopolistic moves by MS and whether a breakup would help, and in fact, it simply couldn't, because the applications half of the split-up company would be where the new monopoly power would lie.
In the case of the Standard Oil break-up, and AT&T, it was possible to do a geographicly based break-up, e.g. by regions of the US. But in the MS case, it would be pointless and meaningless to do a geographic break-up.
It may be time now to start thinking again about the open source solution. Wouldn't it be a good thing if just the OS side was made open source, since that is where the monopoly lies. Opening up the OS and making it GPL would get rid of the monopoly power. And then MS would have to compete on an equal footing with other applications writers - just as happened with most other operating systems.
city: Adelaide, South Australia
Well, the same principle applies to sending stuff to Mars, although it would be so much cheaper to send it all to the Moon. Whatever happened to the story about ice at the Moon's south pole? Couldn't there be life there? And why haven't we got a base there yet? That would be a great place to store data for safe-keeping - for use by whatever life-form takes over on Earth after humans are wiped out by the next big asteroid.
city: Adelaide, South Australia