I once had a cable modem hooked up through a linux box and then on to four PCs (myself and three roommates). One day, the cable modem mysteriously stopped working (it had been working for at least a month beforehand).
When I asked the cable modem company about it, they wanted me to go to Control Panel -> Network...etc... I told them I was using Linux, and that's when their tech pretty much blew smoke up my ass.
"Oh...well...our service can't work with Linux or Windows NT...it can only work with Windows 95 and MacOS. If it isn't already obvious to you why, I can't explain it to you".
...it wasn't obvious why that would be the case...
...and he couldn't explain it to me either.
(btw...rebooting the cable modem *DID* fix the problem)
Our school had them (Oakville Trafalgar High School... class of 92).
I fondly remember the 'ipaint' program on the ICONS--that program where you could create vector-based animation by drawing key frames. Also, there was that really cool chemistry lab program.
Most of the kids at school grudgingly used them--I remember it had some sort of 'PC Compatibility' mode, and they tried to teach kids WordPerfect on them. Wordperfect under the DOS compatibility mode was brutally slow though--felt a bit like wading through a pool of bubblegum. I tried to stay away from them as much as possible.
I had one friend that waded through the reference manuals for the ICON, and actually did quite a bit of development under them. That was like him though--always wanting to figure out what made things tick. While most of us were content with DOS, he was mastering UNIX, QNX, C, and this wierd thing called 'Usenet'. I can honestly say he knew more about the ICON than anybody else at the school, including the Comp. Sci teacher/sysadmin.
There's no doubt there was some inner beauty to the ICON--certainly, it was a very interesting network architecture. Alas, this was all hidden behind horrific applications and a cumbersome user interface.
I think the ICON is what you get when you let the government design computers. All the right features, on paper they should have been great...terrible execution though.
While I'm sure many of us have a good collection of "trial versions" of software, nobody here is advocating that we should legalize piracy.
The problem with these piracy protections is that they are very fallible, and prone to false positives. At the same time, they do little to deter the professional pirates.
Consider:
The product activation feature in Windows XP trips if you change your hardware too much, forcing you to reactivate your product--an unnecessary inconvenience, possibly a privacy violation, and
The whole mess with DeCSS. I bought the DVD...I own the playback hardware...why is that I'm a criminal if I come up with my own method of decrypting and viewing the DVD for my OWN use?
Suppose hypothetically that Microsoft goes out of business and I need to reactivate my Windows XP because I installed it on my larger hard disk.
Macrovision (video copy protection). My TV doesn't have RCA jacks, so I have to play DVDs through my VCR, which means that the display is unwatchable. Even though I bought the DVD, have a legitimately licensed DVD player, and have every right to enjoy it in my own home, I can't...unless I get a video stabilizer, or buy a new TV. I went with the video stabilizer, by the way...a device which in the wrong hands could be used to facilitate piracy. Ironic that such a device should be necessary to view legitimate DVD's on legitimate players...
Copy protected CD's. I bought the CD...suppose I don't own any CD player except what's in my computer, or maybe my DVD player. Again, the piracy prevention mechanism prevents from enjoying my legally owned CD.
Piracy prevention mechanisms are much more inconvenient to legitimate users than to the real pirates. THIS is why everybody is up in arms over the whole thing.
Ha:) patch-2.4.15 was regrettable...file system corruption on shutdown...ooops! Luckily, patch-2.4.16 was out within a couple of days and the problem was fixed. Also, several unofficial patches were available in the interim.
Am I going to go tell the CIO of a Fortune 500 company that some hack coder added something to the kernel that screwed us?
It doesn't matter if it's a kernel patch or an NT service pack. Fortune 500 companies use change management processes to make sure that you don't accidentally break a system while trying to fix it. This means testing patches on non-production servers beforehand. This also means having a contingency plan ready so that you can recover if anything goes wrong.
If a patch breaks a system, the CIO will probably be interested to know what sort of steps you took to prevent or at least mitigate the problem. And, he'll probably want to know what you intend to do about it.
And if you just applied the patch because "they never break anything"...for your sake, I hope your resume is up to date:)
I have a license to drive a car. I cannot possibly transfer my license to another driver.
Nobody is claiming you can transfer your operator's license to somebody else. You can, however, sell your car, because operator licensing is distinct from car ownership and registration.
Your driver's license allows you to drive a car on public roads, but that license is not attached to any particular car. It only says that you are legally qualified to drive a car on public roads (e.g. basic driving skill, age, knowledge of rules of the road, acceptable driving record, etc).
If you own a car, you are allowed to sell the car itself to somebody else. Part of that process is transferring the car's registration from you, to the new owner, and there are legal methods to effect this transfer.
if private use of back-door-less encryption is made illegal in the US, then the government could more easily look inside of emails to see that they do not contain terrorist instructions or focus on whomever is violating this law.
----
That should take care of the law-abiding terrorists, for they would never use an illegal encryption scheme to hide their secret plans. After all, they law abiding terrorists.
Besides, even if they wanted to, they couldn't...once these encryption algorithms and source code become illegal, it becomes impossible to find them anywhere on the internet--they are instantly eradicated, and we can be sure that nobody will have them mirrored anywhere. Thus, the terrorists would have no way of even downloading it.
What are the legitimate uses of encrypted email for those without something to hide?
You aren't suggesting that if somebody has "something to hide", it can only be because they are up to no good?
There is plenty of legitimate private information that could be sent via Email. Private or secret information isn't necessarily related to illegal activity.
My fiancee works as a web designer in a contract position with the state. She has received many kudos for her work, and is very well liked in her office.
At one point, her contract was coming up for renewal. One Friday after work, she opened up a non-descript envelope in the mail, containing a 'status update' printed on a tractor-feed self-duplicating form. The form had several checkboxes indicating whether or not your contract had been renewed or terminated.
Imagine her horror when she discovered that 'terminated' was checked, with no explanation. She had the entire weekend to fester over how cold-hearted this was, having no options other than to leave a voicemail for her boss politely asking for some sort of explanation.
Her boss called her on Monday and was even more surprised about the termination notice. She made a few phone calls, and came back with good news...
Apparently, many other contract employees had received similar mailings that Friday. It turns out was not fired at all--it was a simple misprint. The form was laid out with the 'fired' checkbox directly above the 'not fired' checkbox. The forms had apparently slipped in the printer, causing the printed 'X' to land in the wrong box.
I'm *sure* there's a usability/form design lesson in all of this...
I have heard (is this rumor?) that if you complete your service contract, and try to go to another provider with a "branded" phone (ie, you have an AT&T cell phone, and you try to use Verizon), the phone becomes "worthless" - and thus you have to get yet another "free" phone! What kind of scam is this?
It's because we in North America are blessed with two dominant (and mutually incompatibile) digital standards--CDMA and TDMA. CDMA phones won't work with TDMA networks (and vice versa). If you switch networks, you'll probably have to switch phones as well, because of this incompatibility.
If you have an old analog phone, it *should* work with a TDMA provider such as AT&T (afaik), since the TDMA digital standard was designed to be backwards-compatible with analog phones. I can't speak for CDMA providers, but I would imagine they'll also support analog mode.
The application benchmarks test how quickly the application does something ONCE. This is very different from how most users use their applications--generally, they'll perform very similar tasks many times. Because of this, code-morphing won't provide as much of a boost to a synthetic benchmark, as it would to a user doing real work.
Granted, Crusoe's claim to fame is low power consumption, low heat and high flexibility, as opposed to raw performance. For some, those are more important than raw benchmark scores.
Anyway, this bit about code morphing in benchmarks isn't just Transmeta's spin control. Even ZDNet (which benchmarked the Sony Picturebook) suggested that their own application benchmarks ran tasks once, and didn't accurately reflect the results of code-morphing. Not that I offer ZDNet as the final word in benchmarking, but when they identify limitations in their own benchmarks, it's all the more plausible that these limitations give the Crusoe an artificially low score.
In the long view, our form of democracy has worked out fairly well, voter apathy and all. We've been having these elections for over 200 years, and no Hitlers so far.
That's a ringing endorsement for our current political system? The fact that no matter who gets elected, we can say "Hey...at least he's not Hitler!"?
Imagine that ringing endorsement applied to cookie advertising:
"Buy Chipperiffic cookies. At least ours contain no rat poison."
The good news is that so far, we've never had a ballot with only Hitlers to choose from.
We're lucky I guess...given the current crop of mediocre candidates, we can at least hold our noses, pick the least evil of the bunch, and expect that the winner won't turn out to be a ruthless dictator.
As for reverse engineering being theft: it is. You have to consider that the products they ship are intended to be "black boxes" and may contain trade secrets, which are legally protected. Do you want your company's trade secrets disclosed? Not really. That's why reverse engineering is not a good thing.
Clean room reverse engineering is not theft. If you can duplicate the function of a black box without knowing how it works, then you haven't stolen any trade secrets.
Clean-room reverse engineering must continue to be legally protected. The whole idea behind the clean-room process is that you have one group analyze the original, to create a specification which describes what it does, without describing how it works.
This specification is then given to a second team, which has no knowledge about the design of the orignal, and is therefore clean. The second team then designs their device to meet these specs --thereby duplicating the function of the original without stealing any trade secrets.
This is the process which led to the first PC clone. You're not suggesting that Compaq or Phoenix stole IBM's trade secrets...are you?
Somebody actually did a 'DOOM for system administration' game a while back. I don't have the link handy, but the idea was that you could run around and kill processes using whatever weapon you had at hand. Each enemy had a different process ID number--when you killed that enemy, you killed the corresponding process.
I think the biggest problem was that if you weren't careful, you'd kill the PID associated with your DOOM game, dropping you out immediately.
I'm not sure where you got that homeless person straw man from--can any argument against something be somehow likened to an argument for banning homeless people?
I wouldn't even compare a homeless person to a spammer...the homeless person more than likely wants a nice shower and a bed to sleep in, but because of his circumstances, that's not an option for him. On the other hand, spammers are sending bulk e-missives of their own volition, because it costs them nothing to do it. Even if they get a 1 in 100,000 success rate, they've made money.
As far as those who have to wait for the Spam to download, they can use such methods as www.mailstart.com, and telnet sessions to get rid of mail before they download it. telnet pop.isp.com 110 user username pass password. Boy, that's hard.
It's not hard, but it's a hassle...You seriously think the average user is going to go to that kind of trouble, just to avoid spam? I mean, clearly, *YOU* do, but the average Joe-sixpack is not going to do that--assuming they even know what telnet is to begin with.
Again...you've shifted the burden of solving the whole spam problem to its victims, rather than its cause, without doing anything to address the cost of the extra resources required to process and filter the spam to begin with.
Like you, I take steps to filter out spam, but believe me, I'd rather that it wasn't necessary.
We can all take steps to lock down open relays, install mail filters, subscribe to services like ORBS or MAPS, etc...but again...any time we take steps to fix a problem that shouldn't be there in the first place, we're wasting resources.
I agree that legislation won't stop it...laws backfire by nature. The only thing that will stop it is when spamming becomes unprofitable for the spammer--that is, when they themselves bear the true costs of their marketing strategy.
...and running up and down the streets smashing windows isn't all bad...after all, think of the business created for the local glassmaker--what a benefit for the economy!
That's a classic fallacy. The glassmaker may be employed, but he would have been anyway, installing windows in new construction. His time spent fixing broken windows is lost, with no net benefit to society. At the same time, the shopkeeper has taken money from his limited budget to cover the cost of the repairs, rather than improving the service and selection of his store. His customers now have to face a limited selection, and higher prices (to cover his expense of fixing the windows). In short, economic resources have been expended, but the local economy has not really grown--most people would consider that to be wasteful.
These new IT jobs you speak of are similar to the glass repairs I speak of. The money spent paying people to investigate spam is money not spent on better customer service, bandwidth, or network maintenance. Earthlink would have spent that money anyways--the difference is that they now have to hire spam investigators instead of network engineers.
So it's *MY* problem if I'm getting unanted bulk mail that is costing me money to receive?
At least bulk mail is paid for by the sender--it's still an annoyance, but unlike spam, it's neither trespassing nor theft of service. The postage paid to deliver it helps subsidize the cost of regular first-class postage, and in the thick of winter, it'll keep your house warm.
As for filtering, Earthlink didn't just pull Spaminator out of a hat...it took them time to design/write/customize it, and continual ongoing maintenance (as spammers find new ways through). It uses CPU capacity to process and filter Email, requiring Earthlink to buy a more powerful mail server than they would otherwise need. Somebody has to bear Earthlink's costs of filtering out this unwanted crap...guess who that usually is? (pssst...not the spammer).
A technical solution is not the fix--even if it worked perfectly, it would only mask the annoyance facter. The resources are still wasted, and the costs are still borne by the recipient.
Of course, this couldn't possibly be a troll...no way...
I too am for DeCSS, but I have trouble seeing how anybody could be pro-spam.
The big problem with spam is that the cost is borne by the recipient and their ISP, not the originator. This isn't like the bulk-rate mail you get in your mailbox (paid for by the sender). This is like getting telemarketers on your cell phone while roaming.
Here's how it works...
The spammer gets their hands on a mass email program which fakes his Email address and message headers, finds an open SMTP relay, and fires away--whether he sends 100 or 100,000 Emails to carefully harvested Email addresses or randomly generated hotmail addresses, his cost is the same--the cost of a throwaway ISP account or stolen passowrd--negligible.
The recipient pays for their ISP connection (possibly hourly), and outside of North America, he also pays toll charges for his phone line. After paying to download an inbox full of spam, the recipient now has to delete the spam by hand, or install anti-spam software/filters and hope the spammers haven't found yet another way around his filter. Multiply that by 1000 or 100,000 recipients and you're talking about a lot of wasted time, bandwidth, storage, and money.
The recipient's ISP pays for mail server processing and storage capacity, a good portion of which is wasted on:
Storing spam in the customer's mailbox
Possibly running a spam filter on every incoming Email message
Sending bounce messages for all the spam sent to bogus / random Email addresses
...not to mention the staffing resources wasted investigating cases of spam.
In many ways, spammers are the parasites of the internet. They move from throwaway account to throwaway account, stealing service and wasting resources, to deliver their message to people that do not want to read it, or pay their ISP to store/deliver it.
These guys need their rights protected? What about *MY* rights? Why is the burden on me to set up filters or admit defeat and change my Email address just to get off a list?
I concede that anti-spam legislation must be drafted carefully, because poorly written legislation could inadvertently take away rights of legitimate Emailers. We shouldn't *NEED* legislation for this kind of thing, but we can already conclude the honor system isn't working.
Never mind banning spam...What solution would you propose that would allow spam, but offset the costs of spamming back from the recipients to the original spammer? And how much less spam would we see afterwards?
P.S.
Your position is pro-spam, but your Email address doesn't show up in your messages, where it might be harvested by spammers...why is that?
Of course, that's assuming we can all agree on what does and does not constitute a porn site.
Sure, some of the sites are fairly obvious (to us) as porn sites, but what about the grey areas? Does the sexual content have to be "pornographic", or is mere nudity enough to require a.sex TLD? Does it depend on how much nudity, or what kind is depicted? What about sites that are more suggestive than photographic? What about Cosmopolitan magazine? Playboy? Sex advice columns? Sites run by homosexual support groups?
My point is that there are sites which you and I might not consider to be obscene, sexual or pornographic, but others would.
Basically, this shifts the filtering process from software and into the name registration system. Requiring all porn sites to use a.sex TLD would make it easy to write an anti-porn filter, but deciding which sites should be moved (exiled?) into the new.sex TLD would be a nightmare.
...but if you own the safe and its contents, then you have every right to smash/melt the lock, especially if you have no other way to get at its contents.
How would you legally access your important documents in your own safe if
you lose the key or forget the combination
the lock mechanism rusts, jams, or breaks and becomes unworkable
The 'guts' of the Dialectizer sound very much like the GNU Talkfilters package.
Basically, the Talkfilters process standard input, translating it into Jive, Chef, ValleyGirl, Redneck, etc. by doing string substitution. The whole thing is built using flex, so it shouldn't be too hard to add other dialects as needed.
Build a web-based form, use a CGI script and wget to download the requested page, then pipe it through the appropriate filter.
You might need to add a bit of intelligence so that you don't accidentally dialectize the HTML tags, and handle frames (etc). Also, don't forget: security security security.
Most of the bits and pieces are already written--all that's needed is for somebody to tie it all together and host it.
Slashdot Mirror
I once had a cable modem hooked up through a linux box and then on to four PCs (myself and three roommates). One day, the cable modem mysteriously stopped working (it had been working for at least a month beforehand).
When I asked the cable modem company about it, they wanted me to go to Control Panel -> Network...etc... I told them I was using Linux, and that's when their tech pretty much blew smoke up my ass.
"Oh...well...our service can't work with Linux or Windows NT...it can only work with Windows 95 and MacOS. If it isn't already obvious to you why, I can't explain it to you".
...it wasn't obvious why that would be the case...
...and he couldn't explain it to me either.
(btw...rebooting the cable modem *DID* fix the problem)
Our school had them (Oakville Trafalgar High School... class of 92).
I fondly remember the 'ipaint' program on the ICONS--that program where you could create vector-based animation by drawing key frames. Also, there was that really cool chemistry lab program.
Most of the kids at school grudgingly used them--I remember it had some sort of 'PC Compatibility' mode, and they tried to teach kids WordPerfect on them. Wordperfect under the DOS compatibility mode was brutally slow though--felt a bit like wading through a pool of bubblegum. I tried to stay away from them as much as possible.
I had one friend that waded through the reference manuals for the ICON, and actually did quite a bit of development under them. That was like him though--always wanting to figure out what made things tick. While most of us were content with DOS, he was mastering UNIX, QNX, C, and this wierd thing called 'Usenet'. I can honestly say he knew more about the ICON than anybody else at the school, including the Comp. Sci teacher/sysadmin.
There's no doubt there was some inner beauty to the ICON--certainly, it was a very interesting network architecture. Alas, this was all hidden behind horrific applications and a cumbersome user interface.
I think the ICON is what you get when you let the government design computers. All the right features, on paper they should have been great...terrible execution though.
While I'm sure many of us have a good collection of "trial versions" of software, nobody here is advocating that we should legalize piracy.
The problem with these piracy protections is that they are very fallible, and prone to false positives. At the same time, they do little to deter the professional pirates.
Consider:
The product activation feature in Windows XP trips if you change your hardware too much, forcing you to reactivate your product--an unnecessary inconvenience, possibly a privacy violation, and
The whole mess with DeCSS. I bought the DVD...I own the playback hardware...why is that I'm a criminal if I come up with my own method of decrypting and viewing the DVD for my OWN use?
Suppose hypothetically that Microsoft goes out of business and I need to reactivate my Windows XP because I installed it on my larger hard disk.
Macrovision (video copy protection). My TV doesn't have RCA jacks, so I have to play DVDs through my VCR, which means that the display is unwatchable. Even though I bought the DVD, have a legitimately licensed DVD player, and have every right to enjoy it in my own home, I can't...unless I get a video stabilizer, or buy a new TV. I went with the video stabilizer, by the way...a device which in the wrong hands could be used to facilitate piracy. Ironic that such a device should be necessary to view legitimate DVD's on legitimate players...
Copy protected CD's. I bought the CD...suppose I don't own any CD player except what's in my computer, or maybe my DVD player. Again, the piracy prevention mechanism prevents from enjoying my legally owned CD.
Piracy prevention mechanisms are much more inconvenient to legitimate users than to the real pirates. THIS is why everybody is up in arms over the whole thing.
Is patch-2.4.15.tar.bz2 an unknown patch too?
:) patch-2.4.15 was regrettable...file system corruption on shutdown...ooops! Luckily, patch-2.4.16 was out within a couple of days and the problem was fixed. Also, several unofficial patches were available in the interim.
:)
Ha
Am I going to go tell the CIO of a Fortune 500 company that some hack coder added something to the kernel that screwed us?
It doesn't matter if it's a kernel patch or an NT service pack. Fortune 500 companies use change management processes to make sure that you don't accidentally break a system while trying to fix it. This means testing patches on non-production servers beforehand. This also means having a contingency plan ready so that you can recover if anything goes wrong.
If a patch breaks a system, the CIO will probably be interested to know what sort of steps you took to prevent or at least mitigate the problem. And, he'll probably want to know what you intend to do about it.
And if you just applied the patch because "they never break anything"...for your sake, I hope your resume is up to date
I can't speak for 128-bit encryption, but take a look at rdesktop. It's a Windows Terminal Services / RDP client for Linux.
I have a license to drive a car. I cannot possibly transfer my license to another driver.
Nobody is claiming you can transfer your operator's license to somebody else. You can, however, sell your car, because operator licensing is distinct from car ownership and registration.
Your driver's license allows you to drive a car on public roads, but that license is not attached to any particular car. It only says that you are legally qualified to drive a car on public roads (e.g. basic driving skill, age, knowledge of rules of the road, acceptable driving record, etc).
If you own a car, you are allowed to sell the car itself to somebody else. Part of that process is transferring the car's registration from you, to the new owner, and there are legal methods to effect this transfer.
if private use of back-door-less encryption is made illegal in the US, then the government could more easily look inside of emails to see that they do not contain terrorist instructions or focus on whomever is violating this law.
----
That should take care of the law-abiding terrorists, for they would never use an illegal encryption scheme to hide their secret plans. After all, they law abiding terrorists.
Besides, even if they wanted to, they couldn't...once these encryption algorithms and source code become illegal, it becomes impossible to find them anywhere on the internet--they are instantly eradicated, and we can be sure that nobody will have them mirrored anywhere. Thus, the terrorists would have no way of even downloading it.
You aren't suggesting that if somebody has "something to hide", it can only be because they are up to no good?
There is plenty of legitimate private information that could be sent via Email. Private or secret information isn't necessarily related to illegal activity.
For example:
- confidential business plans
- passwords (esp. reminders of web-site passwords)
- medical records
- credit card information
The list goes on, but hopefully you see my point.Take a look at Blender.
My fiancee works as a web designer in a contract position with the state. She has received many kudos for her work, and is very well liked in her office.
At one point, her contract was coming up for renewal. One Friday after work, she opened up a non-descript envelope in the mail, containing a 'status update' printed on a tractor-feed self-duplicating form. The form had several checkboxes indicating whether or not your contract had been renewed or terminated.
Imagine her horror when she discovered that 'terminated' was checked, with no explanation. She had the entire weekend to fester over how cold-hearted this was, having no options other than to leave a voicemail for her boss politely asking for some sort of explanation.
Her boss called her on Monday and was even more surprised about the termination notice. She made a few phone calls, and came back with good news...
Apparently, many other contract employees had received similar mailings that Friday. It turns out was not fired at all--it was a simple misprint. The form was laid out with the 'fired' checkbox directly above the 'not fired' checkbox. The forms had apparently slipped in the printer, causing the printed 'X' to land in the wrong box.
I'm *sure* there's a usability/form design lesson in all of this...
I have heard (is this rumor?) that if you complete your service contract, and try to go to another provider with a "branded" phone (ie, you have an AT&T cell phone, and you try to use Verizon), the phone becomes "worthless" - and thus you have to get yet another "free" phone! What kind of scam is this?
It's because we in North America are blessed with two dominant (and mutually incompatibile) digital standards--CDMA and TDMA. CDMA phones won't work with TDMA networks (and vice versa). If you switch networks, you'll probably have to switch phones as well, because of this incompatibility.
If you have an old analog phone, it *should* work with a TDMA provider such as AT&T (afaik), since the TDMA digital standard was designed to be backwards-compatible with analog phones. I can't speak for CDMA providers, but I would imagine they'll also support analog mode.
The application benchmarks test how quickly the application does something ONCE. This is very different from how most users use their applications--generally, they'll perform very similar tasks many times. Because of this, code-morphing won't provide as much of a boost to a synthetic benchmark, as it would to a user doing real work.
Granted, Crusoe's claim to fame is low power consumption, low heat and high flexibility, as opposed to raw performance. For some, those are more important than raw benchmark scores.
Anyway, this bit about code morphing in benchmarks isn't just Transmeta's spin control. Even ZDNet (which benchmarked the Sony Picturebook) suggested that their own application benchmarks ran tasks once, and didn't accurately reflect the results of code-morphing. Not that I offer ZDNet as the final word in benchmarking, but when they identify limitations in their own benchmarks, it's all the more plausible that these limitations give the Crusoe an artificially low score.
Imagine that ringing endorsement applied to cookie advertising: The good news is that so far, we've never had a ballot with only Hitlers to choose from.
We're lucky I guess...given the current crop of mediocre candidates, we can at least hold our noses, pick the least evil of the bunch, and expect that the winner won't turn out to be a ruthless dictator.
Surely, we want more from our vote than that?
As for reverse engineering being theft: it is. You have to consider that the products they ship are intended to be "black boxes" and may contain trade secrets, which are legally protected. Do you want your company's trade secrets disclosed? Not really. That's why reverse engineering is not a good thing.
Clean room reverse engineering is not theft. If you can duplicate the function of a black box without knowing how it works, then you haven't stolen any trade secrets.
Clean-room reverse engineering must continue to be legally protected. The whole idea behind the clean-room process is that you have one group analyze the original, to create a specification which describes what it does, without describing how it works.
This specification is then given to a second team, which has no knowledge about the design of the orignal, and is therefore clean. The second team then designs their device to meet these specs --thereby duplicating the function of the original without stealing any trade secrets.
This is the process which led to the first PC clone. You're not suggesting that Compaq or Phoenix stole IBM's trade secrets...are you?
Somebody actually did a 'DOOM for system administration' game a while back. I don't have the link handy, but the idea was that you could run around and kill processes using whatever weapon you had at hand. Each enemy had a different process ID number--when you killed that enemy, you killed the corresponding process.
I think the biggest problem was that if you weren't careful, you'd kill the PID associated with your DOOM game, dropping you out immediately.
...receive a file (in a birthday cake)
...get out of jail!
I'm not sure where you got that homeless person straw man from--can any argument against something be somehow likened to an argument for banning homeless people?
I wouldn't even compare a homeless person to a spammer...the homeless person more than likely wants a nice shower and a bed to sleep in, but because of his circumstances, that's not an option for him. On the other hand, spammers are sending bulk e-missives of their own volition, because it costs them nothing to do it. Even if they get a 1 in 100,000 success rate, they've made money.
As far as those who have to wait for the Spam to download, they can use such methods as www.mailstart.com, and telnet sessions to get rid of mail before they download it. telnet pop.isp.com 110 user username pass password. Boy, that's hard.
It's not hard, but it's a hassle...You seriously think the average user is going to go to that kind of trouble, just to avoid spam? I mean, clearly, *YOU* do, but the average Joe-sixpack is not going to do that--assuming they even know what telnet is to begin with.
Again...you've shifted the burden of solving the whole spam problem to its victims, rather than its cause, without doing anything to address the cost of the extra resources required to process and filter the spam to begin with.
Like you, I take steps to filter out spam, but believe me, I'd rather that it wasn't necessary.
We can all take steps to lock down open relays, install mail filters, subscribe to services like ORBS or MAPS, etc...but again...any time we take steps to fix a problem that shouldn't be there in the first place, we're wasting resources.
I agree that legislation won't stop it...laws backfire by nature. The only thing that will stop it is when spamming becomes unprofitable for the spammer--that is, when they themselves bear the true costs of their marketing strategy.
...and running up and down the streets smashing windows isn't all bad...after all, think of the business created for the local glassmaker--what a benefit for the economy!
That's a classic fallacy. The glassmaker may be employed, but he would have been anyway, installing windows in new construction. His time spent fixing broken windows is lost, with no net benefit to society. At the same time, the shopkeeper has taken money from his limited budget to cover the cost of the repairs, rather than improving the service and selection of his store. His customers now have to face a limited selection, and higher prices (to cover his expense of fixing the windows). In short, economic resources have been expended, but the local economy has not really grown--most people would consider that to be wasteful.
These new IT jobs you speak of are similar to the glass repairs I speak of. The money spent paying people to investigate spam is money not spent on better customer service, bandwidth, or network maintenance. Earthlink would have spent that money anyways--the difference is that they now have to hire spam investigators instead of network engineers.
So it's *MY* problem if I'm getting unanted bulk mail that is costing me money to receive?
At least bulk mail is paid for by the sender--it's still an annoyance, but unlike spam, it's neither trespassing nor theft of service. The postage paid to deliver it helps subsidize the cost of regular first-class postage, and in the thick of winter, it'll keep your house warm.
As for filtering, Earthlink didn't just pull Spaminator out of a hat...it took them time to design/write/customize it, and continual ongoing maintenance (as spammers find new ways through). It uses CPU capacity to process and filter Email, requiring Earthlink to buy a more powerful mail server than they would otherwise need. Somebody has to bear Earthlink's costs of filtering out this unwanted crap...guess who that usually is? (pssst...not the spammer).
A technical solution is not the fix--even if it worked perfectly, it would only mask the annoyance facter. The resources are still wasted, and the costs are still borne by the recipient.
I too am for DeCSS, but I have trouble seeing how anybody could be pro-spam.
The big problem with spam is that the cost is borne by the recipient and their ISP, not the originator. This isn't like the bulk-rate mail you get in your mailbox (paid for by the sender). This is like getting telemarketers on your cell phone while roaming.
Here's how it works...
The spammer gets their hands on a mass email program which fakes his Email address and message headers, finds an open SMTP relay, and fires away--whether he sends 100 or 100,000 Emails to carefully harvested Email addresses or randomly generated hotmail addresses, his cost is the same--the cost of a throwaway ISP account or stolen passowrd--negligible.
The recipient pays for their ISP connection (possibly hourly), and outside of North America, he also pays toll charges for his phone line. After paying to download an inbox full of spam, the recipient now has to delete the spam by hand, or install anti-spam software/filters and hope the spammers haven't found yet another way around his filter. Multiply that by 1000 or 100,000 recipients and you're talking about a lot of wasted time, bandwidth, storage, and money.
The recipient's ISP pays for mail server processing and storage capacity, a good portion of which is wasted on:
...not to mention the staffing resources wasted investigating cases of spam.
In many ways, spammers are the parasites of the internet. They move from throwaway account to throwaway account, stealing service and wasting resources, to deliver their message to people that do not want to read it, or pay their ISP to store/deliver it.
These guys need their rights protected? What about *MY* rights? Why is the burden on me to set up filters or admit defeat and change my Email address just to get off a list?
I concede that anti-spam legislation must be drafted carefully, because poorly written legislation could inadvertently take away rights of legitimate Emailers. We shouldn't *NEED* legislation for this kind of thing, but we can already conclude the honor system isn't working.
Never mind banning spam...What solution would you propose that would allow spam, but offset the costs of spamming back from the recipients to the original spammer? And how much less spam would we see afterwards?
P.S.
Your position is pro-spam, but your Email address doesn't show up in your messages, where it might be harvested by spammers...why is that?
Of course, that's assuming we can all agree on what does and does not constitute a porn site.
.sex TLD? Does it depend on how much nudity, or what kind is depicted? What about sites that are more suggestive than photographic? What about Cosmopolitan magazine? Playboy? Sex advice columns? Sites run by homosexual support groups?
.sex TLD would make it easy to write an anti-porn filter, but deciding which sites should be moved (exiled?) into the new .sex TLD would be a nightmare.
Sure, some of the sites are fairly obvious (to us) as porn sites, but what about the grey areas? Does the sexual content have to be "pornographic", or is mere nudity enough to require a
My point is that there are sites which you and I might not consider to be obscene, sexual or pornographic, but others would.
Basically, this shifts the filtering process from software and into the name registration system. Requiring all porn sites to use a
How would you legally access your important documents in your own safe if
...and now, Win2K runs on x86, and x86, and x86, and x86 :)
The text filters you're thinking about probably come from the GNU Talkfilters package. You can get them here.
The 'guts' of the Dialectizer sound very much like the GNU Talkfilters package.
Basically, the Talkfilters process standard input, translating it into Jive, Chef, ValleyGirl, Redneck, etc. by doing string substitution. The whole thing is built using flex, so it shouldn't be too hard to add other dialects as needed.
Build a web-based form, use a CGI script and wget to download the requested page, then pipe it through the appropriate filter.
You might need to add a bit of intelligence so that you don't accidentally dialectize the HTML tags, and handle frames (etc). Also, don't forget: security security security.
Most of the bits and pieces are already written--all that's needed is for somebody to tie it all together and host it.