and thrown commodity hardware at the problem. Hardware will improve over time and it becomes an off the shelf improvement, not some horrible one-off solution they're stuck with barring great expense and yet another complete reworking.
... because FPGA's are highly specialised one-off hardware items that are never improved on and will be obsolete within a year?
Why aren't the authorities using their resources to actually find, arrest, and confine the people who actually produce child pornography?
Along with "won't somebody think of the children?", statements like that are great for rounding up a posse to burn down the Museum of Natural History, but Telstra has no power to find, arrest, and confine people for any reason, and anything they do doesn't take resources away from "the authorities". By definition, the only thing a DNS block list is for is to stop you stumbling across the stuff on the Interpol block list accidentally. Telstra's media release may be a bit more fluffy than that of course but that's the essence of it.
I've thought about this too. I think one of the biggest fears of the implementer of such a filter is that they may then be held liable for the content they don't filter. I assume though that under the fluff, the charter of Telstra's filter is "to block sites on the Interpol 'worst of the worst' block list via a DNS filter". If you can access sites on the list without altering your DNS servers or having your DNS servers altered by malware then you may have a case. If you understand the underlying technology though, I think you'll realise they have themselves covered.
FWIW, I think that this filter is one of the best possibly outcome (ranking behind an opt in filter, or no filter at all). As long as they stick to blocking DNS records that i'm never going to use anyway and I could circumvent if I wanted to then it seems reasonable. If they had started doing deep packet inspection and modification then Telstra and I might have had a problem... if I was a Telstra customer.
There is always the danger of the "slippery slope", and it's probably quite real in this case, but Telstra is mostly a private company and customers can vote with their credit cards, and if the government mandated it then Australian's can vote with their votes. Another concern is that the big political focus over here at the moment is the carbon tax, so if the government was looking for some misdirection then a compulsory internet filter might be just the thing.
But is it not religious memes that make you have this problem?
It's only in the last century or two that vaguely successful methods of STD prevention have been developed. Prior to that, if you had a lot of sex with a lot of different people the chances are you were going to get some disease that would kill you, or at least hurt you lots.
Then there was also the problem of pregnancy... if you go around having sex with a lot of different people someone's going to get pregnant to someone who isn't really that interested in raising a child with them. And pregnancy is dangerous.
The only widely used and vaguely effective barrier to disease is the condom, and it's not a lot of fun to use, and isn't completely safe anyway. Contraception is kind of a solved problem except that the methods are either permanent, not completely effective and/or mess with your body a lot. There's abortion too, which is much safer than actually having a baby but still not something you'd want to plan for.
So apart from all the emotional attachment to monagomy (i'm not religious), I want my wife to remain faithful to me so I don't catch some nasty disease. Don't get me wrong, I do somewhat envy people who seem quite able to separate the emotional parts of sex and love to the point that an open relationship works for them, but it's not for me - as fun as it would be it just wouldn't work for us.
It is sad, but I think it's a matter of what they are exposed to. I don't think I can remember not being able to tell the time on an analogue clock. My three older kids all have analogue watches. The clock in the lounge room is analogue. The clock on the VCR was digital but the VCR is in a box somewhere now, and was always flashing 0:00 anyway. Our alarm clocks are digital but that's more a size thing. The clocks on the various computers in the house are digital but that's expected if they are to take up 12mm in the bottom of the screen.
If you flashed up a picture of an analogue clock and a digital clock, I could tell the exact time faster on the digital clock and the approximate time faster on the analogue clock. They both have different advantages.
But seriously, good for you for teaching the kids a useful life skill. The skills we learn at school often seem (at the time) so far removed from "real life" that we often find ourselves asking "whats the point?", especially in those angsty highschool years. At least you can point at them and say "ha ha! I taught you something" and they won't have a valid comeback:)
(Besides I have some difficulties to read analog watches).
Interesting... when I was a kid I wore a cheap digital watch because I figured it was just easier to tell the time on. And the batteries seemed to last longer - the digital watch I got when I was about 14 was still running and keeping time when I was 25, without a change of battery (although if I tried to turn on the backlight the display would go blank for a few seconds). These days though, an analogue watch/clock just seems easier to tell the time on... I can tell the exact time faster on a digital watch, but an analogue watch can give me a much faster but slightly less accurate view of the time (eg it's about quarter to 8).
I wonder if it's the display or the internal mechanism that is attractive in this case? Solid state watches with LCD (psuedo-)analogue displays are almost as old as digital watches themselves, and even watches with a direct drive analogue display have existed for years (eg no intricate clockwork just a servomotor driving the hands directly).
A penalty for deliberately trying to mislead the patent examiners would go a long way towards resolving this problem...
It's called inequitable conduct, and it can get your patent thrown out if someone else can prove it to a judge.
That's not quite the definition of 'penalty' I was looking for. That would be like the punishment for being caught shoplifting that you have to put the stuff back - the only thing wasted would be the shoplifters time and bus fare into town, and they could just try again tomorrow using a different tactic.
The definition of 'penalty' I was looking for would be a hefty fine, or maybe an audit/reexamination at their expense on all their existing patents that they wish to keep.
He appeared to have a small plastic box in his hand and after fiddling with the container he bent down and hid it under a flower box standing on the pavement. He then walked off, talking to somebody on his phone.'"
Why attack a flower box? I had heard the terrorists wanted to take us back to the Dark Ages, but, in this case, the assumption appears to be that they are trying to take us all the way back to the Triassic, before the dawn of angiosperms.
That's nothing. Some guys blew up bicycle recently. There was a heap of collateral damage too. They must really hate bicycles.
My understanding is that patent examiners simply go off the information that's filed alongside the patent. If a patent isn't really novel, they wait until a re-examination request comes in - usually as a result of litigation around the patent.
A penalty for deliberately trying to mislead the patent examiners would go a long way towards resolving this problem...
Is it hacking when you guess the passcode? 1-2-3-4?
Yes. If someone steals your care because you left the keys in while you went back in the house and grabbed something it's still theft.
It could diminish the charge from premeditated to opportunistic though, but yes it's still theft even if you are an idiot for leaving the keys in the car (which could be a crime in itself depending on where you live)
Build them large enough, so traffic flowing in has a chance to anticipate an open spot
We love our roundabouts here in Australia and most people don't have a problem with them, but i've seen some in heavily built up areas that are no more than slightly raised and painted area's of road that are smaller than most cars. I normally just drive right over the top of them.
For regular roundabouts vs traffic lights, I'd say that roundabouts outnumber traffic lights where I live and i've seen a few accidents at traffic lights but I can't remember seeing any at roundabouts... and the stats seem to back that up.
It's unusual that you haven't been exposed to that much bullshit or that "DNS", "browser", and "redirects" seem to you be the same thing.
No worries. DNS is the fundamental name to number translation. Any host on the Internet must not screw with this (I posted the RFCs but I understand you didn't read them).
Read them. Implemented them. Understand why a caching resolver (which is what we're talking about here, not DNS servers) might sometimes need to tinker with the records. If you wanted to block access to facebook on a network then creating bogus facebook.com and related entries is the fastest and cleanest way to do that, assuming the people on your network don't know enough to circumvent it and/or you block port 53 from IP's that aren't your resolvers.
Browser is one choice of application type, and not relevant to any discussion.
Redirect is a function of a browser and even less redirect.
having trouble parsing that last sentence.
Have a beautiful day, and look up why "it's" and "its" are not the same word, sweetie.
Oops. Typo, not a general lack of understanding about when to use "it's" and "its". Sorry if it offended you though.
DNS should not be messed with. It's a foundation of the network. The host-RFC says so.
Best regards.
E
I appreciate the sentiment behind your black and white thinking, but if Telstra must block access to Interpol listed child porn sites (eg the worst of the worst), then inserting some replacement DNS entries is the fastest, cheapest, and least intrusive way to do this. I think you'll agree that Telstra doing anything at all to the traffic is a different discussion altogether, and I suspect that we probably agree on that one so I won't make any comment on that.
Agree. Mostly. I think. I'm of two minds on this... on the one hand the block list is indeed the interpol blacklist, which is supposed to be all the stuff which is clearly illegal in just about every jurisdiction, and which the majority of people would say is really nasty stuff. I believe that entries to the list are also subject to close review so you shouldn't end up with legitimate content on there. I'm not a Telstra customer but if I was I doubt i'd even notice this filter - a DNS block list is a very non-invasive way to accomplish it.
On the other hand, i've never stumbled across anything on the internet that would fit the criteria of the Interpol list. Not once. And as you say, if I did want to look for that sort of material it would be incredibly easy to bypass the filter, so what's the point in having it there at all? It seems to be a solution to the wrong problem.
I think that as long as the government are completely open about what they filter then we don't really have a problem here, except for the huge waste of time and money.
That's the most bullshit argument i've ever heard. My spam filter blocks some email, which means it isn't standards compliant. My browser redirects me to a warning page if the page i'm about to visit is known to have been compromised - that's not standards compliant either.
And what's with all the blaming Telstra? Telstra might be a private company in theory but the government is still pulling it's strings. If Telstra wasn't around the government would be making another ISP comply, and that's exactly what will happen unless people change their focus from Telstra and look at who is really driving the blocking of their child porn in the first place.
For all the people arguing about censorship, how is tracking down the servers and shutting them down not an even worse form of censorship though? Should governments just shut down every server with content they don't like?
How's this stopping child porn. The hard core predators will simply go out and find a kid, or change their DNS settings. Maybe this impresses the think of the children demographic but it doesn't do anything.
A bunch of cases recently have seen some people let off because it can't be proven that they didn't stumble across the child porn accidentally. Now apart from pictures of girls that looked like they might not have been quite 18 i've never stumbled across anything like child porn by accident so I find that a bit hard to believe, but if there is evidence that the person took steps to circumvent the filter it is harder for them to argue that they stumbled across it by accident.
But you're right, there was child porn before the internet and there will be child porn after the filter is implemented. And while it might stop a few brainless idiots obtaining pictures, it won't stop anyone who is seriously motivated to find them and it definitely won't stop the images being produced in the first place, which is the real crime.
Did they only look at the hits or also at the misses? There are bound to be enough songs that abide the "formula" but lack enough musicality to become a hit.
I initially made the assumption that any analysis like this would be supervised by someone who understood such things... but maybe that's not the way the kids do things these days.
Slashdot Mirror
and thrown commodity hardware at the problem. Hardware will improve over time and it becomes an off the shelf improvement, not some horrible one-off solution they're stuck with barring great expense and yet another complete reworking.
... because FPGA's are highly specialised one-off hardware items that are never improved on and will be obsolete within a year?
Why aren't the authorities using their resources to actually find, arrest, and confine the people who actually produce child pornography?
Along with "won't somebody think of the children?", statements like that are great for rounding up a posse to burn down the Museum of Natural History, but Telstra has no power to find, arrest, and confine people for any reason, and anything they do doesn't take resources away from "the authorities". By definition, the only thing a DNS block list is for is to stop you stumbling across the stuff on the Interpol block list accidentally. Telstra's media release may be a bit more fluffy than that of course but that's the essence of it.
I've thought about this too. I think one of the biggest fears of the implementer of such a filter is that they may then be held liable for the content they don't filter. I assume though that under the fluff, the charter of Telstra's filter is "to block sites on the Interpol 'worst of the worst' block list via a DNS filter". If you can access sites on the list without altering your DNS servers or having your DNS servers altered by malware then you may have a case. If you understand the underlying technology though, I think you'll realise they have themselves covered.
FWIW, I think that this filter is one of the best possibly outcome (ranking behind an opt in filter, or no filter at all). As long as they stick to blocking DNS records that i'm never going to use anyway and I could circumvent if I wanted to then it seems reasonable. If they had started doing deep packet inspection and modification then Telstra and I might have had a problem... if I was a Telstra customer.
There is always the danger of the "slippery slope", and it's probably quite real in this case, but Telstra is mostly a private company and customers can vote with their credit cards, and if the government mandated it then Australian's can vote with their votes. Another concern is that the big political focus over here at the moment is the carbon tax, so if the government was looking for some misdirection then a compulsory internet filter might be just the thing.
But is it not religious memes that make you have this problem?
It's only in the last century or two that vaguely successful methods of STD prevention have been developed. Prior to that, if you had a lot of sex with a lot of different people the chances are you were going to get some disease that would kill you, or at least hurt you lots.
Then there was also the problem of pregnancy... if you go around having sex with a lot of different people someone's going to get pregnant to someone who isn't really that interested in raising a child with them. And pregnancy is dangerous.
The only widely used and vaguely effective barrier to disease is the condom, and it's not a lot of fun to use, and isn't completely safe anyway. Contraception is kind of a solved problem except that the methods are either permanent, not completely effective and/or mess with your body a lot. There's abortion too, which is much safer than actually having a baby but still not something you'd want to plan for.
So apart from all the emotional attachment to monagomy (i'm not religious), I want my wife to remain faithful to me so I don't catch some nasty disease. Don't get me wrong, I do somewhat envy people who seem quite able to separate the emotional parts of sex and love to the point that an open relationship works for them, but it's not for me - as fun as it would be it just wouldn't work for us.
Lol. Another AC gem.
It is sad, but I think it's a matter of what they are exposed to. I don't think I can remember not being able to tell the time on an analogue clock. My three older kids all have analogue watches. The clock in the lounge room is analogue. The clock on the VCR was digital but the VCR is in a box somewhere now, and was always flashing 0:00 anyway. Our alarm clocks are digital but that's more a size thing. The clocks on the various computers in the house are digital but that's expected if they are to take up 12mm in the bottom of the screen.
If you flashed up a picture of an analogue clock and a digital clock, I could tell the exact time faster on the digital clock and the approximate time faster on the analogue clock. They both have different advantages.
But seriously, good for you for teaching the kids a useful life skill. The skills we learn at school often seem (at the time) so far removed from "real life" that we often find ourselves asking "whats the point?", especially in those angsty highschool years. At least you can point at them and say "ha ha! I taught you something" and they won't have a valid comeback :)
On a side note, who around here calls the future?
We used to be able to, but for some reason 2012 and beyond have stopped answering the phone....
(Besides I have some difficulties to read analog watches).
Interesting... when I was a kid I wore a cheap digital watch because I figured it was just easier to tell the time on. And the batteries seemed to last longer - the digital watch I got when I was about 14 was still running and keeping time when I was 25, without a change of battery (although if I tried to turn on the backlight the display would go blank for a few seconds). These days though, an analogue watch/clock just seems easier to tell the time on... I can tell the exact time faster on a digital watch, but an analogue watch can give me a much faster but slightly less accurate view of the time (eg it's about quarter to 8).
I wonder if it's the display or the internal mechanism that is attractive in this case? Solid state watches with LCD (psuedo-)analogue displays are almost as old as digital watches themselves, and even watches with a direct drive analogue display have existed for years (eg no intricate clockwork just a servomotor driving the hands directly).
A penalty for deliberately trying to mislead the patent examiners would go a long way towards resolving this problem...
It's called inequitable conduct, and it can get your patent thrown out if someone else can prove it to a judge.
That's not quite the definition of 'penalty' I was looking for. That would be like the punishment for being caught shoplifting that you have to put the stuff back - the only thing wasted would be the shoplifters time and bus fare into town, and they could just try again tomorrow using a different tactic.
The definition of 'penalty' I was looking for would be a hefty fine, or maybe an audit/reexamination at their expense on all their existing patents that they wish to keep.
He appeared to have a small plastic box in his hand and after fiddling with the container he bent down and hid it under a flower box standing on the pavement. He then walked off, talking to somebody on his phone.'"
Why attack a flower box? I had heard the terrorists wanted to take us back to the Dark Ages, but, in this case, the assumption appears to be that they are trying to take us all the way back to the Triassic, before the dawn of angiosperms.
That's nothing. Some guys blew up bicycle recently. There was a heap of collateral damage too. They must really hate bicycles.
"Hello, yes, ummm... this is Moham.... ummm... Colin... and i'd like to register my bo... umm... geocaching package.
"Describe it? ummm... it kind of looks like 3 cylinders of plastic with some wires, a battery, and a clock
"That's right. And i'm planning on storing it in a flower pot at No. 9 Downing St. No, no not at No. 10.
"No that's all. Thank you. Praise Allah.
My understanding is that patent examiners simply go off the information that's filed alongside the patent. If a patent isn't really novel, they wait until a re-examination request comes in - usually as a result of litigation around the patent.
A penalty for deliberately trying to mislead the patent examiners would go a long way towards resolving this problem...
My mudguards just used to get packed with mud, sticks, etc or fall off so i'd normally just preemptively remove them.
Don't forget about the mud nozzle behind you to squirt a line of muddy water droplets up and down your back.
Is it hacking when you guess the passcode? 1-2-3-4?
Yes. If someone steals your care because you left the keys in while you went back in the house and grabbed something it's still theft.
It could diminish the charge from premeditated to opportunistic though, but yes it's still theft even if you are an idiot for leaving the keys in the car (which could be a crime in itself depending on where you live)
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders
Why do aliens have to have such silly names. Why can't they just be called Colin or Tim or something.
Build them large enough, so traffic flowing in has a chance to anticipate an open spot
We love our roundabouts here in Australia and most people don't have a problem with them, but i've seen some in heavily built up areas that are no more than slightly raised and painted area's of road that are smaller than most cars. I normally just drive right over the top of them.
For regular roundabouts vs traffic lights, I'd say that roundabouts outnumber traffic lights where I live and i've seen a few accidents at traffic lights but I can't remember seeing any at roundabouts... and the stats seem to back that up.
It's unusual that you haven't been exposed to that much bullshit or that "DNS", "browser", and "redirects" seem to you be the same thing.
No worries. DNS is the fundamental name to number translation. Any host on the Internet must not screw with this (I posted the RFCs but I understand you didn't read them).
Read them. Implemented them. Understand why a caching resolver (which is what we're talking about here, not DNS servers) might sometimes need to tinker with the records. If you wanted to block access to facebook on a network then creating bogus facebook.com and related entries is the fastest and cleanest way to do that, assuming the people on your network don't know enough to circumvent it and/or you block port 53 from IP's that aren't your resolvers.
Browser is one choice of application type, and not relevant to any discussion.
Redirect is a function of a browser and even less redirect.
having trouble parsing that last sentence.
Have a beautiful day, and look up why "it's" and "its" are not the same word, sweetie.
Oops. Typo, not a general lack of understanding about when to use "it's" and "its". Sorry if it offended you though.
DNS should not be messed with. It's a foundation of the network. The host-RFC says so.
Best regards.
E
I appreciate the sentiment behind your black and white thinking, but if Telstra must block access to Interpol listed child porn sites (eg the worst of the worst), then inserting some replacement DNS entries is the fastest, cheapest, and least intrusive way to do this. I think you'll agree that Telstra doing anything at all to the traffic is a different discussion altogether, and I suspect that we probably agree on that one so I won't make any comment on that.
A lot of folks on slashdot host their own domains, which usually means running your own DNS servers.
I think you're getting mixed up between a DNS server and a caching resolver.
Agree. Mostly. I think. I'm of two minds on this... on the one hand the block list is indeed the interpol blacklist, which is supposed to be all the stuff which is clearly illegal in just about every jurisdiction, and which the majority of people would say is really nasty stuff. I believe that entries to the list are also subject to close review so you shouldn't end up with legitimate content on there. I'm not a Telstra customer but if I was I doubt i'd even notice this filter - a DNS block list is a very non-invasive way to accomplish it.
On the other hand, i've never stumbled across anything on the internet that would fit the criteria of the Interpol list. Not once. And as you say, if I did want to look for that sort of material it would be incredibly easy to bypass the filter, so what's the point in having it there at all? It seems to be a solution to the wrong problem.
I think that as long as the government are completely open about what they filter then we don't really have a problem here, except for the huge waste of time and money.
That's the most bullshit argument i've ever heard. My spam filter blocks some email, which means it isn't standards compliant. My browser redirects me to a warning page if the page i'm about to visit is known to have been compromised - that's not standards compliant either.
And what's with all the blaming Telstra? Telstra might be a private company in theory but the government is still pulling it's strings. If Telstra wasn't around the government would be making another ISP comply, and that's exactly what will happen unless people change their focus from Telstra and look at who is really driving the blocking of their child porn in the first place.
For all the people arguing about censorship, how is tracking down the servers and shutting them down not an even worse form of censorship though? Should governments just shut down every server with content they don't like?
How's this stopping child porn. The hard core predators will simply go out and find a kid, or change their DNS settings. Maybe this impresses the think of the children demographic but it doesn't do anything.
A bunch of cases recently have seen some people let off because it can't be proven that they didn't stumble across the child porn accidentally. Now apart from pictures of girls that looked like they might not have been quite 18 i've never stumbled across anything like child porn by accident so I find that a bit hard to believe, but if there is evidence that the person took steps to circumvent the filter it is harder for them to argue that they stumbled across it by accident.
But you're right, there was child porn before the internet and there will be child porn after the filter is implemented. And while it might stop a few brainless idiots obtaining pictures, it won't stop anyone who is seriously motivated to find them and it definitely won't stop the images being produced in the first place, which is the real crime.
after admitting to accidentally collecting payload data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks
So had they not admitted to it they might not be in the mess they are in now? Seems like there's a lesson to be learned here.
And if they are found out they can just apologise. "I'm really really sorry. That I got caught".
Did they only look at the hits or also at the misses? There are bound to be enough songs that abide the "formula" but lack enough musicality to become a hit.
I initially made the assumption that any analysis like this would be supervised by someone who understood such things... but maybe that's not the way the kids do things these days.