Well, this terminology is relatively vague, because it does not separate ownership of the copyright of the "technological measure" from ownership of the copyright of the material being copyrighted. Presumably the authors of this law didn't consider situations where the two are sepparable.
It could be argued for either side, Nikon owns a copyright of the encryption technique, and you own the copyright of the photo that's got encrypted data in it.
I expect we'll see this legal battle happen in court some day, and when it does, it'll be a precedent setting case, because it'll define which copyright is being talked about there. If the decision comes that the algorithm, then it would become illgal to open your own Word docs in any unlicensed software. You would be legally bound to a software manufacturer for the duration of your works created in that software.
Well, it's not *exactly* true. Yes, all bets are off, but few current trojans / viruses / worms are smart enough to automatically disable the firewall.
Certainly there exist scenarios where the firewall won't be of any protection, but the standard worm / virus will be foiled by this. It's like not wearing a hardhat in a consruction area, because you might still be crushed by an I-beam.
Also, client firewalls protect you from internal threats (ala, sasser). We didn't get hit by Sasser even when it got loose on the LAN by people's private laptops.
Also, 2-way communication doesn't happen on spoofed IP addresses (the data goes back to the machine owning the IP that was spoofed, not to the attacker), and even if it did, the switch drops a spoof on the perimeter.
SSH will allow people to connect if they have discovered or brute forced the password. On my box that does have an active SSH connection to the net, botnets sweep SSH daily, sometimes as many as 500 IP's try hundreds of attempts daily. This will only protect you so far, and it is not as far as a firewall which doesn't even let them know a box exists there at all. Running SSH with cypher=none is no different from having the database port wide open, since the database also requires a username and password. Now all you're doing is adding latency for no added benefit.
Properly configuring any application means securing it from attack. I don't need to run it through SSH because an attacker can't even open a TCP connection to it.
In that scenario, what exactly is your client firewall protecting against?
My point there was the well known security principle that no security protects against physical access, so your configuration based security is as good as it gets when the only method of breach is physical access.
They're a "better than nothing" tool
So are all security precautions, ssh/ssl, firewalling, etc etc etc.
If you don't believe that a client firwall provides any meaningful benefit, feel free to not run one, but be advised that your boxen are open to attack by botnets that mine are protected from because of their client firewall.
Client firewalls are just as, and often more protective than a perimeter based firewall because it protects you against inside worms. How many companies got owned by winblows worms behind their external firewall. If they had client firewalls in place, no such ownage would have happened. We do at work, and when someone put a personal laptop on the network that was compromised, it didn't infect the corporate machines.
I'm not particularly interested in continuing to defend the virtues of a client firewall, because it's like arguing the virtues of using a seatbelt. There's always going to be someone who doesn't agree it's worthwhile, and so those of us who realize it is just shake our heads and continue to buckle up.
If they're not, you should be using SSL or an SSH tunnel.
They are different machines, unless you have a really wonky setup, you'll never be firewalling the loopback interface, and yes, if they are the same machine, then you're right, a UNIX domain socket is much faster. But they're not, so it's TCP for me.
The firewall isn't intended to protect the data against sniffing, it's intended to protect against unwanted connections. SSL or SSH don't do this, they only protect the data against sniffing. Each provides a separate type of protection, and there is no overlap in what their intended protections are.
Even with ssh'd data, someone else can still connect to your database server, and if they manage to establish a connection (brute force, or perhaps with authentication information they acquired in another way), you're still compromised. With a properly configured firewall, my database server and my http server can talk to each other transparently, and the rest of the world can't even know the database server exists unless they are the switch between the two. In this model, even if my database username/password gets stolen, they still can't connect to my database server.
Finally, not all connections need to be protected with encryption. My machines sit on the same switch in a trusted lan, and dealing with non-sensitive data. Average daily data throughput between the machines is 500k/s, and it peaks over 1.5m/s. Processing the encryption for that much data is overhead I'd rather leave to improving the two servers' performance since it offers no real benefit unless the switch is compromised. But since the switch is also properly firewalled, this won't happen unless it's done by a human being in the data center. If that's the case, they can simply take my machines offline and reboot them in rescue mode, having full access to the data anyhow.
Face it, client firewalls are an absolutely essential tool in properly securing a box. If you plan for the worst, then all surprises are good ones:-).
BTW, for what it's worth, my database server's firewall log tells me about several failed attempts to connect to MySQL's port every day from a variety of IP's. Someone owns a botnet out there that tries to find MySQL database servers, and I'm happy that they still don't know mine exists.
Realistic, not optimistic. Client firewalls are a useful tool, but no more.
So are computers:-).
Sounds like a job for UNIX domain sockets and proper file system permissions.
Different machines. A client firewall doesn't protect communications across the loopback interface (unless you've got some really wonky stuff going on).
Re:Why is stealth mode pointed out as special?
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Well, yours is an optomistic view. Refreshing:-).
The idea isn't to protect against attack on all those services you have running but don't use, it's to minimise potential damage if you are compromised. If the firewall blocks port 31337 on a windows box, and BackOrifice gets installed, the user is compromised but not exposed.
Also, as another user mentioned, there's the issue of spyware that might set up a listening port, or just any other software which fails to protect itself well, but which you need to run locally. Put holes in the firewall only for those things you know for sure you want the outside having access to, and no matter what crap happens on the client machine, its exposure is still the same.
Also, there's selective access that happens on a client firewall. My database server has a firewall in place to protect its copy of MySQL. Only my http server can connect on that port, anyone else, the OS simply drops the packet (which is the old term for this fancy new "stealth mode").
Firewalls do more than simply provide all or none access to the world, even client firewalls.
I think Shatner in the series was a particularly bad actor, excessively dramatic, and poorly pulling off the confident captain by simply being arrogant. I think Spock did a fine job acting, actually. But McCoy? Nah. Not as bad as the Captain, but he wasn't certainly anyone I'd classify as a good actor. Maybe better than I could do, but that dont make it good.
Second, I never said the special effects made the series bad, in fact I never said the show was bad at all. I think the show overall was a good series for the time, but I think the reason that the show itself is important is because of the important social issues they tackled. They made due with the same budget as other shows on TV that didn't have to do special effects, and it showed in the quality of the effects. As I said though, the special effects weren't the point of the series, and they don't make the series bad. If the special effects *were* the point of the series, then most likely the series *would* have been bad, as I'm not a fan of any show/movie that exists to demonstrate special effects.
Finally, let me elaborate on what I meant by bad writing. The stories were *original*, very much so, and so I guess in that sense the writing wasn't bad at all. But it didn't particularly capture subtle human interaction. The relationships between Kirk, Spock and McCoy were weak and predictable. Humorous at times, sure, but not slap your knee funny, and not particularly clever.
I don't dislike the series like you think, because I recognize the importance of the goals which it accomplished. Follow your dreams, and by the way, the color of that guy's skin really doesn't matter, presented in a way that it wasn't smack-you-in-the-face, but just commonly accepted common sense.
The queen was the Borg's attempt to recognize that there was indeed power in individuality. She was a hybrid of individuality and the collective, and that is why they wanted Seven in that episode, and were willing to trade a slipstream drive for it. (I just watched it like 2 weeks ago on DVD).
By the way, the queen wasn't Voyager's creation, she first appeared in a StarTrek movie (Generations? Never been much of a ST:movie fan). In fact, if you watch the extras from season 5, you discover that the actress who played the borg queen was in fact a different actress who had previously played the queen in the movie.
If you think the queen was a big mistake, don't blame Voyager, blame the movie.
Personally, I think Voyager is the best of all the StarTrek series.
Original StarTrek first explored diversity, and took us to where only our dreams led: Space. However it had bad writing, bad acting, and bad special effects. That wasn't the point of the show though.
TNG extended on the original series fundaments of tolerance, but really put forth that exploration of space was a worthy goal by itself. It was basically the original series plus good writing, acting, and special effects. It was probably the single largest leap forward in all the StarTrek series after Original.
DS9 was really about showing that life in space is exciting just like life exploring space is. It was also the first series to really try to provide an overall story arc, and this is why people who only watched DS9 periodically never liked it: nothing made sense unless you watched every episode in order. DS9 was better than TNG, but not by much.
Voyager, IMO, has the best mission as a series since the original. Stand by your principles no matter the cost. The human spirit *will* endure, no matter how unlikely the odds. No matter how far from your objectives you are, you should strive for those objectives at all costs, and no matter how unlikely they seem to be met, short of compromising your principles. I think they used too many unlikely plot elements (Amelia Erhart? How many alpha quadrant ships will they bump into anyhow?)
I can't speak much to Enterprise, perhaps there is some subtle point that makes it worthwhile, but I got hung up on the poor writing and poor directing early on, and it frankly affronted what I always understood StarTrek to stand for. Maybe it got better in later episodes, but for me the damage was done right out of the gate. I was willing to be forgiving of a mediocre first season (most series had these, they have too much work to do in setting up the environment and characters, while on a still low budget). The first season wasn't mediocre, it was horrible to the point of painful. Porno has better plots.
This series should have been put down by the end of season 2, and they should have destroyed all the original work, and completely erased it from the history books. Then they need to start a new series, and make sure that they have quality actors, quality writers, and a panel of a few hundred hard core ST geeks who are willing to objectively critique the series' ability to continue the ST tradition. Do you hear me Rick Berman? My resume is available if you want it.
1) they're harder to carry than $1 bills (they don't fit in a wallet, and that's a lot of money to be tossing in your coin jar every evening) 2) the $1 bills are still readily available. If the gov't stopped making $1 bills, guess what type of currency we'd all be using for $1 in the near future? 3) little old ladies would still insist on digging though their purse to fish out 75 $1 coins while a line builds up behind them at the super market, and those buggers would fall all the way to the bottom of her 98lb purse. Hence people like myself would decide that the $1 coin wasn't worth the hassle, and throw them into the ocean every chance we got. However, that could be good for the economy.
My experiences from being the sort of person you describe are as follows. There are two classes of people when it comes to receiving respect when you truly deserve it.
There are those who afford you the respect you deserve.
Then there are those people who afford you all the *dis*respect they can, with out at any point crossing this line where you could go to H.R. These are the people who are genuinely threatened by your competence. Perhaps they have the same goals as you, and these goals are mutually exclusive (such as both vieing for the same position).
The correct way to respond to these individuals is with all the professional respect you can muster. Unless your management is blind, they'll see one guy disrespecting another, and no reciprocation. The paint is on the wall there, and usually people who will disrespect you like this are foolish enough to do so in open when their little early nibbles fail to get your back up.
This principle is ancient. The Bible talks about repaying your enemies with kindness, and you pour hot coals on their head, or something to the effect. Certainly it's the same basic principle that the likes of Ghandi demonstrated. Nothing really pisses off that jerk who's always giving you a hard time like never acknowledging his jabs, and continuing to be nice to him. Sometimes you'll even turn that enemy into an ally.
Best of all, to any outside observer, you're always professional no matter how much you are prodded, and that's certainly a promotion worthy quality, and a quality that by itself commands additional respect. I have one of these people at my work, and I think it strengthens my position on a day to day basis.
I don't know how any given password safe type application operates, but that is a consideration made by many such programs. There's a variety of tricks used to secure the data even in RAM, such as accessing it every 1/4 second (which should do a pretty good job of preventing that memory from ever swapping out except under *extremely* heavy loads), only retaining the actual plaintext for the duration that it's required, and destroying it immediately after, custom kernel modules that mark the memory as never permitted to swap, stuff like this.
I read a paper on techniques for this some while back, and a lot of research has gone into ways to secure sensitive data from swap. I'm not up to date on current approaches, or what the technical details of the approaches were in that paper, I found it interesting, but it's not something I personally had any direct use for.
Leet speak is always deleted, and enough of it will result in a short term ban on my website lotgd.net. Some people come back after their several days off and try to push the leet speak envelope again, and end up with a longer ban. We just don't tolerate it.
Any page you place on the web, you're inherrently permitting the user to make a copy of. That's how the web works. Your server reads data off a disk, and sends a copy of that data to me.
It's equivalent to handing out fliers on the street corner, then suing someone else who gives away a copy of the same flier. There is a standard on how web pages operate, followed by apparently everyone except the AFP. And there are standard ways to designate exceptions to that operational model, followed by apparently everyone except the AFP. The failing is not with Google, and is the same as if they put a draconian copyright notice in swahili, then sued users who didn't understand the swahili.
If you do not want copies being distributed, there are known standard ways to do this: first, ensure that copies are only being given by you to those you wish to view it (password protected), and second, the very very standard robots.txt, where you can make it publically available but still deny spider access.
A consortium of companies all agreed: You shouldn't use the products that compete with the consortium's common business objectives, for the following unsubstantiated or opinion based reasons.
But the value of a stock is determined not by the long term investors, but by the day to day traders, who are the ones purely interested in short term goals. If you don't satisfy the short term investors, your stock will go down, and you'll lose even the long term investors who want to pull their shares before the stock tanks.
It's a fundamental problem with capitalism and its inherrent get rich quick mentality. The same problem plagues upper management within companies, who are collectively the leading short term investors for most organizations. Bump stock up today, cash out tomorrow, resign, and take my $50,000,000 golden parachute.
Sounds like it's time for an open standard on TSL: Tax Scripting Language. Something that encapsulates the possibilities of all known tax rules in a sort of programming language of questions, collections, and conditionals. The IRS can release the tax code in TSL each year, and it can be up to software manufacturers to build apps that interpret and drive your tax return.
Then anyone, even non-accountants, can create tax softare, with out the IRS competing with the existing tax software industry. Opening up the possibility for open source tax software that comes bundled with 200X's TSL file.
Local municipalities and state level government could also release their own TSL's, and users could do all of their taxes in one shot.
I make use of this tool extensively; it's a cross platform UML diagramer with a lot of good functionality. The gskinner.com site itself is an excellently done Flash site. It showcases their technical knowhow, with out the Flash interfering with the content.
Let's not forget Laszlo Mail: http://www.laszlosystems.com/products/modules/mail.php One of the best web interfaces to mail I've ever seen (sorry, they don't have an actual demo out there for you to look at, but we've met with the Laszlo guys and they've let us play with it, it's very good!)
Once upon a time, I shared the same allergy to Flash that a lot of the/. crowd owns. It is perhaps because early incarnations of Flash were really not good for much more than making an annoying splash intro. Flash as a language (or rather, ActionScript) has come a long long way. The language itself is a robust language supporting a solid OOP environment. Its ability to load content pieces on demand is highly reminiscent of Ajax that everyone is so excited about now, only it's quite a bit more powerful.
You can build a series of movies (swf's) that each perform a discrete function, and use a master movie to bring them together. When you need the calendar (or any other) piece of your application, well, load it. One command and it's placed on the stage, with a loading indicator, while the user gets to continue interacting with the other pieces of the application. You could easily build an entire browser-based OS within Flash, just like a standard OS, with each piece of it being represented by its own 'process' (movie clip), and with all of it having asynchronous data binding to a server-side database. Imagine being able to log into the same OS, with access to all the same applications and data no matter where in the world you went. It's a pipe dream, but it's entirely possible within Flash, only most "serious" developers refuse to acknowledge the possibility.
Good Flash developers have been doing asynchronous applications for several years now, but have suffered an inability to get good market penetration due mostly to the pundits who call out, "What about users who don't have Flash?" referring to that 1% subset of users using, eg, Lynx. The same individuals have no problem, however, relying entirely on CSS to do their formatting, or linking to a PDF (this generalization is brought to you based on my personal experience with such users; of course I'm sure there are purists who would refuse to rely entirely on CSS for their formatting, or who would refuse to place any object on the web that is not part of HTML1.1).
People (developers) developed the allergy when Flash was immature, and have not bothered to reevaluate it as a rich web application interface since. Laszlo is FOSS whose entire purpose is built around building rich asynchronous applications for the web. It provides all of the UI components you need to build an app (and any you created that it didn't provide can be just as easily used). It even does this in a skinnable fashion, so, like Evolution, users could load their own custom skins which would be applied to all of the default elements.
I'm not saying Flash is the be-all and end-all of web goodness. I certainly realize there are pl
While I'm inclined to agree: they could at least require their editors to read every front page article, I do have to say, the editors here won't be reading the front page for their own oedification. Think about it, they read many more submissions each day than we do, they read (presumably) all the distinct stories submitted by users, so chances are they've seen a dozen or more submissions in the submissions log on each story that does end up on the front page. Maybe with all that information it becomes tough to distinguish between what your coworker posted, and what some jack hole posted.
They should at least have some sort of QC process in place though, with all the dupes that have been coming up lately. Each article must be approved by another editor, and each editor is required to read up on the home page before doing approvals. Or maybe just an IRC channel, "Hey, did anyone post the Mandrakesoft/Connectiva article yet?" "Yeah, CowboyNeal did" "Ok, thanks"
My site (lotgd.net) averages about 1.8 million hits a day now. 1% clickthrough would be absolutely positively lovely. Doesn't happen. I make between $5 and $10 per day on advertising, and this is significantly below my cost to run the site. Unless this guy was for some reason getting much better clickthrough rates than I, this probably only served to offset hosting costs.
The idea is that only those who are damaged can challenge them. Persumably to prevent some group from being able to endlessly tie up the organization in endless litigation surrounding areas by which they are unaffected.
If that ruling comes down, then it's a matter of waiting till the flag goes in, then someone can sue.
"You've also moved away from your original argument, which was I need this law because I can't control my kids."
You're obviously not a parent if you think that a parent can really "control" their kids. I think most kids got a look at their buddie's older brother's PlayBoy when they were 12. There's a big distinction between kids being able to get access to things like this through extraordinary measures (older brother is going to be upset when he finds little brother stole his PlayBoy), and the stuff being openly available with out effort.
That distinction is this: it's very obviously wrong to engage in activities so expressly forbidden. If you as a parent want your child reading porn, then when you provide the porn to your child, you remove this obvious expression of wrong, and make it acceptable behavior for your child. This is the same model being proposed for mature video games.
My original argument stands, this law would be a tool for parents to discourage or prevent their children from having access to material that they believe is inappropriate for those children. Parents who do not believe so are not prevented from providing access to it, and so no one loses their rights, it's just slightly (slightly) more difficult for these latter set of parents to grant access to the material for their children.
This by itself is a good thing, because it encourages at least some form of review by a parent of potentially harmful material. As much as you obviously think that current games on the market are appropriate for your children, there must be a point where there would exist video games you don't want your child having access to. It's proven that taboo sells, so the more shocking and far from the norm a game goes, the more money there is to be made off of it, thus it's an inevitability that over time more and more games will be produced that push the edge of tolerance. At some point (eg, GTA: KKK-nigga-lynching version), you're going to not want your kids playing a game. If you have to be present for the sale, at least you're able to provide a superficial filtering: "Hey, is that a burning cross and an african american strung up on the cover? Let's buy Barnie's Big Purple Adventure instead, ok?" A big difference here from "Here's $50, go get a game."
I've already said, if you find the Bible so offensive, feel free to write your congressman. Get them to put a M rating on the Bible, and I'll agree that it has no place being sold to children. But I still have a hard time following the parallel you draw between the Bible and mature video games. The Bible doesn't present things that our society in general have unanimoulsy agreed as being morally unacceptable. GTA does. I'm no longer sure if it was you or another respondant who agreed with me that at least some aspects of morality are universally accepted as wrong (rape, murder, etc). Mature video games not only portray these things, they glorify them. They are presented as objectives for the player, goals for which to strive.
Yes, children can see images of people being raped or murdered on television, but how many of those TV shows depict the rapist or murderer as the hero? Last I looked, shows like Law & Order, CSI, Monk, Cold Case Files, etc., portray the perpetrator as the antagonist, not the protagonist. The same cannot be said for most M-rated games. This is a *major* distinction, because in one case, the perpetrator of heinous crimes is villified, and in another case, the perp is glorified.
This, I think, is the reason a lot of parents who'd let their children watch crime shows on TV, would not want to let their children play a game where the objective was to commit crime. There's a Law & Order video game I think. I don't actually know anything about the game, but if my child wanted to play it, after reviewing it, I suspect I'd say yes (depending on the age and developmental progress of my child).
In the end, I still fail to see who's rights you think are being trodde
You're right. May as well not try to limit the kid at all if he's just going to do it anyhow. And while we're at it, we should get rid of all these annoying laws; you know the ones, making it illegal to murder or drive drunk. People are going to break the law anyhow, might as well not bother trying to enforce them.
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Well, this terminology is relatively vague, because it does not separate ownership of the copyright of the "technological measure" from ownership of the copyright of the material being copyrighted. Presumably the authors of this law didn't consider situations where the two are sepparable.
It could be argued for either side, Nikon owns a copyright of the encryption technique, and you own the copyright of the photo that's got encrypted data in it.
I expect we'll see this legal battle happen in court some day, and when it does, it'll be a precedent setting case, because it'll define which copyright is being talked about there. If the decision comes that the algorithm, then it would become illgal to open your own Word docs in any unlicensed software. You would be legally bound to a software manufacturer for the duration of your works created in that software.
Well, it's not *exactly* true. Yes, all bets are off, but few current trojans / viruses / worms are smart enough to automatically disable the firewall.
Certainly there exist scenarios where the firewall won't be of any protection, but the standard worm / virus will be foiled by this. It's like not wearing a hardhat in a consruction area, because you might still be crushed by an I-beam.
Also, client firewalls protect you from internal threats (ala, sasser). We didn't get hit by Sasser even when it got loose on the LAN by people's private laptops.
It's lines of defense, man.
Also, 2-way communication doesn't happen on spoofed IP addresses (the data goes back to the machine owning the IP that was spoofed, not to the attacker), and even if it did, the switch drops a spoof on the perimeter.
SSH will allow people to connect if they have discovered or brute forced the password. On my box that does have an active SSH connection to the net, botnets sweep SSH daily, sometimes as many as 500 IP's try hundreds of attempts daily. This will only protect you so far, and it is not as far as a firewall which doesn't even let them know a box exists there at all. Running SSH with cypher=none is no different from having the database port wide open, since the database also requires a username and password. Now all you're doing is adding latency for no added benefit.
Properly configuring any application means securing it from attack. I don't need to run it through SSH because an attacker can't even open a TCP connection to it.
In that scenario, what exactly is your client firewall protecting against?
My point there was the well known security principle that no security protects against physical access, so your configuration based security is as good as it gets when the only method of breach is physical access.
They're a "better than nothing" tool
So are all security precautions, ssh/ssl, firewalling, etc etc etc.
If you don't believe that a client firwall provides any meaningful benefit, feel free to not run one, but be advised that your boxen are open to attack by botnets that mine are protected from because of their client firewall.
Client firewalls are just as, and often more protective than a perimeter based firewall because it protects you against inside worms. How many companies got owned by winblows worms behind their external firewall. If they had client firewalls in place, no such ownage would have happened. We do at work, and when someone put a personal laptop on the network that was compromised, it didn't infect the corporate machines.
I'm not particularly interested in continuing to defend the virtues of a client firewall, because it's like arguing the virtues of using a seatbelt. There's always going to be someone who doesn't agree it's worthwhile, and so those of us who realize it is just shake our heads and continue to buckle up.
If they're not, you should be using SSL or an SSH tunnel.
:-).
They are different machines, unless you have a really wonky setup, you'll never be firewalling the loopback interface, and yes, if they are the same machine, then you're right, a UNIX domain socket is much faster. But they're not, so it's TCP for me.
The firewall isn't intended to protect the data against sniffing, it's intended to protect against unwanted connections. SSL or SSH don't do this, they only protect the data against sniffing. Each provides a separate type of protection, and there is no overlap in what their intended protections are.
Even with ssh'd data, someone else can still connect to your database server, and if they manage to establish a connection (brute force, or perhaps with authentication information they acquired in another way), you're still compromised. With a properly configured firewall, my database server and my http server can talk to each other transparently, and the rest of the world can't even know the database server exists unless they are the switch between the two. In this model, even if my database username/password gets stolen, they still can't connect to my database server.
Finally, not all connections need to be protected with encryption. My machines sit on the same switch in a trusted lan, and dealing with non-sensitive data. Average daily data throughput between the machines is 500k/s, and it peaks over 1.5m/s. Processing the encryption for that much data is overhead I'd rather leave to improving the two servers' performance since it offers no real benefit unless the switch is compromised. But since the switch is also properly firewalled, this won't happen unless it's done by a human being in the data center. If that's the case, they can simply take my machines offline and reboot them in rescue mode, having full access to the data anyhow.
Face it, client firewalls are an absolutely essential tool in properly securing a box. If you plan for the worst, then all surprises are good ones
BTW, for what it's worth, my database server's firewall log tells me about several failed attempts to connect to MySQL's port every day from a variety of IP's. Someone owns a botnet out there that tries to find MySQL database servers, and I'm happy that they still don't know mine exists.
Realistic, not optimistic. Client firewalls are a useful tool, but no more.
:-).
So are computers
Sounds like a job for UNIX domain sockets and proper file system permissions.
Different machines. A client firewall doesn't protect communications across the loopback interface (unless you've got some really wonky stuff going on).
Well, yours is an optomistic view. Refreshing :-).
The idea isn't to protect against attack on all those services you have running but don't use, it's to minimise potential damage if you are compromised. If the firewall blocks port 31337 on a windows box, and BackOrifice gets installed, the user is compromised but not exposed.
Also, as another user mentioned, there's the issue of spyware that might set up a listening port, or just any other software which fails to protect itself well, but which you need to run locally. Put holes in the firewall only for those things you know for sure you want the outside having access to, and no matter what crap happens on the client machine, its exposure is still the same.
Also, there's selective access that happens on a client firewall. My database server has a firewall in place to protect its copy of MySQL. Only my http server can connect on that port, anyone else, the OS simply drops the packet (which is the old term for this fancy new "stealth mode").
Firewalls do more than simply provide all or none access to the world, even client firewalls.
I think Shatner in the series was a particularly bad actor, excessively dramatic, and poorly pulling off the confident captain by simply being arrogant. I think Spock did a fine job acting, actually. But McCoy? Nah. Not as bad as the Captain, but he wasn't certainly anyone I'd classify as a good actor. Maybe better than I could do, but that dont make it good.
Second, I never said the special effects made the series bad, in fact I never said the show was bad at all. I think the show overall was a good series for the time, but I think the reason that the show itself is important is because of the important social issues they tackled. They made due with the same budget as other shows on TV that didn't have to do special effects, and it showed in the quality of the effects. As I said though, the special effects weren't the point of the series, and they don't make the series bad. If the special effects *were* the point of the series, then most likely the series *would* have been bad, as I'm not a fan of any show/movie that exists to demonstrate special effects.
Finally, let me elaborate on what I meant by bad writing. The stories were *original*, very much so, and so I guess in that sense the writing wasn't bad at all. But it didn't particularly capture subtle human interaction. The relationships between Kirk, Spock and McCoy were weak and predictable. Humorous at times, sure, but not slap your knee funny, and not particularly clever.
I don't dislike the series like you think, because I recognize the importance of the goals which it accomplished. Follow your dreams, and by the way, the color of that guy's skin really doesn't matter, presented in a way that it wasn't smack-you-in-the-face, but just commonly accepted common sense.
By the way, the queen wasn't Voyager's creation, she first appeared in a StarTrek movie (Generations? Never been much of a ST:movie fan). In fact, if you watch the extras from season 5, you discover that the actress who played the borg queen was in fact a different actress who had previously played the queen in the movie.
If you think the queen was a big mistake, don't blame Voyager, blame the movie.
Personally, I think Voyager is the best of all the StarTrek series.
I can't speak much to Enterprise, perhaps there is some subtle point that makes it worthwhile, but I got hung up on the poor writing and poor directing early on, and it frankly affronted what I always understood StarTrek to stand for. Maybe it got better in later episodes, but for me the damage was done right out of the gate. I was willing to be forgiving of a mediocre first season (most series had these, they have too much work to do in setting up the environment and characters, while on a still low budget). The first season wasn't mediocre, it was horrible to the point of painful. Porno has better plots.
This series should have been put down by the end of season 2, and they should have destroyed all the original work, and completely erased it from the history books. Then they need to start a new series, and make sure that they have quality actors, quality writers, and a panel of a few hundred hard core ST geeks who are willing to objectively critique the series' ability to continue the ST tradition. Do you hear me Rick Berman? My resume is available if you want it.
IMO the reason that the $1 coins fail is
1) they're harder to carry than $1 bills (they don't fit in a wallet, and that's a lot of money to be tossing in your coin jar every evening)
2) the $1 bills are still readily available. If the gov't stopped making $1 bills, guess what type of currency we'd all be using for $1 in the near future?
3) little old ladies would still insist on digging though their purse to fish out 75 $1 coins while a line builds up behind them at the super market, and those buggers would fall all the way to the bottom of her 98lb purse. Hence people like myself would decide that the $1 coin wasn't worth the hassle, and throw them into the ocean every chance we got. However, that could be good for the economy.
Hmm, maybe what will come of this is a local Internet tax. That's how roads and the like are paid for.
I presume that free city-provided wi-fi still requires a login, just so they know who to throw in jail for all that p2p stuff.
My experiences from being the sort of person you describe are as follows. There are two classes of people when it comes to receiving respect when you truly deserve it.
There are those who afford you the respect you deserve.
Then there are those people who afford you all the *dis*respect they can, with out at any point crossing this line where you could go to H.R. These are the people who are genuinely threatened by your competence. Perhaps they have the same goals as you, and these goals are mutually exclusive (such as both vieing for the same position).
The correct way to respond to these individuals is with all the professional respect you can muster. Unless your management is blind, they'll see one guy disrespecting another, and no reciprocation. The paint is on the wall there, and usually people who will disrespect you like this are foolish enough to do so in open when their little early nibbles fail to get your back up.
This principle is ancient. The Bible talks about repaying your enemies with kindness, and you pour hot coals on their head, or something to the effect. Certainly it's the same basic principle that the likes of Ghandi demonstrated. Nothing really pisses off that jerk who's always giving you a hard time like never acknowledging his jabs, and continuing to be nice to him. Sometimes you'll even turn that enemy into an ally.
Best of all, to any outside observer, you're always professional no matter how much you are prodded, and that's certainly a promotion worthy quality, and a quality that by itself commands additional respect. I have one of these people at my work, and I think it strengthens my position on a day to day basis.
I don't know how any given password safe type application operates, but that is a consideration made by many such programs. There's a variety of tricks used to secure the data even in RAM, such as accessing it every 1/4 second (which should do a pretty good job of preventing that memory from ever swapping out except under *extremely* heavy loads), only retaining the actual plaintext for the duration that it's required, and destroying it immediately after, custom kernel modules that mark the memory as never permitted to swap, stuff like this.
I read a paper on techniques for this some while back, and a lot of research has gone into ways to secure sensitive data from swap. I'm not up to date on current approaches, or what the technical details of the approaches were in that paper, I found it interesting, but it's not something I personally had any direct use for.
Leet speak is always deleted, and enough of it will result in a short term ban on my website lotgd.net. Some people come back after their several days off and try to push the leet speak envelope again, and end up with a longer ban. We just don't tolerate it.
Or a P.O. box, a prepaid cell phone, and a disposable email address. Make all your contact info disposable, and you can game the system.
Any page you place on the web, you're inherrently permitting the user to make a copy of. That's how the web works. Your server reads data off a disk, and sends a copy of that data to me.
It's equivalent to handing out fliers on the street corner, then suing someone else who gives away a copy of the same flier. There is a standard on how web pages operate, followed by apparently everyone except the AFP. And there are standard ways to designate exceptions to that operational model, followed by apparently everyone except the AFP. The failing is not with Google, and is the same as if they put a draconian copyright notice in swahili, then sued users who didn't understand the swahili.
If you do not want copies being distributed, there are known standard ways to do this: first, ensure that copies are only being given by you to those you wish to view it (password protected), and second, the very very standard robots.txt, where you can make it publically available but still deny spider access.
A consortium of companies all agreed: You shouldn't use the products that compete with the consortium's common business objectives, for the following unsubstantiated or opinion based reasons.
But the value of a stock is determined not by the long term investors, but by the day to day traders, who are the ones purely interested in short term goals. If you don't satisfy the short term investors, your stock will go down, and you'll lose even the long term investors who want to pull their shares before the stock tanks.
It's a fundamental problem with capitalism and its inherrent get rich quick mentality. The same problem plagues upper management within companies, who are collectively the leading short term investors for most organizations. Bump stock up today, cash out tomorrow, resign, and take my $50,000,000 golden parachute.
Shh... d' ya wanna get sued?
Sounds like it's time for an open standard on TSL: Tax Scripting Language. Something that encapsulates the possibilities of all known tax rules in a sort of programming language of questions, collections, and conditionals. The IRS can release the tax code in TSL each year, and it can be up to software manufacturers to build apps that interpret and drive your tax return.
Then anyone, even non-accountants, can create tax softare, with out the IRS competing with the existing tax software industry. Opening up the possibility for open source tax software that comes bundled with 200X's TSL file.
Local municipalities and state level government could also release their own TSL's, and users could do all of their taxes in one shot.
Well, there's GModeler:
.php
/. crowd owns. It is perhaps because early incarnations of Flash were really not good for much more than making an annoying splash intro. Flash as a language (or rather, ActionScript) has come a long long way. The language itself is a robust language supporting a solid OOP environment. Its ability to load content pieces on demand is highly reminiscent of Ajax that everyone is so excited about now, only it's quite a bit more powerful.
http://www.gskinner.com/gmodeler/app/run.html
I make use of this tool extensively; it's a cross platform UML diagramer with a lot of good functionality. The gskinner.com site itself is an excellently done Flash site. It showcases their technical knowhow, with out the Flash interfering with the content.
Then there's things like the Laszlo Calendar: http://www.laszlosystems.com/lps/sample-apps/calen dar/calendar.lzo?lzt=html
This is a proof of concept only, it's not actually data bound, but it has the capacity to be.
Of course if I mention Laszlo Calendar, I have to mention the other Laszlo demos:
http://www.laszlosystems.com/demos/
Let's not forget Laszlo Mail: http://www.laszlosystems.com/products/modules/mail
One of the best web interfaces to mail I've ever seen (sorry, they don't have an actual demo out there for you to look at, but we've met with the Laszlo guys and they've let us play with it, it's very good!)
Once upon a time, I shared the same allergy to Flash that a lot of the
You can build a series of movies (swf's) that each perform a discrete function, and use a master movie to bring them together. When you need the calendar (or any other) piece of your application, well, load it. One command and it's placed on the stage, with a loading indicator, while the user gets to continue interacting with the other pieces of the application. You could easily build an entire browser-based OS within Flash, just like a standard OS, with each piece of it being represented by its own 'process' (movie clip), and with all of it having asynchronous data binding to a server-side database. Imagine being able to log into the same OS, with access to all the same applications and data no matter where in the world you went. It's a pipe dream, but it's entirely possible within Flash, only most "serious" developers refuse to acknowledge the possibility.
Good Flash developers have been doing asynchronous applications for several years now, but have suffered an inability to get good market penetration due mostly to the pundits who call out, "What about users who don't have Flash?" referring to that 1% subset of users using, eg, Lynx. The same individuals have no problem, however, relying entirely on CSS to do their formatting, or linking to a PDF (this generalization is brought to you based on my personal experience with such users; of course I'm sure there are purists who would refuse to rely entirely on CSS for their formatting, or who would refuse to place any object on the web that is not part of HTML1.1).
People (developers) developed the allergy when Flash was immature, and have not bothered to reevaluate it as a rich web application interface since. Laszlo is FOSS whose entire purpose is built around building rich asynchronous applications for the web. It provides all of the UI components you need to build an app (and any you created that it didn't provide can be just as easily used). It even does this in a skinnable fashion, so, like Evolution, users could load their own custom skins which would be applied to all of the default elements.
I'm not saying Flash is the be-all and end-all of web goodness. I certainly realize there are pl
While I'm inclined to agree: they could at least require their editors to read every front page article, I do have to say, the editors here won't be reading the front page for their own oedification. Think about it, they read many more submissions each day than we do, they read (presumably) all the distinct stories submitted by users, so chances are they've seen a dozen or more submissions in the submissions log on each story that does end up on the front page. Maybe with all that information it becomes tough to distinguish between what your coworker posted, and what some jack hole posted.
They should at least have some sort of QC process in place though, with all the dupes that have been coming up lately. Each article must be approved by another editor, and each editor is required to read up on the home page before doing approvals. Or maybe just an IRC channel, "Hey, did anyone post the Mandrakesoft/Connectiva article yet?" "Yeah, CowboyNeal did" "Ok, thanks"
My site (lotgd.net) averages about 1.8 million hits a day now. 1% clickthrough would be absolutely positively lovely. Doesn't happen. I make between $5 and $10 per day on advertising, and this is significantly below my cost to run the site. Unless this guy was for some reason getting much better clickthrough rates than I, this probably only served to offset hosting costs.
The idea is that only those who are damaged can challenge them. Persumably to prevent some group from being able to endlessly tie up the organization in endless litigation surrounding areas by which they are unaffected.
If that ruling comes down, then it's a matter of waiting till the flag goes in, then someone can sue.
"You've also moved away from your original argument, which was I need this law because I can't control my kids."
You're obviously not a parent if you think that a parent can really "control" their kids. I think most kids got a look at their buddie's older brother's PlayBoy when they were 12. There's a big distinction between kids being able to get access to things like this through extraordinary measures (older brother is going to be upset when he finds little brother stole his PlayBoy), and the stuff being openly available with out effort.
That distinction is this: it's very obviously wrong to engage in activities so expressly forbidden. If you as a parent want your child reading porn, then when you provide the porn to your child, you remove this obvious expression of wrong, and make it acceptable behavior for your child. This is the same model being proposed for mature video games.
My original argument stands, this law would be a tool for parents to discourage or prevent their children from having access to material that they believe is inappropriate for those children. Parents who do not believe so are not prevented from providing access to it, and so no one loses their rights, it's just slightly (slightly) more difficult for these latter set of parents to grant access to the material for their children.
This by itself is a good thing, because it encourages at least some form of review by a parent of potentially harmful material. As much as you obviously think that current games on the market are appropriate for your children, there must be a point where there would exist video games you don't want your child having access to. It's proven that taboo sells, so the more shocking and far from the norm a game goes, the more money there is to be made off of it, thus it's an inevitability that over time more and more games will be produced that push the edge of tolerance. At some point (eg, GTA: KKK-nigga-lynching version), you're going to not want your kids playing a game. If you have to be present for the sale, at least you're able to provide a superficial filtering: "Hey, is that a burning cross and an african american strung up on the cover? Let's buy Barnie's Big Purple Adventure instead, ok?" A big difference here from "Here's $50, go get a game."
I've already said, if you find the Bible so offensive, feel free to write your congressman. Get them to put a M rating on the Bible, and I'll agree that it has no place being sold to children. But I still have a hard time following the parallel you draw between the Bible and mature video games. The Bible doesn't present things that our society in general have unanimoulsy agreed as being morally unacceptable. GTA does. I'm no longer sure if it was you or another respondant who agreed with me that at least some aspects of morality are universally accepted as wrong (rape, murder, etc). Mature video games not only portray these things, they glorify them. They are presented as objectives for the player, goals for which to strive.
Yes, children can see images of people being raped or murdered on television, but how many of those TV shows depict the rapist or murderer as the hero? Last I looked, shows like Law & Order, CSI, Monk, Cold Case Files, etc., portray the perpetrator as the antagonist, not the protagonist. The same cannot be said for most M-rated games. This is a *major* distinction, because in one case, the perpetrator of heinous crimes is villified, and in another case, the perp is glorified.
This, I think, is the reason a lot of parents who'd let their children watch crime shows on TV, would not want to let their children play a game where the objective was to commit crime. There's a Law & Order video game I think. I don't actually know anything about the game, but if my child wanted to play it, after reviewing it, I suspect I'd say yes (depending on the age and developmental progress of my child).
In the end, I still fail to see who's rights you think are being trodde
You're right. May as well not try to limit the kid at all if he's just going to do it anyhow. And while we're at it, we should get rid of all these annoying laws; you know the ones, making it illegal to murder or drive drunk. People are going to break the law anyhow, might as well not bother trying to enforce them.