Never mind that Intuit is the name of a software company, not a tribe of Eskimos...(perhaps Inuit was the name you were thinking of, or did your VIP make a double-gaffe?).
In 1996 I took delivery of a $5000 apochromatic refractor telescope for which I had waited 20 months to receive. UPS left it on the front porch of the house in the middle of Hollywood, California, despite numerous red/white stickers Adult Signature Required and the fact that the seller had paid for the certified delivery service. It was insured, so the $5000 was covered, but if it had been stolen, 20 months of waiting would have been for nothing.
It's wholly inferior because the bootleg "masters" were videotaped with a camcorder in the movie theater.
If the master was not videotaped in the theater, the the MPAA member companies must have an internal piracy problem. Their own employees are bootlegging stuff off the production line before it is released. If the bootlegs were not made from videotaped masters, then internal piracy is the only explanation for how this busted operation could have been copying movies to DVD that haven't yet been released to video.
In other words, we can add to their "sins" the fact that consumers are being punished for piracy committed by MPAA members themselves.
The proper attribution is clearly written at the top of the article as seen on Yahoo. The story originated from John Borland at CNET News.com. That is who should be given credit for the story, not Yahoo. And you might have actually linked to the original article so that the originating site - a source of many/. discussions - could have realized a little revenue from the referrals. Nothing wrong with Yahoo, it's a very convenient place to find stuff from all over, but very little of the written content there is original to them.
Here is the article at the original publisher's site. Ironically, as I am looking at it right now, the accompanying advertisement is about a CD Burner sale at Gateway.
And of course, the article fails to mention that the LOTR and Ali bootlegs were videotaped in the theater, and that is why they were available before the movies were released on video or DVD. It always amazes me that the MPAA chicken-littles allow us to assume that most of the piracy problem is due to their own insiders bootlegging stuff before it is released. You'd think they'd want to make sure we all knew that this stuff was bootlegged with a camcorder in the movie theatre, not ripped off the production line by one of their own.
Eventually, as spammers are crowded into fewer open relays, those that do remain open are not only unable to get to more and more places on the net, their servers are overloaded because they are the few that spammers can use.
This never happened, and it does not look like it ever will. As soon as one open relay is closed, four more are discovered by the spammmers, or are newly installed with permissive relaying enabled by admins who don't know any better.
If you really want to hurt them, boycott LOTR:TTT and LOTR:ROTK. They've already spent the money on those, so it's 100% pure loss if no one sees them.
Actually, I read recently that the money used to finance the shoot was so heavily leveraged and also subsidised by the NZ government, that New Line stood to lose less than $20 mil if LOTR flopped. They also used active duty NZ military for extras in the battle scenes, and to move all the earth needed to create the outdoor areas of the Shire. And the soldiers received only their regular government paychecks for their efforts.
One bright spot for free software advocates: Any software that implements the standards must be "based on open source code." Hardware copy-protection schemes can remain proprietary.
Now really. If that is actually in this bill, it was put there to ensure it never passes. The US government would never do something so democratic, unless someone was getting paid under the table. Maybe Hollings has been taking Disney for a ride all this time.
If you don't receive a bounce, is that proof that the defendant was served? If so, then you may as well just toss the documents out the window and hope the breeze carries them to their destination. If they aren't returned to you by Divine Providence, then you can assume the defendant was served.
There has been enough erosion of due process already. This is tantamount to giving plaintiffs a license to manufacture summary judgements. If the defendant doesn't show because he was never served, then a summary judgement is the likely outcome. The plaintiffs have every incentive to take this ball and run with it, and no incentive to refrain.
The flipside of course, is that this will streamline the docket quite a bit.
However, I never accused the DNSBL of being untrustworthy, nor did I call for them to be shut down. All I pointed out was that perhaps they are having an effect they they did not intend, to wit:
DNSBL maintainers and users get less spam, and report less spam as a result, thereby rendering their efforts less effective
The people who do not use DNSBL get more spam, thanks to the published list of open relays
Implicit in my argument is the assumption that people who don't use any DNSBL are less likely to report spam. That could be a faulty assumption, but I think there is good reason to believe it. Therefore, the DNSBL tend to make spam more effective and harder to punish, because they have the effect of keeping spam away from those who are most likely to report it and pursue punitive actions. Therefore, people who don't use the DNSBL get more spam as a result.
I pay for my bandwidth to run my own server. Using my resources (bandwidth), for a purpose I don't approve of, should be considered theft.
The problem is codifying this sentiment into a law that applies universally. If the standard is to be "I don't approve of it, therefore it is theft" then what if a person disapproves of retransmitted FINs (because ZoneAlarm squawks about them)? Is it then actionable to have a web server with kernel tunes that do not take ZoneAlarm's incredibly short memory into account?
I'm sure you didn't mean that an anti-spam law should encode what Hallow thinks is appropriate, and apply that to everyone.
Even if you get a law passed, there is still the question of due process. If you get spammed, you still have to press charges, and the courts have to locate the spammer before he can be served. And even if you win the case, if its a civil matter you then face the chore of trying to collect on the judgement. If it's a criminal case, the spammer is in jail, or fined, or both. Well, that spammer is in jail. The other fifty million are still at large, still abusing Asian relays. So what have you accomplished?
I ask you, was all that effort really worth it to avoid having to hit delete? Or would you prefer to do away with due process in order to avoid those extra mouse clicks? Sometimes I wonder...
As the anti-spam vigilantes have become more shrill, more dogmatic, more draconian, and have moved into causing "collateral damage" to sites whose only crime is being neighbors of a spam sewer, the spam continues to increase.
I submit that DNSBL and public blacklists are a failure. They have not done anything substantial to stem the tide of junk email, as this article shows.
In fact, from what I can tell, the spammers use the various DNSBL, especially the ones that list open relays, in order to locate their next set of victim relays. They could not care less that a relative handful of fanatics who use the DNSBL as intended will not be seeing their message. In fact, they are probably happy to ensure that their message will not be seen by those who are most likely to report them and try to get their activities shut down.
So if they own the virus you "accidentally" let loose, then they can assert that they did not give you permission to distribute it, and sue you for infringement.
What a great way to ensure that that boilerplate is amended to contain specific wording that rules out any GPL work by any employees, just to avoid the situation you outlined here.
However, after seeing that they give in to threats without even trying to fight, the google toolbar is gone from my browser.
My, my, look at the influence our reactionary government has on the kids these days. He's gonna grow up to be just like Dubya. His daddy must be so proud.
You're wrong. Qmail and Exchange are two examples of MTAs that, when properly configured, will accept ORBZ's probes, and only later bounce them once they are in the queue. That's because both MTAs delay any processing on incoming messages until they have been written to the queue. People running those MTAs were having to deal with the double bounces that were a direct effect of the ORBZ probing activity.
Furthermore if you blocked ORBZ's probes to save yourself from their trespass, they blacklisted you whether you were an open relay or not.
Excuse me, but the article is about ORBZ not probing for open relays anymore. Maybe I am a dumbass, but I can read.
You think I don't get my share of spam? I also get my share of double bounces. Double bounces are, for the postmaster of a site with many users (and especially many ex-users), the primary debilitating effect of spam. They clog up the queue for several days until the MTA gives up delivering the "no such user" message to the "no such user" spamdrop box. ORBZ added to that pile of cruft. It was intrusive, and I am glad they are gone.
Now I won't have to put up with anymore double-bounces from ORBZ's continual probing of my closed relays. These don't even send our OUR mail. You can't test our outgoing relays, the conversation is in the wrong direction and won't pass our firewall.
Ian, YOU DUMBASS!! I hope you beat the criminal rap, but you got what was coming, what you were asking for. ORBZ's probes were every much a trespass as the spam itself. Why they never understood this is beyond me. Plenty of other DNSBL run a good list without intrusive probing, and are not getting put up on charges either.
Isn't it interesting how so many people feel the need to state the obvious before criticizing the government on this issue?
Don't apologize for your opinion, especially when you go on to make some good points that have nothing to do with kiddie porn, and everything to do with government-sponsored censorship. THAT is the issue here, not whether some loser thinks you get off on kid sex because you failed to provide a disclaimer. You play into their hands when you apologize for a well-reasoned opinion.
If the source is out-of-country, has no operations within the United States, and does not intend to have such, they may simply laugh at the State AG, and the Federal gov't probably isn't going to cause a major international confrontation over a child porn site or two. I mean, there ARE other tools such as trade barriers and so forth that could be used to bludgeon some countries into passing similar laws, but it's not worth it to the Feds to try, I suspect.
Of course not, no one is making any money off of removing child porn from the Internet. If someone WAS making money off of removing child porn, and that someone was a big campaign contributor, you can be damn certain that the Feds would invoke the full might of the military if it came to that, to force a country to accept the US's terms on the matter.
Why would MS complain about Sony unless they did something to provoke it?
What planet are you living on??? Microsoft chose to compete against Sony. That's why MS complained.
Suppose MS had seen that the no-play rule wasn't enforced, and chose instead to allow their visitors to play the Xbox at the same show with the PS2 consoles... oh wait, maybe that wasn't such a good idea after all...
Slashdot Mirror
That's right, why export all that labor to 3rd world adults when we can exploit our own children right here in the good ol' US of A.
AND THEN....???
Never mind that Intuit is the name of a software company, not a tribe of Eskimos...(perhaps Inuit was the name you were thinking of, or did your VIP make a double-gaffe?).
In 1996 I took delivery of a $5000 apochromatic refractor telescope for which I had waited 20 months to receive. UPS left it on the front porch of the house in the middle of Hollywood, California, despite numerous red/white stickers Adult Signature Required and the fact that the seller had paid for the certified delivery service. It was insured, so the $5000 was covered, but if it had been stolen, 20 months of waiting would have been for nothing.
Never trust UPS to follow delivery instructions.
It's wholly inferior because the bootleg "masters" were videotaped with a camcorder in the movie theater.
If the master was not videotaped in the theater, the the MPAA member companies must have an internal piracy problem. Their own employees are bootlegging stuff off the production line before it is released. If the bootlegs were not made from videotaped masters, then internal piracy is the only explanation for how this busted operation could have been copying movies to DVD that haven't yet been released to video.
In other words, we can add to their "sins" the fact that consumers are being punished for piracy committed by MPAA members themselves.
The proper attribution is clearly written at the top of the article as seen on Yahoo. The story originated from John Borland at CNET News.com. That is who should be given credit for the story, not Yahoo. And you might have actually linked to the original article so that the originating site - a source of many /. discussions - could have realized a little revenue from the referrals. Nothing wrong with Yahoo, it's a very convenient place to find stuff from all over, but very little of the written content there is original to them.
Here is the article at the original publisher's site. Ironically, as I am looking at it right now, the accompanying advertisement is about a CD Burner sale at Gateway.
And of course, the article fails to mention that the LOTR and Ali bootlegs were videotaped in the theater, and that is why they were available before the movies were released on video or DVD. It always amazes me that the MPAA chicken-littles allow us to assume that most of the piracy problem is due to their own insiders bootlegging stuff before it is released. You'd think they'd want to make sure we all knew that this stuff was bootlegged with a camcorder in the movie theatre, not ripped off the production line by one of their own.
Eventually, as spammers are crowded into fewer open relays, those that do remain open are not only unable to get to more and more places on the net, their servers are overloaded because they are the few that spammers can use.
This never happened, and it does not look like it ever will. As soon as one open relay is closed, four more are discovered by the spammmers, or are newly installed with permissive relaying enabled by admins who don't know any better.
By NOT buying their latest game, we would directly affect their coiffers.
I couldn't care less who does their hair.
If you really want to hurt them, boycott LOTR:TTT and LOTR:ROTK. They've already spent the money on those, so it's 100% pure loss if no one sees them.
Actually, I read recently that the money used to finance the shoot was so heavily leveraged and also subsidised by the NZ government, that New Line stood to lose less than $20 mil if LOTR flopped. They also used active duty NZ military for extras in the battle scenes, and to move all the earth needed to create the outdoor areas of the Shire. And the soldiers received only their regular government paychecks for their efforts.
Boxer and Feinstein have always been the laphoes of the movie industry. Surely you knew that?
One bright spot for free software advocates: Any software that implements the standards must be "based on open source code." Hardware copy-protection schemes can remain proprietary.
Now really. If that is actually in this bill, it was put there to ensure it never passes. The US government would never do something so democratic, unless someone was getting paid under the table. Maybe Hollings has been taking Disney for a ride all this time.
If you don't receive a bounce, is that proof that the defendant was served? If so, then you may as well just toss the documents out the window and hope the breeze carries them to their destination. If they aren't returned to you by Divine Providence, then you can assume the defendant was served.
There has been enough erosion of due process already. This is tantamount to giving plaintiffs a license to manufacture summary judgements. If the defendant doesn't show because he was never served, then a summary judgement is the likely outcome. The plaintiffs have every incentive to take this ball and run with it, and no incentive to refrain.
The flipside of course, is that this will streamline the docket quite a bit.
However, I never accused the DNSBL of being untrustworthy, nor did I call for them to be shut down. All I pointed out was that perhaps they are having an effect they they did not intend, to wit:
Implicit in my argument is the assumption that people who don't use any DNSBL are less likely to report spam. That could be a faulty assumption, but I think there is good reason to believe it. Therefore, the DNSBL tend to make spam more effective and harder to punish, because they have the effect of keeping spam away from those who are most likely to report it and pursue punitive actions. Therefore, people who don't use the DNSBL get more spam as a result.
I pay for my bandwidth to run my own server. Using my resources (bandwidth), for a purpose I don't approve of, should be considered theft.
The problem is codifying this sentiment into a law that applies universally. If the standard is to be "I don't approve of it, therefore it is theft" then what if a person disapproves of retransmitted FINs (because ZoneAlarm squawks about them)? Is it then actionable to have a web server with kernel tunes that do not take ZoneAlarm's incredibly short memory into account?
I'm sure you didn't mean that an anti-spam law should encode what Hallow thinks is appropriate, and apply that to everyone.
Even if you get a law passed, there is still the question of due process. If you get spammed, you still have to press charges, and the courts have to locate the spammer before he can be served. And even if you win the case, if its a civil matter you then face the chore of trying to collect on the judgement. If it's a criminal case, the spammer is in jail, or fined, or both. Well, that spammer is in jail. The other fifty million are still at large, still abusing Asian relays. So what have you accomplished?
I ask you, was all that effort really worth it to avoid having to hit delete? Or would you prefer to do away with due process in order to avoid those extra mouse clicks? Sometimes I wonder...
As the anti-spam vigilantes have become more shrill, more dogmatic, more draconian, and have moved into causing "collateral damage" to sites whose only crime is being neighbors of a spam sewer, the spam continues to increase.
I submit that DNSBL and public blacklists are a failure. They have not done anything substantial to stem the tide of junk email, as this article shows.
In fact, from what I can tell, the spammers use the various DNSBL, especially the ones that list open relays, in order to locate their next set of victim relays. They could not care less that a relative handful of fanatics who use the DNSBL as intended will not be seeing their message. In fact, they are probably happy to ensure that their message will not be seen by those who are most likely to report them and try to get their activities shut down.
So if they own the virus you "accidentally" let loose, then they can assert that they did not give you permission to distribute it, and sue you for infringement.
What a great way to ensure that that boilerplate is amended to contain specific wording that rules out any GPL work by any employees, just to avoid the situation you outlined here.
However, after seeing that they give in to threats without even trying to fight, the google toolbar is gone from my browser.
My, my, look at the influence our reactionary government has on the kids these days. He's gonna grow up to be just like Dubya. His daddy must be so proud.
I think I'm gonna see how good Yahoo is nowadays.
Far worse. Google is the best thing going.
You're wrong. Qmail and Exchange are two examples of MTAs that, when properly configured, will accept ORBZ's probes, and only later bounce them once they are in the queue. That's because both MTAs delay any processing on incoming messages until they have been written to the queue. People running those MTAs were having to deal with the double bounces that were a direct effect of the ORBZ probing activity.
Furthermore if you blocked ORBZ's probes to save yourself from their trespass, they blacklisted you whether you were an open relay or not.
If that's not vigilantism, I don't know what is.
Excuse me, but the article is about ORBZ not probing for open relays anymore. Maybe I am a dumbass, but I can read.
You think I don't get my share of spam? I also get my share of double bounces. Double bounces are, for the postmaster of a site with many users (and especially many ex-users), the primary debilitating effect of spam. They clog up the queue for several days until the MTA gives up delivering the "no such user" message to the "no such user" spamdrop box. ORBZ added to that pile of cruft. It was intrusive, and I am glad they are gone.
Now I won't have to put up with anymore double-bounces from ORBZ's continual probing of my closed relays. These don't even send our OUR mail. You can't test our outgoing relays, the conversation is in the wrong direction and won't pass our firewall.
Ian, YOU DUMBASS!! I hope you beat the criminal rap, but you got what was coming, what you were asking for. ORBZ's probes were every much a trespass as the spam itself. Why they never understood this is beyond me. Plenty of other DNSBL run a good list without intrusive probing, and are not getting put up on charges either.
First I think child porn is discusting. [sic]
Isn't it interesting how so many people feel the need to state the obvious before criticizing the government on this issue?
Don't apologize for your opinion, especially when you go on to make some good points that have nothing to do with kiddie porn, and everything to do with government-sponsored censorship. THAT is the issue here, not whether some loser thinks you get off on kid sex because you failed to provide a disclaimer. You play into their hands when you apologize for a well-reasoned opinion.
If the source is out-of-country, has no operations within the United States, and does not intend to have such, they may simply laugh at the State AG, and the Federal gov't probably isn't going to cause a major international confrontation over a child porn site or two. I mean, there ARE other tools such as trade barriers and so forth that could be used to bludgeon some countries into passing similar laws, but it's not worth it to the Feds to try, I suspect.
Of course not, no one is making any money off of removing child porn from the Internet. If someone WAS making money off of removing child porn, and that someone was a big campaign contributor, you can be damn certain that the Feds would invoke the full might of the military if it came to that, to force a country to accept the US's terms on the matter.
Not much has been written about the history of computing in Canada...
(-1) Redundant
(sorry, couldn't resist)
Why would MS complain about Sony unless they did something to provoke it?
What planet are you living on??? Microsoft chose to compete against Sony. That's why MS complained.
Suppose MS had seen that the no-play rule wasn't enforced, and chose instead to allow their visitors to play the Xbox at the same show with the PS2 consoles... oh wait, maybe that wasn't such a good idea after all...
Do you "Get it" now??