Then a link to easyubuntu or automatix, or even the CLI method for advanced users.
I believe any such links would run afoul of the DeCSS decision which prohibited links to software designed to "circumvent" encryption used to protect copyrighted materials.
Just have Dell purchase the licenses and bundle them into the cost of the computer.
Why? Are licenses for the codecs going to cost Dell more for a Linux machine than a Windows one?
Somebody (meaning you) still has to pay for the license in that copy of PowerDVD after all. Windows machines don't support a lot of standard codecs out-of-the-box either. Just try playing a XviD movie on a stock PC with Windows Media Player. Oh, yeah, I remember, Windows tells me it needs to find the codec, then it fails to do so. And this is easier for a novice user because....?
I've bought a lot of Dell hardware in my career, and in general I'm pretty happy with Dell. But I agree with others here who say they just haven't done the job with their new Linux lines. Why GNOME and not KDE, a much more Windows-like desktop? Why no codecs and other multimedia support? Why no fine-tuning of the touchpad driver if that's an issue? You don't think Dell ignores issues like that when they configure their standard XP or Vista images, do you?
And, yes, if they're going to sell Linux machines then they damn well need to support them. Does that mean they may not make as much on Linux machines in the short term? Perhaps, since they'll need to build a support staff. In the longer run, they'll discover they're getting a lot fewer support calls per Linux machine than they do for Windows.
I'm not saying it'll be easy to sell Linux machines to a mass audience, but it's not impossible. It does require that the OEM put a little effort into it. If Walt there is having troubles with his trackpad, whose fault is that? Hint, it's not Canonical's.
Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to bundle Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice on those Windows machines you sell either, Mr. Dell.
Well, you won't see any of the sites I host then, since I use DirectNIC as well.
Don't blame them just because you don't like one of their customers. Do you think every DNS registrar reviews every registration (in their case, an online registration) to make sure it passes some kind of Slashdot cleanliness test?
BTW, DirectNIC is an excellent registrar with good customer support. Sure they cost a bit more than GoDaddy, but I've found they're worth the $15/year I pay.
Slashdot is not claiming to be a media site, it is a portal, it links to sites. If IT media is sold out, Slashdot can't setup IT sites just to link.
I'm not asking that Slashdot become a "media site." All I'm asking is that they check to see that the summaries they post are, in fact, consistent with the article that is cited. In this case, we were told the AG's involvement had to do with piracy while the article said it had to do with pornography. A day on Slashdot contains perhaps one or two dozen articles, not hundreds. I don't think it's asking much of the editors that they read the articles they post to ensure the summaries are correct. It took me, at most, five minutes to read the arstechnica article and see the discrepancy.
I don't see any mention in the article of even an attempt to get the NY AG's office to comment on this story. Nor do I see any mention of it on the AG's own web site. If ars were a newspaper, the editors wouldn't have let this story appear at all without at least an official "no comment" by the Attorney General's office.
A quick search this am for "new york attorney general mediadefender" turned up no mainstream press reports about this story.
According the ars piece, by the way, the AG's office appeared to be interested in porn downloads, not, as the editors here put it, "working on a big anti-piracy sting and they were working on finding viable targets." From TFA, "Although the full scope of the project cannot be extrapolated from the e-mails, the information available indicates that MediaDefender intends to provide the Attorney General's office with information about users accessing pornographic content. Other kinds of information could be involved as well." (That last sentence is so vague and general that it could refer to almost any information of any kind anywhere on the planet.)
Don't the editors at least read the stories themselves before they post them to Slashdot?
None of these comments is a defense of either MediaDefender or the NYAG. I'm more concerned about the shoddy reporting that passes for journalism on geek news sites like this one and arstechnica. Particularly the latter, since the articles I've read there in the past gave off the semblance of decent journalism.
I was curious about how Windows handles resales, so I looked up the XP EULA:
13. SOFTWARE TRANSFER. Internal. You may move the Software to a different Workstation Computer. After the transfer, you must completely remove the Software from the former Workstation Computer. Transfer to Third Party. The initial user of the Software may make a one-time permanent transfer of this EULA and Software to another end user, provided the initial user retains no copies of the Software. This transfer must include all of the Software (including all component parts, the media and printed materials, any upgrades, this EULA, and, if applicable, the Certificate of Authenticity). The transfer may not be an indirect transfer, such as a consignment. Prior to the transfer, the end user receiving the Software must agree to all the EULA terms.
Looks to me like you have to right to move Windows XP. I haven't read the Vista License; perhaps it's more restrictive?
On another note, I'm curious about the legal argument for using the DMCA against eBay. Is Autodesk claiming that, by allowing their software to be resold, eBay becomes a "contributory infringer?" Clearly the copyrighted work itself was not available from eBay, unlike a video uploaded to YouTube. It sounds like this argument attempts to extend the Grokster decision. I would think eBay's passivity with respect to the potential infringement would exempt them from any copyright liabilities. Regardless of how the First-Sale/EULA issues are resolved, the application of the DMCA to this case seems rather implausible to this NAL.
That's not what happened. Cingular bought AT&T Wireless from the old AT&T, the one that was created by divestiture in 1984. All the AT&T Wireless operations were folded into Cingular.
Meanwhile AT&T itself got bought by SBC (formerly Southwestern Bell) which has since bought most of the other spun-off RBOCs including Ameritech, Pacific Telesis, and BellSouth. This is "not your father's AT&T" except insofar as it constitutes a reconstruction, with regulatory approval, of the original monopoly AT&T we thought was broken up by divestiture. The other two remaining RBOCs, NYNEX and Bell Atlantic, joined forces to produce Verizon (which also bought the largest independent telco, GTE).
I also don't think any of this had much to do with "bad PR" for Cingular. The new AT&T needed a wireless carrier and negotiated the purchase of Cingular.
I have an 802.11b PCI card from Linksys. Guess what driver it uses? Yup, the good old Linksys ethernet driver. Apparently they figured out how to build one of these "really complicated" devices that presented the same interface to the OS as their ethernet cards.
That said, I stick to Intel wireless now in laptops. Intel has opened the source for its drivers, and they're well-supported in Fedora and Ubuntu.
I run a store-and-forward listener on port 25 for our email services. I have a vast array of rules that block mail from known spamsites and certain types of dynamic IPs. When a message is blocked, I send back a 503 error that includes an email address real people can use to report an incorrect decision. This address has never appeared in any public location like a website where it might have been harvested by spammers through the usual methods.
Nevertheless within about a week after instituting these policies, I started receiving spams at this private address. Obviously someone or something scanned the bounce messages for new addresses and added them to a spam list. By now the list(s) on which that address appears sold and resold many times over. The messages I see that link to Storm all come to this address, since the rest of them are intercepted before being delivered to me and my clients. (Obviously I pass through all traffic to this address so we won't miss legitimate requests from humans to unblock their deliveries.)
So the answer to your question is basically, any way they can find them, and once they find them, they'll be spammed to death for years (decades?) to come.
There's also the used phone option. eBay has a very active market in used cell phones at quite reasonable prices.
Anybody here remember when AT&T was forced to allow its customers to buy their own equipment and attach it to the landline network? What do you supposed happened? That's right, the cost of the terminal equipment plunged, and the variety of devices offered increased, as new competitors entered the market. Why the same logic doesn't apply to the regulation of cell phones escapes me.
All I need is a service provider and a SIMM card. Let me find the phone I want at the price I want to pay. If the service provider wants to sell phones, that's fine with me, but let them compete against Radio Shack, Wal-Mart, and eBay in that part of the business. This whole business where providers like Verizon disable features in phones to protect their profits from services like music downloads just reeks of anti-competitiveness. Landline providers would no doubt prefer to sell you voice messaging for a few bucks a month, but you might prefer to buy an answering machine instead. The same principles should apply to cellular service.
I'd pay to see a well-made movie version of Black Lagoon, though only if they include the Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise arc from the end of the second season.
The spam email in question tells the reader that, if they are running torrents, they should use this Tor thing to cover their tracks. The link points to the trojan. The file in question is about 150K in size, or about 20x smaller than the Windows version of Tor (2-3 MB) on the actual site.
I posted a warning about this very email on a well-known anime site since I suspected some people there might download it in response to the e-mail.
There's also a version that poses as a YouTube video.
Most of these emails have URLs that use IP addresses, not domain names. Between my SpamAssassin rules and Mozilla Thunderbird's built-in anti-malware protections, messages like these are either quarantined or tagged as dangerous. I've not seen an legitimate email from any correspondent that uses URLs with IP addresses in the host part.
I opened the YouTube version in a Windows VM that had Kaspersky installed. It identified an attempted replacement of tcpip.sys and told me it should be quarantined. Unfortunately a ClamAV scan of the file did not detect anything suspicious.
I think that most countries, the US and its NATO allies included, are simply not yet capable of dealing with threats like these in a realistic fashion. Hell, if the Chinese can read Defense Secretary Gates's email, how much protection can there be against a massive denial of service attack from millions of computers worldwide? If you can't protect against a threat, the last thing you want to do is publicize the fact that it exists, especially in our so-called "post-9/11" world. Analysts who took terrorism seriously weren't too successful in getting that threat onto the public agenda before 9/11 either. In retrospect it's pretty obvious that informed people had considered the possibility that terrorists might ram passenger jets into tall buildings well before the evant actually took place. We didn't hear much about that possibility either, perhaps because we were really unprepared to protect against such an eventuality.
It does seem odd that people who build botnets and sell access to them to spammers are somehow so invisible to the military, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement. How come the spammers can find them, but our intelligence agencies cannot? The FBI did arrest three US-based botnet spam operators recently, but I'd wager the really serious threats are managed outside the US.
It's not just threats against military targets either. The article mentions small-to-medium sized banks, for instance. The world has become so inter-connected over the past decade that the number of potential targets for disruption has skyrocketed. My guess that spam represents the leading edge of a problem we'll be dealing with for decades to come.
Has either the Senate or the House held hearings on threats from botnets? I'm curious enough to pursue a search through thomas.loc.gov, but if someone else knows the answer, that would save me the trouble. If they did, did they haul in Bill Gates to testify about the role of Windows in all this?
There are lots of things (embedded Windows Media, etc) out there that I wouldn't expect to work on this setup
Using mplayer-plugin with Firefox and the full array of mplayer codecs works fine for me. On my Fedora box, just adding the Livna repositories enables yum to install everything in one shot with a "yum install mplayer*".
The problem as reported is that the Vista DHCP client fails to obtain an address from Linux servers running (I'd presume) ISC dhcpd.
When I bought a laptop recently it came with Vista. When I connected it to my network it failed to obtain an address. I assumed there was some misconfiguration problem I was missing, Turns out it's a fundamental difference between the DHCP client in Vista and the one in prior versions of Windows. See this item from Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233/en-us.
The version of dhcpd I'm using is an old one (2.0). I thought about upgrading it to see if that would solve the problem, but since I wasn't planning on keeping Vista on the laptop, I didn't bother upgrading. All our other machines run Linux and don't have this problem.
I wonder what decision will be made in enterprises running Linux DHCP servers that introduce Vista into the workplace. Will they follow the Microsoft KB item above and "fix" the problem on every new Vista box they buy? Or will the replace the Linux DHCP box with Windows Server?
The applicability of the statute to Zango itself raised eyebrows here. The article includes this text from the Act describing the content to which the statute applies: "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable."
I take it Zango falls into the "otherwise objectionable" category? Who determines if something is "objectionable?" Isn't this term incredibly elastic? I doubt many members of Congress would have imagined the CDA covering Zango's software.
The word "filthy" is an amusing inclusion as well. Would this cover sites that show photos of children playing in mud?
When you register a work with the Copyright Office, a copy is archived in the Library of Congress. That's fine if you don't care whether your work is publicly available but not if you want to keep your work proprietary for some reason.
The other advantage of registration is that you can sue for "statutory damages" and legal costs. These can be considerably greater than the damage awards available for infringed unregistered works. See 17 USC 412 and the discussion of statutory damages in 17 USC 504 and 17 USC 505.
RFC 3834 discusses the issue of automated responses in great detail. "The Return-Path address is really the only one from the message header that can be expected, as a matter of protocol, to be suitable for automatic responses that were not anticipated by the sender." There were (are still?) a number of poorly-designed vacation autoresponders that ignore this RFC and blindly send replies to the From or Reply-To address which results in horrific mail loops on listservers. I encountered this problem early on managing some lists for a client and had to write a set of procmail filters to bounce these autoreplies to the list owners. RFC 3834 even excludes use of the optional Sender header, though I routinely have my listservers include that header with the same address as the Return-Path just to catch autoreplies sent to Sender address.
I installed two cards to a plain-vanilla box; one is a SoundBlaster Audigy, the other a four-port IDE card so I could use my old drives on a new SATA machine. In Fedora, both cards were detected at boot time and installed without a hitch. For XP, it couldn't identify the soundcard (not a particularly obscure one I might point out) nor could it find the drivers on the Internet. I still haven't found the magic combination to make sound work. As for the IDE card, I was flabbergasted that I would need a driver disk for this card. And, it's not that obscure a manufacturer either (SIIG). Needless to say I spend nearly all my time using Fedora.
Despite the persistent comments that Linux has bad driver support, is hard to install, etc., my experience has been the opposite. I'd understand there might be problems if I were installing obscure hardware components from non-mainstream manufacturers, but that's hardly the case here.
I also don't think that having a problem with video drivers under Xen has much relevance to the computing experience of most people. Isn't that some flavor of Buddhism?
So this puts the U.S. in the position of either letting international casinos into the U.S. market, or shutting down all internet gambling (including aforementioned web-based off-track-betting, lottery tickets, sports books, etc.). The casinos -- particularly the Vegas ones -- wouldn't like that much either.
I suspect a strict interpretation of the ruling would also ban other wire-based interstate gambling operations like betting on horse races at out-of-town tracks. A lot of the gambling rules involve the "wire" since they were originally intended to prohibit telephone-based bookie operations.
"Think of this from the W.T.O.'s point of view," said Charles R. Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School. "They're this fledgling organization dominated by a huge monster in the United States. People there must be scared out of their wits at the prospects of enforcing a ruling that would instantly galvanize public opinion in the United States against the W.T.O."
Can somebody tell me just what public opinion is going to be "galvanized" if the US loses here? Gambling opponents? The evidence suggests that they're probably outnumbered by people who like to gamble (just ask any state with a lottery). Supporters of protections for intellectual property rights? How big a group could that be?
Maybe he just means people would object if the US lost a case to a small country in the WTO? Why? For most Americans the WTO is a non-entity. Some strange notion of national pride (the US never loses)? If you set up a procedure for administrative proceedings you guarantee that someone will lose. Does anyone really expect the US to win every case it's involved with in international tribunals?
I just don't get this comment at all.
I was surprised to read that this case dates back to 2003. The only debate over Internet gambling that registered with me was the one this past year over prohibiting US financial institutions from transferring funds to offshore gambling sites. I'm definitely with Antigua on this one.
Slashdot Mirror
Then a link to easyubuntu or automatix, or even the CLI method for advanced users.
I believe any such links would run afoul of the DeCSS decision which prohibited links to software designed to "circumvent" encryption used to protect copyrighted materials.
Just have Dell purchase the licenses and bundle them into the cost of the computer.
Why? Are licenses for the codecs going to cost Dell more for a Linux machine than a Windows one?
Somebody (meaning you) still has to pay for the license in that copy of PowerDVD after all. Windows machines don't support a lot of standard codecs out-of-the-box either. Just try playing a XviD movie on a stock PC with Windows Media Player. Oh, yeah, I remember, Windows tells me it needs to find the codec, then it fails to do so. And this is easier for a novice user because....?
I've bought a lot of Dell hardware in my career, and in general I'm pretty happy with Dell. But I agree with others here who say they just haven't done the job with their new Linux lines. Why GNOME and not KDE, a much more Windows-like desktop? Why no codecs and other multimedia support? Why no fine-tuning of the touchpad driver if that's an issue? You don't think Dell ignores issues like that when they configure their standard XP or Vista images, do you?
And, yes, if they're going to sell Linux machines then they damn well need to support them. Does that mean they may not make as much on Linux machines in the short term? Perhaps, since they'll need to build a support staff. In the longer run, they'll discover they're getting a lot fewer support calls per Linux machine than they do for Windows.
I'm not saying it'll be easy to sell Linux machines to a mass audience, but it's not impossible. It does require that the OEM put a little effort into it. If Walt there is having troubles with his trackpad, whose fault is that? Hint, it's not Canonical's.
Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to bundle Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice on those Windows machines you sell either, Mr. Dell.
Well, you won't see any of the sites I host then, since I use DirectNIC as well.
Don't blame them just because you don't like one of their customers. Do you think every DNS registrar reviews every registration (in their case, an online registration) to make sure it passes some kind of Slashdot cleanliness test?
BTW, DirectNIC is an excellent registrar with good customer support. Sure they cost a bit more than GoDaddy, but I've found they're worth the $15/year I pay.
Slashdot is not claiming to be a media site, it is a portal, it links to sites. If IT media is sold out, Slashdot can't setup IT sites just to link.
I'm not asking that Slashdot become a "media site." All I'm asking is that they check to see that the summaries they post are, in fact, consistent with the article that is cited. In this case, we were told the AG's involvement had to do with piracy while the article said it had to do with pornography. A day on Slashdot contains perhaps one or two dozen articles, not hundreds. I don't think it's asking much of the editors that they read the articles they post to ensure the summaries are correct. It took me, at most, five minutes to read the arstechnica article and see the discrepancy.
I don't see any mention in the article of even an attempt to get the NY AG's office to comment on this story. Nor do I see any mention of it on the AG's own web site. If ars were a newspaper, the editors wouldn't have let this story appear at all without at least an official "no comment" by the Attorney General's office.
A quick search this am for "new york attorney general mediadefender" turned up no mainstream press reports about this story.
According the ars piece, by the way, the AG's office appeared to be interested in porn downloads, not, as the editors here put it, "working on a big anti-piracy sting and they were working on finding viable targets." From TFA, "Although the full scope of the project cannot be extrapolated from the e-mails, the information available indicates that MediaDefender intends to provide the Attorney General's office with information about users accessing pornographic content. Other kinds of information could be involved as well." (That last sentence is so vague and general that it could refer to almost any information of any kind anywhere on the planet.)
Don't the editors at least read the stories themselves before they post them to Slashdot?
None of these comments is a defense of either MediaDefender or the NYAG. I'm more concerned about the shoddy reporting that passes for journalism on geek news sites like this one and arstechnica. Particularly the latter, since the articles I've read there in the past gave off the semblance of decent journalism.
I was curious about how Windows handles resales, so I looked up the XP EULA:
13. SOFTWARE TRANSFER. Internal. You may move the Software to a different Workstation Computer. After the transfer, you must completely remove the Software from the former Workstation Computer. Transfer to Third Party. The initial user of the Software may make a one-time permanent transfer of this EULA and Software to another end user, provided the initial user retains no copies of the Software. This transfer must include all of the Software (including all component parts, the media and printed materials, any upgrades, this EULA, and, if applicable, the Certificate of Authenticity). The transfer may not be an indirect transfer, such as a consignment. Prior to the transfer, the end user receiving the Software must agree to all the EULA terms.
Looks to me like you have to right to move Windows XP. I haven't read the Vista License; perhaps it's more restrictive?
On another note, I'm curious about the legal argument for using the DMCA against eBay. Is Autodesk claiming that, by allowing their software to be resold, eBay becomes a "contributory infringer?" Clearly the copyrighted work itself was not available from eBay, unlike a video uploaded to YouTube. It sounds like this argument attempts to extend the Grokster decision. I would think eBay's passivity with respect to the potential infringement would exempt them from any copyright liabilities. Regardless of how the First-Sale/EULA issues are resolved, the application of the DMCA to this case seems rather implausible to this NAL.
You're right, I'd forgotten that. Thanks!
That's not what happened. Cingular bought AT&T Wireless from the old AT&T, the one that was created by divestiture in 1984. All the AT&T Wireless operations were folded into Cingular.
Meanwhile AT&T itself got bought by SBC (formerly Southwestern Bell) which has since bought most of the other spun-off RBOCs including Ameritech, Pacific Telesis, and BellSouth. This is "not your father's AT&T" except insofar as it constitutes a reconstruction, with regulatory approval, of the original monopoly AT&T we thought was broken up by divestiture. The other two remaining RBOCs, NYNEX and Bell Atlantic, joined forces to produce Verizon (which also bought the largest independent telco, GTE).
This article at Wikipedia provides more detail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT&T, or take a look at this graphic.
I also don't think any of this had much to do with "bad PR" for Cingular. The new AT&T needed a wireless carrier and negotiated the purchase of Cingular.
I have an 802.11b PCI card from Linksys. Guess what driver it uses? Yup, the good old Linksys ethernet driver. Apparently they figured out how to build one of these "really complicated" devices that presented the same interface to the OS as their ethernet cards.
That said, I stick to Intel wireless now in laptops. Intel has opened the source for its drivers, and they're well-supported in Fedora and Ubuntu.
The "Twelve Kingdoms" novels are being translated and released in hard cover by TokyoPop. The first volume, Sea of Shadow, came out this spring.
I run a store-and-forward listener on port 25 for our email services. I have a vast array of rules that block mail from known spamsites and certain types of dynamic IPs. When a message is blocked, I send back a 503 error that includes an email address real people can use to report an incorrect decision. This address has never appeared in any public location like a website where it might have been harvested by spammers through the usual methods.
Nevertheless within about a week after instituting these policies, I started receiving spams at this private address. Obviously someone or something scanned the bounce messages for new addresses and added them to a spam list. By now the list(s) on which that address appears sold and resold many times over. The messages I see that link to Storm all come to this address, since the rest of them are intercepted before being delivered to me and my clients. (Obviously I pass through all traffic to this address so we won't miss legitimate requests from humans to unblock their deliveries.)
So the answer to your question is basically, any way they can find them, and once they find them, they'll be spammed to death for years (decades?) to come.
Just an update.
Today's version of these scams is a phony NFL Game Tracker.
"Football Season Is Finally here!
We can keep you on top of every single game this season.
Get all your game info daily from our online game tracker:"
Once again the spam sends you to a site using a URL with an IP address in the host part.
There's also the used phone option. eBay has a very active market in used cell phones at quite reasonable prices.
Anybody here remember when AT&T was forced to allow its customers to buy their own equipment and attach it to the landline network? What do you supposed happened? That's right, the cost of the terminal equipment plunged, and the variety of devices offered increased, as new competitors entered the market. Why the same logic doesn't apply to the regulation of cell phones escapes me.
All I need is a service provider and a SIMM card. Let me find the phone I want at the price I want to pay. If the service provider wants to sell phones, that's fine with me, but let them compete against Radio Shack, Wal-Mart, and eBay in that part of the business. This whole business where providers like Verizon disable features in phones to protect their profits from services like music downloads just reeks of anti-competitiveness. Landline providers would no doubt prefer to sell you voice messaging for a few bucks a month, but you might prefer to buy an answering machine instead. The same principles should apply to cellular service.
Just my 2/100th's of a US$.
I'd pay to see a well-made movie version of Black Lagoon, though only if they include the Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise arc from the end of the second season.
The Storm worm isn't using Tor.
The spam email in question tells the reader that, if they are running torrents, they should use this Tor thing to cover their tracks. The link points to the trojan. The file in question is about 150K in size, or about 20x smaller than the Windows version of Tor (2-3 MB) on the actual site.
I posted a warning about this very email on a well-known anime site since I suspected some people there might download it in response to the e-mail.
There's also a version that poses as a YouTube video.
Most of these emails have URLs that use IP addresses, not domain names. Between my SpamAssassin rules and Mozilla Thunderbird's built-in anti-malware protections, messages like these are either quarantined or tagged as dangerous. I've not seen an legitimate email from any correspondent that uses URLs with IP addresses in the host part.
I opened the YouTube version in a Windows VM that had Kaspersky installed. It identified an attempted replacement of tcpip.sys and told me it should be quarantined. Unfortunately a ClamAV scan of the file did not detect anything suspicious.
I think that most countries, the US and its NATO allies included, are simply not yet capable of dealing with threats like these in a realistic fashion. Hell, if the Chinese can read Defense Secretary Gates's email, how much protection can there be against a massive denial of service attack from millions of computers worldwide? If you can't protect against a threat, the last thing you want to do is publicize the fact that it exists, especially in our so-called "post-9/11" world. Analysts who took terrorism seriously weren't too successful in getting that threat onto the public agenda before 9/11 either. In retrospect it's pretty obvious that informed people had considered the possibility that terrorists might ram passenger jets into tall buildings well before the evant actually took place. We didn't hear much about that possibility either, perhaps because we were really unprepared to protect against such an eventuality.
It does seem odd that people who build botnets and sell access to them to spammers are somehow so invisible to the military, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement. How come the spammers can find them, but our intelligence agencies cannot? The FBI did arrest three US-based botnet spam operators recently, but I'd wager the really serious threats are managed outside the US.
It's not just threats against military targets either. The article mentions small-to-medium sized banks, for instance. The world has become so inter-connected over the past decade that the number of potential targets for disruption has skyrocketed. My guess that spam represents the leading edge of a problem we'll be dealing with for decades to come.
Has either the Senate or the House held hearings on threats from botnets? I'm curious enough to pursue a search through thomas.loc.gov, but if someone else knows the answer, that would save me the trouble. If they did, did they haul in Bill Gates to testify about the role of Windows in all this?
There are lots of things (embedded Windows Media, etc) out there that I wouldn't expect to work on this setup
Using mplayer-plugin with Firefox and the full array of mplayer codecs works fine for me. On my Fedora box, just adding the Livna repositories enables yum to install everything in one shot with a "yum install mplayer*".
The problem as reported is that the Vista DHCP client fails to obtain an address from Linux servers running (I'd presume) ISC dhcpd.
When I bought a laptop recently it came with Vista. When I connected it to my network it failed to obtain an address. I assumed there was some misconfiguration problem I was missing, Turns out it's a fundamental difference between the DHCP client in Vista and the one in prior versions of Windows. See this item from Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233/en-us.
The version of dhcpd I'm using is an old one (2.0). I thought about upgrading it to see if that would solve the problem, but since I wasn't planning on keeping Vista on the laptop, I didn't bother upgrading. All our other machines run Linux and don't have this problem.
I wonder what decision will be made in enterprises running Linux DHCP servers that introduce Vista into the workplace. Will they follow the Microsoft KB item above and "fix" the problem on every new Vista box they buy? Or will the replace the Linux DHCP box with Windows Server?
The applicability of the statute to Zango itself raised eyebrows here. The article includes this text from the Act describing the content to which the statute applies: "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable."
I take it Zango falls into the "otherwise objectionable" category? Who determines if something is "objectionable?" Isn't this term incredibly elastic? I doubt many members of Congress would have imagined the CDA covering Zango's software.
The word "filthy" is an amusing inclusion as well. Would this cover sites that show photos of children playing in mud?
When you register a work with the Copyright Office, a copy is archived in the Library of Congress. That's fine if you don't care whether your work is publicly available but not if you want to keep your work proprietary for some reason.
The other advantage of registration is that you can sue for "statutory damages" and legal costs. These can be considerably greater than the damage awards available for infringed unregistered works. See 17 USC 412 and the discussion of statutory damages in 17 USC 504 and 17 USC 505.
RFC 3834 discusses the issue of automated responses in great detail. "The Return-Path address is really the only one from the message header that can be expected, as a matter of protocol, to be suitable for automatic responses that were not anticipated by the sender." There were (are still?) a number of poorly-designed vacation autoresponders that ignore this RFC and blindly send replies to the From or Reply-To address which results in horrific mail loops on listservers. I encountered this problem early on managing some lists for a client and had to write a set of procmail filters to bounce these autoreplies to the list owners. RFC 3834 even excludes use of the optional Sender header, though I routinely have my listservers include that header with the same address as the Return-Path just to catch autoreplies sent to Sender address.
I had just the opposite experience recently.
I installed two cards to a plain-vanilla box; one is a SoundBlaster Audigy, the other a four-port IDE card so I could use my old drives on a new SATA machine. In Fedora, both cards were detected at boot time and installed without a hitch. For XP, it couldn't identify the soundcard (not a particularly obscure one I might point out) nor could it find the drivers on the Internet. I still haven't found the magic combination to make sound work. As for the IDE card, I was flabbergasted that I would need a driver disk for this card. And, it's not that obscure a manufacturer either (SIIG). Needless to say I spend nearly all my time using Fedora.
Despite the persistent comments that Linux has bad driver support, is hard to install, etc., my experience has been the opposite. I'd understand there might be problems if I were installing obscure hardware components from non-mainstream manufacturers, but that's hardly the case here.
I also don't think that having a problem with video drivers under Xen has much relevance to the computing experience of most people. Isn't that some flavor of Buddhism?
So this puts the U.S. in the position of either letting international casinos into the U.S. market, or shutting down all internet gambling (including aforementioned web-based off-track-betting, lottery tickets, sports books, etc.). The casinos -- particularly the Vegas ones -- wouldn't like that much either.
I suspect a strict interpretation of the ruling would also ban other wire-based interstate gambling operations like betting on horse races at out-of-town tracks. A lot of the gambling rules involve the "wire" since they were originally intended to prohibit telephone-based bookie operations.
Don't forget that 38 of the fifty states have lotteries. I suspect they were another big lobby in favor of restricting off-shore Internet gambling.
"Think of this from the W.T.O.'s point of view," said Charles R. Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School. "They're this fledgling organization dominated by a huge monster in the United States. People there must be scared out of their wits at the prospects of enforcing a ruling that would instantly galvanize public opinion in the United States against the W.T.O."
Can somebody tell me just what public opinion is going to be "galvanized" if the US loses here? Gambling opponents? The evidence suggests that they're probably outnumbered by people who like to gamble (just ask any state with a lottery). Supporters of protections for intellectual property rights? How big a group could that be?
Maybe he just means people would object if the US lost a case to a small country in the WTO? Why? For most Americans the WTO is a non-entity. Some strange notion of national pride (the US never loses)? If you set up a procedure for administrative proceedings you guarantee that someone will lose. Does anyone really expect the US to win every case it's involved with in international tribunals?
I just don't get this comment at all.
I was surprised to read that this case dates back to 2003. The only debate over Internet gambling that registered with me was the one this past year over prohibiting US financial institutions from transferring funds to offshore gambling sites. I'm definitely with Antigua on this one.