That's politics, my friend, and any time you have more than two people in a room you get politics.
The Marquis de Condorcet, Lewis Carroll, Duncan Black, Anthony Downs, Kenneth Arrow, and William Riker would be thrilled to hear you say that! Things get even more interesting when you have more than two alternatives among which to choose!
Using the logic I described above, computers located in China spam at about the norm for all computers worldwide. The article reports that 1.9% of relaying hosts are located in China; this is actually slightly better than China's overall share of computers worldwide, 2.1%. (For the US the figures are 13% and 57% respectively.)
I'm an "old-timer" in a variety of meanings despite my ID, and I know about Cantor and Siegel. Nevertheless, Terry asks the right question and points out how uninformative this article is.
The article reports that 13% of hosts "relaying spam" reside in the US. But what should we compare that 13% to? According to the figures in the CIA Factbook, some 57% of worldwide Internet hosts are located in the US. So I'd say the article's entire premise is flawed. If the conditional probability of a host spamming were equivalent world-wide then, using the Factbook's figures, US hosts should account for 57% of spam relays, not 13%.
On top of that, relaying tells us nothing about how spamming works. Spam doesn't come from computers; it starts as some back-alley deal and spreads relentlessly across the globe. Those zombied machines with the ISO country-code domains we all see pummeling our servers aren't the source of the spam either. They're just drones that take their orders from masters far away.
As Woodward and Bernstein were told, "follow the money." Looking at distributions of Internet hosts tells us nothing about the business of spamming or its effects.
Concerning #3, most of these exploits use Javascript to open a phony "scanning" window. I got one of these while reading the New York Times on my Linux machine using Firefox.
In this case the software was distributed through one of the on-line advertising systems that feeds ads to the Times. The fact that serious, reputable publications like the New York Times don't automatically scan all third-party content like these advertisements and block those that contain scriping is just unconscionable to me. Ads with text, graphics, hell even animated GIFs, are okay in my book; scripts, no thank you.
Just today I used my SSN to access my forgotten username at fidelity.com. There's no question that Fidelity needs my SSN since my activities there have tax implications, so there's no way they haven't got my number stored somewhere in their databases. I have no problem with this.
Granted she isn't quite old enough to have seen every American president, but Helen Thomas has seen quite a few. She also thought Bush to be the "worst ever."
Senior staff positions at places like the SEC are exactly the types of position that change when a new Administration comes to power. In comparison to a country like Britain, where the civil service is largely tenured and only the Cabinet changes, American presidents appoint literally thousands of people throughout the Executive Branch.
I thought the comments from the Republicans in the article were rather surprising. All of these events took place during the Bush administration, and many of the staff involved were probably Bush appointees.
The real scandal here is the staffing of regulatory agencies by opponents of regulation, a common practice during the Bush Administration. One of the most effective "deregulatory" actions of that Administration was having their appointees to regulatory bodies sit on their hands for four or eight years. For another example, see this article contrasting antitrust policies at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.
Coincidentally, the Times is running a a story today about this new generation of "social" media sites like Blippy. Not only does Blippy want to compile a list of your purchases, they'd like to read your e-mail, too, if you don't mind. From the article:
The spirit of sharing has already run into some roadblocks. Amazon.com was so wary of the security ramifications of Blippy's idea of letting consumers post everything they bought that, for several months, it blocked the site from allowing people to publish their Amazon purchases.
In March, Blippy sidestepped Amazon by asking its customers for access to their Gmail accounts, and then took the purchase data from the receipts Amazon had e-mailed them. Blippy says thousands of its users have supplied the keys to their e-mail accounts; Amazon declined to comment.
In reply to my own question, I'd totally forgotten about VistA, the open-sourced health management system developed by the US Veterans Administration. It's in the public domain, but only available through a Freedom of Information Act request. There are commercial and non-commercial versions of the code as well, one licensed under the GPL and one using the Eclipse license.
What an insightful observation! I'd guess the developers just followed the usual procedure and attached the GPL license text.
Have other projects using the GPL had to deal with this issue? Can Drupal modules be released as "public domain" even if the rest of the code is GPL? Since the Federal Government has no copyright to transfer, it's probably not even possible for them to give the code to the Drupal developers and let them place it under the GPL or transfer the rights to the FSF.
Of course, one of the links there is "words, not deeds" so perhaps all the noise about open source is just that.
Indeed if you read the article you would have seen a comment by a VP at Ingres that sounds remarkably similar to the criticism from the UK commentator cited at the top of the story:
This is not the first time such platitudes have been made by the government. Over the past 12 months the office of the CIO has continually pointed to open source as the key to reducing capital expenditure on large public sector IT projects. We at Ingres work with public sector bodies daily and have not seen the enforcement of these policies at a practical level and so view this announcement cautiously. Right now there is a very large negotiation underway to renew Oracle's contract with the MOD which in theory should be put to competitive tender but sadly is being conducted behind closed doors.
Of course, Ingres has a vested interest as a competitor to Oracle, but I'm not surprised to hear that the Ministry of Defence conducts its IT negotiations behind closed doors, "in the interests of security," I'm sure.
Now we expect the same of all these random goat herders, but they don't want to drop their farm and start working in a cubicle and watching comedy central. This isn't the only reason for terrorism, but its something to ponder anyway.
Perhaps you should speak with your teacher about the proportion of "goat herders" living in the Middle East today? If you've been left with the impression that these societies are largely populated by goat herders, you should be taking another course. Take a look at this list of countries ranked by percent urban. Sure Yemen and Afghanistan are pretty rural, but most other countries with substantial Muslim populations have a lot of city-dwellers as well.
I searched the entire document for "fair use" and came up with only one entry, footnote 47:
"[For greater certainty, the Parties understand that third party liability means liability for any person who authorizes for a direct financial benefit, induces through or by conduct directed to promoting infringement, or knowingly and materially aids any act of copyright or related rights infringement by another. Further, the Parties also understand that the application of third party liability may include consideration of exceptions or limitations to exclusive rights that are confined to certain special cases that do not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work, performance or phonogram, and do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the right holder, including fair use, fair dealing, or their equivalents.] At least one delegation opposes this footnote."
I wonder which delegation(s) that is (are)? If footnote 47, or some equivalent, does not appear in the final version, would we have a conflict between ACTA and 17 USC?
Perhaps you might want to review the four criteria determining whether a fair-use defense can be raised from 17 USC (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml):
"(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. "
These parodies can all point, at a minimum, to the "substantiality" clause as a defense. They're not using the entire movie, just a clip. They all meet the non-commercial requirement of item (1), and their effect on the commercial value of the film is at least arguable (some may claim it broadened the film's audience). Determining whether a potentially infringing item can be viewed as a fair use of the material is a complex and nuanced process that can only be resolved in a court of law. Automated content matching tools just don't cut it in this arena.
About 60 other companies distribute versions of BitTorrent software, which is open source, but the ["official BT"] company has about 70 million users out of a worldwide total of about 100 million, according to Klinker.
I must be on the wrong trackers, because I sure see a much higher representation of non "BitTorrent" clients than 30%. If anything, I'd say Klinker's official BT client represents a minority of users.
And where does that 100 million figure come from? Are there "only" 100 million BT users worldwide?
How do I know it's not some quack? How do you find that "really skilled person" and know you have one of those "very specific problems in the back?"
In my case the chiropractor was affiliated with the physical therapy provider my back doctor recommend I use. I did a combination of standard PT with a chiro session once every other week. It was hard to know which of these made the greater difference, though my back was much better afterwards.
The only plausible argument I could see is antitrust, claiming that Apple holds a monopoly position in mobile applications. Even then it's not all that plausible with the arrival of Android devices. Maybe the truth here is that people at Adobe are pissed off, and a couple of them whispered "lawsuit" in the ear of TFA's author. As others have already observed, Adobe has a complex relationship with Apple with many other levers of influence that don't involve courts of law.
Combined with the article about Google potentially opening VP8, I'm starting to wonder if Flash is nearing the end of its lifespan. Adobe probably won't care about containers and codecs in the long run as long as its developer tools sell. Plus it gets them out of the business of writing browser plugins, which experience suggests isn't one of their strong suits.
>>I agree but one should still be able to review logs of places the kids (or their friends) have been. I'm their parent, not just their friend.
>So I'm assuming you're one of the power obsessed parents who uses Verizon's "family stalker" app to make sure you know when your kid is peeing and if they stopped to get ice cream or not?
No, I don't think I was a Nazi for wanting to review what sites my then eleven-year-old daughter visited on the Internet over her unfiltered connection from a computer in her bedroom.
You know what the first thing I learned by this practice? That a whole lot of people wanted to sell things to my daughter over this shiny new Internet thingy. And they were capable of doing it with unblockable pop-ups of cute animated kittens. They also wanted to infiltrate my daughter's computer with all sorts of software so they could pop up little reminders with cute animated kittens or track her browsing patterns whenever they needed to. In the end their little plans came to a halt in this household because I'm a geeky parent who uses Linux and knew how to set up a transparent web proxy. Some of these early attempts at surveillance by marketers were poorly written and caused problems with her (then XP) computer. When this happened I was able to consult the logs, see where this crap came from, and block it. Reviewing these logs really helped me understand how to begin dealing with the enormous amount of exploitative junk on the Internet that's targeted at our children.
You'll notice none of my concerns have to do with porn or predation or any of the usual subjects that come up whenever we discuss parental filtering on Slashdot. I had no qualms trusting my daughter to make the right choices for herself on the Internet because I had trusted her to do many other responsible things in her young life. I had no choice in this matter; I was a single father with a young child. That didn't mean I was going to abandon all parental responsibility for her use of the Internet. I logged her traffic for a while, reviewed the logs a few times over the first year or so, then stopped logging. She knew I was logging and knew I could block her access if I wished. She watched me review the log to help diagnose what was wrong with her computer and was happy I could use it to block some of the places that were giving her trouble.
I'm as disgusted as you are by the exploitation of fear represented by products like "family tracking" services. Unfortunately, in the current climate, fear sells. I gave my daughter a cell phone when she entered middle school to help her become more liberated not to be tracked like a lab rat. But I chose to buy her a prepaid phone from Virgin so I could control how much time she spent on the phone. Like my decision to allow unrestricted, but monitored, access to the Internet, I tried to find the right solution that maximized her freedom while not abandoning my responsibilities as her parent to help her make the right decisions.
That's called being a parent, not a storm trooper. "Trust, but verify" as Ronnie said.
As to the OP, I think you're creating a monster for yourself to manage. Parenting is hard, but you've got a lot more experience managing your kids than you have managing a complex network configuration. From what you wrote, I'd suggest the following:
1) See if you can control time-of-day access using the administrative interface of your router. That's probably the easiest method to solve that problem. My Linksys router includes this feature.
2) Take a look at Dan's Guardian as a filtering mechanism if you must have one. It'll run fine on that ten-year-old computer the kids are using now.
3) Use Firefox with AdBlock Plus and perhaps Flashblock as well.
4) Use Linux on the client computers. Yes, yes, I know, gaming, blah, blah, blah. You'll save yourselves a lot of hassle if you don't run Windows, and your kids will get acc
That doesn't mean that you cannot copy some of the material on FiOS, though. I tried recording a movie on HBO to my DVD recorder and was blocked by the older anti-copying technology that applied to SD material.
Slashdot Mirror
That's politics, my friend, and any time you have more than two people in a room you get politics.
The Marquis de Condorcet, Lewis Carroll, Duncan Black, Anthony Downs, Kenneth Arrow, and William Riker would be thrilled to hear you say that! Things get even more interesting when you have more than two alternatives among which to choose!
It's really not that complicated... You have a boss who makes the rules, if your boss later tells you to break the rules then you do it.
Or you resign.
Using the logic I described above, computers located in China spam at about the norm for all computers worldwide. The article reports that 1.9% of relaying hosts are located in China; this is actually slightly better than China's overall share of computers worldwide, 2.1%. (For the US the figures are 13% and 57% respectively.)
I'm an "old-timer" in a variety of meanings despite my ID, and I know about Cantor and Siegel. Nevertheless, Terry asks the right question and points out how uninformative this article is.
The article reports that 13% of hosts "relaying spam" reside in the US. But what should we compare that 13% to? According to the figures in the CIA Factbook, some 57% of worldwide Internet hosts are located in the US. So I'd say the article's entire premise is flawed. If the conditional probability of a host spamming were equivalent world-wide then, using the Factbook's figures, US hosts should account for 57% of spam relays, not 13%.
On top of that, relaying tells us nothing about how spamming works. Spam doesn't come from computers; it starts as some back-alley deal and spreads relentlessly across the globe. Those zombied machines with the ISO country-code domains we all see pummeling our servers aren't the source of the spam either. They're just drones that take their orders from masters far away.
As Woodward and Bernstein were told, "follow the money." Looking at distributions of Internet hosts tells us nothing about the business of spamming or its effects.
The USA Today article contains this observation from the senators:
"Facebook should change the rules so users have to proactively opt into the information sharing program, the senators said."
If they think opt-in is the best solution, how about revisiting the 2003 "CAN-SPAM" bill and changing it from opt-out to opt-in as well?
CAN we SPAM? Yes, we can!
Concerning #3, most of these exploits use Javascript to open a phony "scanning" window. I got one of these while reading the New York Times on my Linux machine using Firefox.
Pirated movies? Facebook? How about the New York Times?
In this case the software was distributed through one of the on-line advertising systems that feeds ads to the Times. The fact that serious, reputable publications like the New York Times don't automatically scan all third-party content like these advertisements and block those that contain scriping is just unconscionable to me. Ads with text, graphics, hell even animated GIFs, are okay in my book; scripts, no thank you.
I don't think data security would have gotten the traction it did here in MA if it hadn't been for the THX breach.
Just today I used my SSN to access my forgotten username at fidelity.com. There's no question that Fidelity needs my SSN since my activities there have tax implications, so there's no way they haven't got my number stored somewhere in their databases. I have no problem with this.
Oh,nooes, Pikachu is nekkid!
Course if it were Jessie....
Granted she isn't quite old enough to have seen every American president, but Helen Thomas has seen quite a few. She also thought Bush to be the "worst ever."
Senior staff positions at places like the SEC are exactly the types of position that change when a new Administration comes to power. In comparison to a country like Britain, where the civil service is largely tenured and only the Cabinet changes, American presidents appoint literally thousands of people throughout the Executive Branch.
I thought the comments from the Republicans in the article were rather surprising. All of these events took place during the Bush administration, and many of the staff involved were probably Bush appointees.
The real scandal here is the staffing of regulatory agencies by opponents of regulation, a common practice during the Bush Administration. One of the most effective "deregulatory" actions of that Administration was having their appointees to regulatory bodies sit on their hands for four or eight years. For another example, see this article contrasting antitrust policies at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.
Coincidentally, the Times is running a a story today about this new generation of "social" media sites like Blippy. Not only does Blippy want to compile a list of your purchases, they'd like to read your e-mail, too, if you don't mind. From the article:
Sigh....
In reply to my own question, I'd totally forgotten about VistA, the open-sourced health management system developed by the US Veterans Administration. It's in the public domain, but only available through a Freedom of Information Act request. There are commercial and non-commercial versions of the code as well, one licensed under the GPL and one using the Eclipse license.
What an insightful observation! I'd guess the developers just followed the usual procedure and attached the GPL license text.
Have other projects using the GPL had to deal with this issue? Can Drupal modules be released as "public domain" even if the rest of the code is GPL? Since the Federal Government has no copyright to transfer, it's probably not even possible for them to give the code to the Drupal developers and let them place it under the GPL or transfer the rights to the FSF.
Of course, one of the links there is "words, not deeds" so perhaps all the noise about open source is just that.
Indeed if you read the article you would have seen a comment by a VP at Ingres that sounds remarkably similar to the criticism from the UK commentator cited at the top of the story:
Of course, Ingres has a vested interest as a competitor to Oracle, but I'm not surprised to hear that the Ministry of Defence conducts its IT negotiations behind closed doors, "in the interests of security," I'm sure.
Now we expect the same of all these random goat herders, but they don't want to drop their farm and start working in a cubicle and watching comedy central. This isn't the only reason for terrorism, but its something to ponder anyway.
Perhaps you should speak with your teacher about the proportion of "goat herders" living in the Middle East today? If you've been left with the impression that these societies are largely populated by goat herders, you should be taking another course. Take a look at this list of countries ranked by percent urban. Sure Yemen and Afghanistan are pretty rural, but most other countries with substantial Muslim populations have a lot of city-dwellers as well.
I searched the entire document for "fair use" and came up with only one entry, footnote 47:
"[For greater certainty, the Parties understand that third party liability means liability for any person who authorizes for a direct financial benefit, induces through or by conduct directed to promoting infringement, or knowingly and materially aids any act of copyright or related rights infringement by another. Further, the Parties also understand that the application of third party liability may include consideration of exceptions or limitations to exclusive rights that are confined to certain special cases that do not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work, performance or phonogram, and do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the right holder, including fair use, fair dealing, or their equivalents.] At least one delegation opposes this footnote."
I wonder which delegation(s) that is (are)? If footnote 47, or some equivalent, does not appear in the final version, would we have a conflict between ACTA and 17 USC?
Perhaps you might want to review the four criteria determining whether a fair-use defense can be raised from 17 USC (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml):
"(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. "
These parodies can all point, at a minimum, to the "substantiality" clause as a defense. They're not using the entire movie, just a clip. They all meet the non-commercial requirement of item (1), and their effect on the commercial value of the film is at least arguable (some may claim it broadened the film's audience). Determining whether a potentially infringing item can be viewed as a fair use of the material is a complex and nuanced process that can only be resolved in a court of law. Automated content matching tools just don't cut it in this arena.
Read Templeton's blog entry for more insight.
From TFA:
About 60 other companies distribute versions of BitTorrent software, which is open source, but the ["official BT"] company has about 70 million users out of a worldwide total of about 100 million, according to Klinker.
I must be on the wrong trackers, because I sure see a much higher representation of non "BitTorrent" clients than 30%. If anything, I'd say Klinker's official BT client represents a minority of users.
And where does that 100 million figure come from? Are there "only" 100 million BT users worldwide?
How do I know it's not some quack? How do you find that "really skilled person" and know you have one of those "very specific problems in the back?"
In my case the chiropractor was affiliated with the physical therapy provider my back doctor recommend I use. I did a combination of standard PT with a chiro session once every other week. It was hard to know which of these made the greater difference, though my back was much better afterwards.
The only plausible argument I could see is antitrust, claiming that Apple holds a monopoly position in mobile applications. Even then it's not all that plausible with the arrival of Android devices. Maybe the truth here is that people at Adobe are pissed off, and a couple of them whispered "lawsuit" in the ear of TFA's author. As others have already observed, Adobe has a complex relationship with Apple with many other levers of influence that don't involve courts of law.
Combined with the article about Google potentially opening VP8, I'm starting to wonder if Flash is nearing the end of its lifespan. Adobe probably won't care about containers and codecs in the long run as long as its developer tools sell. Plus it gets them out of the business of writing browser plugins, which experience suggests isn't one of their strong suits.
>>I agree but one should still be able to review logs of places the kids (or their friends) have been. I'm their parent, not just their friend.
>So I'm assuming you're one of the power obsessed parents who uses Verizon's "family stalker" app to make sure you know when your kid is peeing and if they stopped to get ice cream or not?
No, I don't think I was a Nazi for wanting to review what sites my then eleven-year-old daughter visited on the Internet over her unfiltered connection from a computer in her bedroom.
You know what the first thing I learned by this practice? That a whole lot of people wanted to sell things to my daughter over this shiny new Internet thingy. And they were capable of doing it with unblockable pop-ups of cute animated kittens. They also wanted to infiltrate my daughter's computer with all sorts of software so they could pop up little reminders with cute animated kittens or track her browsing patterns whenever they needed to. In the end their little plans came to a halt in this household because I'm a geeky parent who uses Linux and knew how to set up a transparent web proxy. Some of these early attempts at surveillance by marketers were poorly written and caused problems with her (then XP) computer. When this happened I was able to consult the logs, see where this crap came from, and block it. Reviewing these logs really helped me understand how to begin dealing with the enormous amount of exploitative junk on the Internet that's targeted at our children.
You'll notice none of my concerns have to do with porn or predation or any of the usual subjects that come up whenever we discuss parental filtering on Slashdot. I had no qualms trusting my daughter to make the right choices for herself on the Internet because I had trusted her to do many other responsible things in her young life. I had no choice in this matter; I was a single father with a young child. That didn't mean I was going to abandon all parental responsibility for her use of the Internet. I logged her traffic for a while, reviewed the logs a few times over the first year or so, then stopped logging. She knew I was logging and knew I could block her access if I wished. She watched me review the log to help diagnose what was wrong with her computer and was happy I could use it to block some of the places that were giving her trouble.
I'm as disgusted as you are by the exploitation of fear represented by products like "family tracking" services. Unfortunately, in the current climate, fear sells. I gave my daughter a cell phone when she entered middle school to help her become more liberated not to be tracked like a lab rat. But I chose to buy her a prepaid phone from Virgin so I could control how much time she spent on the phone. Like my decision to allow unrestricted, but monitored, access to the Internet, I tried to find the right solution that maximized her freedom while not abandoning my responsibilities as her parent to help her make the right decisions.
That's called being a parent, not a storm trooper. "Trust, but verify" as Ronnie said.
As to the OP, I think you're creating a monster for yourself to manage. Parenting is hard, but you've got a lot more experience managing your kids than you have managing a complex network configuration. From what you wrote, I'd suggest the following:
1) See if you can control time-of-day access using the administrative interface of your router. That's probably the easiest method to solve that problem. My Linksys router includes this feature.
2) Take a look at Dan's Guardian as a filtering mechanism if you must have one. It'll run fine on that ten-year-old computer the kids are using now.
3) Use Firefox with AdBlock Plus and perhaps Flashblock as well.
4) Use Linux on the client computers. Yes, yes, I know, gaming, blah, blah, blah. You'll save yourselves a lot of hassle if you don't run Windows, and your kids will get acc
verizon never sets the "do not copy" bit
That doesn't mean that you cannot copy some of the material on FiOS, though. I tried recording a movie on HBO to my DVD recorder and was blocked by the older anti-copying technology that applied to SD material.
Matroska in general is great and a lot better than Ogg or others, but it doesn't work on any device besides PC
That's not entirely true.