A huge campaign against.xxx has seen ICANN's public comment board for the registry flooded in recent days by hundreds of posters with little or no understanding of the.xxx bid, but all stating their opposition to its approval. The same campaign has been raging for months, with one ICANN Board member sent threatening letters due to an assumed bias for the registry.
Sounds like a typical day on Slashdot... but seriously, everyone's so concerned about the problem of pornography and had to limit access to it, and yet here is an attractive solution, with very little downside, and of course the fanatics are opposed. They want porn banned entirely, and aren't willing to even see a half-measure put in place to curb and control it. THey want to throw the baby out with the bath water, all because their "morality" is somehow superior to mine. Well, last time I checked, the Constitution of the United States gives me the right to decide for myself what I want to look at and see, and also allows me the right to do it without fear of persecution by the Government or my fellow citizens.
Not everyone believes what the fanatics believe and every individual is entitled to his/her own opinion. And while your opinion might be different than mine, I don't get to foist mine off on you and visa versa. So the fundamentalist s need to go home and play with their toys in private and leave me alone.
What happened behind the scenes was that the US administration told ICANN chairman Vint Cerf and head Paul Twomey that it did not approve of the domain, but due to the difficult political position that it would put both ICANN and the US government in were it to be seen to be directing internet policy (against its publicly stated "hands off" policy), there has been a carefully co-ordinated effort to kill the registry through delay.
Ok, who sees this for the FUD it is? Of course the US Government is directing things at ICANN; they've been basically getting ICANN to thumb its nose at the rest of the world's concerns for years. Why should now be any different? They undoubtedly made it clear that this wasn't going to happen, and Cerf and Twomey then had to find some way to kill the thing gracefully, rather than coming out and saying "the US made us do it" and face the wrath of Congress. And so the slow, lingering death.
For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made -- across town or across the country -- to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.
And later on...
Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.
The telcos stand to make out like gangbusters: a) they ingratiate themselves to the military and the government, which will come in handy to defeat Net Neutrality legislation, b) they can sit there and claim plausible deniability when someone brings suit against them because their phone records were used against them in court wrogfully, as they claim they're not supplying personal information to the NSA and c) the NSA, by running these algorithms and tracing calling patterns is generating data that could potentially be used by them to modify call routing schemes, change marketing penetration, and generally give them access to potentially useful information, which I'm sure the NSA will be only too happy to provide, to gain further cooperation.
Seems as if the telcos are now firmly in bed with the government and will pretty soon be able to write their own ticket to profits on the backs of taxpayers. Are all these illegal immigrants sure they want to be in this country?
Talk about showing your age! I wonder if a 30 year old will understand a reference to an obscure, 1976 sci fi flick (and definitely one of Farrah Fawcett's finest)? Sanctuary! Run to Sanctuary!
as someone mentioned previously in a discussion a few days ago; we all break laws in countries which we're not in, that's ok, we shouldn't be able to be prosectued for it (I know he also broke UK law - but he should only be prosecuted under that).
I really hope that's not some kind of excuse for his behavior. Just because he was in the UK and broke a US law doesn't give him the opportunity to walk off into the sunset. He needs to face the music; he willfully violated US law. Reverse the situation -- if he were in the US and broke into a UK computer, you'd think that was ok? If that's the case I don't know why we're looking for Osama Bin Laden. He may have ordered the deaths of thousands of Americans and others, but since he's in a foreign country and just happened to break some of our laws, that's forgiveable, don't you think? And don't think I don't know what you're going to say: apples and oranges. But while he was breaking into our military's computer network, he had ample opportunity to find out all sorts of things, He may not have been performing espionage in the classic sense, but it's espionage nonetheless. He was trying to find out US secrets, albeit secrets that only exist in his deluded mind.
I think the best he can hope for is the Wacky Farm.
Listen Sonny, you've got no idea what old is! Why, when I first learned to program, I had to carry my punch cards in a paper bag through the snow, on foot, 10 miles, uphill, in both directions! We didn't have these fancy keyboards -- we had to use a telegraph key. Monitors! Feh! We had to use an Etch-a-Sketch!
Seem like their documentary title could use some adjusting, code breaking sounds a lot like simply creating a program that just doesn't work (i.e. is broken)
At first I thought it was a documentary about Bletchley Park, where the Allies broke the German Enigma cipher.
Perhaps they are refering to the "code" of buying all your software from Microsoft, which certainly could use some breaking if not downright thrashing.
You could have at least read the article summary..
Strangely, I did, which led me to RTFA, which led me to the statements I made. It's one of those cases where the article summary really has little do with the gist of the Wired article, which has to do with the arraignment of Eric McCarty:
On April 28, 2006, Eric McCarty was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. McCarty is a professional computer security consultant who noticed that there was a problem with the way the University of Southern California had constructed its web page for online applications. A database programming error allowed outsiders to obtain applicants' personal information, including Social Security numbers.
That is after all the event which causes Mr. McDanel's case to be reviewed.
The McCarty prosecution, brought by the same office that so egregiously mishandled the McDanel incident, is in the same vein. As with Puffer and McDanel, the government will have to prove not only that McCarty accessed the school system without authorization, but also that he had some kind of criminal intent.
Likely, they will point to the fact that McCarty copied some applicant records. "It wasn't that he could access the database and showed that it could be bypassed," Michael Zweiback, an assistant attorney for the Department of Justice's cybercrime and intellectual property crimes section, told the SecurityFocus reporter. "He went beyond that and gained additional information regarding the personal records of the applicant."
But if he wanted to reveal USC's security gaffe, it's not clear what else he could have done. He had to get a sampling of the exposed records to prove that his claims were true. SecurityFocus reported that USC administrators initially claimed that only two database records were exposed, and only acknowledged that the entire database was threatened after additional records were shown to them.
Ok, so there are two ways to look at this:
He did commit a crime. He broke their security, using a known flaw. Happens all the time to anyone running Windows when some virus or Trojan uses a known exploit to mess round with data on your PC. They're guilty, mainly for then using your PC for other nefarious purposes. This argument is weak because all he did was reveal the information to a reporter, and while that's a dubious move at best, it really ended up in little harm.
He didn't commit a crime. He exposed a major college's security lapse and did something with that knowledge that allowed the problem to be solved. I don't agree with his methods -- it would have been far easier to simply go to USC, tell them of the flaw, and then leave them to their own devices. Knowing USC, they would have hemmed and hawed, until some enterprising hacker, out for a little fun, discovered the flaw and did more than steal the records of seven people. He probably felt that this needed to be publicized to force USC's hand, but I still think that smacks of lack of common sense.
I doubt a jury will convict him, though, this being a technical argument mainly and a computer crime, any jury they seat is bound to wind up confused and the best the prosecution can hope is that someone on the jury will have enough savvy to explain it to the others. Or they may convict him for being a wily, young whippersnapper. Who knows?
That all depends...many organizations have positions that are characterized by "all of the responsibility but none of the authority". This means that as a security professional, you may be able to recommend certain practices, but unless one has the authority to see to it that these recommendations are implemented, there really isn't a whole lot more that can be done.
It's too often the case that titles come with very little power. You would think that security people would be in demand now and that people would actually listen to them, but business is still driven by the bottom line, and a company is going to handle security like anything else: the most bang for the least buck. It comes down to the "how little do we have to use and still consider ourselves safe" mentality.
You do know that the USA only became involved after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, right?
Yes and also that Germany, quite stupidly, declared war on the United States on December 11th, 1941, when there was no reason to. Even if they had not, we were already supporting Great Britain via Lend-Lease and it was only a matter of time before we threw our weight behind the Allied drive to retake Europe from the Nazis.
... of course there are some disabled people who can write code, but does that mean they should quit their day jobs just to write open source solutions that open source developers managed to overlook?
I think many a disabled person would feel luck to have a day job, let alone one that allowed them to write code for technologies they need.
There is a solution. They should keep using Microsoft Office with the ODF plugin until the Open Source community finds it valuable to write the proper accessibility options into Linux.
And as usual, the simplest solution is the best solution. I don't think the disabled community is expecting the ODF Alliance to kow-tow to them, but is just trying to encourage the OSS movement to develop the same capabilties that they now enjoy with Microsoft products. It's not impossible, it's just not being done fast enough in the eyes of the disabled.
However, I don't think that's the crux of the problem. People with disabilites are more concerned that ODF incorporate handling for text readers and such from the outset and not have to be bludgeoned into doing it later. It does no good exporting Word docs to ODF format later if ODF is still incapable of working with the assistive technology required. And let's face it: if ODF whole-heartedly embraces this, it puts them one up on Microsoft, which had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the discussion, then dragged its feet in actually developing the functionality.
Whats what part of being a soverign country is; being able to make their own laws.
So Nazi Germany could make laws saying Jews were not people and subject to extermination, and that's all right? Being a sovereign nation, they had the right. So the only justification we had for toppling the Nazi regime was their invasion of other sovereign nations; if Hitler had never invaded another country, we should/could have done nothing about it?
I admit, I'd have a hard time if another country tried to make policy here in the US, but wait, don't they? OPEC raises prices and suddenly our government has to drill in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. The Taliban government of Afghanistan decides to house Osama Bin Laden and the result is the destruction of the World Trade Center and the start of the war on terror. The Soviet Union launches Sputnik and the US lands men on the Moon. Perhaps these aren't the intentional acts of one nation trying to run another, but their consequences are the same -- one nations alters its behavior because of the effect of what another nation does. And that alteration doesn't have to be destructive, that's just usually the most common occurrence.
And so China may indeed do what it likes, but that isn't going to stop those of us on the outside from trying to influence what's going on inside China.
Interesting to think of whether being allowed to Google Tiannenmen Square would influence them in one direction or the other.
I would suspect that would never happen as a) most of the rural poor don't own computers and b) most have probably never heard of the masscre. The Chinese government was censoring things long before the Internet became popular.
Although most of its students know nothing of the university's Internet monitoring efforts, the leaders of Shanghai Normal conducted seminars last week for dozens of other Chinese universities and education officials on how to emulate their success in taming the Web.
University officials turned away a foreign reporter, however, making clear that the university does not wish to publicize its activities more broadly. "Our system is not very mature, and since we've just started operating it, there's not much to say about it," said Li Ximeng, deputy director of the university propaganda department. "Our system is not open for media, and we don't want to have it appear in the news or be publicized."
Because then someone might find out, although I doubt anyone in China would find out since it would no doubt be blocked by censors. The fact is, it's just an extension of their internal spy network, adding one more data source to allow the Chinese goverment to keep tabs on its citizens and purge "unwanted ideas." This is just astounding, especially in a country with such a large population. But I guess when you keep the rural poor in ignorance, you can pretty much run the country any way you please, even though they outnumber you. China was such a fascinating and interesting place two or three thousand years ago, but now it's taken the concept of "insular" to a new extreme.
For her part, Hu beams with pride over her contribution toward building what the government calls a "harmonious society."
The remarks indicated it's not only the nation's largest broadband players, both in the cable and the telecommunications sectors, that have voiced public opposition to what they refer to as unprecedented governmental regulation of the Internet. They've said repeatedly that without evidence of a problem, there's no need for new laws.
Net neutrality, also called network neutrality, is the philosophy that network operators should not be allowed to prioritize content and services--particularly video--that come across their pipes. Proponents have launched a campaign to enact detailed regulations barring such practices, and so far they've won over some congressional Democrats.
Network operators counter that they deserve the right to charge premium fees to bandwidth hogs in order to offset their vast investments in infrastructure and to ensure the quality and security of their products. Mediacom has made $1.7 billion in capital investments over the past decade, according to Commisso.
And so I return to my premise that it's time to nationalize the communications infrastructure in this country. Declare it an important national resource, vital to the safety and security of US citizens, and then take it away from these greedy pinheads. Create a department to oversee telecommunications infrastructure and force these companies to bid on maintenance contracts for the various regions of the country.
True, that means goverment oversight, and the government is an iffy proposition at best, but it's a damned sight better than allowing the telecoms to run amok and ramp up the prices for content we as customers want. In the end, they'd do well to listen to customers, before they don't have any.
It would seem Gary "Uber Hacker" McKinnon is not so "Uber" after all. After reading his interview on Spy.org.uk it has come to our attention that his technical knowledge and indeed, mental state, is not all that it should be.
I seem to remember that he was afraid they were going to ship him to Guantanamo Bay. But perhaps he'd be better off in a Starfleet detention cell, or maybe aboard the Death Star. The guy is a certifiable kook; the only thing he has to fear is a fair trial where he gets on the stand, rants about the hidden UFO technology (which is doing a wonderful job for us in Iraq among other places) we possess, and the jury figures out that he is a kook and send him away.
Much as I tend to think of hackers as low-lifes for the most part, those that use their abilities indescriminately anyway, I don't think even they should be subjected to this guy's company.
Competition will drive more information into the process. So long as people make valid arguments as rated by their peers, their personal agenda is irrelevant. Having many participants in the process dilutes the effect of any bad apples or unconstructive participants. Within any social reputation system, norms evolve to safeguard the quality of participation and we can expect something similar here.
Sounds like we already have that here on Slashdot; let us review patent applications. I am sure we can fair and unbiased, especially when it comes to software patents.
Considering who Bluesecurity are and what they do, this whole thing has actually seemed to me to serve as pretty good PR for them. It pisses off lots of people, but once the facts were out there pretty much everyone I know got pissed at the spammer, not Bluesecurity. Everyone hates spam, but now they see a spammer taking things to the next level of evil, which really strengthens the image of the "good guys." People who never heard of Bluesecurity before are becomeing ready to do what they can to work against this spammer.
I'm considering it from the knee-jerk standpoint. Your stie goes down, you complain to Tucows, Tucows says it was due to a DDoS against Blue Security and next thing you know a whole bunch of smaller sites are not happy with Blue Security. I doubt most of those Tucows sites were "major" sites, but they didn't have to be to inconvenience people.
I suspect that eventually any furor will die down. A lot of sites will begin to wonder about Tucows, given the apparent ease with which their DNS server went down. I'm not sure this whole thing will cause a mad rush to Blue Security but it may cause a move away from Tucows. We'll know the full import after a couple of weeks. In the meantime, bounty on the spammer's head anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
A huge campaign against .xxx has seen ICANN's public comment board for the registry flooded in recent days by hundreds of posters with little or no understanding of the .xxx bid, but all stating their opposition to its approval. The same campaign has been raging for months, with one ICANN Board member sent threatening letters due to an assumed bias for the registry.
Sounds like a typical day on Slashdot... but seriously, everyone's so concerned about the problem of pornography and had to limit access to it, and yet here is an attractive solution, with very little downside, and of course the fanatics are opposed. They want porn banned entirely, and aren't willing to even see a half-measure put in place to curb and control it. THey want to throw the baby out with the bath water, all because their "morality" is somehow superior to mine. Well, last time I checked, the Constitution of the United States gives me the right to decide for myself what I want to look at and see, and also allows me the right to do it without fear of persecution by the Government or my fellow citizens.
Not everyone believes what the fanatics believe and every individual is entitled to his/her own opinion. And while your opinion might be different than mine, I don't get to foist mine off on you and visa versa. So the fundamentalist s need to go home and play with their toys in private and leave me alone.
What happened behind the scenes was that the US administration told ICANN chairman Vint Cerf and head Paul Twomey that it did not approve of the domain, but due to the difficult political position that it would put both ICANN and the US government in were it to be seen to be directing internet policy (against its publicly stated "hands off" policy), there has been a carefully co-ordinated effort to kill the registry through delay.
Ok, who sees this for the FUD it is? Of course the US Government is directing things at ICANN; they've been basically getting ICANN to thumb its nose at the rest of the world's concerns for years. Why should now be any different? They undoubtedly made it clear that this wasn't going to happen, and Cerf and Twomey then had to find some way to kill the thing gracefully, rather than coming out and saying "the US made us do it" and face the wrath of Congress. And so the slow, lingering death.
ICANN gets less relevant every month it seems.
For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made -- across town or across the country -- to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.
And later on...
Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.
The telcos stand to make out like gangbusters: a) they ingratiate themselves to the military and the government, which will come in handy to defeat Net Neutrality legislation, b) they can sit there and claim plausible deniability when someone brings suit against them because their phone records were used against them in court wrogfully, as they claim they're not supplying personal information to the NSA and c) the NSA, by running these algorithms and tracing calling patterns is generating data that could potentially be used by them to modify call routing schemes, change marketing penetration, and generally give them access to potentially useful information, which I'm sure the NSA will be only too happy to provide, to gain further cooperation.
Seems as if the telcos are now firmly in bed with the government and will pretty soon be able to write their own ticket to profits on the backs of taxpayers. Are all these illegal immigrants sure they want to be in this country?
Talk about showing your age! I wonder if a 30 year old will understand a reference to an obscure, 1976 sci fi flick (and definitely one of Farrah Fawcett's finest)? Sanctuary! Run to Sanctuary!
Where the above reference came from.I really hope that's not some kind of excuse for his behavior. Just because he was in the UK and broke a US law doesn't give him the opportunity to walk off into the sunset. He needs to face the music; he willfully violated US law. Reverse the situation -- if he were in the US and broke into a UK computer, you'd think that was ok? If that's the case I don't know why we're looking for Osama Bin Laden. He may have ordered the deaths of thousands of Americans and others, but since he's in a foreign country and just happened to break some of our laws, that's forgiveable, don't you think? And don't think I don't know what you're going to say: apples and oranges. But while he was breaking into our military's computer network, he had ample opportunity to find out all sorts of things, He may not have been performing espionage in the classic sense, but it's espionage nonetheless. He was trying to find out US secrets, albeit secrets that only exist in his deluded mind.
I think the best he can hope for is the Wacky Farm.
Don't laugh -- how much you want to bet this kook ends up in a episode of that series before all is said and done?
Listen Sonny, you've got no idea what old is! Why, when I first learned to program, I had to carry my punch cards in a paper bag through the snow, on foot, 10 miles, uphill, in both directions! We didn't have these fancy keyboards -- we had to use a telegraph key. Monitors! Feh! We had to use an Etch-a-Sketch!
Anyway, Happy Brithday.
Best tasting mineral water I've ever had! Has a funny aftertaste though...
At first I thought it was a documentary about Bletchley Park, where the Allies broke the German Enigma cipher.
Perhaps they are refering to the "code" of buying all your software from Microsoft, which certainly could use some breaking if not downright thrashing.
Strangely, I did, which led me to RTFA, which led me to the statements I made. It's one of those cases where the article summary really has little do with the gist of the Wired article, which has to do with the arraignment of Eric McCarty:
On April 28, 2006, Eric McCarty was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. McCarty is a professional computer security consultant who noticed that there was a problem with the way the University of Southern California had constructed its web page for online applications. A database programming error allowed outsiders to obtain applicants' personal information, including Social Security numbers.
That is after all the event which causes Mr. McDanel's case to be reviewed.
...a great distrubance in The Force.
The McCarty prosecution, brought by the same office that so egregiously mishandled the McDanel incident, is in the same vein. As with Puffer and McDanel, the government will have to prove not only that McCarty accessed the school system without authorization, but also that he had some kind of criminal intent.
Likely, they will point to the fact that McCarty copied some applicant records. "It wasn't that he could access the database and showed that it could be bypassed," Michael Zweiback, an assistant attorney for the Department of Justice's cybercrime and intellectual property crimes section, told the SecurityFocus reporter. "He went beyond that and gained additional information regarding the personal records of the applicant."
But if he wanted to reveal USC's security gaffe, it's not clear what else he could have done. He had to get a sampling of the exposed records to prove that his claims were true. SecurityFocus reported that USC administrators initially claimed that only two database records were exposed, and only acknowledged that the entire database was threatened after additional records were shown to them.
Ok, so there are two ways to look at this:
I doubt a jury will convict him, though, this being a technical argument mainly and a computer crime, any jury they seat is bound to wind up confused and the best the prosecution can hope is that someone on the jury will have enough savvy to explain it to the others. Or they may convict him for being a wily, young whippersnapper. Who knows?
It's too often the case that titles come with very little power. You would think that security people would be in demand now and that people would actually listen to them, but business is still driven by the bottom line, and a company is going to handle security like anything else: the most bang for the least buck. It comes down to the "how little do we have to use and still consider ourselves safe" mentality.
Yes and also that Germany, quite stupidly, declared war on the United States on December 11th, 1941, when there was no reason to. Even if they had not, we were already supporting Great Britain via Lend-Lease and it was only a matter of time before we threw our weight behind the Allied drive to retake Europe from the Nazis.
...how do they get all those mice to smoke tiny cigarettes?
I think many a disabled person would feel luck to have a day job, let alone one that allowed them to write code for technologies they need.
There is a solution. They should keep using Microsoft Office with the ODF plugin until the Open Source community finds it valuable to write the proper accessibility options into Linux.
And as usual, the simplest solution is the best solution. I don't think the disabled community is expecting the ODF Alliance to kow-tow to them, but is just trying to encourage the OSS movement to develop the same capabilties that they now enjoy with Microsoft products. It's not impossible, it's just not being done fast enough in the eyes of the disabled.
Yup. Didn't screen it as well as I thought I had, but then my eyes are old, my limbs are weak...
As was mentioned in a recent /. article, they can always use word and (soon) be able to export their documents to ODF format.
The article in question.
However, I don't think that's the crux of the problem. People with disabilites are more concerned that ODF incorporate handling for text readers and such from the outset and not have to be bludgeoned into doing it later. It does no good exporting Word docs to ODF format later if ODF is still incapable of working with the assistive technology required. And let's face it: if ODF whole-heartedly embraces this, it puts them one up on Microsoft, which had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the discussion, then dragged its feet in actually developing the functionality.
So Nazi Germany could make laws saying Jews were not people and subject to extermination, and that's all right? Being a sovereign nation, they had the right. So the only justification we had for toppling the Nazi regime was their invasion of other sovereign nations; if Hitler had never invaded another country, we should/could have done nothing about it?
I admit, I'd have a hard time if another country tried to make policy here in the US, but wait, don't they? OPEC raises prices and suddenly our government has to drill in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. The Taliban government of Afghanistan decides to house Osama Bin Laden and the result is the destruction of the World Trade Center and the start of the war on terror. The Soviet Union launches Sputnik and the US lands men on the Moon. Perhaps these aren't the intentional acts of one nation trying to run another, but their consequences are the same -- one nations alters its behavior because of the effect of what another nation does. And that alteration doesn't have to be destructive, that's just usually the most common occurrence.
And so China may indeed do what it likes, but that isn't going to stop those of us on the outside from trying to influence what's going on inside China.
I would suspect that would never happen as a) most of the rural poor don't own computers and b) most have probably never heard of the masscre. The Chinese government was censoring things long before the Internet became popular.
Although most of its students know nothing of the university's Internet monitoring efforts, the leaders of Shanghai Normal conducted seminars last week for dozens of other Chinese universities and education officials on how to emulate their success in taming the Web.
University officials turned away a foreign reporter, however, making clear that the university does not wish to publicize its activities more broadly. "Our system is not very mature, and since we've just started operating it, there's not much to say about it," said Li Ximeng, deputy director of the university propaganda department. "Our system is not open for media, and we don't want to have it appear in the news or be publicized."
Because then someone might find out, although I doubt anyone in China would find out since it would no doubt be blocked by censors. The fact is, it's just an extension of their internal spy network, adding one more data source to allow the Chinese goverment to keep tabs on its citizens and purge "unwanted ideas." This is just astounding, especially in a country with such a large population. But I guess when you keep the rural poor in ignorance, you can pretty much run the country any way you please, even though they outnumber you. China was such a fascinating and interesting place two or three thousand years ago, but now it's taken the concept of "insular" to a new extreme.
For her part, Hu beams with pride over her contribution toward building what the government calls a "harmonious society."
Read: dissent will not be tolerated.
The remarks indicated it's not only the nation's largest broadband players, both in the cable and the telecommunications sectors, that have voiced public opposition to what they refer to as unprecedented governmental regulation of the Internet. They've said repeatedly that without evidence of a problem, there's no need for new laws.
Net neutrality, also called network neutrality, is the philosophy that network operators should not be allowed to prioritize content and services--particularly video--that come across their pipes. Proponents have launched a campaign to enact detailed regulations barring such practices, and so far they've won over some congressional Democrats.
Network operators counter that they deserve the right to charge premium fees to bandwidth hogs in order to offset their vast investments in infrastructure and to ensure the quality and security of their products. Mediacom has made $1.7 billion in capital investments over the past decade, according to Commisso.
And so I return to my premise that it's time to nationalize the communications infrastructure in this country. Declare it an important national resource, vital to the safety and security of US citizens, and then take it away from these greedy pinheads. Create a department to oversee telecommunications infrastructure and force these companies to bid on maintenance contracts for the various regions of the country.
True, that means goverment oversight, and the government is an iffy proposition at best, but it's a damned sight better than allowing the telecoms to run amok and ramp up the prices for content we as customers want. In the end, they'd do well to listen to customers, before they don't have any.
From the original Whitedust article on McKinnon: Free Gary? Please God Don't.
It would seem Gary "Uber Hacker" McKinnon is not so "Uber" after all. After reading his interview on Spy.org.uk it has come to our attention that his technical knowledge and indeed, mental state, is not all that it should be.
I seem to remember that he was afraid they were going to ship him to Guantanamo Bay. But perhaps he'd be better off in a Starfleet detention cell, or maybe aboard the Death Star. The guy is a certifiable kook; the only thing he has to fear is a fair trial where he gets on the stand, rants about the hidden UFO technology (which is doing a wonderful job for us in Iraq among other places) we possess, and the jury figures out that he is a kook and send him away.
Much as I tend to think of hackers as low-lifes for the most part, those that use their abilities indescriminately anyway, I don't think even they should be subjected to this guy's company.
Sounds like we already have that here on Slashdot; let us review patent applications. I am sure we can fair and unbiased, especially when it comes to software patents.
I'm considering it from the knee-jerk standpoint. Your stie goes down, you complain to Tucows, Tucows says it was due to a DDoS against Blue Security and next thing you know a whole bunch of smaller sites are not happy with Blue Security. I doubt most of those Tucows sites were "major" sites, but they didn't have to be to inconvenience people.
I suspect that eventually any furor will die down. A lot of sites will begin to wonder about Tucows, given the apparent ease with which their DNS server went down. I'm not sure this whole thing will cause a mad rush to Blue Security but it may cause a move away from Tucows. We'll know the full import after a couple of weeks. In the meantime, bounty on the spammer's head anyone?