I guess we should shut the whole Internet down - just to be sure. No, but ISPs should definitely be responsible for policing their networks. And this includes not just P2P, but spammers and hackers as well. You can't have it both ways.
Both ways!? Show me an ISP who is willing, let alone capable of policing P2P, spammer, and/or hackers on a per user basis, aside from complaints about individuals. Let me give you a small example...a local ISP where I live just bought up another local ISP for about 9000 customers. I live in a small town! Many universities have more users...don't shift the resposibility to the access provider.
What if he wants to let other users to share their legal files? He just don't have a chance to check everyone. Easy:
1. Don't provide free services for people, unless you know and trust them.
That's right, sounds about like the internet used to work...back when there were less than 100 people here...
2. Allow users to share files, but don't let them use anonymous services. Keep some logs so you can comply with a subpoena.
Sounds reasonable. Keep logs, But exactly how does one restrict "anonymous" access from the internet? You can log the ip(s) someone is connecting from, you can get an email address, but how does that help you track down someone who doesn't want to be found?
What if I want to invite to my child's birthday party other classmates with their parents, should I ask them to bring the papers from the police that they are not criminals or should I just shut the whole party down? You should try to avoid clouding the argument with far-flung analogies.
You are guilty of using virtually the same analogy; namely that everyone is guilty until proven innocent and that you can personally check everybody at your party (ie. network)
You are wrong. Everyone is responsible only for own actions. If there is a law making me responsible for the other's actions - that law is anti-constitutional and can be defeated. No, you are wrong. There are plenty of exceptions to this rule. Some examples: companies are responsible for the actions of their employees, parents are responsible for the actions of their children, if you hold a party where you serve alcohol then you may be responsible if your guests drink & drive.
I'm assuming you would also have your ISP liable for their customers' actions and limit them as in the above cases? I can see the liability and limitations in the case of employers and parents, but in the case of parties, which seems most appropriate in the case of ISPs...it seems a little different. For example, let's say you are throwing a party where alcohol is served...a person shows up at the party who is a friend of someone who was invited, or maybe someone who just crashed the party...who really knows or cares, since you have 10,000 people at your little party? Anyway, you card the guy and make sure he's legal...it's all good so far...he proceeds to make an ass of himself at the party and splits, regardless of how drunk he is, or how many people tried to stop him from driving...he accidentally kills 10 people in an accident on the way home. Are you liable for serving him alcohol? What if it was at a bar? Or a concert? I've always thought those laws that assign liability to a bar for serving alcohol to an intoxicated person are stupid. Almost everyone that a bar serves alcohol to is already intoxicated! OK then, what about a law that limits bars to serving no more than one alcoholic drink to a customer per hour? Well, what's to keep a customer from going to a different friggin bar every 15 minutes?
...Even if I am not a Canadian (yet).
The main difference is that Canadians don't have a completely distorted view of the rest of the world.
I agree... But I don't know if you meant to type the "don't" in your above sentence...maybe your reality failed to be distorted for a second there...
Re:Intel is stupid? (Not flamebait!)
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 1
"We're Intel, and we follow tradition like companies such as Kraft; we don't realize at all that unlike making cheese, if we're going to follow Morris's law of increase and doubling performance, we have to make leaps of faith into other shit like diamonds."
And it seems Morris's law of increase and doubling works long after he's beendead!
Re:CVD Diamond- I do this.
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 5, Informative
RTFA...or, to save you the trouble, from the fifth page of the article:
The third big challenge has been the most daunting for materials scientists: To form microchip circuits, positive and negative conductors are needed. Diamond is an inherent insulator - it doesn't conduct electricity. But both Gemesis and Apollo have been able to inject boron into the lattice, which creates a positive charge. Until now, though, no one had been able to manufacture a negatively charged, or n-type, diamond with sufficient conductivity. When I visit Butler in Washington, he can barely contain his glee. "There's been a major breakthrough," he tells me. In June, together with scientists from Israel and France, he announced a novel way of inverting boron's natural conductivity to form a boron-doped n-type diamond. "We now have a p-n junction," Butler says. "Which means that we have a diamond semiconductor that really works. I can now see an Intel diamond Pentium chip on the horizon."
It happened to a friend of mine a couple months ago. His machine was hosed so he decided to reinstall Windows. He didn't get around to installing the various security updates right away, though...by the next day he noticed all his bandwidth being used up and he had 5 or 6 new divx movies being hosted on his machine in a hidden directory.
They were all in French, though...
The scary part is how quickly he was hacked. It had to have been within an hour or two of his fresh install.
Ok, so now we've got a 64-bit platform, which is arugably more than the average user needs. But why does the altivec still only support instructions for 32-bit floats?
I read before that they were trying to go after the scientific computing comminuty with the new G5s, so it doesn't make much sense to me. Our company borrowed a dual 1GHz G4 from Apple last year in order to do some high performance benchmarks (weather forecasting simulations) but we decided that they really weren't worth the price difference vs AMD or Intel platforms when using double precision floats (ie: G4s aren't much faster than Intel/AMD without SIMD)
All of the SIMD instruction sets that I know of (SSE2,3Dnow and Altivec) can only parallelize single precision FP operations. This is fine for Photoshop and 3D game optimization, but we need double precision SIMD for high accuracy simulations.
And before anyone says "Beowulf"...yeah, I know, but wouldn't it be nice if each node was twice as fast? I'm not a chip designer, obviously, but it only makes sense to update the SIMD component to match the processor's native data sizes...it doesn't support 64 bit ints for parallelization, either.
I've seen a lot of ideas thrown out in this discussion (whitelists, blacklists, sender pays, etc) but I have yet to see one which would solve our current spam problem.
You see, a few days ago, someone started sending out porno spam with randomized return addresses from our company's domain. We first found out about this when we started reciving angry email from recipients of the spam, then looked in the mail log and saw an assload of bounces hitting our mailserver.
Well, we got someone to finally send us one of the spam messages with headers and saw that they were originating from an IP which was registered to a provider in Beijing (but announcing that it was the mailserver for [mycompany].com). We fired off an email to the anti-spam address that they had posted. We never got a reply from the Chinese provider, but we did notice the number of bounces in the mail log trickling down after a day or so. We were getting up to 5 per second, now we were getting 1 every 20 minutes.
But they were still sending. We got a few more headers forwarded to us (thank goodness some people research a little before they fire off an angry letter and delete the spam permanently). the emails were almost exactly the same, only the originating IP had changed to a provider in Rio de Janeiro. We sent an email to their abuse address, but the next headers we recieved pointed to a Swedish ISP...
And this is still going on. We'd love to sue these guys...what they are doing is clearly illegal. Hell, I'd love to kick their asses, personally. But it seems all we can do is complain to an isp that they are using and hopefully cut them off for a while before they continue with a new IP. We can't get any info from the ISPs they are using...they won't even respond to let us know they care, much less give out contact info for the offenders.
I really don't see any way of bringing this to a stop, once it starts. Do we have to change our company's name just because of some anonymous assholes?
If you have publicly accessable ports on your computer, I would say that you HAVE given them permission.
Really it sounds like they're doing the same thing that web crawlers do...or a p2p client for that matter. They just takes what they find and run it through a database to see if you're infringing on someone's copyright.
Why do software companies do this? Do they think it will get people hooked on their product? I don't know....
I tried Gator out a few year ago (before their stealth-install tactics) because it sounded like an interesting plug-in, but it turned out to be a real pain in the ass, popping up a window every time you opened a page with a form.
Microsoft added auto-complete to forms in IE a short time after that, and well, it works just about like gator *should* have. I can either scroll down and pick a cached answer or I can ignore the thing and just type...but no pup-up dialogs, sheesh!
It kid of reminds me of those department stores that spray perfume in your face without asking...
There are plenty of competing audio formats, either already implemented or proposed, that have copy protection built in.
The thing is, we already have mp3! It's an open standard and it's not going to go away. Anybody who wants to can encode a (non-copy protected) mp3 and share it with whomever they want. So why would anybody ever use one of the new audio formats? Maybe if it was significantly better (better compression ratio AND higher quality), but I think Napster has already proved that mp3s are "good enough."
Record companies need to realize this and actively support the distribution of mp3s. For example, the other night I had a song stuck in my head that I just had to listen to. I searched Napster and the web for over 4 hours before I found an ftp site that had it. It had a 1:1 ratio for ul/dl, so I spent another half hour uploading one of my mp3s to get download credit so I could get the ONE song I wanted to hear.
Total time: ~5 hours
The thing is, if I had been able to go to mp3.com or emusic.com and buy the song for $.99US I would have done it, just to save myself the time and trouble.
Actually, he gave a damn good reason. MacOS as an operating system was a steaming pile of poo. Preemptive multitasking? Memory protection? Hello???
He never said he had a problem with the GUI or anything. It seems to me that a lot of Mac enthusiasts believe the GUI is the OS (and Apple isn't really helping that notion).
MacOS X fixes the problems that JohnC was specifically complaining about, and therefore decided to support it.
I'm definitely not a physicist, but say you had a really rigid pole, about 1 light year long. Seems like you could send instantaneous signals by manipulating the pole, maybe pushing a button on the other end. Nothing actually moves faster than the speed of light, except the signal. Is that similar to what is going on here?
They've been doing this for years... ...ok, so it's not quite 1 click-- you have to log in every time and enter your max bid, but that's it. What exactly is new about Amazon's deal? That they give you a cookie so you don't have to log in??? (and neither does anyone else who is using your computer;)
C'mon, this article is actually pretty good. ZD isn't bashing Linux, they are basically summarizing the hacking contest...saying what they did right, and what they did wrong. Notice in the "PCWeek Labs recommends" section they didn't say, "Don't use Linux. It's insecure." They give helpful recommendations to keep any system secure. Install all security patches, DUH!
They note that they didn't apply the patches RedHat had. They are admitting that they made a mistake here. They're saying, basically, "Don't DO that!"
They note that there is no central repository for verified Linux patches. Well, yeah...there isn't. There is one for Redhat's distribution...which of course is what they were using. Apparently they didn't know about the site. They do now, though, and are applying the patches to retest.
The point of the article can be summarized in the first sentance: "Security is hard." Not "Linux is Bad, NT is Good."
The only thing I can find wrong with the article is that they don't describe in enough detail what they did to the NT system (aside from disabling services)
Slashdot Mirror
Dunno, iTunes on Windows (at least on my box) is the only player I've seen that does skip mp3s. Uses way too much cpu, too.
Both ways!? Show me an ISP who is willing, let alone capable of policing P2P, spammer, and/or hackers on a per user basis, aside from complaints about individuals. Let me give you a small example...a local ISP where I live just bought up another local ISP for about 9000 customers. I live in a small town! Many universities have more users...don't shift the resposibility to the access provider.
That's right, sounds about like the internet used to work...back when there were less than 100 people here...
Sounds reasonable. Keep logs, But exactly how does one restrict "anonymous" access from the internet? You can log the ip(s) someone is connecting from, you can get an email address, but how does that help you track down someone who doesn't want to be found?
You are guilty of using virtually the same analogy; namely that everyone is guilty until proven innocent and that you can personally check everybody at your party (ie. network)
I'm assuming you would also have your ISP liable for their customers' actions and limit them as in the above cases? I can see the liability and limitations in the case of employers and parents, but in the case of parties, which seems most appropriate in the case of ISPs...it seems a little different. For example, let's say you are throwing a party where alcohol is served...a person shows up at the party who is a friend of someone who was invited, or maybe someone who just crashed the party...who really knows or cares, since you have 10,000 people at your little party? Anyway, you card the guy and make sure he's legal...it's all good so far...he proceeds to make an ass of himself at the party and splits, regardless of how drunk he is, or how many people tried to stop him from driving...he accidentally kills 10 people in an accident on the way home. Are you liable for serving him alcohol? What if it was at a bar? Or a concert? I've always thought those laws that assign liability to a bar for serving alcohol to an intoxicated person are stupid. Almost everyone that a bar serves alcohol to is already intoxicated! OK then, what about a law that limits bars to serving no more than one alcoholic drink to a customer per hour? Well, what's to keep a customer from going to a different friggin bar every 15 minutes?
I agree... But I don't know if you meant to type the "don't" in your above sentence...maybe your reality failed to be distorted for a second there...
And it seems Morris's law of increase and doubling works long after he's been dead!
RTFA...or, to save you the trouble, from the fifth page of the article:
The third big challenge has been the most daunting for materials scientists: To form microchip circuits, positive and negative conductors are needed. Diamond is an inherent insulator - it doesn't conduct electricity. But both Gemesis and Apollo have been able to inject boron into the lattice, which creates a positive charge. Until now, though, no one had been able to manufacture a negatively charged, or n-type, diamond with sufficient conductivity. When I visit Butler in Washington, he can barely contain his glee. "There's been a major breakthrough," he tells me. In June, together with scientists from Israel and France, he announced a novel way of inverting boron's natural conductivity to form a boron-doped n-type diamond. "We now have a p-n junction," Butler says. "Which means that we have a diamond semiconductor that really works. I can now see an Intel diamond Pentium chip on the horizon."
It happened to a friend of mine a couple months ago. His machine was hosed so he decided to reinstall Windows. He didn't get around to installing the various security updates right away, though...by the next day he noticed all his bandwidth being used up and he had 5 or 6 new divx movies being hosted on his machine in a hidden directory.
They were all in French, though...
The scary part is how quickly he was hacked. It had to have been within an hour or two of his fresh install.
Ok, so now we've got a 64-bit platform, which is arugably more than the average user needs. But why does the altivec still only support instructions for 32-bit floats?
I read before that they were trying to go after the scientific computing comminuty with the new G5s, so it doesn't make much sense to me. Our company borrowed a dual 1GHz G4 from Apple last year in order to do some high performance benchmarks (weather forecasting simulations) but we decided that they really weren't worth the price difference vs AMD or Intel platforms when using double precision floats (ie: G4s aren't much faster than Intel/AMD without SIMD)
All of the SIMD instruction sets that I know of (SSE2,3Dnow and Altivec) can only parallelize single precision FP operations. This is fine for Photoshop and 3D game optimization, but we need double precision SIMD for high accuracy simulations.
And before anyone says "Beowulf"...yeah, I know, but wouldn't it be nice if each node was twice as fast? I'm not a chip designer, obviously, but it only makes sense to update the SIMD component to match the processor's native data sizes...it doesn't support 64 bit ints for parallelization, either.
I've seen a lot of ideas thrown out in this discussion (whitelists, blacklists, sender pays, etc) but I have yet to see one which would solve our current spam problem.
You see, a few days ago, someone started sending out porno spam with randomized return addresses from our company's domain. We first found out about this when we started reciving angry email from recipients of the spam, then looked in the mail log and saw an assload of bounces hitting our mailserver.
Well, we got someone to finally send us one of the spam messages with headers and saw that they were originating from an IP which was registered to a provider in Beijing (but announcing that it was the mailserver for [mycompany].com). We fired off an email to the anti-spam address that they had posted. We never got a reply from the Chinese provider, but we did notice the number of bounces in the mail log trickling down after a day or so. We were getting up to 5 per second, now we were getting 1 every 20 minutes.
But they were still sending. We got a few more headers forwarded to us (thank goodness some people research a little before they fire off an angry letter and delete the spam permanently). the emails were almost exactly the same, only the originating IP had changed to a provider in Rio de Janeiro. We sent an email to their abuse address, but the next headers we recieved pointed to a Swedish ISP...
And this is still going on. We'd love to sue these guys...what they are doing is clearly illegal. Hell, I'd love to kick their asses, personally. But it seems all we can do is complain to an isp that they are using and hopefully cut them off for a while before they continue with a new IP. We can't get any info from the ISPs they are using...they won't even respond to let us know they care, much less give out contact info for the offenders.
I really don't see any way of bringing this to a stop, once it starts. Do we have to change our company's name just because of some anonymous assholes?
This page is almost impossible to read in Mozilla... all these accented characters are being displayed on my system as tabs??? or something...
It looks fine in IE...whatsa matta?
If you have publicly accessable ports on your computer, I would say that you HAVE given them permission.
Really it sounds like they're doing the same thing that web crawlers do...or a p2p client for that matter. They just takes what they find and run it through a database to see if you're infringing on someone's copyright.
Sheesh.
Why do software companies do this? Do they think it will get people hooked on their product? I don't know....
I tried Gator out a few year ago (before their stealth-install tactics) because it sounded like an interesting plug-in, but it turned out to be a real pain in the ass, popping up a window every time you opened a page with a form.
Microsoft added auto-complete to forms in IE a short time after that, and well, it works just about like gator *should* have. I can either scroll down and pick a cached answer or I can ignore the thing and just type...but no pup-up dialogs, sheesh!
It kid of reminds me of those department stores that spray perfume in your face without asking...
The thing is, we already have mp3! It's an open standard and it's not going to go away. Anybody who wants to can encode a (non-copy protected) mp3 and share it with whomever they want. So why would anybody ever use one of the new audio formats? Maybe if it was significantly better (better compression ratio AND higher quality), but I think Napster has already proved that mp3s are "good enough."
Record companies need to realize this and actively support the distribution of mp3s. For example, the other night I had a song stuck in my head that I just had to listen to. I searched Napster and the web for over 4 hours before I found an ftp site that had it. It had a 1:1 ratio for ul/dl, so I spent another half hour uploading one of my mp3s to get download credit so I could get the ONE song I wanted to hear.
Total time: ~5 hours
The thing is, if I had been able to go to mp3.com or emusic.com and buy the song for $.99US I would have done it, just to save myself the time and trouble.
He never said he had a problem with the GUI or anything. It seems to me that a lot of Mac enthusiasts believe the GUI is the OS (and Apple isn't really helping that notion).
MacOS X fixes the problems that JohnC was specifically complaining about, and therefore decided to support it.
-P
ATI Developer Registration
-partap
Jeez!
-partap
C'mon, this article is actually pretty good. ZD isn't bashing Linux, they are basically summarizing the hacking contest...saying what they did right, and what they did wrong. Notice in the "PCWeek Labs recommends" section they didn't say, "Don't use Linux. It's insecure." They give helpful recommendations to keep any system secure. Install all security patches, DUH!
They note that they didn't apply the patches RedHat had. They are admitting that they made a mistake here. They're saying, basically, "Don't DO that!"
They note that there is no central repository for verified Linux patches. Well, yeah...there isn't. There is one for Redhat's distribution...which of course is what they were using. Apparently they didn't know about the site. They do now, though, and are applying the patches to retest.
The point of the article can be summarized in the first sentance: "Security is hard." Not "Linux is Bad, NT is Good."
The only thing I can find wrong with the article is that they don't describe in enough detail what they did to the NT system (aside from disabling services)
-partap