1) Build a web site with a fine-print ToS that prohibits visiting from any OS but <pick your favorite alternative OS, like, I don't know, Haiku perhaps>.
2) Paste links to your site all over the web.
3) Search your web server logs for evidence of connections from other operating systems, in violation of your ToS.
4) ???
5) Profit!!!
Unfortunately, the site is/.'ed so there may be some other relevant detail I am missing since I can't RTFA. Assuming that I'm not missing something, however...:
IANAL and so on, but "in criminal law, fraud is the crime or offense of deliberately deceiving another in order to damage them â" usually, to obtain property or services unjustly." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud. Assuming this is a valid definition of fraud (and Wikipedia does state that the specific legal definition of fraud varies in different jurisdictions, so there *is* a little wiggle room here), then common sense would dictate that for Ms. Drew to be guilty of fraud, she would have to have been ineligible for a MySpace account had she used her real name/information but was able to get an account by falsifying this information. Otherwise, she neither damaged MySpace nor unjustly obtained services from them.
...the provider expects valid information to be entered.
And *I* expect that the provider will safeguard any information that I provide to them, will not share with marketers without my explicit permission, and won't turn records over to the Feds without a court order. However, we know that doesn't happen, so I frequently omit or flat out make up information that providers want.
What, because there is finally a consequence to providing false information just to sign-up to a site you're getting pissy?
Yes. When I can *trust* providers with my personal information, I will share it with them. Until then, if they ask for more information than I want to share, they get bad data.
Now if they only start to go after all the spammers with yahoo/google/hotmail account we'll have some progress.
Okay, yeah. I'm with you here. Although it's typically not yahoo/google/hotmail accounts that I have problems with.
NOD32 absolutely *rocks* -- I use it on some servers here at work, and on all of my wife's home and business PCs -- but I have had problems downloading updates from time to time. While the primary cause of this problem is poor Internet connectivity, I don't particularly like the way the web client that Eset built into NOD32 works when it sees packet loss (it gives up).
Please excuse me for following up -- I don't want to sound argumentative, but I am curious.
Having worked at a few different ISPs, I can say that at least in my experience, ISPs *do* log things, but not nearly as much as most people assume. Just about all we logged was our Radius records -- who is using what IP address and at what time -- and our web/mail server logs. The Radius logs allowed us to enforce our acceptable use policies (i.e., don't spam others, don't try to crack other peoples' networks, if you P2P and we get a complaint, we'll send you a cease and desist notice just to cover our backsides, etc.). The logs on the web and mail servers were to allow us to complain to other ISPs if their users weren't playing nicely and it allowed us to troubleshoot problems, for example, if you weren't receiving your e-mail, we could look at the logs and see if it was even getting to our servers.
I know a lot of people are paranoid about their ISPs tracking where they go and what they access on the web, but the truth is that most ISPs don't have the resources to log packet-by-packet data. There's just too much traffic to try to monitor where your users are going -- and the ISPs I have worked for are pretty small (small customer base) compared to the likes of Comcast, Road Runner, AOL, AT&T, etc.
In other words, if you want to avoid having your data logged, the best way to do it is to run your own servers. Then the only person who has the logs is you.
Are static IP addresses (or dynamic DNS) and the Apache web server unavailable in Korea? You're posting on/., so I assume you have the technical skill to set up your own domain -- it's really not that hard to do.
Like you mentioned, I have photos (mostly) and videos (a few) of my family so that extended family across the country can see them. However, I am running them on my own web server rather than on YouTube or a hosting provider's server. There are no links to the pages I want to keep private and I've restricted them with.htaccess files so only the people I give a username and password to can access the pages.
If you've got data you want to post, but don't want to be accessible to the world, this is the way I would (well, "did" actually) do it.
Yeah, I caught that. It doesn't matter though -- high bandwidth == lots of packets, all other things being equal. If the router has to inspect each packet coming through the interfaces due to QoS or ACL configurations, then more packets == more processing overhead. While you might not notice the extra latency caused by inspecting each packet coming in or out of the router when browsing the web or running P2P applications, you absolutely will notice the latency on a VoIP call, since VoIP is highly sensitive to latency and jitter.
In other words, I stand by my post above -- it could be lack of bandwidth, but it could also be a lack of processor horsepower, especially in a small consumer-grade router like a Linksys.
It could also be the processor on the router. If you are using very many firewall rules, etc. on the router, you could be maxing out the processor.
I used to have a Cisco 801 router that was just fine for HTTP, SMTP, POP3, etc., even with publicly accessible servers on the inside network. However, the minute I added an Asterisk server inside my network, I started seeing performance problems (testing showed about 2-3 seconds latency through the router on an IAX call). In a nutshell, the 801 didn't have the horsepower to ACL my servers and internal network *and* send VoIP packets through. I replaced the 801 with an old NexLan router, and it worked just fine. Then I replaced the NexLan with an ImageStream Transport (http://www.imagestream.com), ACL'd the heck out of my network, set up NAT/PAT, added QoS, started an SSH daemon, etc., and it doesn't even break a sweat.
Could you configure an old PC (200MHz would be plenty) with Linux and iptables to replace your Linksys, just for testing?
Call up ImageStream (http://www.imagestream.com) and check out a Transport router. They are essentially just a small PC running Linux. I believe they go for about $800, but they are rock solid and extremely beefy.
Re:The explanation is obvious
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 1
Cool...Next time I travel to some place in the lower 48 states, I'll take a train instead of Alaska Airlines!
Oh, wait...
Re:Back in the day...
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Hmmm...Behind door one, we have "starve and be homeless with your (extended, I presume) family", door two is "have a job but never see your extended family" and hiding behind door three, we have "have a job, and periodically suffer through airline travel to spend time with your loved ones." Which one of these choices seems least irrational to you?
I get your point, but to say that cduffy's choice is irrational is, well, irrational. I'm not in his shoes, so I don't know why it was necessary for him to live/work where he does, but there must be a reason, or he wouldn't be doing it.
True, but here's the situation I am in:
I have worked in IT for ten years. At my previous employer, where I got my break in IT, I found that working as a sys admin in a fairly large company was becoming increasingly unrewarding due to mismanagement and being pigeon-holed into a subset of the tasks we had all shared earlier. I left for a better position in a smaller company where I once again had the opportunity to learn a lot of new skills and could break out of the rut that I had been in at the previous job. Now the company I work for has been bought out by another large company, and it's looking like they are trying to figure out which pigeon-hole the other IT guys and I fit into within their organization. The work load has dropped to nil, and, well, I'm bored again (thus, posting on/.).
At this point in my life, I am seriously considering going back to my first love -- flight instructing. I've taken a part-time job as an instructor, and I've decided that if things don't work out in the new parent company (i.e., if they decide those of us from the smaller company are no longer needed), I probably won't search for a new job in IT. I'll probably flight instruct full time and maybe take a part time job teaching C.S. at the local college. Throw in a little part time IT consulting, and I'll think I'll probably still be financially secure, but a lot happier than I would be in an environment like my first IT position.
You can be happy and financially secure; just think a little outside the box. In today's economy, it's probably a better idea to work a couple of part time gigs than put all of your eggs in the single basket of one job where you could be outsourced/laid off at any time.
considering that Americans are so much taller on average than Japanese it makes sense that they would be proportionally larger in waist size.
Maybe, but I maintain that Americans *are* getting a little...ummm...well-rounded. Consider for a moment that I am right at six feet tall -- somewhat taller than the average Japanese, which from my experience living there as a kid, is about 5' 7" or so. My waist size, on the other hand is still less than the average Japanese person's waist size, even though I am taller than the average Japanese man.
Okay, I understand bell curves, and I understand that maybe I'm just lucky to be on the "below average" side of the curve, so let's talk proportions instead. Given that my observations in Japan are accurate, the ratio of height to waist size for the average Japanese person is 67 / 33.5 or 2.0. For the average American, assuming an average height of 72 inches, the ratio of height to waist size is 1.85. Therefore, even when accounting for the greater average height of an American man, we are *still* more obese than the average Japanese.
Furthermore, when the summaries of successive studies contradict each other people tend to lose faith (?) in studies at all and drift back to traditions, etc.
That actually makes some sense, if you think about it -- hear me out, or it might sound like I'm saying something I'm not really saying. Most people are not scientists, have not studied statistics, and aren't terribly good at critical thinking. So what is Joe Sixpack going to do when one study contradicts another study, but he doesn't have the background to determine what was fundamentally different between these studies? He doesn't understand how the sampling in Study A skewed the results the way BigCompany, who funded the study, wanted the results to turn out. So he loses faith in all studies, as you stated above. If you don't trust the scientists any more, but you still need a solution, what do you do? "Well," Joe Sixpack reasons, "Grandma's never lied to me; what does she do?" Voila -- you have fallen back on tradition. And don't forget, the placebo effect can be very powerful. Whether or not there is any scientific validity to a "remedy," believing that it can make you better can sometimes make you feel better in a kind of reverse psychosomatic effect.
Shouldn't time an [sic] effort be spent on finding the guys who modify the sources, and make a profit...
Okay, IANAL so maybe I am missing something, but I fail to see what in the GPL prohibits this. As I understand the GPL, you can charge for GPL'd products (RedHat does, right?), you just have to provide the source code.
Now maybe if Markus has written a halfway compelling email, he would have received a more informative response. But when you send a jumble of words that fails to reach the 6th grade reading level to someone who has other priorities, it shouldn't come as a surprise that you get blown off.
Perhaps he should have written it in flawless German, then?
Yes, actually that is why Supermicro is being taken to court. It failed -- as the GPL requires -- to extend that freedom from domination and control to its customers. However, Supermicro itself was given freedom from domination and control of the original developer in that the original author of the code could not dictate what changes Supermicro made to the GPL'd code.
Where you are (somewhat) correct is that the GPL does subject developers to the requirement to redistribute code, which is a form of domination and control by the original author over anyone choosing to redistribute original or modified object code under the GPL. The developer does have to give up a portion of his rights -- the right to hoard the source code. But because the developers rights are restricted slightly, the users' rights are enhanced -- you are not bound to the original developer because you can fix problems in the code and redistribute them if you so choose. The user does not necessarily have those rights under the BSD license, and therefore the user is subject to the control and domination of the developer under the BSD license.
With the BSD license, the developer is free to do whatever he wants with the code: sell it, distribute it, keep it for himself, etc. With the GPL license, the user is free to do whatever he wants with the code: modify it for herself, modify it and redistribute it, sell the original or modified code (a la RedHat, among others), just use it as is without ever modifying or redistributing it, etc.
Take your pick -- which group do you want to be more free? The BSD license *restricts* the rights of users, because if the developer doesn't want to provide source code, the developer doesn't have to. If the code sucks and the developer doesn't want to provide the source, the user is hosed. On the other hand, the GPL restricts the rights of developers because you *must* redistribute the original and modified source code if you want to provide a product using GPL'd software.
So given that there are two camps -- users and developers -- there has to be a line drawn in the sand somewhere between them. RMS chose to draw the line a little closer to the users; BSD drew it a little closer to the developers. They're both free, but how free they are depends upon which camp you fall in.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm...I see a chance for a scam here:
1) Build a web site with a fine-print ToS that prohibits visiting from any OS but <pick your favorite alternative OS, like, I don't know, Haiku perhaps>.
2) Paste links to your site all over the web.
3) Search your web server logs for evidence of connections from other operating systems, in violation of your ToS.
4) ???
5) Profit!!!
You've never tried to run Windows Update from Firefox have you?
It may not be a violation of their ToS, but it sure won't work...
Unfortunately, the site is
IANAL and so on, but "in criminal law, fraud is the crime or offense of deliberately deceiving another in order to damage them â" usually, to obtain property or services unjustly." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud. Assuming this is a valid definition of fraud (and Wikipedia does state that the specific legal definition of fraud varies in different jurisdictions, so there *is* a little wiggle room here), then common sense would dictate that for Ms. Drew to be guilty of fraud, she would have to have been ineligible for a MySpace account had she used her real name/information but was able to get an account by falsifying this information. Otherwise, she neither damaged MySpace nor unjustly obtained services from them.
...the provider expects valid information to be entered.
And *I* expect that the provider will safeguard any information that I provide to them, will not share with marketers without my explicit permission, and won't turn records over to the Feds without a court order. However, we know that doesn't happen, so I frequently omit or flat out make up information that providers want.
What, because there is finally a consequence to providing false information just to sign-up to a site you're getting pissy?
Yes. When I can *trust* providers with my personal information, I will share it with them. Until then, if they ask for more information than I want to share, they get bad data.
Now if they only start to go after all the spammers with yahoo/google/hotmail account we'll have some progress.
Okay, yeah. I'm with you here. Although it's typically not yahoo/google/hotmail accounts that I have problems with.
Is it just me, or did the above post sound like it was written by a hit man? ;)
NOD32 absolutely *rocks* -- I use it on some servers here at work, and on all of my wife's home and business PCs -- but I have had problems downloading updates from time to time. While the primary cause of this problem is poor Internet connectivity, I don't particularly like the way the web client that Eset built into NOD32 works when it sees packet loss (it gives up).
...making it almost useless in a desktop environment.
As opposed to, say, Norton or McAfee?
Please excuse me for following up -- I don't want to sound argumentative, but I am curious.
Having worked at a few different ISPs, I can say that at least in my experience, ISPs *do* log things, but not nearly as much as most people assume. Just about all we logged was our Radius records -- who is using what IP address and at what time -- and our web/mail server logs. The Radius logs allowed us to enforce our acceptable use policies (i.e., don't spam others, don't try to crack other peoples' networks, if you P2P and we get a complaint, we'll send you a cease and desist notice just to cover our backsides, etc.). The logs on the web and mail servers were to allow us to complain to other ISPs if their users weren't playing nicely and it allowed us to troubleshoot problems, for example, if you weren't receiving your e-mail, we could look at the logs and see if it was even getting to our servers.
I know a lot of people are paranoid about their ISPs tracking where they go and what they access on the web, but the truth is that most ISPs don't have the resources to log packet-by-packet data. There's just too much traffic to try to monitor where your users are going -- and the ISPs I have worked for are pretty small (small customer base) compared to the likes of Comcast, Road Runner, AOL, AT&T, etc.
In other words, if you want to avoid having your data logged, the best way to do it is to run your own servers. Then the only person who has the logs is you.
Are static IP addresses (or dynamic DNS) and the Apache web server unavailable in Korea? You're posting on /., so I assume you have the technical skill to set up your own domain -- it's really not that hard to do.
.htaccess files so only the people I give a username and password to can access the pages.
Like you mentioned, I have photos (mostly) and videos (a few) of my family so that extended family across the country can see them. However, I am running them on my own web server rather than on YouTube or a hosting provider's server. There are no links to the pages I want to keep private and I've restricted them with
If you've got data you want to post, but don't want to be accessible to the world, this is the way I would (well, "did" actually) do it.
Didn't Paris Hilton do something like that once?
For one thing, how many people running OS-X or Linux run a/v software?
Yeah, I caught that. It doesn't matter though -- high bandwidth == lots of packets, all other things being equal. If the router has to inspect each packet coming through the interfaces due to QoS or ACL configurations, then more packets == more processing overhead. While you might not notice the extra latency caused by inspecting each packet coming in or out of the router when browsing the web or running P2P applications, you absolutely will notice the latency on a VoIP call, since VoIP is highly sensitive to latency and jitter.
In other words, I stand by my post above -- it could be lack of bandwidth, but it could also be a lack of processor horsepower, especially in a small consumer-grade router like a Linksys.
It could also be the processor on the router. If you are using very many firewall rules, etc. on the router, you could be maxing out the processor.
I used to have a Cisco 801 router that was just fine for HTTP, SMTP, POP3, etc., even with publicly accessible servers on the inside network. However, the minute I added an Asterisk server inside my network, I started seeing performance problems (testing showed about 2-3 seconds latency through the router on an IAX call). In a nutshell, the 801 didn't have the horsepower to ACL my servers and internal network *and* send VoIP packets through. I replaced the 801 with an old NexLan router, and it worked just fine. Then I replaced the NexLan with an ImageStream Transport (http://www.imagestream.com), ACL'd the heck out of my network, set up NAT/PAT, added QoS, started an SSH daemon, etc., and it doesn't even break a sweat.
Could you configure an old PC (200MHz would be plenty) with Linux and iptables to replace your Linksys, just for testing?
Call up ImageStream (http://www.imagestream.com) and check out a Transport router. They are essentially just a small PC running Linux. I believe they go for about $800, but they are rock solid and extremely beefy.
Cool...Next time I travel to some place in the lower 48 states, I'll take a train instead of Alaska Airlines!
Oh, wait...
Hmmm...Behind door one, we have "starve and be homeless with your (extended, I presume) family", door two is "have a job but never see your extended family" and hiding behind door three, we have "have a job, and periodically suffer through airline travel to spend time with your loved ones." Which one of these choices seems least irrational to you?
I get your point, but to say that cduffy's choice is irrational is, well, irrational. I'm not in his shoes, so I don't know why it was necessary for him to live/work where he does, but there must be a reason, or he wouldn't be doing it.
yawn....
True, but here's the situation I am in: /.).
I have worked in IT for ten years. At my previous employer, where I got my break in IT, I found that working as a sys admin in a fairly large company was becoming increasingly unrewarding due to mismanagement and being pigeon-holed into a subset of the tasks we had all shared earlier. I left for a better position in a smaller company where I once again had the opportunity to learn a lot of new skills and could break out of the rut that I had been in at the previous job. Now the company I work for has been bought out by another large company, and it's looking like they are trying to figure out which pigeon-hole the other IT guys and I fit into within their organization. The work load has dropped to nil, and, well, I'm bored again (thus, posting on
At this point in my life, I am seriously considering going back to my first love -- flight instructing. I've taken a part-time job as an instructor, and I've decided that if things don't work out in the new parent company (i.e., if they decide those of us from the smaller company are no longer needed), I probably won't search for a new job in IT. I'll probably flight instruct full time and maybe take a part time job teaching C.S. at the local college. Throw in a little part time IT consulting, and I'll think I'll probably still be financially secure, but a lot happier than I would be in an environment like my first IT position.
You can be happy and financially secure; just think a little outside the box. In today's economy, it's probably a better idea to work a couple of part time gigs than put all of your eggs in the single basket of one job where you could be outsourced/laid off at any time.
Maybe, but I maintain that Americans *are* getting a little...ummm...well-rounded. Consider for a moment that I am right at six feet tall -- somewhat taller than the average Japanese, which from my experience living there as a kid, is about 5' 7" or so. My waist size, on the other hand is still less than the average Japanese person's waist size, even though I am taller than the average Japanese man.
Okay, I understand bell curves, and I understand that maybe I'm just lucky to be on the "below average" side of the curve, so let's talk proportions instead. Given that my observations in Japan are accurate, the ratio of height to waist size for the average Japanese person is 67 / 33.5 or 2.0. For the average American, assuming an average height of 72 inches, the ratio of height to waist size is 1.85. Therefore, even when accounting for the greater average height of an American man, we are *still* more obese than the average Japanese.
In those cases, the benefits of the drug outweigh the nastiness of the drug. Doesn't mean it's any less nasty, however.
That actually makes some sense, if you think about it -- hear me out, or it might sound like I'm saying something I'm not really saying. Most people are not scientists, have not studied statistics, and aren't terribly good at critical thinking. So what is Joe Sixpack going to do when one study contradicts another study, but he doesn't have the background to determine what was fundamentally different between these studies? He doesn't understand how the sampling in Study A skewed the results the way BigCompany, who funded the study, wanted the results to turn out. So he loses faith in all studies, as you stated above. If you don't trust the scientists any more, but you still need a solution, what do you do? "Well," Joe Sixpack reasons, "Grandma's never lied to me; what does she do?" Voila -- you have fallen back on tradition. And don't forget, the placebo effect can be very powerful. Whether or not there is any scientific validity to a "remedy," believing that it can make you better can sometimes make you feel better in a kind of reverse psychosomatic effect.
ROFL: you are criticizing my grammar, then ask if I "have ever make friends with English grammar?"
Okay, IANAL so maybe I am missing something, but I fail to see what in the GPL prohibits this. As I understand the GPL, you can charge for GPL'd products (RedHat does, right?), you just have to provide the source code.
Perhaps he should have written it in flawless German, then?
Yes, actually that is why Supermicro is being taken to court. It failed -- as the GPL requires -- to extend that freedom from domination and control to its customers. However, Supermicro itself was given freedom from domination and control of the original developer in that the original author of the code could not dictate what changes Supermicro made to the GPL'd code.
Where you are (somewhat) correct is that the GPL does subject developers to the requirement to redistribute code, which is a form of domination and control by the original author over anyone choosing to redistribute original or modified object code under the GPL. The developer does have to give up a portion of his rights -- the right to hoard the source code. But because the developers rights are restricted slightly, the users' rights are enhanced -- you are not bound to the original developer because you can fix problems in the code and redistribute them if you so choose. The user does not necessarily have those rights under the BSD license, and therefore the user is subject to the control and domination of the developer under the BSD license.
It's a matter of perspective:
BSD --> Freedom for developers.
GPL --> Freedom for users
With the BSD license, the developer is free to do whatever he wants with the code: sell it, distribute it, keep it for himself, etc. With the GPL license, the user is free to do whatever he wants with the code: modify it for herself, modify it and redistribute it, sell the original or modified code (a la RedHat, among others), just use it as is without ever modifying or redistributing it, etc.
Take your pick -- which group do you want to be more free? The BSD license *restricts* the rights of users, because if the developer doesn't want to provide source code, the developer doesn't have to. If the code sucks and the developer doesn't want to provide the source, the user is hosed. On the other hand, the GPL restricts the rights of developers because you *must* redistribute the original and modified source code if you want to provide a product using GPL'd software.
So given that there are two camps -- users and developers -- there has to be a line drawn in the sand somewhere between them. RMS chose to draw the line a little closer to the users; BSD drew it a little closer to the developers. They're both free, but how free they are depends upon which camp you fall in.