On international sites,.de domains function primarily as a tangible target for the censors we have here. The wikipedia.de domain has been forced on several occasions to remove its link to de.wikipedia.org. Keeps them busy, I guess.
I'd be more worried if they started raiding the homes of the domain owners--- oh, wait.:P
I used Azureus for years back when it was still called Azureus and a torrent client rather than some kind of crappy media portal. It was very sleek, really fast on my old laptop that slows down if Firefox and Thunderbird are running simultaneously, and shiny.
When it got renamed and got this stupid front-end page, I put up with having to manually switch to the advanced view for a while, and then tossed it out. Even in classic mode, the program spent at least five minutes loading its GUI. The original Azureus engine is released under the GPL. Someone should have forked it as soon as Vuze Inc. started this crap. Instead, I am now using Deluge on Windows and Transmission on Ubuntu.
Place Goatse on the front page. After everyone's eyes are bleeding, the only remaining visitors will then be robots. Behold, you have isolated the set of spambots from the set of humans.
Inverting the set to get the humans instead of the bots is left as a trivial exercise to the reader.
It is preferred that the client not support outside protocols such as AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc.; if it does, I will have to promulgate and enforce yet one more policy that my techs not connect to them.
Honestly? Just block outgoing connections to oscar.aol.com and the other IM services. If you want to be really paranoid, you can even block outgoing XMPP to make sure that people will only connect with the internal server.
However, as has been said, XMPP is the only reasonable way to go.
If you want to avoid paying for licenses, you have the choice between XMPP, IRC, Bonjour (Apple).
Bonjour is server-less and ad-hoc, which is great if you don't have the infrastructure in place for a central server. At an office building you do, so I think you get a worthless feature at not inconsiderable inconvenience. Bonjour is free as in beer (but I'm not sure whether that extends to business use, so check), but not FOSS.
IRC excels at providing an open chat-room, but one-on-one conversations are less well supported. There's no persistent contact handle, no good presence announcement and even the identity check has to be run as a separate service (NickServ).
XMPP allows you to sign up everyone with their own internal account (employee@xmpp.company.com), and if you need to you can tell the xmpp.company.com server not to forward any connections from or to outside servers.
All conversation over the server can be logged. You may want to put a policy in place to forbid direct (peer-to-peer) connection as that is harder to log, or end-to-end encryption via OTR messaging.
For a client, I'd recommend Pidgin (which you can recompile without the AOL/MSN/Yahoo libraries, or just leave it in and block the servers), though Psi (XMPP only) isn't half bad either.
If a criminal accused his victim of a crime, you sympathize with the victim more than you would normally with either a victim of false accusation or a victim of the crime. The audacity of it adds up.
(Also, these people are profiting off the copied art, claiming it as their own, and slandering the creator - it's not like some personal homepage being slapped for using clip art, or a movie excerpt being taken off Youtube. Plagiarism is a lot, lot worse than copyright violation.)
In other news, is anyone else surprised that a built-in UPS is so slow to catch on for the desktop when notebooks have had it by definition for years? Sure, powerful batteries are expensive, but you'll wish you had one when a power blackout destroys half a day's work. It's one reason why I hesitate to get a desktop PC.
1.) Newspaper asks Google to pay for clips. 2.) Google drops newspaper from news index. 3.) Newspaper calculates the difference this makes in their revenue. 5.) Newspaper offers to pay Google rather a lot in order to be re-indexed.
In the days of the internet, we're seeing a lot of ridiculous paradoxes between legal jurisdictions that are equivalent to "unstoppable force meeting unbreakable object".
But this game of "choose the laws you want to apply" can be played by two.
You want to sue me under UK libel law? I'll tell Wikileaks under Swedish press law. Good luck finding me.
Exactly. Corporations may place their profit above any ethical rules, but they will be damned if they place long-term profit over short-term profit.
Companies are managed by people who are within a decade of retirement. By definition, any decision that would require executives to see beyond the next ten years will never be made.
Imagine Blockbuster or Amazon or iTunes saying: "Take whatever you want. Movies, music, ANYTHING. $20/month." They'd make a fortune. Hell, if you threw games in there, I'd personally pay like $100/month.
There are subscription services that do exactly that. The problem is that as soon as you cancel your subscription fee, you lose the content.
It will take a lot of convincing to make content companies bill a flat rate for downloading, not for usage.
Being a commercial entity, my ISP would sell me out without blinking. I don't know how screwy service providers are in the US (though I've heard tales of Verizon), but around here they're screwy enough on their own even without law enforcement or the content mafia breathing down their necks.
Compared to that, I'd practically trust the Pirate Bay with my life.
First, the government's action can't contravene an individual's subjective expectation of privacy; and second, that expectation of privacy must be one that society in general recognizes as reasonable.
No individual may be spied upon when they can reasonably expect to be in private - but in a society of total surveillance, who can reasonably expect privacy?
The ironic part is that any actual onion-routing network is practically impervious against this kind of attack. An organization would need to own a vast majority or all of the servers in the network in order to sniff traffic - and any onion network operated by only a single organization is by definition suspect.
While PB may not log, what is to stop a government from forcing PB to place their own logging device inline?
The fact that this just isn't going to happen?
1.) They are run from Sweden. Good luck to any government, even the government of Sweden, with fighting Swedish privacy laws.
2.) Public trial. Long before there were even the hint of a possibility this might happen, the entire world would be forewarned several times over.
3.) As events of the past months have shown, TPB is run by the sort of people who will proverbially burn at a stake for their ethics. They would shut down their site long before they would betray their users' trust.
Slashdot Mirror
On international sites, .de domains function primarily as a tangible target for the censors we have here. The wikipedia.de domain has been forced on several occasions to remove its link to de.wikipedia.org. Keeps them busy, I guess.
I'd be more worried if they started raiding the homes of the domain owners--- oh, wait. :P
It's not the Java.
I used Azureus for years back when it was still called Azureus and a torrent client rather than some kind of crappy media portal. It was very sleek, really fast on my old laptop that slows down if Firefox and Thunderbird are running simultaneously, and shiny.
When it got renamed and got this stupid front-end page, I put up with having to manually switch to the advanced view for a while, and then tossed it out. Even in classic mode, the program spent at least five minutes loading its GUI. The original Azureus engine is released under the GPL. Someone should have forked it as soon as Vuze Inc. started this crap. Instead, I am now using Deluge on Windows and Transmission on Ubuntu.
The one person who was going to fix the flaw was killed under mysterious circumstances. COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT!! :P
Place Goatse on the front page. After everyone's eyes are bleeding, the only remaining visitors will then be robots. Behold, you have isolated the set of spambots from the set of humans.
Inverting the set to get the humans instead of the bots is left as a trivial exercise to the reader.
...
Honestly? Just block outgoing connections to oscar.aol.com and the other IM services. If you want to be really paranoid, you can even block outgoing XMPP to make sure that people will only connect with the internal server.
However, as has been said, XMPP is the only reasonable way to go.
If you want to avoid paying for licenses, you have the choice between XMPP, IRC, Bonjour (Apple).
Bonjour is server-less and ad-hoc, which is great if you don't have the infrastructure in place for a central server. At an office building you do, so I think you get a worthless feature at not inconsiderable inconvenience. Bonjour is free as in beer (but I'm not sure whether that extends to business use, so check), but not FOSS.
IRC excels at providing an open chat-room, but one-on-one conversations are less well supported. There's no persistent contact handle, no good presence announcement and even the identity check has to be run as a separate service (NickServ).
XMPP allows you to sign up everyone with their own internal account (employee@xmpp.company.com), and if you need to you can tell the xmpp.company.com server not to forward any connections from or to outside servers.
All conversation over the server can be logged. You may want to put a policy in place to forbid direct (peer-to-peer) connection as that is harder to log, or end-to-end encryption via OTR messaging.
For a client, I'd recommend Pidgin (which you can recompile without the AOL/MSN/Yahoo libraries, or just leave it in and block the servers), though Psi (XMPP only) isn't half bad either.
If a criminal accused his victim of a crime, you sympathize with the victim more than you would normally with either a victim of false accusation or a victim of the crime. The audacity of it adds up.
(Also, these people are profiting off the copied art, claiming it as their own, and slandering the creator - it's not like some personal homepage being slapped for using clip art, or a movie excerpt being taken off Youtube. Plagiarism is a lot, lot worse than copyright violation.)
Nuke the suckers with the powers of law.
Wait, my laptop has one of those too...
In other news, is anyone else surprised that a built-in UPS is so slow to catch on for the desktop when notebooks have had it by definition for years? Sure, powerful batteries are expensive, but you'll wish you had one when a power blackout destroys half a day's work. It's one reason why I hesitate to get a desktop PC.
I notice I skipped 4. This is easy to explain.
4.) should have been "Profit!" except that there is none, as far as the newspaper is concerned.
1.) Newspaper asks Google to pay for clips.
2.) Google drops newspaper from news index.
3.) Newspaper calculates the difference this makes in their revenue.
5.) Newspaper offers to pay Google rather a lot in order to be re-indexed.
Problem solved.
After which, with proper preparation, you would have not just her email address but also access to read its contents. Cyberstalkers, pay attention!
On a related note, it's amazing that a name like "joystick" ever managed to find its way into common use. How did people say it with a straight face?
I get the green card part, but why would you need to prove resistance? Has the revolution started? :P
But I swear I'm not wasting all my time on Slashd--- oh fuck.
In the days of the internet, we're seeing a lot of ridiculous paradoxes between legal jurisdictions that are equivalent to "unstoppable force meeting unbreakable object".
But this game of "choose the laws you want to apply" can be played by two.
You want to sue me under UK libel law? I'll tell Wikileaks under Swedish press law. Good luck finding me.
Odds are the VPN will give you a Swedish IP, seeing as that is where TPB is based.
Exactly. Corporations may place their profit above any ethical rules, but they will be damned if they place long-term profit over short-term profit.
Companies are managed by people who are within a decade of retirement. By definition, any decision that would require executives to see beyond the next ten years will never be made.
There are subscription services that do exactly that. The problem is that as soon as you cancel your subscription fee, you lose the content.
It will take a lot of convincing to make content companies bill a flat rate for downloading, not for usage.
Being a commercial entity, my ISP would sell me out without blinking. I don't know how screwy service providers are in the US (though I've heard tales of Verizon), but around here they're screwy enough on their own even without law enforcement or the content mafia breathing down their necks.
Compared to that, I'd practically trust the Pirate Bay with my life.
If they were fascist, wouldn't they be helping the government spy on people rather than fighting it?
What are you smoking?
No individual may be spied upon when they can reasonably expect to be in private - but in a society of total surveillance, who can reasonably expect privacy?
Catch 22 strikes again! :)
The ironic part is that any actual onion-routing network is practically impervious against this kind of attack. An organization would need to own a vast majority or all of the servers in the network in order to sniff traffic - and any onion network operated by only a single organization is by definition suspect.
The fact that this just isn't going to happen?
1.) They are run from Sweden. Good luck to any government, even the government of Sweden, with fighting Swedish privacy laws.
2.) Public trial. Long before there were even the hint of a possibility this might happen, the entire world would be forewarned several times over.
3.) As events of the past months have shown, TPB is run by the sort of people who will proverbially burn at a stake for their ethics. They would shut down their site long before they would betray their users' trust.
And in that analogy, the RIAA would be like the Catholic church. "If you have nothing to hide, you do not need to use contraception!" :D
In other words, http://xkcd.com/488/ .