In this context I mean direct democracy as in "Town meeting style" as in, the community gets tohgether now and again and votes on the issues. The community never gets together and votes people into offices to make decisions, the people make the decisions directly via a democratic process.
I always find it amusing when someone takes a specific implimentation that happens to be similar to a philosophy that they know about, and take that specific example as proof that the whole theory is worthless.
In actuality, gnutella doesn't paralell any serious anarchist philosophy that I have seen very well at all. Most such systems that I have seen proposed generally call for communities of people that work together for benefit of the community and are run by a direct democracy rather than a representative democracy.
In fact anarchy doesn't advocate a state of chaos or lack of laws as much as a lack of hierarchy. It calls for elimination of the concept of "positions of power" where the laws of the land are decided directly by the people themselves and where no person is forced to live by those rules except as the voluntarily accepted price of living within a given community.
gnutella on the other hand is more of a "free for all". More of an "frontier", which isn't very anarchistic at all, as hierarchy is easily created in the frontier, all it takes is a small gang or some guns. Whoever has the most ability to weild deadly power is the top of the hierarchy.
This isn't windows where you can be sure that everyone is using a GUI, and doing the install on a GUI... how about an OS install?
When I install even a very minimal Debian system I am sure that the software beinbg instatalled is not all licensed from Debian, in fact, only a versy small amount of it is. Some of it is the FSF, some of it is Xfree86, some of it is Berkley, some of it is licensed from other people entirely.
I should have to "click through" how many hundreds of times to get the OS on my box? How about if I want to impliment automated installs? Like say my office mate whpose job it is going to be to setup a research computing cluster... installing software in parallel on a whole cluster of boxen at once?
Secondly, I don't knbow if you read it but neither the GPL nor any other Free Software license that I have seen says much about USE of the software. USE is implied by posession, its Fair Use. You only need these licenses to DISTRIBUTE the software. Thats the whpole reason the GPL exists... to give people terms of a distribution license.
I think thats the major disconnect here, these are not USE licenses (frankly IMNSHO use should be covered under fair use doctrine anyway, making the whole "click through" issue moot) they are distribution licenses.... and not neede dfor use at all...
Its very simple. Legally you have no right to redistribute a copyrighted work by default. So if you don't accept the distribution license (GPL, BSD, whatever it is) then you have no legal right to distribute. So distribution implies agreement with the license.
I was told by a friend of mine that when the cap went into effect his karma was reduced to 50 immediatly, and he was very surprized when I claimed to still have akarma of 115 (it was a while ago). I guess im not as special as I thought? Oh well.
> Sheesh, I miss my Karma:-/ 50 gave you a sense of accomplishment, excellent sounds awful;-)
Heh mine was 112 until the other day. I guess when the cap was instituted my account never had its karma reduced to the cap.
Its funny because I was at 119 when the cap started and then it just never went up again. No matter what it just stayed the same or went down. Slowly over the course of what? the past year and a half? it made it down to 112 (maybe 111?)
Frankly, it was great. My karma couldn't go up...so I just completely stopped careing about it. I was immune to moderation. Even though before the cap I said that I didn't care about karma and gave lip service to the idea that it was meaningless, there was always this odd attachment to it and it felt good to see it go up.
Once the cap was on and it was constrained to only go down, it became completely meaningless of a number. That turned out to be great, because it was a bit freeing. Frankly I like this new system, I think it finnaly will do for everyone what the original cap + high karma did for me.
Frankly, it seems like it might be easietr to just build your own damned caps.
I mean... its a bit painful but its very easy to do, and you can make it into exactly what you want, rather than salvaging and all that work discharging, desoldering etc etc.
I would much rather build a paralell plate cap out of Al foil and low density polyethelene sheet than deal with all those caps and solder.
Plastic is cheap... Al foil is cheap... mineral oil is cheap...
Actually... as I remember MY history class the "creator" wording was not sometrhing Jefferson wanted in the document and only put it there to help it gain acceptance among the other people involved in the document.
The US was founded on the realisation that the Brittish crown couldn't actualy exert real control over its colonies in the americas, and that white land owners could be rallied together under the idea of not paying taxes unless they had some say in the process....er um I mean... it was founded on the ideals of equal liberty and justice for all people (People being a noun which means "white men over 21 who own land")
We had a meeting recently to discuss high level issues about HIPA and how it will effect the lives of sysadmins here. What I have heard sounds like it would be reasonable for biometrics. Basically... HIPA will require that personally identifying health care information be protected, it has to be encrypted such that every feild in the database can be individually encrypted (possibly to prevent someone with DBA access from just dumping the DB and stealing the data) for starters...
then there has to be ACLs for who can access the data... AND all acesses of the data make an audit trail so it can be seen who accessed it. (when princess di came to MGH many years back, a number of employees were slapped by management because they accessed her medical records to satisfy their own personal curiosity - this was before HIPA regulations even! the software recorded who accessed the data)
I think when it comes to personally identifying information these types fo requirements are perfectly reasonable and should be encouraged - never mind restrictions preventing the sale or unauthorized transfer of such information - thats pretty much agiven IMNSHO. (no point in any other restrictions on access if you don't have that now is there?)
I don't use it for work myself, but I still use it all the time at work.
People I work with use various services, and almost never to talk to eachother... but I see it as another way of contacting me when I am online. My cell phone is mine, its not used for work...but I carry it with me to work for when people want to contact me. I see this as basically no different.... it costs the "company" (private university actually) virtually nothing for me to be using it, and they benefit from it.
How? simple...
1) it keeps me sane to have easy access to friends of mine when I need to blow off steam at work and a coworker isn't appropriate (or available) 2) its much less intrusive to the work I do (which is 99% done from my workstation) than picking up the phone if I need to take care of asking someone a question or working some personal stuff out that may need to be done.
What you say does not BELONG to you. It is not property. Once you write it, it exists. You may own the medium it is on, but once it is out in the world it is uncontrollable and no longer owned. You may hold copyright... but a hundred years from now when you are long since dead and copyright is expiring, then what?
We have the works of Galileo, we have letters that Thomas Jefferson wrote to people, why? because they were written. Many years later, long after the fact, these were made public and part of historic record because they survived.
On the net, we have a culture of written information apearing and disapearing. This information is part of our culture, its things that we read and see, when it goes away - for whatever reason - we have lost something.
I have websites from 96 that exist now only in the way back machine. Yea, som eof the stuff I aid back then I don't agree with now, and would rather not have associated with me but, by that same token, I wouldn't want it to be lost forever. If someone read it and what I wrote had enough impact on them that they want to see it again... then I would not even dream of trying to stop them (even if the impact was one of disgust - an impact is an impact) - even if its just someone wanting to see what the web looked like 5 years ago... I think thats valid... I think thats an important record fo our culture.
the only thing I can see a case for really is the removal of personal information that shouldn't have been public in the first place. Beyond that though, I think its good... i mean... its not something that is ever going to be mistaken for a live current site - you have to actually go to the way back machine and ask for it.
All in all this is a good thing and I hope it survives longtime.
Of course I ignored the legality portion of the question since IANAL and thus not qualified to make any such deterination as to what is "legal" or "illegal". I will add that the portion I ignored said specifically "illegal" and not "probiited by the school" which is even harder of a question to answer anyway since every school makes up its own policies, and I was not about to reaearchg the policies of a school I am not about to go to.
Besides... nothing is illegal until you are found guilty by a jury of your peers anyway.
I will take the other side... little of this is good.
Part of being in colledge is NOT having this stuff. What good is it if you come in with it already? Improvising lock picks (if your into that sort of thing, I probably would have been if I stayed in school longer)
Sure you could send her off with a lockpick, a glass bong, a computer with all the latest whizbangs, aq kick ass stereo, a soldering iron etc etc.... but what fun is that? I often lookj back a tthose years and the shit we used to improvise to hget a job done and really apreciate the shit I have accumulated over the years...
I would never go back to clipping wires off the piezo speaker element of a cheap $10 alarm clock and hooking it to my stereo, or smoke my pot out of a cheap ass metal bowl these days (I have a nice alarm clock - evenb tho I quit using it except when I have a morning meeting) and I exclusivly uses glass bowls now... I still am glad I started out where I did.
I say send her off with a toolbox full of simple shit like a hammer and screw drivers, a cheap soldering iron from radio shack, a roll of duct tape and let her have her fun! Remember... McGyver's defining characteristic was that he ALWAYS had to improvise, he NEVER had the "right tool".
And if you actually call the warmed over shit that Dominos makes "pizza" then you have some absolutly amazgingly low standards. Then again, You have actually like exchange so I guess we shouldn't be surprized.
-Steve (who just can't pass up the easy shot sometimes)
Communism? Hmmm that would entail living in communes wouldn't it? I don't think there is any proposal in there that we start living in communes.
Frankly I call it "nice" maybe even "fun". And since when is not getting paid not getting benefit? "Something to do" is often a benefit in and of itself. Never mind actually solving these problems will make life better for others... which doe shave an overall effect on the community at large.
I mean really... when a friend asks you to help them move, do you respond with an hourly rate, or do you just show up ready to haul boxes? I know what I do.
Maybe its a sign that the law is not in line with the will of the people?
The privilidige of copyright is granted by lesser laws. Congress is empowered to enact such things, but, is not required to.
The fact that so many people disregard this law, and most seem to even not believe it is wrong, tells me that the law is out of date, that the law does not carry the mandate of the people.
Ok fine... what was the result beyond network numbers?
I don't know about you, but I would not be happy working for an employer that was watching me like that. In fact, the implicit lack of trust in my ability to manage my usage of the net would have me looking for another job right quick and would sap any motivation I have to work for said employer.
Tell me all you want how its their right and their system. I don't care. It is their system, but I don't like being watched and monitored like that. Personal web surfing at work, while it may take away from time that I maybe should use to do other things, is important to me. It gives me a break from what I am working on, which I need occasionally.
Now all that said...I think you show a lack of understanding of the issues involved in an academic evnironment.
Its not always so simple as adding proxies and what not. The network is there to support education. Its there to expose students to the net and give teachers resources to use to teach students (which includes keeping themselves current with information). You really can't just sit back and say "this has no educational value" because you don't know what someome may be doing with it.
I don't get how file sharing and porn are automatically of no educational value. There is this odd stigma that anything that is primarily recreational or feels good (like sex or just listning to music) is of little to no "real value" and certainly isn't educational, and I dunno about you but, I just don't think thats true.
Whgile thats nice and all... we here have had much more luck using social "backdoors" to fix such problems.
Stuff like putting up router traffic graphs and then using channels that are likely to reach people (for students we used to use a student run web forum that was hosted completely outside our control - until the owner shut it down) and make announcements. Point people at such things. When someone says "The net is slow" say "Its because the bandwith is being used up... see the graphs..."
Have friendly messages sent out informing people of the bandwith usage issue and pointing them at the graphs. Tell them that there have been problems with legitimate uses being slow and that people should try and conserve bandwith during school hours etc etc.
frankly I am with the idea of letting them do what they want and using social pressures and education to solve the problem. Open academic environments are a goodness in my book, and social pressures do work... it just seems that so few are willing to actually try using them.
This brings up a great ppoint...and I think the problem is one of communication between faculty and staff (are those terms used outside of Universities?) Its usually bad at this level (in my experience).
The best way to go (in my opinion) is to start compiling stats... show graphs of what th enet is being used for, and make them public...then show them to everyone...then sit back. When the teachers complain "the net is too slow for my class" point at the graphs and show them how the bandwith is being taken up.
Emphasize that bandwith is a limited resource and people need to learn to share it. Frankly its not really a problem (given that none of us are lawyers, I will ignore the legal angle... which is full of nastiness, loopholes, conditions etc etc) if someone is using all the bandwith, until someon eelse needs some.... file sharing isn't the problem...its irresponsible and uninformed use of bandwith thats the problem.
In fact, this is what we do. Our Noc put up router traffic graphs for all the segments. They point people to them... many of our students know where to find them and do look at them. We also bandwith limit the segmetns now so our real inital issue (segments being saturated) isn't much of an issue...
Heavy handed tactics are just plain bad all around. They foster dislike between people who should be working together. Frankly, when people are made aware of the issues involved, they tend to act much nicer.
Frankly, I think if we spent half the time and energy that is currently spent bitching abou thow bad things are and how dumb people are on giving people the tools to understand and educating them, then we would have a hell of alot less to bitch about.
In short... treating symptoms (p2p network usage) only gets you so far, and garauntees that you will have to fight this same battle again, in a new form.
Thats great. Wonderfull. Stupendous! You have pointed out a type of hypocracy that...well.. that has absolutly nothing to do with the conversation at hand. Good job!
Nowhere in the question is the GPL mentioned. Nowehere in the question is there any talk of pirated software.
The question here is about auditing. Its about searching. Its about a team of people from a hostile organization comming in and gettin gthier grubby hands all over someones equipment. Its about whether this is a reasonable or even legal form of enforcement.
What gives these people the right to do that? Are they just getting away with it because they instill fear, or do they have some real legal backing?
this is the real question at hand. Just because you think I may be doing something that infringes upon your rights does that mean you should be able to infringe upon my rights and inconvinience me to satisfy your questions? How much evidence of such wrongdoing should you need before I can be required to let you dig around for evidence (thus making my life more difficult and giving you access to things that I would never consent to you having access to).
Now lets make this more interesting. University computers may at times have student information. SSNs, Grades, Home phone numbers etc etc. Did you know that some of this information is often protected by law? Even within Universities there is often discussion of how some of this data can be passed around legally to employees, and restrictions on access to the information only as part of ones job (need to know basically).... how do those laws apply to this situation?
Frankly, it may be illegal for the university to consent to such an audit, unless the audit was legally mandated.
Messy... my advice to the person involved... bring all this to the legal department. Universities get sued all the time for various things and thus tend to keep a department of lawyers around. Talk to them say "FERPA" (or FURPA...ive never seen the acronym written, but it comes up in meetings).
Don 't you see... thats what they are trying to avoid.
just think of the horror... I mean, who the hell would buy a Celine Dion CD if they actually knew what it sounded like? The ability to rip this and get iut out on the net is poison to them... it could kill their sales overnight if poeople actually heard it first!
heh no the issue as I see it is not that the warning is there, but that it looks like a CD. General accepted wisdom is that you can put a music CD in your drive and play it... and if it doesn't work big deal. It would be extremely uncommon for a person to expect a machine to crash just because thye put an audio cd in (unless their system is fucked up to begin with... I think ive actually seen that with bad hardware once...)
To me its more like...imagine coca cola put out a 12 oz soda can of gasoline with a little sticker "do not drink" that otherwise was very easy to mistake for Coca Cola Classic because it looks almost the same except for the small sticker.
Its a hazardous product if used incorrectly and it is designed to look exactly like a common item that is not hazardous. It is done intentionally, and a small sticker is added to say "hey this is bad".
Its like the SNL skit mentioned in a previous post "Pet Chow's Rat Poison" (with "Pet Chow" being the brand name and the real product "rat poison" in small letters).
Hmmm fine...and in a cursory look I see companies and people that are dumping crap into the world as having alot more to lose than the "greenies", since it is essentially an argument that they should change how they do things. That means everything from possible minor inconvineiences (which are enough sometimes to make me not do something) to spending billions of dollars to change how factories and machinery work etc.
I also see that you are very quick to use a diminutive term "greenie" to describe anyone on the other side of this debate. Showing that you, yourself, are not above using apeals to frame the debate and attempt to decrease the credibility of your opponents, rather than attacking them on purely logical grounds. This of course does not invalidate any point you make, but does expose your bias.
My personal belief is that the entire global warming issue is a red herring. Yes, the world may be getting warmer. Climates change. We did have an ice age not to long ago. Do we have any evidence that this isn't part of the normal climactic cycle? Lets look at that first, and then look towards causes if it isn't.
That said, I think environmental issues are important, and we definitly need to get a global handle on them and reduce the amount of polluting we do. Regardless of whether there is a global warming problem or not,
If there is anything i have learned its that junk accumulates, and eventually managing it becomes a problem, so its best to reduce the amount of junk now, than have to deal with it all later. Thats true whether its loving hand crafted unix boxen on your network or PCBs in your river bed.
and then make install as yourself to check out what its doing. Tho I imagine that anyone adding stealthy stuff like kernel mods to an install would be smart enough to check the UID before trying to install them
Tho... you can read the code...and there are people who read code, or would notice this sort fo trickery and you can bet that there will be a BUGTRAQ advisory out right quick if such a peice of software got wide distribution.
> How, exactly, does New.net's software mess with the IP stack? > At worst, I understand it to be a simple DNS proxy that filters > between new.net domains and regular domains.
Yup...your right about this... and the search path thing. The mistake you make is to assume that because the method of doing this that you thought of makes sense and works, that new.net did it that way.
Yes, they tell you thats ONE WAY to make it work. However, even the document that you quoted states, thats how to do it "Without the plugin". A Plugin is NOT a registry entry, its a program. Your assumption that this is how the plugi nworks is quite unfounded.
I can imagine a plugin that modifies the IP stack in some way to achieve this same end. It may even do other things too. It sounds to me like this is what they are doing (perhaps the whole point of the plugin is to add new.net to the search path while hiding the fact that its there, and preventing it from being changed)
If it was really as simple as you describe, then there is no need for this "plugin" to exist at all, all they need is a one shot program that changes a registry entry.
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In this context I mean direct democracy as in "Town meeting style" as in, the community gets tohgether now and again and votes on the issues. The community never gets together and votes people into offices to make decisions, the people make the decisions directly via a democratic process.
-Steve
I always find it amusing when someone takes a specific implimentation that happens to be similar to a philosophy that they know about, and take that specific example as proof that the whole theory is worthless.
In actuality, gnutella doesn't paralell any serious anarchist philosophy that I have seen very well at all. Most such systems that I have seen proposed generally call for communities of people that work together for benefit of the community and are run by a direct democracy rather than a representative democracy.
In fact anarchy doesn't advocate a state of chaos or lack of laws as much as a lack of hierarchy. It calls for elimination of the concept of "positions of power" where the laws of the land are decided directly by the people themselves and where no person is forced to live by those rules except as the voluntarily accepted price of living within a given community.
gnutella on the other hand is more of a "free for all". More of an "frontier", which isn't very anarchistic at all, as hierarchy is easily created in the frontier, all it takes is a small gang or some guns. Whoever has the most ability to weild deadly power is the top of the hierarchy.
-Steve
And how would you propose to impliment it?
This isn't windows where you can be sure that everyone is using a GUI, and
doing the install on a GUI... how about an OS install?
When I install even a very minimal Debian system I am sure that the software beinbg instatalled is not all licensed from Debian, in fact, only a versy small amount of it is. Some of it is the FSF, some of it is Xfree86, some of it is Berkley, some of it is licensed from other people entirely.
I should have to "click through" how many hundreds of times to get the OS on my box? How about if I want to impliment automated installs? Like say my office mate whpose job it is going to be to setup a research computing cluster... installing software in parallel on a whole cluster of boxen at once?
Secondly, I don't knbow if you read it but neither the GPL nor any other Free Software license that I have seen says much about USE of the software. USE is implied by posession, its Fair Use. You only need these licenses to DISTRIBUTE the software. Thats the whpole reason the GPL exists... to give people terms of a distribution license.
I think thats the major disconnect here, these are not USE licenses (frankly IMNSHO use should be covered under fair use doctrine anyway, making the whole "click through" issue moot) they are distribution licenses.... and not neede dfor use at all...
Its very simple. Legally you have no right to redistribute a copyrighted work by default. So if you don't accept the distribution license (GPL, BSD, whatever it is) then you have no legal right to distribute. So distribution implies agreement with the license.
-Steve
Odd...
I was told by a friend of mine that when the cap went into effect his karma was reduced to 50 immediatly, and he was very surprized when I claimed to still have akarma of 115 (it was a while ago). I guess im not as special as I thought? Oh well.
-Steve
> Sheesh, I miss my Karma :-/ 50 gave you a sense of accomplishment, excellent sounds awful ;-)
Heh mine was 112 until the other day. I guess when the cap was instituted my account never had its karma reduced to the cap.
Its funny because I was at 119 when the cap started and then it just never went up again. No matter what it just stayed the same or went down. Slowly over the course of what? the past year and a half? it made it down to 112 (maybe 111?)
Frankly, it was great. My karma couldn't go up...so I just completely stopped careing about it. I was immune to moderation. Even though before the cap I said that I didn't care about karma and gave lip service to the idea that it was meaningless, there was always this odd attachment to it and it felt good to see it go up.
Once the cap was on and it was constrained to only go down, it became completely meaningless of a number. That turned out to be great, because it was a bit freeing. Frankly I like this new system, I think it finnaly will do for everyone what the original cap + high karma did for me.
-Steve
Frankly, it seems like it might be easietr to just build your own damned caps.
I mean... its a bit painful but its very easy to do, and you can make it into exactly what you want, rather than salvaging and all that work discharging, desoldering etc etc.
I would much rather build a paralell plate cap out of Al foil and low density polyethelene sheet than deal with all those caps and solder.
Plastic is cheap... Al foil is cheap... mineral oil is cheap...
-Steve
Actually... as I remember MY history class the "creator" wording was not sometrhing Jefferson wanted in the document and only put it there to help it gain acceptance among the other people involved in the document.
-Steve
> Hmmm and what was the U.S.A founded on?
The US was founded on the realisation that the Brittish crown couldn't actualy exert real control over its colonies in the americas, and that white land owners could be rallied together under the idea of not paying taxes unless they had some say in the process....er um I mean... it was founded on the ideals of equal liberty and justice for all people (People being a noun which means "white men over 21 who own land")
but...just maybe I am a bit cynical?
-Steve
We had a meeting recently to discuss high level issues about HIPA and how it will effect the lives of sysadmins here. What I have heard sounds like it would be reasonable for biometrics. Basically... HIPA will require that personally identifying health care information be protected, it has to be encrypted such that every feild in the database can be individually encrypted (possibly to prevent someone with DBA access from just dumping the DB and stealing the data) for starters...
then there has to be ACLs for who can access the data... AND all acesses of the data make an audit trail so it can be seen who accessed it.
(when princess di came to MGH many years back, a number of employees were slapped by management because they accessed her medical records to satisfy their own personal curiosity - this was before HIPA regulations even! the software recorded who accessed the data)
I think when it comes to personally identifying information these types fo requirements are perfectly reasonable and should be encouraged - never mind restrictions preventing the sale or unauthorized transfer of such information - thats pretty much agiven IMNSHO. (no point in any other restrictions on access if you don't have that now is there?)
-Steve
I don't use it for work myself, but I still use it all the time at work.
People I work with use various services, and almost never to talk to eachother... but I see it as another way of contacting me when I am online. My cell phone is mine, its not used for work...but I carry it with me to work for when people want to contact me. I see this as basically no different.... it costs the "company" (private university actually) virtually nothing for me to be using it, and they benefit from it.
How? simple...
1) it keeps me sane to have easy access to friends of mine when I need to blow off steam at work and a coworker isn't appropriate (or available)
2) its much less intrusive to the work I do (which is 99% done from my workstation) than picking up the phone if I need to take care of asking someone a question or working some personal stuff out that may need to be done.
-Steve
The otherquestion is one of historical record.
What you say does not BELONG to you. It is not property. Once you write it, it exists. You may own the medium it is on, but once it is out in the world it is uncontrollable and no longer owned. You may hold copyright... but a hundred years from now when you are long since dead and copyright is expiring, then what?
We have the works of Galileo, we have letters that Thomas Jefferson wrote to people, why? because they were written. Many years later, long after the fact, these were made public and part of historic record because they survived.
On the net, we have a culture of written information apearing and disapearing. This information is part of our culture, its things that we read and see, when it goes away - for whatever reason - we have lost something.
I have websites from 96 that exist now only in the way back machine. Yea, som eof the stuff I aid back then I don't agree with now, and would rather not have associated with me but, by that same token, I wouldn't want it to be lost forever. If someone read it and what I wrote had enough impact on them that they want to see it again... then I would not even dream of trying to stop them (even if the impact was one of disgust - an impact is an impact) - even if its just someone wanting to see what the web looked like 5 years ago... I think thats valid... I think thats an important record fo our culture.
the only thing I can see a case for really is the removal of personal information that shouldn't have been public in the first place. Beyond that though, I think its good... i mean... its not something that is ever going to be mistaken for a live current site - you have to actually go to the way back machine and ask for it.
All in all this is a good thing and I hope it survives longtime.
-Steve
Of course I ignored the legality portion of the question since IANAL and thus not qualified to make any such deterination as to what is "legal" or "illegal". I will add that the portion I ignored said specifically "illegal" and not "probiited by the school" which is even harder of a question to answer anyway since every school makes up its own policies, and I was not about to reaearchg the policies of a school I am not about to go to.
Besides... nothing is illegal until you are found guilty by a jury of your peers anyway.
-Steve
I will take the other side... little of this is good.
Part of being in colledge is NOT having this stuff. What good is it if you come in with it already? Improvising lock picks (if your into that sort of thing, I probably would have been if I stayed in school longer)
Sure you could send her off with a lockpick, a glass bong, a computer with all the latest whizbangs, aq kick ass stereo, a soldering iron etc etc.... but what fun is that? I often lookj back a tthose years and the shit we used to improvise to hget a job done and really apreciate the shit I have accumulated over the years...
I would never go back to clipping wires off the piezo speaker element of a cheap $10 alarm clock and hooking it to my stereo, or smoke my pot out of a cheap ass metal bowl these days (I have a nice alarm clock - evenb tho I quit using it except when I have a morning meeting) and I exclusivly uses glass bowls now... I still am glad I started out where I did.
I say send her off with a toolbox full of simple shit like a hammer and screw drivers, a cheap soldering iron from radio shack, a roll of duct tape
and let her have her fun! Remember... McGyver's defining characteristic was that he ALWAYS had to improvise, he NEVER had the "right tool".
-Steve
And if you actually call the warmed over shit that Dominos makes "pizza" then you have some absolutly amazgingly low standards. Then again, You have actually like exchange so I guess we shouldn't be surprized.
-Steve
(who just can't pass up the easy shot sometimes)
Communism? Hmmm that would entail living in communes wouldn't it? I don't think there is any proposal in there that we start living in communes.
Frankly I call it "nice" maybe even "fun". And since when is not getting paid not getting benefit? "Something to do" is often a benefit in and of itself. Never mind actually solving these problems will make life better for others... which doe shave an overall effect on the community at large.
I mean really... when a friend asks you to help them move, do you respond with an hourly rate, or do you just show up ready to haul boxes? I know what I do.
-Steve
Maybe its a sign that the law is not in line with the will of the people?
The privilidige of copyright is granted by lesser laws. Congress is empowered to enact such things, but, is not required to.
The fact that so many people disregard this law, and most seem to even not believe it is wrong, tells me that the law is out of date, that the law does not carry the mandate of the people.
-Steve
Ok fine... what was the result beyond network numbers?
I don't know about you, but I would not be happy working for an employer that was watching me like that. In fact, the implicit lack of trust in my ability to manage my usage of the net would have me looking for another job right quick and would sap any motivation I have to work for said employer.
Tell me all you want how its their right and their system. I don't care. It is their system, but I don't like being watched and monitored like that. Personal web surfing at work, while it may take away from time that I maybe should use to do other things, is important to me. It gives me a break from what I am working on, which I need occasionally.
Now all that said...I think you show a lack of understanding of the issues involved in an academic evnironment.
Its not always so simple as adding proxies and what not. The network is there to support education. Its there to expose students to the net and give teachers resources to use to teach students (which includes keeping themselves current with information). You really can't just sit back and say "this has no educational value" because you don't know what someome may be doing with it.
I don't get how file sharing and porn are automatically of no educational value. There is this odd stigma that anything that is primarily recreational or feels good (like sex or just listning to music) is of little to no "real value" and certainly isn't educational, and I dunno about you but, I just don't think thats true.
-Steve
Whgile thats nice and all... we here have had much more luck using social "backdoors" to fix such problems.
Stuff like putting up router traffic graphs and then using channels that are likely to reach people (for students we used to use a student run web forum that was hosted completely outside our control - until the owner shut it down) and make announcements. Point people at such things. When someone says "The net is slow" say "Its because the bandwith is being used up... see the graphs..."
Have friendly messages sent out informing people of the bandwith usage issue and pointing them at the graphs. Tell them that there have been problems with legitimate uses being slow and that people should try and conserve bandwith during school hours etc etc.
frankly I am with the idea of letting them do what they want and using social pressures and education to solve the problem. Open academic environments are a goodness in my book, and social pressures do work... it just seems that so few are willing to actually try using them.
-Steve
This brings up a great ppoint...and I think the problem is one of communication between faculty and staff (are those terms used outside of Universities?) Its usually bad at this level (in my experience).
The best way to go (in my opinion) is to start compiling stats... show graphs of what th enet is being used for, and make them public...then show them to everyone...then sit back. When the teachers complain "the net is too slow for my class" point at the graphs and show them how the bandwith is being taken up.
Emphasize that bandwith is a limited resource and people need to learn to share it. Frankly its not really a problem (given that none of us are lawyers, I will ignore the legal angle... which is full of nastiness, loopholes, conditions etc etc) if someone is using all the bandwith, until someon eelse needs some.... file sharing isn't the problem...its irresponsible and uninformed use of bandwith thats the problem.
In fact, this is what we do. Our Noc put up router traffic graphs for all the segments. They point people to them... many of our students know where to find them and do look at them. We also bandwith limit the segmetns now so our real inital issue (segments being saturated) isn't much of an issue...
Heavy handed tactics are just plain bad all around. They foster dislike between people who should be working together. Frankly, when people are made aware of the issues involved, they tend to act much nicer.
Frankly, I think if we spent half the time and energy that is currently spent bitching abou thow bad things are and how dumb people are on giving people the tools to understand and educating them, then we would have a hell of alot less to bitch about.
In short... treating symptoms (p2p network usage) only gets you so far, and garauntees that you will have to fight this same battle again, in a new form.
-Steve
Thats great. Wonderfull. Stupendous! You have pointed out a type of hypocracy that ...well.. that has absolutly nothing to do with the conversation at hand. Good job!
Nowhere in the question is the GPL mentioned. Nowehere in the question is there any talk of pirated software.
The question here is about auditing. Its about searching. Its about a team of people from a hostile organization comming in and gettin gthier grubby hands all over someones equipment. Its about whether this is a reasonable or even legal form of enforcement.
What gives these people the right to do that? Are they just getting away with it because they instill fear, or do they have some real legal backing?
this is the real question at hand. Just because you think I may be doing something that infringes upon your rights does that mean you should be able to infringe upon my rights and inconvinience me to satisfy your questions? How much evidence of such wrongdoing should you need before I can be required to let you dig around for evidence (thus making my life more difficult and giving you access to things that I would never consent to you having access to).
Now lets make this more interesting. University computers may at times have student information. SSNs, Grades, Home phone numbers etc etc. Did you know that some of this information is often protected by law? Even within Universities there is often discussion of how some of this data can be passed around legally to employees, and restrictions on access to the information only as part of ones job (need to know basically).... how do those laws apply to this situation?
Frankly, it may be illegal for the university to consent to such an audit, unless the audit was legally mandated.
Messy... my advice to the person involved... bring all this to the legal department. Universities get sued all the time for various things and thus tend to keep a department of lawyers around. Talk to them say "FERPA" (or FURPA...ive never seen the acronym written, but it comes up in meetings).
-Steve
(A university sysadmin)
YAOD (Yet Another Obligatory Dig)
Don 't you see... thats what they are trying to avoid.
just think of the horror... I mean, who the hell would buy a Celine Dion CD if they actually knew what it sounded like? The ability to rip this and get iut out on the net is poison to them... it could kill their sales overnight if poeople actually heard it first!
-Steve
heh no the issue as I see it is not that the warning is there, but that it looks like a CD. General accepted wisdom is that you can put a music CD in your drive and play it... and if it doesn't work big deal. It would be extremely uncommon for a person to expect a machine to crash just because thye put an audio cd in (unless their system is fucked up to begin with... I think ive actually seen that with bad hardware once...)
To me its more like...imagine coca cola put out a 12 oz soda can of gasoline with a little sticker "do not drink" that otherwise was very easy to mistake for Coca Cola Classic because it looks almost the same except for the small sticker.
Its a hazardous product if used incorrectly and it is designed to look exactly like a common item that is not hazardous. It is done intentionally, and a small sticker is added to say "hey this is bad".
Its like the SNL skit mentioned in a previous post "Pet Chow's Rat Poison" (with "Pet Chow" being the brand name and the real product "rat poison" in small letters).
-Steve
Hmmm fine...and in a cursory look I see companies and people that are dumping crap into the world as having alot more to lose than the "greenies", since it is essentially an argument that they should change how they do things. That means everything from possible minor inconvineiences (which are enough sometimes to make me not do something) to spending billions of dollars to change how factories and machinery work etc.
I also see that you are very quick to use a diminutive term "greenie" to describe anyone on the other side of this debate. Showing that you, yourself, are not above using apeals to frame the debate and attempt to decrease the credibility of your opponents, rather than attacking them on purely logical grounds. This of course does not invalidate any point you make, but does expose your bias.
My personal belief is that the entire global warming issue is a red herring. Yes, the world may be getting warmer. Climates change. We did have an ice age not to long ago. Do we have any evidence that this isn't part of the normal climactic cycle?
Lets look at that first, and then look towards causes if it isn't.
That said, I think environmental issues are important, and we definitly need to get a global handle on them and reduce the amount of polluting we do. Regardless of whether there is a global warming problem or not,
If there is anything i have learned its that junk accumulates, and eventually managing it becomes a problem, so its best to reduce the amount of junk now, than have to deal with it all later. Thats true whether its loving hand crafted unix boxen on your network or PCBs in your river bed.
-Steve
Of course...
./configure --prefix=~/foo
you could do a
and then make install as yourself to check out what its doing. Tho I imagine that anyone adding stealthy stuff like kernel mods to an install would be smart enough to check the UID before trying to install them
Tho... you can read the code...and there are people who read code, or would notice this sort fo trickery and you can bet that there will be a BUGTRAQ advisory out right quick if such a peice of software got wide distribution.
-Steve
> How, exactly, does New.net's software mess with the IP stack?
> At worst, I understand it to be a simple DNS proxy that filters
> between new.net domains and regular domains.
Yup...your right about this... and the search path thing. The mistake you make is to assume that because the method of doing this that you thought of makes sense and works, that new.net did it that way.
Yes, they tell you thats ONE WAY to make it work. However, even the document that you quoted states, thats how to do it "Without the plugin". A Plugin is NOT a registry entry, its a program. Your assumption that this is how the plugi nworks is quite unfounded.
I can imagine a plugin that modifies the IP stack in some way to achieve this same end. It may even do other things too. It sounds to me like this is what they are doing (perhaps the whole point of the plugin is to add new.net to the search path while hiding the fact that its there, and preventing it from being changed)
If it was really as simple as you describe, then there is no need for this "plugin" to exist at all, all they need is a one shot program that changes a registry entry.
-Steve