If you are convinced by Zsh, you can make it your default shell through the "User accounts" panel of Linuxconf (or for the die-hards amongst you, by editing/etc/passwd).
Die-hards? I think you'd have to be nuts to use linuxconf as anything but training wheels. Anyhow, you can change your login shell with chsh(1). That works for everyone, not just root. That aside, I thought the article was pretty good. Yes, it attributed many things to zsh which are already present in bash, but articles on interactive shell use are cool - the modern shells are awesomely deep and powerful.
Another example is Gnumeric. In Excel, you can set the width of a column by typing ALT-ocw, entering the width in points, and hitting enter. In Gnumeric the equivalent would be ALT-oow, but it doesn't work because focus doesn't seem to shift after the second keystroke. So you are effectively forced to use the mouse. I think the best user interfaces were in the late DOS era - WordPerfect 5.1 for example. Once Windows came along, standardization replaced usability. Unfortunately, Unix never had a strong tradition of well-crafted captive user interfaces (vi and emacs are the obvious exceptions) and so the Windows-inspired plague is washing over the Unix world with little resistance.
If you're spamming, then you're trying to sell something. If you're trying to sell something, then you should give some way of contacting the spammers.
Well, obviously they include some means of contacting to buy their offering; they just don't provide general contact information. Now take a company like AT&T. They're trying to sell you something; lots of things in fact. But there is no real way to contact them. You can call 800 numbers and get phonedroids who are allowed to process a limited palette of transactions. But there is no publicized way to contact an actual responsible human being at AT&T. In other words, corporate America has largely gone the same route as the spammers - seeking to sell while remaining unreachable.
Boucher and Goodlatte have introduced the Anti-Spamming Act of 2001, which seeks to punish senders of unwanted and unsolicited e-mails. It would make it a criminal offense to fraudulently use another individual's e-mail address to send spam, or to continue sending spam after being notified by a recipient not to do it anymore.
I hope the bill is more intelligently written than that. The above description legitimizes the 'opt-out' defense. It also has no penalties for companies like Ebay and Amazon that don't forge mail addresses. And since many spammers use throwaway dialup accounts, they could start using the true mail addresses of these accounts and be within the law. Worse, the above description includes lots of mail that isn't really spam. If you send an email to Digital Convergence protesting their policies regarding the Cue-Cat, isn't that an 'unwanted and unsolicited email'? (Hopefully you'd be exempt if you didn't forge the from address.) The idea of bulk seems to be missing. I hope the law is not as stupid as this article implies. But I've never had high hopes for government anti-spam measures - in the end they'll be just another tool used by the rich and privileged to protect their position.
Actually, this makes a lot of sense. A God of creation who is also a God of destruction. Apollo was the God of sickness and healing. In the M$ world, c-a-d is the most powerful incantation, only to be used at times of great stress. Compare init(8). Admittedly, init is too great a God to involve himself in starting a user's session.
The tech boom definitely shifted the balance of power towards programmers, and that's a good thing. I hope it lasts through the recession, if any. The perks you cite, PC's, foosball and 'team-building' are just frills. Cheap for the employer and unimportant for the employee. What's really important is freedom. That means:
Controlling your own workstation. Running whatever OS you want, as long as it interoperates with company systems.
Working your own schedule. (Not short hours, but flexible hours.)
Controlling your immediate physical space - no flourescent lights or motivational posters.
Fast, uncensored internet access.
Those things have become far more prevalent, fortunately. Let me have them, and you can keep the foosball, sushi, massages, whatever.
I agree. I'm not even sure consumer credit should be legal. It is not a rational business transaction - rather it's akin to drug peddling. Traditionally it was called usury and prohibited. People who want to borrow money at high interest rates in order to buy luxuries are people with poor understanding of finances. And people who accomodate them are predators. Paradoxically, I favor drug legalization. So maybe banning usury wouldn't be much of a panacea - we'd shift from MasterCard/VISA to street corner loansharks. The Usury Enforcement Agency would keep demanding more helicopters, automatic weapons and wiretaps. I do resent the deep integration of the credit system with American commerce. Even when you pay cash, you're subsidizing this highly objectionable system.
Simple fact is, if the police want into your data, they will get in eventualy...
Of course. But that's not the main point of encrypting email. The point is to prevent the vacuum-cleaner approach, which the intelligence community is quite fond of. Plaintext email is begging for something like Carnivore. Pretty much all countries have been intercepting telegrams that cross their borders ever since telegraphy existed. The explosion of personal/commercial email must look like a bonanza to these folks. Vastly more grist for their mill. The danger is not that government can intercept your communications - they've always been able to. The danger is that it's so much cheaper and easier to intercept, enabling massive programs of pattern matching and neural net scanning.
I like the architecture the NSA has come up with, but I wonder if it's too complex to be used effectively in the real world. It sounds like NT's security - wonderful in theory, but in practice always left wide open. If SE Linux becomes widespread, I hope people will come up with scripts and tools to check for overly broad permissions. One problem I foresee is that commercial software like Citrix will demand overly broad permissions and refuse to run otherwise. I liked this quote:
Removing permissions for a potentially dangerous program such as Netscape...
I'm glad the NSA wasn't fooled by Netscape's pretty exterior.
I agree; that "summary" decreased in credibility as I read it, finally hitting rock bottom at the words:
You can choke on my manrod and die. I have seen both you and your wife in person and I am far from impressed. In any other situation I would feel pity for you with that cow of a woman you have to lay down with.
This kind of ad hominem venom is cheap and plentiful on usenet. As an outsider to this dispute, I tend to assume that if Gene, the author of the summary, had any specific concrete allegations of wrongdoing on Tim's part, he would have included them.
I imagine you'd like the covers to have a guy standing there with his hand against his head, in the classic "L" ("Loser") position?
That would be cool. How about using photos of car wrecks and train wrecks? Or photos of rotting meat? Maybe photos of diseased organs, like this liver with a hepatocellular carcinoma? Imagine the colophon. It would be perfect light reading after a 3:30 am m$-induced emergency.
...workers are happier if they are able to send off a few quick e-mails while they are working.... Try to take away thier PCs and put them back on thin clients, and you are almost guaunteeing a worker revolt.
Why do you think that PC's are needed in order to use email? It's possible to send and receive email via thin clients. It's equally possible for a corporate IT department to block, limit, censor or log email sent to or from PC's. To back up a level, I can imagine a very free, user-empowering workplace where all users use X terminals communicating with big computers. I can imagine (and have seen) very restrictive workplaces where everyone has a PC.
I am pretty resistant to marketing; therefore there are few 'brands' that elicit any positive response from me. O'Reilly is one. Therefore, it always bothered me that O'Reilly was involved in things like a web server for Windows 95. O'Reilly is primarily Unix-centric, and this little pocket of Windows-centrism stuck out like a sore thumb. On the same note, I'm very unhappy that O'Reilly has chosen to publish ephemeral books on Windows software, such as Excel 2000 in a Nutshell. These books rapidly lose relevance and end up in the bargain bin at the bookstore, harming the image of the O'Reilly 'animal' books as long-term sources of information. As an example of the longevity O'Reilly represents, Essential System Administration was last updated in 1995, and yet I find it reasonably current. I guess O'Reilly makes money by writing about Windows. That's fine - I just wish they'd choose a different image and branding for that series of books.
Initially we were thinking of housing servers in 20' containers...
I looked into building some equipment rooms that way. The benefit is the ability to prefab and test the room completely away from the construction site. The drawback is that if you're providing front and back access, you only get one row of racks in a 96" wide container. Therefore, you end up using twice as much aisle space as you would in a conventional equipment room. In the conventional arrangement, the cost of an aisle is shared by the rows of racks on each side. If you used an architecture where only front access is required, then it would be more feasible. You could have racks against both walls and an aisle in the middle. There is one vendor offering this type of intel-based server, but this limits equipment choices too drastically.
Well like I said, I'm not a db pro, but would security and views not help here? Is it an all or nothing thing? Do you really have to give root access to your data surfers?
No, you don't have to give the data surfers much access. If all they want is reporting, you could limit them to SELECT privs on relevant tables. But they can still bring the database to its knees with enough SELECTs, especially if they're burdensome SELECTs. You could create a view that 'hides' the join across two tables, but you can't stop the user from selecting heavily from that view. Access has several modes of misbehavior in which it spews a high volume of SELECTs. Also, last time I checked, MySQL didn't have views.
Once again, can't you just offer up views to limit what access sees (and do the joins to boot)?
Even if you eliminate the join issue, Access still won't send a proper SELECT that lets the database do the filtering. Rather it will suck the entire table across the network and do the filtering on the client side. A really disastrous design decision. The bottom line is, above a certain level of size/complexity/value, you have to have separate 'production' and 'data mining' databases. Access is not the only reporting tool that can threaten the performance of a databse. Lots of homebrew Perl scripts can be just as dangerous. A production database should preferably be protected from arbitrary SQL queries.
and it was a bit of a nightmare. At first we were impressed with how easy and convenient this was, compared to writing a web interface for the MySQL database. But once the data entry people started using the Access->ODBC->MySQL path, ugly things emerged.
Acess always requests at least three rows in a table. So if you're looking at row 1500, it requests 1499, 1500 and 1501. Maybe that's to allow fast load of the 'next' record? If so, it isn't used, because when you go from 1500 -> 1501, Access loads 1500, 1501, and 1502. So basically it just adds useless traffic to your database.
Access seems to get into random moods where it sends tons of selects to the database. This usually happens when it's been idle for a few minutes. It can generate enough traffic to swamp MySQL.
Access has a 'search' feature which data entry people like. If you want to find an employee with first name T-something, you type a 'T' in the first name box on the form, and tell Access to search. Now you might expect that Access would issue a query: SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE WHERE FIRST_NAME LIKE 'T%'. Wrong. It requests every single record in the table. You probably think I mean: SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE. Nope, even worse. It iterates over the primary key and issues one select per row. This swamped our database a few times.
In the end, we gave up on Access and wrote a perl/web front end.
I think it would be nice if cablecos were treated like telcos, that is they have to rent their lines to other cable companies.
I agree with the sentiment, but foresee implementation problems. Both the telco and cable co. have fat, expensive cables running along poles. The difference is that the telco's cable contains (typically) hundreds of twisted pairs, each of which is dedicated to one circuit. The cable co's cable contains (typically) a center conductor, insulation, and an outer shield. Although the cable has tremendous bandwidth, RF multiplexing is needed in order to have multiple signals peacefully share that cable. What this means is that telephone cables are perfect for splitting up among many vendors. As long as their equipment is FCC compliant, the different vendors can't interfere with each other's signals. The TV cable, however, does not offer this automatic isolation of different signals. Some trusted entity has to be in charge of the equipment that actually connects to the cable.
Inflation is what happens when the government issues more currency, causing the value of existing currency to decrease. We're not living in a particularly inflationary time. Why do you think inflation has anything to do with this?
...Expand to increase revenue and increase "economies of scale" efficiency....
Expanding to increase revenue would not solve your hypothetical problem of rising costs, because the costs will presumably scale along with the revenue. As for economies of scale, I would guess that even the smallest cable company is already past the point where further growth would yield further economies of scale.
Where in the Constitution of the United States is the government granted the power to tell them HOW MUCH they can expand?
Now, if your state or city has laws preventing other cable companies from moving into your area, there's something for you to protest.
As far as I know, every cable TV operator in the US is operating under a "franchise" granted by the municipal government. A quote from this page sums it up:
Ironically, though, head-to-head competition is just what local governments don't want. Once a second operator enters a market, the whole idea of a cable franchise collapses and, with it, the possibility of charging a franchise fee and extracting other benefits for local government.
The article mentioned Linux or the 'industry-leading' PalmOS, which has 86% market share. Sounds like PalmOS would be a more logical move for HP.
Why assume that a commercial Linux-based PDA will be good or open? It may be just an inferior clone of WinCE. An open linux palmtop would be nice, but HP has said nothing about openness. So don't assume that you'll ever get a shell on this device.
I think that companies which publicly threaten to break away from Microsoft are frequently just trying to get better terms from MS. For example, AOL threatened MS with Netscape, and probably got the upper hand in their IE rollout via that threat. I think HP is just saying, "Hey Bill! We have choices. Better treat us right!"
The statement does not necessarily imply that judges are biased toward big companies. It could also point to the fact that the RIAA has done a good job of advocacy, convincing many people that intellectual property exists and that it benefits artists. The other side has not yet done much successful advocacy, so the ideas which would legitimize sharing of data are not widely known.
I'm glad it worked out for you. But for anyone else in such a situation, employers do not have a right to withhold paychecks at their discretion. From California Labor Code:
202. If an employee not having a written contract for a definite period quits his or her employment, his or her wages shall become due and payable not later than 72 hours thereafter, unless the employee has given 72 hours previous notice of his or her intention to quit, in which case the employee is entitled to his or her wages at the time of quitting...
What if the employer doesn't pay?
203. If an employer willfully fails to pay, without abatement or reduction, in accordance with Sections 201, 201.5, 202, and 205.5, any wages of an employee who is discharged or who quits, the wages of the employee shall continue as a penalty from the due date thereof at the same rate until paid or until an action therefor is commenced; but the wages shall not continue for more than 30 days....
And don't forget:
216. In addition to any other penalty imposed by this article, any person, or an agent, manager, superintendent, or officer thereof is guilty of a misdemeanor, who:
Having the ability to pay, willfully refuses to pay wages due and payable after demand has been made.
Falsely denies the amount or validity thereof, or that the same is due, with intent to secure for himself, his employer or other person, any discount upon such indebtedness, or with intent to annoy, harass, oppress, hinder, delay, or defraud, the person to whom such indebtedness is due.
You don't have to get a lawyer or go to court. Just go the nearest labor board ("Department of Industrial Relations") office and fill out a form.
The article says we can expect roughly 1/100 the speed of current silicon. I guess that means CPU's with 500khz - 1Mhz clock speed. The kind of machines that started the PC era. At the same time, we're seeing a strong attack on the programmable, user-controlled computer by the Intellectual Property cartel. Maybe we'll end up using CP/M on 1979-vintage machines because the current crop of hardware is too locked-down and tamperproof. A machine like that could be open-sourced and downloaded from the internet. On the flip side, I see many possibilities for abuse. Manufacturers could build flat computers into cereal boxes, shipping labels, even software packaging. Lots of places to monitor, advertise, and present license agreements. Lots of stuff that quietly 'phones home'. Is it good or bad on the balance? Doesn't matter - nobody can roll back technology.
I'm not defending the MPAA/RIAA or their flunkeys, and I hope they all choke. Having said that, the rhetoric about 'searching a person's hard drive' is utter nonsense. If you run a server on a machine connected to the internet, you're giving permission for people to connect to that server. You, the sysadmin, have complete control over who is allowed to connect: what domains, what IP ranges, what authentication mechanisms. You have absolutely no right to punish someone for connecting to a server you've set up. The problem is not that the IP flunkeys looked at your openly published list of MP3's. The problem is that a) they have the effective power to censor and b) they are lazily leaping to conclusions and c) they are not being appropriately punished for the harm or inconvenience they cause when they're wrong.
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Die-hards? I think you'd have to be nuts to use linuxconf as anything but training wheels. Anyhow, you can change your login shell with chsh(1). That works for everyone, not just root.
That aside, I thought the article was pretty good. Yes, it attributed many things to zsh which are already present in bash, but articles on interactive shell use are cool - the modern shells are awesomely deep and powerful.
Another example is Gnumeric. In Excel, you can set the width of a column by typing ALT-ocw, entering the width in points, and hitting enter. In Gnumeric the equivalent would be ALT-oow, but it doesn't work because focus doesn't seem to shift after the second keystroke. So you are effectively forced to use the mouse.
I think the best user interfaces were in the late DOS era - WordPerfect 5.1 for example. Once Windows came along, standardization replaced usability. Unfortunately, Unix never had a strong tradition of well-crafted captive user interfaces (vi and emacs are the obvious exceptions) and so the Windows-inspired plague is washing over the Unix world with little resistance.
Well, obviously they include some means of contacting to buy their offering; they just don't provide general contact information. Now take a company like AT&T. They're trying to sell you something; lots of things in fact. But there is no real way to contact them. You can call 800 numbers and get phonedroids who are allowed to process a limited palette of transactions. But there is no publicized way to contact an actual responsible human being at AT&T. In other words, corporate America has largely gone the same route as the spammers - seeking to sell while remaining unreachable.
I hope the bill is more intelligently written than that. The above description legitimizes the 'opt-out' defense. It also has no penalties for companies like Ebay and Amazon that don't forge mail addresses. And since many spammers use throwaway dialup accounts, they could start using the true mail addresses of these accounts and be within the law.
Worse, the above description includes lots of mail that isn't really spam. If you send an email to Digital Convergence protesting their policies regarding the Cue-Cat, isn't that an 'unwanted and unsolicited email'? (Hopefully you'd be exempt if you didn't forge the from address.) The idea of bulk seems to be missing.
I hope the law is not as stupid as this article implies. But I've never had high hopes for government anti-spam measures - in the end they'll be just another tool used by the rich and privileged to protect their position.
Actually, this makes a lot of sense. A God of creation who is also a God of destruction. Apollo was the God of sickness and healing.
In the M$ world, c-a-d is the most powerful incantation, only to be used at times of great stress. Compare init(8). Admittedly, init is too great a God to involve himself in starting a user's session.
What's really important is freedom. That means:
Those things have become far more prevalent, fortunately. Let me have them, and you can keep the foosball, sushi, massages, whatever.
I agree. I'm not even sure consumer credit should be legal. It is not a rational business transaction - rather it's akin to drug peddling. Traditionally it was called usury and prohibited. People who want to borrow money at high interest rates in order to buy luxuries are people with poor understanding of finances. And people who accomodate them are predators.
Paradoxically, I favor drug legalization. So maybe banning usury wouldn't be much of a panacea - we'd shift from MasterCard/VISA to street corner loansharks. The Usury Enforcement Agency would keep demanding more helicopters, automatic weapons and wiretaps.
I do resent the deep integration of the credit system with American commerce. Even when you pay cash, you're subsidizing this highly objectionable system.
Of course. But that's not the main point of encrypting email. The point is to prevent the vacuum-cleaner approach, which the intelligence community is quite fond of. Plaintext email is begging for something like Carnivore.
Pretty much all countries have been intercepting telegrams that cross their borders ever since telegraphy existed. The explosion of personal/commercial email must look like a bonanza to these folks. Vastly more grist for their mill.
The danger is not that government can intercept your communications - they've always been able to. The danger is that it's so much cheaper and easier to intercept, enabling massive programs of pattern matching and neural net scanning.
I liked this quote:
I'm glad the NSA wasn't fooled by Netscape's pretty exterior.
This kind of ad hominem venom is cheap and plentiful on usenet. As an outsider to this dispute, I tend to assume that if Gene, the author of the summary, had any specific concrete allegations of wrongdoing on Tim's part, he would have included them.
I looked at their site, and found no such thing. Could you cite the actual URL? I found only 1ru, 2ru, 3ru and accessories.
That would be cool. How about using photos of car wrecks and train wrecks? Or photos of rotting meat? Maybe photos of diseased organs, like this liver with a hepatocellular carcinoma?
Imagine the colophon. It would be perfect light reading after a 3:30 am m$-induced emergency.
Why do you think that PC's are needed in order to use email? It's possible to send and receive email via thin clients. It's equally possible for a corporate IT department to block, limit, censor or log email sent to or from PC's. To back up a level, I can imagine a very free, user-empowering workplace where all users use X terminals communicating with big computers. I can imagine (and have seen) very restrictive workplaces where everyone has a PC.
I am pretty resistant to marketing; therefore there are few 'brands' that elicit any positive response from me. O'Reilly is one. Therefore, it always bothered me that O'Reilly was involved in things like a web server for Windows 95. O'Reilly is primarily Unix-centric, and this little pocket of Windows-centrism stuck out like a sore thumb.
On the same note, I'm very unhappy that O'Reilly has chosen to publish ephemeral books on Windows software, such as Excel 2000 in a Nutshell. These books rapidly lose relevance and end up in the bargain bin at the bookstore, harming the image of the O'Reilly 'animal' books as long-term sources of information. As an example of the longevity O'Reilly represents, Essential System Administration was last updated in 1995, and yet I find it reasonably current.
I guess O'Reilly makes money by writing about Windows. That's fine - I just wish they'd choose a different image and branding for that series of books.
I looked into building some equipment rooms that way. The benefit is the ability to prefab and test the room completely away from the construction site. The drawback is that if you're providing front and back access, you only get one row of racks in a 96" wide container. Therefore, you end up using twice as much aisle space as you would in a conventional equipment room. In the conventional arrangement, the cost of an aisle is shared by the rows of racks on each side.
If you used an architecture where only front access is required, then it would be more feasible. You could have racks against both walls and an aisle in the middle.
There is one vendor offering this type of intel-based server, but this limits equipment choices too drastically.
No, you don't have to give the data surfers much access. If all they want is reporting, you could limit them to SELECT privs on relevant tables. But they can still bring the database to its knees with enough SELECTs, especially if they're burdensome SELECTs. You could create a view that 'hides' the join across two tables, but you can't stop the user from selecting heavily from that view. Access has several modes of misbehavior in which it spews a high volume of SELECTs. Also, last time I checked, MySQL didn't have views.
Even if you eliminate the join issue, Access still won't send a proper SELECT that lets the database do the filtering. Rather it will suck the entire table across the network and do the filtering on the client side. A really disastrous design decision.
The bottom line is, above a certain level of size/complexity/value, you have to have separate 'production' and 'data mining' databases. Access is not the only reporting tool that can threaten the performance of a databse. Lots of homebrew Perl scripts can be just as dangerous. A production database should preferably be protected from arbitrary SQL queries.
- Acess always requests at least three rows in a table. So if you're looking at row 1500, it requests 1499, 1500 and 1501. Maybe that's to allow fast load of the 'next' record? If so, it isn't used, because when you go from 1500 -> 1501, Access loads 1500, 1501, and 1502. So basically it just adds useless traffic to your database.
- Access seems to get into random moods where it sends tons of selects to the database. This usually happens when it's been idle for a few minutes. It can generate enough traffic to swamp MySQL.
- Access has a 'search' feature which data entry people like. If you want to find an employee with first name T-something, you type a 'T' in the first name box on the form, and tell Access to search. Now you might expect that Access would issue a query: SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE WHERE FIRST_NAME LIKE 'T%'. Wrong. It requests every single record in the table. You probably think I mean: SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE. Nope, even worse. It iterates over the primary key and issues one select per row. This swamped our database a few times.
In the end, we gave up on Access and wrote a perl/web front end.I agree with the sentiment, but foresee implementation problems. Both the telco and cable co. have fat, expensive cables running along poles. The difference is that the telco's cable contains (typically) hundreds of twisted pairs, each of which is dedicated to one circuit. The cable co's cable contains (typically) a center conductor, insulation, and an outer shield. Although the cable has tremendous bandwidth, RF multiplexing is needed in order to have multiple signals peacefully share that cable.
What this means is that telephone cables are perfect for splitting up among many vendors. As long as their equipment is FCC compliant, the different vendors can't interfere with each other's signals. The TV cable, however, does not offer this automatic isolation of different signals. Some trusted entity has to be in charge of the equipment that actually connects to the cable.
Inflation is what happens when the government issues more currency, causing the value of existing currency to decrease. We're not living in a particularly inflationary time. Why do you think inflation has anything to do with this?
Expanding to increase revenue would not solve your hypothetical problem of rising costs, because the costs will presumably scale along with the revenue. As for economies of scale, I would guess that even the smallest cable company is already past the point where further growth would yield further economies of scale.
In the Commerce Clause, of course.
As far as I know, every cable TV operator in the US is operating under a "franchise" granted by the municipal government. A quote from this page sums it up:
The statement does not necessarily imply that judges are biased toward big companies. It could also point to the fact that the RIAA has done a good job of advocacy, convincing many people that intellectual property exists and that it benefits artists. The other side has not yet done much successful advocacy, so the ideas which would legitimize sharing of data are not widely known.
What if the employer doesn't pay?
And don't forget:
You don't have to get a lawyer or go to court. Just go the nearest labor board ("Department of Industrial Relations") office and fill out a form.
The article says we can expect roughly 1/100 the speed of current silicon. I guess that means CPU's with 500khz - 1Mhz clock speed. The kind of machines that started the PC era.
At the same time, we're seeing a strong attack on the programmable, user-controlled computer by the Intellectual Property cartel. Maybe we'll end up using CP/M on 1979-vintage machines because the current crop of hardware is too locked-down and tamperproof. A machine like that could be open-sourced and downloaded from the internet.
On the flip side, I see many possibilities for abuse. Manufacturers could build flat computers into cereal boxes, shipping labels, even software packaging. Lots of places to monitor, advertise, and present license agreements. Lots of stuff that quietly 'phones home'.
Is it good or bad on the balance? Doesn't matter - nobody can roll back technology.
I'm not defending the MPAA/RIAA or their flunkeys, and I hope they all choke. Having said that, the rhetoric about 'searching a person's hard drive' is utter nonsense. If you run a server on a machine connected to the internet, you're giving permission for people to connect to that server. You, the sysadmin, have complete control over who is allowed to connect: what domains, what IP ranges, what authentication mechanisms. You have absolutely no right to punish someone for connecting to a server you've set up.
The problem is not that the IP flunkeys looked at your openly published list of MP3's. The problem is that a) they have the effective power to censor and b) they are lazily leaping to conclusions and c) they are not being appropriately punished for the harm or inconvenience they cause when they're wrong.
Apparently they felt rage against your machine. Sorry, couldn't resist.