Yeah, maybe my $1,000,000 bid will actually be just an error from now on.
That might be the solution. What if a few hundred people sent Ebay email saying in effect, "your preferences on myhobbysite.org have been accidentally set to 'No test bids'. We are turning them back on so you can be the same as the rest of the myhobbysite.org community. If you want to opt out, etc. We will randomly place a test bid of approx. 1,000,000 on several thousand auctions a day." Turnabout is fair play.
Sorry to be pedantic, but I think the expression son-of-a-female-dog is redundant. Barring outlandish genetic experiments and test tube puppies, anyone who is the son of a dog is necessarily the son of two dogs, a stud and a bitch. Horses mate with asses to produce mules, but I haven't heard of dogs mating with any other species to produce offspring. So in the future you can say son-of-a-dog or maybe just dogson.
May I recommend that instead of abandoning Ebay, you pester them to help you? If you walk away, your message is lost in the noise. Why not phone them and ask them to honor your preferences? They will tell you to go to a certain web page, etc., but tell them 'I already did that and your mail says an error occurred. So I want you to do it for me.' The cost of handling a single support call is more than they'd make from spamming 1000 people.
First, I appreciate the tone of Peter Santangeli's letter. But I'm confused by the content.
The data access is limited to reading the information. At no time is the buffer in question ever written to.
So the buffer contains whatever it contained when it was allocated? What's the use of that? I'm pretty sure the buffer was written to while parsing the SWF file. The exploit mentioned fields that have are prefixed by a length, where the length is used by the parser to determine how much storage to allocate.
The effects of this defect are limited to the crashing of the users client (denial of service).
I'm quite skeptical of that. Maybe if Peter explained exactly how the buffer overflow causes the crash I could understand his reasons for saying that the bug can't be exploited in other ways. Is he assuming that since the vulnerable buffer was malloc'd from heap, an attacker can't predict a jump address for any particular byte in the buffer?
I think I can make sense of the seeming contradiction. The corporations we characterize as 'evil' are frequently using laws which libertarians do not approve. I think most younger, more net-savvy libertarians would like to see intellectual property abolished or substantially weakened. This would prevent most of the abuses complained of on Slashdot. Beyond that, we need to ask what right and responsibilities a corporation has as an artifical, government-created person. For example, it's noteworthy that while corporations enjoy most of the rights of natural people, they cannot be imprisoned for breaking the law. We don't even attempt to provide an analogous punishment. To explore this question is certainly within the scope of Libertarianism.
Re:The question is not whether there is a problem
on
Information Poisoning
·
· Score: 2
I don't think there is a problem, at least not the one Carr posits. Carr claims that the internet is flooded with misinformation and that people blindly believe what they read on the internet. I haven't found either of these statements to be true. On the contrary, the internet allows one to see both sides of a controversy, where the major media are usually biased towards one side. Also, people tend to be skeptical of internet sources and only grow to trust a particular source over time. For example if/. were to post that the Soviets were selling nuclear missiles on ebay, I'd pretty much assume it was a hoax. But I agree that if the problem did exist, government would not be a good solution.
This article irritates me in so many ways that I'll have to limit myself to highlights. If it were shorter and less literate I'd assume it was a troll. First, Carr raises a straw man: that the only defense for freedom on the internet is financial:
Why are you, Mr. Carr, trying to rain on a parade that has made so much money for so many people and entertained such vast audiences by bringing in the tired old horse known as government regulation?
Actually, financial well-being is the least important benefit of freedom. Carr seems blind to the ways in which the Internet has empowered ordinary people against both corporate and government organizations. Next, Carr introduces the 'child molester' motif:
Put simply and a bit crudely, the operators of the Internet can never be expected to agree to regulations that might obstruct the online activities of child molesters if such regulations would make it difficult for those same companies to reach the children that form such a large part of their customer bases.
OK, Carr started by claiming the Internet will destroy education, health, etc. and now he's focusing on child molesters? Even if the Internet greatly facilitated child molesters, which it doesn't, this would have no bearing on the sweeping arguments with which Carr opened. And notice that with 'operators' Carr is invoking the image of a for-profit field much like broadcast TV - which is not what the Internet is becoming. Then Carr wishes the FCC would censor the Internet as they do TV. Rationale:
Because there is a general recognition that radio and television, being far more pervasive and inescapable than print, must also be more accountable.
Carr, it's more because TV lends itself to monopoly and near-monopoly. The internet doesn't - in fact the internet is more democratic than print media. Just like government officials hoping to use 'child molesters' or 'cyber-terrorism' to get funding, Carr uses the scare of 'widespread information pollution' to justify draconian prior restraint. But he can't point to a single real world example! He whines about Drudge, but how many people have absolute faith in Drudge? A crown jewel of idiocy:
Certainly it is sinister that so few companies control so much information and entertainment, and there is no reason to think that they operate any differently than their blue-chip ancestors -- observe how Napster has revealed its true colors as just another attempt to beguile members of the public with claims of being on "their side," only to turn around and try to bilk them.
If you're concerned about corporate abuse of the Internet, you should advocate less government regulation, not more. The corporations are only winning through burdensome and unfair laws and regulations. In the case of Napster, it was the government's ridiculous interpretation of the ridiculous idea of copyright that forced Napster to kowtow to the 'music industry'. If the government would stay the hell off the internet Napster would not be forced into 'bilking' users. I think Carr is just looking for excuses to push his pro-censorship agenda. I think I'll stop now and resist the temptation to tear this thing apart word by word, illustrating the extreme illogic of which it is made.
Not to mention that for most things crackers want to do with your small linux box, user privs are not required. The logical exploit would be a small program that daemonizes itself and changes $0 to something already prevalent in your process table like 'xterm -bg black -fg green'. Then the daemon would fire off a udp packet to evil hq summarizing the latest capture and do a 'stealth bind' to a high-numbered port, awaiting commands from it's dark master. Then your box is ready to be used as a DOS amplifier or an anonymizing springboard for various attacks. Given how linux users pride themselves on their uptime, the process could be around for quite a while.
Actually, userspace processes cannot write to hardware. That's part of what it means for '386 and up chips to enter protected mode which is the mode in which linux runs. All of Unix security would be worthless if users could perform sector-level writes to the hard disk.
If you overflow the buffer while running a flash movie THE MACHINE RUNNING IT CRASHES. Hence making it tough to 'sploit.
Generically, that describes any buffer overflow exploit that hasn't been perfected yet. If a program has a buffer 100 bytes long with no checking, and I feed it a 10M string, it will almost certainly crash. My string will have overwritten part of the program with instructions the CPU probably doesn't like. With enough work, I can design a string that puts some properly written machine language in a location the program will call or jump to. Thus, I can execute arbitrary code with the same privileges as the program.
I have the same complaint. Ironically, this is part of what frames were meant to address - put the navigational links in a separate page, and reference that page. That way lynx-users know where to go for nav links, but don't have to look at them all the time. I'd like a smarter lynx, that could among other things collapse these navbars into something like a listbox, so it would become only one element to skip past when you don't want it. Re the unfriendly frameset issue, I wish designers would use something like:
Welcome to greedy.com, your source for internet bargains. Click the
nav frame to find your way around our site or the content frame to read the home page. We designed this site mainly for frames-enabled browsers, so we apologize for any difficulty you encounter in navigating our site.
I think the invitation to upgrade your browser is a poor idea because most people running a non-frames browser in 2001 are probably doing it on purpose, and there's no sense driving visitors away to do some other task, after which they'll probably forget to come back.
Yes, that's obviously the perception of the decision-makers, but are the decision-makers right? We've just seen the death of many e-commerce sites built with that 'noisy flashy junky' philosophy, and while their business models certainly contributed, I think the sites actively drove users away. For example, boo.com must be the most extreme case of 'commerce-as-entertainment' and for a brief period after their launch, it seemed that everyone would have to 'catch up' to their 'immersive' web site. Then, of course, they failed miserably. I never managed to see their site - some combination of netscape crashing, slow connections and server-side flakiness. Who survived the e-commerce bloodbath? Amazon comes to mind - flashy perhaps, but info-rich with reviews and easy searching. It's worth remembering that most attempts to "cash in on those knee-jerk, primitive instincts" ended up losing money. Maybe people aren't as primitive as merchants think.
User is extremely bored and wishes to stare at a blank screen for several minutes while a flashing icon loads, then stare at the flashing icon for a few more minutes.
Entertainment's great, as long as it's voluntary. When you hold someone's info hostage to your idea of entertainment, expect some hard feelings. Why not make a plain jane site with link "click here for some excellent graphics and entertaining animations". Then you know anyone downloading your art is doing it voluntarily.
...but I'm guessing that most users want pretty pictures with a minimal amount of useful information.
Ah yes, the drooling morons theory, commonly held by cynical techies. The problem is I have yet to meet one of these drooling morons. The non-tech savvy people I've seen surfing the web are easily confused and intimidated by complex, flashing, javascript-infested sites. They like simple fast sites like Yahoo, and above all sites that make them feel in control. I agree there is some delta between the geeks and the normals - the normals seem to like one chunk of info per page, with clear navigation to access sibling, parent and child chunks of info. The geeks like lots of info on a page so they don't have to interrupt their info uptake for a page load.
The researcher gave Macromedia seven months to patch this before posting to bugtraq. I just goes to prove, if proof is still needed, that commercial vendors will not fix holes until they are being exploited on a massive scale. Yes, I know there are some shining exceptions. But I think that generally, unless a company has a clear track record of working with outsiders to fix holes in a timely fashion, anybody discovering an exploit should post it to bugtraq immediately. Vendors like Macromedia don't deserve the courtesy of advance notification, especially when it leaves huge numbers of machines vulnerable for months.
If spam is such a nice thing, why do most spammers...
He's not arguing that spam is a nice thing. Spam is horrible and spammers are horrible. The question is, are we endorsing measures corrosive to our freedom in order to stamp out something horrible? I think drugs are horrible, but the war on drugs has done so much harm, both physical and moral, that it must be stopped. I think we'll all feel that way about the war on spam if the government earnestly wages such a war. Remember, freedom of speech is about horrible people saying horrible things. I'm not arguing that spam is really protected speech in the constitutional sense. But I think that it's better to err on the side of free speech even in private contexts.
Internet providers, including AOL, AT&T and Mindspring, were besieged by customer complaints and their systems were threatened by the overload.
HellDesk: How can I help you? Irate Customer: I received an e-mailing asking for a £24 "processing fee" in exchange for a chance to work at home stuffing envelopes! So naturally I sent 24 pounds to Shklovskiy and Shtok in Los Angeles! HellDesk: Sir, the problem is in your brain. You must have gotten one of these substandard and shoddy brains. Irate Customer: OK, so how do I replace this brain thingy? HellDesk: Do you have a large butcher knife? Again from the article:
Authorities said Shklovskiy and Shtok devised a way to use personal computers equipped with commercially available software to "harvest" electronic mail addresses.
I would be happier if the article said, "The suspects used a technique called spamming. Spamming is..." This kind of description somehow feeds off of, and into the demonization of computer activity. I'm irritated by the wide-eyed naivete of 'found a way' in several ways. It's somehow similar to the way spammers never use the words spam or UCE in their websites; rather they refer to 'bulk e-mailing' or other ambiguous term. I guess in a broader sense it's part of reporters' general failure to supply the context of what they report.
You couldn't be more wrong. I do a mix of programming and sysadmin. Most of the code I work on is already GPL'd, although people outside my company have little interest in it. I don't get paid to produce intellectual property; I get paid to solve problems. Medical doctors share their techniques - why shouldn't programmers? I think that very few programmers make money off of retail boxed software. Most of us write and maintain the code that powers big organizations and dotcoms. Our employers are increasingly willing to GPL their code (they really don't care one way or the other) as they see that there are no real risks. Contrary to your dire prediction, the salary and status of programmers has increased as Free Software has spread. I think this is partly because a smart programmer of today can be much more productive than ten years ago, thanks in large part to free things like Perl, Linux, Apache and MySQL which form a generic toolbox for much of application programming.
By clicking 'I Accept' below, you affirm under penalty of perjury that the item:
Was not owned, issued, manufactured, specified by any Nazi, Soviet Communist or other official of a repressive state, and does not bear the likeness, symbol or insignia of any political organization or entity other than a free western democracy.
Cannot be used to harm a human being, household pet, personal property or the environment, or to violate anyone's privacy, or to duplicate without authorization information that is protected by copyright or patent or by your country's National Security laws or regulations, nor to tamper with any electronic or computer system.
Does not cause offence to, or ridicule or belittle, people of any religion, political belief, sexual preference, race, profession, place of abode, preference in operating systems or applications, physical, mental or emotional handicap, characteristic odor, drug or smoking habit, criminal record, personality or character.
Does not embody the proprietary intellectual property of any government, corporation, religion, or any other organization, except that it may be or include a properly licensed copy of such a work, complete with a notarized receipt.
Cannot be used to facilitate any abnormal sexual practices, and does not bear any obvious bodily secretions or residues of intoxicating drugs.
Well that makes a lot of sense. But if that's the case, why is Earthweb willing to go to court for this? Wouldn't they rather sell their remaining interest in TPJ to Orwant for a pittance, thinking "good riddance"?
Basic then evolved (or should I say "mutated") first into a Pascal-like syntax with procedures instead of line numbers...
Well, Perl already uses that "Pascal-like" syntax, so you obviously don't mean this literally. But maybe Object-Orientation is to Perl what functions are to Basic? Perl and Basic share some similarities: both are pragmatist's languages, concerned with getting the job done rather than theoretical purity. Both are going to evolve in whatever direction pleases their developers, without one atom of regard for theory. Both enable a very rapid feedback loop in development.
It could indeed happen to slashdot, and the fact that someone modded your comment as 'Troll' show a dangerous blindness. I would assume that Taco &c are bound by non-competes, thus depriving the post-slashdot world of a logical center. Presumably the existing community could move to another platform, possibly running slashcode. But there will be fragmentation, with many small competing sites trying to seize the/. mindshare. Also, it's a mistake to assume that virtual communities can be murdered and then resurrected effortleslly. Typically when a community is killed it never comes back. Bruce Sterling mentions an example of this in The Hacker Crackdown - someone built a BBS on a computer owned by AT&T. One day AT&T decided to pull the plug on that machine. Of course, with the internet we have other ways to ask each other 'what happened to our BBS?' and potentially reunite.
All the bad things you cited involved physically harming or removing a resource so others can't benefit from it. The action in question here is that of copying a resource and then falsely claiming credit for the copy as if it were an original work. So rather than stealing the declaration of independence, they made a web page of it, pretending to have authored it. The original document is still where it was, and the public can still enjoy reading it. It's obnoxious and rude, but it's not stealing.
What I'm thinking is that the reason that this company had an oppurtunity is that the market was ready for everybuddy to run under winders but no one was doing it.
And this is why intellectual property is wrong, whether it benefits greedy.com or the FSF. Intellectual property is the right to create and maintain artificial vacuums or scarcities without fear of anyone else filling them. Having said that, I do understand the point of the GPL in the short run. I just hope to see the day when the GPL is no longer needed because copyrights have been abolished everywhere.
The developers might not be receptive to xp0rnstar's critique, but that's no reason for him to refrain from criticism. Generally, we have to identify problems before solving them. Although there's no immediate solution in sight, the growth of empty daydreams on sourceforge is an incipient problem. The problem is not that daydreams are presented for public review - I think that's great. The problem is that they are presented in a way that implies they're real, actively developed projects. I still criticize Windows when I'm forced to use it, although I don't expect Gates to jump.
Slashdot Mirror
That might be the solution. What if a few hundred people sent Ebay email saying in effect, "your preferences on myhobbysite.org have been accidentally set to 'No test bids'. We are turning them back on so you can be the same as the rest of the myhobbysite.org community. If you want to opt out, etc. We will randomly place a test bid of approx. 1,000,000 on several thousand auctions a day."
Turnabout is fair play.
Sorry to be pedantic, but I think the expression son-of-a-female-dog is redundant. Barring outlandish genetic experiments and test tube puppies, anyone who is the son of a dog is necessarily the son of two dogs, a stud and a bitch.
Horses mate with asses to produce mules, but I haven't heard of dogs mating with any other species to produce offspring.
So in the future you can say son-of-a-dog or maybe just dogson.
May I recommend that instead of abandoning Ebay, you pester them to help you? If you walk away, your message is lost in the noise.
Why not phone them and ask them to honor your preferences? They will tell you to go to a certain web page, etc., but tell them 'I already did that and your mail says an error occurred. So I want you to do it for me.'
The cost of handling a single support call is more than they'd make from spamming 1000 people.
So the buffer contains whatever it contained when it was allocated? What's the use of that? I'm pretty sure the buffer was written to while parsing the SWF file. The exploit mentioned fields that have are prefixed by a length, where the length is used by the parser to determine how much storage to allocate.
I'm quite skeptical of that. Maybe if Peter explained exactly how the buffer overflow causes the crash I could understand his reasons for saying that the bug can't be exploited in other ways. Is he assuming that since the vulnerable buffer was malloc'd from heap, an attacker can't predict a jump address for any particular byte in the buffer?
I think I can make sense of the seeming contradiction. The corporations we characterize as 'evil' are frequently using laws which libertarians do not approve.
I think most younger, more net-savvy libertarians would like to see intellectual property abolished or substantially weakened. This would prevent most of the abuses complained of on Slashdot. Beyond that, we need to ask what right and responsibilities a corporation has as an artifical, government-created person. For example, it's noteworthy that while corporations enjoy most of the rights of natural people, they cannot be imprisoned for breaking the law. We don't even attempt to provide an analogous punishment. To explore this question is certainly within the scope of Libertarianism.
I don't think there is a problem, at least not the one Carr posits. Carr claims that the internet is flooded with misinformation and that people blindly believe what they read on the internet. I haven't found either of these statements to be true. /. were to post that the Soviets were selling nuclear missiles on ebay, I'd pretty much assume it was a hoax.
On the contrary, the internet allows one to see both sides of a controversy, where the major media are usually biased towards one side. Also, people tend to be skeptical of internet sources and only grow to trust a particular source over time. For example if
But I agree that if the problem did exist, government would not be a good solution.
Actually, financial well-being is the least important benefit of freedom. Carr seems blind to the ways in which the Internet has empowered ordinary people against both corporate and government organizations.
Next, Carr introduces the 'child molester' motif:
OK, Carr started by claiming the Internet will destroy education, health, etc. and now he's focusing on child molesters? Even if the Internet greatly facilitated child molesters, which it doesn't, this would have no bearing on the sweeping arguments with which Carr opened. And notice that with 'operators' Carr is invoking the image of a for-profit field much like broadcast TV - which is not what the Internet is becoming.
Then Carr wishes the FCC would censor the Internet as they do TV. Rationale:
Carr, it's more because TV lends itself to monopoly and near-monopoly. The internet doesn't - in fact the internet is more democratic than print media.
Just like government officials hoping to use 'child molesters' or 'cyber-terrorism' to get funding, Carr uses the scare of 'widespread information pollution' to justify draconian prior restraint. But he can't point to a single real world example! He whines about Drudge, but how many people have absolute faith in Drudge?
A crown jewel of idiocy: If you're concerned about corporate abuse of the Internet, you should advocate less government regulation, not more. The corporations are only winning through burdensome and unfair laws and regulations. In the case of Napster, it was the government's ridiculous interpretation of the ridiculous idea of copyright that forced Napster to kowtow to the 'music industry'. If the government would stay the hell off the internet Napster would not be forced into 'bilking' users.
I think Carr is just looking for excuses to push his pro-censorship agenda.
I think I'll stop now and resist the temptation to tear this thing apart word by word, illustrating the extreme illogic of which it is made.
Not to mention that for most things crackers want to do with your small linux box, user privs are not required. The logical exploit would be a small program that daemonizes itself and changes $0 to something already prevalent in your process table like 'xterm -bg black -fg green'. Then the daemon would fire off a udp packet to evil hq summarizing the latest capture and do a 'stealth bind' to a high-numbered port, awaiting commands from it's dark master. Then your box is ready to be used as a DOS amplifier or an anonymizing springboard for various attacks. Given how linux users pride themselves on their uptime, the process could be around for quite a while.
Actually, userspace processes cannot write to hardware. That's part of what it means for '386 and up chips to enter protected mode which is the mode in which linux runs. All of Unix security would be worthless if users could perform sector-level writes to the hard disk.
Generically, that describes any buffer overflow exploit that hasn't been perfected yet. If a program has a buffer 100 bytes long with no checking, and I feed it a 10M string, it will almost certainly crash. My string will have overwritten part of the program with instructions the CPU probably doesn't like. With enough work, I can design a string that puts some properly written machine language in a location the program will call or jump to. Thus, I can execute arbitrary code with the same privileges as the program.
I'd like a smarter lynx, that could among other things collapse these navbars into something like a listbox, so it would become only one element to skip past when you don't want it.
Re the unfriendly frameset issue, I wish designers would use something like:
I think the invitation to upgrade your browser is a poor idea because most people running a non-frames browser in 2001 are probably doing it on purpose, and there's no sense driving visitors away to do some other task, after which they'll probably forget to come back.
Yes, that's obviously the perception of the decision-makers, but are the decision-makers right? We've just seen the death of many e-commerce sites built with that 'noisy flashy junky' philosophy, and while their business models certainly contributed, I think the sites actively drove users away. For example, boo.com must be the most extreme case of 'commerce-as-entertainment' and for a brief period after their launch, it seemed that everyone would have to 'catch up' to their 'immersive' web site. Then, of course, they failed miserably. I never managed to see their site - some combination of netscape crashing, slow connections and server-side flakiness.
Who survived the e-commerce bloodbath? Amazon comes to mind - flashy perhaps, but info-rich with reviews and easy searching.
It's worth remembering that most attempts to "cash in on those knee-jerk, primitive instincts" ended up losing money. Maybe people aren't as primitive as merchants think.
Ah yes, the drooling morons theory, commonly held by cynical techies. The problem is I have yet to meet one of these drooling morons. The non-tech savvy people I've seen surfing the web are easily confused and intimidated by complex, flashing, javascript-infested sites. They like simple fast sites like Yahoo, and above all sites that make them feel in control.
I agree there is some delta between the geeks and the normals - the normals seem to like one chunk of info per page, with clear navigation to access sibling, parent and child chunks of info. The geeks like lots of info on a page so they don't have to interrupt their info uptake for a page load.
The researcher gave Macromedia seven months to patch this before posting to bugtraq. I just goes to prove, if proof is still needed, that commercial vendors will not fix holes until they are being exploited on a massive scale.
Yes, I know there are some shining exceptions. But I think that generally, unless a company has a clear track record of working with outsiders to fix holes in a timely fashion, anybody discovering an exploit should post it to bugtraq immediately. Vendors like Macromedia don't deserve the courtesy of advance notification, especially when it leaves huge numbers of machines vulnerable for months.
He's not arguing that spam is a nice thing. Spam is horrible and spammers are horrible. The question is, are we endorsing measures corrosive to our freedom in order to stamp out something horrible? I think drugs are horrible, but the war on drugs has done so much harm, both physical and moral, that it must be stopped. I think we'll all feel that way about the war on spam if the government earnestly wages such a war. Remember, freedom of speech is about horrible people saying horrible things.
I'm not arguing that spam is really protected speech in the constitutional sense. But I think that it's better to err on the side of free speech even in private contexts.
HellDesk: How can I help you?
Irate Customer: I received an e-mailing asking for a £24 "processing fee" in exchange for a chance to work at home stuffing envelopes! So naturally I sent 24 pounds to Shklovskiy and Shtok in Los Angeles!
HellDesk: Sir, the problem is in your brain. You must have gotten one of these substandard and shoddy brains.
Irate Customer: OK, so how do I replace this brain thingy?
HellDesk: Do you have a large butcher knife?
Again from the article:
I would be happier if the article said, "The suspects used a technique called spamming. Spamming is
This kind of description somehow feeds off of, and into the demonization of computer activity. I'm irritated by the wide-eyed naivete of 'found a way' in several ways. It's somehow similar to the way spammers never use the words spam or UCE in their websites; rather they refer to 'bulk e-mailing' or other ambiguous term.
I guess in a broader sense it's part of reporters' general failure to supply the context of what they report.
You couldn't be more wrong. I do a mix of programming and sysadmin. Most of the code I work on is already GPL'd, although people outside my company have little interest in it. I don't get paid to produce intellectual property; I get paid to solve problems. Medical doctors share their techniques - why shouldn't programmers?
I think that very few programmers make money off of retail boxed software. Most of us write and maintain the code that powers big organizations and dotcoms. Our employers are increasingly willing to GPL their code (they really don't care one way or the other) as they see that there are no real risks.
Contrary to your dire prediction, the salary and status of programmers has increased as Free Software has spread. I think this is partly because a smart programmer of today can be much more productive than ten years ago, thanks in large part to free things like Perl, Linux, Apache and MySQL which form a generic toolbox for much of application programming.
Thank you for using Yahoo! auctions.
I Accept
Well that makes a lot of sense. But if that's the case, why is Earthweb willing to go to court for this? Wouldn't they rather sell their remaining interest in TPJ to Orwant for a pittance, thinking "good riddance"?
Well, Perl already uses that "Pascal-like" syntax, so you obviously don't mean this literally. But maybe Object-Orientation is to Perl what functions are to Basic?
Perl and Basic share some similarities: both are pragmatist's languages, concerned with getting the job done rather than theoretical purity. Both are going to evolve in whatever direction pleases their developers, without one atom of regard for theory. Both enable a very rapid feedback loop in development.
It could indeed happen to slashdot, and the fact that someone modded your comment as 'Troll' show a dangerous blindness. I would assume that Taco &c are bound by non-competes, thus depriving the post-slashdot world of a logical center. /. mindshare. Also, it's a mistake to assume that virtual communities can be murdered and then resurrected effortleslly. Typically when a community is killed it never comes back. Bruce Sterling mentions an example of this in The Hacker Crackdown - someone built a BBS on a computer owned by AT&T. One day AT&T decided to pull the plug on that machine. Of course, with the internet we have other ways to ask each other 'what happened to our BBS?' and potentially reunite.
Presumably the existing community could move to another platform, possibly running slashcode. But there will be fragmentation, with many small competing sites trying to seize the
All the bad things you cited involved physically harming or removing a resource so others can't benefit from it. The action in question here is that of copying a resource and then falsely claiming credit for the copy as if it were an original work.
So rather than stealing the declaration of independence, they made a web page of it, pretending to have authored it.
The original document is still where it was, and the public can still enjoy reading it.
It's obnoxious and rude, but it's not stealing.
Having said that, I do understand the point of the GPL in the short run. I just hope to see the day when the GPL is no longer needed because copyrights have been abolished everywhere.
The developers might not be receptive to xp0rnstar's critique, but that's no reason for him to refrain from criticism.
Generally, we have to identify problems before solving them. Although there's no immediate solution in sight, the growth of empty daydreams on sourceforge is an incipient problem. The problem is not that daydreams are presented for public review - I think that's great. The problem is that they are presented in a way that implies they're real, actively developed projects.
I still criticize Windows when I'm forced to use it, although I don't expect Gates to jump.