Re:Actual use of the idea..
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Pay Lars
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I'm not against record labels. Someone needs to do that dirty work. I'm against the "big" record labels that fuck over artists, etc., and leverage their bigness to monotonize the music I get to hear.
if you think that's Ani, well, so be it.:-)
(Stupid slashdot 70 second rules! gotta wait to post this. I guess I type too fast.:-)
Re:Actual use of the idea..
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Pay Lars
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Why does her having her own record label (which I was aware of) make her a bad example?
The hope would be she can be "pure" about her ways. Maybe she'll get greedy (maybe she already is) but I certainly hope not.
I'll look into direct ordering. Hardly worth the trouble for the # of CDs I buy.
Re:This is more like, "Turn yourself in".
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Pay Lars
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Ever heard the expression "RTFM"?
yeah, at the bottom of the site it says enough that your post is totally and completely irrelevant.
it says that donations are not an admission of guilt. it's valid to say that I just really like the song "nothing else matters" and want to pay a little extra for it.
it also says that they don't log the CC info.
The only thing that remains is the veracity of these statements. Given the "joking" nature of the site, item #1, etc., it seems unlikely that it is rather unlikely that this site is designed or will become a place to have people logged as a starting point for further prosecution.
sorry if I sound harsh, but your post pissed me off because just reading the site woulda prevented it. (and prevented my subsequent post, etc.)
I've often felt that this is how music money should be handled. Take Ani Difranco, for example. most of her CDs are $25+ Canadian - far more than I could afford. I'd be happy to cut her a check for however-much-she-actually-profits plus a bit for each CD. I don't care about the CD insert, the jewel case, i care about the music. I have a fair number of mp3s, a lot of them are legal (as I understand, because I own CDs for most of them.) And I'd be happy to do a "Pay Lars" for some other bands. Happier, in fact. It's too bad that most bands have signed with labels that would never let them get away with it, but if I had any musical talent that people liked, I would certainly grant people the right-to-listen to my music at $1 / song. More profitable, more pure. I suppose that's something along the lines of what mp3.com is trying to do, but from what I understand, it's not as pure.
Well, I'm/sure/ I cracked 500,000 on nintendo, and IIRC I cracked 700,00, but I haven't been playing in a looong time.
:-)
Re:The reason why it *IS* relevent to slashdot..
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Tech Stocks Tumble
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While I see what you're saying, I think the "damage" is done. Obviously, what has released won't be un-released, and even with a horrid stock market crash, very few linux projects will be scrapped, I betcha.
The one lesson we should perhaps learn from this is how important it is that releases of software are as open source as possible, precisely so that companies cannot take them back, inasmuch as the current version is broken and they refuse to fix it.
I agree that they are separate and distinct things, and I would say that usage by a target audience is by far the more important than mainstream viability. Usage by a target audience is also what slashdot is about. (At least the linux aspects of the "news for nerds." after all, mainstream acceptance would be "news for the mainstream," also known as ZDnet, which is where this sort of article belongs.
I use slashdot to find and filter my news for the articles I would never find on my usual perusings of ZDnet and Salon and CNN.
Re:The reason why it *IS* relevent to slashdot..
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Tech Stocks Tumble
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Everybody who uses linux (if you use linux) irrespective of commercial interests, raise your hand?
(presumably most of slashdot goes up)
Now everybody who's totally dependent on some corporate interest for their usage of linux, raise your hand?
hmm...I see.
I use linux because I was sick of pirating, I wanted to try something new and hopefully better. "Commercial" interests have probably only *hindered* that for me, not helped. Slashdot existed sans Andover, sans VA, everything I consider good about linux existed without corporate interests. While I think it's good that slashdot should be kept on its toes for journalistic integrity, I, personally, trust most of what I read here as having only massive personal bias, and no "market" or "corporate" bias, which is exactly what slashdot is supposed to be, IMO.
Though I can't confirm that, it certainly makes sense. Although for the kind of programming I really enjoy, the math isn't/that/ beneficial, for the problems the ACM suggests, it's huge. Being able to think in three dimensions, think in terms of efficiency, proving code, etc., that this university (UW) really hammers on can only help for a contest like the ACM.
I've pondered this one a little bit myself, and one thing I noticed is this: in the way politics works, realistically, you need a large group of people in a reasonably small area to influence the bigwigs. The diminishing power we have over our representatives is our vote (I say diminishing because of how much influence is bought and sold), and votes are geographical in nature. It is very hard to bring the voice from the internet - which clearly transcends geography, - to "old world" or "real world" (depending on where you fit.:-) ) politics.
In the good ol' dial-up BBS days, there was the benefit of knowing when people you were talking to were from your area (because area codes were usually displayed), and there was that chance of getting a bunch of people together. That sort of link between electronic and geographic proximity has been mostly lost, and the link is now between electronic and interest-related proximity - never before have as many geeks been in one "place" as there are here on Slashdot.
So, I guess I'm just rephrasing the question: How do we reforge a geographical link? A protest in front of an MP's (I'm Canadian) office that The Media(tm) picks up on is hundreds of times more influential than a bunch of form letters forwarded along by concerned citizens.
No one said it was the/first/ language they were learning, or the only language they were learning. Somehow I would expect people teaching themselves perl in that sort of environment have at least used basic or turing, probably even a/real/ language.:-)
"I dont live in Michigan, and if I did, probably not Holland. Some of you don't even live in the US... Why should we care about what happens in Michigan? Ok, the geek compound is based there,so what?, discuss this via e-mail not a thread on/." There's a few reasons. I myself am from Canada, but it's an unfortunate truth that American society often leads the way in things like this, and the world watches. So there's one reason, but really not a great one - the EU, for example, as I understand takes tech laws very differently than the US. Secondly, it's interesting. I like it - it's a story of what works and what doesn't when being "activist." Jamie spelled out what mistakes he thought he had made and those things he thought he did right, and we can all learn from this. Third, though you can argue that this is no longer "just someone's home page" the content is still governed basically at the sole discretion of the slashdot crew. It's a tired argument, but if you don't like it, don't read it. If you don't like any of it, do it yourself. If you're doing it yourself, do a better job.:-) Lastly, it matters because censorship very obviously falls into the "Stuff that Matters" category. If you don't think so - well, that's your perogies. perogative. whatever.:-)
Well, if a gal is pregnant, or a guy is gay, as you suggest than, in "real" life (ie: without the internet) they do one of two things:
Go to the many privacy-assured clinics (pregnancy) or find various other sources of information for homosexuals (I'm not overly familiar, but I'm sure it's out there...)/or/ they keep quiet about it. So basically, the thing is that the internet isn't doing anything to/hinder/ their freedom, but it could be helping and it isn't, is what you're saying?
I agree. But then, your parents didn't watch you every minute, and they might have been the say kind of parent that, given the choice, would simply ask to see URLs categorized as directly pornographic. Now, of course, we come back to the same problem of not being able to keep up with the pr0n on the net, but then, if it's an invisible trace (ie: you don't know what has been considered porn) then a kid will stay away anyway. Another handy feature would be a log of how long one was at each site.
if you're at a porn site for 10 seconds, you clearly didn't know what it is, whereas if you're there for 5 minutes (or under that subdomain or something - details that would need to be worked out..) then you might be doing something else.
As to putting the computers in the middle of the room, I think that goes pretty much without saying. But, a kid can peruse the adultish books (not the playboys and the hustlers that I gather some libraries have, but the romance novels and such) without creating any suspicion, and similarly, the tolerance of what they could view on the net is quite high...So/just/ putting them in an openly visible place doesn't cut it, IMO.
As a fairly wellknown geek amongst family and friends, I have more than once been asked about "all the bad stuff on the internet" and how "we don't want our kids on there."
My canned response is now something that Jamie mentioned - "Another kind of software simply informs parents what sites their children have visited. Instead of making it impossible for children to see certain sites, this approach puts parental discipline at the center. Children, realizing that their parents are looking over their shoulders, are thus taught to internalize the restraints and to develop a conscience of their own."
This/is/ the solution to the censorship debate, IMO. Have libraries email visited sites to parents. If you want, you can even white-list acceptable content as a pre-filter. At home, it's the best solution. It by no means limits creativity or exploration, and is like the rest of growing up - if you do something bad, you risk getting caught. My parents (and most, I think) do their best to let their children run wild and free, and restrain them only as necessary - why do we see this differently with respect to the 'net?
This would have been extremely effective in my childhood as a preventative measure for view "inappropriate" stuff..as it was, my parents new little of my habits, and they weren't/that/ bad.:-)
Many of slashdots readerships do have the opportunity to suggest or even promote various things like this as their aunts and uncles or friends' friends' brother asks how to handle this sort of thing. I encourage you all to encourage everyone else to tell them simply to read the history files, or buy software to help you out a bit.
I had this idea quite a while ago. I even posted a comment about it here. There are plenty of reasons not to have this whole fake DeCSS.. Certainly if the file size isn't the same, identifying/real/ decss is trivial. In fact, the file names/in/ the package should be the same. You should have to download the whole thing to figure out that it's not the actual DeCSS. (Or cksum it or whatever, but that requires downloading.)
Then and only then is it a real thorn in the side of people trying to sue DeCSS'ers. This is just a snowball trying to stop a snowplow.
Sorry about the formatting in the last post... This is completely OT, but I'm putting it here because I have the chance to post early, and I'm unabashedly hoping to get moderated up so people can see it, and let me know if they agree or not.
Is it just me, or is there less moderation these days? I usually read at 3+, and even on mediocre-response articles, there is a handful of articles at this level For the last few days, it seems that there has been significantly less.
A few explanations come to mind: o I'm crazy, it's the same as usual. Responses to this article will determine that. o More people are moderating down, rather than up. I don't know, I don't read at -1, but I doubt it. o For some reason, users are moderating less. This seems unlikely to me. o The quotas for how many moderation points are given it has been dropped.
It's that last one that is bothersome -- because, again, there are a few explanations that I can think of: o One of the slashdot crew is fiddling with quotas to try and fine-tune the moderation system. o A bug in the code, perhaps.
Or the really bothersome one:
The ability to moderate is being limited. Why is this bothersome? Well, I'm not normally a conspiracy nut, but moderation is what keeps any force from being able to heavy-handedly change slashdot. Like other people have pointed out, 90% of the content here is in the comments, if not more. The users control the comments, the users control the site, which means VA, Andover, and whoever, have only a limited ability to influence things, because they have watchdogs that can get moderated up if something seems fishy. If there are fewer moderation points being given out, then this seems awfully suspicious.
Just some thoughts. Anyone noticed the same thing?
My apologies to the slashdot crew for yet more criticism and paranoia, but..I can't help it.:-)
This is completely OT, but I'm putting it here because I have the chance to post early, and I'm unabashedly hoping to get moderated up so people can see it, and let me know if they agree or not. Is it just me, or is there less moderation these days? I usually read at 3+, and even on mediocre-response articles, there is a handful of articles at this level For the last few days, it seems that there has been significantly less. A few explanations come to mind: o I'm crazy, it's the same as usual. Responses to this article will determine that. o More people are moderating down, rather than up. I don't know, I don't read at -1, but I doubt it. o For some reason, users are moderating less. This seems unlikely to me. o The quotas for how many moderation points are given it has been dropped. It's that last one that is bothersome -- because, again, there are a few explanations that I can think of: o One of the slashdot crew is fiddling with quotas to try and fine-tune the moderation system. o A bug in the code, perhaps. Or the really bothersome one: The ability to moderate is being limited. Why is this bothersome? Well, I'm not normally a conspiracy nut, but moderation is what keeps any force from being able to heavy-handedly change slashdot. Like other people have pointed out, 90% of the content here is in the comments, if not more. The users control the comments, the users control the site, which means VA, Andover, and whoever, have only a limited ability to influence things, because they have watchdogs that can get moderated up if something seems fishy. If there are fewer moderation points being given out, then this seems awfully suspicious. Just some thoughts. Anyone noticed the same thing? My apologies to the slashdot crew for yet more criticism and paranoia, but..I can't help it.:-)
Oh, I know. But I had really _no_ budget to upgrade..I was just doing it because I knew I could get a steal of a deal, and I was sick of my k6-233. Obviously if I had $600 cash, I'd drop it on an athlon in a second..but the Celery covers what I need...
Assuming that's $150 American, that's 'bout $225 canadian, plus a more expensive chip, and instead I got a BP6 and a celeron for about what I would have paid for just the mobo. I can justify the more expensive chip, but since feature for feature the motherboards are very similar (except the BP6 is dual!) It didn't make sense.
..to read about tech, and get interesting insights into the politics behind it all. He waves his conspiracy stick in neat directions, often implying that Intel is involved in some pretty microsoft-like tactics to get people not to make AMD motherboards and such.
And lately, Intel has really been on the run, releasing unstable 600's (or was it 650s?) and claiming to release the 750s and 800's when they weren't available..something that when AMD did, Intel cried about.
It's really impressive to see AMD doing so well...mostly indicated by the number of mistakes intel has made lately (Rambus, etc.)
I'm an AMD fan...though the last purchase I made was a celeron..couldn't justify the cost of AMD motherboards.
Absolutely it could be any guy whose girlfriend who just dumped him. Everyone keeps pointing out that it's easy. The obvious argument is "why hasn't it been done before?" Obviously, there are lots of SK's that like to go around defacing sites that require little to no skill...and they're smart enough to pull this off, apparently..and the ones that deface the various "official"-type pages (.gov, etc...) don't seem afraid of being caught. So why hasn't anyone else done this?
I also like the thought-experiment of imagining that I am, in fact, in control of sufficient bandwidth that I can shut down any site of my choosing. That's pretty cool.:-)
I agree that it's odd to do it without an announced agenda..obviously 90% of the current/. discussion is speculation, so I'll join in...maybe "they" will release something on why nice and soon now.
Certainly, an obvious, fairly "clean" motive is to show, as many SK's rationalize, that they're demonstrating the weaknesses in security in the way the 'net works...The fact that most users use windows, will run anything a random ICQer tells them to, and more and more of these people have high bandwidth access.
I've digressed a bit - to respond to your first sentence ("So you advise any "revolutionaries" to go DoSing random sites as their plan A?") no. But _if_ there is a "big picture" to this, and it's some damn smart guy somewhere damn well hidden with a damn good motive and agenda, this would seem to be how it would start, no?
This is what _I_ would do, given that I had the means, motive, opportunity, knowledge, intelligence, stupidity, money, guts, etc.
This questioning is especially necessary with the Buy.com.
pardon me, but who's heard of buy.com?
Out of the following four sites, pick the one that doesn't belong:
Yahoo, CNN, Altavista, Ebay, Buy.com.
well gee...The first four are probably the most high profile sites on the net, except maybe microsoft (Which brings up another interesting question...what script kiddie _wouldn't_ shut down MS?!)
I think Buy.com has some server trouble on their IPO day, and blamed it on "hackers"...(see the cnn.com article...)
How often are sites like the MPAA defaced/DoS'd in times of trial? Remember the NATO sites being taken down during the anti-Yugoslavia (IIRC) airstrikes? How big of news did that make? Not a whole lot. First, get their attention, then make your statement. Maybe the MPAA is next... Also, CNN is, depending who you ask, a highly biased source of information, a very "American" media outlet, lurid and sensationalist. I can't decide what I think, and I won't until (if?) we hear about an intent or motive. There is at least _some_ organization here, and certainly some guts - we all know that the (supposed) Melissa author was tracked down, and he though not careful, didn't exactly go shouting his name to the police. There's a lot of infrastructure to track this already in the 'net. Just my thoughts.
For the typical user as you describe, I would argue windows is _certainly_ not ready for consumption. The people that are oblivious to resolution (which is a great example) have _no_ idea how to cope with the things windows does, even when it works relatively properly. Not a sniff. I've seen it, I've dealt with it a lot. Even with hewlett packard's make-it-easy software, a true newbie (or even someone that's used a machine at work for a while) will have a helluva time installing drivers...it's amazingly inconsistent how you _actually_ get drivers to work.
Sure, usually you can just plug something in and insert a disk..and I think every user should know how to do that (or equivalent sort of thing) under any OS. But some people just have no time/interest/ability to learn that. I'm a windows user, and extremely comfortable in my environment. I've tried linux (probably installed it 20 times) and every time I have a megabig problem during install, and I just don't have a tolerance for it. My win98 is "rock solid" for a windows machine -- it crashes perhaps once a week, which is better than I saw during _several_ of my linux installs.
And moreover, a linux install that lets me ignore everything and just let the installer do everything installs an amazingly bloated system. Way more than my current win9x system. And there's no way to trim it down that's readily visible without flipping through every package.
So there's my linux wishlist, I guess. I don't need a gui - I was a DOS boy for a long time. I need to know what I have on my system, where it is, how to change it. And there just doesn't seem to be a resource for me to learn that...It's perhaps a flaw in the decentralized nature of linux development.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not against record labels. Someone needs to do that dirty work. I'm against the "big" record labels that fuck over artists, etc., and leverage their bigness to monotonize the music I get to hear.
:-)
:-)
if you think that's Ani, well, so be it.
(Stupid slashdot 70 second rules! gotta wait to post this. I guess I type too fast.
Why does her having her own record label (which I was aware of) make her a bad example?
The hope would be she can be "pure" about her ways. Maybe she'll get greedy (maybe she already is) but I certainly hope not.
I'll look into direct ordering. Hardly worth the trouble for the # of CDs I buy.
yeah, at the bottom of the site it says enough that your post is totally and completely irrelevant.
- it says that donations are not an admission of guilt. it's valid to say that I just really like the song "nothing else matters" and want to pay a little extra for it.
- it also says that they don't log the CC info.
The only thing that remains is the veracity of these statements. Given the "joking" nature of the site, item #1, etc., it seems unlikely that it is rather unlikely that this site is designed or will become a place to have people logged as a starting point for further prosecution.sorry if I sound harsh, but your post pissed me off because just reading the site woulda prevented it. (and prevented my subsequent post, etc.)
I've often felt that this is how music money should be handled. Take Ani Difranco, for example. most of her CDs are $25+ Canadian - far more than I could afford. I'd be happy to cut her a check for however-much-she-actually-profits plus a bit for each CD. I don't care about the CD insert, the jewel case, i care about the music. I have a fair number of mp3s, a lot of them are legal (as I understand, because I own CDs for most of them.) And I'd be happy to do a "Pay Lars" for some other bands. Happier, in fact.
It's too bad that most bands have signed with labels that would never let them get away with it, but if I had any musical talent that people liked, I would certainly grant people the right-to-listen to my music at $1 / song. More profitable, more pure.
I suppose that's something along the lines of what mp3.com is trying to do, but from what I understand, it's not as pure.
Nothing else matters!
(Sorry, couldn't help it.)
Well, I'm /sure/ I cracked 500,000 on nintendo, and IIRC I cracked 700,00, but I haven't been playing in a looong time.
:-)
While I see what you're saying, I think the "damage" is done. Obviously, what has released won't be un-released, and even with a horrid stock market crash, very few linux projects will be scrapped, I betcha.
The one lesson we should perhaps learn from this is how important it is that releases of software are as open source as possible, precisely so that companies cannot take them back, inasmuch as the current version is broken and they refuse to fix it.
I agree that they are separate and distinct things, and I would say that usage by a target audience is by far the more important than mainstream viability. Usage by a target audience is also what slashdot is about. (At least the linux aspects of the "news for nerds." after all, mainstream acceptance would be "news for the mainstream," also known as ZDnet, which is where this sort of article belongs.
I use slashdot to find and filter my news for the articles I would never find on my usual perusings of ZDnet and Salon and CNN.
Everybody who uses linux (if you use linux) irrespective of commercial interests, raise your hand?
(presumably most of slashdot goes up)
Now everybody who's totally dependent on some corporate interest for their usage of linux, raise your hand?
hmm...I see.
I use linux because I was sick of pirating, I wanted to try something new and hopefully better. "Commercial" interests have probably only *hindered* that for me, not helped. Slashdot existed sans Andover, sans VA, everything I consider good about linux existed without corporate interests. While I think it's good that slashdot should be kept on its toes for journalistic integrity, I, personally, trust most of what I read here as having only massive personal bias, and no "market" or "corporate" bias, which is exactly what slashdot is supposed to be, IMO.
Though I can't confirm that, it certainly makes sense. Although for the kind of programming I really enjoy, the math isn't /that/ beneficial, for the problems the ACM suggests, it's huge. Being able to think in three dimensions, think in terms of efficiency, proving code, etc., that this university (UW) really hammers on can only help for a contest like the ACM.
-Sylvester
I've pondered this one a little bit myself, and one thing I noticed is this: in the way politics works, realistically, you need a large group of people in a reasonably small area to influence the bigwigs. The diminishing power we have over our representatives is our vote (I say diminishing because of how much influence is bought and sold), and votes are geographical in nature. It is very hard to bring the voice from the internet - which clearly transcends geography, - to "old world" or "real world" (depending on where you fit. :-) ) politics.
In the good ol' dial-up BBS days, there was the benefit of knowing when people you were talking to were from your area (because area codes were usually displayed), and there was that chance of getting a bunch of people together. That sort of link between electronic and geographic proximity has been mostly lost, and the link is now between electronic and interest-related proximity - never before have as many geeks been in one "place" as there are here on Slashdot.
So, I guess I'm just rephrasing the question: How do we reforge a geographical link? A protest in front of an MP's (I'm Canadian) office that The Media(tm) picks up on is hundreds of times more influential than a bunch of form letters forwarded along by concerned citizens.
-Syvlester
No one said it was the /first/ language they were learning, or the only language they were learning. Somehow I would expect people teaching themselves perl in that sort of environment have at least used basic or turing, probably even a /real/ language. :-)
Hmm....Why does this merit a score 3?
it's his birthday present, silly!
:-)
"I dont live in Michigan, and if I did, probably not Holland. Some of you don't even live in the US... Why should we care about what happens in Michigan? Ok, the geek compound is based there,so what?, discuss this via e-mail not a thread on /." There's a few reasons. I myself am from Canada, but it's an unfortunate truth that American society often leads the way in things like this, and the world watches. So there's one reason, but really not a great one - the EU, for example, as I understand takes tech laws very differently than the US. Secondly, it's interesting. I like it - it's a story of what works and what doesn't when being "activist." Jamie spelled out what mistakes he thought he had made and those things he thought he did right, and we can all learn from this. Third, though you can argue that this is no longer "just someone's home page" the content is still governed basically at the sole discretion of the slashdot crew. It's a tired argument, but if you don't like it, don't read it. If you don't like any of it, do it yourself. If you're doing it yourself, do a better job. :-) Lastly, it matters because censorship very obviously falls into the "Stuff that Matters" category. If you don't think so - well, that's your perogies. perogative. whatever. :-)
Well, if a gal is pregnant, or a guy is gay, as you suggest than, in "real" life (ie: without the internet) they do one of two things:
/or/ they keep quiet about it. So basically, the thing is that the internet isn't doing anything to /hinder/ their freedom, but it could be helping and it isn't, is what you're saying?
/just/ putting them in an openly visible place doesn't cut it, IMO.
Go to the many privacy-assured clinics (pregnancy) or find various other sources of information for homosexuals (I'm not overly familiar, but I'm sure it's out there...)
I agree. But then, your parents didn't watch you every minute, and they might have been the say kind of parent that, given the choice, would simply ask to see URLs categorized as directly pornographic. Now, of course, we come back to the same problem of not being able to keep up with the pr0n on the net, but then, if it's an invisible trace (ie: you don't know what has been considered porn) then a kid will stay away anyway. Another handy feature would be a log of how long one was at each site.
if you're at a porn site for 10 seconds, you clearly didn't know what it is, whereas if you're there for 5 minutes (or under that subdomain or something - details that would need to be worked out..) then you might be doing something else.
As to putting the computers in the middle of the room, I think that goes pretty much without saying. But, a kid can peruse the adultish books (not the playboys and the hustlers that I gather some libraries have, but the romance novels and such) without creating any suspicion, and similarly, the tolerance of what they could view on the net is quite high...So
As a fairly wellknown geek amongst family and friends, I have more than once been asked about "all the bad stuff on the internet" and how "we don't want our kids on there."
/is/ the solution to the censorship debate, IMO. Have libraries email visited sites to parents. If you want, you can even white-list acceptable content as a pre-filter. At home, it's the best solution. It by no means limits creativity or exploration, and is like the rest of growing up - if you do something bad, you risk getting caught. My parents (and most, I think) do their best to let their children run wild and free, and restrain them only as necessary - why do we see this differently with respect to the 'net?
/that/ bad. :-)
My canned response is now something that Jamie mentioned -
"Another kind of software simply informs parents what sites their children have visited. Instead of
making it impossible for children to see certain sites, this approach puts parental discipline at the center. Children, realizing that their parents are looking over their shoulders, are thus taught to internalize the restraints and to develop a conscience of their own."
This
This would have been extremely effective in my childhood as a preventative measure for view "inappropriate" stuff..as it was, my parents new little of my habits, and they weren't
Many of slashdots readerships do have the opportunity to suggest or even promote various things like this as their aunts and uncles or friends' friends' brother asks how to handle this sort of thing. I encourage you all to encourage everyone else to tell them simply to read the history files, or buy software to help you out a bit.
Argh.
/real/ decss is trivial. In fact, the file names /in/ the package should be the same. You should have to download the whole thing to figure out that it's not the actual DeCSS. (Or cksum it or whatever, but that requires downloading.)
I had this idea quite a while ago. I even posted a comment about it here. There are plenty of reasons not to have this whole fake DeCSS.. Certainly if the file size isn't the same, identifying
Then and only then is it a real thorn in the side of people trying to sue DeCSS'ers. This is just a snowball trying to stop a snowplow.
Sorry about the formatting in the last post...
:-)
This is completely OT, but I'm putting it here because I have the chance to post early, and I'm unabashedly hoping to get moderated up so people can see it, and let me know if they agree or not.
Is it just me, or is there less moderation these days? I usually read at 3+, and even on mediocre-response articles, there is a handful of articles at this level For the last few days, it seems that there has been significantly less.
A few explanations come to mind:
o I'm crazy, it's the same as usual. Responses to this article will determine that.
o More people are moderating down, rather than up. I don't know, I don't read at -1, but I doubt it.
o For some reason, users are moderating less. This seems unlikely to me.
o The quotas for how many moderation points are given it has been dropped.
It's that last one that is bothersome -- because, again, there are a few explanations that I can think of:
o One of the slashdot crew is fiddling with quotas to try and fine-tune the moderation system.
o A bug in the code, perhaps.
Or the really bothersome one:
The ability to moderate is being limited. Why is this bothersome? Well, I'm not normally a conspiracy nut, but moderation is what keeps any force from being able to heavy-handedly change slashdot. Like other people have pointed out, 90% of the content here is in the comments, if not more. The users control the comments, the users control the site, which means VA, Andover, and whoever, have only a limited ability to influence things, because they have watchdogs that can get moderated up if something seems fishy. If there are fewer moderation points being given out, then this seems awfully suspicious.
Just some thoughts. Anyone noticed the same thing?
My apologies to the slashdot crew for yet more criticism and paranoia, but..I can't help it.
This is completely OT, but I'm putting it here because I have the chance to post early, and I'm unabashedly hoping to get moderated up so people can see it, and let me know if they agree or not. Is it just me, or is there less moderation these days? I usually read at 3+, and even on mediocre-response articles, there is a handful of articles at this level For the last few days, it seems that there has been significantly less. A few explanations come to mind: o I'm crazy, it's the same as usual. Responses to this article will determine that. o More people are moderating down, rather than up. I don't know, I don't read at -1, but I doubt it. o For some reason, users are moderating less. This seems unlikely to me. o The quotas for how many moderation points are given it has been dropped. It's that last one that is bothersome -- because, again, there are a few explanations that I can think of: o One of the slashdot crew is fiddling with quotas to try and fine-tune the moderation system. o A bug in the code, perhaps. Or the really bothersome one: The ability to moderate is being limited. Why is this bothersome? Well, I'm not normally a conspiracy nut, but moderation is what keeps any force from being able to heavy-handedly change slashdot. Like other people have pointed out, 90% of the content here is in the comments, if not more. The users control the comments, the users control the site, which means VA, Andover, and whoever, have only a limited ability to influence things, because they have watchdogs that can get moderated up if something seems fishy. If there are fewer moderation points being given out, then this seems awfully suspicious. Just some thoughts. Anyone noticed the same thing? My apologies to the slashdot crew for yet more criticism and paranoia, but..I can't help it. :-)
Oh, I know. But I had really _no_ budget to upgrade..I was just doing it because I knew I could get a steal of a deal, and I was sick of my k6-233. Obviously if I had $600 cash, I'd drop it on an athlon in a second..but the Celery covers what I need...
Assuming that's $150 American, that's 'bout $225 canadian, plus a more expensive chip, and instead I got a BP6 and a celeron for about what I would have paid for just the mobo. I can justify the more expensive chip, but since feature for feature the motherboards are very similar (except the BP6 is dual!) It didn't make sense.
..to read about tech, and get interesting insights into the politics behind it all. He waves his conspiracy stick in neat directions, often implying that Intel is involved in some pretty microsoft-like tactics to get people not to make AMD motherboards and such.
And lately, Intel has really been on the run, releasing unstable 600's (or was it 650s?) and claiming to release the 750s and 800's when they weren't available..something that when AMD did, Intel cried about.
It's really impressive to see AMD doing so well...mostly indicated by the number of mistakes intel has made lately (Rambus, etc.)
I'm an AMD fan...though the last purchase I made was a celeron..couldn't justify the cost of AMD motherboards.
-Sylvester
Absolutely it could be any guy whose girlfriend who just dumped him. Everyone keeps pointing out that it's easy. The obvious argument is "why hasn't it been done before?" Obviously, there are lots of SK's that like to go around defacing sites that require little to no skill...and they're smart enough to pull this off, apparently..and the ones that deface the various "official"-type pages (.gov, etc...) don't seem afraid of being caught.
:-)
/. discussion is speculation, so I'll join in...maybe "they" will release something on why nice and soon now.
So why hasn't anyone else done this?
I also like the thought-experiment of imagining that I am, in fact, in control of sufficient bandwidth that I can shut down any site of my choosing. That's pretty cool.
I agree that it's odd to do it without an announced agenda..obviously 90% of the current
Certainly, an obvious, fairly "clean" motive is to show, as many SK's rationalize, that they're demonstrating the weaknesses in security in the way the 'net works...The fact that most users use windows, will run anything a random ICQer tells them to, and more and more of these people have high bandwidth access.
I've digressed a bit - to respond to your first sentence ("So you advise any "revolutionaries" to go DoSing random sites as their plan A?") no. But _if_ there is a "big picture" to this, and it's some damn smart guy somewhere damn well hidden with a damn good motive and agenda, this would seem to be how it would start, no?
This is what _I_ would do, given that I had the means, motive, opportunity, knowledge, intelligence, stupidity, money, guts, etc.
(Motive being the most pivotal one.)
This questioning is especially necessary with the Buy.com.
pardon me, but who's heard of buy.com?
Out of the following four sites, pick the one that doesn't belong:
Yahoo, CNN, Altavista, Ebay, Buy.com.
well gee...The first four are probably the most high profile sites on the net, except maybe microsoft (Which brings up another interesting question...what script kiddie _wouldn't_ shut down MS?!)
I think Buy.com has some server trouble on their IPO day, and blamed it on "hackers"...(see the cnn.com article...)
How often are sites like the MPAA defaced/DoS'd in times of trial? Remember the NATO sites being taken down during the anti-Yugoslavia (IIRC) airstrikes? How big of news did that make? Not a whole lot. First, get their attention, then make your statement. Maybe the MPAA is next... Also, CNN is, depending who you ask, a highly biased source of information, a very "American" media outlet, lurid and sensationalist. I can't decide what I think, and I won't until (if?) we hear about an intent or motive. There is at least _some_ organization here, and certainly some guts - we all know that the (supposed) Melissa author was tracked down, and he though not careful, didn't exactly go shouting his name to the police. There's a lot of infrastructure to track this already in the 'net. Just my thoughts.
For the typical user as you describe, I would argue windows is _certainly_ not ready for consumption. The people that are oblivious to resolution (which is a great example) have _no_ idea how to cope with the things windows does, even when it works relatively properly. Not a sniff. I've seen it, I've dealt with it a lot. Even with hewlett packard's make-it-easy software, a true newbie (or even someone that's used a machine at work for a while) will have a helluva time installing drivers...it's amazingly inconsistent how you _actually_ get drivers to work.
Sure, usually you can just plug something in and insert a disk..and I think every user should know how to do that (or equivalent sort of thing) under any OS. But some people just have no time/interest/ability to learn that. I'm a windows user, and extremely comfortable in my environment. I've tried linux (probably installed it 20 times) and every time I have a megabig problem during install, and I just don't have a tolerance for it. My win98 is "rock solid" for a windows machine -- it crashes perhaps once a week, which is better than I saw during _several_ of my linux installs.
And moreover, a linux install that lets me ignore everything and just let the installer do everything installs an amazingly bloated system. Way more than my current win9x system. And there's no way to trim it down that's readily visible without flipping through every package.
So there's my linux wishlist, I guess. I don't need a gui - I was a DOS boy for a long time. I need to know what I have on my system, where it is, how to change it. And there just doesn't seem to be a resource for me to learn that...It's perhaps a flaw in the decentralized nature of linux development.
There's some thoughts.