Of course not. I support the idea of the government, the large corporations, and the security community together creating sound (AND OPEN) specifications to prevent such things as spam, viruses, and spyware, then implementing them.
Sigh... You don't seem to understand the difference between SMTP and HTTP.
I beg your pardon! I certainly do. I was talking about two SEPARATE (but related in root cause, i.e. greed and evil) problems: Spam (SMTP) and spyware (usually contracted over Web browsers, thus HTTP).
"Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses" would apply in the Real World where governments and big companies shun the open-source world, but I was talking about a hypothetical situation where the giant entities that control our world (big corps and the gubmint) actually Did The Right Thing. This would imply working with standards bodies to make the standard open to ALL and not relying upon DMCA/patent nonsense or some 'security through obscurity' BS a la CSS.
"Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves" doesn't apply, since all the schemes I can think of to foil spam are, in fact, economic in nature (and simply implemented through technical means). Of course, you didn't check that box.
"Lack of centrally controlling authority for email" is bullshit. There IS an effective "central authority". It's called "The Fortune 500 companies and the American government". Collectively, they control just about everything on the planet, including Teh Intarweb. If they say one day "Everyone must now implement SecureSMTP on their mail servers and readers and SecureHTTP on their Web servers and clients", BAM, everyone would have to. Period, full stop, end of sentence, no discussion.
Here in the Real World, these entities would only use this extreme amount of clout to do evil, but in my example they would use it to Do The Right Thing. Wishful thinking, I know.
From my experience, I would estimate their loss of sales from boycotts at around 5 to 10%.
You're an imbecile if you think ANY boycott of ANY technology product or service has been that successful in the past, oh, twenty years.
People simply don't give a shit. And speaking of:
Maybe younger people might not care so much, but older adults are generally shocked and none too happy when the DRM bites them in the rear.
Apathy is a growing plague, it would seem. The older people are growing grey and eventually will die, and the apathetic brats currently in HS/college will grow up and take their places. And I see no reason why THEIR kids won't be even worse.
At least, relatively speaking. How many BILLIONS of dollars have been made off of the Star Wars franchise? How many BILLIONS of dollars have been made off of Star Trek? Shit, probably even the humble Back to the Future trilogy of quasi-sci-fi movies made more money than the entire run of B5.
Why? Mainstream appeal. Regardless of how good a show is, if it appeals only to SlashDot nerd types and "Comic Book Guy" types, it'll get frowned upon and scoffed at by investors.
Sad but true.
It's a duopolist's world. The cola world has Coke and Pepsi, the fast food world has McDonald's and Burger King, the software world has Microsoft and... err... and Microsoft, and sci-fi has Star Trek and Star Wars.
Everyone else, regardless of any amount of genuine merit, is a bit player, and will be treated as such by The Powers That Be (and Joe Sixpack).
1) There IS a technological defense against spam. It's called "making it economically infeasible to spam", which translates into implementing technological schemes which do something such as [A] require a "floor" amount of bandwidth to send one email (say, 5MB per) or [B] require CAPTCHA-type verification to send your first email to a given person.
Yes, it's annoying. But it would solve the problem.
2) Did I say a bleeding thing about a "conspiracy"? There is no "conspiracy" necessary for every very very rich person to simultaneously be interested in keeping themselves and their (also very very rich) friends very very rich. It's human nature.
Look. If American corporations and the American government actually wanted to work together to eradicate spyware (as opposed to working together to make lots of money), we wouldn't have spyware. We also wouldn't have spam, viruses, or any number of other nasty things. The fact of the matter is that almost all sorts of online nastiness can be used to benefit the already super-rich. Example: Spyware used to benefit Sony (or so they think), viruses used by companies to insert, well, spyware... spam used, of course, to advertise the products of big companies (directly, indirectly, or "The makers of Viagra paid a marketing firm, who paid another marketing firm, who paid a slightly sleazier marketing firm, who sold a list to an even sleazier one, who sold it in turn to an even sleazier one, who ended up spamming you about buying Viagra")...
They. Don't. Give. A. Fuck. In fact, tacitly I think they like this sort of online plague, since they know damned well that only the 'little guys' (read: their competition and their user base) will ever get in trouble for breaking the DMCA, or spreading spyware, or releasing viruses, or spamming-- but they never will.
It will be a cold day in Hell when Sony actually experiences any pain over this. N.b.: A pathetic boycott by 0.1% of 1% of nerds, who in turn make up 1% of the population, will not cause them pain. Also, a $100,000,000 *kof*slaponthewrist*kof* "fine" will not cause them pain either.
The DMCA was conceived as a way of keeping the rich rich. Full stop. End sentence.
And to those of you who think that the combined might of the Fortune 500 companies and the American government couldn't eradicate spyware, spam, etc. if they REALLY wanted to, think again. It's as simple as implementing new security standards and specs, testing them with the cooperation of the security community, setting a worldwide/nationwide rollout date, then requiring everyone's software to support them as of that date. Think "Attention (ebay|Yahoo|Google|MSN) Users: After JULY 23, 2007, you must have upgraded your Web browser to support the new HardenedHTTP specification. Browsers which support this include: Mozilla Firefox 2.0, Netscape 8.1, Opera 9.01, or Internet Explorer 8 Beta."
Yeah, it'd cost billions. But these companies and the US government, put together, have TRILLIONS.
They don't care, though. They'd rather bring their considerable resources to bear upon the tricky problem of making their CEOs and Board members a few more billion apiece. Consumers? Pfeh, they don't even have people to read their email for them. Who cares about them?
Not to mention that when you add the numbers up and take into account water vapor
Water vapor? Water vapor? While I'd imagine water vapor is a lot more common than the others, doesn't it strike you that something as mundane as water vapor might just be a lot less, oh, I don't know, harmful than, say, carbon monoxide (or just about everything else)?
Earth's ecosystem evolved in tandem with the presence of water vapor. Earth is "used" to water vapor. It's not used to several billion internal combustion vehicles and hundreds of thousands of gasoline-burning and jet-fuel-burning aircraft zooming about polluting willy-nilly.
The reactionary conservative crowd will stick their fingers in their ears and say that "global warming" is a myth. They'll crack jokes about how "global worming" (sic) is supposed to cause an ice age (hyuk hyuk, how funny). Then they'll segue into a rant about how those evil scientists are still trying to spread the "disproven" theory of evolution.
The mountain of evidence that we are, slowly but surely, screwing up our planet's very ability to support life itself does not matter to many people. They would prefer to believe (against all reason) that such a bad thing simply cannot happen to us. Worse, many (most?) people simply don't care what will happen in three or four or five (or ten) generations, since "ah well, I won't be alive then anyways." Never mind that this is the present generation's great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, or whatnot we're talking about, and that most people-- if asked-- will vehemently insist that they care about their children.
Trying to talk sense into these people is like trying to argue with a Scientologist about psychiatry or with a Southern Baptist about evolution.
If the UN were "communist", or any other relative or variant of socialism, they wouldn't allow one of the world's most famous capitalist entities to push them around.
Are geeks still being called horrible names in schools? Are they still being beaten up and ridiculed? Do they still have to fear for their safety on buses, in locker rooms, and on their way home from school?
If you want to host something, your choices are legion:
1) Pay for hosting services.
2) Pay for a shell account somewhere, SSH-tunnel in, and have people connect to your machine's server through the tunnel.
3) Pay for a "real" IP.
4) Move to a boutique ISP that provides "real" IPs to all users.
This is freaking ridiculous. And there is a simple solution.
The ONLY machines that need actual IP addresses are servers and gateways.
PERIOD.
Everyone else can be NATted.
The simple solution is to NAT everyone and everything that isn't a server or a gateway to other machines. Instead of a typical University gobbling up class-Cs or even class-Bs like candy, they'd require a single class-C at most. Every other machine on campus would be NATted. AOL could have a single class-C, since its users aren't technologically literate enough to want actual "real" IPs. ISPs with a mix of non-technical and technical users (such as Earthlink) would need more, so they could sell "real" IPs to those who'd use them. ISPs which cater to geeks (such as Speakeasy) would need still more.
In such a world, we'd see a complete reversal of current trends; huge national ISPs whose user populations are mostly non-geeks would need only a scant few IP addresses, and smaller "boutique" ISPs whose users are mostly geeks would need more than AOL or MSN.
And we WOULDN'T run out of IPs this way.
I've heard the hype about every coffee percolator, Coke machine and pencil sharpener having its own IP address. That's nice. But not necessary. This whole "crisis" with us running out of IPs can easily be averted with a change in IP distribution policies.
Speaking as a Unix geek: This is usually the sort of sentence one hears from Windows people in defense of Windows. It's very ironic that someone is using the very same argument in defense of Ubuntu, a Linux distribution. I think this is actually a good thing. (It's certainly a pleasant change.)
AOL says that since it will control the network, it can protect users from the sorts of viruses and spyware that infect other peer-to-peer systems.
Seriously, I trust AOL to "protect" a system around as much as I trust Microsoft to "protect" consumers from endless upgrade cycles. AOL's own software has some vaguely spyware-like characteristics; for example, it hooks itself deeply into your system (from what I've heard; obviously, I don't use AOL) in all sorts of places, and if you cancel, and accidentally double-click on any of the various icons (or do any of several other things), it will assume you want to re-activate your service. I've heard that AOL's software basically associates itself with various file types, puts itself into various context-sensitive menus, etc....
I do not trust this company to "protect" computers from spyware. In fact, I would not be at all surprised if their application took, say, a detailed audit of all software installed on one's computer.
Remember what Luke Skywalker was? A farm boy... on a moisture farm. Recovering moisture from the air, the Skywalker farmstead would then sell the resulting water.
Maybe Europe should look into starting a new moisture farm industry.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. It's not always about the money.
You know that. I know that. Most people on SlashDot know that. Joe Average doesn't.
Of course not. I support the idea of the government, the large corporations, and the security community together creating sound (AND OPEN) specifications to prevent such things as spam, viruses, and spyware, then implementing them.
"Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses" would apply in the Real World where governments and big companies shun the open-source world, but I was talking about a hypothetical situation where the giant entities that control our world (big corps and the gubmint) actually Did The Right Thing. This would imply working with standards bodies to make the standard open to ALL and not relying upon DMCA/patent nonsense or some 'security through obscurity' BS a la CSS.
"Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves" doesn't apply, since all the schemes I can think of to foil spam are, in fact, economic in nature (and simply implemented through technical means). Of course, you didn't check that box.
"Lack of centrally controlling authority for email" is bullshit. There IS an effective "central authority". It's called "The Fortune 500 companies and the American government". Collectively, they control just about everything on the planet, including Teh Intarweb. If they say one day "Everyone must now implement SecureSMTP on their mail servers and readers and SecureHTTP on their Web servers and clients", BAM, everyone would have to. Period, full stop, end of sentence, no discussion.
Here in the Real World, these entities would only use this extreme amount of clout to do evil, but in my example they would use it to Do The Right Thing. Wishful thinking, I know.
People simply don't give a shit. And speaking of:
Apathy is a growing plague, it would seem. The older people are growing grey and eventually will die, and the apathetic brats currently in HS/college will grow up and take their places. And I see no reason why THEIR kids won't be even worse.
...and fail financially.
At least, relatively speaking. How many BILLIONS of dollars have been made off of the Star Wars franchise? How many BILLIONS of dollars have been made off of Star Trek? Shit, probably even the humble Back to the Future trilogy of quasi-sci-fi movies made more money than the entire run of B5.
Why? Mainstream appeal. Regardless of how good a show is, if it appeals only to SlashDot nerd types and "Comic Book Guy" types, it'll get frowned upon and scoffed at by investors.
Sad but true.
It's a duopolist's world. The cola world has Coke and Pepsi, the fast food world has McDonald's and Burger King, the software world has Microsoft and... err... and Microsoft, and sci-fi has Star Trek and Star Wars.
Everyone else, regardless of any amount of genuine merit, is a bit player, and will be treated as such by The Powers That Be (and Joe Sixpack).
1) There IS a technological defense against spam. It's called "making it economically infeasible to spam", which translates into implementing technological schemes which do something such as [A] require a "floor" amount of bandwidth to send one email (say, 5MB per) or [B] require CAPTCHA-type verification to send your first email to a given person.
Yes, it's annoying. But it would solve the problem.
2) Did I say a bleeding thing about a "conspiracy"? There is no "conspiracy" necessary for every very very rich person to simultaneously be interested in keeping themselves and their (also very very rich) friends very very rich. It's human nature.
Look. If American corporations and the American government actually wanted to work together to eradicate spyware (as opposed to working together to make lots of money), we wouldn't have spyware. We also wouldn't have spam, viruses, or any number of other nasty things. The fact of the matter is that almost all sorts of online nastiness can be used to benefit the already super-rich. Example: Spyware used to benefit Sony (or so they think), viruses used by companies to insert, well, spyware... spam used, of course, to advertise the products of big companies (directly, indirectly, or "The makers of Viagra paid a marketing firm, who paid another marketing firm, who paid a slightly sleazier marketing firm, who sold a list to an even sleazier one, who sold it in turn to an even sleazier one, who ended up spamming you about buying Viagra")...
They. Don't. Give. A. Fuck. In fact, tacitly I think they like this sort of online plague, since they know damned well that only the 'little guys' (read: their competition and their user base) will ever get in trouble for breaking the DMCA, or spreading spyware, or releasing viruses, or spamming-- but they never will.
It will be a cold day in Hell when Sony actually experiences any pain over this. N.b.: A pathetic boycott by 0.1% of 1% of nerds, who in turn make up 1% of the population, will not cause them pain. Also, a $100,000,000 *kof*slaponthewrist*kof* "fine" will not cause them pain either.
The DMCA was conceived as a way of keeping the rich rich. Full stop. End sentence.
And to those of you who think that the combined might of the Fortune 500 companies and the American government couldn't eradicate spyware, spam, etc. if they REALLY wanted to, think again. It's as simple as implementing new security standards and specs, testing them with the cooperation of the security community, setting a worldwide/nationwide rollout date, then requiring everyone's software to support them as of that date. Think "Attention (ebay|Yahoo|Google|MSN) Users: After JULY 23, 2007, you must have upgraded your Web browser to support the new HardenedHTTP specification. Browsers which support this include: Mozilla Firefox 2.0, Netscape 8.1, Opera 9.01, or Internet Explorer 8 Beta."
Yeah, it'd cost billions. But these companies and the US government, put together, have TRILLIONS.
They don't care, though. They'd rather bring their considerable resources to bear upon the tricky problem of making their CEOs and Board members a few more billion apiece. Consumers? Pfeh, they don't even have people to read their email for them. Who cares about them?
...which no one will use.
Just like the last stable branch.
Thankyew, thankyew, I'll be here all week. Try the veal!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate...
Water vapor? Water vapor? While I'd imagine water vapor is a lot more common than the others, doesn't it strike you that something as mundane as water vapor might just be a lot less, oh, I don't know, harmful than, say, carbon monoxide (or just about everything else)?
Earth's ecosystem evolved in tandem with the presence of water vapor. Earth is "used" to water vapor. It's not used to several billion internal combustion vehicles and hundreds of thousands of gasoline-burning and jet-fuel-burning aircraft zooming about polluting willy-nilly.
The reactionary conservative crowd will stick their fingers in their ears and say that "global warming" is a myth. They'll crack jokes about how "global worming" (sic) is supposed to cause an ice age (hyuk hyuk, how funny). Then they'll segue into a rant about how those evil scientists are still trying to spread the "disproven" theory of evolution.
The mountain of evidence that we are, slowly but surely, screwing up our planet's very ability to support life itself does not matter to many people. They would prefer to believe (against all reason) that such a bad thing simply cannot happen to us. Worse, many (most?) people simply don't care what will happen in three or four or five (or ten) generations, since "ah well, I won't be alive then anyways." Never mind that this is the present generation's great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, or whatnot we're talking about, and that most people-- if asked-- will vehemently insist that they care about their children.
Trying to talk sense into these people is like trying to argue with a Scientologist about psychiatry or with a Southern Baptist about evolution.
...point them at this story.
If the UN were "communist", or any other relative or variant of socialism, they wouldn't allow one of the world's most famous capitalist entities to push them around.
Are geeks still being called horrible names in schools? Are they still being beaten up and ridiculed? Do they still have to fear for their safety on buses, in locker rooms, and on their way home from school?
If so, geeks have not gone mainstream.
So now the soldiers can march around Iraq saying "My hovercraft is full of eels" in Arabic.
Or maybe "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO U.S.".
Uhh, "DMCA" is a law, not a corporation or government entity.
How does one "work for" a law?
If you want to host something, your choices are legion:
1) Pay for hosting services.
2) Pay for a shell account somewhere, SSH-tunnel in, and have people connect to your machine's server through the tunnel.
3) Pay for a "real" IP.
4) Move to a boutique ISP that provides "real" IPs to all users.
This is freaking ridiculous. And there is a simple solution.
The ONLY machines that need actual IP addresses are servers and gateways.
PERIOD.
Everyone else can be NATted.
The simple solution is to NAT everyone and everything that isn't a server or a gateway to other machines. Instead of a typical University gobbling up class-Cs or even class-Bs like candy, they'd require a single class-C at most. Every other machine on campus would be NATted. AOL could have a single class-C, since its users aren't technologically literate enough to want actual "real" IPs. ISPs with a mix of non-technical and technical users (such as Earthlink) would need more, so they could sell "real" IPs to those who'd use them. ISPs which cater to geeks (such as Speakeasy) would need still more.
In such a world, we'd see a complete reversal of current trends; huge national ISPs whose user populations are mostly non-geeks would need only a scant few IP addresses, and smaller "boutique" ISPs whose users are mostly geeks would need more than AOL or MSN.
And we WOULDN'T run out of IPs this way.
I've heard the hype about every coffee percolator, Coke machine and pencil sharpener having its own IP address. That's nice. But not necessary. This whole "crisis" with us running out of IPs can easily be averted with a change in IP distribution policies.
Wow. That comment really makes you sit back and shake your head in amazement.
Not so long ago, we were talking about which drives gave the best cost per megabyte.
Now we're talking about cost per terabyte.
Simply amazing.
Cue rights violations for the transgendered in 5, 4, 3, 2......
[sample situation follows]
"I'm sorry, Sir, you can't fly here dressed like that."
"But I have a note from my therapi...."
"Sir, you cannot fly here dressed like that."
"But you didn't even know until you search...."
"Sir, you are not allowed on the plane unless you change."
"I don't have any male clothes!"
"Maybe you should have thought of that before you tried to fly, Sir?"
"But I'm required to live as a woman before surgery!"
"I'm sorry, Sir, you have two choices; dress as a man or leave."
"But..."
"Sir, am I going to have to call security? You may not fly on this plane. Please leave or I'll call security."
Pretty much. But with companies like AOL and MS, it's safer to assume the worst.
Seriously, I trust AOL to "protect" a system around as much as I trust Microsoft to "protect" consumers from endless upgrade cycles. AOL's own software has some vaguely spyware-like characteristics; for example, it hooks itself deeply into your system (from what I've heard; obviously, I don't use AOL) in all sorts of places, and if you cancel, and accidentally double-click on any of the various icons (or do any of several other things), it will assume you want to re-activate your service. I've heard that AOL's software basically associates itself with various file types, puts itself into various context-sensitive menus, etc....
I do not trust this company to "protect" computers from spyware. In fact, I would not be at all surprised if their application took, say, a detailed audit of all software installed on one's computer.
They lost Minerva??? But she's so ... so ... minky!
(preparing to get modded (-1, Furry)...)
Remember what Luke Skywalker was? A farm boy... on a moisture farm. Recovering moisture from the air, the Skywalker farmstead would then sell the resulting water.
Maybe Europe should look into starting a new moisture farm industry.
Which, notably, is more expensive. Nevertheless, check it out.