I apologise; I called you an idiot as I thought you had not fully read the news.com.au article. I did indeed miss the significance of your use of quotes. I believed your motivation for quoting the word was that you felt it was not the correct term for the activity being pursued. I retract my earlier statement, and I apologise wholeheartedly for any upset I may have caused you.
Now, as we're being fastidious, the word "monitoring" does not imply automation as you assert. Some monitoring may be automated, but not all monitoring is automated. To assume otherwise is a syllogistic fallacy. Similarly, the word "monitoring" implies absolutely nothing about remoteness.
In fact, the APOD article does not provide any information whatsoever about the circumstances of the monitoring carried out, except that it included a "series of images".
In contrast, the news.com.au article states that the photographer "stood near the Darwin Cenotaph on The Esplanade and looked down to Fort Hill Wharf".
It seems too that "monitoring" is not the only word you have problems with. You point out that news.com.au credited the photo to "amateur photographer Wayne Pryde", implying that the lack of this information in the APOD post is suspicous. There is nothing in Mr. Pryde's status as an amateur photographer that precludes him from studying cloud formations. An amateur is somebody who engages in an activity as a pasttime.
Perhaps you find it incredible that Mr. Pryde studies cloud formation in his spare time. If this is true, I would first point out your selective quoting of the news.com.au article; it described him as a "keen amateur photographer" (emphasis mine). I would also suggest you look at other techical/artistic fields which enjoy amateur participation. For example, there are people who write computer software in their spare time. There's a news website called Slashdot which often has articles about this particular phenomenon.
Of course, your suspicion may be caused by the deep ambiguity regarding Mr. Pryde's status as a photographer in the APOD post. After all, they recklessly referred to him as "the photographer", so I see the potential dilemma. You may sleep soundly tonight however: I checked the email address provided for Mr. Pryde and the domain, crowneplazadarwin.com.au, is registered to Darwin International Hotels. Assuming Mr. Pryde is an employee there I think one can also assume that studying cloud formations is not part of his job description. Furthermore, his address, itsupport, and the fact his name appears on the whois data implies that his professional expertise is in IT.
This would tally with the description in news.com.au of Mr. Pryde as an "IT expert".
In the case that English is not a native language to you, I sincerely apologise for the insult which you are about to receive.
How about next time you call bullshit, check where you are standing. Idiot.
Of course, the photo may indeed be a fake, but the points you raised are irrelevant. The most obvious red flag is the reference of nameless experts: "meteor experts" and "atmospheric scientists" in the APOD post; "photographic experts" in the news.com.au article. Another red flag is that no explanation is given for the exclusion of a meteor or lightning as possible causes. These are good reasons to doubt the authenticity of the photograph. I will monitor developments with interest.
BTW, nice sig - "Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever."
The online editorial team at the Magazine called the online review the Ultimate when it pretty obviously is not the Ultimate
It depends what definition of "ultimate" one uses - hopefully ZDNet meant "ultimate" as in "last". I just posted to their feedback section (prior to reading this post) that by describing the article as "ultimate" belittled the tests which were carried out.
Hopefully in future ZDNet will continue contracting the testing to you guys, and will start contracting their journalism to, you know, journalists, or something.
...14 year-old AOL subscriber Iain Polowski, 15, has lodged a patent application for the "Me too!" expression which he developed for use in internet chat rooms and meeting sites.
"i started hte develepoment process ovr 6 month ago when my mom baught me a comptutor for my birthday. i realised that most of that i said was saying the same thing as somebody else but it was hard to say it the same but differently. si i invented the process of typing 'Me too!' as a mechanicalism to show agreement with somebody, while saving on band-witdh and time", Iain said in an Online interview with Wired today. "What colour bra?", he continued before adding, "shit sorry, wrong window".
Microsoft's director of licensing David Kaefer indicated that MSN chat users who subscribed to their licence indemnification program would not have anything to worry about, raising speculation that Microsoft are preparing a hostile takeover of Iain. "Me too!", added Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer.
Not to mention the fact that they are one of the very few companies that not only support Windows and Mac, but Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD too.
They are also the only truly innovative people in the browser market. Without detracting from Mozilla, most of it's killer features have been in Opera for quite some time now.
As well as the notable tabbed browsing and gesture-based browsing, Opera introduced many smaller things that have proven invaluable in my work as a (non-designer) web developer:
single click toggling of things such as javascript, java, and cookies
Ability to easily view, edit, and delete cookies
debugging of page structure by highlighting certain page elements
On page menu uploads straight to the w3c HTML validator
Also, the following innovations have definately added to my browsing 'experience'
The Zoom function - overlooked by many, this lets you zoom in/out on a page (Ctrl+Scrollwheel!) which, when you have a 1600x1200 display, is often of great help.
Address bar shortcuts - "g" for google etc. unfortunately not customisable, as it is on Firefox.
Meta links toolbar - if a page has meta link tags, Opera displays them on a toolbar at the top of the page, no larger than the slashdot OSDN menu.
It does all this while still rendering faster than any other engine and yet retaining a small footprint - I currently have 15 Opera windows open, with 29 tabs, on a P3 550 w/ 128M RAM.
Finally, anybody who responds to MS bullshit by releasing a Swedish Chef "Bork Bork" edition is a good guy to me.
There are problems - they only recently added the capability to view an SSL cert, and the Java support on FreeBSD is difficult to get working (although that is more a problem with java on FreeBSD than with Opera).
The OSS community needs companies like Opera - how else will we ever get decent gaming:)
So long as the registrar who receives the transfer request follows up by then confirming the request from the domain owner, that shouldn't be a problem.
First, the current registrar must approve a transfer of domain without obtaining the registrant's approval. This is contrary to common sense.
The question asked of the losing registrar isn't "Do you approve?", it is "Do you have any objections?".
This was to allow the losing registrar to block a transfer if, for example, they haven't yet been paid by the customer.
It was never intended as an authentication mechanism - that is already done by the gaining registrar.
... then the appropriate response is to require the current registrar to approve a transfer request when the registrant has approved it.
That's why the current registrar was never meant to be authenticating the request in the first place. The ones who currently do started of their own volition, and ICANN didn't have the balls to tell them to stop. In the past, a client of ours had to post a notarised letter to Australia from here in Ireland, just to get the current registrar to release it.
This is a compromise - ICANN are allowing those losing regisrtrars who want to double check to do so, but prevents them from blocking the transfer unless the customer explicitly objects.
Your point about the race condition in unlocking a domain begs the argument - The gaining registrar still has to get confirmation from you before it can proceed.
It is sensationalism, but not for the reason you gave.
If I transfer your domain to my registrar, I will (in most cases) then be able to change the whois and NS data for the domain, thus changing ownership and hosting setup.
The true sensationalism is overlooking the fact that is only a change to how the losing registrar should behave; the gaining registrar still needs positive affirmation from the registrant.
If a registrar abuses the system in such a manner, it would be a blatant breach of their contract with ICANN. They would also be exposed to legal action from the customer.
ICANN need to shut down any such operators immediatedly. If they don't enforce their own rules, the system will be screwed anyway, irregardless of the transfer procedures.
Now whether they actually have the bottle to do this is a debate for another millenia...
The gaining registrar uses the existing whois data to verify the customer's details. Usually this takes the form of an email send to the admin-c address with a unique url for the user to follow.
Remember, this is how it's currently done.
The losing registrar works off the whois data too. The only extra information the losing registrar may have would perhaps be the credit card used to pay for the domain, and really, this sort of information shouldn't be accessable anyway once the payment has been made. If the registration was made by a reseller for the registrar, then the registrar itself definately won't have anything other than the whois data, and the name of their reseller.
The ICANN position has *always* been that the gaining registrar must verify the request.
If your company doesn't do this, then it's not fulfilling it's responsabilities, and should have it's ICANN accredidation removed.
ICANN, until now, *never* asked losing registrars to double-check the veracity of the transfer.
Companies like yours which did so introduced needless delays for the customer.
this new system is going to turn out very badly for everyone
This system has been in operation for years!
Registries like Tucows don't require confirmation from the domain owner for transfers away. So, if as you say you don't verify transfer requests you receive, then I can use you to hijack (unlocked) Tucows domains. That is the situation at present, but the fault is with your employer, not Tucows.
Of course, if ICANN don't follow through with enforcement by removing the accreditation of operators like your employer, then it'll all go to hell anyway, new system or old.
(I should note, Tucows does notify of transfers away, but don't require you to okay it. They know the rules, and follow them.)
There are four parties involved in the transfer process:
The registrant or domain owner;
The losing registrar;
The gaining registrar.
The central registry - central repository of records.
Got that?
Okay, the way a transfer was supposed to work was as follows:
The domain owner submits a transfer request to the gaining registrar
The gaining registrar was to seek confirmation of the transfer from the domain owner, based on existing whois information, and independent of the request.
Having received such confirmation, they notify the central registry that the transfer is valid.
The central registry notifies the losing registrar of the imminent move, to give them a chance to block it should there be unresolved billing issues or other disputes. Only in such a case was the losing registrar meant to block the transfer.
If the losing registrar does not object, the transfer is executed.
(Steps 2 and 4 actually run in parallel, but that's irrelevant.)
The Problem However, a number of losing registrars put in a policy some time ago that they would also seek confirmation from the domain owner, despite the gaining registrar having already done so in step 2. They would object to all transfers unless they received authorisation to their liking from the domain owner.
One registrar in particular required a copy of an Australian driving licence or passport, or a notarised letter for non-aussies. In this case it made the administrative cost of a transfer prohibitively high. The did not require this level of identification when a domain was being transferred to them. (Before you ask, yes the admin details were correct. They were just being berks.)
Invariably this policy was put in by registrars to try to prevent customers moving to other registrars, by adding additional hoops. The 'excuse' put forward was to reduce exposure to legal actions.
When one tries to cover ones ass too much, one's hands end up covered in shit.
Not all registrars did this - the nicer ones honored the word of the gaining registrar and only interfered if there were billing issues etc.
The Solution The new ICANN rules is a compromise - it now explicitly allows the losing registrar to seek the double confirmation, but they can no longer block the move just because the customer didn't jump through enough hoops for them It does not require the losing registrar to do so, so this is business as usual for the nice registrars.
The important point is that the gaining registrar still has to verify the transfer in the first place, as it should be. The customer confirms their identity once, and no more.
What's to stop a registrar faking authorisation? The loss of their ICANN accredidation, and hence their business.
Final point: although this is a non-story, it *is* important to make sure your admin details, especially your email address, are correct and up to date. Just as you would check your entry in the phone book, check your whois data too.
Slashdot Mirror
Real men don't remember passwords - they upload them via ftp and let the world remember...
It doesn't work in Dillo.
Mind you, Dillo doesn't appear to support pop-ups in the first place, and it gives a warning about the meta refresh citibank uses.
I apologise; I called you an idiot as I thought you had not fully read the news.com.au article. I did indeed miss the significance of your use of quotes. I believed your motivation for quoting the word was that you felt it was not the correct term for the activity being pursued. I retract my earlier statement, and I apologise wholeheartedly for any upset I may have caused you.
Now, as we're being fastidious, the word "monitoring" does not imply automation as you assert. Some monitoring may be automated, but not all monitoring is automated. To assume otherwise is a syllogistic fallacy. Similarly, the word "monitoring" implies absolutely nothing about remoteness.
In fact, the APOD article does not provide any information whatsoever about the circumstances of the monitoring carried out, except that it included a "series of images".
In contrast, the news.com.au article states that the photographer "stood near the Darwin Cenotaph on The Esplanade and looked down to Fort Hill Wharf".
It seems too that "monitoring" is not the only word you have problems with. You point out that news.com.au credited the photo to "amateur photographer Wayne Pryde", implying that the lack of this information in the APOD post is suspicous.
There is nothing in Mr. Pryde's status as an amateur photographer that precludes him from studying cloud formations. An amateur is somebody who engages in an activity as a pasttime.
Perhaps you find it incredible that Mr. Pryde studies cloud formation in his spare time. If this is true, I would first point out your selective quoting of the news.com.au article; it described him as a "keen amateur photographer" (emphasis mine). I would also suggest you look at other techical/artistic fields which enjoy amateur participation. For example, there are people who write computer software in their spare time. There's a news website called Slashdot which often has articles about this particular phenomenon.
Of course, your suspicion may be caused by the deep ambiguity regarding Mr. Pryde's status as a photographer in the APOD post. After all, they recklessly referred to him as "the photographer", so I see the potential dilemma. You may sleep soundly tonight however: I checked the email address provided for Mr. Pryde and the domain, crowneplazadarwin.com.au, is registered to Darwin International Hotels. Assuming Mr. Pryde is an employee there I think one can also assume that studying cloud formations is not part of his job description. Furthermore, his address, itsupport, and the fact his name appears on the whois data implies that his professional expertise is in IT.
This would tally with the description in news.com.au of Mr. Pryde as an "IT expert".
In the case that English is not a native language to you, I sincerely apologise for the insult which you are about to receive.
How about next time you call bullshit, check where you are standing. Idiot.
Of course, the photo may indeed be a fake, but the points you raised are irrelevant. The most obvious red flag is the reference of nameless experts: "meteor experts" and "atmospheric scientists" in the APOD post; "photographic experts" in the news.com.au article.
Another red flag is that no explanation is given for the exclusion of a meteor or lightning as possible causes. These are good reasons to doubt the authenticity of the photograph. I will monitor developments with interest.
BTW, nice sig - "Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever."
I assume you're aiming for immortality.
WTF indeed.
May I quote the ninth paragraph of the article you linked to:
"I was taking a series of time-lapse pictures of the build-up of clouds," Mr Pryde said.
In the case that news.com.au altered the story since you read it, I sincerely apologise for the insult which you are about to receive.
How about you RTFA you post next time, idiot.
The online editorial team at the Magazine called the online review the Ultimate when it pretty obviously is not the Ultimate
It depends what definition of "ultimate" one uses - hopefully ZDNet meant "ultimate" as in "last". I just posted to their feedback section (prior to reading this post) that by describing the article as "ultimate" belittled the tests which were carried out.
Hopefully in future ZDNet will continue contracting the testing to you guys, and will start contracting their journalism to, you know, journalists, or something.
"There are four lights!!!" (for very large values of four)
Yeah, I only found out how to change the samba settings on XP/2000 last week.
Ignorance is indeed bliss.
Swine.
I just had to go back and look at the photo. You're right, there *is* a woman in the picture, all I'd noticed before was the tag...
I feel so pathetic, and I hate you for pointing it out.
Rumbled!
Should have called it "mee to!", shouldn't I?
...14 year-old AOL subscriber Iain Polowski, 15, has lodged a patent application for the "Me too!" expression which he developed for use in internet chat rooms and meeting sites.
"i started hte develepoment process ovr 6 month ago when my mom baught me a comptutor for my birthday. i realised that most of that i said was saying the same thing as somebody else but it was hard to say it the same but differently. si i invented the process of typing 'Me too!' as a mechanicalism to show agreement with somebody, while saving on band-witdh and time", Iain said in an Online interview with Wired today. "What colour bra?", he continued before adding, "shit sorry, wrong window".
Microsoft's director of licensing David Kaefer indicated that MSN chat users who subscribed to their licence indemnification program would not have anything to worry about, raising speculation that Microsoft are preparing a hostile takeover of Iain. "Me too!", added Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer.
Thanking you kindly sir. Now I have another reason to dodge work :)
They are also the only truly innovative people in the browser market. Without detracting from Mozilla, most of it's killer features have been in Opera for quite some time now.
As well as the notable tabbed browsing and gesture-based browsing, Opera introduced many smaller things that have proven invaluable in my work as a (non-designer) web developer:
Also, the following innovations have definately added to my browsing 'experience'
- The Zoom function - overlooked by many, this lets you zoom in/out on a page (Ctrl+Scrollwheel!) which, when you have a 1600x1200 display, is often of great help.
- Address bar shortcuts - "g" for google etc. unfortunately not customisable, as it is on Firefox.
- Meta links toolbar - if a page has meta link tags, Opera displays them on a toolbar at the top of the page, no larger than the slashdot OSDN menu.
It does all this while still rendering faster than any other engine and yet retaining a small footprint - I currently have 15 Opera windows open, with 29 tabs, on a P3 550 w/ 128M RAM.Finally, anybody who responds to MS bullshit by releasing a Swedish Chef "Bork Bork" edition is a good guy to me.
There are problems - they only recently added the capability to view an SSL cert, and the Java support on FreeBSD is difficult to get working (although that is more a problem with java on FreeBSD than with Opera).
The OSS community needs companies like Opera - how else will we ever get decent gaming
So long as the registrar who receives the transfer request follows up by then confirming the request from the domain owner, that shouldn't be a problem.
First, the current registrar must approve a transfer of domain without obtaining the registrant's approval. This is contrary to common sense.
... then the appropriate response is to require the current registrar to approve a transfer request when the registrant has approved it.
The question asked of the losing registrar isn't "Do you approve?", it is "Do you have any objections?".
This was to allow the losing registrar to block a transfer if, for example, they haven't yet been paid by the customer.
It was never intended as an authentication mechanism - that is already done by the gaining registrar.
That's why the current registrar was never meant to be authenticating the request in the first place. The ones who currently do started of their own volition, and ICANN didn't have the balls to tell them to stop. In the past, a client of ours had to post a notarised letter to Australia from here in Ireland, just to get the current registrar to release it.
This is a compromise - ICANN are allowing those losing regisrtrars who want to double check to do so, but prevents them from blocking the transfer unless the customer explicitly objects.
Your point about the race condition in unlocking a domain begs the argument - The gaining registrar still has to get confirmation from you before it can proceed.
It is sensationalism, but not for the reason you gave.
If I transfer your domain to my registrar, I will (in most cases) then be able to change the whois and NS data for the domain, thus changing ownership and hosting setup.
The true sensationalism is overlooking the fact that is only a change to how the losing registrar should behave; the gaining registrar still needs positive affirmation from the registrant.
If a registrar abuses the system in such a manner, it would be a blatant breach of their contract with ICANN. They would also be exposed to legal action from the customer.
ICANN need to shut down any such operators immediatedly. If they don't enforce their own rules, the system will be screwed anyway, irregardless of the transfer procedures.
Now whether they actually have the bottle to do this is a debate for another millenia...
The gaining registrar uses the existing whois data to verify the customer's details. Usually this takes the form of an email send to the admin-c address with a unique url for the user to follow.
Remember, this is how it's currently done.
The losing registrar works off the whois data too. The only extra information the losing registrar may have would perhaps be the credit card used to pay for the domain, and really, this sort of information shouldn't be accessable anyway once the payment has been made. If the registration was made by a reseller for the registrar, then the registrar itself definately won't have anything other than the whois data, and the name of their reseller.
Then your employers policies are screwed up.
The ICANN position has *always* been that the gaining registrar must verify the request.
If your company doesn't do this, then it's not fulfilling it's responsabilities, and should have it's ICANN accredidation removed.
ICANN, until now, *never* asked losing registrars to double-check the veracity of the transfer.
Companies like yours which did so introduced needless delays for the customer.
this new system is going to turn out very badly for everyone
This system has been in operation for years!
Registries like Tucows don't require confirmation from the domain owner for transfers away. So, if as you say you don't verify transfer requests you receive, then I can use you to hijack (unlocked) Tucows domains. That is the situation at present, but the fault is with your employer, not Tucows.
Of course, if ICANN don't follow through with enforcement by removing the accreditation of operators like your employer, then it'll all go to hell anyway, new system or old.
(I should note, Tucows does notify of transfers away, but don't require you to okay it. They know the rules, and follow them.)
First, if your registrar charges you for domain locking (which none do), move to one that doesn't.
Second, this applies *only* to confirmation sought by the losing registrar.
The gaining registrar still has to seek explicit confirmation from the domain owner in the first place.
No. The gaining registrar still has to get explicit confirmation from the domain owner.
It doesn't matter - the gaining registrar will still has to get explicit confirmation from the icann.org owners in the first place.
While acknowleding that this is a joke, I will point out that this doesn't affect .uk domains at all, or any other ccTLD for that matter.
- The registrant or domain owner;
- The losing registrar;
- The gaining registrar.
- The central registry - central repository of records.
Got that?Okay, the way a transfer was supposed to work was as follows:
- The domain owner submits a transfer request to the gaining registrar
- The gaining registrar was to seek confirmation of the transfer from the domain owner, based on existing whois information, and independent of the request.
- Having received such confirmation, they notify the central registry that the transfer is valid.
- The central registry notifies the losing registrar of the imminent move, to give them a chance to block it should there be unresolved billing issues or other disputes. Only in such a case was the losing registrar meant to block the transfer.
- If the losing registrar does not object, the transfer is executed.
(Steps 2 and 4 actually run in parallel, but that's irrelevant.)The Problem
However, a number of losing registrars put in a policy some time ago that they would also seek confirmation from the domain owner, despite the gaining registrar having already done so in step 2. They would object to all transfers unless they received authorisation to their liking from the domain owner.
One registrar in particular required a copy of an Australian driving licence or passport, or a notarised letter for non-aussies. In this case it made the administrative cost of a transfer prohibitively high. The did not require this level of identification when a domain was being transferred to them. (Before you ask, yes the admin details were correct. They were just being berks.)
Invariably this policy was put in by registrars to try to prevent customers moving to other registrars, by adding additional hoops. The 'excuse' put forward was to reduce exposure to legal actions.
When one tries to cover ones ass too much, one's hands end up covered in shit.
Not all registrars did this - the nicer ones honored the word of the gaining registrar and only interfered if there were billing issues etc.
The Solution
The new ICANN rules is a compromise - it now explicitly allows the losing registrar to seek the double confirmation, but they can no longer block the move just because the customer didn't jump through enough hoops for them
It does not require the losing registrar to do so, so this is business as usual for the nice registrars.
The important point is that the gaining registrar still has to verify the transfer in the first place, as it should be. The customer confirms their identity once, and no more.
What's to stop a registrar faking authorisation? The loss of their ICANN accredidation, and hence their business.
Final point: although this is a non-story, it *is* important to make sure your admin details, especially your email address, are correct and up to date. Just as you would check your entry in the phone book, check your whois data too.
Hmm... if I were adept enough to pilfer your wallet, I reckon I'd take your gun and *then* your wallet...
...often it's the one guy who says "why is that wheel upsidedown" that reveals a completely unanticipated problem.
Indeed.