How The U.S. Government Undermined the Internet || Pixel Advt Hoax? || and more

based upon: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/29/us_undermines_internet/

How The U.S. Government Undermined the Internet: "Yes, 2005 was a bad year.
(Score:5, Insightful)
by twitter (104583) Alter Relationship on Friday December 30, @10:10AM (#14365010)
(Last Journal: Thursday January 27, @07:41PM)
Yea, never mind things like the Tsunami or Katrina or in the U.S. all of the controversies in government... I'm sure when I'm 85 years old this is exactly what I'll remember about 2005.

Freedom of speech is important. I'm from New Orleans and still live in Louisiana. That ICANN is handing portions of the Internet over to government censors bothers me, and I consider it a large problem. Is my perspective warped? No. Without free speech, everyday can be like Katrina because your government can do whatever it wants to you. Just ask people from the former Soviet states what government housing and shopping are like.

Other disturbing US trends include re-centralization of telco into less than friendly hands. The destruction of smaller ISP continues. Blatant anti-competitive behavior by the remainder is tollerated and even encouraged. 2005 was another bad year for the world of ends.--
Friends don't help friends install MS junk."
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Read The Guidelines

(Score:5, Informative)

by N8F8 (4562) on Friday December 30, @08:44AM (#14364435)

From CP-1: Internet Domain Name System Structure and Delegation (ccTLD Administration and Delegation) [icann.org] (a) Delegation of a New Top Level Domain. Delegation of a new top level domain requires the completion of a number of procedures, including the identification of a TLD manager with the requisite skills and authority to operate the TLD appropriately. The desires of the government of a country with regard to delegation of a ccTLD are taken very seriously. The IANA will make them a major consideration in any TLD delegation/transfer discussions.
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Who wants to eat crow?

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by dada21 (163177) * <adam.dada@gmail.com> on Friday December 30, @08:47AM (#14364460)
(http://dadasays.blogspot.com/)

I've said from the beginning that DNS is a government mechanism for censorship -- it was, it is and it will continue to be. The typical authoritarian response (from slashdotters no less) is that other countries can run their own DNS TLD's, but this will just lead to multiple censors, not real freedom.

Regulation does not help the needy or the poor. It does not help those who can not do something for themselves. Regulation does not make a safer or better product, and it does not create a cheaper marketplace.

Regulation gives those in power the ability to put friends, family and cronies into high paying monopolistic jobs, determine which companies can enter a market and prevent everyone else from competing or making a better product.

Those who know me (even if you don't like me) know I am anti-DNS. I don't have a free market solution YET, but I think about it every day. DNS will be the fall of the Internet, until there is a decentralized version, and I believe that Google or another major search company will find a way to replace the central authority version.

I know we need DNS today -- links, bookmarks, advertising, all that. I also know we needed coal burning stoves just 40 years ago in some parts of the U.S. Without government, society tries to find ways to become more free by competing with others. Everyone wants a profit, but we believe we'll earn more by underpricing our competition and offering a better product. With government, society tries to find ways around the bureaucracy, red tape and restrictions. We have markets that have an excessively high cost of entry, but it is not always because of the equipment needed -- many markets are expensive because of government regulations and restrictions.

In the end, our freedoms are destroyed, our hard work is overtaxed and our children are left with the burden of paying off our mistakes.
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Re:Who wants to eat crow?

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by Hiro Antagonist (310179) on Friday December 30, @09:43AM (#14364811)
(Last Journal: Thursday October 10, @09:56AM)

I think you need to better qualify your statements; the 'regulation' of the FDA did indeed help the needy and the poor, as did the 'regulation' of labor (minimum wage, limits on working hours, safety regulations). Sure, both have their problems, but the pre-FDA and pre-labor law US was not a fun place to live unless you were one of the wealthy, and if you weren't, even a lifetime of hard work and frugality wouldn't prepare you for retirement.

Not to say that all regulation is good, mind you, but there are many instances where our government did its job and represented The People, all those tired and poor masses, and helped America acheive a better standard of living; lassiez-faire capitalists seem to forget that, and also seem to forget that a 'free market' only exists on a level economic playing field -- get some ill-behaved 800lb gorillas-of-industry out there, and the little guy needs some help on his team, and fast.
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Bigger picture

(Score:5, Insightful)

by PaulModz (942002) on Friday December 30, @10:40AM (#14365217)

If the United States government had taken similar steps five years ago, it would likely have been perceived quite differently. Whatever your politics, you have to admit that the world's perception of the United States and it's government hasn't changed this drastically since World War II. Even our strongest allies no longer trust our good intentions.

How do you think World War II and the post-war period would have played out if Curtis LeMay and Douglas MacArthur had been in charge instead of FDR, Marshall and Eisenhower? Most historians agree that the Cuban Missile Crisis would have resulted in the Global Thermonuclear War if Kennedy has listened to LeMay and invaded Cuba. Damn Massachusetts liberals.

Of course, if Truman had listened to MacArthur during the Korean War, we wouldn't have made it to 1962.

I'm looking around, and I don't see a new FDR, JFK, or Eisenhower waiting in the wings. Or maybe they are there, and the polarization of American politics is silencing the moderate voices of reason.

We've now been fighting the War on Terrorism longer than we fought WWII, how do you think the results stack up? If George Bush had been president during the Cuban Missile Crisis, do you think he would have listened to LeMay and invaded Cuba?
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Browser appliance

(Score:5, Informative)

by QuaintRealist (905302) <quaintrealist&gmail,com> on Friday December 30, @07:54AM (#14364191)
(Last Journal: Friday December 09, @02:26PM)

If you use Windows, go get the vmware browser appliance and use it - connecting to the internet through a virtual machine is like wearing gloves in the OR - it's just common sense.

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vm/browserapp.html [vmware.com]
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MOD PARENT UP

(Score:5, Informative)

by brunes69 (86786) <.gro.daetsriek. .ta. .todhsals.> on Friday December 30, @08:07AM (#14364256)
(http://www.keirstead.org/)

If all you are doing is browsing the web, there is absolutely no reason to not do it in a sandbox. In fact, I don't get why all browsers run in sandboxes. Why do they *ever* need access to the host OS? If they need to save downloaded files, they can do so via a mounted share. At least in a sandbox they cannot execute privilidged code, at most they could infect executabes on said share.
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Re:Sorry to say it got me

(Score:5, Informative)

by molnarcs (675885) <molnarcs@gmail . c om> on Friday December 30, @08:54AM (#14364518)
(http://www.tftpanel.hu/ | Last Journal: Saturday September 17, @01:06PM)

Never ever visit astalavista from windows, not even in Firefox - even using firefox, free-av catched ~10 viruses that tried to execute while only visiting the site, and searching for my lost cd key (well, lost CD to be precise, taht came with my TV card, with the only app that worked for me).

--
FreeBSD stuff (docs, wallpapers, ascii, etc.) [unideb.hu]
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Windows Major Foul-Up

(Score:5, Insightful)

by spellraiser (764337) <tharfagreinir.gmail@com> on Friday December 30, @08:19AM (#14364327)
(Last Journal: Wednesday January 12, @09:10AM)

Larry Seltzer has a concise column [eweek.com] about this exploit, where he doesn't exactly pull the punches on Microsoft. The most interesting piece of information there is this:

The problem with the WMF (Windows Metafile) file format turns out to be one of those careless things Microsoft did years ago with little or no consideration for the security consequences.

Almost all exploits you read about are buffer overflows of some kind, but not this one. WMF files are allowed to register a callback function, meaning that they are allowed to execute code, and this is what is being exploited in the WMF bug.

I find this mind-boggling to the point of absurdity. Regardless of any supposed benefit gained by this, allowing a data file to execute arbitrary code upon it being viewed is simply begging for an exploit like this. No matter whan spin Microsoft will try to put on this one, it makes them look bad. Extremely bad.

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Re:Just goes to show...

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by liquidpele (663430) on Friday December 30, @12:19AM (#14363041)
(Last Journal: Friday October 24, @09:59AM)

This reminds me of the guy who invented the pet rock. I mean, he got rich, but what a bunch of morons that *bought* a freakin rock! Although the look of the page is cool, I don't see this working for many more people.

--
"While I'm all for porn and violence, let's not pretend that it somehow builds character and prepares you for life"

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Like PT Barnum said...

(Score:5, Funny)

by Stickerboy (61554) on Friday December 30, @12:04AM (#14362989)
(http://slashdot.org/)

...there's a sucker born every minute.

Or in this case, at least 10,000 in 4 months
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Different Perspective

(Score:5, Interesting)

by matr0x_x (919985) on Friday December 30, @12:22AM (#14363058)
(http://www.mac-poker.net/)

OK - I see all these people asking "why the heck would someone pay to advertise on that?" I paid for an advertisement to my http://www.mac-poker.net/ [mac-poker.net]Mac Poker site early on - and it brought in TONS of traffic. Mind you the traffic was "silly traffic" (aka it was not targetted and most of it was "browsers" clicking a random pixel) but it was still worth it. Now, I got in at about 80K when the site was still hot hot hot. After about 200K there were two many pixels to click and my clicks went down, and after 500K the sites traffic dropped drastically.--
Want to play poker on your Mac? Mac Online Poker [mac-poker.net]

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I call hoax

(Score:5, Interesting)

by RajivSLK (398494) on Friday December 30, @12:54AM (#14363162)

Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, earned a cool million dollars in four months on the Internet.

I don't believe it. There is no verification that anyone actually paid him anything. I think it's all an ingenious hoax to get the news media (who are known for not verifying anything) to run this story around the world. A stunt to drive traffic to his site and try to earn some money. Ingenious really
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Re:I call hoax

(Score:5, Insightful)

by Animats (122034) on Friday December 30, @01:59AM (#14363350)
(http://www.animats.com)

Agreed. The going rate for banner ad impressions is about $100 per million impressions, and that's for a 486*60 pixel ad with decent placement. This guy would charge $30,000 for a standard sized banner. So he'd have to get 300 million hits to be competitive. No way.

And his is an ad-cluttered site. You probably have to derate the price by a factor of 5 or so. At which point you've reached the English-speaking population of the planet as the breakeven point.

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The internet hulla hoop?

(Score:5, Insightful)

by drunkgoat (927967) on Friday December 30, @12:26AM (#14363070)

Am I the only one who thinks this site has been blown way out of proportion? Sure the creator promises that your ad will be in place until 2010, but honestly, who is going to view that page more than once ? Especially since in the FAQ it states that you are not allowed to modify your images once they have been posted. This page is going to be stagnet for the next 5 years and the visitor numbers will drop substantialy after the first few months.
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