Comment Re:i'm getting a migraine (Score 1) 368
Also try to make it a place where they don't use IS08559 Wesrern character encoding.
Submission + - Asian group follies racism protest, called racists
DA-MAN writes: "A Radio Duo was suspended on April 23rd for a prank call to a chinese restaurant. The Organization of Chinese Americans lead this offensive, including a protest in front of CBS HQ on April 27th, asking for the firing of JV & Elvis. During this protest OCA passed out this flyer which equated the prank call to Hitler, the KKK and Nazi Germany. Now HIAS, the group which asked for the firing of CNN's Lou Dobbs is taking OCA's Nazi references to task, calling OCA a racist organization. Am I the only one that finds this whole thing ridiculous from the start? First satire is lost, now the special interest groups can't even agree."
Submission + - Real ID DHS Town Hall meeting/webcast on May 1
jdp writes: "As the May 8th deadline for submitting comments on the
proposed Real ID implementation to the Department of Homeland Security
nears, DHS and the California Department of Motor Vehicles are sponsoring a
Town
Hall Meeting to
seek public feedback at
UC Davis on May 1 (10 a.m. — 2 p.m. PDT) — and it's being webcast!
We're covering this on the Stop
Real ID Now! blog. If you're ready to file comments even before
the meeting, EFF,
PrivacyActivism, and the ACLU all
have instruction pages up."
Submission + - RIAA wants DRM on webcasts too
rec9140 writes: "Bluebeat wants to beat down the digital absconders who capture streaming audio streams and wants to add their X1 tehcnoology player to webcasts .... http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2007/Apri l/28/style/stories/09style.htn"
Submission + - Studios Want Security at Cinemas to Stop Piracy
Chubbs writes: CBC is reporting that the Hollywood studies are having security guards in Canadian cinemas search moviegoers for camcorders, cell phones, and other devices that could be used to pirate movies:
With the official start of the summer movie season set for next week with the opening of Spider-Man 3, security in cinemas is being stepped up. Security guards at a preview screening for Spider-Man 3 inspected bags, confiscated portable phones, and scanned movie goers with metal detectors. With a budget of $250 million, Spider-Man 3 is a heavy investment for Sony Pictures and it is trying to stop the film from being recorded and leaked to the internet.
Submission + - Google Shareholder Proposal to Resist Censorship
buxton2k writes: Slashdot has had plenty of stories about technology companies like Google kowtowing to repressive political regimes such as China's. I'm an (extremely) small shareholder in Google, and I looked at their proxy statement today. Most of the time, shareholders' meetings don't deal with anything other than rubber-stamping the board of directors, but Google's upcoming meeting has a interesting shareholder proposal dealing with free speech and censorship to be voted on at the May 10 meeting.
The proposal cites the UN Declaration of Human Rights and declares that "technology companies in the United States have failed to develop adequate standards by which they can conduct business with authoritarian governments while protecting human rights to freedom of speech and freedom of expression". If adopted by shareholders, it would call for management to adopt 6 minimum standards including: not storing data that can identify an individual in repressive countries; using all legal means to resist censorship; and documenting and publicizing "all cases where legally-binding censorship requests have been complied with." The proposal was submitted by the Comptroller of New York City, which owns large amounts of Google stock in City pension plans.
Is a proposal like this (assuming it ever passed) feasible to implement? Would it actually do anything to open up repressive regimes? Is this a reasonable balance between upholding liberal democracy values and doing business in dictatorships? Would it have any effect on domestic issues such as DMCA takedown orders? Most of all, as a shareholder, what is Google's board of directors' justification for recommending that shareholders vote AGAINST this proposal? If you are a Google shareholder, were you aware of this proposal, and if so, are you going to vote for or against?
The proposal cites the UN Declaration of Human Rights and declares that "technology companies in the United States have failed to develop adequate standards by which they can conduct business with authoritarian governments while protecting human rights to freedom of speech and freedom of expression". If adopted by shareholders, it would call for management to adopt 6 minimum standards including: not storing data that can identify an individual in repressive countries; using all legal means to resist censorship; and documenting and publicizing "all cases where legally-binding censorship requests have been complied with." The proposal was submitted by the Comptroller of New York City, which owns large amounts of Google stock in City pension plans.
Is a proposal like this (assuming it ever passed) feasible to implement? Would it actually do anything to open up repressive regimes? Is this a reasonable balance between upholding liberal democracy values and doing business in dictatorships? Would it have any effect on domestic issues such as DMCA takedown orders? Most of all, as a shareholder, what is Google's board of directors' justification for recommending that shareholders vote AGAINST this proposal? If you are a Google shareholder, were you aware of this proposal, and if so, are you going to vote for or against?
Submission + - Bill would nullify Internet radio royalty increase
skelator2821 writes: Supporters say it would save webcasters from bankruptcy.
Could they finally be doing something right for consumers and the Music world?
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9018099&intsrc=hm_ list
Submission + - Forensic Tool for Macs
Zygote writes: http://www.subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?m ain_page=product_info&cPath=200&products_id=195
"MacLockPick(TM) is a valuable tool for law enforcement professionals to perform live forensics on Mac OS X systems. The solution is based on a USB Flash drive that can be inserted into a suspect's Mac OS X computer that is running (or sleeping). Once the software is run it will extract data from the Apple Keychain and system settings in order to provide the examiner fast access to the suspect's critical information with as little interaction or trace as possible."
Submission + - Skip a security check, get suspended
numatrix writes: "Network Computing has a piece about a University of Portland student who was suspended for writing a program to bypass the Cisco Clean Access NAC system on campus. Apparently this incredibly dangerous activity is a Patriot Act violation. Or, at least, it is if you believe the letters being sent out by the administration at UP who seem to be confusing "skipping security checks" with "hack into a licensed product"."
Submission + - Vonage starts grassroots campaign against Verizon
notlisted writes: "I received an interesting email from Vonage this morning regarding their latest effort against Verizon's patent claims:
Dear Vonage Customer:
Vonage invites you to be among the first to join a new grassroots campaign aimed at preserving your right to choose your phone service. We're launching a national movement — Free to Compete — because we believe marketplace competition is good, and we want consumers to have a choice. To learn the facts and find out how you can help preserve competition and your right to choose your phone service, please visit FreeToCompete.com.
Since the day we opened our doors, our mission has been to provide consumers with an alternative to the services offered by entrenched landline phone providers. In our five short years, we've gone head-to-head with many of these industry giants, and amassed 2.4 million customer lines with our innovative technology, cool features and value pricing.
You may have heard that Verizon® is suing us over patents they say we violated. Verizon has pursued litigation against Vonage in an effort to achieve in court what it cannot achieve in the marketplace. The suit could result in limiting competition and consumers' freedom to choose a communications provider, which could ultimately drive up the cost of phone service. Vonage will continue fighting this attempt to limit your choice, while ensuring that you continue to receive the reliable, quality service you've come to expect.
As our customers, you are the most passionate and effective spokespeople we have. Let your voice be heard by visiting FreeToCompete.com where you can:
1. Send an email to Verizon telling them you support Vonage as they defend your right to a better phone service
2. Sign our Petition
3. Learn the facts of the case
4. Spread the word
We hope you'll join us in taking up this important challenge by visiting FreeToCompete.com. Together, let's move the battle for free competition and choice in the phone industry out of the courts and back into the marketplace!
And thank you for choosing Vonage.
Regards,
Jeffrey Citron
Chairman, Interim CEO and Chief Strategist"
Dear Vonage Customer:
Vonage invites you to be among the first to join a new grassroots campaign aimed at preserving your right to choose your phone service. We're launching a national movement — Free to Compete — because we believe marketplace competition is good, and we want consumers to have a choice. To learn the facts and find out how you can help preserve competition and your right to choose your phone service, please visit FreeToCompete.com.
Since the day we opened our doors, our mission has been to provide consumers with an alternative to the services offered by entrenched landline phone providers. In our five short years, we've gone head-to-head with many of these industry giants, and amassed 2.4 million customer lines with our innovative technology, cool features and value pricing.
You may have heard that Verizon® is suing us over patents they say we violated. Verizon has pursued litigation against Vonage in an effort to achieve in court what it cannot achieve in the marketplace. The suit could result in limiting competition and consumers' freedom to choose a communications provider, which could ultimately drive up the cost of phone service. Vonage will continue fighting this attempt to limit your choice, while ensuring that you continue to receive the reliable, quality service you've come to expect.
As our customers, you are the most passionate and effective spokespeople we have. Let your voice be heard by visiting FreeToCompete.com where you can:
1. Send an email to Verizon telling them you support Vonage as they defend your right to a better phone service
2. Sign our Petition
3. Learn the facts of the case
4. Spread the word
We hope you'll join us in taking up this important challenge by visiting FreeToCompete.com. Together, let's move the battle for free competition and choice in the phone industry out of the courts and back into the marketplace!
And thank you for choosing Vonage.
Regards,
Jeffrey Citron
Chairman, Interim CEO and Chief Strategist"
Submission + - Project Honey Pot sues e-mail address-harvesters
mi writes: "Unspam Technologies, Inc. — the company behind Project Honey Pot — filed a federal lawsuit today against a number of e-mail address-harvesters, that the the project has helped identify as the "worst of the worst" by linking the harvested addresses (the harvesting itself being legal) with the actual spams. Most of them individual names are still unknown, so the suit names a number of "John Does". It is hoped, that the real names will emerge during the discovery process. Hopefully, this undertaking — in a federal court and utilizing real lawyers — will be more successful, than the lone spam-fighter suing the spammers in Small Claims Court, whom Slashdot has featured a couple of times."
In France, Only Journalists Can Film Violence 531
BostonBTS sends word that the French Constitutional Council has just made it illegal to film violence unless you are a professional journalist (or to distribute a video containing violence). The law was approved exactly 16 years after amateur videographer George Holliday filmed Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King. The Council was tidying up a body of law about offenses against the public order, and wanted to ban "happy slapping." A charitable reading would be that the lawmakers stumbled into unintended consequences. Not according to Pascal Cohet, a spokesman for French online civil liberties group Odebi: "The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said [Cohet]. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet."
Submission + - E-auction Company Uses Patent to Sue Nashville PD
Synistar writes: GovDeals, an Ebay-like government auction company, is using a patent that they were awarded on a "tiered method for auctioning government assets over a computerized network, such as the Internet"to sue the Nashville Police Department . Apparently GovDeals was rejected in their bid to become a contractor for the city government. They warned the city that they were in process of obtaining a patent and that the city would be in violation of it if they did not hire GovDeals. When they lost the bid and were awarded the patent they then turned around and sued the Police Department for violating it. So were patents intended as a means to wrangle government contracts and punish those who don't hire you?
Submission + - Copyright law used to shut down anti-coal site
driptray writes: The Sydney Morning Herald reports that an Australian mining industry group has used copyright laws to close a website that parodied a coal industry ad campaign. A group known as Rising Tide created the website using the slogan "Rising sea levels: brought to you by mining" in response to the mining industry's slogan of "Life: brought to you by mining". The mining industry claimed that the "content and layout" of the parody site infringed copyright, but when Rising Tide removed the copyrighted photos and changed the layout, the mining industry still lodged a complaint. Is this a misuse of copyright law in order to stifle dissent?
Submission + - Linux + Windows Storage Server 2003 nightmare
An anonymous reader writes: I'm having some pain and would like to vent and maybe get some advice.
I joined this startup like 8 months ago. At first we had a cheap PC running Ubuntu with www+ldap+nfs server running. There was a small of centos cluster (TORQUE pbs) running h/w EDA stuff, and a few Ubuntu for s/w folks, all running off that server. For e-mail we decided to use Yahoo small business. All was well.
Few months later it was time to have our own e-mail server so we decided to use exchange server (pretty standard for non-dotcom companies around here). So we got an IT guy. He convinced us to go with Windows Storage Server 2003 and migrate to active directory so that we could have user based access control over NFS, and have centralized authentication for both unix and windows machines. I had my concern about running NFS off windows (symbolic link), but was told that it would work. I disagreed but conformed against my instinct.
First problem that came up before the migration: setgid/setuid doesn't work. MS confirmed that they broke it in the new SFU. This kind of screwed up our original access control plans. We went ahead without this feature.
Second problem that came up: filenames. Windows does not allow certain characters to be in the filename (and unix programs love to use some of these characters). Luckily there was some mapping function in SFU so we mapped the forbidden characters to > 256 (NTFS supports unicode).
After some short tests we scheduled for a night shutdown and went ahead with the migration. My torque PBS nodes went down, but I figured I can fix them later. After all these are just applications! So now we're up running, kind of.
User started to report slow login. It now takes 2-5 seconds to authenticate a user (name resolution is configured properly). So I started running nscd on the centos4.4 machines. This resolved the problem... except that nscd would crash like every two days on average. After some debugging I got this messasge ../../../libraries/liblber/sockbuf.c:91: ber_sockbuf_ctrl: Assertion `( (sb)->sb_opts.lbo_valid == 0x3 )' failed
Interestingly, after I got the TORQUE pbs nodes up running again, pbs_mom crash with similar frequency, with the exact same message!
While the IT guy is frantically installing any new patch releases from MS, I have two choices from the linux side:
1. create watchdog script to restart pbs_mom and nscd daemon
2. upgrade ldap related packages hoping that problem will go away.
3. gdb and start looking at some source codes
So I downloaded latest source of nss_ldap and compiled. Replaced the centos default .so and observed -> didn't fix the problem
Now I downloaded latest stable openldap source. It doesn't even compile when I tried it in the windows NFS mount. After moving it to /tmp all was well. I'm also building pam_ldap.so from latest source. Will report back after a few days.
That's it for me as far as venting is concerned. If anyone ever consider running Linux cluster with Active Directory.. please do me a favor and save the money. MS simply does not work in an unix environment no matter what they say. It was obvious that they did not spend any QA money on it.
If you guys have any tips or suggestions please post.
thanks
p.s. a few other "small problems" with MS's NFS implementation
1. centos "find" binary uses some optimization that does not work with NFS over NTFS. Now we have to use find -noleaf... argGGh!
2. once a while we'd get these weird files in the directory that we can't delete (related to locks probably). The only way to destroy them was to nuke the entire directory by "rm -rf" in the parent. Rebooting the windows server also works.....
3. sometimes (very rarely) files would disappear when you do ls in linux (but if you access them by name directly they'll still there).
I joined this startup like 8 months ago. At first we had a cheap PC running Ubuntu with www+ldap+nfs server running. There was a small of centos cluster (TORQUE pbs) running h/w EDA stuff, and a few Ubuntu for s/w folks, all running off that server. For e-mail we decided to use Yahoo small business. All was well.
Few months later it was time to have our own e-mail server so we decided to use exchange server (pretty standard for non-dotcom companies around here). So we got an IT guy. He convinced us to go with Windows Storage Server 2003 and migrate to active directory so that we could have user based access control over NFS, and have centralized authentication for both unix and windows machines. I had my concern about running NFS off windows (symbolic link), but was told that it would work. I disagreed but conformed against my instinct.
First problem that came up before the migration: setgid/setuid doesn't work. MS confirmed that they broke it in the new SFU. This kind of screwed up our original access control plans. We went ahead without this feature.
Second problem that came up: filenames. Windows does not allow certain characters to be in the filename (and unix programs love to use some of these characters). Luckily there was some mapping function in SFU so we mapped the forbidden characters to > 256 (NTFS supports unicode).
After some short tests we scheduled for a night shutdown and went ahead with the migration. My torque PBS nodes went down, but I figured I can fix them later. After all these are just applications! So now we're up running, kind of.
User started to report slow login. It now takes 2-5 seconds to authenticate a user (name resolution is configured properly). So I started running nscd on the centos4.4 machines. This resolved the problem... except that nscd would crash like every two days on average. After some debugging I got this messasge
Interestingly, after I got the TORQUE pbs nodes up running again, pbs_mom crash with similar frequency, with the exact same message!
While the IT guy is frantically installing any new patch releases from MS, I have two choices from the linux side:
1. create watchdog script to restart pbs_mom and nscd daemon
2. upgrade ldap related packages hoping that problem will go away.
3. gdb and start looking at some source codes
So I downloaded latest source of nss_ldap and compiled. Replaced the centos default
Now I downloaded latest stable openldap source. It doesn't even compile when I tried it in the windows NFS mount. After moving it to
That's it for me as far as venting is concerned. If anyone ever consider running Linux cluster with Active Directory.. please do me a favor and save the money. MS simply does not work in an unix environment no matter what they say. It was obvious that they did not spend any QA money on it.
If you guys have any tips or suggestions please post.
thanks
p.s. a few other "small problems" with MS's NFS implementation
1. centos "find" binary uses some optimization that does not work with NFS over NTFS. Now we have to use find -noleaf... argGGh!
2. once a while we'd get these weird files in the directory that we can't delete (related to locks probably). The only way to destroy them was to nuke the entire directory by "rm -rf" in the parent. Rebooting the windows server also works.....
3. sometimes (very rarely) files would disappear when you do ls in linux (but if you access them by name directly they'll still there).
