I'm browsing the RFC, and it sounds like they're planning on having people's firewalls spit out IIALP messages in response to port scans, etc. In my opinion, this is a really bad idea!

You don't know the half of it. Slashdot actually port scans every computer that posts anonymously looking for proxies. If this protocol went into affect, Slashdot would be at the top of the list, continually proxy scanning the hundreds of anonymous posters it gets per minute. If ISPs implemented it, no one would even be able to route to Slashdot.

Consider the effectiveness of Slashdot's own "excessive bad posting" filter, which (to overcome DHCP) has subnet-banned class C's all over the Internet, blocking hundreds of people from posting.

I'd say that just based on the examples give above, this kind of banlisting would be a false-positive-ridden nightmare scenario.

Perhaps someone on the Qt/Mac or equivalent GTK project could answer this for me. Why is it that when these toolkits get ported to another other platform, be it Windows, MacOS, BeOS or what have you, they insist on looking and acting as GTK or Qt applications rather than native apps? A Qt/Windows or GTK/Windows app would be much more useful and usable to me if it used native Windows widgets and thus fit in with every other program I use.

As an example, I use gaim on FreeBSD because its tabbed interface is simply the best I've come across. I would love to use it instead of Trillian when I'm forced into using Windows. But the Windows port of gaim, which uses GTK+/Windows, works horribly. The GTK theme doesn't match my XP settings, widgets draw slowly and work clumsily (tooltips in particular seem to spontaneously appear and refuse to go away, even when the program is minimized!), and all in all it feels like a cheap Wal-Mart knockoff.

GTK+ widgets offer no benefits over standard Windows controls -- they draw slower, they don't match the environment, and Windows is just as themable as GTK is. Going back on-topic, this Qt/Mac port of Konqueror likewise eschews native widgets for the entirely out-of-place Qt look. All I can ask is Why? Wouldn't it be far easier for Qt/ and GTK/Windows or /Mac to simply wrap native widgets, rather than poorly ape them?

isn't unix dying?

So, basically, they want you to run a keystroke logger. The logger will then report back the number of times you push each key. Are we supposed to just trust them to ignore the order? I have to really doubt the sanity (or common sense, anyway) of the person who would voluntarily give away his security like that.