DISQUS

(circa 1997)
"What's this 'libc.so' thing, it's huge!" *clickity-click* "AGGGH!!!!"

Ah, good times ...

"three Democratic senators — six percent of the Senate"

<pre>3 / (50 * 2) < 6%</pre>

Or am I missing something?

I'm trying to decide if I'm glad that there's no exception to Fair Use for "Your parody sucks".

Either way, I blame Warner for bringing it to public attention. Bastards.

Well, Tim and the Mikes already made 90% of my point (thanks guys), but I would like to add one thing:

If we're surveying the content producers of the world in an attempt to judge the validity of strong copyright protection, shouldn't we also consider the opinion of all the content consumers? If we consider every act of copyright infringement as a vote against strong copyright protection, well, there's really no contest. For every litigious rock star there are a million torrent-wielding listeners.

If the only reason we allow a state-granted monopoly is for the benefit the public, and the public widely rejects it, does that make copyright obsolete? Can society just opt-out?

I just finished adding off-site backup for my home machines, also through DreamHost. My version uses duplicity to make encrypted, incremental backups of my various machines to a central server (for easy restores). I then use rsync to push it all to DreamHost in the middle of the night (for redundancy). (tip: use --bwlimit to keep it from chewing-up all the network bandwidth)

It's quite satisfying having a backup system that's automatic, secure, redundant, and universal -- server(s), workstations, even my family's PDAs are all backed-up, and my precious bits can survive any disaster short of a nuclear war (and maybe even that).

The article goes on to argue that the real issue is the lack of competition in the broadband market.

One point a lot of people seem to miss is that "sufficient competition" doesn't mean that everyone must have access to at least two telcos, in case one does something bad. All you need is enough options for enough people so that the threat of large numbers of customers leaving will disuade any ISP from doing something stupid (like throttling Google traffic unless you pay more).

From where I sit, we've already surpassed that level of broadband adoption, so there's not much to worry about.

Tor isn't a traditional web anonymizer, which simply disguises your address by running all requests through their proxy. The anonymizer still knows all about you, and your privacy is at their mercy.

Tor, on the other hand, actually routes individual packets through other users' machines. No one machine sees all of your packets, and there's no (feasible) way of tracking any of the packets back to their source (or destination).

Tor isn't the only anonymizing protocol out there (see also ANT), but it's probably the most popular.