ars article

main issue seems to be if the gov’t already has evidence that you have incriminating evidence on the HD (like a recording of you admitting it). still, definitely not resolved completely.

Domain names aren’t exactly like land. They’re used as a way of naming, which lands us more in Trademark law than in land law. Note that trademarks all cost the same amount to register, regardless of perceived value. While your domain name isn’t as important in 2011 as it was in the 90s (better search engines), it’s still a big aspect of what you are called / who you are on the Internet, which seems much different than a chunk of land in Manhattan. To maintain trademarks, you need to actively use it in commerce, and not just claim it for all time and not use it. This is what the ‘bad faith’ rules are all about – trying to determine if a domain name holder is trying to legitimately use it, or just squatting on a name.

Under the UDRP, he’d probably lose out due to some bad faith actions, such as implying he wants to sell the site and that was part of his purpose. From what I recall, he also had a pattern of abuse like this. His case predates the UDRP and ACPA, and he straight-up lost in court.

The wiki has a decent summary of his case. I’m not a huge fan of the “you must show it is a parody instantly” idea (which it seems like the 4th Cir didn’t hold to either).

It’s not up to the squatter, it’s up to the registrar. The registrars for the top level domains (like verisign for .com) will abide by the UDRP. The squatter doesn’t have a say in it. Odds are, there’s some boilerplate about it in the contract they sign with Verisign.

Check out Wipo’s info, specifically “All ICANN-accredited registrars that are authorized to register names in the gTLDs and the ccTLDs that have adopted the Policy have agreed to abide by and implement it for those domains”

Just the other day a friend of mine had a nice idea for a website, and like many descriptive names, the website was taken. It’s one of those fake looking websites with some ads links, and of course a page where you can submit an offer to buy the site for an excessive amount of money. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could use the legal system to deal with this?

where does the corporate tax fit into this? i’m under the impression that dividends get taxed heavily (35%) before we even see it, and then it gets taxed again. while that doesn’t cover the buy/sale of a capital asset, doesn’t the value of a stock derive from its present value of future dividend payments (which would take in account of the corporate tax?) Part 3 of this WP opinion has some interesting points that may or may not be wrong.

When I see the “Is a reward for a lifetime of hard and difficult service.” option, I can’t help but think of all the crappy people that stuck around just for the retirement: some lousy senior NCOs with three years to go on cruise control, or some junior officers that stuck around because they could sham for a while and eventually get immense benefits. (note: i’m not saying this is all people, just that i am reminded of those). There’s a big difference between someone who worked their ass off (or even a veteran with blown off legs) and a shitbag that shammed for 20 years. Let’s reward them equally.

actually, it works out quite well. trucks hardly ever get in the passing lane (they even have signs for areas where you aren’t supposed to do it), and trucks never go over 100km/h. and since no one passes on the right, it’s really quite easy/safe to pass a slower vehicle and get in the right lane without worrying about some ass racing up behind you and cutting into your blind spot.

i remember them being illegal in pennsylvania years ago, though i never actually read the law.

the issue i have with it is the whole speed trap / scanner arms race is a ridiculous waste of resources due to garbage laws that the majority doesn’t agree with. the result is a situation that breeds contempt for the law, shows the ignorance/greed of lawmakers, benefits from corruption (like how people who know the cops get off free), and creates a set of laws that are more easily avoidable by the rich/powerful.

are police scanners legal where you live?

cool stuff. hope you got to have fun with it at work.

Introduction

GRUB is the GRand Unified Bootloader. For those unfamiliar, a bootloader is a critical piece of software used when a computer turns on. Its job is to load an operating system. The bootloader resides on a disk of some sort (floppy, hard) and is called by the BIOS, which is the real low-level program that runs on startup. GRUB is installed at a specific location on these devices.

A Reliable Multicast Framework for Light-weight Sessions and Application Layer Framing
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This is an attempt to build a general reliable multicast implementation on top of IP multicast. It attempts to leave many of the decisions to the application layer (in accordance with the E2E principle) and provide only the basics all MC implementations need. It’s fundamental flaw is that it relies on IP multicast, which no one uses.

A Delay-Tolerant Network Architecture for Challenged Internets (DTN)
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Not all networks look like the Internet. Our current network stack is built on the assumptions: an end-to-end path exists, it has reasonable RTTs, and packets will arrive with reasonably high probability. These assumptions do not hold for may interesting networks, such as satellite networks, ad-hoc networks, sensor networks, poor-people networks, etc. One interesting network they use is a vehicle, like a bus, that drives from A to B. It physically moves packets around, and when a node is in range of the bus, it can send a load of packets to be delivered to the other end – very much like the postal service.

End-to-End Internet Packet Dynamics
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This is one of those measurement papers that bridge the gap between facts and intuition. It was done in 1995, and consisted of TCP communications between 35 sites. Initially, the paper started out a little dry and boring, but has a lot of interesting results.

Some highlights:
- Out of order packet delivery is not that big of a deal, possibly because our current fast retransmit threshold for dups is conservative. More research is required to know if these values should be tuned.

Middleboxes No Longer Considered Harmful
Middleboxes are things like NAT boxes or firewalls. They violate basic tenets of the Internet, specifically that every node is uniquely identified and that network devices should not process packets. This paper presents and architecture (DOA – Delegation-Oriented Architecture) to enable the use of these middle boxes in a way that does not violate these tenets.

The main idea is to decouple the IP address from the host ID, called the EID (endpoint ID). The EID is independent of network topology. IPv6 is another approach to uniquely identifying an endpoint, but it is not independent from the topology. The authors downplayed the benefit of IPv6; it does get rid of the need for NAT-style middleboxes. Still, there are other things such as mobility that benefit from DOA’s location-independence that IPv6 lacks.