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Comment: Re:Fuck religion. (Score 5, Informative) 903

by Pliny (#45838419) Attached to: US Justice Blocks Implementation of ACA Contraceptive Mandate

That's rewriting history slightly. Was it "rammed through" the Senate? Certainly. Though, if memory serves, the House was under Republican control at the time. Also, for the last goddamn time, the ACA is not a *leftist* law. The "left" is still pissed at Obama and Congress about getting knifed in the back over a public option. The ACA started life on the right at the Heritage Foundatrion in 1989. It's a testament to how hard the right worked throughout the '90s and the aughts to drag the country their way that the ACA became centrist enough for Obama to latch onto it like a limpet.

Comment: Automate your own response? (Score 1) 333

by Pliny (#37987334) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Spammers You Know?

The reasonable thing to do is just block everything from their domain or that includes their name.

However that's no fun. What is fun is whipping up a python script and using a service like Tropo to respond to every single message with a phone call to tell them that the email is unwanted. Of course, to ensure that they can effectively identify the offending mail, the script should read it to them in it's entirety and ask them to press a button to acknowledge that they've understood and will stop. If the call gets... disconnected for any reason, it should call back and start over until it gets it's acknowledgement.

Comment: Re:Serious question (Score 1) 335

by Pliny (#36803348) Attached to: Test Driving GNU Hurd, With Benchmarks Against Linux

The Hurd has one thing going for it. It's design called for putting as much functionality as possible into client-server interfaces. This made it run horrifically slow. However, now that we're in the multicore era... It might actually be a path forward. Fortunately, BeOS went the same direction, and it's not quite dead yet.

Comment: The Net interprets censorship... (Score 3, Insightful) 529

by Pliny (#34359938) Attached to: DHS Seizes 75+ Domain Names

John Gilmore's quote was always an oversimplification. The net itself doesn't do anything but move packets. The people that use the net are the ones that find ways over, under, and around censorship. And this is censorship. We can argue about whether or not it's justified (and in the case of websites selling Chanel knockoffs as the real thing, it might be) but the fact the ICE and DHS have exerted control over ICANN is not good.

I'm a US citizen, born and raised here. The prospect of my government having the power to control the web scares me shitless. It's time to start working on a decentralized, cryptographically sound successor to DNS. It's also time to get serious about IPv6 and IPSec (encryption at the network layer) as a way to foil deep packet inspection.
