Slashdot Mirror

My spam peaked early 2004 with about 30,000 mails per stuffing not only my inbox, but also my DSL connection. I had a "catch all" option on several dozen domains and most of the spam I received was addressed to non existing mail boxes. Due to my local spam filters very efficient handling of the problem I only started to worry about the situation when downloading all the spam started to take hours and my provider complained about the daily traffic.

The problem with the non existent mail addresses became a large one sometimes in 2003, when enough people had some kind of spam filtering that deflected most of the usual spam. I guess that sometime in 2004 even the last catch all rules have been disabled, so that today simply guessing email addresses will gain nothing for the spammer.

So maybe spam has not really peaked, but there are simply different waves of spam techniques. Some of them rely on mass, others on tricking the filters. We may simply be in a "smart spam phase". A lot of the spam that reaches me today shows the message as a picture instead of text and I have not yet figured out why thunderbird will display those pictures, since I disabled this.

But the article is right in spam becoming something like a background noise. I still have to manually mark about 100 mails per day as spam, but I got very fast in recognizing it and it only takes a few seconds. I'm always astonished if I meet friends whose email address have not been public for more than a decade and who are very annoyed if one or to mails per week pass their spam filter. To me it is like complaining about banner ads. It's just an unavoidable part of the internet ecosystem, like mosquitos.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

Bill Gates from Triumph of the nerds:

Success is a menace -- it fools smart people into thinking they can't lose.

Not only did I name the wrong decade, I fucked up the quote too. This is not from Triumph of the nerds, but from Pirates of Silicon Valley.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

This somehow reminds me of Apple in the 90s.

No, more like in the 80s. In the 90s Apple tried to become another boring PC manufacturer to save their market share, only to see it erode it even more. That is, till the reverse takeover by the prophet.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

Forget about the AI rumor. It's just a rumor, the last sentence of TFA, unrelated to the rest.

More interesting is the following quote:

One visitor to the company's "Googleplex" in Silicon Valley "felt as if I were in the company of missionaries". A consequence of the theory that Google is aiming to run the world could be that "Google may be less liked in the industry than Microsoft inside 12 months," says Pip Coburn, a technology analyst. Bloggers have started accusing Google of hubris and arrogance.

This somehow reminds me of Apple in the 90s. They were on a crusade. They had found the holy grail. They could not fail. They would bring their vision to the world.

They could fail. And they failed. It didn't destroy them, but put their feet back to the ground. Where they belong. Today they make great products while listening to their users needs. They have learned that even though they may be on a mission, missionaries usually do not change the world. Hard workers and creative people do, as long as they stay connected to reality.

Bill Gates from Triumph of the nerds:

Success is a menace -- it fools smart people into thinking they can't lose.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

Very nice, very small, but only converts DC to DC, so there will still be another brick doing AC-DC conversion beneath your super tiny designer micro case or nanomac. Nice nonetheless, maybe one could fit those to work with existing DC networks for household appliance, so we can finally have a network of toasters, smart Japanese toilets, mirco ovens, light switches and artificial pets. Or maybe we'll just build more efficient computers that run by power over ethernet.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

What happens if a kid requests the newsletter, but the kids school or parents have put its email address on the blacklist?

I believe if somebody requests to be part of a distribution, it no longer becomes unsolicited (spam, by definition, is unsolicitied e-mail).

The problem is that kids cannot legally sign contracts or agree to license agreements. Maybe the kid requested the mail, but legally this is not valid. If the parents don't want the kid to receive the mail, this has to be accepted without considering the kids choice.

Are there any laws on solicited, but inappropriate, e-mail being sent to minors, given that there is no simple way to allow the provider to judge a requestor's age?

I think there are. Some years ago several mail providers kicked out everybody below 13, because a change in law required them to get written permission from the parents to store any data related to the kids user account, since the child could not legally agree to their terms of condition. Since this was not practical possible, they simply closed those accounts.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

They could have avoided a lot of complaints if they had simply made a feature you could enable--not a feature you have to disable.

If they had done that, most people would never have realized that the option exists. If there wasn't a podcast icon on the left side, many people would never have found the option. Better to ask during installation: "iTunes 6.0.2 offers a new option to display recommendations from iTMS matching the music your are playing. For this iTunes has to send the trackname of the current title to iTMS. These informations will only be used to change the MiniStore and be discarded afterwards. Do you want to activate this function [Yes/No]"

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

Lets get something correct, MacOS X is NOT Open Source. Never has been, never will be. Yes, Darwin may be, but MacOS X is not totally Darwin.

I never claimed that MacOS X is open source (I should now, I payed several times for it). I said "Unix based operating systems". Darwin (Mach kernel plus FreeBSD personality) is open source. The application layer (Cocoa, Carbon) is not. Cocoa is not part of the Unix based operating system, there were versions running on Windows NT. I'm aware that most people will not differentiate between those, but technically Cocoa is not the OS.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

Their Unix based operating systems are open source.

Umm, I do not think that OS X is considered open source. If this were the case, don't you think someone would have dragged OS X to x86 before Apple did. As for Sun, they just recently opened Solaris and that was mostly a move to encourage OSS people to use more Sun items.

Darwin is open source, including the Mach Kernel and the Free BSD personality. Cocoa and Carbon (the OpenStep and classic MacOS based APIs) are not. I avoided calling it OS X for exactly that reason.

Both were founded in the context of Stanford university.

How you gather this one? Jobs is a dropout from Reeds College and Wozniak is a dropout of UC-Berkley. The closest I can figure is they attended a Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto. Not quite stanford but I can see your confusion.

I gathered this from my memory, heavily based on watching Triumph of the nerds several times. I was wrong.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

So think twice before "death to all marketers".

FTFA: The Free Speech Coalition, a trade group for the adult-entertainment industry, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Utah in November seeking to bar the state from enforcing its law, saying it is invalid under a federal anti-spam law and violates free-speech provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Several groups said they plan to join in filing a legal brief in the suit opposing the Utah law, including the Email Sender and Provider Coalition, a marketing trade group; Beverage Solutions Inc., a beer-and-wine seller; and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group.

While protecting children from spam is a noble goal, Utahs method of forcing companies to have a third party check their address databases against blacklists (and having to pay a lot for that) will only catch a small part of the spam, while resulting in a giant overhead.

What worries me most is the definition of "inappropriate sales pitches", which can be heavily fined. What is inappropriate? I run a website for free language training, aimed at adults and kids. What happens if a kid requests the newsletter, but the kids school or parents have put its email address on the blacklist? If some right wing christian decides that teaching children the french names of bodyparts is indecent, will I be fined for making an "inappropriate sales pitches"? Smells like CDA.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

• Both companies were at one time the main producer of Unix workstations (Sun during the 90s, Apple today)
• OpenStep was the result of a collaboration of NeXT and Sun to create an object oriented API based on NeXTSTEP. It ran on NeXTs Mach/BSD OS and Solaris. After the NeXT takeover by Apple in 1996 OpenStep became what today is known as MacOS X, still running on Mach/BSD.
• Styling: Sun and Apple (and NeXT) released workstations in (almost) cubic (Sparcstation IPX, G4 Cube, NeXT Cube) and pizza box format (Sparcstation 20, Mac LC, NeXTstation)
• Their Unix based operating systems are open source
• Both are strong supporters of Java
• Both are based in California
• Both were founded in the context of Stanford university
• Both tried (and failed) to grab a larger peace of the desktop market
• Both were early integrators of network technology into their computers
• Both have been declared dead several times
• Both produced some of the first application servers (WebObjects, J2EE)

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

A recent study (German) showed that 10% of all Germans or 16% of all Germans older than 18 years already use VoIP. Germany is placed 3rd in broadband use in Europe in absolute numbers, although it is the country with the largest population. This is a new trend, numbers are rising fast. I guess that the numbers in the US will be even higher. So switching to encrypted VoIP might be a viable solution for the near future.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

Also, you forgot Django in your mentions of Python web frameworks.

Well, I did not really forget it, I ignored it. Mainly to avoid the "there are lots of frameworks, all of which suck" discussion. From what I see Turbogears currently gets the most attention and is the closest in terms of "packaging" (including screencasts, PR etc.) to RoR, so I picked it for comparison.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

So I don't see why you have go for a pre-emptive strike against the evil hordes of RoR users, who don't seem to have materialised in this article anyway : )

Basically because I was wrong. I had a lot of discussions during the last few weeks with people praising RoR and bashing Python on the one side and people praising Python and dismissing Ruby as a toy on the other. So the pre-emptive strike was intended as a "hey, they are both worth considering, choose based on your needs" to stop any bashing in advance. To my total surprise the subject didn't even come up, making my posting surplus.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

Some remarks:

• The concept: Take a 12" iBook, flip the display onto its back, attach a Keytec USB touchpanel on top and fix it all together. No further hardware modifications, of course you will not be able to use the keyboard or trackpad afterwards, and one USB port is already used by the touchscreen.
• None of these have ever been build. From their site: "The iTab is not built yet. We will build them as they are sold." If they intend to sell 100 of them, shouldn't they at least build one prototype? All they have are some photoshopped mockups.
• Obviously Apples warranty will no longer apply. They will give you no guarantee either. Even more: "We will not fix any broken iTabs." Great service. Should you buy it and it never works, just throw it away. But of course this will never happen, because "we will do extensive tests on the iBook before modifying to catch any problems with it. Any problems with a computer are usually immediately visible after these tests. So the chance of your iTab breaking after purchase is lower." Exactly. The whole warranty stuff is overrated, vendor tested hardware almost never fails.
• Handwriting does not work. "The touchscreen technology used in iTab is not compatible with InkWell, Apple's handwriting recognition technology". Your only option is to purchase a third party virtual keyboard product.
• The vendor has a 14 feedbacks from buyers at ebay, five of them since 09/2005, most of which where books about tennis, none hardware.

Don't touch it

Auction on ebay
iTab homepage (already slashdotted)

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

Since this is inevitable to pop up, a very simplyfied version (slightly offtopic):

Why not ditch Python and use Ruby (on Rails)?

• Ruby is a nice language. It looks more like Java (or C or Perl) than Python, so that may be an advantage for those who dislike Pythons whitespace handling (I think it is genius)
• Rails is a very nice framework for developing database driven web-apps very fast
• Someone (David Heinemeier Hansson) really cared to make this user/developer friendly. There is good marketing, nice screencasts (although basically smoke and mirrors), good documentation, a well structured central web site, lots of support. All this may be even more important than the technical differences to other platforms like Python.
• It's hype, so you could easily sell it to management

Why better stick with Python?

• Most of the hyped features Rails are available on Python too, although not yet in such a nice package. The Turbogears folks try this, but in a more pythoniac way. I like it better, since they actually bundled already established products like CherryPy and SQLObject instead of simply writing from scratch. This may not result in a smooth package like RoR, but it is more clearly aimed at the integration of other products.
• There are tons of modules and documentation for Python out there. So if you come to the point where you want to include other features than those already present in your framework, it will be easier to add them from different sources, because a) there are more and b) integration is a more established process.
• There has been a lot going on in the RoR aftershock to improve the situation, like discussions about merging the different frameworks (Turbogears/Subway) to create a unified and very powerful platform.
• There is always a way up in Python with Zope (although this is a beast and documentation is bad, 3.X is much better, but lots of products currently still require 2.X) and integration in J2EE.
• Python is old. There has not only been one generation of developers whos projects failed, but many. RoR is still in the "early adaptors" phase, where everyone sees the revolution and casualties are accepted. Ruby alone has had a strong following in Japan, but for the rest of the world Rails was the first contact. Wait a year until the "RoR sucks" postings appear, than you'll be much wiser.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

Not only is this a good book, it is also one of only few that cover Python 2.4. The author Magnus Lie Hetland has a free python tutorial ("minimal crash course) (Instant python) on his homepage. He was also involved (as author, editor etc.) in several other book projects:

• Practical Python (Author) [Beginning Python is based on this one]
• Python Cookbook (Coauthor)
• Python in a nutshell (Editor)
• Foundations of Python network programming (Editor)

So we can assume he has a clue what he is writing about.

His homepage uses PHP, btw.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

I don't think they set out to solve X bugs in Y months. I would assume they have a certain number of manhours devoted to fixing bugs, and fix however many they get around to. They can always increase the resources devoted to this, yes, but I doubt anyone over there says "oh, this one doesn't have an exploit in the wild, try to take as long as you can to fix it".

If you had the public reputation of Microsoft and also declared years ago, that from now on security would be priority no 1, don't you think that "fix anything as fast as possible" would be the only possible answer? Since this is Microsoft with > 50,000 developers, there should never be a situation where it is technically possible to "increase the resources devoted to this". Maybe there is a reasonable limit (e.g. groups with more than seven developers are inefficient"), but they could finance several hundred teams of bug fixers, testers etc. So why don't they?

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

What happens: iTunes sends a request to the music store if you click on a track in your iTunes Library. It displays the recommendations it received based on the track you clicked in a mini store below the library. If you dislike this, press COMMAND-SHIFT-M ( Edit > Hide MiniStore).

Is this spyware? I think the definition as used in the article is ways to broad:

spyware (because it sends information to a server) and adware (because it displays information to attempt to sell you products)

My definition would include "without my consent and without me being able to turn if of". Maybe yours would be "without asking me BEFOREHAND".

The main problem is that we are developing a lot of technology that allows us to personalize any kind of service. This has been impossible in the past, but with the establishment of the web as data infrastructure and database driven applications on web servers accessing data from millions of users at a time, this all changed. I think we have to change the way we think about this and whom to blame.

I'm somewhat paranoid about my data, e.g. I only pay cash to leave no trace. On the other hand I LOVE amazons recommendation system and am very willing to give them informations not only about what I buy, but also about what I might buy. [But I wouldn't search amazon for the "Anarchists handbook" or "DIY pipe bombs" without deleting my cookies first.]

We're just at the beginning of the massive use of personalization. Wait a couple of years and someone will convince you with a service that requires tracking you via GPS 24h/day. The old idea of "minimal data collection" simply will not work. But 1984 wont happen either. We will get used to leaving data tracks everywhere. [One thing that really scared me was AT&Ts patent to read the RFID tags in your trash can to find out about your consumption habits.] It will happen because it is so convenient. Like gene modified fruit or gene therapy. Resistance is (basically) futile, though often worth a try.

Our main focus should be to push society into handling this wisely, if it cannot (or should not) be stopped. So push for privacy laws that do not simply allow or prohibit collecting data, but which clearly define who may access the data, what they may do with it, in which ways they have to inform you about it.

Control what is done with your data, not if it exists at all.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

The most interesting result of Security Fix's study is that Microsoft took longer to fix a problem if the researcher waited to disclose the problem until after Microsoft published the patch.

I'd like to know if the time to issue a fix also depends on existing exploits, i.e. is Microsoft faster if there is already an exploit out there. If yes, than it seems obvious that Microsoft does not really put as much afford into fixing bugs as they claim, they're "motivated" by public pressure.

One explanation for additional delay in case of a not yet disclosed or not yet exploited problem may be more thorough testing, so it may not even be a bad thing. But I'm afraid that the delay is not really "in the best of the customers", more in the best of Microsoft. I have no prove, but it seems to be the general company policy.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

When I was a kid, educational software like Zork really helped, typing and spelling especially.

Yes, it does. And it is a good example for how educational software should be:

• You played, because you wanted.
• The learning happened because you needed the knowledge for yourself, so learning made sense.
• The situation required you to think how to apply your knowledge in the "real world" of Zork.
• There was an instant reward.
• You could start and stop the learning process at any time.
• It was fun.

For me it was "Wishbringer" and "Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy". Since my first language is German, it was even more usefull, since I usually had no opportunity to really try my English communication skills in my natural habitat. SimTalk is way more efficient than NoTalk.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - free online language training

Man, do I hate those studies. What the hell were they measuring? Two groups of six years old listening to a story while the text ist displayed on a computer screen.

Group A Will only have the posibility to listen to the story while the currently read line is highlightened on the screen. Group B Will additionaly be encouraged to click on illustrations, triggering almost 300 animations and sound effects. 100 of these have nothing to do with the story whatsoever

When asked about the story, 90% of group A will remember it correctly, but only 30% of group B. So what is the conclusion? Maybe that distractions, especially those that are not related to what you are currently doing will harm your concentration and therefore you will remember not as well as if you were left alone? No, the conclusion is:

Interactive learning fails reading test

WTF?

• Maybe I would have bought it if they did not add 33% of noise to the experiment.
• Maybe I would have bought it if the animations were designed to give an insight into the story. (Were they? They don't say. Animations and sound effects may be "Hit the monkey, win an iPod" flash banners displayed because the story is about a monkey).
• Maybe I would have bought it if they had tested for some positive reaction to the added interactive component (Were the children that did not follow the linear story able to tell the story in a nonlinear context? Could they seperate the single elements of the story more easily? Did anybody care to check?)

I don't claim that it is impossible that interactive learning is the wrong educational tool for six years old. I don't believe it, but I just can't prove it. But I'm annoyed by all these stupid studies making statements based on unprecise conditions, which will not allow to deduce verifyable conclusions, but will be picked up by the press (and slashdot) nonetheless.

They're just like those studies that claim over and over again that playing counterstrike will turn kids into brutal killers. Proven wrong again and again, but nobody cares.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - free online language training