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Slashback: Walmart and Wiki, Alan Ralsky
USB sticks as a security threat. martijnd writes "The BBC follows up on the risks of USB sticks as a threat to business by looking at data theft and virus-spreading-as-from-a-floppy infiltration."
More On Wal-Mart's Wikipedia War. An anonymous reader writes "Past the media coverage of their article 'Wal-marts Wikipedia War', Whitedust has apparently received an interesting email from Mike Krempasky (representing Edelman Public Affairs in Washington, DC). While maintaining that Whitedust has no actual specific issue with Wal-Mart - the article was published on the simple premise that Wikepedia's important neutrality was apparently being compromised - and in the interests of a more balanced argument, Whitedust have published the email in full to their readership along with some other interesting notes."
Mindstorms NXT: Mindstorms Resurrected?. Since the announcement of Mindstorms NXT; many people believe that my earlier article was completely off target. My latest article, Mindstorms NXT: Mindstorms Resurrected?, attempts to complete the analysis. It concludes that Mindstorms NXT does not represent any change of direction for Lego; and unless forced by competition to act otherwise, Lego will continue to market Mindstorms as a niche product line."
Spam King Alan Ralsky NOT Jailed. narzy writes "DailyTech.com is reporting that contrary to reports last week, spam king Alan Ralsky was in fact not picked up by the Feds. Inquires put in to the DoJ and Detroit FBI field office resulted in puzzling dead ends as both agencies had no information as to having Mr. Ralsky in custody. Early Monday morning the original source recanted the story of Mr. Ralsky's arrest."
LiveJournal Explains Ban on Ad-Blocking Software. An anonymous user writes "LJ Founder, Brad Fitzpatrick, blames the change to the Terms of Service on boilerplate language put into the document by 'some lawyers'." From the article: "This is a pre-announcement that a more user-friendly TOS change is on its way. (After all, we can't even detect that you're even using ad blockers to begin with, so there's no point in us saying you can't. Plus you might not even have control over what's installed on your computer, etc.) So, yeah, sorry: we messed up."
I am Tim Thorpe, I am also narzy I wrote the article on dailytech.com and submitted it to /.
I just ad blocked images from a local web server and looked in the logs afterwards. No more requests for the images. Maybe I am missing something seems that it would be trivial to detect. Just look in the logs. You wouln't even have to look through all of them, you could just take samples.
It's very unlikely that many (if any) Wal-Mart employees are manipulating Wikipedia. Most of them don't make enough money to own a computer and have an Internet connection. Even if they do, they're too busy working a second job just to make ends meet. Sad but true.
An expensive toy that appeals to a small percentage of the population should have the full marketing resources of the company behind it.
--
I use a Mac, asshole.
No need to be redundant.
Actually, I can't imagine why either. This new product is so clearly superior, and will probably also be easier to use (if for no other reason, than that it has servos) that I can't picture anyone buying any more mindstorms. Certainly I will not be purchasing any more mindstorms equipment, and I do currently have some (but I only have a couple of the blue RCXs, even, so it's not like I have a huge investment.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
user didn't download ads, user is using an ad blocker.
AdBlock has a feature to download the ad but not display it.
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
It seems Australia could be used as a testbed for invasive smart card and biometric technologies, seeing as how the populace on the whole embraces the anti-terrorism-means-restricting-our-rights -mantra.
I am sure that the Australian experience will be looked at in the US, once the final decision has been made to implement a universal biometric ID system.
There are many things, such as the PASS-card as well as requireing biometrics on your passport, that can be seen as groundlaying work for such a system.
Things like these, after all, don't come all of a sudden, instead they are slowly implemented, one step at a time. In the end, you will find it strangely convinient, and not really all that bad, to have to carry your biometrically enhanced universal RFID card along with you.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
Don't they have space for him?
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Gotcha, I've never noticed that particular feature. Half of the joy of blocking ads is not wasting bandwidth on them. 49% is not seeing 'em, and 1% is not putting hits into the ad-tracking assholes' databases...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And how much would it cost to monitor, analyze and store the data from the tracking of even a small percentage of their 10,169,726 users and communities? Is it such that it would add any value to their ad-service business? Would it be less per month than the combined ad revenue per month? Would it be worth going out of their way to shut down any of the users they found in violation, particularly in the eyes of the advertisers?
So let's say they honestly can't (because I know it's possible not to), why would they even want to? I doubt it makes good business sense.
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
If a user for Livejournal is using a text-only browser they won't load any images. If you just look for images loaded in a log a text-only browser will show up as adware when it's really not.
I'd say 99% of the joy of blocking ads is not seeing them. Unless you are still on dialup, I HIGHLY doubt you notice the bandwith difference.
And how much would it cost to monitor, analyze and store the data from the tracking of even a small percentage of their 10,169,726 users and communities?
They are already doing that. Any site with any traffic that generates revenue monitors this very closely. It's the blood of the net.
Would it be worth going out of their way to shut down any of the users they found in violation, particularly in the eyes of the advertisers?
For sites of that magnitude, changing click-through ratios by just a few percentage points can mean millions in revenue - lost or gained.
There is a web page to check for Federal prisoner: http://www.bop.gov/iloc2/LocateInmate.jsp
s action=NameSearch&needingMoreList=false&LastName=H unziker&Middle=&FirstName=gary&Race=U&Sex=U&Age=&x =0&y=0
I checked before, and found out that a spammer that I sued Gary Hunziker was recently released. http://www.bop.gov/iloc2/InmateFinderServlet?Tran
It sometimes is a handy web site.
Fight Spammers!
If they don't have'em, how likely is it they have people to manipulate a wiki in-house? They'd just contract it out, like the defense. Plausible deniability.
It's important to observe that most ads are delivered from diferent servers. The content site only places a few inline frames on it's pages.
So to do what you propose, the logs from multiple servers/organizations must be corelated. It could work for online comunities to do this scan once in a while, but the average add-infested website would need a constant link with the adserver to check for this and instantly refuse service to a surfer that blocks adds.
Also note that the adservers have litle incentive to suport this. They usualy only care about the clicks, not the number of impressions. No add displayed, no clicks, no money for the content site.
IIRC, the issue was to prevent LiveJournal authors from using sneaky html/css tricks to obscure or somehow defeat the adverts & to prevent them from offering up ad-blocking software to their readership.
If you want to refresh your memory, you can read this section of the original thread
It didn't really have anything to do with [Random Person] browsing by and using an ad-blocker.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
According to our latest poll, at time of writing 74% of Whitedust readers believe that Wal-Mart have manipulated Wiki.
A purported *security* company thinks this is valid evidentiary support? "The lurkers support me in email" is even lamer in the real world than it is on Usenet.
In response to this, I recommend a proxy that holds the ad block list/logic that still downloads all the images, but requests the non-ad images from the http server first, and discards at the proxy the rest (the ad images). Now you still get the pages faster with no ads, but you still use the bandwidth (to the proxy) of the whole page, including ad images. And technically, they COULD see what order you are downloading the images in, but at some point it's more trouble than it's worth for them to force someone to view ads. And you may be able to foil THAT by getting one or more of the ads early on.
I don't know a lot about how proxy and ad blocking works, or if anyone has already implemented this, but there's an idea for anyone so inclined to write one or modify an existing.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
The biggest problem with NXT for me is that they skimped on the memory. That thing really cries out for a decent amount of Flash memory.
www.sjbaker.org
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I just wondered whether if someone was in a similar situation as yours in the future, it wouldn't be a bad idea to link your comments in some way; actually I was thinking about this when reading some AC posts that resembled posts of a registered user ... sometimes you want to post something anonymously or pseudonymously, but leave open the possibility of claiming the comment later.
I was thinking that maybe the way to do it would just be to end one comment (the one from your alternate account, AC, whatever) with a MD5 hash of some secret phrase, and then if you later wanted to claim the post you could publish the secret using your main account. Not quite as effort intensive as actually signing the posts cryptographically (plus it's deniable, sort of) but it'd let you claim an anonymous body of work later on if you wanted.
Anyone have any immediate thoughts or criticisms?
It just seems like it's getting to the point where few people have just one account on one site anymore; most people have a bunch of accounts, sometimes using the same nickname and sometimes using different ones. Sometimes you don't want to link all the identities together, but there are definitely reasons why you'd want to be able to retroactively, if circumstances dictated. Has anyone put any serious thought into the problem, in a way that preserved psuedonymity until a user chose to reveal themselves?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I don't notice the bandwidth difference, but I see a huge difference (on some pages) in the time it takes to display pages on my 3Mbps DSL line. The way some pages are written, browsers can't render the page until they've fetched the ads. IIRC it has something to do with sizes not being included in an img tag...
Some of the ad servers are quite slow to respond, and I can see my browser waiting for ads.mediaplex.com or some such. If I configure a proxy to remove all references to these servers, pages load much faster even though the bandwidth difference is negligible. So for me, 50% of the joy of blocking ads is the latency difference, not the bandwidth difference.
But to address OP's point, they can't tell whether you've fetched the image or not in anything resembling real time if they don't host the image themselves. So it's not incompetence alone that prevents them from noticing this, it's the desire of ad providers to track their own stats rather than trust LJ to do so themselves. Well, that and the desire of the ad providers to be able to send cookies to your site and track you across different sites, which they couldn't do unless you make an HTTP request to the ad provider...
.sig: file not found
Shortly after release, there will be a hack to add a secure digital card controller to the NXT. The card controllers can be wired into almost any standard flash memory circuit and cost about $5 each. Then you can throw a gig of flash on there for $30, or four gigs for $120 (don't know if it will be able to use all four gigs, though...)
Regards,
Ross
Half of the joy of blocking ads is not wasting bandwidth on them.
It's the other way round : with "download, don't display" enabled, half the joy is knowing that the asshole is paying for the bandwidth, even though the ad never got displayed.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
After reading the recent article about people in the UK being healthier than people in the USA, it struck me that if we ever have nationalized health-care in the USA, it is guaranteed to come with a national-id card as part of the implementation.
Sure, it is technically possible, even technically easier, to not implement a full-on big-brother national-id just to do socialized medicine. But the political climate in the USA is such that it just won't come to pass without such a draconian requirement. There are just too many corporate and political powers with an interest in tracking all citizens at some level or another and too few citizens that understand or care about the huge risks that such systems bring with them.
So, while some arguments for a single-payer healthcare system are compelling, I find the threat of the one database to rule them all and in the darkness bind us to be sufficiently compelling on its own to oppose any nationalized health-care system in the USA.
I guess it could be worse - we could still end up with the identity card and the subsequent corporate-police-state-utopia without any of the benefits like nationalized healthcare.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Uh, 256kB is a decent amount of Flash. I can't imagine that regular customers of these sets will ever reach that limit.
For comparison, the HP49G+ has a very similiar CPU and comes with only twice that amount (the HP48G only comes with 64kB and has nearly the same software), but includes a full-blown advanced symbolic manipulation and solving code library competing with Mathematica in some areas.
Though dispicable, Wal-mart's actions are not unsual. Manipulating media is par for the course for corporate PR.
Check out my women's designer clothing store.
Which would still give credit for the ad counters, no?
That and most ads these days are served by an external image reference to 3rd-party server named e.g. ad.sendmecrap.com; the LJ servers would not easily be able to detect if these weren't being downloaded.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
paying until 2011 for a Bush is getting off easy. We will be paying much longer for this Bush.
Fight Spammers!
While you did get right the idea that a rank-and-file minimum wage part-time Walmart employee is unlikely to defend the company on his own time for reasons having to do with low income, I saw nothing inflammatory about it.
Any more my posting the fact that PR people, whether in-house or working for an agency gets paid a hell of a lot more than minimum wage is.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Thats right. The ads are served from a different server.
What is therefore missing is the link between requests.
IF you served your own ads you could indeed build in some system that checks wether the ad you inserted into the page is being downloaded. You would have to start a session for each user, you would have to write a script around your image server that notes in the session wether the image was retrieved but it is doable.
But how do you do this with ads from a third party?
I serve a page to you with a link to get an image from another server. UNLESS I can communicate with that server I have no way of telling wether you did that.
How it could work.
There are other ways as well, the server could send a list of ads included to the adserver and get a single message back if they all been requested or not. But the idea remains the same, you need communication between the adserver and the page server.
That, to my knowledge isn't in use yet.
Oh and the above "solution" ain't perfect either. Ad blockers that retrieve the ad but don't show it would be unaffected. How do you deal with a slow client who browses to fast for the ads to download? You also end up sending your content and are only able to block the user from getting stuff again within the same session.
More problems then, for now, it seems worth to taggle.
There is one form of ad that bypasses all this. The blocking flash ad. You know those screens you get before you go to the content page with a huge flash ad? Some require you to wait some time but what if the content link is only IN the flash ad.
Just make the link to the content only display after the ad has played. Forced ads. Lovely eh?
I have had to think about this problem before. The writeup above is very simple because I can't be arsed to write it all down again because at the time I came to the realisation that it is hard to sell anti-ad-blocker solutions to people who use IE and don't even know how to block virusses.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
EnvironmentalChemistry.com think they can stop people blocking advertisements. Unless, of course, said people are using Firefox with Javascript disabled and View -> Page Style > No Style.
Does anybody else here think it would be worth applying for a patent on a foolproof ad-blocker-stopping method, and then signing the patent over to an anti-advertising group?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
GN Doesn't make a lot of money off the Corvette, (actually, they don't make a lot of money on ANYTHING, but that's not the point) but they still have it to bring people in and give them a higher thing to dream for. At least in the past you could put them in a Camaro for half the price.
Imagine a 6-7 year-old seeing some fantastic mindstorms creation. They pick up a couple of basic sets, graduate to Technic, then Mindstorms.
Why isn't Ralsky not in jail?
...to the other inmates who don't want spam all day, all night, etc.
Because it would constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
I can't picture anyone buying any more mindstorms
The NXT is a mindstorms kit. The entire line in fact. And blue RCXs? RCXs are yellow and black.
As for the article, the guy obviously doesn't know anything about lego. Studless lego has been phased into the Technic line for years, and had nothing to do with the NXT. I think they are trying to compete better by moving away from overly blocky designs, and doing away with the studs is a big help in that area. IMHO, that is a mistake, because kids can't apply their years of experience in building regular LEGO kits to the Technic kits, which results in less free form play and less play over all. I personally had a hard time learning how to build using beams and pins instead of studs, and the frustration made playing with technic sets a pain instead of a joy.
I...I'm attacking the darkness!
Did I just circumvent DRM measures by ignoring their Javascript and CSS?
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
One of three is only 33%. That would indicate WalMart is a pretty good place to work. Many retail positions have 100% turnover. Hell, turnover at Starbucks EXCEEDS 100%.
33% only sounds like a lot because you have no idea what a realistic turnover figure for that industry is. Most people have no idea what typical compensation and benefits are, something that WalMart opponents exploit very successfully.
Most of the WalMart negative publicity is union driven. They want the dues from those walmart employees and are trying to create the impression that WalMart employees would be better if they had unions.
paintball
Probably won't be able to handle even a gig, but that's no big deal. I can't see needing more than 128MB or so, since it's got limited writes. (If you could use a hard disk or something, you might use it to cache data... but then, all of that is probably best done on the host computer.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
While it's easy to say that it's mindstorms, you probably won't be able to use [for example] the servos from NXT on classic mindstorms, because they use a different connector and have both a motor drive AND a sensor, OR they have a more complicated input than mindstorms motors. If you can't use the same peripherals on each, then at the very least, it's a 2.0 and might as well be considered a separate product.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
According to this guy (who was in the beta testing of the NXT) Lego will sell compatibility cables for the old system. That link also shows you how to make your own in the interim. I don't know how a port would handle having an old motor w/o rotation info, but I think you could program around that.
I...I'm attacking the darkness!