Unix-style programmers just think that B- is more important than A- for the success of most projects.
The issue is that when you care too much about A, especially if you try to make it easy for people who don't even know what they are trying to do with the software, you might fail to accomplish making a good, useful program for those who need it to get work done.
RIGHT-ON!!!!
I am a programmer, and about 15 years ago, I got suckered in a job where I had to touch a beige toaster.
Well, that system is so crufty that after a while, it was painfully obvious that despte all the hype about "user friendlyness" and all that oxdung, at a given point, you had to give up the tricycle and had to learn how to use a bicycle.
A whole industry has been suckered into using a bloated, overpriced, crufty platform: the pre-press industry (graphic arts).
Many times, I would work on extremely complex projects (say two 900 page books at a time) on extremely tight deadlines.
Needless to say, this stretched the poor macintrashes to the limit, making one realizes that you cannot have a whole industry run solely on that kind of platforms.
At a given point, when you do **DEAD SERIOUS** stuff, you have to **LEARN** to use a computer properly, not shield yourself behind pretty mickey-mouse GUIs and be totally oblivious on the function of your tool, to the point that it will cough-up on you.
Well the stability and disaster recovery side of mainframes isn't really a result of the programmer. To the applications programmer, the system "just works", which it should for the price you're paying.
Just watched their blue frog presentation. It just wants to make spammer stop sending spam to the blue frogs to "stay in business".
No good. We want spammers to STOP SPAMMING OUTRIGHT!.
Plus they do a big NO-NO: they tell spammers to "download our address registry to clean their lists". So, basically, when you put your address in blue frog, you are basically putting that address on a list that's going to be available to spammers.
Don't DDOS the unsubscribe servers, just flood them with useless information.
US Census publishes lists of first and last names, which can then be used by a script to generate fake e-mails, which then can be submitted to the unsubscribe website.
The idea is to fill the spammer's list of "unsubscribed" e-mails with worthless e-mail address, thus diluting the value of the list.
This method can also be used against ph15hers, too.
the best solution I have seen is where you have to register your equipments MAC address, then you get a "static" (i.e. always the same) ip address served to you via dhcp. No registered MAC address == no ip address.
Better: give unregistered MACS IPs that are on a limited subnet (if not simply not routed at all). This way, when you plug-in, you can check that the network link is up, but the machine cannot do any harm nor access sensitive (firewalled) stuff.
Plus, any unauthorized (or misconfigured) machine on the network will stick-out like a sore thumb as a DHCP lease...
Gimme the work. Finally, it's going to be less tiring doing it than trying to avoid doing it...
Those who read french undoubtely know Gaston Lagaffe (Gaston The-Blunder), a comic character who works in the children's magazine it is published. Being lazy, he eithers find ways to avoid working by sleeping on the job, inventing goofy machines to do the work (often with catastrophic results) or simply help pass the time he is at work (either by playing or cooking).
The comic strip ran for almost forty-five years and grew-up; at some point, you could see that several of the characters (the cop always trying to ticket him for illegal parking, his immediate bosses, the businessmen trying, for all that time, to sign some contracts) had quite serious neuroses, with Gaston always seeming to be the more sane character...
I like surfing the web with Lynx under Cygwin with the colors set to grays.
I do it on the actual server console, so when the boss goes by, it looks like I'm working on something ***VERY*** crucial, so he doesn't bother me with his stupid pointless concerns...
Australia's been banning books for years. Some friends got some nastygrams from Customs or similar when they tried to get some drug related book shipped in to the country.
Canada does too; however, importers of pr0n will routinely have their shipments shipped to them through Qu*bec, as the customs agents there, being french, are much more open-minded and thus less likely to find books objectionnable...:)
The likely scenario is that some crotchety old bastard who doesn't even own a TV in the northern wastelands of Canada who was elected by his four neighbors, which live 100 miles away (giving him a solid 90% of the vote), was given a wet dream bill by a lobbyist going through the motions to receive his paycheck.
Actually, no. The bitch who tries to pass this bill through is in the second largest city in Canada, and I can personally vouch that she has an arse wider than a Hummer! (During the elections last year, I personally worked for her opponent and she won by so close a margin (about 130 votes) that the riding automatically went into a recount. We did not get you this time, bitch, but with the "sponsorship scandal", we'll nail you real good next year).
This bill won't likely pass before a long time, because the minority government will likely call elections next year, and there are more pressing concerns than kow-towing to big media.
The notorious Black Box Hosting ("Our offshore bullet proof web hosting plans allow bulk email hosting, spam friendly web hosting and bulletproof host.") is still up. They claim to be in "some province in the highlands of China", and their netblock (219.148.32.234) comes up as "CHINANET HEBEI PROVINCE NETWORK".
Cool! let's each open an account on their servers in China, and put some Falung Gong material on them!!!
A minor sidenote is that MS actually shipped a language for the Mac... Microsoft Basic.
That's nothing. Apple was preparing an basicish object-oriented programming language for the Macintosh, with complete GUI API.
When Microsoft saw this, they said: "If you release this thing, we will not make any software for the Macintosh", right after the groundbreaking JAZZ spreadsheet was released for the Mac.
Between my first job and my second job, I spent a summer in a railroad museum in Vermont, where I touched to many rail trades, from painting old cars to firing a steam engine.
If ever I was sent 100 years in the past, I'll go working on the railroad...
The chief of the credit card processing company whose computer system was penetrated by data thieves, exposing 40 million cardholders to a risk of fraud, acknowledged yesterday that the company should not have been retaining those records. Skip to next paragraph Multimedia Points of Contact on the Data Trail
The official, John M. Perry, chief executive of CardSystems Solutions, indicated that the records known to have been stolen covered roughly 200,000 of the 40 million compromised credit card accounts, from Visa, MasterCard and other card issuers. He said the data was in a file being stored for "research purposes" to determine why certain transactions had registered as unauthorized or uncompleted.
"We should not have been doing that," Mr. Perry said. "That, however, has been remediated." As for the sensitive data, he added, "We no longer store it on files."
Under rules established by Visa and MasterCard, processors are not allowed to retain cardholder information including names, account numbers, expiration dates and security codes after a transaction is handled.
"CardSystems provides services and is supposed to pass that information on to the banks and not keep it," said Joshua Peirez, a MasterCard senior vice president who has been involved with the investigation. "They were keeping it."
The security breach was first reported Friday when MasterCard International said a lapse at CardSystems had allowed the installation of a rogue computer program that could extract data from the system, potentially compromising 40 million accounts of various credit cards.
MasterCard said Saturday that 68,000 of its own account numbers were especially at risk because they were in a file found to have actually been "exported from the system." CardSystems said yesterday that the file also contained data from other cards in proportion to the volume of business it handles from each company. That would translate to about 100,000 Visa accounts and roughly 30,000 others.
It is not clear whether those numbers could yet grow.
The details about CardSystems' handling of the data raised new questions about the effectiveness and enforcement of the standards established by the card companies for data protection and storage.
To protect cardholders, Visa and MasterCard have long-established policies for the merchants and processors that handle transactions on their payment network. They require their processors, for example, to hire a certified outside assessor to do an annual security assessment. Processors must also conduct a quarterly self-evaluation and scans for network vulnerabilities.
The card associations have also spent millions of dollars to upgrade their own computer systems with sophisticated fraud-detection software. Over the last two years, they have sent out teams to processor and merchant sites to review compliance.
But one kink in this chain - one processor that fails to comply - can put untold numbers of cardholders at risk of fraud.
"The standards themselves are very effectively written," said Tom Arnold, a partner at Payment Software Company, a consulting firm in San Francisco that advises and provides security assessments for merchants and processors. "The challenge in the industry can be when people don't fully comply or try to cut corners."
Avivah Litan, an industry analyst at Gartner Inc., agreed. "If they are really serious about these programs, they should pay attention to how the processors are guarding the data, and they are not," she said. After the disclosure of the security breach at CardSystems, varying accounts were offered about the company's compliance with card association standards.
Jessica Antle, a MasterCard spokeswoman, said that CardSystems had never demonstrated compliance with MasterCard's standards. "They were in violation of our rules," she said.
I think the whole thing smacks of a kind of strange Soviet irony that is somehow like Mother Russia's revenge on America. We destroyed their way of life and now they are stealing from our grandparents.
Funny how things change... 20 years ago, the soviets were the "empire of evil". The soviets having crashed, this role is proudly being held by the United States...
many of these crimes of greed were perpetrated by people who were already criminals, or former socialist potentates (or both). 'Harvard Business school types' had very little to do with it.
They supplied the ideological plumbing details (the precise instructions on how to do it).
If the Harvard Business School types who descended like vultures on the former eastern bloc countries haven't worked so hard to savagely gut the social protection systems that were in place, there would not be so many criminals in those countries nowadays...
Getting into payment systems will expose Google to new levels of regulation that may affect user's privacy. Regulations related money laundering and anti-terrorist laws may force Google to collect and turn-over data on users of its payment service. I wonder if those rules might also force Google to turn-over other data on "customers of interest".
All this data will be, of course, searchable though Google excellent user-interface...
Slashdot Mirror
I am a programmer, and about 15 years ago, I got suckered in a job where I had to touch a beige toaster.
Well, that system is so crufty that after a while, it was painfully obvious that despte all the hype about "user friendlyness" and all that oxdung, at a given point, you had to give up the tricycle and had to learn how to use a bicycle.
A whole industry has been suckered into using a bloated, overpriced, crufty platform: the pre-press industry (graphic arts).
Many times, I would work on extremely complex projects (say two 900 page books at a time) on extremely tight deadlines.
Needless to say, this stretched the poor macintrashes to the limit, making one realizes that you cannot have a whole industry run solely on that kind of platforms.
At a given point, when you do **DEAD SERIOUS** stuff, you have to **LEARN** to use a computer properly, not shield yourself behind pretty mickey-mouse GUIs and be totally oblivious on the function of your tool, to the point that it will cough-up on you.
No good. We want spammers to STOP SPAMMING OUTRIGHT!.
Plus they do a big NO-NO: they tell spammers to "download our address registry to clean their lists". So, basically, when you put your address in blue frog, you are basically putting that address on a list that's going to be available to spammers.
Who in his right mind would do this???
US Census publishes lists of first and last names, which can then be used by a script to generate fake e-mails, which then can be submitted to the unsubscribe website.
The idea is to fill the spammer's list of "unsubscribed" e-mails with worthless e-mail address, thus diluting the value of the list.
This method can also be used against ph15hers, too.
Plus, any unauthorized (or misconfigured) machine on the network will stick-out like a sore thumb as a DHCP lease...
If they won't support it, why not open the source and release it as such?
This bill won't likely pass before a long time, because the minority government will likely call elections next year, and there are more pressing concerns than kow-towing to big media.
Here is my China-Korea spam-blocking script: #!/bin/sh #firewall for china and korea, port 25. #http://www.okean.com/iptables/rc.firewall.sinokor ea #send comments, corrections, and additions to: submit@okean.com #last updated 2005.06.05 1054 PDT (UTC -7) iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.14.0.0/15 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.16.0.0/14 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.20.0.0/16 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.22.0.0/15 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.24.0.0/15 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.30.0.0/15 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.32.0.0/13 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.40.0.0/15 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.42.0.0/16 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.44.0.0/14 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.48.0.0/13 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.65.64.0/18 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.66.0.0/15 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.72.0.0/13 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.82.0.0/15 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.87.64.0/18 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.102.0.0/15 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.116.0.0/14 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.120.0.0/13 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.128.0.0/13 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.140.0.0/14 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.144.0.0/16 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.145.0.0/17 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.148.0.0/14 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.192.0.0/14 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.200.0.0/13 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 58.240.0.0/14 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.0.0.0/11 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.32.0.0/12 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.48.0.0/14 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.52.0.0/14 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.56.0.0/13 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.64.0.0/13 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.72.0.0/15 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.77.0.0/16 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.78.0.0/15 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.80.0.0/14 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.107.0.0/17 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.108.0.0/15 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.150.0.0/16 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.151.0.0/17 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.186.0.0/15 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.191.0.0/17 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 59.192.0.0/10 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 60.0.0.0/13 --destination-port 25 -j DROP iptables -
When Microsoft saw this, they said: "If you release this thing, we will not make any software for the Macintosh", right after the groundbreaking JAZZ spreadsheet was released for the Mac.
Apple pulled the OO language...
This way, there is no way the server could "sense" that the ads are blocked...
An additionnal bonus would be the DDOS performed on advertising servers (such as Doublefuck's) when ***EVERYONE*** starts leeching their ads.
Between my first job and my second job, I spent a summer in a railroad museum in Vermont, where I touched to many rail trades, from painting old cars to firing a steam engine. If ever I was sent 100 years in the past, I'll go working on the railroad...
Lost Credit Data Improperly Kept, Company Admits
By ERIC DASH
Published: June 20, 2005
The chief of the credit card processing company whose computer system was penetrated by data thieves, exposing 40 million cardholders to a risk of fraud, acknowledged yesterday that the company should not have been retaining those records.
Skip to next paragraph Multimedia
Points of Contact on the Data Trail
The official, John M. Perry, chief executive of CardSystems Solutions, indicated that the records known to have been stolen covered roughly 200,000 of the 40 million compromised credit card accounts, from Visa, MasterCard and other card issuers. He said the data was in a file being stored for "research purposes" to determine why certain transactions had registered as unauthorized or uncompleted.
"We should not have been doing that," Mr. Perry said. "That, however, has been remediated." As for the sensitive data, he added, "We no longer store it on files."
Under rules established by Visa and MasterCard, processors are not allowed to retain cardholder information including names, account numbers, expiration dates and security codes after a transaction is handled.
"CardSystems provides services and is supposed to pass that information on to the banks and not keep it," said Joshua Peirez, a MasterCard senior vice president who has been involved with the investigation. "They were keeping it."
The security breach was first reported Friday when MasterCard International said a lapse at CardSystems had allowed the installation of a rogue computer program that could extract data from the system, potentially compromising 40 million accounts of various credit cards.
MasterCard said Saturday that 68,000 of its own account numbers were especially at risk because they were in a file found to have actually been "exported from the system." CardSystems said yesterday that the file also contained data from other cards in proportion to the volume of business it handles from each company. That would translate to about 100,000 Visa accounts and roughly 30,000 others.
It is not clear whether those numbers could yet grow.
The details about CardSystems' handling of the data raised new questions about the effectiveness and enforcement of the standards established by the card companies for data protection and storage.
To protect cardholders, Visa and MasterCard have long-established policies for the merchants and processors that handle transactions on their payment network. They require their processors, for example, to hire a certified outside assessor to do an annual security assessment. Processors must also conduct a quarterly self-evaluation and scans for network vulnerabilities.
The card associations have also spent millions of dollars to upgrade their own computer systems with sophisticated fraud-detection software. Over the last two years, they have sent out teams to processor and merchant sites to review compliance.
But one kink in this chain - one processor that fails to comply - can put untold numbers of cardholders at risk of fraud.
"The standards themselves are very effectively written," said Tom Arnold, a partner at Payment Software Company, a consulting firm in San Francisco that advises and provides security assessments for merchants and processors. "The challenge in the industry can be when people don't fully comply or try to cut corners."
Avivah Litan, an industry analyst at Gartner Inc., agreed. "If they are really serious about these programs, they should pay attention to how the processors are guarding the data, and they are not," she said. After the disclosure of the security breach at CardSystems, varying accounts were offered about the company's compliance with card association standards.
Jessica Antle, a MasterCard spokeswoman, said that CardSystems had never demonstrated compliance with MasterCard's standards. "They were in violation of our rules," she said.
It is not clear whether or when M
If the Harvard Business School types who descended like vultures on the former eastern bloc countries haven't worked so hard to savagely gut the social protection systems that were in place, there would not be so many criminals in those countries nowadays...
How about Goopay? Goopal? Paygoo? Palgoo? Paygle? Paygle?
Thanks for the cn-kr block script. :)