Junkbuster does have a logging function, but you can turn most of it off if you like. If you turn off all the debugging log functions, the only things left are "program started" sorts of log entries. If you turn them all on, everything that passes through the proxy gets logged, including all the data from the http connection. You can be your own paranoid delusion, and try to track yourself down.
Also, never post to slashdot using your real name.
Build a real firewall around the inside walls of your apartment. Design carefully, so that a few pyrotechnics can start a fire that will burn all the evidence, even if the feds get in. Lock all food items in the refrigerator.
Same morphing regardless of language or virtual machine...
From my understanding, the Crusoe morphing starts from the x86 instructions. So, regardless of what language the program was written in, or how it was invoked, the Crusoe chip is still morphing the x86 instructions into its native code. The Crusoe is not morphing Java into a virtual machine, its at a lower level than that.
The "innocent until proven guilty" bit does not have as much of an effect in civil court as it does in a criminal case. And, in "Real-life", innocent until proven guilty is meaningless.
However, this is the first time the DMCA has been tested in court (from what I've heard). The language of the Act in question does provide for immediate (but possibly temporary) shutdown of a website, with very very little evidence required. No law enforcement personnel need to be involved. All that's needed to get a site shut down is that you own a copyright, believe "in good faith" that a site is infringing on it, and send the notice to the proper address. Welcome to the DMCA.
I hope the DMCA gets stopped quickly, but until then, watch out for the copyright holders.
It'd probably work well as a password without all the excess hash-functions:-)
It looks like a reference to Tolkien, so, without further adieu...
Here's my not current password suggestion... Use the Vax password setting program that chooses from random phonemes, such as co-di-th-me-ow-roh. Run it several times, since the default is to provide only three phonemes. You now have a pronouncable, pseudorandom, fairly random password, with a little more randomness than random text from a book.
Ignore that, and go to the lava-lamp random bits website. grab some hexadecimal bits, toss the high-order(eighth) bit, toss illegal characters, convert to ascii, and use them for your password. Choose bits from somewhere in the middle, as anyone can see the current random bits.
There you go... One of the world's most expensive password generation routines. (6 lava-lamps, digital camera, SGI O2 as server, world-wide network reccomended.)
Slashdot, keep the banner ads if you want. I don't care anymore. There is no use in my complaining about them, because no one will listen. Those who do listen, will decide that there's nothing they can do about it, because they need the revenue, and I've pretty much decided that/. wouldn't be worth the $5 a year it would cost, because it would cost $50 a year to do it without advertising. That's it. I'll stick with print advertising, where the ads don't blink in my face all day while I'm reading.
The cure for banner ads will probably be worse than the disease, as we start getting targetted infomercials (aka interstitials) between pages. There's nothing I can do about that. I don't work for a company that sells or advertises consumer products. There's no compelling reason for any corporation to listen to me, as I'm only one customer out of many.
I'm sick of Madison Avenue and all the ad agencies trying to figure out how to better make use of my money (by getting me to purchase the products advertised). There's apparently nothing I can do about it, because all these ad agencies are here to stay, and there's no possible way to make money without selling something on the web, even if it's just advertising.
I hope I'm wrong (or just manic-depressive), but there sure seems to be very little, if anything, I can do to stop advertising. Not only that, but I'm not really sure that I want to stop it.
But you lose the war the first time you have to pay a subscription to get access to slashdot.
You are making an unwarranted assumption here. The amount of money Slashdot is getting from advertisers may be much less than you think.
If/. cost $5 or less per year, AND turned off tracking, AND turned off all banner ads, then I'd be happy to pay that subscription fee. I suspect there's more than a few here that would be willing to do so. The problem with pay-per-view, is in the amount charged, and the difficulty of collecting small sums of money. Some newspaper sites (hopefully now defunct) were charging on the order of 1 to 2 dollars a page. Their content was not worth that much. That's how much they charged for the entire printed newspaper... Face it, most content isn't worth a dollar a page.
The difficulty in collecting small sums is that banks don't like handling the collection of (for instance) 5 cents from each of 3000 different people.
Sites survived before banner ads, and they'll continue to survive with or without them. They may not be the same, or even running on the same computers, but they will survive. Several sites are out there that have no banner ads, and make no direct revenue for the site operators. They're still there, and show no sign of going away. If the disappearance of advertising increases my costs to access the web, so be it. I'm willing to give up a little of my cash, in order to avoid the time it takes to try to ignore the blinkenlicht banners.
Ads of all sorts annoy me intensely. I would be very happy if all the advertising agencies finally admitted that ads don't work on people like me, and allowed me to avoid them. They haven't, and aren't likely to, because a few of the ads do work. (I do my best to avoid being taken in, but don't always avoid it. When I do respond positively to an ad, I regret it later.) It is much harder to get advertising taken out of a medium than it is to get it inserted.
No DNS lookup, but I wasn't doing one of those, anyway. (love junkbuster;-) I doubt it was anything other than a possible performance boost for Slashdot.
Coincidentally, it works around any name-based blocking, at least until someone adds that IP to the blocking system. So, it gives/. a few more ad "impressions". In my case, it wasn't that many. Now, it seems that they've added another one, adfu.slashdot.org. So, I had to add that one to my blocklist. If they want to join the content and advertising servers into one URL, well, I'll just have to stop reading slashdot. I've done that before, too. I'm sure nobody missed me.
Once might be a coincidence, twice might be a coincidence... If they do it again, I'll be getting suspicious.
You may think that I'm going overboard with trying to avoid banner ads. That's OK. I have the feeling that any time an advertisement shows up, it's one less useful bit of information that I could've had instead. Too many advertising agencies and corporations think that if I only saw their message, I would buy their product. That's why there are so many ads trying to get my attention everywhere, not just the net. On the net, I still have some choice as to what I see. I will do everything in my power to keep that choice. It's my computer, my phone line, my network connection, and I'd rather keep it that way, regardless of the (theoretical) increase in cost if there were no ads.
Seriously, why is it a bad thing for someone to mention that they don't like the NY Times registration requirements? Especially on a Your-rights-online posting involving profiling based on computer-based tracking? When you register for the NYT, you allow tracking, whether or not you agree with it.
This is another case of "to serve you better, we track you". Whether it's good or bad, legal or illegal, I still don't want them to do it.
In fact, I'm not even in favor of Slashdot's registration requirements. I was in the midst of doing a book review for slashdot when they implemented the "track what person 'X' has said for the past few weeks" feature, and stopped doing the review. A lot of what Slashdot does to serve me better, removes some of the privacy I might otherwise have had.
Yeah, I agree, that a thousand companies "better serving" their customers net effect is a destruction of privacy.
This is why it is so difficult to get some companies to realise that sometimes privacy is more important than service. Some companies fall back on the argument that "we only collect this info to better serve the customer", instead of figuring out some way of serving the customer that doesn't involve tracking them for years. As someone else once mentioned, there is no concept of forgiveness in most computer systems. In some cases, there's no such thing as forgiveness on the net. Cantor (sp?) and Siegel's Green Card Lottery messages will probably never be forgotten entirely, even after the law firm folds up.
Even those companies that offer to stop tracking someone who requests it, tend to request much more information about the person than is strictly necessary to stop tracking. Try to get off one of Microsoft's mailing lists. I think it's gotten easier than it was, but the original required a large number of forms to be filled out before you ever got to the "stop sending me email" checkbox.
I know I've said this before, but sometimes I think it just doesn't sink in...
If you work for a company that sends email to a big list of addresses, and someone asks to be removed from your emailing lists, please don't ask them for physical address as well. The only data you need to have, in order to remove an email address from a list, is that email address.
The BBB privacy seal looks like it's slightly better than the Truste one, but not by much. They mention a requirement to get consent prior to transferring information for a particular use, but only if that use is NOT mentioned in the privacy policy as a possible use of individually identifiable info. There are also requirements to allow optout from 3rd party transfers, and some other good requirements. It still seems to be mainly a "enforce your privacy policy" requirement.
They've got a BBB child privacy seal, which is basically the same as the adult one, with the addition of requiring a parental consent when acquiring/transferring/using information about a child.
So, it looks like the BBB privacy seal is nearly the same as the truste one. As someone else mentioned, follow the revenue stream to the source, and you'll probably be able to figure out how strong the enforcement procedures are.
In the above "how strong" info, a "respondent" is a business. As of June 30, 1999, there were 4 complaints, 3 were ineligible for various reasons, and 1 was resolved after the "complainant" contacted the BBB. No cases had been "decided".
The strangest one that was ineligible, was declared ineligible because the business's web-site did not have a privacy policy.
So far, none of the industry-funded "privacy" initiatives seems to have any likelihood to protect consumer privacy. They're still in the "enforce your privacy policy" stage.
There's got to be a consumer-funded privacy initiative somewhere.
I believe the NASA Mars Pathfinder mission used something that might be called super-resolution. The idea was to take several pictures, from slightly different locations. These pictures were then mathematically combined and filtered, to provide an equivalent picture that was higher resolution than the original raster, but with the same field of view.
ie, NASA seems to have worked out how to get an 800x600 image out of a bunch of 640x480 pictures, without mosaicing them.
Many of these algorithms came out of trying to solve the "oops, wrong mirror" problem with the Hubble Telescope.
The exact mathematics are beyond me, and I couldn't find them the last time I looked at NASAs information on the web, though they did have sample images (before/after processing).
Altogether, an interesting idea. Much better than the guesstimating done by the average scanner to go from 600x600 optical to 4800x4800 "take more space than necessary" dpi... NASA takes info from multiple images, and the scanner just takes one.
Because of my general experience that anything marketed on TV is not as good as the equivalent that isn't marketed on TV, and I've just about had it with Magic cards anyway. I have an intense dislike for advertising, no matter how well hidden or displayed. I am trying to train myself to avoid purchasing anything that is advertised more than occasionally. Doesn't always work, and there isn't always a second equal choice.
In my experience the money that could have gone to improving the product instead gets spent on "creative" advertising.
Hamsters shot out of cannons won't make me want to pay retail+shipping+tax for computer equipment, though I do get the joke.
The following message really boils down to this: "trust someone" is not equivalent to "trust the computer". I choose to trust people I know more than computers I don't. Since I occasionally run Microsoft software, I don't even completely trust the computers I know. (I take that back, I completely trust my computer to crash occasionaly, regardless of what it's running.)
Yes, everyone must trust someone, or join the ranks of the paranoid. I've never met Rob. I trust him no more or no less than anyone else I've never met except on the net. My web of trust on the net is probably less than that in real life.
I have no particular reason to trust a website. I certainly do not wish to become intimate with yoda.slashdot.org.
Lack of trust in Rob's servers has nothing to do with lack of trust in Rob. At this point, Rob hasn't done much to increase or decrease my trust in him personally, should I ever meet him. I'm fairly sure he's a nice guy, a law-abiding citizen, and would love to have some extra money. I still don't particularly trust the servers.
Lack of trust in marketing and sales computers does not imply lack of trust in humanity in general. Humans are not computers. Computers have no heart to become intimate with. They have no reason to be nice and work well with others, unless they were carefully programmed to. Most are not.
I deny all sites income by blocking banner ads. No "playing favorites" by only letting certain sites through. I'm thus being unfair in equal proportion to all, which I think is actually being more than fair. To me, personally, ads do nothing to improve the net experience. To me, personally, they tend to decrease my enjoyment of the web. If I do nothing to discourage their use now, things will only get more commercial in the future.
I do not wish to encourage the further commercialization of the net. Any way that I can block ads, I will. Usenet, for instance, due to the lack of control from certain companies, is so full of advertizing, that no useful message gets through.
Advertizing, once it hits a medium, be it net, TV, or radio, never wants to stop. Ads may, or may not, work, but companies become afraid that if they don't advertise as much as their competitors, then they'll lose business. Thus, advertising tends towards a maximum.
At any point, if Slashdot was truly hurting for money, they could ask for donations. I'm perfectly happy to send in my $5 or so, along with everyone else. What I dislike, is the fact that Slashdot gets an unknown amount of money from bannerads, and there's no way for me to know either:
A) The product advertised is any better than any other product that's not been advertised. As far as I know, CmdrTaco et al do not decide exactly which ads get put up top, other than perhaps excluding blatantly Microsoft ads.
Or,
B) The product is worse than other alternatives, but got advertised more because it paid more for it.
A company's idea of how good its product is, and how much it advertises, and how good the product really is, are three almost independent variables, and the goodness of a product cannot be determined by watching or clicking through the ads.
Yes, my view of the internet doesn't mesh well with the desires of corporate marketing departments. For that, and for depriving Slashdot of the few cents of revenue they might get from my actually viewing the banner ads, I apologize must humbly. Where should I send the $5 for this years worth of banner ads?
I've had both targeted ads, and untargeted ads, aimed at me for as long as I've had access to purchasing power.
Potential for abuse? It's already being abused. The company I lease my apartment from, EQR, has a banner ad pointing to a credit reporting agency, on the 'contact the landlord at the following address and phone number' page. Whether they can cross-track between the two sites or not, I don't know.
All I know is that the potential for abuse is relatively high, and that such abuse would be nearly impossible to detect without some sort of tracker trackers to watch the actions of those who track someone. "Who will watch the guards?" only becomes a meaningful question, when we actually have guards in place. In this case, a better question is probably who is watching the IETF (internet engineering task force? members include Cisco, Intel, Lucent, etc.). If the technology to reduce or prevent abuse isn't being designed in now, then perhaps there's a need for a law about it. Perhaps the need to provide some amount of personal privacy should overpower the need to provide protection from abuse. The problem then becomes, who writes the law? EPIC? EFF? IBM? CIA? NSA? average joe congressman? Few members of Congress (or other elected government officials) have as much training in electronics as I do, and I don't know the answer. How can I expect them to come up with a correct law?
This is, and always will be, a tough question. Once truly well-targeted ads start showing up, you won't even notice them.
Heh, and on the law front, most abuses on the net are already prosecutable under current law. The congressmen seem to have forgotten that, and are bent on adding new laws for us to accidentally break.
By the way, this is an advertisement, and I'm trying to get you to buy my ideas. Please vote for me in the next election.
I was under the impression that the/. cookie is used to log in. Don't accept the cookie. Log in manually each time. Or am I blissfully unaware of something?
Well, I'm not sure. I'm certain, that if you want to be heard more than occasionally (and thus don't want to have to log-in separately for each comment), you have to accept the cookie. If you want to get any of the customization benefits, such as more comments on each page, or change the default level to display comments above or below the standard level, you've got to accept it.
And, we're all blissfully unaware of something, I'm just not aware what it is.
Sophisticated, maybe. Stealth? Nope. They're advertised in lots of places. Product placement in TV shows other than the animated Pokemon show. The "aim it at the young people who watch TV" idea has been around since the beginning of the action figure era. Pokemon cards managed to melt together the action figure, baseball card, and card game marketing ideas. Once they reached something near critical mass, all they needed to do to get a media blitz is announce detection of counterfeit cards.
You want stealth marketing, look at Magic: the Gathering card marketing, before the recent TV commercial blitz. Comic book vendors where given a higher incentive (better pricing? I don't know) based on how many cards they managed to sell. Does anyone else know how MtG cards were marketed, prior to the TV blitz? I certainly don't remember. And, now that they've started ads on TV, I haven't (and won't) buy any more of them.
Well, I gave doubleclick a chance, when they were getting started, to provide me with well-targetted ads...
Absolutely none of them was about anything I would want to purchase.
Slashdot used to get me to look at the banner ads, because they looked like they might point to something I wanted. I was right. They did look like the pointed at something I wanted. They didn't actually point at something I wanted.
I finally came to the conclusion that noone has yet figured out how to target me successfully with a banner ad, and stopped allowing dclick, etc. cookies to be set.
I even tried signing up for one of those "tell us what you want to get emailed ads about, and we'll reward you for reading them" services. Even given my truthful preferences, these guys couldn't target me with something I really wanted to buy.
So, all of my experiences with advertising, including the "well-targeted" net banners, has been negative. Even junk mail. Intuit, for example, recently sent me a "special offer" for Quicken, that wanted me to pay more than I would have to purchase the Q at a local retailer. Can't these people understand that a "special targetted offer" should be BETTER than what I can get indirectly from another company? No, I'm not going to purchase the new Quicken, as it seems to require IE to be installed (er.. and working properly {evil grin}), and this is the second time they've sent me a phony special offer.
There's a strong history in my family of ignoring ads whenever possible, and that includes leaving something on the shelf if I happen to remember seeing an ad about it.
So I'm a "non-standard" human. Deal with it. Is a 2% positive response worth annoying 4% of your current customer base? What if you were annoying 10%? How would you know, if those that you annoyed finally decided never to do business with the company again?
I truly hate thinking about marketing, but I've decided that, in order to avoid junk mail and ads as much as possible, I've got to know how marketing works. Strange, but the more I find out how it really works, the more I get annoyed with it.
To really confuse things, there's a perl script called "cookiepecker.pl" (no I don't remember where it is found, but www.perl.com/CPAN ought to have it somewhere.)
This perl script will change a few bits in each cookie, whenever it's run, though it only works on cookies in the cookiefile (session-only cookies won't be affected, and cookies already loaded into netscape probably won't be affected) I think you can tell it not to change certain cookies at all, but don't quote me on that.
Unless the site has implemented ECC (error-correction codes) in their cookies, this will at least confuse the heck out of the servers, and might accidentally give you someone else's tracking number for a while.
I can see the website owners complaining about this now... "How dare you screw up my carefully set cookies? Are you some kind of evil hacker?"
I dare, because you do. I chose long ago to use my powers only for good;-) I encourage all web administrators, owners, and users, to do the same, and stop trying to track me without my consent, or by making it impossible to use the site effectively without consenting to tracking.
Slashdot is one example, in that if you want to be heard, you have to login and accept the cookie.
I understand the need to make money. I just don't understand the need to make more money by tracking every move a customer makes, just because it's possible. Possibility does not imply correctness.
In simpler words, "just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should."
I no longer use Application Service Providers, for just that reason. There's absolutely no guarantee that (if it existed) Microsoft Office for Web wouldn't store a clear copy of anything I might write on it somewhere that MS could search through it for interesting bits. MS:"But we won't search through it for interesting bits" Errr... Yeah, that makes me feel much more secure. And I won't search through Microsoft source code for interesting bits either. That doesn't mean they'll give it to me.
The grocery on the corner doesn't know anymore what you need.
Good. They shouldn't need to know what I, personally, need. They do need to know, what, on average, is usually purchased by their customers. Having the information that "guardian-ct" purchases baby-wipes is not necessary to their business. They may want to have that information, but they certainly don't need it to make a profit. Assuming that "guardian-ct" must have a baby, because it purchased baby-wipes, is an invalid, but common, assumption. Oh, and assuming "guardian-ct" actually purchased baby wipes, because this message claims that it did, is also a bad assumption.
In my country, criminals go free, because of privacy. Camera's in stores are illegal because of privacy.
In my country (USofA), victims (of both criminals, and overzealous government personnel) go free, too, because of privacy (ie, the right to not be searched without due cause). Sometimes privacy has to trump the right of the government to prosecute criminals, in order for the normal members of society to have more freedom. This country was founded by a group with a high level of distrust of government (well, at least one particular government). High enough to challenge it in battle. I don't think we should ever forget that. At this point, I'm beginning to think that large corporations are becoming more and more like the government.
If you're going to mention your country, could you at least name it so I have a point of reference?
Slashdot Mirror
No payment of 20 bucks necessary. Just download, compile, and install (well, maybe not That easy...)
Someone else out there has modified the junkbuster code to return 1x1 blank GIFs in place of banner ads.
www.junkbuster.com (basic junkbuster code nearby)
www.waldherr.org (blank GIFifier)
Junkbuster does have a logging function, but you can turn most of it off if you like. If you turn off all the debugging log functions, the only things left are "program started" sorts of log entries. If you turn them all on, everything that passes through the proxy gets logged, including all the data from the http connection. You can be your own paranoid delusion, and try to track yourself down.
enjoy...
Also, never post to slashdot using your real name.
Build a real firewall around the inside walls of your apartment. Design carefully, so that a few pyrotechnics can start a fire that will burn all
the evidence, even if the feds get in. Lock all
food items in the refrigerator.
(sorry, too much conspiracy theory)
Same morphing regardless of language or virtual machine...
From my understanding, the Crusoe morphing starts from the x86 instructions. So, regardless of what language the program was written in, or how it was invoked, the Crusoe chip is still morphing the x86 instructions into its native code. The Crusoe is not morphing Java into a virtual machine, its at a lower level than that.
The "innocent until proven guilty" bit does not have as much of an effect in civil court as it does in a criminal case. And, in "Real-life", innocent until proven guilty is meaningless.
However, this is the first time the DMCA has been tested in court (from what I've heard). The language of the Act in question does provide for immediate (but possibly temporary) shutdown of a website, with very very little evidence required. No law enforcement personnel need to be involved. All that's needed to get a site shut down is that you own a copyright, believe "in good faith" that a site is infringing on it, and send the notice to the proper address. Welcome to the DMCA.
I hope the DMCA gets stopped quickly, but until then, watch out for the copyright holders.
Berkeley, South Dakota?
If I remember correctly, AOL was at least threatened with a UDP, if not actually UDPed, several years ago...
Spammer vs. anti-spammer has been going on a long time, and is likely to continue.
Welcome to the "September that never ended"
...household phrase?
:-)
It'd probably work well as a password without all the excess hash-functions
It looks like a reference to Tolkien, so, without further adieu...
Here's my not current password suggestion... Use the Vax password setting program that chooses from random phonemes, such as co-di-th-me-ow-roh. Run it several times, since the default is to provide only three phonemes. You now have a pronouncable, pseudorandom, fairly random password, with a little more randomness than random text from a book.
Ignore that, and go to the lava-lamp random bits website. grab some hexadecimal bits, toss the high-order(eighth) bit, toss illegal characters, convert to ascii, and use them for your password. Choose bits from somewhere in the middle, as anyone can see the current random bits.
There you go... One of the world's most expensive password generation routines. (6 lava-lamps, digital camera, SGI O2 as server, world-wide network reccomended.)
Oh, to heck with it. I give up.
/. wouldn't be worth the $5 a year it would cost, because it would cost $50 a year to do it without advertising. That's it. I'll stick with print advertising, where the ads don't blink in my face all day while I'm reading.
Slashdot, keep the banner ads if you want. I don't care anymore. There is no use in my complaining about them, because no one will listen. Those who do listen, will decide that there's nothing they can do about it, because they need the revenue, and I've pretty much decided that
The cure for banner ads will probably be worse than the disease, as we start getting targetted infomercials (aka interstitials) between pages. There's nothing I can do about that. I don't work for a company that sells or advertises consumer products. There's no compelling reason for any corporation to listen to me, as I'm only one customer out of many.
I'm sick of Madison Avenue and all the ad agencies trying to figure out how to better make use of my money (by getting me to purchase the products advertised). There's apparently nothing I can do about it, because all these ad agencies are here to stay, and there's no possible way to make money without selling something on the web, even if it's just advertising.
I hope I'm wrong (or just manic-depressive), but there sure seems to be very little, if anything, I can do to stop advertising. Not only that, but I'm not really sure that I want to stop it.
But you lose the war the first time you have to pay a subscription to get access to
/. cost $5 or less per year, AND turned off tracking, AND turned off all banner ads, then I'd be happy to pay that subscription fee. I suspect there's more than a few here that would be willing to do so. The problem with pay-per-view, is in the amount charged, and the difficulty of collecting small sums of money. Some newspaper sites (hopefully now defunct) were charging on the order of 1 to 2 dollars a page. Their content was not worth that much. That's how much they charged for the entire printed newspaper... Face it, most content isn't worth a dollar a page.
slashdot.
You are making an unwarranted assumption here. The amount of money Slashdot is getting from advertisers may be much less than you think.
If
The difficulty in collecting small sums is that banks don't like handling the collection of (for instance) 5 cents from each of 3000 different people.
Sites survived before banner ads, and they'll continue to survive with or without them. They may not be the same, or even running on the same computers, but they will survive. Several sites are out there that have no banner ads, and make no direct revenue for the site operators. They're still there, and show no sign of going away. If the disappearance of advertising increases my costs to access the web, so be it. I'm willing to give up a little of my cash, in order to avoid the time it takes to try to ignore the blinkenlicht banners.
Ads of all sorts annoy me intensely. I would be very happy if all the advertising agencies finally admitted that ads don't work on people like me, and allowed me to avoid them. They haven't, and aren't likely to, because a few of the ads do work. (I do my best to avoid being taken in, but don't always avoid it. When I do respond positively to an ad, I regret it later.) It is much harder to get advertising taken out of a medium than it is to get it inserted.
Yeah, maybe.
;-) I doubt it was anything other than a possible performance boost for Slashdot.
/. a few more ad "impressions". In my case, it wasn't that many. Now, it seems that they've added another one, adfu.slashdot.org. So, I had to add that one to my blocklist. If they want to join the content and advertising servers into one URL, well, I'll just have to stop reading slashdot. I've done that before, too. I'm sure nobody missed me.
No DNS lookup, but I wasn't doing one of those, anyway. (love junkbuster
Coincidentally, it works around any name-based blocking, at least until someone adds that IP to the blocking system. So, it gives
Once might be a coincidence, twice might be a coincidence... If they do it again, I'll be getting suspicious.
You may think that I'm going overboard with trying to avoid banner ads. That's OK. I have the feeling that any time an advertisement shows up, it's one less useful bit of information that I could've had instead. Too many advertising agencies and corporations think that if I only saw their message, I would buy their product. That's why there are so many ads trying to get my attention everywhere, not just the net. On the net, I still have some choice as to what I see. I will do everything in my power to keep that choice. It's my computer, my phone line, my network connection, and I'd rather keep it that way, regardless of the (theoretical) increase in cost if there were no ads.
Right, insults will work.
;-)
Seriously, why is it a bad thing for someone to mention that they don't like the NY Times registration requirements? Especially on a Your-rights-online posting involving profiling based on computer-based tracking? When you register for the NYT, you allow tracking, whether or not you agree with it.
This is another case of "to serve you better, we track you". Whether it's good or bad, legal or illegal, I still don't want them to do it.
In fact, I'm not even in favor of Slashdot's registration requirements. I was in the midst of doing a book review for slashdot when they implemented the "track what person 'X' has said for the past few weeks" feature, and stopped doing the review. A lot of what Slashdot does to serve me better, removes some of the privacy I might otherwise have had.
Welcome to the brave new world
Yeah, I agree, that a thousand companies "better serving" their customers net effect is a destruction of privacy.
This is why it is so difficult to get some companies to realise that sometimes privacy is more important than service. Some companies fall back on the argument that "we only collect this info to better serve the customer", instead of figuring out some way of serving the customer that doesn't involve tracking them for years. As someone else once mentioned, there is no concept of forgiveness in most computer systems. In some cases, there's no such thing as forgiveness on the net. Cantor (sp?) and Siegel's Green Card Lottery messages will probably never be forgotten entirely, even after the law firm folds up.
Even those companies that offer to stop tracking someone who requests it, tend to request much more information about the person than is strictly necessary to stop tracking. Try to get off one of Microsoft's mailing lists. I think it's gotten easier than it was, but the original required a large number of forms to be filled out before you ever got to the "stop sending me email" checkbox.
I know I've said this before, but sometimes I think it just doesn't sink in...
If you work for a company that sends email to a big list of addresses, and someone asks to be removed from your emailing lists, please don't ask them for physical address as well. The only data you need to have, in order to remove an email address from a list, is that email address.
BBB Online
The BBB privacy seal looks like it's slightly better than the Truste one, but not by much. They mention a requirement to get consent prior to transferring information for a particular use, but only if that use is NOT mentioned in the privacy policy as a possible use of individually identifiable info. There are also requirements to allow optout from 3rd party transfers, and some other good requirements. It still seems to be mainly a "enforce your privacy policy" requirement.
They've got a BBB child privacy seal, which is basically the same as the adult one, with the addition of requiring a parental consent when acquiring/transferring/using information about a child.
So, it looks like the BBB privacy seal is nearly the same as the truste one. As someone else mentioned, follow the revenue stream to the source, and you'll probably be able to figure out how strong the enforcement procedures are.
In the above "how strong" info, a "respondent" is a business.
As of June 30, 1999, there were 4 complaints, 3 were ineligible for various reasons, and 1 was resolved after the "complainant" contacted the BBB. No cases had been "decided".
The strangest one that was ineligible, was declared ineligible because the business's web-site did not have a privacy policy.
So far, none of the industry-funded "privacy" initiatives seems to have any likelihood to protect consumer privacy. They're still in the "enforce your privacy policy" stage.
There's got to be a consumer-funded privacy initiative somewhere.
Berserker series by Fred Saberhagen.
I claim my artificially intelligent self-repairing warship.
Link: http://ic-www.arc.nasa.gov/ic/projects/bayes-group /group/super-res/2d/mpf/
Mars Pathfinder Super-resolved images
I believe the NASA Mars Pathfinder mission used something that might be called super-resolution. The idea was to take several pictures, from slightly different locations. These pictures were then mathematically combined and filtered, to provide an equivalent picture that was higher resolution than the original raster, but with the same field of view.
ie, NASA seems to have worked out how to get an 800x600 image out of a bunch of 640x480 pictures, without mosaicing them.
Many of these algorithms came out of trying to solve the "oops, wrong mirror" problem with the Hubble Telescope.
The exact mathematics are beyond me, and I couldn't find them the last time I looked at NASAs information on the web, though they did have sample images (before/after processing).
Altogether, an interesting idea. Much better than the guesstimating done by the average scanner to go from 600x600 optical to 4800x4800 "take more space than necessary" dpi... NASA takes info from multiple images, and the scanner just takes one.
Astronomical data processing is amazing.
Because of my general experience that anything marketed on TV is not as good as the equivalent that isn't marketed on TV, and I've just about had it with Magic cards anyway. I have an intense dislike for advertising, no matter how well hidden or displayed. I am trying to train myself to avoid purchasing anything that is advertised more than occasionally. Doesn't always work, and there isn't always a second equal choice.
In my experience the money that could have gone to improving the product instead gets spent on "creative" advertising.
Hamsters shot out of cannons won't make me want to pay retail+shipping+tax for computer equipment, though I do get the joke.
The following message really boils down to this:
"trust someone" is not equivalent to "trust the computer". I choose to trust people I know more than computers I don't. Since I occasionally run Microsoft software, I don't even completely trust the computers I know. (I take that back, I completely trust my computer to crash occasionaly, regardless of what it's running.)
Yes, everyone must trust someone, or join the ranks of the paranoid. I've never met Rob. I trust him no more or no less than anyone else I've never met except on the net. My web of trust on the net is probably less than that in real life.
I have no particular reason to trust a website. I certainly do not wish to become intimate with yoda.slashdot.org.
Lack of trust in Rob's servers has nothing to do with lack of trust in Rob. At this point, Rob hasn't done much to increase or decrease my trust in him personally, should I ever meet him. I'm fairly sure he's a nice guy, a law-abiding citizen, and would love to have some extra money. I still don't particularly trust the servers.
Lack of trust in marketing and sales computers does not imply lack of trust in humanity in general. Humans are not computers. Computers have no heart to become intimate with. They have no reason to be nice and work well with others, unless they were carefully programmed to. Most are not.
I deny all sites income by blocking banner ads.
No "playing favorites" by only letting certain sites through. I'm thus being unfair in equal proportion to all, which I think is actually being more than fair. To me, personally, ads do nothing to improve the net experience. To me, personally, they tend to decrease my enjoyment of the web. If I do nothing to discourage their use now, things will only get more commercial in the future.
I do not wish to encourage the further commercialization of the net. Any way that I can block ads, I will. Usenet, for instance, due to the lack of control from certain companies, is so full of advertizing, that no useful message gets through.
Advertizing, once it hits a medium, be it net, TV, or radio, never wants to stop. Ads may, or may not, work, but companies become afraid that if they don't advertise as much as their competitors, then they'll lose business. Thus, advertising tends towards a maximum.
At any point, if Slashdot was truly hurting for money, they could ask for donations. I'm perfectly happy to send in my $5 or so, along with everyone else. What I dislike, is the fact that Slashdot gets an unknown amount of money from bannerads, and there's no way for me to know either:
A) The product advertised is any better than any other product that's not been advertised. As far as I know, CmdrTaco et al do not decide exactly which ads get put up top, other than perhaps excluding blatantly Microsoft ads.
Or,
B) The product is worse than other alternatives, but got advertised more because it paid more for it.
A company's idea of how good its product is, and how much it advertises, and how good the product really is, are three almost independent variables, and the goodness of a product cannot be determined by watching or clicking through the ads.
Yes, my view of the internet doesn't mesh well with the desires of corporate marketing departments. For that, and for depriving Slashdot of the few cents of revenue they might get from my actually viewing the banner ads, I apologize must humbly. Where should I send the $5 for this years worth of banner ads?
I've had both targeted ads, and untargeted ads, aimed at me for as long as I've had access to purchasing power.
Potential for abuse? It's already being abused. The company I lease my apartment from, EQR, has a banner ad pointing to a credit reporting agency, on the 'contact the landlord at the following address and phone number' page. Whether they can cross-track between the two sites or not, I don't know.
All I know is that the potential for abuse is relatively high, and that such abuse would be nearly impossible to detect without some sort of tracker trackers to watch the actions of those who track someone. "Who will watch the guards?" only becomes a meaningful question, when we actually have guards in place. In this case, a better question is probably who is watching the IETF (internet engineering task force? members include Cisco, Intel, Lucent, etc.). If the technology to reduce or prevent abuse isn't being designed in now, then perhaps there's a need for a law about it. Perhaps the need to provide some amount of personal privacy should overpower the need to provide protection from abuse. The problem then becomes, who writes the law? EPIC? EFF? IBM? CIA? NSA? average joe congressman? Few members of Congress (or other elected government officials) have as much training in electronics as I do, and I don't know the answer. How can I expect them to come up with a correct law?
This is, and always will be, a tough question. Once truly well-targeted ads start showing up, you won't even notice them.
Heh, and on the law front, most abuses on the net are already prosecutable under current law. The congressmen seem to have forgotten that, and are bent on adding new laws for us to accidentally break.
By the way, this is an advertisement, and I'm trying to get you to buy my ideas. Please vote for me in the next election.
Well, I'm not sure. I'm certain, that if you want to be heard more than occasionally (and thus don't want to have to log-in separately for each comment), you have to accept the cookie. If you want to get any of the customization benefits, such as more comments on each page, or change the default level to display comments above or below the standard level, you've got to accept it.
And, we're all blissfully unaware of something, I'm just not aware what it is.
Sophisticated, maybe. Stealth? Nope. They're advertised in lots of places. Product placement in TV shows other than the animated Pokemon show.
The "aim it at the young people who watch TV" idea has been around since the beginning of the action figure era. Pokemon cards managed to melt together the action figure, baseball card, and card game marketing ideas. Once they reached something near critical mass, all they needed to do to get a media blitz is announce detection of counterfeit cards.
You want stealth marketing, look at Magic: the Gathering card marketing, before the recent TV commercial blitz. Comic book vendors where given a higher incentive (better pricing? I don't know) based on how many cards they managed to sell. Does anyone else know how MtG cards were marketed, prior to the TV blitz? I certainly don't remember. And, now that they've started ads on TV, I haven't (and won't) buy any more of them.
Well, I gave doubleclick a chance, when they were getting started, to provide me with well-targetted ads...
Absolutely none of them was about anything I would want to purchase.
Slashdot used to get me to look at the banner ads, because they looked like they might point to something I wanted. I was right. They did look like the pointed at something I wanted. They didn't actually point at something I wanted.
I finally came to the conclusion that noone has yet figured out how to target me successfully with a banner ad, and stopped allowing dclick, etc. cookies to be set.
I even tried signing up for one of those "tell us what you want to get emailed ads about, and we'll reward you for reading them" services. Even given my truthful preferences, these guys couldn't target me with something I really wanted to buy.
So, all of my experiences with advertising, including the "well-targeted" net banners, has been negative. Even junk mail. Intuit, for example, recently sent me a "special offer" for Quicken, that wanted me to pay more than I would have to purchase the Q at a local retailer. Can't these people understand that a "special targetted offer" should be BETTER than what I can get indirectly from another company? No, I'm not going to purchase the new Quicken, as it seems to require IE to be installed (er.. and working properly {evil grin}), and this is the second time they've sent me a phony special offer.
There's a strong history in my family of ignoring ads whenever possible, and that includes leaving something on the shelf if I happen to remember seeing an ad about it.
So I'm a "non-standard" human. Deal with it. Is a 2% positive response worth annoying 4% of your current customer base? What if you were annoying 10%? How would you know, if those that you annoyed finally decided never to do business with the company again?
I truly hate thinking about marketing, but I've decided that, in order to avoid junk mail and ads as much as possible, I've got to know how marketing works. Strange, but the more I find out how it really works, the more I get annoyed with it.
To really confuse things, there's a perl script called "cookiepecker.pl" (no I don't remember where it is found, but www.perl.com/CPAN ought to have it somewhere.)
;-) I encourage all web administrators, owners, and users, to do the same, and stop trying to track me without my consent, or by making it impossible to use the site effectively without consenting to tracking.
This perl script will change a few bits in each cookie, whenever it's run, though it only works on cookies in the cookiefile (session-only cookies won't be affected, and cookies already loaded into netscape probably won't be affected) I think you can tell it not to change certain cookies at all, but don't quote me on that.
Unless the site has implemented ECC (error-correction codes) in their cookies, this will at least confuse the heck out of the servers, and might accidentally give you someone else's tracking number for a while.
I can see the website owners complaining about this now... "How dare you screw up my carefully set cookies? Are you some kind of evil hacker?"
I dare, because you do. I chose long ago to use my powers only for good
Slashdot is one example, in that if you want to be heard, you have to login and accept the cookie.
I understand the need to make money. I just don't understand the need to make more money by tracking every move a customer makes, just because it's possible. Possibility does not imply correctness.
In simpler words, "just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should."
I no longer use Application Service Providers, for just that reason. There's absolutely no guarantee that (if it existed) Microsoft Office for Web wouldn't store a clear copy of anything I might write on it somewhere that MS could search through it for interesting bits. MS:"But we won't search through it for interesting bits" Errr... Yeah, that makes me feel much more secure. And I won't search through Microsoft source code for interesting bits either. That doesn't mean they'll give it to me.
If you're going to mention your country, could you at least name it so I have a point of reference?