The paranoia is real. The problem is real. Paranoid direct marketing reasons, though they might be paranoid, are still valid reasons. The only way someone can avoid direct marketing is to be well hidden in some ways, and well known in others.
The DMA has setup a way to become well known as someone who doesn't want junk mail or phone calls. In some ways it works. Of course, you have to give them enough information to figure out who you are, and where you live.
Being well hidden, means not showing up on the list when some company tries to target market some product. This is much more difficult, as it involves not being a normal person, and not sending in any "warranty" registration cards, and not doing any business by catalog. Those "customer number" and "source code" boxes on the back of the catalog, along with (in some cases) the catalog number of the thing you purchase, are trackable.
As has been said, "just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean there not out to get me."
The truly paranoid privacy advocates will not be posting to slashdot, so you won't get the really extreme views that do exist, and in some case have much validity.
You don't get cookies from GIFs if you leave the graphics off. The sites you go to, can still track you, even without using cookies. Some shopping (and other) sites use strange URLs, that include what looks like some random garbage in the middle. That random garbage is equivalent to a cookie, and can be used to track and "shopping cart" a user. In some cases it is now Impossible to opt out of the tracking mechanism without specific knowledge of how the URL cloaking for the site works. Some have put the "URL-based cookie" between "[]"s, and can be disabled by editting the URLs by hand (rt-click, Copy Link Location, paste into Location box of browser, edit URL in location box to remove ID information, hit enter) Others encode the entire URL, including the filename, in the random string, and the site isn't usable without the tracking information included.
Welcome to the well-tracked world of the URL. It takes a great deal of time and effort to avoid tracking. If you want to avoid being tracked, you always have to examine the URL carefully BEFORE you click it.
If the medium is the message, why does the Direct Marketing Association require the target to send a request by US mail, in order to be put on the Telephone Preference Service? It's called cost-shifting by privacy advocates, and good business by the DMA.
As Sun's CEO, (Scott McNealy?) once said... "You have no privacy, get over it."
The problem is that most CEOs do not have much in the way of privacy, what with journalists and photographers following them around with tape recorders and cameras, and security personell protecting them from unwanted attentions.
This lack of corporate director privacy encourages them to ignore the feelings of those who do have a small amount of privacy already, and make it truly difficult to remain unknown and still get the services provided by the corporation.
Slashdot itself is somewhat guilty of this. Everybody knows that Rob has an email address. Most who read Slashdot know how to find it, and probably send him enough email that he's swamped. At least occasionally, he's followed by reporters. So, we end up with a login system that's not only extraordinarily complex and customizable, but also cookie powered and easily trackable. If Rob wants to find out what I read today, he probably can do so fairly easily. He can tell me that he's not, and won't, and that the software system that Slashdot uses is designed to prevent tracking (No, he hasn't told me this.) There's no proof one way or the other, unless there's tracking in the current Slash release.
Oh, and targetted ads... To DoubleClick, the-dma.org, et al, go away. I'm not a target, I'm a human being, and I despise being treated as another datapoint to be aimed at. Sure, I am a statistic. That doesn't mean I like it, or that I want to be treated as one by a bunch of corporations.
A low amount of privacy is no excuse for reducing privacy further.
The real privacy zealots will not be posting to Slashdot, or anywhere else on the net.
One of my relations told me about working at a tech firm up in Alaska (or was it Canada?). The "emergency cooling system" just opened a large door to the outside.
In many instances, for example in the telecom field, FPGAs have already beat general purpose processors. Many ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode, get your mind out of the bank) switches use FPGAs in the crossbar switch (multi-way high-speed data connections with FIFOs (first-in-first-out buffers), for those who don't know what crossbar switches are). Some printers use them to control and buffer the digital video raster that gets sent to the printhead. When there's a mechanical, not pausable, time-critical, function involved, it's usually more expensive to purchase and program a general purpose processor to meet the real-time needs, than it is to purchase and program an FPGA.
Programming an FPGA to play tic-tac-toe is just silly. Possible, but silly.
This message buzz-word compliant.
Oh, of course. Just run for election.
on
One for the Kids
·
· Score: 1
That'll solve everything.
Do you realize how much time (and money) running for election (even locally) now involves? I barely have enough time for my own life, cooking, cleaning, working, sleeping, to run for public office. Few companies grant time off to run for public office, or only claim that they would, but the actual policy is "if you don't work x hours per week, you're out of here"
Getting involved in an election is also difficult, though not impossible. If you want to really do it right... Just read all the local newspapers, not just the main one. Watch all the TV newscasts. Read all the internet sites. Go to any local government meetings. Go to the precinct meetings held after the voting ends (you did know about those, right?).
Or, you can just do things the way most people do, and just go to the booth and select the ones that look right.
There's so much to consider, that spending enough time to figure out what the candidates real positions are, and how likely they are to stick to those positions that you like versus the ones you are against, is more time than most of us have available.
But, GET INVOLVED! At the least, communicate with your representatives, regardless of how difficult it is, regardless of how many junk mail lists they put you on, because people who communicate with representatives are more likely to contribute to them. Oh, and your letter will be "carefully" read and considered (as another vote for or against whatever issue)
Get them to read Slashdot, and offer to spend several hours a day explaining it to them. You may get a job as an aide, and get to be ignored full-time.
Thanks for reading this far, I'm done ranting for the moment.
A single person will have great difficulty stopping an entire government from doing whatever it likes.
A government can, with relative ease, stop an individual from doing something the government doesn't like. Part of that ability to stop comes from the government's ability to monitor the actions of all citizens in order to catch the ones that are doing things the government doesn't like.
The level of enforcement authority is the main difference between an individual hacker, and the government.
Whether or not the elitist system is bad, we already have one. The level of information you are allowed to get is currently proportional to the amount of money (or power) you have to spend on information retrieval. It's not anarchy, yet, due to the fact that there are government controls on who can (theoretically, at least) gain access to more specific information. However, I would guess that the Pres. of the US, and other world leaders, have more access to information about an individual (should they care to ask), than I would have about the President.
Figuring out how to balance the needs of the country for security from criminals, with the needs of the country for security from governments, is a hard problem, at least from the government's point of view.
From my point of view, it's easy. "I'm not a criminal, so leave me alone." Not everyone has this view, and it is a somewhat dangerous position to actually have implemented. If I'm being entirely left alone by the government, then some criminal may just attack me (since the gov. isn't watching me). I am willing to take that risk. Many people are not, and they probably shouldn't be forced to take that risk.
Starting around the "September that would not end", there was a "company" called Cyberpromo, which would send out mass email to any email address they could find on usenet, and anywhere else they could find.
This email promoted their services in several ways, including "Email uses no trees." Other dubious claims about low cost to send, and high response rates were also included. None of those were accurate, but they all seemed to imply the better "economy" of sending junk email versus junk postal mail. Almost everyone on the net at the time got at least one copy of that message. Perhaps the "dead trees" saying came about as a response to the "save trees" meme having been spread all around the net by a truly annoying company that wouldn't take "Stop sending email" for an answer.
Then again, dead trees have been around longer than paper. Originally, it was more like "dead papyrus plants."
Another older version is Inner Space, which is essentially an asteroids game that looks through the Windows filesystem for icons to use as rock.
It used a file browser to choose directories, which were then converted into levels. The number of rocks would depend on the number of files in the directory. Mindless? Yes. Boring? Yes.
Slashdot Mirror
Well said.
Cookies do make it cheaper to break "privacy".
The paranoia is real. The problem is real. Paranoid direct marketing reasons, though they might be paranoid, are still valid reasons. The only way someone can avoid direct marketing is to be well hidden in some ways, and well known in others.
The DMA has setup a way to become well known as someone who doesn't want junk mail or phone calls. In some ways it works. Of course, you have to give them enough information to figure out who you are, and where you live.
Being well hidden, means not showing up on the list when some company tries to target market some product. This is much more difficult, as it involves not being a normal person, and not sending in any "warranty" registration cards, and not doing any business by catalog. Those "customer number" and "source code" boxes on the back of the catalog, along with (in some cases) the catalog number of the thing you purchase, are trackable.
As has been said, "just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean there not out to get me."
The truly paranoid privacy advocates will not be posting to slashdot, so you won't get the really extreme views that do exist, and in some case have much validity.
You don't get cookies from GIFs if you leave the graphics off. The sites you go to, can still track you, even without using cookies. Some shopping (and other) sites use strange URLs, that include what looks like some random garbage in the middle. That random garbage is equivalent to a cookie, and can be used to track and "shopping cart" a user. In some cases it is now Impossible to opt out of the tracking mechanism without specific knowledge of how the URL cloaking for the site works. Some have put the "URL-based cookie" between "[]"s, and can be disabled by editting the URLs by hand (rt-click, Copy Link Location, paste into Location box of browser, edit URL in location box to remove ID information, hit enter) Others encode the entire URL, including the filename, in the random string, and the site isn't usable without the tracking information included.
Welcome to the well-tracked world of the URL. It takes a great deal of time and effort to avoid tracking. If you want to avoid being tracked, you always have to examine the URL carefully BEFORE you click it.
If the medium is the message, why does the Direct Marketing Association require the target to send a request by US mail, in order to be put on the Telephone Preference Service? It's called cost-shifting by privacy advocates, and good business by the DMA.
As Sun's CEO, (Scott McNealy?) once said...
"You have no privacy, get over it."
The problem is that most CEOs do not have much in the way of privacy, what with journalists and photographers following them around with tape recorders and cameras, and security personell protecting them from unwanted attentions.
This lack of corporate director privacy encourages them to ignore the feelings of those who do have a small amount of privacy already, and make it truly difficult to remain unknown and still get the services provided by the corporation.
Slashdot itself is somewhat guilty of this. Everybody knows that Rob has an email address. Most who read Slashdot know how to find it, and probably send him enough email that he's swamped. At least occasionally, he's followed by reporters.
So, we end up with a login system that's not only extraordinarily complex and customizable, but also cookie powered and easily trackable. If Rob wants to find out what I read today, he probably can do so fairly easily. He can tell me that he's not, and won't, and that the software system that Slashdot uses is designed to prevent tracking (No, he hasn't told me this.) There's no proof one way or the other, unless there's tracking in the current Slash release.
Oh, and targetted ads... To DoubleClick, the-dma.org, et al, go away. I'm not a target, I'm a human being, and I despise being treated as another datapoint to be aimed at. Sure, I am a statistic. That doesn't mean I like it, or that I want to be treated as one by a bunch of corporations.
A low amount of privacy is no excuse for reducing privacy further.
The real privacy zealots will not be posting to Slashdot, or anywhere else on the net.
One of my relations told me about working at a tech firm up in Alaska (or was it Canada?). The "emergency cooling system" just opened a large door to the outside.
Poof... No more heat problems.
In many instances, for example in the telecom field, FPGAs have already beat general purpose processors. Many ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode, get your mind out of the bank) switches use FPGAs in the crossbar switch (multi-way high-speed data connections with FIFOs (first-in-first-out buffers), for those who don't know what crossbar switches are). Some printers use them to control and buffer the digital video raster that gets sent to the printhead. When there's a mechanical, not pausable, time-critical, function involved, it's usually more expensive to purchase and program a general purpose processor to meet the real-time needs, than it is to purchase and program an FPGA.
Programming an FPGA to play tic-tac-toe is just silly. Possible, but silly.
This message buzz-word compliant.
That'll solve everything.
Do you realize how much time (and money) running for election (even locally) now involves? I barely have enough time for my own life, cooking, cleaning, working, sleeping, to run for public office. Few companies grant time off to run for public office, or only claim that they would, but the actual policy is "if you don't work x hours per week, you're out of here"
Getting involved in an election is also difficult, though not impossible. If you want to really do it right... Just read all the local newspapers, not just the main one. Watch all the TV newscasts. Read all the internet sites. Go to any local government meetings. Go to the precinct meetings held after the voting ends (you did know about those, right?).
Or, you can just do things the way most people do, and just go to the booth and select the ones that look right.
There's so much to consider, that spending enough time to figure out what the candidates real positions are, and how likely they are to stick to those positions that you like versus the ones you are against, is more time than most of us have available.
But, GET INVOLVED! At the least, communicate with your representatives, regardless of how difficult it is, regardless of how many junk mail lists they put you on, because people who communicate with representatives are more likely to contribute to them. Oh, and your letter will be "carefully" read and considered (as another vote for or against whatever issue)
Get them to read Slashdot, and offer to spend several hours a day explaining it to them. You may get a job as an aide, and get to be ignored full-time.
Thanks for reading this far, I'm done ranting for the moment.
A single person will have great difficulty stopping an entire government from doing whatever it likes.
A government can, with relative ease, stop an individual from doing something the government doesn't like. Part of that ability to stop comes from the government's ability to monitor the actions of all citizens in order to catch the ones that are doing things the government doesn't like.
The level of enforcement authority is the main difference between an individual hacker, and the government.
Whether or not the elitist system is bad, we already have one. The level of information you are allowed to get is currently proportional to the amount of money (or power) you have to spend on information retrieval. It's not anarchy, yet, due to the fact that there are government controls on who can (theoretically, at least) gain access to more specific information. However, I would guess that the Pres. of the US, and other world leaders, have more access to information about an individual (should they care to ask), than I would have about the President.
Figuring out how to balance the needs of the country for security from criminals, with the needs of the country for security from governments, is a hard problem, at least from the government's point of view.
From my point of view, it's easy. "I'm not a criminal, so leave me alone." Not everyone has this view, and it is a somewhat dangerous position to actually have implemented. If I'm being entirely left alone by the government, then some criminal may just attack me (since the gov. isn't watching me). I am willing to take that risk. Many people are not, and they probably shouldn't be forced to take that risk.
Starting around the "September that would not end", there was a "company" called Cyberpromo, which would send out mass email to any email address they could find on usenet, and anywhere else they could find.
This email promoted their services in several ways, including "Email uses no trees." Other dubious claims about low cost to send, and high response rates were also included. None of those were accurate, but they all seemed to imply the better "economy" of sending junk email versus junk postal mail. Almost everyone on the net at the time got at least one copy of that message. Perhaps the "dead trees" saying came about as a response to the "save trees" meme having been spread all around the net by a truly annoying company that wouldn't take "Stop sending email" for an answer.
Then again, dead trees have been around longer than paper. Originally, it was more like "dead papyrus plants."
--
All is not yet^W^W lost.
Another older version is Inner Space, which is essentially an asteroids game that looks through the Windows filesystem for icons to use as rock.
It used a file browser to choose directories, which were then converted into levels. The number of rocks would depend on the number of files in the directory. Mindless? Yes. Boring? Yes.
But, certainly unique.
the doom AI will notice any wounding, and start all the rest of the processes fighting amongst themselves.
"Kill one of 'em, and let the rest of them sort it out."