in order to "cause" the "attack" the website must come up in a search.
No they have to come up as a potential link on any page the person visits. The connectivity of the internet is high enough that this is a very high ratio to the actual number of site visits, if you have a site that is highly connected to other sites, it has a particularly high cost (e.g. the "digg this" link on so many news sites). Assuming google uses the refcount as its sole ranking, this means that the highest google hits get mashed up when any of the sites that reference them are viewed.
all this does is "pre-crawl" the pages in a search result to look for malware.
"All this does" is follow every link on every page you view on the off-chance that you view it, and then fail to database the results. The reason people say this is skeevy is that they don't collect the results that each client generates and perform simple DB queries instead of hammering servers. Of course, this would be an "invasion of privacy" since they would be sending browse information across to a remote host to check or update the database for a specific site... The net cost of this rudimentary solution is borne by the customer in performance costs and by the most interconnected sites on the internet in the form of traffic and the resulting load.
so unless everyone is searching google for the same thing, it really doesn't do a ton.
No, you don't know what you are talking about.
unless of course you run some pos server and have somehow gotten your result for whatever to be top ranked and of course it's a popular search string.
Now you are just sounding stupid, did you write this thing? I bet you don't even think it's a big deal to use BUBBLE SORT for large data sets with very short keys!
but then, i would blame the company, not avg, since they've gone to the trouble to probably cause this themselves.
The cost of running servers to handle even 25% more traffic than required is not a one-time payout, it comes in the form of maintenance and facilities bills every month. There is no reasonable justification for this cost, and it is the result of a faulty design. If they are going to prescan, they should prescan when a new page would be loaded instead of scanning the links of the current page without user action. Let the user/app take the brunt of the cost, not the internet.
I think the point of making solar curtains is to reach the untapped market of apartment dwellers who don't own houses upon which to place their own solar panels. Since apartments rarely come with these newfangled "yards" and "fences" they also have no exterior land space upon which to install outdoor solar collectors without risk of theft. Since these people have high mobility, curtains are the easiest solution as they can be moved with the tenant and are not left behind when they move. Since they are relatively cheap, they can be sold in every K-Mart for a tidy profit and resold when they inevitably get damaged during a move.
I think this is fairly clearly overhyped. They are suggesting the following:
We can construct more flexible molecules to use as catalysts. More flexible molecules interact more easily with other molecules in the environment. Unfortunately, by reacting without selectivity, it is more likely to find unexpected side-effects. This would have no place in drug design, though it could plausibly be used in very controlled environments. Realistically, people tend to want a catalyst to take A->B, not to take A-B, C-D, E-F, G-H, B-A, etc. The laundry list of reactants makes it more difficult to control or contain the reaction and makes the "enzyme" itself more dangerous to handle. There may be some utility to this in the long run; however, at present it appears as though their chief accomplishment can be summed up in one sentence: "We have come up with a (complex) way to take a very simple, easy to use enzyme like TAC Polymerase and turn it into something with unknown side-effects that may or may not function as expected."
This just looks like buggy code to me... I mean, consider Polymerase as an example. It works well because it binds very specifically to DNA and matches appropriate base pairs. If it had a significantly more flexible binding pocket, and was less choosy, what use would it really be? Who wants to use a polymerase with a high probability of generating "AAAAAAAAAAAA..." regardless of the source strand used as a basis? Who wants a transport mediator protein without directionality? I mean, the idea translates to "let's take known algorithms and just give a non-0 probability of incorrectly jumping at any control point to see what happens". I think it is clear that most algorithms just fail if someone so much as flips an if -- imagine if they removed, flipped, or added random ifs every time the algorithm was run...
This article is fallacious and incorrect. For anyone to believe that we are "losing elements" due to their usage in disposable consumer goods would require an abnormally low intelligence. Please note the following quote from the article:
"Gallium is thought to make up 0.0015 percent of the Earth's crust and there are no concentrated supplies of it. We get it by extracting it from zinc or aluminum ore or by smelting the dust of furnace flues."
Hrmm, so now it is being used in disposable consumer goods... which will then be disposed... where it could be mined from the city dump. We have already heard of issues with heavy metal leakage from dumps, which turn out to be rich in metals like mercury derived from disposal of things such as thermostats and thermometers. It is obvious that if this particular element is so rare, the concentration of it in the city dump will be high enough to warrant extraction. I mean, look at how much effort is extended to collect it presently! There are still vast quantities of copper in landfills in things like refrigerator coils disposed of prior to the 1990s. These elements aren't "gone forever" they are in the dump. The foolish comparison to the plight of the Dodo is wrong in every way. It is describing extinction as the process of moving things from place to place. By that very argument, the captivity of an animal equates to death and thus zoos do not actually contain animals, those animals are gone forever and can never be seen again, because after all, they are no longer where they were so they must be gone... By the same argument, a laptop is not a computer because when you move it, you eradicate it. The best part is, the earth moves around the sun every year, so it has long since been eradicated by the definition used in this article. Why worry about the eradication of elements on a planet that has long since been eradicated? Arguments for the conservation of base elements are idiotic and fundamentally based on the assumption that elements can be consumed or transformed into an unusable by processes short of a nuclear reaction.
I think this is a valid point. Are standards democratic? Does Microsoft get a 70% vote at standards meetings because they have 70% market share? I am thinking 'no'. Given that the standards are designed by a group in which the largest market share holder may be marginalized by groups of competing products, I do not see any reason they should be held to them. In a sense, Microsoft represents their constituency just as opera represents theirs. Why should Opera have so much say in the user experience of Microsoft product users?
From a tactical perspective, these standards are a means through which multiple vendors can ensure a uniform interpretation of a given protocol. They are not to be enforced by law, but are effectively treaties between companies to prevent them from reinventing TCP 30 different ways. If Microsoft has enough market share that its behavior dramatically changes the expectations of a given protocol (e.g. HTTP), then there are only two recourses available to the standards body (i.e. representatives from every other major vendor) -- they must either choose not to adapt, or choose to adapt to the quirks of Microsoft's implementations. Not adapting may draw to light the flaws in the implementation of IE, etc. But it will also polarize and fragment users of web browsers, and this sort of polarization will only hurt the users of smaller vendors. I think there is a clear case for trying to push Microsoft to fix every bug through economic/diplomatic means (not legal). If all else fails, there is no choice but to adapt. Hopefully, Microsoft will keep their products on Windows alone and other operating systems will grab a larger chunk of the market, lending credibility to alternative alternative browsers like Opera who are currently playing third fiddle to IE and Firefox.
As a final retrospective note -- if you were to develop a new application chosen from all the existing market areas today, would you really select an operating system or web browser? These seem to me to be the hardest markets to crack, especially after they ended the browser wars and solidified...
If you read the entire discussion thread, the proponents of the delete action were fundamentally basing their arguments on the fact that:
googling the topic failed to yield "enough" results,
other encyclopedias relevant to the field did not yet have information about this topic,
the article was heavily edited by the proposer of the theory,
and resources used as references were not of sufficient calibre for Wikipedia's standards.
While it makes sense to do something about these articles, deletion is perhaps not the correct behaviour. As I understood it, Wikipedia seeks to trump standard encyclopedias by providing dynamic content -- edited by experts in related fields -- that can be edited 'on the fly' to perfection.
Earlier in this thread someone made the point that Wikipedia should not be cited -- this is fundamentally due to the dynamic nature of its content. It is preferable to cite journal articles or books because the media is static -- you know that the information you cite is the information that a reader will see if they view the source. We expect dynamic source when we visit a website, we expect it to be a work in progress, and we expect it to be as up-to-date as possible.
I recognize that Wikipedia could be brought down by idiots posting new encyclopedia definitions for terms they make up (akin to the junk in urban dictionary), but I feel that if a theory is posited as theoretical and has some real source material somewhere, then some information about it should be available on Wikipedia. Wikipedia should have kept this article and done what the system is expected to do -- allow the contention to enter the article by letting people who are experts in the field edit it.
Now Wikipedia has tried to get the egg off its face by deleting slightly questionable material without any (outside of this slashdot article) bad press for the author. This should be handled the way journals handle these things. If you sneak a stinker past the editors and peer review board (hard enough as it is), and it is discovered to be a poorly supported paper, then they:
1.) contact your university with their findings
2.) publish rebuttal articles that generally tend to be quite deleterious to the authors'
credibility.
If it is true that the author wanted to use Wikipedia to add credibility to his theories and enhance his name, then clearly the worst thing Wikipedians could do would be to edit those articles with rebuttals that put the egg appropriately on the author's face. If this kind of thing were to happen in PNAS or Nature, for instance, they would do exactly as I suggested rather than pretend they had never published it -- they would publish their findings against the proposed theory and the authors would suffer quite a bit of embarrasment while generally having difficulty publishing in any reputable journals from that point onward.
However, after viewing the article through google's cache I see no reason to be so callous about this situation. Mediating the article with some of the information suggested by the editors would probably be sufficient (e.g. add that the claims have not been tested, no further research is ongoing, little foundational basis, at odds with many psychological theories in mainstream psychology, etc.) to balance the article in order to remove the promotional tone while saving the pertinent information.
Slashdot Mirror
not really.
ya really
in order to "cause" the "attack" the website must come up in a search.
No they have to come up as a potential link on any page the person visits. The connectivity of the internet is high enough that this is a very high ratio to the actual number of site visits, if you have a site that is highly connected to other sites, it has a particularly high cost (e.g. the "digg this" link on so many news sites). Assuming google uses the refcount as its sole ranking, this means that the highest google hits get mashed up when any of the sites that reference them are viewed.
all this does is "pre-crawl" the pages in a search result to look for malware.
"All this does" is follow every link on every page you view on the off-chance that you view it, and then fail to database the results. The reason people say this is skeevy is that they don't collect the results that each client generates and perform simple DB queries instead of hammering servers. Of course, this would be an "invasion of privacy" since they would be sending browse information across to a remote host to check or update the database for a specific site... The net cost of this rudimentary solution is borne by the customer in performance costs and by the most interconnected sites on the internet in the form of traffic and the resulting load.
so unless everyone is searching google for the same thing, it really doesn't do a ton.
No, you don't know what you are talking about.
unless of course you run some pos server and have somehow gotten your result for whatever to be top ranked and of course it's a popular search string.
Now you are just sounding stupid, did you write this thing? I bet you don't even think it's a big deal to use BUBBLE SORT for large data sets with very short keys!
but then, i would blame the company, not avg, since they've gone to the trouble to probably cause this themselves.
The cost of running servers to handle even 25% more traffic than required is not a one-time payout, it comes in the form of maintenance and facilities bills every month. There is no reasonable justification for this cost, and it is the result of a faulty design. If they are going to prescan, they should prescan when a new page would be loaded instead of scanning the links of the current page without user action. Let the user/app take the brunt of the cost, not the internet.
I think the point of making solar curtains is to reach the untapped market of apartment dwellers who don't own houses upon which to place their own solar panels. Since apartments rarely come with these newfangled "yards" and "fences" they also have no exterior land space upon which to install outdoor solar collectors without risk of theft. Since these people have high mobility, curtains are the easiest solution as they can be moved with the tenant and are not left behind when they move. Since they are relatively cheap, they can be sold in every K-Mart for a tidy profit and resold when they inevitably get damaged during a move.
I think this is fairly clearly overhyped. They are suggesting the following:
We can construct more flexible molecules to use as catalysts. More flexible molecules interact more easily with other molecules in the environment. Unfortunately, by reacting without selectivity, it is more likely to find unexpected side-effects. This would have no place in drug design, though it could plausibly be used in very controlled environments. Realistically, people tend to want a catalyst to take A->B, not to take A-B, C-D, E-F, G-H, B-A, etc. The laundry list of reactants makes it more difficult to control or contain the reaction and makes the "enzyme" itself more dangerous to handle. There may be some utility to this in the long run; however, at present it appears as though their chief accomplishment can be summed up in one sentence:
"We have come up with a (complex) way to take a very simple, easy to use enzyme like TAC Polymerase and turn it into something with unknown side-effects that may or may not function as expected."
This just looks like buggy code to me... I mean, consider Polymerase as an example. It works well because it binds very specifically to DNA and matches appropriate base pairs. If it had a significantly more flexible binding pocket, and was less choosy, what use would it really be? Who wants to use a polymerase with a high probability of generating "AAAAAAAAAAAA..." regardless of the source strand used as a basis? Who wants a transport mediator protein without directionality? I mean, the idea translates to "let's take known algorithms and just give a non-0 probability of incorrectly jumping at any control point to see what happens". I think it is clear that most algorithms just fail if someone so much as flips an if -- imagine if they removed, flipped, or added random ifs every time the algorithm was run...
Yadda yadda more analogies...
This article is fallacious and incorrect. For anyone to believe that we are "losing elements" due to their usage in disposable consumer goods would require an abnormally low intelligence. Please note the following quote from the article:
"Gallium is thought to make up 0.0015 percent of the Earth's crust and there are no concentrated supplies of it. We get it by extracting it from zinc or aluminum ore or by smelting the dust of furnace flues."
Hrmm, so now it is being used in disposable consumer goods... which will then be disposed... where it could be mined from the city dump. We have already heard of issues with heavy metal leakage from dumps, which turn out to be rich in metals like mercury derived from disposal of things such as thermostats and thermometers. It is obvious that if this particular element is so rare, the concentration of it in the city dump will be high enough to warrant extraction. I mean, look at how much effort is extended to collect it presently! There are still vast quantities of copper in landfills in things like refrigerator coils disposed of prior to the 1990s. These elements aren't "gone forever" they are in the dump. The foolish comparison to the plight of the Dodo is wrong in every way. It is describing extinction as the process of moving things from place to place. By that very argument, the captivity of an animal equates to death and thus zoos do not actually contain animals, those animals are gone forever and can never be seen again, because after all, they are no longer where they were so they must be gone... By the same argument, a laptop is not a computer because when you move it, you eradicate it. The best part is, the earth moves around the sun every year, so it has long since been eradicated by the definition used in this article. Why worry about the eradication of elements on a planet that has long since been eradicated? Arguments for the conservation of base elements are idiotic and fundamentally based on the assumption that elements can be consumed or transformed into an unusable by processes short of a nuclear reaction.
I think you have confused communism with nationalism.
I think this is a valid point. Are standards democratic? Does Microsoft get a 70% vote at standards meetings because they have 70% market share? I am thinking 'no'. Given that the standards are designed by a group in which the largest market share holder may be marginalized by groups of competing products, I do not see any reason they should be held to them. In a sense, Microsoft represents their constituency just as opera represents theirs. Why should Opera have so much say in the user experience of Microsoft product users?
From a tactical perspective, these standards are a means through which multiple vendors can ensure a uniform interpretation of a given protocol. They are not to be enforced by law, but are effectively treaties between companies to prevent them from reinventing TCP 30 different ways. If Microsoft has enough market share that its behavior dramatically changes the expectations of a given protocol (e.g. HTTP), then there are only two recourses available to the standards body (i.e. representatives from every other major vendor) -- they must either choose not to adapt, or choose to adapt to the quirks of Microsoft's implementations. Not adapting may draw to light the flaws in the implementation of IE, etc. But it will also polarize and fragment users of web browsers, and this sort of polarization will only hurt the users of smaller vendors. I think there is a clear case for trying to push Microsoft to fix every bug through economic/diplomatic means (not legal). If all else fails, there is no choice but to adapt. Hopefully, Microsoft will keep their products on Windows alone and other operating systems will grab a larger chunk of the market, lending credibility to alternative alternative browsers like Opera who are currently playing third fiddle to IE and Firefox.
As a final retrospective note -- if you were to develop a new application chosen from all the existing market areas today, would you really select an operating system or web browser? These seem to me to be the hardest markets to crack, especially after they ended the browser wars and solidified...
If you read the entire discussion thread, the proponents of the delete action were fundamentally basing their arguments on the fact that:
googling the topic failed to yield "enough" results,
other encyclopedias relevant to the field did not yet have information about this topic,
the article was heavily edited by the proposer of the theory,
and resources used as references were not of sufficient calibre for Wikipedia's standards.
While it makes sense to do something about these articles, deletion is perhaps not the correct behaviour. As I understood it, Wikipedia seeks to trump standard encyclopedias by providing dynamic content -- edited by experts in related fields -- that can be edited 'on the fly' to perfection.
Earlier in this thread someone made the point that Wikipedia should not be cited -- this is fundamentally due to the dynamic nature of its content. It is preferable to cite journal articles or books because the media is static -- you know that the information you cite is the information that a reader will see if they view the source. We expect dynamic source when we visit a website, we expect it to be a work in progress, and we expect it to be as up-to-date as possible.
I recognize that Wikipedia could be brought down by idiots posting new encyclopedia definitions for terms they make up (akin to the junk in urban dictionary), but I feel that if a theory is posited as theoretical and has some real source material somewhere, then some information about it should be available on Wikipedia. Wikipedia should have kept this article and done what the system is expected to do -- allow the contention to enter the article by letting people who are experts in the field edit it.
Now Wikipedia has tried to get the egg off its face by deleting slightly questionable material without any (outside of this slashdot article) bad press for the author. This should be handled the way journals handle these things. If you sneak a stinker past the editors and peer review board (hard enough as it is), and it is discovered to be a poorly supported paper, then they:
1.) contact your university with their findings
2.) publish rebuttal articles that generally tend to be quite deleterious to the authors'
credibility.
If it is true that the author wanted to use Wikipedia to add credibility to his theories and enhance his name, then clearly the worst thing Wikipedians could do would be to edit those articles with rebuttals that put the egg appropriately on the author's face. If this kind of thing were to happen in PNAS or Nature, for instance, they would do exactly as I suggested rather than pretend they had never published it -- they would publish their findings against the proposed theory and the authors would suffer quite a bit of embarrasment while generally having difficulty publishing in any reputable journals from that point onward.
However, after viewing the article through google's cache I see no reason to be so callous about this situation. Mediating the article with some of the information suggested by the editors would probably be sufficient (e.g. add that the claims have not been tested, no further research is ongoing, little foundational basis, at odds with many psychological theories in mainstream psychology, etc.) to balance the article in order to remove the promotional tone while saving the pertinent information.