The Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden are *already* connected. Previous poster hinted at it with a map, but it's blindingly obvious, so I will be too. Maybe talking about some *other* body of water? The African rift-valley lakes perhaps? (didn't RTFA, shame on me)
1. Found open-source project
2. Set up donation page with all funds going to your own personal account, while building up a community and admins
4. go AWOL
4. Profit!
I munge on my web site/blog/waste of internet space. The address printed there (via javascript obfuscation) is not used anywhere else. If you visit my site with javascript enabled, you'll note that the address ends in a "1" now, because a spammer got ahold of the previous email address. So I killed that address, and created its descendant with an appended "1". This has eliminated all spam for several years so far, and allowed through several legitimate mails. If a spammer gets ahold of the new one, I'll kill/create once again.
At some point, the spammers will get too smart about js parsing, it will be too time-consuming for me to continue killing/creating email addresses, and I'll have to do something else. For the time being, munging is still useful for me.
"#3 - Find a local swimming pool, strap on a pair of rollerblades, get a bicycle."
Yeah, biking through the swimming pool while wearing rollerblades made me lose a lot of weight too. Highly recommended. Be sure to surface periodically so you don't run out of breath.
Actually, when you say "ivory-tower leftist", you're putting him in "American" terms. He's actually German. They have an (irrational?) phobia of nuclear power over there. In fact, they passed a law recently that all of their nuclear power stations have to be decommissioned within the next 5-10 years. They're re-thinking that now due to the carbon emissions problem, but the die-hard greens are talking "constitutional amendment" to force a permanent ban.
Heck, I have some friends from Germany, and they've told me about devices you can buy there which are designed to "shut off power if they detect electricity from nuclear plants". Yes, I don't even think that's possible.
The ingrained, instinctive dislike of nuclear power is really kind of nutty when you think about it, and I'm not sure where it comes from. Maybe due to being on the front lines between the nuclear-equipped Americans and Soviets during the cold war?
Hardware: external hard drive attached to a linux machine via usb2, second external hard drive alternating with first for offsite backup.
Software: rsync, rdiff-backup, cryptsetup
Setup:
My two Mac OS X machines, along with anything else such as external website data files get backed up to the Linux machine via an hourly rsync. So if they're not on or accessible from the network when the rsync happens, they will be rsynced soon after they have been reconnected.
Every night, rdiff-backup onto the external hard disk (this gives me unlimited versioned backups). Every week or so, disconnect the hard disk from the linux box, move it to the car. Hook the other hard disk which was in the car to the linux box.
The external disks are set up with an encrypted file system (cryptsetup), so if the disks get stolen, the thief will not be able to easily read the data.
This is certainly not a "computer novice" friendly solution. Then again, I have versioned backups, encrypted backup media, (reasonably) offsite backups, multiple-machine networked backup, and (mostly) automatic operation. So for me it was worth it.
It seems to me that tests like "remote break-in using ssh" are not as good of a fit to today's common home computing environment. For something like OS X, most home machines probably are not running any services, so it is rather pointless to try to break into them using standard ssh/http attacks.
I would prefer to see test break-in attempts set up like this:
an unprivileged "test account" is created on OS X and set up with email, web browser, and other common desktop programs
the "test account" is set up with several common methods of communicating with the outside world: email, IM, commonly-browsed web sites, webmail, banking sites, etc
the test account's email address and IM account are made public to the would-be attackers
someone regularly checks the test account's email and acts like a "gullible user" would, eg click on spam and phishing links, go to hostile web sites, follow dubious instructions received via IM from supposed friends
the challenge: attacker must be able to do something "bad": control box resources (think spyware), steal critical system information (think remote root), get bank account information (think phishing), whatever
A few years ago, this was trivial on Windows. I hear they've cleaned up their act to some extent. How well would OS X hold up? How about a standard desktop version of Linux?
I'm guessing all you have to do is get there, kick off anyone else who might already be there or who has claimed it, and defend yourself against all other comers. Unless we get clearly defined prospecting rules, I suspect that the miners will the biggest guns will retain possession. Due to the instability caused by these kinds of issues, I predict that humanity's impending move off the planet will be extremely disruptive toward our existing laws and political arrangements.
They feed off each other. Google indexes Wikipedia's content. This allows Google to put more relevant results for obscure encyclopedic topics into its top-ranked search results. So Google benefits from higher quality search results. Wikipedia benefits from Google for the extra traffic it receives from search results. Win-win. This is classic "network effect".
"DVDs are the perfect example of this. I've now run into 2 DVDs that won't even allow me to fast forward or skip the two trailers at the beginning. Even hitting the "Stop" button gives me an, "Operation Not Permitted" response. Disabling "Stop" does not prevent piracy, it only allows control. And my DVD manufacturer is forced to comply with the will of the MPAA, not mine. Just think of the fun when the broadcast flag gives them the same capability (or more) for controlling recordings made of over-the-air content (you will be forced to watch that commercial)."
Yes, I also find this outrageous. This is one of the reasons I will probably start ripping my DVD's onto my hard drive. At some point, user-hostile DRM provokes its own backlash. I'm hoping DRM is a self-correcting problem. Eg, the more restrictions the rights-holders add, the more the end-users will work to circumvent and nullify those restrictions.
The same will probably apply to any DRM on these new formats. All it takes is one clever hacker to break the DRM scheme and get the word out about how to do it. Once this happens, anyone can build software or hardware to do it automatically. The more odious they make the DRM on Blu Ray, the quicker this will happen.
So, I remember reading somewhere that the new DVD's are really hostile to end-user rights. Bill Gates says so, so it must be true:)
Personally, I think whatever DRM is included by the megacorps will just get broken anyway, so I don't see the point. Remember region encoding in DVD's? It's trivial to circumvent.
Why is "trading stocks", etc considered addiction
on
Hooked On The Web
·
· Score: 1
"But other users have a broader dependency and spend hours online each day, surfing the Web, trading stocks, instant messaging or blogging, and a fast-rising number are becoming addicted to Internet video games"
Why blame this on the internet? Some people used to spend hours talking to their friends on the phone, etc. Now they do it via IM. Some people obsessively trade stocks, only now they use a web browser intead of a telephone. Just because it's on the internet, does this now make it into an "addiction"? Sounds sensationalist to me.
It somehow reminds me of the situation nowadays where you can seemingly take any mundane activity, attach "on the internet" to it, and suddenly be granted a patent. Can you patent "shopping"? No, but go ahead and patent "shopping on the internet". Ridiculous.
If there are Nessus tests that can cause a service or OS to crash, then that service or OS has an urgent security vulnerability that needs to be fixed. I wonder whether these vulnerabilities have been posted to Bugtraq and the like? Or maybe they are widely known, but the companies who produce the vulnerable product never fix it?
I could be wrong, but I get the impression that Chinese history is not one contiguous "society", but many intertwining cultures in the same geographical areas. At times in the past for significant periods, there was no unified Chinese state, which is what I presume you mean by a society. So what we are really talking about is a continuous history in a given area. Other areas have had a continuous history for at least as long as China. Specifically Crete, Egypt, the fertile crescent (Iraq/Mesopotamia), and the Indus valley (for the latter, see here).
To keep this OT, religion as a cohesive force for a given society should be considered alongside every other "cohesive force", such as music, politics, language, and learning. All of these together and in balance create "culture", which tends to pull a group of people together. "Disintegrating" forces, such as war, famine, disease, overpopulation, environmental depletion, or out-of-balance "culture" have the opposite effect. History shows that periods of cohesion are always followed by periods of disintegration. No society, China included, is exempt from this. So if the religious right gets too extreme and out of balance, they cease to have a "cohesive" effect, and start to have a "disintegrating" effect.
By obsolete prestige projects, I mean the Chinese orbit/moon missions, the American Mars/moon missions, the International Space Station, etc. I'm guessing the first space elevator is going to be built 10 to 15 years from now. This will quickly open up space to the familiar menagerie of capitalists, settlers, and adventurers. So "prestige" missions like this which consist of temporarily transporting a few native-born sons onto a piece of nearby space rock won't get much news. Average people will already be doing much more than this.
I still think nations will have prestige projects and space races like before, but the scale will be much different. Instead of "let's send 3 men to the moon for a few days", think "let's send a probe to Alpha Centauri".
Wouldn't it be cool if you could manage your Gallery using iphoto? You could make a local iphoto album as normal, and then publish it to Gallery. The publisher could take care of uploading and synchronizing everything. If you changed something on the Gallery side, you could then synchronize it back into iphoto.
Point B actually boils down to personal ethics: either you're a thief or you aren't. If you are, I don't expect you to understand why someone would prefer buying stuff if shoplifting it was easy. If you aren't, then you can understand that most people wouldn't shoplift even if shops were completely non-supervised.
and then:
The world isn't made of only extremes. In the real world there are a lot of shades of grey in between owning a Ferrari and walking to work.
I'm not trying to pick on you, but these two statements contradict each other.
I had a similar problem, at least WRT referer spamming. I wrote a script to strip out all that garbage from my log files. You can have a look at it if you want.
Slashdot Mirror
I rarely comment on Slashdot, but that was awesome. Well done!
The Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden are *already* connected. Previous poster hinted at it with a map, but it's blindingly obvious, so I will be too. Maybe talking about some *other* body of water? The African rift-valley lakes perhaps? (didn't RTFA, shame on me)
To all media companies:
I refuse to buy anything containing DRM. You can "innovate" all you want with DRM-laden products. But I won't spend any money on them.
1. Found open-source project
2. Set up donation page with all funds going to your own personal account, while building up a community and admins
4. go AWOL
4. Profit!
I munge on my web site/blog/waste of internet space. The address printed there (via javascript obfuscation) is not used anywhere else. If you visit my site with javascript enabled, you'll note that the address ends in a "1" now, because a spammer got ahold of the previous email address. So I killed that address, and created its descendant with an appended "1". This has eliminated all spam for several years so far, and allowed through several legitimate mails. If a spammer gets ahold of the new one, I'll kill/create once again.
At some point, the spammers will get too smart about js parsing, it will be too time-consuming for me to continue killing/creating email addresses, and I'll have to do something else. For the time being, munging is still useful for me.
Uhh... how does the Flying Spaghetti Monster affect swap?
Just wondering...
http://xkcd.com/282/
"#3 - Find a local swimming pool, strap on a pair of rollerblades, get a bicycle."
Yeah, biking through the swimming pool while wearing rollerblades made me lose a lot of weight too. Highly recommended. Be sure to surface periodically so you don't run out of breath.
Actually, when you say "ivory-tower leftist", you're putting him in "American" terms. He's actually German. They have an (irrational?) phobia of nuclear power over there. In fact, they passed a law recently that all of their nuclear power stations have to be decommissioned within the next 5-10 years. They're re-thinking that now due to the carbon emissions problem, but the die-hard greens are talking "constitutional amendment" to force a permanent ban.
Heck, I have some friends from Germany, and they've told me about devices you can buy there which are designed to "shut off power if they detect electricity from nuclear plants". Yes, I don't even think that's possible.
The ingrained, instinctive dislike of nuclear power is really kind of nutty when you think about it, and I'm not sure where it comes from. Maybe due to being on the front lines between the nuclear-equipped Americans and Soviets during the cold war?
Hardware: external hard drive attached to a linux machine via usb2, second external hard drive alternating with first for offsite backup.
p _system.writeback
Software: rsync, rdiff-backup, cryptsetup
Setup:
My two Mac OS X machines, along with anything else such as external website data files get backed up to the Linux machine via an hourly rsync. So if they're not on or accessible from the network when the rsync happens, they will be rsynced soon after they have been reconnected.
Every night, rdiff-backup onto the external hard disk (this gives me unlimited versioned backups). Every week or so, disconnect the hard disk from the linux box, move it to the car. Hook the other hard disk which was in the car to the linux box.
The external disks are set up with an encrypted file system (cryptsetup), so if the disks get stolen, the thief will not be able to easily read the data.
I wrote a script to do the backups and alert me to when the backup disk isn't mounted, the backups haven't been updated, or the backup media hasn't been changed for a while. I posted it on my website at http://yoderhome.com/e/blog/computitude/new_backu
This is certainly not a "computer novice" friendly solution. Then again, I have versioned backups, encrypted backup media, (reasonably) offsite backups, multiple-machine networked backup, and (mostly) automatic operation. So for me it was worth it.
Anyone with me on this? We need to start up a US equivalent of the Swedish Pirate Party. Our platform:
DRM is illegal
Rein in patents
Reduce copyright terms
Restore fair use
Restore internet provider competition
We on Slashdot complain about anti-consumer legislation and ideas, but the only way to do fix it is through political power.
It seems to me that tests like "remote break-in using ssh" are not as good of a fit to today's common home computing environment. For something like OS X, most home machines probably are not running any services, so it is rather pointless to try to break into them using standard ssh/http attacks.
I would prefer to see test break-in attempts set up like this:
an unprivileged "test account" is created on OS X and set up with email, web browser, and other common desktop programs
the "test account" is set up with several common methods of communicating with the outside world: email, IM, commonly-browsed web sites, webmail, banking sites, etc
the test account's email address and IM account are made public to the would-be attackers
someone regularly checks the test account's email and acts like a "gullible user" would, eg click on spam and phishing links, go to hostile web sites, follow dubious instructions received via IM from supposed friends
the challenge: attacker must be able to do something "bad": control box resources (think spyware), steal critical system information (think remote root), get bank account information (think phishing), whatever
A few years ago, this was trivial on Windows. I hear they've cleaned up their act to some extent. How well would OS X hold up? How about a standard desktop version of Linux?
I'm guessing all you have to do is get there, kick off anyone else who might already be there or who has claimed it, and defend yourself against all other comers. Unless we get clearly defined prospecting rules, I suspect that the miners will the biggest guns will retain possession. Due to the instability caused by these kinds of issues, I predict that humanity's impending move off the planet will be extremely disruptive toward our existing laws and political arrangements.
So I wonder how many yards it will travel in 3 or 4 years before it burns up? This is going to be the longest drive ever.
They feed off each other. Google indexes Wikipedia's content. This allows Google to put more relevant results for obscure encyclopedic topics into its top-ranked search results. So Google benefits from higher quality search results. Wikipedia benefits from Google for the extra traffic it receives from search results. Win-win. This is classic "network effect".
"DVDs are the perfect example of this. I've now run into 2 DVDs that won't even allow me to fast forward or skip the two trailers at the beginning. Even hitting the "Stop" button gives me an, "Operation Not Permitted" response. Disabling "Stop" does not prevent piracy, it only allows control. And my DVD manufacturer is forced to comply with the will of the MPAA, not mine. Just think of the fun when the broadcast flag gives them the same capability (or more) for controlling recordings made of over-the-air content (you will be forced to watch that commercial)."
Yes, I also find this outrageous. This is one of the reasons I will probably start ripping my DVD's onto my hard drive. At some point, user-hostile DRM provokes its own backlash. I'm hoping DRM is a self-correcting problem. Eg, the more restrictions the rights-holders add, the more the end-users will work to circumvent and nullify those restrictions.
The same will probably apply to any DRM on these new formats. All it takes is one clever hacker to break the DRM scheme and get the word out about how to do it. Once this happens, anyone can build software or hardware to do it automatically. The more odious they make the DRM on Blu Ray, the quicker this will happen.
So, I remember reading somewhere that the new DVD's are really hostile to end-user rights. Bill Gates says so, so it must be true :)
Personally, I think whatever DRM is included by the megacorps will just get broken anyway, so I don't see the point. Remember region encoding in DVD's? It's trivial to circumvent.
"But other users have a broader dependency and spend hours online each day, surfing the Web, trading stocks, instant messaging or blogging, and a fast-rising number are becoming addicted to Internet video games"
Why blame this on the internet? Some people used to spend hours talking to their friends on the phone, etc. Now they do it via IM. Some people obsessively trade stocks, only now they use a web browser intead of a telephone. Just because it's on the internet, does this now make it into an "addiction"? Sounds sensationalist to me.
It somehow reminds me of the situation nowadays where you can seemingly take any mundane activity, attach "on the internet" to it, and suddenly be granted a patent. Can you patent "shopping"? No, but go ahead and patent "shopping on the internet". Ridiculous.
If there are Nessus tests that can cause a service or OS to crash, then that service or OS has an urgent security vulnerability that needs to be fixed. I wonder whether these vulnerabilities have been posted to Bugtraq and the like? Or maybe they are widely known, but the companies who produce the vulnerable product never fix it?
I could be wrong, but I get the impression that Chinese history is not one contiguous "society", but many intertwining cultures in the same geographical areas. At times in the past for significant periods, there was no unified Chinese state, which is what I presume you mean by a society. So what we are really talking about is a continuous history in a given area. Other areas have had a continuous history for at least as long as China. Specifically Crete, Egypt, the fertile crescent (Iraq/Mesopotamia), and the Indus valley (for the latter, see here).
To keep this OT, religion as a cohesive force for a given society should be considered alongside every other "cohesive force", such as music, politics, language, and learning. All of these together and in balance create "culture", which tends to pull a group of people together. "Disintegrating" forces, such as war, famine, disease, overpopulation, environmental depletion, or out-of-balance "culture" have the opposite effect. History shows that periods of cohesion are always followed by periods of disintegration. No society, China included, is exempt from this. So if the religious right gets too extreme and out of balance, they cease to have a "cohesive" effect, and start to have a "disintegrating" effect.
By obsolete prestige projects, I mean the Chinese orbit/moon missions, the American Mars/moon missions, the International Space Station, etc. I'm guessing the first space elevator is going to be built 10 to 15 years from now. This will quickly open up space to the familiar menagerie of capitalists, settlers, and adventurers. So "prestige" missions like this which consist of temporarily transporting a few native-born sons onto a piece of nearby space rock won't get much news. Average people will already be doing much more than this.
I still think nations will have prestige projects and space races like before, but the scale will be much different. Instead of "let's send 3 men to the moon for a few days", think "let's send a probe to Alpha Centauri".
Wouldn't it be cool if you could manage your Gallery using iphoto? You could make a local iphoto album as normal, and then publish it to Gallery. The publisher could take care of uploading and synchronizing everything. If you changed something on the Gallery side, you could then synchronize it back into iphoto.
I can only wish...
Point B actually boils down to personal ethics: either you're a thief or you aren't. If you are, I don't expect you to understand why someone would prefer buying stuff if shoplifting it was easy. If you aren't, then you can understand that most people wouldn't shoplift even if shops were completely non-supervised.
and then:
The world isn't made of only extremes. In the real world there are a lot of shades of grey in between owning a Ferrari and walking to work.
I'm not trying to pick on you, but these two statements contradict each other.
Bah!
I hate our #$#&@ monopolist telecom carriers!
I had a similar problem, at least WRT referer spamming. I wrote a script to strip out all that garbage from my log files. You can have a look at it if you want.
link to the post is here