I'd say that shooting the bastards that are about to capture your boat right now seems pretty effective.
Because the same flawed argument you just presented is offered up on an hourly basis in discussions about spam.
And the argument doesn't work in either case, because in both cases it is based on the horrendously flawed assumption that there is a static number of pirates (or spammers) in the world, and that if you kill one the total number in the world goes down forever, never climbing back to its previous level. However we already know that isn't the case in either situation; whether you are murdering pirates or spammers, more people will continue to go into those professions because they are profitable.
Was Ralsky actually arrested and tried in person, or is he still running around free? The closest answer to that which I can find is at his wikipedia entry where it states that
On June 22, 2009, he pleaded guilty to wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering charges and violating the CAN-SPAM Act.[10] He agreed to assist in the prosecution of other spammers in exchange for sentencing consideration
South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique and Madagascar
Wow, you have access to a map. I'm happy for you. I'll see your country dropping and reply with India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tibet, Thailand and Sri Lanka. We might be able to build a full atlas if we continue on long enough.
Africa. That is what the people of that continent really want.
I'm glad you claim to be an expert on the opinions of a large portion of the world's population. I'm sure every single one of them are eternally grateful to have you as an advocate and spokesman.
In America, we have more than enough opportunity already.
Apparently in your view of America everything is handed out for free. That may be true in the affluent suburb you live in. However you would likely be quite surprised to learn that not everyone has the gifted lifestyle you talk so much about. There are people in this country who actually do work for what they have, no matter how much you may want to claim otherwise.
In madagascar, you don't get to go to college and seek a degree in what you want.
Guess what? You don't always get that in the USA, either. A lot of qualified students in the USA don't get to go to college at all. And qualified students who are able to afford to go to college don't always get to go to the college they want, or study what they want, either. If you go to school with the intention of studying medicine and find you can't hack organic chemistry, then you either drop out or find a new field of study.
We already have enough and spend enough on schools
That may be true in some schools but there are plenty of schools where it is not.
We can't just buy nice shiny Macs for every classroom and think kids will just jump on the science bandwagon
Can you point to where shiny Macs were part of the plan? Unless we're trying to get more kids into CSci or Design, I don't see shiny new Macs being an integral part. Are you aware of how many schools don't even have adequate chemistry or physics labs? Do you know how many kids at your local high school share a single fetal pig in biology?
Provide an excellent school with more things and you'll still have kids that simply don't care and don't try because their parents don't care and don't push
Can you explain how your plan to take resources away from schools will encourage parents to care and push?
I have very poor friends in several countries in Africa and Asia. I've lived in Africa. I know what people have to struggle through.
Considering your previous reply was chock full of distortion and lies, you should understand why I don't see any reason to believe those statements from you, either.
because I'm conservative and do want to help people
Yet another statement that you have already disproven in your other reply. Either that or you have an immensely different view of the meaning of "help people" than most people in the world.
People on welfare in America are still in the top 15% of wealthiest people in the world
Do you have a source for that stat? I'm guessing the answer is no, but feel free to surprise us on that.
(like you appear to be)
Actually, at this point I'm still wondering if you are for real. We have had people parading as conservatives on here for extended periods of time just to make their cause look foolish; your replies would certainly fit under that umbrella.
when we Americans get all up in arms about not getting everything we want when we want it
Exactly how you arrived at that conclusion from anything I said is a mystery.
In America, we don't just want a chance, we want it rolled out before us and as easy as it possible can be....then we might try a little
Again I would love to know how you came to that conclusion.
However, more importantly that statement of your opinion has nothing to do with the discussion. If you would like to actually talk about education and science funding, please do so.
So then are you saying that the GOP response is to distort reality as far as possible?
not sit back and watch as my Obama-money comes pouring in while watching Oprah
Yep... and then distort it even further if you can get away with it?
not the land of hand-outs for not trying
Check. Now can the GOP continue on and show that they have no grasp on how the rest of the world funds education and operates their national budgets?
In most of the world, they are passing us up because their lives depend on them doing well and getting a job to earn money. Without it, they starve.
That is an excellent start. Can you drive home the distortion now by belittling people who didn't crawl out of the correct vagina and find themselves born into wealth?
With more and more fallback in America, we slowly reduce the incentive to do anything. Ultimately, the government (via taxing the rich) will give me everything I ever want whether I try or not.
Yeah, we see why the conservatives deserve to be in power now. They will ensure that only the rich and richer have money. If anyone else can't make enough money to improve their own situation, it must be only their own fault, period. Clearly the free market has solved all of our problems so brilliantly in the past 8 years, we want more of that.
Conservatives declare war on science to spite "the liberal agenda" in...
Nevermind, they declared war on science some time ago. As much as I love my job I hate the fact that my entire field is a political football, kicked around everytime the leadership in Washington changes. Why on earth supporting scientific research has become a partisan issue is beyond me; scientific research benefits people of all political persuasions.
No offense, but just here on slashdot I have seen at least a dozen suggestions to do that already. I have said before and I will say again that I'm not concerned enough about the attempts to change my ssh port; I actually rather enjoy parsing through the data generated by 100's of compromised systems failing in their attempts to access my home server. If I was runing a for-profit system and there was a genuine concern about accessibility problems coming from this then I would probably change my port just to slow down the traffic. However, as long as their methods remain the same I have nothing to worry about. And since I'm watching their attempts in real-time I can see if they ever improve.
I changed SSH to a nonstandard port and reduced attempts by 95%.
That is an option that has been suggested many, many, times. And indeed as you state it does work pretty well for most attempts. However it is not without trade-offs. I do a fair bit of traveling myself, and I sometimes don't know ahead of time what kind of equipment I might be using to access my home system; I would rather leave it on the standard ssh port.
Then I started a whitelist (hosts.allow) for SSH. That took care of the rest.
Again, for some people that would be a sub-par solution. If I don't know ahead of time what address or address block I might be logging in from next week, then a whitelist could result in me locking myself out of my own system when I need it most.
In short, your solutions may work well for you; and if so that is great. However some of us can't make use of those approaches practically.
Though in my case, I happen to enjoy watching the hack attempts fail. I find the resulting information interesting. I do after-the-fact armchair-quarterbacking on the logs to critique the botnets (or clouds) on how they failed to get into my system. I can also use the logs to see how their approaches are changing over time, to make sure that I am taking the correct precautions should they get more intelligent in their technique.
The summary starts by talking about jailbroken iphones getting rickrolled. It then goes on to discuss the growing hail mary cloud of compromised systems that are trying endlessly to find unsecured *nix boxes to log in to.
I've mentioned distributed attempts against my own system before. The only thing that has changed over time is the number of systems involved in a cycle. I suspect my own system is currently (by nothing other than bad luck) the target of multiple concurrent cycles. I suspect this because I see different parts of the alphabet being cycled at different rates (in terms of attempts per user name) at the same time.
Although in spite of all the advice people offer to ward off the attacks, there are a couple of really simple things to do that will keep it at bay with excellent effectiveness:
Don't allow remote root login
Keep your list of allowed users as short as possible and practical
Avoid common login names (especially common first names) if possible
Make sure your users use strong passwords
If you keep to at least those precautions you just need to grep your messages log for the allowed user names periodically to make sure that there weren't any attempts on valid names. Then as a bonus your system will keep generating more log entries for you to post to slashdot journal entries as your observations of the attack attempts...
... are you still letting them all log in to Windows with full administrator rights? When I used to be suckered into supporting my mom's PC, we all found that the rate of problems went down astronomically when I set them up to use non-administrator accounts with their regular logins, and made the administrator account as cumbersome and inconvenient as possible to use.
Once you have the hardware setup, and the most important applications properly installed, there should be next to no need for them to have administrator rights on any regular basis. And if they don't have administrator rights a lot of those viruses and malware infections that are dependent on administrator rights will simply not be of any consequence since they won't be able to install and deliver their payloads.
And if you can't explain that simple principle to them in terms that they can understand and agree with, then you need to tell them you won't support their system anymore. When they find some other poor sucker to support their system, you will sleep much better at night.
... what happened to 3com. Some of us remember "back in the day" when 3com was one of the top brands for network cards (3c503 or 3c509 anyone?). Then their cards disappeared from the market some years ago, apparently they decided to focus on other areas. I guess it isn't a huge surprise that they would become a target for acquisition.
Another part is that a very significant share of the spamvertisements are for products that are being sold through countries that don't care at all about spam. Sure, your inbox may have thousands of emails from the "Canadian pharmacy", but that domain is likely registered in China and hosted in Russia. Hence there is nothing "Canadian" about (aboot?) it. And the people profiting from it are in countries where no authorities have any interest in stopping the spamming.
Spam isn't so much an economics problem as a "some people are just dicks" problem
That statement is accurate only for those who believe that spam is sent out to piss you off. Perhaps the spam you receive is somehow different from the spam that is sent to me? The spam that is sent to my addresses is sent to sell various products or services. And why is the spam sent to sell products? Because someone is paying the spammer to send it.
Spam is a product that people are willing to pay for.
Hence spam is a economic problem, because there is economic incentive to send it. Billions or trillions of spam messages can be sent at nearly no cost to the spammer; very little business needs to come from those spam messages to make them incredibly profitable.
A lot of the problem with spam is the current system we use for email. It was never intended for such widespread use and has little-to-none in the way of authentication or security measures.
I have yet to see a proposed replacement for the existing email system that actually suggests anything that would make a bit of meaningful difference for spam issues.
You can encrypt emails for security sure, but it doesn't help get around the problem of spam..
I agree with you on that. Encryption isn't worth squat in regards to spam.
Sure. Let's educate every farking idiot on the face of the earth. Just like we did with consumers the world over in every single city across the fruited plain. It's worked well for hundreds of years! "Buyer beware" and Heaven help you if you should get defrauded
If you somehow took what I said to mean that I wanted to do what you are suggesting, then I ask you to go back to read it again.
To control spam, we need to control commerce, world wide. And that's a big, big problem that will take at least a generation or two to handle.
That is a bit closer to what I was suggesting, but going from the opposing side of the same coin.
Another botnet is on the verge of picking up a good number of those systems. Within a very short while we'll see the spam levels right back where they were before. Anti-botnet activities are good when done in the name of anti-botnet activity, but they are weak efforts in the name of stopping spam. The way to stop spam is to fight it as the economic problem that it is; if people continue to go after the symptoms of spam like this they will continue to find themselves quickly thwarted.
Is why the insurance companies, and all the representatives that they contributed heavily to, didn't put more support behind this bill. In the end, this is a massive handout for for-profit insurance. The "public option" is a joke; it will end up just being assistance in buying insurance that is already in existence. Meanwhile more people who don't currently have insurance will be forced into buying insurance from the big companies that we already have.
What congress has done is given us penicillin for a gigantic gushing head wound. Sure, there is a chance of infection but this does nothing to stop the bleeding.
I was once ticketed for doing 45 in a 30 in a woefully underpowered car. The ticket the cop wrote (which I did not see in full until my day in court) claimed I was 30-40 feet from a stoplight where not only did I stop, but I made a right-hand turn. I had two guys in my car with me, which didn't help the car accelerating on flat ground (this was a very flat area of a very flat state). So basically for the ticket to be correct, this car which made around 70hp on a good day needed to be accelerating at Porsche speed while turning.
The ticket that the officer gave me that day (which was missing some of the critical information such as the location where he claimed I was) had a court date on it, so I went to court armed with information on how I could not possibly have been going as fast as claimed.
Instead I was greeted by a DA for that county. I had the option to come back later to be heard by the judge, but the county was quite a ways away from home and I didn't really want to go back. The DA offered me a "plea bargain" since I had no tickets on my record prior. They said I could enter a plea of "guilty not accepted", under which they would accept a lesser fine from me than the original ticket (the DA essentially changed the reported speed from 45 to 38, still in a 30), and as long as I was not pulled over in their county again for the next 12 months the ticket would not be reported to my insurance company (I was a young man at the time so that part was important to me).
I accepted that deal, wrote them a check that day, and I haven't returned to that county since.
accidental contact with the accelerator link. It was an incredibly dumb design to start with
I can say from my experience that you didn't see the first German car with an impeccably stupid throttle linkage design. One of my previous cars was a dune buggy (on an original bug chassis); somehow the original linkage on that was knocked out while I was driving one day. The linkage was a single piece of metal bent to the shape of an "S" with an additional 90 degree bend. Once it was out there was no way to reinstall it. I eventually went to a shop that specialized in old bug parts, where the owner was very familiar with that problem. He gave me an aftermarket device that was made to substitute (one of these) which looked a bit odd but worked much better than original.
The fix was to put a metal guard plate over the rod behind the brake pedal.
I thought the fix was to require the driver to depress the brake pedal to shift from park to reverse or drive - which later became a requirement for all automatic transmissions in the US. If the driver has to depress the brake first (while still in park) they are less likely to have the engine start revving up without noticing it (and before engaging drive or reverse).
Slashdot Mirror
How can you compare the two?
The comparison is quite easy, actually.
I'd say that shooting the bastards that are about to capture your boat right now seems pretty effective.
Because the same flawed argument you just presented is offered up on an hourly basis in discussions about spam.
And the argument doesn't work in either case, because in both cases it is based on the horrendously flawed assumption that there is a static number of pirates (or spammers) in the world, and that if you kill one the total number in the world goes down forever, never climbing back to its previous level. However we already know that isn't the case in either situation; whether you are murdering pirates or spammers, more people will continue to go into those professions because they are profitable.
Just shoot the fuckers already. Pretty soon there won't be any more of them.
Yeah, just like executing and imprisoning spammers has helped tremendously to slow down the worldwide spamming epidemic. It's guaranteed to work!
On June 22, 2009, he pleaded guilty to wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering charges and violating the CAN-SPAM Act.[10] He agreed to assist in the prosecution of other spammers in exchange for sentencing consideration
By comparison, trials for other spammers have been held without them present as they tend to not stay in one place long.
South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique and Madagascar
Wow, you have access to a map. I'm happy for you. I'll see your country dropping and reply with India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tibet, Thailand and Sri Lanka. We might be able to build a full atlas if we continue on long enough.
Africa. That is what the people of that continent really want.
I'm glad you claim to be an expert on the opinions of a large portion of the world's population. I'm sure every single one of them are eternally grateful to have you as an advocate and spokesman.
In America, we have more than enough opportunity already.
Apparently in your view of America everything is handed out for free. That may be true in the affluent suburb you live in. However you would likely be quite surprised to learn that not everyone has the gifted lifestyle you talk so much about. There are people in this country who actually do work for what they have, no matter how much you may want to claim otherwise.
In madagascar, you don't get to go to college and seek a degree in what you want.
Guess what? You don't always get that in the USA, either. A lot of qualified students in the USA don't get to go to college at all. And qualified students who are able to afford to go to college don't always get to go to the college they want, or study what they want, either. If you go to school with the intention of studying medicine and find you can't hack organic chemistry, then you either drop out or find a new field of study.
We already have enough and spend enough on schools
That may be true in some schools but there are plenty of schools where it is not.
We can't just buy nice shiny Macs for every classroom and think kids will just jump on the science bandwagon
Can you point to where shiny Macs were part of the plan? Unless we're trying to get more kids into CSci or Design, I don't see shiny new Macs being an integral part. Are you aware of how many schools don't even have adequate chemistry or physics labs? Do you know how many kids at your local high school share a single fetal pig in biology?
Provide an excellent school with more things and you'll still have kids that simply don't care and don't try because their parents don't care and don't push
Can you explain how your plan to take resources away from schools will encourage parents to care and push?
I have very poor friends in several countries in Africa and Asia. I've lived in Africa. I know what people have to struggle through.
Considering your previous reply was chock full of distortion and lies, you should understand why I don't see any reason to believe those statements from you, either.
because I'm conservative and do want to help people
Yet another statement that you have already disproven in your other reply. Either that or you have an immensely different view of the meaning of "help people" than most people in the world.
People on welfare in America are still in the top 15% of wealthiest people in the world
Do you have a source for that stat? I'm guessing the answer is no, but feel free to surprise us on that.
(like you appear to be)
Actually, at this point I'm still wondering if you are for real. We have had people parading as conservatives on here for extended periods of time just to make their cause look foolish; your replies would certainly fit under that umbrella.
when we Americans get all up in arms about not getting everything we want when we want it
Exactly how you arrived at that conclusion from anything I said is a mystery.
In America, we don't just want a chance, we want it rolled out before us and as easy as it possible can be....then we might try a little
Again I would love to know how you came to that conclusion.
However, more importantly that statement of your opinion has nothing to do with the discussion. If you would like to actually talk about education and science funding, please do so.
not sit back and watch as my Obama-money comes pouring in while watching Oprah
Yep... and then distort it even further if you can get away with it?
not the land of hand-outs for not trying
Check. Now can the GOP continue on and show that they have no grasp on how the rest of the world funds education and operates their national budgets?
In most of the world, they are passing us up because their lives depend on them doing well and getting a job to earn money. Without it, they starve.
That is an excellent start. Can you drive home the distortion now by belittling people who didn't crawl out of the correct vagina and find themselves born into wealth?
With more and more fallback in America, we slowly reduce the incentive to do anything. Ultimately, the government (via taxing the rich) will give me everything I ever want whether I try or not.
Yeah, we see why the conservatives deserve to be in power now. They will ensure that only the rich and richer have money. If anyone else can't make enough money to improve their own situation, it must be only their own fault, period. Clearly the free market has solved all of our problems so brilliantly in the past 8 years, we want more of that.
Conservatives declare war on science to spite "the liberal agenda" in ...
Nevermind, they declared war on science some time ago. As much as I love my job I hate the fact that my entire field is a political football, kicked around everytime the leadership in Washington changes. Why on earth supporting scientific research has become a partisan issue is beyond me; scientific research benefits people of all political persuasions.
You left out the all-important "attempt_to_kill_owner" loop.
No offense, but just here on slashdot I have seen at least a dozen suggestions to do that already. I have said before and I will say again that I'm not concerned enough about the attempts to change my ssh port; I actually rather enjoy parsing through the data generated by 100's of compromised systems failing in their attempts to access my home server. If I was runing a for-profit system and there was a genuine concern about accessibility problems coming from this then I would probably change my port just to slow down the traffic. However, as long as their methods remain the same I have nothing to worry about. And since I'm watching their attempts in real-time I can see if they ever improve.
I was making something similar, but they glowed when grues were nearby.
There, fixed that for 'ya.
I changed SSH to a nonstandard port and reduced attempts by 95%.
That is an option that has been suggested many, many, times. And indeed as you state it does work pretty well for most attempts. However it is not without trade-offs. I do a fair bit of traveling myself, and I sometimes don't know ahead of time what kind of equipment I might be using to access my home system; I would rather leave it on the standard ssh port.
Then I started a whitelist (hosts.allow) for SSH. That took care of the rest.
Again, for some people that would be a sub-par solution. If I don't know ahead of time what address or address block I might be logging in from next week, then a whitelist could result in me locking myself out of my own system when I need it most.
In short, your solutions may work well for you; and if so that is great. However some of us can't make use of those approaches practically.
Though in my case, I happen to enjoy watching the hack attempts fail. I find the resulting information interesting. I do after-the-fact armchair-quarterbacking on the logs to critique the botnets (or clouds) on how they failed to get into my system. I can also use the logs to see how their approaches are changing over time, to make sure that I am taking the correct precautions should they get more intelligent in their technique.
The summary starts by talking about jailbroken iphones getting rickrolled. It then goes on to discuss the growing hail mary cloud of compromised systems that are trying endlessly to find unsecured *nix boxes to log in to.
Although in spite of all the advice people offer to ward off the attacks, there are a couple of really simple things to do that will keep it at bay with excellent effectiveness:
If you keep to at least those precautions you just need to grep your messages log for the allowed user names periodically to make sure that there weren't any attempts on valid names. Then as a bonus your system will keep generating more log entries for you to post to slashdot journal entries as your observations of the attack attempts...
... are you still letting them all log in to Windows with full administrator rights? When I used to be suckered into supporting my mom's PC, we all found that the rate of problems went down astronomically when I set them up to use non-administrator accounts with their regular logins, and made the administrator account as cumbersome and inconvenient as possible to use.
Once you have the hardware setup, and the most important applications properly installed, there should be next to no need for them to have administrator rights on any regular basis. And if they don't have administrator rights a lot of those viruses and malware infections that are dependent on administrator rights will simply not be of any consequence since they won't be able to install and deliver their payloads.
And if you can't explain that simple principle to them in terms that they can understand and agree with, then you need to tell them you won't support their system anymore. When they find some other poor sucker to support their system, you will sleep much better at night.
... what happened to 3com. Some of us remember "back in the day" when 3com was one of the top brands for network cards (3c503 or 3c509 anyone?). Then their cards disappeared from the market some years ago, apparently they decided to focus on other areas. I guess it isn't a huge surprise that they would become a target for acquisition.
Joe jobs are certainly one part of it.
Another part is that a very significant share of the spamvertisements are for products that are being sold through countries that don't care at all about spam. Sure, your inbox may have thousands of emails from the "Canadian pharmacy", but that domain is likely registered in China and hosted in Russia. Hence there is nothing "Canadian" about (aboot?) it. And the people profiting from it are in countries where no authorities have any interest in stopping the spamming.
Spam isn't so much an economics problem as a "some people are just dicks" problem
That statement is accurate only for those who believe that spam is sent out to piss you off. Perhaps the spam you receive is somehow different from the spam that is sent to me? The spam that is sent to my addresses is sent to sell various products or services. And why is the spam sent to sell products? Because someone is paying the spammer to send it.
Spam is a product that people are willing to pay for.
Hence spam is a economic problem, because there is economic incentive to send it. Billions or trillions of spam messages can be sent at nearly no cost to the spammer; very little business needs to come from those spam messages to make them incredibly profitable.
A lot of the problem with spam is the current system we use for email. It was never intended for such widespread use and has little-to-none in the way of authentication or security measures.
I have yet to see a proposed replacement for the existing email system that actually suggests anything that would make a bit of meaningful difference for spam issues.
You can encrypt emails for security sure, but it doesn't help get around the problem of spam..
I agree with you on that. Encryption isn't worth squat in regards to spam.
Sure. Let's educate every farking idiot on the face of the earth. Just like we did with consumers the world over in every single city across the fruited plain. It's worked well for hundreds of years! "Buyer beware" and Heaven help you if you should get defrauded
If you somehow took what I said to mean that I wanted to do what you are suggesting, then I ask you to go back to read it again.
To control spam, we need to control commerce, world wide. And that's a big, big problem that will take at least a generation or two to handle.
That is a bit closer to what I was suggesting, but going from the opposing side of the same coin.
Another botnet is on the verge of picking up a good number of those systems. Within a very short while we'll see the spam levels right back where they were before. Anti-botnet activities are good when done in the name of anti-botnet activity, but they are weak efforts in the name of stopping spam. The way to stop spam is to fight it as the economic problem that it is; if people continue to go after the symptoms of spam like this they will continue to find themselves quickly thwarted.
Is why the insurance companies, and all the representatives that they contributed heavily to, didn't put more support behind this bill. In the end, this is a massive handout for for-profit insurance. The "public option" is a joke; it will end up just being assistance in buying insurance that is already in existence. Meanwhile more people who don't currently have insurance will be forced into buying insurance from the big companies that we already have.
What congress has done is given us penicillin for a gigantic gushing head wound. Sure, there is a chance of infection but this does nothing to stop the bleeding.
I was once ticketed for doing 45 in a 30 in a woefully underpowered car. The ticket the cop wrote (which I did not see in full until my day in court) claimed I was 30-40 feet from a stoplight where not only did I stop, but I made a right-hand turn. I had two guys in my car with me, which didn't help the car accelerating on flat ground (this was a very flat area of a very flat state). So basically for the ticket to be correct, this car which made around 70hp on a good day needed to be accelerating at Porsche speed while turning.
The ticket that the officer gave me that day (which was missing some of the critical information such as the location where he claimed I was) had a court date on it, so I went to court armed with information on how I could not possibly have been going as fast as claimed.
Instead I was greeted by a DA for that county. I had the option to come back later to be heard by the judge, but the county was quite a ways away from home and I didn't really want to go back. The DA offered me a "plea bargain" since I had no tickets on my record prior. They said I could enter a plea of "guilty not accepted", under which they would accept a lesser fine from me than the original ticket (the DA essentially changed the reported speed from 45 to 38, still in a 30), and as long as I was not pulled over in their county again for the next 12 months the ticket would not be reported to my insurance company (I was a young man at the time so that part was important to me).
I accepted that deal, wrote them a check that day, and I haven't returned to that county since.
That's nothing. I keep my mouse stationary, and rotate Earth to scroll.
This only works provided you only scroll in one direction, ever.
accidental contact with the accelerator link. It was an incredibly dumb design to start with
I can say from my experience that you didn't see the first German car with an impeccably stupid throttle linkage design. One of my previous cars was a dune buggy (on an original bug chassis); somehow the original linkage on that was knocked out while I was driving one day. The linkage was a single piece of metal bent to the shape of an "S" with an additional 90 degree bend. Once it was out there was no way to reinstall it. I eventually went to a shop that specialized in old bug parts, where the owner was very familiar with that problem. He gave me an aftermarket device that was made to substitute (one of these) which looked a bit odd but worked much better than original.
The fix was to put a metal guard plate over the rod behind the brake pedal.
I thought the fix was to require the driver to depress the brake pedal to shift from park to reverse or drive - which later became a requirement for all automatic transmissions in the US. If the driver has to depress the brake first (while still in park) they are less likely to have the engine start revving up without noticing it (and before engaging drive or reverse).
giz-explains-why-every-country-has-a-different-fing-plug
I'm not falling for those goatse references ...