I would think that this award should have gone to 3drealms for their great job finally releasing Duke Nukem Forever and turning fantastic corporate profits against all odds. It was worth every moment of wait, suspense, and hype.
Schools I went to (prior to college) had one-way intercoms, the front office could use it to deliver messages to all rooms simultaneously. The rooms also had phones, so they could call the office or each other. I know this for a fact as in middle school we used to harass each other (and some particular teachers) before first period with prank calls over the phone.
Because they stopped including phones when they started building schools with two-way intercoms, and usually ripped them out of existing schools. (Or, more accurately, used the existing phone cable for them.)
Well apparently your schools were more progressive than the ones I went to - as I mentioned I was in one of the poorest districts in my home state - because last I heard they still have phones in the classrooms. And I know that as of last December the same could be said for the lecture halls and classrooms where I had undergraduate courses.
In the normal world, most schools stopped having telephones in classrooms more than a decade ago.
Apparently you have a very strict and distinct definition of "the normal world". Which unfortunately excludes the world I grew up in and knew.
Possibly more than two decades ago, because I remember my elementary school not having them.
Then you attended some schools that are dramatically more progressive than the ones I went to. I am not quite old enough to know myself what was in high schools "more than two decades ago".
Go and ask. She won't.
A few of my wife's friends are teachers. I will ask them next time I see them. Granted the district they teach in is approximately 1,000 miles from the one I attended for primary and secondary school.
If she does, ask if people could call 911 from them
I am not familiar with a phone system that intentionally restricts calling 911.
One may exist, but I have not seen it.
not without some special code that students don't know.
When I was in middle and high school, the "special code" (provided it was a local call) was 9. At the university, it was 8. Granted there were phones at the university that could not dial outside the university phone network, they could all call 911, they even had stickers on them to remind us that they could.
Okay, I don't know what the hell school all you idiots are going to, but in reality, schools actually don't have phones in them anywhere except the office and teachers lounges and stuff.
I don't know what school you went to, but every school I attended had phones in every classroom; with the possible exception of my elementary school (I don't remember specifically if we had phones in every room then or not). And the school district I was in was one of the poorest in the state.
Granted, we did not have computers in every room - if a teacher needed one for a class they would often go borrow an Apple II on a cart - but we did have phones in every room.
And every room I had a class in during my undergraduate work had a phone in it as well, as best I recall.
So why your school chose to not put phones in the rooms is beyond me. But don't go running around claiming that every school is the same as yours.
Oh I can't dial 911 as my phones jammed, let me just ask the nearest teacher to go to the principal to find the technician to switch it off.
Because of course most schools wouldn't have regular phones anywhere in the building. I'm sure that teacher that you found to go ask the principal wouldn't have been able to find a phone to dial from, either.
We are dealing with a high school kid who owns a kindle and was using it for school. While it is possible that kid actually earned the $500 to buy it himself, I'm probably not alone in finding that unlikely.
What a surprise that he found money to hire a lawyer as well. I wonder if he got around to actually reading a print copy of 1984 in the meantime, or if his school is going to let him skip the test while he waits for his lawyer to find a judge willing to hear his case.
I have never in my life sent $5 worth of text messages in a month.
So you are complaining about the price of something that costs less (in an entire year) less than a reasonable tip for good service at a reasonable restaurant
$5/month * 12 months/year = $60 dollars. Where are you eating that you are tipping $60, and can I have some of your extra money? You clearly make a lot more money than I do if you consider $60 to be a reasonable tip. Even if you are tipping 20%, a $60 tip would mean the bill total should have been $60 * 5 = $300. I would not consider $300 to be a reasonable restaurant bill unless I was feeding 10 people or more. I can't think of a time when my wife and I ever had a $300 dinner bill.
McDonalds workers can afford the $5, most Starbucks patrons do it daily.
So you're saying that because some people are gullible enough to do it, that makes it right? I can think of much more worthwhile things I can do with $5 every month. And being as other carriers charge text messaging at their cost relative to voice (nothing), I would say we are getting screwed monumentally.
The markup on this is insane, and the main reason why I use it as seldom as possible. I send barely a dozen text messages a year and will keep it that way until the prices come down to earth. And don't try to sell me on an "unlimited text" plan because I have never in my life sent $5 worth of text messages in a month.
MMS
I honestly haven't found a good reason to care about this one yet, one way or the other. Voicemail is adequately cheap and effective for me.
ringtones
On this one I don't care how much they charge. Frankly I think the higher a musical riff is on the billboard charts, the higher the price should be for it as a ringtone. I for one don't want to hear the background to Britney's latest hit while I am waiting in line at the bank. Nor do I want to hear the latest from the newest boy band, anywhere, ever. Why people insist their phones not ring like phones is beyond me.
It's called the # key. It works on T-Mobile and with many other vendor's voicemail systems
On Sprint you press 1.
On Verizon there is no key. You can mash keys until you run out of buttons and the closest you'll get is a prompt asking for the customer's PIN.
I don't know anyone currently on AT&T so I don't know what the option is for their voicemail (if there is one).
It's not a conspiracy now.
Its not a universal standard, either. Maybe we don't need to go all the way to beep-only, but it would be nice if there was a consistent way to bypass other people's voicemail greetings, especially if you don't know beforehand what network they use.
If you are calling a sprint customer, you can bypass their voicemail greeting by pressing 1, and get the beep you really want.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Verizon, who as best I can tell does not allow you to bypass the greeting and prompt. Indeed if you don't like it when people leave you voicemail, become a Verizon subscriber and use a super-long greeting. People will give up on leaving a voicemail on your phone.
There was a definite advantage in terms of ICANN enforcement of registrar responsibilities when there was only one registrar. Now that we have hundreds or thousands of registrars, we have all kinds of nonsense going on in blatant violation of registrar accreditation terms and ICANN can't keep up with the problems. Which apparently lead ICANN to their new strategy - nothing. Now we have unscrupulous registrars all over the world selling domains to bogus registration information, making it much more difficult to uncover who is really behind various nefarious acts on the internet (including but by no means limited to spam).
So in the end, the monopoly was indeed broken up, but the consumer lost, and lost big.
I see this story has been tagged 'democrats', which implies that something is being done explicitly by democrats. While indeed this could be a change driven by democrats, they are not changing something that was implemented by republicans. After all, it says that the policy began in 2000 - when Bill Clinton was president. Just because it wasn't changed during 8 years of a republican POTUS doesn't mean they didn't want to.
It sounds like this approach would be fairly CPU intensive; analyzing the characteristics of packets, comparing them to other packets, looking for information on their originating systems, etc... It seems like they are throwing a non-trivial amount of computational time at the problem in order to spare the storage space that would be otherwise taken up by spam.
And of course as others have already pointed out, this just starts another round of whac-a-mole by pursuing this avenue.
... between jerks and idiots. While the jerks will get through quicker by ignoring rules and other people, idiots will make the problem worse by ignoring the existence of things like other cars and the laws of Newtonian physics.
Welcome to the world of open source software. The place where you can modify the code in any way you want.
Though Wine is just an API, AFAIK. It would seem that you would need to modify it extensively to actually have it truly behave like Windows. And I suspect not all botnet infections exploit the same Windows flaws, so wouldn't the total number of vulnerabilities to implement into Wine to reach the same level of vulnerability be rather substantial?
I understand not wanting to buy 1M windows licenses; I am of the persuasion that is not inclined to buy 1 license.
However, the summary seems to claim that Wine == Windows environment. I don't see how they are analogous in this sense. In particular, if you are trying to understand botnet behavior, you need infected botnet systems. Is there a way to make Wine vulnerable to the infections that frequently hit Windows systems?
BBG is lower due to the high binding affinity of BBG for
proteins, as is characteristic for all Coomasie dyes (14). Never-
theless, BBG outside the lesion was minimal, indicating that
BBG primarily entered the lesion via the disrupted bloodspinal
cord barrier.
Our mutual friend wikipedia tells us that Coomassie blue started as a fabric dye in Africa.
The actual research article mentioned in the CNN blurb is in the most recent (as in today) issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The plot line - though highly coherent as it was - is a bit dated. After all, I'm pretty sure the office supply wars between the staples and the lines and dots has been resolved.
The summary is trying to bring up classic fears of cloning. However just because they raised pups from skin cells does not mean they can raise offspring from those cells that have a legitimate chance of living full lives. If they are indeed starting from adult skin cells, then they are starting with essentially old material; mammalian cells (excluding gametes and their progenitor cells) generally only can divide a certain number of times before they are no longer really viable for growth.
So before we see people start banging the drum over "ZOMG! Teh humanz r cloning!" we need to see if these mouse clones are actually viableclonesof their parents.
It's not their time, so they don't have to care what the returns are.
True, they don't exactly have someone at a keyboard typing in 'whois aaaaaa.com' all the way through 'whois zzzzzz.com' and dumping the results somewhere. However I don't think it is reasonable to assume the spammers to be idiots, either. They are, after all, in the business of spamming to make money so they will choose the action that is most profitable.
Setting a botnet to pull e-mail addresses out of WHOIS doesn't cost anything except the price of renting a botnet from the Russian mafia, but they can probably find a way to get it for free.
Probably true as well.
However, if we assume that the spammers are fairly intelligent people - rather than assuming they are idiots - we could come to the conclusion that they know that the email addresses in WHOIS records are likely to be amongst the more intelligent people on the internet. Hence the spammers would realize that these people who have email addresses in WHOIS records are not amongst the people most likely to buy a spamvertised product.
I do believe there is a reasonable compromise that can be made between for-profit web domains (who IMHO should be obliged to have legitimate contact information in their records) and non-profit or hobby domains (who generally I would say should be eligible for obfuscation services).
And which of these two categories would you put spammers in?
Spammers are, undoubtedly, trying to make money. They don't send out spam just to piss you off; they send it out because someone is paying them to do it.
Though at this point I should make an important distinction that I may not have been adequately clear on earlier. There is an important difference between spamming domains and spamvertised domains.
I would argue that the former is more nebulously defined, and not necessarily worth putting great effort into finding the identity of. The latter, however, should be easy to find the identity of via a WHOIS search. Unfortunately, there are several registrars who are in cahoots with the spammers themselves and sell domains to spammers with intentionally bogus records. And by the time a complaint is logged with ICANN over the bogus records at the registrar, the domain has already been shut down in some other way.
Although after that happens, nothing is done about the registrar that intentionally and knowingly violated the accreditation terms that they agreed to with ICANN. Indeed, even though a single domain was just shut down, the same registrar likely has several dozen more that they sold to the same spammer (or spamvertising company as it may be) that will take months or years more to be all shut down. And all of those domains have bogus registration data as well.
So in the end, the registrars will continue to ignore the rules, and nothing will be done. And this game will be even worse when ICANN starts selling gTLDs; but that is for another conversation.
that evil spamming domain is pulling contact information from people who *do* have legit info in the fields
For one, I doubt that the spammers are really pulling much information from WHOIS records. Sure, they do use it, I don't see any reason to expect that they do not. However I suspect they get better returns on their time by using google to crawl through forum posts and other such things that tend to have email addresses in them.
That said, I am sympathetic towards people who want to protect their privacy from publicly accessible WHOIS records and people who might use that information for nefarious purposes. I do believe there is a reasonable compromise that can be made between for-profit web domains (who IMHO should be obliged to have legitimate contact information in their records) and non-profit or hobby domains (who generally I would say should be eligible for obfuscation services).
The most profitable moves that registrars make in violation of ICANN rules are the ones that are almost never punished. Consider all the registrations that are issued with incomplete or outright bogus registration data, and how little ICANN has done about the registrars who are repeat offenders of that.
There is a reason why your favorite evil spamming domain has bad registration data, and there is a reason why it will stay that way.
At first I thought this would help the slashdot coders, until I read more closely:
Slow Web page loading can discourage visitors to a site more than any other problem, regardless of how attractive or feature-rich the given site might be
Attractive and feature-rich are not adjectives that are appropriate to apply to slashdot it its current form. Hence I don't think this book is the cure to what ails them.
Slashdot Mirror
I would think that this award should have gone to 3drealms for their great job finally releasing Duke Nukem Forever and turning fantastic corporate profits against all odds. It was worth every moment of wait, suspense, and hype.
Did you have intercoms?
Schools I went to (prior to college) had one-way intercoms, the front office could use it to deliver messages to all rooms simultaneously. The rooms also had phones, so they could call the office or each other. I know this for a fact as in middle school we used to harass each other (and some particular teachers) before first period with prank calls over the phone.
Because they stopped including phones when they started building schools with two-way intercoms, and usually ripped them out of existing schools. (Or, more accurately, used the existing phone cable for them.)
Well apparently your schools were more progressive than the ones I went to - as I mentioned I was in one of the poorest districts in my home state - because last I heard they still have phones in the classrooms. And I know that as of last December the same could be said for the lecture halls and classrooms where I had undergraduate courses.
In the normal world, most schools stopped having telephones in classrooms more than a decade ago.
Apparently you have a very strict and distinct definition of "the normal world". Which unfortunately excludes the world I grew up in and knew.
Possibly more than two decades ago, because I remember my elementary school not having them.
Then you attended some schools that are dramatically more progressive than the ones I went to. I am not quite old enough to know myself what was in high schools "more than two decades ago".
Go and ask. She won't.
A few of my wife's friends are teachers. I will ask them next time I see them. Granted the district they teach in is approximately 1,000 miles from the one I attended for primary and secondary school.
If she does, ask if people could call 911 from them
I am not familiar with a phone system that intentionally restricts calling 911.
One may exist, but I have not seen it.
not without some special code that students don't know.
When I was in middle and high school, the "special code" (provided it was a local call) was 9. At the university, it was 8. Granted there were phones at the university that could not dial outside the university phone network, they could all call 911, they even had stickers on them to remind us that they could.
Okay, I don't know what the hell school all you idiots are going to, but in reality, schools actually don't have phones in them anywhere except the office and teachers lounges and stuff.
I don't know what school you went to, but every school I attended had phones in every classroom; with the possible exception of my elementary school (I don't remember specifically if we had phones in every room then or not). And the school district I was in was one of the poorest in the state.
Granted, we did not have computers in every room - if a teacher needed one for a class they would often go borrow an Apple II on a cart - but we did have phones in every room.
And every room I had a class in during my undergraduate work had a phone in it as well, as best I recall.
So why your school chose to not put phones in the rooms is beyond me. But don't go running around claiming that every school is the same as yours.
Oh I can't dial 911 as my phones jammed, let me just ask the nearest teacher to go to the principal to find the technician to switch it off.
Because of course most schools wouldn't have regular phones anywhere in the building. I'm sure that teacher that you found to go ask the principal wouldn't have been able to find a phone to dial from, either.
We are dealing with a high school kid who owns a kindle and was using it for school. While it is possible that kid actually earned the $500 to buy it himself, I'm probably not alone in finding that unlikely.
What a surprise that he found money to hire a lawyer as well. I wonder if he got around to actually reading a print copy of 1984 in the meantime, or if his school is going to let him skip the test while he waits for his lawyer to find a judge willing to hear his case.
I have never in my life sent $5 worth of text messages in a month.
So you are complaining about the price of something that costs less (in an entire year) less than a reasonable tip for good service at a reasonable restaurant
$5/month * 12 months/year = $60 dollars. Where are you eating that you are tipping $60, and can I have some of your extra money? You clearly make a lot more money than I do if you consider $60 to be a reasonable tip. Even if you are tipping 20%, a $60 tip would mean the bill total should have been $60 * 5 = $300. I would not consider $300 to be a reasonable restaurant bill unless I was feeding 10 people or more. I can't think of a time when my wife and I ever had a $300 dinner bill.
McDonalds workers can afford the $5, most Starbucks patrons do it daily.
So you're saying that because some people are gullible enough to do it, that makes it right? I can think of much more worthwhile things I can do with $5 every month. And being as other carriers charge text messaging at their cost relative to voice (nothing), I would say we are getting screwed monumentally.
TFA had several people posting that * skips the greeting on Verizon... or is this just to log in to check the voicemail?
It has been a while since I last called a Verizon phone, but I seem to recall that * just asks you for your PIN to check your voicemail.
there are way bigger fish to fry than voicemail
Agreed
SMS
The markup on this is insane, and the main reason why I use it as seldom as possible. I send barely a dozen text messages a year and will keep it that way until the prices come down to earth. And don't try to sell me on an "unlimited text" plan because I have never in my life sent $5 worth of text messages in a month.
MMS
I honestly haven't found a good reason to care about this one yet, one way or the other. Voicemail is adequately cheap and effective for me.
ringtones
On this one I don't care how much they charge. Frankly I think the higher a musical riff is on the billboard charts, the higher the price should be for it as a ringtone. I for one don't want to hear the background to Britney's latest hit while I am waiting in line at the bank. Nor do I want to hear the latest from the newest boy band, anywhere, ever. Why people insist their phones not ring like phones is beyond me.
Now get off my lawn.
It's called the # key. It works on T-Mobile and with many other vendor's voicemail systems
On Sprint you press 1.
On Verizon there is no key. You can mash keys until you run out of buttons and the closest you'll get is a prompt asking for the customer's PIN.
I don't know anyone currently on AT&T so I don't know what the option is for their voicemail (if there is one).
It's not a conspiracy now.
Its not a universal standard, either. Maybe we don't need to go all the way to beep-only, but it would be nice if there was a consistent way to bypass other people's voicemail greetings, especially if you don't know beforehand what network they use.
If you are calling a sprint customer, you can bypass their voicemail greeting by pressing 1, and get the beep you really want.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Verizon, who as best I can tell does not allow you to bypass the greeting and prompt. Indeed if you don't like it when people leave you voicemail, become a Verizon subscriber and use a super-long greeting. People will give up on leaving a voicemail on your phone.
There was a definite advantage in terms of ICANN enforcement of registrar responsibilities when there was only one registrar. Now that we have hundreds or thousands of registrars, we have all kinds of nonsense going on in blatant violation of registrar accreditation terms and ICANN can't keep up with the problems. Which apparently lead ICANN to their new strategy - nothing. Now we have unscrupulous registrars all over the world selling domains to bogus registration information, making it much more difficult to uncover who is really behind various nefarious acts on the internet (including but by no means limited to spam).
So in the end, the monopoly was indeed broken up, but the consumer lost, and lost big.
I see this story has been tagged 'democrats', which implies that something is being done explicitly by democrats. While indeed this could be a change driven by democrats, they are not changing something that was implemented by republicans. After all, it says that the policy began in 2000 - when Bill Clinton was president. Just because it wasn't changed during 8 years of a republican POTUS doesn't mean they didn't want to.
It sounds like this approach would be fairly CPU intensive; analyzing the characteristics of packets, comparing them to other packets, looking for information on their originating systems, etc... It seems like they are throwing a non-trivial amount of computational time at the problem in order to spare the storage space that would be otherwise taken up by spam.
And of course as others have already pointed out, this just starts another round of whac-a-mole by pursuing this avenue.
... between jerks and idiots. While the jerks will get through quicker by ignoring rules and other people, idiots will make the problem worse by ignoring the existence of things like other cars and the laws of Newtonian physics.
Welcome to the world of open source software. The place where you can modify the code in any way you want.
Though Wine is just an API, AFAIK. It would seem that you would need to modify it extensively to actually have it truly behave like Windows. And I suspect not all botnet infections exploit the same Windows flaws, so wouldn't the total number of vulnerabilities to implement into Wine to reach the same level of vulnerability be rather substantial?
I understand not wanting to buy 1M windows licenses; I am of the persuasion that is not inclined to buy 1 license.
However, the summary seems to claim that Wine == Windows environment. I don't see how they are analogous in this sense. In particular, if you are trying to understand botnet behavior, you need infected botnet systems. Is there a way to make Wine vulnerable to the infections that frequently hit Windows systems?
BBG is lower due to the high binding affinity of BBG for proteins, as is characteristic for all Coomasie dyes (14). Never- theless, BBG outside the lesion was minimal, indicating that BBG primarily entered the lesion via the disrupted bloodspinal cord barrier.
Our mutual friend wikipedia tells us that Coomassie blue started as a fabric dye in Africa.
The actual research article mentioned in the CNN blurb is in the most recent (as in today) issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The plot line - though highly coherent as it was - is a bit dated. After all, I'm pretty sure the office supply wars between the staples and the lines and dots has been resolved.
The summary is trying to bring up classic fears of cloning. However just because they raised pups from skin cells does not mean they can raise offspring from those cells that have a legitimate chance of living full lives. If they are indeed starting from adult skin cells, then they are starting with essentially old material; mammalian cells (excluding gametes and their progenitor cells) generally only can divide a certain number of times before they are no longer really viable for growth.
So before we see people start banging the drum over "ZOMG! Teh humanz r cloning!" we need to see if these mouse clones are actually viableclonesof their parents.
It's not their time, so they don't have to care what the returns are.
True, they don't exactly have someone at a keyboard typing in 'whois aaaaaa.com' all the way through 'whois zzzzzz.com' and dumping the results somewhere. However I don't think it is reasonable to assume the spammers to be idiots, either. They are, after all, in the business of spamming to make money so they will choose the action that is most profitable.
Setting a botnet to pull e-mail addresses out of WHOIS doesn't cost anything except the price of renting a botnet from the Russian mafia, but they can probably find a way to get it for free.
Probably true as well.
However, if we assume that the spammers are fairly intelligent people - rather than assuming they are idiots - we could come to the conclusion that they know that the email addresses in WHOIS records are likely to be amongst the more intelligent people on the internet. Hence the spammers would realize that these people who have email addresses in WHOIS records are not amongst the people most likely to buy a spamvertised product.
I do believe there is a reasonable compromise that can be made between for-profit web domains (who IMHO should be obliged to have legitimate contact information in their records) and non-profit or hobby domains (who generally I would say should be eligible for obfuscation services).
And which of these two categories would you put spammers in?
Spammers are, undoubtedly, trying to make money. They don't send out spam just to piss you off; they send it out because someone is paying them to do it.
Though at this point I should make an important distinction that I may not have been adequately clear on earlier. There is an important difference between spamming domains and spamvertised domains.
I would argue that the former is more nebulously defined, and not necessarily worth putting great effort into finding the identity of. The latter, however, should be easy to find the identity of via a WHOIS search. Unfortunately, there are several registrars who are in cahoots with the spammers themselves and sell domains to spammers with intentionally bogus records. And by the time a complaint is logged with ICANN over the bogus records at the registrar, the domain has already been shut down in some other way.
Although after that happens, nothing is done about the registrar that intentionally and knowingly violated the accreditation terms that they agreed to with ICANN. Indeed, even though a single domain was just shut down, the same registrar likely has several dozen more that they sold to the same spammer (or spamvertising company as it may be) that will take months or years more to be all shut down. And all of those domains have bogus registration data as well.
So in the end, the registrars will continue to ignore the rules, and nothing will be done. And this game will be even worse when ICANN starts selling gTLDs; but that is for another conversation.
that evil spamming domain is pulling contact information from people who *do* have legit info in the fields
For one, I doubt that the spammers are really pulling much information from WHOIS records. Sure, they do use it, I don't see any reason to expect that they do not. However I suspect they get better returns on their time by using google to crawl through forum posts and other such things that tend to have email addresses in them.
That said, I am sympathetic towards people who want to protect their privacy from publicly accessible WHOIS records and people who might use that information for nefarious purposes. I do believe there is a reasonable compromise that can be made between for-profit web domains (who IMHO should be obliged to have legitimate contact information in their records) and non-profit or hobby domains (who generally I would say should be eligible for obfuscation services).
The most profitable moves that registrars make in violation of ICANN rules are the ones that are almost never punished. Consider all the registrations that are issued with incomplete or outright bogus registration data, and how little ICANN has done about the registrars who are repeat offenders of that.
There is a reason why your favorite evil spamming domain has bad registration data, and there is a reason why it will stay that way.
Slow Web page loading can discourage visitors to a site more than any other problem, regardless of how attractive or feature-rich the given site might be
Attractive and feature-rich are not adjectives that are appropriate to apply to slashdot it its current form. Hence I don't think this book is the cure to what ails them.
... so we can buy a copy to send to the programmers at slashdot. You can send your money to me and I'll handle the rest.