I taught my nine year old brother to use Mailinator.
Experimenting on children is the answer
on
Good Email For Kids?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I know sociology is a field without a notion of controlled experiments, but we really owe it to society to raise 100 kids for every single childhood experience we assume will fuck them up for life, and see what happens.
So they cans tart to get used to how life is? SO they can keep in easy contact with a family memeber?
Neither of which requires that they have their own e-mail address. When I was 5 I got letters from grandparents and other family members.
That's really not a valid argument. If you weren't just being argumentative, you would have made space in your comment to respect the fact that the obvious alternative you suggested is not in a lot of people's minds (again, especially on Slashdot) quite as convenient or popular as email is. You basically just ignored geekoid's comment and used it as a shitty segue to your ill-informed opinion.
'fracai' said:
When I was 5 I got letters from grandparents and other family members. I also didn't have my own street address and, unless asked to, probably didn't check the mail box on my own.
Yeah, but that wasn't because snailmail is fundamentally more appropriate for children, it's because you're over 20 and the Internet wasn't a viable option for most people in 1988.
In fact, I'm absolutely confident that had the Internet been an option at the time, it isn't the five year old in this scenario who will find email too challenging, it's going to be the grandparents, no contest. I mean, come on, plenty of people in their seventies these days are still afraid of computers, why would they have been quicker on the uptake 15 years ago?
Also, why didn't you use the phone or check the mailbox? You sound like you were a very boring child.
Mildly ironic side-note: Letting your kids bring the mail in is a great way to prepare them for their first email SPAM experience.
Am I the only person who found this to be a *really* strange turn of phrase?
With game developers targeting the relatively modest hardware available in current consoles and trickle-down bringing cutting-edge features down to budget price points, today's low-end graphics cards are more capable than ever.
I have not read the article, but I'd like to point out the possibility that because social networking is a big buzz-word, the experiment is being misrepresented.
While I don't believe an experiment really proves anything to anyone with a mind of their own, I think we're all way past due to begin thinking about better sandboxing (more precise, efficient, and platform-agnostic) methods for running all the untrustworthy code we do. We ought to have control over how resources of all kinds are allowed to anything we run. It should be trivial to tell your browser what the default outgoing transmission rate for a Facebook app ought to be (but this should not be implemented in the browser -- it should be available for non-web-based software as well) as well as any other resource you can think of.
The comment by Cassius Corodes is undereducated and misleading. There are a myriad of reasons besides whether or not the operator will be in the loop (which should only be guaranteed if the caller provides the correct password anyhow) that I'm sure other responders have already pointed out. Please mod it down.
By itself, a MicroID has no inherent meaning, since it is simply a string created from two URIs. Any entity can generate a MicroID even if it has not verified the identity of the resources associated with one or both URIs. Furthermore, a MicroID is easily copied by an entity that did not generate it. Finally, a MicroID is not digitally signed by the entity that generated it and therefore cannot be cryptographically associated with the generating entity.
It could *EASILY* turn out that Pickens is just another participant in the public relations campaign that big oil is putting on to convince Americans that big oil isn't out to get them.
People are angry at the pump, and the more people who identify oil companies as enemies, the more people are exploring alternative fuels.
While his emphasis on America's trade deficit and, apparently, the economy seems to be a new tune for an oil man, he has plenty of others with whom to share the oil-going-green spotlight with.
Too many people don't understand they have a legal right to take photographs and record video in public places, and that it's protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
The practice of street photography has a long tradition in New York City and its purpose varies from hobby and artistic expression to memory making and journalistic documentation. But the freedom to photograph and film has long been taken for granted and challenged in the wake of 9/11.
Know your rights and what to do when approached by law enforcement.
My name is Kim Lengle and I pitched this story to several College Current producer during a pitch session of Jon Alpert's Documentary class at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. I was told that you had a similar story that couldn't be aired.
My story has first hand accounts and shows myself and my partner being kicked out of public places for trying to record video.
As this guy clearly escapes with video footage, and I've seen countless others do the same, it's pretty clear that this isn't any real form of security at all.
Don't forget having quality, accessible implementations available. Everyone hated Javascript for a real long time because the only implementations available were bad, and locked up inside browsers which didn't really work as good development tools.
I think that density, not price, is going to drive the SSD market as well. We need space on our small computers, and the mechanical solution is not keeping up. I believe this is why Apple went to flash memory for the iPods, although initially they were dedicated to hard drives. My iPhod mini only has 4 gb, the same as the nano that replaced it. The new nanos have more memory than even the EOL minis.
I'm pretty confident that Apple's reason for switching to solid state flash memory in their handheld electronics (and now/soon their laptops as well) was because iPods were notorious for mechanical failure as they are often put through quite a bit of physical abuse.
Imagine that! Video cameras more expensive than still cameras!
Incidentally, timholman, I recommend you invest in a quality still-picture digital camera if you want an economic solution for high quality digital imaging.
I'd take a look at buying one of the cheaper Canon Powershot cameras between $100 and $200 for which there exists open source firmware. For networking, you might explore whether or not the USB mechanism in the camera can be coerced into the host role (as opposed to acting as a device) which has been accomplished in similar situations for devices such as the BlackDog and many iPods with Linux installed. With USB device hosting capability in hand, you could then easily connect it to a USB Ethernet NIC for a little over $20.
With your own firmware installed, you might even do something really novel and program the camera to do something that will get the intruder's attention before snapping a photo so that they are sure to be looking right at it, giving you an excellent shot of his or her identity.
It has been a long time since I've seen such a terribly written post filled with so much garbage reach the score 5 on Slashdot. I have no choice but to debunk the entire post piece by piece.
requiring convicted criminals to use a vpn would be a step in the right direction. also much easier to implement than trying to build an internet around catching crooks.
How would this help catch anyone? How would you enforce it? How do you propose that you try to catch someone violating their VPN lock? Do you expect them to post to their MySpace while they're stealing credit card infos?
so what do you do with the criminals from Africa who are connected to organized crime, who have whole 'internet cafes' and people standing watch so they can get out of there if the 'police' come, who are more than likely on the take anyways...
Seriously, you don't need your own accomplice cafe to be anonymous on the internet, much less to skirt some stupid probation condition like "only use the internet through our proxy/vpn." ---- Shit, okay I need to go see a woman, apparently, so I'll just end with this:
although i Seriously doubt they're going to make it easier for the movie and music industries to track down users, and catch them 'in the act' what is going to get targeted is the stuff that really steals from the banks, and the rich and gives it to the criminals.
if i had the money I'd bet a billion dollars that within a decade hacking will be traceable world wide, through hardware ids before they get the money transfered from one bank account to another one.
Why do you need a billion dollars? I'll give you 10:1 odds on any amount you name. You don't understand anything, I am really embarrassed that Slashdot even ran this story, let alone give a post like yours a score of 5.
Seriously Slashdot, you guys fucking suck now.
I can't end this post though without commenting on the original article.
This is one of the worst written articles I've ever seen on Slashdot. It contains absolutely nothing that cannot be solidly labeled "FUD." The article itself is all over the place, devoid of real-world examples you might get from a real journalist, and reads like it has been written by a child. It's very clear to me that Patrick J. Dempsey is not very intelligent, and does not understand the types of challenges that exist for internet security, nor does he understand the liberties we're used to enjoying here in The United States of America. Case in point: this guy's argument could be made in favor of putting cameras on every street corner and requiring everyone to carry federal (or international) identification cards.
That doesn't mean he's safe from fear of being discovered. No, it doesn't.
There's no such thing as 'anonymous' on the internet. Blinks.....What?!
Should it become a priority to find who made a post, it could be done. No. Wrong.
And, considering Microsoft's vast army of lawyers... Welp, I know I wouldn't take that risk. Because you're a self-serving douche.
That doesn't mean somebody else wouldn't, but it is still a valid question to ask. No, it isn't a valid question to ask, because you're not basing it on any information about this specific situation. It happens all the time. So unless you think it's valid (which might, in a perfect world, imply some sort of usefulness) to challenge the entire incorporeal idea of investigative journalism, this is not a valid question to ask.
Well, the Web does make information flow easy - if both parties want the information to flow. I don't think any of us would approve of a Web that makes our information flow out to unknown parties without our permission. Would you? I hope others do not share your misunderstanding. I wasn't suggesting any such thing.
And the Web has no control whatsoever of the format of data. Data is "just bits". While this is closer to how I would prefer the web to be, it is not close to how the web actually is. The web is, for better or worse, a collection of standards and standard-implying implementations for many different file formats. But file formats are not really my point. I prefer the slightly greater abstraction "format." For instance the output of slashdot.org/comments.pl is probably XML, in turn expressing HTML, in turn expressing a nested tree of comments and interfaces for navigating and adding to those comments. Sure, somewhere, someone is concerned with what file format the output of comments.pl is. But we're probably more concerned with what format our comments are delivered in.
When you go to Hotmail or whatever, somewhere there is a page about your contacts where you can view your contact list and all the information you entered. Somehow that page is a format for your contacts, and unless Microsoft actually asks you to enter data about your contacts which you will not be able to retrieve at a later date, this does provide an interface for any web client possessing your login credentials to download your contact information. Pushing this contact information to a new service is now only an exercise in deciphering that format, reformatting the data to fit the input format expected by the new service you want to use, and actually sending it (and also, of course, reconciling any discrepencies between the two services' idea/format of what a contact is, for instance if there is a single "slot" for a person's email address, or if you can associate multiple email addresses with the same person; if you're thinking to yourself hey isn't that also a format? then you're starting to catch on to the design problem the web suffers from.)
Nowhere did I suggest anything that would mean unknown parties are able to glean my contact information. Point of fact:
Creating yet another interface for retrieving contact information (which is what's going on here when two companies create a behind-the-scenes linkage for sharing data which you can already download with a web client and your login credentials,) you are creating even greater risk that that information can fall into the wrong hands. Most people don't realize that the DRY principal is not only a programming guideline, but a security measure. The more functionality you needlessly duplicate, the more opportunities you have created for a security vulnerability. If the web as a platform were designed with more emphasis on enabling developers to follow good programming practices, all our data would be far more secure.
(Also, I think what is more relevant to the current story, it seems that Microsoft is planning to make your contact information available to "the wrong hands.")
Besides that? I find that it is more consistent. If you move from one Linux distribution to another, you need to go hunting for the configuration files, they are not in a set location as specified by man hier. I know that when I install something from the ports tree, the configuration files can always be found in/usr/local/etc/, which is a nice change from having to hunt in/var/www/httpd for Apache's configuration file and/opt/etc/ for the dhcp servers config file.
Not to knock FreeBSD or any *BSD for that matter, but this is kind of a poor comparison. You've just attributed FreeBSD with advantages over, it seems, GNU/Linux, because different GNU/Linux distributions do things differently from one another, whereas FreeBSD doesn't suffer from this problem.
Well, just how many different FreeBSD distributions are there?
Slashdot Mirror
I taught my nine year old brother to use Mailinator.
I know sociology is a field without a notion of controlled experiments, but we really owe it to society to raise 100 kids for every single childhood experience we assume will fuck them up for life, and see what happens.
That's really not a valid argument. If you weren't just being argumentative, you would have made space in your comment to respect the fact that the obvious alternative you suggested is not in a lot of people's minds (again, especially on Slashdot) quite as convenient or popular as email is. You basically just ignored geekoid's comment and used it as a shitty segue to your ill-informed opinion.
'fracai' said:
Yeah, but that wasn't because snailmail is fundamentally more appropriate for children, it's because you're over 20 and the Internet wasn't a viable option for most people in 1988.
In fact, I'm absolutely confident that had the Internet been an option at the time, it isn't the five year old in this scenario who will find email too challenging, it's going to be the grandparents, no contest. I mean, come on, plenty of people in their seventies these days are still afraid of computers, why would they have been quicker on the uptake 15 years ago?
Also, why didn't you use the phone or check the mailbox? You sound like you were a very boring child.
Mildly ironic side-note: Letting your kids bring the mail in is a great way to prepare them for their first email SPAM experience.
Am I the only person who found this to be a *really* strange turn of phrase?
I agree 99% with CWRUisTakingMyMoney.
I have not read the article, but I'd like to point out the possibility that because social networking is a big buzz-word, the experiment is being misrepresented.
While I don't believe an experiment really proves anything to anyone with a mind of their own, I think we're all way past due to begin thinking about better sandboxing (more precise, efficient, and platform-agnostic) methods for running all the untrustworthy code we do. We ought to have control over how resources of all kinds are allowed to anything we run. It should be trivial to tell your browser what the default outgoing transmission rate for a Facebook app ought to be (but this should not be implemented in the browser -- it should be available for non-web-based software as well) as well as any other resource you can think of.
Just ask China's latest political prisoner James Powderly (of GRL fame.)
His recommendation probably goes something like this.
The comment by Cassius Corodes is undereducated and misleading. There are a myriad of reasons besides whether or not the operator will be in the loop (which should only be guaranteed if the caller provides the correct password anyhow) that I'm sure other responders have already pointed out. Please mod it down.
It could *EASILY* turn out that Pickens is just another participant in the public relations campaign that big oil is putting on to convince Americans that big oil isn't out to get them.
People are angry at the pump, and the more people who identify oil companies as enemies, the more people are exploring alternative fuels.
While his emphasis on America's trade deficit and, apparently, the economy seems to be a new tune for an oil man, he has plenty of others with whom to share the oil-going-green spotlight with.
Slashdot's listing of this article was bought and paid for. Gamasutra -> Money -> Slashdot -> Viewers -> Advertisements -> Money
It's like printing your own money. I hate news aggregators with privileged editors (not that Digg is any better -- in fact it's worse.)
Too many people don't understand they have a legal right to take photographs and record video in public places, and that it's protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
The practice of street photography has a long tradition in New York City and its purpose varies from hobby and artistic expression to memory making and journalistic documentation. But the freedom to photograph and film has long been taken for granted and challenged in the wake of 9/11.
Know your rights and what to do when approached by law enforcement.
My name is Kim Lengle and I pitched this story to several College Current producer during a pitch session of Jon Alpert's Documentary class at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. I was told that you had a similar story that couldn't be aired.
My story has first hand accounts and shows myself and my partner being kicked out of public places for trying to record video.
Watch the video.
As this guy clearly escapes with video footage, and I've seen countless others do the same, it's pretty clear that this isn't any real form of security at all.
Don't forget having quality, accessible implementations available. Everyone hated Javascript for a real long time because the only implementations available were bad, and locked up inside browsers which didn't really work as good development tools.
Can someone please explain these "quantum" differences that allegedly exist in synthetic drugs and are somehow relevant to my physiology?
Starbucks.
I think that density, not price, is going to drive the SSD market as well. We need space on our small computers, and the mechanical solution is not keeping up. I believe this is why Apple went to flash memory for the iPods, although initially they were dedicated to hard drives. My iPhod mini only has 4 gb, the same as the nano that replaced it. The new nanos have more memory than even the EOL minis.
I'm pretty confident that Apple's reason for switching to solid state flash memory in their handheld electronics (and now/soon their laptops as well) was because iPods were notorious for mechanical failure as they are often put through quite a bit of physical abuse.
I meant to give this URL for the "open source firmware" link. I must have messed it up somehow:
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK_in_Brief
Imagine that! Video cameras more expensive than still cameras!
Incidentally, timholman, I recommend you invest in a quality still-picture digital camera if you want an economic solution for high quality digital imaging.
I'd take a look at buying one of the cheaper Canon Powershot cameras between $100 and $200 for which there exists open source firmware. For networking, you might explore whether or not the USB mechanism in the camera can be coerced into the host role (as opposed to acting as a device) which has been accomplished in similar situations for devices such as the BlackDog and many iPods with Linux installed. With USB device hosting capability in hand, you could then easily connect it to a USB Ethernet NIC for a little over $20.
With your own firmware installed, you might even do something really novel and program the camera to do something that will get the intruder's attention before snapping a photo so that they are sure to be looking right at it, giving you an excellent shot of his or her identity.
Let us know how it goes!
Yeah, but I really have no idea where to find any formal literature or studies on the subject.
Or can you recommend any reading on the subject?
It has been a long time since I've seen such a terribly written post filled with so much garbage reach the score 5 on Slashdot. I have no choice but to debunk the entire post piece by piece.
requiring convicted criminals to use a vpn would be a step in the right direction. also much easier to implement than trying to build an internet around catching crooks.How would this help catch anyone? How would you enforce it? How do you propose that you try to catch someone violating their VPN lock? Do you expect them to post to their MySpace while they're stealing credit card infos?
so what do you do with the criminals from Africa who are connected to organized crime, who have whole 'internet cafes' and people standing watch so they can get out of there if the 'police' come, who are more than likely on the take anyways...Seriously, you don't need your own accomplice cafe to be anonymous on the internet, much less to skirt some stupid probation condition like "only use the internet through our proxy/vpn." ---- Shit, okay I need to go see a woman, apparently, so I'll just end with this:
although i Seriously doubt they're going to make it easier for the movie and music industries to track down users, and catch them 'in the act' what is going to get targeted is the stuff that really steals from the banks, and the rich and gives it to the criminals.if i had the money I'd bet a billion dollars that within a decade hacking will be traceable world wide, through hardware ids before they get the money transfered from one bank account to another one.
Why do you need a billion dollars? I'll give you 10:1 odds on any amount you name. You don't understand anything, I am really embarrassed that Slashdot even ran this story, let alone give a post like yours a score of 5.
Seriously Slashdot, you guys fucking suck now.
I can't end this post though without commenting on the original article.
This is one of the worst written articles I've ever seen on Slashdot. It contains absolutely nothing that cannot be solidly labeled "FUD." The article itself is all over the place, devoid of real-world examples you might get from a real journalist, and reads like it has been written by a child. It's very clear to me that Patrick J. Dempsey is not very intelligent, and does not understand the types of challenges that exist for internet security, nor does he understand the liberties we're used to enjoying here in The United States of America. Case in point: this guy's argument could be made in favor of putting cameras on every street corner and requiring everyone to carry federal (or international) identification cards.
The informant has chosen not to reveal his identity. Did you even read the article? Bad form.
When you go to Hotmail or whatever, somewhere there is a page about your contacts where you can view your contact list and all the information you entered. Somehow that page is a format for your contacts, and unless Microsoft actually asks you to enter data about your contacts which you will not be able to retrieve at a later date, this does provide an interface for any web client possessing your login credentials to download your contact information. Pushing this contact information to a new service is now only an exercise in deciphering that format, reformatting the data to fit the input format expected by the new service you want to use, and actually sending it (and also, of course, reconciling any discrepencies between the two services' idea/format of what a contact is, for instance if there is a single "slot" for a person's email address, or if you can associate multiple email addresses with the same person; if you're thinking to yourself hey isn't that also a format? then you're starting to catch on to the design problem the web suffers from.)
Nowhere did I suggest anything that would mean unknown parties are able to glean my contact information. Point of fact:
Creating yet another interface for retrieving contact information (which is what's going on here when two companies create a behind-the-scenes linkage for sharing data which you can already download with a web client and your login credentials,) you are creating even greater risk that that information can fall into the wrong hands. Most people don't realize that the DRY principal is not only a programming guideline, but a security measure. The more functionality you needlessly duplicate, the more opportunities you have created for a security vulnerability. If the web as a platform were designed with more emphasis on enabling developers to follow good programming practices, all our data would be far more secure.
(Also, I think what is more relevant to the current story, it seems that Microsoft is planning to make your contact information available to "the wrong hands.")
You're Fired (tm)
Not to knock FreeBSD or any *BSD for that matter, but this is kind of a poor comparison. You've just attributed FreeBSD with advantages over, it seems, GNU/Linux, because different GNU/Linux distributions do things differently from one another, whereas FreeBSD doesn't suffer from this problem.
Well, just how many different FreeBSD distributions are there?