This story just emphasizes that litigation doesn't solve anything. How is this 'crusade' actually helping reduce the kind of really atrocious spam that consumes untold CPU cycles, internet bandwidth, and user time? I can't believe that these companies, "large and small," that are actually reachable, are the really troublesome spammers, and not just some more or less well-meaning people who didn't perfectly adhere to CAN-SPAM regulations. So, he's essentially extorting from legitimate companies and groups, rather than doing anything that reduces truly destructive and troublesome spam.
This guy seems like a lawyer's lawyer. He's getting paid by the law without having to actually represent anyone but himself.
Why on earth are they mentioning how fast rainbow tables can break an old windows hash? That has nothing to do with most pages running apache on linux. The example password would last for quite a while against a brute force attack. Anyone worth their salt wouldn't allow that many auth attempts from one IP. Get it worth their salt? Lololol.
Anyhow why is the windows example being used in this article at all?
Right, but the issue is, they weren't cracking over an IP. They made off with a hash file. This is why system-level security is more important than user-level security. The problem isn't that the users had weak passwords, it's that Gawker's servers were compromised. Now the hackers don't have to worry about IP auth denial.
A hacker making off with a hash file is like a thief making off with your portable safe. Sure, it's fire proof and has a padlock, but he has all the time in the world now, in a safe environment, to gain access to your personal documents.
The bigger question is, why was your doors unlocked?
Weak passwords and fake information for meaningless sites, stronger passwords for financial and personal sites. Differentiation is the key, not complexity.
Survivor 10: Internet Edition. Web-browsers battle it our in the toughest of surfing environments: hundreds of tabs, incompatible add-ons, swamps of malware, installs on wristwatches! (Spoiler: In the finale, FireFox and IE team up (gasp!) in a last ditch effort to defeat young upstarts Safari and Chrome!)
All of which are fundamentally governed by the laws of physics. Math.
I think you're equivocating here. Governed by physics, yes, but not by math. Math is the language of description, not the laws themselves. So the equivocation here is between description and causation. Mathematics describes in a human/machine cipherable language the seemingly immutable physical principles of the universe. This type of sensual observation falls prey to Hume's complete skepticism, that we cannot say something is fundamental just because our experience of it has never been controverted. That's an impossible jump of logic, no matter how high the mound of evidence piles.
The response to Hume's skepticism is Kant's transcendentalism, a notion which de facto attempts to escape Turing completeness. Even if our divine spark doesn't come from an actual deity, Kant's claim is that we are in some way divine, he sets the plane of divinity within us. While Kant's claims need not be accurate, successive thinkers continue to ground 'humanness' (what makes us self-aware and makes our life meaningful) in something beyond chemeo-physical determinism/reactionism. Heidegger's 'being-towards death,' Levinas' 'Otherness,' and Derrida's 'differance' all point to this, arguing in the very structure of cognition (i.e. the very reasons why science is interesting to us and why we carry it out) extends beyond Turing complete determinism.
For me this questions bends back the fundamental possibility/intelligibility of AI. Can a thorough (i.e. Turing complete) description of the physical laws ever be reverse-compiled into that seemingly 'divine' spark of human awareness and intentionality. Description, codification, transition of sensation into intelligibility is the first step, but I'm doubtful that it can ever be translated 100% back.
Exactly. This judge is essentially speeding in order to change the speed limit. Instead of judging by the current laws and waiting for the legislature to change the laws which he can enforce, he is taking matters into his own hands and changing the law himself by stretching the law to cover the situation in the way he feels it should.
The question is: is this or isn't this simply what judges do they administer verdicts? Isn't just always inherently interpretive? Is judgment a referential or creative act?
The name Pirate Party especially intrigues me. The reason is this: movements in history often end up very far from where they start. Imagine in 100 years, when history has stripped the original reason for the naming of the 'Pirate Party' from social memory, as a father explains to his son why the majority party of their country is named after ancient sea-robbers. Already the term pirate has been shifted and reassigned once. What if some day the just majority of a society is known as pirates? Shifts in ideology produce interesting etymological histories.
...at the end of the day, they're all good ole boys and socialize and play together in their elite circles.
But also not. While the idea of America's two parties functionally being one big family is novel and intriguing, there are true separations. In the south they really drink sweet tea and own guns and have less (or different) money and go to church a lot. In the north they live in high rises and go to the opera and drive luxury cars and complain about global warming.
My point is this: I have had dinner with both liberals and republicals so blinded by ideology that had they met a (one-sided) gun fight would have surely insued. The only thing which makes this situation hilarious and tragic is how little significant space actually separates their views, thereby making their ardor hallow and frightening.
Your comment does raise an interesting point for me, however, having lived near Washington D.C. almost my entire life. I wonder if the artificiality of that town, removed from the country and from the areas where which the elected officials supposedly 'represent' is sufficiently homogenous to truly turn the majority of politics into friends behind the guise of opposition. Maybe them, like us, are just happy to have jobs and to get paid for doing relatively little... essentially for looking busy.
We all appreciate the ability to get up in arms over nothing. Ardently defending your favorite linux distro or computing platform is a cathartic experience of fervor without something actually crucial to survival being on the line. Perhaps America, so instantiated in its history of wealth and domination, has no reason for actual party creation, affiliation, or division, because nothing has sufficiently rocked the boat so as to leave us concerned to the point of change.
We're all pretty confident things will recover, one way or another, under the blundering of either blue or red. In this sense, we all believe in one party, the green party, and its simply a matter of whichever other color seems to be most affiliated with that one at the moment that we vote for.
In addition to this, what about those humans who just happen to fall into the seemingly 'mechanical pattern' that a computer registrant would? I know some parents of friends who very meticulously and methodically fill out forms, reading every box and explanation to ensure that they're inputting the right data.
Any computer judgment of what is authentically human is in a way a reverse Turing test. It's a computer judging if humans are behaving enough like humans. The problem here is too many degrees of separation: a very specific type of human [engineer] designs a computer to assess the 'humanness' of other humans actions. Any such assessment would be based on certain assumptions and biases about how humans act. It sounds like putting a document through Google translator into another language and then back again, before turning it in for a final grade.
It's like when people use ketchup to make spaghetti sauce. It sort of works, but it's just wrong.
This is a good analogy, but I think there's a deeper issue here.
Comic Sans accomplishes a brute, banal affect of familiarity and informality: a shotgun approach akin to the atrocity that is OVEREMPHASIZED, over-exclaimed(!!!) writing. The problem lies less with the typeface itself (except perhaps for lending itself particularly well to this type of exploitation) than it does with the lack of true choice available to the average computer user/document creator the world over. It's popularity is no different than the abhorrent proliferation of lens flares and single filter image edits among amateur graphics editors.
It's not a misapplication as much as an over-application. Its widespread use is like someone who puts ketchup on everything, even ice cream and fillet mignon. Its widespread use is a symptom of a culture uneducated in nuance and therefore lacking in choice.
From the article: "However, the shapes of words set in lowercase provide a valuable cue to readers that helps speed the process of reading; type in all caps forms a rectangular shape for every word, which makes distinguishing words harder."
I once read on a forum that it is on average %10 slower to read anything written in all capital then in mixed or lower case. This may not seem significant until one considers the ramifications for reading significantly long documents or the build up of lost productivity over years of reading terminal messages.
Ironic, isn't it, that the people who "declined to cash out"(read: take investors money and run) are unemployed, while many of those who pocketed the money are employed elsewhere? I would prefer it the other way around. When you played Super Mario or Donkey Kong, what happened when you stayed on one of those hovering, crumbling log platforms too long? You had to start the level over. Life is sometimes about hopping from one platform to the next, before the first one drops out from under you, and people get rewarded for that.
Instead of seeing it as cashing out, maybe see it like a surfer who knows when the wave is going to break. You get back to shore and people say, "nice ride. here's a better board, go out there and do it again, and this time we'll take pictures!"
Captain going down with his ship is romantic, but maybe not the most practical.
And if I fit any more metaphors into this post I'm going to shoot myself.
Exactly. This system is more likely to catch a bunch of nervous kids trying to work up the courage to ask out the cute girl in the next row over, not attack the cockpit for the glory of Allah.
(No offense to Allah, he probably made the cute girl in the next row.)
impressed. That video was really impressive, and the fact that they have Travis from Blink 182 (yes, let the hating begin now) doing mo-cap is awesome.
Obviously Guitar Hero has the budget to do this kind of thing, and it's all publicity and hype for their set, but I think they're doing a pretty good job on this. It still just rubs kind of weird when you realize that the closer and closer they get to the real thing, the more people are just going to want to play the real thing. I don't know about you, but that video actually made me wish I was real drummer more than anything else.
Power to Guitar Hero. As long as the competition between you and Rock Band is fair and lively, the consumer benefits! Yay competition.
I agree. I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the obvious connection between the weak sales of the first gen iPhone in Q1 and the impending release of the second generation iPhone in Q2. Don't you guys see? Q1 is *always* the weakest quarter, saleswise. not to mention you can't even buy the 1st gen iPhone from the website anymore, and like the article said, local supplies are drying up. What does that matter when millions of people buy the 2nd gen iPhone in the month(s) after release?
Besides this, didn't Jobs say he wanted to sell 10M iPhones by2008, not in 2008? Geeze and I'm not even a Mac fanboi (double checks). I hear a lot of unjustified bashing and it seems like people are missing basic ques. 3G + deals in foreign countries + techno-lust + the Christmas season and business apps = easily 10M iPhones by the end of the year, I say.
Excellent point. It's hard to see the things which have become "fundamental" to our existence sometimes. So many flashy new things are held up by undergirding of solid old technologies. Honestly, the comparison is like saying that a dot com start-up is going to replace the steel or tele-com industry. They're just in entirely different leagues, and one is built on top of the other.
Things which are flashy cannot be firm, and things which are firm cannot be flashy, history generally shows.
The problem is that there's so much at stake in computer hardware. A lot of consumer decisions are made on snap reflexes to past experiences. If your car breaks down, you don't loose thousands of miles of past driving experience, or anything as nasty as a hard drive failure on a PC. I've established loyalties to companies based not so much on what they've provided me, but on the fact that they've simply not let me down. So far, these are my Hardware company loyalties:
Motherboards: Gigabyte (2 boards + 1 RMA [my fault], 5 years)
Hard Drives: IBM/Hitatchi DeskStar (4 drives, increasing size not failures, 6 years)
GPU: nVidia (2 cards, Ti500 and 8600GT, almost 8 years)
Optical Drives: Lite-On (4 drives, 6 years)
Interestingly, the only flip-flop I've had lately is AMD to Intel. AMD rocked Intel in heat/stability/efficiency back around the Barton/P4 era. Since Duo Core, though, there's no turning back.
... making sure we actually switch stuff off at the socket... I keep trying to think of a funny and poignant way to point out that we Americans don't have the slightest notion of this concept, because its not built into to our electrical system. I'm sure you could get switches at the sockets if you intentionally looked for them, but I was 21 before I ever knew of this concept, from going over to England to visit family. It's one of those small details that sticks in your head, kind of like slang words or Cadbury chocolate. American chocolate is rubbish.
Agreed here. I don't have much hope in the mission of SETI, but Folding@Home's research is basically like throwing a gigantic brute force attack at unsolved protein mysteries. It feels like hacking, in a way. I love that idea, instead of just processing bombarded information from outer space.
What's the actual difference in energy costs, though? Not saying you're stupid or selfish for not donating, just interested in the real figures, if you've got any. I throw my system into hibernation most nights, and try to turn off the monitor at least when I go away for a couple hours during the day. What have you found your general savings to be?
Yes, I'm the best Free Open Source Software project than I know of.
Of course, the all female dev team I wrote into the design doc hasn't quite been assembled yet, but the robots we've are doing a pretty good job in the meantime.
As for the creation version. That makes it even more likely that the universe would be swarming with intelligent life. Religious people believe the Earth is teeming with life because God enjoys playing with DNA. So why wouldn't he just go wild when working with whole galaxies rather than just a single planet?
Disclaimer: I'm not trolling. I'm saying things I honestly believe might be true.
For a number of reasons:
1. Because power is often shown in restraint. This is called meekness. God said "blessed are the meek," and by these He didn't mean the powerless, but the powerful who restrain their power in proper ways. Meekness, as we've all heard, is speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Perhaps God did the same.
2. Because a tool of art is juxtaposition: God might have decided to create a vast backdrop on a canvas, and then populate one living, juxtaposing planet in the midst of all of it.
3. Because love is specific choice, not having a bunch of mistresses. I'm straying into explicitly Christian theology here, but if God loves us and created us to worship Him, perhaps he doesn't value quantity of worship but quality of worship. The concept of one single, specifically loved part of the universe seems (IMO) to be in line with God's character. In the Bible God choose Israel, a fledgling people in the universe of civilizations, not unlike our planet and solar system in relation to the entire universe, to bless and pursue. Why shouldn't he be equally as specific and unique in his creation of a single world to honor and glorify him amongst all this space?
The bible says, "The heavens declare the glory of the Lord." Perhaps all that out there exists to remind us of His size over us. To me this is a terribly beautiful concept, that we might be alone in the universe, alone by His specific choice, instead of part of random chance or just one more of the millions of planets he hits up for his glory fix on a regular basis.
Maybe this shows me to have the mind of an artist more than that of a scientist, but I'll take a beautiful possibility over a statistical possibility almost any day.
Slashdot Mirror
This story just emphasizes that litigation doesn't solve anything. How is this 'crusade' actually helping reduce the kind of really atrocious spam that consumes untold CPU cycles, internet bandwidth, and user time? I can't believe that these companies, "large and small," that are actually reachable, are the really troublesome spammers, and not just some more or less well-meaning people who didn't perfectly adhere to CAN-SPAM regulations. So, he's essentially extorting from legitimate companies and groups, rather than doing anything that reduces truly destructive and troublesome spam.
This guy seems like a lawyer's lawyer. He's getting paid by the law without having to actually represent anyone but himself.
Why on earth are they mentioning how fast rainbow tables can break an old windows hash? That has nothing to do with most pages running apache on linux. The example password would last for quite a while against a brute force attack. Anyone worth their salt wouldn't allow that many auth attempts from one IP. Get it worth their salt? Lololol. Anyhow why is the windows example being used in this article at all?
Right, but the issue is, they weren't cracking over an IP. They made off with a hash file. This is why system-level security is more important than user-level security. The problem isn't that the users had weak passwords, it's that Gawker's servers were compromised. Now the hackers don't have to worry about IP auth denial.
A hacker making off with a hash file is like a thief making off with your portable safe. Sure, it's fire proof and has a padlock, but he has all the time in the world now, in a safe environment, to gain access to your personal documents.
The bigger question is, why was your doors unlocked?
Weak passwords and fake information for meaningless sites, stronger passwords for financial and personal sites. Differentiation is the key, not complexity.
Survivor 10: Internet Edition. Web-browsers battle it our in the toughest of surfing environments: hundreds of tabs, incompatible add-ons, swamps of malware, installs on wristwatches! (Spoiler: In the finale, FireFox and IE team up (gasp!) in a last ditch effort to defeat young upstarts Safari and Chrome!)
All of which are fundamentally governed by the laws of physics. Math.
I think you're equivocating here. Governed by physics, yes, but not by math. Math is the language of description, not the laws themselves. So the equivocation here is between description and causation. Mathematics describes in a human/machine cipherable language the seemingly immutable physical principles of the universe. This type of sensual observation falls prey to Hume's complete skepticism, that we cannot say something is fundamental just because our experience of it has never been controverted. That's an impossible jump of logic, no matter how high the mound of evidence piles.
The response to Hume's skepticism is Kant's transcendentalism, a notion which de facto attempts to escape Turing completeness. Even if our divine spark doesn't come from an actual deity, Kant's claim is that we are in some way divine, he sets the plane of divinity within us. While Kant's claims need not be accurate, successive thinkers continue to ground 'humanness' (what makes us self-aware and makes our life meaningful) in something beyond chemeo-physical determinism/reactionism. Heidegger's 'being-towards death,' Levinas' 'Otherness,' and Derrida's 'differance' all point to this, arguing in the very structure of cognition (i.e. the very reasons why science is interesting to us and why we carry it out) extends beyond Turing complete determinism.
For me this questions bends back the fundamental possibility/intelligibility of AI. Can a thorough (i.e. Turing complete) description of the physical laws ever be reverse-compiled into that seemingly 'divine' spark of human awareness and intentionality. Description, codification, transition of sensation into intelligibility is the first step, but I'm doubtful that it can ever be translated 100% back.
Exactly. This judge is essentially speeding in order to change the speed limit. Instead of judging by the current laws and waiting for the legislature to change the laws which he can enforce, he is taking matters into his own hands and changing the law himself by stretching the law to cover the situation in the way he feels it should.
The question is: is this or isn't this simply what judges do they administer verdicts? Isn't just always inherently interpretive? Is judgment a referential or creative act?
The name Pirate Party especially intrigues me. The reason is this: movements in history often end up very far from where they start. Imagine in 100 years, when history has stripped the original reason for the naming of the 'Pirate Party' from social memory, as a father explains to his son why the majority party of their country is named after ancient sea-robbers. Already the term pirate has been shifted and reassigned once. What if some day the just majority of a society is known as pirates? Shifts in ideology produce interesting etymological histories.
...at the end of the day, they're all good ole boys and socialize and play together in their elite circles.
But also not. While the idea of America's two parties functionally being one big family is novel and intriguing, there are true separations. In the south they really drink sweet tea and own guns and have less (or different) money and go to church a lot. In the north they live in high rises and go to the opera and drive luxury cars and complain about global warming.
My point is this: I have had dinner with both liberals and republicals so blinded by ideology that had they met a (one-sided) gun fight would have surely insued. The only thing which makes this situation hilarious and tragic is how little significant space actually separates their views, thereby making their ardor hallow and frightening.
Your comment does raise an interesting point for me, however, having lived near Washington D.C. almost my entire life. I wonder if the artificiality of that town, removed from the country and from the areas where which the elected officials supposedly 'represent' is sufficiently homogenous to truly turn the majority of politics into friends behind the guise of opposition. Maybe them, like us, are just happy to have jobs and to get paid for doing relatively little... essentially for looking busy.
We all appreciate the ability to get up in arms over nothing. Ardently defending your favorite linux distro or computing platform is a cathartic experience of fervor without something actually crucial to survival being on the line. Perhaps America, so instantiated in its history of wealth and domination, has no reason for actual party creation, affiliation, or division, because nothing has sufficiently rocked the boat so as to leave us concerned to the point of change.
We're all pretty confident things will recover, one way or another, under the blundering of either blue or red. In this sense, we all believe in one party, the green party, and its simply a matter of whichever other color seems to be most affiliated with that one at the moment that we vote for.
In addition to this, what about those humans who just happen to fall into the seemingly 'mechanical pattern' that a computer registrant would? I know some parents of friends who very meticulously and methodically fill out forms, reading every box and explanation to ensure that they're inputting the right data.
Any computer judgment of what is authentically human is in a way a reverse Turing test. It's a computer judging if humans are behaving enough like humans. The problem here is too many degrees of separation: a very specific type of human [engineer] designs a computer to assess the 'humanness' of other humans actions. Any such assessment would be based on certain assumptions and biases about how humans act. It sounds like putting a document through Google translator into another language and then back again, before turning it in for a final grade.
It's like when people use ketchup to make spaghetti sauce. It sort of works, but it's just wrong.
This is a good analogy, but I think there's a deeper issue here.
Comic Sans accomplishes a brute, banal affect of familiarity and informality: a shotgun approach akin to the atrocity that is OVEREMPHASIZED, over-exclaimed(!!!) writing. The problem lies less with the typeface itself (except perhaps for lending itself particularly well to this type of exploitation) than it does with the lack of true choice available to the average computer user/document creator the world over. It's popularity is no different than the abhorrent proliferation of lens flares and single filter image edits among amateur graphics editors.
It's not a misapplication as much as an over-application. Its widespread use is like someone who puts ketchup on everything, even ice cream and fillet mignon. Its widespread use is a symptom of a culture uneducated in nuance and therefore lacking in choice.
Also, in addition to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps
From the article: "However, the shapes of words set in lowercase provide a valuable cue to readers that helps speed the process of reading; type in all caps forms a rectangular shape for every word, which makes distinguishing words harder."
I once read on a forum that it is on average %10 slower to read anything written in all capital then in mixed or lower case. This may not seem significant until one considers the ramifications for reading significantly long documents or the build up of lost productivity over years of reading terminal messages.
What about Papyrus? Where is the outrage over that faux-elegant atrocity?
... that lets you interact with the globe, draw markers, add layers or integrate with Google MapsAww crap! I thought they meant real markers! ...
Anyone know how to get sharpie out of LCD?
Instead of seeing it as cashing out, maybe see it like a surfer who knows when the wave is going to break. You get back to shore and people say, "nice ride. here's a better board, go out there and do it again, and this time we'll take pictures!"
Captain going down with his ship is romantic, but maybe not the most practical.
And if I fit any more metaphors into this post I'm going to shoot myself.
(No offense to Allah, he probably made the cute girl in the next row.)
because perpetrators wouldn't ever be calm or completely resigned to their fate/choice.
Obviously Guitar Hero has the budget to do this kind of thing, and it's all publicity and hype for their set, but I think they're doing a pretty good job on this. It still just rubs kind of weird when you realize that the closer and closer they get to the real thing, the more people are just going to want to play the real thing. I don't know about you, but that video actually made me wish I was real drummer more than anything else.
Power to Guitar Hero. As long as the competition between you and Rock Band is fair and lively, the consumer benefits! Yay competition.
Besides this, didn't Jobs say he wanted to sell 10M iPhones by2008, not in 2008? Geeze and I'm not even a Mac fanboi (double checks). I hear a lot of unjustified bashing and it seems like people are missing basic ques. 3G + deals in foreign countries + techno-lust + the Christmas season and business apps = easily 10M iPhones by the end of the year, I say.
Things which are flashy cannot be firm, and things which are firm cannot be flashy, history generally shows.
Motherboards: Gigabyte (2 boards + 1 RMA [my fault], 5 years)
Hard Drives: IBM/Hitatchi DeskStar (4 drives, increasing size not failures, 6 years)
GPU: nVidia (2 cards, Ti500 and 8600GT, almost 8 years)
Optical Drives: Lite-On (4 drives, 6 years)
Interestingly, the only flip-flop I've had lately is AMD to Intel. AMD rocked Intel in heat/stability/efficiency back around the Barton/P4 era. Since Duo Core, though, there's no turning back.
... making sure we actually switch stuff off at the socketAgreed here. I don't have much hope in the mission of SETI, but Folding@Home's research is basically like throwing a gigantic brute force attack at unsolved protein mysteries. It feels like hacking, in a way. I love that idea, instead of just processing bombarded information from outer space.
What's the actual difference in energy costs, though? Not saying you're stupid or selfish for not donating, just interested in the real figures, if you've got any. I throw my system into hibernation most nights, and try to turn off the monitor at least when I go away for a couple hours during the day. What have you found your general savings to be?
Dixy cup.
Of course, the all female dev team I wrote into the design doc hasn't quite been assembled yet, but the robots we've are doing a pretty good job in the meantime.
Please, donate for a good cause.
Disclaimer: I'm not trolling. I'm saying things I honestly believe might be true.
For a number of reasons:
1. Because power is often shown in restraint. This is called meekness. God said "blessed are the meek," and by these He didn't mean the powerless, but the powerful who restrain their power in proper ways. Meekness, as we've all heard, is speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Perhaps God did the same.
2. Because a tool of art is juxtaposition: God might have decided to create a vast backdrop on a canvas, and then populate one living, juxtaposing planet in the midst of all of it.
3. Because love is specific choice, not having a bunch of mistresses. I'm straying into explicitly Christian theology here, but if God loves us and created us to worship Him, perhaps he doesn't value quantity of worship but quality of worship. The concept of one single, specifically loved part of the universe seems (IMO) to be in line with God's character. In the Bible God choose Israel, a fledgling people in the universe of civilizations, not unlike our planet and solar system in relation to the entire universe, to bless and pursue. Why shouldn't he be equally as specific and unique in his creation of a single world to honor and glorify him amongst all this space?
The bible says, "The heavens declare the glory of the Lord." Perhaps all that out there exists to remind us of His size over us. To me this is a terribly beautiful concept, that we might be alone in the universe, alone by His specific choice, instead of part of random chance or just one more of the millions of planets he hits up for his glory fix on a regular basis.
Maybe this shows me to have the mind of an artist more than that of a scientist, but I'll take a beautiful possibility over a statistical possibility almost any day.
Technorant, out.