They're getting pretty close, actually. The message "Bum fights! See two bums beat the crap out of each other!" arrived in my mailbox a few weeks ago.
Unfortunately, the images don't work now, and I'm afraid to look it up on Google.
Interesting thought though - how about becoming one of the Marketing Beelzebubs themselves, but send out spoof spam instead? Hopefully the "S""N"R (where S = real spam && N = fake spam) would lessen the effectiveness of "the real stuff", and give people a laugh...
Well.. it was just an idea.
Poster does not condone unsolicited bulk mailing in any way shape of form etc etc blah blah blah.
"basically you have to hand the decision over to someone else"
Perhaps it's another instance of p2p use other than simple content trading... I've heard of various ideas that could implement combinations of mail headers, mailing lists and some filtering process (procmail, say) to provide ratings for others' e-mails, i.e. if you get a spam, you can mark it as such so that your mark gets received by others looking out for the message. The client filtering software then uses an entire web of trust to rate messages accordingly.
Naturally, the use of p2p in such a way depends on a multitude of factors, such as scalability, vulnerability, etc. Plus, I still believe a more active anti-spam approach would have a more drastic impact on the source.
Had a scan through Paul Graham's write-up, which fits in with an idea I've kicked about my head for a while now, which is basically using GAs and prolonged statistical analysis to spot spam trends. I think this holds much promise. It would, however, be interesting to see how spammers reacted if such filtering became widespread to the point of effectiveness against them. Spam attached to lists of jokes? Amusing AVIs? "Hey, look at this funny monkey sniffing its own butt! Wouldn't you find it funnier if you had a fantastically large penis?"
Conceptually, this doesn't really appear to be too different to the current system of mailing blacklists - except the first "opt-out" database is instead the client choice of using the second database. On the whole.
The main problems I can see with either system are that firstly, it's still an opt-out mechanism. Unfortunately, opt-in systems are (at least currently) more politically-induced rather than technologically, i.e. laws rather than code, which personally I find less ideal. The other point is the perennial problem of inappropriate censorship. For instance, recently the Politech mailing list has found itself on a number of blacklists, when it clearly shouldn't be. The question is how do you know for certain that those on the blacklist are validly there? Or, more abstractly, how do you know what is spam to some people isn't useful to others? And who gets to decide?
Clearly spam is increasing as the Internet grows, and not only do more unsuspecters get caught in the click-through marketing traps, but also more people find their way into the Temple of the Spam Merchant, and try to make a fast buck. I suspect simple blocking procedures, that only the more tech-savvy would use anyway, will do nothing to decrease the amount of spam. Rather, the wave of bulk mail will only lessen once the effort to send it is unbearingly more than the benefits gained.
Perhaps one method is to not ignore it at all, and instead waste as much of their time as possible. If everyone replied to one spam a day (by visiting the website, phoning them up, et al.) then how long would it take the spammer to realise they spent more than half their time following up false business leads? This is an idea that a fe have adopted, and there are various websites that reveal their adventures, but unless it becomes more commonplace, there's still no reason for spammers to stop.
By rewriting wiretap laws, CSEA would allow limited surveillance without a court order when there is an "ongoing attack" on an Internet-connected computer or "an immediate threat to a national security interest."
Forget the life sentence bit, does this mean that there are going to be yet further vaguities being introduced that allow anyone to seize your logs just because they don't like what you're thinking?
Another comparison worth making is between "18" and David Bowie's new LP, "Heathen". The latter was deliberately produced without copy protection, Mr. Bowie being one of the artists who has faith in both the technology and his fans. It's currently at number 11 in the UK, down from number 5.
Bullshit. As has been pointed out time and time again, you can increase security all you like, lock down men, women and children in their little homes with their little TVs just so they can't be harmed, and bring in all the laws you want. But at the end of the day if someone wants to inflict horrible damage upon you and your population, then they will.
Privacy and rights are not mindless. It's standing up for what makes the human race so great - individuality, and the ability to think and speak for oneself.
If you want answers, first you have to find the questions. Now, the question is not "how can we stop people killing us?" but rather "Why do they want to kill us?" Once we've asked that (which is currently a rarity, thanks to the loss of freedom of speech), then we can sort out the solutions. Don't claim that security through obscurity is going to help anything, because it's not.
Re:It's a new world, folks, adjust your arguments
on
Surveillance Update
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
They're scared because they've been told to be scared. The shrieking hysteria emanating from TV sets, the reassuring paranoia that politicians advocate, the mass hallucination that is popular media. All of it.
People like to be scared, that's the reason why 1984 is so popular. Fear gives people a sense of place, the security that all they have to do is wrap themselves in a blanket and they can get on with doing nothing. Without fear, people would have to think, and would have to actually do something. People like to be scared, and that's what they're getting.
The one hope, the way to get out of this, is to move this critical mass all at once. Drag an entire mindset out of its creepy little hole with no light (but at least it's warm there). If there's one thing that fear instills, it's an affinity with leadership - sombody else that's making decisions and doing all of the thinking for them.
In an age of information "overload", this leader is just whoever happens to be shouting the loudest. Democracy, an excuse for people to feel less guilty about not thinking, is the means by which those that shout the loudest get to maintain their position. In order to shift the mass of the masses, an assault on their perception is needed. Independent media is one start, but it needs to progress into and right through dependent media and the word on the street. We can argue for liberty over safety, we just have to make sure it's heard above the noise of calming warmongering.
Time to wake up, boys n girls. The legacy philosophies we've suckled on for so long have finally been whipped out from under us like some magician's tablecloth. No more the unharrassed, laissez-faire, self-regulated, sensical approach. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy for letting it go.
And yet all is not lost. This is the net, a place driven by evolution and change and progress. It evolved from one organisation's needs to an unpredictable beast that panders to the needs of anyone and everyone, a panacaea for a sick society dependent on simple variety. And now it's being tamed.
Look around. Netspace has grown stale and bloated. Development, the slave of investment and capital, galumphs towards stationary anguish, a victim of its own success, the energy required to organise its own grotesque matter turning it into a turgid lump feeding off the ideas and technologies that made it so successful all those years ago.
But all is not lost. Much as the limitations and restrictions imposed upon content distribution begat the rise of distributed systems, just as the advances of surveillance gave birth to fresh, simpler waves of viruses, so the need now is for infrastructures that take back what was previously reigned by an absence of crumbling politics. The technology means anything's possible, the forces driving us towards necessity are gathering and rumbling. Time to change the net again.
As with the rest of MS' target markets, sales are driven by the people that don't know any better other than what they are told. Believe the Hype[tm].
What we really need is the counter-argument in the Right Place - complaining on/. is fine for the converted. The real next step is to take on MS at their forte - the message that is marketing. Get a few outspoken OSS evangelists out there on soapboxes, run some ads paid for by donations maybe. Anything to influence the sheeple into realising that they have a choice.
How long until we see overlaid adverts during shows? Captive audiences. There must be one of those screen corners left to show a rotating Coke can during the kiddies' cartoons, or enough space along the top to scroll some translucent pictures of MacD's latest offering...
Or maybe it's already here. I dunno, I don't watch a a great deal. And most of that's BBC.
I've mirrored the links out of a sense of rebellion and to see what happens:) Whether it will achieve anything remains to be seen, but it at least publicises the extent to which both the DMCA and Scientology is so very, very wrong. There is no way to silence criticism on the net, but if scare tactics were to work then this would be a disturbed place indeed. Hence my mirroring.
Fair point. IE6 doesn't load any slower than Moz, works, does everything IE 5 did... And, indeed, while it's bundled with Windows, I fear that many people will still be happy with it and that the monopoly shall continue.
I'm using Linux on my home desktop, and Win2k at work, and am running Moz on both for several reasons:
Mail - ignoring the browser for a mo... But I don't really fancy loading both Moz and Outlook, so it makes sense to use either Outlook/IE or just Mozilla. And the IMAP support in Outlook is blown away by.. uh.. well, anything, really. So Moz gets that bit.
Peace of mind - Mozilla had its cookie and image managers way before IE 6 came out. I love the "enable cookies only from original server" aspect. Coupled with this goes the whole IE privacy issues - I have no idea who's looking at what I'm looking at in IE, authenticated-Microsoft or otherwise.
Extendability - mozdev.org (currently dead tho?) is a fantastic example of OSS community. From Annozilla to Recall to Multizilla, it's good to see people picking it up, and I hope the projects will evolve as Mozilla does.
Debugging - From a web developer POV. Microsoft and "useful debugging info" in the same sentence? Ahahahah. No, seriously. Ahaha.
Bizarrely, despite MS's desperate attempts to blend the boundaries between the desktop and the net, IE is still very much just a window for browsing remote sites. If anything, it's moving info away from the desktop into the waiting arms of fat controllers. Mozilla (and, I suspect, many other browsers) has succeeded in providing a platform from which interactivity and true innovation is infinitely more feasible, the seeds of which we are seeing now. Distributed independence. If AOL take it and run with it without screwing it over with hype and brand names, and if the Mozilla team can carry on the good work, iron out all the blatant bugs and maximise performance, then I'll be a very happy man.
This would be so laughable that it hurts if the RIAA didn't take it all so seriously... Anyway, check this out:
Full-length CD units dropped 6.4 percent in 2001... Whereas CDs represented 87 percent of units shipped to U.S. markets in 2000, CDs represented 91 percent of all units shipped in 2001.
Leaving the price-hikes and the crap music arguments aside... People are also buying less cassettes (which also happen to be cheaper than CDs) as they fade into obscurity, hence the unit number drop. LP numbers stay the same though. Therefore it must mean that people are illegally recording entire music collections onto tape, rather than buying it! Scoundrels...
The DVD music video has shown its continued popularity with an incredible 138 percent increase to 7.9 million units shipped in 2001.
Music videos have been available free on the net for years, and naturally, this piracy fiasco surrounding DVDs means that numbers have plumme- What?? People are actually buying a new format? Quick put all the prices up before they start to pirate them, too! We'll criminalize our paying consumers before they know what's hit them!
So it's finally been worked out that Microsoft's word (as opposed to (but not excluding) MS' Word[tm]) is not to be trusted, and that the only real way to settle this all properly is to see the case with the states' own eyes.
At least two issues come out of this with regards the case though:
How much can we trust Microsoft to hand over untampered code? If they had any sense (from their point of view) then they would have worked on a special branch of the code that was deliberately obfuscated and/or integrated, all ready to hand over if the time came. They'll still fight the order, naturally. But it always helps to be prepared for the worst.
What are the chances of the States finding further anti-trust evidence? Fortunately IANAL. But does this news mean that they are only allowed to present excerpts and reasoning from the source code that is applicable to the integration issue, or are they allowed to bring other issues to light should they discover any?
Yes I've tried it. Absolutely yes, technically speaking you cannot hijack an account by just follwing the web forms (leaving possible vulnerabilities aside). But have you tried taking control of an account in your name? To reset your password you have to provide location information that matches the current Passport settings - these are changeable without validating the e-mail address, effectively making this reset-via-webpage step impossible. From there, you can reset it via e-mail, which provides a mail with a link to reset it, which works.
Call me lazy, but I don't fancy having to go through all of that just because Microsoft couldn't be bothered to implement simple, well established e-mail validation techniques.
Anything that does that is clearly the Spawn of Satan's Spawn.
"The important thing with this is that the web becomes the hub," explains Mr Burwood.
...as well as other web-centric ideals. Is this it then? The all-encompassing "Internet" has finally been superceded by the ever-evolving, designed-for-hypertext "web". Or I could just be too pedantic.
What distresses me more is the banality which this vision of the future holds. "And on a Saturday afternoon, all it does is monitor the football results for you." Oh woohoo and other saracasm. Sure, there's plenty of talk here about how IT can make everything "easier" (and I'll believe it when I can put my hands through its sides), yet nothing about how we can reach out and achieve new experiences, interact with people and ideas that we never thought we'd even dream about...
"Underlying all the elements of CoolTown is the potential of the internet to affect people's lives."
Time to fulfil the potential, not mould it into the pap of society that seems to extrude from every firewalled port at the moment.
Dictionarily, yes. It would satisfy the conditions of being both "bulk" (as the same message gets sent by the MS mail gateway to several users, as per normal working conditions) and "unsolicited" in that the people receiving it never asked for it.
But then, this is the exact same service being provided by MS Passport (and to be fair, any other decent service) anyway - it's just being abused. If somebody were to mail 1000 people informing them that their accounts had been breached, would that be spam?
On a different note, spam has become one of the most publicised and hated aspects to e-mail. Its abhorrence in the public eye is easily confirmed by its insidious nature, reaching anybody and everybody. The means by which spam is popular is also the means by which it has become so despised - everybody has had to suffer it. How else better to change the perception of the general public than to hit them directly?
Quick update on how passport seems to work - there is a "Reset my password" link, in case you've forgotten your password, obviously, but also to be used if someone else were to sign you up, I guess. This works fine - it took a while longer to come through than the "Welcome to MSN Passport" e-mail did, but it got there.
This is great if someone just signs you up and leaves it at that. However, the same e-mail verification process (get the sign-up statistics first, ask for validation later...) is used if you want to change your e-mail. So by the time they confirm the password reset, they're told that the account is not registered at all! If they then don't register with passport.com, there is nothing AFAICS to stop the account being pointed back at that e-mail, starting the fun and games from scratch again.
I also assume (subject to further tests) that the same mechanism is still in place for subscribing to e-mail lists and the like. We shall see...
I have been on the receiving end of Microsoft's "Security Policy" in the past, finding myself (accidentally or deliberately, I have no idea) subscribed to several salubrious MSN forums. After several months and few non-automated replies, I finally topped receiving the e-mails, but with neither explanation of why I got them, who had done it, nor even an acknowledgement or an apology.
Let us now put this into the context of the passport scheme - the EPIC letter states "Microsoft has indicated that the company's goal is to have every Internet user possess a Passport account", which I deem a fair summary of the situation (although, ideally, everybody would also use a Hotmail account too). Trundle along to, say, http://www.passport.com and look! See how you can sign up with ease! Get it now! Calooh! Callay!
Now let us try to pull the same trick that was pulled on me, and that I have fortunately not seen on any well-organised mailing list outside of Redmond. Enter an e-mail address, any e-mail address (excepting MS-specific ones such as Hotmail) - even make one up that obviosuly doesn't exist, and then... Carry On! Yes! There's still no security! At least, I guess, an e-mail gets sent to the e-mail address asking you to verify it, but this seems to be purely for service embellishment:
Please take a moment to help us verify your e-mail address. This ensures that.NET Passport can respond to you if you contact us about a service issue. In addition, some participating.NET Passport sites may require you to verify your e-mail address to take full advantage of their own services.
Using the new obviously-fake account, I can save settings, edit my MSN etc etc much as I may or may not want to. That is not the issue. What we have here is clearly a case of theft of privacy - without even trying, anyone is able to sign up anybody else's e-mail account for a passport. Who knows what havoc this could/will cause! Not being particularly au fait with MSN, I have only circumspection, but Microsoft have an epic journey to go before they reach "Trustworthy Computing [tm]" if they fail to understand the basics of privacy and intrusion, as highlighted here.
To conclude, I say get out there, fight it from the other end - the end that consumers will understand. Sign up as many fake and real accounts as you like to demonstrate just how fallible the system is. I'm off to see if they prevent scripting...
* The Content files are encrypted and the Player contains decryption technology. You agree to abide by U.S. and other applicable export control laws and not to transfer any material subject to restrictions under such laws to a national destination or person prohibited under such laws.
So now it's illegal to get US discs sent over to the UK (or, indeed, anywhere)? Someone's been talking too much to the MPAA. How long until we see CDs with Zones on them?
Not that it matters. I can't play it on my Linux install anyway...
The Register covered this too, including some of their usual paranoia;) backed up by this:
"Predictive has also filed a patent for a biometric system which identifies different individuals within the same household. The system works on recognising people's keystroke, mouse or remote-control usage patterns. It says that it generates random, anonymous IDs each time, which have the effect of protecting privacy, rather than invading it."
There have been lots of comments along the lines of, "this is just a novel compression/transmi[ss]ion scheme"
Well yes, as would almost any advance in data transmission be. The idea is to get information from one place to another as fast as possible, so reducing the size makes it faster...
For me, the important difference to note here is that:
"We send recipes, not pieces of content..."
So with "symbols", the sender is informing the receiver how to create the file. The only similar paradigm I can think of right now is the DCT techniques used in JPEGs, whereby the pixels are approximated and then described via a combination of mathematical waves. But I'm very tired, so there are probably loads more...
Without knowing the intimate details, it's hard to say how much of an improvement over current FTP methods this yields. I suspect that the gain would depend on not only the size of the file, but also the type of the file - the same two factors that affect just about any other form of compression (Lempel-Zif, to be least complex). As in the article:
Transporter Fountain was created to handle large, long-distance file transfers
(my emphasis) - the situations described here, such as back-up information (long streams of continuous data) would naturally be suited a lot better to this way.
Unfortunately, the article doesn't go into more complex details about how the symbols are sent (a UDP stream is implied, and makes sense if you only need a subset of the generated symbols to regenerate the file). Time to dig...
Slashdot Mirror
you should make your mark want to see your ads.
They're getting pretty close, actually. The message "Bum fights! See two bums beat the crap out of each other!" arrived in my mailbox a few weeks ago.
Unfortunately, the images don't work now, and I'm afraid to look it up on Google.
Interesting thought though - how about becoming one of the Marketing Beelzebubs themselves, but send out spoof spam instead? Hopefully the "S""N"R (where S = real spam && N = fake spam) would lessen the effectiveness of "the real stuff", and give people a laugh...
Well.. it was just an idea.
Poster does not condone unsolicited bulk mailing in any way shape of form etc etc blah blah blah.
"basically you have to hand the decision over to someone else"
Perhaps it's another instance of p2p use other than simple content trading... I've heard of various ideas that could implement combinations of mail headers, mailing lists and some filtering process (procmail, say) to provide ratings for others' e-mails, i.e. if you get a spam, you can mark it as such so that your mark gets received by others looking out for the message. The client filtering software then uses an entire web of trust to rate messages accordingly.
Naturally, the use of p2p in such a way depends on a multitude of factors, such as scalability, vulnerability, etc. Plus, I still believe a more active anti-spam approach would have a more drastic impact on the source.
Had a scan through Paul Graham's write-up, which fits in with an idea I've kicked about my head for a while now, which is basically using GAs and prolonged statistical analysis to spot spam trends. I think this holds much promise. It would, however, be interesting to see how spammers reacted if such filtering became widespread to the point of effectiveness against them. Spam attached to lists of jokes? Amusing AVIs? "Hey, look at this funny monkey sniffing its own butt! Wouldn't you find it funnier if you had a fantastically large penis?"
The main problems I can see with either system are that firstly, it's still an opt-out mechanism. Unfortunately, opt-in systems are (at least currently) more politically-induced rather than technologically, i.e. laws rather than code, which personally I find less ideal. The other point is the perennial problem of inappropriate censorship. For instance, recently the Politech mailing list has found itself on a number of blacklists, when it clearly shouldn't be. The question is how do you know for certain that those on the blacklist are validly there? Or, more abstractly, how do you know what is spam to some people isn't useful to others? And who gets to decide?
Clearly spam is increasing as the Internet grows, and not only do more unsuspecters get caught in the click-through marketing traps, but also more people find their way into the Temple of the Spam Merchant, and try to make a fast buck. I suspect simple blocking procedures, that only the more tech-savvy would use anyway, will do nothing to decrease the amount of spam. Rather, the wave of bulk mail will only lessen once the effort to send it is unbearingly more than the benefits gained.
Perhaps one method is to not ignore it at all, and instead waste as much of their time as possible. If everyone replied to one spam a day (by visiting the website, phoning them up, et al.) then how long would it take the spammer to realise they spent more than half their time following up false business leads? This is an idea that a fe have adopted, and there are various websites that reveal their adventures, but unless it becomes more commonplace, there's still no reason for spammers to stop.
Another comparison worth making is between "18" and David Bowie's new LP, "Heathen". The latter was deliberately produced without copy protection, Mr. Bowie being one of the artists who has faith in both the technology and his fans. It's currently at number 11 in the UK, down from number 5.
Stop whinging Moby. Come up with a better excuse.
Bullshit. As has been pointed out time and time again, you can increase security all you like, lock down men, women and children in their little homes with their little TVs just so they can't be harmed, and bring in all the laws you want. But at the end of the day if someone wants to inflict horrible damage upon you and your population, then they will.
Privacy and rights are not mindless. It's standing up for what makes the human race so great - individuality, and the ability to think and speak for oneself.
If you want answers, first you have to find the questions. Now, the question is not "how can we stop people killing us?" but rather "Why do they want to kill us?" Once we've asked that (which is currently a rarity, thanks to the loss of freedom of speech), then we can sort out the solutions. Don't claim that security through obscurity is going to help anything, because it's not.
They're scared because they've been told to be scared. The shrieking hysteria emanating from TV sets, the reassuring paranoia that politicians advocate, the mass hallucination that is popular media. All of it.
People like to be scared, that's the reason why 1984 is so popular. Fear gives people a sense of place, the security that all they have to do is wrap themselves in a blanket and they can get on with doing nothing. Without fear, people would have to think, and would have to actually do something. People like to be scared, and that's what they're getting.
The one hope, the way to get out of this, is to move this critical mass all at once. Drag an entire mindset out of its creepy little hole with no light (but at least it's warm there). If there's one thing that fear instills, it's an affinity with leadership - sombody else that's making decisions and doing all of the thinking for them.
In an age of information "overload", this leader is just whoever happens to be shouting the loudest. Democracy, an excuse for people to feel less guilty about not thinking, is the means by which those that shout the loudest get to maintain their position. In order to shift the mass of the masses, an assault on their perception is needed. Independent media is one start, but it needs to progress into and right through dependent media and the word on the street. We can argue for liberty over safety, we just have to make sure it's heard above the noise of calming warmongering.
Time to wake up, boys n girls. The legacy philosophies we've suckled on for so long have finally been whipped out from under us like some magician's tablecloth. No more the unharrassed, laissez-faire, self-regulated, sensical approach. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy for letting it go.
And yet all is not lost. This is the net, a place driven by evolution and change and progress. It evolved from one organisation's needs to an unpredictable beast that panders to the needs of anyone and everyone, a panacaea for a sick society dependent on simple variety. And now it's being tamed.
Look around. Netspace has grown stale and bloated. Development, the slave of investment and capital, galumphs towards stationary anguish, a victim of its own success, the energy required to organise its own grotesque matter turning it into a turgid lump feeding off the ideas and technologies that made it so successful all those years ago.
But all is not lost. Much as the limitations and restrictions imposed upon content distribution begat the rise of distributed systems, just as the advances of surveillance gave birth to fresh, simpler waves of viruses, so the need now is for infrastructures that take back what was previously reigned by an absence of crumbling politics. The technology means anything's possible, the forces driving us towards necessity are gathering and rumbling. Time to change the net again.
As with the rest of MS' target markets, sales are driven by the people that don't know any better other than what they are told. Believe the Hype[tm].
/. is fine for the converted. The real next step is to take on MS at their forte - the message that is marketing. Get a few outspoken OSS evangelists out there on soapboxes, run some ads paid for by donations maybe. Anything to influence the sheeple into realising that they have a choice.
What we really need is the counter-argument in the Right Place - complaining on
"Fuck" and "Microsoft" seem to be blocked as names. But creative use of spaces gets around it quite nicely.
How long until we see overlaid adverts during shows? Captive audiences. There must be one of those screen corners left to show a rotating Coke can during the kiddies' cartoons, or enough space along the top to scroll some translucent pictures of MacD's latest offering...
Or maybe it's already here. I dunno, I don't watch a a great deal. And most of that's BBC.
Divide and conquer.
I'm using Linux on my home desktop, and Win2k at work, and am running Moz on both for several reasons:
Bizarrely, despite MS's desperate attempts to blend the boundaries between the desktop and the net, IE is still very much just a window for browsing remote sites. If anything, it's moving info away from the desktop into the waiting arms of fat controllers. Mozilla (and, I suspect, many other browsers) has succeeded in providing a platform from which interactivity and true innovation is infinitely more feasible, the seeds of which we are seeing now. Distributed independence. If AOL take it and run with it without screwing it over with hype and brand names, and if the Mozilla team can carry on the good work, iron out all the blatant bugs and maximise performance, then I'll be a very happy man.
Leaving the price-hikes and the crap music arguments aside... People are also buying less cassettes (which also happen to be cheaper than CDs) as they fade into obscurity, hence the unit number drop. LP numbers stay the same though. Therefore it must mean that people are illegally recording entire music collections onto tape, rather than buying it! Scoundrels...
Music videos have been available free on the net for years, and naturally, this piracy fiasco surrounding DVDs means that numbers have plumme- What?? People are actually buying a new format? Quick put all the prices up before they start to pirate them, too! We'll criminalize our paying consumers before they know what's hit them!
At least two issues come out of this with regards the case though:
Call me lazy, but I don't fancy having to go through all of that just because Microsoft couldn't be bothered to implement simple, well established e-mail validation techniques.
Fastest way to get a). the general public and b). Microsoft to take note.
Quote: "I'm waking you 30 minutes early"
Anything that does that is clearly the Spawn of Satan's Spawn.
"The important thing with this is that the web becomes the hub," explains Mr Burwood.
...as well as other web-centric ideals. Is this it then? The all-encompassing "Internet" has finally been superceded by the ever-evolving, designed-for-hypertext "web". Or I could just be too pedantic.
What distresses me more is the banality which this vision of the future holds. "And on a Saturday afternoon, all it does is monitor the football results for you." Oh woohoo and other saracasm. Sure, there's plenty of talk here about how IT can make everything "easier" (and I'll believe it when I can put my hands through its sides), yet nothing about how we can reach out and achieve new experiences, interact with people and ideas that we never thought we'd even dream about...
"Underlying all the elements of CoolTown is the potential of the internet to affect people's lives."
Time to fulfil the potential, not mould it into the pap of society that seems to extrude from every firewalled port at the moment.
But then, this is the exact same service being provided by MS Passport (and to be fair, any other decent service) anyway - it's just being abused. If somebody were to mail 1000 people informing them that their accounts had been breached, would that be spam?
On a different note, spam has become one of the most publicised and hated aspects to e-mail. Its abhorrence in the public eye is easily confirmed by its insidious nature, reaching anybody and everybody. The means by which spam is popular is also the means by which it has become so despised - everybody has had to suffer it. How else better to change the perception of the general public than to hit them directly?
This is great if someone just signs you up and leaves it at that. However, the same e-mail verification process (get the sign-up statistics first, ask for validation later...) is used if you want to change your e-mail. So by the time they confirm the password reset, they're told that the account is not registered at all! If they then don't register with passport.com, there is nothing AFAICS to stop the account being pointed back at that e-mail, starting the fun and games from scratch again.
I also assume (subject to further tests) that the same mechanism is still in place for subscribing to e-mail lists and the like. We shall see...
Let us now put this into the context of the passport scheme - the EPIC letter states "Microsoft has indicated that the company's goal is to have every Internet user possess a Passport account", which I deem a fair summary of the situation (although, ideally, everybody would also use a Hotmail account too). Trundle along to, say, http://www.passport.com and look! See how you can sign up with ease! Get it now! Calooh! Callay!
Now let us try to pull the same trick that was pulled on me, and that I have fortunately not seen on any well-organised mailing list outside of Redmond. Enter an e-mail address, any e-mail address (excepting MS-specific ones such as Hotmail) - even make one up that obviosuly doesn't exist, and then... Carry On! Yes! There's still no security! At least, I guess, an e-mail gets sent to the e-mail address asking you to verify it, but this seems to be purely for service embellishment:
Using the new obviously-fake account, I can save settings, edit my MSN etc etc much as I may or may not want to. That is not the issue. What we have here is clearly a case of theft of privacy - without even trying, anyone is able to sign up anybody else's e-mail account for a passport. Who knows what havoc this could/will cause! Not being particularly au fait with MSN, I have only circumspection, but Microsoft have an epic journey to go before they reach "Trustworthy Computing [tm]" if they fail to understand the basics of privacy and intrusion, as highlighted here.
To conclude, I say get out there, fight it from the other end - the end that consumers will understand. Sign up as many fake and real accounts as you like to demonstrate just how fallible the system is. I'm off to see if they prevent scripting...
So now it's illegal to get US discs sent over to the UK (or, indeed, anywhere)? Someone's been talking too much to the MPAA. How long until we see CDs with Zones on them?
Not that it matters. I can't play it on my Linux install anyway...
Well yes, as would almost any advance in data transmission be. The idea is to get information from one place to another as fast as possible, so reducing the size makes it faster...
For me, the important difference to note here is that:
So with "symbols", the sender is informing the receiver how to create the file. The only similar paradigm I can think of right now is the DCT techniques used in JPEGs, whereby the pixels are approximated and then described via a combination of mathematical waves. But I'm very tired, so there are probably loads more...
Without knowing the intimate details, it's hard to say how much of an improvement over current FTP methods this yields. I suspect that the gain would depend on not only the size of the file, but also the type of the file - the same two factors that affect just about any other form of compression (Lempel-Zif, to be least complex). As in the article:
(my emphasis) - the situations described here, such as back-up information (long streams of continuous data) would naturally be suited a lot better to this way.
Unfortunately, the article doesn't go into more complex details about how the symbols are sent (a UDP stream is implied, and makes sense if you only need a subset of the generated symbols to regenerate the file). Time to dig...
...gotta be one of these!