Actually, Amazon can work without cookies enabled at all. Persistence is handled by an identifier that every link on the site has, which is also stored in a cookie. Try it yourself -- disable cookies, log in, and tool around for a while. You get very nearly the same experience.
Re:All Your A Root Server Are Belong To Us!
on
The Root of All E-Mail
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Wow, that's the least funny parody of an old joke I've ever read.
I don't think my real name, address, email address, phone numbers, job information, etc, is worth the ability to read an article on any website, no matter how upscale.
Yeah, use fake information, blah, but it's still stupid.
BTW, ANY student who majors in CS will know what a core dump is, dont be alarmist. Any student who isnt CS, has no reason to know. So what?
I'm not so sure. The college I went to has switched to all-microsoft for their courses. CS students are no longer exposed to the *nix way of doing things; they are instead taught how to assemble MFC forms and write handlers for their buttons.
Windows applications don't produce core dumps, they just GPF and are swept under the rug. It's likely that students who graduate in the next few years will not know what a core dump is or why they should care about it.
That's the default.ico file, a Microsoft 'feature' that the rest of the industry has adopted (probably because they were sick of getting bad requests from MSIE). I don't know if Mozilla supports it (it would have to render a Microsoft icon format image), but if it does you may have to bookmark it.
Personally I find it amusing that Slashdot has the icon at all, given that the overwhelming vibe here is anti-MS-influence.
1. Terrorists DO benefit from anthrax, because it's scaring the shit out of the nation. That's, uh, the point of terrorism.
2. Saying OSS doesn't benefit from passport exploits implies that the Open Source Software movement is responsible for the exploits. They're not. Microsoft is. And through some twisted, delusional logic you assert that Microsoft benefits from building in exploits.
It's a well-known fact that CmdrTaco is trying to make it as easy as possible for trolls to post to slashdot, because he could use them as an excuse to further crack down on Joe Poster.
Also, hospitals won't treat you if they find you have an organ donor card -- they'll let you die because other people need your organs.
Furthermore, the entire world is an intricate conspiracy designed to repress you.
The text of the bill as passed to the senate is posted on the site:
SEC. 224. SUNSET.
(a) IN GENERAL- Except as provided in subsection (b), this title and the amendments made by this title (other than sections 203(a), 203(c), 205, 208, 210, 211, 213, 216, 219, 221, and 222, and the amendments made by those sections) shall cease to have effect on December 31, 2005.
(a) IN GENERAL- Except as provided in subsection (b), this title and the amendments made by this title (other than sections 203(a), 203(c), 205, 208, 210, 211, 213, 216, 219, 221, and 222, and the amendments made by those sections) shall cease to have effect on December 31, 2005.
(b) EXCEPTION- With respect to any particular foreign intelligence investigation that began before the date on which the provisions referred to in subsection (a) cease to have effect, or with respect to any particular offense or potential offense that began or occurred before the date on which such provisions cease to have effect, such provisions shall continue in effect.
IANAL, but I read this as 'Most of the stuff in this bill dies in 2006, unless it's actively being used at that time.'
The stuff that will not die includes:
Authority to share criminal investigative information
Employment of translators by the FBI
Something about number of judges from somewhere being increased from 7 to 11 (no shit, read it yourself)
what information can be reported about a suspect (I think, it's not clear)
what agencies that information can be reported to
THE DELAY OF WARRANT NOTIFICATION in the event it would cause 'adverse results'
lots of stuff about wiretapping (section 216)
single-jurisdiction search warrants for terrorism
sanctions against the taliban (in particular! not just afghanistan in general) and Syria
the assurance of compensation for compliance with federal officials
The warrant notice scares me the most. Does that mean that I can be arrested and then not be presented with a warrant, or that my house could be searched and I could not be presented with a warrant?
I think slashcode has decided to implement session-based comments. In order to post a comment, you first have to load comments.pl with op=Reply. The form contains a hidden element called 'formkey' along with the other standard elements.
I assume these are entered into a database and given some sort of expiration time. If you don't post the comment within the allotted amount of time your form key expires.
Haven't tried enough things, or bothered to read the slashcode, to find out what it's doing exactly, but it seems like a pretty reasonable way to cut down on autoposters.
Until they figure out this regexp:
/NAME="formkey"\s+VALUE="(\w)"/
$1 contains your formkey, now you can go crazy. Slashdot will then start populating the form with hidden, invalid formkeys, commented out with HTML.
The trolls will then start using honest-to-goodness HTML parsers to autopost, and then slashdot will be screwed again.
Given that it would require its own Turing machine to decode: yes, it is possible to tell a joke about 3 people in a few binary digits:
111 ; in a life boat were
001 ; bill clinton,
010 ; fidel castro,
101 ; and the pope.
001 ; bill says:
0011 1010 ; "There's only
1001 0101 ; "one vest,
0010 1001 ; "and it's
0100 ; "mine."
; (note, the binary is not actual english;
; this is a rough translation)
1111 ; terminate the quote
1001 ; a second passes,
101 ; then the pope says:
0100 1110 ; "don't forget
1110 0001 ; "your cigar."
; quote termination is implicit
I'm running Windows 2000, with fairly new hardware, so my story may not be typical one, but I've got to say: what the fsck?!
I've had Myst III: Exile for a week now, and it runs like a charm. It's never locked up, the graphics are awesome, the end of one puzzle is an *extremely* long and cool video clip.
Throughout the whole game video and static images are merged even more seamlessly than they were in Riven, starting from the opening scene. You get sucked right into the game within minutes of popping the disc into your drive.
I may be an exception rather than the rule, but Myst III is fantastic.
You forgot about scribble.nu, livejournal.com, pitas.com, opendiary.com, and several others that aren't coming to me at the moment. I should point out that of course I'm not going to link to my competitors, that runs against the idea of promotion.
I did help Avian Chaos with several slashdot-trolling programs, mostly because I thought they were nifty and useful. You can still get them, in fact, from http://awdang.com/slashgame/. There's three different versions of the slashgame, one unfinished version of the game in perl, and a few utilities for googlifying text and finding hidden sids.
The scripts themselves can't take anything down except maybe Google. None of them automatically post anything to slashdot; they only look at slashdot or google, and print text to standard output.
It's been a while since I looked at the number of diaryland users. Oh well.
I'm Stephen Deken, the creator of diary-x.com, one of the sites listed in the article. I'd like to address some of the more common concerns that many/.ers are already raising in previous posts.
The first thing people usually ask about online journals is "why would anyone want to keep an online journal?" The answer to that isn't simple, but it can be boiled down to the fact that writing about your problems helps you to overcome them. Many, many people (diary-x has around 4000 users, diaryland has about 20,000) find online journaling to be a very useful and theraputic service.
The next question is usually "okay, but why online? Why not in a paper journal?" Again, the answer is complicated but it comes down to the ability to easily manage the journal - you can't shuffle pages with physical journals as you can with online journals. Not only that, but you have the added psychological bonus of being contacted by other people who have gone through the same things you're going through in your own life, without those people knowing exactly who you are.
Another concern is about security. Journals on diary-x (as well as the other services) can be 'locked' if you're only wanting the service for the convienence, so only you, or the people you trust, can read your journal.
People here seem to be giving an awful lot of flack to the spelling and grammar of many online journalers. Bear in mind that free services such as diary-x attract a very young, mostly non-net savvy user base -- the age of the user is what dictates the 'feel' of the journal. Most young people (by young I mean younger than 20 or so) don't look beyond themselves, and so yes, their journals are somewhat tedious.
But as these same posters have pointed out, there are gems in the sand. To find the really great journals, you have to sift through the ones that don't live up to whatever your standards are - just like the rest of the internet.
For further perusal, you can check out diary-x.com, as well as my journal on it. Or, take a stroll through the member's lists if you want to try and find some of those gems.
I always go back to that mysterious place called the 'real world' whenever I'm trying to figure out whether or not a product or service is worth paying for.
Let's say you walk into a store. On the counter is a photo album full of pictures of ugly-ass people. There's a button on each page of the album that lets you vote on how much you'd like to have sex with the people in the photographs. The icing on the cake is that the coin slot is labeled '25 cents, but free if you don't feel like paying'.
Sure, I'd walk up to it and press a few buttons and say "wow, that sure is neat!", but pulling a quarter out of my pocket, just so I can look at people I see on the bus every day? That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
The fact of the matter is, bangable.com isn't very highly marketable. If you're expecting to read the fortunes of the endless thousands of visitors who are sending your URL to all of their friends with notes like "Look at this stupid fucking site" then you're living in some sort of dreamland...
If, in the year 100002001, we're still bickering about the most pointless of things (or, in this case, saving the planet), I say we just let the Earth fall into the sun. We obviously don't deserve to live if that's the case.
--
this is not a sig
Re:Ah, but the innocent have nothing to fear..
on
The Unblinking Eye
·
· Score: 1
Uhm, I've bought about twenty airline tickets with cash in the past three years and no one has even given me a strange look.
Other people have already pointed out the usefulness of glimpse, so I won't stand on my high horse about that.
But xargs is your friend if you're worried about truncation of wildcards:
find./ -type f | xargs -n 1 grep 'whatever'
--
no sig
Re:Er :Missing the point on floppy-based routers?
on
Theo de Raadt Responds
·
· Score: 1
Most of us don't have access to cyrogenic storage chambers, vacuum sealed sterile canisters lined with lead, or other methods of keeping a flimsy disk of plastic and metal from being destroyed by a determined four year old with a box of crayons, a screwdriver, and a refrigerator magnet.
One day that sacred copy of CPM/86 on original floppies will fail to boot and I'll laugh at you. Then I'll take a CD down from my shelf, make floppies from the images on them, and send them to you with a note reminding you not to trust floppies no matter how diligent in handling them you are.
My workstation has a CD burner. 1x CDROM drives can be taken from old machines. You can buy a stack of 50 blank CDs for about $15.
If floppy reliablity is an issue, wouldn't it make sense to use a CD-based system instead? It has all the same advantages (assuming the BIOS can boot from CD; most can), with the added bonus that since you'll never be opening the tray, or moving the CD around, it's highly unlikely that the media will ever fail. Therefore, the system will only fail to boot due to a failure in the drive or the motherboard.
Sure, you'd have to burn another CD if you needed to upgrade the system, but with a system like that, you'd only have to upgrade it once every two years.
The overview isn't much on gory details, so I'm speaking from a somewhat limited viewpoint here. Hopefully someone else will know more about this and be able to flesh it out a little more into reality.
This can only work if they intend to create what amounts to proxy-based co-operative subnets, which allocate, use, and discard IP addresses for sets of users. With a large enough number of users per group, it would tend to mask out individual users.
The problem as I see it is that you'd still have to have some identifying information, or there's no way to form a socket. Even if the identifying information is one of the sockets within a certain group, the accessed server will still log the connection as coming from a user within that group.
The group can't be infinitely large because that would be too much strain on the proxy routers. But they can't be too small, either, because information could be inferred from the time of the connection, etc.
And it doesn't stop people from tying together a username, biographical information, and the proxy-router pool of users the accesses are coming from. Then again, the article says it's 'controlled nymity', but it's a long way from paying in cash for a pr0n mag.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Amazon can work without cookies enabled at all. Persistence is handled by an identifier that every link on the site has, which is also stored in a cookie. Try it yourself -- disable cookies, log in, and tool around for a while. You get very nearly the same experience.
Wow, that's the least funny parody of an old joke I've ever read.
I have to go wash my brain now.
Nothing in life is free.
I don't think my real name, address, email address, phone numbers, job information, etc, is worth the ability to read an article on any website, no matter how upscale.
Yeah, use fake information, blah, but it's still stupid.
Windows applications don't produce core dumps, they just GPF and are swept under the rug. It's likely that students who graduate in the next few years will not know what a core dump is or why they should care about it.
That's the default.ico file, a Microsoft 'feature' that the rest of the industry has adopted (probably because they were sick of getting bad requests from MSIE). I don't know if Mozilla supports it (it would have to render a Microsoft icon format image), but if it does you may have to bookmark it.
Personally I find it amusing that Slashdot has the icon at all, given that the overwhelming vibe here is anti-MS-influence.
1. Terrorists DO benefit from anthrax, because it's scaring the shit out of the nation. That's, uh, the point of terrorism.
2. Saying OSS doesn't benefit from passport exploits implies that the Open Source Software movement is responsible for the exploits. They're not. Microsoft is. And through some twisted, delusional logic you assert that Microsoft benefits from building in exploits.
It's a well-known fact that CmdrTaco is trying to make it as easy as possible for trolls to post to slashdot, because he could use them as an excuse to further crack down on Joe Poster.
Also, hospitals won't treat you if they find you have an organ donor card -- they'll let you die because other people need your organs.
Furthermore, the entire world is an intricate conspiracy designed to repress you.
LOOK OUT! THEY'RE COMING NOW!
SEC. 224. SUNSET.
(a) IN GENERAL- Except as provided in subsection (b), this title and the amendments made by this title (other than sections 203(a), 203(c), 205, 208, 210, 211, 213, 216, 219, 221, and 222, and the amendments made by those sections) shall cease to have effect on December 31, 2005.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:H.R.31
In particular, there is this:IANAL, but I read this as 'Most of the stuff in this bill dies in 2006, unless it's actively being used at that time.'
The stuff that will not die includes:
- Authority to share criminal investigative information
- Employment of translators by the FBI
- Something about number of judges from somewhere being increased from 7 to 11 (no shit, read it yourself)
- what information can be reported about a suspect (I think, it's not clear)
- what agencies that information can be reported to
- THE DELAY OF WARRANT NOTIFICATION in the event it would cause 'adverse results'
- lots of stuff about wiretapping (section 216)
- single-jurisdiction search warrants for terrorism
- sanctions against the taliban (in particular! not just afghanistan in general) and Syria
- the assurance of compensation for compliance with federal officials
The warrant notice scares me the most. Does that mean that I can be arrested and then not be presented with a warrant, or that my house could be searched and I could not be presented with a warrant?I mean:
/NAME="formkey"\s+VALUE="(\w+)"/
And I'm testing.
I think slashcode has decided to implement session-based comments. In order to post a comment, you first have to load comments.pl with op=Reply. The form contains a hidden element called 'formkey' along with the other standard elements.
/NAME="formkey"\s+VALUE="(\w)"/
I assume these are entered into a database and given some sort of expiration time. If you don't post the comment within the allotted amount of time your form key expires.
Haven't tried enough things, or bothered to read the slashcode, to find out what it's doing exactly, but it seems like a pretty reasonable way to cut down on autoposters.
Until they figure out this regexp:
$1 contains your formkey, now you can go crazy. Slashdot will then start populating the form with hidden, invalid formkeys, commented out with HTML.
The trolls will then start using honest-to-goodness HTML parsers to autopost, and then slashdot will be screwed again.
See? Quiche.
Are you calling CmdrTaco an ass?
Wait, don't answer that.
I'm running Windows 2000, with fairly new hardware, so my story may not be typical one, but I've got to say: what the fsck?!
I've had Myst III: Exile for a week now, and it runs like a charm. It's never locked up, the graphics are awesome, the end of one puzzle is an *extremely* long and cool video clip.
Throughout the whole game video and static images are merged even more seamlessly than they were in Riven, starting from the opening scene. You get sucked right into the game within minutes of popping the disc into your drive.
I may be an exception rather than the rule, but Myst III is fantastic.
Someone needs to unleash a bucket of positive mod points on the parent.
Try http://www.google.com/intl/us/.
You forgot about scribble.nu, livejournal.com, pitas.com, opendiary.com, and several others that aren't coming to me at the moment. I should point out that of course I'm not going to link to my competitors, that runs against the idea of promotion.
I did help Avian Chaos with several slashdot-trolling programs, mostly because I thought they were nifty and useful. You can still get them, in fact, from http://awdang.com/slashgame/. There's three different versions of the slashgame, one unfinished version of the game in perl, and a few utilities for googlifying text and finding hidden sids.
The scripts themselves can't take anything down except maybe Google. None of them automatically post anything to slashdot; they only look at slashdot or google, and print text to standard output.
It's been a while since I looked at the number of diaryland users. Oh well.
--
Stephen Deken.
Of course, for the less mentally stable, a slashdot account would do just as well as a journal...
Hi everyone,
/.ers are already raising in previous posts.
I'm Stephen Deken, the creator of diary-x.com, one of the sites listed in the article. I'd like to address some of the more common concerns that many
The first thing people usually ask about online journals is "why would anyone want to keep an online journal?" The answer to that isn't simple, but it can be boiled down to the fact that writing about your problems helps you to overcome them. Many, many people (diary-x has around 4000 users, diaryland has about 20,000) find online journaling to be a very useful and theraputic service.
The next question is usually "okay, but why online? Why not in a paper journal?" Again, the answer is complicated but it comes down to the ability to easily manage the journal - you can't shuffle pages with physical journals as you can with online journals. Not only that, but you have the added psychological bonus of being contacted by other people who have gone through the same things you're going through in your own life, without those people knowing exactly who you are.
Another concern is about security. Journals on diary-x (as well as the other services) can be 'locked' if you're only wanting the service for the convienence, so only you, or the people you trust, can read your journal.
People here seem to be giving an awful lot of flack to the spelling and grammar of many online journalers. Bear in mind that free services such as diary-x attract a very young, mostly non-net savvy user base -- the age of the user is what dictates the 'feel' of the journal. Most young people (by young I mean younger than 20 or so) don't look beyond themselves, and so yes, their journals are somewhat tedious.
But as these same posters have pointed out, there are gems in the sand. To find the really great journals, you have to sift through the ones that don't live up to whatever your standards are - just like the rest of the internet.
For further perusal, you can check out diary-x.com, as well as my journal on it. Or, take a stroll through the member's lists if you want to try and find some of those gems.
Thanks,
--
Stephen Deken
awdang.com
diary-x.com
I always go back to that mysterious place called the 'real world' whenever I'm trying to figure out whether or not a product or service is worth paying for.
Let's say you walk into a store. On the counter is a photo album full of pictures of ugly-ass people. There's a button on each page of the album that lets you vote on how much you'd like to have sex with the people in the photographs. The icing on the cake is that the coin slot is labeled '25 cents, but free if you don't feel like paying'.
Sure, I'd walk up to it and press a few buttons and say "wow, that sure is neat!", but pulling a quarter out of my pocket, just so I can look at people I see on the bus every day? That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
The fact of the matter is, bangable.com isn't very highly marketable. If you're expecting to read the fortunes of the endless thousands of visitors who are sending your URL to all of their friends with notes like "Look at this stupid fucking site" then you're living in some sort of dreamland...
--
this is not a sig!
If, in the year 100002001, we're still bickering about the most pointless of things (or, in this case, saving the planet), I say we just let the Earth fall into the sun. We obviously don't deserve to live if that's the case.
--
this is not a sig
Uhm, I've bought about twenty airline tickets with cash in the past three years and no one has even given me a strange look.
Talk out of your ass much?
--
this is not a sig?
Other people have already pointed out the usefulness of glimpse, so I won't stand on my high horse about that.
./ -type f | xargs -n 1 grep 'whatever'
But xargs is your friend if you're worried about truncation of wildcards:
find
--
no sig
Most of us don't have access to cyrogenic storage chambers, vacuum sealed sterile canisters lined with lead, or other methods of keeping a flimsy disk of plastic and metal from being destroyed by a determined four year old with a box of crayons, a screwdriver, and a refrigerator magnet.
One day that sacred copy of CPM/86 on original floppies will fail to boot and I'll laugh at you. Then I'll take a CD down from my shelf, make floppies from the images on them, and send them to you with a note reminding you not to trust floppies no matter how diligent in handling them you are.
--sjd;
Maybe *I'm* missing something...
My workstation has a CD burner. 1x CDROM drives can be taken from old machines. You can buy a stack of 50 blank CDs for about $15.
If floppy reliablity is an issue, wouldn't it make sense to use a CD-based system instead? It has all the same advantages (assuming the BIOS can boot from CD; most can), with the added bonus that since you'll never be opening the tray, or moving the CD around, it's highly unlikely that the media will ever fail. Therefore, the system will only fail to boot due to a failure in the drive or the motherboard.
Sure, you'd have to burn another CD if you needed to upgrade the system, but with a system like that, you'd only have to upgrade it once every two years.
--sjd;
The overview isn't much on gory details, so I'm speaking from a somewhat limited viewpoint here. Hopefully someone else will know more about this and be able to flesh it out a little more into reality.
This can only work if they intend to create what amounts to proxy-based co-operative subnets, which allocate, use, and discard IP addresses for sets of users. With a large enough number of users per group, it would tend to mask out individual users.
The problem as I see it is that you'd still have to have some identifying information, or there's no way to form a socket. Even if the identifying information is one of the sockets within a certain group, the accessed server will still log the connection as coming from a user within that group.
The group can't be infinitely large because that would be too much strain on the proxy routers. But they can't be too small, either, because information could be inferred from the time of the connection, etc.
And it doesn't stop people from tying together a username, biographical information, and the proxy-router pool of users the accesses are coming from. Then again, the article says it's 'controlled nymity', but it's a long way from paying in cash for a pr0n mag.
--sjd;