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User: elronxenu

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Comments · 505

  1. Re:F*** You Network Solutions on NSI Registers Every Domain Checked · · Score: 1
    I think they are going to register a lot more than 600,000 domains today!

    I too have seen it with my own eyes. But it doesn't always happen immediately. Some domains I tried containing english words were registered almost immediately, whereas other domains of made-up words and junk characters (check uturjigjrtgj.com) took much longer to be registered.

    It's worthwhile to make the point again, that this is highly unethical, deceitful behaviour. It's what I expect from Network Solutions - the arse end of the Internet. But this behaviour can be fixed by the simple matter of eliminating 'domain tasting'.

    Now, will ICANN finally have the balls to stop domain tasting and revoke Network Solutions' registrar agreement?

  2. Re:High index of refraction? on Mathematician Theorizes a Crystal As Beautiful As A Diamond · · Score: 1
    You're very clever young man, but it's turtles all the way down.

  3. Re:The best tools stay out of the way... on Goodbye Cruel Word · · Score: 1
    I agree with your comment about LaTeX - everything seems to be implemented as a hack. Much as I admire Knuth, the TeX language sucks, and that shows in LaTeX. It's not orthogonal. While I love markup, the markup language should make sense.

    I've used LOUT too, and it seems to be a better designed language than TeX - and it uses TeX's typesetting algorithm, so it's not making inferior formatting choices.

    What I'd like to see is a sensible markup language which not only abstracts your formatting (font choices, headings, footnotes, index) but also permits easy specification of large scale page structure - columns, margins, galleys.

  4. DHCP on Boeing 787 May Be Vulnerable to Hacker Attack · · Score: 5, Funny
  5. Re:well, not effortlessly on RTF Vs. OOXML · · Score: 1
    OpenCourseWare?

    I tried to view a video from that just the other day and what they sent was a .rm file. Why can't they provide an mpeg or AVI encoding?

  6. Re:Default value goes back pretty far on Office 2003 Service Pack Disables Older File Formats · · Score: 1
    I expect many documents still exist in those old formats.

    If 'security' is really the reason for dropping support that's pretty shameful; instead they should be supporting a safe subset of the document format so old documents can be imported safely.

    This is just one more step in the process as predicted by many folks - old documents can't be read because they require obsolete software to work, which runs on obsolete Windows versions, which runs only on obsolete computers. The roots of the problem are that the document formats are proprietary and secret - and Microsoft requires obsolescence to keep people buying Windows.

  7. Re:Data mining on Domains May Disappear After Search · · Score: 1

    FWIW, "irrevocable" would have been a better word for it than "irreversible".

  8. Re:Data mining on Domains May Disappear After Search · · Score: 3, Interesting
    They could stop the domain tasters in one minute by ... making all registrations irreversible.

    The stated reason for allowing retraction of registrations is to allow mistakes to be corrected. But with domains costing just a few dollars to register for a year, how much harm is done by making the customer pay for such mistakes? Answer - none at all. Meanwhile unscrupulous domain tasters are registering, and then returning, millions of domains a day for free.

    The DNS marketplace has probably the most widespread corruption of any economy in the world today.

  9. Re:Start menu has always sucked on Vista Named Year's Most Disappointing Product · · Score: 1
    The name might be non-indicative, but that's because you can't call every music player program "music player". They have to have different names, that's why iTunes isn't called "online music store".

    At least they're grouped appropriately. On my system Amarok is in the "Multimedia" menu. And it is labelled "Audio Player (Amarok). Image viewers are in the "Graphics" menu labelled "Image Viewer (GQview)" and "Image Viewer (KView)". Games are in the "Games" menu.

    It is this basic organisation which Windows lacks, which the GP was referring to. It's endemic too, affecting even the contents of the C:\WINDOWS directory.

  10. Re:I was wondering... on Encryption Passphrase Protected by the 5th Amendment · · Score: 1
    In a civil case the court can order you to co-operate with discovery requests. That's active assistance. I don't know how it would go in a criminal case though.

    But it seems likely that if a court can compel you to state, say, your mother's maiden name on the basis that this is not an incriminating word, then they can use the same technique to compel production of a passphrase.

    I suppose it's just as well that passphrases are so easy to forget. You didn't need that encrypted data, whatever it was, anyway.

  11. Re:Types of registrars on Experience with Fighting Domain Farming · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Network Solutions has appalling customer service.

    I transferred all my domains away from them a few years ago. Their systems were primitive; their processes were set up to make it as hard as possible to make changes, particularly any change like "transfer a domain away from them".

    And they're very expensive. It's not about being stingy, it's about not getting value for the $35 a year or whatever it is they charge, when other registrars will provide better service for $8 or less.

  12. Re:I was wondering... on Encryption Passphrase Protected by the 5th Amendment · · Score: 1
    RTFA. It seems likely that this will be overturned.

    The reason is that the passphrase itself is not self-incriminating. Immunity can be granted on the content of the passphrase (which compels the defendant to reveal it) but not on the contents of the files decrypted with the passphrase.

    The analogy is discovery. A court can compel a defendant to turn over all emails, say, which relate to the subject matter of the court case. It's not a defence to say "I won't give you these physical emails because they might incriminate me". The court can make you hand over your stuff to them, no matter how incriminating it may be. And so, compelling a defendant to reveal a passphrase by granting immunity from prosecution to the passphrase itself may not extend to immunity with regard to the information obtained from the encrypted data.

  13. Re:Why? on Flying Humans · · Score: 1
    But there is an intrinsic benefit to contributing to Open Source.

  14. Re:Kinda flawed on Spam Trap Claims 10x-100x Accuracy Gain · · Score: 2, Informative
    It's not possible to reliably determine the originating sender's IP address, because this would have to come from the message headers, and the sender of a message can forge those headers to say anything it likes. The original IP address could be behind RFC1918 address space (like mine) or simply be fake.

    Only the mail relay IP address can be determined unambiguously - that's the host which is connecting to the host which is checking the mail for spamminess.

  15. Re:Kinda flawed on Spam Trap Claims 10x-100x Accuracy Gain · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Thanks, I was wondering why TFA said "the message does not have to have the same contents" yet it talks extensively about "the same message sent to multiple recipients".

    If the contents are irrelevant, then how does this system determine that any two messages are the same? And your answer, "by the sender IP" (and unspoken, by a similar send time).

    Which then leads me to ask - what about mail relays, where the same IP address sends thousands of emails every day? Wouldn't every email sent by the relay at roughly the same time be considered the same message, and (because almost everybody gets more spam than ham) be classified as spam?

    I think the article tag is correct - "snakeoil".

  16. Re:The reason is much simpler on RIAA Afraid of Harvard · · Score: 4, Funny

    There...fixed that for you

    Fixed that for you, I did.

  17. Re:might be on to something on A New Theory of Everything? · · Score: 5, Funny
    No, because 8 dimensions are occupied by the packet headers and routing information.

  18. Re:Standard Microsoft Operating Procedure on Microsoft Windows 7 "Wishlist" Leaked · · Score: 1
    It's modded Funny, but I didn't write it as a joke. All good jokes have a kernel of truth at their core. For my comment however, I was 90% serious, 10% joking.

    Microsoft _does_ do this. It _is_ part of their standard operating procedure. They release details of their "roadmap" for the next few years - which, by a strange co-incidence, contains product features being touted by Microsoft competitors - either a released competing product, or soon-to-be-released. Customers see the roadmap and decide to wait for the Microsoft vapourware. This hurts the competitor.

    As time passes, some of the features of the roadmap get dropped, for whatever reason.

    The list we saw in this article looked more like a bug list than a product roadmap - and that's where the 10% joke comes in, in that _any_ disclosure of Microsoft of up-coming features or "how great the _next_ version will be!" fits the above process.

    As an example of how this technique can have the opposite effect, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect.

  19. Standard Microsoft Operating Procedure on Microsoft Windows 7 "Wishlist" Leaked · · Score: 5, Funny

    Step 1: Release awful product
    Step 2: Seed the marketplace with rumours about how great the next version will be
    Step 3: Sell a lot of awful product (this is the Profit!!! step)
    Step 4: Develop next version, dropping cool features and instead devoting more development time to Microsoft Bob, Clippy, and meaningless user-interface tweaks
    Loop around to Step 1.

  20. Re:I love it when the magic works... on IFPI Domain Dispute Likely to Go To Court · · Score: 2, Informative
    Like this one?

    mickey.JPG

  21. Re:Who Will Get Unix? on Novell to SCO - Pay Up · · Score: 2, Informative
    Judge Kimball already ruled that Copyrights did not transfer with the Asset Purchase Agreement, and so SCO does not own the Unix System V Copyrights. He also found that the Microsoft and Sun licenses were in part SysV licenses, so some part of the revenue belongs to Novell. SCO claims it owns all the revenue. Therefore, SCO has converted (stolen) Novell's property.

    The 5-day trial which was suspended due to SCO's application for Ch11 bankruptcy was all about finding how much of that revenue was Novell's. SCo petitioned for bankruptcy on the last business day before the scheduled start of the trial.

  22. Novell to SCO: Will it blend? on Novell to SCO - Pay Up · · Score: 2, Funny

    N/T

  23. Re:This Is Sad on The New Moon Race · · Score: 1

    In 2037, the U.S. president will announce a new goal to reach the moon again by 2050.

    I find it very depressing that we pushed ourselves to the limit in the 1960s and developed all kinds of new technology in order to reach the moon by 1969, and having achieved it, once the "gee-whiz" factor and the "we beat the Soviets" factor wore off, politics ended the moon missions. It took us over 30 years to recover the impetus to go back there.

  24. Re:Nope on de lcaza calls OOXML a "Superb Standard" · · Score: 1
    I expect Microsoft's EULA for Word says you're not allowed to reverse-engineer it. Even if that language doesn't hold up in court, it still represents a prior restraint; you can't implement MS OOXML _and_ keep Microsoft happy, because to do so you would have to reverse-engineer Word, thus breaking your license agreement.

  25. Re:Um, certified mail or lockbox? on How Do I Secure An IP, While Leaving Options Open? · · Score: 1

    What if there's more than one dispute? What if there are concurrent disputes? If you ever have to prove ownership more than once, and you use this method, then second and subsequent proofs depend on proof that you proved it the first time. The necessary chain of evidence becomes longer and thus, more fragile. Use of a digital timestamping service, on the other hand, gives you proof that you can use as many times as necessary. Or if you give the dated document to your lawyer, the lawyer can testify time and again that the document was given on a certain date.