The ISPs are using this approach, it's called a "spamtrap". If you look at the spamcop reports for an IP or SNDS data from Microsoft you can see the number of spamtrap hits. This does not blacklist the sender right away, but it does increase their spamscore.
I think your Yahoo situation is unlikely -- I'm sure Yahoo has some rate limiting/captcha/etc. in place to prevent someone to sign up thousands of accounts programmatically.
Three prisoners were sitting in a U.S. jail, found guilty of "economic crimes" and were also comparing stories. The first one said, "I charged higher prices than my competitors, and I was found guilty of profiteering, monopolizing and exploiting consumers." The second one said, "I charged lower prices than my competitors, and I was found guilty of predatory pricing, cutthroat competing and under-charging." The third prisoner said, "I charged the same prices as my competitors, and I was found guilty of collusion, price leadership and cartelization."
It's been a long time ago since my childhood in Poland (we escaped when I was 12 years old though not shots were fired), but one thing I recall is learning about binary numbers (and other non-decimal bases). In grade 4, at the age of 8 or so. That was in about 1983. I had no access to computers until I moved to the West (Denmark) but plenty of exciting computer magazines to read. I recall one article in a popular magasine you could buy at any newsstand, describing how to draw pictures in 3D with LOGO, describing both theory behind perspective, projection etc. with plenty of math and practical LOGO code.
Another youth-oriented technical magasine around that time - 83-85 - described the RSA algorith in detail. They showed an encoded text using the algorithm and encouraged users to decode it (using paper and pencil of course) and send in the answer.
I was in a special math class back there, preparing for the "Math Olympics". In contrast, in Denmark, the only special classes were for children who refused to learn -- and noone could give a damn about your affinity for mathemathics. Excelling in school was not well seen there (that might just be a Scandivian, not Western-European thing). Only very recently (the last few years) a special school for gifted children, Mentiqa, opened in Denmark.
Having said that, I'm glad I didn't stick around. Rationed food, martial law, tanks on the streets, curfew etc.
Denmark (!) has this feature. As a Danish citizen, I have acquired a SSL client-side certificate which I've installed into my browser. It is protected by a master password of course, but using it I can go to any site (mostly governmental services but also e.g. my cell phone provider lets me log in with it so I can check my cell phone logs or buy talk time) and be securely logged in, or use it to sign my email with a key verified by a government-sponsored organisation.
If permitted sites can access your information such as address or the Danish equivalent of SSN, but other sites can simply attach your signature to an account so you only have to remember your one master password.
The digital signature can also be used to enter a binding contract via the Internet, though I don't really know which sites use this feature.
One of the governmental services includes a site where bills, bank statements and official documents such as those from the tax office sent to me are stored as PDF files. All bills I get are paid electronically of course, but now a company can sign up for this service where such documents are stored on a server accessible to you as PDF files from anywhere.
One of the TV channels here in Denmark (TV2) supports something like this: you can stream up to 1mbit quality video of most (it's not clear to me exactly how much this includes, they mention e.g. that Tour de France coverage is excluded) of their current and past programs. The lowest (yearly) cost is about $90.
"Speed of Dark", by Elizabeth Moon is a near-future novel about a entirely autistic person, but I recognize many of his traits in me and other geeks (such as trying to "understand" this silly smalltalk (not Smalltalk), trying to understand *everything*).
Re:Expect their products to be leased not sold
on
EMC To Acquire VMware
·
· Score: 1
Well, Windows Update works for me, though I don't recall doing anything special.
My Win4Lin Windows is an ancient 98 (which works OK for Office 2000 and doing web-stuff with IE6). I select Tools, Windows Update from IE 6.0 and it works (I think right after I installed 98 which came with something like 4.0, I needed to download IE by hand and install it)
Does your network work correctly?
Currently I run win4lin 5.5.11a, but it has certainly worked in the past with 4.0.
I'm not sure if it's some XSS protection, but I've noticed certain submissions to one of my sites to be occasionally mangled. E.g. a variable called foo1234.1.2 will have its name mangled to foo~~~~.1.2 as if something on the user's site considered 1234 to be a dangerous number. I've seen this happen very rarely however, maybe 3-4 times in the last 6 months with a 100k unique clients. Since all those numbers are generated on the client and are hidden variables obviously this protection, if it is indeed trying to protect sensitive numbers, is doing more harm than good!
Whatever product does this also mangles Referer to Weferer and replaces it with a long string of hex digits.
I've been an eMusic subscriber for three years, and following these changes I've cancelled my account today.
eMusic was, I thought, a great concept: unlimited downloads, unrestricted MP3 files and a large selection of non-mainstream, but often interesting music.
They've recently started limiting their downloads and now, following the takeover by "Dimensional" officialy made my $10/month unlimited plan limited to 40 downloads per month. The $50/plan, 5 times as expensive allows download of only 300 songs.
For me, it's no longer worth it. There just hasn't been any interesting new albums on the site, not enough to warrant this huge increase in price.
Anyway, prompted by mention of this topic on Slashdot I finally got around in releasing a maintenane release of mcl, 0.53.00. It basically fixes all the ancient C++ code that only compiled with 2.95, and also makes the code work with Perl 5.8.0 etc.
There was also this international company, PowerGen, which opened a branch in Italy. Their Italian home page was named www.powergenitialia.com.
(I saw this on RISKS and I'll note that some people though it was not real -- but at some point there was a real looking homepage at that address).
Re:Ooh more vaporware.
on
MRAM in 2004?
·
· Score: 1
Try the Linux software suspend (in 2.6 now, and available as a patch for older kernels). It uses your swap file to store the memory when you shut down, and next time it reads directly from it.
The speed increase was not that great, but being able to return to your xterms, xemacsen etc. in exactly the same state as they were before is nice.
I can tell you the reason. You are using Privoxy or some other filtering web proxy that kills window-opening Javascript -- and does it by renaming open to concat in what it *thinks* is JS.
Exactly the same thing drove me COMPLETELY NUTS some months ago as I was downloading some Python code with "open" in it which magically turned into "concat".
If it is privoxy you are using, you can turn it off in/etc/privoxy/default.filter -- just search for concat.
Galactic Civilizations, a 4X space game in the style of MOO / Civilization has a technology named "Near Omnipotence" whose description reads:
With access to what scientists are referring to as the 'the console' we just need to enter the correct code and we will enter a new state of being that is technically referred to as 'God Mode'
Later on, if your civilization is evil enough (i.e. when exploring space you've forced your colonists to work in Death Mines to extract metal that adds +5% hit points to your battleships or have wiped out native civilizations on new planets) you can research "Galactic Domination Philosophy" whose description simply reads: Our troubles with the Justice Department will finally be over.
It has already happened -- here in Denmark. The Anti-Piracy Group acquired warrants to find identities of file sharers (with blessing of copyright holders, of course) and sent them letters demanding reparations. 125 people paid up a total of 305 thousand Danish kroner. This happened about 2 months ago (here's a wired story about this: http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,56717,00.html )
It seems however that they decided to change their style in the future: they will search for people that share illegal files but only demand a written declaration that the file sharing will stop.
Here in Scandinavia, ElectroLux has commercially launched Trilobite which is similar -- it runs around finding the walls, uses ultrasound to detect obstacles and can find its way back to the base station when necessary. This happened about a year ago (November 2001) according to the press release dates.
Trilobite is about 12000 DKK however, which is 1500 EUR.
Here's the Danish website with Flash demonstration and some information in English too.
I use win4lin. It is cheaper than vmware ($89 vs $299 -- I even think they have a special at the moment so it costs $59) and I've found it to be much, much faster than vmware (on a p3-800). Even when run in a window, all menus update at a nice speed. Starting win4lin with win98 and IE6 starting up in window takes 20 seconds.
Sharing files is also much nicer than with vmware -- the C: drive is simply in ~/win and there's another drive mapped as ~/mydata, so you can just copy or symlink stuff you want there.
I installed it so I could run IE6 for some web development stuff, but it's run most other apps I've tried nicely as well (no directx, and only windows 95/98/ME are supported).
For example, let's say you had an ability to put an invisible camera at any arbitrarily chosen point in space and watch what is happening.
That's the plot of the Clarke/Baxter novel "Light Of Other Days" incidentally. I liked most of it, there was plenty of good speculation on the societal effects of such invention. (Well, Asimov also had a similar short story).
PS: Ubik is great, do they keep you in half-life to let you post on Slashdot?
In Denmark
on
Rent-a-Game
·
· Score: 4, Informative
One of the bigger ADSL ISPs in Denmark, CyberCity has done something similar at PlayingGod.dk.
There are fewer games but it seems cheaper: a game for 7 days for 50 kroner (about 4 UKP), 12 games for 30 days (they select the games) 150 kroner (12 UKP) and 5 games for 7 days for 100 kroner.
All games can be downloaded (they claim to use some sort of streaming technology so they are downloaded on demand rather than everything at once). If you are a CC ADSL customer, you can also temporarily upgrade your bandwidth for a price to speed up the download:)
The sites that use the tip jar do NOT get any information about your identity.
The tip jar image contains personalized information because it is loaded from Amazon.com. The sites simply has a standard IMG tag which makes your browser load a certain image from Amazon's servers. When loading that image, your browser also sends your user info cookie, so Amazon can see who you are and personalize the tip jar image.
But that knowledge stays only between you and Amazon -- the site that uses the tip jar will not get any information.
Slashdot Mirror
The ISPs are using this approach, it's called a "spamtrap". If you look at the spamcop reports for an IP or SNDS data from Microsoft you can see the number of spamtrap hits. This does not blacklist the sender right away, but it does increase their spamscore.
I think your Yahoo situation is unlikely -- I'm sure Yahoo has some rate limiting/captcha/etc. in place to prevent someone to sign up thousands of accounts programmatically.
It's been a long time ago since my childhood in Poland (we escaped when I was 12 years old though not shots were fired), but one thing I recall is learning about binary numbers (and other non-decimal bases). In grade 4, at the age of 8 or so. That was in about 1983. I had no access to computers until I moved to the West (Denmark) but plenty of exciting computer magazines to read. I recall one article in a popular magasine you could buy at any newsstand, describing how to draw pictures in 3D with LOGO, describing both theory behind perspective, projection etc. with plenty of math and practical LOGO code.
Another youth-oriented technical magasine around that time - 83-85 - described the RSA algorith in detail. They showed an encoded text using the algorithm and encouraged users to decode it (using paper and pencil of course) and send in the answer.
I was in a special math class back there, preparing for the "Math Olympics". In contrast, in Denmark, the only special classes were for children who refused to learn -- and noone could give a damn about your affinity for mathemathics. Excelling in school was not well seen there (that might just be a Scandivian, not Western-European thing). Only very recently (the last few years) a special school for gifted children, Mentiqa, opened in Denmark.
Having said that, I'm glad I didn't stick around. Rationed food, martial law, tanks on the streets, curfew etc.
Denmark (!) has this feature. As a Danish citizen, I have acquired a SSL client-side certificate which I've installed into my browser. It is protected by a master password of course, but using it I can go to any site (mostly governmental services but also e.g. my cell phone provider lets me log in with it so I can check my cell phone logs or buy talk time) and be securely logged in, or use it to sign my email with a key verified by a government-sponsored organisation.
If permitted sites can access your information such as address or the Danish equivalent of SSN, but other sites can simply attach your signature to an account so you only have to remember your one master password.
The digital signature can also be used to enter a binding contract via the Internet, though I don't really know which sites use this feature.
One of the governmental services includes a site where bills, bank statements and official documents such as those from the tax office sent to me are stored as PDF files. All bills I get are paid electronically of course, but now a company can sign up for this service where such documents are stored on a server accessible to you as PDF files from anywhere.
This idea was on Slashdot just a few days ago -- look up JSON.
One of the TV channels here in Denmark (TV2) supports something like this: you can stream up to 1mbit quality video of most (it's not clear to me exactly how much this includes, they mention e.g. that Tour de France coverage is excluded) of their current and past programs. The lowest (yearly) cost is about $90.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345 447557
"Speed of Dark", by Elizabeth Moon is a near-future novel about a entirely autistic person, but I recognize many of his traits in me and other geeks (such as trying to "understand" this silly smalltalk (not Smalltalk), trying to understand *everything*).
Well, Windows Update works for me, though I don't recall doing anything special.
My Win4Lin Windows is an ancient 98 (which works OK for Office 2000 and doing web-stuff with IE6). I select Tools, Windows Update from IE 6.0 and it works (I think right after I installed 98 which came with something like 4.0, I needed to download IE by hand and install it)
Does your network work correctly?
Currently I run win4lin 5.5.11a, but it has certainly worked in the past with 4.0.
I'm not sure if it's some XSS protection, but I've noticed certain submissions to one of my sites to be occasionally mangled. E.g. a variable called foo1234.1.2 will have its name mangled to foo~~~~.1.2 as if something on the user's site considered 1234 to be a dangerous number. I've seen this happen very rarely however, maybe 3-4 times in the last 6 months with a 100k unique clients. Since all those numbers are generated on the client and are hidden variables obviously this protection, if it is indeed trying to protect sensitive numbers, is doing more harm than good!
Whatever product does this also mangles Referer to Weferer and replaces it with a long string of hex digits.
eMusic was, I thought, a great concept: unlimited downloads, unrestricted MP3 files and a large selection of non-mainstream, but often interesting music.
They've recently started limiting their downloads and now, following the takeover by "Dimensional" officialy made my $10/month unlimited plan limited to 40 downloads per month. The $50/plan, 5 times as expensive allows download of only 300 songs.
For me, it's no longer worth it. There just hasn't been any interesting new albums on the site, not enough to warrant this huge increase in price.
Anyway, prompted by mention of this topic on Slashdot I finally got around in releasing a maintenane release of mcl, 0.53.00. It basically fixes all the ancient C++ code that only compiled with 2.95, and also makes the code work with Perl 5.8.0 etc.
Get it from http://www.andreasen.org/mcl/ as usual.
For a more modern MUD, non-text-only client, check out Papaya.
There was also this international company, PowerGen, which opened a branch in Italy. Their Italian home page was named www.powergenitialia.com.
(I saw this on RISKS and I'll note that some people though it was not real -- but at some point there was a real looking homepage at that address).
Try the Linux software suspend (in 2.6 now, and available as a patch for older kernels). It uses your swap file to store the memory when you shut down, and next time it reads directly from it.
The speed increase was not that great, but being able to return to your xterms, xemacsen etc. in exactly the same state as they were before is nice.
"Prisimq" sounds like a name belonging to one of the characters in a certain Jim Theis story.
Exactly the same thing drove me COMPLETELY NUTS some months ago as I was downloading some Python code with "open" in it which magically turned into "concat".
If it is privoxy you are using, you can turn it off in /etc/privoxy/default.filter -- just search for concat.
With access to what scientists are referring to as the 'the console' we just need to enter the correct code and we will enter a new state of being that is technically referred to as 'God Mode'
Later on, if your civilization is evil enough (i.e. when exploring space you've forced your colonists to work in Death Mines to extract metal that adds +5% hit points to your battleships or have wiped out native civilizations on new planets) you can research "Galactic Domination Philosophy" whose description simply reads: Our troubles with the Justice Department will finally be over.
No, Python has had a generational garbage collector for some years (since Python 2.0).
It still uses RC to immediately finalize objects but will collect cyclical garbage as well when it periodically runs.
It has already happened -- here in Denmark. The Anti-Piracy Group acquired warrants to find identities of file sharers (with blessing of copyright holders, of course) and sent them letters demanding reparations. 125 people paid up a total of 305 thousand Danish kroner. This happened about 2 months ago (here's a wired story about this: http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,56717,00 .html )
It seems however that they decided to change their style in the future: they will search for people that share illegal files but only demand a written declaration that the file sharing will stop.
Trilobite is about 12000 DKK however, which is 1500 EUR.
Here's the Danish website with Flash demonstration and some information in English too.
Sharing files is also much nicer than with vmware -- the C: drive is simply in ~/win and there's another drive mapped as ~/mydata, so you can just copy or symlink stuff you want there.
I installed it so I could run IE6 for some web development stuff, but it's run most other apps I've tried nicely as well (no directx, and only windows 95/98/ME are supported).
The special URL - http://www.netraverse.com/special.htm
I think there is an older version available as trial, if you google for win4lin evaulation.
That's the plot of the Clarke/Baxter novel "Light Of Other Days" incidentally. I liked most of it, there was plenty of good speculation on the societal effects of such invention. (Well, Asimov also had a similar short story).
PS: Ubik is great, do they keep you in half-life to let you post on Slashdot?
Happy Billioniversary!
Spam spam spam!
May W. Richard Stevens Rest In Peace!
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
spam spam spam
postercomment compresssion filter? WTF!
There are fewer games but it seems cheaper: a game for 7 days for 50 kroner (about 4 UKP), 12 games for 30 days (they select the games) 150 kroner (12 UKP) and 5 games for 7 days for 100 kroner.
All games can be downloaded (they claim to use some sort of streaming technology so they are downloaded on demand rather than everything at once). If you are a CC ADSL customer, you can also temporarily upgrade your bandwidth for a price to speed up the download :)
The tip jar image contains personalized information because it is loaded from Amazon.com. The sites simply has a standard IMG tag which makes your browser load a certain image from Amazon's servers. When loading that image, your browser also sends your user info cookie, so Amazon can see who you are and personalize the tip jar image.
But that knowledge stays only between you and Amazon -- the site that uses the tip jar will not get any information.