But that would defeat the purpose of sending it as an image in the first place. The whole point (I would assume) is to combat auto-response agents that could easily reply back with the number. By placing it in an image along with some obfuscation designed to confuse OCR, automated response systems would be extremely difficult to write.
The spammers will just build an automated response system.
Good. I'd love it if they did. That way, we'd have a "good" return address with which we could track them down. Right now, I'll bet a very large percentage (approaching 100%) of U[B|C]E has a fake return/from address.
The worst part, IMHO, is that the original page was reported to have been a joke. Perhaps in bad taste, but only a joke.
The fact that a city successfully lobbied Google to remove a humor page from its index just because it appeared in a search for their city name is just sad. Granted, Google can do whatever the heck it wants with its own data; it's just bad mojo to censor something that was (supposedly) obviously satire. The interesting part in all this is that, having chosen to censor its index, one wonders if Google can remain a "common carrier" (for lack of a better term). I recall (but cannot for the life of me find the link) a case where an ISP was held liable for some objectionable newsgroups they carried because of their history of censoring groups they did not approve of. IIRC, the judge made it a point to say the ISP would not have been liable had they not censored other groups in the past. By chosing to censor information, they lost the right to hide behind a veil of "we're just a conduit".
Again, this comment would be much more informative if I could find the URL for that damn story;)
Anyone else remember those books that were thick directories of popular web/gopher/wais servers to visit? IIRC, they even had a special BBS phone directory in the back. The things were out of date the instant they were printed but, man, those were the days:)
As useful as the Web has become, I still feel a bit nostalgic for the days when it was ruled by educational institutions, geeks, government agencies and porn. Life without banners....ahhh:)
I think those are all good suggestions. In a way, they mirror (somewhat) some of the ideas I had.
I think the point about not linking to the mirror until after the original article/content becomes unavailable is key to refute any arguments over lost ad revenue. Essentially, I'm saying that I will direct people to your site as long as there's something there for them to read. When you (as the site owner) cease to make the content available, you really aren't losing any revenue by me linking to a cached copy. As long as it's properly attributed, I think you'd have a good chance of defending yourself against any copryright infringement challenges.
I actually read a bit on copyright law after posting this AskSlashdot and found it to be less helpful than if I'd never read it. Everything is subjective, so it looks like the best you can do is show good intent and hope for the best;) Worst case scenario is that you remove the cache; big deal.
I agree with your example; it shouldn't matter. The only potential problem I see is that, on the 'net, we have a much larger table. Granted, my site does not have the readership of Slashdot but would I not be re-distributing the original content? Like photocopying the original magazine article and handing out copies to everyone I know, then them handing it out to everyone they know, etc.
If I could rely on the original content provider to keep the article available, this would be a non issue. It's somewhat like a bibliography in the printed world; if you want to see my references, go to pretty much any library.
One of my thoughts was to mirror the original article, (locally cached) ads and all so I hadn't modified it, just in case the content disappeared. In that respect, I wouldn't be taking away ad revenue for the provider while the article was up; I'd just have something to point to when the content became unavailable.
That's not highly likely in our case. I would liken our version of a "slashdotting" to be along the lines of a fly hitting a brick wall;) Again, the purpose of my question was not to debate mirroring and the "Slashdot effect", but in the case of articles that just cease to be available.
What I believe is that the content providers either went out of business (as is common these days), were swallowed up by another provider who may not archive old content or just lost some pages as a result of a re-design.
"As far as traffic lights go - a good bit of that is rote memorization of "top/leftmost == red == stop", so even if a severely colorblind person saw a light they shouldn't be confused as to its state."
Good point. Although, as my red/green color-blind father once pointed out, horizontal traffic lights can be confusing;)
Seriously, "The Matrix" was released back in 1999. Four years to the sequel(s) isn't a short wait. Personally, I'm glad they're releasing them both within such a short span.
The last sequel I waited a long time for (and wasn't even sure they'd make) was Beverly Hills Cop III. Seven years, and it wasn't even that good. Let's hope the Newsweek article is right and the upcoming Matrix sequels will be worth the wait.
"maybe it's time for the codemonkeys to hack their awesome perl script to automatically filter for "sameness" in an article compared against previous articles, and then make the editor click through to really post the article."
I have seen this suggested quite a few times, more often recently, and thought it might be time to point out that Slashcode CVS appears to have this feature in admin.pl:
Similar Stories: Q&A With Mister Dude Monday December 16, @05:17AM dude Dude! Monday November 25, @11:55AM dude
(keying on word "dude";)
I've tested it a bit and it seems to register a few too many false positives right now. Of course, I'm sure it's just having the kinks worked out.
The "Toy Story 2" DVD had a "sneak preview" of "Monsters, Inc" featuring Mike and Sully. The file date on the disc is Sept. 14, 2000.
If you read the article, you'll see that some of Mouse's prior art dates back to the 1960's:
Drawings attached to the complaint, dating from the early 1960s, pair a small, two-legged eyeball with a large, dull-witted monster character in a "buddy" relationship. The lawsuit claims that Disney and Pixar also appropriated the "buddy" relationship theme from Mouse's work.
Unless Disney has been working on this story for 40 years, I think Stanley Mouse has a case.
Here in the Northeast US, I love not dealing with frozen locks in the winter. It's quite nice to be able to just "click" open the doors without dealing with lock de-icer on particularly nasty days.
Very true. You definitely see the numbers drop off in the sophomore-level classes. As they say, those intro classes help "separate the men from the boys".
A lot of programming and Computer Science in general is not something you can learn easily. Certain skills like debugging and optimization can be a pain to pick up if you don't have the knack for them. I've known a bunch of intelligent people who could read the books and pass the tests, but application of ideas to those real-world scenarios that didn't always fit ever-so-neatly was their achilles' heel.
I think the hardest thing I ever had to show someone was debugging their own code. Sometimes those logic errors and typos don't stand out to the original coder, since s/he is "bridging the gap" in their mind (ie: they see what they thought they wrote).
For people who hate/can't do debugging, the best advice I ever gave was to take a break. Sometimes, like solving a puzzle, the best move is to take your mind off the puzzle and come back later. Of course, tracing variables through the code and setting breakpoints in a debugger doesn't hurt either, but it was never as well-received;)
They did mention talking about releasing content tarballs, so I imagine LWN mirrors will start popping up soon afterward.
I agree that they should remain active in some scaled-back form. Perhaps no more (or not as many) paid authors or less original content. There are many sites out there that exist primarily in "hobby" form (mine included), and I think the community in general would be happier to see them linger than disappear altogether.
It is the first to use pretty much the same injection code routines for both, though. The previous virus I referenced had two separate infection routines for PE and ELF files.
It shouldn't be much of a surprise that mods help the gaming industry. Not everyone likes to sit back and be spoon-fed their entertainment; some like to actively participate and mold things the way they like. Others just enjoy playing in a manner the original developers never intended or thought of.
I remember playing "Barney-stein" with the Beavis and Butthead guards and loving every minute of it!
If they're talking about the cost of sending/receiving email, which it seems they are, I just don't get the complaint. My ISP pays for the network traffic generated my email sent to and from my account without any "payment" from others.
Email isn't like the telephone call scenario they mention; each ISP pays the "costs" for their subscribers' usage (and then recoup the costs from the subscribers). AFAIK, there's no "terminating minutes"-type agreements for email in the US.
Any real determined thief won't mess with the locks when the car's covered in breakable glass;)
As much as I oppose the idea of DRM, I believe it's the only barrier in the way of releasing more information in digital form. Sure, some may say e-books and the like will never replace their dead-tree counterparts, but I can think of a few times in which they'd be useful. Take technical books/papers - how cool would it be to just "grep" the doc for the keywords you want instead of hoping they are in the index? Remember a vague passage from a novel you read? Just enter what you recall and we'll search the text for you. The possibilities can be endless.
The only bad thing about this implementation is what happens when/if "MightyWords" goes away? How will I be able to unlock my e-docs if I need to move them to another computer and my software can't contact them? Or, perhaps I am trying to read it on a device temporarily without internet access - then what?
I wonder if they ever asked themselves why people might be inclined to pirate music in the first place.
Good point, but if the "industry" was that savvy in the first place, I doubt they'd be nearly the giant PITA they are now;)
I know plenty of people (myself included) who would jump at the opportunity to purchase individual tracks in a digital format for a fraction of the cost of a CD. I should ammend that and say "popular" format - I don't want to have to go out and buy another player after dumping $600 on a portable MP3 jukebox. Some of these companies need to release entire libraries of tracks dating back to the 70s and 80s for online sale - it would be a killer! I know they won't, but they should..
Restrictions just hurt the loyal customers; people with no intention of paying for something will always find another way.
Apple's just advocating fair use. Ripping your CDs and burining custom collections is not "bad" - it's the people who take things a step further and distribute that music. If a person wants to load the tracks onto a custom CD or an MP3 player, what's wrong with that?
The arguments the "industry" keeps posing are like blaming the people who make ballpoint pens for ransom notes....
This sounds like (among other things) a larger-scale Seti@Home project - sharing your unused cpu cycles to solve larger problems. I'm not sure how well this would be received, especially given the recent concerns over what these clients are actually transmitting.
Slashdot Mirror
But that would defeat the purpose of sending it as an image in the first place. The whole point (I would assume) is to combat auto-response agents that could easily reply back with the number. By placing it in an image along with some obfuscation designed to confuse OCR, automated response systems would be extremely difficult to write.
Good. I'd love it if they did. That way, we'd have a "good" return address with which we could track them down. Right now, I'll bet a very large percentage (approaching 100%) of U[B|C]E has a fake return/from address.
The fact that a city successfully lobbied Google to remove a humor page from its index just because it appeared in a search for their city name is just sad. Granted, Google can do whatever the heck it wants with its own data; it's just bad mojo to censor something that was (supposedly) obviously satire. The interesting part in all this is that, having chosen to censor its index, one wonders if Google can remain a "common carrier" (for lack of a better term). I recall (but cannot for the life of me find the link) a case where an ISP was held liable for some objectionable newsgroups they carried because of their history of censoring groups they did not approve of. IIRC, the judge made it a point to say the ISP would not have been liable had they not censored other groups in the past. By chosing to censor information, they lost the right to hide behind a veil of "we're just a conduit".
Again, this comment would be much more informative if I could find the URL for that damn story ;)
As useful as the Web has become, I still feel a bit nostalgic for the days when it was ruled by educational institutions, geeks, government agencies and porn. Life without banners....ahhh :)
I think the point about not linking to the mirror until after the original article/content becomes unavailable is key to refute any arguments over lost ad revenue. Essentially, I'm saying that I will direct people to your site as long as there's something there for them to read. When you (as the site owner) cease to make the content available, you really aren't losing any revenue by me linking to a cached copy. As long as it's properly attributed, I think you'd have a good chance of defending yourself against any copryright infringement challenges.
I actually read a bit on copyright law after posting this AskSlashdot and found it to be less helpful than if I'd never read it. Everything is subjective, so it looks like the best you can do is show good intent and hope for the best ;) Worst case scenario is that you remove the cache; big deal.
If I could rely on the original content provider to keep the article available, this would be a non issue. It's somewhat like a bibliography in the printed world; if you want to see my references, go to pretty much any library.
One of my thoughts was to mirror the original article, (locally cached) ads and all so I hadn't modified it, just in case the content disappeared. In that respect, I wouldn't be taking away ad revenue for the provider while the article was up; I'd just have something to point to when the content became unavailable.
What I believe is that the content providers either went out of business (as is common these days), were swallowed up by another provider who may not archive old content or just lost some pages as a result of a re-design.
Good point. Although, as my red/green color-blind father once pointed out, horizontal traffic lights can be confusing ;)
Try loop-aes for a quick, non-kernel-dependent implementation.
CryptoAPI isn't bad either, but loop-aes is quicker to set up, IMHO.
..don't forget "Platinum Edition"...
Seriously, "The Matrix" was released back in 1999. Four years to the sequel(s) isn't a short wait. Personally, I'm glad they're releasing them both within such a short span.
The last sequel I waited a long time for (and wasn't even sure they'd make) was Beverly Hills Cop III. Seven years, and it wasn't even that good. Let's hope the Newsweek article is right and the upcoming Matrix sequels will be worth the wait.
"maybe it's time for the codemonkeys to hack their awesome perl script to automatically filter for "sameness" in an article compared against previous articles, and then make the editor click through to really post the article."
I have seen this suggested quite a few times, more often recently, and thought it might be time to point out that Slashcode CVS appears to have this feature in admin.pl:
Similar Stories:
Q&A With Mister Dude Monday December 16, @05:17AM dude
Dude! Monday November 25, @11:55AM dude
(keying on word "dude";)
I've tested it a bit and it seems to register a few too many false positives right now. Of course, I'm sure it's just having the kinks worked out.
If you read the article, you'll see that some of Mouse's prior art dates back to the 1960's:
Drawings attached to the complaint, dating from the early 1960s, pair a small, two-legged eyeball with a large, dull-witted monster character in a "buddy" relationship. The lawsuit claims that Disney and Pixar also appropriated the "buddy" relationship theme from Mouse's work.
Unless Disney has been working on this story for 40 years, I think Stanley Mouse has a case.
Here in the Northeast US, I love not dealing with frozen locks in the winter. It's quite nice to be able to just "click" open the doors without dealing with lock de-icer on particularly nasty days.
A lot of programming and Computer Science in general is not something you can learn easily. Certain skills like debugging and optimization can be a pain to pick up if you don't have the knack for them. I've known a bunch of intelligent people who could read the books and pass the tests, but application of ideas to those real-world scenarios that didn't always fit ever-so-neatly was their achilles' heel.
For people who hate/can't do debugging, the best advice I ever gave was to take a break. Sometimes, like solving a puzzle, the best move is to take your mind off the puzzle and come back later. Of course, tracing variables through the code and setting breakpoints in a debugger doesn't hurt either, but it was never as well-received ;)
I agree that they should remain active in some scaled-back form. Perhaps no more (or not as many) paid authors or less original content. There are many sites out there that exist primarily in "hobby" form (mine included), and I think the community in general would be happier to see them linger than disappear altogether.
I wonder if this question (and the others mentioned) have anything to do with this recent IDG story.
It is the first to use pretty much the same injection code routines for both, though. The previous virus I referenced had two separate infection routines for PE and ELF files.
I remember playing "Barney-stein" with the Beavis and Butthead guards and loving every minute of it!
Email isn't like the telephone call scenario they mention; each ISP pays the "costs" for their subscribers' usage (and then recoup the costs from the subscribers). AFAIK, there's no "terminating minutes"-type agreements for email in the US.
As much as I oppose the idea of DRM, I believe it's the only barrier in the way of releasing more information in digital form. Sure, some may say e-books and the like will never replace their dead-tree counterparts, but I can think of a few times in which they'd be useful. Take technical books/papers - how cool would it be to just "grep" the doc for the keywords you want instead of hoping they are in the index? Remember a vague passage from a novel you read? Just enter what you recall and we'll search the text for you. The possibilities can be endless.
The only bad thing about this implementation is what happens when/if "MightyWords" goes away? How will I be able to unlock my e-docs if I need to move them to another computer and my software can't contact them? Or, perhaps I am trying to read it on a device temporarily without internet access - then what?
Good point, but if the "industry" was that savvy in the first place, I doubt they'd be nearly the giant PITA they are now ;)
I know plenty of people (myself included) who would jump at the opportunity to purchase individual tracks in a digital format for a fraction of the cost of a CD. I should ammend that and say "popular" format - I don't want to have to go out and buy another player after dumping $600 on a portable MP3 jukebox. Some of these companies need to release entire libraries of tracks dating back to the 70s and 80s for online sale - it would be a killer! I know they won't, but they should..
Restrictions just hurt the loyal customers; people with no intention of paying for something will always find another way.
The arguments the "industry" keeps posing are like blaming the people who make ballpoint pens for ransom notes....
This sounds like (among other things) a larger-scale Seti@Home project - sharing your unused cpu cycles to solve larger problems. I'm not sure how well this would be received, especially given the recent concerns over what these clients are actually transmitting.