Microsoft Word import is still iffy. Some documents import fine, some import badly, and some don't import at all. It's better than it was in older versions of OpenOffice,
but if formatting matters, you still can't freely interchange documents between OpenOffice and Word. I know, this really is a problem with Microsoft's obscure format.
It's the biggest obstacle to widespread OpenOffice adoption, though.
The help system is terrible. Each help box needs to stand alone. Instead, help text often assumes context from previous help text. For example, search help for "print envelope" and you get "Letter Wizard, Page 3", which isn't helpful. In general, finding answers with the help system is hard, and when you've found them, there's a good chance they will be out of context. A bad help system is a significant barrier to adoption.
OpenOffice's answer to Clippy, the diamond-shaped popup thing, is even less useful than
Microsoft's version.
Auto-completion of words is badly designed. In Word, if you don't accept what it's doing, auto-completion doesn't try again for a while. In Open Office, it gets in your face and keeps trying. This is obnoxious. In typical open-source style, there's some obscure configuration parameter you can change to fix this. Wrong answer.
"Draw" is reasonably good, better than what Microsoft Office used to have. But then Microsoft bought Visio and integrated it into Office, and Visio is better than Draw.
"Calc" is about as good as everybody else's spreadsheet.
"Impress" is OK for producing dumb presentations, but PowerPoint presentations tend to look better.
Ah. The charts on the real web site are much more useful.
Looks like "usb-agent" is using way too much CPU time. The Linux hot-plugging system seems to consume excessive resources. Big jobs like file system recovery and GUI startup aren't the bottleneck. It's probably going to turn out that something simple like parsing the file of hot-pluggable devices and drivers is inefficient.
The "bootchart" tool mentioned in the article looks promising. But it's mostly unlabeled bars. Until they figure out how to correctly identify all the processes running during boot, it's not too helpful.
The CPU utilization during booting is much higher than I would have expected. That's interesting, and unexpected. For most of the first ten seconds of post-kernel startup, the system is CPU bound, while the disk is idle more than half the time. Where is all that CPU effort going?
This is about right. Cable TV hit about 60% market penetration by household in the US years ago, and has been stuck there since. That's probably about where Internet penetration will end up.
US broadband penetration is up to 80% of US Internet users. Some other countries are higher, but they're mostly countries which are either very crowded or very cold.
You know, someone could make a funny parody of the "Get a Mac" commercials;
I was thinking briefly of creating "idweeb.org", where people could post pictures of dweebs wearing white-corded earphones. The domain is available. Go for it if you're interested.
We're seeing some good political maneuvering here.
With this appearing in the Washington Post, and support from ACLU lawyers, it's quite possible that the plan is to get this guy called to testify before a congressional committee. If he testifies under oath before Congress on this, that overrides the FBI's "gag order".
But, in my time dealing with alot of these clowns, I have met a higher concentration of assholes than in any other sector...
That's a classic comment in LA. Movie executives are smart. Music execs are dumb. Making a movie is complicated; bringing a big production together is a huge management and organization job. It's easy to screw up, and the industry's tolerance for expensive screwups is low.
Making a musical recording is a few guys in a room. "Music management" is sales, promotion, and bullying; it's not about production.
"This is the music industry. We're all wiseguys." - Get Shorty 2
I read the paper and made a copy of the most difficult map, track #8.
I'll try to convert that into a form the Overbot software can handle, and run it.
That map, assuming the vehicle is 2m wide and 3m long, has a narrowest width of 4 meters, which is not all that tight. The simulated vehicles in the
article seem to have a rather tight minimum turning radius. They do skid in turns;
unclear if the controller is exploiting that behavior to tighten turns. What is the minimum turning radius of those vehicles?
Reactive control is easy if the turning radius of the vehicle is small. The paper on
"Power and limits of reactive agents" uses a round vehicle with a zero turning radius, one that can turn in place. With a vehicle like that, you don't have to predict. The Roomba works the same way; zero turning radius and purely reactive control.
I'll have to pass this along to the robotics group at UC Santa Cruz who now has the Overbot; they may follow up.
The big question: how many infected systems are running Vista? If there are a significant number of infected Vista systems, Microsoft blew it again. (Remember, Microsoft said that Windows 95 was going to fix security. Then Windows XP was going to fix security. Then Vista...)
On the other hand, if Vista systems aren't being turned into zombies, we may be at the beginning of the end.
Spammers have had to resort to more and more desperate efforts to keep spamming. In the late 1990s, spammers could just buy a big pipe and start sending. That's dead.
Then there was spamming through open relays. That's essentially dead. There used to be a significant amount of "legitimate spam". That was killed by the combination of CAN-SPAM and spam filters - if it comes from a known spam source, it gets deleted, and if the sender lies about the source, they've committed a felony. China finally cracked down on "bulletproof hosting". (There are some "bulletproof hosting" outfits left, but most are gone and some of the remaining ones may be sting operations.) Zombies are about the only way left to spam in bulk. And note how few different spams there are. The number of actual spammers left isn't that large. It's small enough for law enforcement to target.
If the zombie problem can be cracked, which ought to be possible, spamming may drop to a minor problem.
Notice that in all the examples, the road is much wider than the car. That's not by accident.
Driving using reactive behaviors is easy if you have plenty of room. On narrow roads, though, those approaches fail. You have to look ahead. In fact, to drive in the real world, you need a controller that plots at least an S-curve ahead. Otherwise, you'll end up in a tight spot pointed in a direction that won't get you through.
You don't necessarily have to "plan", in the AI sense, but you need a fairly good dynamics prediction capability, after which you can run a reactive controller on the prediction.
We went through this with our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. We started out with a reactive planner, but it just couldn't deal with tight spots. Most of the other teams ended up with S-curve planners, too. The reason you need S-curves is that you need to be able to achieve both a desired position and direction at a point ahead of the vehicle. So you need a curve with at least two degrees of freedom.
The predictor needs to know enough about the vehicle dynamics to make reasonable predictions. For example, predicted S-curves have to be built knowing how fast you can change the steering angle and how tightly you can turn given the current speed and ground bank.
If you need to do this stuff, read up on adaptive model-based feedforward control. The idea is that you have a system that learns how the system behaves as the inputs change and builds a model. Inverting the model gives you a predictor. Given a predictor, you can control.
A useful feature of that approach is that, while you're using one predictor, you can be training a better one safely. Predictors are trained by watching; they don't have to be in control. So you can start out with some dumb controller and work your way up to better ones, without crashing. This is probably how mammals learn motor skills.
The problem I would have with the Google work environment is that it all appears to be geared to getting you to spend as many hours as possible at the office.
Er, yes. Google has on-site laundromats in their office buildings.
In time, programming will be a union job. Like animation. Yes, creative jobs can be unionized. Most of the film industry, from grips to actors to directors, is unionized.
I'm not insisting that interceptions be public records immediately, although, in time, they should be. I'm saying that records about them should be archived somewhere outside the executive branch of government.
Most interceptions could be disclosed within a year. I'd like to see legislation requiring that at least 75% of interceptions are disclosed after two years. Most investigations are closed within two years, but some run longer. The Administration can keep 25% secret. After four years, all interceptions have to be disclosed unless a court is convinced otherwise, and those can't exceed 25% of the remainder. This puts a leash on Big Brother without interfering with real investigations.
The combination is a disaster for Sony. They probably could have overcome any two of those problems. If, say, they'd shipped a year before the XBox 360, there would have been a year to get through the "hard to develop" problem, and the price comparison wouldn't have been so unfavorable. Or if Sony had the low-priced entry, like last time with the PS2, they could have won out. But expensive, late, and hard all in one box may be too much for Sony.
The point is, who's getting those undocumented "oral requests" for telco information? Is the FBI just calling up Verisign's NetDiscovery center? That's worth knowing. What are Verisign's review processes before they deliver information? That should be on the public record. More transparency and oversight is needed in that operation.
It would be appropriate to require that records of all interceptions go to components of the judicial and legislative branches, such as the Clerk of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the General Accounting Office of Congress.
Put all that blithering into Microsoft Word 97, clicked on Tools->AutoSummarize, and got this 500 word summary:
Maybe I'm biased, since one of the Web sites being blocked was mine. Which begs the question: If they really believe that backbone companies have the right to silently block Web sites, are some of them headed for a rift with Net Neutrality supporters?"
In the aforementioned instance, AboveNet and TeleGlobe were not selling "parental filters" or other common types of filtered Internet access; the users being blocked from our Web sites were adults paying for what they thought were unfiltered Internet connections. If an ISP filters incoming mail from known spammers, that generally improves the user experience, and is something many users would expect an ISP to do anyway. Similarly, if an ISP blocks traffic from sites because of spam or other network abuse, that serves to protect their own users. But if an ISP blocks users from viewing sites because of their content, that's generally not expected by users, unless they've specifically signed up for something like a parental controls. Well, true, but the fact that AboveNet blocked Web sites was not widely known even within the company; when I once called AboveNet feigning ignorance and asking them if they blocked RBL'ed Web sites, the technician who spoke to me said, "No, that wouldn't make any sense." Some have argued that if an ISP blocks the user from reaching a Web site, then even if the ISP is defrauding the user, that's still strictly an issue between the user and the ISP. The modern-day threats to Net Neutrality are different: slowing access to Web sites unless the site owners pay a "toll", instead of blocking access to sites because of the content of other sites hosted at the same ISP. If a user buys Internet access, they almost always buy it with the understanding that if they access a site, the content will download as quickly as their connection allows.
There is a clear line between following user preferences by blocking spam, and countermanding user preferences by blocking sites because of their content -- and once you've crossed that line, where's the logical stopping point? It was MAPS's decision, not ours or our ISP's, to have our site blocked. I tried to track down the influential people who had spoken out supporting AboveNet's blocking of Web sites, or at least their right to block Web sites. INTERNET NEUTRALITY
Second, there's network neutrality. In Internet service, the government mandates nothing. Although, he didn't get to making any such frank statements during the controversy over AboveNet's Web site blocking. Internet service providers have voluntarily upheld content-neutral practices without the need for government intervention, and consumers would never stand for blocked Web sites...
I mean trying to stop people DESCRIBING an event...
The National Basketball Association already tried that and lost. NBA sued a cellular service that sent out play by play score updates. (National Basketball Ass'n v. Motorola, Inc., 105 F.3d 841 (2d Cir.))
Reading the filings you can see why some lawyers cost so much. At the same IBM's lawyers building an almost invincible legal position on every one of their claims, they take huge swipes at SCO's claims. They point out flaws in SCO's arguments and point out when SCO has failed to address an important point. No detail is forgotten even the little detail of SCO's use of cross referencing to hide their lack of evidence.
IBM is represented by Cravath, Swayne, and Moore, and that's how Cravath works. They have a very organized staff checking everything the other side puts out. Everything goes into a litigation support system (Cravath was the first law firm to use one, and it was developed by IBM for a famous IBM case). At least two different lawyers check over everything. One of Cravath's slogans used to be "For those must-win cases". Cravath often wins simply because the other side makes mistakes, and they don't.
This is good work by Microsoft. They've tracked down a few big-time web spammers, all the way up the food chain. But there are more.
We've been working on the web spam problem, from a different angle. Our starting point is the legal requirement that a business cannot be anonymous. Every legitimate business must have an identifiable person or corporation behind it. (See CA B&P code sec. 17358, ("disclosure of... legal name and address information shall appear on...
the first screen displayed... (or) on the screen on which a buyer may place the order for goods or services...") the European Directive on Electronic Commerce ("the service provider shall render easily, directly and permanently accessible to the recipients of the service and competent authorities, at least the following information: (a) the name of the service provider; (b) the geographic address at which the service provider is established...")
Given that basis, our solution to web spam is straightforward: if we can't find a valid business name and address on a web site that's selling or advertising, it's not a legitimate business.
Of course, if there is a name and address, it should match business license data, corporate registration data, fictitious name filings, and similar records of business existence.
So we have a system that parses web pages in some detail, looking for addresses. If a web site has a name and address on it that obeys postal addressing rules, we can usually find it. We have access to some business databases, and we're adding more. We look at some other info, like SSL certs and BBB seals, which has some credibility. Thus, we can check for legitimacy.
Our goal is to feed this into search engine rankings, so that non-legitimate businesses fall out of visibility.
"Doorway pages" and "affilates" with no business behind them aren't legitimate businesses, so they're toast. Completely phony addresses won't work, either; they won't match business records. Stealing the name address of a legitimate business is felony identity theft, which is a place you don't want to go. (Also, sometimes, we can detect and report that.)
An early version of this is already running at SiteTruth.com.
If you're responsible for a commercial web site, run it through the Detailed SiteTruth analysis, for Webmasters and see what SiteTruth finds. If SiteTruth can't find your business name and address, you might want to fix that. The day will come when it affects your search placement.
This is the alpha test phase for SiteTruth; there's more coming.
Web spam used to be a safe tactic. That was then. This is now.
Much wiretapping in the US is actually outsourced to Verisign. Verisign's NetDiscovery center provides a full-service wiretapping service, with hooks into telcos, cellular networks, VoIP providers, cable TV systems, wireless data networks, and ISPs. Verisign's proprietary back door into the SS7 telephone signaling control network makes this not only possible, but allows Verisign to offer wiretapping services at a lower cost.
So if Congress or the press wants to look into this matter, the place to go is Verisign's Network Security Office. Also, attending Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception, Cybercrime Investigations and Intelligence Gathering Conference and Expo in May, in Washington, DC. "Now that most nations of the world require lawful interception support of VoIP and other IP-based services, ISS World Spring 2007 is a must attend event." Talks include "Best Practices for Successful Deployments of Word Spotting Technology" and "Content and P2P Monitoring and Filtering". Major topics for this year include inteconnecting multiple intercept systems to allow easier remote access.
Still too much in the kernel
on
ReactOS Revealed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
ReactOS still, apparently, has much of the graphics system in the kernel.
Along with drivers. It emulates NT 4/2000/XP architecture, not NT 3.51, which actually
had a cleaner kernel.
But at least they didn't put in a 16-bit subsystem.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah. The charts on the real web site are much more useful.
Looks like "usb-agent" is using way too much CPU time. The Linux hot-plugging system seems to consume excessive resources. Big jobs like file system recovery and GUI startup aren't the bottleneck. It's probably going to turn out that something simple like parsing the file of hot-pluggable devices and drivers is inefficient.
The "bootchart" tool mentioned in the article looks promising. But it's mostly unlabeled bars. Until they figure out how to correctly identify all the processes running during boot, it's not too helpful.
The CPU utilization during booting is much higher than I would have expected. That's interesting, and unexpected. For most of the first ten seconds of post-kernel startup, the system is CPU bound, while the disk is idle more than half the time. Where is all that CPU effort going?
This isn't a new DRAM chip. This is an ad from the fan and heatsink crowd.
there isn't a single DRM system that can't be bypassed
How's your XBox 360 emulator coming?
This is about right. Cable TV hit about 60% market penetration by household in the US years ago, and has been stuck there since. That's probably about where Internet penetration will end up.
US broadband penetration is up to 80% of US Internet users. Some other countries are higher, but they're mostly countries which are either very crowded or very cold.
You know, someone could make a funny parody of the "Get a Mac" commercials;
I was thinking briefly of creating "idweeb.org", where people could post pictures of dweebs wearing white-corded earphones. The domain is available. Go for it if you're interested.
We're seeing some good political maneuvering here. With this appearing in the Washington Post, and support from ACLU lawyers, it's quite possible that the plan is to get this guy called to testify before a congressional committee. If he testifies under oath before Congress on this, that overrides the FBI's "gag order".
But, in my time dealing with alot of these clowns, I have met a higher concentration of assholes than in any other sector...
That's a classic comment in LA. Movie executives are smart. Music execs are dumb. Making a movie is complicated; bringing a big production together is a huge management and organization job. It's easy to screw up, and the industry's tolerance for expensive screwups is low. Making a musical recording is a few guys in a room. "Music management" is sales, promotion, and bullying; it's not about production.
"This is the music industry. We're all wiseguys." - Get Shorty 2
I read the paper and made a copy of the most difficult map, track #8. I'll try to convert that into a form the Overbot software can handle, and run it.
That map, assuming the vehicle is 2m wide and 3m long, has a narrowest width of 4 meters, which is not all that tight. The simulated vehicles in the article seem to have a rather tight minimum turning radius. They do skid in turns; unclear if the controller is exploiting that behavior to tighten turns. What is the minimum turning radius of those vehicles?
Reactive control is easy if the turning radius of the vehicle is small. The paper on "Power and limits of reactive agents" uses a round vehicle with a zero turning radius, one that can turn in place. With a vehicle like that, you don't have to predict. The Roomba works the same way; zero turning radius and purely reactive control.
I'll have to pass this along to the robotics group at UC Santa Cruz who now has the Overbot; they may follow up.
The big question: how many infected systems are running Vista? If there are a significant number of infected Vista systems, Microsoft blew it again. (Remember, Microsoft said that Windows 95 was going to fix security. Then Windows XP was going to fix security. Then Vista...)
On the other hand, if Vista systems aren't being turned into zombies, we may be at the beginning of the end.
Spammers have had to resort to more and more desperate efforts to keep spamming. In the late 1990s, spammers could just buy a big pipe and start sending. That's dead. Then there was spamming through open relays. That's essentially dead. There used to be a significant amount of "legitimate spam". That was killed by the combination of CAN-SPAM and spam filters - if it comes from a known spam source, it gets deleted, and if the sender lies about the source, they've committed a felony. China finally cracked down on "bulletproof hosting". (There are some "bulletproof hosting" outfits left, but most are gone and some of the remaining ones may be sting operations.) Zombies are about the only way left to spam in bulk. And note how few different spams there are. The number of actual spammers left isn't that large. It's small enough for law enforcement to target.
If the zombie problem can be cracked, which ought to be possible, spamming may drop to a minor problem.
That's a complex situation. The Marshals Service is administratively under DOJ, but by law, takes its orders from judges. Federal judges are currently lobbying Congress for more control over the Marshals.
Notice that in all the examples, the road is much wider than the car. That's not by accident.
Driving using reactive behaviors is easy if you have plenty of room. On narrow roads, though, those approaches fail. You have to look ahead. In fact, to drive in the real world, you need a controller that plots at least an S-curve ahead. Otherwise, you'll end up in a tight spot pointed in a direction that won't get you through.
You don't necessarily have to "plan", in the AI sense, but you need a fairly good dynamics prediction capability, after which you can run a reactive controller on the prediction.
We went through this with our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. We started out with a reactive planner, but it just couldn't deal with tight spots. Most of the other teams ended up with S-curve planners, too. The reason you need S-curves is that you need to be able to achieve both a desired position and direction at a point ahead of the vehicle. So you need a curve with at least two degrees of freedom.
The predictor needs to know enough about the vehicle dynamics to make reasonable predictions. For example, predicted S-curves have to be built knowing how fast you can change the steering angle and how tightly you can turn given the current speed and ground bank.
If you need to do this stuff, read up on adaptive model-based feedforward control. The idea is that you have a system that learns how the system behaves as the inputs change and builds a model. Inverting the model gives you a predictor. Given a predictor, you can control.
A useful feature of that approach is that, while you're using one predictor, you can be training a better one safely. Predictors are trained by watching; they don't have to be in control. So you can start out with some dumb controller and work your way up to better ones, without crashing. This is probably how mammals learn motor skills.
If a judge orders someone to do something, and they refuse, isn't it then the justice department's responsibility to enforce that judge's order?
Actually, that's done by U.S. Marshals, the enforcement arm of the judicial branch, with about 3,000 deputy U.S. Marshals.
The problem I would have with the Google work environment is that it all appears to be geared to getting you to spend as many hours as possible at the office.
Er, yes. Google has on-site laundromats in their office buildings.
In time, programming will be a union job. Like animation. Yes, creative jobs can be unionized. Most of the film industry, from grips to actors to directors, is unionized.
I'm not insisting that interceptions be public records immediately, although, in time, they should be. I'm saying that records about them should be archived somewhere outside the executive branch of government.
Most interceptions could be disclosed within a year. I'd like to see legislation requiring that at least 75% of interceptions are disclosed after two years. Most investigations are closed within two years, but some run longer. The Administration can keep 25% secret. After four years, all interceptions have to be disclosed unless a court is convinced otherwise, and those can't exceed 25% of the remainder. This puts a leash on Big Brother without interfering with real investigations.
The problems of the PS3:
The combination is a disaster for Sony. They probably could have overcome any two of those problems. If, say, they'd shipped a year before the XBox 360, there would have been a year to get through the "hard to develop" problem, and the price comparison wouldn't have been so unfavorable. Or if Sony had the low-priced entry, like last time with the PS2, they could have won out. But expensive, late, and hard all in one box may be too much for Sony.
The point is, who's getting those undocumented "oral requests" for telco information? Is the FBI just calling up Verisign's NetDiscovery center? That's worth knowing. What are Verisign's review processes before they deliver information? That should be on the public record. More transparency and oversight is needed in that operation.
It would be appropriate to require that records of all interceptions go to components of the judicial and legislative branches, such as the Clerk of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the General Accounting Office of Congress.
Put all that blithering into Microsoft Word 97, clicked on Tools->AutoSummarize, and got this 500 word summary:
Maybe I'm biased, since one of the Web sites being blocked was mine. Which begs the question: If they really believe that backbone companies have the right to silently block Web sites, are some of them headed for a rift with Net Neutrality supporters?"
In the aforementioned instance, AboveNet and TeleGlobe were not selling "parental filters" or other common types of filtered Internet access; the users being blocked from our Web sites were adults paying for what they thought were unfiltered Internet connections. If an ISP filters incoming mail from known spammers, that generally improves the user experience, and is something many users would expect an ISP to do anyway. Similarly, if an ISP blocks traffic from sites because of spam or other network abuse, that serves to protect their own users. But if an ISP blocks users from viewing sites because of their content, that's generally not expected by users, unless they've specifically signed up for something like a parental controls. Well, true, but the fact that AboveNet blocked Web sites was not widely known even within the company; when I once called AboveNet feigning ignorance and asking them if they blocked RBL'ed Web sites, the technician who spoke to me said, "No, that wouldn't make any sense." Some have argued that if an ISP blocks the user from reaching a Web site, then even if the ISP is defrauding the user, that's still strictly an issue between the user and the ISP. The modern-day threats to Net Neutrality are different: slowing access to Web sites unless the site owners pay a "toll", instead of blocking access to sites because of the content of other sites hosted at the same ISP. If a user buys Internet access, they almost always buy it with the understanding that if they access a site, the content will download as quickly as their connection allows.
There is a clear line between following user preferences by blocking spam, and countermanding user preferences by blocking sites because of their content -- and once you've crossed that line, where's the logical stopping point? It was MAPS's decision, not ours or our ISP's, to have our site blocked. I tried to track down the influential people who had spoken out supporting AboveNet's blocking of Web sites, or at least their right to block Web sites. INTERNET NEUTRALITY
Second, there's network neutrality. In Internet service, the government mandates nothing. Although, he didn't get to making any such frank statements during the controversy over AboveNet's Web site blocking. Internet service providers have voluntarily upheld content-neutral practices without the need for government intervention, and consumers would never stand for blocked Web sites...
I mean trying to stop people DESCRIBING an event...
The National Basketball Association already tried that and lost. NBA sued a cellular service that sent out play by play score updates. (National Basketball Ass'n v. Motorola, Inc., 105 F.3d 841 (2d Cir.))
Reading the filings you can see why some lawyers cost so much. At the same IBM's lawyers building an almost invincible legal position on every one of their claims, they take huge swipes at SCO's claims. They point out flaws in SCO's arguments and point out when SCO has failed to address an important point. No detail is forgotten even the little detail of SCO's use of cross referencing to hide their lack of evidence.
IBM is represented by Cravath, Swayne, and Moore, and that's how Cravath works. They have a very organized staff checking everything the other side puts out. Everything goes into a litigation support system (Cravath was the first law firm to use one, and it was developed by IBM for a famous IBM case). At least two different lawyers check over everything. One of Cravath's slogans used to be "For those must-win cases". Cravath often wins simply because the other side makes mistakes, and they don't.
All this is incredibly expensive, but it works.
This is good work by Microsoft. They've tracked down a few big-time web spammers, all the way up the food chain. But there are more.
We've been working on the web spam problem, from a different angle. Our starting point is the legal requirement that a business cannot be anonymous. Every legitimate business must have an identifiable person or corporation behind it. (See CA B&P code sec. 17358, ("disclosure of ... legal name and address information shall appear on ...
the first screen displayed ... (or) on the screen on which a buyer may place the order for goods or services ...") the European Directive on Electronic Commerce ("the service provider shall render easily, directly and permanently accessible to the recipients of the service and competent authorities, at least the following information: (a) the name of the service provider; (b) the geographic address at which the service provider is established...")
Given that basis, our solution to web spam is straightforward: if we can't find a valid business name and address on a web site that's selling or advertising, it's not a legitimate business. Of course, if there is a name and address, it should match business license data, corporate registration data, fictitious name filings, and similar records of business existence.
So we have a system that parses web pages in some detail, looking for addresses. If a web site has a name and address on it that obeys postal addressing rules, we can usually find it. We have access to some business databases, and we're adding more. We look at some other info, like SSL certs and BBB seals, which has some credibility. Thus, we can check for legitimacy.
Our goal is to feed this into search engine rankings, so that non-legitimate businesses fall out of visibility.
"Doorway pages" and "affilates" with no business behind them aren't legitimate businesses, so they're toast. Completely phony addresses won't work, either; they won't match business records. Stealing the name address of a legitimate business is felony identity theft, which is a place you don't want to go. (Also, sometimes, we can detect and report that.)
An early version of this is already running at SiteTruth.com. If you're responsible for a commercial web site, run it through the Detailed SiteTruth analysis, for Webmasters and see what SiteTruth finds. If SiteTruth can't find your business name and address, you might want to fix that. The day will come when it affects your search placement.
This is the alpha test phase for SiteTruth; there's more coming.
Web spam used to be a safe tactic. That was then. This is now.
Much wiretapping in the US is actually outsourced to Verisign. Verisign's NetDiscovery center provides a full-service wiretapping service, with hooks into telcos, cellular networks, VoIP providers, cable TV systems, wireless data networks, and ISPs. Verisign's proprietary back door into the SS7 telephone signaling control network makes this not only possible, but allows Verisign to offer wiretapping services at a lower cost.
Verisign is extending their wiretapping network internationally. Italy is already hooked up.
So if Congress or the press wants to look into this matter, the place to go is Verisign's Network Security Office. Also, attending Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception, Cybercrime Investigations and Intelligence Gathering Conference and Expo in May, in Washington, DC. "Now that most nations of the world require lawful interception support of VoIP and other IP-based services, ISS World Spring 2007 is a must attend event." Talks include "Best Practices for Successful Deployments of Word Spotting Technology" and "Content and P2P Monitoring and Filtering". Major topics for this year include inteconnecting multiple intercept systems to allow easier remote access.
ReactOS still, apparently, has much of the graphics system in the kernel. Along with drivers. It emulates NT 4/2000/XP architecture, not NT 3.51, which actually had a cleaner kernel.
But at least they didn't put in a 16-bit subsystem.
Penny Arcade is for people who don't get Megatokyo.