You can place a fraud alert, valid for 90 days, which will cause credit institutions to check who they give their money to before doing so. Is it just me, or is there a touch of surreal in this?
Anyway, the obvious thing to do is to put yourself on fraud alert *before* your ID is stolen, not after. And keep the alert updated at all times. This is the easy way to bounce back the cost of carelessness to those that should be careful to begin with, banks and other credit institutions.
Perhaps the webserver, perhaps the DNS, Whatever. Look at the whois:
Domain Name:OPENLINUX.ORG Created On:03-Aug-1998 04:00:00 UTC Last Updated On:10-Nov-2004 04:47:01 UTC
Domain Name: CALDERASYSTEMS.COM
Created on: 13-AUG-98
Expires on: 12-AUG-06
Last Updated on: 28-JUL-04
Not very likely for someone to anticipate in 1998 what SCO would do in 2003, register domains in their name, go unnoticed until 2006 and then use the domains for a funny press release with funnier 404 fortune cookies.
The wonderful internet of all kinds of intricate P2P human communications depends on a very simple basis of physical communication: the cable. And that in turn depends on geography. You can build millions of P2P networks for short distance, but that's no internet. Global reach requires cross-ocean cables and there are just so many of them (and satellites, for the sake of accuracy). That's your bottlenecks. If they get 0wn3d by some senator, all your data on them are belong to him.
You can't avoid passing your communications over senator McCarthy's cables. What you can do though, is use his cables and give him the long nose anyway. The long nose goes by the name of "encryption".
Thus, the answer to your question is no, it is not financially feasible to create an internet that relies on P2P-connectivity, but it's not necessary either. The problem is not at the level of connectivity, but at the top-level of the data. Stop using hotmail to begin with, start routine-encrypting your communications as the next step. There's your P2P internet. At least until the day that backbone providers refuse to carry encrypted data...
First they hire you as a professional, then they treat you as an ignoramous. This can't be. Tell the suit that if he doesn't trust your judgement, the very one he hired you for, he should resign giving his own bad judgement as the reason.
The state can appeal to my moral or hit my wallet, but it can't do both at the same time. If I've paid for recycling, moral is out of the equation and I throw the recyclables in the garbage. Whoever got my recycling money can go fish them out of there and do the recycling I paid for. That's the way I deal with beer bottles (10 c a piece) and lemonade tins (30 c a piece) today and that's the way I'd deal with 6-dollar computers too.
By visiting my website you agree to accept and view commercial content on the site and to not block, remove or otherwise make inaccessible said material, bla, bla, bla...
By transmitting your website to my browser you agree to not transmit or attempt to transmit any commercial material to my system, bla, bla, bla...
A year and a half ago, someone I knew received an invitation to speak at a conference. He felt honoured and accepted, but became somewhat suspicious at the requested "paper submission fee". He and I started investigating the conference, searched the net for previous years' editions and comments on them, checked the organisation etc. It all turned out to be a scam, pretty unique in its method.
Three or four conferences on distinct technical subjects and apparently unrelated to each-other were being organised at the same time in the same hotel in Miami. All conferences had pompus websites made from the same template and all were served from the same IP address without a reverse record in Venezuela. All the websites of previous years' conferences were gone. Some conferences gave the same Florida phone number to the secretariat and others gave no phone number at all. The Florida number in question was forwarded to Venezuela.
Common to all these conferences was that they were headed by professor Nagib Callaos, the same one who accepted the SCIgen paper. I searched the net for his credentials; I found none. I phoned his office in Venezuela and asked for them; I was met first with polite evasions and then with hostile evasions. One of his conferences stated boldly that it was organised "under the auspices of the University of Texas in Austin". I checked with the university; the university had never heard of the conference, nor of "professor" Callaos. Shortly after my phone calls to UT, the website of the conference "under the auspices of UT" disappeared, although the conference itself was still ahead in time.
The catch is the submission fees, 250-600 dollars per accepted paper, allegedly to cover the costs of publishing the papers in book form. Presumably nobody ever attends these conferences except the speakers themselves. If the SCIgen gibberish paper is actually read at WMSCI 2005, it will serve the rest of the speakers as a reminder that greed for recognition works just as well as greed for money in the 419-world.
All work submitted to Turnitin is checked against three databases of content:
[...]
3. Millions of student papers already submitted to Turnitin.
So the teachers commit copyright infringement by submitting their students' works to turnitin and turnitin commits grand scale copyright infringement by copying, preserving and capitalising on "millions of student papers" without the students' permission. Great business!
Does anyone else notice that self-builts score higher than most vendors on both home machines and servers? The results are probably skewed by the fact that self-builders are bound to be more knowlegdable than the average buyer and can fix more problems themselves, but this is nevertheless a rather bad rate for the industry. See for instance the replies to "how often is it down?" in the server category. Seems to me that PCMag should include parts vendors along with ready system vendors in next year's survey.
Asking for the impossible is easy, delivering the impossible for just under 200 dollars is slightly more difficult.
You need to start by answering a simple question, probably together with your boss (or even letting him answer it for you): who works for whom?
If the students work for the teachers, then you can publish huge and illegible scans and let the students work them out.
If the teachers work for the students, then the teachers should deliver cleanly typed and formatted electonic documents, which you can turn to neat.pdfs for the students without any scanner at all.
If you work for the school, then the school should provide you with whatever means it reasonably takes, money- and timewise, to process the work you have, even if that means buying industrial scanners and exhorbitantly-priced software for handwriting recognition, or sitting for weeks there, typing out the hand-written papers.
My point is: everybody wants to offload all their responsibilities on the admin, but that's surely not a reason for the admin to go along with that. If they want you to do the impossible, they should also pay you accordingly. Do they?
Use RFID or something similar. Put a basket of tags at the common entrances to the woods, with a sign "if you carry one of these it might help us find you if you get lost". People who take one can deposit it at the exit. Nobody will complain and it will be very hard to abuse the system.
Or start tracking everyone without their permission and face complaints, lawsuits and abuse of your system for purposes other than the one intended. Bank robber flees in the woods, sheriff confiscates your tracking data either you like it or not, wrong man gets arrested and blames you for it, that kind of thing. Looks like a wasps' nest to me.
My father got his first computer last year at age 73. Fifteen years ago he used a couple of custom DOS programmes at work for a while, but that's all. Now he had to start from the very bottom basics, things like how to use the mouse and what the shift key does.
For a man who doesn't know what the shift key does, the learning curve is equal in all common operating systems. There was no legacy here, nor any acquired bad habits to take into account. So I installed Redhat on his machine.
The first major advantage, for the both of us, is that I can do everything on his machine remotely. We live some 3000+ km apart, so dropping by to do an update or fix a problem is not an option. However, as long as sshd runs and he can connect to the net, there is no problem that can't be fixed remotely.
The second major advantage is that we could skip most part of the security litany. No Outlook there. No MSIE. No spyware that comes in easy click-here-to-install rpms. Mozilla is secure enough for clueless use all by itself and, if he ever tries to run Netsky, all he'll get is a question he can't answer.
The third major advantage is that he is protected against himself. He can't ruin the system no matter what he does. Yes, he does have the root password, but he has no concept of what root is and no wish to find out. A little bash scrip backs up his home directory on CD every once in a while and that's all it takes to keep that system sane.
After eight months, the net result of this is only positive. All the probems he has had so far are of the kind he would have had on Windows too. Of all the problems mentioned in the main article, he has had none.
My short advise is: if your parents are new to computers, don't waste their learning efforts on Windows. Go straight for your favourite OS, as long as it has a good-looking and well-functioning GUI on top of it.
Try to buy 1-CPU annual licenses. "Recalculate" lopps back to itself, no re-calculation takes place. "Finalize" hangs indefinitely. It could be because they're running their webshop on SCO OpenServer, but it could also be because they're running it on uncle Bill's.$ servers. It's like the difference between a Vi@gra spam and a v1agra spam.
Home users might embrace Fedora for the desktop, but not many admins are likely to put it on servers. Without the input from the professionals, Redhat will lose a valuable resource in improving not only Fedora, but also RHEL. As for the professionals who switch to RHEL, I doubt they'll be willing to provide debugging help to Redhat after having paid a couple of thousand per machine. Those people will be expecting answers, not questions, so they'll never compensate for the lost input from RHL professionals gone.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is sold through a one-year subscription and it does have a licensing agreement. But before you mention the "p"-word ("proprietary"), understand that the code is open and protected by the GPL license. It's not proprietary. We're licensing the services, not the software. The source code files can be downloaded by anyone, and you still have the right to use the software after the license and services expire.
If that's really so, then why have you removed all BSD- and LaTeX- and other such freely redistributable programmes from the source tree? Why couldn't you leave postgresql and passivetex, just to mention two examples - in the source tree, if you weren't really trying to block people from compiling RHEL from source?
It's a short-sighted race where all sides are right. No webmaster can be blamed for trying to finance part of his costs with some ads. No website visitor can be blamed for not wanting to see a pile of ads on a site that might not even be worth his visit. And no ad blocker vendor can be blamed for offering what people are asking for. At the end of the line, everybody bites his own tail; the webmaster will lose his visitors, the consumer who paid the blocking software will have less free sites available and the software vendor who helped ruin the market will have sawn the branch he was sitting on. Like in so many other races, the winners are those who move in and out at the right time.
The time of banner ads was over long ago. Smart webmasters with a big audience moved over to collecting and selling data on their visitors to those who stayed in ad market. That will soon come to an end too. Now, stop complaining about all that and think: what could you get from a website, that can be sold to those who stay behind in the market of collecting data on their visitors? Figure that and you open the next market, make your money, and move on again before the others.
If you can't do that, then you need to get around the ad blockers. Use tables instead of images. Use words that Norton doesn't catch. Place your ads in unexpected places on your pages. Read up on how spammers try to defeat filters (and vice versa) and see what ideas can be useful to you. When you figure how to defeat the blockers, sell the method; that's more lucrative than just using it.
Diebold is claiming copyright to all of those memos in notices signed "to the best of our knowledge" and "under penalty of perjury". Is that not enough evidence for you? I always thought that a full admission is sufficient for a conviction in the US...
For those who haven't found these yet:
www.provocation.net/diebold/ and centipede.provocation.net/diebold/, both in Europe, still carry the full memo archive.
The first one is fast and offers a full-text search of the archive, but rejects Internet Explorer. The second one is slow but accepts all browsers.
Despite a "cease and desist" link on both sites, I've heard nothing from Diebold so far. The only conclusion one can draw from that is that Diebold knows it can't get any further than DMCA notices and simply doesn't bother about non-DMCA'able sites.
Sending the postage is cumbersome. Download Bev Harris' book and Diebold's internal memos from here (fast, blocks MSIE) or here (slow), print them, and send them off yourself. Keep a copy;)
Indy has more offers of webspace than it can handle. For now, here's yet another mirror of the Diebold report. I put it on my home machine as a test of my provider's balls 'cause I haven't had the opportunity to measure them before. If they turn out too small, then the stuff will go on the high-speed bullet-proof server.
That is precisely the area that needs work done. It probably takes a new protocol to arrive at a distributed system that is nevertheless secure. In DNS-based RBL systems one could use zone signing to ensure that bogus zones/servers can't be introduced into the system. You can imagine authoritative updates being issued by some trusted bodies, e.g. ORBS, Spamcop etc, and targeted client queries to the distributed servers like "check this IP for me against your lists from x and y RBL". If the reply comes with a fresh signature from the originating RBL, you can surely trust it.
Slashdot Mirror
You can place a fraud alert, valid for 90 days, which will cause credit institutions to check who they give their money to before doing so. Is it just me, or is there a touch of surreal in this?
Anyway, the obvious thing to do is to put yourself on fraud alert *before* your ID is stolen, not after. And keep the alert updated at all times. This is the easy way to bounce back the cost of carelessness to those that should be careful to begin with, banks and other credit institutions.
Perhaps the webserver, perhaps the DNS, Whatever. Look at the whois:
Domain Name:OPENLINUX.ORG
Created On:03-Aug-1998 04:00:00 UTC
Last Updated On:10-Nov-2004 04:47:01 UTC
Domain Name: CALDERASYSTEMS.COM
Created on: 13-AUG-98
Expires on: 12-AUG-06
Last Updated on: 28-JUL-04
Not very likely for someone to anticipate in 1998 what SCO would do in 2003, register domains in their name, go unnoticed until 2006 and then use the domains for a funny press release with funnier 404 fortune cookies.
The wonderful internet of all kinds of intricate P2P human communications depends on a very simple basis of physical communication: the cable. And that in turn depends on geography. You can build millions of P2P networks for short distance, but that's no internet. Global reach requires cross-ocean cables and there are just so many of them (and satellites, for the sake of accuracy). That's your bottlenecks. If they get 0wn3d by some senator, all your data on them are belong to him.
You can't avoid passing your communications over senator McCarthy's cables. What you can do though, is use his cables and give him the long nose anyway. The long nose goes by the name of "encryption".
Thus, the answer to your question is no, it is not financially feasible to create an internet that relies on P2P-connectivity, but it's not necessary either. The problem is not at the level of connectivity, but at the top-level of the data. Stop using hotmail to begin with, start routine-encrypting your communications as the next step. There's your P2P internet. At least until the day that backbone providers refuse to carry encrypted data...
First they hire you as a professional, then they treat you as an ignoramous. This can't be. Tell the suit that if he doesn't trust your judgement, the very one he hired you for, he should resign giving his own bad judgement as the reason.
The state can appeal to my moral or hit my wallet, but it can't do both at the same time. If I've paid for recycling, moral is out of the equation and I throw the recyclables in the garbage. Whoever got my recycling money can go fish them out of there and do the recycling I paid for. That's the way I deal with beer bottles (10 c a piece) and lemonade tins (30 c a piece) today and that's the way I'd deal with 6-dollar computers too.
By visiting my website you agree to accept and view commercial content on the site and to not block, remove or otherwise make inaccessible said material, bla, bla, bla...
By transmitting your website to my browser you agree to not transmit or attempt to transmit any commercial material to my system, bla, bla, bla...
A year and a half ago, someone I knew received an invitation to speak at a conference. He felt honoured and accepted, but became somewhat suspicious at the requested "paper submission fee". He and I started investigating the conference, searched the net for previous years' editions and comments on them, checked the organisation etc. It all turned out to be a scam, pretty unique in its method.
Three or four conferences on distinct technical subjects and apparently unrelated to each-other were being organised at the same time in the same hotel in Miami. All conferences had pompus websites made from the same template and all were served from the same IP address without a reverse
record in Venezuela. All the websites of previous years' conferences were gone. Some conferences gave the same Florida phone number to the secretariat and others gave no phone number at all. The Florida number in question was forwarded to Venezuela.
Common to all these conferences was that they were headed by professor Nagib Callaos, the same one who accepted the SCIgen paper. I searched the net for his credentials; I found none. I phoned his office in Venezuela and asked for them; I was met first with polite evasions and then with hostile evasions. One of his conferences stated boldly that it was organised "under the auspices of the University of Texas in Austin". I checked with the university; the university had never heard of the conference, nor of "professor" Callaos. Shortly after my phone calls to UT, the website of the conference "under the auspices of UT" disappeared, although the conference itself was still ahead in time.
The catch is the submission fees, 250-600 dollars per accepted paper, allegedly to cover the costs of publishing the papers in book form. Presumably nobody ever attends these conferences except the speakers themselves. If the SCIgen gibberish paper is actually read at WMSCI 2005, it will serve the rest of the speakers as a reminder that greed for recognition works just as well as greed for money in the 419-world.
Imagine if Sokrates had been asked whether he wanted his lectures transcribed on media lasting 10, 20, 30 or 40 years...
Mirror here.
All work submitted to Turnitin is checked against three databases of content:
[...]
3. Millions of student papers already submitted to Turnitin.
So the teachers commit copyright infringement by submitting their students' works to turnitin and turnitin commits grand scale copyright infringement by copying, preserving and capitalising on "millions of student papers" without the students' permission. Great business!
Does anyone else notice that self-builts score higher than most vendors on both home machines and servers? The results are probably skewed by the fact that self-builders are bound to be more knowlegdable than the average buyer and can fix more problems themselves, but this is nevertheless a rather bad rate for the industry. See for instance the replies to "how often is it down?" in the server category. Seems to me that PCMag should include parts vendors along with ready system vendors in next year's survey.
Asking for the impossible is easy, delivering the impossible for just under 200 dollars is slightly more difficult.
.pdfs for the students without any scanner at all.
You need to start by answering a simple question, probably together with your boss (or even letting him answer it for you): who works for whom?
If the students work for the teachers, then you can publish huge and illegible scans and let the students work them out.
If the teachers work for the students, then the teachers should deliver cleanly typed and formatted electonic documents, which you can turn to neat
If you work for the school, then the school should provide you with whatever means it reasonably takes, money- and timewise, to process the work you have, even if that means buying industrial scanners and exhorbitantly-priced software for handwriting recognition, or sitting for weeks there, typing out the hand-written papers.
My point is: everybody wants to offload all their responsibilities on the admin, but that's surely not a reason for the admin to go along with that. If they want you to do the impossible, they should also pay you accordingly. Do they?
Use RFID or something similar. Put a basket of tags at the common entrances to the woods, with a sign "if you carry one of these it might help us find you if you get lost". People who take one can deposit it at the exit. Nobody will complain and it will be very hard to abuse the system.
Or start tracking everyone without their permission and face complaints, lawsuits and abuse of your system for purposes other than the one intended. Bank robber flees in the woods, sheriff confiscates your tracking data either you like it or not, wrong man gets arrested and blames you for it, that kind of thing. Looks like a wasps' nest to me.
My father got his first computer last year at age 73. Fifteen years ago he used a couple of custom DOS programmes at work for a while, but that's all. Now he had to start from the very bottom basics, things like how to use the mouse and what the shift key does.
For a man who doesn't know what the shift key does, the learning curve is equal in all common operating systems. There was no legacy here, nor any acquired bad habits to take into account. So I installed Redhat on his machine.
The first major advantage, for the both of us, is that I can do everything on his machine remotely. We live some 3000+ km apart, so dropping by to do an update or fix a problem is not an option. However, as long as sshd runs and he can connect to the net, there is no problem that can't be fixed remotely.
The second major advantage is that we could skip most part of the security litany. No Outlook there. No MSIE. No spyware that comes in easy click-here-to-install rpms. Mozilla is secure enough for clueless use all by itself and, if he ever tries to run Netsky, all he'll get is a question he can't answer.
The third major advantage is that he is protected against himself. He can't ruin the system no matter what he does. Yes, he does have the root password, but he has no concept of what root is and no wish to find out. A little bash scrip backs up his home directory on CD every once in a while and that's all it takes to keep that system sane.
After eight months, the net result of this is only positive. All the probems he has had so far are of the kind he would have had on Windows too. Of all the problems mentioned in the main article, he has had none.
My short advise is: if your parents are new to computers, don't waste their learning efforts on Windows. Go straight for your favourite OS, as long as it has a good-looking and well-functioning GUI on top of it.
Try to buy 1-CPU annual licenses. "Recalculate" lopps back to itself, no re-calculation takes place. "Finalize" hangs indefinitely. It could be because they're running their webshop on SCO OpenServer, but it could also be because they're running it on uncle Bill's .$ servers. It's like the difference between a Vi@gra spam and a v1agra spam.
Home users might embrace Fedora for the desktop, but not many admins are likely to put it on servers. Without the input from the professionals, Redhat will lose a valuable resource in improving not only Fedora, but also RHEL. As for the professionals who switch to RHEL, I doubt they'll be willing to provide debugging help to Redhat after having paid a couple of thousand per machine. Those people will be expecting answers, not questions, so they'll never compensate for the lost input from RHL professionals gone.
That should read "BSD- and LaTeX-licensed". Yeah, the preview...
The time of banner ads was over long ago. Smart webmasters with a big audience moved over to collecting and selling data on their visitors to those who stayed in ad market. That will soon come to an end too. Now, stop complaining about all that and think: what could you get from a website, that can be sold to those who stay behind in the market of collecting data on their visitors? Figure that and you open the next market, make your money, and move on again before the others.
If you can't do that, then you need to get around the ad blockers. Use tables instead of images. Use words that Norton doesn't catch. Place your ads in unexpected places on your pages. Read up on how spammers try to defeat filters (and vice versa) and see what ideas can be useful to you. When you figure how to defeat the blockers, sell the method; that's more lucrative than just using it.
Diebold is claiming copyright to all of those memos in notices signed "to the best of our knowledge" and "under penalty of perjury". Is that not enough evidence for you? I always thought that a full admission is sufficient for a conviction in the US...
Despite a "cease and desist" link on both sites, I've heard nothing from Diebold so far. The only conclusion one can draw from that is that Diebold knows it can't get any further than DMCA notices and simply doesn't bother about non-DMCA'able sites.
Sending the postage is cumbersome. Download Bev Harris' book and Diebold's internal memos from here (fast, blocks MSIE) or here (slow), print them, and send them off yourself. Keep a copy ;)
OK then, here.
Indy has more offers of webspace than it can handle. For now, here's yet another mirror of the Diebold report. I put it on my home machine as a test of my provider's balls 'cause I haven't had the opportunity to measure them before. If they turn out too small, then the stuff will go on the high-speed bullet-proof server.
That is precisely the area that needs work done. It probably takes a new protocol to arrive at a distributed system that is nevertheless secure. In DNS-based RBL systems one could use zone signing to ensure that bogus zones/servers can't be introduced into the system. You can imagine authoritative updates being issued by some trusted bodies, e.g. ORBS, Spamcop etc, and targeted client queries to the distributed servers like "check this IP for me against your lists from x and y RBL". If the reply comes with a fresh signature from the originating RBL, you can surely trust it.