...among others. The Internet Research Task Force Anti-Spam Research Group (IRTF ASRG) currently has a sub-group specifically dedicated to the unification of these proposals. This is a relatively recent initiative (only about a month old). You can find archives of the discussion at gmane.org.
I've always wondered what it would be like in the world if barriers for people to interact with people from other parts of the world, whether geographical or language were removed.
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." -- Douglas Adams
He says the way to kill spam is to foil address harvesting, by obfuscating email addresses in web pages and on Usenet.
All very well for new addresses, I suppose. I've taken that approach myself, on my spamless email addresses. If it becomes a problem to spammers, they are likely to adapt by harvesting addresses directly from PCs using viruses and other malware.
As Paul Vixie said, the major problem here is one of broken expectations. The.com and.net domains have behaved in the non-wildcard manner since day dot. There is a reasonable expectation that a DNS query on a non-existent.com or.net domain will return a "no such domain" response. VeriSign unilaterally broke this without warning. I believe that ".museum" has implemented the wildcard since day dot, so there are no broken expectations there. As the IAB said, it's reasonable to implement wildcards with the informed consent of everyone who is delegated a name in that zone (but it's still a bad idea, technically, for various reasons).
The GNU project is about freedom, is not about taking over the desktop or making Microsoft go bankrupt. It's about CHOICE, and it has been extremely successful at that.
I think you pretty much had it when you said the GNU project was about freedom, given their definition of that term. (Freedom is a very tricky thing to define, and subject to much disagreement. Many people dispute whether GPL or BSD-style licensing are better examples of freedom-in-licensing.) But then you went and said it's about CHOICE, and you've muddied the waters. To suggest that the GNU stance is pro-choice is, at the very best, a naive oversimplification. The GPL is notable for the rights that it reinstates to the licensee, but it is just as notable for the restrictions that it puts on those rights with regards to the creation of derived works.
The GNU project is all about restricting the available choices to the ones they consider morally or socially acceptable. They have taken careful steps to limit legally available courses of action in order to maximise freedom for the majority.
Whether this actually results in maximised freedom is just as debatable as the definition of "freedom" itself.
Sounds a lot like what I've been copping, on and off, since March this year, and I'm not even running a DNSRBL. First, there was the prelude to the war (kinda longish: short version is that I got Joe-Jobbed to little effect), then came threat letters and a serious attack (period from threat to attack documented in my journal; some details of attack documented in this journal (note that I feign ignorance of their identity for a while) -- start at the bottom and work your way up, since journals are listed in reverse chronological order). Being bandwidth-billed at painful rates, and wasting time defending the site when I could have been doing paid contract work, the expense of the attack grew out of control, and I had to take my offensive-to-spammers site offline. I've since put it back on again, with significantly improved defensive measures, and they've attacked it half-heartedly a few times since then.
Believe me, folks, if my site isn't safe, then nobody is. I figured I was a complete nobody in the anti-spam scene, and yet I was an early target! The Spamafia brooks no criticism: you will be driven off the web forcibly. Oh yeah, and my experience was that the police really don't have the resources to do anything about this. My ISP at the time didn't seem to care much, either. And there are more attacks that you probably haven't heard about. It's a war zone out there, folks.
Intellectual property is a myth. You CANNOT and SHOULD not be able to own an idea.
"Intellectual property is a myth" is only true in the same sense that money is a myth: the myth becomes reality so long as people believe in it. Similarly, the proposition, "you cannot own an idea," is more or less true in a metaphysical sense, but in a practical sense it's false, because there are police forces and judicial systems which happen to enforce laws which treat various ideas rather a lot like property. As to whether this ought to be the case, well, that depends on your social theory. I'm thinking that current trends are awful, myself, so it's not like I disagree with you on that one.
But, funnily enough, copyright and patents are still not unpopular ideas amongst the general public. We may be heading towards the Great Intellectual Property Revolution(TM), but we're a lot further from it than you might think. The public perception is that Copyrights and Patents exist to reward creative and inventive people, which is prima facie a Good Thing(TM), and unless the RIAA, SCO et al do us a really big favour and start p(er|ro)secuting people en masse, people just aren't going to get a sense of the cost of these laws in terms of lost personal freedom. It's too much to hope that there could ever be a general appreciation of how the laws are sliding further and further from "reward creative and inventive people" toward "give already rich and powerful corporations greater control over people and markets". This is esoteric stuff to Mr Average.
But I could rant all day, so I'll stop before I really get going.
Those horoscopes are nicely crafted. They had me wondering whether they were generated by a program (like mission statement generators) half the time. But the hard-nosed rationalists among you might want to hope you're wrong this time! From Pisces:
You've got an uncanny knack for reading the public pulse right now. It's a good time to push a new idea like crazy - and get your colleagues to help you.... What you do now will have staying power and prove to be lasting. Take the high road. Be sure to back up critical files at the end of the month.
I'm working on a thesis detailing a somewhat spam-proof replacement for SMTP. I'll review my backup regimen immediately, but I hope one of my fellow Pisceans doesn't beat me to the punch. Most amusing.
A good mechanism for micropayments would be a good thing, in and of itself, although I won't venture into the tricky area of what counts as "good" in a micropayment system. The mixed results of PayPal to date demonstrate the two-edged nature of a system for managing payments where the custodians of the money are, arguably, a little under-accountable.
But cutting to the chase, if a good micropayment system does get invented, then it will seriously lower the bar on the "tip jar" concept. The overhead of deciding whether you want to spend a cent here and a cent there (especially on a site that you can't sample for free) is enough of a headache (even at low risk levels) to drive people away, but if your favourite webcomic has a tip jar, you might throw in a dime a day, or even a penny a day (he said, shamelessly resorting to Americanisms). Those things can add up if you have a big readership, and can overcome the expenses that Mr McCloud points out with regards to bandwidth and success being its own worst enemy.
As for the sites that want to try the "you must pay me 25 cents in order to see this page" approach -- feh -- let them take their chances with the free market; I won't resent them in the unlikely case that it works. But in my not-particularly-humble opinion, voluntary payments will be the way to go (see second and second-last paragraph of linked Cringely article).
You're not the guy in the Rackspace ad which seems to be permanently affixed to the left margin of The Register at the moment, are you? (direct link to image, me hopes) At least it's not terribly likely to be snitched by your competitors.
The cite that one of the main reasons is that internet connection speeds have still yet to catch up on the whole in order to benefit from the rich multimedia content of the CD.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a paper-boy on a bicycle.
"You cannot bypass people's constitutional rights to privacy, due process and anonymous association to identify an alleged infringer," Ballard said.
It is, of course, truly dreadful that the RIAA et al have been able to make an end run around the subpoena process with the DMCA. I hope Ballard is right, and it is ruled unconstitutional. But think about what will hit the fan if that part of the DMCA is overturned: all these cases that the RIAA is bringing to court will have been based on inadmissable evidence, since the evidence wasn't legally obtained, no? Messy.
Copyright lawyers said it remains unresolved whether consumers can legally download copies of songs on a CD they purchased rather than making digital copies themselves.
Sheesh -- what a mind-bender. The theory goes that a person can make an MP3 copy of a work for their own use if they own a properly licensed copy of the work (on CD, for example), but they can't obtain exactly the same copy from another person with exactly the same right. Ow! Ow! Damn you lawyers -- you're giving my brain a cramp!
I wasn't aware that this point was open for discussion, but I guess lawyers are lawyers, and the RIAA's lawyers are paid to make things happen the RIAA's way no matter what kind of specious legal theories need to be invented. I can see that a lot will hinge around whatever legal language grants the right to make "personal" copies in the first place.
The sad thing about this is that it's such an obviously cynical ploy -- not that anyone was expecting any different from the RIAA, but sad in any case. Technology is making it easier and easier for the public to obtain their copies of things any which way they like. The RIAA is using cynical legal theories to quash that convenience any which way they can for as long as they can.
God speed the inevitable demise of the RIAA and others like them.
Look, I'm not asking for protection. I'm pointing out that the laws which are supposed to encourage authors and creators of works can be turned around to work against those very same people. This isn't major news, it's just a very commonly ignored fact. (How many times have we heard musicians bitch about the record industry on these grounds -- losing the rights to their own creations?) You say, "Quit bitching and hang your own shingle, learn to negotiate, or move to California." A parent poster said, "Seems to me that the people who want all intellectual property laws abolished are the ones who have no intellectual property of their own." That is, anyone who is against Intellectual Property Rights must either be an uncreative drone or a whiner who refuses to stand up for himself. Give me a break! I believe my life stands testament to the fact that I am neither of these, but I still remain unpersuaded that Intellectual Property Rights are a good thing, even in the purely selfish sense of good for me as an intended beneficiary.
If you want more of the story -- of why I'm suspicious of Intellectual Property Rights even now that I'm a free agent -- read on.
The only direct beneficiaries of Intellectual Property Laws are lawyers, judges, and legislators. Laws guarantee those jobs; everyone else is left to manipulate the legal environment to their advantage as best they can, to suit some related end.
For your information, and for the information of those who have a similar attitude to you, I did resign my position with that employer. It was more convenient for me at the time to sign away the rights than it was to engage in a protracted bitchfight about it, and when it was no longer convenient, I gave them the ultimatum: reinstate rights or say bye-bye. It so happens that I said bye-bye, and then several months later they axed that entire department anyhow.
But don't think for a moment that I've changed my stance on the trouble with having rights. The trouble with having rights is that they can be taken from you and used against you. All it takes is sufficient clout, in a legal-and-monetary sense (the two are hard to separate). I'd rather not have these rights precisely because I have no wish to use them against anyone else, so I'd rather not face the risk that my rights could be used against me.
Seems to me that the people who want all intellectual property laws abolished are the ones who have no intellectual property of their own. Why should authors, programmers, musicians, architects, graphic designers, inventors have to give up their creations into the public domain without any compensation?
I, for one, have been in a position where I would prefer not to have intellectual property rights, on the grounds that I've had to give them up to an employer without compensation. If the creations had been in the public domain at the outset, then I would have had as much right in them as anyone else, but when employment contracts dictate that all works created during the term of employment (including those created out of work hours, on your own equipment) belong to the company, then "intellectual property rights" become a rod for an author's back.
Thank you for reminding me. I neglected to mention the obvious reference in The Hunting of the Snark, where the Baker had "forty-two boxes, all carefully packed, with his name painted clearly on each."
If you think my hypothesis about forty-two having an overly-high representation is false, then you need not speculate about it: the text is there and awaits your analysis.
I've always supposed that when DA was dreaming up the answer to life, the universe, and everything, he just wanted an answer which was singularly precise, yet totally unhelpful. A number would do. A simple number. Why forty-two, exactly? No reason, other than it sprang to mind.
But note that there is prior art for authors of a twisted-logic bent to gravitate towards forty-two as a good arbitrary number. In particular, I refer to Lewis Carroll.
"Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court."
Everybody looked at Alice.
"I'm not a mile high," said Alice.
"You are," said the King.
"Nearly two miles high," added the Queen.
"Well, I sha'n't go, at any rate," said Alice: "besides, that's not a regular rule: you invented it just now."
"It's the oldest rule in the book," said the King.
"Then it ought to be Number One," said Alice.
-- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Chapter 12
One instance doesn't count for a lot, so here's another.
The helmsman used to stand by with tears in his eyes: he knew it was all wrong, but alas! Rule 42 of the Code, "No one shall speak to the Man at the Helm," had been completed by the Bellman himself with the words "and the Man at the Helm shall speak to no one." So remonstrance was impossible, and no steering could be done till the next varnishing day. During these bewildering intervals the ship usually sailed backwards.
-- Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, Preface
One more, just to be sure.
"No doubt", said I, "they settled who
Was fittest to be sent:
Yet still to choose a brat like you,
To haunt a man of forty-two,
Was no great compliment!
-- Lewis Carroll, Phantasmagoria, Canto 1
Why is the number forty-two so over-represented? I have no idea, but I like to think of Douglas Adams as the Lewis Carroll of the 20th century.
Only 20 or so angry phone calls? I've had my personal phone numbers included in "Joe Job" spam (where a spammer deliberately impersonates you in order to cause you grief), and my phone rang off the hook all day with irate callers. Bit of an uneven playing field, wouldn't you say? I've never sent any spam at all, and I've had it far worse.
You said, "OSX is really pretty, and I own a dual G4 tower myself. But I seriously question the constant adulation it gets here on Slashdot; I have often wondered if the place is being astroturfed."
Apple has never had any need of astroturfing, to the best of my knowledge. Apple Zealots are a natural phenomenon.
which of the following isn't a random set of numbers
Answer: none of them were random; all of them chosen by you off the top of your head. There are important mathematical differences between these two cases. What you have given is sets of "arbitrary" numbers, rather than "random" numbers.
Now, if you'd asked which of the sets could be generated randomly, then the answer is all of them, given a generator function with the correct output range.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm reminded of a recent "Freefall" (web comic).
As Spike Milligan said, "my grandmother died of deafness -- she didn't hear the steamroller coming."
There are quite a number of such proposals. For instance...
...among others. The Internet Research Task Force Anti-Spam Research Group (IRTF ASRG) currently has a sub-group specifically dedicated to the unification of these proposals. This is a relatively recent initiative (only about a month old). You can find archives of the discussion at gmane.org.
I'm not familiar with Oliver Postgate (by name, at least). How about Peter Sallis, best known for being Wallace in Wallace and Grommit?
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." -- Douglas Adams
All very well for new addresses, I suppose. I've taken that approach myself, on my spamless email addresses. If it becomes a problem to spammers, they are likely to adapt by harvesting addresses directly from PCs using viruses and other malware.
As Paul Vixie said, the major problem here is one of broken expectations. The .com and .net domains have behaved in the non-wildcard manner since day dot. There is a reasonable expectation that a DNS query on a non-existent .com or .net domain will return a "no such domain" response. VeriSign unilaterally broke this without warning. I believe that ".museum" has implemented the wildcard since day dot, so there are no broken expectations there. As the IAB said, it's reasonable to implement wildcards with the informed consent of everyone who is delegated a name in that zone (but it's still a bad idea, technically, for various reasons).
I think you pretty much had it when you said the GNU project was about freedom, given their definition of that term. (Freedom is a very tricky thing to define, and subject to much disagreement. Many people dispute whether GPL or BSD-style licensing are better examples of freedom-in-licensing.) But then you went and said it's about CHOICE, and you've muddied the waters. To suggest that the GNU stance is pro-choice is, at the very best, a naive oversimplification. The GPL is notable for the rights that it reinstates to the licensee, but it is just as notable for the restrictions that it puts on those rights with regards to the creation of derived works.
The GNU project is all about restricting the available choices to the ones they consider morally or socially acceptable. They have taken careful steps to limit legally available courses of action in order to maximise freedom for the majority.
Whether this actually results in maximised freedom is just as debatable as the definition of "freedom" itself.
Believe me, folks, if my site isn't safe, then nobody is. I figured I was a complete nobody in the anti-spam scene, and yet I was an early target! The Spamafia brooks no criticism: you will be driven off the web forcibly. Oh yeah, and my experience was that the police really don't have the resources to do anything about this. My ISP at the time didn't seem to care much, either. And there are more attacks that you probably haven't heard about. It's a war zone out there, folks.
"Intellectual property is a myth" is only true in the same sense that money is a myth: the myth becomes reality so long as people believe in it. Similarly, the proposition, "you cannot own an idea," is more or less true in a metaphysical sense, but in a practical sense it's false, because there are police forces and judicial systems which happen to enforce laws which treat various ideas rather a lot like property. As to whether this ought to be the case, well, that depends on your social theory. I'm thinking that current trends are awful, myself, so it's not like I disagree with you on that one.
But, funnily enough, copyright and patents are still not unpopular ideas amongst the general public. We may be heading towards the Great Intellectual Property Revolution(TM), but we're a lot further from it than you might think. The public perception is that Copyrights and Patents exist to reward creative and inventive people, which is prima facie a Good Thing(TM), and unless the RIAA, SCO et al do us a really big favour and start p(er|ro)secuting people en masse, people just aren't going to get a sense of the cost of these laws in terms of lost personal freedom. It's too much to hope that there could ever be a general appreciation of how the laws are sliding further and further from "reward creative and inventive people" toward "give already rich and powerful corporations greater control over people and markets". This is esoteric stuff to Mr Average.
But I could rant all day, so I'll stop before I really get going.
I'm working on a thesis detailing a somewhat spam-proof replacement for SMTP. I'll review my backup regimen immediately, but I hope one of my fellow Pisceans doesn't beat me to the punch. Most amusing.
But cutting to the chase, if a good micropayment system does get invented, then it will seriously lower the bar on the "tip jar" concept. The overhead of deciding whether you want to spend a cent here and a cent there (especially on a site that you can't sample for free) is enough of a headache (even at low risk levels) to drive people away, but if your favourite webcomic has a tip jar, you might throw in a dime a day, or even a penny a day (he said, shamelessly resorting to Americanisms). Those things can add up if you have a big readership, and can overcome the expenses that Mr McCloud points out with regards to bandwidth and success being its own worst enemy.
As for the sites that want to try the "you must pay me 25 cents in order to see this page" approach -- feh -- let them take their chances with the free market; I won't resent them in the unlikely case that it works. But in my not-particularly-humble opinion, voluntary payments will be the way to go (see second and second-last paragraph of linked Cringely article).
You're not the guy in the Rackspace ad which seems to be permanently affixed to the left margin of The Register at the moment, are you? (direct link to image, me hopes) At least it's not terribly likely to be snitched by your competitors.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a paper-boy on a bicycle.
Finally, a site that will pronounce "Linux" the way it was intended.
It is, of course, truly dreadful that the RIAA et al have been able to make an end run around the subpoena process with the DMCA. I hope Ballard is right, and it is ruled unconstitutional. But think about what will hit the fan if that part of the DMCA is overturned: all these cases that the RIAA is bringing to court will have been based on inadmissable evidence, since the evidence wasn't legally obtained, no? Messy.
Sheesh -- what a mind-bender. The theory goes that a person can make an MP3 copy of a work for their own use if they own a properly licensed copy of the work (on CD, for example), but they can't obtain exactly the same copy from another person with exactly the same right. Ow! Ow! Damn you lawyers -- you're giving my brain a cramp!
I wasn't aware that this point was open for discussion, but I guess lawyers are lawyers, and the RIAA's lawyers are paid to make things happen the RIAA's way no matter what kind of specious legal theories need to be invented. I can see that a lot will hinge around whatever legal language grants the right to make "personal" copies in the first place.
The sad thing about this is that it's such an obviously cynical ploy -- not that anyone was expecting any different from the RIAA, but sad in any case. Technology is making it easier and easier for the public to obtain their copies of things any which way they like. The RIAA is using cynical legal theories to quash that convenience any which way they can for as long as they can.
God speed the inevitable demise of the RIAA and others like them.
If you want more of the story -- of why I'm suspicious of Intellectual Property Rights even now that I'm a free agent -- read on.
The only direct beneficiaries of Intellectual Property Laws are lawyers, judges, and legislators. Laws guarantee those jobs; everyone else is left to manipulate the legal environment to their advantage as best they can, to suit some related end.
But don't think for a moment that I've changed my stance on the trouble with having rights. The trouble with having rights is that they can be taken from you and used against you. All it takes is sufficient clout, in a legal-and-monetary sense (the two are hard to separate). I'd rather not have these rights precisely because I have no wish to use them against anyone else, so I'd rather not face the risk that my rights could be used against me.
I, for one, have been in a position where I would prefer not to have intellectual property rights, on the grounds that I've had to give them up to an employer without compensation. If the creations had been in the public domain at the outset, then I would have had as much right in them as anyone else, but when employment contracts dictate that all works created during the term of employment (including those created out of work hours, on your own equipment) belong to the company, then "intellectual property rights" become a rod for an author's back.
See the long version at The Trouble With Having Rights , or the slightly briefer and less formal version of the same theme at The Intellectual Slave .
If you think my hypothesis about forty-two having an overly-high representation is false, then you need not speculate about it: the text is there and awaits your analysis.
But note that there is prior art for authors of a twisted-logic bent to gravitate towards forty-two as a good arbitrary number. In particular, I refer to Lewis Carroll.
One instance doesn't count for a lot, so here's another.
One more, just to be sure.
Why is the number forty-two so over-represented? I have no idea, but I like to think of Douglas Adams as the Lewis Carroll of the 20th century.
Only 20 or so angry phone calls? I've had my personal phone numbers included in "Joe Job" spam (where a spammer deliberately impersonates you in order to cause you grief), and my phone rang off the hook all day with irate callers. Bit of an uneven playing field, wouldn't you say? I've never sent any spam at all, and I've had it far worse.
Apple has never had any need of astroturfing, to the best of my knowledge. Apple Zealots are a natural phenomenon.
Answer: none of them were random; all of them chosen by you off the top of your head. There are important mathematical differences between these two cases. What you have given is sets of "arbitrary" numbers, rather than "random" numbers.
Now, if you'd asked which of the sets could be generated randomly, then the answer is all of them, given a generator function with the correct output range.