It's one thing to make information available to potential customers; it's another to be expected to provide free bandwidth to third parties who aren't potential customers at all.
You know those free local newspapers? Do you think it would be legit for a company to go take tons of them from free newspaper stands and then pass them out to their customers from another location? It's the same thing.
Just because I give *you* something for free doesn't mean that I'm obligated to provide it to you in bulk for further redistribution.
"I wan't to stop looking at porn, but can't control myself, so I'll make it so that if I do look at porn someone will know that I did and I'll be embarassed."
And you just know that people will share tricks for getting around the monitoring software, which adds a whole new layer of dishonesty and self-contempt to the whole exercise.
Wouldn't be a whole lot easier to either 1) just stop looking at porn, or 2) admit that you like porn and get on with things?
Actually, Hormel has given up on the spam thing. They used to say that it was OK to use the work in lower case to refer to junk email, but would actively contact and even threaten folks using it in its capitalized form. However, they've apparently decided that any publiclity is good publicity.
Google's intent here is clearly to protect their trademark -- they don't really have a choice. If they aquiesce and agree that "to google" is a generic word and not a brand reference, you can bet that Inktomi and Overture-those-fraudulent-bastards-it's-a-classifi ed-ad-engine-not-a-search-engine will call their offerings "Googlers" or something similar. Which would be a moral victory for Google, but perhaps a commercial disaster.
A good and thoughtful post. I would expand your speed / power point, though, to note that the real issue is efficiency. Yes, if you can get twice the power for the same weight from the batteries, you can double speed. However, you can also find improved efficiency in prop design, water resistance (aquadynamics), etc. Batteries may be one of the best bets, since so much is being spend on improving them but incremental improvements in efficeincy in other areas could also serve to increase performance.
Er, I'm assuming you're a college student. Or high school student. $10,000 isn't that much money. Even, as you say, for a program "hacked together in a couple of months." Let's say it's just two months. That's $5,000/month for the winning entry. That's below what a good programmer makes.
And what are they going to do with the program once they get it? Nothing. This isn't about buying programming time. Like most contests, they're betting that the contest itself will buy them more than $10K worth of promotion. How many/. banner ads do you think $10K would buy, with what return? What is the value of getting hundreds or thousands of/. types to think about this, and write comments, and generally stir up interest in the contest and company?
It's not much money, but they have already demonstrated a pretty savvy approach to spending it.
I mean, come on, do you realize that fully 20% of the oxygen that trees produce goes to criminals, bums, drug dealers, and pirates? Coincidence? I think not! The trees must be jailed!
If their business model is so easily and widely abused, then they're not "innocent bystanders," but part of the problem.
Now that I'll agree with. Of course, like most things, it's not black and white. The way I see it, the people who send out spam are the #1 problem. The ISP's who intentionally allow it are the next worst offenders. The affiliate programs that encourage it are public enemy #3, in my book, especially when they turn a blind eye to spammers.
The sad thing is that it *can* be done right. Amazon.com has a huge affiliate program, but I have yet to receive a single spam that's trying to cash in on it.
Yes, but it's only a matter of time before libraries are illegal. That's not an exaggeration; the MPAA, RIAA, and several publishing groups are working on it.
Then you'd have to go buy more copies of the stuff you donated.
You sound pretty heated, so I'm not sure if there's any real point to responding, but oh well.
48 hours is a good but not great response time. However, Geocities could easily do more to prevent repeat abusers by doing some parsing of page content. What usually happens is that a spammer sets up 20 geocities cites which are either identical or at least link to the same affiliate program. Then they use them, one after the other, moving on to the next each time one is shut down. Geocities could easily kill this by logging the offending links and proactively killing the sites (sure, you get into obfuscation and such, but it would still do a lot of good). They could also amend their TOS to forbid participation in affiliate programs, and do quite a bit to strip out common affiliate tags in an automated fasion.
I have some experience with Ifriends. I can almost assure you that they are not the spammers themselves -- not out of any ethical concerns, but just because they're smart enough to not want to deal with their upstreams and such. It's just another case where the business model they've chosen incents them to turn a blind eye to spammers who promote their business. It's unfortunate, but unless you have evidence otherwise, I think your arguments would be stronger if you stuck to the supportable facts.
Other than that, I think you were agreeing with me, albeit in a pretty, um, enthusiastic manner.
I work in both the adult internet industry and internet dating service industry.
Odds are, the website you clicked through to wasn't set up by whatever matchmaker service you ended up on. The matchmaker service probably has an affiliate program ("send us traffic and we'll give you 50% of all signups"), and some enterprising college kid (or adult) discovered that they could set up geocities websites that link to the matchmaker site, spam the entire world, and make a few bucks from the affiliate commissions.
There are probably a couple of things wrong here:
1) The matchmaker site is probably not enforcing its TOS, if they have one. There's a temptation to turn a blind eye to what affiliates do to generate traffic; if people get upset enough about a particular spammer, you can always say "Gosh! They were violating our TOS. We'll kick them off!"
2) Geocities is pretty notorious for being slow to respond to abuse complaints.
It's a nasty problem, and one inherent to affiliate programs. Ethical companies aggressively pursue thier TOS and make it really clear that they do before allowing affiliates to sign up ("DO NOT USE SPAM to promote our site; we will not pay you your commissions on referrals generated by spam, we will immediately terminate your account, and we will happily share your personal information with any anti-spammers who complain").
Eat healthy food. Pretend you're a car. Would you put sugar into your gas tank? Of course not. So don't eat junk food either.
So, er, you drink only Premium Unleaded gasoline? I'm not sure I even want to know what you do with motor oil and other lubricants. On the whole, I'm not at all sure that the whole "pretend you're a car" approach is all that healthy. Besides, do you put apple slices in your gas tank?
Good things will come, and you and I will still be roaming these hills for 100+ years to come!
...unless you get hit by a bus at 35 years old. Tempting fate is never smart, and this post of yours is damned close to declaring yourself unsinkable. I can only hope that you live far away and that we never share an airplane.
...it's about expenses and database cleanliness. They finally realized that they were incenting their customers to lie to them, and then they were expending a fair amount of money sending junk mail to nonexistant people. Worse, they didn't even know how many unique customers they had, since people offer the same bogus info twice (some do, and make a point of it, but they're the exception).
Someone finally wised up and realized that they have a hugely polluted customer database and that, for a mail-order house, that's pretty expensive.
How they spin it for public consumption is their business, but I'd definitely take it with a grain of salt. That's my take on it, anyways.
the new System of a Down CD (then they'd know how much I hate ads and corporate america)
Domain Name: SYSTEMOFADOWN.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Online, MIS (OM98-ORG) mis_online@SONYMUSIC.COM
SONY Music Entertainment, Inc.
550 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10022
US
212-833-7305
Fax- 212-833-6636
Oh, yeah, System of a Down isn't corporate rock. You're a rebel! MTV is just *so* subversive and anti-corporate.
Sorry, nothing personal, but that's about as silly as parading a Celine Dion liking as a sign of disliking corporate america. System of a Down is a *good* corporate rock band, but they're about as mainstream as you can get without performing at the Super Bowl (though I wouldn't rule that out).
Manager type: "Mr. Tech! Why didn't you tell us we had a pornographic domain name!"
Mr. Tech: "Er, because we don't?"
Manager type: "I can't believe you call yourself a tech! Our Net Nanny software clearly says that our domain name is pornographic. Don't you know anything about domain names?"
Mr. Tech: "Sure, you mean like the fact that the system is a way for mapping names to IP addresses?"
Manager type: "Nevermind that! Quick, change our domain name! We don't want to be listed as pornography!"
Mr. Tech: "Er, OK, sure."
Manager type: "By the way, what is our IP address?"
Mr. Tech: "214.57.69.0/24"
Manager type: "What? Are you kidding? You picked a *pornographic IP address*? What kind of tech are you? NetNanny says that addresses that include 69 are pornographic! You're fired!"
Mr. Tech: "Thank god for that."
Cheers -b
Would that be Michael Meyers?
on
Halloween VII
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Halloween VII, posted by Michael, eh? Where's the theme music?
Say I'm your government affiliated nail remover company, and I employ 25% of the domestic population. Your foreign clawhammer company is coming in and creating unemployment, destroying jobs, and generally upsetting my (admittedly backwards) economy. I go to outlaw clawhammers so my populace can remain employed (and pay taxes). Should that "not be allowed to happen"?
Say I'm a large automaker with higher overhead than my foreign competition because of worker safety laws and my contractual obligations to the various unions I work with. I'm damned well going to lobby the government to add tariffs to foreign cars to level the playing field. Should that "not be allowed to happen"?
Say I'm a large US distributor of alcohol and I want to spend some money to make sure that my main competitor, marijuana, remains illegal. Should that "not be allowed to happen"?
Finally, if you're still supporting the implied-passive-voice "should not be allowed to happen", how about we take it out of passive voice. *By Who*?
You think the UN, or maybe the US, should invade countries because they have different economic ideas than us?
It's not immoral. It is economically unsound. And there's no force in the world with the moral authority to tell Panama (or anyone else) that they have to see things our way.
You imply that this kind of thing "should not be allowed to happen" -- I say the free market "will not allow this to happen." There's no moral judgement to be made here. The free (or relatively free) market will speak, and that's that. No sense getting your panties in a twist. And you know what? The manner in which it does happen may just be educational to all of us.
A good point, but of course, there's the question of where the code resides that checks the timestamps / cyrptographically signed data. If it's on machine 1 or 2, it's back to single point of faulure. And, if it's on Machine 3, you now have a system where compromise of any 2 of 3 systems is catastrophic, which is ugly because it leads to finger pointing ("No, it must have been altered on system 2!" / "No, it was code on system, 3"!).
Of course, in situations like this the signed data would probably be looked at by human eyes, but that's not practical for every bet, and as many people have said, the only reason this person got caught seems to be that they got really greedy. Me, I'll take $10k/month for the rest of my life rather than $3mil now.
Yes, but the database *coders* for your bank could easily reset your pin, or code an app such that when the teller goes to reset it, it always gets set to some value that they'd know.
This wasn't a case of a front-end person, working the phone banks, manipulating data. If it was indeed a hack/theft, it was someone with access to the code and/or database itself. Encryption doesn't do you much good, there.
Thanks for the enlightening and relatively (har!) easy to understand post. I'm still trying to get my head around this, though.
Let's say there's a black hole over yonder. And coming at it from a right angle, on a trajectory perpindicular to where we're observing from, there's a big rock (let's call it "Earth") travelling at 99% the speed of light.
Do you mean to say that when the big old rock nears the event horizon, its apparent velocity from our observation platform drops, approaching zero, because the time it lives in is rapidly accelerated (relative to us)?
Does it matter if our viewpoint is perpindicular to, or straight behind, the speeding rock?
How would you determine which 200 patents are worthy? "Everyone submit their patents, and the best 200 win?" Would it make any sense if an idea that was patentable one year wasn't the next, by virtue of their being more "worthy" ideas?
Or, maybe I'm missing your point and you're not suggesting a quote, but standards high enough that only *about* 200 are granted a year. That's maybe more reasonable, but still completely unrealistically low. If you look at the number of industries that produce patent-worthy ideas (start with computer hardware, agriculture, oil refining, aerospace...), I'd say there are maybe 50 general industries that produce patentable things.
So each one of those *entire industries* would get about 4 patents a year, with a 200 patent-per-year model. You can't really support that, can you? I mean, God knows there are plenty of absolutely stupid patents; I'll start by saying that 50% of patents probably shouldn't be granted, and I'll go as high as 9 out of 10. But you're saying that only one out of a thousand, or one out of ten thousand? I think that'd be pretty hard to support.
Finally, I *said* the system was broken. Apparently not clearly enough. However, I said that picking far outlying data is a bad argument; even in your 200 patents-per-year model, I guarantee you there will be mistakes occaisionally. The huge number of bad patents is a better argument for "brokenness" than a single, absolutely ridiculous example -- you'll be able to find that in any system, broken or not.
Slashdot Mirror
It's one thing to make information available to potential customers; it's another to be expected to provide free bandwidth to third parties who aren't potential customers at all.
You know those free local newspapers? Do you think it would be legit for a company to go take tons of them from free newspaper stands and then pass them out to their customers from another location? It's the same thing.
Just because I give *you* something for free doesn't mean that I'm obligated to provide it to you in bulk for further redistribution.
Cheers
-b
"I wan't to stop looking at porn, but can't control myself, so I'll make it so that if I do look at porn someone will know that I did and I'll be embarassed."
And you just know that people will share tricks for getting around the monitoring software, which adds a whole new layer of dishonesty and self-contempt to the whole exercise.
Wouldn't be a whole lot easier to either 1) just stop looking at porn, or 2) admit that you like porn and get on with things?
Cheers
-b
Actually, Hormel has given up on the spam thing. They used to say that it was OK to use the work in lower case to refer to junk email, but would actively contact and even threaten folks using it in its capitalized form. However, they've apparently decided that any publiclity is good publicity.
i ed-ad-engine-not-a-search-engine will call their offerings "Googlers" or something similar. Which would be a moral victory for Google, but perhaps a commercial disaster.
Google's intent here is clearly to protect their trademark -- they don't really have a choice. If they aquiesce and agree that "to google" is a generic word and not a brand reference, you can bet that Inktomi and Overture-those-fraudulent-bastards-it's-a-classif
Cheers
-b
"Skip the computers -- play some football or something. And start chasing the girls *now*."
-b
I mean, surely it counts as a "lifetime career" if you commit suicide at 35, right?
-b
A good and thoughtful post. I would expand your speed / power point, though, to note that the real issue is efficiency. Yes, if you can get twice the power for the same weight from the batteries, you can double speed. However, you can also find improved efficiency in prop design, water resistance (aquadynamics), etc. Batteries may be one of the best bets, since so much is being spend on improving them but incremental improvements in efficeincy in other areas could also serve to increase performance.
Cheers
-b
We all know that jaywalking is the gateway crime to mass murder and child molestation. The government told us so.
Cheers
-b
Er, I'm assuming you're a college student. Or high school student. $10,000 isn't that much money. Even, as you say, for a program "hacked together in a couple of months." Let's say it's just two months. That's $5,000/month for the winning entry. That's below what a good programmer makes.
/. banner ads do you think $10K would buy, with what return? What is the value of getting hundreds or thousands of /. types to think about this, and write comments, and generally stir up interest in the contest and company?
And what are they going to do with the program once they get it? Nothing. This isn't about buying programming time. Like most contests, they're betting that the contest itself will buy them more than $10K worth of promotion. How many
It's not much money, but they have already demonstrated a pretty savvy approach to spending it.
Cheers
-b
I mean, come on, do you realize that fully 20% of the oxygen that trees produce goes to criminals, bums, drug dealers, and pirates? Coincidence? I think not! The trees must be jailed!
-b
Now that I'll agree with. Of course, like most things, it's not black and white. The way I see it, the people who send out spam are the #1 problem. The ISP's who intentionally allow it are the next worst offenders. The affiliate programs that encourage it are public enemy #3, in my book, especially when they turn a blind eye to spammers. The sad thing is that it *can* be done right. Amazon.com has a huge affiliate program, but I have yet to receive a single spam that's trying to cash in on it.
Cheers
-b
Yes, but it's only a matter of time before libraries are illegal. That's not an exaggeration; the MPAA, RIAA, and several publishing groups are working on it.
Then you'd have to go buy more copies of the stuff you donated.
Cheers
-b
You sound pretty heated, so I'm not sure if there's any real point to responding, but oh well.
48 hours is a good but not great response time. However, Geocities could easily do more to prevent repeat abusers by doing some parsing of page content. What usually happens is that a spammer sets up 20 geocities cites which are either identical or at least link to the same affiliate program. Then they use them, one after the other, moving on to the next each time one is shut down. Geocities could easily kill this by logging the offending links and proactively killing the sites (sure, you get into obfuscation and such, but it would still do a lot of good). They could also amend their TOS to forbid participation in affiliate programs, and do quite a bit to strip out common affiliate tags in an automated fasion.
I have some experience with Ifriends. I can almost assure you that they are not the spammers themselves -- not out of any ethical concerns, but just because they're smart enough to not want to deal with their upstreams and such. It's just another case where the business model they've chosen incents them to turn a blind eye to spammers who promote their business. It's unfortunate, but unless you have evidence otherwise, I think your arguments would be stronger if you stuck to the supportable facts.
Other than that, I think you were agreeing with me, albeit in a pretty, um, enthusiastic manner.
Cheers
-b
I work in both the adult internet industry and internet dating service industry.
Odds are, the website you clicked through to wasn't set up by whatever matchmaker service you ended up on. The matchmaker service probably has an affiliate program ("send us traffic and we'll give you 50% of all signups"), and some enterprising college kid (or adult) discovered that they could set up geocities websites that link to the matchmaker site, spam the entire world, and make a few bucks from the affiliate commissions.
There are probably a couple of things wrong here:
1) The matchmaker site is probably not enforcing its TOS, if they have one. There's a temptation to turn a blind eye to what affiliates do to generate traffic; if people get upset enough about a particular spammer, you can always say "Gosh! They were violating our TOS. We'll kick them off!"
2) Geocities is pretty notorious for being slow to respond to abuse complaints.
It's a nasty problem, and one inherent to affiliate programs. Ethical companies aggressively pursue thier TOS and make it really clear that they do before allowing affiliates to sign up ("DO NOT USE SPAM to promote our site; we will not pay you your commissions on referrals generated by spam, we will immediately terminate your account, and we will happily share your personal information with any anti-spammers who complain").
Cheers
-b
Just be glad you live in a *free* country. Just imagine what it must be like in the rest of the world!
Cheers
-b
So, er, you drink only Premium Unleaded gasoline? I'm not sure I even want to know what you do with motor oil and other lubricants. On the whole, I'm not at all sure that the whole "pretend you're a car" approach is all that healthy. Besides, do you put apple slices in your gas tank?
...unless you get hit by a bus at 35 years old. Tempting fate is never smart, and this post of yours is damned close to declaring yourself unsinkable. I can only hope that you live far away and that we never share an airplane.
Cheers
-b
...it's about expenses and database cleanliness. They finally realized that they were incenting their customers to lie to them, and then they were expending a fair amount of money sending junk mail to nonexistant people. Worse, they didn't even know how many unique customers they had, since people offer the same bogus info twice (some do, and make a point of it, but they're the exception).
Someone finally wised up and realized that they have a hugely polluted customer database and that, for a mail-order house, that's pretty expensive.
How they spin it for public consumption is their business, but I'd definitely take it with a grain of salt. That's my take on it, anyways.
-b
Domain Name: SYSTEMOFADOWN.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Online, MIS (OM98-ORG)
mis_online@SONYMUSIC.COM
SONY Music Entertainment, Inc.
550 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10022
US
212-833-7305
Fax- 212-833-6636
Oh, yeah, System of a Down isn't corporate rock. You're a rebel! MTV is just *so* subversive and anti-corporate.
Sorry, nothing personal, but that's about as silly as parading a Celine Dion liking as a sign of disliking corporate america. System of a Down is a *good* corporate rock band, but they're about as mainstream as you can get without performing at the Super Bowl (though I wouldn't rule that out).
Cheers -bConversation overheard at library:
Manager type: "Mr. Tech! Why didn't you tell us we had a pornographic domain name!"
Mr. Tech: "Er, because we don't?"
Manager type: "I can't believe you call yourself a tech! Our Net Nanny software clearly says that our domain name is pornographic. Don't you know anything about domain names?"
Mr. Tech: "Sure, you mean like the fact that the system is a way for mapping names to IP addresses?"
Manager type: "Nevermind that! Quick, change our domain name! We don't want to be listed as pornography!"
Mr. Tech: "Er, OK, sure."
Manager type: "By the way, what is our IP address?"
Mr. Tech: "214.57.69.0/24"
Manager type: "What? Are you kidding? You picked a *pornographic IP address*? What kind of tech are you? NetNanny says that addresses that include 69 are pornographic! You're fired!"
Mr. Tech: "Thank god for that."
Cheers
-b
Halloween VII, posted by Michael, eh? Where's the theme music?
Cheers
-b
Er, Ok, I'll take you up on this.
Say I'm your government affiliated nail remover company, and I employ 25% of the domestic population. Your foreign clawhammer company is coming in and creating unemployment, destroying jobs, and generally upsetting my (admittedly backwards) economy. I go to outlaw clawhammers so my populace can remain employed (and pay taxes). Should that "not be allowed to happen"?
Say I'm a large automaker with higher overhead than my foreign competition because of worker safety laws and my contractual obligations to the various unions I work with. I'm damned well going to lobby the government to add tariffs to foreign cars to level the playing field. Should that "not be allowed to happen"?
Say I'm a large US distributor of alcohol and I want to spend some money to make sure that my main competitor, marijuana, remains illegal. Should that "not be allowed to happen"?
Finally, if you're still supporting the implied-passive-voice "should not be allowed to happen", how about we take it out of passive voice. *By Who*?
You think the UN, or maybe the US, should invade countries because they have different economic ideas than us?
It's not immoral. It is economically unsound. And there's no force in the world with the moral authority to tell Panama (or anyone else) that they have to see things our way.
You imply that this kind of thing "should not be allowed to happen" -- I say the free market "will not allow this to happen." There's no moral judgement to be made here. The free (or relatively free) market will speak, and that's that. No sense getting your panties in a twist. And you know what? The manner in which it does happen may just be educational to all of us.
Cheers
-b
A good point, but of course, there's the question of where the code resides that checks the timestamps / cyrptographically signed data. If it's on machine 1 or 2, it's back to single point of faulure. And, if it's on Machine 3, you now have a system where compromise of any 2 of 3 systems is catastrophic, which is ugly because it leads to finger pointing ("No, it must have been altered on system 2!" / "No, it was code on system, 3"!).
Of course, in situations like this the signed data would probably be looked at by human eyes, but that's not practical for every bet, and as many people have said, the only reason this person got caught seems to be that they got really greedy. Me, I'll take $10k/month for the rest of my life rather than $3mil now.
Cheers
-b
Yes, but the database *coders* for your bank could easily reset your pin, or code an app such that when the teller goes to reset it, it always gets set to some value that they'd know.
This wasn't a case of a front-end person, working the phone banks, manipulating data. If it was indeed a hack/theft, it was someone with access to the code and/or database itself. Encryption doesn't do you much good, there.
Cheers
-b
Are you trying to imply that there are not, in fact, Iraqi submarines patrolling Lake Michigan?
-b
Thanks for the enlightening and relatively (har!) easy to understand post. I'm still trying to get my head around this, though.
Let's say there's a black hole over yonder. And coming at it from a right angle, on a trajectory perpindicular to where we're observing from, there's a big rock (let's call it "Earth") travelling at 99% the speed of light.
Do you mean to say that when the big old rock nears the event horizon, its apparent velocity from our observation platform drops, approaching zero, because the time it lives in is rapidly accelerated (relative to us)?
Does it matter if our viewpoint is perpindicular to, or straight behind, the speeding rock?
I've *almost* got this, I swear.
Cheers
-b
Whoa! Don't you think that's a bit extreme?
How would you determine which 200 patents are worthy? "Everyone submit their patents, and the best 200 win?" Would it make any sense if an idea that was patentable one year wasn't the next, by virtue of their being more "worthy" ideas?
Or, maybe I'm missing your point and you're not suggesting a quote, but standards high enough that only *about* 200 are granted a year. That's maybe more reasonable, but still completely unrealistically low. If you look at the number of industries that produce patent-worthy ideas (start with computer hardware, agriculture, oil refining, aerospace...), I'd say there are maybe 50 general industries that produce patentable things.
So each one of those *entire industries* would get about 4 patents a year, with a 200 patent-per-year model. You can't really support that, can you? I mean, God knows there are plenty of absolutely stupid patents; I'll start by saying that 50% of patents probably shouldn't be granted, and I'll go as high as 9 out of 10. But you're saying that only one out of a thousand, or one out of ten thousand? I think that'd be pretty hard to support.
Finally, I *said* the system was broken. Apparently not clearly enough. However, I said that picking far outlying data is a bad argument; even in your 200 patents-per-year model, I guarantee you there will be mistakes occaisionally. The huge number of bad patents is a better argument for "brokenness" than a single, absolutely ridiculous example -- you'll be able to find that in any system, broken or not.
Cheers
-b