But, if you load up Firefox, which they heavily support and fund, MSN isn't even an option unless you add them in.
Given that Mozilla has long positioned itself as an alternative to Microsoft, at least in the browser space, and that many developers and early adopters are strongly anti-Microsoft, would you really expect them -- Google or no Google -- to include a Microsoft search as a default option? It might seem logical, but as you may have noticed, people can get surprisingly emotional about their software.
Amazon(Which happens to be powered by Google),
Not last I looked. It returns Amazon.com product listings. A9 gets its web results from Google (last I looked, anyway), but Amazon's internal search results are, well, internal.
No, Google does NOT want to compete on technical merits
You keep saying this, but you don't back it up with any support. Claiming that Google doesn't want to compete on technical merits because this complaint isn't technical in nature is like saying that Microsoft doesn't care about the server market because the X-Box team isn't working on IIS. The two are not mutually exclusive, however much you want to portray them that way.
Now is this just the shell that can be left out, or the whole program? 'Cause I'd expect at the very least the HTML+CSS rendering engine would be needed for a whole lot of internal stuff (not to mention a bunch of third-party apps that rely on the DLL...)
Well, not exclusively. They do contribute quite a bit financially (mostly via search partnership deals, IIRC), and they employ a couple of Firefox developers.
But just as with, say, IBM and the Linux kernel, there are other contributors to Mozilla's finances, organization, and development.
I'm not assuming anything. I installed IE7 beta 2 on Windows XP. It only put MSN in the search drop-down. I was able to add more engines from the "Find more providers" page, but MSN was the only one preloaded when I installed it.
On further investigation, two things are apparent:
1. IE7 picks up IE6's search settings, including settings from installed search toolbars 2. OEMs may be installing additional presets for IE6, which would get picked up by IE7.
Perhaps is inherited the settings from IE6 and those were the default for that?
Hmm, that's probably it. I re-read the IE blog post and found this:
The search box in IE7 uses IE6's AutoSearch setting because we think this setting is the best indication IE has of the user's preference.
Dell probably pre-installed some search engines in IE6 for you, which IE7 picked up. My machine was a wipe-and-reinstall job, so it only had Microsoft's own defaults.
Search engines pay money to the browser makers to get their search engines in there anyway.
Um, care to back that up?
Funny, I thought that "accusation" was common knowledge. Opera, for instance, hasn't exactly been hiding the fact. Back in September, Jon von Tetzchner said:
What finally made [going free] possible is the increase in revenues from search and service partners. We can now go free and still increase our revenues.
And later in the same interview:
We have been working with Google for a long time. Our new search deal increases our search based revenue, which is an important factor in our decision to go free. We are also working with Google to make sure their services work well with Opera.
Don't believe for one moment that Google's motives are pure and "do no evil".
Not to make a judgment about Google specifically, but it's entirely possible to have impure motives without doing evil to get there. Motives are about ends, doing evil is about means. (Of course, there are certain ends that you can only achieve by doing evil -- like deciding to f*ing kill someone.)
One's motive could be to make huge piles of cash, but one could go about it ethically. One could even try to compete on both technical and PR levels.
I got it from installing IE7 beta 2 and clicking on the down arrow next to the search bar. MSN was the only search engine in the list, but there was an option to add more providers. Google was, indeed, on the page that led to.
My copy of IE7 came with: MSN, Yahoo, Google, and Ebay.
Just to hazard a guess, do you happen to have the Yahoo and/or Google toolbars for IE? According to the IE blog, they pick up settings from any search toolbars that are installed.
When you add a search provider to IE7, it asks you whether you want it to be the default for all future searches. Kind of like the "make XYZ your default browser" option. Firefox doesn't have this concept for its search box.
The main difference between the IE7 search box and the Firefox and Opera search boxes is that the IE7 search box comes preloaded with only one search provider: MSN. Firefox and Opera both include a half-dozen or so providers when you install them. (You can add additional search engines in all three.)
Well, that, and Firefox doesn't have a setting for a "default" provider. It "defaults" to the last one you used, which can be helpful if, say, you use Google most of the time and want to do a bunch of IMDB lookups in a row. (Yes, you can add IMDB as a search engine.) Of course, if you've never used the box before, it starts out with Google...
Wow. Reading that I suddenly remembered my own experience providing a lyrics service on the web.
Back in 1995, I put together a website that cross-referenced the lyrics to Les Misérables in English, French and German (all typed in by hand from the CD liner notes). At first it was hosted on webspace at AOL, but I later moved it to some space I had at college. From 1996-2000 I added songs in more and more languages, each time carefully cross-referencing and linking so that you could jump from each song straight to the same song in each other language. I had a modern French version (the original was considerably different from the show as it opened in London and Broadway) in all-caps, and a French speaker agreed to provide all the accents and diacritical marks. People sent me, sometimes one song at a time, lyrics in Hungarian, Norwegian, and Swedish. I tracked down import CDs of more languages that I could type myself. People even started sending me songs in Chinese and Japanese, first as GIF images, later in text. I learned a lot about cross-platform use of character encodings and fonts, and about website accessibility.
After I graduated from college, a friend at the lab agreed to keep my site running for a few months while I found new hosting. In January 2000, I bought a domain name. In February, I transferred my entire website from www.arts.uci.edu to hyperborea.org. In March I received a cease-and-desist letter. Knowing I had no legal right to keep the lyrics online, I took the Les Mis section down that afternoon, leaving only the parts that weren't subject to copyright.
Now, keep in mind that I ran this site for five years at AOL and UCI, making no effort to hide it. Within a month of setting up my own domain name, suddenly the lawyers were after me? It seemed too much of a coincidence.
Even today, there are still pages on the net that link to "Les Mis: The Complete Multilingual Libretto." (Of course, many of them are Geocities sites that haven't been updated since 1997, or exported bookmarks files languishing on some university server.) And I still get the occasional request for lyrics by email.
You're assuming he's going to be distributing copyrighted material -- and that he's going to be distributing it without permission. (You can distribute copyrighted material all you want, if you've gotten permission to do so. Otherwise, the publishing industry would be vastly different, and GPL software wouldn't exist.)
The story doesn't tell us anything about which songs he's going to be including. For all we know, it could be a collection of folk songs or hymns that are already in the public domain.
Advice to watch out for copyright issues is good. Assuming he's violating copyright (even if it's the safe way to bet) is still jumping to conclusions, and ignoring the technical questions posed in the story doesn't help anyone.
Well, "script" doesn't really make sense in the context of your original post, but I'll take you at your word that you don't see the appeal of mixing scripts on one page.
To start, I'll direct you to the Japanese codepage 932, which includes at least four scripts: basic latin alphabet, katakana, hirigana, and kanji. People seem to have thought it was necessary to be able to use all of those on one page, perhaps because Japanese tends to mix three of them together on a regular basis and likes to throw in English words for flavor. (No doubt, Latin characters helped to write computer programs as well.)
Unicode just extends the principle so that you can do things like:
Aggregate titles from articles in multiple languages
Use one language for content and another for labels (or, in the case of the web, navigation)
Write something like a Japanese/Russian dictionary intended for readers, that displays words the way you would see them in actual Japanese or Russian text
...and so on. The Unicode character set is just a big flat space, just like ASCII except with a lot more code points.
The point about internationalization perhaps shouldn't focus on UTF-8 specifically -- one could use UTF-16 instead -- but both encodings give you access to the Unicode character set, which allows you to, as you put it, "define the code page once per document."
MXPTR, SPF, Sender-ID, RMX, whatever, these schemes don't help stop spam -- they help stop (or at least identify) forgery. As it happens, a lot of spam today uses forged sender addresses. , so blocking mail that actively fails such a check does stop spam. Experience with SPF has shown us that spammers are perfectly willing to adopt this kind of record and just authorize the entire internet to send for their own domain. (On the plus side, since their SPF record says the domain is correct, you can safely blacklist them by domain.)
As a FUSSP, blocking all non-SPF/MXPTR/whatever labeled mail is going to require every single sender in the world to adopt this change before it will be useful. Not what I'd call "easy," by any stretch.
1) While blocking access to port 25 outside of the ISP's network is one thing, you can't block port 80 or 443 (or some others) without seriously disrupting your customers' experience. So you have to let some traffic out. And there's nothing saying a zombie can't be programmed to connect on either of those ports even if it doesn't use HTTP.
Of course, not too many target mail servers are going to be listening for incoming mail on ports 80 and 443. Somewhere along the line, some machine under the spammer's control* is going to have to send the message to port 25 on a machine that isn't under the spammer's control.
A bot could send data to a proxy that runs on a non-standard port, then forwards it on to the target, but that would just add a bottleneck -- and the whole purpose of using botnets is to avoid funnelling the traffic through a small number of easily-blocked servers. They'd have to set up a second botnet of proxies on ISPs that don't filter outbound port 25, at which point the first botnet is completely redundant. Might as well cut out the middle man.
In fact, the only way I can think of to effectively send spam using port 80/443 would be to log into a webmail service and automate the UI. Even then, you'd be subject to whatever filtering or rate limiting Hotmail (or Gmail, or Yahoo, etc.) does on their own outgoing mail.
*Either through direct control (spammer's own box or someone's pwned box) or abuse of resources (open relaying, SMTP-AUTH'ed submission using stolen credentials, etc.) The only exception is if the abused box is also the target.
Never underestimate spammers. It may give you a warm and fuzzy feeling to assume that "spammers are stupid," but some of them are surprisingly sophisticated.
One reason we're still in an arms race against spammers is that some of them -- just enough -- have the expertise (or can hire a less than scrupulous developer to provide it) to counteract just about every technological measure we've thrown at them so far.
To assume that spammers are too stupid to work around something is to fall into the trap of being an anti-spam kook.
What does this exactly entail? Does the computer first have to be compromised? Spyware/spamware installed through a backdoor? I've lightly read through the paper and it does mention that some sort of malware may be present on the victim's machine.
Yes. This has been standard operating procedure for many spammers for about two years now. Virus, worm, and spyware authors set up backdoors through which compromised computers can be loaded with spam-sending software. Then they sell access to these botnets on the black market. Spammers use software designed to blast out commands to dozens or hundreds of bots sitting in homes, businesses and elsewhere, which then spew their virtual sludge across the internet.
The hardcore spammers effectively have infinite processing power and bandwidth, since they can distribute the load across a botnet, and when the same spam run is coming a few messages at a time from hundreds of IP addresses, it's a lot harder to blacklist by IP. That's why many ISPs have started filtering outgoing SMTP traffic, and why blacklists have cropped up that just block any incoming mail from dynamic IP space.
Slashdot Mirror
But, if you load up Firefox, which they heavily support and fund, MSN isn't even an option unless you add them in.
Given that Mozilla has long positioned itself as an alternative to Microsoft, at least in the browser space, and that many developers and early adopters are strongly anti-Microsoft, would you really expect them -- Google or no Google -- to include a Microsoft search as a default option? It might seem logical, but as you may have noticed, people can get surprisingly emotional about their software.
Amazon(Which happens to be powered by Google),
Not last I looked. It returns Amazon.com product listings. A9 gets its web results from Google (last I looked, anyway), but Amazon's internal search results are, well, internal.
No, Google does NOT want to compete on technical merits
You keep saying this, but you don't back it up with any support. Claiming that Google doesn't want to compete on technical merits because this complaint isn't technical in nature is like saying that Microsoft doesn't care about the server market because the X-Box team isn't working on IIS. The two are not mutually exclusive, however much you want to portray them that way.
Now is this just the shell that can be left out, or the whole program? 'Cause I'd expect at the very least the HTML+CSS rendering engine would be needed for a whole lot of internal stuff (not to mention a bunch of third-party apps that rely on the DLL...)
I am curious about how much freedom OEM's will have to remove IE.
Not sure, but Microsoft expects OEMs will install their own set of search providers.
Firefox is NOT developed by Google
Well, not exclusively. They do contribute quite a bit financially (mostly via search partnership deals, IIRC), and they employ a couple of Firefox developers.
But just as with, say, IBM and the Linux kernel, there are other contributors to Mozilla's finances, organization, and development.
I'm not assuming anything. I installed IE7 beta 2 on Windows XP. It only put MSN in the search drop-down. I was able to add more engines from the "Find more providers" page, but MSN was the only one preloaded when I installed it.
On further investigation, two things are apparent:
1. IE7 picks up IE6's search settings, including settings from installed search toolbars
2. OEMs may be installing additional presets for IE6, which would get picked up by IE7.
Hmm, that's probably it. I re-read the IE blog post and found this:
Dell probably pre-installed some search engines in IE6 for you, which IE7 picked up. My machine was a wipe-and-reinstall job, so it only had Microsoft's own defaults.
Who said I was complaining? I'm describing a design difference. Firefox sticks with the last one you used, IE asks you to choose a default.
Why must everything be confrontational?
Oh, wait, this is Slashdot. Why am I bothering to ask?
Funny, I thought that "accusation" was common knowledge. Opera, for instance, hasn't exactly been hiding the fact. Back in September, Jon von Tetzchner said:
And later in the same interview:
How do I get rid of the search box entirely?
Assuming this isn't a rhetorical question:
Right-click on the toolbar. Click "Customize." Drag the search box off of the toolbar. Enjoy your search-box-free surfing.
Don't believe for one moment that Google's motives are pure and "do no evil".
Not to make a judgment about Google specifically, but it's entirely possible to have impure motives without doing evil to get there. Motives are about ends, doing evil is about means. (Of course, there are certain ends that you can only achieve by doing evil -- like deciding to f*ing kill someone.)
One's motive could be to make huge piles of cash, but one could go about it ethically. One could even try to compete on both technical and PR levels.
I don't know where you got your information.
I got it from installing IE7 beta 2 and clicking on the down arrow next to the search bar. MSN was the only search engine in the list, but there was an option to add more providers. Google was, indeed, on the page that led to.
My copy of IE7 came with: MSN, Yahoo, Google, and Ebay.
Just to hazard a guess, do you happen to have the Yahoo and/or Google toolbars for IE? According to the IE blog, they pick up settings from any search toolbars that are installed.
When you add a search provider to IE7, it asks you whether you want it to be the default for all future searches. Kind of like the "make XYZ your default browser" option. Firefox doesn't have this concept for its search box.
That's the major design difference.
The main difference between the IE7 search box and the Firefox and Opera search boxes is that the IE7 search box comes preloaded with only one search provider: MSN. Firefox and Opera both include a half-dozen or so providers when you install them. (You can add additional search engines in all three.)
Well, that, and Firefox doesn't have a setting for a "default" provider. It "defaults" to the last one you used, which can be helpful if, say, you use Google most of the time and want to do a bunch of IMDB lookups in a row. (Yes, you can add IMDB as a search engine.) Of course, if you've never used the box before, it starts out with Google...
Of course, you can always read what the IE team has to say about searching...
Sure, I knew a guy who used to take old, broken monitors out to the desert and use them for target practice.
Oh, you meant with a camera! In that case, see the other comments about syncing framerates...
Wow. Reading that I suddenly remembered my own experience providing a lyrics service on the web.
Back in 1995, I put together a website that cross-referenced the lyrics to Les Misérables in English, French and German (all typed in by hand from the CD liner notes). At first it was hosted on webspace at AOL, but I later moved it to some space I had at college. From 1996-2000 I added songs in more and more languages, each time carefully cross-referencing and linking so that you could jump from each song straight to the same song in each other language. I had a modern French version (the original was considerably different from the show as it opened in London and Broadway) in all-caps, and a French speaker agreed to provide all the accents and diacritical marks. People sent me, sometimes one song at a time, lyrics in Hungarian, Norwegian, and Swedish. I tracked down import CDs of more languages that I could type myself. People even started sending me songs in Chinese and Japanese, first as GIF images, later in text. I learned a lot about cross-platform use of character encodings and fonts, and about website accessibility.
After I graduated from college, a friend at the lab agreed to keep my site running for a few months while I found new hosting. In January 2000, I bought a domain name. In February, I transferred my entire website from www.arts.uci.edu to hyperborea.org. In March I received a cease-and-desist letter. Knowing I had no legal right to keep the lyrics online, I took the Les Mis section down that afternoon, leaving only the parts that weren't subject to copyright.
Now, keep in mind that I ran this site for five years at AOL and UCI, making no effort to hide it. Within a month of setting up my own domain name, suddenly the lawyers were after me? It seemed too much of a coincidence.
Even today, there are still pages on the net that link to "Les Mis: The Complete Multilingual Libretto." (Of course, many of them are Geocities sites that haven't been updated since 1997, or exported bookmarks files languishing on some university server.) And I still get the occasional request for lyrics by email.
You're assuming he's going to be distributing copyrighted material -- and that he's going to be distributing it without permission. (You can distribute copyrighted material all you want, if you've gotten permission to do so. Otherwise, the publishing industry would be vastly different, and GPL software wouldn't exist.)
The story doesn't tell us anything about which songs he's going to be including. For all we know, it could be a collection of folk songs or hymns that are already in the public domain.
Advice to watch out for copyright issues is good. Assuming he's violating copyright (even if it's the safe way to bet) is still jumping to conclusions, and ignoring the technical questions posed in the story doesn't help anyone.
Well, "script" doesn't really make sense in the context of your original post, but I'll take you at your word that you don't see the appeal of mixing scripts on one page.
To start, I'll direct you to the Japanese codepage 932, which includes at least four scripts: basic latin alphabet, katakana, hirigana, and kanji. People seem to have thought it was necessary to be able to use all of those on one page, perhaps because Japanese tends to mix three of them together on a regular basis and likes to throw in English words for flavor. (No doubt, Latin characters helped to write computer programs as well.)
Unicode just extends the principle so that you can do things like:
...and so on. The Unicode character set is just a big flat space, just like ASCII except with a lot more code points.
The point about internationalization perhaps shouldn't focus on UTF-8 specifically -- one could use UTF-16 instead -- but both encodings give you access to the Unicode character set, which allows you to, as you put it, "define the code page once per document."
MXPTR, SPF, Sender-ID, RMX, whatever, these schemes don't help stop spam -- they help stop (or at least identify) forgery. As it happens, a lot of spam today uses forged sender addresses. , so blocking mail that actively fails such a check does stop spam. Experience with SPF has shown us that spammers are perfectly willing to adopt this kind of record and just authorize the entire internet to send for their own domain. (On the plus side, since their SPF record says the domain is correct, you can safely blacklist them by domain.)
As a FUSSP, blocking all non-SPF/MXPTR/whatever labeled mail is going to require every single sender in the world to adopt this change before it will be useful. Not what I'd call "easy," by any stretch.
1) While blocking access to port 25 outside of the ISP's network is one thing, you can't block port 80 or 443 (or some others) without seriously disrupting your customers' experience. So you have to let some traffic out. And there's nothing saying a zombie can't be programmed to connect on either of those ports even if it doesn't use HTTP.
Of course, not too many target mail servers are going to be listening for incoming mail on ports 80 and 443. Somewhere along the line, some machine under the spammer's control* is going to have to send the message to port 25 on a machine that isn't under the spammer's control.
A bot could send data to a proxy that runs on a non-standard port, then forwards it on to the target, but that would just add a bottleneck -- and the whole purpose of using botnets is to avoid funnelling the traffic through a small number of easily-blocked servers. They'd have to set up a second botnet of proxies on ISPs that don't filter outbound port 25, at which point the first botnet is completely redundant. Might as well cut out the middle man.
In fact, the only way I can think of to effectively send spam using port 80/443 would be to log into a webmail service and automate the UI. Even then, you'd be subject to whatever filtering or rate limiting Hotmail (or Gmail, or Yahoo, etc.) does on their own outgoing mail.
*Either through direct control (spammer's own box or someone's pwned box) or abuse of resources (open relaying, SMTP-AUTH'ed submission using stolen credentials, etc.) The only exception is if the abused box is also the target.
Isn't it fun to imagine spammers being sentenced to a couple hours in the stocks in the village square?
Don't you mean sentenced to a couple of hours in the St0cKz?
Bonus points for spelling "pique" correctly!
Too bad there's no +1 Good Spelling mod...
Nah, just the original one. There's no need to go decapitating zombies left and right.
What I want to know is: Why are so many people using Worcestershire Sauce as embalming fluid?
Never underestimate spammers. It may give you a warm and fuzzy feeling to assume that "spammers are stupid," but some of them are surprisingly sophisticated.
One reason we're still in an arms race against spammers is that some of them -- just enough -- have the expertise (or can hire a less than scrupulous developer to provide it) to counteract just about every technological measure we've thrown at them so far.
To assume that spammers are too stupid to work around something is to fall into the trap of being an anti-spam kook.
Some measurable percentage of people would still click on it.
Many of them without even reading it. "Oh, it's just some confirmation box, let's get it out of the way."
What does this exactly entail? Does the computer first have to be compromised? Spyware/spamware installed through a backdoor? I've lightly read through the paper and it does mention that some sort of malware may be present on the victim's machine.
Yes. This has been standard operating procedure for many spammers for about two years now. Virus, worm, and spyware authors set up backdoors through which compromised computers can be loaded with spam-sending software. Then they sell access to these botnets on the black market. Spammers use software designed to blast out commands to dozens or hundreds of bots sitting in homes, businesses and elsewhere, which then spew their virtual sludge across the internet.
The hardcore spammers effectively have infinite processing power and bandwidth, since they can distribute the load across a botnet, and when the same spam run is coming a few messages at a time from hundreds of IP addresses, it's a lot harder to blacklist by IP. That's why many ISPs have started filtering outgoing SMTP traffic, and why blacklists have cropped up that just block any incoming mail from dynamic IP space.