I've seen some that use linguistically-based tests. Things like "What color is an orange?" or "Please type Bob's first name."
Of course, if you're really getting hammered, you'll need to vary the structure of the questions (and the keywords) a lot, and probably move into the realm of general knowledge questions -- and then you need to make sure you're not relying on vocabulary or knowledge that would exclude more people than you intend.
And the simple ones only work because it's not worth the spammers' time to write a sentence parser.
I think the tool itself is intended less for end-users and more for researchers, who could then send their data to:
Someone's abuse department (if something like click fraud is involved)
Someone's lawyers (with regard to trademark infringement cease-and-desist letters)
Legal authorities (in the event that the offending domain is doing something illegal)
Someone's purchasing or corporate takeover department (in the event that the typosquatter can be bought out)
Tony Soprano (in the event that other methods of persuasion fail to have their desired effect)
When used appropriately (i.e. not to just silence critics or harass bystanders), the end user could benefit when the deceptive site is taken down and replaced with a redirect to the "real" site.
Of course, like any tool, it's just as likely to be abused. I seem to remember a running battle between, IIRC, toys.com and toy.com back in 1999 or 2000, where one site was an online toy seller and the other was an art group. In this case it was just a similar domain name.
I think you mean a squatting-on-domain-names-by-making-use-of-typogra phical-user-errors scheme.
Though it occurs to me that German speakers might actually construct the term that way, only they'd leave out the hyphens and tack on the word scheme as well.
(Incidentally, it looks like/. is inserting a space in the middle of "typographical." Under the circumstances, that seems oddly appropriate.)
I like the idea (even with the cute overload), though I'm not sure it really improves much over a single captcha image. Aside from the obvious anticipation of OCR improvements.
It seems a bit process-intensive, though, judging by the load time I'm getting. The success message on the demo seems rather appropriate, given last weekend's Slashdot layout...
I agree -- the idea that AT&T could be forwarding all traffic to the NSA suggests that the NSA has the bandwidth and servers to handle as much traffic as a major ISP. This doesn't quite pass the smell test with me.
It's much easier to believe that AT&T is sending lots of arbitrary traffic to the NSA, or is sending a pseudo-targeted subset of traffic.
Though if the NSA really does have the setup to handle it all, that might explain why the Internet backbone has become a bottleneck -- it's handling twice as much traffic as it needs to!
In what way did they say, "piss off" to the Open Source community?
As you say you "wouldn't look for anything free from Red Hat," it sounds like you think they've discontinued Fedora Core. This, in turn, implies that you have yet to read the entire headline (never mind the summary or the article).
1. Red Hat is not abandoning Fedora Core. They had plans to create a nonprofit foundation to run Fedora, but those plans didn't work out.
2. CentOS works just like Red Hat because it's literally a clone of Red Hat. They take the open source RPMS from RHEL, remove or replace anything trademarked or non-redistributable, point updates to their own servers and rebuild. The result is a Linux distro with the same structure, library versions and software set as RHEL.
The reason Red Hat isn't mentioned by name on CentOS' website anymore is that RH's lawyers called them up and insisted they remove the trademarks. So now whenever Red Hat is mentioned on the website, they refer to it as "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor."
It's all about target audience. Red Hat Enterpise Linux is all about being a stable production OS. Fedora Core is all about being on the bleeding edge of Linux technology.
Stability comes at the cost of lots of testing and debugging time. That's why a production-class OS like Debian or RHEL is always a bit behind in the software it includes.
If you like having the latest and greatest, and are willing to accept the risks that go along with that (there's a reason "cutting edge" became "bleeding edge," after all), Fedora is a good choice. If you want a production OS, you shouldn't even consider it. You should instead go with RHEL, one of the free rebuilds like CentOS, Debian, etc.
The whole accretion-disk-clumping-into-planets theory has been around for decades, and we've seen signs of accretion discs around stars before. What's new here is that such a disc has been found around the remnants of a star that's already gone supernova -- an event which would have destroyed any previous solar system.
This is the missing link which explains why we've found planets around pulsars, because any planets formed earlier in the star's lifetime would have been destroyed in the supernova.
I've been running KDE apps on GNOME and vice-versa for years, largely thanks to the work of Freedesktop.org at getting them to use common drag-n-drop, system menus, and notification area. So based on the incredible lack of information in the article, I had to wonder... WTF does this do that isn't already possible?
The Portland project page isn't particularly informative either -- the description is too low-level: "we're going to create two interfaces." OK, two interfaces to do what?
The Integration Tasks page actually provides information about what kinds of things they want to do: make sure apps built for both desktops will talk to the screen saver in the same way, deal with power management, share preferences like default apps, etc.
Sounds like a logical continuation of FreeDesktop.org's efforts so far, and something that will improve matters for people like me who like some apps from one desktop and some from the other.
Suppose you have a site license for MS software? Why should you be double-taxed?
You shouldn't, but if the seller has already contractually agreed to install Windows on every PC they sell, then your licensing status doesn't matter. The seller has its obligations and Microsoft is legally within its rights to insist the seller fulfill those obligations until such time as the contract expires, is renegotiated, or is deemed unenforceable.
That doesn't make it moral or ethical, but it's more likely to be legal than trying to force resellers who haven't made such agreements to install Windows on everything, which is the distinction the GP appears to have been making.
Yes. TerraSoft Solutions will sell you a PowerPC-based Mac with Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed. Their base configurations are all dual-boot, but I suspect if you customize your order, they'll be willing to sell you a Linux-only system.
Okay... And trying to force the bundling of your software isn't abusing an abuse?
Oh, it is, but they were convicted in a US court, which doesn't have jurisdiction in the UK (much to the consternation of the RIAA and MPAA). Even then, they got off lightly enough that they don't seem to be terribly concerned with risking a repeat.
I'm sure it makes companies less likely to donate to them as well because they're not able to deduct their contribution from their taxes either.
One of the hazards of offering perks for charity is that you get people who act charitably solely for the perks, and not because it's, well, a charitable thing to do. Take away the perks, and suddenly their charity dries up.
It makes me think B5 might have been on to something with the Vorlons' whole "if you do the right thing for the wrong reasons, the work becomes corrupt" attitude.
It also makes me wonder about potential side effects of streamlining the tax system (beyond the obvious implosion of the tax preparation industry). I wonder how much charity would just stop happening if the tax breaks disappeared.
Darwin is based on FreeBSD, not OpenBSD -- though I must admit, I have no idea how much cross-pollination there is among the *BSDs -- but like most of the civilized world, they do use OpenSSH.
Does anybody know if there's a way to disable that? To make firefox look like a regular search string?
Sure. It works like this:
1. Type "www.google.com" in the location bar. 2. Hit Enter. 3. Enter your search in the form.
In all seriousness, you could probably track down the file that defines the search plugin and alter the query string, or create your own search plugin that hits Google, but why would you want to? Presumably if you like Firefox you'd want to see them supported through their search deal, and there are no more privacy implications than there are in using the normal form. (All the info is available from the User-Agent string, unless you're masking it.) And if you don't like Firefox, presumably you're using another browser anyway.
Note that the above is also true for Opera, which has a similar deal with Google.
1. Given that Mozilla does acutlaly have a revenue stream in addition to donations, what makes you think that $10K is all redirected donations?
2. Given that "the Mozilla project uses SSH extensively for various purposes, including securing connections to the Mozilla CVS repository," perhaps supporting further development of OpenSSH might be considered important for continued development of the browser?
What about other uses of money that aren't directly "improving the browser?" Would it be acceptable for MoFo to buy new servers for download mirrors? Support forums? How about Windows licenses or Mac hardware for development workstations, build boxes, and QA?
3. While we're at it, what is it with the donate-but-with-strings-attached attitude these days?
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen some that use linguistically-based tests. Things like "What color is an orange?" or "Please type Bob's first name."
Of course, if you're really getting hammered, you'll need to vary the structure of the questions (and the keywords) a lot, and probably move into the realm of general knowledge questions -- and then you need to make sure you're not relying on vocabulary or knowledge that would exclude more people than you intend.
And the simple ones only work because it's not worth the spammers' time to write a sentence parser.
I think the tool itself is intended less for end-users and more for researchers, who could then send their data to:
When used appropriately (i.e. not to just silence critics or harass bystanders), the end user could benefit when the deceptive site is taken down and replaced with a redirect to the "real" site.
Of course, like any tool, it's just as likely to be abused. I seem to remember a running battle between, IIRC, toys.com and toy.com back in 1999 or 2000, where one site was an online toy seller and the other was an art group. In this case it was just a similar domain name.
To sum up: Buzzwords are often jargon, but not all jargon terms are buzzwords.
squatting-on-domain-names scheme
a phical-user-errors scheme.
/. is inserting a space in the middle of "typographical." Under the circumstances, that seems oddly appropriate.)
I think you mean a squatting-on-domain-names-by-making-use-of-typogr
Though it occurs to me that German speakers might actually construct the term that way, only they'd leave out the hyphens and tack on the word scheme as well.
(Incidentally, it looks like
I like the idea (even with the cute overload), though I'm not sure it really improves much over a single captcha image. Aside from the obvious anticipation of OCR improvements.
It seems a bit process-intensive, though, judging by the load time I'm getting. The success message on the demo seems rather appropriate, given last weekend's Slashdot layout...
I agree -- the idea that AT&T could be forwarding all traffic to the NSA suggests that the NSA has the bandwidth and servers to handle as much traffic as a major ISP. This doesn't quite pass the smell test with me.
It's much easier to believe that AT&T is sending lots of arbitrary traffic to the NSA, or is sending a pseudo-targeted subset of traffic.
Though if the NSA really does have the setup to handle it all, that might explain why the Internet backbone has become a bottleneck -- it's handling twice as much traffic as it needs to!
In what way did they say, "piss off" to the Open Source community?
As you say you "wouldn't look for anything free from Red Hat," it sounds like you think they've discontinued Fedora Core. This, in turn, implies that you have yet to read the entire headline (never mind the summary or the article).
There's a lot of that going around. It seems people get through "Fedora" and assume they know what the next word is going to be.
People who don't read the article? Standard for Slashdot.
People who don't read the summary? Rare, but I can see it happening.
But people who don't read the headline? That seems silly, even for this place.
1. Red Hat is not abandoning Fedora Core. They had plans to create a nonprofit foundation to run Fedora, but those plans didn't work out.
2. CentOS works just like Red Hat because it's literally a clone of Red Hat. They take the open source RPMS from RHEL, remove or replace anything trademarked or non-redistributable, point updates to their own servers and rebuild. The result is a Linux distro with the same structure, library versions and software set as RHEL.
The reason Red Hat isn't mentioned by name on CentOS' website anymore is that RH's lawyers called them up and insisted they remove the trademarks. So now whenever Red Hat is mentioned on the website, they refer to it as "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor."
It's all about target audience. Red Hat Enterpise Linux is all about being a stable production OS. Fedora Core is all about being on the bleeding edge of Linux technology.
Stability comes at the cost of lots of testing and debugging time. That's why a production-class OS like Debian or RHEL is always a bit behind in the software it includes.
If you like having the latest and greatest, and are willing to accept the risks that go along with that (there's a reason "cutting edge" became "bleeding edge," after all), Fedora is a good choice. If you want a production OS, you shouldn't even consider it. You should instead go with RHEL, one of the free rebuilds like CentOS, Debian, etc.
The whole accretion-disk-clumping-into-planets theory has been around for decades, and we've seen signs of accretion discs around stars before. What's new here is that such a disc has been found around the remnants of a star that's already gone supernova -- an event which would have destroyed any previous solar system.
This is the missing link which explains why we've found planets around pulsars, because any planets formed earlier in the star's lifetime would have been destroyed in the supernova.
I've been running KDE apps on GNOME and vice-versa for years, largely thanks to the work of Freedesktop.org at getting them to use common drag-n-drop, system menus, and notification area. So based on the incredible lack of information in the article, I had to wonder... WTF does this do that isn't already possible?
The Portland project page isn't particularly informative either -- the description is too low-level: "we're going to create two interfaces." OK, two interfaces to do what?
The Integration Tasks page actually provides information about what kinds of things they want to do: make sure apps built for both desktops will talk to the screen saver in the same way, deal with power management, share preferences like default apps, etc.
Sounds like a logical continuation of FreeDesktop.org's efforts so far, and something that will improve matters for people like me who like some apps from one desktop and some from the other.
Suppose you have a site license for MS software? Why should you be double-taxed?
You shouldn't, but if the seller has already contractually agreed to install Windows on every PC they sell, then your licensing status doesn't matter. The seller has its obligations and Microsoft is legally within its rights to insist the seller fulfill those obligations until such time as the contract expires, is renegotiated, or is deemed unenforceable.
That doesn't make it moral or ethical, but it's more likely to be legal than trying to force resellers who haven't made such agreements to install Windows on everything, which is the distinction the GP appears to have been making.
Can I buy a Mac without OSX?
Yes. TerraSoft Solutions will sell you a PowerPC-based Mac with Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed. Their base configurations are all dual-boot, but I suspect if you customize your order, they'll be willing to sell you a Linux-only system.
Okay... And trying to force the bundling of your software isn't abusing an abuse?
Oh, it is, but they were convicted in a US court, which doesn't have jurisdiction in the UK (much to the consternation of the RIAA and MPAA). Even then, they got off lightly enough that they don't seem to be terribly concerned with risking a repeat.
I'm sure it makes companies less likely to donate to them as well because they're not able to deduct their contribution from their taxes either.
One of the hazards of offering perks for charity is that you get people who act charitably solely for the perks, and not because it's, well, a charitable thing to do. Take away the perks, and suddenly their charity dries up.
It makes me think B5 might have been on to something with the Vorlons' whole "if you do the right thing for the wrong reasons, the work becomes corrupt" attitude.
It also makes me wonder about potential side effects of streamlining the tax system (beyond the obvious implosion of the tax preparation industry). I wonder how much charity would just stop happening if the tax breaks disappeared.
Was it "Hoy hoy" or just "Ahoy" (i.e. the standard ship-to-ship greeting) that Bell wanted?
Darwin is based on FreeBSD, not OpenBSD -- though I must admit, I have no idea how much cross-pollination there is among the *BSDs -- but like most of the civilized world, they do use OpenSSH.
Does anybody know if there's a way to disable that? To make firefox look like a regular search string?
Sure. It works like this:
1. Type "www.google.com" in the location bar.
2. Hit Enter.
3. Enter your search in the form.
In all seriousness, you could probably track down the file that defines the search plugin and alter the query string, or create your own search plugin that hits Google, but why would you want to? Presumably if you like Firefox you'd want to see them supported through their search deal, and there are no more privacy implications than there are in using the normal form. (All the info is available from the User-Agent string, unless you're masking it.) And if you don't like Firefox, presumably you're using another browser anyway.
Note that the above is also true for Opera, which has a similar deal with Google.
This is 10% of their target just from one donor -- not even counting all the people who've donated smaller amounts.
Hey, I'm impressed they donated anything, given the stony response from companies like IBM, Novell and Red Hat.
10% of the target from just one donor? That doesn't sound bad at all.
1. Given that Mozilla does acutlaly have a revenue stream in addition to donations, what makes you think that $10K is all redirected donations?
2. Given that "the Mozilla project uses SSH extensively for various purposes, including securing connections to the Mozilla CVS repository," perhaps supporting further development of OpenSSH might be considered important for continued development of the browser?
What about other uses of money that aren't directly "improving the browser?" Would it be acceptable for MoFo to buy new servers for download mirrors? Support forums? How about Windows licenses or Mac hardware for development workstations, build boxes, and QA?
3. While we're at it, what is it with the donate-but-with-strings-attached attitude these days?
You'll buy a DS card and plug it in.
Hmm, if they include Flash support, this could open up sites like PopCap to a whole new audience...
Bill O'Reily is really a lizard person.
Now that I might believe...