How do digital signatures allow easy harvesting of email addresses?
Certificates must be centrally stored or related to a trusted central authority. With this, you only have to break that central authority to get all the valid e-mail addresses. In addition, if all e-mail had to be signed, then people wouldn't be able to use throwaway e-mail addresses as easily, so every "give us your e-mail" would mean that a valid e-mail address was being harvested.
Few organizations on this planet have the resources to brute force a valid bogus digital signature, and no one can do it on the sort of scale you'd need to send spam.
You are thinking about forging e-mail, which isn't the problem. Spam could have a valid signature without being from someone you know. Like current spam and phishing, it could be from someone you might know.
Easy to obtain, in that we really only need the mail server admins to cooperate, then everyone (who wants to get their email) will play along pretty damned quick.
Once you finish that "easy" task, could you get to work on the trivial problems of a portable fusion reactor, transporter technology, and faster than light travel?
Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes - Can spam as much as they want, it will never get read.
The bot that controls a Windows machine probably also would be able to control the certificates the user had for sending e-mail. Thus, signed spam from people you trust.
Joe jobs and/or identity theft - Would require either knowing their private key, or even in the easiest case, physical access to their machine.
Cruise on over to Verisign and see just how easy it is to get a certificate with an e-mail address that isn't yours, and Verisign is one of the better at checking it. Also, read what I wrote about bots infecting the machine.
I don't want the government reading my email - So add full-message encryption basically for no extra work. And they can read your email now, so how would this make it any worse?
Because today there isn't a central certificate authority that is required to be used by everyone sending e-mail. This idea would make that a reality. That CA would have all the private keys for all the certs in a one-stop shop for the government. Encrypting wouldn't do any good, because it would be done using one of the same keys that was available in the CA.
It doesn't matter whether you do the blocking at the SMTP level or not, it is still being blocked including some legitimate emails. If legitimate email is being blocked for any reason, it means the service is not reliable.
You misunderstand the term "reliable" as it applies to networking.
TCP is called "reliable" and is said to "guarantee delivery". This is not true. TCP merely guarantees that if it was not delivered, the client program knows it was not delivered. SMTP behaves in exactly the same way.
So, the key is to block at the SMTP level, which guarantees that the real sending server gets an error message. If that sending server is legitimate (e.g., a GMail server), then the error message is passed along to the original sender, and they can do something about it. This is as "reliable" as e-mail ever can be, given the nature of the Internet.
So, what TFA was complaining about was anti-spam measures that break the SMTP "reliable" contract of either actually delivering the e-mail or else returning an error message to the sender. MS Exchange and qmail come to mind as two programs that make it very hard to notify the sender of an error without creating blowback spam.
No greylisting implementation that I know of requires the sender to do anything special to "validate" their e-mail. What you are thinking of is a challenge-response system, and those suck because they create blowback spam.
Greylisting works on the principle that most spam comes from systems that don't follow RFC because they do not retry if they receive a temporary error. The MTA with the greylisting implmentation always returns a temporary "4xx" error code for any e-mail with a "new" sender/recipient/source IP triple and stores the information in a database. The greylist server keeps returning a temporary error for anything that matches this tuple for the configured timeout (usually about 5 minutes). After that, it lets the connection through as normal (where other anti-spam measures may be taken).
This stops most bot networks from sending spam. It still works remarkably well, as I only use that and SpamAssassin with a reject score of 10, and I see about 1-2 spam e-mails per week.
I agree that "DRM" means "digital rights management". But, "DRM" was never used as a term except when referring to "management of copyrighted digital material".
So, the "managing of rights" that is controlled by file system ACLs, passwords, etc., has never fallen under the umbrella of "DRM".
Stop mis-using the word DRM and, ya know, people might start to listen. Stop letting people redefine words like DRM or "freedom" and then you'll get people to listen.
First, despite your claim that "chmod" is "DRM", it's not, and never has been. DRM and copyright are permanently intertwined, while chmod/passwords/etc. have never been about protecting copyright.
DRM has been redefined not by those of us who are arguing that we should be able to listen to music on any device we want, but by those that are selling the music.
So, don't complain about postings here...complain to Apple that "DRM" means a different thing that what they thought it meant when they had FairPlay programmed for iTunes.
The content providers have re-defined DRM so that it doesn't mean "access control for digital representations of copyrighted material". It now means "preventing users from doing anything with digital representations of anything except for exactly what we want them to do, regardless of any rights they have to do more".
Now you request the 100th fibonacci number, like this: (fibs !! 99). Haskell doesn't know the value of elements 2 through 99, so it unrolls it, performing the computation as much as possible - that's the laziness. Now it stores:
[0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55,... , 218922995834555169026, <some vague concept of the remaining computation>]
And it returns you the value 218922995834555169026 which is the last *known* element of the list. Note however that the computed list so far remains.
So, basically, if you do want to do something that actually approaches infinite (say the 1,000,000,000th Fibonacci number), Haskell will croak trying to keep all one billion numbers of the list around, while other languages will just output the result (although it would take a fairly long time, I suspect).
I'm sure that a "good" Haskell implementation will not actually roll over and die given this sort of request, but it would have to throw away most (if not all) of the list, thus making it pretty much like other languages.
So, it's a language for defining "infinite" data structures and not blowing up at the point of definition, but when it comes to actually executing with truly large datasets, it suffers the same problems as every other language.
"PC" has been used to specifically refer to IBM PC-compatible for over 25 years, since before Macs.
And, since Apple uses the term to mean something else entirely, that's what makes it "misleading".
Current Macs are as "IBM PC-compatible" as current machines from Dell, HP/Compaq, etc. Neither is anything like the last IBM-built non-laptop PC, but both have evolved from that specification into the current versions with 64-bit computing, multiple processors/cores, and PCI Express 2.0.
And, both "Macs" and "PCs" (used in the Apple way) can run Windows or OS-X.
For me, it's possibly a better advert than the Apple ones, the basic message of which I took to be: Macs are designed for goofing around showing off your photos, and PCs are for actually getting anything done.
I always thought the basic message of the "I'm a Mac/PC" ads was that PCs inhibit your ability to get things done and Macs make it easier. Note: I'm using "PC" in the same way the ads do...to refer to a Windows machine. It's not correct, but unfortunately it's another case where perception becomes reality.
I can't see how you got the reverse out of those ads. If the focus group for testing them had had the same opinion as you, I don't think we would have ever seen them in that form.
Personally, I like the Mac/PC ads, although I only agree with about 10% of what they say, since I (and people around me) run XP systems that only reboot once a month for patch Tuesday, and run a lot of different types of software with no issues.
int fib(int x) { int fib1 = 0, fib2 = 1; for (int i = x; i > 0; i--) { int temp = fib1 + fib2; fib1 = fib2; fib2 = temp; }
return fib2; }
int bignum = fib(100);
This function is just as "lazy" in that until the call to it, nothing is calculated, and only the minimum required work is done.
Now, if Haskell is smart enough to be able to cache the result of the 100th Fibonacci number and use it later (like as the starting point for the calculation of the 200th), that would be useful.
Still, 10%-20% ain't bad. But how can you improve that 500-fold?
Maybe it's 500x per unit of area.
Current solar panels are rated that way (e.g., N watts per square meter), and since this system goes 3D (i.e, up), maybe it can increase the amount of power generated without increasing the area required. It would increase the volume required, but if a current installation is 6 inches thick and this new one were 18 inches thick, it probably wouldn't change the ability to install it at any given location.
For God's sake, there is even an episode where George is pretending to be a Whale Biologist to get a woman and when they are wandering the beach they happen to come across a beached whale!
It's called "exaggeration".
The joke is an absurd extenstion of a guy pretending to be a doctor/movie producer/interested in Russian poetry/etc. to impress a girl and getting caught at it.
Although later seasons did become a bit tedious, seasons 3-5 were probably the best non-sketch comedy show at its prime, with season 4 being close to perfect. The show probably jumped the shark in season 6, when it did a 100th episode clip show.
I liked Seinfeld, but these commercials aren't even close to a bad episode, and I'm surprised they made it to TV.
In my previous job, the first manager I had was perfect...he understood enough tech to be able to get us the resources we needed, kept upper management and clients off our back, but let us sweat the small stuff (like which Linux distro to use). This is the ideal level of "domain knowledge" for any manager. You need to know enough to make things run smoothly, but you really don't need to know more than that. And, even if you know more than that, you really shouldn't use that knowledge unless somebody is about to make a mistake.
He left because his wife wanted to move to a different city for a job (since she made a lot more than he did, he went).
After that, the approximately 10-person IT department ran with no manager for nearly a year. It only worked because the people were all self-motivated, but it was really hard to get any really big projects going during that time. Then, we got a manager who thought they knew everything about tech and had to micro-manage everything. The department dealt with this by nodding politely and agreeing with everything, and the went on with what we had done for the previous year. It was the only way to avoid disaster.
A bad manager is far worse than no manager, but a good manager is worth every penny they get paid, since they make me less likely to commit murder while on the job.
I've never installed a real OS that wasn't essentially "click through the installer and end up with a magically working system", and that's going back to things like Netware 3.x. Although I've never used Slackware, if it doesn't make you manually calculate and edit boot block values so that the right kernel gets loaded, it's just a matter of degree.
And, just this week I have had two "things go wrong" that required some reasonable skills, but nothing somebody who wasn't afraid of the command line couldn't just Google:
1. A Linux RAID-5 array had a single disk fail but refused to mount the RAID-5 degraded without forcing (the replacement disk was being delayed by Hurricane Ike), and when forced, file systems on LVM volumes were a bit wonky. No data loss, and the new drive is in place.
2. A clone of a VMware image to a physical machine (yes, you can do that) halted in the middle of the XP boot process, which hadn't happened with any other machine. It turns out this was a lot older machine than we were led to believe (a Pentium III), and the multi-processor HAL needed to be replaced using the recovery console.
I'm an IT project manager. If one of my peeps bailed and I couldn't step right in and fill their spot and train their replacement myself I would consider myself a failure.
I suspect the only reason that you can do this is because you have not managed anything complicated.
I'm not a manager, but I have two...one that is overall in charge of the projects I work on, and one that oversees the tech end of the work our consulting company does. So, the first guy works with the customer to determine what they want us to accomplish for them, and the second supplies information about (for example) how much Oracle costs us and what hardware it should run on. The first guy is different depending on the project and customer, while the second is always the same.
Neither one of them could possibly do more than 10% of my day-to-day job, and nobody would ever expect them to. There are at least two other people at my level (the "managed") that can do at least enough of my job to keep things going when they peel me from the front of a bus. Together, those two people can probably do 90% of what I do, although since it's not their primary duty, they aren't as good at it.
This is how a real-world company works on large projects. People are cross-trained, and only rarely do managers get included in that training.
Slackware. Forget about Redhat and all the other GUI-fied distributions. Install Slackware and do everything yourself. It's the only way to learn.
This is good advice.
Actually, it's not very good advice.
Last I checked, Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS all have the exact same command line as every other distribution, and the system is configured using the same text files that have been used for nearly 20 years. All the GUI tools do is modify the config files.
For a newbie, having the GUI there to change a config then looking at what text file got changed (and how it got changed) is an excellent learning tool.
Also, last I looked, Slackware isn't one of the distributions that make a good bullet point on a resume. Red Hat, CentOS, and SUSE are good for real-world server skills, while Ubuntu, Debian, and maybe some Fedora would be good for Linux desktop skills.
I have to agree. I laugh at the Mac/PC ads, mostly because they are so over the top.
Macs aren't that wonderful and PCs don't suck as much as the ads would want you to believe, but that don't change the fact that the ads are well done, and even non-techies find them worth watching.
It isn't really much of a joke if you don't know the context from Family Guy...otherwise, it should get a +5 for the image created of Steve Jobs on the Jerry Springer show.
This is absolutely the way Google should implement this...make the change only appear to you, and then find a way to correlate the data that avoids gaming.
It would probably require that you be logged in to Google, but that shouldn't be too much of a burden on most people who would want this feature. You could use a cookie to send your "don't show" list, but that could start to get pretty large over time, and has the disadvantage of not being available across multiple computers.
Because with a fast enough net connection, you wouldn't need to store anything incriminating on your computer.
It would all be on some other machine, but quickly accessible. And, if you can run the client from a thumb drive, then you wouldn't need anything on your machine that even hinted at the files you had stored elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
How do digital signatures allow easy harvesting of email addresses?
Certificates must be centrally stored or related to a trusted central authority. With this, you only have to break that central authority to get all the valid e-mail addresses. In addition, if all e-mail had to be signed, then people wouldn't be able to use throwaway e-mail addresses as easily, so every "give us your e-mail" would mean that a valid e-mail address was being harvested.
Few organizations on this planet have the resources to brute force a valid bogus digital signature, and no one can do it on the sort of scale you'd need to send spam.
You are thinking about forging e-mail, which isn't the problem. Spam could have a valid signature without being from someone you know. Like current spam and phishing, it could be from someone you might know.
Easy to obtain, in that we really only need the mail server admins to cooperate, then everyone (who wants to get their email) will play along pretty damned quick.
Once you finish that "easy" task, could you get to work on the trivial problems of a portable fusion reactor, transporter technology, and faster than light travel?
Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes - Can spam as much as they want, it will never get read.
The bot that controls a Windows machine probably also would be able to control the certificates the user had for sending e-mail. Thus, signed spam from people you trust.
Joe jobs and/or identity theft - Would require either knowing their private key, or even in the easiest case, physical access to their machine.
Cruise on over to Verisign and see just how easy it is to get a certificate with an e-mail address that isn't yours, and Verisign is one of the better at checking it. Also, read what I wrote about bots infecting the machine.
I don't want the government reading my email - So add full-message encryption basically for no extra work. And they can read your email now, so how would this make it any worse?
Because today there isn't a central certificate authority that is required to be used by everyone sending e-mail. This idea would make that a reality. That CA would have all the private keys for all the certs in a one-stop shop for the government. Encrypting wouldn't do any good, because it would be done using one of the same keys that was available in the CA.
It doesn't matter whether you do the blocking at the SMTP level or not, it is still being blocked including some legitimate emails. If legitimate email is being blocked for any reason, it means the service is not reliable.
You misunderstand the term "reliable" as it applies to networking.
TCP is called "reliable" and is said to "guarantee delivery". This is not true. TCP merely guarantees that if it was not delivered, the client program knows it was not delivered. SMTP behaves in exactly the same way.
So, the key is to block at the SMTP level, which guarantees that the real sending server gets an error message. If that sending server is legitimate (e.g., a GMail server), then the error message is passed along to the original sender, and they can do something about it. This is as "reliable" as e-mail ever can be, given the nature of the Internet.
So, what TFA was complaining about was anti-spam measures that break the SMTP "reliable" contract of either actually delivering the e-mail or else returning an error message to the sender. MS Exchange and qmail come to mind as two programs that make it very hard to notify the sender of an error without creating blowback spam.
No greylisting implementation that I know of requires the sender to do anything special to "validate" their e-mail. What you are thinking of is a challenge-response system, and those suck because they create blowback spam.
Greylisting works on the principle that most spam comes from systems that don't follow RFC because they do not retry if they receive a temporary error. The MTA with the greylisting implmentation always returns a temporary "4xx" error code for any e-mail with a "new" sender/recipient/source IP triple and stores the information in a database. The greylist server keeps returning a temporary error for anything that matches this tuple for the configured timeout (usually about 5 minutes). After that, it lets the connection through as normal (where other anti-spam measures may be taken).
This stops most bot networks from sending spam. It still works remarkably well, as I only use that and SpamAssassin with a reject score of 10, and I see about 1-2 spam e-mails per week.
I agree that "DRM" means "digital rights management". But, "DRM" was never used as a term except when referring to "management of copyrighted digital material".
So, the "managing of rights" that is controlled by file system ACLs, passwords, etc., has never fallen under the umbrella of "DRM".
24 years after their iconic '1984' ad, Apple look like hypocrites with their complete about-face on the iPhone.
This line really should be used in the ad for every other phone out there that lets users run abitrary apps.
Unfortunately, I just ran out of mod points.
Stop mis-using the word DRM and, ya know, people might start to listen. Stop letting people redefine words like DRM or "freedom" and then you'll get people to listen.
First, despite your claim that "chmod" is "DRM", it's not, and never has been. DRM and copyright are permanently intertwined, while chmod/passwords/etc. have never been about protecting copyright.
DRM has been redefined not by those of us who are arguing that we should be able to listen to music on any device we want, but by those that are selling the music.
So, don't complain about postings here...complain to Apple that "DRM" means a different thing that what they thought it meant when they had FairPlay programmed for iTunes.
The content providers have re-defined DRM so that it doesn't mean "access control for digital representations of copyrighted material". It now means "preventing users from doing anything with digital representations of anything except for exactly what we want them to do, regardless of any rights they have to do more".
Now you request the 100th fibonacci number, like this: (fibs !! 99). Haskell doesn't know the value of elements 2 through 99, so it unrolls it, performing the computation as much as possible - that's the laziness. Now it stores:
[0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, ... , 218922995834555169026, <some vague concept of the remaining computation>]
And it returns you the value 218922995834555169026 which is the last *known* element of the list. Note however that the computed list so far remains.
So, basically, if you do want to do something that actually approaches infinite (say the 1,000,000,000th Fibonacci number), Haskell will croak trying to keep all one billion numbers of the list around, while other languages will just output the result (although it would take a fairly long time, I suspect).
I'm sure that a "good" Haskell implementation will not actually roll over and die given this sort of request, but it would have to throw away most (if not all) of the list, thus making it pretty much like other languages.
So, it's a language for defining "infinite" data structures and not blowing up at the point of definition, but when it comes to actually executing with truly large datasets, it suffers the same problems as every other language.
But how Nielsen organizes and interprets those facts may be. How it defines a broadcast market. How it defines a station's target audience.
The only thing that Nielsen "defines" in this case is their own name for the DMA. The FCC defines the DMAs.
Nielsen does have extra groupings and organizations of stations that cross DMAs, but AFAIK, those weren't part of Wikipedia.
I would think that with a 5-digit UID you would have heard of "Firefox", "Adblock", and "NoScript".
"PC" has been used to specifically refer to IBM PC-compatible for over 25 years, since before Macs.
And, since Apple uses the term to mean something else entirely, that's what makes it "misleading".
Current Macs are as "IBM PC-compatible" as current machines from Dell, HP/Compaq, etc. Neither is anything like the last IBM-built non-laptop PC, but both have evolved from that specification into the current versions with 64-bit computing, multiple processors/cores, and PCI Express 2.0.
And, both "Macs" and "PCs" (used in the Apple way) can run Windows or OS-X.
For me, it's possibly a better advert than the Apple ones, the basic message of which I took to be: Macs are designed for goofing around showing off your photos, and PCs are for actually getting anything done.
I always thought the basic message of the "I'm a Mac/PC" ads was that PCs inhibit your ability to get things done and Macs make it easier. Note: I'm using "PC" in the same way the ads do...to refer to a Windows machine. It's not correct, but unfortunately it's another case where perception becomes reality.
I can't see how you got the reverse out of those ads. If the focus group for testing them had had the same opinion as you, I don't think we would have ever seen them in that form.
Personally, I like the Mac/PC ads, although I only agree with about 10% of what they say, since I (and people around me) run XP systems that only reboot once a month for patch Tuesday, and run a lot of different types of software with no issues.
I don't see the point at all.
This function is just as "lazy" in that until the call to it, nothing is calculated, and only the minimum required work is done.
Now, if Haskell is smart enough to be able to cache the result of the 100th Fibonacci number and use it later (like as the starting point for the calculation of the 200th), that would be useful.
Still, 10%-20% ain't bad. But how can you improve that 500-fold?
Maybe it's 500x per unit of area.
Current solar panels are rated that way (e.g., N watts per square meter), and since this system goes 3D (i.e, up), maybe it can increase the amount of power generated without increasing the area required. It would increase the volume required, but if a current installation is 6 inches thick and this new one were 18 inches thick, it probably wouldn't change the ability to install it at any given location.
For God's sake, there is even an episode where George is pretending to be a Whale Biologist to get a woman and when they are wandering the beach they happen to come across a beached whale!
It's called "exaggeration".
The joke is an absurd extenstion of a guy pretending to be a doctor/movie producer/interested in Russian poetry/etc. to impress a girl and getting caught at it.
Although later seasons did become a bit tedious, seasons 3-5 were probably the best non-sketch comedy show at its prime, with season 4 being close to perfect. The show probably jumped the shark in season 6, when it did a 100th episode clip show.
I liked Seinfeld, but these commercials aren't even close to a bad episode, and I'm surprised they made it to TV.
It's only somewhat insensitive.
In my previous job, the first manager I had was perfect...he understood enough tech to be able to get us the resources we needed, kept upper management and clients off our back, but let us sweat the small stuff (like which Linux distro to use). This is the ideal level of "domain knowledge" for any manager. You need to know enough to make things run smoothly, but you really don't need to know more than that. And, even if you know more than that, you really shouldn't use that knowledge unless somebody is about to make a mistake.
He left because his wife wanted to move to a different city for a job (since she made a lot more than he did, he went).
After that, the approximately 10-person IT department ran with no manager for nearly a year. It only worked because the people were all self-motivated, but it was really hard to get any really big projects going during that time. Then, we got a manager who thought they knew everything about tech and had to micro-manage everything. The department dealt with this by nodding politely and agreeing with everything, and the went on with what we had done for the previous year. It was the only way to avoid disaster.
A bad manager is far worse than no manager, but a good manager is worth every penny they get paid, since they make me less likely to commit murder while on the job.
I've never installed a real OS that wasn't essentially "click through the installer and end up with a magically working system", and that's going back to things like Netware 3.x. Although I've never used Slackware, if it doesn't make you manually calculate and edit boot block values so that the right kernel gets loaded, it's just a matter of degree.
And, just this week I have had two "things go wrong" that required some reasonable skills, but nothing somebody who wasn't afraid of the command line couldn't just Google:
1. A Linux RAID-5 array had a single disk fail but refused to mount the RAID-5 degraded without forcing (the replacement disk was being delayed by Hurricane Ike), and when forced, file systems on LVM volumes were a bit wonky. No data loss, and the new drive is in place.
2. A clone of a VMware image to a physical machine (yes, you can do that) halted in the middle of the XP boot process, which hadn't happened with any other machine. It turns out this was a lot older machine than we were led to believe (a Pentium III), and the multi-processor HAL needed to be replaced using the recovery console.
I'm an IT project manager. If one of my peeps bailed and I couldn't step right in and fill their spot and train their replacement myself I would consider myself a failure.
I suspect the only reason that you can do this is because you have not managed anything complicated.
I'm not a manager, but I have two...one that is overall in charge of the projects I work on, and one that oversees the tech end of the work our consulting company does. So, the first guy works with the customer to determine what they want us to accomplish for them, and the second supplies information about (for example) how much Oracle costs us and what hardware it should run on. The first guy is different depending on the project and customer, while the second is always the same.
Neither one of them could possibly do more than 10% of my day-to-day job, and nobody would ever expect them to. There are at least two other people at my level (the "managed") that can do at least enough of my job to keep things going when they peel me from the front of a bus. Together, those two people can probably do 90% of what I do, although since it's not their primary duty, they aren't as good at it.
This is how a real-world company works on large projects. People are cross-trained, and only rarely do managers get included in that training.
Slackware. Forget about Redhat and all the other GUI-fied distributions. Install Slackware and do everything yourself. It's the only way to learn.
This is good advice.
Actually, it's not very good advice.
Last I checked, Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS all have the exact same command line as every other distribution, and the system is configured using the same text files that have been used for nearly 20 years. All the GUI tools do is modify the config files.
For a newbie, having the GUI there to change a config then looking at what text file got changed (and how it got changed) is an excellent learning tool.
Also, last I looked, Slackware isn't one of the distributions that make a good bullet point on a resume. Red Hat, CentOS, and SUSE are good for real-world server skills, while Ubuntu, Debian, and maybe some Fedora would be good for Linux desktop skills.
Unfortunately, Michael Jackson is all too real.
My mommy always said there were no monsters—no real ones—but there are.
For someone with Jerry Seinfeld's pile of cash, there had to be some really big incentive to do this.
Maybe it was a Bill Gates-sized pile of cash, but I'd be surprised if it was that simple.
I have to agree. I laugh at the Mac/PC ads, mostly because they are so over the top.
Macs aren't that wonderful and PCs don't suck as much as the ads would want you to believe, but that don't change the fact that the ads are well done, and even non-techies find them worth watching.
I posted my comment before he got modded funny.
It isn't really much of a joke if you don't know the context from Family Guy...otherwise, it should get a +5 for the image created of Steve Jobs on the Jerry Springer show.
This is absolutely the way Google should implement this...make the change only appear to you, and then find a way to correlate the data that avoids gaming.
It would probably require that you be logged in to Google, but that shouldn't be too much of a burden on most people who would want this feature. You could use a cookie to send your "don't show" list, but that could start to get pretty large over time, and has the disadvantage of not being available across multiple computers.
Because with a fast enough net connection, you wouldn't need to store anything incriminating on your computer.
It would all be on some other machine, but quickly accessible. And, if you can run the client from a thumb drive, then you wouldn't need anything on your machine that even hinted at the files you had stored elsewhere.
Apparently, there are no moderators who watch Family Guy.
That says something about either the intelligence of /. moderators or of Family Guy viewers.