Well, if you are trying to find spammers, and get more excuses to slam their websites, etc. then you want to click the unsubscribe links. The more spam they send you, the more they get slammed in response. Also, if this Black Frog stuff keeps track of this stuff, as part of the system, you then collect evidence of them sending you stuff even after you unsubscribed, which could be used to prosecute them in court as well as pounding their servers into the ground.
So it makes sense for a system like this to do it, because it wants to get the spammers to send it stuff, so it can punish the people who hired the spammers.
An open standard is neccesary to having multiple, differently vulnerable applications, but not sufficient. And yes, a single reference implementation that
everyone just grabs and uses contributes to a monoculture. So what does that teach us?
When you put out a new standard {graphics format, file format, etc.}, put out several, differently implemented reference implementations. Take advantage of other existing lower level impementations (if it's XML based, do one with SAX, and one with expat, etc.)
When you put out a reference implementation, don't say "This is just a demo reference impelmentation, it doesn't have to be production quality" -- people are going to take it and use it, and bugs in it will be resurfacing for a decade or more.
If you have trouble coming up with reference implementations, contact a professor somewhere teaching a software engineering class, and get them to use the spec as a class project... Next thing you know you'll have 15 or 20 implementations, several of which could probably be cleaned up into a useful example. And it will help check if your spec is actually clear enough to implement...
This article is also interesting because it demonstrates another aspect of how the combination of evoluton and sexual reproduction is more powerful than simple evolution.
Two different populations breed in isolation. Group A develops some mutations that are beneificial in their environment, Group B develops mutations benificial in theirs. Now, through whatever mechanism (fire, flood, you name it) Groups A and B are brought back together and interbreed. Now you get permutations of the mutations in group A, and the mutations in group B.
This is an effect I noticed when I played with a "genetic hillclimber" optimization engine a few years back -- just to watch how it worked, I wrote a scoring function that basically scored a string of bits to see how close it was to the string "this is a test". Watching the population as it ran, you got some bit-vectors that guessed the "this" part at the front, and some that guessed the "test" part at the end, and both had middling-fair scores. But the minute those two bit-vectors were paired together, their offspring took over the whole population, with strings with "this...test", that
very quickly converged on the "this is a test" string.
That is to say, different mutations are going on in parallel, and pairs of individuals are interbreeding, and the offspring can have both sets of mutations (or in 2 generations, all four, etc.) When populations split, and join up again later, you can get truly exceptional combinations, as you combine things that let you survive well in two different locales.
This is why I, personally, think the "melting pot" countries of the world are a Good Thing.
We should remember that to most customers, the source code is as unintelligable as the binary blob. They can fix either with equal facility -- none.
The real question is, (using a car analogy) if you needed to get it fixed, do you always want to go to the dealer, or do you want to be able to go to another mechanic?
Today most customers have never seen, nor heard of, a local software repair shop, so to them there is not a difference -- the distributor of the software is the only place to go to get it fixed if there is something wrong with it.
Most people will never actually see the value of free software until there is a local software fix-it shop, because they aren't qualified to fix it themselves.
There's at least emacspeak
which provides your full emacs environment audibly, including code developent (with aural code formatting!) web browsing with aural style sheets, etc.
And the code that does this, and AsTeR, which is a package that speaks LaTeX (including complicated formulas) was done by T.V. Raman, who is blind himself, and has been using and developing open source code for quite some time.
There may be an emacs mode already done for OpenDoc format, perhaps someone who follows emacs more closely can say.
Your rate of being scanned is based on your pagerank, at least according to the site a previous poster mentioned (look for "stats porn":-))
So the site that gets updated has links to it that Google thinks are good, and the site that doesn't get updated doesn't have good linkage. That is to say, if it would come up at the top of the list in a Google search, it gets scanned more often, but if it would come up on page 32 of 32, it gets scanned very very rarely.
Okay, but what if your computer is on the internet, and you connect to their computer by dialup, and then you start a PPP link... Now they are on the internet, too.
So There!
[sorry, this thread was getting so silly, it just needed to be pushed over the edge]
These are attempts to poison word-based beysian(sp?) spam filters.
If you mark enough of these random collection of useful word messages as spam, your beysian spam filer will start filing real, useful email as spam,
and you will eventually decide the filter doesn't work and turn it off...
Of course, if you feed your filter just the headers and stuff that actually looks like spam, and not the blocks of random words, it can still learn useful things.
Having unauthorized access for "only" half a month on average is not acceptable
It ignores completely whatever mechanism was used to obtain the password in the first place.
If the person got the password by looking at the postit note on the authorized users keyboard, they can do it again once the password is changed. If you examine the assorted mechanisms for obtaining a password mentioned in the article, all but maybe 2 of them are repeatable once the password is changed.
Secondarily, if he/she knows the password, the bad guy/gal can change the password,
possibly locking out the valid user. Depending how often the valid user uses that system, that can persist for quite a while, too.
...if the audio engineers, songwriters, etc. were getting much of the money either.
But they're not.
It's going to the majority shareholders and CEO's of music companies.
Not to mention the artists who do write their own songs, mix their own audio, and still get bupkis when it comes to record contracts. (i.e. Vangelis, Pet Shop Boys, etc.)
Ah, yes, "since 1945", conveniently avoiding Hitler's pseudo-Christian Holocaust, and the pseudo-Muslim genocide of Armenians in the early 1900's, etc.
(I use "pseudo-", above, to indicate that those people claimed they were adhering to that religion, regardless of the actual tenets of said religion...)
Actually, yes. If we did switch entirely to biofuels, we would start removing CO2 from
the atmosphere, rather than adding it, possibly causing a drift into "global cooling".
But if we do that *before* we use up all the petroleum, we can mix some petroleum into
the fuel mix to keep the C02 levels even, at least for a while.
Of course you would need to grow more stuff than we do now in order to use it for bio-fuel.
What we grow now, we mostly eat, or we feed to cattle/pigs/etc. (which we eat).
And of course, you can (and should) run the tractors, harvesters, etc. on the biodiesel you're producing.
Could you just grow it, and plow it under? Yes. If you grew enough, you would take
more carbon out of the air than we're putting in.
You *could* possibly pay for that by taxing fossil fuels, and/or changing current
farming subsidies.
It might even be cheaper than actually making fuel out of it, if you were to
do it right.
BUT... it doesn't solve other problems, like our dependency
on importing fuel from other countries. Nor does it help with what we are going
to do when we use up the petroleum that's there.
And it's not clear that we *can* grow enough plants per year to make up for the
carbon we're spewing currently.
Yes, Biodeisel and ethanol do not reduce the CO2 emissions that come out of the car signifigantly,
if at all. (they do reduce some other pollutants, which is nice...)
However, the source of that carbon is the big win there --
the carbon that went into the biodeisel and ethanol comes from C02 in the air,
(go read any high-school biology text on photosynthesis and the carbon cycle...)
not out of the ground. And you don't put all of the carbon from growing the plants into
the fuel. So using biodeisel and/or ethanol reduces the net amount of C02 in the air.
(i.e you use 100g of carbon from the air to grow the corn; you put 80g of that carbon into the
fuel, and burn it, you have a net loss of 20g of carbon from the air...)
So if we switched everything from petroleum to biofuels overnight, we would change from
adding x amount of carbon to the air a day, to removing x/10 or so per day.
However, unless we change the way we grow our crops (with petroleum derived fertilizers)
and produce our ethanol (petroleum fueled distilleries) we arent' actually going to reduce
our fuel consumption nearly as much as we ought to with this approach; as numerous studies
"debunking" ethanol as a solution have pointed out. (The part those studies get wrong is
that there *are* ways to grow corn, etc. *without* using all that petroleum, ask any Amish
farmer in Pennsylvania...)
Unfortunately, when someone is dialing a wrong number, the fact that you don't give it out doesn't help...
That is, it works if the wrong number they dial is the VOIP number, but it doesn't work if the wrong number they dial is the actual cell phone number, and this latter case is the one at hand.
Still, it is a pretty cool solution for the slightly different problem of people calling your listed number:-).
You're falling for the classic confusion here (which the FSF "purists" are trying to correct)
that doing commercial software somehow requires being proprietary.
The FSF folks would be ecstatic to have busnesses actually embrace the open source model, be commercial, and sell lots and lots of support, installation, and maintenance for software that is still modifiable by the end customer.
People keep trying to paint the FSF folks as anti-commercial, or anti-business. They are most assuredly not. They are trying to educate companies and the public about a better way to do
software, whether as a business or not.
And neither companies nor people should adopt FSF principals out of altruism. They should adopt them because they realize that once customers understand what the free software rights really do for them, they will begin to demand them by not doing business with companies that don't grant them. Just as you wouldn't buy a car from a dealer if you could only ever get it fixed at that dealership (for whatever rates they choose to charge), you will stop buying software that can only be modified by that software company. It doesn't mean you won't go to the dealer for some or all repairs, it just means you don't want to be forced to.
Of course, pushing the car analogy, this only really happens when you become aware of local car repair companies. And this is where companies like IBM can really help -- by offering the
"Jiffy Lube" of free software -- a national, well known chain of software maintenance, configuration, and repair for open source.
Um, that sort of assumes that EULA's have any validity, which I don't think is a given here.
Secondarily, actually having an employment contract that your employer signs is pretty rare in the US, as opposed to the UK. But you can of course still line out anything that
you don't like in any piece of paper that they *do* want you to sign, or just not sign it
and drop it into the pile with the rest. Since they don't sign it after you do, very often nobody actually checks.
Slashdot Mirror
Now how effective these guys will be at actually punishing those who hire the spammers, I can't tell you. But it does appear to be their intent...
So it makes sense for a system like this to do it, because it wants to get the spammers to send it stuff, so it can punish the people who hired the spammers.
Two different populations breed in isolation. Group A develops some mutations that are beneificial in their environment, Group B develops mutations benificial in theirs. Now, through whatever mechanism (fire, flood, you name it) Groups A and B are brought back together and interbreed. Now you get permutations of the mutations in group A, and the mutations in group B.
This is an effect I noticed when I played with a "genetic hillclimber" optimization engine a few years back -- just to watch how it worked, I wrote a scoring function that basically scored a string of bits to see how close it was to the string "this is a test". Watching the population as it ran, you got some bit-vectors that guessed the "this" part at the front, and some that guessed the "test" part at the end, and both had middling-fair scores. But the minute those two bit-vectors were paired together, their offspring took over the whole population, with strings with "this...test", that very quickly converged on the "this is a test" string.
That is to say, different mutations are going on in parallel, and pairs of individuals are interbreeding, and the offspring can have both sets of mutations (or in 2 generations, all four, etc.) When populations split, and join up again later, you can get truly exceptional combinations, as you combine things that let you survive well in two different locales.
This is why I, personally, think the "melting pot" countries of the world are a Good Thing.
There's a whole ubuntu forums thread on this topic...
The real question is, (using a car analogy) if you needed to get it fixed, do you always want to go to the dealer, or do you want to be able to go to another mechanic?
Today most customers have never seen, nor heard of, a local software repair shop, so to them there is not a difference -- the distributor of the software is the only place to go to get it fixed if there is something wrong with it.
Most people will never actually see the value of free software until there is a local software fix-it shop, because they aren't qualified to fix it themselves.
And the code that does this, and AsTeR, which is a package that speaks LaTeX (including complicated formulas) was done by T.V. Raman, who is blind himself, and has been using and developing open source code for quite some time.
There may be an emacs mode already done for OpenDoc format, perhaps someone who follows emacs more closely can say.
So the site that gets updated has links to it that Google thinks are good, and the site that doesn't get updated doesn't have good linkage. That is to say, if it would come up at the top of the list in a Google search, it gets scanned more often, but if it would come up on page 32 of 32, it gets scanned very very rarely.
So There!
[sorry, this thread was getting so silly, it just needed to be pushed over the edge]
If you mark enough of these random collection of useful word messages as spam, your beysian spam filer will start filing real, useful email as spam, and you will eventually decide the filter doesn't work and turn it off...
Of course, if you feed your filter just the headers and stuff that actually looks like spam, and not the blocks of random words, it can still learn useful things.
- Having unauthorized access for "only" half a month on average is not acceptable
- It ignores completely whatever mechanism was used to obtain the password in the first place.
If the person got the password by looking at the postit note on the authorized users keyboard, they can do it again once the password is changed. If you examine the assorted mechanisms for obtaining a password mentioned in the article, all but maybe 2 of them are repeatable once the password is changed.Secondarily, if he/she knows the password, the bad guy/gal can change the password, possibly locking out the valid user. Depending how often the valid user uses that system, that can persist for quite a while, too.
...the Federation as Root Beer analogy...
We should remember that Starfleet Acadamy is ostensibly somewhere near CalTech, so you need to get some Real Genius type stuff going on...
But they're not.
It's going to the majority shareholders and CEO's of music companies.
Not to mention the artists who do write their own songs, mix their own audio, and still get bupkis when it comes to record contracts. (i.e. Vangelis, Pet Shop Boys, etc.)
(I use "pseudo-", above, to indicate that those people claimed they were adhering to that religion, regardless of the actual tenets of said religion...)
But if we do that *before* we use up all the petroleum, we can mix some petroleum into the fuel mix to keep the C02 levels even, at least for a while.
And of course, you can (and should) run the tractors, harvesters, etc. on the biodiesel you're producing.
Could you just grow it, and plow it under? Yes. If you grew enough, you would take more carbon out of the air than we're putting in.
You *could* possibly pay for that by taxing fossil fuels, and/or changing current farming subsidies.
It might even be cheaper than actually making fuel out of it, if you were to do it right.
BUT ... it doesn't solve other problems, like our dependency
on importing fuel from other countries. Nor does it help with what we are going
to do when we use up the petroleum that's there.
And it's not clear that we *can* grow enough plants per year to make up for the
carbon we're spewing currently.
Yes, Biodeisel and ethanol do not reduce the CO2 emissions that come out of the car signifigantly, if at all. (they do reduce some other pollutants, which is nice...)
However, the source of that carbon is the big win there -- the carbon that went into the biodeisel and ethanol comes from C02 in the air, (go read any high-school biology text on photosynthesis and the carbon cycle...) not out of the ground. And you don't put all of the carbon from growing the plants into the fuel. So using biodeisel and/or ethanol reduces the net amount of C02 in the air. (i.e you use 100g of carbon from the air to grow the corn; you put 80g of that carbon into the fuel, and burn it, you have a net loss of 20g of carbon from the air...)
So if we switched everything from petroleum to biofuels overnight, we would change from adding x amount of carbon to the air a day, to removing x/10 or so per day.
However, unless we change the way we grow our crops (with petroleum derived fertilizers) and produce our ethanol (petroleum fueled distilleries) we arent' actually going to reduce our fuel consumption nearly as much as we ought to with this approach; as numerous studies "debunking" ethanol as a solution have pointed out. (The part those studies get wrong is that there *are* ways to grow corn, etc. *without* using all that petroleum, ask any Amish farmer in Pennsylvania...)
That is, it works if the wrong number they dial is the VOIP number, but it doesn't work if the wrong number they dial is the actual cell phone number, and this latter case is the one at hand.
Still, it is a pretty cool solution for the slightly different problem of people calling your listed number :-).
Then let's see them put it back together...
The FSF folks would be ecstatic to have busnesses actually embrace the open source model, be commercial, and sell lots and lots of support, installation, and maintenance for software that is still modifiable by the end customer.
People keep trying to paint the FSF folks as anti-commercial, or anti-business. They are most assuredly not. They are trying to educate companies and the public about a better way to do software, whether as a business or not.
And neither companies nor people should adopt FSF principals out of altruism. They should adopt them because they realize that once customers understand what the free software rights really do for them, they will begin to demand them by not doing business with companies that don't grant them. Just as you wouldn't buy a car from a dealer if you could only ever get it fixed at that dealership (for whatever rates they choose to charge), you will stop buying software that can only be modified by that software company. It doesn't mean you won't go to the dealer for some or all repairs, it just means you don't want to be forced to.
Of course, pushing the car analogy, this only really happens when you become aware of local car repair companies. And this is where companies like IBM can really help -- by offering the "Jiffy Lube" of free software -- a national, well known chain of software maintenance, configuration, and repair for open source.
Secondarily, actually having an employment contract that your employer signs is pretty rare in the US, as opposed to the UK. But you can of course still line out anything that you don't like in any piece of paper that they *do* want you to sign, or just not sign it and drop it into the pile with the rest. Since they don't sign it after you do, very often nobody actually checks.
This is actually due to the fact that if someone commissions a study and it doesn't come out the way they like, they just don't publish it...
- Get or build a keycaps-puller (you can make one out of a paperclip and an old pen tube in about 5 minutes if you don't have one)
- pull all the keycaps from your keyoard, and put them in a bowl or bag
- swab the now visible surfaces with a swab (i.e. q-tip)
- take the keycaps to a restroom, fill a sink with soapy water, and wash them.
- dry the keycaps, bring them back to your keyboard, and put them back on.
Of course, this reminds me that it's been a while since I did clean my keyboard.Lysdexics of teh wlord, Untie and Lure!