Actually in this case it's not so much your IP they want as confirmation of your email. Seems to me a well-written web-bug would be referenced as http://server.domain.com/.gif, with perhaps some rewriting on the server side to map that to confirm.cgi?hash=whatever (assuming it's not just a hardwired zombie doing the work).
Here's a slightly different perspective on why a laptop in particular in the front seat could be a bad thing: A woman I know was using her laptop in the front passenger seat of a fairly recent-model car a couple years ago. It was a rainy day, and the driver was at one point unable to stop fast enough to avoid hitting a car in front of them. Driver and passenger-side airbags both deployed; the damage to the car was not what I'd call minimal, but little enough that the car was made roadworthy again afterwards, and the driver says he locked his arms and didn't even hit the airbag. The passenger didn't fare so well; she got a face full of laptop screen, including a number of bits in her left eye that caused her some problems (glaucoma and other assorted fun) for months if not years afterward. Unfortunately, I've lost contact with her since (you know who you are - if you're reading this, I'm on IRC in the usual place), so I don't know what she's up to since or how it's affected her in the long term, but at the very least it definitely was a pain in her ass for many months.
Re:I'd rather see BitTorrent improved in more...
on
RSS & BT Together?
·
· Score: 1
That's not actually a hard thing to implement, assuming a single tracker or a pre-fetched metafile (.torrent) - make a cron job that checks files in a directory for 1) whether a metafile exists and 2) whether it's being seeded/downloaded, and then does each as needed. Extra points if you monitor the tracker for anything in that directory and seed only if certain critera aren't met.
I've done pretty well on rebates; then again, I usually depend on the fact that the money's gonna come back, so it's in my interest to make absolutely sure I read the instructions first. Of course, try to get the average American consumer, especially those of us with a Y chromosome (yes, I have one), to do that...
Rationally, I think the only way around it is to attack the economics of spam, as has been suggested by many much smarter than me.
Someone else on this thread mentioned that the way this is going to stop is when there is no commons left. What I see, though, is a middle ground. Whether the spammers like it or not, their feedback loop almost certainly doesn't generate anywhere near the profits we imagine, or that they imagined when they were getting into the business. (I'm thinking of the Sanford Wallace interview that was posted a while back, albeit taken with much salt.) Even at the hundredths of a cent per message they're paying right now, it's necessary for spammers to keep escalating their tactics. Eventually they're either going to run out of technology to abuse, at which point the spam-fighters catch up and the whole thing implodes, or (more likely) the cost of their next trick (l33t h4x0rZ don't work for free) is going to become so astronomical that the ROI's no longer there, and hopefully all these spammers will run themselves a couple million a piece into debt before they decide it's time for a long walk into the Atlantic Ocean.
Realistically, I don't think we're close to that limit. It might still be a race between spammers destroying their own economics and the destruction of the commons, but I have to hold out at least a little optimism.
Actually, the way I read that part of the document suggested that this was not an abandonment of any claim on Diebold's part, but rather a disclaimer, in effect stating that the concessions are not an admission of "irreparable harm" to the plaintiffs. (IANAL blah blah)
Unfortunately I have my doubts as to whether Diebold or any of the other voting-machine manufacturers would be particularly willing to go forward with such a process. As much as many of us (myself at times included) might like to believe that this is fueled by a massive right-wing conspiracy, the real fact is that it's just not their usual MO.
Prior to entry into the voting-machine market, Diebold's primary presence in computing has been in manufacturing ATMs. A brief consideration (disclaimer: I didn't research this and won't be held responsible if it turns out to be dead wrong) suggests that these are, by design, pretty much turnkey systems in which a large amount of the security is provided by an extremely limited user interface. There aren't a lot of branches in the ATM flowchart, and the necessary local configuration is probably minimal.
Now compare this to the requirements of a voting system. Because ballots vary greatly from one precinct to the next, each voting machine must store considerably more local configuration. With this comes a much more complex UI and many more opportunities for security to be compromised. If this is a first foray into a system this complex, it may be a simple underestimation of the requirements. When one considers that the operation of the Diebold voting machine as discussed in the Johns Hopkins paper is not unlike that of an ATM, it's easy to see where someone may have seen elections as just another nail to hit with their particular hammer. Little did they know that the demands are so different.
Yes it is. However, if people allow a language to change too quickly, then what you end up with is a large numbers of colloquialisms that basically form a new, incompatible language.
Because of the length of time over which this generally occurs, I fail to see the problem. English as spoken today bears very little resemblance to English as spoken a thousand years ago; meanwhile, the language as spoken ten or even a hundred years ago is quite understandable. As technology advances and global communication becomes easier, the evolution of language should accelerate, and there's really nothing wrong with that as I see it.
How useful is a programming language whose syntax and semantics are redefined on an annual basis? The same applies to spoken/written languages.
I think I can answer your question by posing what is essentially the same question in a slightly larger scope: How useful is a medium whose standards and technologies are redefined on an annual (or more frequent) basis? (Confused? Consider these: HTML, CSS, XML, Perl, PHP, Java... you get the idea.)
And this is why I dislike people trying to instruct the moderators. GP isn't promoting, simply informing. The way the post reads, I suspect the poster's rather skeptical as well.
Simple: In the vast majority of cases, the n00b factor takes over and you're left with end-lusers who have no ads and really don't grok why since it's not a feature one normally associates with one's antivirus software. Since few people really surf for the sake of the ads, they're not missed, and ad revenues take a dive.
All in all, i think Norton is being irresponsible to block banners and all they will end up doing is making advertisers rely more on nuiscance ads, like popunder and flash ads(shudder).
If I'm reading it right, these aren't immune either. It looks like it suppresses any image that's sourced from outside the page's domain. I'm not sure if it catches popups/popunders as well (maybe the images are blocked but the windows still pop), but it severely hobbles ad functionality in any case. What worries me more would be that more people would likely look to adware/we-swear-it's-not-spyware (GAIN or worse) to support their sites, or use increasingly convoluted and browser-breaking scripts to get around the filters.
I'm going to have to agree that this is potentially harmful as it either destroys most forms of revenue for free sites or, at the bare minimum, greatly increases the required investment -- workarounds I see include putting in DNS A records for your ad server (okay, so maybe that's not such a bad idea, since it could be useful in transparent targeting too) or using ProxyMatch directives to hide the ad server (my bandwidth says itai!). I don't know that I'd call the functionality itself irresponsible on Symantec's part, as how to handle advertising has always been (and should be) the viewer's choice. Enabling it by default, though, that's a problem.
The difference it makes is that he's far less likely to be teaching classes (therefore curtailing one of the major channels for spreading his knee-jerk views on-campus), and he certainly isn't in any position of real power in terms of academic program design.
Okay, I posted this comment at root level because it addresses a lot of threads:
He's not a prof (thank god). As someone pointed out, he's probably not even the head of IT. Whether he teaches or not I don't know (I've heard of IT grunts teaching the odd class here and there, albeit not in any institution this reputable), but it doesn't require anything quite as sticky as revocation of tenure; if the department or university administration really finds this dodgy little article to be a problem, they can fire him (though really a good lesson on OSS history would probably serve better).
It may or may not be satire. It's rather unfortunate either way, because just as some people actually take Rush Limbaugh seriously, so will someone take this article seriously.
Syllabus isn't associated with Princeton; rather, it's operated by 101communications LLC, whose business seems primarily to be buzzword-laden magazines and conferences. Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily mean it's got a small readership, but it does tend to say something of its credibility.
What I see here is that a license that demands a minimum level of usability is a license that no one will use, because it creates (or should create) the same obligation in the developer of the software so licensed. One of the major parts of the problem is that what may appear perfectly intuitive and usable to the developer is all too frequently opaque and intractable to another user, even an experienced one. Who, then, becomes the arbiter of what interface complies with the license?
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned. -- Bruce Ediger (out-of-date email removed), on X interfaces
This is not to say there's no place for usability guidelines in the overall structure, but I believe that Bruce has the right idea: the place for these decisions is in creating distributions, not in licensing. Sure, you've still got the same question of who decides, but at least you've got a much greater chance of maintaining consistency.
Actually, if you read the section 301 filing, there is very little discussion of the commercial impact and lots on the prior art (the Mosaic browser and two publications on HTML+), all of which appeared well before (>1 year) the filing date of Eolas' patent. Sure, there's little question that the reason W3C is fighting is because Eolas v. Microsoft stands to throw the Web back by ten years, but it doesn't change the fact that they seem to have valid prior art. Since the vast majority of really harmful software patent issues lately seem to be over chicken/egg issues like this, it strikes me as all to the good to fight this one in order to set a precedent that might help in cleaning up some of the other really ugly software patents and either shoring up the rules or tightening the review process.
Slashdot Mirror
That trick never works!
You Slashdotted PuTTY! You bastards!
Ah hell, and I'd have actually made the six-hour drive from Denver, Wolf Creek Pass and all, for that. ;)
Actually in this case it's not so much your IP they want as confirmation of your email. Seems to me a well-written web-bug would be referenced as http://server.domain.com/.gif, with perhaps some rewriting on the server side to map that to confirm.cgi?hash=whatever (assuming it's not just a hardwired zombie doing the work).
Here's a slightly different perspective on why a laptop in particular in the front seat could be a bad thing: A woman I know was using her laptop in the front passenger seat of a fairly recent-model car a couple years ago. It was a rainy day, and the driver was at one point unable to stop fast enough to avoid hitting a car in front of them. Driver and passenger-side airbags both deployed; the damage to the car was not what I'd call minimal, but little enough that the car was made roadworthy again afterwards, and the driver says he locked his arms and didn't even hit the airbag. The passenger didn't fare so well; she got a face full of laptop screen, including a number of bits in her left eye that caused her some problems (glaucoma and other assorted fun) for months if not years afterward. Unfortunately, I've lost contact with her since (you know who you are - if you're reading this, I'm on IRC in the usual place), so I don't know what she's up to since or how it's affected her in the long term, but at the very least it definitely was a pain in her ass for many months.
That's not actually a hard thing to implement, assuming a single tracker or a pre-fetched metafile (.torrent) - make a cron job that checks files in a directory for 1) whether a metafile exists and 2) whether it's being seeded/downloaded, and then does each as needed. Extra points if you monitor the tracker for anything in that directory and seed only if certain critera aren't met.
...mail in rebait.
Freudian typo?
I've done pretty well on rebates; then again, I usually depend on the fact that the money's gonna come back, so it's in my interest to make absolutely sure I read the instructions first. Of course, try to get the average American consumer, especially those of us with a Y chromosome (yes, I have one), to do that...
Rationally, I think the only way around it is to attack the economics of spam, as has been suggested by many much smarter than me.
Someone else on this thread mentioned that the way this is going to stop is when there is no commons left. What I see, though, is a middle ground. Whether the spammers like it or not, their feedback loop almost certainly doesn't generate anywhere near the profits we imagine, or that they imagined when they were getting into the business. (I'm thinking of the Sanford Wallace interview that was posted a while back, albeit taken with much salt.) Even at the hundredths of a cent per message they're paying right now, it's necessary for spammers to keep escalating their tactics. Eventually they're either going to run out of technology to abuse, at which point the spam-fighters catch up and the whole thing implodes, or (more likely) the cost of their next trick (l33t h4x0rZ don't work for free) is going to become so astronomical that the ROI's no longer there, and hopefully all these spammers will run themselves a couple million a piece into debt before they decide it's time for a long walk into the Atlantic Ocean.
Realistically, I don't think we're close to that limit. It might still be a race between spammers destroying their own economics and the destruction of the commons, but I have to hold out at least a little optimism.
Sure, what you end up buying at Wal-Mart will still come from some large company, but will often have been started by a small guy.
Not necessarily so: I first saw both Apex and Oritron DVD players at Wal-Mart.
...abandoning claims of irrepairable[sic] harm...
Actually, the way I read that part of the document suggested that this was not an abandonment of any claim on Diebold's part, but rather a disclaimer, in effect stating that the concessions are not an admission of "irreparable harm" to the plaintiffs. (IANAL blah blah)
Unfortunately I have my doubts as to whether Diebold or any of the other voting-machine manufacturers would be particularly willing to go forward with such a process. As much as many of us (myself at times included) might like to believe that this is fueled by a massive right-wing conspiracy, the real fact is that it's just not their usual MO.
Prior to entry into the voting-machine market, Diebold's primary presence in computing has been in manufacturing ATMs. A brief consideration (disclaimer: I didn't research this and won't be held responsible if it turns out to be dead wrong) suggests that these are, by design, pretty much turnkey systems in which a large amount of the security is provided by an extremely limited user interface. There aren't a lot of branches in the ATM flowchart, and the necessary local configuration is probably minimal.
Now compare this to the requirements of a voting system. Because ballots vary greatly from one precinct to the next, each voting machine must store considerably more local configuration. With this comes a much more complex UI and many more opportunities for security to be compromised. If this is a first foray into a system this complex, it may be a simple underestimation of the requirements. When one considers that the operation of the Diebold voting machine as discussed in the Johns Hopkins paper is not unlike that of an ATM, it's easy to see where someone may have seen elections as just another nail to hit with their particular hammer. Little did they know that the demands are so different.
...stop Princess Buttercup's marriage to Prince Ruperdink.
HUMPERDINCK!
Yes it is. However, if people allow a language to change too quickly, then what you end up with is a large numbers of colloquialisms that basically form a new, incompatible language.
Because of the length of time over which this generally occurs, I fail to see the problem. English as spoken today bears very little resemblance to English as spoken a thousand years ago; meanwhile, the language as spoken ten or even a hundred years ago is quite understandable. As technology advances and global communication becomes easier, the evolution of language should accelerate, and there's really nothing wrong with that as I see it.
How useful is a programming language whose syntax and semantics are redefined on an annual basis? The same applies to spoken/written languages.
I think I can answer your question by posing what is essentially the same question in a slightly larger scope: How useful is a medium whose standards and technologies are redefined on an annual (or more frequent) basis? (Confused? Consider these: HTML, CSS, XML, Perl, PHP, Java... you get the idea.)
I seem to recall an old BOFH story to this effect. Hell of the thing is, do it right as a contractor and it might just work in some companies.
And this is why I dislike people trying to instruct the moderators. GP isn't promoting, simply informing. The way the post reads, I suspect the poster's rather skeptical as well.
How his this worse than disabling it by default?
Simple: In the vast majority of cases, the n00b factor takes over and you're left with end-lusers who have no ads and really don't grok why since it's not a feature one normally associates with one's antivirus software. Since few people really surf for the sake of the ads, they're not missed, and ad revenues take a dive.
And I find out about that inexpensive, good-quality product that I need so badly how again? Right then, start over.
There's a horrible joke in there somewhere about the models and fungal infections -- er, wait, that's "myco," not "mico," isn't it?
All in all, i think Norton is being irresponsible to block banners and all they will end up doing is making advertisers rely more on nuiscance ads, like popunder and flash ads(shudder).
If I'm reading it right, these aren't immune either. It looks like it suppresses any image that's sourced from outside the page's domain. I'm not sure if it catches popups/popunders as well (maybe the images are blocked but the windows still pop), but it severely hobbles ad functionality in any case. What worries me more would be that more people would likely look to adware/we-swear-it's-not-spyware (GAIN or worse) to support their sites, or use increasingly convoluted and browser-breaking scripts to get around the filters.
I'm going to have to agree that this is potentially harmful as it either destroys most forms of revenue for free sites or, at the bare minimum, greatly increases the required investment -- workarounds I see include putting in DNS A records for your ad server (okay, so maybe that's not such a bad idea, since it could be useful in transparent targeting too) or using ProxyMatch directives to hide the ad server (my bandwidth says itai!). I don't know that I'd call the functionality itself irresponsible on Symantec's part, as how to handle advertising has always been (and should be) the viewer's choice. Enabling it by default, though, that's a problem.
The difference it makes is that he's far less likely to be teaching classes (therefore curtailing one of the major channels for spreading his knee-jerk views on-campus), and he certainly isn't in any position of real power in terms of academic program design.
(can I get an AMEN!)
This is not to say there's no place for usability guidelines in the overall structure, but I believe that Bruce has the right idea: the place for these decisions is in creating distributions, not in licensing. Sure, you've still got the same question of who decides, but at least you've got a much greater chance of maintaining consistency.
Except that, in what I thought one of the more masterful touches of scammery, it says persecuted, as in wronged.
Actually, if you read the section 301 filing, there is very little discussion of the commercial impact and lots on the prior art (the Mosaic browser and two publications on HTML+), all of which appeared well before (>1 year) the filing date of Eolas' patent. Sure, there's little question that the reason W3C is fighting is because Eolas v. Microsoft stands to throw the Web back by ten years, but it doesn't change the fact that they seem to have valid prior art. Since the vast majority of really harmful software patent issues lately seem to be over chicken/egg issues like this, it strikes me as all to the good to fight this one in order to set a precedent that might help in cleaning up some of the other really ugly software patents and either shoring up the rules or tightening the review process.