Open Sourced, hunter-seeker virus removal worms, out in the wild nearly as fast as the original
I have a better idea. How about instead of virus removal worms, we make security-bug fixing worms? If we create them as soon as a vulnerability is discovered, then nasty worms would have no opportunity to exploit said vulnerabilities, unless those making the nasty worms are actually smart enough to find their own.
It would also help with the "lazy sysadmin" problem (although usually it's more a case of "overworked sysadmin"). And admins could even download and install the worm on their own network, to automate the process of fixing security holes.
Quite honestly, I say go for it. Call it a network admin tool, make the IP range configurable, and leave it to other people to "abuse". You'd be completely free of liability since you're not specifically the one that is scanning networks in an unauthorized way, you'd be the guy that creates a tool that "potentially" has the capacity for abuse.
Somehow, I don't think the virus writer/scanner cartel will let this become a trend.
What does it matter to them? People are still stupid enough to run attachments that come in their e-mail. So long as this is true, they have a market to sell to.
I once read that one of the best sources of random numbers was from the background radiation of space. And it's really easy to gather as well: you just tune a radio (or better yet point a dish, as someone could potentially un-random it by broadcasting) to a station that isn't used and hit "record."
This method is fantasticly simpler than setting up a webcam to watch 6 lava lamps.
Any program that does something this dangerous automatically, even to people that deserve it, is a BAD idea.
This is the sort of thing that needs human supervision because bugs, user input, and solar flares may cause the program to act differently than you think it should. Any sysadmin who's made programs that would affect thousands of users automatically knows this. There will be a percentage - no matter how small - that the program will affect negatively, and that tiny percentage will be very, very pissed off.
You should be exceptionally careful about where you point your Massive Hose of Death because after all, to err is human, but to really fuck things up requires a recursive algorithm working at 2 billion cycles per second.
It's also ocurred to me that you'd be hurting yourself just as bad bandwidth wise anyway. We all complain about how much of our mail is spam, and how much bandwidth it wastes, but to DDOS them would waste hundreds of times more, not only for you but every provider that carries the traffic.
Your post shows the amount of experience you have. It's very low.
Here's what I do:
Me: Hello, helpdesk. user: I can't get on the internet. Me: Okay, what happens when you try to get on the internet?
### Notice I don't try to ask anything technical here, about anything the user probably doesn't know, like the operating system they use. My response gives much better results. ###
user: Um, it gives me an error
### Responses vary. Sometimes they'll actually give me the error. If I wanted to know what the operating system was, I would know from the error. Like if they said "It says 'error 691'" I would know right away both that they're using windows, and that their password is wrong. ###
Me: What does the error say? I'd need that information to find out the problem.
### again, no technical knowledge required.
user: I don't have it in front of me right now, I closed that window. Me: Okay, can you try to connect to the internet right now, or do you have to hang up the phone first? user: I've got a second phone line. Lemme try this again.
### It's not always this way, but I want to be somewhat brief. If the user answers that he has to hang up first, then I tell him that he should write down any error message he gets and call us back. Sometimes this is where he reveals he has ADSL, which again, is very helpful. ###
user: it says "The computer you are dialing is not answering" And I can hear a voice coming from the computer. Oh, it's starting to dial again.
### Here we see why we didn't get the error message earlier. Oftentimes, the user will leave the error message on the screen before calling us, because they know they'll need it. ###
Me: Okay, click cancel, we don't need this window anymore. Can you see your "My Computer" icon?
### Notice I said "your 'my computer' icon" not "my computer." Microsoft has always irritated me with that little naming convention. ###
user: No, I just see "This page cannot be displayed." Me: Okay, close this window. Umm, for that matter, close anything you have open right now. user: okay, all I can see now is my icons. Me: Okay, double-click on the My Computer icon, and then open Dial up networking.
### Two steps at a time, max. Even YOU couldn't follow instructions much more complex than that unless they were written down. ###
user: Okay. Now I've got "Make new connection," and "Internet Foo"
### See, we've just established that the user has windows 95 or windows 98. If he had Me or XP, he wouldn't get this, and I would ask him what he *does* have in this window, and I could figure it out from there. At any rate, I now have the information in our database so we don't have to guess next time. ### Me: Okay, now right-click on the "Internet Foo" icon... user: right click? Me: click with the button on the right side of the mouse. It should pop up a menu. user: Okay, it says 'connect', blah blah blah Me: Alright, now click properties at the bottom. user: right click or left click? Me: Unless I say otherwise, I always mean left click. user: okay... Me: we should see the phone number here. More than likely, we've got the area code in the area code box. Windows will just assume you don't need to dial that unless you're dialling long distance. Just type '604' at the beginning of the phone number in the phone number box.
### Finish up the call, various troubles getting user to edit text snipped, close windows, haveaniceday.
The user I just walked through here is pretty typical, although perhaps a bit on the slow side and certainly not clued when it comes to computers. You'll notice there's no yelling, no frustration on my part, and most of all, it's not that hard.
Except that most of my free time is spent recovering[1] from my job, I'd probably pitch in to something like that. Or at least take up writing C again so that I could, another thing I don't have time to do.
[1] My job is stressful enough that I require recovery time that involves putting holes in counter-terrorists with an AK-47. And booze. Lots of booze.:)
And I've tried to run various bits of free software as my desktop... FreeBSD, Redhat, Gentoo, and they all share a common problem.
Most of the software is half-finished, abandoned, beta, alpha, or pre-alpha. If a program even installs at all, there's Incredibly Important features missing, it's a pain in the ass to install, it relies on dependencies that may or may not work in the first place or are old, or only work with ONE version of the dependency that's hidden away in a closet in Tibet, and the list goes on. I once heard an employer say "Hackers never finish anything," and I think he's right. If developers want to be taken at all seriously, they have to have the discipline to finish the job and do it properly, no matter how dull and boring it is to finish up the not-so-cool bits of a program.
Don't get me wrong, the server side of open source is great, but I suspect that's because the drudgery of making it look good isn't necessary. The desktop is where Linux is completely lacking.
CIA analyst 1: Hey, I have an idea, how about we train these Taliban guys to fight the Russians!
CIA analyst 2: These Taliban guys... they're maniacal religious fanatics bent on eliminating all foreign influences on their people. They see the Russians as invaders trying to take their religion and antiquated pre-industrial ways away from them. They also seem to have a chip on their shoulder for Coca Cola and Universal Studios for the same reasons.
CIA analyst 1: They're religious fanatics with guns? The Reagan Administration will love them then.
-- Unix is like a lover to me: I don't understand it very well, and it makes me angry sometimes, but I am still in love with it.
So, um, what if I can make it sit up and do tricks? What if I know it so well that I know every nook and cranny, every lovely curve, all the sweet spots, and every way to make it respond to my slightest whim and desire?
Does this make me a pervert? Am I normal? Do I need help?
While I'm happy to see Sun's finally beginning to warm up to Linux (aka if you can't beat 'em, join 'em strategy) I wonder if this is too late for Sun?
What do you mean, "finally warming up to Linux?" They've been selling it in their Cobalt products for years.
Take the cost of running a mail server. Hardware, upgrades, bandwidth, administration.
Multiply by 40-60%. This is the noise part of the signal-noise ratio that is e-mail. I'm sure you get the picture.
And that's if you don't even try to squelch the noise. Hardware and administration costs go up exponentially when you start diverting CPU time from sorting mail to filtering it.
Oh, and don't forget the problem is getting worse - exponentially.
It won't be long until 80-90% of the cost of running a mail server goes towards dealing with ads for things that would make the ACLU wish they hadn't fought the CDA. Now consider how much money Sprint spends on providing e-mail to their clients. And consider how Sprint would love to see 70-80% of that cost go away. I would imagine the next conservative administration would introduce legislation that would legalize the public flogging of spammers, just based on pressure from big business, nevermind the public.
This only served to remind me of a call I had from a little old lady today that was using Netscape 7.1 for her e-mail.
She'd been using the internet since the Old Days, back when Netscape was being used by the masses. The problem is that the mail client for Netscape 7 likes to use the sidebar buttons entirely too much.
How too much? Twice, to be exact. Only twice, you ask?
Well, twice is way too many. Because once you hide your mailbox list on the left side, and the message index pane at the top, all you see is the one message you had selected.
Or, when you start the application, you see the web page that you put in as the start page for mail (god knows why you'd want one). So all our Little Old Lady from Silicon Valley could see was our home page. Which happened to also have a link to our webmail. Imagine her confusion when she found that she had no mail when she logged on that way. Not to mention the confusion of the level 1 techs below me, who couldn't quite decipher what the hell was going on.
This is where the story gets interesting, and more importantly, points out some very important interface design flaws in Netscape and Mozilla.
Those buttons to hide and unhide the left and top panes are strictly for the sort that reads Slashdot. Their purpose is not obvious. Their very existence is not obvious. And if one were to click them accidentally, it's not obvious what happened. More importantly though, is that they are fucking impossible to describe over the phone. They don't look like buttons. Hell, the border that they reside on isn't something you can describe either, especially when the border that exists around the web page being displayed is much more obvious. Personally, I'm certain that there is no real reason to use them in an e-mail program, because quite honestly, the folders list should always be visible, and the index list should likewise always be visible. If they should ever disappear, the user will invariably wonder where they went and complain to someone like me. Outlook Express at least, has menu choices to bring them back. Netscape does not.
Netscape will never again be ready for primetime. There are two reasons for this: IE and Outlook Express comes with every computer on the planet, (or near enough to make no odds) and Netscape's/Mozilla's interface was designed by geeks, for geeks. While this makes it superior because of better features, it makes it very hard to do technical support for it over the phone. As such, people like me will continue to recommend it to customers, and will continue to get people started with it in the first place. It simply makes our jobs easier.
Usually it takes quite a bit to make the roughies turn their heads
This can also mean you look like a moron.
It is beautiful, light and fast
Light, perhaps. Fast, if you discount the fact that without gears acceleration is crap. Beautiful, no. I'm sorry, it's ugly as sin. As I park the bamboo bicycle in front of the Shop in order to have a black currant juice it feels almost as if I am dismounting a Harley right next to a café
You're a nut. Also see first point. It is hard to find a disadvantage (to the bicycle) - except the material it is made from. Light bicycles are made from aluminum, which is one of the most resource demanding materials that exist.
Every morning there's 30,000 single occupant motor vehicles on the road in your city, spewing thousands of tonnes of toxins into the air you breathe, held up by the accident on the freeway that killed two people, and you're worried about the resources spent *building* the bicycles that carry 1/30th that many people to work in the morning?
Someday, when the biggest thing we have to worry about is the amount of resources spent on building an aluminum bicycle, perhaps then we can turn to bamboo. Until then, there are much better alternatives.
"Building these bicycles is art. It is not something you just do. Every bamboo must be selected and fitted into the frame according to size and quality. The secret lies in treating and handling the material the right way. Learning that takes times and the maintenance takes time as well.
Great. I want 1000.
Oh wait... haha. Silly me. You can't produce these in a factory. It's an art.
Name: John Smith. Address: 2134 Birch St. St. Paul, Minnesota. 51230 Phone: (415) 555-1111 Cell: (415) 555-2222 *from in-store monitors Sex: M Height: 6'1" Weight: 140-160 Lbs. *See photo. Age: 27 Shoplifter: No Marital Status: Likely common-law. Unmarried. *See: condom purchases Dietary habits: Deficiencies in Zinc and vitamin C. Diet high in sugar and fatty foods. BMI and age indicate that metabolism is high and may be for several years. Customer may be more susceptible to common colds October through March. *see: Over-the-counter medication purchases. *see also: confection purchases *see also: frozen novelty purchases Grooming habits: Generally neat. *see: personal grooming purchases *see also: shampoo purchases
Advertisement: sending flier 2c by addressed admail first and third friday every month. 15% increase in spending observed over past year.
if people do this in large quanitites it frustrates the snapshot game.
Who said you needed numbers to do this?:)
All you'd really need would be about two people a week. Maybe three or four. It would make the whole process turn up more false alarms than it would positives.
This kind of scheme also encourages pranksters to take ALL the razor blades off their designated shelf and put them somewhere else. Creative shelf stocking to screw around the security. This isn't illegal by any stretch of the imagination, but you might not be welcome when you come back next time.:)
I suspect they get no spam at all. Few, if any, spammers would be so stupid as to NOT automatically delete *.gov, or even *@whitehouse.gov from their lists. That is, if their webcrawlers didn't simply avoid those web pages altogether.
This is pretty obvious based on how the government is handling the spam issue: They're sort of waffling on the issue, leaving anything that's the remotest bit effective to languish in favour of legislation that gets paid for by ambulance chasers. If everyone in the government got anywhere near as much spam as us little people did, then legislation would be pushed through in record time to televise the executions of spammers.
Think about that for one second. How do you think conservative congresscritters from the bible belt would react to getting getting a single unsolicited message advertising gay porn and farmyard sex?
Or maybe, just maybe, it's a unix-like operating system that works wonders for building infrastructure?
Using it to control and automate things like power stations and fresh water reservoirs, for instance.
Not to mention banks.
Things that were being done 20 years ago in the US by big iron mainframes that cost $180,000, plus $10,000 for the OS itself, which can now be outdone many times over by systems costing $300 and $0 for the OS.
There's little or no need to use hardware as crufty as a 486 anymore, when you can get a system a cheap as this.
Things in developing countries are typically done on the cheap, but are often newer technology than the legacy systems Americans continue to use (because it was state of the art years ago and would cost too much to bring back up to the state of the art again).
Slashdot Mirror
Even better: who needs sysadmins now that the worms can do the job cheaper? :-)
Um, typically the sysadmin isn't lazy, but horribly overworked.
This means one less thing on his to-do list.
Open Sourced, hunter-seeker virus removal worms, out in the wild nearly as fast as the original
I have a better idea. How about instead of virus removal worms, we make security-bug fixing worms? If we create them as soon as a vulnerability is discovered, then nasty worms would have no opportunity to exploit said vulnerabilities, unless those making the nasty worms are actually smart enough to find their own.
It would also help with the "lazy sysadmin" problem (although usually it's more a case of "overworked sysadmin"). And admins could even download and install the worm on their own network, to automate the process of fixing security holes.
Quite honestly, I say go for it. Call it a network admin tool, make the IP range configurable, and leave it to other people to "abuse". You'd be completely free of liability since you're not specifically the one that is scanning networks in an unauthorized way, you'd be the guy that creates a tool that "potentially" has the capacity for abuse.
Somehow, I don't think the virus writer/scanner cartel will let this become a trend.
What does it matter to them? People are still stupid enough to run attachments that come in their e-mail. So long as this is true, they have a market to sell to.
I once read that one of the best sources of random numbers was from the background radiation of space. And it's really easy to gather as well: you just tune a radio (or better yet point a dish, as someone could potentially un-random it by broadcasting) to a station that isn't used and hit "record."
This method is fantasticly simpler than setting up a webcam to watch 6 lava lamps.
We mobilized to b!tch slap specific spammers.
We mobilized to protest Turbotax spyware.
We mobilized to protest the "Patriot" Act.
Yeah, and look at what we've got.
An infinite number of spammers.
Turbotax spyware.
The Patriot Act.
It's a pretty good indication that politicians don't give a tinker's damn about us, and we have about as much influence as ants on the sidewalk.
I couldn't help but notice that we make up all of about 5% of the current Internet population, never mind the rest of the population.
Any program that does something this dangerous automatically, even to people that deserve it, is a BAD idea.
This is the sort of thing that needs human supervision because bugs, user input, and solar flares may cause the program to act differently than you think it should. Any sysadmin who's made programs that would affect thousands of users automatically knows this. There will be a percentage - no matter how small - that the program will affect negatively, and that tiny percentage will be very, very pissed off.
You should be exceptionally careful about where you point your Massive Hose of Death because after all, to err is human, but to really fuck things up requires a recursive algorithm working at 2 billion cycles per second.
It's also ocurred to me that you'd be hurting yourself just as bad bandwidth wise anyway. We all complain about how much of our mail is spam, and how much bandwidth it wastes, but to DDOS them would waste hundreds of times more, not only for you but every provider that carries the traffic.
Sure it does. I just showed how the exact same customer didn't need to be raked over the coals like the person I replied to did.
Exact same situation. No irritation for either party.
Your post shows the amount of experience you have. It's very low.
Here's what I do:
Me: Hello, helpdesk.
user: I can't get on the internet.
Me: Okay, what happens when you try to get on the internet?
###
Notice I don't try to ask anything technical here, about anything the user probably doesn't know, like the operating system they use. My response gives much better results.
###
user: Um, it gives me an error
###
Responses vary. Sometimes they'll actually give me the error. If I wanted to know what the operating system was, I would know from the error. Like if they said "It says 'error 691'" I would know right away both that they're using windows, and that their password is wrong.
###
Me: What does the error say? I'd need that information to find out the problem.
### again, no technical knowledge required.
user: I don't have it in front of me right now, I closed that window.
Me: Okay, can you try to connect to the internet right now, or do you have to hang up the phone first?
user: I've got a second phone line. Lemme try this again.
###
It's not always this way, but I want to be somewhat brief. If the user answers that he has to hang up first, then I tell him that he should write down any error message he gets and call us back. Sometimes this is where he reveals he has ADSL, which again, is very helpful.
###
user: it says "The computer you are dialing is not answering" And I can hear a voice coming from the computer. Oh, it's starting to dial again.
###
Here we see why we didn't get the error message earlier. Oftentimes, the user will leave the error message on the screen before calling us, because they know they'll need it.
###
Me: Okay, click cancel, we don't need this window anymore. Can you see your "My Computer" icon?
###
Notice I said "your 'my computer' icon" not "my computer." Microsoft has always irritated me with that little naming convention.
###
user: No, I just see "This page cannot be displayed."
Me: Okay, close this window. Umm, for that matter, close anything you have open right now.
user: okay, all I can see now is my icons.
Me: Okay, double-click on the My Computer icon, and then open Dial up networking.
###
Two steps at a time, max. Even YOU couldn't follow instructions much more complex than that unless they were written down.
###
user: Okay. Now I've got "Make new connection," and "Internet Foo"
###
See, we've just established that the user has windows 95 or windows 98. If he had Me or XP, he wouldn't get this, and I would ask him what he *does* have in this window, and I could figure it out from there. At any rate, I now have the information in our database so we don't have to guess next time.
###
Me: Okay, now right-click on the "Internet Foo" icon...
user: right click?
Me: click with the button on the right side of the mouse. It should pop up a menu.
user: Okay, it says 'connect', blah blah blah
Me: Alright, now click properties at the bottom.
user: right click or left click?
Me: Unless I say otherwise, I always mean left click.
user: okay...
Me: we should see the phone number here. More than likely, we've got the area code in the area code box. Windows will just assume you don't need to dial that unless you're dialling long distance. Just type '604' at the beginning of the phone number in the phone number box.
###
Finish up the call, various troubles getting user to edit text snipped, close windows, haveaniceday.
The user I just walked through here is pretty typical, although perhaps a bit on the slow side and certainly not clued when it comes to computers. You'll notice there's no yelling, no frustration on my part, and most of all, it's not that hard.
I hope this helps.
Except that most of my free time is spent recovering[1] from my job, I'd probably pitch in to something like that. Or at least take up writing C again so that I could, another thing I don't have time to do.
:)
[1] My job is stressful enough that I require recovery time that involves putting holes in counter-terrorists with an AK-47. And booze. Lots of booze.
And I've tried to run various bits of free software as my desktop... FreeBSD, Redhat, Gentoo, and they all share a common problem.
Most of the software is half-finished, abandoned, beta, alpha, or pre-alpha. If a program even installs at all, there's Incredibly Important features missing, it's a pain in the ass to install, it relies on dependencies that may or may not work in the first place or are old, or only work with ONE version of the dependency that's hidden away in a closet in Tibet, and the list goes on. I once heard an employer say "Hackers never finish anything," and I think he's right. If developers want to be taken at all seriously, they have to have the discipline to finish the job and do it properly, no matter how dull and boring it is to finish up the not-so-cool bits of a program.
Don't get me wrong, the server side of open source is great, but I suspect that's because the drudgery of making it look good isn't necessary. The desktop is where Linux is completely lacking.
I'm sure the argument went something like this:
CIA analyst 1: Hey, I have an idea, how about we train these Taliban guys to fight the Russians!
CIA analyst 2: These Taliban guys... they're maniacal religious fanatics bent on eliminating all foreign influences on their people. They see the Russians as invaders trying to take their religion and antiquated pre-industrial ways away from them. They also seem to have a chip on their shoulder for Coca Cola and Universal Studios for the same reasons.
CIA analyst 1: They're religious fanatics with guns? The Reagan Administration will love them then.
I'm shocked! Amazed! dumbfounded!
They were still developing for Netware until now? I thought they died off years ago!
From the article:
-- Unix is like a lover to me: I don't understand it very well, and it makes me angry sometimes, but I am still in love with it.
So, um, what if I can make it sit up and do tricks? What if I know it so well that I know every nook and cranny, every lovely curve, all the sweet spots, and every way to make it respond to my slightest whim and desire?
Does this make me a pervert? Am I normal? Do I need help?
But I have a better one. How about I give you the finger...
...and you give me my law suit.
[finger]
You can't scare me with this gestapo crap. I know my rights.
Mr. Szulik, you disappoint me.
But tell me. What good is a law suit if you're unable to... speak?
Just, um, please don't make any autonomous machines that run on the stuff, mmkay?
While I'm happy to see Sun's finally beginning to warm up to Linux (aka if you can't beat 'em, join 'em strategy) I wonder if this is too late for Sun?
What do you mean, "finally warming up to Linux?" They've been selling it in their Cobalt products for years.
Take the cost of running a mail server. Hardware, upgrades, bandwidth, administration.
Multiply by 40-60%. This is the noise part of the signal-noise ratio that is e-mail. I'm sure you get the picture.
And that's if you don't even try to squelch the noise. Hardware and administration costs go up exponentially when you start diverting CPU time from sorting mail to filtering it.
Oh, and don't forget the problem is getting worse - exponentially.
It won't be long until 80-90% of the cost of running a mail server goes towards dealing with ads for things that would make the ACLU wish they hadn't fought the CDA. Now consider how much money Sprint spends on providing e-mail to their clients. And consider how Sprint would love to see 70-80% of that cost go away. I would imagine the next conservative administration would introduce legislation that would legalize the public flogging of spammers, just based on pressure from big business, nevermind the public.
This only served to remind me of a call I had from a little old lady today that was using Netscape 7.1 for her e-mail.
She'd been using the internet since the Old Days, back when Netscape was being used by the masses. The problem is that the mail client for Netscape 7 likes to use the sidebar buttons entirely too much.
How too much? Twice, to be exact. Only twice, you ask?
Well, twice is way too many. Because once you hide your mailbox list on the left side, and the message index pane at the top, all you see is the one message you had selected.
Or, when you start the application, you see the web page that you put in as the start page for mail (god knows why you'd want one). So all our Little Old Lady from Silicon Valley could see was our home page. Which happened to also have a link to our webmail. Imagine her confusion when she found that she had no mail when she logged on that way. Not to mention the confusion of the level 1 techs below me, who couldn't quite decipher what the hell was going on.
This is where the story gets interesting, and more importantly, points out some very important interface design flaws in Netscape and Mozilla.
Those buttons to hide and unhide the left and top panes are strictly for the sort that reads Slashdot. Their purpose is not obvious. Their very existence is not obvious. And if one were to click them accidentally, it's not obvious what happened. More importantly though, is that they are fucking impossible to describe over the phone. They don't look like buttons. Hell, the border that they reside on isn't something you can describe either, especially when the border that exists around the web page being displayed is much more obvious. Personally, I'm certain that there is no real reason to use them in an e-mail program, because quite honestly, the folders list should always be visible, and the index list should likewise always be visible. If they should ever disappear, the user will invariably wonder where they went and complain to someone like me. Outlook Express at least, has menu choices to bring them back. Netscape does not.
Netscape will never again be ready for primetime. There are two reasons for this: IE and Outlook Express comes with every computer on the planet, (or near enough to make no odds) and Netscape's/Mozilla's interface was designed by geeks, for geeks. While this makes it superior because of better features, it makes it very hard to do technical support for it over the phone. As such, people like me will continue to recommend it to customers, and will continue to get people started with it in the first place. It simply makes our jobs easier.
From the article:
Usually it takes quite a bit to make the roughies turn their heads
This can also mean you look like a moron.
It is beautiful, light and fast
Light, perhaps. Fast, if you discount the fact that without gears acceleration is crap. Beautiful, no. I'm sorry, it's ugly as sin.
As I park the bamboo bicycle in front of the Shop in order to have a black currant juice it feels almost as if I am dismounting a Harley right next to a café
You're a nut. Also see first point.
It is hard to find a disadvantage (to the bicycle) - except the material it is made from. Light bicycles are made from aluminum, which is one of the most resource demanding materials that exist.
Every morning there's 30,000 single occupant motor vehicles on the road in your city, spewing thousands of tonnes of toxins into the air you breathe, held up by the accident on the freeway that killed two people, and you're worried about the resources spent *building* the bicycles that carry 1/30th that many people to work in the morning?
Someday, when the biggest thing we have to worry about is the amount of resources spent on building an aluminum bicycle, perhaps then we can turn to bamboo. Until then, there are much better alternatives.
"Building these bicycles is art. It is not something you just do. Every bamboo must be selected and fitted into the frame according to size and quality. The secret lies in treating and handling the material the right way. Learning that takes times and the maintenance takes time as well.
Great. I want 1000.
Oh wait... haha. Silly me. You can't produce these in a factory. It's an art.
So um, they're not going to replace steel bikes?
SAFEWAY INTERNAL DATA - CONFIDENTIAL
:)
[photo]
Name: John Smith.
Address: 2134 Birch St. St. Paul, Minnesota. 51230
Phone: (415) 555-1111
Cell: (415) 555-2222 *from in-store monitors
Sex: M
Height: 6'1"
Weight: 140-160 Lbs. *See photo.
Age: 27
Shoplifter: No
Marital Status: Likely common-law. Unmarried. *See: condom purchases
Dietary habits: Deficiencies in Zinc and vitamin C. Diet high in sugar and fatty foods. BMI and age indicate that metabolism is high and may be for several years. Customer may be more susceptible to common colds October through March.
*see: Over-the-counter medication purchases.
*see also: confection purchases
*see also: frozen novelty purchases
Grooming habits: Generally neat.
*see: personal grooming purchases
*see also: shampoo purchases
Advertisement: sending flier 2c by addressed admail first and third friday every month. 15% increase in spending observed over past year.
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Adding a new entry to the database isn't scary.
if people do this in large quanitites it frustrates the snapshot game.
:)
:)
Who said you needed numbers to do this?
All you'd really need would be about two people a week. Maybe three or four. It would make the whole process turn up more false alarms than it would positives.
This kind of scheme also encourages pranksters to take ALL the razor blades off their designated shelf and put them somewhere else. Creative shelf stocking to screw around the security. This isn't illegal by any stretch of the imagination, but you might not be welcome when you come back next time.
I suspect they get no spam at all. Few, if any, spammers would be so stupid as to NOT automatically delete *.gov, or even *@whitehouse.gov from their lists. That is, if their webcrawlers didn't simply avoid those web pages altogether.
This is pretty obvious based on how the government is handling the spam issue: They're sort of waffling on the issue, leaving anything that's the remotest bit effective to languish in favour of legislation that gets paid for by ambulance chasers. If everyone in the government got anywhere near as much spam as us little people did, then legislation would be pushed through in record time to televise the executions of spammers.
Think about that for one second. How do you think conservative congresscritters from the bible belt would react to getting getting a single unsolicited message advertising gay porn and farmyard sex?
So this means that I can randomly grab a story from www.asstr.org and produce some reeeeealy filthy rap?
Oh wait, nevermind. This has been done already. Albums made and T-shirts sold.
lobbying with 'The Authority' to have Windows deployed all over Iraq?
I think that it's absolutely essential to have Windows deployed all over Iraq.
So many windows were broken during the war, and now there's a glass shortage there. Windows to the people! Keep the blowing sand out of homes!
Or maybe, just maybe, it's a unix-like operating system that works wonders for building infrastructure?
Using it to control and automate things like power stations and fresh water reservoirs, for instance.
Not to mention banks.
Things that were being done 20 years ago in the US by big iron mainframes that cost $180,000, plus $10,000 for the OS itself, which can now be outdone many times over by systems costing $300 and $0 for the OS.
There's little or no need to use hardware as crufty as a 486 anymore, when you can get a system a cheap as this.
Things in developing countries are typically done on the cheap, but are often newer technology than the legacy systems Americans continue to use (because it was state of the art years ago and would cost too much to bring back up to the state of the art again).
SCO sues Afganistan...
Into the stone age!