Looks like they took the idea directly from this movie, where the advertisements were directly targeted at Jon Anderton (and everyone else) as they walked by them in futuristic, ad-driven, corporate America.
If this is where we're heading, folks... I'd be very scared.
I've been noticing this trend for a few years now, where the word "free" has been slowly redefined.
"Free one month subscription! Only $6.95!"
"Free Membership, just enter your credit card number below!"
Look at Orkut... there are a few "Free Software" communities there (emblazened with images of RMS with the disk-pack on his head), and hundreds of people come in there thinking that the community is dedicated to "Freeware" or those asking for registration codes, keygens, and hacks for commercial software.
Time and time again, I've seen people confuse "Free" with "free" and "Free Sofware" with "Freeware".
To us, the disctinction is very clear, but to others, it needs to be explained... again.. and again.. and again, hundreds of times. As more and more people are exposed to it, more and more people need to understand it.
And I'm only enraged about this particular thing right now, because I have found YET ANOTHER company openly infringing on our GPL/LGPL code in their commercial product. This makes 5 companies total, all of whom deny it, and all of whom have direct examples of our source code in their public SDKs and documentation.
"It's this sort of "GUI for everything" approach the Linux community still needs to catch up on."
...except where the GUI configuration tools are not desired, which is in 99% of the case with servers and most workstations. Remember, Linux isn't just for desktops (although it excels there as well). GUI tools are slower, and just screw things up.
The other problem with the broken "GUI For Everything(tm)" mentality, is that GUI tools often get stuffed up when other tools change items in the config files that the GUI allows you to twiddle, for example reading and writing out to configuration files with an automated Perl script.
Witness how OSX screwed this up. Add a user to your OSX system with 'adduser' from the shell, and then look at your standard "Users" applet in the GUI. Oops!
"GUI For Everything(tm)" is probably fine for those who are very new to the OS, or green in general, as long as it isn't the default, and is always an optional item, not a requirement.
(Also, the caveat that it handle human-readible configuration files is a must, of course).
Why is it that every time someone brings up the "Are we alone?" discussion in any fora, that the assumption is made that if we can't find a planet equivalent to our own, we must be alone?
Seriously.. there is life, even on our own planet, living in extremes that we would think would be completely inhabitable to life. Life living at -100F (deep sea) in temperature, or even in +1600F temperatures (lava beds).
Has anyone thought that perhaps the reason why we haven't been contacted by other lifeforms, is because maybe they skipped over our planet because they saw it as uninhabitable?
"Oh that rock is too close to that star. Its much too hot there to support life. Let's keep looking..."
Perhaps what we consider "habitable" is merely defined by our own skewed metric of what constitutes "life".
Maybe we're looking for a planet(oid) with an oxygen atmosphere, clouds, near a sun.. when in fact, life could be way out in the darkness, nowhere near the sun or heat, in extremely cold or devoid conditions.
Open your eyes. Anyone out there that evolved in this same universe/galaxy/dimension, might not even remotely be close to us in biology or design. Also, there are likely planets out there, which have been in existance for 100,000 years, without any catastrophic events to "reboot" their evolution, as we have endured here several times.
Ever wonder what a planet of humanoid life, evolving for 100,000 consecutive years without interruption would look like? Just think of how much we've evolved (and de-evolved, ahem) in the last 200 years.
What I find interesting, and ironic, is that the Gentoo.org website is using openly-visible ".xml" files for each of its pages.. except that they:
Don't validate as a well-formed XML document
Are sending an HTML 4.01 Transitional DocType
Don't validate as HTML 4.01 Transitional in many cases
Aren't accessible to blind or colorblind readers
Are changing font sizes with hard-size values, making the page unreadible for sight-disabled visitors
So I have to wonder... why even have them as.xml pages in the URI request, when they aren't XML and they aren't even valid HTML.
False elitism.
These pages aren't generated by an XSLT transformation from XML to HTML (and if they were, they certainly wouldn't be using a.xml handler in the doctype or URI handling).
Please, to all the Gentoo folks still learning HTML in their second-level grade school class, learn to do things right. Make your pages accessible, validate them, and don't try to fake your elitism, without the proper skills to back it up.
"Maybe he would have known earlier if you had reported the scam to the police as soon as it happened to you instead of just blogging about it for weeks and weeks."
Actually, I did report it to the police and the FBI as well as eBay's Fraud Division. I was given the stock line that I have to go "through the proper channels" (i.e. through eBay, then my bank, then the USPS, and so on), before the police could get involved.
In fact, up until he stopped shipping laptops, "technically" (according to Detective Gishner), "Brian" wasn't really breaking the law.. he was just "doing bad business" by shipping late, or mis-shipping items.
And if you read my blog, I didn't blog about it for "weeks and weeks", that was one day's entry.
In the future, please read the OP and linked reference material, before talking out of your rectum.
"10 laptops at retail price, maybe $20,000; you're talking of a period not more than maybe 2-3 months total. He'd be lucky to make a few hundred in interest, and with the way interests rates have been for awhile now, probably even less. Definitely not worth the risk.">
...except that he had over 200 auctions going on at once. My "10 laptops" was just an example of the scam. According to the police, he had over 100k in the bank tied up in winner-supplied payments each month.
I had something even worse happen to myself, and about 200 other people with a very similar-sounding laptop scam from "electro_depot", otherwise known as "Brian Silverman".
Luckily, my vigilance paid off, and Brian Silverman, aka "electro_depot" was caught and charged by the FTC for his crimes.
Dozens upon dozens of people were scammed by Brian over the course of a year or two. Many of them went to google to find out more about him, because he failed to return emails and phone calls. At that time, my Advogato diary entry was the only hit that google returned, and over 80 people contacted me directly via email to ask if I had ever received my laptop (at the time, I hadn't).
I had an officer, Det. Mike Gischner from the NYC "Computer Crime Squad" division call me directly, based on that same Advogato diary entry (the only one mentioning "Brian Silverman" by name at the time), asking me if I had heard of anyone else that had problems with Brian. I asked him if 120 people was enough. Silence on the phone. He thought I was kidding. I forwarded him all of the emails I had received at the time, and proceeded with his end of the case. He had no idea that there were that many people being screwed by this jerk.
As time went on, several web sites popped up to try to track the fraud from Brian Silverman, based on my original "collection" of users and emails that I had received. I take full credit for bringing enough evidence to bring him to justice.
I did eventually receive my laptop... the last one he actually sent out to anyone. I managed to track him down, at his home address, and called him one night asking (no no, demanding) my laptop, or I would be at his front door the next morning. The laptop arrived a couple of days later.
As an aside note, the laptop, which I am typing this reply on right now, has been back to IBM 7 times for repair in the last couple of years, for repairs and replacement of almost every part, several times. Its definately a lemon, but it works well now.. and is basically brand-new again.
Basically his scam was as follows:
Put "several" laptop models online on eBay for sale (note: He never actually has these laptops at all, he has never even purchased them). Let's use 10 laptops as an example; 5 IBM laptops and 5 Sony laptops.
Get several dozen bidders on the laptops, raising the price around normal MSRP
Take the highest bidders on all of the auctions, and demand that they send the payment within 5 days of auction close
10 people send in their payments for the "10" laptops (remember, he hasn't ever purchased a single laptop)
Keep the money as long as possible, in a bank account, until people start complaining about shipment
Delay delay delay, using whatever tactics are necessary. I've heard dozens of his excuses from various bidders.
Delay some more, making sure to keep that bank account interest rolling in (more profit in his pocket)
When people get heated enough to start threatening, send 8 people back their money (leaving the highest 1 IBM and 1 Sony buyer waiting) (more profit in his pocket)
It is now 2-3 months later, and the "top-of-the-line" laptop is now no longer top-of-the-line.
He purchases the laptops, wholesale, from the absolute-cheapest place he can find, having them shipped ground, factory-direct. At this point, since it is 1/4 of a year later, the laptops cost anywhere from 20%-40% less than the original auction price (more profit in his pocket).
Eventually, he decided that the whole "Ship the laptop" thing was just too much trouble, and he started keeping the money, never purchasing any laptops at all, for any bidders.
I'm glad he's rotting in a federal prison right now, getting 60 months (from what I understand), for his crimes, and an enormous $600k fine and penalties.
The easiest solution I see, is for Google to create an universal translator system, tied into their Google translation engine, to automagically translate the non-native posts into your own native language, when you log into Orkut.
Problem solved.
They're always looking to find new services to extend their Google Portfolio, and this would be a worthwhile one.
For posts in English, to Brazilian readers, it would simply translate that way as well..
"I simply ran across them one day when looking for web-based IMAP clients that were a/little/ more aesthetically pleasing than SquirrelMail..."
I'm curious.. what else did you come up with? I've got some users beginning to complain about SquirrelMail's clunky UI. Did you find anything free and easily put in place of SM?
# Do NOT visit the following pathname or your host # will be blocked from this site. This is a trap # for mal-configured bots which do not follow # RFCs. User-agent: * Disallow:/cgi-bin/block_crawler.pl
Basically this allows Google to spider my site, but when robots like msnbot decide to ignore this, reading and parsing robots.txt at each line, they'll follow block_crawler.pl, which is a script that appends their IP, date, time, etc. to.htaccess, with a "Deny from" rule.
For excessive abuses, I just block their/24 at the firewall.
Incidentally, they are ignoring robots.txt because they want to beat google at indexing "More(tm)" content, and be the "premiere" search engine out there. A year of "accidentally" crawling more content than they should, and their search engine will appear to have a LOT more pages that google does. You can bet a press release advertising this fact will appear soon after.
I have another little trap for the harvesters, called "Can-o-Raid", which I've been using for about 4 years now. You can read more about it on my Perlmonks writeup over here. Being able to pollute the search engines with +/- 7 million fake email addresses per-night is pretty nice.. and I can slow them down by adding a sleep(45) to each page reload. They can't get out, once they get in.
"If you know neither side is supposed to be queueing mail out or in, then mail should arrive immediately (modulo some sort of minutes-long polling/refresh interval in the delivery agent)."
I think you're confusing email with Instant Messaging. Try not to confuse the two.
There is no such thing as "guaranteed instant delivery" in email, and there never was. We don't need to replace SMTP (which works fine), with something "faster", just because people demand instant access to emails the second they click "Submit" on some web form or "Send Message" in their mail client.
ALL SMTP is queued and sent. That is exactly how it works. If you doubt me, read the requisite RFCs.
Two misspelled words, and you jump all over him like that? What useful post did you add to the thread? I think he made a genuine effort to help, despite those two misspellings.
You, OTOH, trolled through the crosslane in front of him. Nice try.
A mostly-proprietary OS, with no documentation, no public APIs, and everything we've done to make it work with Linux, Unix, and OSX machines, has been reverse-engineered on the wire, byte-for-byte. We've even uncovered some really stupid PalmOS bugs before their own engineers caught them, by using this same methodology. We're already better at compensating for their own bugs and bad data structures in-code, than their own commercial Palm Desktop/HotSync Manager products).
Open standards are nice, but only if you embrace them fully. Palmsource does not.
# DNS based IP address spam list russia.blackholes.us R$* $: $&{client_addr} R$-.$-.$-.$- $: <?> $(dnsbl $4.$3.$2.$1.russia.blackholes.us. $: OK $) R<?>OK $: OKSOFAR R<?>$+<TMP> $: TMPOK R<?>$+ $#error $@ 5.7.1 $: Mail from $&{client_addr} rejected by russia.blackholes.us
I found better instructions, which interleaved more closely with the way we do business on our Free Software project hosting services.. in a slightly more secure fashion. The added benefit is that we also now can offer anonymous cvs-over-ssh, cvs-over-ssh, pserver (which is quite secure, despite the FUD to the contrary), and subversion repositories to our project developers.
But thanks anyway for pushing me to find alternatives that actually work.
You're kidding, right? Here are their instructions for setting up anonymous cvs-over-ssh:
To use anoncvs over ssh, remove the ':pserver:' prefix on the cvsroot, and set the variable CVS_RSH to 'ssh', using the method appropriate for your shell.
Of course, as you know that simply won't work, because the user 'anoncvs' will not exist as a valid user on the server-side. Go ahead, try it on any box running an existing pserver instance.
Do you have a real, measurable example of anonymous cvs-over-ssh, or are you just taunting the original poster?
Do you honestly need these convoluted secrecy schemes like 1024-bit encryption and splitting up files into thousands of pieces that are distributed to thousands of other machines on the network just to share Linux ISOs and Project Gutenberg texts?
Actually... what about the Nicholas Berg beheading video, which the US government is trying hard to suppress? What about audio streams of news from outside the US, that contains "missing" elements that our local media conveniently "forgot" to report on? What about a host of other things that are censored by our own government and people, but which is freely available in many other parts of the world?
p2p is not all bad, even if the majority of public redistribution happens to be mp3.. think outside the box. We're not all using p2p just to "download Britney Spears" mp3s.
Slashdot Mirror
If this is where we're heading, folks... I'd be very scared.
I've been noticing this trend for a few years now, where the word "free" has been slowly redefined.
Look at Orkut... there are a few "Free Software" communities there (emblazened with images of RMS with the disk-pack on his head), and hundreds of people come in there thinking that the community is dedicated to "Freeware" or those asking for registration codes, keygens, and hacks for commercial software.
Time and time again, I've seen people confuse "Free" with "free" and "Free Sofware" with "Freeware".
To us, the disctinction is very clear, but to others, it needs to be explained... again.. and again.. and again, hundreds of times. As more and more people are exposed to it, more and more people need to understand it.
And I'm only enraged about this particular thing right now, because I have found YET ANOTHER company openly infringing on our GPL/LGPL code in their commercial product. This makes 5 companies total, all of whom deny it, and all of whom have direct examples of our source code in their public SDKs and documentation.
BASTARDS!
...except where the GUI configuration tools are not desired, which is in 99% of the case with servers and most workstations. Remember, Linux isn't just for desktops (although it excels there as well). GUI tools are slower, and just screw things up.
The other problem with the broken "GUI For Everything(tm)" mentality, is that GUI tools often get stuffed up when other tools change items in the config files that the GUI allows you to twiddle, for example reading and writing out to configuration files with an automated Perl script.
Witness how OSX screwed this up. Add a user to your OSX system with 'adduser' from the shell, and then look at your standard "Users" applet in the GUI. Oops!
"GUI For Everything(tm)" is probably fine for those who are very new to the OS, or green in general, as long as it isn't the default, and is always an optional item, not a requirement.
(Also, the caveat that it handle human-readible configuration files is a must, of course).
Why is it that every time someone brings up the "Are we alone?" discussion in any fora, that the assumption is made that if we can't find a planet equivalent to our own, we must be alone?
Seriously.. there is life, even on our own planet, living in extremes that we would think would be completely inhabitable to life. Life living at -100F (deep sea) in temperature, or even in +1600F temperatures (lava beds).
Has anyone thought that perhaps the reason why we haven't been contacted by other lifeforms, is because maybe they skipped over our planet because they saw it as uninhabitable?
Perhaps what we consider "habitable" is merely defined by our own skewed metric of what constitutes "life".
Maybe we're looking for a planet(oid) with an oxygen atmosphere, clouds, near a sun.. when in fact, life could be way out in the darkness, nowhere near the sun or heat, in extremely cold or devoid conditions.
Open your eyes. Anyone out there that evolved in this same universe/galaxy/dimension, might not even remotely be close to us in biology or design. Also, there are likely planets out there, which have been in existance for 100,000 years, without any catastrophic events to "reboot" their evolution, as we have endured here several times.
Ever wonder what a planet of humanoid life, evolving for 100,000 consecutive years without interruption would look like? Just think of how much we've evolved (and de-evolved, ahem) in the last 200 years.
According to archive.org, their site has been broken since June 2003, at the latest. I didn't go back further than that.
Lame. Very lame.
So I have to wonder... why even have them as .xml pages in the URI request, when they aren't XML and they aren't even valid HTML.
False elitism.
These pages aren't generated by an XSLT transformation from XML to HTML (and if they were, they certainly wouldn't be using a .xml handler in the doctype or URI handling).
Please, to all the Gentoo folks still learning HTML in their second-level grade school class, learn to do things right. Make your pages accessible, validate them, and don't try to fake your elitism, without the proper skills to back it up.
Actually, I did report it to the police and the FBI as well as eBay's Fraud Division. I was given the stock line that I have to go "through the proper channels" (i.e. through eBay, then my bank, then the USPS, and so on), before the police could get involved.
In fact, up until he stopped shipping laptops, "technically" (according to Detective Gishner), "Brian" wasn't really breaking the law.. he was just "doing bad business" by shipping late, or mis-shipping items.
And if you read my blog, I didn't blog about it for "weeks and weeks", that was one day's entry.
In the future, please read the OP and linked reference material, before talking out of your rectum.
...except that he had over 200 auctions going on at once. My "10 laptops" was just an example of the scam. According to the police, he had over 100k in the bank tied up in winner-supplied payments each month.
POMO == Postal Office Money Order, backed by the legal and prosecutorial authority of the USPS and Federal Government.
Luckily, my vigilance paid off, and Brian Silverman, aka "electro_depot" was caught and charged by the FTC for his crimes.
Dozens upon dozens of people were scammed by Brian over the course of a year or two. Many of them went to google to find out more about him, because he failed to return emails and phone calls. At that time, my Advogato diary entry was the only hit that google returned, and over 80 people contacted me directly via email to ask if I had ever received my laptop (at the time, I hadn't).
I had an officer, Det. Mike Gischner from the NYC "Computer Crime Squad" division call me directly, based on that same Advogato diary entry (the only one mentioning "Brian Silverman" by name at the time), asking me if I had heard of anyone else that had problems with Brian. I asked him if 120 people was enough. Silence on the phone. He thought I was kidding. I forwarded him all of the emails I had received at the time, and proceeded with his end of the case. He had no idea that there were that many people being screwed by this jerk.
As time went on, several web sites popped up to try to track the fraud from Brian Silverman, based on my original "collection" of users and emails that I had received. I take full credit for bringing enough evidence to bring him to justice.
I did eventually receive my laptop... the last one he actually sent out to anyone. I managed to track him down, at his home address, and called him one night asking (no no, demanding ) my laptop, or I would be at his front door the next morning. The laptop arrived a couple of days later.
As an aside note, the laptop, which I am typing this reply on right now, has been back to IBM 7 times for repair in the last couple of years, for repairs and replacement of almost every part, several times. Its definately a lemon, but it works well now.. and is basically brand-new again.
Basically his scam was as follows:
Eventually, he decided that the whole "Ship the laptop" thing was just too much trouble, and he started keeping the money, never purchasing any laptops at all, for any bidders.
I'm glad he's rotting in a federal prison right now, getting 60 months (from what I understand), for his crimes, and an enormous $600k fine and penalties.
Problem solved.
They're always looking to find new services to extend their Google Portfolio, and this would be a worthwhile one.
For posts in English, to Brazilian readers, it would simply translate that way as well..
I'm curious.. what else did you come up with? I've got some users beginning to complain about SquirrelMail's clunky UI. Did you find anything free and easily put in place of SM?
Basically this allows Google to spider my site, but when robots like msnbot decide to ignore this, reading and parsing robots.txt at each line, they'll follow block_crawler.pl, which is a script that appends their IP, date, time, etc. to .htaccess, with a "Deny from" rule.
For excessive abuses, I just block their /24 at the firewall.
Incidentally, they are ignoring robots.txt because they want to beat google at indexing "More(tm)" content, and be the "premiere" search engine out there. A year of "accidentally" crawling more content than they should, and their search engine will appear to have a LOT more pages that google does. You can bet a press release advertising this fact will appear soon after.
I have another little trap for the harvesters, called "Can-o-Raid", which I've been using for about 4 years now. You can read more about it on my Perlmonks writeup over here. Being able to pollute the search engines with +/- 7 million fake email addresses per-night is pretty nice.. and I can slow them down by adding a sleep(45) to each page reload. They can't get out, once they get in.
I think you're confusing email with Instant Messaging. Try not to confuse the two.
There is no such thing as "guaranteed instant delivery" in email, and there never was. We don't need to replace SMTP (which works fine), with something "faster", just because people demand instant access to emails the second they click "Submit" on some web form or "Send Message" in their mail client.
ALL SMTP is queued and sent. That is exactly how it works. If you doubt me, read the requisite RFCs.
You, OTOH, trolled through the crosslane in front of him. Nice try.
Streamripper has worked for me, for years now. You might want to give it a try.
Almost.. but not quite.
A mostly-proprietary OS, with no documentation, no public APIs, and everything we've done to make it work with Linux, Unix, and OSX machines, has been reverse-engineered on the wire, byte-for-byte. We've even uncovered some really stupid PalmOS bugs before their own engineers caught them, by using this same methodology. We're already better at compensating for their own bugs and bad data structures in-code, than their own commercial Palm Desktop/HotSync Manager products).
Open standards are nice, but only if you embrace them fully. Palmsource does not.
Google the rest of them. Quite a motley crew they have there.
I'm sorry, but porn and probe are just two words that should never follow one another in a sentence.
But thanks anyway for pushing me to find alternatives that actually work.
Of course, as you know that simply won't work, because the user 'anoncvs' will not exist as a valid user on the server-side. Go ahead, try it on any box running an existing pserver instance.
Do you have a real, measurable example of anonymous cvs-over-ssh, or are you just taunting the original poster?
Actually... what about the Nicholas Berg beheading video, which the US government is trying hard to suppress? What about audio streams of news from outside the US, that contains "missing" elements that our local media conveniently "forgot" to report on? What about a host of other things that are censored by our own government and people, but which is freely available in many other parts of the world?
p2p is not all bad, even if the majority of public redistribution happens to be mp3.. think outside the box. We're not all using p2p just to "download Britney Spears" mp3s.