To say that you have a right to free expression unless another value takes priority is completely meaningless and hollow; it is redundant unless those values are explicitly listed. You have a right to anything unless another value takes priority. If they want to outlaw a particular opinion (say, that the Holocaust didn't happen), they just have to invent some value taking priority. I'm sure China is also pretty good at inventing communal values that take priority over the expression of certain opinions.
I'm not seeing the problem with murderers being executed.
Yes, and presumably you don't even see a problem with executing children. That's exactly my point: Americans are happy to take away rights that are accepted in every other civilized society, but the Court keeps them from doing so. The only hope for an end to capital punishment in the US is the Court recognizing it as cruel and unusual punishment; lawmakers will never reach that conclusion.
From article 5 of the german constitution aka Basic Law:
"Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing, and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship."
Why not quote the following paragraph too? "These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons, and in the right to personal honor."
In other words, a constitutionally protected right to freedom of expression does not exist in Germany. Every general law can curtail it at will.
Are we really more inclined to take away people's rights?
I think Americans are indeed more inclined to take away people's rights, but the Supreme Court won't let them. Without the Court, they would have all forms of abortion illegal, they would have striptease and pornography outlawed, they would have mandatory school prayer, and they would still put 16-year old killers in gas chambers.
You can't do quantum mechanics without complex numbers. The Schrödinger equation has a fat i right in the middle of it. Complex numbers were discovered, not invented.
However I wasn't talking about high profile sites, I'm talking about the vast bulk of the web which is mindlessly protected by CAPTCHAs.
Which means that we were talking about different things all along. The rest of us were talking about high-profile sites which are the target of thousands of spammers every day and which employ captchas as a last line of defense, and how spammers can easily overcome this defense.
I would be seriously interested in learning from you if you can suggest a plausible generic method for taking a random web page and determining the specific request for the CAPTCHA in the page (or if it has CAPTCHA at all).
There is no such generic method. I already pointed out to you: the generic part of the procedure is the process of solving the captcha, utilizing a site that presents captchas to porn viewers. This site's services can be used by many independent spammers, possibly for a fee. The site can also make additional money from advertising.
What the human spammer has to do is to look at the site they want to spam, and figure out which of the presented images is the captcha. They have to do that only once, for each site they want to spam. Then they write a script which downloads that picture, submits it to the captcha solving server, receives the solution, and completes the spam submission process.
You keep asking for a "generic" way of doing it, with which you probably mean: a method that works completely automatically for any site. Such a method does not exist; even in the absence of captchas the spammers have to write site-specific scripts to fill in the submission forms and submit the spam. A completely generic spamming script does not exist, neither for captcha-protected sites nor for unprotected sites. So your repeated insistence that overcoming captcha-protected sites cannot be done "completely generically" is not an argument against the captcha-solving idea.
you presented the captcha as if it were part of the porn site, and that users of the site were totally unaware of the site's true purpose.
Yes, you present the captchas to the porn viewers as if they were part of the porn site. Whether the porn viewers are aware of the true purpose or not is irrelevant. Sooner or later word will probably get out. Solving captchas is not illegal.
if once built it were an automated system
The captcha solving server is completely automatic. As I pointed out above, the actual spammer has to write a small site-specific script for each site they want to spam, utilizing the services of the captcha-solving server.
beyond the sophistication of normal spam operations
You are aware of the fact that the average spammer commands a bot-net of several thousand zombie machines distributed all over the internet? At a moment's notice, they can command these zombie machines to do anything they like. There is a lot of money in spamming, and setting up a little porn site in a corner of the web somewhere is a minor task.
to get you arrested than normal spam operations
Nothing illegal about it whatsoever.
if every web site removed their CAPTCHA protection the collective hassle and inconvenience of the spam you would end up would probably be insignificant to the inconvenience CAPTCHAs currently cause the blind and visually impared.
That's a completely different discussion. Most sites that allow user submissions now employ captchas, presumably because they disagree with you and can't deal with the mountains of spam in any other way.
and then determine the post request and store this in some sort of repository. The post request is going to be tricky as it will be site specific.[...]the day to day workload to keep this spamming operation sounds relatively time consuming compared with most spammming tactics
A normal spamming tactic: write a site-specific perl script which reads the submit form, fills it in, and submits it along with the spam; all run from a botnet. Captchas are designed to prevent this tactic. The new spamming tactic: write a site-specific perl script which reads the submit form, submits a copy of the captcha to the captcha-solving server and receives the reply, fills the form in, and submits it along with the spam; all run from a botnet. The difference in complexity between the two scripts is negligible.
No "post request" has to be stored in any sort of "repository".
How do you generically differentiate between, wallpaper, advertising and captcha [...] you end up building an entire system just to post spam to one site
The system has two components, a generic one and a site-specific one. The generic one is an Internet service which takes as input a copy of a captcha image and provides as output the solution in real time; it employs porn surfers in the obvious fashion. The site-specific one is a little perl script you write for each site you want to attack. The script reads the site's submit form, sends a copy of the presented captcha to above-mentioned services and receives its solution, fills in the site's submit form, and submits the spam. This script is put on your botnet.
True, but only because he couldn't. He has long pushed for a federal ban of all types of human cloning, including for research and therapeutic purposes. See his speech on the subject.
Can they not multiply the embryonic stem cells they have now without harvesting more?
Well, the basic strategy they're pursuing involves creating and destroying new embryos. Say there's something wrong with your body, Alzheimer's. You need new stem cells to fix it, identical to your other healthy stem cells. So they'll take a cell out of your skin, create an embryo out of it by cloning, destroy the embryo (a shapeless ball of cells at this point), harvest its stem cells, and implant them into you.
The coordination and fund raising efforts are taking mindshare from other projects. The funding itself is taking dollars from other projects.
Please realize that the laptops are paid for by the governments of the participating countries. No fund raising is going on. Presumably, the authorities in these countries know better than Mr. Dvorak whether these investments are useful to them or not.
You log in with your one-time password, you get a message from the bank "Sorry, our database is currently down, please try again later." This message was of course constructed by the keylogger that's running on your computer. The keylogger has already logged into your bank account with the password it just captured and is now busy moving your money to Russia. True, the keylogger needs a bit of knowledge about your bank's site, but it isn't that complicated really.
Brandt's original paper is here, explaining his methodology and giving the complete list of articles he found. Wikipedia's response is here, where people go through the list one by one and also check the other contributions of users who have added copyrighted content. Wikipedia also has a bot which aims to detect newly added copyright violations by searching Google.
Plagiarism is not a legal term, it's a term used in journalism and academia to describe taking somebody else's words or ideas and presenting them as your own, without attribution. In these realms, it is considered unethical.
If you copy somebody's words, and these words are not in the public domain (for instance because the author is long dead or works for the U.S. government), and you can't defend the use as "fair use", then it's a civil offense and they can sue you (in some countries and severe cases it's even a criminal offense). Whether you attribute the copied material or not is irrelevant for the legal status of copyright infringement.
Wikipedia is extremely vigilant in removing copyright infringements. Plagiarisms of public domain works are not considered that big a deal; Wikipedia policy generally requires sources for all statements but that is rarely enforced.
The rodent calorie-restriction longevity increase only shows up in laboratory settings, where the rodents are protected from exposure to infectious agents. When they are allowed such exposure, they prove to be much more susceptable to them, becoming ill more easily and dying form it ditto.
That's a very interesting result, do you happen to have a pointer to the paper?
I can't imagine what it was like to grow up not knowing what's on the other side of the ocean. Not knowing what the sun really is.
Can you imagine what it would be like to grow up not knowing how the brain really works? What consciousness really is? What constitutes dark matter? Whether the universe is spatially infinite or not?
Slashdot Mirror
To say that you have a right to free expression unless another value takes priority is completely meaningless and hollow; it is redundant unless those values are explicitly listed. You have a right to anything unless another value takes priority. If they want to outlaw a particular opinion (say, that the Holocaust didn't happen), they just have to invent some value taking priority. I'm sure China is also pretty good at inventing communal values that take priority over the expression of certain opinions.
He did.
You can't do quantum mechanics without complex numbers. The Schrödinger equation has a fat i right in the middle of it. Complex numbers were discovered, not invented.
What the human spammer has to do is to look at the site they want to spam, and figure out which of the presented images is the captcha. They have to do that only once, for each site they want to spam. Then they write a script which downloads that picture, submits it to the captcha solving server, receives the solution, and completes the spam submission process.
You keep asking for a "generic" way of doing it, with which you probably mean: a method that works completely automatically for any site. Such a method does not exist; even in the absence of captchas the spammers have to write site-specific scripts to fill in the submission forms and submit the spam. A completely generic spamming script does not exist, neither for captcha-protected sites nor for unprotected sites. So your repeated insistence that overcoming captcha-protected sites cannot be done "completely generically" is not an argument against the captcha-solving idea.
Yes, you present the captchas to the porn viewers as if they were part of the porn site. Whether the porn viewers are aware of the true purpose or not is irrelevant. Sooner or later word will probably get out. Solving captchas is not illegal. The captcha solving server is completely automatic. As I pointed out above, the actual spammer has to write a small site-specific script for each site they want to spam, utilizing the services of the captcha-solving server. You are aware of the fact that the average spammer commands a bot-net of several thousand zombie machines distributed all over the internet? At a moment's notice, they can command these zombie machines to do anything they like. There is a lot of money in spamming, and setting up a little porn site in a corner of the web somewhere is a minor task. Nothing illegal about it whatsoever. That's a completely different discussion. Most sites that allow user submissions now employ captchas, presumably because they disagree with you and can't deal with the mountains of spam in any other way.No "post request" has to be stored in any sort of "repository".
The solid core is made of iron, not rock.
You log in with your one-time password, you get a message from the bank "Sorry, our database is currently down, please try again later." This message was of course constructed by the keylogger that's running on your computer. The keylogger has already logged into your bank account with the password it just captured and is now busy moving your money to Russia. True, the keylogger needs a bit of knowledge about your bank's site, but it isn't that complicated really.
Wikipedia admins can read deleted articles and can provide a copy if you ask nicely. Deleted articles remain under GFDL so distribution is legal.
Brandt's original paper is here, explaining his methodology and giving the complete list of articles he found. Wikipedia's response is here, where people go through the list one by one and also check the other contributions of users who have added copyrighted content. Wikipedia also has a bot which aims to detect newly added copyright violations by searching Google.
If you copy somebody's words, and these words are not in the public domain (for instance because the author is long dead or works for the U.S. government), and you can't defend the use as "fair use", then it's a civil offense and they can sue you (in some countries and severe cases it's even a criminal offense). Whether you attribute the copied material or not is irrelevant for the legal status of copyright infringement.
Wikipedia is extremely vigilant in removing copyright infringements. Plagiarisms of public domain works are not considered that big a deal; Wikipedia policy generally requires sources for all statements but that is rarely enforced.