Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Except the piano analogy is flawed.
Pianos haven't progressed to 2,000 1mm-wide keys, or introduced three-dimensional keyboards, or decided to have little-endian keyboards with the low notes beneath your right hand fingers, or added green keys above the white keys, or added a Dvorak mechanism placing the most commonly played notes beneath your fingers.
Composers haven't introduced new semi-tone notes, located between B and B-flat, or decided to portray their music to the pianist in XML format. They aren't asking pianists to play notes in 2400MHz tempo, or even to get those albums cranked out before they go home for the weekend.
My point is that computer technology has changed dramatically from the time I started learning it (1973.) And I mean really, truly changed. Yes, there are certainly technological advances in pianos, keyboards, music and notation, and I don't mean to slight the skills of any pianist regardless of whether or not they have learned new technologies. But very few of those changes really alter how a pianist plays. The changes in programming have been fundamental. Everything I learned back in the '70s has been almost completely thrown out or changed (except for one thing -- the keyboard.) If I never learned more than what I knew back then, if I didn't keep up with new technologies and new development methodologies and instead kept writing assembler code filled with GOTOs, I'd be almost useless. It's more likely that I'd be mopping floors for a living.
Younger minds may or may not absorb information quicker, but that's not really the point. If people don't keep learning in this business they quickly become irrelevant, regardless of age.
Oh, yeah, you're absolutely right. Nobody wants to ditch their existing stuff. First, they paid for it; they will want to keep it. Second, if you tell someone "You actually PAID for windows? Linux is FREE" they're going to get defensive. You've lost them before your opening argument.
That's why a giveaway disc of OSS Windows Open Office applications would be more of a winner. They don't have to throw anything away, they can keep running Windows, but they can get the software they need so little Susie can write her science paper on nematodes. And they don't have to spend $179 for the Microsoft product.
If you go the "giveaway donated hardware route" for the less fortunate, you then have the ability to install an actual distro (of whatever the machine is capable of.) Nobody feels bad.
Just an aside: as a counter to my arguments I just read in Consumer Reports today about the Wal-Mart Lindows PC where they totally dissed it. "... OK for Web browsing, e-mail, and letter writing, but not much more. And anyone who equates "low-priced" with "basic and easy to use" will be frustrated. Instead, we recommend you spend another $200 or so for a low-priced Windows computer..." I personally think this is one of the strongest arguments against Lindows (not Linux) -- it's not ready for Joe Sixpack yet, but it's being marketed directly to him in his own store.
My son's school does not "require" MS-Word. However, MS-Word is the word processor provided on all the school computers, and it is the word procesor that the typing instructors use to teach typing and document preparation classes. It's also the word processor that the teachers use if they are preparing homework or memos or whatever. It's also the word processor they'll expect to use if they need to see a soft copy of his documents for any reason. If he wants to print it formatted at school, he either plays Word or learns some other kludge completely on his own (I'd probably recommend he save it in HTML and use IE or Word to print it at school.) And heaven help him if he tells the teacher "No, you need to edit this in AbiWord."
And in case you haven't been in a high school this year, pencil-written reports are no longer acceptable in most classes. (Feel free to rant all you want, but this simply reflects the real-world.) The students are given a "format" which their homework and papers must follow. They are only given a description of the format, however, and are given nothing Word-specific: neither instructions nor a document template file. And they are given their study halls and time after school to spend on the school-provided computers to work on their papers (assuming they're not standing in line waiting for them.)
You're right: teachers not only shouldn't have to research software, but they don't and can't. Even if they could find the time to perform the research, the software (and hardware) is provided and installed by the IT department of the district. All those computers are locked down tight. And the teachers have absolutely no say in the software whatsoever.
The thing to remember is that Microsoft's business plan is based on keeping Microsoft products in the public eye; at work, at home and in the schools in front of your kids. They are ABSOLUTELY THE BEST at marketing their stuff. They're even better at it than IBM was at the top of their game in the '80s. All Microsoft salespeople are nice, friendly folks. I honestly like every single one I've ever met or done business with. You'd probably play cards with them; you'd let your kids play with their kids. But if you mention OSS or Linux as an alternative to ANYTHING, their hackles raise. Their antennae go up. Unless you cleverly deflect the suggestion as "one of my people suggested Linux - mumble - save money - mumble - open source something" they will silently add you to a mental list of subversives. You'll still get the smiles and the handshakes, but you'll find you do not get attention at the podium at meetings. And if you do take up swords with them, they do not back down. That's when you learn that they are truly, deeply predatorial, backed with a huge silent platoon of sales support staff, and a division of not-so-silent lawyers. If you don't make a quick, decisive well-planned first strike their staff will descend like a biblical plague that would put frogs and locusts to shame.
You can bet Microsoft is giving schools deals on their licensing. But, they give nothing away for free. I imagine our district could probably save money if we went to the IT department and questioned their choice of non-OSS. However, the Microsoft rep's job is to counter any and all offers to keep that software in front of the students of today. Sure, you might even save the district some short-term money by blackmailing Microsoft with the threat of OSS. But once Microsoft is through with you, you'll never be seen by the schoolboard as anyone but that "tinfoil-beanie Line-X freak." Welcome to Intermediate Schoolboard Politics 3003.
If you want to get OSS in the door, dodge the political route and get it installed as a first step. Have them get some real application usage out of it before asking the Microsoft reps to refund your SQL and Win2K licenses. Get discs of open source apps out at the PTO meetings before anyone takes notice. As soon as the schoolboard discovers them, they'll run them past their IT people who will then ask their Microsoft reps what's going on with this free software stuff. It will take days, maybe less. And then you better be really, really well prepared to defend yourself in front of an audience.
Yeah, that's it, the FOSS CDs. I knew someone had a collection of open source windows binaries on an easy-to-use disk.
They'd be great spiffs to hand out at the PTA/PTO meetings to the majority of parents who already have Windows PCs at home. It would need a really tight installer that wouldn't trash other previously installed stuff. (Just think how P.O.ed you'd be if you already had the $499 version of Office Professional and along came Open Office and overwrote all your.DOC and.XLS associations...)
Even Joe Sixpack is starting to get fed up with Microsoft.
Joe Sixpack has one feature that Microsoft doesn't want to exploit: he's cheap. Sure, he'll plunk down $50.00 for a game (repeatedly) but when you ask him to fork over $279 for Office (which sounds a lot like "work") he's more likely to take a second look before shelling out that kind of dough.
Throw in the added whining 10-year-old "but Dad, I need Word for my schoolwork, teacher says" and you've got additional friction.
I see a big void out there waiting for the Open Office crowd to step in: offering "Schoolwork CDs." It worked very well for Apple in the 80s; school sales literally kept them afloat while the IBM PC ate their lunches in the business world. Picture a schoolful of kids, all needing (yes, needing) an MSWord-compatible word processor for their home computers for their schoolwork. Now picture the local PTA volunteers burning 300 copies of "Open Office for Windows for Schools" with SIMPLE installers, and offering them to parents gratis. Would they still fork over $179 for "Office XP for Students and Teachers" if free disks are lying on a table at the exits? Or would they start seeing Open Source as a viable alternative to All Things Microsoft?
And for those parents who can't afford the latest equipment, a Linux For Schools distro could be put together that specializes in offering only the stuff people need for schoolwork: Open Office, Mozilla, etc. No check boxes for servers, no configurations other than a time zone. For that matter, a "Configure Your Own Linux For Schools Distro" distro could be put together for the PTA crowd. It would allow the novice to input the schools name, a few bitmaps of the school logo at various resolutions, time zone, etc., and produce an ISO ready for handing out at the meetings. It could even print a disc sleeve that lists minimum computer required. That would need to be nothing more than about a 90MHz Pentium with 2GB of disk that can be had for about $20.00 from a junk trader. Hell, the PTAs invovled could probably get old PCs donated from the more "technologically current" families that they could preinstall and offer to the less affluent students or schools. I know I have a basement full of ancient PCs that aren't improving with age.
I don't think it's that simple any longer. Spoken languages are like living things, constantly growing, occasionally shrinking. English is particularly dynamic. Latin, on the other hand, is pretty much a static language, used today only by scholars, priests and scientists. Its finer points are argued only by pedants; these arguments are largely lost on the general population who will use the language any way they see fit to say what they want.
I think a case could easily be made for virii to be the English plural of virus simply by the undisputable fact that that meaning is already understood by most people. It's already well established jargon; and from there to Webster's it's a simple matter of time. And isn't that better than a word in common usage NOT being placed in the dictionary, simply because some purists think it's wrong?
I've learned to accept changes such as this. They're harmless. They add a touch of levity. But they're certainly meaningless in the overall picture. If words like this "corrupt the purity of Latin," so what? Latin is not being changed; no one's asking Latin to be changed; it's still a dead language. All it means is that virii will never be added to a Latin dictionary. But English continues to live, and will continue to be goverened by usage rather than argument. In modern English, I think "virii" is as correct as "modem" or "sleepover". It's certainly as understandable.
MIPS == "Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed."
Unless, of course, you wish to believe the old folks who might otherwise tell you it stands for Millions of Instructions Per Second. Back in the good-old-days, before the current abundant crop of benchmarks, people tended to measure CPUs more simply. You used to hear arguments of "my RISC chip performs more cycles per second than your CISC chip" or "my CISC chip performs more work per cycle than your RISC chip." (Anyone else notice the passing of CISC and RISC from the lexicon?)
Personally, I think we need a unit to measure the accelerating number of benchmarks created every year. How about the Shtonestone?
And to stay on topic (not that it matters much on Slashdot), the name has been "computron" for years and years.
Counting change is not an innate skill, that's for sure. The ability to simply count money isn't even necessarily a given. I've seen people struggle when a cash register tells them to give $0.87 change. And woe unto me if I should helpfully offer a $20.01 for a $14.76 purchase AFTER the cashier has already hit the $20.00 button.
Years ago, I looked at an ActiveX "change-making" object from NCR. It's interface was a little picture of a cash drawer. You gave it the amount of change to give, and it displayed the number of each denomination of bill and coin to give as change to the customer.
It was cute and it was clever, but I didn't buy it because the registers only know an aggregate cash amount -- they don't know the quantities of denominations they contain. It would be bad for a register to tell them to give "one $TEN and three $ONEs" if the till has no ten-dollar bills in it. And we certainly were not going to slow down sales by requiring cashiers to somehow "input" the fact that they took in "six ones, two fives and four quarters" for a $17 cash sale.
Hey, I modified a thread engineering program for a TRS-80 for a friend's machine shop back in 1981, and wrote them a new version completely from scratch in GW-BASIC in 1982. They are still using it today (although I had to port it to the IBM PC Basic compiler.) I also wrote a brute-force change gear combination searcher that took a few minutes to sift through all their possible gear combinations.
At least they've upgraded their PCs a few times since then. But the software still runs. It just runs faster (the gear calculator now has the results before the screen refreshes.)
And a digital embargo would take 12 years of arguing with the UN email council, and the US would pull the plug anyway.
Laws will not solve technology problems.
Let me repeat: Laws will NEVER solve technology problems.
Most laws are written by ordinary people. These people are just humans. The problem is that the laws they write are flawed, but they NEVER ADMIT IT. They don't go back and fix broken laws (at least not in a timely fashion.) Hell, 40 years ago it was STILL legal to shoot Indians in Nebraska, as long as you did it from a covered wagon. Some cities still have legally enforceable ordinances preventing cars from going faster than 10MPH when near or passing a horse. You think this mechanism is capable of "real-time updates"? Can such a system ever hope to keep up with the dynamics of RFCs? (yes, that's a joke.)
And even if they could keep the laws absolutely up-to-the-minute current, approach it differently. Try to legally define "spam". Congress is still unable to provide a definition of what's obscene, and that's after only 50+ years of trying. "I know it when I see it" has been struck down repeatedly. Spam is even harder to nail to the wall.
And even if a wonderful, perfect law gets passed covering every country in the UN, then what? We live with its aftermath! Think about that nightmare. Look at how other laws are misapplied to poorly understood technologists. Think about the absolute pile of feces we know as the DMCA, authored by Senator Hollings (D., Disney Corp.) and how it was used to prosecute a non-citizen. Look at the USA Patriot Act, and think how it's being misapplied by Lord High Protector Ashcroft and his minions. They drag RICO statutes into play for phone hackers as if they were bank robbers, such that they end up serving more time than many violent criminals.
"But what about the spam?" the people continue to whine. Solve it technologically. Rework the mail RFCs, most of which are as out of date as the covered wagon statutes. RFCs still in force allow for bang paths, although I would be surprised to learn if there even a dozen people for whom bang-paths still work. They can upgrade. Open SMTP relays should be digitally embargoed by anyone unfortunate enough to hear from one. If that were true for about a hundred major sites, spam would stop because it would never make it into the system. I'd demand such a newly-compliant SMTP gateway from my ISP, as would anyone who would like to see spam stopped.
This thread has more than enough workable solutions going to stop spam. If only a handful of influential people got off their asses and implemented any of them, spam would dry up and stop.
So don't sit there and tell me laws are going to solve anything. I'd rather have the spam problem than another shitty law.
It would keep getting better and better when implemented by more and more of the huge email networks. It would need a properly phrased bounce message so that if Average Joe's ISP had an open relay he would get a message saying "Couldn't deliver your message because your internet provider allows spam. Click <href="mailto:postmaster@yourbadisp.com&subjec t= Close%20your%20open%20SMTP%20relay">here </A> to send your internet provider a note telling them to fix it so you can have your mail delivered."
It could be customized to reply in the default language(s) of the TLD of the originating relay.
Not that I could guarantee that everyone would understand a bounce message, but I hold out hope for most people. And at some point, maybe we just raise the bar to enter the internet by a single millimeter. Exercising the responsibility required to deal with a bounce message in order to get your own mail sent might be a good enough test.
A/. poll asking the same question would be many times more accurate.
Brilliant! I believe you may have stumbled on a way to measure the veracity of statistics!
One slashdotPoll == margin of error is within +/- 99.99% (give or take a CowboyNeal or two.) Think about it, it sounds almost as good as the legendary "Five Nines" (from the other direction, of course, but that's yet another beauty of statistics.)
Perhaps we need a Slashdot poll to determine whether or not this should be included as a new Standard Unit.
You need a few more things to make this a more attractive honeypot.
First, address harvesting bots typically don't parse text looking for the representation of email addresses. They are strictly interested in mailto: urls. Embed your addresses inside anchor tags.
That said, you might want to consider adding some cover text between those anchors. Add some headings and other webby stuff. I don't know if the harvesting bots are smart enough to recognize honeypots, but if they try you don't want to be giving them anything recognizable as a fake link farm.
You also should consider a robots.txt file. Apparently some address harvesters seem to like using those to discover pages such as addressbook.asp, etc. They certainly manage to ignore them when it suits them.
Next, remember that they only find your honeypot via links. Make sure all your pages have a link to your honeypot (and don't use the words "honeypot" or "spam" in the link), as well as links from any other webmasters who might wish to perform a good deed. And of course, your honeypot pages should all interlink with each other. After all, if links to address lists point to other valuable address lists, they're even more valuable, right?
Other than the fact that the author took LaBrea off the web due to fear of his state's misinterpretation of the DMCA, a "tar pit" like LaBrea can be a useful tool in which to mire the spammers. PeachPit is another one I remember. I don't know if you can incorporate delays and slowness in an.asp, but it could be another valuable approach.
If you want to judge your success, include a link to a valid "spam-only" email address somewhere in your generated page. If it starts getting spam, you'll know your honeypot is catching flies.
Finally, I wouldn't doubt that these spammers have at least one techie who read Slashdot. Posting "Here's my honeypot" to this guy is simply going to get your hostname blacklisted among other spammers. They won't harvest you once they discover you, and any further work you do will be for naught until you bring up a new, unrelated site. As an added non-bonus, they may automate their robots to blacklist any site that refers to a known honeypot. At least I know I would do these things if I made my money selling harvester bots to spammers.
But you've got the right idea and I think your heart is in the right place. And what you're doing is certainly harmless to anyone but spammers. Good luck, and don't forget to keep a log of visits to your page.
The output of a biometric interface is a blob of data. That blob can be captured and used later in a replay attack. And being biometric, you can't change it if it gets stolen!
Consider the victim of the article's hacking. Doesn't matter how he signed on or authenticated himself, once a trojan or virus ran with system authority it was in control. It could then choose to steal biometric info at will.
The only way to secure anything like that is via a trusted computing device. While I'm not ruling out Palladium, I'm really referring to a smart card that performs challenge/response exchange with the authorizing host.
Biometrics can be copied (and thus forged.) Do not place blind trust them.
The fraud is their telling you that you've got a stable chip when they really sold you a cheaper unstable overclocked chip.
Intel believes that overclocked CPUs have a shorter MTBF. So if you, the evil grey-market retailer, sells a box labeled "3.0GHz P4" but it's really a 2.9GHz P4 overclocked to 3.0GHz, it might behave badly more often.
Intel believes two things can happen to overclocked CPUs: they will have random instruction errors, causing weird BSoDs frequently; or they might burn up and die within 6-12 months instead of the 5 years both Intel and their customer base may have come to expect.
You are correct with 'people thinking Intel stinks because they bought an overclocked CPU that fails.' So the grey-marketers are trading Intel's good name in exchange for a cheaper chip. That's fraud. They've traded YOUR stability for THEIR profit, but they promised you that you bought the stable chip Intel advertises.
Shrinkage (which includes both internal theft and external theft, but also encompasses other losses such as accounting errors, shipping errors, etc.) presents two different faces here. First is the immediately visible loss of tangible goods, which was about 5% of sales many years ago. Modern tagging and security systems, better employee training and better computing and accounting systems have reduced this to under 2% of sales in most retail organizations.
Now, pretend to be the CEO of a retail corporation. Picture a roomful of angry stockholders all demanding more return on their investment, and a clientele that can barely afford to pay your prices today. Your margins are already so thin you can see through them.
Twenty years ago, you looked at that 5% and saw turning that lost money into dividends. No price increases, just bottom line improvement by throwing better security systems in place. It was "low-hanging fruit". Now, it's tougher. Your investors still demand ROI, but you've picked the bottom branches clean. Your systems long ago improved accuracy from 2% to within.01%. Your security measures have cut both internal and external theft in half. So why stop there? Look at all the money you saved by getting rid of half the bad guys. Get the other half. It's huge. And they're a great target: they are bad people, stealing your precious money. Who in their right mind would pass it up?
If WalMart, the largest corporation in America valued at about $242 billion, suffers a 2% loss rate due to theft, that's $4.8 billion dollars in losses that they could recoup. Roll that number around on your tongue for a while. $4.8 billion dollars. That buys more than just a lot of RFID tags.
You may think it's just the 14-year-old kid down the street bumping a t-shirt, but I assure you that from a retailer's point of view, we see it very differently.
But I'd still like to see him go down for piracy alone. I think that many other spammers are also committing crimes for which they could be punished.
I prefer to see existing laws used and enforced. I am a firm believer in the idea that we already have enough laws. I can't remember the last time I saw a well-written, constitutionally sound, practical and sensible law passed. Today's lawmakers are very bad at their jobs, and tend to pass really bad crap legislation that serves one or two special interest groups at a time, while doing nothing for the public at large.
That's why I want to see Mr. Moore nailed on piracy. I think Congress would fsck up a piece of anti-spam legislation, and end up with junk that would either screw up and take away our rights to send automated emails or leave gaping holes for some spammers to sleaze through. And what good would it do to outlaw it in America, anyway? For example, I get boatloads of Italian language spam but I don't know how or why I got on their lists -- I've never spoken the language or corresponded with an Italian speaker. So what's next, Georgie Junior invades Italy because they're sending Brigata Rosa terror spams?
No thank you. Lock this slimeball up because he's a thief, and be satisfied that a spammer rests in the Graybar Hotel for a year.
If it works like that, it can probably very easily be tricked into producing nonrandom numbers by inserting HF energy at these frequencies.
(i.e. put a transmitter nearby)
Yeah, there probably is an external way to "reduce" entropy (other than by using the provided mechanism to alter the oscillator bias voltage.) But that will require an attacker to have physical access to the machine, and enough time on it to sample the effects of his change in order to see what's happened because of it. Since these chips are already varying their oscillation rates due to manufacturing tolerances, heat, etc., just having one oscillator lock-up with a randomly placed attacking transmitter might not throw the chip off in a predictable manner (or at least in a manner that would be meaningful to an attacker.)
Slashdot Mirror
Pianos haven't progressed to 2,000 1mm-wide keys, or introduced three-dimensional keyboards, or decided to have little-endian keyboards with the low notes beneath your right hand fingers, or added green keys above the white keys, or added a Dvorak mechanism placing the most commonly played notes beneath your fingers.
Composers haven't introduced new semi-tone notes, located between B and B-flat, or decided to portray their music to the pianist in XML format. They aren't asking pianists to play notes in 2400MHz tempo, or even to get those albums cranked out before they go home for the weekend.
My point is that computer technology has changed dramatically from the time I started learning it (1973.) And I mean really, truly changed. Yes, there are certainly technological advances in pianos, keyboards, music and notation, and I don't mean to slight the skills of any pianist regardless of whether or not they have learned new technologies. But very few of those changes really alter how a pianist plays. The changes in programming have been fundamental. Everything I learned back in the '70s has been almost completely thrown out or changed (except for one thing -- the keyboard.) If I never learned more than what I knew back then, if I didn't keep up with new technologies and new development methodologies and instead kept writing assembler code filled with GOTOs, I'd be almost useless. It's more likely that I'd be mopping floors for a living.
Younger minds may or may not absorb information quicker, but that's not really the point. If people don't keep learning in this business they quickly become irrelevant, regardless of age.
The CNN article says "The appeal of 'V' continues" ... "a fresh take on this timeless story of human resilience and resistance."
I only watched it for the "mousies."
That's why a giveaway disc of OSS Windows Open Office applications would be more of a winner. They don't have to throw anything away, they can keep running Windows, but they can get the software they need so little Susie can write her science paper on nematodes. And they don't have to spend $179 for the Microsoft product.
If you go the "giveaway donated hardware route" for the less fortunate, you then have the ability to install an actual distro (of whatever the machine is capable of.) Nobody feels bad.
Just an aside: as a counter to my arguments I just read in Consumer Reports today about the Wal-Mart Lindows PC where they totally dissed it. "... OK for Web browsing, e-mail, and letter writing, but not much more. And anyone who equates "low-priced" with "basic and easy to use" will be frustrated. Instead, we recommend you spend another $200 or so for a low-priced Windows computer..." I personally think this is one of the strongest arguments against Lindows (not Linux) -- it's not ready for Joe Sixpack yet, but it's being marketed directly to him in his own store.
And in case you haven't been in a high school this year, pencil-written reports are no longer acceptable in most classes. (Feel free to rant all you want, but this simply reflects the real-world.) The students are given a "format" which their homework and papers must follow. They are only given a description of the format, however, and are given nothing Word-specific: neither instructions nor a document template file. And they are given their study halls and time after school to spend on the school-provided computers to work on their papers (assuming they're not standing in line waiting for them.)
You're right: teachers not only shouldn't have to research software, but they don't and can't. Even if they could find the time to perform the research, the software (and hardware) is provided and installed by the IT department of the district. All those computers are locked down tight. And the teachers have absolutely no say in the software whatsoever.
The thing to remember is that Microsoft's business plan is based on keeping Microsoft products in the public eye; at work, at home and in the schools in front of your kids. They are ABSOLUTELY THE BEST at marketing their stuff. They're even better at it than IBM was at the top of their game in the '80s. All Microsoft salespeople are nice, friendly folks. I honestly like every single one I've ever met or done business with. You'd probably play cards with them; you'd let your kids play with their kids. But if you mention OSS or Linux as an alternative to ANYTHING, their hackles raise. Their antennae go up. Unless you cleverly deflect the suggestion as "one of my people suggested Linux - mumble - save money - mumble - open source something" they will silently add you to a mental list of subversives. You'll still get the smiles and the handshakes, but you'll find you do not get attention at the podium at meetings. And if you do take up swords with them, they do not back down. That's when you learn that they are truly, deeply predatorial, backed with a huge silent platoon of sales support staff, and a division of not-so-silent lawyers. If you don't make a quick, decisive well-planned first strike their staff will descend like a biblical plague that would put frogs and locusts to shame.
You can bet Microsoft is giving schools deals on their licensing. But, they give nothing away for free. I imagine our district could probably save money if we went to the IT department and questioned their choice of non-OSS. However, the Microsoft rep's job is to counter any and all offers to keep that software in front of the students of today. Sure, you might even save the district some short-term money by blackmailing Microsoft with the threat of OSS. But once Microsoft is through with you, you'll never be seen by the schoolboard as anyone but that "tinfoil-beanie Line-X freak." Welcome to Intermediate Schoolboard Politics 3003.
If you want to get OSS in the door, dodge the political route and get it installed as a first step. Have them get some real application usage out of it before asking the Microsoft reps to refund your SQL and Win2K licenses. Get discs of open source apps out at the PTO meetings before anyone takes notice. As soon as the schoolboard discovers them, they'll run them past their IT people who will then ask their Microsoft reps what's going on with this free software stuff. It will take days, maybe less. And then you better be really, really well prepared to defend yourself in front of an audience.
They'd be great spiffs to hand out at the PTA/PTO meetings to the majority of parents who already have Windows PCs at home. It would need a really tight installer that wouldn't trash other previously installed stuff. (Just think how P.O.ed you'd be if you already had the $499 version of Office Professional and along came Open Office and overwrote all your .DOC and .XLS associations...)
Thanks!
Joe Sixpack has one feature that Microsoft doesn't want to exploit: he's cheap. Sure, he'll plunk down $50.00 for a game (repeatedly) but when you ask him to fork over $279 for Office (which sounds a lot like "work") he's more likely to take a second look before shelling out that kind of dough.
Throw in the added whining 10-year-old "but Dad, I need Word for my schoolwork, teacher says" and you've got additional friction.
I see a big void out there waiting for the Open Office crowd to step in: offering "Schoolwork CDs." It worked very well for Apple in the 80s; school sales literally kept them afloat while the IBM PC ate their lunches in the business world. Picture a schoolful of kids, all needing (yes, needing) an MSWord-compatible word processor for their home computers for their schoolwork. Now picture the local PTA volunteers burning 300 copies of "Open Office for Windows for Schools" with SIMPLE installers, and offering them to parents gratis. Would they still fork over $179 for "Office XP for Students and Teachers" if free disks are lying on a table at the exits? Or would they start seeing Open Source as a viable alternative to All Things Microsoft?
And for those parents who can't afford the latest equipment, a Linux For Schools distro could be put together that specializes in offering only the stuff people need for schoolwork: Open Office, Mozilla, etc. No check boxes for servers, no configurations other than a time zone. For that matter, a "Configure Your Own Linux For Schools Distro" distro could be put together for the PTA crowd. It would allow the novice to input the schools name, a few bitmaps of the school logo at various resolutions, time zone, etc., and produce an ISO ready for handing out at the meetings. It could even print a disc sleeve that lists minimum computer required. That would need to be nothing more than about a 90MHz Pentium with 2GB of disk that can be had for about $20.00 from a junk trader. Hell, the PTAs invovled could probably get old PCs donated from the more "technologically current" families that they could preinstall and offer to the less affluent students or schools. I know I have a basement full of ancient PCs that aren't improving with age.
Damn. I'm thinking this sounds pretty good...
You obviously never troll check, either. You should consider it.
But you're right, they're consumers, and all that implies. Nice "swarm" metaphor, by the way.
"Oh, Mommy, look, it's Shiny Video Game. Can we buy it?"
"No, darling, it says it only runs on Palladium, and we still run XP."
"But MOMMY, I WANT SHINY VIDEO GAME!"
Total cost of that trip to Best Buy?
People will buy whatever is being sold to them. They deserve it all, especially since they'll be trampling us on the way.I think a case could easily be made for virii to be the English plural of virus simply by the undisputable fact that that meaning is already understood by most people. It's already well established jargon; and from there to Webster's it's a simple matter of time. And isn't that better than a word in common usage NOT being placed in the dictionary, simply because some purists think it's wrong?
I've learned to accept changes such as this. They're harmless. They add a touch of levity. But they're certainly meaningless in the overall picture. If words like this "corrupt the purity of Latin," so what? Latin is not being changed; no one's asking Latin to be changed; it's still a dead language. All it means is that virii will never be added to a Latin dictionary. But English continues to live, and will continue to be goverened by usage rather than argument. In modern English, I think "virii" is as correct as "modem" or "sleepover". It's certainly as understandable.
Unless, of course, you wish to believe the old folks who might otherwise tell you it stands for Millions of Instructions Per Second. Back in the good-old-days, before the current abundant crop of benchmarks, people tended to measure CPUs more simply. You used to hear arguments of "my RISC chip performs more cycles per second than your CISC chip" or "my CISC chip performs more work per cycle than your RISC chip." (Anyone else notice the passing of CISC and RISC from the lexicon?)
Personally, I think we need a unit to measure the accelerating number of benchmarks created every year. How about the Shtonestone?
And to stay on topic (not that it matters much on Slashdot), the name has been "computron" for years and years.
Years ago, I looked at an ActiveX "change-making" object from NCR. It's interface was a little picture of a cash drawer. You gave it the amount of change to give, and it displayed the number of each denomination of bill and coin to give as change to the customer.
It was cute and it was clever, but I didn't buy it because the registers only know an aggregate cash amount -- they don't know the quantities of denominations they contain. It would be bad for a register to tell them to give "one $TEN and three $ONEs" if the till has no ten-dollar bills in it. And we certainly were not going to slow down sales by requiring cashiers to somehow "input" the fact that they took in "six ones, two fives and four quarters" for a $17 cash sale.
Anyway, their real slogan is "You've got questions? We've got blank stares."
At least they've upgraded their PCs a few times since then. But the software still runs. It just runs faster (the gear calculator now has the results before the screen refreshes.)
Laws will not solve technology problems.
Let me repeat: Laws will NEVER solve technology problems.
Most laws are written by ordinary people. These people are just humans. The problem is that the laws they write are flawed, but they NEVER ADMIT IT. They don't go back and fix broken laws (at least not in a timely fashion.) Hell, 40 years ago it was STILL legal to shoot Indians in Nebraska, as long as you did it from a covered wagon. Some cities still have legally enforceable ordinances preventing cars from going faster than 10MPH when near or passing a horse. You think this mechanism is capable of "real-time updates"? Can such a system ever hope to keep up with the dynamics of RFCs? (yes, that's a joke.)
And even if they could keep the laws absolutely up-to-the-minute current, approach it differently. Try to legally define "spam". Congress is still unable to provide a definition of what's obscene, and that's after only 50+ years of trying. "I know it when I see it" has been struck down repeatedly. Spam is even harder to nail to the wall.
And even if a wonderful, perfect law gets passed covering every country in the UN, then what? We live with its aftermath! Think about that nightmare. Look at how other laws are misapplied to poorly understood technologists. Think about the absolute pile of feces we know as the DMCA, authored by Senator Hollings (D., Disney Corp.) and how it was used to prosecute a non-citizen. Look at the USA Patriot Act, and think how it's being misapplied by Lord High Protector Ashcroft and his minions. They drag RICO statutes into play for phone hackers as if they were bank robbers, such that they end up serving more time than many violent criminals.
"But what about the spam?" the people continue to whine. Solve it technologically. Rework the mail RFCs, most of which are as out of date as the covered wagon statutes. RFCs still in force allow for bang paths, although I would be surprised to learn if there even a dozen people for whom bang-paths still work. They can upgrade. Open SMTP relays should be digitally embargoed by anyone unfortunate enough to hear from one. If that were true for about a hundred major sites, spam would stop because it would never make it into the system. I'd demand such a newly-compliant SMTP gateway from my ISP, as would anyone who would like to see spam stopped.
This thread has more than enough workable solutions going to stop spam. If only a handful of influential people got off their asses and implemented any of them, spam would dry up and stop.
So don't sit there and tell me laws are going to solve anything. I'd rather have the spam problem than another shitty law.
I know. She keeps sending me email wanting to look at her web site, along with her "friends" n4n0_n4na@msn.com and 133t_1i22y@msn.com.
It would keep getting better and better when implemented by more and more of the huge email networks. It would need a properly phrased bounce message so that if Average Joe's ISP had an open relay he would get a message saying "Couldn't deliver your message because your internet provider allows spam. Click <href="mailto:postmaster@yourbadisp.com&subjec t= Close%20your%20open%20SMTP%20relay">here </A> to send your internet provider a note telling them to fix it so you can have your mail delivered."
It could be customized to reply in the default language(s) of the TLD of the originating relay.
Not that I could guarantee that everyone would understand a bounce message, but I hold out hope for most people. And at some point, maybe we just raise the bar to enter the internet by a single millimeter. Exercising the responsibility required to deal with a bounce message in order to get your own mail sent might be a good enough test.
Oh, great. What's next up there, the goatse.guy?
Brilliant! I believe you may have stumbled on a way to measure the veracity of statistics!
One slashdotPoll == margin of error is within +/- 99.99% (give or take a CowboyNeal or two.) Think about it, it sounds almost as good as the legendary "Five Nines" (from the other direction, of course, but that's yet another beauty of statistics.)
Perhaps we need a Slashdot poll to determine whether or not this should be included as a new Standard Unit.
First, address harvesting bots typically don't parse text looking for the representation of email addresses. They are strictly interested in mailto: urls. Embed your addresses inside anchor tags.
That said, you might want to consider adding some cover text between those anchors. Add some headings and other webby stuff. I don't know if the harvesting bots are smart enough to recognize honeypots, but if they try you don't want to be giving them anything recognizable as a fake link farm.
You also should consider a robots.txt file. Apparently some address harvesters seem to like using those to discover pages such as addressbook.asp, etc. They certainly manage to ignore them when it suits them.
Next, remember that they only find your honeypot via links. Make sure all your pages have a link to your honeypot (and don't use the words "honeypot" or "spam" in the link), as well as links from any other webmasters who might wish to perform a good deed. And of course, your honeypot pages should all interlink with each other. After all, if links to address lists point to other valuable address lists, they're even more valuable, right?
Other than the fact that the author took LaBrea off the web due to fear of his state's misinterpretation of the DMCA, a "tar pit" like LaBrea can be a useful tool in which to mire the spammers. PeachPit is another one I remember. I don't know if you can incorporate delays and slowness in an .asp, but it could be another valuable approach.
If you want to judge your success, include a link to a valid "spam-only" email address somewhere in your generated page. If it starts getting spam, you'll know your honeypot is catching flies.
Finally, I wouldn't doubt that these spammers have at least one techie who read Slashdot. Posting "Here's my honeypot" to this guy is simply going to get your hostname blacklisted among other spammers. They won't harvest you once they discover you, and any further work you do will be for naught until you bring up a new, unrelated site. As an added non-bonus, they may automate their robots to blacklist any site that refers to a known honeypot. At least I know I would do these things if I made my money selling harvester bots to spammers.
But you've got the right idea and I think your heart is in the right place. And what you're doing is certainly harmless to anyone but spammers. Good luck, and don't forget to keep a log of visits to your page.
The output of a biometric interface is a blob of data. That blob can be captured and used later in a replay attack. And being biometric, you can't change it if it gets stolen!
Consider the victim of the article's hacking. Doesn't matter how he signed on or authenticated himself, once a trojan or virus ran with system authority it was in control. It could then choose to steal biometric info at will.
The only way to secure anything like that is via a trusted computing device. While I'm not ruling out Palladium, I'm really referring to a smart card that performs challenge/response exchange with the authorizing host.
Biometrics can be copied (and thus forged.) Do not place blind trust them.
Intel believes that overclocked CPUs have a shorter MTBF. So if you, the evil grey-market retailer, sells a box labeled "3.0GHz P4" but it's really a 2.9GHz P4 overclocked to 3.0GHz, it might behave badly more often.
Intel believes two things can happen to overclocked CPUs: they will have random instruction errors, causing weird BSoDs frequently; or they might burn up and die within 6-12 months instead of the 5 years both Intel and their customer base may have come to expect.
You are correct with 'people thinking Intel stinks because they bought an overclocked CPU that fails.' So the grey-marketers are trading Intel's good name in exchange for a cheaper chip. That's fraud. They've traded YOUR stability for THEIR profit, but they promised you that you bought the stable chip Intel advertises.
Shrinkage (which includes both internal theft and external theft, but also encompasses other losses such as accounting errors, shipping errors, etc.) presents two different faces here. First is the immediately visible loss of tangible goods, which was about 5% of sales many years ago. Modern tagging and security systems, better employee training and better computing and accounting systems have reduced this to under 2% of sales in most retail organizations.
Now, pretend to be the CEO of a retail corporation. Picture a roomful of angry stockholders all demanding more return on their investment, and a clientele that can barely afford to pay your prices today. Your margins are already so thin you can see through them.
Twenty years ago, you looked at that 5% and saw turning that lost money into dividends. No price increases, just bottom line improvement by throwing better security systems in place. It was "low-hanging fruit". Now, it's tougher. Your investors still demand ROI, but you've picked the bottom branches clean. Your systems long ago improved accuracy from 2% to within .01%. Your security measures have cut both internal and external theft in half. So why stop there? Look at all the money you saved by getting rid of half the bad guys. Get the other half. It's huge. And they're a great target: they are bad people, stealing your precious money. Who in their right mind would pass it up?
If WalMart, the largest corporation in America valued at about $242 billion, suffers a 2% loss rate due to theft, that's $4.8 billion dollars in losses that they could recoup. Roll that number around on your tongue for a while. $4.8 billion dollars. That buys more than just a lot of RFID tags.
You may think it's just the 14-year-old kid down the street bumping a t-shirt, but I assure you that from a retailer's point of view, we see it very differently.
But I'd still like to see him go down for piracy alone. I think that many other spammers are also committing crimes for which they could be punished.
I prefer to see existing laws used and enforced. I am a firm believer in the idea that we already have enough laws. I can't remember the last time I saw a well-written, constitutionally sound, practical and sensible law passed. Today's lawmakers are very bad at their jobs, and tend to pass really bad crap legislation that serves one or two special interest groups at a time, while doing nothing for the public at large.
That's why I want to see Mr. Moore nailed on piracy. I think Congress would fsck up a piece of anti-spam legislation, and end up with junk that would either screw up and take away our rights to send automated emails or leave gaping holes for some spammers to sleaze through. And what good would it do to outlaw it in America, anyway? For example, I get boatloads of Italian language spam but I don't know how or why I got on their lists -- I've never spoken the language or corresponded with an Italian speaker. So what's next, Georgie Junior invades Italy because they're sending Brigata Rosa terror spams?
No thank you. Lock this slimeball up because he's a thief, and be satisfied that a spammer rests in the Graybar Hotel for a year.
Yeah, there probably is an external way to "reduce" entropy (other than by using the provided mechanism to alter the oscillator bias voltage.) But that will require an attacker to have physical access to the machine, and enough time on it to sample the effects of his change in order to see what's happened because of it. Since these chips are already varying their oscillation rates due to manufacturing tolerances, heat, etc., just having one oscillator lock-up with a randomly placed attacking transmitter might not throw the chip off in a predictable manner (or at least in a manner that would be meaningful to an attacker.)