>I'm amazed that so many readers here think it's
>ok to apply pressure to Media3 (who did support
>a spammers web site) by blacklisting a large
>block of Media3's legit customers, not just the
>spammer.
Well, look at it this way: What else can you do that Media3 cares about? Media3 has made it clear that, as long as the spam *itself* doesn't go over their network, you can host whatever you want on their pages, advertise it in spam, advertise it in faxes, advertise it by printing your URL on the flayed skins of your enemies, it doesn't matter, it's not *our* fault.
As long as they believe that, the spammers whose pages they host will have a very compelling *reason* to send out spam - they will be able to collect responses, collect money, and rake in cash, and they can do it because they're getting cheap, reliable, spam-friendly hosting.
Media3 has nothing to lose if we block a few spammer sites; the spammers don't care about a mere few percent of the net not seeing them, and since they don't send mail over their Media3 connection, the rest of the RBL users (those who just use it to block mail) aren't doing anything.
So, how do we communicate to Media3 that they are doing damage to the network? How do we tell them we want them to be good neighbors, or no neighbors at all?
We block *everything* of theirs. It's that simple. They won't *listen* to anything else.
If Media3 wins a suit against the RBL, I'm going to go add their blocks to our *local* blackhole list. And they'll stay there. Forever.
Or, they can admit that this is a *cooperative* network (you don't cooperate, we don't network with you), kick their spammers off, stop accepting spammer cash, and *POOF* no more RBL listing.
Imagine if Peacefire had bought its connectivity from Cyberpromo. They *did* host web pages, after all. Would you be surprised that they lost a bit of connectivity?
When you pick a hosting provider, one of the things you need to look for is "anti-spam policy". If they don't have one, you are likely to end up on the wrong side of a number of blacklists.
The problems with censorware are:
1. Inaccurate or undocumented listings.
2. Listings for things other than those said.
The RBL has neither of these problems. Media3 is actively and knowingly supporting the people who flood your mailbox with all the crap we call "spam". Does blocking Media3's sites, in many cases at the IP level, result in you getting less spam?
Today? No. Today, it just means those sites don't get as much traffic.
Tomorrow? Sooner or later, Media3 will have to decide whether it wants to be on the network where spammers do business, or on the network where RBL subscribers do business. If they pick the spammer network, they will eventually be totally removed from the network, as they find their way into more and more blacklists. If they decide they want the other network, they will stop supporting spammers and people who sell spamware.
With no way to sell their products, the spamware vendors will stop sending you ads for them. People will stop *buying* the products, because there will be no way to buy them. You will get less spam.
It's an educational tool. Media3 has the option of being on the network where you host spammer pages, or on the network that RBL subscribers see. They have made their choice.
Your list of sites "also affected" misses the point entirely. Those people are paying Media3, and as long as Media3 makes money, Media3 has no real reason to care whether or not hosting spammer sites is damaging to the rest of the network.
If your hosting company is supporting spammers, you will be fucked. Don't buy hosting from companies that are unwilling to terminate spammer websites.
The RBL isn't about stopping spam *today*. It's about encouraging the policies that we *absolutely need* if we are to have less spam *tomorrow*. Thanks to the RBL, a number of very large networks have put in strong, effective, anti-spam policies. Every day, you don't get dozens of spams that would once have been sent via netcom. Every day, hundreds of spams that would have advertised sites hosted by companies with a policy just like the Media3 policy *aren't* sent, because those sites got taken down, because the policies got fixed.
Media3 is wrong. MAPS is right. Media3 is trying to support the theory that, as long as the actual spam is relay-raped or sent via throwaway dialup accounts, it's not their problem where the page is hosted. MAPS is educating them. As soon as Media3 fixes its policy to unequivocally prohibit the hosting of spamware sites, address list sites, and sites advertised in spam, and starts enforcing that policy, everyone is happy.
No *INFORMATION* is restricted. Only the *TEXT* they wrote! You can describe the same bug. You can communicate the same *information* - you just can't copy their text wholesale.
I don't know why they want to restrict it. Maybe to track which bugs people read. Maybe to ensure that sites which report on MS bugs have to actually do their own writing. I don't see it as a big deal; you can say anything you want, you just can't copy their precise wording. Big deal.
... but you *have to actually like D&D*. Or at least, you have to be comfortable with it. It has to seem normal to you for a bunch of people with nothing in common to suddenly start going on a quest together. Weird unique items which can't be duplicated must seem logical.
If you accept the premises on which most D&D games are built, it's a pretty fun movie. The fight scenes are good; they would have been great with better use of the cameras. The plot is much more coherent than, say, The Matrix, or Mission Impossible 2, and it serves the same basic purpose; provide a vague justification for whatever you were going to do next.
I had a lot of fun. I might even go see it again. There were problems, but mostly it was a lot of fun.
However, it *really* requires you to have the right sort of suspension of disbelief.
The dialogue was a little weak - but *D&D IS LIKE THAT*. I saw nothing wrong with Profion's dialogue; I spend a good four to six hours a week either running characters that talk like that, or listening to someone else do it.
I run a couple of D&D games fairly regularly, and I play in another one.
I think the big lesson is this: This is a movie that you will like about as much as you like classic D&D. If you don't think dungeon crawls are fun, you won't like the movie. If you think gaming is for geeks, you won't like the movie - and I pity you. If you don't buy into the basic premises of the heroic fantasy world, you won't like the movie.
The acting may have been a little off, but compared to a middle-aged programmer saying "So, we tell her about the quest, uhm, and the gem" these guys were *into* their roles.:)
It's all relative. What amazes me is that people who liked the Matrix are complaining about the plot and the acting in the D&D movie. The thing the Matrix did better was effects and camera work. It did them a lot better, but that doesn't mean it had a plot, or that the actors were remotely convincing.
Whitehat.com awarded part of IBM a White Hat of the Month award in February. I have no idea whether the site is still actively maintained, but WhiteHat was an attempt at replacing crap like TRUSTe with an organization that actually *cared*.
IBM is moderately serious about privacy. They are the only major vendor (except Compaq) that hasn't spammed either me or anyone I know. Gateway has spammed most of the people I know; Dell has spammed a couple of them, etcetera etcetera. IBM has had my email address in their databases for two years without bugging me, and has been very good about sending me information I asked for *and nothing else*.
I know it seems weird, but IBM may actually be one of the more ethical companies out there, in this regard.
When I learned about color, people saw on two color axes; there's red/green and blue/yellow. This is why some people are "red/green" colorblind; they don't distinguish properly between red and green.
That's *two* axes. RGB is not the way *vision* works, it's the way *DISPLAYS* work; it's additive light. Just like RGY is not the way *vision* works, it's the way *pigments* work.
I can't even begin to find a frame of reference for evaluating this claim, because it contradicts the rest of what we have about color models. We've known for a long time that RGB didn't model, correctly, the whole range of human color vision anyway.
Not reliable enough...
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 3
The current system, for all its flaws, is a lot safer than anything running over the net.
I would love to see punchcard ballots replaced, but we want to be sure we replace them with something *actually* more reliable, not just something that might well be more reliable.
On the other "modernization" issue: The electoral college is a good thing, because without it, no one outside of CA, NY, FL, PA, and TX matters.
Lots of people mentioned that, but it isn't true. Several people have posted sample ballots. They look the same to me. Could you identify *exactly* what differences you think there were between the sample and the actual? "There are holes to punch in the actual ballot" isn't a reasonable answer.
Say what you want. My mom's roommate was an election monitor in Chicago in 1960. She showed up, and she was escorted from the room and told that, were she to actually try to monitor anything, she would likely come to grevious physical harm. She went home.
Of *course* there was no "proof". What kind of idiot rigs an election and leaves *proof* lying around?
People have said that the actual ballots and the sample ones were "different", but I've seen pictures of both, and I don't see the difference. Maybe one of the pictures was faked up?
A friend of mine has a sample ballot that was faked to him, and he has a "real" ballot. The only difference is that the sample ballot does not have the holes in it; the placement of names and arrows is the same.
He tried his kids (8, 10) on the sample ballot. He gave them 20 seconds to indicate "how do you vote for Gore". Then he asked them "how do you vote for Buchannan", and at this point, the 8-year-old had to ask how you spell Buchannan. Both were able to pick the right dot.
If that's "too confusing", we have more serious problems than who gets elected.:)
Or maybe they were just the same, and people are scrabbling to find explanations.
Mistakes were made. Both parties approved them in advance. We don't overturn elections over stupid mistakes, *even* if we think they might have changed the outcome. We certainly can't give one county the option of *CHANGING* their votes based on new information - but there's no way to prevent a do-over from being a *change* in the vote. At that point, it's unfair to the *other* 100,000,000 voters that none of *US* are allowed to reconsider our votes based on what we know of nationwide turnout.
I don't think it's a question of "not obvious until it's in the machine". More likely, it's a question of "professionals looking at a ballot are unlikely to realize it could confuse laymen".
However, there's no way to call a do-over on an election in a context like this; if Palm Beach gets a do-over, everyone else has to get one too, because otherwise, the people in Palm Beach get to place votes with extra information about the race, and that's unfair to everyone else.
Meanwhile, I want to see recounts in a couple of other states with margins of a couple to a few thousand people, and we should see if there were any *other* irregularities; if there were, in other states, then we have even *more* reason to do the whole thing over - or just accept that we fucked up, pick the winner according to the rules we have, and *move on*. We don't need any more divisiveness than we have already.
First off, the registered voters all saw the ballot in advance, and none of them complained *then*.
Secondly, I think we should consider the implications of allowing a re-vote in this one county. These people would be voting, not based on what option they chose on election day, but based on the knowledge that the entire election outcome depends on them. I bet you'd get a lot more republicans coming out to vote. Some Nader supporters might switch.
However, this *isn't fair*. You aren't allowed to wait until you know what other people in your area do, *then* vote. If they get to re-do this, the only fair thing is for *everyone* to re-do this. In which case, several *other* states will probably flip-flop, one way or another, as apathetic voters who thought the state was a wrap-up for their side run out and make sure it is this time.
Yes, it sucks if people were confused. The time to bring that up was when people in *BOTH* major parties *REVIEWED* these ballots, quite some time ago.
In the mean time, whatever the recount says, it's better if we accept it and move on, than if we spend the next four years throwing accusations around.
While I don't think our health care system is good, all the ones "solved by fiat" are worse - and that's even *BEFORE* you think about how expensive they'd be if *WE* weren't paying for *ALL* the significant research.
I've seen healthcare by decree, and I've seen what we have. What we have is *better*.
"Better" doesn't mean "good", and I'd like to see people keep trying to solve this problem, but the one thing we know for sure is that *no one* has solved this problem.
The fundemental problem is that it is possible, but insanely expensive, to push the envelope a few percent. If we don't, we are letting people die. If we do, we are devoting *all* of our resources to healthcare. We have found one compromise - we do it for people that can afford it. It's not the best answer, maybe, but it's *an* answer.
Environmental issues: Yes, a lot of people endorse Gore. A lot of people think Superfund works, too. I don't buy an endorsement from a group with one agenda item picking the candidate who *says* the most. Bush has a better record on *improvements*, even though Texas sucked when he got there.
Yes, Bush is a politician, and I don't believe *everything* he says... But he doesn't lie as often or as much as Gore does. Also, with the sold vote thing, I have to say that I think Gore is more deeply dishonest.
Anyway, I appreciate the feedback, and I'm aware that not everyone will agree. (BTW, don't worry about being "slashdotted". That article has gotten no more than 400-500 hits so far today.)
It's not fixed if "some people don't have this problem". It's fixed if "no people have this problem".
Amazon has spent years running opt-out spam, spamming harvested addresses, and generally playing fast and loose with things. They've made people jump through opt-out hoops, they've managed to fail to handle unsubscribe requests, and they've never, ever, responded substantively to complaints about this process.
I never said it was useless, I was just pointing out that there's no such thing as a generalizable 2:1 lossless compression algorithm.
Techies are supposed to be precise about these things. It's the big difference between us and folks like the RIAA; we care enough to get the details right.
Sorry, but no. *IF* I delete it, sure, take it off the record.
But if I want to *KEEP* my mail, then it should be my right to do so, and have it remain legally real forever.
If someone sends me a confirmation that they've cancelled my order, should they be able to bill my card six months later, knowing that the confirmation is "no longer legally valid"? Total bullshit.
firehose.net is what you're looking for. firehouse.net is a guy who does security consulting, mostly in a BSD context. A great guy, too.:) (I work with him sometimes.)
He's getting about a hundred hits a minute off that bogus link. Luckily, he's not a Microsoft guy, or you'd have crashed his system.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
>I'm amazed that so many readers here think it's
>ok to apply pressure to Media3 (who did support
>a spammers web site) by blacklisting a large
>block of Media3's legit customers, not just the
>spammer.
Well, look at it this way: What else can you do that Media3 cares about? Media3 has made it clear that, as long as the spam *itself* doesn't go over their network, you can host whatever you want on their pages, advertise it in spam, advertise it in faxes, advertise it by printing your URL on the flayed skins of your enemies, it doesn't matter, it's not *our* fault.
As long as they believe that, the spammers whose pages they host will have a very compelling *reason* to send out spam - they will be able to collect responses, collect money, and rake in cash, and they can do it because they're getting cheap, reliable, spam-friendly hosting.
Media3 has nothing to lose if we block a few spammer sites; the spammers don't care about a mere few percent of the net not seeing them, and since they don't send mail over their Media3 connection, the rest of the RBL users (those who just use it to block mail) aren't doing anything.
So, how do we communicate to Media3 that they are doing damage to the network? How do we tell them we want them to be good neighbors, or no neighbors at all?
We block *everything* of theirs. It's that simple. They won't *listen* to anything else.
If Media3 wins a suit against the RBL, I'm going to go add their blocks to our *local* blackhole list. And they'll stay there. Forever.
Or, they can admit that this is a *cooperative* network (you don't cooperate, we don't network with you), kick their spammers off, stop accepting spammer cash, and *POOF* no more RBL listing.
Imagine if Peacefire had bought its connectivity from Cyberpromo. They *did* host web pages, after all. Would you be surprised that they lost a bit of connectivity?
When you pick a hosting provider, one of the things you need to look for is "anti-spam policy". If they don't have one, you are likely to end up on the wrong side of a number of blacklists.
The problems with censorware are: 1. Inaccurate or undocumented listings. 2. Listings for things other than those said. The RBL has neither of these problems. Media3 is actively and knowingly supporting the people who flood your mailbox with all the crap we call "spam". Does blocking Media3's sites, in many cases at the IP level, result in you getting less spam? Today? No. Today, it just means those sites don't get as much traffic. Tomorrow? Sooner or later, Media3 will have to decide whether it wants to be on the network where spammers do business, or on the network where RBL subscribers do business. If they pick the spammer network, they will eventually be totally removed from the network, as they find their way into more and more blacklists. If they decide they want the other network, they will stop supporting spammers and people who sell spamware. With no way to sell their products, the spamware vendors will stop sending you ads for them. People will stop *buying* the products, because there will be no way to buy them. You will get less spam. It's an educational tool. Media3 has the option of being on the network where you host spammer pages, or on the network that RBL subscribers see. They have made their choice. Your list of sites "also affected" misses the point entirely. Those people are paying Media3, and as long as Media3 makes money, Media3 has no real reason to care whether or not hosting spammer sites is damaging to the rest of the network. If your hosting company is supporting spammers, you will be fucked. Don't buy hosting from companies that are unwilling to terminate spammer websites. The RBL isn't about stopping spam *today*. It's about encouraging the policies that we *absolutely need* if we are to have less spam *tomorrow*. Thanks to the RBL, a number of very large networks have put in strong, effective, anti-spam policies. Every day, you don't get dozens of spams that would once have been sent via netcom. Every day, hundreds of spams that would have advertised sites hosted by companies with a policy just like the Media3 policy *aren't* sent, because those sites got taken down, because the policies got fixed. Media3 is wrong. MAPS is right. Media3 is trying to support the theory that, as long as the actual spam is relay-raped or sent via throwaway dialup accounts, it's not their problem where the page is hosted. MAPS is educating them. As soon as Media3 fixes its policy to unequivocally prohibit the hosting of spamware sites, address list sites, and sites advertised in spam, and starts enforcing that policy, everyone is happy.
No *INFORMATION* is restricted. Only the *TEXT* they wrote! You can describe the same bug. You can communicate the same *information* - you just can't copy their text wholesale.
I don't know why they want to restrict it. Maybe to track which bugs people read. Maybe to ensure that sites which report on MS bugs have to actually do their own writing. I don't see it as a big deal; you can say anything you want, you just can't copy their precise wording. Big deal.
... but you *have to actually like D&D*. Or at least, you have to be comfortable with it. It has to seem normal to you for a bunch of people with nothing in common to suddenly start going on a quest together. Weird unique items which can't be duplicated must seem logical.
:)
If you accept the premises on which most D&D games are built, it's a pretty fun movie. The fight scenes are good; they would have been great with better use of the cameras. The plot is much more coherent than, say, The Matrix, or Mission Impossible 2, and it serves the same basic purpose; provide a vague justification for whatever you were going to do next.
I had a lot of fun. I might even go see it again. There were problems, but mostly it was a lot of fun.
However, it *really* requires you to have the right sort of suspension of disbelief.
The dialogue was a little weak - but *D&D IS LIKE THAT*. I saw nothing wrong with Profion's dialogue; I spend a good four to six hours a week either running characters that talk like that, or listening to someone else do it.
I run a couple of D&D games fairly regularly, and I play in another one.
I think the big lesson is this: This is a movie that you will like about as much as you like classic D&D. If you don't think dungeon crawls are fun, you won't like the movie. If you think gaming is for geeks, you won't like the movie - and I pity you. If you don't buy into the basic premises of the heroic fantasy world, you won't like the movie.
The acting may have been a little off, but compared to a middle-aged programmer saying "So, we tell her about the quest, uhm, and the gem" these guys were *into* their roles.
It's all relative. What amazes me is that people who liked the Matrix are complaining about the plot and the acting in the D&D movie. The thing the Matrix did better was effects and camera work. It did them a lot better, but that doesn't mean it had a plot, or that the actors were remotely convincing.
Obviously, it's not true, because NetBSD uses 0xA9,
not 0xA5.
Sheesh.
Whitehat.com awarded part of IBM a White Hat of the Month award in February. I have no idea whether the site is still actively maintained, but WhiteHat was an attempt at replacing crap like TRUSTe with an organization that actually *cared*.
IBM is moderately serious about privacy. They are the only major vendor (except Compaq) that hasn't spammed either me or anyone I know. Gateway has spammed most of the people I know; Dell has spammed a couple of them, etcetera etcetera. IBM has had my email address in their databases for two years without bugging me, and has been very good about sending me information I asked for *and nothing else*.
I know it seems weird, but IBM may actually be one of the more ethical companies out there, in this regard.
When I learned about color, people saw on two color axes; there's red/green and blue/yellow. This is why some people are "red/green" colorblind; they don't distinguish properly between red and green.
That's *two* axes. RGB is not the way *vision* works, it's the way *DISPLAYS* work; it's additive light. Just like RGY is not the way *vision* works, it's the way *pigments* work.
I can't even begin to find a frame of reference for evaluating this claim, because it contradicts the rest of what we have about color models. We've known for a long time that RGB didn't model, correctly, the whole range of human color vision anyway.
The current system, for all its flaws, is a lot safer than anything running over the net.
I would love to see punchcard ballots replaced, but we want to be sure we replace them with something *actually* more reliable, not just something that might well be more reliable.
On the other "modernization" issue: The electoral college is a good thing, because without it, no one outside of CA, NY, FL, PA, and TX matters.
Lots of people mentioned that, but it isn't true. Several people have posted sample ballots. They look the same to me. Could you identify *exactly* what differences you think there were between the sample and the actual? "There are holes to punch in the actual ballot" isn't a reasonable answer.
Say what you want. My mom's roommate was an election monitor in Chicago in 1960. She showed up, and she was escorted from the room and told that, were she to actually try to monitor anything, she would likely come to grevious physical harm. She went home.
Of *course* there was no "proof". What kind of idiot rigs an election and leaves *proof* lying around?
According to Democratic sources, at least 10,000 people have called in to report that they voted for Buchannan by mistake.
People have said that the actual ballots and the sample ones were "different", but I've seen pictures of both, and I don't see the difference. Maybe one of the pictures was faked up?
:)
A friend of mine has a sample ballot that was faked to him, and he has a "real" ballot. The only difference is that the sample ballot does not have the holes in it; the placement of names and arrows is the same.
He tried his kids (8, 10) on the sample ballot. He gave them 20 seconds to indicate "how do you vote for Gore". Then he asked them "how do you vote for Buchannan", and at this point, the 8-year-old had to ask how you spell Buchannan. Both were able to pick the right dot.
If that's "too confusing", we have more serious problems than who gets elected.
Or maybe they were just the same, and people are scrabbling to find explanations.
Mistakes were made. Both parties approved them in advance. We don't overturn elections over stupid mistakes, *even* if we think they might have changed the outcome. We certainly can't give one county the option of *CHANGING* their votes based on new information - but there's no way to prevent a do-over from being a *change* in the vote. At that point, it's unfair to the *other* 100,000,000 voters that none of *US* are allowed to reconsider our votes based on what we know of nationwide turnout.
I don't think it's a question of "not obvious until it's in the machine". More likely, it's a question of "professionals looking at a ballot are unlikely to realize it could confuse laymen".
However, there's no way to call a do-over on an election in a context like this; if Palm Beach gets a do-over, everyone else has to get one too, because otherwise, the people in Palm Beach get to place votes with extra information about the race, and that's unfair to everyone else.
Meanwhile, I want to see recounts in a couple of other states with margins of a couple to a few thousand people, and we should see if there were any *other* irregularities; if there were, in other states, then we have even *more* reason to do the whole thing over - or just accept that we fucked up, pick the winner according to the rules we have, and *move on*. We don't need any more divisiveness than we have already.
First off, the registered voters all saw the ballot in advance, and none of them complained *then*.
Secondly, I think we should consider the implications of allowing a re-vote in this one county. These people would be voting, not based on what option they chose on election day, but based on the knowledge that the entire election outcome depends on them. I bet you'd get a lot more republicans coming out to vote. Some Nader supporters might switch.
However, this *isn't fair*. You aren't allowed to wait until you know what other people in your area do, *then* vote. If they get to re-do this, the only fair thing is for *everyone* to re-do this. In which case, several *other* states will probably flip-flop, one way or another, as apathetic voters who thought the state was a wrap-up for their side run out and make sure it is this time.
Yes, it sucks if people were confused. The time to bring that up was when people in *BOTH* major parties *REVIEWED* these ballots, quite some time ago.
In the mean time, whatever the recount says, it's better if we accept it and move on, than if we spend the next four years throwing accusations around.
Whoever loses: You can at least rest assured that your opponent will be laughed out of office if he claims a "mandate".
Creative Labs shipped a 3DO-system-on-a-card, but it only worked with a Creative Labs CD-ROM. The dependancy killed it; it just wasn't useful enough.
While I don't think our health care system is good, all the ones "solved by fiat" are worse - and that's even *BEFORE* you think about how expensive they'd be if *WE* weren't paying for *ALL* the significant research.
I've seen healthcare by decree, and I've seen what we have. What we have is *better*.
"Better" doesn't mean "good", and I'd like to see people keep trying to solve this problem, but the one thing we know for sure is that *no one* has solved this problem.
The fundemental problem is that it is possible, but insanely expensive, to push the envelope a few percent. If we don't, we are letting people die. If we do, we are devoting *all* of our resources to healthcare. We have found one compromise - we do it for people that can afford it. It's not the best answer, maybe, but it's *an* answer.
Environmental issues: Yes, a lot of people endorse Gore. A lot of people think Superfund works, too. I don't buy an endorsement from a group with one agenda item picking the candidate who *says* the most. Bush has a better record on *improvements*, even though Texas sucked when he got there.
Yes, Bush is a politician, and I don't believe *everything* he says... But he doesn't lie as often or as much as Gore does. Also, with the sold vote thing, I have to say that I think Gore is more deeply dishonest.
Anyway, I appreciate the feedback, and I'm aware that not everyone will agree. (BTW, don't worry about being "slashdotted". That article has gotten no more than 400-500 hits so far today.)
I think that pretty much summarizes the "character" issue this time. He'll vote whichever way gets him the most air time.
http://www.plethora.net/~seebs/pres.html
Also have a look at the description of how Gore sold his vote: http://www.culturaldissident.com/Simpson.htm.
It's not fixed if "some people don't have this problem". It's fixed if "no people have this problem".
Amazon has spent years running opt-out spam, spamming harvested addresses, and generally playing fast and loose with things. They've made people jump through opt-out hoops, they've managed to fail to handle unsubscribe requests, and they've never, ever, responded substantively to complaints about this process.
I never said it was useless, I was just pointing out that there's no such thing as a generalizable 2:1 lossless compression algorithm.
Techies are supposed to be precise about these things. It's the big difference between us and folks like the RIAA; we care enough to get the details right.
Yes, the hackers *WERE* suspicious. They said "I don't trust this, it looks like a bad deal".
"Suspicious" does not necessarily mean "worthy of suspicion".
Lossless compression that compresses about 2:1? In the general case, this is outright silly.
If you mean of music only, it's still wrong; I can make you a CD with an audio track that does *not* compress 2:1. Or at all, really.
Sorry, but no. *IF* I delete it, sure, take it off the record.
But if I want to *KEEP* my mail, then it should be my right to do so, and have it remain legally real forever.
If someone sends me a confirmation that they've cancelled my order, should they be able to bill my card six months later, knowing that the confirmation is "no longer legally valid"? Total bullshit.
firehose.net is what you're looking for. firehouse.net is a guy who does security consulting, mostly in a BSD context. A great guy, too. :) (I work with him sometimes.)
;-)
He's getting about a hundred hits a minute off that bogus link. Luckily, he's not a Microsoft guy, or you'd have crashed his system.